Jan+26th

- Activists organized around specific struggles in //groupuscules//, advocating doing away with theorization and emphasizing direct action in favor of speech. Students and workers had accused intellectuals and delegates of speechifying (blah blah) and brought knowledge and common sense to their limit by breaking down language to demonstrate its paucity and inability to account for reality. - Symbolic Action (Yippies!) //Revolutionary Action//  Grass Roots Action Beyond the struggle against power, the late sixties and early seventies inaugurated a __political praxis__ founded upon a struggle for visibility and, in this sense, politics as a matter of recognition. This signaled a shift away from representation as being a dispositif for political mediation, and the imperative became imperative to speak in one’s own name. //Everyone speaks in direct or participatory democracy. I SpEAK THEREFORE I AM;// SPEAKING IN ONE’S NAME as the political task. - Shift from REVOLUTION (trying to take over power) RESISTANCE; not to take over power but to fight against it, by //speaking truth to power//; à Foucault: Power is not imposed from above but horizontally; it is everywhere, through mechanisms implemented by the… “disciplinary society”; Centralized automatic surveillance or permanent visibility. **POWER** is not a person but “a certain distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes….” It is imparted by institutions (Schools, hospitals, bureaucracy) and by spectacle. Thus, power is a MULTIPLICITY of relationships of power. Colonialism: Relationships of inferiority/superiority (above/below); it permeates the whole culture… - “What not to wear” (as the break-down, blank slate imposition) Colonialism is not only conquering a people (in some cases, the annihilation of an entire people) but space, territory, soul, culture, economy, labor. “Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours.” - Colonizer uses brute force; the native has only the choice between servitude or supremacy. Forced labor. à ** Power relations are created in between the settlers, the colonial administrators (or bureaucrats), the educated elite, the working class, the “mother land”. ** - Arendt: Slaves can never get revenge from their masters (her critique of Fanon and the Black Panther Party) - ** What happened to Imperialism after the Cold War? We now exist in what many call “Empire” (we will address that in a few weeks). In short: ** Everyone in the world: brands, movies, songs…same TV. Neoliberal economic system (privatization). Globalization. Further economic disparity; pockets of the third world in the first and viceversa; de-centralization (no ‘mother land’) - SPEAKING FROM/FOR within the “Third World”, “National Liberation Struggles”; post-colonization or de-colonization. i.e., Sartre **supported (vouched for)**… unification of the Third World against colonialism… a revolution led by the peasants. Mao; Che Guevara: - THIRD WORLD: “Ignored or exploited world”; a project (Prashay) an ideology (Hanah Arendt); Mao. Now: what was the relationship between the colonies and the colonized? colonies “ressembled” the “mother land” but not fully. Relationship of resemblance; Sartre: “Nauseating Mimicry” (Imitators of Europe) Example: Who was Frantz Fanon? (Bio) Was born in Martinique (Caribean Island in 1925), studied medicine in France and specialized in psychiatry; went to do work in Algeria… at the time of the National Liberation Movement (joined it); Algeria’s independence form France. __ Fanon: voiced the “third world” __ European value of UNIVERSALITY: As “humans” we all have rights that should be respected. But this universality does not apply in the colonies, because colonialsim reduces them to the level of monkeys. - Fanon on Violence: a chapter devoted to violence in //The Wretched of the Earth// (first published in 1963). For Sartre, it is an “interpretation” of the colonial situation. Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. - Violence, decolonization; Fanon’s take into decolonization. (absolute substitution; decolonization as tabula rasa); - The settler created the “native.” Absolute violence. A rational confrontation of points of view is not possible; A world of divisions and opposites; The native: as evil… (or as “pure”) White values are affirmed with violence to create supremacy; To break the native.. when he must admit the supremacy of the white man’s values. “In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up.” “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” __ “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized thorugh a rapid movmenet of decolonization, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all and that the leader has no specific merit… __ What was left by Colonialism? __ FANON: The appearance of the settler has meant in terms of **syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy and the petrification of individuals.