Katarzyna Marciniak | Occidental College (original) (raw)
Uploads
Books by Katarzyna Marciniak
Oxford University Press, 2020
Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past.... more Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer crucial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.
Counter Memory: My mother, an active Solidarity member, keeps bringing home various publications ... more Counter Memory: My mother, an active Solidarity member, keeps bringing home various publications produced underground. We see pamphlets, manifestoes, and whole books occasionally-"bibuła" in the underground lingo. All documents have sketchy fonts and low-quality paper. My grandmother and father worry out loud that this is dangerous. We will all go to jail, says my grandmother. I am young, but I understand that we have access to illicit stuff. I read a lot of those materials. This is my introduction to defying the communist regime. December 2011, an uncanny emergence: the gigantic head of Lenin appears on La Brea Avenue, a major artery running through Los Angeles. This glistening creation of stainless steel is a sculpture placed in a public space-on the street, in front of the new, but yet to be opened at that point, Ace Museum of Contemporary Art (see Figure 31.1).1 Titled "Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head, " the sculpture is the work of Beijing-based brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, referred to as "two of the most incendiary figures in China's contemporary art world. "2 Gao Qiang remarked on the fact that their art is often thought of as shocking: "It is fine if people get shocked by the work or think it's sensationalist, but that's not the intention. I personally never get shocked by art because life itself in China is shocking enough. "3 The brothers are known for their controversial, politically challenging art, specifically for their various provocative renditions of Mao, still a sacrosanct figure for some Chinese. Headless Mao, naked Mao, feminized Mao with huge breasts, a firing squad of Mao figures shooting at Christ, repentant Mao in a kneeling position with a hand on his chest-these are some of the Gao Brothers' best-known pieces. Their Mao performance in Moscow at the Kandinsky Prize ceremony
In 1988, still living in Łódź, Poland, I was a host to an unusual guest from the United States: R... more In 1988, still living in Łódź, Poland, I was a host to an unusual guest from the United States: Roman, a Vietnam vet and resident of Montana. My guest's Vietnam war background and complex experiences of living the trauma aerwards had made him quite 'dierent' from other westerners around me, who were mainly American and British teachers in the English Philology department where I was a student at the time. ese invited scholars knew well how to act out their 'superiority' as 'native speakers' dispensing to us an 'authentic' knowledge of culture, history and literature. Perhaps my guest's family's complicated history also contributed to his ability to make our transcultural encounter a memorable one. His parents were refugees from Ukraine; he himself was born in a refugee camp in Germany during the war and remembered his parents' stories of dispossession and pain of dislocation and exile. He spoke about their plight; their journey in a boxcar to Germany. I remember returning home from the university and nding him sharing these stories with my parents (he spoke Ukrainian, my parents spoke Polish and Russian); the table was oen full of his drawings on pieces of paper and napkins. He is a graphic artist and when they could not nd the right words, he would draw for them. e memory of this compelling encounter is coming back now as I nish this project because my guest was the rst westerner who spent a substantial time with me and my family and was genuinely interested in nding out about our experiences of Soviet colonization. is was 1988 and the Berlin Wall was still in place; nobody would use the term 'colonization' openly. Rather, people talked about the Soviet-imposed regime; the shorthand for it was the word komuna. Years later, when I was a doctoral student in the United States and postcolonial studies was gaining momentum, I often wondered (Figure 1: Lightstones, Łódź, 2009).
Papers by Katarzyna Marciniak
This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of... more This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of 'the aporia' to propose that foreignness is critically aporetic-undecidable and unstable. At a moment when racist political rhetoric is being normalized and xenophobic political movements are on the rise, thinking about 'aporias of foreignness' allows us to reflect upon questions of belonging and hospitality, and the complexity and historical contingency of the relationship between self and other, indigenous citizen and immigrant, asylum-seeker or refugee. The introductory chapter proposes that cinema is a crucial medium through which to rethink foreignness since cinema always involves a potentially disorienting encounter with the unfamiliar, an encounter that is at the centre of the work of artist Ai Weiwei in film and other media.
Oxford University Press, 2020
Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past.... more Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer crucial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.
