African Athena

At the Edge of the Frame

This is piece I wrote about the photographic work of my friend and colleague Roshini Kempadoo for her retrospective exhibition catalogue in 2004 – Roshini Kempadoo Works 1990-2004. See her website for further images referenced here.

At the Edge of the Frame

In postcoloniality, every metropolitan definition is dislodged. The general mode for the postcolonial is citation, reinscription, rerouting the historical.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak i

I am interested in uncovering the contribution photography/the visual makes to sustaining the hegemonic order of western dominance and superiority, where the black subject is still constructed as the ‘underdeveloped’ other; childlike, immature, and in need of either control or consolation. Of course there are many complex ways which this order manifests itself. I aim to re-orientate these notions through artwork production. I am particularly interested in how digital media may have a role to play in disrupting the signification of the black subject as other. The image from Lapping it Up is perhaps an example of these two notions, where a spliced/cut disrupted digital image references the voyeuristic gaze of tourism, associated with the sexual play of skin tones, difference and otherness. The landscape positions it ‘over there’ and yet posits the black male subject as nearer, reflecting, recalling. The cupping of the hands marks the fragility of the sea and the water as a precious resource.
Roshini Kempadoo ii

Much of this photography and text work has to do with ‘making ourself visible’, redefining the image/position of the woman/person of colour in the large discourse.[...]Reterritorialisation includes recapturing one’s (combined and various) history, much of which has been dismissed as an insignificant footnote to the dominant culture. These objects become texts of redemption and emancipation then; not simply adaptations of Western codes, they construct and (re)define their makers’ own relationship with the world.
Kellie Jones iii

It is the ‘liminal space’ opened up by the ‘technological splicing’ of an ambivalent image of (post)colonial desire and mastery, with the scene of (an)other repressed history that Roshini Kempadoo’s creative corpus inhabits. She probes, cuts and re-positions the framings that have rendered the subaltern an object, invisible and exploited. From the early deconstructive monochrome montages of black women to the more recent digitally layered images of the Caribbean, Kempadoo’s photographic works are marked by a passionate intensity of expression and critical reflection. The characteristic juxtaposition and superimposition of different images, from across time and space, produces a complex articulation of multiple discourses that transverse Kempadoo’s photo-world. Her projects are challenging events, for they attempt to make visible the social and historical forces of the ‘outside world’ inside and across the frame of the image, by exposing the limits of representation itself. To view collectively Kempadoo’s intricate photo-constructions produced over the last decade, is to encounter a dense, multi-media labyrinthian flow of still images, through which the diasporic artist interrupts and recontextualises the present. Her work offers a disjunctive and dislocated political vision of everyday survival and struggle in contemporary globalization.

Informed by the traditions of social documentary and photojournalism, and working with the critical developments in cultural studies and postcolonial theory, Kempadoo’s artwork questions the truth claims of hegemonic visual culture, while attempting to construct new understandings of gendered and racialised subjects. Her ‘politics of representation’ is an example of the work of a number of black photographers that emerged in the 1980s, who questioned the prevailing social realist idiom of racial representation. This shift from documentary realism to one exploring questions of identification, desire, the body and spectatorship has been understood as a turn to ‘avant-garde’ modes of expression. Characteristically Kempadoo’s position within this new wave of black creative production is quite distinctive and nuanced – she has operated across, and with, the two generic approaches, deconstructing, with good aesthetic and political effect, the documentary/avant-garde division. Kempadoo, with photographers such as Dave Lewis, Sunil Gupta, Ingrid Pollard, Lorna Simpson and Clarissa Sligh, has been addressing the conceptual task highlighted by David A. Bailey and Stuart Hall ‘…there is a need for a more refined critical apparatus for seeing what someone who is practising in the documentary genre can and can’t do, how the genre limits them and how the genre allows them to refer to certain things which those who are working in the avant garde genres cannot, as well as how avant garde genres open up connections which realism blocks out.’iv Significantly, many of these ‘post- documentary’ photographers have tended to work at the complex intersections of gender, sexuality and racial history. The indexical reference and the appearance of ‘reality’ that the photograph connotes has been the very locus to articulate a political aesthetic, that translates across multiple and at times antagonistic social formations that are rarefied by global media culture. In the case of Kempadoo this has meant examining the potential and limits of cyberculture and virtual reality to represent the vissitudes of sexual difference and (post)colonial history.

