15th June | Panel 1

Decolonial Discourses and Cultural Contexts: A Critical Overview

Chair: Yan Jia (PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies, SOAS University of London)

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1. Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson (PhD Candidate, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam)

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Title: Art as Modern Missionary Mission and Inequity in the Attention/Profit Economy of Art

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The Western white art world and academia are some of the biggest stages (and most profitable markets) for grand ally theatre. Under the guise of “raising awareness”, the neoliberal bourgeois Western art world is consuming violence against oppressed people, enacting it, turning into a commodity, profiting from commodifying it.

 

Who benefits? Who speaks for whom? Who is barred access to the table, to the room? Countless highly problematic, exploitative, stigmatising and ultimately neocolonial art projects and conferences that speak about oppressed Others (while excluding them from speaking) are celebrated as “giving voice of the ‘voiceless’”. The assumption that these Others, who are made an object of study, are voiceless and need saving through art and academia is very telling. This past year and a half alone we have witnessed repeated instances of what I call “art as present-day missionary mission” – art projects that posit art as a solution and and “raising awareness” as a goal in itself, i.e. the exhibiting and circulation of art *about* injustice and political violence as goal (and with this the arousal, release and purification charge of emotive affect of guilt and pity in the art world audience), rather than justice and social equity in the political issues that were turned into art materials (and for the people directly affected by injustice, who have been turned into unpaid protagonists), while dismissing already existing knowledges and self-organised emancipatory struggles.

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For this paper, I propose to follow a decolonial* analysis to reveal the art world economy of the social /cultural capital gained from commodifying other people’s struggle as art currency. First, examining a few examples and then examining the deconstructing the vectors of “profit” along the questions of “Who can speak / who is heard” (i.e. unequal distribution of attention depending on the speaker’s social status / privilege), the dynamics of performative allyship as currency in an institutional cultural economy that excludes those whose struggles are being commodified, whose bodies are ventriloquised. Lastly, presenting powerful critiques from various communities, and the best-practice-lists / demands towards more respectful and ethical approaches of their struggles.

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n.b.:

* “decoloniality” not as a intellectual metaphor but as a critical method honouring the original literal meaning of decolonising in regards to indigenous sovereignty and an analysis of power around the “triad structure of settler-native-slave” (cf. Wang & Wayne Yang). I will in this paper intentionally refer to critical texts by people / artists / scholars who themselves belong to oppressed communities, be they “recognised” scholars / artists or not. My paper sees their knowledge as as legitimate a source (if not more) than that legitimised by Western cultural institutions and their systems of epistemological power.

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2. Denise Clarke (PhD Candidate, Department of Art History and Archaeology, SOAS, University of London)

 

Title: What Else Can They Do? World Picturing And Decolonial Aesthesis At Sharjah Biennial 11

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Described by Elena Filipovic as "caught between malaise or rapture; cynicism or critical embrace", the contested critical currency of the Biennial phenomena has been crudely bi-furcated into Biennials good, Biennials bad. The latter position is generally predicated on the conceptualization of the Biennial as a handmaiden to neo-liberalism, a leading component of the nation-state with its roots in the cultural manifestations of western colonial drives and always formed against the backdrop of the “ur-biennial, Venice. However, concomitant with its rapid expansion across the globe since the late 1980’s, the biennial form now exists as one of the most visible sites for the production, distribution and generation of discourses surrounding contemporary, it seems essential to ask, beyond imitation and national narcissism, what else can they do?

For Walter Mignolo, the Biennial form is a key site for the articulation of Decolonial Aesthesis -  artistic practices that challenge the hierarchies of modern western aesthetics as an aspect of "the colonial matrix of power" that implies control of knowledge, senses and perception. Citing Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013 as an exemplar, Mignolo mobilized a variety of artworks to situate that the biennial as moment of “epistemic and aesthetic disobedience” emanating from the energies of an emergent Global South as part of a larger project of Decolonialisation aimed at liberating us from Eurocentrism and Globalism.

