Yesterday at Politics and Prose Bookstore I was delighted to be invited into dialogue with my former colleague Joshua Hotaka Roth (Mount Holyoke College) about his marvelous new graphic memoir, Life Lines: Art, Memory, Relationship (University of Toronto Press, 2026). When teaching several years ago at Mount Holyoke I had the opportunity to encounter this project in its early stages. It is thrilling to behold it now as a completed, published work.

I approach the book in large measure as an anthropologist, in conversation with a fellow anthropologist. Joshua’s resonant title “Life Lines” suggests multiple associations. The phrase evokes, first and foremost, the inscrutable calligraphic “MOOPS” designs his father, a contemporary artist, created across the decades. I don’t believe Joshua offers us an etymology of the delightful term MOOPS, but it may be that the phrase is an amalgam of “me” and “oops”, along with a sense of the recursive “loops”of these spiraling graphic forms. That is to say, MOOPS may be a composite of the artist’s selfhood and the continuous inventive play of the accidental that anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss termed “bricolage,” at the heart of the mythological imagination in so called “archaic” societies.

From “Helping” to Mutual Care

Late in his father Richard’s life, Joshua embarked on a collaborative project with his Dad to better understand these designs, hitherto only comprehensible to his father. The title “Life Lines” evokes the lines of Joshua’s own drawings chronicling his deepening understanding of his father’s life work, which takes us through his father’s experiences of home care and eventual death. This joint initiative, and the meaningful sense of mutual discovery it catalyzed, emerged as a metaphorical “life line” binding father and a son.

Such lines of mutual respect stand in striking contrast to how eldercare is usually organized in modern societies, in which the aged are relegated to care facilities that render them structurally invisible, subject to regimens of management that attend, with varying degrees of success, to their physical needs without necessarily honoring the entirety of their personhood. Joshua quotes medical anthropologist Janelle Taylor, with whom Ellen and I attended graduate school at the University of Chicago many years ago. Whenever her friends learned her mother was suffering from dementia, they inevitably asked Janelle if her mother still recognized her. The real question, Janelle notes, in reference to our aged loved ones, is “do we still recognize them?” Joshua’s entire book can be conceived of as an effort to live up to Janelle’s challenge: to recognize the full complex consciousness of the person directly across from us, to be present with them in the deepest sense, to enter with them into meaningful exchange even if the old words and so many of the memories that once informed the relationship have drifted off. In the give and take of touch, smiles, gestures, and even shared breath, the deeper life lines endure.

Speculatively, I wonder if the “lines” in question might in some ways evoke the most ancient forms of human inscription, including the rock and cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic. On the cave walls of southern Europe and the rock-faces from southern Africa to Australia, that date back tens of thousands of years, such intricate designs bound together innumerable generations of artists. Each cohort of artist was inspired by inscriptions created by their ancestors, which they modified and added to, leaving behind gifts in turn for their posterity. (Joshua, suggestively, notes that one of his father’s favorite MOOPs was reminiscent of a Paleolithic fertility figure.) In diverse cultural words, these graphic forms played vital roles in generational succession, initiating cohorts of youth into maturity, passing on the enigmatic mysteries of ancestral wisdom. For countless millennia, to be human has been to engage in the making, deciphering, and remaking of such life lines, which by definition escape easily understanding. Anthropologist Alfred Gell once characterized art as a “technology of enchantment” that bound together creator and viewer through dense layers of “cognitive indecipherability”, producing cascading webs of influence and mutual enchantment. Such is the power of “life lines” that bind together parent and child, and, more broadly, link the generations that come before and which will come after.

Language, Story-telling, Abstraction

In reference to the dynamics of generational succession, a questioner speculated that the father’s MOOPS might in part be inspired by kanji, the Chinese derived ideograms, and perhaps the Japanese syllabaries hiragana and katakana that Richard must have become familiar with through his Japanese wife and fellow artist. His mother was, his father always said, the “pillar of the family”, while he, a lover of creature comforts, was the “pillow of the family.” The mother dies late in the book, but perhaps her spirit lives onwards in the MOOPS that continue to unite father and son, through evocations of the East Asian ideograms that are compressed abstractions from the observed world.

