protest: africans in the zoo

I put a hold on my H-Net Afro-Am mail while I am in Taos but I got this through another listserv I'm on. Please send this zoo director an e-mail in protest.


I am a German scholar of African American History and member of H-Net Afro-Am. Today I would like to direct your attention to something that is going on in Germany which, in my opinion, requires the consideration of the international scholarly community. It is with utmost indignation that the African German community has taken notice of the plans to open an "African Village" within the zoo of Augsburg, Germany. The opening of this exhibit is scheduled for July 9 - July 12. 2005. "Artisans, silversmiths, basket makers and traditional hairdressers are situated in an unique African steppe landscape" according to the leaflets handed out by the organizers of the show. The conveners obviously are oblivious of the fact that exhibits like the one planned in Augsburg are organized within the German tradition of racist "ethnographic shows" (Völkerschauen). A letter of reply by Ms. Barbara Jantschke, PhD, from the Augsburg Zoo, directed to an African Swiss citizen underlines the intention, to put Africans on display in the zoo within "an atmosphere of exoticism".

It is obvious that the conveners do not understand the historical implications of their project. Even in Germany the impact of colonialism and racism on African societies are nowadays debated in public. The way Africans and African Americans in Germany are perceived and discussed, the way they are present on billboards and in TV ads prove that the colonialist and racist gaze is still very much alive in Germany. This is the direct result of forty years of German colonialism and twelve years of National Socialism. People of color are still seen as exotic objects (of desire), as basically dehumanized entities within the realm of animals. This also explains why a zoo has been selected as site for the exhibit. It is necessary to remind the organizers that in the history of "ethnographic shows" African and German African individuals were used as object for anthropometric tests and ethnological investigations of highlyquestionable scientific benefit. Many of the artists who performed in these shows in the 1920s and 1930s died from malnutrition and as a consequence of bad living conditions. The Nazis employed a policy of eugenic control, resulting in forced operations to limit the biological reproduction of African Germans or in downright incarceration in concentration camps.
Survivors of this policy had to gain a living as performers in exotic shows. The Augsburg exhibit thus fails to acknowledge the political and social history of persecution in Nazi Germany.

The African German community and concerned individuals like myself call to your attention the need to protest against the opening of the exhibit in the Augsburg Zoo. Please direct your personalized letters of protest to Frau Dr. Barbara Jantschke (Director Zoo Augsburg) at barbara.jantschke@zoo-augsburg.de.


Thank you
Norbert Finzsch
Professor of History and
Provost of the University of Cologne
Anglo-Amerikanische Abteilung
Historisches Seminar
Universität zu Köln
Albertus-Magnus-Platz
Philosophikum
D 50923 Köln
Tel. ++49-221-470-2307
Email: Norbert.Finzsch@uni-koeln.de
URL http://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/histsem/anglo/

fuckin' a

The amazing Ms. Zoe Strauss has been awarded a Pew Grant (http://www.pewarts.org/aboutpewfellows.html)!! There is justice in the world. Rock on, Zoe!

Malcolm X - gay black hero?

(Okay, Adrienne keeps telling me to post, so here's something I was forwarded. I don't even remember what or when it was but recently I saw Malcolm X's name on a list of famous gays or bisexuals and it didn't even register. Given the rampant push in this country to deny gay people their rights it makes for interesting reading.

Today I was walking to the post office and I hear a voice call out from behind me. It was a black man riding his bike up behind me; he has lived here in Taos for 11 months and was surprised to see another black person, particularly a woman. Alright, brother, I'm with you, but then he goes on to say that there aren't enough people of African descent here for him [hello; did you check before you moved to a town where "Other"—that is, anyone other than Latino, Anglo, or Native American—makes up less than 2% of the population?] and that white women here try to talk to him and it isn't right, that we have a 500-year history of horrendous things done to us and no one has even paid for that, blah blah blah. Then he corrals me into the music store to listen to his mediocre reggae CD with a picture of Haile Selassie and his family on the cover. And I'm thinking, hmmm, so mentioning that I'm bouncing down the street to mail a letter to my white lesbian partner is surely going to get me kicked out of the club, huh? God, I hate that kind of righteous intolerance and that way in which I'm implicated through his willingness to confide stuff like that in me.)

