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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- David Bowie and Transmedia StardomPublication . Mendes, Ana Cristina; Perrott, LisaAddressing the interart, intertextual, and intermedial dimensions of David Bowie's sonic and visual legacy, this book considers more than five decades of a career invested with a star's luminosity that shines well beyond the remit of pop music. The book approaches the idea of the star David Bowie as a medium in transit, undergoing constant movement and change. Within the context of celebrity studies, the concept of stardom provides an appropriate frame for an examination of Bowie's transmedial activity, especially given his ongoing iconic signification within the celestial realm. While Bowie has traversed many mediums, he has also been described as a medium, which is consistent with the way he has described himself. With contributions from a wide range of disciplinary areas and countries, each chapter brings a fresh perspective on the concept of stardom and the conceptual significance of the terms 'mediation' and 'navigation' as they relate to Bowie and his career. Containing a multitude of different approaches to the stardom and mediation of David Bowie, this book will be of interest to those studying celebrity, audio and visual legacy, and the relationships between different forms of media. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Celebrity Studies.
- Disposability and ordinariness in the New Europe of Damjan Kozole’s Spare PartsPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis chapter studies the early twenty-first-century representation of disposability, violence, and differentiated citizenships in Damjan Kozole’s cross- border film Spare Parts (2003). The emphasis of the analysis lies on the imaginaries of disenfranchisement involving the migrant characters – who might be refugees, temporary or guest workers, genocide survivors, or economic migrants – ineligible applicants for visas that inhabit Kozole’s cinematic narrative and are transported across borders by Slovenian human traffickers. The issue of illegal border crossings in the context of New Europe is set against the backdrop of Slovenia’s integration into the European Union, which would take place a year after the theatrical release of Spare Parts. Concurrently, the focus is on how ordinariness and familiarity, the anti-heroic and the commonplace, can be interpreted in the thematic of border crossings (or underpassings) and movement (mobility and its opposites – stasis, inertia, and stagnation).
- Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-PeripheryPublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaThis book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.
- The world as a readymade: a conversation with Ai WeiweiPublication . Mendes, Ana Cristina; Ai WeiweiAi Weiwei positions himself first and foremost as a thinker, driven by curiosity and even selfishness, and not shying away from ridicule. Through immersion and direct response to different, unfamiliar conditions, he aims to defamiliarize pre-set thinking, not letting himself be trapped by rationality and led by simplified, predetermined conclusions about the world. Despite the self-proclaimed selfishness at their core, Ai’s artistic acts become selfless through resonance, inviting the viewer into his thought experiments with the world, which he engages with as if the world were a readymade. This conversation departed from the transnational film Tree (2021), where Ai meticulously documents the work of Brazilian and Chinese artisans in creating his 32-metre iron sculpture Pequi Tree (2018–2020). We began with political curiosity as a creative driver for the artist, the influence of Duchamp and Warhol, and the choice of the audiovisual medium to reflect reality. The conversation branched out to consider aesthetics, tying the issue of aestheticization to Ai’s role as a public intellectual, from an earlier refusal of aesthetics or ‘beautification’ in the interest of unmediated transparency to the realization that new aesthetics are needed for new publics.
- Introduction: Navigating with the Blackstar: the Mediality of David BowiePublication . Mendes, Ana CristinaDespite the death of David Jones, David Bowie continues to shine with a distinctive luminosity and navigational function. He shines in absence and in repetition in various venues, as on a wall in Turnpike Lane. Our approach to this special issue of Celebrity Studies is framed by the idea that a social, cultural, ideological and semiotic understanding of stardom is entirely fitting for an examination of David Bowie and his legacy. Building on previous research on Bowie’s star personae (Stevenson 2006, Cinque and Redmond 2014, Cinque et al. 2015), this framework can be further inflected by considering the cosmological significance of stars in relation to Bowie. For instance, stars provide constellations of perpetual guiding points which enable enlightened communities to navigate pathways. Stars also have a spectral dimension, since they are luminous, but not always visible. Stars might seem static and omnipresent, but they are constantly transforming, changing appearance, ageing, living and dying. As Bowie has so aptly emphasised in his lyrics and interviews, there are many different types of stars (including his contentious statement that ‘Adolf Hitler was the first pop star’), and it was important that he set the record straight about which type of star he is: ‘… not a film star… not a pop star… not a marvel star… not a gang-star… I’m a star’s star… I’m a black star’.