** __ à Diaspora, immigrants: “The Third World” @ home; economic and political refugees. In relationship to the imperative to “speak in one’s name.” - What are the relationships that are WOVEN in between the colonized, the former colonized and the oppressor? A term from post-colonial studies: the SUBALTERN. Can the SUBALTERN speak? “Tropical Surrealism,” “Aesthetics of Hunger,” “Primitivism” The Manichean world Fanon talks about as characteristic of Colonialism; it means: Absolute “evil” or primitive vs. absolute good or civilized. Gauguin: (D) Tahiti; Took a reading of “primitive” cultures against the grain as “pure”, untainted by the vices of civilization; idealized view. PICASSO: Fetishization and exorcism; use of African masks; “Primitivism” as a kind of fetishism: a recognition of primitive difference: which is both feared and desired. A show: “Primitivism” in France in 1907: colonial extraction of tribal work as art; the objects which have specific functions in the cultures where they came from, are reduced to forms. Opposition between “archaic” versus “court” civilization; Ethnography and Anthropology: as the social sciences of the other. (Came with colonialism); The “primitive” object was valued; not as a way to better understand the “other” but they used it for its “transgressive” (or exotic) value. Glauber Rocha: “Culture” in Latin America and “civilized culture” beyond how Europeans see it. Exotization of Latin American civilization; incomprehension. “Formal exoticisms that vulgarize social problems)… à The European observer is only interested in artistic creation from the underdeveloped world to the extent that it satisfies his nostalgia for primitivism: Hybrid, dressed up as legacies from the civilized world, misunderstood because imposed by colonialist conditioning.  - An example (art, film, literature) of **primitivism** in the sense Glauber Rocha describes it?  Liberation of colonialism (Economic and political conditioning); philosophical emancipation and yet, impotence  ROCHA: Latin American HUNGER: (eating dirt, roots, stealing, killing to eat…) A cinema that the Europeans do not understand (the colonizers);  Hunger is violence and violence is not PRIMITIVISM;  Formal exercises (formalism) (bankruptcy); brecht;  “Hysteria and Sterility;” Rocha’s critique of the arts… Walter Benjamin’s discussion of form, content… correct political tendency, production; Benjamin’s emphasis on technique, and Rocha’s Cinema Novo; ‘tropical surrealism’ and Benjamin’s critique of works that are not progressive in form and content? i.e., socialist realism; The “Dantesque South” (Gómez-Peña) and “Tropical Surrealism” (Glauber Rocha); (Provide examples of “Dantesque South” and “Tropical Surrealism”; Gómez-Peña on Art: how is his position different than Glauber Rocha? (Aesthetics of Hunger): “The role that artists and cultural organizations can perform in this paradigm shift (border) is crucial. Artists can function as community brokers, citizens, diplomats, ombudsmen, and border translators. And our art spaces can perform the multiple roles of sanctuaries, demilitarized zones, centers for activism against xenophobia, and informal think tanks for intercultural and translational dialogue. Collaborative projects among artists from different communities and nationalities can send a strong message to a larger society: YES: we can talk to one another; we can get along, despite our differences, our fear, and our rage.  Gómez-Peña:  - Life at the border; (**the border as the mental diaspora and post-colonial condition**)  - What is the “border” experience? - California as the Third World within the shrinking First World. (Unemployment, racial tensions, crime and poverty) **Fear is always at the core of xenophobia; “Invaders”;** The Other as the opposite of the nation; as the limits of national boundaries; Native Americans… the Soviets, Mexicans; “Illegal aliens” are the scapegoats. - The other, the stranger, the immigrant: as that which I am not; as he/she whom I am responsible for; he/she who carries all the evils… The absorb the negativity (fear, anxiety, rage); they are perceived as a threat. (Latinos, Hispanics, Mexican-Looking people): Brown people from the south; Brown people from the East; What is the difference with colonialism? Hatred for the immigrant as the new American patriotism: “True Americans” as the other of the dark-skined invaders; - Degrees or willingness or capacity to ASSIMILATE - ”Their indigenous features and rough clothes conjure images of an unpleasant pre-European American past, and of the mythical lands to the south immersed in poverty and political turmoil, where innocent gringos could be attacked for no apparent reason.” - Fear of the other, fear of the “elsewhere” - Gómez-Peña would say: Xenophobia is everywhere. Mexican and Caribbean workers in the farms of Ontario: Come to work… and help with the harvests; they are workers, consumers, strangers and helping hands. They are perceived as: competition with locals for their jobs, as exploited workers or as a threat to local culture; Workers: married, little education, poor; “Off Shore” program; - They live in constant fear of expulsion from the program and deportation; forced overtime… no political activism; parternalistic attitudes. Their freedom is constrained and their bad working conditions have been legitimized at the ideological level. How is this done? By drawing cultural and symbolic representations of Mexican and Caribbean farm workers. Before the workers from the “off shore” program were perceived as racially inferior; TODAY: they are portrayed as “PARTICULARLY SUITED FOR THE STRENOUS