Art and Culture by Daniel Drennan ElAwar
This statement is in response to the Vancouver City Council’s recently proposed resolution target... more This statement is in response to the Vancouver City Council’s recently proposed resolution targeting BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions). It has been updated to reflect growing local efforts in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and protests concerning the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline through Indigenous territory. It serves as the framework
for a project produced by Jamaa Al-Yad Artists’ Collective: Land Back 2020.
College Art Association Conference, 2019
ABSTRACT
Teaching illustration in the periphery of capital/empire reveals contradictions of disco... more ABSTRACT
Teaching illustration in the periphery of capital/empire reveals contradictions of disconnection and uprootedness concerning culture, language, community, and artistic practice. Analyzing and contesting this fracture has a long history. Paulo Freire stated: “The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors”, Frantz Fanon referred to the “colonized mind”, and Patrick Lumumba called for “mental decolonization”.
Given the structural nature of colonial education, within which students are educated outside of local language, culture, and majority class, how might it be possible to reintegrate with local space, popular realm, and community-mindedness? How would an awareness of globalization, liberalism, and imperialism have an impact on their projects and their local artistic practices? Finally, what are the negative effects/disincentives of taking political stands in terms of personal and/or commercial work, given a globalized art industry itself imbued with neo-liberal and capitalist norms?
This presentation reflects on twelve years of teaching in Greater Syria. Themes examined include communal and collaborative work; the collision of local and colonial languages; the interaction with displaced, dispossessed, and marginalized populations; the exploration of social issues beyond imperialist and humanitarian imperialist contexts; as well as concepts of fractured, uprooted, and affected identities. The presentation explores as well how such pedagogical foci might be applicable in the core of capital/empire, as well as among disparate and seen-as unrelated communities.
KEYWORDS
Decolonization methodologies
Indigenization
Visual Arts
Illustration
Class
Marxism
Antonio Gramsci
Mehdi ‘Amel
Anti-capitalism
Anti-globalization
Extirpation
Colonialism
Social Death
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for feedback from Jamaa Al-Yad members Lara Atallah and Karim Eid-Sabbagh, as well as for the input, work, and support from my students over the past decade and a half. No greater inspiration exists for my efforts.
NOTE
This is an expanded version of the presentation given at the CAA Conference in New York City, February, 2019.
MDLAB Conference, LAU, Beirut, 2019
This document started as working guidelines of activist praxis for the artists’ collective
جمع ا... more This document started as working guidelines of activist praxis for the artists’ collective
جمع اليد (Jamaa Al-Yad: http://www.jamaalyad.org) founded in Beirut in 2009. Part of our primary research directive was examining liberation movements and their creative output, as well as the reasons for their often demise, with a goal of emulating effective methods while avoiding such ends. With members currently in various places outside of Greater Syria, we have also developed concepts of “acculturated” and “assimilated” colonization that work among nation-states and across ideas of a global North–South divide. Part of our focus now involves a “reverse Orientalizing” that is aimed at elaborating for those in the neo-liberalized global North their own internalized colonization.
The document evolved through collaborative development and an extensive self-evaluation after each project’s completion. These guidelines were most notably employed in 2010 as the primary framework for a design class taught at the American University of Beirut entitled: “Design III: Mediating the Real World”, and in 2018 for a relief printmaking class taught at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC, entitled: “Relief Printmaking: The Art of Protest and Resistance”. In June of 2019, they formed the basis of a workshop given at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, for the MDLAB Conference that took place there.
The following is taken from the most recent printmaking class’s syllabus:
Evaluating illustration as a material practice of protest and resistance requires an examination not just of images produced, but of producers, media of application and dissemination, context of production, as well as audiences engaged with. To further elaborate is how cultural norms inform and shape artistic practice, and how adherence to, as well as resistance against these norms further mold popular imaginary concerning local and global events. In this light, such practice relies on technique and medium to embody as much meaning as the subject matter illustrated.
Current art education, reflecting dominant cultural norms as well as economic and political incentives concerning pedagogy and learning, focuses on the artist as a unique individual divorced from audience: an independent and exalted actor with absolute “agency” and “free will”. This is a willful contradiction and deceit that avoids seeing the artist as a conduit of a given class context, often of a hegemonic dominant cultural discourse. It further obviates engagement with audiences in creative labor. Students will be expected to challenge a passive channeling of the status quo and to actively question their role and engagement in terms of their own practice.
Collective and collaborative practices will be foregrounded in this class. Furthermore, this class will focus on the historic role of the craftsperson and artist, art as a material practice, the non-neutrality of tools and means of dissemination, the definition of and engagement with audiences concerning their artistic output, and the shared and co-extensive labor of artistic endeavors. The goal here is not a purity of practice, but instead a weeding out of the taints, leanings, and extirpative intent of the dominant cultural mode. Long-term, this will lead to a robust practice solidly grounded in dialectical frameworks, discussions, and critiques as well as valid media and praxis.
Included here are the vocabulary and framework as evolved to this point; a case study and evaluation of one of Jamaa Al-Yad’s projects; and a worksheet for analyzing manifestations in an active and activist manner. To note: The suggested practice case study (Positive-Negatives) was chosen for its self-presentation as progressive and beneficent. Examined using the vocabulary and framework provided, it can instead be seen to evoke a neo-liberal, reactionary, and colonizing stance via liberal tropes and extracted narratives derived from the global South but for a global Northern audience.
Jadaliyya, 2019
This article speaks of alienation, migration, liberation, protest and resistance art and art move... more This article speaks of alienation, migration, liberation, protest and resistance art and art movements, as well as the place of the artist in periphery and core. Maymanah Farhat contacted me to write a two-paragraph art review for Jadaliyya’s 2018 end-of-year art review. I wrote the following instead. With special thanks to Maymanah for follow-up reference to the El-Khiam prison art collection, and to Lara Atallah for her helpful review, input, and suggestions.
Available also from the "Files..." pull-down link above.
This manifesto was originally publish... more Available also from the "Files..." pull-down link above.
This manifesto was originally published as a blog post in May of 2021; it has been updated and revised now that I've been back into the fiber arts for a few years. The "manifesto" as such in terms of material practice, ideas of community, as well as collective notions of creative output stems from and applies to other arts as well. The perspective is from the Global South, and a class-based analysis examines notions of communal endeavor, source material, as well as the "stitching together" of community.
UPDATE: March 25, 2023, added a section on Material Production in answer to the focus in Global Northern fiber communities on "charity" purchases of yarn from countries in the Global South.
UPDATE: October 20, 2024, minor typos corrected; addendum added to address a successful campaign to add Palestine to the country drop-down menu at Ravelry.
