Melina Pappademos - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Melina Pappademos
Radical History Review, Oct 1, 2022
The evocative cover for this issue, by the Nigerian photographer Emeka Okereke, features the part... more The evocative cover for this issue, by the Nigerian photographer Emeka Okereke, features the participants in the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project during their trip to Bangladesh in 2019. 1 We were drawn to it because it reflects and transcends so many of the ideas associated with the ideal and the challenge of the Afropolitan. Par excellence, the term Afropolitan signals mobility, but one often connected to the Global North or to the largest cities on the African continent. Without any context, it is not possible to know that the image is of Bangladesh from the landscape-a low seawall, a busy road, the speeding car rendered motionless. The viewer can only search the expressions of the people standing together and apart, facing and turned away from the camera, for clues. It is also not entirely clear who is from the Trans-African Project and who is from the Bangladeshi Drik Network partnered with them. 2 The viewer is put in the uncomfortable situation of assuming who might belong and who might not, raising a central question about the Afropolitan who seeks to transcend such borders. The photograph appears on the cover of the Trans-Bangladeshi, a newsletter that Invisible Borders published in Dhaka as part of its project. From the newsletter's essays, poems, and photographs, we learn some of the stories and interests of the participants. Next to the cover image is the opening reflection, "Let's Try On New Clothes," by the Nigerian writer Kay Ugwuede. The short essay uses the metaphor of "trying on clothes" to reflect on how countries can outgrow their colonial borders. She also describes the initial meeting with their Bangladeshi counterparts
Radical History Review, 2018
This issue explores the ways, means, and co-constitution of military infrastructures, labor, stra... more This issue explores the ways, means, and co-constitution of military infrastructures, labor, strategies of violence, and capital's emergencies and ever-expanding need for growth. Throughout the issue's articles, it threads together critical themes: militarism as a structure of everyday life under capitalism; the role of the state in managing the contradictions of militarized capital, from suppressing dissent to mobilizing labor; violence that exceeds the temporal and spatial boundaries of formal combat, as well as the discursive boundary between “soft” and “hard” power; and the spaces of sociality where local workers and foreign soldiers interact. The included essays show that the relations of violence that converge in any particular site animate other sites of the empire where the imperatives of militarism and capitalism converge. They also show the creative militancy of people who are on the front lines of documenting communities and lifeways lost to these convergent forces and who insist that another world is possible.
Issue: A Journal of Opinion, 1996
I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I sa... more I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.
The American Historical Review, 2013
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2012
This article examines race and the structure of republican Cuban politics after Spanish coloniali... more This article examines race and the structure of republican Cuban politics after Spanish colonialism ended in 1898. It discusses the structural role of patronage and political sociability in the transition from colony to republic, alongside ideas circulating about ...
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2013
Radical History Review
Increased access to visual archives and the proliferation of digitized images related to sexualit... more Increased access to visual archives and the proliferation of digitized images related to sexuality have led a growing number of scholars in recent years to place images and visual practices at the center of critical historical inquiries of sexual desire, subjectivity, and embodiment. At the same time, new critical histories of sexual science serve both to expand the temporal and geographical frames for investigating the historical relationships of sex and visual production, and to generate new lines of inquiry and reshape visual studies more broadly. The contributors to this issue invite us to ask: What new questions and challenges for the study of sex and sexual science are posed by critical studies of the visual? How are new visual methodologies that focus on archives changing the contours of historical knowledge about sex and sexuality? What—and where—are new methodologies still needed? “Visual Archives of Sex” aims to illuminate current research that centers visual media in the ...
