scholarly journals Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance and/as (Art) Work

Author(s):  
Andreas Petrossiants

Considering the literature on feminist militancy and “domestic labor” of the late 1960s and early 70s from the perspective of Western visual culture, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles is undoubtedly a central figure. Surprisingly, however, her works have rarely been read through the lens of the international Wages for Housework movement. This essay proposes to read Ukeles’ cultural activism and work through the writing and political organizing of Silvia Federici, who also distanced herself from previously dominant and at times sectarian feminisms to articulate a pointedly (post-)autonomist feminism as a political project. The author is trying to grasp and describe the truly radical and imperative position that Ukeles activated, and continues to “maintain.”

Author(s):  
Amy Abugo Ongiri

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.


MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 32-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ksenija Vidmar Horvat

 This paper investigates visual representations of migrants in Slovenia. The focus is on immigrant groups from China and Thailand and the construction of their ‘ethnic’ presence in postsocialist public culture. The aim of the paper is to provide a critical angle on the current field of cultural studies as well as on European migration studies. The author argues that both fields can find a shared interest in mutual theoretical and critical collaboration; but what the two traditions also need, is to reconceptualize the terrain of investigation of Europe which will be methodologically reorganized as a post- 1989 and post-westernocentric. Examination of migration in postsocialism may be an important step in drawing the new paradigm.


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