Laura Harris
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823279784
- eISBN:
- 9780823281480
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279784.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, ...
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Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, Harris argue that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, Harris show how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.Less
Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, James and Oiticica, Harris chart a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, Harris argue that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, Harris show how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.
Laura Harris
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823279784
- eISBN:
- 9780823281480
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823279784.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each ...
More
In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.Less
In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.