Kempadoo has been especially attentive to addressing within her projects the ethical and social implications of artistic production. Her engagement with the politics of gender and black female subjectivity, is worked through a vigorous reflection upon the institutional, historical and cultural contexts in which aesthetics, technology and spectatorship are enunciated. As an experienced pedagogue, her practice is informed by a dialogic approach that creates an environment in which the audience or users positionality is foregrounded and questioned. For example, in recent digital pieces such as Back Routes (2002) and Ghosting (2004), Kempadoo produces an interactive environment that draws the spectator into exploring their investments in the images, by navigating the non-linear pieces through specific user interventions. A constant thematic in the photo-works is the challenging of the fetishistic structures that enframe the black female body. By visualising the relationship between desire and power the images expose the place of voyeurism and capitalism in the oppression of women. Kempadoo’s complex articulation of sexual, racial and commodity fetishisms are thought provoking feminist mappings of the way global power has oppressed black and ‘third world’ subjects. The importance of trade, capitalism and the economy, as the driving force of historical and contemporary imperialism, patriarchy and racism are central concerns in many of the works. In Future Looms (1998) the place of labour, class and work is critically examined through the linking of images of industrial capitalism with the new world of virtual labour. Or the iconic composite digital print, from “The ‘Head People’” in Sweetness and Light (1997) of Kempadoo – the waitress/servant – holding aloft a personal computer superimposed on an anthropological-style archive sequence of naked black women, makes the provocative connection between colonial exploitation and contemporary gendered labour.

GHOSTING (2004)

‘Who do they expect me to be today?’ (Identity in Production 1990)

‘I wonder is it possible to position
myself from both
HERE and THERE?
No one experience
no one history
but from this an identity
in constant change,
constant trans-formation.
And now I know
it is not only
my fragmented history,
but also my future
that shapes
my sense of being’
(Constant Transformation 1990)

In Kempadoo’s artwork the displacements produced by empire and its aftermath is the horizon for the mapping of cultural identity and belonging. Kempadoo’s own exploration of her multiple and partial identities – black, Asian, British, Guyanese, Trinidadian, West/East Indian, Indo-Caribbean – are literally inscribed across the bodies of the photo-constructions. The traumatic journeys of slavery, indenture and immigration converge in Kempadoo’s Caribbean ‘auto-graphic’ imaginary. The sumptuous images of the sea and sparsely populated island interiors create a sublime experience of loss and melancholia, where the hauntings of the past continue to disrupt any fixed identification. But this loss is an enabling one – As Françoise Vergès has astutely argued, creolization ‘…stems from a loss. A loss of the culture of origin, loss of native land, loss of language, and nothing can be done about that…loss constitutes the soil on which creolization can be constructed.’v Kempadoo invents through a bricolage of cultural fragments an image of a ‘minimal creole self’, always distorted, blurred and destabilising the imperial gaze. The exposed, naked body of the artist, inhabiting some of the photographic images, is allegorical of the ruptured Indian presence in the Caribbean. The processes of enculturation, from loss and exploitation, required creating a layered, palimpsest identity, where the traces of the past are painfully grafted over one and another. A hybrid Indian culture is reinvented through fictional re-imaginings.