 

This paper argues that Mignolo’s analysis displays a certain Arcadianism that obscures the multiple processes underpinning power relations at different geographic scales. Whilst it acknowledges that Sharjah Biennial has contributed to a reinterpretation of the original European biennial form and is a participant in the undermining of a Eurocentric artworld towards a more plurivrersal one, it suggests that Mignolo’s instrumentalizing of art for higher political purpose and his implied conflation of shifts within the artworld with larger geopolitical ones need to be put under scrutiny.

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3. Lauren Pyott (PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies, SOAS, University of London)

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Title: ‘East East East’ and Decolonial Labour Pains: When a New Cultural Cartography is Not Enough

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In May 2013, Waltern Mignolo praised that year’s 11th edition of the Sharjah Biennial (SB11), entitled Re:Emerge, Towards a New Cultural Cartography, as heralding a “change of epoch” in the -ennial market and a prime example of “epistemic and aesthetic disobedience”. According to him it “open[ed] up the silenced and marginalized creativity of the 'Global South' and 'Global East'”, in part through its Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa’s choosing 80% of her participating artists from the non-Western world. He went on to say that

 

“What has been announced with Sharjah Biennial 11 is nothing less than the end of an illusion of the successful fiction of western modernity from the European Renaissance through to the European Enlightenment right through to the end of the twentieth century.”

 

However, what SB11 ‘emerged’ from was more than just a Euro-American dominated art market. The Biennial’s previous edition two years earlier had been mired in controversy around local sensitivities and a political crackdown at the time of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. SB11’s ‘Eastern’ focus therefore, could be seen as less of a shift of aesthetic influence and more a shift of critical attention on domestic politics. Rather than “cut[ting] across economics, politics, culture, art, aesthetics, religion and sensibilities”, as Mignolo claimed, I argue that SB11 in fact revealed the continued impact of neoliberal political structures and neo-colonial power dynamics on the Emirati, if not global, art scene.  

 

At a time when renewed interest is being paid to the importance of “epistemic and aesthetic disobedience” and its attendant decolonial movements, and in the context of the UAE’s ‘Look East’ policy, this paper aims to complicate the notion of “de-linking” and suggests that merely shifting geographical focus is not enough. Instead I argue that attention must also always be paid to the political, economic and social structures in which such art initiatives exist.

 

This argument will unfold in two parts. In the first half, I will consider the curatorial framework and political context of SB11 in more depth and discuss the potential shortcomings of this apparent “new cultural cartography”. In the second half, I will discuss the independent Dubai based initiative “East/East-East” which attempts to offer “alternative approaches to art from the geographical East” but does so by explicitly drawing attention to and critiquing the political and economic structures in which it is forced to exist. 

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4.  Flair Donglai Shi (DPhil Candidate, English Language and Literature, University of Oxford)

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Title: A Failure to Decolonise the Literary Prize: the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Politics of Recognition 

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This paper focuses the Man Asian Literary Prize (2007-2012) (MALP), as a case of failure, in which the partial agency of the interventionist prize did not effectively decolonise existing power structures in what Pascale Casanova calls “the international literary space”. The main body of this paper is divided into two parts. Part 1 presents a comprehensive picture of the establishment, development and decline of the prize and makes observations about the shifting directions of recognition during the prize’s six years of operation. I bring together and examine a variety of textual and paratextual resources, including the two archival documents related to the prize’s launch, the announced longlists and shortlists in the prize’s history, media reports as well as publicity outlets such as its Youtube channel and Facebook page.  Pierre Bourdieu and James English’s theories about different forms of capital and their interconversions are also applied to this examination to emphasise the fact that in a case of failure like the MALP, the partial nature of “the agency of the cultural prize” is demonstrated through the prize’s role not as the agent and source, but as the patient and beneficiary, of recognition and cultural capital. Part 2 situates the prize and its failure in the debate on world literature as a cultural habitus and offers three possible explanations for the prize’s failure towards cultural decolonisation, including the lack of scandals, the lack of cooperation with Asian countries, and the conservative West-centric elements in the operation of the prize that contradicted with its claimed ambitions. Through these possible explanations, I caution against the over-confidence in and over-reliance on the prize as the creator of cultural value, and argue that as prizes necessarily act as the intermediator through which different players in the cultural habitus can exchange different forms of capital, its own survival and prestige very much depend on the stakes it can build for these players. Ultimately, the failure of prizes, especially interventionist ones like the MALP, can offer us the important lesson that without decentring or diversifying the source of recognition in the existing West-centric paradigm, it is difficult for a new paradigm to be effectively established from within the power structures of a cultural habitus.

