Alternative Genealogy Research Articles

Abolition, Black Ultraradicalism, and the Generation of the General Strike

AbstractThis essay unearths an alternative genealogy of the general strike by tracing the concept's first articulation back to the struggle against Atlantic racial slavery. The famed originator of the general strike idea, the English radical William Benbow, turns out to have adapted the revolutionary program of his associate Robert Wedderburn, a Jamaican-born Black abolitionist and “ultraradical” communist. Wedderburn's 1817 abolitionist text on the general strike, energized by the Haitian Revolution and calling for global rebellion across both the Caribbean and Europe, reveals the theory and practice of the general strike to have always been a weapon of Black radicalism and one especially shaped by enslaved women. With this framework established through the recovery of Wedderburn's importance, the essay offers theoretical reflections on some of the key issues that the general strike inherently raises around work, temporality, the idea of the proletariat, and communism, while engaging several important thinkers of the general strike (in particular W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Benjamin, and Saidiya Hartman). Ultimately, the essay argues for approaching the general strike in the light of its convergence with abolition.

Diasporic returns and queer kinship networks in contemporary French and Maghrebi francophone cinema

Recent portrayals of trans-Mediterranean mobility within French and Maghrebi francophone queer cinema have showcased the return of immigrant and second-generation queer men of Maghrebi origin to their diasporic homeland in North Africa. Focusing on two films from this corpus – Rémi Lange’s 2001 Tarik El Hob (The Road to Love) and Mehdi Ben Attia’s 2009 Le fil (The String) — this article traces the ways in which ethnic queer subjects have fostered alternative genealogies of kinship and intimacy in relation to the French nation state and the Maghrebi heteronormative family. It demonstrates how such a reconceptualization of kinship ties involves the renegotiation of domesticity for queer Maghrebi immigrant and diasporic subjects against the backdrop of institutional kinship structures such as civil unions and same-sex marriage in contemporary France.

The Remains of Power: Meaning and Function of Regalia in Madagascar

ABSTRACT It has become commonplace to define sovereignty as an almost divine and transcendent power, a concept which has its roots in the ancient Roman world. Following Foucault’s lead, for example, Giorgio Agamben has argued that the political capture of life represents the original paradigm of the entire history of Western civilization. This ontological and Western-centric reading of sovereignty has had an enormous influence on the social and human sciences. Taking its cue from Ernst Kantorowicz’s insights into the ‘duality’ of power, this article problematizes Agamben’s reading by exploring an alternative paradigm, which conceives sovereignty as a ‘chronotopic apparatus’ and ordering ritual. Through an analysis of the meaning and function of royal remains (regalia), effigies and ritual practices in western Madagascar, the essay shows a different understanding of sovereignty and of its symbolism, which can be used to articulate an alternative genealogy of political power.

The Three States of the Architectural Fragment as a Collective Archive of Concepts: Tracing an Alternative Genealogy of Aldo Rossi’s Analogous Cities

The Three States of the Architectural Fragment as a Collective Archive of Concepts: Tracing an Alternative Genealogy of Aldo Rossi’s Analogous Cities

Gender, Race, and Religion in an African Enlightenment

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar to genetic critiques, such alternative genealogies are not primarily about history but about the future, providing an almost eschatological vision of how society could be restructured.

