THE COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION OF BODIES AND SPACE

http://the-archipelago.net/2014/08/21/ann-laura-stoler-the-colonial-administration-of-bodies-and-space/

Conversation recorded with Ann Laura Stoler in New York on August 11, 2014

Ann Laura Stoler and I begin this conversation by introducing the political context lexicon (see below) that she co-curates and edits. We then discuss the work she had done around the colonial management of sexuality and reproduction. The existence of the métis (mix-blooded) child in the colony renders more complex the binary distinction between colon citizens and colonial subjects. Biology is nevertheless not merely the only site of recognition for the colonial administration, behavior is also extremely important in the access to citizenship. We examine how space, whether corridor or school, is built to accommodate the administrated behavior of the colony. Finally, Ann gives us a preview of her forthcoming book that attaches a strong importance to the notion of duress and the concepts we need to write new colonial histories of the present.
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the The New School for Social Research in New York City. She has worked on issues of colonial governance, racial epistemologies, and the sexual politics of empire. Her regional focus has been Southeast Asia. She was a visiting distinguished professor at the École des hautes études and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and is recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation and Social Science Research Council fellowships.

The Slave Ship: An Operative Architecture Responsible for the Abysmal Atlantic Crossing

info@thefunambulist.net
The Slave Ship: An Operative Architecture Responsible for the Abysmal Atlantic CrossingJanuary 8, 2016
Architecture & Design / History - By: Léopold Lambert



Above: La Marie-Séraphine (1770) / Excerpt from Bertrand Guillet, La Marie-Séraphine: Navire négrier, Nantes: Editions MeMo, 2009.


Writing about the open wound that the history of slavery constitutes is always a painful exercise. It is also doomed to fail making us fathom the formidable sustainability of violence that the three centuries of legalized slavery implemented — but would we ever recover from such a fathoming? This article is the fifth one about the abysmal Atlantic crossing and its architectural technology, the slave ship. While two of them were comparing (without ever equating) the Atlantic abyss with the current Mediterranean one (see “The Mediterranean Abyss: South Wall of Fortress Europe and Cemetery of the Poors” and “The Politics of Overpopulated Spaces“), two others focused on the historical crossing of the slave trade, citing the three Carribean authors C.L.R. James, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau (see “The Slave Ship Is Architecture” and “Abysmal Atlantic: The Slave Ships’ Genocide“).
The argument of these articles in the broader context of the research exposed on this platform is simple: although architecture and design (and through them, architects and designers) cannot be held responsible for the founding logic of the genocide that constitutes the slave trade, the latter could simply have never existed without their active contribution and, as such, architecture is fundamentally responsible for the operativity of slavery. Here, more than ever, we need to forget any dissociation between the various scales of design: the plantation cabin is architecture, of course (see Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg (eds), Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) but more broadly, any materialized form of whatever size or nature implementing the organization of bodies in space is also architecture. This includes the slave ship and its inherent tension between the fundamental cruelty of its design and the economization of life that its function requires vis-a-vis its “human cargo.”

Descendances du nu Jimmy Robert

How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion

The Philadelphia Museum of Art examines the past and present of Vlisco fabrics, a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world.

Installation view, Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (photo by Tim Tiebout, courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

PHILADELPHIA — Riotously colorful, densely patterned, and unassailably fabulous, Vlisco fabrics have, for decades, been tailored into shift dresses, power suits, and formal gowns for Central and West Africa’s cosmopolitan elite. Their patterns and palettes evince an instantly recognizable aesthetic. And there are scores of Vlisco imitators: Chinese knockoffs are sold on city streets all over the world. But are any of these fabrics in fact African? The exhibition Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) as part of a suite of shows and programs called “Creative Africa,” poses this question in an indirect but intriguing way, by explaining the company’s origins in the Dutch colonial empire and demonstrating its products’ lasting popularity, in African fashion and beyond. Art enthusiasts, for instance, might recognize Vlisco fabrics from the work of Yinka Shonibare MBE, who has used the them to fashion Victorian-style gowns and waistcoats for the generally headless human figures in his haunting installations. In Shonibare’s work, the fabrics do conceptual double duty: they act as a symbol of “African culture,” for those who perceive their patterns to be indigenous, and as a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world, for those who understand the complexities of their origins.