Remember one-third quota, coolie woman.
Was your blood spilled so I might reject my history -
forget tears among the paddy leaves…vi

Virtual Exiles: Going for Gold (2000)

The exiled existence in the over-developed metropolis raises more questions of belonging, home and family. Kempadoo’s scattering of family and homes across the oceans, gives her a critical transnational perspective, always an outsider, but at home in multiple locations, in these ‘global postmodern’ times. The early family album montages of intimate domestic spaces, framed with texts of dislocation need to be read as acts of memory-work and identity formation that resonate across her work. The private and the public fold onto each other to create a place of uncanny belonging and transient home in the maelstrom of migration. ‘The family archive relates precisely to the construction of a ‘third space’…that liminal, in-between, transitional space, neither simply historical and collective nor wholly personal and subjective; an undecidable space ‘in between’ which brings a radically subjective sensibility to bear on the social and historical aspects of agency and the self.’vii

The recent works have returned to the histories of the Caribbean through an engagement with the archive and digital technologies. The internet project Virtual Exiles (2000), with the use of imperial and private archival imagery reconstructs other histories and memories of Guyana. As in Sweetness and Light, Kempadoo makes the analogy between colonialism and cyberspace – the projects create diasporic narratives that are made invisible by the circuits of the global information economy. While technology of the internet is itself mobilised to challenge the marginalisation of the subaltern subjects dispersed across the world, the new media also become objects of critique and analysis. As Maria Fernandez has observed,

‘Many artists have used digital media specifically to remember and to construct that ‘inappropriate’ site of intervention theorised by Bhabha. These artists include Esther Parada, Martina Lopez, Pedro Meyer, Roshini Kempadoo, Rafael Lorenzo-Hemmer, Keith Piper and Reggie Wooleri amongst others. Many of the images created by these artists bring to the digital realm the uncomfortable subjects of colonialism, imperialism and their legacy in the form of immigration and transculturation. Often the work mixes facts and fictions, past and present, materialising Hall’s claim that the past is not reclaimed literally but through the imagination.’viii

The use, by Kempadoo, of electronic processes of production, distribution and exhibition such as CD-ROMs, internet, websites, installations, multi-media environments and digital prints create an expansive contemporary recontextualisation of the still image, exploring the photograph’s inherent relationship to ‘reality’, memory and history.

‘The importance of the indexicality of the digital image has remained a central concern to me – mostly because of my interest in the re-articulation of memories and disrupting dominant historical narratives. There is something still disconcerting in virtual and digital spaces where the break from the real is seen as liberation. I am therefore more enthusiastic about the possibilities of what digital media artwork can engage with to ‘decentre’ what Foucault describes as the twin ‘figures of anthropology and humanism”ix

Virtual Exiles: Frontlines/Backyards (2000)

In Back Routes the slow movement of the digitally manipulated image of the landscape enhances the affective force of the photograph. The still image becomes a contemplative space of reflection and critical thinking. Within the global media spectacle of speed and visual simulation, Kempadoo produces a sublime stillness to the Caribbean. With the use of digital technologies of sampling, editing and processing Kempadoo is able to literally work beyond the boundaries of the still frame. In Back Routes and Ghosting the inventive use of sound and spoken word, as well as written text, creates a ‘sensorous’ soundscape that engulfs the still images. The innovative collaborations with the Guyanese dub poet Marc Matthews produces creole dialogues that are counterpoints to the images, while recontextualising and challenging the hegemonic discourses of authority. The use of voice, words and music within the digital space also references the importance of creole narratives and popular Caribbean vernacular culture in Kempadoo’s practice. As with the use of written texts, the soundtrack doesn’t anchor the meaning of the visual image but in fact multiplies it – it poetises and pluralises meanings. In Ghosting the mixing of contemporary music tracing Trindadian rhythms, with dialogues, conversations and stories signify the social antagonisms, negotiations and cultural translations that are in play in the Caribbean. This sonic montage adds further layers to the complexity of black subjectivity produced in the visual images.

