Replaying racism

I recently was drawn (backwards, kicking & screaming) into a debate about the movie "Avatar." My response to the film when it came out is here. It has been a few months (ok, several) and this year has been incredibly busy to boot, that I found myself struggling to recall the specific prompts that had made me respond the way I did, and why I consider the film racist. I was also holding back my tongue while speaking to members of my soon-to-be husband's extended family, not wanting to fight with them. My interlocutor told me he didn't see why the movie was racist, and that he left the film with a message of peace and better understanding between peoples.

The next day while watching tv I saw "Scandalize My Name," a film about the ways that McCarthyism wrought havoc on the black community and was often used as a justification for not supporting civil rights for all. Because communism supported rights for all, many civil rights advocates were dismissed as communists. One of the commentators said, "Racism is most dangerous when it is invisible."



That was it. That was exactly what I had been groping for in my argument over "Avatar." The film cloaks its racism so insidiously, allowing the "natives" to win but portraying them in degrading ways, always nature lovers, without science or technology, wearing simple clothing associated with barbarism or caveman style (loincloths, anyone?) and lacking the means to function in the modern world. They inevitably are ruled or dominated by someone from a more "sophisticated" world, a white militarized capitalist world, who infiltrates their community, learns their ways, and then leads them to victory (which they could not achieve on their own). Most insultingly, at the end of the film, the main character ATTAINS indigeneity, rendering it a commodity that can be won by the white man. The "secret ways", the indigenous identity, can be explored, discovered, and its secrets opened to a person who can become indigenous. All of these tired tropes and stereotypes abound in "Avatar," but they are carefully hidden and concealed so most walk out of the theater without realizing that yes, yet again, native peoples are being represented as backwards, timeless, nature lovers, unmodern, etc...and these tropes internalized by new, younger audiences who will then regurgitate them. This is unacceptable. Racism is dangerous, but fatal and insidious when it is invisible. That is truly frightening. We as audiences cannot be afraid to peal back the layers of the image to unfold the meaning within, and speak out against it.


I find it troubling that children and adults alike are watching this film and internalizing these stereotypes. Writing more blog posts is unlikely to change the world...but I must use my voice however I can to speak out against this continued exploitation and representation.

Snowout in Brooklyn

Got back from Christmas in Vermont to find Brooklyn under piles and piles of snow...storm came through on Sunday. It's Wednesday night, and we still have very limited mobility and services in the outer boroughs. Check out this great capture of the blizzard from Mike Black:

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

Here's the fallout (falldown?) from the storm as of Wednesday around noon, 12/29/2010 here in South Brooklyn.

Sunset Park - Snowout 12.29.10 from beth harrington on Vimeo.

some more...

Sunset Park 2 - Snowout, as of 12.29.10 from beth harrington on Vimeo.

(Please excuse the audio - I did not edit)

I also did some videos in Park Slope, Red Hook, and Bay Ridge which I will post later. Whole streets remain blocked and impassable with snow. Bloomberg has promised all streets will be cleared by tomorrow morning. Here in Sunset Park, we aren't holding our breath.

Mathaf opens in Doha

Contemporary Arab Art: Walid Raad

This is amazing.

Go to the Atlas Group's website, and pick Archive > A > Raad.




Raad placed colored dots over the bullet marks in buildings and the urban environment in Lebanon in the 80s, based on the tracemarks of the bullets which often etched various colors into the buildings.

He realized later that the color of the bullets corresponded to their country of origin, and he had created an archive of the countries that sold ammunition during the war.

More soon - on Raad, whose work has been a joyful discovery.
So much to do, so much to prove, so little time.

Contemporary Iranian Art: Shadi Ghadirian

Photographer Shadi Ghadirian lives and works in Tehran. Her series of Qajar photographs, mimicking standards of 18th and 19th century Qajar court photography, is framed in "Veil" as a thoughtful and witty retort to ethnographic Orientalist portraits and in "Unveiled" as subversive art worthy of a second look.
Responses to her work vary. In an exhibition review, critic Olivia Hampton writes, “Qajar is a recreation of the photographic compositions and styles of the studio portraits that flourished in the Qajar dynasty, who ruled Iran from 1794-1925... But clear intrusions of modernity surface in the work, in the form of ghetto blasters and television sets.” Here we see a European art critic reading the work to be about modernity, and an “intrusion” into an idealized and Orientalized past. In a similar vein, “Unveiled” curator Lisa Farjam writes, “Ghadirian, who is influenced by Qajar traditions in Iranian photohistory, does not bow to the standard image of the darkly-clad Muslim woman; these veils are full of color and life.” Here, Ghadirian is presented as drawing from a traditional and Islamic past while infusing a modernity and vibrance. Farjam frames Ghadirian as breaking stereotypes of “the Muslim woman,” whose form, voice, and sexuality are cloaked and disappear with the veil.


