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- The Louvre going APESHIT: audiovisual re-curation and intellectual labour in The Carters’ Afrosurrealist music videoPublication . Mendes, Ana Cristina; Wacker, JulianThis article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. Against the backdrop of calls for decolonizing archives and public institutions such as the university and the museum, and arguing for the political potential of APESHIT, this article makes a case for the music video as an act of resistance against the enduring ‘coloniality of power' in the European museum and elsewhere in the public sphere. We argue that The Carters embrace the role of the public intellectual-activist - assumed to be within the remit of the Western, White, liberal intellectual for centuries. Our argument is threefold: (1) the aesthetics of the APESHIT music video builds on and contributes to the Afrosurrealist artistic tradition, engaging with contemporary Blackness via the strange and absurd; (2) the music video itself creates performance art that intervenes in and extends beyond the Louvre and audiovisually re-curates its exhibitions; (3) The Carters can be seen as celebrity ‘critical organic catalysts’ whose Afrosurrealist intervention targeted at the colonial legacies of museums activates a critical relationship with these museal spaces traditionally constructed as White spaces.
- The liquidscape of Mare Nostrum: Manoel de Oliveira and Banksy’s Mediterranean crossingsPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThe Mediterranean Sea has never ceased to be of geopolitical strategic importance, but its presence in the mediascape has grown in prominence since 2010, in what has been labelled as the Mediterranean ‘crisis’. Drawing on an understanding of the Mediterranean Sea as a discursive space of political, economic and cultural identity conflicts, this article moves excursively from A Talking Picture (Um Filme Falado), a 2003 film directed and written by Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, to a composite photograph, unofficially attributed to Banksy, inspired by the refugee crisis in Europe, to examine representations of the postimperial liquidscapes of Mare Nostrum. Guided by these two film and graphic art texts, the article travels from the Mare Nostrum that corresponds to the liquidscapes of European civilization’s birth, as suggested by Oliveira’s work, to the Mare Nostrum that was the site of an eponymous military and humanitarian operation devised by the Italian government following the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck. As for the critical framework for scrutinizing these cross-media representations of liquidscapes, this article sets out to revisit Arjun Appadurai’s theorization for understanding global cultural flows, proposed almost three decades ago, arguing for the enduring topicality of the imaginary landscapes of scapes.
- Precarity as a Mode of EnquiryPublication . Lau, Lisa; Mendes, Ana CristinaThis chapter extends the original understanding of precarity as a concept, taking it from its economic roots, describing a largely Eurocentric, post-Fordist diminishing of labour and livelihood securities, to an urban Indian context where not just livelihoods are precaritized, but increasingly lifeworlds. We offer a review of the development of the concept of precarity as a mode of enquiry and use two novels—Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis—to illustrate the agency and political potential of precarity noted by various scholars working on this concept. Our reading of these novels finds that the textual spaces of fiction usefully open up the concept of precarity for scrutiny, including the precarity of home and the slow violence of precarity on identities, communal bonds and societal fabric.
- Violence Framed: Remediating Images of Racialized Violence in FilmPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis chapter examines the remediation of images of racialized violence in the films I Am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck, and BlacKkKlansman, by Spike Lee, and the HBO series Lovecraft Country, by Misha Green, in particular, how their use of remediation sutures past and present images of violence, re-familiarizing audiences with the realities of the past of anti-Black violence and its physical and representational afterlives. The twofold focus of analysis is on: (1) the uncovering of the representational violence of the whiteness within sci-fi and romantic-comedy films and westerns of classical Hollywood cinema; and (2) the quotation of lynching photographs. The use of visual quotations as part of Peck, Lee, and Green’s social justice agenda is concurrently assessed.
- Mona MontagesPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaShort-form essay on Dayanita Singh's artworks Mona Montages, included in the exhibition catalogue Dayanita Singh: Dancing with My Camera, edited by Stephanie Rosenthal (Hatje Cantz 2022).
- The politics of museal hospitality : Sonia Boyce’s neo-Victorian takeover in Six ActsPublication . Espinoza Garrido, Felipe; Mendes, Ana CristinaMuseums and their painstakingly curated constructions of history are increasingly being scrutinised for their heteronormative, androcentric and decisively white biases, often through museum interventions. Based on an understanding of museal hospitality as the constantly-shifting laws that regulate access to Britain’s prestigious exhibition spaces (and the intersections of these spaces with issues of race and gender), this article posits that Sonia Boyce’s Six Acts (2018) can be understood as a neo-Victorian intervention that critiques and forces us to acknowledge the conditions of Britain’s museal hospitality. In conceptualising the museum space as a host, based on Immanuel Kant’s and, particularly, Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality, this article argues that Six Acts addresses and modulates the relationship between host and guest, and interrelatedly, re-conceptualises the Victorian art gallery as a neo-Victorian museum (as an institutional space that self-consciously and reflexively engages with the gendered and racialised subtexts of Victorian visual arts). Boyce’s artwork performs epistemic labour, helping us to continually unlearn both the Victorian ideological biases that still suffuse contemporary discourses on heritage and art, on artistic merit as a law of hospitality, and a distorted imagination of a historically white Victorian Britain.
