Who needs coping objects at home, anyways?
This Ph.D. is practice-based. It means I’m working closely with people, my friends. I’m not toiling away in an isolated lab making ‘discoveries’.
How do people use objects as acts of resistance against marginalizing and oppressive places?
My work with people is about having sit-down conversations and doing collaborative ethnographies with people so we can share with each other the physical objects and rituals we practice to ‘take up space.’ The precursor to exploring this question about how people use objects and spaces is what I will do and design in order to ask this question to people in the first place. What I am offering people?, How might I communicate that?, What does this look like?, but firstly I need to articulate the practical need for this work.
Who needs this, anyways?
In an interview, Misato Yamada shares she was taught not to talk about her native Ainu identity.
“My parents didn’t speak much Ainu and didn’t teach me our culture. So I’m here to learn from my Ainu ancestors. I’m learning traditional embroidery and dance from them. Really, I wanted to learn from grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, naturally, by watching.” When she starts to say she really wanted to learn from her family, she pauses when she speaks and you can sense a weighty lump in her throat come up and see tears in her eyes.*
“‘Many of us have never known who we are!’ A Razack (2002) put it clearly for me, I desired to “unmap a White Settler culture in me, using Lisa Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizimg Methodologies to re-center, rewrite, and re-right.”
What might I offer people?
An intimate small-scale service like:
- Alice Sparkly Kat who provides decolonized astrological services for individuals and communities. Alice Sparkly Kat offers personal trainings, group trainings, reads at events, and does research and workshops.
- Griot Circle, which “is a multi-generational service organization that’s been catering to the needs of LGBTQ seniors in downtown Brooklyn for the past two decades.”
Dinner Party like:
- DeVonn Francis. Francis is an artist and chef. They’ founder of Yardy NYC, a community-oriented food, media and events company. I’ve come across DeVonn Francis’ work because a friend, Emilio Martinez Poppe, shared DeVonn Francis’ work on facebook.
Resource Library like:
- The Iyapo Repository. “The Iyapo Repository is a resource library that houses a collection of digital and physical artifacts created to affirm and project the future(s) of peoples of African descent.”
- Free Black History Library. It is an open google drive library with essays ranging from topics about black film scripts and mass incarceration to essays by Elijah Muhammad to Zora Neale Hurston.
- Hand-made zines to publish the process, what happened, and findings from the research.
What ideas am I contributing, where?
I’ve been thinking about the ‘bucket’ or ‘house’ I want to contribute to through my research. It’s interdisciplinary, but when it comes to theory I develop I want to contribute to the work that Black and People of Color feminists are doing. I want the project and my work with people to contribute to community organizing by and for People of Color. The only way I know I can play with and understand how people use objects, materiality, and personhood in this context as deeply and rigorously as I want to is through design. I see this work as contributing to feminisms and community organizing through design.
I want my work to be the sister-project of this brief statement. I want my work to evidence these ideas:
The walls of images in Southern black homes were sites of resistance. They constituted private, black-owned and -operated gallery space where images could be displayed, shown to friends, and strangers. These walls were a space where, in the midst of segregation, the hardship of apartheid, dehumanization could be countered. …Images could be critically considered, subjects positioned according to the individual desire. —bell hooks
I still need to do the work of articulating the value of sitting down and talking to me to the people and friends I want to work with. But when it comes to the meat and substance of people using objects as resistance, there’s plenty of exciting pieces of evidence I’ve come across so far.
Connected Literature
How do people use objects as acts of resistance against marginalizing and oppressive places?
Michael McMillan, The ‘west indian’ front room: reflections on a diasporic phenomenon
This essay is about formal living rooms west-indian families, women in particular, set up for themselves as they settled in Britain. It provides lots of affirmation about the politics of private spaces.
Post-World War II black settlers in Britain may have been represented as socially problematic ‘Others,’ but their participation in an emerging consumer culture meant that the front room came to signify the ongoing decolonizing process in an attempt to re-define themselves.