Following on this discussion, anthropologist Ellen Schattschneider brought in Levi-Strauss’ structuralist discussion of abstraction as a generative system that is foundational to human thought and communicative systems. A phoneme is not, after all, an actual sound, but rather an abstracted concept that is distinguished from other abstracted phoneme-concepts through a series of structural contrasts. Culture too for Levi-Strauss is built upon such inter-related contrastive abstracted forms, including kinship terms and mythological images (“mythemes” for Levi-Strauss) that are defined contrastively to other abstractions. In this sense, Ellen proposed, Richard’s abstracted MOOPS encapsulate something profound about the operations of language and culture themselves, arbitrary contrastive operations that condense fundamental processes of meaning-making.

Pondering Ellen’s point, it occurred to me that Victor Turner, in building on Levi-Strauss’ insights, argued in his classic work on the liminal period in Rites of Passage that the radical transformative power of the liminal often depends on abstraction, including simplified masks or material objects that strip away all superfluous details in order to illuminate, for initiates or initiators alike, the fundamental system of contrastive relations out of which a cultural world is produced. The shrinking-down of our attention in abstraction, in other words, is key to processes through which we are moved through the life cycle and achieve higher level of psychosocial integration.

Ethnographic Encounters

Whatever the precise sources of these inscriptive codes, I am struck that Joshua, an anthropologist to the core, operates as an ethnographer venturing into foreign territory, to inhabit, if only incompletely, the lifeworld of others. Anthropologists inevitably operate in the shadow of the Tower of Babel, negotiating a core paradox; as members of the human species, we all ultimately share common origins and are united by a deep cognitive unity, yet we are divided by profound differences of language and culture. Inevitably, the overlap between anthropologist and Native, between guest and host, is only partial, and yet, miraculously, that is often enough for deep mutual understanding to unfold.

In a particularly poignant example of this partial encounter, on p. 123, Joshua addresses his Dad: “MOOPS allow you to write statements only you can read. Is the calligraphic quality of MOOPS supposed to suggest a hidden transcript?“ The question is reminiscent of political scientist James Scott’s concept of the ‘hidden transcript’, a touchstone of modern anthropological analyses. which often emphasizes decoding the perspectives of the subaltern.

Yet to his son’s question Richard responds in a way that indicates his frame of reference is quite different: “ Hmm. MOOPS are a device that help me generate interesting visual compositions.” In other words, Joshua’s primary orientation is towards decoding textual meaning in the MOOPs, whereas his father the artist emphasizes the power of image.

Their alternate stances from these varied points of view, is beautifully illustrated in the successive double pages of pp. 124-125, and pp. 126-127. 
In the first sequence, Joshua is shown in the upper left, gazing into a vast unfolding page of MOOPS.

Then on the next sequence, as we turn the page, the father Richard is visible on the upper right, gazing into another page of piled inscription, dubbed a “Tower of Babel.”

Their perspectives are different, yet they meet in the middle, and that meeting, like the pursuit of cross cultural exchange in the anthropological project, is a form of life-giving exchange.

A further intriguing instance of cross-cultural exchange is suggested by Richard’s incorporation of design motifs from the textile art of the Kuba people of Central Africa. In Flash of the Spirit, art historian Robert Faris Thompson famously observes that African music and art forms are often enlivened the off beat phrasing of accents, breaking the expected continuum of surface regularity, by staggering and suspending established pattern. Something similar, we might speculate, unfolds with Richard’s MOOPs, characterized by poly-rhythmic musicality of overlapping off beats. The eye cannot quite determine where to rest, and that “cognitive indecipherability” is part of what so seductively draws us in.

Trauma and Healing

At times, Joshua speculates that his father carries traces of trauma, from his own experiences of wartime service, in the US Army, at which he was an observer at the Nuremberg war crime trials, and later in Haganah Zionist paramilitary struggles to establish Jewish sovereignty in British mandate Palestine. In this respect, it would be interesting to interpret the spiraling lines of the MOOPs as cracks in the artist’s psyche and lifeworld, which may reveal both fractures and possibilities of healing. One is put in mind of the well known lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:


“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in”

Political Economies, and Moral Economies, of Care

Finally, I am intrigued by the globalized political economy of care that runs through this narrative. The primary caregivers in the story are Black immigrant women from Jamaica and Guyana, who are heirs to a long complex colonial history in the Black Atlantic, binding together peoples of African descent into vast extractive industries, including sugar production and the Atlantic slave trade, which have led to lines of immigration into the North American metropole, where many of them became employed in healthcare. One of the many ironies of our current care system is that eldercare depends, in places like New York City, on women of color, from societies that revere elders and honor to wisdom of seniors, while residing as subaltern in wealthy modern social formations that suffer from paroxysms of of xenophobia, seen most recent in the current wave of mass deportation. Our current war against “the stranger in our midst” is not unconnected to our strange campaign against care for our own elders and those in need. This beautiful book, ultimately, is a call to resurrect the life lines that ought to bind together resident and immigrant, young and old, the relatively privileged and the relatively precarious, into a larger community of care and compassion.

