Lisa Uddin | Whitman College (original) (raw)
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Recent Work by Lisa Uddin
Aggregate, 2022
Days. Almost every one we grab pickaxes. Almost every one we mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymn... more Days. Almost every one we grab pickaxes. Almost every one we mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymns. We chip worry stone. We hope. We gather moss. We lie flat. We scratch at the mineshaft. We descend deeper. We lamp away from the light not toward exit but through the broken core.
liquid blackness, 2021
This essay reflects on the impulses, aspirations, and process of an online art criticism series c... more This essay reflects on the impulses, aspirations, and process of an online art criticism series called Black One Shot, which ran in 2018 and 2020 on ASAP/J, the open access journal for the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP). Sourcing visual and epistolary materials from the series’ production, the coeditors revisit their collaborative effort to discern blackness and pursue object-forward art criticism without foreclosures and guarantees.
Archives of American Art Journal, 2021
Papers by Lisa Uddin
in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. I... more in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
ASAP/J, 2020
The argument for this essay is as follows: that toilets imagined, built, and used in and around U... more The argument for this essay is as follows: that toilets imagined, built, and used in and around U.C. Berkeley’s design studio pushed the radicalism of California counterculture, even for the studio itself. Material in a 150-page volume of reprinted articles, reflections, and drawings compiled after the studio suggests that composting toilets were ground zero, as it were, for a critique and reformulation of human autonomy in everyday modern lifeworlds; a small-scale experiment in how to put high capitalist human bodies into physical, psychic, and semiotic proximity with their own refuse and the act of its elimination.
Two hours into the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971) dancer and choreogra... more Two hours into the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971) dancer and choreographer Trina Parks navigates the living room of John Lautner’s 1968 Elrod House, a lavish sunburst-shaped retreat “built into the rock and desert” of Palm Springs California and laden with bachelor-pad eccentricity.1 Playing the role of a bodyguard named “Thumper,” and paired with her white colleague “Bambi” (Lola Larsen), Parks’ performance in the scene is virtuosic black spatial praxis in the sense proposed by Mario Gooden.2 This micro-operation is worth considering so that we might know (or know how to know) how certain maneuvers can, paraphrasing Huey Copeland, tend a postwar architecture toward blackness.
Public: Art/Culture/Ideas, No. 41, Gardens issue, 2010
rochester.edu
In the opening sequences of Luc Jacquet's recent film for National Geographic, March of The P... more In the opening sequences of Luc Jacquet's recent film for National Geographic, March of The Penguins (2005), audiences are shown spectacular vistas of a barren Antarctic landscape. The ice-covered backgrounds are punctuated by tiny, black figures waddling across the ...
This thesis argues for the generative powers of popular culture and asks what they can bring to a... more This thesis argues for the generative powers of popular culture and asks what they can bring to a critical understanding of modern science. Drawing on literature in science studies, cultural studies and feminist theory, the project considers in particular how sensational ...
Reviews by Lisa Uddin
July 2015: I write this reflection on Claudia Rankine's Citizen zigzagging between two unfolding ... more July 2015: I write this reflection on Claudia Rankine's Citizen zigzagging between two unfolding events: 1. Completing a review of Brian Massumi's book about animality and politics and 2. Learning of 28-year-old Sandra Bland's arrest, detention, and purported suicide in police custody in Texas. My nausea stems not only from the revelation of another rotten system of justice, this time in the Lone Star State, but also its possible affinities with euphoric theory on the political promise of activating that which is nonhuman. This is Massumi's tone and wager, shared by many other thinkers in the strand of critical theory that some identify as posthumanism. Massumi in particular sees nonhuman animals pointing to alternate and more hopeful ways of being in and relating to the world. If only we could tap into that promise. If only we could figure out how to think with or as animals rather than at or about them. Our job -framed as play -is to embrace animal modalities that can expose the frailty and folly of the humanist subject, to practice subjectivity without subjects. Three weeks ago, I also zigzagged at an Environmental Humanities conference when a white PhD candidate offered another version of posthumanist thinking pitched toward the ontology of objects. He asked what would happen if we recognized amidst the #BlackLivesMatter movement that life is matter. The question received murmurs of appreciation while I wondered why my stomach dropped. Was his pithiness pure privilege? Was it a valid inquiry? Am I asking the same thing?
A review of Brian Massumi's What Animals Teach Us about Politics
Reviews in Cultural Theory, Jul 2014
Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, Sep 2009
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2007
Invisible Culture, Jan 1, 2003
Aggregate, 2022
Days. Almost every one we grab pickaxes. Almost every one we mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymn... more Days. Almost every one we grab pickaxes. Almost every one we mine. We hum worksongs. We sing hymns. We chip worry stone. We hope. We gather moss. We lie flat. We scratch at the mineshaft. We descend deeper. We lamp away from the light not toward exit but through the broken core.
liquid blackness, 2021
This essay reflects on the impulses, aspirations, and process of an online art criticism series c... more This essay reflects on the impulses, aspirations, and process of an online art criticism series called Black One Shot, which ran in 2018 and 2020 on ASAP/J, the open access journal for the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP). Sourcing visual and epistolary materials from the series’ production, the coeditors revisit their collaborative effort to discern blackness and pursue object-forward art criticism without foreclosures and guarantees.
Archives of American Art Journal, 2021
in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. I... more in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
ASAP/J, 2020
The argument for this essay is as follows: that toilets imagined, built, and used in and around U... more The argument for this essay is as follows: that toilets imagined, built, and used in and around U.C. Berkeley’s design studio pushed the radicalism of California counterculture, even for the studio itself. Material in a 150-page volume of reprinted articles, reflections, and drawings compiled after the studio suggests that composting toilets were ground zero, as it were, for a critique and reformulation of human autonomy in everyday modern lifeworlds; a small-scale experiment in how to put high capitalist human bodies into physical, psychic, and semiotic proximity with their own refuse and the act of its elimination.