To counter these views, fellow artist Jananne Al-Ani intervenes to clarify multiple readings by varied audiences, rather than assuming a homogenous and Western audience. She notes, “For an Iranian audience, the contemporary props are seen as ordinary objects in an extraordinary costume drama, whereas for a Western audience – with no knowledge of the history of Iranian dress – the contemporary props disrupt what appears to be a timeless ethnographic portrait of an Other culture.” Here, Al-Ani broadens the debate and the discussion of the work to include multiple perspectives, rather than presuming the work’s audience(s) will be culturally homogenous. Moore writes that Ghadirian's inclusion of Western electronics "raise pointed questions about the provenance of commodity culture and the different forms of fetishism that impact upon women transnationally.” Moore thus creates a productive channel into discussing how women’s bodies in representation have been historically used across many cultures for varying reasons.

This call to a broader audience and shared commonalities reappears in Ghadirian’s more recent work, the “Like EveryDay” series, which highlights the quotidian nature of many women’s lives and the roles they perform. Ghadirian’s gallery labels the series, which was featured in the “Unveiled” exhibition, as “depicting anonymous chador-wrapped figures with kitchen utensils instead of faces. This simple, ominous collision of potent symbols – the veil and domesticity –parodies stereotypical understanding of women of the region and universally.” Most viewers imagine the veiled figures to be human, and Muslim women, given that resemblance to variations of the Islamic veil, but there are no discernible people in these photographs.


The immediate association for Western audiences is the equating of women as tools, implements, and as invisible as the household items of daily use; women are reduced to sexual tools in wearing the veil, could be an interpretation. In the photographs, there is no trace of a person visible except for one figure in a gingham flowered veil with a strainer over her face; here, the viewer can see traces of skin, a nose, and the tip of a finger, presumed to be feminine by the veil. Otherwise, the series portrays tools and veils, but not people.


Ghadirian works within Iranian political constraints, despite the potentially difficult interpretations of some of her works. According to Iranian law, “All images of women in Iran must be shown in hijab and instead of trying to escape this or seeing it as a constraint, Shadi Ghadirian has made it her theme as she continues to investigate the condition of women in her home country.” Much as Sedira pushes viewers to interpret, hold, and gather multiple viewpoints at once, Ghadirian works within and through her sociopolitical situation to create works that challenge easy assumptions and classification.

On transcendence - in fond memory of Father Rog

When I first started looking at colleges, my mother was very nervous. She was going to be living on another continent, and I was going back to "the States" for school. Her first-born baby was going to be gone, far from where she could fix things, put band-aids on cuts, brew tea, listen to worries. Her anxiety for me was palpable.

We visited Seattle University the summer between my junior and senior year. I met with admissions staff and professors. Three weeks later, in Germany, I got a note thanking me for my visit. Handwritten. And when I got my acceptance letter the next spring, the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences wrote a message on my acceptance: "Thanks for your statement. Given your interests, you would enjoy Frances Mayes' A Year in Provence." The dean wrote to me. My mom loved that the Jesuits needed two PhDs to teach, that the community was small and tight-knit, that SU seemed to care about its students personally. I wouldn't be just a number at SU.

And I wasn't. I am profoundly thankful for my formative 4 years at SU.

I wasn't a number because of the incredible SU faculty and staff, including Father Roger Gillis. Father Rog was really involved with Search, but accessible to everyone on campus, always ready with a smile and a kind word.


(photo from the Spectator)

This afternoon, Father Rog passed away. He had been battling cancer for several months. The Jesuits started a Facebook page, whose members swelled quickly, and the wall immediately filled with kind notes and memories and pictures of Father Rog dancing.

There are amazing individuals in history who have big names and who we can all think of when we think of grace, acceptance, love, faith...Father Rog lived this. Every day. For years - not just the years that I was at SU. The notes on his Facebook wall, this groundswell of love and gratitude, dates back before my time and continued in the years after my graduation. He shared this grace with his students, so fully, so openly - it did not matter if you were lost, found, Christian, atheist, tall, short... It was the first time that I was in a community of religious people and did not feel pressure to convert or join. Nor did I feel judged. Father Rog accepted us as we were, loved us in our brokenness and our wholeness.

I look up to figureheads like Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, but it is because of Father Rog that I understand them as real people and believe that this kind of transcendent beauty and grace is attainable. It is possible to live with grace and radiate love. He did it.

So, it is our loss, but he filled us with a joy for life that we should cherish and share.

Rest in peace, Father Rog.