The Tyee, 2019
The Tyee, an independent online magazine out of Vancouver, BC, published an article entitled “Und... more The Tyee, an independent online magazine out of Vancouver, BC, published an article entitled “Undone: A Newcomer’s Story”, about a “refugee” who ended up committing suicide:
https://thetyee.ca/News/2019/07/01/Undone-Newcomer-Story/
The publisher, David Beers, asked if I would be interested in addressing the following concerns about the story, stated as follows:
We are reaching out to you and others who have expertise and influence in order to publish a follow-up piece. We ask for your responses and ideas for how to improve support for newly arrived refugees, particularly those from the LGBTQ community who may be from conservative religious backgrounds. We aim to publish this piece on August 2. Any thought or ideas you might be willing to share for publication would be very much appreciated. Among the questions that come to mind are:
How does Farid’s story fit into the picture of challenges for refugees you are learning about in your role?
What additional context would you like to see added to this report?
Do you see in Farid’s story indications of a systemic failure?
Do you think the provincial or federal government should be holding hearings on gaps in services, especially around mental health?
Can you recommend others we should connect with in seeking ideas for improving matters?
Would you be willing to allow us to publish your response?
This is my response to the story, which addresses issues of decolonization, mediation, and representation of “refugees” in “Western” media. It is an attempt to provide a meta-observation, a step back away from the story, in an effort to decolonize perceptions of immigrants within a Canadian context. This response is referenced in a follow-up article that appeared on
August 2, 2019.
Dissident Voice, 2012
…This discussion of violence controlled by those who have the power to define the parameters for ... more …This discussion of violence controlled by those who have the power to define the parameters for said violence brings us to Sacha Cohen, and his portrayal of an Arab leader in his movie The Dictator. In naming the dictator “Gen. Shabazz Aladeen”, pointed reference is made to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s taken name, juxtaposed mockingly against the exoticized “Aladdin” (which removes any religious significance here). In an interview with Howard Stern Cohen states:
“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”
In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.…
Culture Critique, 2009
This article looks at mediation, art, and art practice through an economic and political lens. Th... more This article looks at mediation, art, and art practice through an economic and political lens. This focus is required in order to not only avoid theories that posit the end of the author, the meaninglessness of words, the sheer inability to express or communicate, the inescapability of the spectacle, etc., but to challenge them directly. For despite their often unstated claim to challenge centers of power, they can be seen to in fact enable them, by removing agency from the voicer and meaning from the voiced, and by avoiding the major problematic of the one theorizing: the inability to step not only outside of one’s role, but down from one’s class position; to call into question or otherwise unanchor one’s place. For such theories to work, they need to ascribe to Agamben's separation of the politicized citizen from his "merely alive" brethren. This leaves the politicized landscape to work within the over- or super- mediated space of the dominant dogma, thus assuring a remove or attenuating distance from those whose voice is now seen as marginal and non-existent.
The further implication that this dominant group is now the normative one, reduces much of the world’s population to useless appendage (as Agamben rightly posits), yet results in their objectification as much-heralded examples of revolution via this medium, as can be seen in advertisements from credit card companies that portray Africans in tribal dress as the new enlightened users of their services. More recent examples, such as the so-called Twitter revolution in Iran, reveal instead a minority comprador class in cahoots with foreign intervening powers, using the marketing language of the Internet to sell "freedom" as a self-aggrandizing trope to the very West that engendered it, yet which in no way embodies it to begin with. Contradictory examples do exist, such as African farmers using cell phone technologies to communicate, or the organizing currently taking place among factory workers in Egypt, but these can be shown to be manifestations of an extant on-the-ground capacity for social networking, a vibrant social contract that pre-exists the technology. Meaning, if the Web were to disappear, Egypt would still be able to organize and strike; the compradors, on the other hand, would have a much more difficult time of things.
This article focuses on the uselessness of sub-categories of ethnic or other so-called identity markers, the continuation of the straw man discussion of East versus West, or the divining of greater abstract meanings via superficial semiotic trappings. It posits that focus need be brought upon what makes for true dominant and resistant discourse, the fact that these discourses are hugely complex and found within and without Eastern and Western societies in their inclusive entireties, and that the primary goal of current dominant discourses is to destroy their social networks and non-mediated expression by the enforcement of dystopic tools that contradictorily proclaim utopia even in their destruction of non-mediated voice. That this branding and mediation applies equally and indiscriminately to soap detergent, taco restaurants, and action figures but also to countries, politicians, our current spate of ersatz revolutions, and ever-perpetual wars should give us great pause. Those truly in favor of a radical break with the current status quo will need to examine cultural manifestations for their meaning in a way that questions creator, audience, and medium; and in such a way that these symbolic events' complexity is expanded on and not reduced, in order that the manipulative tango so far described becomes evident and therefore avoidable if not defeatable.
Draft article, 2019
ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2014, renowned American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita had his... more ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2014, renowned American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Salaita’s employment was terminated in response to his public tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s summer assault on Gaza. —Haymarket Books, publicity blurb for Uncivil Rites
This article explores themes that date back to my Master’s degree work completed at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. The divide inherent then between projects in the public interest——based on notions of public access and democratic control of the media, as compared to projects that were useful more in terms of corporate sponsorship and donations——reveals a stark political and class chasm that persists within the digital realm to this day. As digital media consolidate more in fewer hands, and as individual privacy concerns serve as a blind to obfuscate issues of communal control and content, the need for the conversation to shift in a literally radical way grows more pressing. In the example put forward here, that of a Twitter bot that I programmed to call out right-wing and reactionary accounts (which itself got shut down), I hope to elucidate what should be a major concern of all truly progressive forces concerning the media and their sources, the technologies of conveyance and their private owners, as well as the distances imposed on audiences in terms of the ability to be heard, to organize, to protest, and to resist.
KEYWORDS
Technology
Algorithms
Perl
Twitter
Social Media
Islamophobia
Racism
Linguistics
Liberation Theology
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the assistance of Damian Conway whose book on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and email feedback on Perl gave me the confidence to write the Twitter module which is still in use with my other Twitter accounts.
