WENDY NANAN
March 19-September 6, 2020

OPENING RECEPTION
POSTPONED, new date TBD

HOURS
Tuesday-Sunday 10 AM-5 PM

LOCATION
OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas
201 18th Street NW
Washington, DC 20006

ADMISSION
Free

WASHINGTON, DC – The AMA | Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Permanent Mission of Trinidad and Tobago to the OAS proudly present WENDY NANAN, a retrospective solo exhibition by the pioneering Trinidadian artist. Curated by Trinidadian-Canadian scholar Andil Gosine, WENDY NANAN will be the largest exhibition of the artist’s life’s work, and will include key projects from her repertoire over the last four decades:

Cricket: Since the early 1980s, Nanan has been drawing scenes of cricketers from games she has attended, some with her parents, who were dedicated fans of the sport. These drawings are remarkable for their intense observation and quick calligraphic rendering in the Japanese zenga manner, of cricket in play at the Queen’s Park Oval. Occupying the AMA’s largest gallery, this exhibition marks the first time that so many of the works are seen together. 

Breath: Following her recent exhibition in Trinidad, Nanan has created a series of eight new pod-like sculptures for this exhibition. Constructed from papier-mâché and sea shells that the artist has collected over regular trips to Manzanilla beach along the Trinidad’s Atlantic coast, and sculpted in the form of a vulva, the series is centrally concerned with the anxieties about women’s bodies and sexualities. Accompanying the series will be the debut of a 22-minute video by the curator in which the artist recounts her biography while audiences witness their creation.

Additionally, four brightly-coloured papier-mâché sculptures complete the show:

Depicting a marriage between the Hindu god Vishnu and the Catholic Madonna in a space that is part-temple, part-church, in Idyllic Marriage, Nanan thrusts into an interrogation of the necessary discomfort of mixing in the Americas, slyly observant of both the productive rewards and violence of hybridity. The piece simultaneously invites critique and reflection about male-female relationships and the historical institutionalized marginalization of women.

A new Baby Krishna from her series that reimagines the Hindu deity Krishna, will also debut.  The original series of four papier-mâché sculptures presented an answer to the question, “What happens when Asia comes to the Americas?” Nanan’s depictions not only add Christian-signifying angel wings and a halo, reflecting the reality of cultural mixing in the region, but also various items (including sugarcane, salt, and oil) that signify the industries that were socially formative across the region. The resulting work is neither blasphemous nor celebratory and is offered instead as a catalyst for contemplative interrogation of our times.  

The Bounce from her oversized book series continues the artist’s exploration of shared struggles and spiritualities across the Americas. In this work, lyrics from the epic Billie Holiday song are the background text to the bounce between the Hindu god Ganesh and The Lion of The Twelve Tribes. It references the “bounce” shared between Barack and Michelle Obama on election night, a time when universal forces colluded to say we have finally overcome.

Finally, Persona charts the artist’s biography in nine phases.

BIOGRAPHIES

Wendy Nanan
Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1955, Nanan is the first Indo-Trinidadian, and among the first Caribbean women artists to have a long and sustained professional practice. She obtained her BFA at Wolverhampton Polytechnic,England in 1979. Her work is included in many public and private collections, including Trinidad and Tobago’s National Museum. In her practice, Nanan takes on core questions at the heart of historical and contemporary struggles about identity, culture and power in the region. She has produced work that is at once historically and geographically specific to the place she inhabits, and timeless, gently provocative and persistently infused with her feminist politics. While Nanan is deeply respected by peers and critics in the Caribbean, she remains an under-attended-to artist, in part due to her determined locally-situated practice,she has remained in Trinidad since completing art school in 1980, and is famously reclusive, her philosophy being that “it is more important to create the work than to seek an audience for it.” Work by Nanan will also be included in "Cultural Encounters - Art of the Asian Diaspora" at Morikami Museum (Florida), and "Visible Man - Art and Black Male Subjectivity" at the Dorothy Uber Bryan Gallery (Ohio), in 2020.