The author suggest that in a future project he might explore that lifeworlds of the immigrant women of color who gave unstinting care to his father in his final years, even during the terrors of the Covid-19 Lockdown. Such a sequel, honoring these postcolonial “life lines,” will be well worth the wait.

Here are some notes on the lives and Civil War service of the brothers

John Armstead Harris (1839-1893) Company G, USCT 1st
Joseph H Harris (1844-1931), Company G, USCT 1st

Parents: Mary Ann Harris (1820-1913) and Thomas Harris (1815-1891), who settled in Dry Meadows off Broad Branch Road in Washington County, District of Columbia, in the 1840s, perhaps escaping the racial violence of downtown DC.

1860, John Harris, eldest son, turns 21 and seeks freedom certificate, attested to by Martha Parker. Then works in Georgetown (and probably regularly returns to Dry Meadow Farm to help out) Address: 20 Fifth street (now 34th and Q st) near Georgetown College, joined eventually by brother Joseph.

Before 1862 John Harris, eldest son, marries Millie/Mildred

May 22, 1863. US War Department establishes Bureau of Colored Troops.

July 10, 1863. John Harris enlists USCT 1, Co. G (Col. Holman, for three years)

July 12, 1862 Joseph Harris enlists USCT 1, Co. G

June 18, 1864 John Harris, suffers severe wound in his hand in the assault on Petersburg (nb ten percent of the USCT 1st were wounded or killed in the campaign. The June 18 assault on the city fails, and initiates a 9 month siege.)

-John Harris transported to Balfour US General Hospital in Portsmouth, VA, underwent surgery to remove part of hand, leaving it permanently disabled. Transferred to US General Hospital, Fort Monroe, Hampton, VA.

Sept 1864. Joseph Harris falls ill, evacuated to field hospital, Point of Rocks. VA, potentially could have been tended to by Clara Barton. Then seven months at Fort Monroe, before discharged from Army

Christmas Eve, 1864, John Harris rejoins his regiment

June 11, 1864, Confederate General Jubal Early and 11,000 troops advance towards DC. The Harris family evacuate from Dry Meadow Farm.

January 1865 John Harris with USCT1 sailed to staging near near Fort Fisher, Wilmington NC

28 September 1865. John Harris mustered out of service, in North Carolina

c.1866 Joseph moved to New York City for 20 years. Pullman Porter

c 1866 John Harris moves to Herring Hill, Georgetown (26 Monroe Street, 1337 27th street, Georgetown)

7 November 1893 John Harris (same person?) leg broken while working at H.C. Winship Wharf, Georgetown

Late 1893? John Harris dies? (Still searching for death record or death notice.

1894: Mildred Harris listed as “widow” of John Harris, 1337 27th St, Georgetown. So John dead by now.

c. 1893 Joseph return to Dry Meadows Farm and farms

1925; Joseph Harris property auctioned off to white speculators

—Joseph Harris and wife Margaret move to 1117 19th street, south of Dupont Circle.

1929: Construction of the all-white Lafayette Elementary School begins on the former grounds of the Harris farms

25 March 1931. Joseph Harris dies Garfield Hospital. Buried Woodlawn Cemetery

Sources:

Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green, Between Freedom and Equality; The History of an African American Family in Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2021

U.S., Colored Troops Military Service Records, 1863-1865 (National Archives)

Special thanks to Cate Atkinson on DC land records.

As recently reported, the Trump administration has been eager to locate temporarily the statue to Caesar Rodney, a Delaware signer of the Declaration of Independence, to Freedom Plaza near the White House in Washington DC. Rodney was a prominent slaveowner, and his statue consequently was removed in June 2020 from Rodney Square in Wilmington Delaware, during the summer of racial justice protests.