Textile pattern by Constance Girard for Vlisco on view in Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The story of Vlisco begins not in Dakar, Lagos, or Accra, but in the small Dutch city of Helmond, where, in 1846, industrialist Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen purchased a textile factory with the goal of selling upholstery fabric, bedspreads, and handkerchiefs abroad. Van Vlissingen began creating imitation batik fabric based on designs from Indonesia — then known as the Dutch East Indies — with the goal of capitalizing on new roller printing technology that could effect the look of batik without all the labor-intensive work required to make the real thing. Batik originated in China and India in the 8th century, and it was refined in 13th-century Indonesia with the development of a new tool for applying hot wax to fabric known as canting, likely an anglicized form of the word tjanting. When Dutch imitators such as van Vlissingen entered the business, Indonesians noticed small flaws in their fabrics — namely a “crackle” effect, the result of small veins of pigment leaking through the wax resist — and the Dutch East Indies even went so far as to ban their sale in the 19th century. But other areas of the Dutch empire provided a ready, if unexpected, marketplace. Vlisco fabrics became a popular item in a different part of the Dutch colonial ecosystem, starting in Ghana, which was then called the Gold Coast.
The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

Between 1855 and 1872, approximately 3,000 Ghanian soldiers served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. They returned home, as servicemen often do, with a taste for items they encountered abroad. As the story goes, the soldiers had learned to appreciate the look of genuine batik but didn’t mind the crackle of the van Vlissingen version, so they purchased bolts of it for their female relatives back in Ghana. By the turn of the century, despite the ceding of the colony to the UK, the sale of Dutch-made faux batik in the Gold Coast was robust. By the 1930s, it was being adapted to suit Ghanian tastes, not by accident, but by design. According to Dilys Blum, the PMA’s senior curator of costume and textiles who organized the exhibition, the trend was so popular that several companies based in England, France, and Switzerland began producing faux batik fabrics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Van Vlissingen responded by consolidating its grip on the marketplace and buying up several smaller concerns. Thus, a fabric produced in Europe with Asia in mind never quite hit the mark in its intended marketplace, but found an enthusiastic audience at the opposite end of the empire.

Anna Baumann - Kienast

Sumatra-Träume am Zürichsee

Ein aus Indonesien zurückgekehrter Kautschukpflanzer und eine Künstlerin liessen vor über 100 Jahren die Villa Sunneschy in Stäfa für sich erbauen. Die Erinnerung an das Paar will eine Arbeitsgruppe direkt in der Villa lebendig erhalten.

Urs Köhle 24.10.2016

Rudolf Baumann war ein Rebell. Oder ein Lausbub. Jedenfalls mochte sich der Spross einer reichen Horgner Seidenindustriellenfamilie den Anweisungen des Familienrates nicht fügen. Mit 20 Jahren reiste er darum ab in den Fernen Osten.
Das hatte später bauliche Auswirkungen auf den Kehlhof in Stäfa. Baumann, der Horgen mit Fahrkarte und etwas Bargeld verlassen hatte, kehrte nämlich gut 15 Jahre später wohlhabend aus den Tropen zurück. Er verheiratete sich mit Anna Kienast, die ebenfalls aus den Horgner Seidendynastien stammte. Die beiden bauten für sich im Kehlhof die heutige Villa Sunneschy.
1908 wurde der Bau fertiggestellt. Er klingt mit vielem an Südostasien an, wohin die Eheleute mehrmals längere Reisen unternahmen.

Beschläge aus China
Auf den Reisen füllte das Ehepaar «die Reisekiste mit Ausstattungselementen wie Batik aus Indonesien und Kastenbeschlägen aus China», schreibt Annegret Diethelm in ihrer Geschichte des«Sunneschy», welche die Gemeinde Stäfa 2001 herausgab. Chinesische Beschläge sind heute noch in der Villa Sunneschy zu sehen, ebenso Tropenholz und Tapeten, die Rudolf und Anna Baumann-Kienast damals nach Hause senden liessen.
Von seiner Tätigkeit als Pflanzer kannte Rudolf Baumann Nordostneuguinea sehr gut. Ins damalige von der deutschen Neu-Guinea Compagnie verwaltete Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land war er 1891 gegangen. Vertraglich hatte er sich als Tabakpflanzer verpflichtet. Damit blieb er aber erfolglos. Ab 1895 war er Kaffeepflanzer auf einer eigenen Plantage in Ostsumatra. Kurz nach der Jahrhundertwende begann er dort, Kautschuk anzubauen. Es gelang ihm, seine Plantage vor der Rückkehr in die Schweiz gewinnbringend zu verkaufen. Nicht alle dort tätigen Auslandschweizer waren so erfolgreich, sagt der Ethnologe Christian Kaufmann, der in Südostasien jahrelang Feldforschung betrieb.

