Experiments in Exile

Laura Harris

Description

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, Experiments in Exile charts a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the "undocuments" that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, it argues that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica's experiments recall the insurgent sociality of "the motley crew" historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James's and Oiticica's projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker's inability to find evidence of that sociality's persistence or futurity, it shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew's multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James's and Oiticica's undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.

Sujets

• América del Sur
• History of art
• South America
• Latin America
• History of the Americas
• Human geography
• Central America
• SS Central America

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 07 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823279814
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

E X P E R I M E N T SI NE X I L E

   

 Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

 



E X P E R I M E N T S I N E X I L E C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Experiments in Exile

 1What Happened to the Motley Crew? James,  Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness

 2Dialectic of Contact: The Organ/ization  and the Nests

 3Undocuments: Reproduction at the Margins

AçKôEGEŝ  NôEŝ  BîîôGà  IEX

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



   

E X P E R I M E N T SI NE X I L E

INTRODUCTION Experiments in Exile

InExperiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentiethcentury American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during thes and on Oiti cica’s stay during thes. Given the significant differences between them— not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexual ity (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avantgarde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief. In the context of repressive states—in James’s case a crown colony of Britain and in Oiticica’s case a military dictatorship and then later, in both cases, in the United States—where citizenship was differentially conferred and foreclosed, restricted and at the same time restrictive, both James and Oiticica sought alternatives to the social relations of citizens by studying and attempting very different modes of sociality or collective life. While at first James and Oiticica tried to live the social life of the citizen, by contrib uting, through the publication or public exhibition of aesthetic works, to