My colleagues and I at Partners for Historical Justice, as well as my students, have been curious about which precise enslaved people Caesar Rodney owned and what became of them. Here are my initial notes:

Many newspaper reports indicate that Rodney owned about 200 people, some of which he acquired, along with the Byfield plantation (east of Dover, of about 1000 acres), after his mother’s death in 1763. I have not yet located the probate records from his parents’ estates; however, Caesar’s probate will and inventory papers from the time of his death in 1784 (reproduced in Scott 2000, p 221; from the Historical Society of Delaware Archives) clearly indicate the names of 18 enslaved persons in the estate. Of these, three were freed outright, and the remainder were to be freed, in a delayed fashion. when they reached the age of 25.

(As noted below, there is some evidence that Rodney sold off many of his farmworking slaves during the Revolutionary War period, so those who remained many have primarily been household slaves, including his coachman John.)

Those to be immediately manumitted were Old Negro Charles, Old Negro Peg, and Negro Jude.

The probate inventory for the Caesar Rodney estate, completed 20th July 1784, indicates the names of 15 enslaved individuals, with notations on how many years they had left to serve. (Source: Rodney Collection, Box 6, Folder 22, Delaware Historical Society.) Rodney specified in his will that his heirs should not take these bondspeople out of the state prior to their reaching their age of freedom, but of course there was no workable legal mechanism to guarantee that they would really be manumitted on schedule.

The 15 individuals to be freed in this delayed fashion were:

1. Shadrack, 4 years to serve, so presumably born 1763 with anticipated manumission in: 1788

2. Charles, 4 years to serve, so born c. 1763 with anticipated manumission: 1788 (perhaps related to Old Negro Charles)

3; Ezekel, 5 years to serve, so born 1764 with anticipation manumission1789

4; Hannah, “four years to serve, a breeding woman,” so b 1763 anticipated manumission: 1788

5; Cyrus, 3 years to serve until 25, so to be freed 1787, implying birth in 1762

6. Ezekill, 3 months old in 1784 to serve till 25 so born 1784, to be freed in 1809
7. Kate, “5 years to serve, a breeding woman:, so born 1764, anticipated manumission in 1789.
8. Maria, “3 years to serve till 25”, so born about 1762
9. Charlotte, 1 year to serve till 25, so born about 1760 with anticipated manumission in 1785.
10. Bosman, 4 years to serve, so born around 1762 with anticipated manumission in 1788.

11. Pegg, 13 years old, to serve till 25, so born 1771 with anticipated freedom in 1796 (perhaps related to Old Negro Peg).

12, Harry, 10 years to serve so born 1769 with anticipation of freedom in 1794.

13. John, 17 years to serve so born 1776, with anticipated freedom in 1801. [In correspondence, Rodney mentions his enslaved coachman John ( Scott 2000, p. 89) This may be an older relative of this younger John.

14. Sal, 12 years to serve, so born about 1771, anticipated freedom in 1796.

15. Beth “at Fields, 4 years to serve, “ so to be freed in 1788 and likely born in 1763 (Perhaps “Fields” mean Byfields).

In addition, as noted below, I speculate that the enslaved man Caesar Rodney, born around 1780, may have been enslaved by Caesar Rodney the signer of the Declaration of Independence.

It is of course possible that some of these individuals were fathered by Caesar Rodney, the signer of the Declaration.

Out of the fifteen granted gradual manumission in 1784, five individuals may appear in subsequent record of free people in Delaware and adjacent states, starting with the 1790 census. (NOTE: The first US census of 1790 listed 8,887 slaves and 3,899 free Blacks in the state of Delaware).

OLD CHARLES

“Old Charles” is mentioned in an undated letter to Caesar Rodney from his brother and business partner Thomas Rodney, that seems to date to mid 1775. The Rodneys, occupied with the demands of Revolutionary War planning, have rented out their farms and are considering selling off their farmworking slaves. Tommy writes remarks that “some applycations have been made for the negroes–all the men except Old Charles will bring 100 pounds when it is convenient to sell.” (Scott 2000: 89, citing n.d, letter in the Rodney Collection, Historical Society of Delaware.)

“Old Charles’ or perhaps the younger Charles, born about 1763, may correspond to the household head Negro Charles, in the US 1800 Census, in Christiana Hundred, New Castle, Delaware. Household total: 8 free persons of color.

