slides from class

1. MIA - BORDERS
“I was a refugee because of war and now I have a voice in a time when war is the
most invested thing on the planet. What I thought I should do with this record is
make every refugee kid that came over after me have something to feel good about.
Take everybody’s bad bits and say, ‘Actually, they’re good bits. Now whatcha gonna
do?’”
“The most powerful thing about Borders’ is that the mantra of ‘what’s up with that?’
is not a condemnation. It’s a question.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Nw7HbaeWY

2. Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary
Reception Center) (2007)
Adrian Paci (Albania)
16:9 video projection, color, sound, 5’30’’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-
Nw7HbaeWY

3. CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?
CAN THE SUBALTERN BE HEARD?

4. DEFINITIONS

5. COLONIALISM
 Colonialism is an ancient practice (Greeks, Romans, Moors, Ottomans)
 Colonialism establishes political, economic and cultural control over an indigenous
population (the people living on the land before the arrival of the settlers) or mixed
population that also includes previous colonizers or migrants
 Colonialism as a broad concept refers to the project of European political
domination from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries that ended with the
national liberation movements of the 1960s (exception – Russia through the 1990s)

6. SETTLER COLONIALISM
• A distinct type of colonialism that functions through the ongoing elimination and
replacement of Indigenous populations with an invasive settler society that, over time,
develops a distinctive identity and sovereignty.
• Settler colonizers “come to stay”
• Settler colonial states include allof North America, Central America, and South America,
Greenland, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and also parts of Russia (i.e., Eastern
Siberia)

7. SETTLER COLONIALISM – U.S.
• “...we live in a settler colonial global present” Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial
Present (2015).
• A settler colonialism framework recognizes that the United States is a present-day
settler colonial society whose laws, institutions, and systems of governance
continue to enact an ongoing “structure of invasion” that persists to this day.
• A framework of settler colonialism understands that the three foundational
processes upon which the United States was built—Indigenous elimination, slavery
and anti-Black racism, and immigrant exploitation—are ongoing processes that
continue to shape present-day systemic inequities.

8. OTHER TYPES OF COLONIALISM
• Internal colonialism – exploitation of minority groups within a wider society
which leads to political and economic inequalities between regions within a state
or a geographically based pattern of subordination of a differentiated population,
located within the dominant power or country, i.e., Sami people – (Norway,
Sweden, Finland, Russia); Kurds (Turkey, Syria, Iraq); apartheid in South Africa;
ghettoes in US, Northern Ireland & Sicily;
• Residual Colonialism – holding of territories, i.e., American Samoa;
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; Federated States of Micronesia;
Guam; Republic of the Marshall Islands; Republic of Palau; US Virgin Islands;
Puerto Rico

9. POST-COLONIALISM

10. POST-
COLONIALISM
“Post-colonialism” is a a concept or theoretical term derived from
the academic arena of Post-colonial Studies which focuses on the
cultural, political, economic and social legacy of colonialism and
the human consequences of the control and exploitation of both
colonized people and their lands
Post-colonialism is a concept used to describe the struggles of
societies that experienced/experience the transition from political
dependence to sovereignty post-1960s, but its concepts are often
applied to settler colonial and other colonial societies post-1960s
Post-colonial subjects may live on their original land or anywhere
in the globe. Displacement and diaspora is also part of the post-
colonial narrative.
Key theorists: Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Wole
Soyinka, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

11. POST-COLONIAL INDEPENDENCE
1940S-1960S (GENERALLY)
India
1947
Sri Lanka
1948
Senegal
1960
Vietnam
1945
Egypt
1953
Lebanon
1943
Kenya
1963
Algeria
1962
Iraq
1958
Ethiopia
1941
Kazakhstan
1991

12. “THE SUBALTERN”
SUBALTERN
STUDIES

13. CAN THE
SUBALTERN
SPEAK?
Speech/speechlessness
becomes a metaphor for
the powerlessness of the
subaltern
Can the subaltern be
heard…?

14. GAYATRI(GAI-
UH-TREE)
SPIVAK:
CAN THE
SUBALTERN
SPEAK? (1988)
“Let us now move to consider the margins
(one can just as well say the silent, silenced
center)…men and women among the
illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest
strata of the urban subproletariat….”