On Malcolm X's 80 birthday, Peter Tatchell reveals the hidden gay past of the American black nationalist
leader

Thursday May 19, 2005

The Guardian

Malcolm X was born 80 years ago today, on 19 May 1925.
But amid the commemorations, controversy is brewing.
Some black activists are enraged by suggestions that
their hero might have been gay - or at least bisexual.
The controversy has been stirring since the
publication of Bruce Perry's acclaimed biography,
Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America
(Station Hill, New York) in 1991. Based on interviews
with Malcolm's closest boyhood and adult friends,
Perry suggests that the US black nationalist leader
was not as robustly heterosexual as his Nation of
Islam (NoI) colleagues have always insisted.

Malcolm X, real name Malcolm Little, joined the
militant Muslim NoI in 1949, attracted by its teaching
that Allah would deliver black people from white
bondage. By the 1960s, Malcolm had developed NoI
ideology in new directions, becoming America's leading
spokesperson for black consciousness, pride and
self-help. Sexual freedom was not, however, part of
his agenda.

Yet Perry's book documents Malcolm X's many gay
experiences. A schoolmate, Bob Bebee, recalls the day
they stumbled on a local boy jerking off. Malcolm,
Bebee recalled, ordered the youth to masturbate him,
and subsequently boasted he had given him oral sex.
Later, from the age of 20, Malcolm had sex with men
for money - as hinted at in Spike Lee's 1992 biopic -
and he had at least one sustained sexual liaison with
a man. While living in Flint, Michigan, his roommate
noticed that instead of sleeping in the room they were
sharing, Malcolm sneaked down the hall to spend the
night with a gay transvestite named Willie Mae.
In New York, two of Malcolm's friends from Michigan
remember bumping into him at the YMCA, where Malcolm
bragged he earned money servicing "queers". Later,
Malcolm worked as a butler to a wealthy Boston
bachelor, William Paul Lennon. According to Malcolm's
sidekick Malcolm Jarvis, he was paid to sprinkle
Lennon with talcum powder and bring him to orgasm.
Perry suggests that Malcolm's gay encounters may not
have been entirely financially motivated. His
masculine insecurities and ambivalence towards women
fit the archetype of a repressed gay man and point to
latent homosexuality.

After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six,
he lacked male role models and was dominated by strong
women - in particular, his tyrannical mother. He
feared women and his early sexual experiences with
girls were mostly unsatisfactory. Far from macho,
Malcolm hated fighting and got beaten by other men.
His passionate assertion that the need to feel
masculine is a man's "greatest urge" indicates someone
doubtful of his own manliness.

As for his sporadic gay hustling, as Perry notes,
"there were other ways he could have earned money".
Dope-dealing, thieving and pimping were sources of
income he had pursued with success. There was no
imperative to sell his body. Why, then, did he
prostitute himself? Misogyny and repressed
homosexuality might be the answer. According to Perry:
"His male-to-male encounters, which rendered it
unnecessary for him to compete for women, afforded him
an opportunity for sexual release without the
attendant risk of dependence on women."
Was Malcolm X gay? Bisexual? In his schooldays, he was
apparently a passive participant. Others masturbated
or fellated him. Later, while working as a male
prostitute, he took a more hands-on role in sex,
especially with Lennon. This part-time whoring may
have been pecuniary. There is, however, plentiful
research suggesting that many guys who have sex with
men for payment are in denial about their
homosexuality. They tell themselves they are doing it
for the money. This is their way of coping with
same-sex desires that they are unable to accept. Was
this Malcolm's excuse? Surely there must have been
some degree of queer desire to enable Malcolm to
sustain his sexual experiences with men over a period
of 10 years? If this desire was within him from
adolescence to early adulthood, could he have erased
it completely in later life?