Andil Gosine
Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Art & Justice at York University, Toronto. Dr. Gosine’s scholarship and artistic practice examine imbrications of ecology, desire and migration, and include numerous publications and multimedia projects. Exhibitions of his work Deities, Parts I & II showed in New York in 2019, and Coolie Coolie Viens and All the Flowers in Canada in 2018. Dr. Gosine is currently completing revisions on his forthcoming monograph, Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke). He is also working on a book project about Wendy Nanan.

AMA | Art Museum of the Americas
The AMA serves as the principal instrument of cultural diplomacy of the OAS. AMA’s mission is founded on the notion that the arts are transformative for individuals and communities. This guiding principle promotes the core values of the OAS by providing a space for cultural expression, creativity, innovation, dialog, and learning, while highlighting themes such as democracy, development, human rights, justice, freedom of expression, and innovation. AMA’s work draws on contemporary art to showcase a constructive vision of the future of the Americas via local and hemispheric cultural exchange. Wendy Nanan is part of a larger effort that AMA is making to amplify the voices of Caribbean, women and non-binary artists and curators.

Accessibility: This exhbition takes place on AMA's first floor, and is wheelchair accessible; please inform the guard at the front entrance to open the back doorway at the top of the ramp. There is a flight of winding stairs leading to the museum’s second floor. Restrooms are located on the second floor. For more information on accessibility, please contact 202 370 0147 or artmus@oas.org

A book signing will be hosted at Nightboat books on Friday, March 6th Nightboat Reading from 5:30-7:30 pm at La Quinta Inn & Suites San Antonio Riverwalk (The Crockett Room, 303 Blum San Antonio, Texas 78205).

Rosamond S. King, associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY and author of Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University Press of Florida, 2014) will be at booth #1045 signing books of poetry.

Join members of the Office Hours Poetry Community for an onsite reading at AWP San Antonio. Location: Grand Hyatt, (Seguin A), 4th Floor. The event goes from 3:00 to 4:30 pm.

Robin Gow is the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books, 2020) and the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press, 2019. They are an adjunct instructor and grad student at Adelphi University. Gow is also the author of A Million Quiet Revolutions, a forthcoming Young Adult Verse Novel.

JP Howard is an educator, literary activist, curator and community builder. Her debut poetry collection, SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is also the author of bury your love poems here (Belladonna*) and co-editor of Sinister Wisdom Journal Black Lesbians--We Are the Revolution! JP has received fellowships from Cave Canem, VONA, and Lambda. Her poetry is widely anthologized. JP curates Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon, a NY based forum offering writers a monthly venue to collaborate. http://www.jp-howard.com

Miah Jeffra is author of The First Church of What's Happening (Nomadic 2017), The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), The Violence Almanac (Black Lawrence 2021), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2020). Awards include the New Millennium Prize, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, Lambda Literary Fellowship, and 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Outstanding Anthology. Miah is founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.

Rosamond S. King’s publications include the forthcoming All the Rage, the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone and poems in more than three dozen journals, blogs, and anthologies, including The Feminist Wire, Harriet, and The Caribbean Writer. She is sx salon’s Creative Editor and Associate Professor at Brooklyn College. Her goal is to make people feel, wonder, and think, usually in that order. www.rosamondking.com

Sanjana Nair is a full-time professor at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has taught at New York University and Miami University and served as the first Treasurer for the Asian American Poetry organization Kundiman. Her poetry has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Fence Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, The Equalizer, Swimm, What Rough Beast for Indolent Books, Anastamos, No, Dear Magazine, Prometheus Dreaming, The Southampton Review and The Bangalore Review. Deeply invested in collaboration, her work has been performed in multiple Emotive Fruition shows New York City and her piece The Lady Apple, a collaboration between poet and composer Beata Moon, was performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater as well as featured on National Public Radio’s Soundcheck. She resides with her family in Brooklyn.