Umfangreiches Landgut
In Stäfa herrschte der ehemalige Pflanzer sozusagen in einem privaten Kolonialreich über 3500 Rebstöcke, über Obst- und Gemüsekulturen, Schafe und Fische. Sein Landgut war um ein Mehrfaches grösser als die heute immer noch ansehnliche Liegenschaft Sunneschy. Es umfasste nicht nur die Halbinsel beim Kehlhof, sondern auch Gebäude, Kultur- und Torfland bergseits der Seestrasse und sogar oberhalb der Bahnlinie. Für die Fische besass er zwei Weiher, den einen davon beim Schwyler.
Als Privatier widmete sich Rudolf Baumann seinen Hobbys, sammelte fernöstliche Gegenstände, schrieb und fotografierte. Als eine der ersten Privatpersonen verarbeitete er seine Aufnahmen in der Dunkelkammer; seine Werke sind die eines Bildungsreisenden mit wissenschaftlich-völkerkundlichem Interesse. Das Museum der Weltkulturen in Frankfurt hat rund 1000 von Baumanns Fotografien archiviert.
Baumann verarbeitete seine Eindrücke aus dem Fernen Osten vor allem schreibenderweise. Seine Ehefrau Anna, in bildenden Künsten talentiert und ausgebildet, arbeitete im Sunneschy bis 1914 ausschliesslich als Malerin und Grafikerin. Bei der Eröffnung des Kunsthauses in Zürich 1910 waren von ihr Arbeiten in Öl und Tempera ausgestellt. Später wandte sie sich der Plastik und Bildhauerei zu. Sie war in der Zürcher Kunstszene bestens vernetzt, und der Kehlhof wurde zu einem Treffpunkt von Künstlern.

Ein Enkel engagiert sich
Die Ehe des Künstlerpaars blieb kinderlos. 1917 holte Anna Baumann die damals 17-jährige Friedl Wiederkehr zu sich, die sie vier Jahre zuvor als Modell engagiert hatte. Bis zu ihrer Heirat lebte die junge Frau als Pflegetochter im Sunneschy.
Friedl Wiederkehrs EnkelThomas Matta, Raumplaner und Architekt unter anderem des Stäfner Gemeindehauses, gehört zu einer Gruppe, die nun das künstlerische Erbe des längst verstorbenen Ehepaars Bau­mann-Kienast dokumentieren will. Ein weiteres Ziel ist, Wissen über die Geschichte der Villa Sunneschy zu vermitteln.

Im einstigen Atelier
Diese Geschichte war wechselhaft, seit sich Anna und Rudolf Baumann-Kienast im Dezember 1920 bei der Gemeinde Stäfa abmeldeten. Das Paar lebte nachher in Castagnola im Tessin. Rudolf Baumann starb 1952, seine Ehefrau 1961. Die Villa Sunneschy hatte verschiedene Besitzer, bis die Gemeinde 1978 die Liegenschaft kaufte. Die Liste der vor­geschlagenen Verwendungen ist fast endlos. Im Dezember 2000 wurde die Villa nach einer Renovation neu eingeweiht. Heute ist sie vor allem ein Restaurant. Die Gruppe mit Thomas Matta will im Gegensatz zu anderen früheren Interessenten nicht die Villa in Beschlag nehmen. Vorderhand hat sie überhaupt erst Ideen. Eine davon ist, dass Besucher in Anna Baumanns ehemaligem Atelier Informationen finden und Wechselausstellungen ansehen könnten – beispielsweise mit Werken der einstigen Besitzerin.
Zu dieser Arbeitsgruppe Sunneschy gehören neben Matta der 1925 geborene Jeroen Bool aus Rotterdam, der vor einigen Jahren die Initialzündung zur erneuten Beschäftigung mit der Villa Sunneschy gegeben hat, sein Cousin Christian Kaufmann aus Basel, die beide über ihre Mütter mit dem Bauherrenpaar verbunden sind, und die Kunsthistorikerin Annegret Diethelm.
Diese vier sind seit Jahren daran, Grundlagen und Materialien zu Leben und Wirken des Ehepaars Baumann-Kienast zusammenzutragen. Sie möchten ihr Wissen und ihr Material an einen Verein weitergeben und haben Kontakt aufgenommen mit dem Gemeinderat Stäfa, dem Sunneschy-Pächter Béda Zingg und der Lesegesellschaft Stäfa.
«Wir möchten mit neuen Leuten ein Konzept erarbeiten», sagt Matta, «und hoffen, ein paar motivierte Personen aus Stäfa dafür gewinnen zu können.» An einem Informationsanlass (siehe Kasten) will die Gruppe sondieren, wie gross das Interesse ist, die Erinnerung wachzuhalten an die Geschichte der Villa Sunneschy und das Wirken des viel gereisten Künstlerehepaars, das sie einst baute. (Zürichsee-Zeitung)(Erstellt: 24.10.2016, 10:29 Uhr)