Design Altruism Project, 2011
"…Lebanon is a very particular case; we have to examine it in terms of its political and economic... more "…Lebanon is a very particular case; we have to examine it in terms of its political and economic history. There is no history to this country other than one framed along neo-liberal economic lines; meaning, the governmental, legal, educational, social, and cultural systems existing here work within an economic model that has always been purely capitalistic and serving comprador and foreign interests. Period. Unlike our neighbors going through various revolutions, there has never been an official government or “regime” here that advocated for, say, socialism, or Pan-Arabism, or a break with foreign interests. So the left-leaning causes end up being centered elsewhere, and they resonate back here, especially in terms of specific industries, like publishing. But when they actually managed to gain strength and popular support, they became targeted. The destruction of the left-wing coalition that went up against the local system and acted in a resistant capacity wholly outside of this mode gave us the civil war. This has not been recovered from yet.…"
AIGA, 2007
"…On the streets of Beirut, a vernacular of graffiti, political posters, cloth banners and stenci... more "…On the streets of Beirut, a vernacular of graffiti, political posters, cloth banners and stenciled portraits of leaders and martyrs—and the effacement thereof, whether intentionally or through natural causes—produces a lively debate. Various individuals and groups effectively claim existence, label their territories, as well as write and re-write their histories— Lebanon has no one history. I refer to this as a “debate” because of this back and forth, of placement and replacement, which lies in stark contrast to the monologue that rises above buildings and highways, the one-way beaming of high-priced messages as represented by billboards and advertising space.…"
Design Altruism Project, 2014
"…This is a movement for global justice, both political and economic. It focuses on the various l... more "…This is a movement for global justice, both political and economic. It focuses on the various levels of displacement, dispossession, and disinheritance that formed the active undergirding of globalizing capitalism as represented by apartheid South Africa, and today, apartheid Israel. This is not a “singling out” of one nation or one people; this is instead the focus on an offense against human rights and decency that becomes representative of all struggles worldwide for equality and dignity for all.…"
Design Altruism Project, 2011
"…The fact of the matter is that there are more vital, creative, interesting, and inherently vali... more "…The fact of the matter is that there are more vital, creative, interesting, and inherently valid artworks made by those protesting the Olympic Games than by design firms working for them, and this is easily verified (do an Internet search on “protest,” “Olympics,” and “Vancouver,” for example), leaving the design realm woefully out of touch with reality. This distance from the street can be summed up by the recently held What Design Can Do conference in Amsterdam, as well as the upcoming Design Activism and Social Change conference of the Fundació Història del Disseny in Barcelona — another Olympic city that went through its urban restructuring and is now witnessing uprisings — which without apparent irony will feature a city tour of “Anarchism in Barcelona” for attending designers. The blog for the Barcelona conference more incredibly critiques the former conference for maintaining that neo-liberalism is a given, yet this is validated by many of the speakers in Barcelona and their connections to core centers and peripheral extensors of Capital. A more potent and far more valid critique would be along the lines of the anarchists in Copenhagen, defacing the mural painted by artist Shepard Fairey, best known for his “Hope” painting of Barack Obama.…"
In February of 2015, The Beirut-based artists' collective Jamaa Al-Yad produced materials for the... more In February of 2015, The Beirut-based artists' collective Jamaa Al-Yad produced materials for the theater play Malcolm X Returns as well as the workshops and discussions held on the AUB campus. One of the events held on campus was a lecture series featuring Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace, as well as Daniel Drennan ElAwar, then a professor at the university. The lectures focused on Malcolm X as a historical figure (Dr. Baraka) as well as an "image", represented, maligned, exalted (Prof. ElAwar). Both lectures are available from the link on the first page of this slide show, which was used by Prof. ElAwar in his lecture. His lecture examines the role of activist art in representation, audience, and bridging of common cause.
A panel discussion “Narratives of Hope” discussing Malcolm X was presented by Ajamu Baraka and Da... more A panel discussion “Narratives of Hope” discussing Malcolm X was presented by Ajamu Baraka and Daniel Drennan, and moderated by Dr. Rania Masri, on February 23, 2015.
My presentation documents self-representation within resistant communities, and speaks of fighting the reduced image provided by the given dominant mode.
A panel discussion “Narratives of Hope” discussing Malcolm X was presented by Ajamu Baraka and Da... more A panel discussion “Narratives of Hope” discussing Malcolm X was presented by Ajamu Baraka and Daniel Drennan, and moderated by Dr. Rania Masri, on February 23, 2015.
My presentation documents self-representation within resistant communities, and speaks of fighting the reduced image provided by the given dominant mode.
Land of Gazillion Adoptees, 2015
This was my second piece for Land of Gazillion Adoptees/Gazillion Voices, originally published in... more This was my second piece for Land of Gazillion Adoptees/Gazillion Voices, originally published in May of 2015.
"I explained that I was adopted; that this meant I was migrated contrary to any will, voice, or agency I might be imbued with as a human being. That such an act connected me with many on the planet, similarly displaced, dispossessed, disinherited. That above all else I felt compelled to speak out about such injustice. I explained also that Palestinians were among the few in Lebanon that really “got” where I was coming from when I spoke about my adoption. Finally I stated that whereas I didn’t dare compare my situation to theirs, that there was only hope in combining voices, in sharing struggles.…"
Griot's Republic, 2018
Much of the last year of X’s life was devoted to travel in Southwest Asia and Africa. Primarily t... more Much of the last year of X’s life was devoted to travel in Southwest Asia and Africa. Primarily to perform hajj at a pivotal time in his own sense and understanding of Islam, X also wished to visit various capitals in the region. He was deeply marked by his pilgrimage. Click on link for the article at Griot's Republic.
Adoption by Daniel Drennan ElAwar
Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture Conference, 2016
Research completed as a fellow under the auspices of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and C... more Research completed as a fellow under the auspices of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship
Adoption Via Lebanon: Practices of Extirpation and Their Impact on Kinship, Community, Identity, and Citizenship
The dominant cultural mode portrays adoption as an act of charity and beneficence. This remains the status quo despite the elaboration to the contrary by adoptees come of age as well as their mothers, families, and communities from whom they go missing. The roots of modern-day adoption can be found in particular cultural concepts of nuclear family and the exaltation of the individual over the community. Furthermore, historically speaking, adoption as we know and understand it today evolved from indentured servitude, the emptying of poorhouses, social experiments based in eugenics that targeted the poor and indigent, the eradication of the Indigenous, the population and re-population of colonies and colonizing countries, as well as the procurement of cheap labor. Only much later in time did the mythology of adoption shift to evoke family creation. Nonetheless, its vestigial historical and socially experimental derivations categorize adoption as a manifestation of class warfare, as well as of colonial and imperial power.
The origins of adoption practice so described and its global expansion/universalization over the past century reveal what I will refer to in this lecture as an international “cosmopolitan class”. This class shares particular beliefs about itself that are rooted in the globalizing capitalism that gave it rise. Whereas previously there was a concomitant belief that one could aspire to this class--and, for adoptees, that they were elevated to this class--the crises within capitalism have created and exacerbated an unbridgeable divide, with adoptees left walking a "razor's edge" between them. Expanding further, this divide denotes a difference not just in terms of citizenship, but in sheer political embodiment, between what I will define and refer to as polis and zoë. Via the adoption of children across borders and class strata, this class empowers nation-state agency in a continuation of colonial and missionary actions against subject populations. The perpetuation of the practice is based in shared class interests in a formerly liberal and currently neo-liberal order. Adoption is thus added to a list of deleterious practices of dispossession, displacement, and disinheritance actively used against those deemed to be extraneous to the body politic.
Bada’el/Alternatives | Legal Agenda Workshop, 2014
In 2014, Bada’el/Alternatives and Legal Agenda held a workshop aimed at defining within Lebanon t... more In 2014, Bada’el/Alternatives and Legal Agenda held a workshop aimed at defining within Lebanon the right to origins and establishing alternative care policies for so-called orphans. This presentation, which was simultaneously translated into Arabic for those listening, expanded on research into adoption practices, and placed them within the Southeast Asian context.