WORK TASKS.” Speak no eEnglish; spend 3 to 5 months a year at home; no social links to the community; occasional visits to grocery stores, banks and pubs. They live in “social isolation” from the rest of the community” because they don’t have leisure time, transportation or speak English. Perceived as thieves or drunks. - Idea that the foreign farm workers create for themselves and their family in Mexico and the Caribbean… the offshore program offers a unique chance for poor foreign families to achieve middle-class status. The offshore program as a win-win situation: workers can pursue their dream, while Canadians can feel good that they enable poor families in Mexico and the Caribbean to help themselves; as “foreign aid.” And yet… multiculturalism implies a “tolerant conviviality” à Immediacy without proximity; (bodies that fear touching each other in public spaces). - **Today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality…) (Coffee without caffeine; sugarless sugar; virtual sex)** Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have provided a definition of the “Fourth Peoples”: “Variously called ‘indigenous,’ ‘tribal,’ or ‘First nations”; the still-residing descendants of the original inhabitants of territories subsequently taken over or circumscribed by alien conquest settlement. As many as 3,000 native nations, representing some 250 million people, according to some estimates, function within the 200 states that assert sovereignty over them. […] As non nation-state communities, native peoples rarely “scan” on the global seen and are often not even identified through their self-chosen names; rather, they are called “rebels,” guerrillas,” or “separatists” involved in civil wars. - Differently than the Latin American, Asian and African colonial and post-colonial processes, Native North Americans and Palestinians have not been exploited but they have been expelled from their land, their histories effaced, their cultures suppressed. In both cases, as chief Seattle put it, the colonialists’ appetite devoured the earth and left behind only a desert. [1] Both peoples share the predicaments of how to assert their historical presence based on historical and political absence while bearing witness to their own annihilation. Their ordeals differ, however in the historical stage of their colonization. In North America, annihilation moves today toward the incorporation of the Natives, as Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook’s drawings show, evidencing the contradictions inherent to the capitalistic and nationalizing incorporation of her community and how it has altered their everyday life. In her work, technology and older forms of existence cohabit reflected in the social and transpiring as the symptoms of this not uncomplicated coexistence. These contradictions are analogue to the dichotomy of the global versus the local, as many parts of the world find themselves in between tradition and ‘Western progress.’ What strongly comes out from Pootoogook’s drawings, however, it is the fact that a new understanding of their land and life has been imposed on her community. Another example is Rebecca Belmore, whose work is premised upon the facts that her homeland is the ‘modern nation’ of Canada but as a member of the Anishinabe community, within Canada, she is in a place of cultural and political exile. [2] What is more, Native North Americans must survive within a ‘politics of nationalism’ in which differences in race, culture, civilization, and ethnicity are celebrated under the banner of multiculturalism. They are thus forced to participate in a system that alienates them, at the individual and social levels. Not diaspora or immigrants… original inhabitants; In Palestine the annihilation is also ongoing by the continuous expansion of the borders, the increasing isolation through the apartheid wall, land confiscation and house demolitions, youth imprisonment, the restriction of movement in the Occupied Territories, the siege of Gaza. **Gómez-Peña: “Us, the subjects of “fringe-documentary”);** The Anglo-Saxon academic and artistic production for the past 30 years or so, has created sites for the oppressed to tell their stories, for victims to witness the wrongs done to them, for the others of the West to write their own stories and narratives. Somehow, //the subaltern// has become the only line of resistance from the discursive site of a ‘marginalized voice.’ Consensually, such voices are accepted either as the ‘other’ of hegemony or tolerated within the consensual democratic coexistence of multiple, plural, differential or antagonistic discourses . Arguably, representation has become only possible as self-representation: ‘I speak therefore I am’ + ‘I am therefore I resist.’  Consensually, such voices are accepted as the TOLERATED ‘other’ of hegemony. Following a politics not as a struggle for power but of loss and dispossession, for recognition and survival, betterment and liberation, enlightenment and community and putting aesthetic practice at the forefront of this struggle, [3] the artworks exhibited in ‘Enacting Emancipation’ share the discursive site from which they address the viewer. This is a place in which is possible today to accommodate easily ‘otherness’, at the core of multicultural ethics and politics, as ‘indigenous expression under oppression,’ or ‘ethnic art.’ Such platform, however, is the only category through which ‘indigenous expression under oppression’ art can be exhibited these days, under the rhetoric of the universalization of suffering, exalting victimhood. Jean Fisher and Jimmi Durham wrote in 1988: __“__ __ Indigenous America is outside representation, unrepresentable, except as a phantasm masquerading under the misnomer 'Indian' -- a term that homogenizes what was in fact a heterogeneous population __ .” [4] And I add, twenty years later, what is still obliterated from this platform is, the question of where do the political interests and needs of the ‘Fourth World’ [5] peoples lie. [6] In this context, the fourth peoples’ struggle cannot be that of emancipation, but to paraphrase Deleuze, their struggle is to find the origin and collective destination for a people to come still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations. [7] In general, artistic discourses produced within the framework of multiculturalism tend to either __demand restitution, denounce racism and exclusion or stage emancipation__. Jacques Rancière calls ‘consensual stupor,’ guilt at the most, if the interpellated feels responsible. At the worst, it fuels facile identificatory fantasies propelled by local popular and commercial culture to transgress ‘ethnic’ boundaries and to be able identify with the ‘other.’ Today, the histories that the words ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Zionist’ are absolutely foreign to each other within the framework of consensual multiculturalism. I cite Mahmoud Darwish’s “The Speech of the Red Indian”: “ Isn't it about time, stranger, for us to meet face to face in the same age, both of us strangers to the same land, meeting at the tip of an abyss?” [8] The disaster both peoples have undergone, as Chief Seattle put it, is “the end of life and the beginning of survival.” [9] Artists addressing such disaster excavate and recuperate the traces of //life// embodied in memories and oral histories, the traces of //culture// reified in objects, invoke the specters of the land’s annihilated inhabitants. Here differences in the historical stage of colonization of both peoples comes again to the fore: Whereas Palestinians have been obliged to write their national history through documentation and memory, the Native North Americans unveil the colonialist narratives that have covered their histories and transformed them into a matter of ethnographical or anthropological study. à Denounce oppression, demand restitution; The colonized (or the subaltern) Cannot SPEAK Let Columbus scour the seas to find India, It is his right! He can call our ghosts the names of spices, He can call us Red Indians, He can fiddle with his compass to correct his course, Twist all the errors of the North wind, But outside the narrow world to his map, He cannot believe that all men are born equal The same as air and water, The same as people in Barcelona, Except that they happen to worship Nature's God in everything, And not gold. The “Red Indians’” postcolonial //plainte// is beyond claiming restitution and recognition or singing a nostalgic elegy to what was lost. Their words come from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “The Speech of the Red Indian.” In these lines, they confer on Columbus a list of “rights” that pertain to his map of the world. Although they see that his map is already narrow, one thing that they do not grant him is the right to believe that all men are equal. Here the “Red Indians” convey their past-present not as their ghostly differential appearance (as they do in the scene with Judith and Darwish), but as the inevitable outcome of a historical event that has perpetuated inequality and further hubris in spite of the universal proclamation of the equality of all humans. [10] - For Gayatari Spivak, the SUBALTERN is the “poorest woman in the South” who cannot speak; Abderrahama Sissako, //Bamako// (2006) excerpt: the Peasant.
 * REFUSAL TO SPEAK: (Speech as Praxis); EMPHASIS ON ACTION **
 * Different forms of organization and ACTION; (action, theory and praxis) **
 * Power is and comes from everywhere, it is self-reproducing and it is all-over. It is a situation in a particular society. **
 * “Direct democracy” or “participatory democracy”: to speak truth to power without mediation. **
 * I.e., In the Colonial regime (explain the blank-slate exercise)… **
 * - **** Yinka Shonibare’s Parody of Fragonard (D) **
 * For Sartre, Fanon brought this “Whitewashing” (he was privileged and got an education in france; he studied with Freud ); to an end in his work. How? **
 * Violence in the colonies: it not only has as its aim to keep the men enslaved but also dehumanizes them (outside of European “universality); **
 * The CURE: ** The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms.
 * Violence done to the colonized: extends to culture; distinction between European culture (thought of as superior) and the culture of the colonized which is either understood as inferior or as exotic. **
 * Fanon: ** Decolonization is always violence; it is the replacing of a certain “species” of men by other “species” of men. **Walter Benjamin On Violence**.
