Posts filed in:#Experimental

I May Destroy You, Atlanta and Get Out: Afro-Surrealism and the everyday horror of Blackness

Written by Laura Hackshaw

Edited by Veronica Vivi

Illustrated by Daley North

This is a show tune
But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail

Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

–  Mississippi Goddamn by Nina Simone

‘‘Afro-Surrealism is drifting into contemporary culture on a rowboat with no oars…to hunt down clues for the cure.’’

–  D. Scot Miller – Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black is the New Black a 21st Century Manifesto (2009)

*This essay contains spoiler alerts for several TV shows and films

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Tracey Emin

Clare Appezzato

Edited by Veronica Vivi

Illustration by Holly Summerson hollysummerson.wix.com/arts

Tracey Emin’s work is provocative and personal. Her art is produced in a variety of ways including painting, drawing, sewing and sculpture. However, arguably her most notable and analysed media is neon text. With these, she stretches the limits of art and calls into question whether a phrase hung up in lights can be considered artwork. One look at it and you will think that yes it can, undoubtedly so. Her relative popularity aside (she was nominated for a Turner Prize) her achievements are consistently undermined, and her art is constantly critiqued for being ‘trivial’ and ‘vulgar’ by those who believe that art must adhere to some sort of strict guidelines. Emin hits back at these critics (mainly men) with her continually beautiful collections of neon lights. Emin belongs in the world of academia and she deserves to be studied, because she is a clear cut woman who is redefining what can be considered ‘art’. In this age of technology, new media and the internet, her neon lights are representative of a new age of art that comes along with it.

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Continuing The Unfinished Conversation: Stuart Hall through the lens of John Akomfrah

The archive has been the space of intervention from the beginning. One of the few spaces, reservoirs of memory, for diasporic subjects is the archive.

John Akomfrah (2014)

Benjamin E.I. Lubbock

Edited by Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo and Rianna Walcott

Art by Maïa Walcott https://maiawalcott98.wixsite.com/mysite

Memory and the moving image are John Akomfrah’s materials. In The Unfinished Conversation, a three-screen video installation, his subject matter is the formation of identity, which, for individuals struggling to define themselves in their social contexts, is a matter of urgency. It is not easy to explain how identities are created, and there are few who have considered the matter in greater depth than Stuart Hall, around whom the film revolves. Born in Jamaica before immigrating to Oxford, Hall became editor-in-chief of the New Left Review and a founding figure of the New Left movement. He was an activist, regularly televised for his analyses of media reports, and co-authored seminal texts such as The Popular Arts (1964), which advanced the claim that film, media and pop culture should be taken seriously as objects of study. But what he was arguably most renowned for were his theories of identity: “Identity is formed at the intersection between the political and the personal” (Hall, 2013).

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Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

Curricular Dissonance:
Teaching English Literature as a Postcolonialist, or, the Power of Voice

Dr. Justine Seran

Edited by Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo

Art by Iara Silva https://www.instagram.com/iiaraz_/

I taught pre-honours literature at the University of Edinburgh for three years, and it never ceased to frustrate me, as a researcher specialised in contemporary literature, postcolonial criticism, and women’s studies, to expose future generations to the very curriculum centred on dead white men that I strove to escape by focusing my research on exploring (and celebrating) the work of living women of colour. Critiquing an antiquated curriculum and suggesting a wider breadth of reading to students during tutorials is one thing, but embedding diversity on the level of course design and organisation is another.

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