The 1810 census for Christiana Hundred lists a Charles Hart, as head of a household of 7 persons of color.

Then, the 1820 census lists a Charles Hart and, eleven lines away, a Charles Hart, Jr, They are presumably father and son.

The 1830 census also list a Charles Hart, whom I presume is the younger man. Then, a Charles Hart, born about 1794, who is presumably Charles Hart, Jr., is listed in New Castle Delaware in the 1850 census as a laborer, living with his wife Julia, adjacent to the the Black family of William and Elizabeth Morris , who are perhaps kin.

JOHN



Perhaps relevant: a John Rodney is listed as head of a household of 7 free persons of color in the 1820 census for Little Creek Hundred, Kent County, Delaware, the same neighborhood in which Harry Rodney (discussed below) is listed. The same man is listed in the 1830, 1850. and 1850 censuses.

The 1850 census in the same Little Creek Hundred shows John Rodney married to Sarah (Furbee), age 64, with children Matilda, 17 years old, and John (Jr.), 10.

John Rodney Jr. married Matilda Parker or Pasker, and had three children, Matilda Rodney 2nd. b. 3 NOV 1876 • New Jersey; d. 14 OCT 1911 • Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Henry Rodney, Birth 1858 • Camden, NJ, Death 3 FEB 1923 • Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Sarah Elizabeth Rodney Williams, born in Camden, NY, Death 24 MAR 1929 • Washington, D.C. (buried in Paynes Cemetery). I do not see descendants for these Henry and Sarah Elizabeth. However. Matilda Rodney, daughter of John Rodney Sr and Sarah Furbee Rodney, married it appears David Miller. Their children included Henrietta and Laura Miller, who seem to have had descendants.

A possible relative, a different John Rodney, born Pennsylvania, is referenced as Secretary of Masonic Lodge 16 of Hartford, CT in the The Weekly Anglo-African 1859 December.

HARRY (b 1769)

A Harry Rodney appears in the 1830 census in Little Creek, Kent County, Delaware , in a household of six free Black persons, as follows

Free colored persons – Males – Under 10 1
Free Colored Persons – Males – 24 thru 35 1
Free Colored Persons – Males – 55 thru 99 1
Free Colored Persons – Females – 10 thru 23 1
Free Colored Persons – Females – 24 thru 35 1

EZEKIEL (the younger)

A black man named Ezekiel Rodney, died 5 August, 1821 age 40, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, so seems likely to be the infant Ezekiel, born about March 1784, listed in Caesar Rodney’s probate inventory.

HANNAH, b. 1763

There is a negro Hannah, with no surname listed. in the 1800 census, in Duck Creek Hundred, Kent County, Delawar, heading a household of three free persons of color. Perhaps she is the same person as the Hannah manumitted by Caesar Rodney.

CHARLES, b. 1763

It is possible that the younger manumitted Charles (born around 1763) resurfaces in a fugitive slave advertisement in 1800 for a Charles Rodney, having escaped from a John Quimby residing in Newtown, Chester Ferry, Queen Annes County (later known as Chestertown, Kent County, Maryland), along with the pregnant enslaved woman Nanny and her daughter Ariana. The fugitive Charles Rodney is referred to as a “noted ferry man,” who had driven a wagon in the Revolutionary War, and is said by his enslaver to “read tolerably well.” This Charles is said to be about 40 years old, whereas the Charles owned by Caesar Rodney would have been born 1763, so about 37 years old.

The relevant section of the advertisement reads: “The noted Ferry man Charles, who calls himself Charles Rodney; he went off on the 18th of February last, he is a dark mulatto, about five feet eight or nine inches high, about forty years old, stoops in his shoulders when he walks, a scar on his head very perceivable — he took with him a small bay mare about 4 or 5 years old, her mane trimmed and bob tail’d; his cloathing unknown, as he carried off a variety of cloaths; it is probable he has changed his name, as he is a very artful, sensible fellow, he can read tolerably well it is likely he may hire himself to drive a waggon, being well acquainted with that business, driving for the army during the war; he also perhaps may have a pass.”

If this is the same Charles, then it would follow that the manumission stipulation of Caesar Rodney’s will was not actually followed by his heirs, and that Charles was sold out of the state of Delaware and that his promised manumission was not in fact honored in 1788.