GHOSTING (2004)

Through digital imaging, and multi-media forms of exhibition and viewing, Kempadoo is pushing the creative and critical limits of the still image. This ‘representational limit’, of the still frame itself, as used by Kempadoo, is not necessarily a restrictive limitation, but in fact a conceptually enabling one. Against the eurocentric cyber-discourse of post-human, post-race futuristic utopia, the digital, for Kempadoo, enables a ‘return of the real’. The digital manipulation of archival material changes the meaning of the past. In a similar context Jacques Derrida argues ‘…the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archiviable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.’x For Kempadoo the electronic interfaced archive becomes a memory screen – a surface to produce new subject histories and engender a counter-tradition. At the same time, the still image as encoded screen covers up, hides, as much as it exposes. The fractured voices of colonial desire, rape and violence that reverberate around the image environment are ‘ghosts in the machine’ of a subterranean space that one could call a cybernetic creole culture. Bodies, machines, languages interact, enabling new configurations of narrative and meaning to be constructed. This counter-colonial cybernetic tradition is not just one of sensory affect and rhizomatic connections, but also one of loss, forgetting and death. It is the silences, the gaps, and the absences that become ‘visible’ when one re-examines the imperial picture in the digital age. The formation of this ‘prosthetic race memory’ allows for ‘postcolonial mourning’ to be performed and worked through by revisiting the traumas and lacunae of modern racial terror. As Iain Chamber’s poignantly observes:

‘In the rewriting, and rerouting, of a particular Caribbean history the literary event discloses a deviation in the logic of representation: for it draws me into considering not only what is put forth, represented, but also to what withdraws from view, remains in the shadows, persists in being unrepresented. In the withdrawn and the non-represented, the event of art reveals an interruption in the linearity of temporal ‘progress’, disturbing the representation of ‘truth’ as the transparent and rational accumulation of ‘knowledge”xi

It is the ‘unrepresented’ that Roshini Kempadoo’s ethical art practice is committed to excavating – an ‘archaeology of silence’. In the gaps, juxtapositions and frissons between different creative and critical discourses we see another truth, another possibility of being and living. The ghostly traces of subaltern poetics produce other modes of figuration and looking, ones that create new hybrid forms of struggle, identification and belonging.

Notes:

i. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, (New York and London: Routledge, 1993, p.217)
ii. Roshini Kempadoo, From unpublished presentation, DuPont Lectures at The Art Institute of Boston, USA, (October 2003)
iii. Kellie Jones ‘Re-creation’ in Ten 8 Vol. 2 No. 3 ‘Critical Decade: Black Photography in the 80s’ (Spring 1992, p.105)
iv. David A Bailey and Stuart Hall ‘The Vertigo of Displacement’ in ibid., p.20
v. Françoise Vergès, From ‘Open Session, Cosmopolitanism, Urban Culture, and Creole Identity in the 21st Century in Okwui Enwezor et al. Creolite and Creolization, Documenta 11_Platform 3, (Hatje Cantz, 2003, p.205)
vi. Mahadai Das ‘They Came in Ships’ in David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (eds.), India in the Caribbean, (London: Hansib, 1987, p. 289)
vii. Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different, (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2001, p.67)
viii. Maria Fernandez ‘Postcolonial Media Theory’ in Third Text (Summer 1999, pp.15-16)
ix. Roshini Kempadoo, From unpublished presentation, DuPont Lectures at The Art Institute of Boston, USA (October 2003)
x. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p.17)
xi. Iain Chambers, ‘The Edge of the World’ in Culture after Humanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp185-86). The title of this catalogue essay is inspired by the sub-heading of a section in this collection.

‘No space for teaching’

Note on the neo-liberal university 1

My blogging (and other writing) has dramatically slowed down in the last few weeks as I tackle the numerous bureaucratic obstacles placed by the university to the start of teaching.