---

In Stäfa steht die skurrilste und schönste Villa am See
Im Kolonialreich des Herrn Baumann
29.8.2001
Als Rudolf Baumann, Sprössling einer reichen Horgner Seidenfabrikantenfamilie, und seine Frau Anna die Villa Sunneschy im Jahr 1906 erbauen liessen, träumte der Bauherr von einem privaten Kolonialreich, während die sensible Gattin eine Einheit von Mensch und Natur anstrebte. Entstanden ist eine skurrile, bezaubernde Villa, die heute dank der Gemeinde Stäfa der Bevölkerung offen steht. Selten haben Menschen einem Haus ihren Stempel mehr aufgedrückt als der weitgereiste Privatier und Schriftsteller Rudolf Baumann und dessen ebenso schöne wie begabte Frau Anna der Villa Sunneschy in Stäfa. Als das ungleiche Paar das Seegrundstück auf der Kehlhof-Halbinsel im Jahr 1906 kaufte, wollte der aus den Tropen zurückgekehrte Bauherr möglichst vielen seiner Südsee-Erinnerungen Raum geben, während seine malende Ehefrau Einfluss auf die Farbgebung nahm und darauf achtete, dass die Innen- und die Aussenwelt ein harmonisches Ganzes bildeten.

Liebe, Luxus und Kapitalismus nach Sombart

Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning

Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning brings together a deeply evocative constellation of recent works by Doris Salcedo (Colombian, b. 1958), the renowned Bogotá-based artist known for her sculptures and public installations that respond to the testimonies of survivors and victims of political violence. Evoking themes such as the lasting grief of war, Salcedo’s works honor, acknowledge, and mourn those lost to oppression and political violence in Colombia and beyond. The pieces also address 20th-century preoccupation with materiality and the object; however, Salcedo’s artistic process is distinctive in the way it fuses painstaking research with works fastidiously made by hand.
The Materiality of Mourning features four separate installations, with a number of Salcedo’s works created between 2001 and today. These include the Harvard Art Museums’ recent acquisition, A Flor de Piel (2013), which will be shown publicly for the first time in this exhibition. A room-size tapestry comprised of thousands of preserved hand-sewn red rose petals, the work is intended as a shroud for a nurse who was tortured to death in the Colombian war.
Additional objects on view include a selection of Salcedo’s seminal sculptures, on loan from private and public collections as well as from the artist herself. Several works incorporate domestic furniture in unsettling configurations. Thou-less (2001–02), for instance, is comprised of carved, stainless steel chairs that are at once familiar and strange. Other works highlight how Salcedo has recently pushed her commitment to materiality and its expressive possibilities to new extremes. These include four works from the "Disremembered" series, individual ephemeral blouse-like sculptures that are constructed of handwoven silk threads filled with tiny needles. Each "Disremembered" sculpture provides a spectral contrast to Salcedo’s dense physically imposing works, such as the two untitled furniture pieces (2008) made of wood, metal, and concrete—with a combined weight of over 1,800 pounds—that will also be shown in the exhibition.
The accompanying illustrated catalogue, published by the Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press, draws on more than a decade of research by exhibition curator Mary Schneider Enriquez, who delves into Salcedo’s complex artistic practice, the significance of materiality, and the political context informing her work. An essay by conservation scientist Narayan Khandekar explores the artist’s use of organic and nontraditional materials, particularly with regard to the conservation challenges they pose. The catalogue also includes a contribution from Salcedo herself, reflecting on the philosophical underpinnings of her work and on her decision to remain working in her native Colombia.Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.