The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves

Reviewed by: The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves Bernhard Malkmus The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. By Jason Groves. New York: Fordham University Press. 2020. x+208 pp. $105. ISBN 978-0-8232-8810-6. Human civilization's geological agency in transforming the biosphere has been reframing the epistemologies of all academic disciplines, in particular in the humanities. Reflection on what it means to be human no longer takes place on a stage for which the natural world is a mere backdrop; it is complicated by the myriad feedback loops between human cultures and anthropogenically transformed natures that mark our human condition today. The geological imaginary in the Anthropocene is closely tied to the history of Earth systems sciences that emerged during the hottest phase of the Cold War and to the epistemic construction of a global environment by the United Nations and international diplomacy. It is thus a form of planetary thinking, for which the Austrian writer and polymath Raoul Schrott has forged the new literary genre of a 'scientific epic' in his Erste Erde Epos (Munich: Hanser, 2016). However, as Jan Volker Röhnert reminds us in his Über das Gehen im Karst (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2021), the geological imaginary has a much longer history, in particular in German-language letters. Geology is, of course, the discipline that revolutionized the human sense of time; it opened up the vista of unimaginable natural histories that allowed humans to conceive of life as an evolutionary development. Geology has also provided a plethora of metaphors for rethinking the human on the threshold to modernity; it has offered ambivalent imagery between the biotic and the abiotic, the latent and the manifest, the exploitable and the uncanny. Grounded in this ambivalence, geology in modern German literature functions also as a mode of thinking about alternative modernities. This is evident in Jason Groves's new study, which traces the signs of a planetary ecological reflexivity in the archive of German literature in modernity, aiming to unearth 'those imaginaries in which other earths emerged' (p. 1). His close readings of a 'mineral imaginary' add up to a genealogy of the discovery of a climatologically volatile and unreliable Earth. In the process, the study becomes a cryptogram of a planetary imagination that enables us to consider alternative genealogies of modernity and trace the roots of Anthropocene thinking. His point of departure is the observation that the climax of modern Subjektphilosophie coalesces with an unprecedented fecundity of scientific and imaginative thinking about minerality and geology. He thus complicates the conventional narrative of an intrinsically teleological post-Enlightenment concept of the subject by revealing the degree to which the reflection on human subjectivity around 1800 was modulated by creatureliness—and the degree to which that creatureliness encompassed both [End Page 308] animality and minerality. Intense efforts to imagine deep earth and deep time reframe the standardized genealogy of the modern subject. The Germanic obsession with foundlings, in particular, and the multiple attempts to reassemble historical narratives around these erratic witnesses to Earth's history offer a particularly compelling way of rethinking modern human self-reflection through the lens of 'the lithic' (p. 6). Groves is engaging in an exercise of ichnology; he is reading what was never written, he is tracking traces such as foundlings to piece together the hidden geology of intellectual history. In claiming a 'geophilological turn', however, he is probably overstating the case. In his Introduction one gets the impression that Groves wanted to synthesize his considerable theoretical acumen as early as possible. However, a more gradual argumentative approach that links theoretical inferences to concrete close readings and thus creates a narrative momentum would have been more reader-friendly. In spite of the apparent theoretical ambition, some of the references remain underexplored, for example trauma theory and colonialism. Some readers might find Groves's choice of authors somewhat eclectic and wonder why, for example, there are no in-depth discussions of Jean Paul and E. T. A Hoffmann or Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Others might bemoan the fact that the book does not strictly adhere to the format of a traditional academic...

Toward Critical State Studies: Bringing the Democratic State Back into American Literary Criticism

Abstract This essay starts from the apparent disconnect between democracy and the State in American literary studies. Taking the case of antebellum US literature (James Fenimore Cooper and Lydia Maria Child), it contends that literature is one place of elaboration of a democratic statecraft. Nineteenth-century US literature has been read as both complicit with and resisting to reigning models of statecraft endorsing racial domination, bureaucratization, and the monopoly of violence. However, we remain indifferent at our own peril to the potential forces of State as a democratic public authority and of state regulation as a non-arbitrary public provision. Putting American literature to the test of statecraft and statecraft to the test of literature, critical State studies proposes to revisit literary practices as a mode of critique in nineteenth-century state building. Nineteenth-century literature, I argue, both facilitated and performed this critique. Reading nineteenth-century US literature from the perspective of critical State studies—here, reading The American Frugal Housewife as a manual of democratic regulatory practice, or The Pioneers as an attempt at democratic environmental governance—allows us to investigate how literature, as a mode of representation and a political practice, gives shape and voice to alternative modes of statecraft. Turning the State into a methodological problem, a pressure point of generative possibilities, critical State Studies requires that we attend to an alternative genealogy of the State and recover a past that has not yet been present in our reading of American literature.