There is an increasingly a growing body of work examining the relationship between free market capitalism and the university. (See for example EduFactory and Migrating University projects for good critiques of the neo-liberal university). Here I just wanted to share how this neo-liberalism operates on the ground at the University of East London (UEL) – a new university, with a large body of working class and black students, which is very much operating at the front-line of neo-liberal ideology. While areas such as funding, quality control, student fees, performance monitoring, audit culture and research assessment exercises, have been rightful targets of the critique, universities also operate control by the careful and extensive management of all its resources. At UEL the spaces and facilities available for teaching itself are centrally managed. UEL has a relatively new Docklands campus which has been expanding over the last few years. What is significant is how spaces for teaching in this expanding campus, have in relative percentage terms, been decreasing. Room booking and the allocation of rooms for teaching modules has become very difficult, with less and less appropriate space being available for classes. It is not that the facilities or the actual rooms themselves are not of a high technical standard, but the time and availability for rooms as identifie d by the university is now significantly determining how and what sort of teaching can take place. It has also become common place for rooms to be double-booked or apparent mis-understandings between university space management and academics in the sort of rooms being booked with resultant disruption of valuable class time.

This relative reduction in spaces for teaching is part of the logic to make teaching more ‘efficient’ in the context of space-time economic management. It is also an ideologically significant marker of the transformation of the university to the production of economically useful knowledge for capitalism. (See the recent announcement that UK research funding bodies will prioritise research that directly contributes to the economy). Availability of teaching classes is now secondary in the university to space for ‘business units, ‘knowledge transfer’ seminar boardrooms, corporate hospitality, marketing and publicity, external corporate conferences and events…. also to add at UEL the university library is embedded in the Business School building and is located on the trading floor!

Last year one of my classes of students and I were virtually physically removed by the space management troops when I refused to move rooms for the third time in the first 4 weeks of the semester. In the first 2 weeks I was given rooms with no tables to write on! I was told that this wasn’t their problem and that I had to sort it out myself. I did and they didn’t like it and they bought in these management thugs to reprimand me in front of the students and threw me out. This year they are going around monitoring room usage and sending out notices of room ‘under use’ or ‘mis-use’.

All this is minor, and I just wanted to vent my anger with the impossible situation many of us find us in, but it makes partially visible the insidious form in which new capitalism is permeating all teaching and learning.

ADFED – Asian Dub Foundation Education

 

 

For those of you into Facebook. Support ADFED – Asian Dub Foundation Education – an East London based independent grassroots community music education and training organisation set up by the band ADF.

Sticky Mics

Some thoughts on Cultural Studies Now:

After a late summer break and with the benefit of time I wanted to very briefly reflect on the Cultural Studies Now conference which took place in London in July. As one of the organizers my perspective is clearly marked by my insider location and personal inscription within the conference machinery. But in a conference of this size, with over 100 panels across four days, no one really has a totalizing perspective on the event. This is not to say one cannot attempt to piece together one – to draw out the kernel around which the conference became constructed. It is in this spirit that this post is a sort of tangential comment on Melissa Gregg’s entry ‘Post Transit’ in her Home Cooked Theory blog. While Gregg’s post is a limited response to the conference within the context of a blog, it does present a position on the event and cultural studies more generally, which essentially for me is the present problem with Cultural Studies scholarship as a politics. So in that sense it represents an important commentary on the present state of critical thought.

The crux of the ‘Post Transit’ entry revolves around the ‘hero-worship’ of Stuart Hall and the ’shadow’ this has placed on scholars in the Britain, secondly and significantly for me that the tone of the conference was far too serious, and thirdly Gregg critiques endlessly the facilities and generally poor organization.

I am not interested in refuting any of these observations – they might even be true – what is more interesting is how they defend a rather comfortable, privileged, bourgeois, apolitical and somewhat ahistorical view of academic life.

Many of us are happy to be in the ’shadow’ of Hall. We have learned much from his approach to intellectual thought. In particular for many of us Black students and lecturers he remains a critical inspiration. His recent thinking on the history of cultural studies remains a productive catalyst to our work and practice – others may have different views about Hall- so be it.

I also wouldn’t make an apology for the seriousness of the conference – I don’t actually agree with this characterisation – but maybe the everyday humour was lost in translation. The question of seriousness or not – or our perceptions of it – is partially about what sort of political forms and practices we like and privilege. It says something about what we think are the appropriate modes of political engagement at this geo-political conjuncture. All I will say now is that neoliberal culture and contemporary hegemonic power thrives on not being serious. It is maybe the ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’ of our political commitment that needs to be asserted against the postmodern culture of irony and cynical distance. Lets get serious.

