Voice, Identity and Culture
Performing Post-Xicanidades: Travel, Transculturation and Transversalism in Contemporary Chicanx Theater, Poetry and Popular Music in Europe
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ben Olguin
While Chicana/os and Latina/os—or Latinx—traveled throughout Europe in the 20th century primarily due to warfare and related Cold War contexts, contemporary Latinx travelers and expatriates in the new millennium have returned to Europe in a new era of globalization that inevitably involves radical transformations of Latinidades, or Latinx epistemologies and ontologies. This paper explores select case studies of Latinx cultural workers—primarily playwrights, poets and musicians—who have traveled to various southern and eastern European nations to participate in complex consumptions and performances of culture. I submit that the multiple gazes and reverse gazes, as well as dialogues and transculturations, have undergirded new post-Latinx formations, that is, transversal syntheses of Europeanized Latinx identities, cultures, and knowledges. Several questions guide this inquiry. Why did Latinx artists and travelers travel to select countries during the Cold War and post-millennium? What impact did their European encounters have on their work? How were notions of Latinidades transformed in the process of their encounters and performances? How did the different eras of contact zone encounters impact framings of the “end” of Latinx Studies at different times?
Cultural Memory: Finding the Resonance Bridge through Art Immersion Experiences
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Heidi Powell
The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss how cultural memory as a pedagogical place in art making and art education in global contexts occurs through community art making. Discussed are the theory and importance of (re)collecting and (re)telling memories through story and object making through cultural immersion. This paper addresses: Immersion in cultural events, i.e. explored through the making of alfombras during Semana Santa in Antigua, Guatemala; how immersion in the art making practice of other cultures informs community identity through cultural competency, revealing a new understanding of artmaking as perpetuating cultural continuity; how immersion contributes to memory pedagogy and broader notion of global communities in arts education, and historical memory and the circularity of knowledge. This reflective investigation of memory and object making funded by cultural immersion, art making, and art education. It is important to acknowledge that the (re)collecting is grounded in cultural nuances and ripe with personal values and emotions as well as cultural knowledge. The role memory pedagogy (Powell, 2017) plays in the narratives of success, failure, change, and hope as an artist and art educator in our field is an invisible force that we often overlook in understanding the very notions of art making as cultural memory. The intangible of memory is what exists in our work as artists and art educators, finding voice in the tangible object of experience on the human journey as we immerse ourselves in cultures and their art making practices.
Strong Houses, Strong Voices: Sharing the Lived Experiences of Post-natural Builders in South Africa through Digital Storytelling
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christine Scoggin
Strong Houses, Strong Voices is an arts-based research project which uses co-created first-person video narratives to present the lived experiences of a group of "post-natural" builders currently constructing houses within South African informal settlements. Post-natural builders use a combination of traditional building materials such as mud, straw, manure and water, and repurposed materials such as tires, cans and bottles to create low-cost, environmentally appropriate "shack replacement" houses. The builders are typically geographically dispersed, time poor, and extremely marginalized due to lack of formal education, lack of citizenship, or disability. The study ultimately aims to encourage widespread take up of these citizen-led building practices, whilst challenging national housing standards that typically prohibit such experimental structures. The study is based on the ‘digital storytelling’ methodology pioneered by the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS), which is widely regarded as a democratizing and empowering methodology for community arts and arts-based research. Such approaches have been used extensively in South Africa for research and community arts purposes, most notably in relation to teacher training, and examination of gender-based violence and HIV-related stigma. The study responds to criticisms of this methodology that include its formulaic models, extensive time requirements and leanings toward sentimentality, by demonstrating how it can be successfully adapted to telling the powerful stories of these South African "post-natural" builders.