Sexuality is not like a newspaper - read today and
discarded tomorrow. Established desires can be
sublimated or repressed, but never eliminated. If
people have a homosexual capacity, it stays with them
for life - even if they never act on it. Was Malcolm
an exception? There is no evidence that his same-sex
dalliances continued once he joined the NoI; he
married and had children, and, with all the fervour of
a zealous convert, he embraced the NoI's fiercely
puritanical Muslim sexual morality.

Had he not been assassinated in 1965, almost certainly
at the hands of NoI rivals, Malcolm might have
eventually, like Huey Newton of the Black Panthers,
welcomed the gay liberation movement as part of the
struggle for human emancipation. Instead, to serve its
homophobic political agenda, for 50 years the NoI has
suppressed knowledge of Malcolm's gay past.
Now it is time to blow the whistle. There is not a
single world-famous black person who is openly gay.
Young black lesbians and gays need role models. Who
better than Malcolm X, one of the inspirations of my
activism and one of the great modern heroes of black
liberation?

See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1486997,00.html#article

support minutemen protestors!

I was just forwarded this, so in the interest of expediency:

BREAKING NEWS: Garden Grove (CA) Police drop criminal charges against Hal Netkin In a phone call I just made to Garden Grove police, they have confirmed a rumor a CNN reporter passed on to me a couple of minutes ago that Hal Netkin was released from jail early this morning and will not face criminal charges for running his minivan into four people at the protest against Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist.

Begin forwarded message:
May 25th Garden Grove Protest of Minutemen, 3 students STILL in jail, Need BAIL

****** PLEASE FWD TO ALL LISTSERVS******

PLEASE SUPPORT STUDENTS AND PROTESTORS INVOLVED IN A LOCAL PROTEST AGAINST THE RACIST MINUTEMEN! ***

ON MAY 25TH A PROTEST OCCURRED FOR THE RACIST MINUTEMAN MEETING. A MEMBER PLOWED INTO A GROUP OF PROTESTERS WITH HIS VAN AND GOT NO CHARGES BUT 5 STUDENT PROTESTERS RECEIVED FELONY CHARGES. WE NEED BAIL TO GET THEM OUT OF JAIL NOW AND PUBLICIZE THIS INJUSTICE***

IF YOU WISH TO DONATE, PLEASE ATTEND THIS MEETING OR EMAIL jjkang@uci.edu

Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist was in Garden Grove (Southern California) Wednesday night, giving a speech to a crowd of about 60 people. The Minutement Project is a racist organization attempting to unlawfully detain and deter immigrants from crossing into the United States by intimidation and force.

Protestors organized at the venue, started marching, chanting and beating drums. They were met by violent Minutemen. Police were present in riot gear and on horseback to protect the racists. Approximately five protestors were arrested; two of them have since been released through bail. A local university student was arrested for no apparent reason. The police also arrested a disabled man in a wheelchair. The charges are all FALSE and constitute a complete overreaction on behalf of the police. They are trying to make an example out of these very few.

While the police arrested and charged several innocent non-violent protestors under false charges, it was recently reported that Hal Netkin, a supporter of the racist Minutemen, was RELEASED WITHOUT CHARGES after he consciencously CHARGED HIS MINIVAN into a crowd of protestors and injuring two. This attitude shows that the police ACTIVELY SUPPORT the racist Minutemen. We need to raise as much as we can tonight in order to help alleviate the costs of bail and court fees. The sooner we get these innocent protestors out, the safer they'll be. Any amount is urgently welcomed. If you represent an organization, we ask that you relay this message to your organization. This is no joke.