As their children became parents and grandparents themselves, their response to the front room was much more ambivalent. They saw it as ‘hoarding’ for a better tomorrow that never came: deferred dreams.
Gene Bawden, Mediated Truths and Perpetuated Myths: the Architectural Fictions of Early Australian Photography
Gene Bawden describes the other side of the coin which is when Black Indigenous individuals do not have a privilege of exercising resistance. This statement also points to the need for documenting and writing about objects and spaces of resistance.
[The Tasmanians in a photo] have been interiorized: their spirit incarcerated forever inside the fictions of white Victorian domesticity.
bell hooks, In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life
Here, bell hooks describes family photographs as objects and the use of them as private, black-owned and -operated gallery spaces.
Images that would subvert the status quo are harder to produce. … The erosion of oppositional black subcultures (destroyed in the desegregation process) has deprived us of those sites of radical resistance…
Using images, we connect ourselves to a recuperative, redemptive memory that enables us to construct radical identities, images of ourselves that transcend that limits of the colonizing eye.
Otrude N. Moyo, Navigating my journey towards learning Ubuntu — A way of decolonizing myself
Moyo also writes about the need for documenting the way we use objects and spaces.
Many of us have never known who we are! A Razack (2002) put it clearly for me, I desired to “unmap a White Settler culture in me, using Lisa Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizimg Methodologies to re-center, rewrite, and re-right.
Claudio Moreira, This Is home, or Is It?: Disrupting Grand Narratives of Home as Physical or Institutional Space
Claudio Moreira reminds me of the question in the back of my head about this whole project being materialistic and my belief that everything is impermanent. They express that the notion of a home place is a colonized, western idea. It challenges some of the assumptions I have about place. This essay is problematic though, in that it tried not to trivialize ‘homelessness’ but it does and easily replaces the definition. The piece doesn’t acknowledge the intersectionality that people who are physically without homes might also experience the homelessness that Moreira’s points out.
I’m negating life as a quest for the home place.
My interest is more about displacement than about establishing identity and a home place, as suggested by colonization and decolonization literature.
In a personal letter, my friend and great scholar Aisha Durham wrote this to me: “I have to remind myself that marginalized folk have always been forced to live like nomads — carrying home (and the weight of the world) on our backs.”
Please reach out if you want pdfs of any of these articles.
* When I was writing about Misato Yamada’s story, I wanted to add, “To me, it viscerally feels like she’s armed her entire body, including her head, with traditional Ainu clothing.” That sentiment is me projecting meaning onto her experience. I initially deleted that statement I wrote because of this, but I’m choosing to put it back in, in order to be explicit and show an example of the care I’ll be maintaining in as I work with people, collaborate with them, and write about it.
Moyo, Otrude. “Navigating My Journey towards Learning Ubuntu-A Way of Decolonizing Myself.” Reflections : Narratives of Professional Helping 22, no. 2 (2016): 74–81.
Francis, DeVonn. “Events.” YARDY. https://www.yardy.nyc/.
McMillan, Michael. “The West Indian Front Room: Reflections on a Diasporic Phenomenon.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 13, no. 1 (2009): 135–156.
Bawden, Gene Thomas. “Mediated Truths and Perpetuated Myths: the Architectural Fictions of Early Australian Photography.” Fabulation: Myth, Nature, Heritage: The Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand, 2012, 1–12. Editors: Stuart King, Anuradha Chatterjee, Stephen Loo.
Weisman, Celia Y., and bell hooks. “Art on My Mind: Visual Politics.” Womans Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1998): 54–64
Moyo, Otrude. “Navigating My Journey towards Learning Ubuntu-A Way of Decolonizing Myself.” Reflections : Narratives of Professional Helping 22, no. 2 (2016): 74–81.
Moreira, Claudio. “This Is Home, or Is It?: Disrupting Grand Narratives of Home as Physical or Institutional Space.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10, no. 1 (2010): 78–83.