15. SUBLALTERN =
SOCIAL STATUS
The subaltern is very clearly not any post-colonial (non-
Western) individual (Spivak)
subaltern describes the lower classes and the social
groups who are at the margins of society: a subaltern is a
person without agency because of their social status
Rural groups, tribal group, Indigenous groups, women,
children, illiterate individuals, refugees, migrant laborers,
lower-caste; (the dispossessed)
Fringe of society/outside of the colonial state and the
modern sovereign state. They are the displaced and
dispossessed.
“double discrimination”

16. “The subaltern ‘cannot speak’… because her speech falls short of fully authorized,
political speech. Too much gets in the way of her message's being heard, socially and
politically.”
Gaytri Spivak

17. THE PROBLEM OF SUBALTERN SPEECH IN
POST-COLONIAL THEORY
• Colonialism reformulates non-Western forms of knowing, reasoning and acquiring knowledge of
the world as myth and as folklore
• to be heard and known, the subaltern must adopt Western ways of knowing, reasoning, and
language –and must conform expression of their non-Western knowledge of colonial life to
Western ways of knowing the world
• the subalterns' abandonment of culturally customary ways of thinking and the subsequent
adoption of Western ways of thinking are necessary in many situations…
• but this also means that post-colonial subjects can present challenges to and/or contributions to
Western ways of knowing (in their own societies and globally)
• those on the fringes of society are displaced from the socio-economic institutions of the society
(jobs, education), in order to deny their agency by both colonial powers and elite within their own
country

18. THE PRACTICE OF SATI (WIDOW SUICIDE)
AND SUBALTERNITY
“The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself
upon it. This is widow sacrifice. (The conventional transcription of the Sanscrit word
for the widow would be sati. The early colonial British transcribed it suttee.) The right
was not practiced universally and was not caste- or class-fixed. The abolition of this
rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of ‘White men saving
brown women from brown men’…Against this is the Indian nativist statement, a
parody of the nostalgia for lost origins: ‘The women wanted to die,’ still being
advanced…”

19. PROBLEM OF THE
WIDOW + SPEECH
• A “double displacement”
• Indian patriarchal customs speak for her +
determine her behavaor
• White government speaks for her - to save her
from brown men
• Gender behavior is constructed via fundamentally
patriarchal law
• No-one asks the widow what she wants
• She has no platform to express her concerns.

20. “The subaltern cannot speak, not because there are not activities in which we can
locate a subaltern mode of life/culture/subjectivity, but because…‘speaking’ itself
belongs to an already well-defined structure and history of domination. As Spivak
says in an interview: ‘If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not
a subaltern any more.’”
Rey Chow

21. A ZU TIWALINE/ DONIA MAAOUI
(TUNISIAN BERBER/CAMBODIAN)
'EYES OF THE WIND' (BONUS TRACK
TAKEN FROM DRAW ME A SILENCE
The Berbers, an Indigenous people of Northern Africa, live in
scattered communities across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya,
Egypt, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. Fractured identity due to
colonialism and post-colonial nation building
“Uniting the bonds that connect Berber music, dub culture
and techno hypnosis” (survivance)
Tunisia was French occupied
Berber music, culture, inserted into the desert landscape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMV7UtEkIPA

22. THE SUBALTERN VOICE:
SPEECH AS METAPHOR IN MEDIA ART

23. THE PROBLEM OF SUBALTERN SPEECH IN
POST-COLONIAL THEORY
to be heard and known, the subaltern must adopt Western ways of
knowing, reasoning, and language –and must conform expression of
their non-Western knowledge of colonial life to Western ways of
knowing the world

24. IMMIGRATION, MIGRATION +
REFUGEEISM + SUBALTERNITY
Labor – immigration and migrant work (global)
Ethnic or religious persecution
Human rights violations (women, LGBTQ+, religion)
Displacement due to environmental disasters (i.e., drought, famine)
Displacement due to war/violence
Internal migration (rural to urban)
International migration

25. OL ORI BURU (2015)
PAOLO NA ZARETH
(KRENAK , AFRO-BRA ZIL AN + EUROPE AN
DESCENT)
In this work a Nigerian immigrant on the top of
a building looking through São Paulo's skyline
pours insults in Yoruba language over the city.
He unloads this frustration and the questioning
around the separation between the African man
and his geographic and cultural origin, and the
diaspora of his people throughout the world.
• “Oi Ori Buruku” is a curse phrase in Yoruba
which means ‘bad mentality’, with the word ‘Ori’
signifying the essence of being.
• https://vimeopro.com/loopfair/videocloop/vi
deo/162948247