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Art and Culture by Daniel Drennan ElAwar
Teaching illustration in the periphery of capital/empire reveals contradictions of disconnection and uprootedness concerning culture, language, community, and artistic practice. Analyzing and contesting this fracture has a long history. Paulo Freire stated: “The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors”, Frantz Fanon referred to the “colonized mind”, and Patrick Lumumba called for “mental decolonization”.
Given the structural nature of colonial education, within which students are educated outside of local language, culture, and majority class, how might it be possible to reintegrate with local space, popular realm, and community-mindedness? How would an awareness of globalization, liberalism, and imperialism have an impact on their projects and their local artistic practices? Finally, what are the negative effects/disincentives of taking political stands in terms of personal and/or commercial work, given a globalized art industry itself imbued with neo-liberal and capitalist norms?
This presentation reflects on twelve years of teaching in Greater Syria. Themes examined include communal and collaborative work; the collision of local and colonial languages; the interaction with displaced, dispossessed, and marginalized populations; the exploration of social issues beyond imperialist and humanitarian imperialist contexts; as well as concepts of fractured, uprooted, and affected identities. The presentation explores as well how such pedagogical foci might be applicable in the core of capital/empire, as well as among disparate and seen-as unrelated communities.
KEYWORDS
Decolonization methodologies
Indigenization
Visual Arts
Illustration
Class
Marxism
Antonio Gramsci
Mehdi ‘Amel
Anti-capitalism
Anti-globalization
Extirpation
Colonialism
Social Death
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for feedback from Jamaa Al-Yad members Lara Atallah and Karim Eid-Sabbagh, as well as for the input, work, and support from my students over the past decade and a half. No greater inspiration exists for my efforts.
NOTE
This is an expanded version of the presentation given at the CAA Conference in New York City, February, 2019.
The document evolved through collaborative development and an extensive self-evaluation after each project’s completion. These guidelines were most notably employed in 2010 as the primary framework for a design class taught at the American University of Beirut entitled: “Design III: Mediating the Real World”, and in 2018 for a relief printmaking class taught at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC, entitled: “Relief Printmaking: The Art of Protest and Resistance”. In June of 2019, they formed the basis of a workshop given at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, for the MDLAB Conference that took place there.
The following is taken from the most recent printmaking class’s syllabus:
Evaluating illustration as a material practice of protest and resistance requires an examination not just of images produced, but of producers, media of application and dissemination, context of production, as well as audiences engaged with. To further elaborate is how cultural norms inform and shape artistic practice, and how adherence to, as well as resistance against these norms further mold popular imaginary concerning local and global events. In this light, such practice relies on technique and medium to embody as much meaning as the subject matter illustrated.
Current art education, reflecting dominant cultural norms as well as economic and political incentives concerning pedagogy and learning, focuses on the artist as a unique individual divorced from audience: an independent and exalted actor with absolute “agency” and “free will”. This is a willful contradiction and deceit that avoids seeing the artist as a conduit of a given class context, often of a hegemonic dominant cultural discourse. It further obviates engagement with audiences in creative labor. Students will be expected to challenge a passive channeling of the status quo and to actively question their role and engagement in terms of their own practice.
Collective and collaborative practices will be foregrounded in this class. Furthermore, this class will focus on the historic role of the craftsperson and artist, art as a material practice, the non-neutrality of tools and means of dissemination, the definition of and engagement with audiences concerning their artistic output, and the shared and co-extensive labor of artistic endeavors. The goal here is not a purity of practice, but instead a weeding out of the taints, leanings, and extirpative intent of the dominant cultural mode. Long-term, this will lead to a robust practice solidly grounded in dialectical frameworks, discussions, and critiques as well as valid media and praxis.
Included here are the vocabulary and framework as evolved to this point; a case study and evaluation of one of Jamaa Al-Yad’s projects; and a worksheet for analyzing manifestations in an active and activist manner. To note: The suggested practice case study (Positive-Negatives) was chosen for its self-presentation as progressive and beneficent. Examined using the vocabulary and framework provided, it can instead be seen to evoke a neo-liberal, reactionary, and colonizing stance via liberal tropes and extracted narratives derived from the global South but for a global Northern audience.
This manifesto was originally published as a blog post in May of 2021; it has been updated and revised now that I've been back into the fiber arts for a few years. The "manifesto" as such in terms of material practice, ideas of community, as well as collective notions of creative output stems from and applies to other arts as well. The perspective is from the Global South, and a class-based analysis examines notions of communal endeavor, source material, as well as the "stitching together" of community.
UPDATE: March 25, 2023, added a section on Material Production in answer to the focus in Global Northern fiber communities on "charity" purchases of yarn from countries in the Global South.
UPDATE: October 20, 2024, minor typos corrected; addendum added to address a successful campaign to add Palestine to the country drop-down menu at Ravelry.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2019/07/01/Undone-Newcomer-Story/
The publisher, David Beers, asked if I would be interested in addressing the following concerns about the story, stated as follows:
We are reaching out to you and others who have expertise and influence in order to publish a follow-up piece. We ask for your responses and ideas for how to improve support for newly arrived refugees, particularly those from the LGBTQ community who may be from conservative religious backgrounds. We aim to publish this piece on August 2. Any thought or ideas you might be willing to share for publication would be very much appreciated. Among the questions that come to mind are:
How does Farid’s story fit into the picture of challenges for refugees you are learning about in your role?
What additional context would you like to see added to this report?
Do you see in Farid’s story indications of a systemic failure?
Do you think the provincial or federal government should be holding hearings on gaps in services, especially around mental health?
Can you recommend others we should connect with in seeking ideas for improving matters?
Would you be willing to allow us to publish your response?
This is my response to the story, which addresses issues of decolonization, mediation, and representation of “refugees” in “Western” media. It is an attempt to provide a meta-observation, a step back away from the story, in an effort to decolonize perceptions of immigrants within a Canadian context. This response is referenced in a follow-up article that appeared on August 2, 2019.
“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”
In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.…
The further implication that this dominant group is now the normative one, reduces much of the world’s population to useless appendage (as Agamben rightly posits), yet results in their objectification as much-heralded examples of revolution via this medium, as can be seen in advertisements from credit card companies that portray Africans in tribal dress as the new enlightened users of their services. More recent examples, such as the so-called Twitter revolution in Iran, reveal instead a minority comprador class in cahoots with foreign intervening powers, using the marketing language of the Internet to sell "freedom" as a self-aggrandizing trope to the very West that engendered it, yet which in no way embodies it to begin with. Contradictory examples do exist, such as African farmers using cell phone technologies to communicate, or the organizing currently taking place among factory workers in Egypt, but these can be shown to be manifestations of an extant on-the-ground capacity for social networking, a vibrant social contract that pre-exists the technology. Meaning, if the Web were to disappear, Egypt would still be able to organize and strike; the compradors, on the other hand, would have a much more difficult time of things.