CHARLOTTE b. 1760

Speculatively, perhaps Charlotte became Charlotte Croker, who died 1 July 1850 in Philadelphia, PA (residing at Lombard Street below Eighth) at the age of 90, so born around 1760. There is a long line of African American Crokers, in Delaware, including Daniel Croker, in the 1840 census in Dover Hundred, Kent County, Maryland, as head of a household of five people of color. His apparent son, Daniel Croker, born 1841, lived in Camden, NJ during the Civil War. Perhaps these two Daniel Crokers are Charlotte’s descendants.

Caesar Rodney, Escaped and Free

Perhaps significantly, a black man named Caesar Rodney appears in an 1802 runaway slave ad. 22 years old Cesar Rodney has escaped from enslaver Frederick Stump, and is thought to be heading to Philadelphia, where he had been raised by a Mr Wirtz. He escaped 12 June 1802, at age 22, so was born around 1780. ( Frederick Stump is infamous in colonial Pennsylvania history for having murdered at least ten Native Americans in 1768)

This Caesar clearly attained his freedom at a subsequent point. He is enumerated in the 1820 census (7 August 1820) residing in Salisbury, Lancaster County, Philadelphia, and in the 1830 census in Drumore, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in a household of two persons of color; an African American man named Caesar Rodney, perhaps he same person, is listed in the 1830, 1840, 1850 and 1860 censuses in Little Creek, Kent County, Delaware.

Perhaps this Caesar had been previously enslaved by Caesar Rodney the signer of Declaration and even fathered by him.We will continue to work on documenting the stories of these enslaved people and their descendants. Perhaps there will be a way to honor this community at Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington DC when the statue of Caesar Rodney is placed there.

References

Scott, Jane Harrington. 2000. A Gentleman as Well as a Whig: Caesar Rodney and the American Revolution. Newar: University of Delaware Press. (National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Delaware).

My students and I in ANTH215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to works on display in the exhibition, “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Here is a draft giude to Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi’s roZen (Rituals of Becoming)

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi
b. 1981, Ho, Volta Region, Ghana; works in Kumasi, Ashanti Region, Ghana
Polyptych from froZen (Rituals of Becoming) series 1–4
2016
Photographic print

Notes by Mark Auslander

Visual description: In four photographic prints, arranged in a row, the world famous performance artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (who goes by the name “crazinisT artisT”) sits naked, in profile facing toward our left, in a studio space preparing herself. She sits on a stool covered in black cloth, holding a compact mirror in her left hand and applying make up with her right hand. In front of her is a simple wooden dressing table (“vanity table” in American English) on which rests a small mirror and perhaps makeup . Some red substance, perhaps raw meat or fabric, can be seen on the table and on its base. The entire background is a set of red sheets, with a white vertical line rising from the mirror towards the ceiling.

The artist’s body is photographed in such a way as to obscure the conventional biological indicators of sex; both the groin and chest areas are somewhat obscured, although the general sense conveyed (and made explicit in the video iteration) is that the performer lacks breasts in a biological sense.

Each image is slightly different. In the first, to the far left, the artist’s head is titled back in profile, as lipstick is applied to the lips. In the second, some of her face is obscured by foundation being applied. In the third, more of her face is visible, as foundation is applied on her right side, invisible to the camera. In the final image, she holds her head more upright, and is once again applying lipstick.

Background: The still photographs are drawn from the larger performance project froZen (Rituals of Becoming) , which has been captured on video, including on Vimeo: vimeo.com/250720337 In this 10 minute video, we see a crowded studio, filled with costumes and regalia. We see the artist successively from the front, side and behind, in a red bra, seated, preparing her hair. We then see her in close up, perhaps engaging in careful facial hair removal. We next see her washing her face from a smallmetal bowl, and then standing naked in a larger metal tub, covered with suds as she scrubs herself, then dries herself and dresses in feminine garments. The net effect is extraordinary intimacy and self-revelation, which complicates conventional readings of gender, as a seemingly “male” body is transformed into a “femme” presence.

The four photographic stills on display in HERE similarly take us into moments that would normally be considered supremely private, giving as access to “frozen” moments when gender is being actively made in front of of our eyes.