As the person responsible for the mics, I didn’t really care too much if they were sticky! I was just pleased they managed to work – some of the time. I won’t go on about the difficulties we had getting support from the university, but to say that University of East London is, in financial terms, a poor university. We are pleased we managed to pull off the event with not too many problems. Stuffy, crowded halls, running over time, microphones and audio-visual facilities not working well, are all part of the politics of conferences. I’m probably being far too old-fashioned and serious here, but isn’t there a relationship between the ‘form’ and the ‘content’ of conferences. Maybe the sticky mics were a sign of people’s commitment and passion over the four days.

State of Exception?

The ‘war on terror’ is essentially a security and policing operation on a global sphere. While there has been much debate about the significance of 9/11 as an event, if it is approached through the lens of the shifts in race politics in the US, one begins to see how the nexus of capital and state power is articulated in the control of racial groups over the longer historical period, especially after the end of the 1960s with the political attack on civil rights and anti-racism. The connection between race in the US, especially in terms of white racism towards African-Americans, and Muslims and Islam has not been strongly articulated. In fact, there is a tendency to see the war on Islamic militancy and the new legal and security measures as exceptional to the workings of western liberal democracy. What needs to been examined in more critical detail, is the connection between colonialism and postcolonial state racism, and the control and policing of racial and cultural alterity.

This article by Daniel Lazare in Alternet outlines in some detail how the American criminal justice system, built around jailing and incarcerating, a significantly higher proportion of people than in any other western nation, maybe tells us something about the how race, class and capital are now configured. It also interestingly makes the point that the ideological co-ordinates of the ‘war on terror’ were already in place on America’s ‘war of drugs’. The relationship between race, American democracy and postcolonialism has a longer historical formation. The new global Empire is less of a break from the old colonialism and more of a displacement of colonial practices into the west itself. In this sense 9/11 is just the incorporation of the west into the postcolonial wars of the third world. More to follow..

Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?
By Daniel Lazare, Alternet (20 August 2007)

With five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners. How did the American criminal justice system go so wrong? How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they’re not for “people like us” (in Woody Allen’s marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class? Read on >>

War on Democracy – Pilger film

The whole John Pilger film ‘War on Democracy’ is on Google Video

War on Democracy

The recent UK TV screening of John Pilger’s War on Democracy feature-length documentary was a timely reminder of American governmental initiation and support of genocide and fascism, and the undermining of democracy, in Latin American over the last century. In typical Pilger style, it provided a highly emotive and powerful account of the suffering and resistance by the poor to this continual state violence and brutality. The film principally focused on Venezuela and the figure of Hugo Chavez. While remaining controversial to many, even on the left in the west, Chavez continues to symbolically embody the hopes for political and economic reform. As the film highlighted, and is a feature of Latin American social movements, the oppressed remain overwhelmingly indigenous Indians, Africans and ‘mixed race’. Integral to the Venezuelan democratic reforms is the undoing of the racial hierarchies endemic to the nations of the Americas. This article by Nikolas Kozloff in the excellent venezuelanalysis.com in 2005 offers a good analysis of Chavez’s racial politics and makes a strong argument for the centrality of anti-racism and (multi)cultural politics to universalist democratic politics:

A Real Racial Democracy?
Hugo Chávez and the Politics of Race
(October, 2005)

Nikolas Kozloff

As the war of words heats up between the Bush White House and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the firebrand South American leader has boldly sought to forge ties with poor communities of color in the United States. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Chávez provided relief assistance to the poverty stricken and largely African American victims of the disaster. The head of Citgo, the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state owned oil company, set up disaster relief centers in Louisiana and Texas in the wake of the hurricane and provided humanitarian to thousands of victims. Volunteers based at Citgo refineries in Lake Charles, Louisiana and Corpus Christi, Texas, provided medical care, food and water to approximately 5,000 people. In Houston, volunteers from Citgo headquarters provided similar assistance to 40,000 victims. What is more, Venezuela has provided hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in energy assistance to the United States. Chávez followed up his bold initiative by announcing that he would soon begin to ship heating and diesel oil at rock bottom prices to schools, nursing homes, hospitals and poor communities within the U.S. The Venezuelan president has also offered to provide free eye surgery for poor Americans suffering from certain eye conditions. The firebrand South American leader, who proclaimed the plan during a recent visit to New York, will begin his oil program through an October pilot project in Chicago. There, the Venezuelan government will target poor Mexican Americans for assistance. Read more>>