Two hours into the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971) dancer and choreogra... more Two hours into the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971) dancer and choreographer Trina Parks navigates the living room of John Lautner’s 1968 Elrod House, a lavish sunburst-shaped retreat “built into the rock and desert” of Palm Springs California and laden with bachelor-pad eccentricity.1 Playing the role of a bodyguard named “Thumper,” and paired with her white colleague “Bambi” (Lola Larsen), Parks’ performance in the scene is virtuosic black spatial praxis in the sense proposed by Mario Gooden.2 This micro-operation is worth considering so that we might know (or know how to know) how certain maneuvers can, paraphrasing Huey Copeland, tend a postwar architecture toward blackness.
Public: Art/Culture/Ideas, No. 41, Gardens issue, 2010
rochester.edu
In the opening sequences of Luc Jacquet's recent film for National Geographic, March of The P... more In the opening sequences of Luc Jacquet's recent film for National Geographic, March of The Penguins (2005), audiences are shown spectacular vistas of a barren Antarctic landscape. The ice-covered backgrounds are punctuated by tiny, black figures waddling across the ...
This thesis argues for the generative powers of popular culture and asks what they can bring to a... more This thesis argues for the generative powers of popular culture and asks what they can bring to a critical understanding of modern science. Drawing on literature in science studies, cultural studies and feminist theory, the project considers in particular how sensational ...
July 2015: I write this reflection on Claudia Rankine's Citizen zigzagging between two unfolding ... more July 2015: I write this reflection on Claudia Rankine's Citizen zigzagging between two unfolding events: 1. Completing a review of Brian Massumi's book about animality and politics and 2. Learning of 28-year-old Sandra Bland's arrest, detention, and purported suicide in police custody in Texas. My nausea stems not only from the revelation of another rotten system of justice, this time in the Lone Star State, but also its possible affinities with euphoric theory on the political promise of activating that which is nonhuman. This is Massumi's tone and wager, shared by many other thinkers in the strand of critical theory that some identify as posthumanism. Massumi in particular sees nonhuman animals pointing to alternate and more hopeful ways of being in and relating to the world. If only we could tap into that promise. If only we could figure out how to think with or as animals rather than at or about them. Our job -framed as play -is to embrace animal modalities that can expose the frailty and folly of the humanist subject, to practice subjectivity without subjects. Three weeks ago, I also zigzagged at an Environmental Humanities conference when a white PhD candidate offered another version of posthumanist thinking pitched toward the ontology of objects. He asked what would happen if we recognized amidst the #BlackLivesMatter movement that life is matter. The question received murmurs of appreciation while I wondered why my stomach dropped. Was his pithiness pure privilege? Was it a valid inquiry? Am I asking the same thing?
A review of Brian Massumi's What Animals Teach Us about Politics
Reviews in Cultural Theory, Jul 2014
Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, Sep 2009
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2007
Invisible Culture, Jan 1, 2003
Afterimage: the journal of media arts and criticism, Nov 2010
The quality and degree of a design's material innovation should be evaluated by its ability to di... more The quality and degree of a design's material innovation should be evaluated by its ability to dismantle anti-black formations of the human and the nonhuman. Or, to put it differently, a truly materially innovative design should work against the racialized conditions of its possibility. That is my claim today - a prescriptive one - and in making it, I am continuing to interrogate the renewed focus on materiality in modern life whose primary project is to decenter humans in accounts and processes of world making and consider how matter is a lively, integrated, and agential force in that world making.
Why do we feel bad at the zoo? In a fascinating counterhistory of American zoos in the 1960s and ... more Why do we feel bad at the zoo? In a fascinating counterhistory of American zoos in the 1960s and 1970s, Lisa Uddin revisits the familiar narrative of zoo reform, from naked cages to more naturalistic enclosures. She argues that reform belongs to the story of cities and feelings toward many of their human inhabitants.
In Zoo Renewal, Uddin demonstrates how efforts to make the zoo more natural and a haven for particular species reflected white fears about the American city ⎯ and, pointedly, how the shame many visitors felt in observing confined animals drew on broader anxieties about race and urban life. Examining the campaign against cages, renovations at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and the San Diego Zoo, and the cases of a rare female white Bengal tiger and a collection of southern white rhinoceroses, Uddin unpacks episodes that challenge assumptions that zoos are about other worlds and other creatures and expand the history of U.S. urbanism.
Uddin shows how the drive to protect endangered species and to ensure larger, safer zoos was shaped by struggles over urban decay, suburban growth, and the dilemmas of postwar American whiteness. In so doing, Zoo Renewal ultimately reveals how feeling bad, or good, at the zoo is connected to our feelings about American cities and their residents.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On Feeling Bad at the Zoo
1. Shame and the Naked Cage
2. Zoo Slum Clearance in Washington, D.C.
3. Mohini’s Bodies
4. White Open Spaces in San Diego County
5. Looking Endangered
Afterword: Good Feelings in Seattle
Notes
Index
Black One Shot is an art criticism series that stages brevity and precision in response to the ar... more Black One Shot is an art criticism series that stages brevity and precision in response to the art of blackness, contemporary and/or prescient. It launched in June 2018 on ASAP/J, the online platform for the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present. It's second run begins in June 2020. http://asapjournal.com/tag/black-one-shot/
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2016