“United we stand, divided we fall”: Sovereignty and Government during the Greek Revolution, 1821–1828

This article explores the political languages which Greek revolutionaries employed between roughly 1821 and 1828, and the multiple ways in which these languages found their way into the political projects they put into force (or sought to do so). It does so by considering the revolution as an open-ended political crisis during which revolutionaries were forced to address – theoretically and practically – the fundamental issues of political power: its source, its location and its organisation. As it shows, the frameworks for political action (or “scripts”) the revolutionaries drew on varied and fed into alternative visions of statehood (national, federal, local). By uncovering and understanding these alternatives, as well as why some predominated over others, the article aims to: propose an alternative genealogy of “the political” in the Greek revolution; shed new light on the liberalism(s) of the Revolution; and bring the perspective of the Greek world into the discussion about the importance of the revolutionary wave of the 1820s.

From Medical Halakha to Jewish Bioethics

ABSTRACT Scholars of applied Jewish ethics often describe the 1959 publication of Jewish Medical Ethics, by Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, as the birth of Jewish bioethics. The decades following its publication saw prolific scholarship, predominantly by Orthodox rabbis, that examined questions about medical practice and technology through the lens of halakha, or Jewish law. This article offers an alternative genealogy of Jewish bioethics, proposing that the field actually emerged around the 1990s, when academic ethics scholars began offering critiques of the earlier scholarship, which is better understood as medical halakha. This article outlines key features of medical halakha as compared with Jewish bioethics, clarifies differences between the two, and argues that drawing a distinction between these two genres will enable greater diversity and creativity in Jewish bioethics discourse. The article closes by discussing ways to incorporate Jewish philosophy into Jewish bioethics under this new framework.

The Forgotten Lives of Sociology of Death: Remembering Du Bois, Martineau and Wells.

This article seeks to rewrite the genealogy of sociology of death by revisiting the history of sociology, from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. Providing an overview of sociological studies of death that consolidated into a subfield in the 1990s, it shows how recent attempts at including intersectional and decolonial approaches link with considerations of death in sociology’s early history. Engaging sociological thinkers Harriet Martineau, Émile Durkheim, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the article seeks to provide an alternate genealogy of the sociology of death and to make a case for mainstreaming the study of death within the discipline. It shows that questions of suicide and Black death were a significant part of these scholars’ writings and that attention to loss and mourning shaped emergent understandings of the social, sociological frameworks, and methodologies. This view supplements efforts toward encouraging intersectional and geopolitical approaches to the study of death in sociology, approaches that are more needed than ever before to contend with the scale of loss and suffering that is filling lives.

Unfree Labour and Australia’s Obscured Pacific Histories: Towards a New Genealogy of Modern Slavery

ABSTRACT The passage of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 received bipartisan support and was heralded within both Houses of Parliament as a significant step towards addressing Australia’s complicity in modern slavery. Political discourse surrounding the legislation, however, exhibits a profound and disconcerting dehistoricisation, emphasising particularities of global supply chains and contemporary transnational capitalism. Australia’s own histories of slavery, slavery-like conditions and unfree labour are overwhelmingly absent from these narratives, which are framed instead by occasional references to the transatlantic slave trade. Attending particularly to histories of coerced Pacific labour within Australia, we analyse these absences as reflective of deeply rooted fissures of memory and power within Australia’s national imaginaries, and of the exercise of colonial power both within the settler state and in its entanglements with the region. Through reference to two threads of Pacific labour history in Australia—the struggle for recognition of the 19th-century Pacific labour trade, and the labour patterns of 20th-century Papuan and New Guinean domestic workers—we argue for an alternate genealogy of modern slavery, one that re-centres attention to race and coloniality, and attends more fully to the presence of the past in the exploitations of the present.

POSTCOLONIZING PLANETARY URBANIZATION: Aníbal Quijano and an Alternative Genealogy of the Urban

AbstractThe success of the ‘planetary urbanization’ approach is built upon the work of Henri Lefebvre and his understanding of the achievement of a world that is fully articulated through urban relations. However, scholars inspired by this view have normally considered his work and the Euro‐American space as presumed starting points from which to observe the progression of planetary urban processes. This article proposes an alternative genealogy of planetary urbanization by looking at—both theoretically and empirically—the global ‘periphery’ of Latin America. Specifically, the article explores the early work of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano at CELAC between 1966 and 1971. Framed within Dependency Theory, Quijano's reflections share strong similarities and consonances with some of the critical insights that Lefebvre would elaborate only a few years later. The article thus aims to ‘postcolonize’ the planetary urbanization approach by shifting its Euro‐American theoretical and empirical centres, opening it up to contributions that—due to geo‐cultural hierarchies—have traditionally been overlooked within the main Anglophone debates. In so doing, the article proposes to engage in a plural dialogue in urban studies that combines planetary urbanization with the postcolonial critique.