This article focuses on the uselessness of sub-categories of ethnic or other so-called identity markers, the continuation of the straw man discussion of East versus West, or the divining of greater abstract meanings via superficial semiotic trappings. It posits that focus need be brought upon what makes for true dominant and resistant discourse, the fact that these discourses are hugely complex and found within and without Eastern and Western societies in their inclusive entireties, and that the primary goal of current dominant discourses is to destroy their social networks and non-mediated expression by the enforcement of dystopic tools that contradictorily proclaim utopia even in their destruction of non-mediated voice. That this branding and mediation applies equally and indiscriminately to soap detergent, taco restaurants, and action figures but also to countries, politicians, our current spate of ersatz revolutions, and ever-perpetual wars should give us great pause. Those truly in favor of a radical break with the current status quo will need to examine cultural manifestations for their meaning in a way that questions creator, audience, and medium; and in such a way that these symbolic events' complexity is expanded on and not reduced, in order that the manipulative tango so far described becomes evident and therefore avoidable if not defeatable.
In the summer of 2014, renowned American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Salaita’s employment was terminated in response to his public tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s summer assault on Gaza. —Haymarket Books, publicity blurb for Uncivil Rites
This article explores themes that date back to my Master’s degree work completed at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. The divide inherent then between projects in the public interest——based on notions of public access and democratic control of the media, as compared to projects that were useful more in terms of corporate sponsorship and donations——reveals a stark political and class chasm that persists within the digital realm to this day. As digital media consolidate more in fewer hands, and as individual privacy concerns serve as a blind to obfuscate issues of communal control and content, the need for the conversation to shift in a literally radical way grows more pressing. In the example put forward here, that of a Twitter bot that I programmed to call out right-wing and reactionary accounts (which itself got shut down), I hope to elucidate what should be a major concern of all truly progressive forces concerning the media and their sources, the technologies of conveyance and their private owners, as well as the distances imposed on audiences in terms of the ability to be heard, to organize, to protest, and to resist.
KEYWORDS
Technology
Algorithms
Perl
Twitter
Social Media
Islamophobia
Racism
Linguistics
Liberation Theology
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the assistance of Damian Conway whose book on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and email feedback on Perl gave me the confidence to write the Twitter module which is still in use with my other Twitter accounts.
My presentation documents self-representation within resistant communities, and speaks of fighting the reduced image provided by the given dominant mode.
My presentation documents self-representation within resistant communities, and speaks of fighting the reduced image provided by the given dominant mode.
"I explained that I was adopted; that this meant I was migrated contrary to any will, voice, or agency I might be imbued with as a human being. That such an act connected me with many on the planet, similarly displaced, dispossessed, disinherited. That above all else I felt compelled to speak out about such injustice. I explained also that Palestinians were among the few in Lebanon that really “got” where I was coming from when I spoke about my adoption. Finally I stated that whereas I didn’t dare compare my situation to theirs, that there was only hope in combining voices, in sharing struggles.…"
Adoption by Daniel Drennan ElAwar
Adoption Via Lebanon: Practices of Extirpation and Their Impact on Kinship, Community, Identity, and Citizenship
The dominant cultural mode portrays adoption as an act of charity and beneficence. This remains the status quo despite the elaboration to the contrary by adoptees come of age as well as their mothers, families, and communities from whom they go missing. The roots of modern-day adoption can be found in particular cultural concepts of nuclear family and the exaltation of the individual over the community. Furthermore, historically speaking, adoption as we know and understand it today evolved from indentured servitude, the emptying of poorhouses, social experiments based in eugenics that targeted the poor and indigent, the eradication of the Indigenous, the population and re-population of colonies and colonizing countries, as well as the procurement of cheap labor. Only much later in time did the mythology of adoption shift to evoke family creation. Nonetheless, its vestigial historical and socially experimental derivations categorize adoption as a manifestation of class warfare, as well as of colonial and imperial power.
The origins of adoption practice so described and its global expansion/universalization over the past century reveal what I will refer to in this lecture as an international “cosmopolitan class”. This class shares particular beliefs about itself that are rooted in the globalizing capitalism that gave it rise. Whereas previously there was a concomitant belief that one could aspire to this class--and, for adoptees, that they were elevated to this class--the crises within capitalism have created and exacerbated an unbridgeable divide, with adoptees left walking a "razor's edge" between them. Expanding further, this divide denotes a difference not just in terms of citizenship, but in sheer political embodiment, between what I will define and refer to as polis and zoë. Via the adoption of children across borders and class strata, this class empowers nation-state agency in a continuation of colonial and missionary actions against subject populations. The perpetuation of the practice is based in shared class interests in a formerly liberal and currently neo-liberal order. Adoption is thus added to a list of deleterious practices of dispossession, displacement, and disinheritance actively used against those deemed to be extraneous to the body politic.
Teaching illustration in the periphery of capital/empire reveals contradictions of disconnection and uprootedness concerning culture, language, community, and artistic practice. Analyzing and contesting this fracture has a long history. Paulo Freire stated: “The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors”, Frantz Fanon referred to the “colonized mind”, and Patrick Lumumba called for “mental decolonization”.
Given the structural nature of colonial education, within which students are educated outside of local language, culture, and majority class, how might it be possible to reintegrate with local space, popular realm, and community-mindedness? How would an awareness of globalization, liberalism, and imperialism have an impact on their projects and their local artistic practices? Finally, what are the negative effects/disincentives of taking political stands in terms of personal and/or commercial work, given a globalized art industry itself imbued with neo-liberal and capitalist norms?
This presentation reflects on twelve years of teaching in Greater Syria. Themes examined include communal and collaborative work; the collision of local and colonial languages; the interaction with displaced, dispossessed, and marginalized populations; the exploration of social issues beyond imperialist and humanitarian imperialist contexts; as well as concepts of fractured, uprooted, and affected identities. The presentation explores as well how such pedagogical foci might be applicable in the core of capital/empire, as well as among disparate and seen-as unrelated communities.
KEYWORDS
Decolonization methodologies
Indigenization
Visual Arts
Illustration
Class
Marxism
Antonio Gramsci
Mehdi ‘Amel
Anti-capitalism
Anti-globalization
Extirpation
Colonialism
Social Death
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for feedback from Jamaa Al-Yad members Lara Atallah and Karim Eid-Sabbagh, as well as for the input, work, and support from my students over the past decade and a half. No greater inspiration exists for my efforts.
NOTE
This is an expanded version of the presentation given at the CAA Conference in New York City, February, 2019.
The document evolved through collaborative development and an extensive self-evaluation after each project’s completion. These guidelines were most notably employed in 2010 as the primary framework for a design class taught at the American University of Beirut entitled: “Design III: Mediating the Real World”, and in 2018 for a relief printmaking class taught at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC, entitled: “Relief Printmaking: The Art of Protest and Resistance”. In June of 2019, they formed the basis of a workshop given at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, for the MDLAB Conference that took place there.