Sarah M. Sala is a queer poet of Polish-Lebanese descent. Her debut collection, Devil’s Lake is forthcoming from Tolsun Books August 2020. She is the founding director of the free poetry workshop, Office Hours, and Assistant Poetry Editor at the Bellevue Literary Review. Her work appears in BOMB, the Southampton Review, and the Los Angeles Review. Visit her at sarahsala.com and @sarahmsala.

Benny Sisson is a trans poet. She is a library assistant, adjunct instructor, and MFA candidate at Adelphi University. Her work has been featured with Lunch Ticket, Crab Fat Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Mineola, NY.

Noel Quiñones is a Puerto Rican writer, community organizer, and performer from the Bronx. His work has been published in POETRY, the Latin American Review, Rattle, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. He is the founder and former director of Project X, a Bronx-based arts organization, and a current M.F.A. candidate at the University of Mississippi.

CHRISTINA QUINTANA (CQ) is a writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots, and the author of the full-length play Scissoring (Dramatists Play Service) and The Heart Wants, a chapbook of poetry (Finishing Line Press). Her plays have been developed and produced across the country, and she is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Playwrights Realm, Van Lier New Voices at the Lark, Queer/Art and Lambda Literary. Most recently, her dystopian television drama, Invisible Lily, was featured on the 2020 WeForShe "Ones to Watch" List, and CQ served as staff writer on the upcoming ABC series The Baker and the Beauty. She is currently at work on a new musical commissioned by Black Cap Productions based on Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America by Roberto G. Gonzales and a literary novel with the working title The Twisted Fate of La Media Luna. For more, visit www.cquintana.com

Sarah Sala is a queer poet of Polish-Lebanese descent. Her debut collection, Devil’s Lake is forthcoming from Tolsun Books June 2020. She is the founder of the free poetry workshop, Office Hours, and Assistant Poetry Editor at the Bellevue Literary Review. Her work appears in BOMB, the Southampton Review, and the Los Angeles Review. Visit her at sarahsala.com and @sarahmsala.

The 12th Annual Festival of Language 2020 brings together 33 poets and writers from more than a dozen states and a couple of countries to perform flash readings from their works in a celebration of innovation, creativity, inclusion, and words. Free. Pre-reading gathering starts @4:30pm, first readers at 5pm. Hosted by Ted Pelton.

The lineup includes poet Rosamond S. King, associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and author of Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University Press of Florida, 2014). King will read from 6-7 pm.

When: Wednesday, March 4th, 2020, 4:30-6:30 pm
Location: Cherrity Bar: 302 Montana St, San Antonio, TX 78203

Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/192112255226121

The Virgin Islands Studies Collective (La Vaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer and Tiphanie Yanique) published a collaborative article in NTiK entitled "Ancestral Queendom: Reflections on the Prison Records of the Rebel Queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI (formerly the Danish West Indies)." Each member responds to one of the prison records of the four women taken to Denmark for their participation in the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history. Their reflections combine elements of speculation, fiction, black feminitist theory and critique as modes of responding to the gaps and silences in the archive, as well as finding new questions to be asked.

Check out their promo video: https://youtu.be/a748f-8NzlE

Date: Friday, February 21
Venue: Louise McCagg Gallery at Barnard College
Time: 7-9pm 

Join us for the opening of IN ALL MY DREAMS, a collective, multivalent project situated at the intersections of literature, history, and visual art in the Caribbean.

Contemporary artists Nathalie Jolivert, Tessa Mars, and Mafalda Mondestin propose an extraordinary, multi-dimensional visual dialogue with famed Haitian author René Depestre’s novel Hadriana In All My Dreams. In crafting vibrant new ways of bringing Depestre’s work into the world, they present an arguably less common vision of what Haiti, its writers, and its artists offer on the global stage.

