Research on the Production Technology and Inheritance Status of Southern Zhejiang Clamp-Resist Dyeing

As a national intangible cultural heritage of China, the southern Zhejiang Clamp-resist dyeing is a kind of blue quilt manufacturing technology used by ancient folk people. This kind of folk homescloths has its own unique folk aesthetic form, and its patterns are mostly monochrome square symmetrical baizi figures, opera figures and auspicious patterns. In the local customs of Zhejiang province, this kind of quilt is often used as a dowry for women when they get married (Zhang, 2010). In this paper, the author made an in-depth investigation and research on the technical details and inheritance of the southern Zhejiang Clamp-resist dyeing.

Approaching the Jazz Past: MOPDTK’s Blue and Jason Moran’s “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959”

This article analyzes two approaches to the jazz past undertaken recently under the aegis of “jazz reenactment”: Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s 2014 release of Blue (a note-for-note re-performance of the Miles Davis Sextet’s 1959 album, Kind of Blue) and Jason Moran’s multi-media re-visiting of Thelonious Monk’s 1959 Town Hall Concert, “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959.” I contend that rather than an ironic critique of the canonization of jazz, Blue is a direct product of the same tradition of understanding the past that informs such canonization. This tradition is based in an epistemology that privileges objectivity, logic, boundaries, and an obsession with naming while suspecting the subjective and what cannot be named. Jason Moran’s “In My Mind,” however, offers a different understanding of the past, one rooted in ambiguity and connection rather than delineation and separation. I argue that this latter understanding offers a necessary critique of conceptions of the past and of self and other found in the dominant Western worldview.

Composing an Autoethnographic Cartography of Blue: Becoming a Pharologist in and of the Academy

In this autoethnographic cartography, I argue for the need for alternative embodied maps for academic life. Using my experiences as a budding pharologist (someone who studies lighthouses), I bear witness to my cultural experience of academia through a collaged autoethnography of mapping and composing space. I bring together autoethnography, theories of cartography, as well as my experiences researching lighthouses as sites of public memory performance, to demonstrate that there is a need in the culture of academia for real discussions about anxiety and similar issues—among faculty and students—and that autoethnography, cartography, and pharology provide an entry into such a discussion. In fragmented sections designed to highlight the ways experiences intertwine, I move through four phases of feeling “blue”: the deep blue of confusing academic anxiety and depression; the search for a methodology to lead me to a brighter, more pleasant kind of blue; the research journey that moved me forward; and the “blue sky” blue it led me to. Through autoethnographic writing and stylistic experimentation, I map my experience of journeying through academic anxiety, providing an example of working toward alternative mappings, compositions, and visions of academic life.