DO NOT LET INJUSTICE GO UNCHECKED. PLEASE HELP FINANCIALLY AND SPREAD THE WORD. PLEASE ANY HELP WOULD BE APPRECIATED, PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO ANYONE YOU CAN, YOU CAN MEET US AT A HOLDING CELL, OR IF YOU CAN REPLY TO AASHOURI@MSN.COM AND MAIL A CHECK IT WOULD BE GREAT, BECAUSE THEY HAVE FELONY CHARGES AND BAIL FOR EACH PERSON HAS RANGED FROM $2000 TO $4000!!!

Also: http://swarmtheminutemen.com/

psycho killer

Yes, I know this image is everywhere and yes, I believe he killed that woman (as my friend Carolyn points out, the media keeps referring to her as a B-movie actress as though that lessens her value as a victim) and yes, I really suspect that this hair is symptomatic of somebody crazy like a fox (if you're being accused of murder, do you really want people to think you're in your right mind?) but damn if it doesn't make me smile in wide-eyed wonder! I've been having some low days and a glimpse at ol' Phil certainly perks me up. I made it my wallpaper—a dozen spectacularly coiffured heads (I mean, that shit is shaped) staring blankly into space. I like to think of this as the face of genius (which so many think he is; just heard someone on the radio the other day referring to him as a one).

more kudos for the ladies

Carrie Mae Weems has been awarded the 2005-2006 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship. Congrats, Carrie! Here's her project statement from their site (http://www.aarome.org/rome_prize/prize_list_index.htm):

I would like to produce a new body of work at the cinecittà film studio using Rome and its architectural ruins as the social space to investigate the collapsing power of the state. Much of my work during the past 25 years has in one way or another focused on this issue. In this context, however, I am interested in the comic/tragic as a way of continuing this investigation, using elements of performance, theater, spectacle, and humor as the vehicle. Some might call this the circus.

"...the study of madness isn't enough to create sanity."

That's it. Someone shared it with me and it seemed like food for thought.

what's up with african men being the new weird exotic in movies?

Yeah, let me just post this—I've been watching a lot of movies here; two of the ones I rented were I ♥ Huckabees and Garden State. So in each of these films there is an African man who has been adopted by a kooky white suburban family, played for either mystery or laughs. Now, I suppose these are both your youth-oriented hipster flicks, possibly not meant for the likes of me, and everyone is cast as quirky but what are they trying to say about black men, about African men? That they aren't quite like the white folks around which they live and work—indeed, in whose families they are depicted living? Given that there are no other black folks in either movie—no friends, no clerks, none—these plot arcs based solely on the "joke" of difference are really rather troublesome. Has anyone else seen either and can offer their opinion? I wanted to like both films, but I kept thinking, why can't the black man just be?

beulah and maudelle

Okay, I know there are some folks out there who know more about early 20th century African American, Los Angeles-based sculptor Beulah Woodard than I. I'm trying to find information about and the whereabouts of sculptures she made of Maudelle Bass. Here's one:




The other, apparently, is of Maudelle in a Madonna pose (which I suppose this could be, depending on what the rest of it looks like). Help!


Spring has finally come here; though chilly today, things are blooming; there are lilacs everywhere! (Now that's I've got my digital camera's batteries I can start posting cheesy pictures.) Now that I'm settling in I can feel the clock ticking—that's inevitable, I suppose. Residencies are strange things. On the one hand, they make no sense—why leave your life and your stuff behind for a period of time? You can't possibly remember or have room to bring everything you might need to produce something. How can one really work that way? On the other, you truly do have to resort to your creativity or inspiration or something when you're plunk down in the middle of nowhere far from home and the mail is so slow that it takes 2 weeks to turn around a http://www.greencine.com movie (they're a cool independent alternative to Netflix). Suffice it to say I'm very happy to be here and I hope I get a fraction done of what I thought I would.