Artists Talk, moderated by Dominique Jean-Louis, will begin promptly at 7:30pm. Light refreshments will be served. 

For further details, be sure to visit the exhibition website.

RVSP here.

With #1619Project The New York Times has embarked upon a momentous reinterpretation of US history, one that centers African Americans in a national narrative driven by brutal economic exploitation and progressive democratic resistance.  The brainchild of acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this multimedia, multi-platform production represents a massive corporate investment in public history -- a scale of investment at The Times perhaps last seen in the 1940s when it helped to sponsor the publication of the Jefferson papers.  Not surprisingly, the underlying interpretive frame for #1619Project, a compelling historiographical mashup of Afro-pessimism and Afro-exceptionalism, has won plenty professional endorsement, especially within the academy’s “progressive” wing.  Equally unsurprising is the fact that Hannah-Jones’ powerful and disruptive intervention has generated push-back. The project’s simultaneous incrimination of traditional patriotic heroes and recuperation of black people’s special role in redeeming the nation has rankled a few members of the profession’s “validating elite,” to borrow a term from Lloyd Best.

As a practicing student of history, I of course deeply appreciate #1619Project and welcome it as a strong stimulant for a profession that struggles to stay woke.  Yet, I too have a deep reservation about a fundamental aspect of Hannah-Jones’ framing. My issue, it should be stated from the outset, is contrary to the criticism voiced by some of my senior colleagues.*  Whereas they appear anxious that #1619Project represents the “ideology” of antiracism gone too cynically far (a case of white lives like Lincoln’s mattering too little?), I am concerned that the reinterpretation marks a conservative retreat from the much-needed materialist road of anti-racist historiography.

How so?  The problem lies in the project’s implicit naturalization of race, a process essential to all racist thought.  Presumed in Hannah-Jones’ narrative is an understanding that the twenty Africans who arrived in Virginia in August 1619 were racialized from day one and on that basis deemed fit for slavery.  “Those men and women who came ashore on the August day were the beginning of American slavery,” she writes. Charmingly simple and seemingly factual, this statement should actually give pause.  It is a presumption, in fact, that rushes over a long-running and consequential debate about the status of those twenty Africans, about whether they were slaves and, indeed, whether they were viewed through the lens of “race.”  Ignoring this quarrel over the significance of “August, 1619,” Hannah-Jones ends up disregarding a radical tradition of anti-racist history-writing that disagrees with her interpretation of that date as an inaugural moment for a nation historically founded on racism and black enslavement.  The result is a silencing of authors (often non-white and wielding an historical materialist approach) concerned to demonstrate that race was not obvious and natural from inception but was produced under specific conditions.

As history would have it, on the very day that #1619Project dropped, Nell Painter voiced this longstanding objection to Jones’ founding premise about 1619. In an op-ed that targeted President’s Trump’s use of “enslaved” to describe the 20 Virginia arrivants of 1619, Painter insisted that these Africans were not slaves and, moreover, were not yet subject to the ideology of race.  It was not “until the eighteenth century that we find the more familiar, hardened boundaries of racialized American identity,” she wrote.  Painter then went on to blame the “ideology of race” for encouraging people like Trump to tell a history in which “the Jamestown Africans of 1619 are always already enslaved” and in which “Africans and their descendants are the same as slaves.”  In Painter’s view, it was conventionally racist to presume that the 20 Africans who came ashore were viewed as racial inferiors fit for enslavement.

The failure to engage this argument against “1619” as an inaugural date is remarkable if not curious in an historical project that drew on the best of professional consultants.  After all, the academic debate over the beginnings of slavery and racism in North America has been so enduring and intense that -- like many of these Ivory Tower affairs -- it acquired a brand: “the origins debate.”  This scholarly quarrel took off in the middle of the 20th century and featured, on one side, memorable authors like Eric Williams and the marital team of Mary and Oscar Handlin.  To these historians, the enslavement of Africans was neither immediate nor originally rationalized through race-thinking. As Williams famously phrased it in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), “slavery was not borne of racism, rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”   A few years later, the Handlins made a remarkably similar argument in an article that -- unlike Williams’ book -- focused more on slavery in North America than in the Caribbean.  Slavery and racism, they argued, were not stamped on Africans from inception; rather, both emerged toward end of the 17th century, conditioned by the demands of developing capitalist plantations.