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15th June | Panel 2

Practical Manifestos and Radical Ideas: Methods for Decolonising the Cultural Institution

Chair: Aakriti Mandhwani (PhD Candidate, South Asia Department, SOAS, University of London)

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1. ​Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (MA, Postcolonial Studies, SOAS, University of London)

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Title: A Manifesto: Decolonising the "Postcolonial Theory and Practice" course

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Having been taught the ‘Postcolonial Theory and Practice’ MA course at Soas, 2016-17, we (a group of MA students) intend to present a manifesto-style paper on what we believe it could look like to decolonise this course; a course which has particularly high potential to be modified and thus decolonised.

We work from the premise that decolonising within the academic institution will always be incomplete; a course alone cannot address questions of accessibility and structural inequality, but the hope is to outline what one part of the ‘decolonising’ project might mean: it begins with a recognition that all knowledges are situated and therefore centres multiple epistemologies in dialogue with one another. 

 

Our intention is to resist against the course’s tendency to fall back on canons, include global south contexts as “additional” extras and leave students’ own positionalities unquestioned. By outlining our 22 week programme for exploring colonialism and postcolonialism in an interdisciplinary and multi-epistemic way – platforming alternative assessment methods and non-textual and non-canonical sources – we argue there are practical ways to begin to decolonise knowledge produced in the institution. Such a project is important because we believe, contrary to mainstream depictions, that it could give universities renewed social relevance and more meaningful authority in today’s world.

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The manifesto will briefly introduce our goal, highlight the aims of the ‘decolonised’ course and explain how the classroom would operate and how students would be assessed. We bring together theory and praxis whilst persistently encouraging critical awareness about the situatedness of all knowledge and of this course, its classroom, and very students. This serves as a practical case study of what an attempt to decolonise could look like. Therefore we will present it alongside representatives from the Decolonising our Minds Society who will speak to the larger project of decolonising the curriculum.

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2. Jack Clift (PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies, SOAS, University of London)

 

Title: Historical fiction against History? Reading Hindi and Urdu in post-Partition India

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This paper seeks to challenge the colonised underpinnings of academic history by examining representations of the past in post-independence Indian historical fiction. Though not a cultural institution in itself, the discipline of history penetrates a variety of institutions, and its attendant discourses have significantly influenced ways of thinking about the past. The principles of the post-’Enlightenment’ era have imbued academic history with a focus on temporal linearity and causality, rejecting understandings of the past that do not meet its rational, positivist criteria. Such exclusions form part of a repudiation of ‘non-Western’ knowledge that has undergirded wider processes of colonisation, privileging the epistemology of the coloniser. This paper hopes to disrupt the resultant dichotomy between history – as a discipline of ‘fact’ – and literature – as the realm of ‘fiction’ – by illustrating how historical fiction offers a fruitful way to examine the past.

 

Drawing on the fields of memory studies, oral history, and the history of emotions, this work attempts to decolonise the epistemic tools utilised when interrogating the past. By focussing on the historical novels of the Hindi writer Krishna Sobti and the Urdu author Qurratulain Hyder, this paper explores depictions of women’s experiences of the Partition of British India in 1947. The works differ in their portrayals, but in both cases they present what might be considered non- or even anti-historical narratives: narrations are partial and interspersed with silences, the experiences of the protagonists and their emotional responses take centre stage, and so on. While the works do not meet the rational criteria of academic history, they offer an understanding of how this moment of history is remembered by those who experienced it. In doing so, historical fiction undercuts the dominance that academic history wields in determining how the past is remembered, emphasising otherwise underrepresented voices and their tellings of history.