Oh, and for those of you keeping track I was turned down for another job—for the first time in my life I applied for a corporate job (reasoning that most arts money is corporate, too, just less direct) but I guess a bunch of varied arts administration doesn't translate. Sigh. How can I possibly be so unemployable? Oh, make that two—I think I can safely add UCIrvine to the list of rejectors. Maybe they all know I don't really want their jobs even though I could do them in my sleep? Sigh. I guess this just means I have to do my own thing, make it up. I got a few ideas brewing, my partner and I. Once again, stay tuned...

(Oh, and for those of you also keeping track, PageSixSixSix is now http://www.perezhilton.com !)

with a nod to ice cube...

I gotta say it was a good day.

Lesson #1—leave the house. Preferably on foot or something else near to the ground. My best days here so far have been the ones where I left my life (what I brought of it with me here) behind for a few hours to discover something else. What got me out of the house was having to go to the post office to pick up a beautiful print Myra sent me (thanks, Myra!) You know, there's nothing like getting exciting mail (hint, hint; my mailing address here is 5318 NDCBU Taos, NM 87571, through June 30) and knowing what it was I was already feeling pretty great about that.

I started with a late breakfast; wanting overall change in my life I went someplace other than Michael's Kitchen (http://michaelskitchen.com/) and the Dragonfly Café (http://www.dragonflytaos.com/), and I'm glad I did—the waitress, Marla, at the Bent Street Café (no website) was so much nicer to me than they ever are at Michael's—I wonder if they're Republicans?! (they're always nice at the Dragonfly but Michael's serves breakfast all day.) I was reading the local paper headline and Marla and I both agreed that the woman who'd hit her philandering state senator husband with a hammer was totally justified—she should have hit him harder!

I saw there was an arts and crafts fair in the park across the street. Oh boy, I thought, jewelry! Sure enough, I scraped out the last of my cash and got a beautiful pair of copper earrings (though I'm sorry I let those women put that moisturizer on me—I still reek). Talking with the designer, Fred Wilson (http://kfwilson.com/aboutfred_narrative.html) and his wife, I discovered he is also a potter and muralist (and he makes beautiful jewelry but his is not on their site), originally from California—Westsiiiide! (Okay, I'm being foolish.) He and his wife go to a lot of these kinds of fairs, and he talked about the number of black artists throughout this country who he has met in similar circumstances whose work isn't known, there are no books, but there's this great network of talent out there that's just under the radar. He's right—there are reminders all around me, almost daily, of why I do what I do and why what I want to do is important and why, unlike Kaia (see below) of The Butchies (who, sadly, are no longer!), I don't wear Prada (okay, I have a pair of shoes but my sister gave them to me).

As my partner reminded me last night, most of us have these touchstones, these measures, however ridiculous and vapid, against which we gauge our own successes. Smart or not, that's the way it is. At various times, I've tried to let mine go, to rise above them, be real Buddhist about it, you know, his or her success is my success, but that doesn't always work. What does work, I am discovering, is focusing on what is possible rather than on what is frustrating which we cannot change. I know what I loathe about the art world, about America, and that loathing is debilitating. Instead, I'm trying to stay here—what change can I make; what good can I do?

wasting one's life

I'm addicted to online celebrity gossip. Maybe it's the circumstance of being here on a residency with all my time my own but really, this began before I got here. (maybe it's the side effect of being a freelancer?) http://pagesixsixsix.com (although their last post was a frantic search for a lawyer—uh oh!), http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/, Ted Casablanca Thursdays on E! Online (http://www.eonline.com/Gossip/Awful/index.html?fdfour1 )—I spend an inordinate amount of my time reading these pages, often about people I've never even heard of since I don't have a TV! The ridiculous thing is I can't stand to look at the print equivalents that my sister subscribes to—People, Star—and I will go off on how this kind of mindless obsession with celebrity is part and parcel of the anesthetizing of the American populace and that's how we end up with Bush—but I can spend a good chunk of my time obsessively checking these sites for updates, new information, new pictures, etc. It's a complete waste of time though I have to admit that Perez Hilton of PageSixSixSix is hilariously insane and profane and anyone who worships both drag queen Jackie Beat (http://www.jackiebeat.net/) and born-again former Facts of Lifer Lisa Welchel (http://www.lisawhelchel.com/) is worth reading at least once a week.