The Handlins’ argument against the inaugural import of 1619 actually became conventional wisdom for a quick academic minute.  By the fifties, though, it began to come under attack, first by Carl Degler, and then, more influentially, by Winthrop Jordan.  Jordan’s award-winning White Over Black, though sometimes uncertain and even confusing in its argument against the Handlins, nevertheless restored “August, 1619” as a significant beginning.  By that date, according to Jordan, it would have been so natural to view the twenty African arrivals as members of an inferior race that their enslavement amounted to an “unthinking decision.”

While this is not the place to referee the academic “origins debate,” it is critical to comprehend that the stakes were anything but academic.  For Williams, the Handlins and their followers, the point of contending that the idea of black inferiority did not prevail from the start in 1619 was to advance the goal of denaturalizing race.  Appreciating that racism relies on the naturalization of race, they contributed to a wider intellectual move to expose race as an idea in history, indeed, as one of “man’s most dangerous ideas,” to cite Ashley Montagu’s anti-racist classic.  In their view, blackness and whiteness were inventions (not only Nell Painter but scholars like Silvia Federici, Toni Morrison and Barbara Fields would develop and refine this line of argument.) At stake for historians like the Handlins was an understanding that race, because it was made in the past, could be unmade in the future.  This was no easy optimism, as some have suggested. It was the urgent antiracist thinking of an age that had witnessed the atrocities of World War II.

On the other side of the “origins debate,” Jordan was not what we would think of as a stereotypical ‘racist;’ yet, it is important to recognize that his analysis effectively naturalized race, despite explicitly opposing white supremacy. In fact, it should have come as no surprise to close readers that Jordan ended White Over Black with a “Note on the Concept of Race” that affirmed race as biology.  To the extent that Jordan’s monumental work has been persuasive in the debate about the significance of “1619,” it represented a setback for anti-racist history-writing.

Indeed, there is a rich irony in the fact that #1619Project effectively follows Jordan’s naturalizing lead rather than the historical road paved by Williams and the Handlins. According to Hannah-Jones, a crucial source of inspiration for the project came from a teenage encounter with a book by Lerone Bennett, the recently passed writer, scholar and magazine editor.  Reading Bennett’s Before The Mayflower: A History of Black America proved to be a “revelation” for her.  Started as a series of articles in Ebony and first published in 1962, the book produced one of those “aha” moments that led Hannah-Jones to conceive of #1619.  Given this story, it is indeed a revelation to pick up this book and to discover that Bennett not only had a stake in the “origins debate” ignored by Hannah-Jones but also that he opposed Jordan and took the anti-racist side of Williams and the Handlins.

In Before The Mayflower, Bennett writes: “But the first black immigrants were not slaves and this is of capital importance in the history of the Negro.”  And a few lines further: “In Virginia then, as in other colonies, the first Negroes fell into a socio-economic groove that carried no implications of racial inferiority.  That came later. But in the interim, a period of forty years or more, the first black settlers accumulated land, voted, testified in court and mingled with whites on the basis of equality.”   Bennett’s rejection of the inaugural significance of 1619 was even more emphatic in an Ebony essay published a few years later.  Titled “The Road Not Taken,” this 1970 article stated plainly that “[i]n the beginning there was no race problem in America.  The race problem in America was the deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites and reds to make money.”  The rest of the essay analyzed the rise of enslavement and racism in North America, placing particular emphasis on context and the interested “choices” that conditioned their emergence.