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3.  Ayesha Fuentes (PhD Candidate, Department of History of Art and Archeology, SOAS, University of London)

 

Title: Cultural detritus, conservation ethics and contemporaneity

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Cultural institutions are expected to preserve and make accessible their collections of artistic and historic properties. As an extension of this mandate, conservation provides technical expertise for the maintenance and interpretation of objects as artifacts. In its recent history, conservation — as it has been fostered within cultural and academic institutions — has established professional standards and used scientific methodologies to refine and endorse its practices. However, in prioritizing object integrity and limiting circulation, conservation contributes to an institutionally-biased, materialistic, and static concept of culture as a type of detritus. This paper argues that the decomposition of cultural properties and dematerialization of conservation practices — the inverse of current policies of material preservation — are necessary steps in the decolonization of cultural institutions.

 

This paper asserts that conservation as a discipline has the capacity to contribute to this process by interpreting technologies as dynamic and innovative, and critically engaging with existing professional standards. Surpassing its current physico-chemical and materialist approach, conservation is expanding its methodologies in documenting creative practices — or ‘scoring’, for example — with which it might advocate for the contemporanaeity, access, transmission and renewal of cultural technologies. Here, conservation has an opportunity to transcend its more problematic categories of specialization (e.g. “ethnographic art”) and its systematically unsustainable standards, and to contribute professional knowledge to the fluid and ongoing processes of cultural history. These perspectives will be illustrated with examples taken from the author’s professional experiences as an objects conservator and broader disciplinary trends in cultural heritage like the increasing prioritization of intangible values, investment into historic and developing technologies, and research into non-institutional modes of technical expertise. By embracing the decomposition of objects and the inevitable collapse of their artifactual integrity, conservation has the opportunity to destabilize the preservation mandate of collections and endorse cultural processes as immaterial and continuous.

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4. Sayan Bhattacharyya (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania)

 

Title: Categorical order makes the heterogeneous less visible: Scaling up in digital text repositories

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Critical theory since Foucault has been attentive to the problematic of how epistemic violence may be enacted through the complicity of apparatuses of knowledge production in the rendering-invisible of certains kinds of inscriptions within discourse. As computational tools for text analysis and aggregation increasingly treat large textual corpora as “big data” and provide the means for extracting new forms of knowledge from these large bodies of text, the sheer amount of material whose excavation is made possible extends beyond the scale of conventional modalities of language use. My paper describes how this sets the stage, within the context of the so-called digital humanities, for an unexpected encounter with the abovementioned problematic.  I illustrate this encounter with the help of the example of the HathiTrust+Bookworm, a digital tool for “culturomics”, recently developed for extracting and analyzing lexical usage across a large digital text corpus.

 

I will show how, when large-scale repositories reconfigure collections of many individual texts into "big” textual data, then the combined actions of focusing and of expansion of depth of field that are afforded by culturomics-based inquiry may, in certain situations, render some non-western languages less visible. This loss of visibility is not due to wilful neglect or suppression, but simply because hegemonic forms of knowledge representation presuppose a homogeneous, rationalistic and categorical order as their unique condition of possibility — a presupposition which, I show, is amplified when small data is aggregated into the régime of big data. My presentation engages with a key contention of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: that a heterogeneous subaltern subjectivity can be legible within hegemonic, categorical representation only when it has already ceded its heterogeneity to epistemic colonization. I conclude by  generalizing the problem from the particular context described, and by outlining some possible "decolonizing" strategies for recuperation and redressal.

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15th June | Special Discussion

Decolonising Pedagogical Practices at SOAS

Chair: Frances Grahl (PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies, SOAS, University of London)

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1. Alex Mason (PhD Candidate, University of Sheffield)

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Title:  ‘Jay-Z considers himself a poet! Discuss': Cultural erasure in the university space

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Despite championing equality and diversity in official manifestos, universities still ultimately propagate and privilege white, middle class cultural values over all others. At a recent colloquium I attended, a conversation broke out about what exactly constituted poetry and differentiated it from other genres of writing. No definite conclusion was reached, with participants agreeing that the parameters of poetry were difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. An especially enthusiastic lecturer decided to emphasise this point, embarking on a lengthy monologue about the blurriness of boundaries between different art forms. Looking to end with a flourish, the lecturer paused briefly before pressing their point home with the statement: ‘Jay-Z considers himself a poet! Discuss.’