Contributors: Erica Ball, Anthony Bogues, Lisa Brock, Sara Busdiecker, Prudence Cumberbatch, Jacq... more Contributors: Erica Ball, Anthony Bogues, Lisa Brock, Sara Busdiecker, Prudence Cumberbatch, Jacqueline Francis, Anita Gonzalez, Amoaba Gooden, Dayo Gore, Laura A. Harris, Christopher J. Lee, Kevin Mumford, Melina Pappademos, Cristobal Valencia Ramirez, Rochelle Rowe, Theresa Runstedtler, Michelle Ann Stephens, Tyler Stovall, Deborah Thomas, Leon Wainwright, Cadence Wynter, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Radical History Review, 2013
Haitian Lives/Global Perspectives Haitian artists Vladimir Cybil Charlier and Andre Juste created... more Haitian Lives/Global Perspectives Haitian artists Vladimir Cybil Charlier and Andre Juste created the artwork that graces the cover of this issue. Entitled Brooklyn, the painting is part of a collaborative series, The Politics of Paradise, which focuses on Haitian and, by extension, Caribbean and black diasporic culture and history, seen primarily through the prism of the familiar, fantastical art of Haiti. The series examines exploitative marketing practices associated with Caribbean art. To show the relationship of the art industry to inexpensive cultural labor, Charlier and Juste depict tediously hand-painted bolts of canvas that could be marketed and sold "by the yard" and rolls of paper towel adorned with iconic "naive" paintings and patterns of tropical vignettes. Charlier was born in Queens, New York, but grew up in Haiti; Juste was born and raised in Haiti, settling in New York in 1989. Both artists believe their trajectories of emigration and return home, their existences in at least two worlds, fundamentally have shaped their worldviews, captured poignantly by Charlier: "When one inhabits two worlds, one often simultaneously belongs to both and none." 1 For us, their work perfectly captured the themes of this issue and our desire to place Haitian perspectives at the center of inquiry in the wake of the global response to the devastating 2010 earthquake. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster that leveled Haiti's capital city and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the Caribbean republic reentered mass public consciousness. While plate tectonics were to blame for the earthquake itself, commentators from across the political spectrum attributed the vast scale of this "unnatural disaster" in the "poorest country in the West" to a variety of human factors, most notably to foreign interference, administrative misappropriation, and Haitians' general incapacity for self-rule. Academics participated in the collective
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2011
Radical History Review
Militarism and capitalism have been conjoined, in symbiosis, from at least the period of the tria... more Militarism and capitalism have been conjoined, in symbiosis, from at least the period of the triangular trade one-half millennia ago, when industrialization projects around the globe trafficked in human bodies and the labor and armaments of systemic control. The evolving enmeshment of capitalist and military growth, in fact, generates a multitude of intricate relationships, where militarism avails its considerable resources to suppress anticapitalist movements globally, and where the military-industrial complex stabilizes capitalist activity, absorbing its excesses by producing armaments, surveillance tactics, and ever-diversifying uses of security technology. Further, as capitalist activity continues to seek new markets and forms of production, in concomitant fashion, policies of human dispossession, dislocation, and destruction inevitably are normalized. In the United States, for example, state and private enterprises approach these twined forces of expansion and destruction with the false yet clichéd appeal of spreading the "greater goods" of capitalism and democracy through the War on Terror. That is, deeper conjunctions of militarism and capitalism make the line between them increasingly indistinct and call for radical interventions to expose the military-industrial complex's inner workings and impacts on the quality of human life and on the viability of societies across the globe. The editors of this issue and the scholars whose work appears on its pages seek to demonstrate the critical need to understand capitalist projects and military aggression by illuminating their deep entanglements.
African and Black Diaspora an International Journal, 2012
The American Historical Review, 2014
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011
Radical History Review, Oct 1, 2022
The evocative cover for this issue, by the Nigerian photographer Emeka Okereke, features the part... more The evocative cover for this issue, by the Nigerian photographer Emeka Okereke, features the participants in the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project during their trip to Bangladesh in 2019. 1 We were drawn to it because it reflects and transcends so many of the ideas associated with the ideal and the challenge of the Afropolitan. Par excellence, the term Afropolitan signals mobility, but one often connected to the Global North or to the largest cities on the African continent. Without any context, it is not possible to know that the image is of Bangladesh from the landscape-a low seawall, a busy road, the speeding car rendered motionless. The viewer can only search the expressions of the people standing together and apart, facing and turned away from the camera, for clues. It is also not entirely clear who is from the Trans-African Project and who is from the Bangladeshi Drik Network partnered with them. 2 The viewer is put in the uncomfortable situation of assuming who might belong and who might not, raising a central question about the Afropolitan who seeks to transcend such borders. The photograph appears on the cover of the Trans-Bangladeshi, a newsletter that Invisible Borders published in Dhaka as part of its project. From the newsletter's essays, poems, and photographs, we learn some of the stories and interests of the participants. Next to the cover image is the opening reflection, "Let's Try On New Clothes," by the Nigerian writer Kay Ugwuede. The short essay uses the metaphor of "trying on clothes" to reflect on how countries can outgrow their colonial borders. She also describes the initial meeting with their Bangladeshi counterparts
Radical History Review, 2018
This issue explores the ways, means, and co-constitution of military infrastructures, labor, stra... more This issue explores the ways, means, and co-constitution of military infrastructures, labor, strategies of violence, and capital's emergencies and ever-expanding need for growth. Throughout the issue's articles, it threads together critical themes: militarism as a structure of everyday life under capitalism; the role of the state in managing the contradictions of militarized capital, from suppressing dissent to mobilizing labor; violence that exceeds the temporal and spatial boundaries of formal combat, as well as the discursive boundary between “soft” and “hard” power; and the spaces of sociality where local workers and foreign soldiers interact. The included essays show that the relations of violence that converge in any particular site animate other sites of the empire where the imperatives of militarism and capitalism converge. They also show the creative militancy of people who are on the front lines of documenting communities and lifeways lost to these convergent forces and who insist that another world is possible.
Issue: A Journal of Opinion, 1996
I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I sa... more I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.