26. FINDING FANON (FF) GAIDEN:
DELETE (2016)
FF Gaiden: Delete (Larry Achiampong & David Blandy w/Indigenous
paperless migrants from Eritrea and Kurdistan) from from the
organization Mennisker i Limbo (People in Limbo) in Oslo, Norway
Participants tell their stories of migration via a journey through Grand
Theft Auto V.
The artists worked with individual group members to develop written
scripts, synthetic voiceovers and character avatars
This is a genre of media art called “machinima” which uses footage from
video games to create media art and filmic works
gaiden = a media work, usually a video game, which takes place in or
refers to another work, but isn't really a sequel or prequel.
https://vimeo.com/192201168

27. THINGS TO
THINK ABOUT
How does animation/video game
world work to support or enhance
meaning?
What is the role of sound and voice-
over in this work?
How does the landscape of Grand
Theft Auto work to represent the
stories, voices and journeys of
paperless immigrants?

28. YINKA SHONIBARE
THE CROWNING (2007)
Yinka Shonibare is British-Nigerian artist who
uses vibrant Ankara fabric, mining its complex
multi-national history. Although it is often
associated with the African continent, this fabric
was originally inspired by Indonesian design
and mass-produced in the Netherlands, hence
it also being known as Dutch wax fabric. The
Dutch colonial powers then sold it to colonies
in West Africa, explaining its perceived
Africanness. Shonibare sources his fabric from
London, completing its global journey.
Shonibare dresses the two figures in The
Crowning in luxurious eighteenth-century
costumes (a regular motif of his) made of
Ankara fabric to explore not only race and
globalisation but also class. Class differences
are brought into the present by the inclusion of
the Chanel logo in the fabric print.

29. SCRAMBLE FOR
AFRICA
2003
YINKA SHONIBARE
•
• “An exploration of late Victorian
England and its territorial expansion
into Africa during the 1880s. The
"scramble" for Africa by leading
European and world powers
resulted in the carving up of the
continent, an act that was
formalized at the Berlin Conference
of 1884-85.”

30. HINTERLAND (2013)
HEW LOCKE
• Edinburgh-born artist Hew Locke grew up in Guyana. His
work builds upon his own heritage and experience to provide
insight into the themes of colonial and post-colonial power
• Locke has layered paint over a photograph of the statue of
Queen Victoria in his hometown of Georgetown in
Guyana. During the socialist uprising of 1970, the statue was
dumped in the Georgetown Botanical Gardens before being
restored in 1990. The painted images of skeletons and
oppressed peoples over the monument symbolise the
exploitation of native peoples under empire. Queen Victoria’s
statue becomes a symbol of the oppressive and exploitative
nature of colonialism.

31. SUBALTERN SPEECH SPEAKING WITH
AND THROUGH MEDIA

32. THE PROBLEM OF SUBALTERN SPEECH IN
POST-COLONIAL THEORY
to be heard and known, the subaltern must adopt Western ways of knowing, reasoning,
and language –and must conform expression of their non-Western knowledge of
colonial life to Western ways of knowing the world

33. While Indigenous self-determination demands the right to be heard and
acknowledgement and acceptance of an Indigenous world view, a consideration of
who is listening to their messages is an essential part of the communication process.
T. Dreher “Listening across difference: Media and multiculturalism beyond
the
politics of voice” (2009).

34. A SÁMI AND HER BODY
(2007)
LISELOTTE WA JSTEDT
(SÁMI, KIRUNA SWEDEN)
“I investigate the body as a
tool, a house, flesh. I learn what
the different parts of my body
are called in Sámi language. I
do this in my home. Me in my
body among my things that I
identify with. I try out my
different Sámi attributes.”
Sápmi = land of the Sámi
https://vimeo.com/127584155

35. A SÁMI IN THE CITY
(2007)
LISELOTTE WAJSTEDT
“I investigate the big city Stockholm from my
perspective and in a Sámi way. I conduct the
investigation with the purpose to learn new
words. What do you call a skyscraper or a
shopwindow or the concrete. How do you
say: I am walking here on the pedestrian
street, but now I am entering a fashion shop.
Wow! What a nice dress, gotta have it. I am
carrying a dictionary and a phone... in
emergencies I can call up my relatives up
north and ask if there is something I don´t
understand. I put post-it notes on everything
I see and want to learn. Document it with my
camera.”
https://vimeo.com/7548572

36. SPANIARDS NAMED HER MAGDALENA, BUT
NATIVES CALL HER YUMA (2013)
CAROLINA CAYCEDO (MUISCA, COLOMBIA)
HT TPS://VIMEO.COM/151806127