By considering the class and racial prejudice underpinning the lecturer’s condescending statement, this paper will examine how white, middle-class cultural values are insidiously propagated in the university space. Through an analysis of the space’s power dynamics, it will also show how these cultural values are systematically legitimated and sanctioned by the higher education institution. The paper will then go on to argue that these institutionally corroborated cultural values, serve the function of maintaining white, middle-class hegemony in the academic space, to the detriment of the minority groups who inhabit it.

Indeed, the latter segment of the paper will use affect theory in conjunction with excerpts from Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, to highlight how the erasure affected and effected by micro-aggressions (like the lecturer’s statement) physically and psychologically marginalise and oppress minority students, who are rendered alien in a space constituted as white and middle-class. Finally, the paper will end by proposing that, due to this affective nature of the university space, alternative structures are needed for successful counter-hegemonic resistance in academia.

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2. Smita Yadav (School Tutor of Anthropology, University of Sussex)

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Title: Academic precariousness, Hierarchies, and Colonial Pedagogy

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In an already precarious academic environment, how are global south academics navigating their way into mainstream higher education sector in global north academic institutes both for intellectual, professional, and employment opportunities? What ideological paradoxes  are faced by them considering their already precarious financial and visa conditions and how do they manoeuvre around them while also pursuing  their radicalised research? In this paper, I will draw upon my experiences of how one is perceived as a researcher in a highly corporatised professional academic world based on criteria other than academic and research standards. It will raise questions of who decides who is a global south and who is a global north academic scholar and what are the blurred  boundaries and hierarchies. Why does it matter and for whom? The paper will highlight the dilemmas of this kind of corporatised consumption of professional education by the global south academicians based in the global north whose lives are not only regulated by border controls but also by a rigid pedagogy.  The paper will contribute  to our understanding of how the co-dependencies and paradoxes of global  north higher education system on global south consumers  of education for their increased enrolments and university rankings which do not reflect the intellectual and ideological tensions. In this uneasy co-existence, how global south, especially women scholars , who are genuinely passionate  about their research and want to pursue academic careers in global north, have to compromise in order to comply and thus are left  feeling  gagged despite passing the vigorous academic processes in the global north.

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16th June | Panel 1

From the Inside Looking Out? Positionality and Decolonising in Museums and Exhibitions

Chair: Lauren Pyott (PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies, SOAS, University of London)

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1. Sara Wajid (Head of Interpretation, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), Charlotte Holmes (Community Engagement Officer, Collecting Birmingham, Birmingham Museums Trust), and Subhadra Das (Curator, UCL Collections)

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Title: Is it possible to decolonise museums from within?

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In his keynote speech at the 1999 conference ‘Whose Heritage?’ Professor Stuart Hall asked, “When you work within institutions you must ask yourself: ‘Are you in their mouth or are they in yours?’” Three members of the ‘Museum Detox’ collective of BAME museum professionals reflect on our experiences as BAME curators, community engagement practitioners and policy-makers and discuss whether it’s possible for us to ‘decolonise museums from within’.

 

A real decolonial approach to museum curation must start with acknowledgment of the institutional racism in the cultural sector and the acceptance that museums can perpetuate racism by divorcing scientific and artistic collections from their means of production. This attitude whitewashes a history where science and racism were inextricably bound. At UCL, Curator Subhadra Das works with the Galton Collection across a range of academic disciplines to highlight past ideas, acknowledge current social structures and inform future change.

 

For many years museums have tried unsuccessfully to diversify their audiences and workforce. More recently examples of exciting decolonial practice have emerged but do these interventions address fundamental knowledge production processes? Will celebrations of Black culture at glamorous Museum Lates see the classification of ethnography and fine art removed? Community Engagement Officer at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Charlotte Holmes will explore the radical culture change needed if museums and their workforce are to acknowledge their oppressive role, implement historic honesty, and truly reflect 'other' world views.

 

It has become an orthodoxy of museum practice that Black artists can be decolonial intermediaries between the museum and audiences. Head of Interpretation at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Sara Wajid, will assess the decolonising affect of Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Ship in a Bottle’ at the National Maritime Museum.