The following is taken from the most recent printmaking class’s syllabus:
Evaluating illustration as a material practice of protest and resistance requires an examination not just of images produced, but of producers, media of application and dissemination, context of production, as well as audiences engaged with. To further elaborate is how cultural norms inform and shape artistic practice, and how adherence to, as well as resistance against these norms further mold popular imaginary concerning local and global events. In this light, such practice relies on technique and medium to embody as much meaning as the subject matter illustrated.
Current art education, reflecting dominant cultural norms as well as economic and political incentives concerning pedagogy and learning, focuses on the artist as a unique individual divorced from audience: an independent and exalted actor with absolute “agency” and “free will”. This is a willful contradiction and deceit that avoids seeing the artist as a conduit of a given class context, often of a hegemonic dominant cultural discourse. It further obviates engagement with audiences in creative labor. Students will be expected to challenge a passive channeling of the status quo and to actively question their role and engagement in terms of their own practice.
Collective and collaborative practices will be foregrounded in this class. Furthermore, this class will focus on the historic role of the craftsperson and artist, art as a material practice, the non-neutrality of tools and means of dissemination, the definition of and engagement with audiences concerning their artistic output, and the shared and co-extensive labor of artistic endeavors. The goal here is not a purity of practice, but instead a weeding out of the taints, leanings, and extirpative intent of the dominant cultural mode. Long-term, this will lead to a robust practice solidly grounded in dialectical frameworks, discussions, and critiques as well as valid media and praxis.
Included here are the vocabulary and framework as evolved to this point; a case study and evaluation of one of Jamaa Al-Yad’s projects; and a worksheet for analyzing manifestations in an active and activist manner. To note: The suggested practice case study (Positive-Negatives) was chosen for its self-presentation as progressive and beneficent. Examined using the vocabulary and framework provided, it can instead be seen to evoke a neo-liberal, reactionary, and colonizing stance via liberal tropes and extracted narratives derived from the global South but for a global Northern audience.
This manifesto was originally published as a blog post in May of 2021; it has been updated and revised now that I've been back into the fiber arts for a few years. The "manifesto" as such in terms of material practice, ideas of community, as well as collective notions of creative output stems from and applies to other arts as well. The perspective is from the Global South, and a class-based analysis examines notions of communal endeavor, source material, as well as the "stitching together" of community.
UPDATE: March 25, 2023, added a section on Material Production in answer to the focus in Global Northern fiber communities on "charity" purchases of yarn from countries in the Global South.
UPDATE: October 20, 2024, minor typos corrected; addendum added to address a successful campaign to add Palestine to the country drop-down menu at Ravelry.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2019/07/01/Undone-Newcomer-Story/
The publisher, David Beers, asked if I would be interested in addressing the following concerns about the story, stated as follows:
We are reaching out to you and others who have expertise and influence in order to publish a follow-up piece. We ask for your responses and ideas for how to improve support for newly arrived refugees, particularly those from the LGBTQ community who may be from conservative religious backgrounds. We aim to publish this piece on August 2. Any thought or ideas you might be willing to share for publication would be very much appreciated. Among the questions that come to mind are:
How does Farid’s story fit into the picture of challenges for refugees you are learning about in your role?
What additional context would you like to see added to this report?
Do you see in Farid’s story indications of a systemic failure?
Do you think the provincial or federal government should be holding hearings on gaps in services, especially around mental health?
Can you recommend others we should connect with in seeking ideas for improving matters?
Would you be willing to allow us to publish your response?
This is my response to the story, which addresses issues of decolonization, mediation, and representation of “refugees” in “Western” media. It is an attempt to provide a meta-observation, a step back away from the story, in an effort to decolonize perceptions of immigrants within a Canadian context. This response is referenced in a follow-up article that appeared on August 2, 2019.
“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”
In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.…
The further implication that this dominant group is now the normative one, reduces much of the world’s population to useless appendage (as Agamben rightly posits), yet results in their objectification as much-heralded examples of revolution via this medium, as can be seen in advertisements from credit card companies that portray Africans in tribal dress as the new enlightened users of their services. More recent examples, such as the so-called Twitter revolution in Iran, reveal instead a minority comprador class in cahoots with foreign intervening powers, using the marketing language of the Internet to sell "freedom" as a self-aggrandizing trope to the very West that engendered it, yet which in no way embodies it to begin with. Contradictory examples do exist, such as African farmers using cell phone technologies to communicate, or the organizing currently taking place among factory workers in Egypt, but these can be shown to be manifestations of an extant on-the-ground capacity for social networking, a vibrant social contract that pre-exists the technology. Meaning, if the Web were to disappear, Egypt would still be able to organize and strike; the compradors, on the other hand, would have a much more difficult time of things.
This article focuses on the uselessness of sub-categories of ethnic or other so-called identity markers, the continuation of the straw man discussion of East versus West, or the divining of greater abstract meanings via superficial semiotic trappings. It posits that focus need be brought upon what makes for true dominant and resistant discourse, the fact that these discourses are hugely complex and found within and without Eastern and Western societies in their inclusive entireties, and that the primary goal of current dominant discourses is to destroy their social networks and non-mediated expression by the enforcement of dystopic tools that contradictorily proclaim utopia even in their destruction of non-mediated voice. That this branding and mediation applies equally and indiscriminately to soap detergent, taco restaurants, and action figures but also to countries, politicians, our current spate of ersatz revolutions, and ever-perpetual wars should give us great pause. Those truly in favor of a radical break with the current status quo will need to examine cultural manifestations for their meaning in a way that questions creator, audience, and medium; and in such a way that these symbolic events' complexity is expanded on and not reduced, in order that the manipulative tango so far described becomes evident and therefore avoidable if not defeatable.
In the summer of 2014, renowned American Indian studies professor Steven Salaita had his appointment to a tenured professorship revoked by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Salaita’s employment was terminated in response to his public tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s summer assault on Gaza. —Haymarket Books, publicity blurb for Uncivil Rites
This article explores themes that date back to my Master’s degree work completed at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. The divide inherent then between projects in the public interest——based on notions of public access and democratic control of the media, as compared to projects that were useful more in terms of corporate sponsorship and donations——reveals a stark political and class chasm that persists within the digital realm to this day. As digital media consolidate more in fewer hands, and as individual privacy concerns serve as a blind to obfuscate issues of communal control and content, the need for the conversation to shift in a literally radical way grows more pressing. In the example put forward here, that of a Twitter bot that I programmed to call out right-wing and reactionary accounts (which itself got shut down), I hope to elucidate what should be a major concern of all truly progressive forces concerning the media and their sources, the technologies of conveyance and their private owners, as well as the distances imposed on audiences in terms of the ability to be heard, to organize, to protest, and to resist.
KEYWORDS
Technology
Algorithms
Perl
Twitter
Social Media
Islamophobia
Racism
Linguistics
Liberation Theology
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the assistance of Damian Conway whose book on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and email feedback on Perl gave me the confidence to write the Twitter module which is still in use with my other Twitter accounts.
My presentation documents self-representation within resistant communities, and speaks of fighting the reduced image provided by the given dominant mode.