- The accentual dialogized heteroglossia of Shakespeare in India: Utpal Dutt’s legacy in Shakespeare Wallah and The Last LearPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis article focuses on a key figure of Shakespearean performance in pre- and post-independence India: the Bengali stage and film actor, director, playwright, and theater activist Utpal Dutt (1929–1993). I trace Dutt’s impact from his tours in the aftermath of independence with the Shakespeareana Company and his re-playing of Shakespeare in the Bengali Jatra tradition, through Rituparno Ghosh’s 2007 The Last Lear. This focus on Dutt’s influence is set against the backdrop of the politics of performing-adapting Shakespeare in Indian English accents, considering the accentual dialogized heteroglossia of Shakespearean performance in India after independence from British rule.
- Hospitality and Re-Orientalist Thresholds: Amit Chaudhuri Writes Back to IndiaPublication . Lau, Lisa; Mendes, Ana CristinaIn times of heightened, no-longer-linear migratory flows, when migrations oscillate and even double back on their own routes, this article interrogates the unwritten social contract of hospitality between host and guest. Taking as a case study Amit Chaudhuri’s returnee narrative, Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013)—his personal account of relocation to India—this paper juxtaposes the mismatch between hospitalities assumed and experienced, from India’s lukewarm hospitality to the expectations of its elite (even celebrity) sojourner authors, now diasporic returnee migrants. The article highlights the tensions in negotiating host–guest roles, particularly when insider–outsider, stranger–native boundaries blur. It also raises the question of whether some degree of re-orientalism is therefore inevitable in the cosmopolitan returnee’s perceptions and subsequent representations of what was once ‘home’ and now is ‘home again’.
- Romancing the other: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost HappinessPublication . Lau, Lisa; Mendes, Ana CristinaArundhati Roy’s second and latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness — which took her 10 years to write — is crammed full of misfits and outsiders, the flotsam and jetsam of India’s complex, stratified society. The novel is inhabited by cohorts of others: hijras, political rebels, the poor, women who will not “know their place”, and abandoned baby girls. The narrative of Roy’s latest political romance shows these others carving out new spaces for themselves, defying convention, trying possible new lives, and testing out new roles. This article aims to look at the texture of romance in Roy’s novels. Set within the narrative of Roy’s romance with India’s others, the article focuses on the Tilo–Musa romance in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and compares it with the Ammu–Velutha romance in the author’s first novel, The God of Small Things, published in 1997. Romance in Roy’s novels serves multiple purposes, as this article argues and unpacks. Mapping out the patterns of romance which Roy creates in both her novels, this analysis employs the trope of romance as a lens through which to offer a postcolonial reading of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which interpenetrates intimacy and desire and the political. Deconstructing the (remarkably similar) romances at the heart of both of Roy’s novels reveals that her romances may not just be her rebuttal to India’s wrongs, but may even constitute a form of political rescue. We conclude that although Roy is purposeful in identifying and avoiding reorientalist representations, her rejection of abjection and victimhood, and her overt celebration of larger-than-life others, may have subverted the inferiorizing of the other, without, however, decreasing the process of othering.
- From "Crisis" to Imagination : Putting White Heroes Under Erasure Post-George FloydPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaIn the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, global protests against racialized police brutality targeted statues and other public art forms symbolizing racism. Either framed as a “weird global media event” or “global iconic event,” Floyd’s murder forced a reckoning with histories of oppression and systemic racism, with a potential enduring social effect and a transnational historical significance by inviting resonance and global solidarity. This article focuses on the U.K. context and spans a decade to invite a rethinking of ideas of crisis, history, and hero through a consideration of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue and its pushing into the Bristol Harbour on June 7, 2020, by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, and Yinka Shonibare CBE’s artwork Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010–2012), commissioned for the “Fourth Plinth” temporary exhibits in Trafalgar Square. Such consideration bears on this contemporary moment when we are witnessing globally connected protest actions calling for the decolonization of public material culture.