And here, in this stress on material interest, context and “choice,” lies the ultimate reason why #1619Project should engage seriously the arguments of authors like the Handlins, Bennett and Painter. Their emphasis on conditions, power and agency provides the vital and critical reminder that the making of our racist society has not been inevitable, that the roots of white supremacy lies neither in destiny nor DNA.  Rather, the nation’s historically racist order reflects the results of decisions, often well calculated, made by people with control over powerful institutions. This is a crucial lesson for the young readership being cultivated by The Times.  It is important that they not be misled into thinking that it is somehow natural to perceive a mortal threat in superficial bodily factors like black skin and broad noses.  They must be exposed to histories that not only debunk white supremacy but also illuminate our complicity in reproducing the violent governing concept of race as we make it seem like a part of nature or -- no better -- an essentialized form of “culture.”

If the modern past of people of African descent has been thus far filled with so much death and despair that it necessitated a kind of historical scholarship I once dubbed “wake work,” the very survival of this community in the future demands something else: studies that expose the killing emptiness of the race idea, a genuine anti-racist intellectual labor that we might embrace as “life work.”**

Nuff thanks, as usual, to Donette Francis, Charisse Burden-Stelly and “PanchoD” for careful and caring engagement. And special thanks to my graduate seminar student Sarah Whites-Koditschek for her insightful work on #1619Project.

* See “Letter to The Editor: Historians Critique The 1619 Project, and We Respond,” The New York Times, December 20, 2019.  Here is a good place to acknowledge that this essay is my own response to an invitation to respond to the #1619Project at the World Socialist Website.

** “Loving Through Loss: Reading Saidiya Hartman’s History of Black Hurt,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 6 1 (2008): article 6. Christina Sharpe would add nuance to the term later. See “Black Studies: In The Wake,” Black Scholar 44 2 (2014): 59-69.

Image from New York Times Live Events

Date: Friday, 6 December 2019
Venue: Barnard College Digital Humanities Center
Time: 1-8pm 

Over the course of an afternoon of panel presentations and roundtable conversation, participants will engage critically with the digital as praxis, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by the media technologies that ever more intensely reconfigure the social, historical, and geo-political contours of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Presenters will consider the affordances and limitations of the digital with respect to a wide range of disciplines and methodologies. As with every iteration of “The Caribbean Digital,” we look forward to picking up themes addressed in our previous conferences – many of which currently feature in the three issues of archipelagos journal, our peer-reviewed publishing platform dedicated to Caribbean digital scholarship and scholarship of the Caribbean digital.

Read sx archipelagos here.

From http://caribbeandigitalnyc.net/2019/

Black Cultural Archives (BCA), the only national archive for Black British history, brings its unique collection of images, artifacts and artworks together online for the first time (g.co/blackculturalarchives).

A two-year project in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, the BCA have digitized over 4,000 items from their collection, forming a series of curated online exhibitions and stories which can be accessed globally to help inspire and educate. As Britain has a strong West Indian population, this new digital archive will contain many materials that tell the stories of Caribbean migrants and their descendants across the UK. 

Available on the Google Arts & Culture website and app, the new digital collection utilises innovative technologies including ultra-high resolution Gigapixel photography using the Art Camera to help preserve these important histories for future generations, and to encourage enquiry and dialogue all over the world.

Read more on the BCA website

Text from the BCA website with minor edits

Date: Friday, 22 November 2019
Venue: Altschul Hall, Barnard Hall
Time: 4-5:30pm 

In collaboration with the Wattle and Red Earth (WARE) Collective, the Columbia Center for Archeology and Barnard Department of Anthropology will be screening "Rockstone and Fire," a documentary exploring the rural architecture of post-emancipation Jamaica and the efforts of the WARE Collective to preserve Jamaican cultural heritage and traditional forms of environmentally-sustainable building techniques. Courtney Coke, the director, and other members of the WARE Collective will be present for a discussion following the screening. A trailer can be viewed at: https://filmfreeway.com/RockstoneandFire343.