Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul
Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom
Publication Year: 2007
Published by: State University of New York Press
Unmaking Race,Remaking Soul
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Contents
Illustrations
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pp. ix-x
Foreword: “Tragedy Fatigue” and “Aesthetic Agency”
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pp. xi-xiv
Last spring, preparing to leave for a University of California conference on “black thought in the age of terror,” I tuned into the local public radio station and heard a BBC report on “tragedy fatigue” in Australia. The reporters narrated, among news of varied atrocities on aboriginal lands committed by aboriginal men, the stitching together of an infant follow- ...
Acknowledgments
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pp. xv-xvi
We wish to thank Jane Bunker and her assistants for guidance of this project from its first draft to its last. Two anonymous reviewers made many helpful suggestions that improved the organization of the volume generally and specific contributions particularly. The SUNY Women’s Studies program and its co-sponsors generously supported a symposium in 2003 ...
On Unmaking and Remaking: An Introduction (with obvious affection for Gloria Anzald�a)
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pp. 1-18
Our title for this volume makes obvious reference to Gloria Anzaldúa’s magnificently rich collection of writings by feminists of color titled Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990). Her recent death is a loss for all of us, and her passing warrants memorializing. In addition to her two coedited collections, including This Bridge Called My Back: Writings ...
Part I. Resisting Imagination
1. Writing the Xicanista: Ana Castillo and the Articulation of Chicana Feminist Aesthetics
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pp. 21-46
Of all the writers to whom Ana Castillo is compared, perhaps the most frequent are Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Chilean Isabel Allende, arguably the two best-known proponents, or practitioners, of “magical realism.” García Márquez’s Cien años de la soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), which was originally published in 1967 and has ...
2. Everyday Revolutions, Shifting Power, and Feminine Genius in Julia Alvarez’s Fiction
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pp. 47-58
Julia Alvarez uses the conventions of domestic femininity, womanhood, and motherhood to resist patriarchal authority both at the level of private family life and in public institutions, including government. These uses simultaneously demonstrate that resistance to domination involves shifting power dynamics and strikingly underscore sexual...
3. Authorizing Desire: Erotic Poetics and the Alsthesis of Freedom in Morrison and Shange
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pp. 59-78
Oppression has at least two existential characteristics: (1) it aims to reduce the oppressed to the status of an object, and (2) it excludes the oppressed from the community of those regarded as having the capacity and the authority to make meanings and establish values. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir specifically identifies manipulation of desire as ...
Part II. Body Agonistes
4. MeShell Ndeg�ocello: Musical Articulations of Black Feminism
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pp. 81-102
What does it mean to “believe in things we cannot see”? How is wetness audible? In western cultures, sight and vision dominate conceptualizations of knowledge, power, aesthetics, and sexuality. The epistemological power of music (sounding and listening) is often marginalized, cast in the shadow of visual and literary culture. In American popular music, ...
5. Portraits of the Past, Imagined Now: Reading the Work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson
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pp. 103-140
Carrie Mae Weems’ Mirror, Mirror (1987–88, figure 5.1), from her Ain’t Jokin’ series, is a photograph of a black woman holding up a mirror that does not reflect her image. Her face is turned away, and her eyes are cast downward. Her expression suggests a melancholy shadowed by exhausted disgust. In the place of her reflection, we see the image she responds to: a ...
6. The Coloniality of Embodiment: Coco Fusco’s Postcolonial Genealogies and Semiotic Agonistics
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pp. 141-158
The work of Coco Fusco eerily epitomizes the situation of post ethnic racial subjects in a post–civil rights, post–cold war, and what Fusco herself has termed the “pan-American postnationalism” era (1995, 21–24). Loathe as we may be to admit it, there are times when it becomes inevitable to think of an artist’s works as being representative of a histor- ...
Part III. Changing the Subject
7. Pueblo Sculptor Roxanne Swentzell: Forming a Wise, Generous, and Beautiful “I Am”
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pp. 161-180
As a contemporary Pueblo sculptor, Roxanne Swentzell is working within the challenges of two different cultural ideas about women, portraying both Pueblo women’s creative capacity and their unique gender position. While choosing to maintain some values she has lived as a Native American, Roxanne makes sculptures for a global community she also recognizes ...
8.The Syncretism of Native American, Latin American, and African American Women’s Art: Visual Expressions of Feminism, the Environment, Spirituality, and Identity
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pp. 181-196
This chapter discusses aspects of traditional Native American religion/spirituality and traditional African religion/spirituality that are evident in the art of Latin American, African American, and Native American women artists. Artists that fuse both African and Native American religious symbols in a syncretic manner as well as those who are ...
9. Dalit Women’s Literature: A Sense of the Struggle
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pp. 197-210
At a very broad level the Indian caste system refers to the hierarchical division of society based on ritual purity derived from lifestyles and hereditary occupations traditionally monopolized by the members of various caste groups. This hierarchy was sanctioned by religious texts. Dalit refers to the social groups defined as outcastes by the dominant caste groups....
Part IV. Home Is Where the Art Is: Shaping Space and Place
10. The Role of “Place” in New Zealand Maori Songs of Lament
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pp. 213-230
The Ma\ori people of New Zealand have a word for “their place” in the landscape. They call it “t\rangawaewae” (a standing place for the feet). Being an oral people by inclination they have a way with words, as when orators exercise the right to which their turangawaewae entitles them, to stand on the marae (the ceremonial center of Maori cultural life) and ...
11.Theater Near Us: Librarians, Culture, and Space in the Harlem Renaissance
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pp. 231-246
In the later years of the Harlem Renaissance, two successive theater groups rehearsed and produced their shows in the basement of a branch of the New York Public Library on 135th Street. Both groups were deliberately modeled on the Little Theater (or Art Theater) movement, originally a white, early twentieth-century project, defined as distinct from the ...
12. Into the Sacred Circle,Out of the Melting Pot: Re/Locations and Homecomings in Native Women’s Theater
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pp. 247-264
While reflective of rich diversity among communities, home has always held a unique meaning among the over five hundred First Nations in North America. Far more than a just a geographic location, home, according to Paula Gunn Allen (1992), In�s Hern�ndez-�vila (1995), Winona LaDuke (2005), and Jace Weaver (1997), is the centuries-old source of ...
Works Cited
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pp. 265-282
About the Contributors
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pp. 283-286
Index
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pp. 287-297
E-ISBN-13: 9780791479797
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791471616
Print-ISBN-10: 0791471616
Page Count: 315
Illustrations: 22 figures
Publication Year: 2007