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2. Clair le Couteur (PhD Candidate, Fine Art, Royal College of Art)

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Title: Decolonising, Non-Binary Research and the Fictive Museum

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As a cultural institution, the museum object-label form epitomises power, authority and the subject/ object binary. What happens to the status of labelling in the fictive museum, hybrid museum-artworks fusing facts and fictions? In Warrington – a town between Liverpool and Manchester with a deep imperial heritage – is the oldest municipal museum in Britain. Due to institutional inertia, funding issues, and related factors, Warrington’s displays remained largely unchanged for much of the twentieth century; it was used by museum studies courses as an example of ‘invalid’ past practices, particularly ‘scientific racism’ progress mythology in Ethnology. Largely re-hung in the 1990s, today Warrington Museum engages self-consciously with its status as a ‘museum of museums’.

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Hanging in the mezzanine void between the museum’s 1920s Ethnology room and the Fish Gallery are 188 photographs, linked by custom made elastic ‘India tags’. The installation is a collaboration, a ‘remix’ of one institution by another – the fictive ‘John Affey Museum’ – and forms part of an ongoing research residency called Roots Between the Tides (RBTT). The photographs were taken in

the museum’s stores, archives, and surroundings, and are connected together into a network of associations, a model or portrait of the museum. Here, randomly numbered images are labelled not by institutionally-authored texts, but by each other.

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Drawing on the work of feminist scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Val Plumwood in the context of Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory, this project proposes a non-binary, categorycrossing approach to decolonising the museum. In queering, trans-ing, and networking the objectlabel form, RBTT foregrounds the contingency and precarity of institutional status within colonial

kyriarchal assemblages.

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3. Laura Vallés (PhD Candidate, Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art)

 

Title: The Potosí Principle: How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

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The aim of this paper is to reflect on the curatorial proposal of The Potosí Principle, an exhibition held at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2010 on the occasion of the Bicentenario: the two hundredth anniversary of the independence movement in Latin America. On the one hand, The Potosí Principle critically reflected on the origins and expansion of modernity based on the colonial processes and baroque paintings of seventeenth century Potosí, an area that is now occupied by Peru and Bolivia that was, at that time, greater than London or Paris. On the other hand, the overabundance of wealth - obtained by exploiting metals through indigenous labour - and the role of images during that period were in formal and discursive dialogue with new art productions focusing on the contemporary centres of economic power. In this regard, this paper aims to provide an analysis of the potential that this curatorial proposal about past and present economic and artistic structures had for rethinking the colonial implications of the museum and for acting as a form of resistance. 

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 4. Grit Köppen (PhD, University of the Arts, Berlin; Beyreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, Beyreuth)

 

Title: Anti-colonial Legacies of Ethiopian Artists and their Critique on European Cultural Institutions

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 In Ethiopia it is European cultural institutions – like the British Council, Alliance Française, Goethe-Institut – which play a central role in the field of art. They act as relevant actors of European cultural policy in Africa and at the same time they promote contemporary art productions logistically and financially. On site these cultural institutions fulfill changing functions; they serve as gallery, archive, theatre stage as well as funding body. 

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Due to the current harsh material conditions of many Ethiopian artists' working groups as being visible in high production costs and economic poverty, they temporarily use these cultural institutions as partners in order to realize their own productions in Addis Ababa. However, striking on the Ethiopian art historical background is the strong anti-colonial resistance particularly within the field of performing arts, since Ethiopian theatre practitioners and performance artists contributed significantly to the successful mobilization for a strategic military defense against European colonial interests. Nowadays it is remarkable that Ethiopian artists question the power of representation and the politics of the aesthetics performed by European cultural institutions on the African continent. In particular, they criticize the selection procedures of Ethiopian art productions due to a setting of conceptual and aesthetic standards defined by European cultural institutes. These procedures characterize the domination of Western values in the art production process, the discursive and economic power relations within the field of art and the asymmetry in international cultural relations. Many Ethiopian artists make clear that fundamental inequalities exist not only in the political-economic sense but also in the aesthetic-artistic sense. 

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In order to actively counteract this tendency, Ethiopian artists pursue different strategies. One strategy is to create temporary, self-determined and strategic alliances with European cultural institutes in order to use these platforms for their own anti-essentialist, institutional-critical and decolonial articulations in their art productions. Another strategy is to increasingly establish self-organized art collectives and to create inter-subjective, transcultural and inter-continental networks by themselves - in order to become gradually independent of the influence of European cultural institutions. 

