In our presentation today, my focus was on artists within our own collection at the Davis that illustrate intervention into the history of black female bodily representation. I have chosen to focus on the methods used by Renée Stout. Stout is an African American artist from Pittsburg that uses art to both bring to light and explore religious practices of the African diaspora. Her art is very much a reflection of her own spiritual journey. At first I was quite confused by Stout because she often bounces from faith tradition to faith tradition in her art. One minute she’ll be exploring ideas of black femininity through a Congolese Nsiki, the next numerology, and the next creating an alter ego of a Haitian root worker named Fatima Mayfield.

There is a tension in the Black American community often times between exploring your “African” roots and being appropriative. I was concerned that Stout’s work crossed this line since researching Stout I know that she grew up in the Christian tradition and did not have access to exploring these belief systems until later in life. I was concerned that her representations of different African belief systems had the potential to either misrepresent these faith traditions, or appropriate something deeply personal for many people, like religion, for her own artistic expression.

However, the more I thought about this idea of exploration vs. appropriation I realized that it was not such a clear cut question. The Thompson reading discusses how artists based in African countries like South Africa utilized other more general ideas of African femininity, expressing them through objects that were not necessarily a direct part of their personal, or their countries’, experience. And yet, their use of these different objects effectively expressed the ideas of beauty, femininity, masculinity, and diaspora that they were trying to communicate. Furthermore, stereotypes of Black bodies in the U.S. have derived from a history of African colonialism and the relationship of the “West” to the African continent. With the transatlantic slave trade those ideas and relationships have literally been transplanted into the Americas.

This leads me  to conclude that the entirety of the African diaspora has had such a transnational experience, to the point where you can’t simplify a discussion about authenticity, and thus appropriation as it relates to members of the African diaspora relating and communicating with each other. The conversation involves acknowledging that people were literally colonized and this caused people to convert or remix their faith traditions accordingly because of where they were being located, their safety, or simply how the politics of the region influenced their faith.

Furthermore, the article also often used the term “African women” in a way that implied it was talking about women of the entirety of the African diaspora because of overarching themes that impacted most African peoples given shared histories of colonialism and white supremacy. Situating the work of Renée Stout in this larger historical context of remixing as a way of responding to history and creating locations for self-empowerment, the way that she as an female of the African diaspora utilizes faith traditions and objects in her art makes more sense.

What is interesting about Professor Shakhsari’s piece Cyberspace, the War on Terror and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer is that in the discussion of the politics of visibility, there are examples where the Iranian queer subject is not just made hypervisible, but can also be made invisible. It is necessary when constructing a hegemonic narrative to quell those stories and views that challenge and diversify that narrative. Thus we see how the tensions between representing the various situations, opinions, and desires of the queer members of the Iranian diaspora and representing a narrative stripped of complexity are acted out. This seems to end up a diversity of voices being subjugated in favor of a narrative like Parsi’s who “repeats the usual narrative of escape from a home of oppression in Iran to freedom in the ‘West'”; many voices are made invisible.

Parsi’s effective use of the tools of Weblogistan to disseminate his message has immense power to shape the larger narrative. At first I was surprised at the ease with which this hegemonic narrative of the queer Iranian experience was able to be created because you would think that the web would actually be the perfect platform to highlight a variety of opinions and experiences on the matter. However Shakhsari also discusses the barriers of access to the world of Weblogistan for some people to disseminate their opposing views. Furthermore, we can’t forget that those stories, video clips, and articles which were picked up and circulated most widely after 9/11 were those that operated to serve the geopolitical project of otherizing and demonizing Iran. Anything that served that larger project was made highly visible. This happened often, Shakhsari writes, to the detriment of safety for many queer Iranian subjects. Shakhsari piece aims to warn us against the tendency to separate the politics of Weblogistan from the politics of real bodies moving through the world and to keep in mind the consequences for the narratives that Weblogistan helps construct and perpetuate. Who are we making invisible? Who are we making hypervisible and why?

As a side note I would be really interested to put this article in conversation with something like Hillary Clinton’s most recent video about marriage equality. What is the political project of the Secretary of State in this video. Who is she making hypervisible? Who is she making invisible in this plea? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6HBExa6LAY

Raiford: Raiford tracks how the Black Panther Party for Self Defense has engaged the “struggle over the relations of representation” and in particular how they worked to redefine what images should be considered “positive” depictions of black people. Through these depictions they not only helped redefine and negotiate black representation, but they critiqued the often uninterrogated images of the hegemonic state.

Jones: During the migration of black artists to L.A. in the 1950s-1960s, black art and artists flourished in black own businesses, art galleries, and community spaces like Black churches and community centers. Although their artwork gained success outside of these spaces, the community of black arists produced work that was inseparable from conversations around black politics at the time, and often directly critiqued racial oppression and violence against Black and Brown communities.

Johnson: Johnson discusses the paradox that emerges when Black artists appropriate assemblage, an art form developed by white artists, in order to express a politics of black empowerment and solidarity.

The Raiford piece made me think of Professor Greer’s lecture she just gave for Black History month about the representations of MLK and Rosa Parks as brands and asking what happens when images are appropriated to create monolithic identities. Her answer was that it damages the potential scope of political possibility for black politics. I was thinking about this conversation in relation to representations of The BPP for Self Defense and the Raiford piece. Reading through the Raiford piece I was thinking about the modern day implications for photographs of the BPP for Self Defense that were popularized at that time. Their image was appropriated back then, and is still appropriated even now. The relationship between “the Black image and Black politics” is extremely important as the history of Black Americans in this country has been a very graphic, complex, visual history. There is no doubt a a link between visuals and what we remember so what do we lose when we rely and trust these images to narrate history to us? I suppose I have less commentary and more just questions about what it means when Professor Greer shows a picture of the Black Panther Party and it immediately registers in people’s minds (or at least the mind of a woman in the audience) as a representation of violence even though they are not shown in photographs as using their guns, even though they believed themselves to be acting in self defense of a violent police, even though the Black Panther party was armed with “guns, cameras, AND lawbooks”). How do we discuss how the Black Panther Party redefined and reconstructed images of the black body while also critiquing the way that these photos were used and how they served to aggravate the eventual political fissures in the party.