{"id":38383,"date":"2014-11-17T17:35:48","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T17:35:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38383"},"modified":"2015-03-11T17:18:05","modified_gmt":"2015-03-11T17:18:05","slug":"the-pose-as-interventionist-gesture-erica-lord-and-decolonizing-the-proper-subject-of-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38383","title":{"rendered":"The Pose as Interventionist Gesture: Erica Lord and Decolonizing the Proper Subject of Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pose as Interventionist Gesture: Erica Lord and Decolonizing the Proper Subject of Memory<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

E-Misf\u00e9rica<\/a>
\nDecolonial Gesture, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014<\/a><\/p>\n

Colleen Kim Daniher<\/strong><\/a>
\nSchool of Communication
\nNorthwestern University, Evanston, Illinois<\/em><\/p>\n

This article investigates the decolonial politics of the pose in the photographic and installation work of mixed-race Native Alaskan artist Erica Lord<\/a>. Refiguring the pose as decolonial gesture, I argue that Lord\u2019s poses can be understood as decolonial labor because of the ways in which they employ messy genealogies of colonial space and time in order to disrupt the linear unfolding of white settler colonial history. In the act of posing, Lord intervenes in a visual and historical archive that positions both Native and mixed race subjects\u2014especially women\u2014as particularly vulnerable subjects to the ongoing Western imperial project of assimilationist inclusion. Lord\u2019s photographic poses enact a literal seizure of time that resists both the presumed past-ness of the Native American and the presumed futurity of the racially-ambiguous, mixed race woman. In so doing, she revises the temporal politics of both, critically calling into question \u201cthe proper\u201d subject of memory.<\/em><\/p>\n

And it is always exciting, then and now, to realize that you are not a person or a voice that stands alone […] There\u2019s this quote that I repeat to myself all the time, I put it on the starter slide for just about every presentation I give, and I think about it often…<\/em><\/p>\n

Erica Lord,<\/a> in interview with Dasha Shleyeva<\/a><\/p>\n

and when we speak we are afraid<\/em>
\n our words will not be heard<\/em>
\n nor welcomed<\/em>
\n but when we are silent we are still afraid<\/em>
\n so it is better to speak<\/em>
\n remembering<\/em>
\n we were never<\/em>
\n meant to survive<\/em><\/p>\n

Audre Lorde<\/a> from Litany for Survival<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A woman, hair bleached blond and eyes rimmed with kohl<\/a>, gazes directly into the camera. She is naked, save for a banana-lined skirt and piles of necklaces cascading down her bare breasts. Back arched, her hands wrapped around her exposed stomach, the woman\u2019s feet are planted firmly on the ground, yet her long legged stance suggests the latent possibility of movement, of dance. We have seen this image, differently, before. Behind her, a double shadow, as if in flight, splays against the obvious studio backdrop. Moving between darkness and light, stillness and movement, presence and absence, the photograph conjures the ghost of Josephine Baker<\/a> only to refract it, multiplying different trajectories of space and time both into the past and into the future.<\/p>\n

The image is multimedia artist Erica Lord\u2019s 2005 self-portrait, Danse Sauvage<\/em>, and it features the artist in costume and in character as Baker. Lord is a self-identified mixed-race Native Alaskan of Athabascan (interior Alaska), Inupiat (North and Northwest Alaska), Finnish, Swedish, English, and Japanese descent. She has described the work as being \u201ca direct response to the feeling of being seen as exotic,\u201d explaining that she: \u201ctried looking back in history, at other mixed women, or other Native women who sort of owned that power [of exoticism] […] The photograph sort of grew from this desire to emulate or embody that sort of force or power that she [Josephine Baker] had\u201d (Shleyeva 2010). Although some might object to Lord\u2019s proximate staging of North American Indigenous and Black diasporic histories, this essay seizes upon Lord\u2019s identificatory \u201clook back in history\u201d in order to examine the ways in which such a gesture critically addresses the overlapping but sometimes fraught relationship between decolonizing and antiracist epistemological stances. Bonita Lawrence<\/a> and Enakshi Dua<\/a> have characterized this antagonism as an issue of historical memory: critical race and postcolonial theory systematically erases Aboriginal peoples and decolonization from the construction of knowledge about ‘race,’ racism, racial subjectivities, and antiracism\u2026the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples from the project of antiracism erases them from history. (Lawrence and Dua 2005, 132)…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pose as Interventionist Gesture: Erica Lord and Decolonizing the Proper Subject of Memory E-Misf\u00e9rica Decolonial Gesture, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014 Colleen Kim Daniher School of Communication Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois This article investigates the decolonial politics of the pose in the photographic and installation work of mixed-race Native Alaskan artist Erica Lord. Refiguring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[18451,18450,18449,5077,18448],"class_list":["post-38383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-colleen-daniher","tag-colleen-k-daniher","tag-colleen-kim-daniher","tag-e-misferica","tag-erica-lord"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}