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16th June | Panel 2

An Alternative Cultural Toolkit for Decolonisation

Chair: Chinmay Sharma (PhD, South Asia Department, SOAS, University of London)

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1. Sumedha Chakravarthy (MA, Comparative Literature, SOAS, University of London)

 

Title:  ‘Another museum, Another History’: Tracing the de-colonization of authorship in Indian Documentary Cinema

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Narrativisation is a process inherently inscribed within structures of power. Authorship plays a central role in constituting, sustaining or dismantling epistemic power within cultural production. Cinema, particularly documentary cinema, is a medium that can (and, does) effectively re-draw assumed boundaries of agency and authorship, between producers, subject(s), subjectivities, and spectators. It is a site of cultural production that critically examines, and attempts to redistribute narrative voice and space, and instigate socio-political change. However, documentary cinema often operates as a Bourdieusian ‘field’ fraught with authorial monopolization based on accumulated cultural and social capital. and needs to be problematized in order to harness its potential as a site of destabilizing hegemonic structures. The identification of subjects, privileged authorial voice(s), and the emphatic assumption of ‘true’ representations are some aspects of documentary cinema that yield evidence of epistemological, socio-economic and cultural dominance by colonial and neocolonial interests and their preferred ideological positions. This paper intends to examine how specifically authorship in, and of, documentary cinema in India has remained largely coloured by the intellectual colonization of what may be called a comprador bourgeois political and cultural aesthetic. In this paper, I examine the change affected over time in the ‘authorship’ of Indian documentary cinema: a consequence of changing political-cultural and socio-economic topographies in the country. I argue that these changing topographies have yielded to the emergence of ‘reflexivity’ in documentary filmmaking, and that this reflexivity radicalizes the potential of documentary cinema; transforming it from being a narrative ‘museum’ of constructed realities to being a powerful site for de-colonising epistemological and cultural privilege over narrative representation. The paper will trace the movement of authorial practices within documentary cinema in India from the Film Division’s Griersonian movies that claimed to ‘document’ reality, to movements in the 1970s and 80s that moved away from being mere mouthpieces to the government but remained confined to the understanding of narrative erasure as facilitating ‘objective’ representation; and finally, look at more recent authorial practices that aim to decenter creative power and thus, decolonize the fertile site of documentary cinema.

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The specific movies I will examine are two of the Film Division of India’s movies on growth, development and secularism (1950s), Anand Patwardhan’s work in the 1970s and 80s, and R.P. Amudhan’s films starting from the mid-2000s.

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2.  Frances Grahl (PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Literary and Postcolonial Studies, SOAS, University of London)

 

Title: From the Text to the Streets: The Novel as A Decolonising Tool

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The effects are elliptic, elusive, hard to quantify; yet contemporary novels nonetheless can act dialectically as agents for change. The novel is perceived and taught as bound up with the nation state, but also known for its imaginative potential: it is a site where describing the real and imagining the impossible sit side by side. This paper looks at spaces in/by which novels challenge accepted or hegemonic histories: recent novels about migration to Europe which directly challenge nationalist narratives. What do these texts do, and where do they sit within wider movements to decolonise our minds, in the context of an urban, European cultural hegemony? How radical is the novel’s ability to render the normalised, the apparently natural, strange again?

 

Igiaba Scego, Italo-Somali writer, rewrites the revered monuments of Imperial and fascist Rome in her novels, representing accepted local histories within a global, colonial context. Characters enact and re-enact historical walks, layer history onto history, create palimpsestic maps of time and space.

 

Leila Sebbar uncovers and excavates the history of Algerians in Paris, calling into question French cultural memory and raising questions of belonging and identity for the present and the past. Her novels correlate with renewed activism on behalf of French/North African counter-histories, and as I will argue, leave their imprint not just on the page but on the city.