The drama of nonviolence: theatre as education within the American civil rights movement

ABSTRACT Role-play was a popular educational strategy within the American civil rights movement. Many civil rights activists performed the movement in private before performing it again in public. Compared to the scholarship on the role of music in the civil rights movement, the importance of drama has been understudied. The history of role-play as an educational strategy provides new insights into the relationship between performance and nonviolent activism, and offers an alternative genealogy of applied theatre.

Provincializing the OECD-PISA global competences project

ABSTRACT In 2018 the OECD added a set of global competence measures to its PISA programme, and reported on the outcomes in November 2020. In this paper I explore the provenance of the idea of global competence underpinning the OECD-PISA Global Competence framework and measure. The official account by the OECD references the OECD PISA Governing Board, Expert Panels, National Teams and Consortia engaged in the creation and delivery of this assessment tool. However, in this paper I problematise this narrative and sketch out an alternate genealogy that seems to operate in the shadowlands of the official account. I describe a web of relationships and projects and identify nodal actors like Asia Society, experts and brokers in élite US universities, agencies involved in the circulation of results. I argue that this rendering of global competence is not only provincial in that its ideational base can be linked to US corporate interests, but its pedagogical impulse is in shaping the culture of the new capitalism, on the one hand, and managing its tendencies to reduce social cohesion, on the other.

Melancholy and its sisters: transformations of a concept from Homer to Lars von Trier

ABSTRACT This introduction argues for competing diachronic and synchronic accounts of melancholy in European and American culture. Taking the pioneering and yet belated work Saturn and Melancholy (1964) of Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, and Raymond Klibansky as its starting point, this article situates melancholy as at once its own, often local and non-specialist discourse as well as a conceptual web binding together medical, artistic, and social innovations, competitions, and turmoil. As a subject, melancholy demands interdisciplinary study, as Dürer’s print Melencolia I continues to prove. As a locus of methodological innovation, melancholy in the wake of Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky continues to yield the alternative genealogies, conceptual histories, and formal artistic vocabularies of this volume’s contributions whether moving backwards from Dürer to Homer or forward to the present day with Lars von Trier and major European novelists.

States as colonial projects: Unevenness, combination and race through the lens of Abya Yala

This article argues for an ‘expanded’ account of the modern state that places race and coloniality at the center of its analysis to enable a conversation between uneven and combined development (UCD) and critical race theories (CRT). Following a decolonial reading of both literatures and adjacent fields, I question UCD’s reproduction of Eurocentric epistemological assumptions through narratives of capitalist ‘modernisation’ that erase Indigenous and racialised peoples from the histories of modern state formation. This leads to an invitation to engage in cross-pollination between traditions by placing the concept of ‘interaction’, as recently developed by UCD scholars, in dialogue with ‘relational’ processes of colonisation and racialisation theorised by CRT and thinkers from Abya Yala. I argue that this combined perspective is better equipped to reflect on conflicts over land, territories, self-determination, and ultimately survival, by speaking of the experience of modern state formation in colonial central Mexico. I look at the formation of Iberian imperial governance in the sixteenth century as a Lettered City, a complex network of bureaucratic and Inquisitorial rule based on the prominence of the written word. In this context, Indigenous Nahua politicians, intellectuals and community leaders transformed and conditioned the state apparatuses by employing precolonial documents and producing many others to secure political and territorial autonomy. I conclude by suggesting that this approach can start a conversation on alternative genealogies of colonialism and state formation that emerge from Indigenous and racialised histories of struggle, negotiation and adaptation.

