This issue of PARSE journal concludes the theme of “Intersectional Engagements in Politics and Art”, first initiated as a research arc within PARSE in 2018. Under this theme, artists, scholars and students, as well as a wider public have gathered to share a critical exploration of the nexus of race, coloniality, gender and sexuality in contemporary art-making, scholarship and artistic research. Focusing on socially engaged practices related to memory, history, embodiment and alterity, the journal issue offers yet another set of considerations that brings together research by practitioners and scholars from a wide range of fields, disciplines and contexts.

The theme began as a way to address and explore interest within arts research about the notion of intersectionality as a mode of creative practice, as well as a form of critical analysis. This interest, arguably following a turn towards the intersectional in feminist artistic practice and pedagogy, came as scholars in the humanities and social sciences were already debating the various appropriations and reifications that had seemingly made intersectionality into “a grand theory of everything”, to use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s words, with the effect of positioning intersectionality as a deeply contested, seemingly overdetermined concept.1

Intersectionality, often considered to have become an established notion in the early 1990s through Crenshaw’s work in legal scholarship, addressing overlapping forms of racial, gendered and sexual discrimination, has in recent decades been taken up within broad, interdisciplinary movements in academia and the arts as well as public life.2 The term has been borrowed to name all kinds of discriminating and enabling practices within complex operations of social delineation. In response, Crenshaw offers intersectionality specifically as “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.”3 She has also been careful to point out, albeit often overlooked, how her own work builds on the research of other black feminists working in her own and neighbouring fields of research and practice.

Within artistic research, intersectional analysis has activated a two-pronged course of inquiry: to explore how an understanding of the complex operations of power and social delineation can have an enabling impact on artistic practice, and to think critically about such practices in light of what it means to attend to gender, race and sexuality in terms of non-separability and political urgency. For this reason, the “Intersectional Engagements” research arc from which the journal issue is a further development, has sought to highlight the operative, performative and ethical potentials of intersectional approaches to creative and research practices. As such it was intended as an invitation to resituate and reconfigure critical practices in the arts.

As researchers and practitioners we understand race, gender and sexuality to become articulated interdependently and through their co-constitutive relations across interdisciplinary artistic (and) research practices, and situate these inquiries in the multiple colonial legacies shaping and permeating arts and politics on a global scale. We have in the end titled the journal issue Intersections in order to evoke these co-constitutive relations and articulations. In the writing compiled for this issue the “intersectional engagements” of the research theme appears with varying degrees of directness in authors’ writing from a spectrum of academic and artistic disciplines. In each contributor’s case the content under discussion reflects upon the complex ways in which power emerges and is made unavailable, or how power is identified and negotiated. Central to these co-constituted and reconstituted relations to power is the insistence of returning to the story. “Story within a story, within a story, within a story” exposes the necessity of returning to personal stories, lived experiences and testimonies of multiple identity intersections.4 This insistence on the personal, and at times intimate, is aimed at challenging institutionalised narratives that fortify those political structures that maintain dominant ones.

These confrontations with hegemonic stories and the role of institutions in reinforcing prevailing legacies is explored eloquently in Lindiwe Dovey’s “On Teaching and Being Taught: Reflections on Decolonising Pedagogy”. Here she addresses the connection between how, as a white woman, she is positioned in relation to the content of African stories in cinema, the intersectional encounters with students who question the curriculum of received colonial histories, and their demand for representations that recognise and advance their own immediate racialised experiences.

In “Living with Contradictions”, Nina Mangalanayagam offers a striking account of strategies used by British artists Lindsay Seers and Miranda Pennell, who each draw from colonial stories and archives in their families to re-examine contemporary political situatedness. Mangalanayagam locates her own relation to whiteness, hybridity and an interrogation of national identity at the outset to situate her reading of Seers’s and Pennell’s work. What emerges from this article is a layering of encounters, “the story within, the within” of colonial narratives underlined by gendered experiences produced by an encounter—at the intersection—between personal gendered histories and colonial archives.

In “Recollect: Snippets of Self” Nikki Comninos eschews the insistence of presenting the whole story and instead deploys a strategy of drawing from moments of personal encounter, pieces of family archive and memory, which are offered as furtive fragments. The stories are presented as “snapshots” from a white family exiled in Zimbabwe and the assemblage of the (film-maker’s) self are pieces sewn together through intimate recollections of how genders are constructed and race reviewed against the backdrop of a newly constituted democratic South Africa.

America’s dominant and prevailing stories of black women’s experiences is challenged through quilting practice in “That’s Not Your Story: Faith Ringgold Publishing on Cloth”. Jessica Hemmings carefully offsets Ringgold’s biographical interviews against a lineage of black feminist writers—including bell hooks, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker—who make visible the legacy of African American history, from slavery to experiences in Harlem and the legacy of Aunt Jemima. Working not only from the intersection of race, gender and nation, the article further highlights the fault lines between art and craft and invites reconsideration of what publishing might mean against institutional expectations.