My presentation documents self-representation within resistant communities, and speaks of fighting the reduced image provided by the given dominant mode.
"I explained that I was adopted; that this meant I was migrated contrary to any will, voice, or agency I might be imbued with as a human being. That such an act connected me with many on the planet, similarly displaced, dispossessed, disinherited. That above all else I felt compelled to speak out about such injustice. I explained also that Palestinians were among the few in Lebanon that really “got” where I was coming from when I spoke about my adoption. Finally I stated that whereas I didn’t dare compare my situation to theirs, that there was only hope in combining voices, in sharing struggles.…"
Adoption Via Lebanon: Practices of Extirpation and Their Impact on Kinship, Community, Identity, and Citizenship
The dominant cultural mode portrays adoption as an act of charity and beneficence. This remains the status quo despite the elaboration to the contrary by adoptees come of age as well as their mothers, families, and communities from whom they go missing. The roots of modern-day adoption can be found in particular cultural concepts of nuclear family and the exaltation of the individual over the community. Furthermore, historically speaking, adoption as we know and understand it today evolved from indentured servitude, the emptying of poorhouses, social experiments based in eugenics that targeted the poor and indigent, the eradication of the Indigenous, the population and re-population of colonies and colonizing countries, as well as the procurement of cheap labor. Only much later in time did the mythology of adoption shift to evoke family creation. Nonetheless, its vestigial historical and socially experimental derivations categorize adoption as a manifestation of class warfare, as well as of colonial and imperial power.
The origins of adoption practice so described and its global expansion/universalization over the past century reveal what I will refer to in this lecture as an international “cosmopolitan class”. This class shares particular beliefs about itself that are rooted in the globalizing capitalism that gave it rise. Whereas previously there was a concomitant belief that one could aspire to this class--and, for adoptees, that they were elevated to this class--the crises within capitalism have created and exacerbated an unbridgeable divide, with adoptees left walking a "razor's edge" between them. Expanding further, this divide denotes a difference not just in terms of citizenship, but in sheer political embodiment, between what I will define and refer to as polis and zoë. Via the adoption of children across borders and class strata, this class empowers nation-state agency in a continuation of colonial and missionary actions against subject populations. The perpetuation of the practice is based in shared class interests in a formerly liberal and currently neo-liberal order. Adoption is thus added to a list of deleterious practices of dispossession, displacement, and disinheritance actively used against those deemed to be extraneous to the body politic.
☐ First, an introduction to Frantz Fanon for those who are not familiar with his work.
☐ Second, an application of his main theoretical and practical writings from the book: The Wretched of the Earth to the situation of the adopted child.
☐ Third, a mapping out and expansion of his framework in an effort to engender a discussion and find a valid practical application of adoptee resistance.
PROPOSAL:
1. Purpose • This presentation will challenge the current stasis of adoption activism. It will propose the correct reclassification of adoption as a purely extirpative practice. This redefinition demands responses that do not in and of themselves aid or abet said practice. It will advance an activist and revolutionary praxis as the basis for a renewed activism concerning adoption.
2. Conceptualizations/Theory(ies) • Despite its formalization and adaptation over the years, adoption’s function as an extirpative violence continues to seek the removal of the unwanted, unfit, and undesirable figuratively from the body politic, more literally from geographic place, and existentially from life itself. As such, adoption activism need focus on precursors in a similar vein: eugenics, euthanasia, genocide, and societal cleansing of unwanted populations. A radical adoption activism puts forward the tenet that the act of adoption does not put an end to this desired annihilation, nor does it remove an adoptee to a safe haven. In fact, the desired end result of the original targeting continues, with deleterious social and psychological effects on adoptees over a lifetime.
In this light, and in an effort to regain a sense of holistic purpose, such activism must seek out communal alliances with those similarly deemed outside of the polis and part of the zoë (Agamben). It requires an examination of the history of adoption less in terms of race, family, belonging, and identity along individualistic lines as defined and categorized by dominant norms, and more in terms of originating class and community as targeted for extermination by said norms. Theoretical frameworks denoting the formalization of genocidal strategies (Card, Marsoobian), the concept of social death (Patterson), and the failures of liberal citizenship (Balibar, Wallerstein) prevail as valid lenses through which to define adoption, especially in the face of the continuing failure of adoptees to be considered valid members of the polity.
The dominant cultural mode portrays adoption as an act of charity and beneficence. This despite the growing elaboration to the contrary by adoptees come of age as well as their mothers, families, and communities from whom they go missing. This trope also runs counter to more popular cultural conceptions of adoption. In these the implied absence of filiation is still a mark and a stain on the one so branded. Nonetheless, this stigma is often alleviated via informal kinship practices. On the contrary, those who abscond with children are painted literally as bogeymen. The disparity of viewpoints makes sense when the historical roots of modern-day adoption are reviewed. These roots derive from class-based concepts of the nuclear family and the exaltation of the individual over the community. Historically, adoption evolved from indentured servitude, the emptying of poorhouses, the eradication of the Indigenous, the population of colonies, and the procurement of cheap labor from abroad. The rise of American empire post–World War II necessitated that the mythology of adoption shift to primarily evoke family creation. Its vestigial historical and socially experimental derivations nonetheless categorize adoption as a mutable manifestation of class warfare, as well as of colonial and imperial power.
Informal and/or communal kinship practices are thus inverted and formalized under the rubric “adoption”. In this formalization and use against targeted populations, the origins of the institution carry forward as manifestations of current adoption industry practice. The practice is reinforced and becomes hegemonic. Receiving and source populations continue to reflect the class disparity that has always been at the core of this transfer of children and rupture of filiation. This transfer maps readily onto extirpative practices also based in economic and political class disparities. These include slavery, trafficking, gentrification, deportation, immigration, land occupation, apartheid, incarceration, enforced statelessness, etc. The origins of the practice and its global expansion/universalization reveal an international “cosmopolitan class”. Expanding further, this divide denotes a difference in sheer political embodiment, between polis and zoë. Via the adoption of children across borders and class strata, dominant classes empower nation-state agency in a continuation of colonial and missionary incursions against subject populations. The perpetuation of the practice is based in shared class interests in globalization and the neo-liberal order. In this way, adoption is added to a list of deleterious practices of dispossession, displacement, and disinheritance employed against those deemed to be extraneous to the body politic.
The Conference was held at the Padova Hotel, Sin el Fil, and the aim of the conference was to highlight the processes and practices of inter-country adoption via Lebanon and their implications concerning the right to origins and access to information. The findings of the documentation process of some thousands of adoption encounters was shared. Foregrounded were the narratives of the individuals who were adopted as well as the unheard voices of original mothers and families. The following is one such testimony, an homage to my mother Bahija.
The Conference was held at the Padova Hotel, Sin el Fil, and the aim of the conference was to highlight the processes and practices of intercountry adoption via Lebanon and their implications concerning the right to origins and access to information. The findings of the documentation process of some thousands of adoption encounters was shared. Foregrounded were the narratives of the individuals who were adopted as well as the unheard voices of original mothers and families. The following is one such testimony, a homage to my mother Bahija.