 

This paper will provide two brief snapshots of how literature can be an active agent within decolonising processes, each one contextualised within anti-racist and pro-migrant activism in the European city, and each one showing how radical texts are not confined to the page, but can work dialectically with human agency and activism. To finish, I will look at the limitations of this (nonetheless useful) approach to literary analysis, and pose some questions about where these tentative observations sit within wider questions of literary canon, production and reception.

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3. Carol Que (M.St. Student, History of Art Department, University of Oxford)

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Title: Speculative Homelands in Larissa Sansour’s Video Essays

 

This paper offers a reading of Larissa Sansour’s video essays, Nation Estate (2012) and In the Future they ate from the finest porcelain (2015), that not only accounts for the political present of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine, but also corroborates previous scholarship on Palestinian oral history, Native and Indigenous studies. Through Sansour’s two films, I examine the architectural and archaeological processes of settler colonialism to shed light on the slow violence of militarisation and capitalist production that is built into the environment. I consider how Palestinian indigeneity endures not only within the ecological landscape, but also persists through Sansour’s tactical deployment of archaeology to counter nation state-building ideologies. The two video essays are brought together to mobilise an idea of linguistic materiality for purposes of self and communal preservation, through a visual and dialectical development of Sansour’s female protagonists. I describe how Sansour conveys the vitality of Palestinian feminist resistance, and in doing so co-opts the conventional and loaded symbolism of the Palestinian woman as a mode of imaging the homeland. Finally, this paper works as a self-reflexive speculation on art history’s responsibility to Sansour’s art and the ethics of art historical writing, to insist upon an intimacy with theory and politics in the discipline. As such, I argue that it is artists like Sansour who are redefining what Palestinian liberation means in twenty-first century, and whose work needs to be contextualised in global histories of art, resistance, and decolonial commitments.

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4. Davinia Gregory (PhD Candidate, Sociology and Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick) and Maya Oppenheimer (Design writer, tutor at Royal College of Art) 

 

Title: Collaboration and Solidarity Among Junior Academics as Methodology for Decolonization in the Art School – Case: The Royal College of Art

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This paper is from a collaborative project intersecting with my PhD, which is about decolonising the arts in the UK. Maya and I were once MA students at the Royal College of Art. We have since returned, to teach Critical Historical Studies in its School of Design.1 This project takes the RCA as case study and site for ethnography, and ourselves as subjects for autoethnography on the importance and processes of decolonising postgraduate art school education from the bottom up. It considers the variety of barriers that the neoliberalisation of such educational institutions poses to these endeavours, and works toward proposing a series of long term practices that can be sustained as solutions. 

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The paper works from key observations about the history and current workings of an institution that produces some of the world’s most influential cultural industry practitioners. The diversity of these observations results from the fact of our ethnic difference from each other, and they have been combined produce knowledge that can effect change because of our equal commitment to collective liberation in Lorde’s truest sense. 

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The research for this paper considers Sara Ahmed’s observation: 

“The more the institution presents itself as opened up, the more walls seem to come up… brick walls; those hardenings of histories into barriers in the present. Barriers that we experience as physical.” (Ahmed, 2015) 

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The interviewee who described these walls to Ahmed was describing barriers formed by diversity policy, to her work as a diversity practitioner. Decolonization aims to chip away at the wall that the institution has become, and if, as Ahmed writes in ‘Living a Feminist Life’, women of colour do diversity work by simply being present within an institution, then it is no surprise that the institution, by way of its diversity agenda, becomes a menace to their state of simply being within it. It is in dealing with and changing the everyday reality of this, that networks and collaborations can be helpful. The paper considers the formation and maintenance of particular types of networks as helpful methodologies for working toward decolonization from the bottom up. It considers the power dynamics in collaboration, the difference between allyism and true interdependence, and the importance of particular types of support networks, which it pins down and identifies. Furthermore, since funding bursaries have been drastically cut and fees have tripled, the intersections of race and class have re-emerged as areas of contention at the RCA, and the paper considers new issues involved in decolonizing the curriculum, in light of this. It interrogates pedagogical and selection processes for both students and staff, asking: With the neoliberalisation of the art school, how and how far is decolonisation possible? 

The collaborative methodology carries through to the paper’s very delivery, demonstrating how interdependence and true collegial solidarity can work in decolonising the institution from the bottom up, a generation at a time. 

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