So I was joking with my friend Myra about how I should just throw caution to the wind, unite my various interests, and turn this blog into an art world gossip column and she forwarded me this really interesting article about the New York Diary section of artforum.com, which is apparently essentially a gossip column: http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz4-26-05.asp
I don't know whether it's good or bad to read that we (my friends and I) are not alone in our criticism of the shallow star worship of the contemporary art world (which is really just a mirror of the growing disparity between the haves and have-nots in America) but I remember an L.A.-based arts professional friend who recently did two years in New Jersey/New York saying she couldn't get over how shallow the whole thing was, that if you didn't wear Prada you were no one, and I thought, wow, is this what my parents supported me through college to do? Is that what I want the sum of my life's work to be? I don't think so!

I wandered into a store today in Taos and had a long chat with the proprietress who said that $10 per hour in Taos was really good money and that every other clerk she knew in town was an artist, writer, or some kind of creative person, and that a friend in his 50s had only just recently begun to support himself on his art. Reality check, not that I needed it—the majority of creative people struggle to make a living and most of them do something else in order to do so. My partner and I have had this discussion often, that many really talented people with MFAs but without trust funds give up making art after they graduate because they can't sustain it. Jerry Saltz, the author of the above-mentioned article, writes, "There's nothing wrong with showing work when you're young, but art has to be its own reward." Really? Why do we perpetuate this notion that art doesn't have to be self-supportive? What that really means is that only the people who can afford the time to make art make it, the result of which is a very narrow representation of creativity. Why can't we come up with a system in which art is something we value and we all support (me coming from a state which ranks 50th in arts spending)? Any culture in which a guy who cuts celebrities' hair can earn $120,000 per year (see the May issue of Vibe) but nearly everyone I know in the arts is struggling just to find or keep a job is one that needs some serious overhauling.

(The Butchies; http://www.thebutchies.com/)

the eyes go

I've been having terrible headaches and dizzyness for the past few months but I don't have vision coverage with my insurance so I haven't wanted to have my eyes checked out and besides, my vision has always been perfect. Well, no more—the years have caught up with me. I bought myself a pair of reading glasses and boy, do they help! It's too soon to say if the headaches will all go away now but I'm the last in my family to succumb to the need for corrective lenses. Sigh. One of those milestones we all reach sooner or later...

I've been in Taos one month now, me and the butterflies, magpies and vultures (a whole flock of them hang out in a tree just down the block. Being ignorant of birds, I thought they were hawks!) Now, ordinarily I would think this was kind of cool, but I have to admit that the presence of vultures, and their unsettling habit of circling around any human being walking by, is a bit disconcerting. Are they just waiting for something to happen, for you to stumble or appear weak or frail or something? Still, none are as glorious as the ravens, though there are fewer here than there are in Santa Fe.

I'm still not entirely sure what I'm doing here, and maybe that's okay, but the first month has gone by quite quickly, mostly taken up by deadlines I had to bring with me. It's freezing here, too—May 1 and it's still snowing in the mountains—I can't wait for spring. But I do think I've reached a kind of epiphany regarding my writing, my photography—all the ways I've defined myself professionally thus far, the choices I've made to work in service of other people's work while neglecting my own. I can't do it anymore. Writing a bunch of biographical encyclopedia entries the last couple weeks for the astonishingly low sum of about 10 cents per word (the going rate for encyclopedias)—some on artists my age—during this time when I'm supposed to be focused on myself woke me up to what I've been doing professionally for the last ten years. I don't regret what I've done, but I don't want to go on nickel-and-diming my way through a career. So I'm making some changes. Stay tuned for the progress...