Readings from the Slave Narratives

Veröffentlicht am 23.09.2015
Unchained Memories is a 2003 documentary film about the stories of former slaves interviewed during the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project and preserved in the WPA Slave Narrative Collection. This HBO film interpretation directed by Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon is a compilation of slave narratives, narrated by actors, emulating the original conversation with the interviewer. The slave narratives may be the most accurate in terms of the everyday activities of the enslaved, serving as personal memoirs of more than two thousand former slaves. The documentary depicts the emotions of the slaves and what they endured. The "Master" had the opportunity to sell, trade, or kill the enslaved, for retribution should one slave not obey.
Narrated by: Whoopi Goldberg
Sarah Gudger, North Carolina (Vol. 11)— read by LaTanya Richardson
Charley Williams, Oklahoma (Vol. 13) – read by Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Martin Jackson, Texas (Vol. 16) - read by Robert Guillaume
Henry Coleman, South Carolina (Vol. 14) – read byRoscoe Lee Browne
Jennie Proctor, Texas (Vol. 16) – read by Oprah Winfrey
Elizabeth Sparks, Virginia (Vol. 17) – read by Angela Bassett
Rosa Starke, South Carolina (Vol. 14) --
Cato Carter, Texas (Vol. 16) – read by Roger Guenveur Smith
Mary Reynolds, Texas (Vol. 16) – read by Angela Bassett
Rev. Ishrael Massie, Virginia –
Fannie Berry, Virginia – read by CCH Pounder
Mary Estes Peters, Arkansas (Vol. 2) – read by Jasmine Guy
Sarah Ashley, Texas (Vol. 16) – read by LaTanya Richardson
Charles Grandy, Virginia — read by Ruben Santiago-Hudson
William Colbert, Alabama (Vol. 1) – read by Courtney B. Vance
Katie Darling, Texas (Vol. 16) – read by Jasmine Guy Jasmine Guy
Vinnie Brunson, Texas (Vol. 3) – read by Vanessa L. Williams
Fannie Berry, read by CCH Pounder
Jack & Rosa Maddox, Texas (Vol. 7) – read by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee
Mary Reynolds, Texas (Vol. 16) – read by Angela Bassett
Louisa Adams, North Carolina (Vol. 11) – read by LaTanya Richardson

Lygia Clark (String Figures)

The Curandera of Conquest Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonial Remedy

Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35:1 Spring 2010 © University of California Regents 135

George Hartley

ABSTRACT: In this essay I argue that the primary role that Gloria Anzaldúa creates for herself as a writer and activist is that of the curandera of conquest, the healer of la herida abierta (the open wound) created by the borders imposed by capitalism, nationalism, imperialism, sexism, homophobia, and racism. After examining Anzaldúa’s Prietita and the Ghost Woman as both an illustration (in content) and an example (in enactment) of her practice as a curandera, I provide a brief overview of curanderismo and key developments in the theories of decolonization within global indigenous studies since the turn of the twenty-first century. I read Anzaldúa’s decolonizing work as a companion to this recent decolonization move within indigenous theory and practice.

In a 1991 interview concerning the Quincentennial celebrations, Gloria Anzaldúa defines her project of “spiritual activism” as a decolonizing countermovement to Euro-American glorifications of both conquests, the Spanish and the Anglo (2000, 177–94). She anchors her rejection of colonialism in what she calls the “New Tribalism,” grounded in her attention to the indigenous roots of mestizaje. Noting that the Conquest was enacted through writing (letters between Columbus and Isabella, chronicles written by the clergy, and, we could add, treaties between the U.S. government and hand-chosen tribal “representatives”), she argues for “reclaiming the agency of reinscribing, taking off their inscriptions and reinscribing ourselves” (189) as a step toward healing of the Earth (193). In this example we see Anzaldúa’s self-definition as a curandera of conquest, a healer of la herida abierta, the open wound created by the borders that neocolonialism has imposed—borders policing class, national, gender, sexual, racial, and religious divisions. Anzaldúa’s healing work in defining mestiza consciousness functions as a necessary precondition for liberation from below and as the embodiment of a concrete, historically embedded alternative to the colonizing Eurocentric rationality of modernity.1

