Monthly Archives: September 2021

Tyler T. Schmidt (bio) A review of Montez, Ricardo. Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire. Duke UP, 2020. I keep thinking about Juan Dubose crashing in the hallway while his boyfriend, artist Keith Haring, soldiers through a dinner at the poet John Giorno’s house in January 1985. The event, peopled with gay […]

Jens Andermann (bio) A review of Benezra, Karen. Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America. U of California P, 2020. Over the course of little more than a decade, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Latin American art experienced a wholesale transformation. As evidenced by the diverse group invited to participate in the […]

Keguro Macharia (bio) Invitation I was delighted when SA Smythe invited me to write this Afterword. It extended an earlier invitation issued in 2018 to participate in a symposium, “Troubling the Grounds: Global Figurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity,” held in May 2019. My response to Dr. Smythe was short: “My mother has cancer—not a […]

Zoé Samudzi (bio) Abstract The recognition of and desire to prevent genocide are unquestionable social and political necessities. But despite genocide’s standardization and codification in international law, understandings and applications of its meaning are still contested. Using Germany’s response to the 1904–1908 Ovaherero and Nama genocide and Raphael Lemkin’s response to the Civil Rights Congress’s […]

Joy Enomoto (bio) Abstract This essay centers on three Melanesian women artist activists who use art as a tool for social justice and as visual archive: Camari Serau and Mere Tuilau both of iTaukei descent living on the island of Viti Levu, Fiji, and Sonja Larson of Papuan Tolai descent living in New Mexico. This […]

Sandra Harvey (bio) [T]he wake has positioned us as no-citizen … with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake In her much-celebrated The Transit of Empire, Chickasaw critical theorist Jodi Byrd begins a chapter on colonial multiculturalism with a story about land desecration […]

Paul Joseph López Oro (bio) Abstract Central Americans of African descent are in the margins on the histories of transmigrations and political movements in the isthmus and their diasporas. The absence of Black Central Americans in Latinx Studies and Central American Studies is an epistemological violence inherited from Latin American mestizaje. The insurgence of Afro-Latinx […]

Alírio Karina (bio) Abstract Thoroughly entangled in the legacies of colonial anthropology, witchcraft is often presented as evidence of primitiveness or superstition, or as a metaphor for reality. This paper examines a set of witchcraft objects held at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, reading them against anthropological and political-theoretical efforts to treat witchcraft as a […]

Sarah E.K. Fong (bio) Abstract Bridging Black and Native Studies, this essay juxtaposes the speeches of late-nineteenth century social reformers with Black and Indigenous place-making practices to show that white settler spatial imaginaries depict both Black and Indigenous peoples as placeless within the lands currently called the United States. Moving beyond an analytical separation of […]

Chad Infante, Sandra Harvey, Kelly Limes Taylor, and Tiffany King (bios) In 2015, we began assembling a dialogue among Black identified scholars committed to research focusing on Black diasporan people about how Black Studies might approach Native and Indigenous Studies. Tiffany Lethabo King reached out to Shona Jackson, Melanie Newton, Faye Yarborough, Tiya Miles, Chad […]

SA Smythe (bio) The interrelated quest to map the unknown—the geographic unknown, the corporeal indigenous/black unknown—sets forth what Neil Smith calls “uneven development,” albeit from a very different analytical perspective: the systematic production of differential social hierarchies, which are inscribed in space and give a coherence to disproportionate geographies. —Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds We, to […]

Jens Andermann teaches at NYU and is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. He is the author of Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (2018, forthcoming in English from Northwestern), New Argentine Cinema (2011), The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007), and […]