In “The Grain of Her Voice: Nina Simone, Josette Bushell-Mingo, and the Intersections between Art, Politics, and Race”, a collective of feminist scholars, artists and performers enter into an incisive dialogue around questions of joy, rage and grief in the music and performances of Nina Simone as explored through Josette Bushell-Mingo’s solo performance, Nina—A Story about Me and Nina Simone. Through exchange and joint critical reflection, Bushell-Mingo, Anna Adeniji, Barby Asante, Anna Lundberg and Monica L. Miller engage with complex questions of grief, care and mothering in the experience of black women, and also poignantly address the criticality of race as a condition of spectatorship.

In “Sámi Heritage and IKEA Fusion: Maria Vinka’s Denationalised Design, Neocolonial Craft and Material Imaginaries Somewhere in Between” Ezra Shales considers the complexities of seeing, but more frequently overlooking, gender, culture and race, in mass-produced products by IKEA designer Maria Vinka. While a design house as large as IKEA presents an unlikely opportunity for “carving out space for alterity and individual authorship”, Shales adeptly draws attention to a sample of complex artefacts designed by Vinka that cannot be simplified by excuse of a singular understanding of Swedish identity, IKEA itself or Maria Vinka’s design oeuvre.

Drawing inspiration from projects as eclectic as the First Moon Flights Club, activist and artist Edward Mukuka Nkoloso’s project, Zambia Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, Syria’s first cosmonaut Muhammed Ahmed Faris and Gilles Fontolliet’s “Palestinian Space Agency”, Paulina Sobczyk’s writing posits ArabFuturism as “practices of disobedience, persistence, and imagining differently”. In her writing, “Space is the Place: Reflections on Arabfuturism”, the ability to imagine and dream differently acts as a “willfulness archive”.

Jens Haendeler describes his ongoing work, atlas al-‘aīn (atlas of the spring), as a “performative counter-archive of common memories” with the Palestinian villagers of Al-Walaja. Gathering historic and legal documents, poetry, photography, texts and objects, sound recordings, drawings and conversational mappings to aid “common memory production”, Haendeler’s project seeks to de-centre assumed holders of power and narration and instead allow for alternative memory construction through “an ongoing performative (spatial) practice”.

Foregrounding the relational and embodied aspects of translation practice, in “Ástin sem varð að taugahrúgu [The love that became a nervous wreck] Or, What Does Queer Failure Have to Do with Translation?” Maxine Savage invokes literary and poetic translation as “a scene of an expansive intimacy” between the translator, author and reader. Incorporating their own translations of Elísabet Kristín Jökulsdóttir’s 2014 poetry collection, Ástin ein taugahrúga. Enginn dans við Ufsaklett (Love, a nervous wreck. No dancing at Coalfishrock) Savage eloquently works through queer theory to renegotiate predominant conceptions of failure and loss surrounding literary translation, and to reflect on queer shame, kinship and relationality.

In “Strange Meetings: The Manure is Leaking into the Text”, Sanna Samuelsson shares excerpts of her forthcoming novel Mjölkat (The Milking) together with a reflective essay composed from within the process of writing the novel, imaged here from “within the pool of manure”. Taking Joyelle McSweeney’s notion of the “necropastoral” as a framework for writing situated in the rural periphery, Samuelsson elegantly and effectively conjures a literary form that is at once meditative and unsettling, a form of decomposition teeming with life.

And finally, we have included a transcribed conversation between Christiane Jatahy, Patricia Lorenzoni, and Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, entitled “Between Reality and Fiction”. Discussing Jatahy’s award-winning production Julia, which was part of the 2018 Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival, they address the relationship between theatre and politics, as well as the intersection of race, class, gender, and coloniality in Jatahy’s adaptation of August Strindberg’s classic.

The editors wish to take this opportunity to thank all those who contributed their time and energy to the open peer-review process under which the PARSE journal operates: Patricia Barbeito, Erling Björgvinsson, Jason E. Bowman, Otto von Busch, Grace Cochrane, Erica De Greef, Suzanne Elisa Harris-Brandts, Cecilia Lagerström, Patricia Lorenzoni, Nduka Mntambo, Elena Raviola, Monica Sand, Imri Sandström and Mick Wilson. We also want to thank our copy editor Gerrie van Noord and administrators Rose Borthwick and Lucy Wilson.

 

Footnotes

 

  1. Crenshaw Kimberlé. “Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality, more than two decades later”. 8 June 2017. Available at https://www.law.columbia.edu/pt-br/news/2017/06/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality (accessed 2018-10-01).
  2. See, for example, Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”. Stanford Law Review. Vol 43. No 6. July 1991. pp. 1241-1299.
  3. Crenshaw, “on intersectionality, more than two decades later”.
  4. Dyangani Ose, Elvira. A Story Within A Story… Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art. Stockholm: Art and Theory. 2015.