Join us for the CEE monthly lunch and conversation, "Third Thursday", which is happening this month ONLY on WEDNESDAY NOV 19. In order to ignite our conversation this month, we have invited Lisa Britton, from Penn's French and Francophone Studies, to speak on an video/audio that records the story of Moussa SY, a French-Senegalese descendant who, on any given day of the year, will don the uniform of his great-great-grandfather and walk 30 km from his home in Soissons to the memorial sites along the Chemin des Dames. Keep Reading...
MEDIUM/ARCHIVE | DEC 2nd at 5:30 PM
An Augmented Audio Presentation by Ernst Karel (CEE Fellow Fall 2019) and Veronika Kusumaryati
CEE Visiting Fellow Ernst Karel and collaborator Veronika Kusumaryati will present a preview of an augmented sound work composed from the resulting 37 hours of tape in the audio archives resulting from the ‘Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea’ organized by filmmaker Robert Gardner 1961. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to anthropology, the lives of the Hubula and of Michael Rockefeller, and the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua. Keep Reading...
SHE/IT HAPPENS | Dec 5th, Noon
Lunch with Multimedia Ghanaian Artist & Scholar
Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi
Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi (preferred pronoun "sHe/it") who performs under the name crazinisT artisT, is a Ghanaian-Togolese multimedia installation and performance artist and is coming to Philly the week of Dec 1-Dec 6. Vab's artwork and scholarship explores vulnerability and survival, the persistent violence of colonial-Christian regimes of gender and colorism, and experiences of abjection in Ghana and global South border-zones. Vab's work has been extensively covered by international media in African Arts, CNN,BBC, Harper's Bazaar, OkayAfrica,CCQ, Diario de Regiao, Apollo, and many other venues. sHe/it has exhibited and worked as an artist-in-residence in prominent institutions across the globe, including New York, Nigeria, Switzerland, Cape Verde, Germany, Brazil, England, Portugal and others (full CV here).
MULTIMEDIA EXHIBIT OPENING |Dec 4th @ 6:30-8:30
Implosions at the Interface of Science(s) and Justice(s)
Save the date for an exhibit showcasing the end-of-semester interdisciplinary and collaborative works by Penn graduate students in Kristina Lyons' (Penn Anthropology) seminar, "Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s) ' (Venue TBA)
WE DON'T NEED A MAP | Film Screening
Nov. 10, 2 PM
Rainey Auditorium
Dir. Warwick Thornton (2017) (Australia) The Southern Cross has become a symbol of white nationalism in Australia, and anti-immigration sentiment. For indigenous Australians these stars are a much more connected and familial entity, pointing to the origins of all people.
Spring Courses at CEE
IT WAS THE LAW AT THE TIME | Museums, Colonialism, and the Question of Property
Prof. Dr. Wayne Modest
CEE Spring Fellow 2020
Current discussions about who owns cultural property, especially in relation to objects acquired under and during Europe's colonial project, form their arguments, limits and possibilities around international legal instruments. Like broader claims for reparations by formally colonized peoples, legal demands for reparations or restitution with regard to cases of colonial injustice often run up against responses such as 'it was the law at the time' ... Proposed solution for these conflicts almost always circumvent questions of ownership (at the time) or other legal possibilities. They are sought in extra-legal ways. While the legal limits of current claims form part of the investigation of many of these studies, they often fail to pay serious attention to the relationship between the law and the colonial project itself. Importantly, they also fail to explore the relationship between the law, questions of property and the 'creation' of the colonized subject. This seminar will focus on this nexus and will interrogate the role of law within the colonial era, especially with regard to the legal fashioning of hierarchies of colonial subjects and colonial objects. Keep Reading...
Edited for length by CEE staff
MODALITIES OF BLACK FREEDOM AND ESCAPE | Ships
Dr. Grace Sanders Johnson & Emily Carris (CEE Spring 2020 Fellow) & Joanne Douglass
The artistic and community practice of boating/shipping is the touch point for this course. The course revolves around three major projects. First, the seminar readings and discussion will prime students with ethnographic, historical, theoretical, and technical understandings of boats and shipping. Second, students will share-collect oral histories with members of the black West and North Philadelphia boating communities. With these narratives, course participants will craft a sail that responds to the immediate concerns and aspirations regarding black escape and freedom. Students will design, assemble, and mount the sail onto a boat at the end of the semester. In the process of creating the sail, studying community practices, and mapping routes of escape for Philadelphia communities, students will also earn their boating license (surprisingly, this does not require getting on a boat).
