I’ll be presenting a paper in progress for a panel at the annual conference for the American Studies Association in Baltimore, MD this fall. Our panel and submitted abstract are below.

“Sites/Sights of Racial Re/production: Community Formations in the Places of Visual Culture” with Miya Schaffer, Alma Villanueva, and Anna Storti (Chair).

This panel examines the “places” of race in visual culture, the sites/sights wherein racial meaning is produced and circulated, refined and contested. We understand the visual sites of racial re/production in terms of the dance theater, the photographic studio, the photo album, digital archives, and the surfaces of photographs and bodies themselves. Throughout these locations, asymmetrical power relations — between colonizer/photographer and the racialized subject of portraiture, between white choreographer and racialized performer — are materialized and actively rehearsed. Given these flows of power in these sites/sights, they also provide critical access points for disrupting oppressive hierarchies and re-envisioning alternative, ethical relations across social formations.

Specifically, we bring together photographic portraiture and dance, enacting interdisciplinary aesthetic, methodological, and theoretical collaboration as, in the words of this year’s conference call-for-proposals, an act of “solidarities in practice.” We emphasize overlap between the presumptions of fixity in still images and fluidity of movement in dance: the photographed subject becomes a moving figure who elicits kinesthetic responses, and the theater becomes a mode of visual capture. (Racialized) visualities of dancing bodies are necessarily connected to photographic representations of racialized bodies. Moving between these “aesthetic practices” (Gopinath 2018), we demonstrate how visual cultures of the contemporary US are intimately related to its imperial reach in the Philippines, Hawai’i, Jamaica, and the Amazon since at least the development of nineteenth-century visual technologies. We do so through a mode of curation in the spirit of Gayatri Gopinath’s Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, which foregrounds the “co-implication and radical relationality” among “seemingly disparate racial formations, geographies, [and] temporalities” (4). Without seeking “coevalness or sameness” among subject populations who are pulled into the visual regimes of race, our panel gestures toward transnational and cross-racial struggles and affinities (4).

We explore these affinities through our own efforts towards community-making, which involve deliberating the communities formed through the “places” of visual culture. Engaging the community of contemporary dance spectators in the US, panelist Miya Shaffer explores the theater’s “framing” of race, challenging audiences to see beyond static, flattened racial categories on the dancing body’s surface. alejandro t. acierto analyzes how a colonial photograph from the Philippines challenges the legibility of both the dynamic between colonized/colonizer and the racialized figure of the photographed subject through the technique of blurring, ultimately galvanizing the community of contemporary viewers who encounter the image in the digital archive. Alma Villanueva looks at how people identifying as multiracial/mixed-race form community through a photographic genre of historical race-type portraiture, resulting in a semblance of racial diversity that is premised on gender normativity. Collectively, we present aesthetic practices as fundamentally community-engaged: dance and photography implicate an audience who perceives, interprets, and shares their understanding to others, creating different communities through each act of production and reception. We therefore insist on activating these communities towards anti-racist, decolonial ends, where examining the places of visual culture can challenge racial fixities, racialized “neutralities,” and colonial-designed relations.