Counter Memory: My mother, an active Solidarity member, keeps bringing home various publications ... more Counter Memory: My mother, an active Solidarity member, keeps bringing home various publications produced underground. We see pamphlets, manifestoes, and whole books occasionally-"bibuła" in the underground lingo. All documents have sketchy fonts and low-quality paper. My grandmother and father worry out loud that this is dangerous. We will all go to jail, says my grandmother. I am young, but I understand that we have access to illicit stuff. I read a lot of those materials. This is my introduction to defying the communist regime. December 2011, an uncanny emergence: the gigantic head of Lenin appears on La Brea Avenue, a major artery running through Los Angeles. This glistening creation of stainless steel is a sculpture placed in a public space-on the street, in front of the new, but yet to be opened at that point, Ace Museum of Contemporary Art (see Figure 31.1).1 Titled "Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin's Head, " the sculpture is the work of Beijing-based brothers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, referred to as "two of the most incendiary figures in China's contemporary art world. "2 Gao Qiang remarked on the fact that their art is often thought of as shocking: "It is fine if people get shocked by the work or think it's sensationalist, but that's not the intention. I personally never get shocked by art because life itself in China is shocking enough. "3 The brothers are known for their controversial, politically challenging art, specifically for their various provocative renditions of Mao, still a sacrosanct figure for some Chinese. Headless Mao, naked Mao, feminized Mao with huge breasts, a firing squad of Mao figures shooting at Christ, repentant Mao in a kneeling position with a hand on his chest-these are some of the Gao Brothers' best-known pieces. Their Mao performance in Moscow at the Kandinsky Prize ceremony
In 1988, still living in Łódź, Poland, I was a host to an unusual guest from the United States: R... more In 1988, still living in Łódź, Poland, I was a host to an unusual guest from the United States: Roman, a Vietnam vet and resident of Montana. My guest's Vietnam war background and complex experiences of living the trauma aerwards had made him quite 'dierent' from other westerners around me, who were mainly American and British teachers in the English Philology department where I was a student at the time. ese invited scholars knew well how to act out their 'superiority' as 'native speakers' dispensing to us an 'authentic' knowledge of culture, history and literature. Perhaps my guest's family's complicated history also contributed to his ability to make our transcultural encounter a memorable one. His parents were refugees from Ukraine; he himself was born in a refugee camp in Germany during the war and remembered his parents' stories of dispossession and pain of dislocation and exile. He spoke about their plight; their journey in a boxcar to Germany. I remember returning home from the university and nding him sharing these stories with my parents (he spoke Ukrainian, my parents spoke Polish and Russian); the table was oen full of his drawings on pieces of paper and napkins. He is a graphic artist and when they could not nd the right words, he would draw for them. e memory of this compelling encounter is coming back now as I nish this project because my guest was the rst westerner who spent a substantial time with me and my family and was genuinely interested in nding out about our experiences of Soviet colonization. is was 1988 and the Berlin Wall was still in place; nobody would use the term 'colonization' openly. Rather, people talked about the Soviet-imposed regime; the shorthand for it was the word komuna. Years later, when I was a doctoral student in the United States and postcolonial studies was gaining momentum, I often wondered (Figure 1: Lightstones, Łódź, 2009).
This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of... more This introduction examines the meaning of foreignness, drawing on Jacques Derrida's discussion of 'the aporia' to propose that foreignness is critically aporetic-undecidable and unstable. At a moment when racist political rhetoric is being normalized and xenophobic political movements are on the rise, thinking about 'aporias of foreignness' allows us to reflect upon questions of belonging and hospitality, and the complexity and historical contingency of the relationship between self and other, indigenous citizen and immigrant, asylum-seeker or refugee. The introductory chapter proposes that cinema is a crucial medium through which to rethink foreignness since cinema always involves a potentially disorienting encounter with the unfamiliar, an encounter that is at the centre of the work of artist Ai Weiwei in film and other media.
Special Issue of Koht ja pack/Place and Location:, 2008
"We are trying to do positive action: by opening a certain spirit, a certain poetic space, we can... more "We are trying to do positive action: by opening a certain spirit, a certain poetic space, we can at least hope to change how we think about the problem. " Ai Weiwei, commenting on the refugee crisis.
European Journal of Cultural Studies, May 1, 2009
Focusing on the architectural and media design of the New European landscape of Poland, this arti... more Focusing on the architectural and media design of the New European landscape of Poland, this article introduces the concept of `post-socialist hybridity' as a metaphor to capture the contradictions and ambivalences that have emerged in the post-Berlin Wall period. This hybridity is connected to Poland's spectral nationality: that is, the way in which socialism, although officially dead, continues to haunt
Social Identities, Jan 24, 2007
... I do not admire the tilted angle as a fancy, symbolic representational tactic; instead, I rea... more ... I do not admire the tilted angle as a fancy, symbolic representational tactic; instead, I read it straightforwardly: as a world out-of-synch, skewed memories from the time when I used to inhabit this landscape. ... The diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five notebooks from the Lłódz ghetto. ...
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2010
... The context is intentionally global, featuring such films as Ursula Biemann's Performing... more ... The context is intentionally global, featuring such films as Ursula Biemann's Performing the Border ... best when they are offered texts that prompt their imaginative identification with the narrative. What if, following Yaeger's point about the consumption of trauma, we think of my ...
Feminist Media Studies, 2008
This article considers representations of migrant women who work as domestic help and probes the ... more This article considers representations of migrant women who work as domestic help and probes the abjecting logic of cleaning practices vis-à-vis current issues of legality, illegality, immigration, transcultural difference, and rage. I survey diverse media depictions of foreign women and cleaning scenes in transnational settings: Fear and Trembling (2003), Maid in America (2004), The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady (2002), Dirt (2003),
differences, 2006
... American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, eco-nomically, a... more ... American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, eco-nomically, and culturally (4). Henry Yu, exploring the racial ... written in English by an émigré from a European Communist country (Fjellestad 136); a celebration of transculturalism (Proefriedt 132 ...
Cinema Journal, 2003
... film, like the recent Oscar-winning No Mans Land (Danis Tanovic, 2001) and to some degree Bea... more ... film, like the recent Oscar-winning No Mans Land (Danis Tanovic, 2001) and to some degree Beautiful People (Jasmin Dizdar, 1999), gives ... parts: "Words," "Faces," and "Pictures."1" Contextualizing Before the Rain within the category of transnational exilic cin-ema is especially ...
Citizenship Studies, 2013
The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by ir... more The last decade has witnessed an explosion of ‘immigrant protests’, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This special issue on ‘immigrant protest’ has emerged in response to this rise in the visibility of immigrant
protests, and its central aim is to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship. This introduction maps out some of the central issues and themes emerging from the contributions to this issue, exploring the tensions
between integrationist and autonomous approaches and theories of migrant activism and resistance and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility.
By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, we hope to further extend discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the
material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis and political participation and practice today.
Keywords: protest; resistance; neoliberalism; autonomy of migration; art activism