Grasping at Bits--Art and Intellectual Control In the Digital Age: Version 1.1 (original) (raw)
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The Historian, 2018
Agency has long been a central concern of historians of Africa. Past studies of agricultural innovations, labor unrest, and "informal" trade have allowed us to see African peoples not as passive economic actors but as empowered producers who pursued their own aims amid the imposition of exploitative colonial economies. Few studies, however, have examined African consumerism or the ways in which the creation of African consumer cultures was more than a byproduct of colonial or global capitalism. In Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana, Bianca Murillo offers a stimulating corrective to this imbalance. Presented as an "attempt to explore the multitude of relationships that shaped Ghana's economic reality and structured capitalist exchange" in the British colony of the Gold Coast turned independent nation of Ghana (1957), her book deploys archival and oral sources to explore "the complex social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible" (6). Proposing an African-centered rethinking of consumption studies-a field focused predominantly on consumer choice, demand, and desire-Murillo argues that Ghana's consumer culture was driven not by things, but by social relationships and everyday contests over access to goods, distribution channels, and commercial spaces. The result is a rich foray into how social interactions, local beliefs, and public sentiment influenced twentieth-century Ghanaians' experiences with the global market. Comprised of five crisply-written chapters that progress chronologically but focus on individual case studies, as well as a brief afterword, Market Encounters is noteworthy for being one of the first book-length histories of African consumer culture. But the book warrants wide attention for other reasons. One is Murillo's use of consumer politics as an analytical tool for "peel[ing] back complex layers of meaning" behind wider historical events (163). The fruits of her approach are obvious in her discussions of the creation of the colonial economy (chapters 1-2) and the shifting (and oftentimes disastrous) economic ideologies that followed independence (chapters 3-5), which she recasts not as mere top-down initiatives, but as processes influenced by ordinary Ghanaian men and women. But her analytical tack proves equally insightful about political matters, unveiling how public concerns about economic injustice and the ethics of accumulation were formative to the 1948 Accra Riots and the 1966 military coup that overthrew Kwame Nkrumah. Attending to consumer politics, she reveals, can do much to enrich our general understanding of modern Africa. Another of Murillo's innovative methods is her work in corporate archives: repositories that she insists have "untapped" potential for social and cultural history (22). Showing that corporate records can be used to interrogate on-the-ground power struggles as well as racial and gendered tensions, she provides historians with a new means of uncovering colonial and post-colonial histories, particularly for time periods and places for which few official archival records currently exist. All told, Market Encounters is a highly informative and thought-provoking book that admirably probes the intersections of social worlds and economic processes. It deserves careful attention from students and scholars alike.
The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico
Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, 2019
Agency has long been a central concern of historians of Africa. Past studies of agricultural innovations, labor unrest, and "informal" trade have allowed us to see African peoples not as passive economic actors but as empowered producers who pursued their own aims amid the imposition of exploitative colonial economies. Few studies, however, have examined African consumerism or the ways in which the creation of African consumer cultures was more than a byproduct of colonial or global capitalism. In Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana, Bianca Murillo offers a stimulating corrective to this imbalance. Presented as an "attempt to explore the multitude of relationships that shaped Ghana's economic reality and structured capitalist exchange" in the British colony of the Gold Coast turned independent nation of Ghana (1957), her book deploys archival and oral sources to explore "the complex social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible" (6). Proposing an African-centered rethinking of consumption studies-a field focused predominantly on consumer choice, demand, and desire-Murillo argues that Ghana's consumer culture was driven not by things, but by social relationships and everyday contests over access to goods, distribution channels, and commercial spaces. The result is a rich foray into how social interactions, local beliefs, and public sentiment influenced twentieth-century Ghanaians' experiences with the global market. Comprised of five crisply-written chapters that progress chronologically but focus on individual case studies, as well as a brief afterword, Market Encounters is noteworthy for being one of the first book-length histories of African consumer culture. But the book warrants wide attention for other reasons. One is Murillo's use of consumer politics as an analytical tool for "peel[ing] back complex layers of meaning" behind wider historical events (163). The fruits of her approach are obvious in her discussions of the creation of the colonial economy (chapters 1-2) and the shifting (and oftentimes disastrous) economic ideologies that followed independence (chapters 3-5), which she recasts not as mere top-down initiatives, but as processes influenced by ordinary Ghanaian men and women. But her analytical tack proves equally insightful about political matters, unveiling how public concerns about economic injustice and the ethics of accumulation were formative to the 1948 Accra Riots and the 1966 military coup that overthrew Kwame Nkrumah. Attending to consumer politics, she reveals, can do much to enrich our general understanding of modern Africa. Another of Murillo's innovative methods is her work in corporate archives: repositories that she insists have "untapped" potential for social and cultural history (22). Showing that corporate records can be used to interrogate on-the-ground power struggles as well as racial and gendered tensions, she provides historians with a new means of uncovering colonial and post-colonial histories, particularly for time periods and places for which few official archival records currently exist. All told, Market Encounters is a highly informative and thought-provoking book that admirably probes the intersections of social worlds and economic processes. It deserves careful attention from students and scholars alike.