Such healing work involves a diagnosis and a remedy. Anzaldúa situates her diagnosis within her chronicling of Anglo terrorism in the Southwest. The social forces of oppression that she identifies produce the illness: internalized colonialism. Having internalized the perspective of the colonizers, one sees oneself through the colonizers’ eyes and in terms of the colonizers’ values and, then, is rajada: sliced right down the middle by the inner conflict resulting from such internalization. This slice or cut—what Anzaldúa (1987, 67) refers to as la rajadura—manifests as the individual incorporation of the herida abierta of the border. The Chicana’s process of recognizing and purging herself of this internalized alien and constantly self-damning perspective and replacing it with a positive, re-indigenized self-orientation is the primary act of decolonizing that Anzaldúa’s writings make possible. In this way she provides the remedy for the root cause of the many symptoms of colonized selfhood.

I clarify my claim that Anzaldúa is the curandera of conquest first by examining her book Prietita and the Ghost Woman (2001). Next, I lay out the key elements of curanderismo. I provide a brief overview of key developments in the theories of decolonization within global indigenous studies since the turn of the twenty-first century, looking specifically at the work of Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith and that of two native North American activist-theoreticians, Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Taiaiake Alfred. Finally, I show how Anzaldúa’s decolonizing work is already operating in terms similar to this recent decolonization move within indigenous theory and practice. As a gesture toward a kind of pan-tribal solidarity, I want to suggest a cross-reading of Anzaldúa within the terms of indigenous decolonization—and the reverse. Such a move might function as a bridgebetween global movements of indigenous decolonization and Anzaldúa’s militant Chicana critique of Spanish and Anglo colonialisms, which in turn raises important issues for cross-border indigenism and for peoples who have been detribalized through ethnic cleansing of various sorts.2

GEORGE HARTLEY, an associate professor in the Department of English and the Latin American Studies Program at Ohio University, is author of The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (2003) and Textual Politics and the Language Poets (1989). He is currently writing a book manuscript titled “The Curandera of Conquest: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonizing Consciousness.” He can be contacted at hartleyg@ohio.edu.

Plantations and Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species (Anna Tsing)

Plantations were the engine of European expansion. Plantations produced the wealth—and the modus operandi—that allowed Europeans to take over the world. We usually hear about superior technologies and resources; but it was the plantation system that made navies, science, and eventually industrialization possible. Plantations are ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion. Plantations deepen domestication, re-intensifying plant dependencies and forcing fertility. Borrowing from state-endorsed cereal agriculture, they invest everything in the superabundance of a single crop. But one ingredient is missing: They remove the love. Instead of the romance connecting people, plants, and places, European planters introduced cultivation through coercion.[xxvi] The plants were exotics; the labor was forced through slavery, indenture, and conquest. Only through extreme order and control could anything flourish in this way; but with hierarchy and managed antagonism in place, enormous profits (and complementary poverties) could be produced. Because plantations have shaped how contemporary agribusiness is organized, we tend to think of such arrangements as the only way to grow crops. But this arrangement had to be naturalized until we learned to take the alienation of people from their crops for granted.




Consider sugar cane, a key participant. No one loves plantation sugar cane. Puerto Rican cane workers go out to “defend themselves” (se defienden) and “do battle” (bregando) with the cane.[xxvii] Yet between the 17th and the 19th centuries, sugar cane plantations produced much of the wealth that fueled European conquest and development. The cane was moved across the warm zones, redefining regions; and so too came owners, managers, and laborers.[xxviii] Slaves were sent from West Africa to the New World. Contracted coolie labor from India and China moved into the Pacific. Peasants were conquered and coerced in the Indies. And in forging a new antagonism to plantation plants, humans changed the very nature of species being. Elites entrenched their sense of autonomy from other species; they were masters not lovers of nonhuman beings, the species Others who came to define human self-making. But for planters this was only possible to the extent that human subspecies were formulated and enforced: Someone had to work the cane. Biology came to signify the difference between free owners and coerced labor. Colored people worked the cane; white people owned and managed it. No racial laws or ideals could stop miscegenation, but they could guarantee that only those of the white race could inherit property. Racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance.[xxix]
From the first, fungi were there, ready for niches to fill. Fungi constrained smallholder sugar cane; after it is cut, cane must be processed immediately to avoid fungal fermentation. The huge scale of cane plantations, and their savage labor discipline, are in part a response to fears of fermentation, which inspire on-site, expensive mills—and the desire to keep them running continuously. Yet fungal fermentation turned out to be a gift to the planters. It didn’t take Caribbean planters long to observe that molasses, a byproduct of sugar milling, suited ubiquitous local yeast spores and quickly changed to alcohol. Rum was born, and the deadly but profitable “triangle trades” proffered rum for more African slaves, and thus more sugar production, and thus more distillers and financers in England or New England. Long before sugar became an object and symbol of mass consumption (thus cementing the expectation of species-autonomous publics whose species-unrecognizeable foods mysteriously appeared from afar), fungally fermented rum made plantation sugar profitable—spreading it across the field of European conquest.[xxx]
At the edge of respectability, rum charged sea-faring masculinities in which trade became adventure. Fermentation thus detracted attention from the cruelty of shore-bound domestication, both human and nonhuman.
White women became agents of racial hygiene. By dividing us firmly into races, plantations remade human species being, the practice of being human. Racial separation—depending as it does on marriage and family organization—required additional transformations of gender. In the plantation zones, with their unsettled mixtures of native and foreign, free, bound, and enslaved, wild and tame, disease and plenty, things could so easily go awry. Here white women became responsible for maintaining the boundaries—of homes, families, species, and the white race. Tropical fungi were one small part of their problem; molds and infections could get out of hand. Keeping their homes free of mildew, mosquitoes, and miscegenation, white women in the tropics became models of species and subspecies alienation.[xxxi]