Translation: Hala Kambris
This is the original Arabic of an article I wrote in 2007 entitled: "Re-evaluating Adoption: Validating the Local".
Informal and/or communal kinship practices are thus inverted and formalized under the rubric “adoption”. In this formalization and use against targeted populations, the origins of the institution carry forward as manifestations of current adoption industry practice. The practice is reinforced and becomes hegemonic. Receiving and source populations continue to reflect the class disparity that has always been at the core of this transfer of children and rupture of filiation. This transfer maps readily onto extirpative practices also based in economic and political class disparities. These include slavery, trafficking, gentrification, deportation, immigration, land occupation, apartheid, incarceration, enforced statelessness, etc. The origins of the practice and its global expansion/universalization reveal an international “cosmopolitan class”. Expanding further, this divide denotes a difference in sheer political embodiment, between polis and zoë. Via the adoption of children across borders and class strata, dominant classes empower nation-state agency in a continuation of colonial and missionary actions against subject populations. The perpetuation of the practice is based in shared class interests in globalization and the neo-liberal order. Adoption is thus added to a list of deleterious practices of dispossession, displacement, and disinheritance used against those deemed to be extraneous to the body politic.
This jarring contradiction between the socially progressive speaking out concerning the current situation at the border of Mexico and the United States and the seen-as progressive nature of adoption/foster care as promoted along the entire spectrum of American culture ignores the political and economic history of separating children from their parents as being functional to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Treating this as “something new” ascribes such activism to a cynical political ploy; to examine the long history of such actions provides for the possibility of true change.
The problem for adoptees arguing about their position in society is similar to what has been experienced previously by other marginalized groups looking to make a space within the hegemonic culture. Namely, how to expand out from what is considered simply a personal issue; an individual hang-up; a “selfish” focus on one’s condition. The individualistic and solipsistic dominant culture ironically turns around and tells its absconded-with children to not be so “selfish” as to complain. In other terms, this was used against other groups as well—”don’t be ‘uppity'”; “know your role”. We should literally be seen and not heard. Those days are over.
What follows is a reversal of roles. 30 answers to 30 questions that have come up in discussion boards and various “answer” web sites that pretend to be objective but more often than not stifle debate, delete contrarian posts, and disallow membership to those with a minority point of view—the web site Canada Adopts! is probably the most fascistic in this regard. This is understandable, however, when we consider that the answers to the questions, when removed from a personal or individual emotional plane, and instead focusing on the economic and political realm, are harder to justify by those in power—and thus the retaliation, the backlash, and the twisted framing of the dominant culture of those seeking infants as being somehow minority, victimized, and on the defensive.
Armed with this positioning of the argument, the anti-adoption movement is poised to join its brothers and sisters in other liberation movements of dispossessed and marginalized peoples the world over in the struggle for equality, true equality; the status of polis for all, and the end of the false positioning of the dominant mode of thinking as anything other than what it is: the political and economic destruction of those who don’t fit in to its view of the world. Nothing more and nothing less.
The questions listed out include:
Do people who have been adopted blame others all their lives for their adoption?
Can someone please tell me more about the darkside of adoption?
When/why did the word “bitter” get associated with non-compliant adoptees?
Why would someone think that Adoption erases a child’s identity?
What do you anticipate your response will be if another family member/friend decides to adopt?
What about the children? Is it better for a child to live in hell?
Does anything anyone say about adoption hurt you anymore?
[What do you think of this] “Gotcha Day” celebration?
Should international adopters send the children back?
Do you believe God has a play in infertility/fertility/adoption?
Why is it common for infant-adoptive parents to be ridiculed?
Have you felt in your life like you’re always searching for something?
In adoption-speak, what difference between “from China” and “Chinese”?
Should I write this letter to the mother of the child in my care?
Wouldn’t you want Lebanese orphans to be saved like you?
Why are people so against adoption here?
Shouldn’t we praise those who disrupt their adoptions?
What if I make every effort to help my child through their grief?
Is there a difference between an adopted child and a “Western” child?
Why don’t more people adopt?
What can adoptive parents do to change things?
What do you think of expatriate adoptions abroad?
Doesn’t it say to adopt in the Bible?
Is it okay to not get U.S. citizenship for an internationally adopted child?
What are you grateful for as an adoptee?
Is there any value in an adoptee cultural camp?
What does “adoptee” mean to you?
What are you [adoptee] trying to accomplish on this blog?
Isn’t it valid to compare adoption with a pregnancy?
Why are adoptees never asking, always answering questions?
The point here was always to shift the debate from the personal to the economical and political. “Entitled opinion” of course exists where history is concerned, but at least changing the parameters of the discussion gets us away from the purely emotional, and the mythologies that take advantage of this.
"Underlying this are basic notions of power differential as well as of agency, which flow along a similar continuum of individual to communal. By this I mean to say that our sense of free will is defined and shaped by a variety of outside incentives, pressures, encouragements, dissuasions, and other derivations—familial, communal, societal, spiritual, etc.—which we can say helped us form a decision, or which we might say held sway outside of our control, or which played a role somewhere in between, or, yet again, which we might be completely ignorant of. Similar to countries going through a reconciliation process, it is not valid to maintain such power differentials, or unequal agency. And so, for example, it is not enough to hear an apology from those who nonetheless remain in control: There is an inherent need for all stories to be heard in a way that truly empowers the tellers as a whole, that incorporates them into the body politic. That some stories from the realm of adoption are encouraged while others are met with disdain reveals the power differential and disempowerment so involved."
Abstract: Teaching illustration in the periphery of capital/empire reveals contradictions of disconnection/uprootedness concerning culture, language, community, and artistic practice. Contesting this fracture has a long history. Paulo Freire stated: “The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors”; Frantz Fanon referred to the “colonized mind”; and Patrick Lumumba called for “mental decolonization”. He advised his compatriots to “rediscover [their] most intimate selves and rid [them]selves of mental attitudes and complexes and habits that colonization...trapped [them] in for centuries.”
Given the structural nature of colonial education, within which students are educated outside of local language, culture, and majority class, how might it be possible to reintegrate with local space, realm, and communities? How would an awareness of globalization, liberalism, and humanitarian imperialism affect their university-based projects and, later, their local artistic practices? Finally, what are the negative effects/disincentives of taking political stands in terms of personal/commercial work, given a globalized art industry itself imbued with liberal/capitalist incentives and tendencies?
This paper will reflect on 12 years of teaching in Greater Syria, and attempting to “decolonize” the classroom. Themes examined include communal/collaborative work; the collision of local/colonial languages; the interaction with displaced, dispossessed, and marginalized populations; the exploration of social issues beyond humanitarian imperialist contexts; concepts of fractured, uprooted, and affected identities; and concluding with an exploration of how such pedagogical foci might “travel” and be applicable in the core of capital/empire, as well as among disparate and seen-as unrelated communities.