Café Culture as Decolonial Feminist Praxis: Scherezade García’s Blame … Coffee

This article provides a decolonial feminist analysis of Latinx artist Scherezade García’s most recent portable mural, Blame it on the bean: the power of Coffee (2019), created for and installed in the café and library of The People’s Forum, a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities” and “collective action” in the heart of Manhattan. This artwork depicts three allegorical women convening over cups of coffee, one of which has precariously overflowed onto a miniaturized portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose undoing was said to have been facilitated by his excessive indulgence in coffee and other commodities of empire. Historically, coffee production was bound to imperial plantocracies, enslavement, and patriarchal networks; today, the industry remains a continued site of oppression and erasure for female workers around the globe. By placing this mural in conversation with the portable material economies of the Caribbean, the gendered history of coffee production and consumption, and the history of female representation in art, this article argues that the mural dismantles heteropatriarchal conventions precisely by invoking café culture—the very mode of social performance that García’s work critiques. In so doing, García subverts the problematically gendered and racialized heritage of coffee with a matriarchal Afrolatinidad that, in the artist’s words, “colonizes the colonizer.”

The Explanation of The Indices and Components of The Cafe in The Traditional and Modern Times of Iran

Several factors affecting the cultural growth of the society are the correct function of social interaction, daily activities in the workplace, and increasing social action according to population growth rate need to be more evident. Review of past history showed the arrival of cafe culture in the Safavid era and Shah Abbas(I) and establishment of coffee houses in Qajar and Pahlavi era with social, economic and cultural function. In the first Pahlavi period, with the arrival of a new style of cafe from the west, the social approach and architectural style of the coffee house changed to a coffee shop. The young people of the society, as the audience, chose the coffee shop as a platform for social communication. In this article, we try to explain the course of physical and cultural developments of cafes and increase the benefit of young people from temporary urban social exchange centres as a third place (home, workplace and coffee shop) by interpreting the study examples of traditional and modern cafes in the period. We will pay attention to the Pahlavi, contemporary and modern West.

Paris

This chapter explores the affective pull that Paris exerted upon modernist writers and artists, attracting outsiders from around the globe to experience its cultural institutions and openness to creative experimentation. The chapter first discusses the writers T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars as ‘outsider-insiders’ (in Peter Gay’s terms), figures who come to the city as outsiders but who, by virtue of status or identity, are able to function as insiders within its cultural geography. The second group of writers discusses include Hope Mirrlees (in her poem Paris), Jean Rhys (in novels such as After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight), and Gwendolyn Bennett (in her story ‘Wedding Day’), female modernists who remain marked as outsiders in the city. The chapter discusses how all of these writers engaged affectively with various aspects of the technological modernity of Paris, including features such as the Eiffel Tower, café culture, hotel rooms, and the Grands Boulevards.