By the late 19th century, discourses of scientific hygiene and eugenics informed white women’s species segregations. Pasteurian germ theory was tested and boosted in the tropics, where white-controlled spaces could be organized as laboratories, with microorganisms stopped at the border of white homes. White women were called to follow their husbands to the tropics to keep things clean.[xxxii] Re-imported to the metropole, such public and private hygiene charged class dichotomies, informing distinctions between those women Ehrenreich and English once contrasted as the “sick” and the “sickening.”[xxxiii] Vulnerable upper class women became the angels of the house; poor women were blamed as the agents of infection. Both received renewed mandates to reproduce. Poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive.[xxxiv] Privileged families were charged with the advancement of the race; women must bear its heirs.
The boundaries of the home became the expected boundaries of love. With the fetishization of the home as a space of purity and interdependence, extra-domestic intimacies, whether within or between species, seemed archaic fantasies (the community, the small farmer) or passing affairs (feminism, animal rights). Outside the home, the domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests reigned. Moreover, this kind of family fetish reappeared in mid-20th century U.S. mass culture—and once again in our times now—as the United States assumed a global leadership that allowed it to draw from older regimes of colonial culture. Here love is just not expected outside family walls. Within the family, other species can be accepted; pets are models for family devotion. But the model of the loving and beloved pet does not spread love; it holds it tight inside the family.
U.S. publics learn to imagine themselves as compassionate, moral people because they love their children and their pets. They learn that this love makes them “good people”—unlike terrorists, who only hate. They imagine that this love equips them to make decisions for the whole world; it creates a moral hierarchy in which American “goodness” is qualification for global leadership. Other peoples, and other species, are judged by their ability to live up to U.S. standards of domestic intimacy. If they are properly engaged with family love, they may deserve to live. Others risk becoming “collateral damage” in U.S. projects to improve the world; to eliminate them may be unfortunate but not “inhumane.” Under this tutelage, our species being is realigned to stop Others at home’s door.
Given the power and pervasiveness of this biosocial plan, it is amazing that a still-rich diversity of species and populations still exists on earth. But such richness can no longer be taken for granted.

http://tsingmushrooms.blogspot.pt

Ann Hamilton Pays Tribute to Philadelphia’s Frayed Textile Industry

Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9 (all photos by Thibault Jeanson, courtesy the Fabric Workshop and Museum)

PHILADELPHIA — Started around 1907, Municipal Pier 9was built as part of a comprehensive plan to upgrade the Delaware River as a shipping channel. Intended to resemble (and rival) Chelsea Piers in New York City, these buildings were designed to accommodate larger cargo ships and it was hoped that they would help rejuvenate the waterfront area, making it once again a competitive port for international trade and commerce. From roughly 1880 to 1920, Philadelphia’s industrial district supported an array of mills and plants and no other city produced a wider range of textile products. At the turn of the 20th century, there were close to 700 textile companies operating in the area, creating everything from yarn, rope, ribbons, and lace to silk stockings, upholstery, and military cloths. Yet the area’s textile industry declined after the 1920s, and the trade activities at the ports began to suffer in turn. While other similar building sites have been turned into condos, Pier 9 was until recently used as a storage facility and it retains vestiges of its previous life: a railway track bisects the interior and metal covers lift to reveal large portals that open directly onto the river — it is as if the space was patiently waiting, still ready to receive cargo.


Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9

This pier is the setting for Ann Hamilton’s latest installation, habitus, made in collaboration with Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, where a companion display fills three floors of exhibition space. Cloth and the history of textile production in the city form the foundation of both parts of Hamilton’s project. At Pier 9, the former space of bustling trade is filled with 12 spectral, spinning curtains that hang from the steel beams and girders that crisscross the ceiling. Next to each curtain are two thick ropes — made from a twist of linen and wool — that are attached to a pulley system. These ropes activate the installation when the visitor pulls them: the fabric forms begin to spin, slowly, and some emit the humming wheeze of an accordion or the ringing of bells. Made from Tyvek, the curtains have been dyed, as the artist says, to match the atmosphere, in shades of soft gray-blue. Gathered and draped in billowing furls, the fabric falls some 30 to 40 feet from the steel beams to just above the compact and uneven dirt floor. The draped fabric looks somewhat like the over-fussy curtains of a stately home, the kind you would like to hide behind, or even the full dress of a fine lady, who has gathered up her skirts and lifted them, too high to be dainty.

Ann Hamilton, ‘habitus’ (2016), installation view at Municipal Pier 9

SOLANGE - DON'T TOUCH MY HAIR (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

War is Willemstad?

Achille Mbembe zu Mestizaje

documentary fabulation

The interesting thing here is the fundamental ambiguity and plurality of meaning of filmic images. Within the aesthetic regime, as we have seen, images and signs are always more and less than simple representations of a pre-existing reality; they are more because they harbour the unfulfilles promise of a deeper meaning and they are less because they forever hide this meaning from us, remaining mute. Like all films - documentary or otherwise - le teem d’alexander derives its aesthetic force from its use of fabulation. The fable, as understood by ranciere, is a specific way of organizing and reorganizing reality, or representing it and presenting it.
Rancher argues that fabulation is common to all film. The fable, however, consists of the creation of a gap within this narrative that ensures that the narratives becomes unhinged, opens up for multiple meaning. ?even the most classical of cenematohraphic forms, the ones most faithful to the representative tradition of carefully arranged accidents, clearly defines characters, and neatly composed images, are affected by this gap, evidence enough that the film fable belongs to the aesthetic regime of art (1006a:15). The fable consists of a series of discrepancies: discrepancies between what is said and what is seen, between what i s seen and what can be seen. Modernism in Film is merely an extreme, purified form of this procedure of fabulation. More precisely, modernism is a radicalized version of what is even more interesting in its more balanced form: the deregulated and deregulating fable of film. It tries to isolate ine aspect of the fable while obfuscating or filtering out the other aspects.
The fable, Ranciere explains, is concerned with the ‚mise-enscène of a mise-en-scène‘ and with a ‚counter-movements that affects the arrangement of incidents and shots, automatism separating the image from movements, voicee hollowing to the visible’ (2006a:15). Still the documentary differs in its use of fabulation in that it is not bound to producing a reality effect by presenting its viewers with recognizable stereotypes and predictable plotlessness: because it does not have convince people that its story is real, the documentary has the unique opportunity not just to male its viewers feel that it is dealing with history, but to question history, rework it, and ask how history becomes what it is for us. This is the value of le tombeau d’alexander for Rancièere. The documentary not only presents the lifee and work of Alexander Medvedkin, it presents the essence of the film fable and its relation to history. in accordance with a modernistic logic, Marker isolates images in order to give them a specific discursive force: the become pure historical referents or pure spectacle. We can see this principle at work in his use of found footage of the stars, the Russian Revolutionand so on. And yet these images are no longer used as immediate historical referents. Instead they are used to question the very idea of images as historical referents. Medvedkin and his time thus become an enigma. The documentary’s function is not simply to represent Mededkin in his time but also to question the enigmatic history of the twentieth century and the role of images in it. This is what the film fable is all about in the case of documentary



Ranciere and Filmvon Paul Bowman

Deleuze Dictionary: Fabulation

Fabulation: The Artist as Cultural Physician

Fabulation and Giants