Modernity, Frontiers and Revolutions.
Modernity, Frontiers and Revolutions, 2018
The role of Art in modern global society is unquestionable. In fact, art and travel have come to occupy an increasingly central place in contemporary culture in a genealogy that began with the Portuguese Discoveries when men set off to conquer and later to build a heritage that was an extension of the metropolitan culture in the distant colony. Although adapted obviously to the intrinsic conditioning restrictions of the overseas territories, the arts travelled from this side of the ocean to the other, perpetuating an inheritance that would become a legacy and a derivative in the post-colonial world of the twenty-first century. This paper aims at providing a perspective of the links between Art, Travel and Colonial Power in the light of postcolonial and modernity studies.
RE-STAGING COLONIALITY IN THE AMERICAS
Minorit'Art, 2018
This article addresses the issue of aesthetic coloniality in the Caribbean and Latin American contexts. More specifically, it fathoms the reach of colonial artistic stereotypes and the ways of debunking essentialist myths in the field of the plastic, visual and performative arts.
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2022
Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez are among the most exciting artists working today. Although they are based in cities on opposite ends of the country-Glow in New York City, and Rodriguez in Los Angeles-we decided to focus on their works in this special forum of JTAS because of their shared interest in critically engaging with the intimate material exchanges at the heart of colonial and imperial projects. Their works evidence deep commitments to making visible those micropolitics and histories of empire that have been naturalized and obscured through processes of extraction and commodity fetishism. In Glow's and Rodriguez's art, everyday materials such as spices, perfumes, foods, plants, minerals, and insects are transformed-remade and recoded to reveal suppressed, sedimented histories of empire. Glow describes herself as a "multisensory artist, researcher, and advocate." 1 Her work bridges a wide range of media and thematic concerns, from performance art and multimedia sense-scapes to oil on canvas. One of the throughlines that unifies Glow's practice is a concern with documenting and revealing the ongoing colonial histories embedded within such everyday items as perfume bottles, cloves, nutmeg, and tobacco. She is especially interested in exploring how a range of colonial spaces are linked by chemosensory experiences of taste and smell. In Rhunhattan [Tearoom] (2015), for example, Glow excavates a little-discussed chapter of colonial history. In 1667, British and Dutch colonizers "exchanged" the island of Manhattan for the island of Rhun in the Banda Islands archipelago in present-day Indonesia. During the seventeenth century, Rhun was an important hub in the spice trade. This colonial exchange enriched the Dutch by allowing them to control the global nutmeg trade. As Glow notes, "the consequences were devastating" for the Indigenous peoples on both islands: the Bandanese of Rhun and the Lenape/Lunaapeew/Lunaape of
Coloniality: the darker side of Western modernity
An article written for the Catalog of the exhibit, Modernologies, MACBA (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona). It became the title of one of my books. And it is also an earlier expression of my interests in museums, arts and decolonial aesthesis.
Special Issue: Cultures and Imperialisms
Le Simplegadi, Year XII, Number 12, 2014
Rivista internazionale on-line di lingue e letterature moderne International refereed online journal of modern languages and literatures http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi
The aim of this course is to provide students with tools to help them understand the Postcolonial perspective and its dialogue with curatorial practices. One of the students main tasks will be to collectively create a critical cartography of terms, exhibitions and texts of interest from the 1980s to the present. Each unit is made up of three hours divided into two parts: the first will be offered as a lecture and the second will be a text analysis and debate. In the first part (1:30 h) we will explore postcolonial debates, theories and key concepts, and in the second we will look at a Case Study of a curatorial projects and the debates surrounding it. For this last part, one student will be on charge of one of the texts and will be in charge of moderating the debate. Students will be given the opportunity to propose their own texts for analysis, focusing on either an exhibition or curatorial theory. Assessments will evaluate the text analysis and moderation carried out by individual students in the second part of the class and their final presentation. Student dissertations will be delivered three weeks before the end of the course and will be evaluated and commented in pairs, which means that each student will receive feedback from the teacher and another form a peer review in the class. Students will be able to incorporate these critiques and comments into their final presentations. During the course, students will also have the opportunity to work on their presentation skills.
Monstrous Anthropology: The Appearance of Colonisation
Third Text, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2017.1403754 The following article attempts to track the points where the imaginings of indigeneity emerged from their colonial context in the form of discursive practices or concepts. The argument is that the origins of these imaginings are located in our shared history of colonisation at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. The main aim of this article is to problematise Western aesthetic discourse and briefly show how contemporary Indigenous art problematises this discourse. This article shows that the mechanism used to assemble these imaginings was configured by an aesthetic of ugliness, particularly of the monstrous. This depiction, constituted by historical processes, established the first discursive rules of the formation of the European conceptualisation of ‘indigeneity’: 1) terror, horror and tragedy, 2) capturing and enslavement, 3) similarity and anthropocentrism, and 4) conquest. These discursive formation processes provide part of the blueprint of the Western imaginings of indigeneity.