 * (Or self-determination) “Independence ** : has brought moral compensation to colonized peoples, and it has established their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society, or to build up and affirm values. The warming, light-giving center where man and citizen develop and enrich their experience in wider and still wider fields does not yet exist. Set in a kind of irresolution, such men persuade themselves fairly easily that everything is going to be decided elsewhere, for everybody, at the same time.”
 * - **** Absence of inastructure, a geography of hunger; an underdeveloped world, a world inhuman in its poverty, without doctors, engineers, administrators. (European Opulence), built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races); **
 * __ - __****__ De-colonization started in 1948 with India and was completed in the 60’s 70’s… __**** De-colonization of Algeria in 1961; ** Some Third World revolutions: Mozambique won; but the rest went wrong (Chile), corrupt (Vietnam) or the struggles changed: as in the case of the Palestinian Revolution: PLO: became a //political// movement, as differently from a //guerrilla//.
 * - ** Economic dispossession and no infrastructure; poverty, lack of education, etc.
 * Before we get to Glauber Rocha’s “Tropical Surrealism” and “Aesthetics of Hunger” **
 * What is primitivsm? PRIMITIVISM **
 * - ****Hysteria ** : “Denunciation of social problems.” Tears and mute suffering and paternalism;
 * (FRIDA KAHLO DIAPO as ‘tropical surrealism’) **
 * What is the “Dantesque” south? **
 * Hell: Polluted, corrupt, dangerous; Heaven: A Beach Resort. **
 * THE THIRD WORLD INSIDE THE FIRST: **
 * The origin of chaos: The “Dantesque South” **
 * A term in America: “Nativism” **
 * There are two topics that determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude toward Others: the respect of Otherness, openness toward it, and the obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the Other is okay insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other. This is emerging as a central “human right” in late capitalist society: the right not to be harassed, to be kept at a safe distance from others. **
 * Again: Degrees of assimilation **
 * (D) Simone Weil: ** Why is the determination to fight against prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention . All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to flight –the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.
 * “We are equally scared of each other… let me speak before we continue to live together… Us who are labeled ‘extremists’ for merely disagreeing with you…” **
 * - **** In the “Declaration of Poetic Disobedience,” Whas it clear who is this “You” the artist is addressing? And the “We”? **
 * (D) **

[1] //Chief Seattle’s Thoughts//, available at ** URL: ** ** http://www.kyphilom.com/www/seattle.html ** [2] From the artist’s statement in her website. [3] This is Said’s position, stemming from the politics of recognition that arose from de-colonization and other specific movements in the late sixties. See Edward Said in “Panic of the Visual,” interview with WTJ Mitchell in //Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truths to Power//, Edited by Paul A. Bové, (Durham and London: The Duke University Press, 2000), 49. [4] With Jimmie Durham, “The Ground Has Been Covered,” //Artforum//, (Summer 1988), p. 101. [5] I am uncertain that the term ‘Forth World’ peoples is accurate… at a time of the long passed collapse of the second and the increasingly becoming Third of the First and First of the Third. [6] Michael Ignatieff for example, dismisses the idea that any form of systematic reparation for the wrongs done to the Natives in North America is possible. He articulates the problem in this manner: “The problem is that the majority has genuine difficulty accepting the idea that present generations remain responsible for the harms committed by past ones. How long must the Canadian majority continue to pay for the abuses done to aboriginal peoples in times past? How long must it do penance for racism, sexism and other forms of injustice? The victim minorities resent depending on the majority for redress. The majority resents depending on the minority for forgiveness. Since forgiveness would foreclose future claims, victims tend to withhold it; since redress implies culpability, it too is withheld. So the politics of argument is replaced by a politics of blackmail and stonewalling.” In Michael Ignatieff, //The Rights Revolution// (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2000), 115. [7] Gilles Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” //Essays Critical and Clinical//, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3. [8] Published in his collection //Eleven Planets//, 1992. [9] //Chief Seattle’s Thoughts//, available at URL: ** http://www.kyphilom.com/www/seattle.html ** [10] I address this further below in terms of the historico-political quandary of the Fo urth World peoples. For a brilliant re-make of the classic Western movie with post-colonial implications see Jim Jarmush’s //Dead Man//, (1994).