Call for Papers – Interrogating Postcolonial Sexuality

Racism in the Closet: Interrogating Postcolonial Sexuality

Special issue of darkmatter journal
http://www.darkmatter101.org

Call for Papers

This issue of darkmatter sets out to explore the complex and controversial relationship between discourses of race and sexuality. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which racialized difference has been configured as an obstacle to sexual freedom.

While previous explorations of sexuality and race have tended to place emphasis on the negotiation and resolution of conflict between competing rights claims, this issue takes as a point of departure the recognition that their differential positioning in any social formation will invariably overdetermine the outcome of any such settlement. From this perspective it becomes more productive to give critical attention to the wider social and cultural contexts within which these conflicts take place, not in the name of conflict resolution, but in an attempt to understand their profound significance to the structuring of our contemporary social orders.

The need to theorize race through sexuality and the underpinning categories of sex/gender is becoming increasingly important given the ways in which new articulations of race and sexuality are occurring within and beyond the nation-state. Consider, for example, the way in which gay rights are being mobilized in anti-immigration discourse as a key signifier of European cultural superiority. Race and sexuality have also been central to the moral economy of the War on Terror, from representations of Afghanistan and Iraq to the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. As sexuality has come to play a major role in shaping dominant Western attitudes to cultural difference, lesbian and gay activists across the world have become starkly aware of the normative racial bias in hegemonic forms of sexual politics.

This issue asks: how are lesbian and gay subjects being mobilized in such discourses? How does a LGBTIQ politics collude with or participate in the War on Terror? How might we go about resisting a neocolonial politics of sexuality? In what new ways are race and sexuality articulated in an international comparative context? Can we think beyond intersectional and identitarian paradigms by questioning the praxis of othering and interrogating the production of whiteness as a queer norm?

Possible topics might include:

• sexuality and the racialization of religious/cultural practices;
• discourses of women’s rights and gay rights in the War on Terror;
• the politics of race and sexuality in nationalist and supra-nationalist formations;
• racism, Islamophobia and white privilege in activist communities;
• human rights and the politics of normalization;
• the relationship between queer subjects, biopolitics and necropolitics;
• race and reproductive technology/biotechnology.

In the first instance, please send abstracts of up to 300 words to dmjournal3@gmail.com by September 30 2007.

Indicative article length: 1,500 – 8,000 words. Alternative formats, such as essays, commentaries, and reviews are welcome, as are audio, visual and digital contributions.

This edition of darkmatter is co-edited by Henriette Gunkel and Ben Pitcher.

Lessons of Empire

 

Two villagers who left their mud and wood huts last month to travel to London — Kumuti Majhi and Phulme Majhi — were a stark contrast to the 212,000 wealthy Indians who visited Britain last year on shopping expeditions where they outspent Japanese tourists. The villagers’ mission, rather than the acquisition of designer clothing or the latest electronics, was to try to save the livelihoods of their small tribe that grows millet, fruit and spices in the lushly-forested Niyamgiri hills in eastern India.

On August 1, 2007, the Majhis spoke out at the annual general meeting of Vedanta Resources PLC, a British multinational that is poised to dig a new bauxite mine that threatens the village of Jaganathpur. While Vedanta is incorporated in Britain, it is owned by Anil Agarwal, the world’s 230th richest man according to the Forbes 2007 list, a former scrap metal merchant who was born in eastern India. (See Vedanta Undermines Indian Communities, by Nityanand Jayaraman…read more