The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body by Alys X. George

Reviews 197 The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body. By Alys X. George. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2020. 322 pp. £36. ISBN 978–0-226–66998–4. In The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body, Alys X. George rewrites the cultural history of Viennese modernism. In particular, she argues for the centrality of the human body and its close entanglement with art, politics and medicine throughout the long Viennese fin de siècle (1870–1938). The alternative genealogy she proposes extends from imperial Vienna to the First Republic of the interwar years. A timely and pioneering interdisciplinary study, it will be a key text for those interested in rethinking Viennese modernity and bodily culture around 1900. Additionally, The Naked Truth will have immediate relevance for readers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, not least because it provides a historical context of the current cultural crisis, particularly as pandemic protocols repeatedly draw attention to our bodies. In keeping with its contextual approach, The Naked Truth follows Hermann Bahr’s cue that the Austrian form of modernism ‘identified the body as a key locus of modernist cultural production’ (p. 3). It also draws on Elaine Scarry’s argument in The Body in Pain (1985), inasmuch as cultures in crisis ‘result in recourse to the body’ (p. 13), here understood as a site of stability, certainty and concrete materiality. This is another corporeal ‘turn’ that sounds painfully familiar to pandemic-struck readers. And yet the reader keeps wondering about the nature of the truth that might be marked and framed through the body. The study’s thematic approach is well composed and lucidly presented. Each of the four chapters focuses on a corporeal topos, namely bodies on display, bodies in pieces, patients’ bodies and bodies in motion. These, in turn, are examined across various cultural practices, including large-scale human exhibitions, cadaveric dissection, self-vivisection, the medicalization of bodies in the visual arts and literature, bodily gesture in dance, photography and film, as well as the treatment of the bodies of workers and working-class mothers. In this way, The Naked Truth engages with literary studies, the visual arts, the performing arts, popular culture, the history of medicine, medico-scientific cultures and social history, as well as architecture and politics. Given the number of disciplines George interweaves, it would have been helpful to be reminded of the necessary limitations of her study. ‘Why, then, has the body been neglected in the cultural history of Vienna?’ (p. 3), The Naked Truth asks. It links one of the main reasons for the neglect of the human body to ‘fin-de-siècle Vienna’ as an academic phenomenon. The latter was generated through dialogue with Carl Schorske’s landmark series of essays on Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979) and its fascination with the psyche. By tracing a hidden history of fin-desi ècle Vienna, George’s study establishes a new paradigm for Viennese modernism, arguing that homo physiologicus was as important a figure as homo psychologicus. In so doing, George challenges the exclusivity of a ‘psychological Reviews 198 withdrawal into aestheticism’ (p. 235) around 1900. This challenge includes Jewish bodies and working-class bodies, as detailed throughout the remaining three chapters. George complicates Schorske’s narrative by arguing that the ‘unique attentiveness to the materiality of the human body in Viennese culture’ originated ‘from the centrality of the materialist conception of disease under the second Vienna medical school’ (pp. 5–6). In her view, Viennese modernism is obscured when we exclude its interaction with those medical and popular cultures that predated the psychological turn (p. 235). The Naked Truth provides a refreshing discussion of Vienna’s institutional sites in the third and fourth chapters, reading them as practices that cut across modernism, medicine, popular culture, architecture and politics. By bringing two Viennese doctor-writers into conversation, one of whom is truly familiar to the canon, the other largely forgotten, she establishes Marie Pappenheim as a counterpart to Arthur Schnitzler. George reads Pappenheim’s 1906 poem ‘Autopsy Room’ and her work as a physician and social activist through the Anatomical Institute in relation to Schnitzler’s...

Crafting New Narratives of Diasporic Resistance with Indo-Caribbean Women and Gender-Expansive People across Generations