37. ‘CULTURE FOR SALE’ (2012) BY
YUKI KIHARA
(SAMOAN/JAPANESE
DESCENT)
Culture for Sale’ is the title of the interdisciplinary
work which features a live public performance
and video installation conceived by Kihara where
the live performance featured Samoan dancers
who were instructed only to perform briefly when
they were paid money by the audience. The video
installation also echoed the performance - the
audience was able to pay-per-view the footage of
the performance by inserting coins into the coin
slot machine placed next to each monitor
presented as a 'vending machine'.
‘Culture for Sale’ explores the commercialization
of Samoan culture in the so called ‘post-colonial’
era in the wake of the 50th Anniversary of the
Independence of Samoa in June 2012
https://vimeo.com/40031800

38. BLACK GIRL (1966)
Ousmane Sembène (Lebu/Serer, Senegal)

39. Made in
1965/1966
First feature film
by an African
director
First African film
to play at Cannes
First feature-
length film made
in Africa
In French and
Wolof (Sembène‘s
native language)
Taken from a
newspaper story
Sembène read in
France
Based on a story,
included in Tribal
Scars, called “The
Promised Land”

40. OUSMANE
SEMBÈNE
• An author/filmmaker
• Started making movies in his
40s
• Black Girl is his first film
• Communicating to Africans
but also to those outside

41. Records the story of a young black Senegalese
woman, Diouana, brought to Antibes, France
by a French couple previously stationed in
Dakar. Under the mistaken assumption that
she has been employed as a governess for the
couple's children, Diouana quickly learns that
she must do the cooking, laundry, cleaning,
and babysitting. Without salary or friends,
treated as invisible by her employers, confined
to the house except for shopping, and
disillusioned by the sad discrepancy between
the realities of her life in France and her earlier
fantasies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sptKbtXIn
4o

43. NARRATIVE DEVICES

44. NARRATIVE DEVICES
The story is
told
through:
Voice-over
Narration
Flashbacks

45. ALLEGORY
1. The past is used to speak about the present
2. One character is used to represent a larger
group, particularly members of a particular social
or political class

46. Diouana represents the African worker/the
domestic worker/the female domestic worker/the
subaltern
Her employers – the colonial past/legacy od the
colonial past and post-colonial relationship
Diouana’s clothing – the struggle of the subaltern
subject and identity post-colonial
The mask – African culture under colonialism,
sovereignty
The film depicts struggles of societies that
experienced the transition from political
dependence to sovereignty
Allegory in Black Girl

47. DIOUANA AS THE SUBALTERN
as a woman
as a
domestic
worker
as an
immigrant
as an African
woman
as “illiterate”
as
Indigenous
person

48. CHARACTER
CONSTRUCTION:
CLOTHING
French clothing vs. African
clothing
What do the different styles of
clothing mean to Diouana?
What does it mean/signal
when she changes between
the two (is she still subaltern)?

49. THE MASK
What does the mask represent?

51. “In many African cultures, the person who wears a ritual mask conceptually is
transformed into the spirit represented by the mask itself. The transformation of the
mask wearer into a spirit usually relies on other practices, such as music and dance or
costume costumes that contributes to the transformation.”

52. AESTHETICS OF BLACK
AND WHITE

53. THE
AESTHETICS
OF BLACK
AND WHITE
• Black Girl explores themes of the legacy
colonialism, sublaterity, and the struggle for
identity for the post-colonial subject through
the use of black and white imagery
• Black and white visual imagery are used to add
meaning to the narrative – everything means
something in this film
• The floor, for example, with its bold black and
white horizontal stripes, which will never
intermingle, stand-in for black and white culture
in Senegal
• African clothing is richly patterned; French
clothing is white

56. “Besides film scholars, however, few people
know that Sembène’s film was based on a
real-life incident. Few know that there is
another woman shadowing the Diouana
we see on screen and in visual artworks like
Nyoni’s portrait. The “real” Diouana, so to
speak, was Diouana Gomis (1927–58): a 31-
year-old woman from Boutoupa in
Ziguinchor, Senegal. Hired in Dakar as a
maid and nanny for a white French family,
she arrived in Antibes in April 1958 and
died by suicide less than three months
later. “
Sembène’s “Black Girl” Is a Ghost Story
Doyle Calhoun
https://www.publicbooks.org/sembenes-
black-girl-is-a-ghost-story/