The American Historical Review, 2013
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2012
This article examines race and the structure of republican Cuban politics after Spanish coloniali... more This article examines race and the structure of republican Cuban politics after Spanish colonialism ended in 1898. It discusses the structural role of patronage and political sociability in the transition from colony to republic, alongside ideas circulating about ...
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2013
Radical History Review
Increased access to visual archives and the proliferation of digitized images related to sexualit... more Increased access to visual archives and the proliferation of digitized images related to sexuality have led a growing number of scholars in recent years to place images and visual practices at the center of critical historical inquiries of sexual desire, subjectivity, and embodiment. At the same time, new critical histories of sexual science serve both to expand the temporal and geographical frames for investigating the historical relationships of sex and visual production, and to generate new lines of inquiry and reshape visual studies more broadly. The contributors to this issue invite us to ask: What new questions and challenges for the study of sex and sexual science are posed by critical studies of the visual? How are new visual methodologies that focus on archives changing the contours of historical knowledge about sex and sexuality? What—and where—are new methodologies still needed? “Visual Archives of Sex” aims to illuminate current research that centers visual media in the ...
Contributors: Erica Ball, Anthony Bogues, Lisa Brock, Sara Busdiecker, Prudence Cumberbatch, Jacq... more Contributors: Erica Ball, Anthony Bogues, Lisa Brock, Sara Busdiecker, Prudence Cumberbatch, Jacqueline Francis, Anita Gonzalez, Amoaba Gooden, Dayo Gore, Laura A. Harris, Christopher J. Lee, Kevin Mumford, Melina Pappademos, Cristobal Valencia Ramirez, Rochelle Rowe, Theresa Runstedtler, Michelle Ann Stephens, Tyler Stovall, Deborah Thomas, Leon Wainwright, Cadence Wynter, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Radical History Review, 2013
Haitian Lives/Global Perspectives Haitian artists Vladimir Cybil Charlier and Andre Juste created... more Haitian Lives/Global Perspectives Haitian artists Vladimir Cybil Charlier and Andre Juste created the artwork that graces the cover of this issue. Entitled Brooklyn, the painting is part of a collaborative series, The Politics of Paradise, which focuses on Haitian and, by extension, Caribbean and black diasporic culture and history, seen primarily through the prism of the familiar, fantastical art of Haiti. The series examines exploitative marketing practices associated with Caribbean art. To show the relationship of the art industry to inexpensive cultural labor, Charlier and Juste depict tediously hand-painted bolts of canvas that could be marketed and sold "by the yard" and rolls of paper towel adorned with iconic "naive" paintings and patterns of tropical vignettes. Charlier was born in Queens, New York, but grew up in Haiti; Juste was born and raised in Haiti, settling in New York in 1989. Both artists believe their trajectories of emigration and return home, their existences in at least two worlds, fundamentally have shaped their worldviews, captured poignantly by Charlier: "When one inhabits two worlds, one often simultaneously belongs to both and none." 1 For us, their work perfectly captured the themes of this issue and our desire to place Haitian perspectives at the center of inquiry in the wake of the global response to the devastating 2010 earthquake. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster that leveled Haiti's capital city and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the Caribbean republic reentered mass public consciousness. While plate tectonics were to blame for the earthquake itself, commentators from across the political spectrum attributed the vast scale of this "unnatural disaster" in the "poorest country in the West" to a variety of human factors, most notably to foreign interference, administrative misappropriation, and Haitians' general incapacity for self-rule. Academics participated in the collective
Hispanic American Historical Review, 2011
Radical History Review
Militarism and capitalism have been conjoined, in symbiosis, from at least the period of the tria... more Militarism and capitalism have been conjoined, in symbiosis, from at least the period of the triangular trade one-half millennia ago, when industrialization projects around the globe trafficked in human bodies and the labor and armaments of systemic control. The evolving enmeshment of capitalist and military growth, in fact, generates a multitude of intricate relationships, where militarism avails its considerable resources to suppress anticapitalist movements globally, and where the military-industrial complex stabilizes capitalist activity, absorbing its excesses by producing armaments, surveillance tactics, and ever-diversifying uses of security technology. Further, as capitalist activity continues to seek new markets and forms of production, in concomitant fashion, policies of human dispossession, dislocation, and destruction inevitably are normalized. In the United States, for example, state and private enterprises approach these twined forces of expansion and destruction with the false yet clichéd appeal of spreading the "greater goods" of capitalism and democracy through the War on Terror. That is, deeper conjunctions of militarism and capitalism make the line between them increasingly indistinct and call for radical interventions to expose the military-industrial complex's inner workings and impacts on the quality of human life and on the viability of societies across the globe. The editors of this issue and the scholars whose work appears on its pages seek to demonstrate the critical need to understand capitalist projects and military aggression by illuminating their deep entanglements.
African and Black Diaspora an International Journal, 2012
The American Historical Review, 2014
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011
Black Political Activism and the Cuban Republic, 2011