This study used participatory oral history and digital archiving to explore two interrelated questions: How do Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations experience processes of storytelling? What are the challenges and possibilities of oral history and digital archiving for constructing alternative histories and genealogies of resistance? In the first phase of the study, twelve Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people across generations participated in an oral history workshop where they were introduced to oral history methods, co-created an interview guide, conducted oral history interviews of one another, and engaged in collective reflection about processes of storytelling. In the second phase, four co-authors of a community-owned digital archive participated in semi-structured interviews about their work to craft new narratives of diasporic resistance rooted in the everyday stories of Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people. In this paper, I analyze how Indo-Caribbean women and gender-expansive people practice resistance by breaking silences in their communities around gender-based oppression, shift norms through producing analyses of their own stories, and reshape community narratives. Furthermore, I explore how oral history participants and co-authors of a digital archive understand the risks associated with sharing stories, raising the ethical dilemmas associated with conceptualizing storytelling as purely liberatory.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Hester Baer and Alexandra M. Stewart In her 2017 book Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed calls attention to the politics of citation. Arguing that citational practices often perpetuate the institutions of white heteropatriarchy, she instead cites work that is committed to naming and dismantling those institutions, especially work by feminists of color, and adopts a strict policy of citing no white men. “I think as feminists we can hope to create a crisis around citation, even just a hesitation, a wondering, that might help us not to follow the well-trodden citational paths,” Ahmed writes (148). By invoking scholarship that has contributed significantly to feminist and antiracist thought but has often been abandoned prematurely in favor of novel intellectual objects, Ahmed departs from “the official paths laid out by disciplines” to pursue alternative genealogies (15). Together with awareness about the politics of citation, renewed attention to the consequences of syntax, orthography, and register is crucial for disrupting normative discourses. While it may seem patently obvious to reiterate the point that language and discourse shape systems of meaning and thought, recent debates over and shifts in stylistic choices concerning the naming of gender and race underscore how the politics of language continues to be a key arena for negotiating social and cultural change. In 2019, Merriam-Webster named the English-language pronoun “they” as its word of the year, responding to a surge in searches in its online dictionary for the definition of the pronoun’s usage in the singular to refer to a nonbinary person (Harmon).1 During the same period, the Gendersternchen (gender star) was increasingly adopted as a typographic style in German: the placement of an asterisk in between the conventionally gendered forms of a noun (for example, Autor*innen, or authors) allows the writer to refer to all genders and to nonbinary people, while also highlighting the constructedness of grammatical gender and gender [End Page xi] categories more broadly.2 Last year the New York Times changed its house style to capitalize the word Black when referring to people of African origin in order to better reflect their shared culture and history, a change that reflected the embrace of this orthographic choice in journalistic and popular usage (Coleman). In the US and in Germany, the terms BIPoC and BPoC have increasingly been adopted in mainstream discourse; originating as terms of self-identification, BIPoC and BPoC reference the collective experience of racism shared by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, including those previously colonized and enslaved. These brief examples demonstrate how linguistic shifts index, and help to instill, changing sociocultural norms. They also reflect the imbrication of language, embodiment, and knowledge, exemplifying how the naming of bodies shapes the way they are perceived and understood. When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 as an analytical lens for highlighting the complex and interlocking ways in which racial and gender discrimination are experienced by Black women, she created new language that enabled the articulation of critical insights about the interactions of power and identity.3 Reflecting on the significance of the term intersectionality for her own life and work, Sharon Dodua Otoo highlights the matter of language: “I am grateful to all Black feminists who continue to teach us the importance of coining words to spotlight, critique, and challenge dominance” (“Language Matters,” our emphasis). As Otoo suggests, coining words offers one strategy for combating the rhetorical violence to which Black women are disproportionately subjected. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have notably emphasized the limitations of language when it comes to activism and advocacy, arguing that the easy adoption and appropriation of decolonizing discourse neutralizes what is unsettling about decolonization and evades its actual goal of repatriating Indigenous life and land: “decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (3). Robbie Richardson likewise cautions that the land acknowledgments now offered by many institutions and invoked regularly by speakers at conferences and events may serve as feel-good gestures that do not benefit dispossessed people (“Some Observations”). These caveats pose crucial...

El museo como proyecto artístico

El museo como proyecto artístico habita un terreno poroso entre las prácticas instituyentes, la gestión y la producción artística que habilita la práctica contemporánea en arte. En este trabajo se analizan tres experiencias que se nombran como museo, surgidos entre 2010 y 2017 en diferentes ciudades de Argentina: La Ene. Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, Unidad Básica. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Córdoba y MUCA. Musea Constructora de La Plata. Para el análisis se partirá de la definición de museo acuñada por el ICOM, así como de los debates sobre el rol de los museos de arte y las prácticas museales contemporáneas. A su vez, se trazaron posibles genealogías alternativas de museos y filiaciones con proyectos artísticos de la crítica institucional a nivel internacional, regional y local. Se considera que estos proyectos constituyen experiencias críticas y proponen otros modos posibles de ser museo.