Interpretive Notes: The drag artist Ru Paul has famously observed, “We are all born naked. Everything else is drag.” This dictum is powerfully illustrated by the froZen project; which emphasizes how the gendered appearance of “the feminine” is carefully built up from a naked body that might be conventionally read as bio-physically male. The title “froZen” presumably alludes to the ways in which the observer’s attention is frozen, or stopped in its tracks, as we experience cognitive dissonance in facing up to gender itself being made right in front of our eyes.

As Arnold van Gennep long ago observed, rites of passage the world over are divided into three parts: (1) separation from everyday life; (2) radical transformation within a liminal period in which the subject is “betwixt and between” conventional coordinates of experience; and (3) re-entry and re-aggregation, in which the subject is returned to everyday life, in which everything is the same, yet everything is different. In the ritual space of the “froZen” series, we gain entry into the topsy-turvy world of the liminal period, in which the most important work of ritual is accomplished. Conventional rites of female initiation or male initiation seek to intensify dichotomous gender-based identities; but in “froZen”, the ambiguous mysteries of the liminal period, normally hidden away from the public, are brought into the light, so that we see gender-making in action

The series title ““froZen”,” might conjure up associations with the famous Disney 2013 animated film, “Frozen”, which itself challenges conventional gendered narratives about love, identity. and agency: the child viewer learns that the apparently heroic prince is in fact a villain, and that the most important form of love is sibling solidarity between the two sisters, Anna and Elsa, who ultimately must save themselves without depending on male figures.

The emphasis on the letter “Z”, capitalized in “froZen”, might evoke the ways in which “Z,” the final letter of the alphabet, comes directly after “X” and “Y”, the conventional genetic chromosomes governing femaleness and maleness. “Z” in this sense would seem to transcend the conventional male/female binary. In this sense, the series seems to proceed according to what James Fernandez, in reference to the initiation process in the central African religious movement Bwiti, terms “edification by puzzlement,” intensified experiences of cognitive dissonance and epistemic shock that catalyze deeper understanding and elevated forms of consciousness. Here, in “froZen”, we come to understand that gender, rather than being in a fixed state of being, confined to the static male/female dichotomy, is rather produced through a continuously unfolding state of becoming. The fully dressed trans or drag performer will eventually emerged gorgeously from chrysalis, but here we are taken into the site of mysterious transformation, within the normally hidden pupa of the studio.

In this photographic series of four stills (“frozen” in time). the time-based unfolding of a video or live performance is played with in interesting ways. Careful inspection indicates minor but significant differences between each still, paradoxically calling attention to the minute processes through gender is made (and “made up”).

Speculatively, might the prominence of red cloth and black cloth in the these four photographic stills be read through Asante (or more broadly Akan) ritual symbolism? The vertical white stripe above the minor, dividing the red field might suggest, in keeping with the imagery of Kente, a dynamic relationship between blood and sacrificial energies (redness) and the purity of ancestral light (whiteness). The black cloth-covered stool on which Va-Bene sits, undergoing extraordinary transformation, just might evoke the Asante practice of draping a chiefly stool in black cloth during the funeral period, indicative of a suspension of a normal state of being, while inviting ancestral energies to infuse continuity into the long term life of the community. Similarly, the red cloth hung in the background of the studio might parallel the use of red cloth by close relatives during the mortuary process, expressive of inconsolable grief and raw emotion. In the regular funeral process the death of a person is honored. In contrast, in froZen, a different kind of loss and regeneration is unfolding: an older gender identity is being eclipsed in favor of a new gendered-ness, a different cycle of death and the regeneration of life that transcends conventional dichtomies.

In that light cosnider the white-ish color on the red cloth, to the right side, behind the performer, which partially echoes the white stripe on the cloth, the whiteness glimpsed in the table mirror, and the the shiny illumination along the artist’s side. Might these instances of whiteness or birghtness be evocative of ancestral presence? The mysterious process of radical gender fluidity and transformation, it is perhaps being suggested, is being blessed by ancestral forces, which operate at levels beyond conventional mortal understanding.

Prompts for closer looking:

1. How do you make sense of the symmetries within the sequence of four images. In the first, on the far left, the artist applies her lipstick, which is true as well, for the final image, on the far right. In the two middle images,
   the artist applies foundation with a make-up sponge. In image 2, she applies the sponge to her left cheek, and then in image 3, she applies it to her right cheek, away from of our immediate view. What is the net effect of these balanced symmetrical contrasts through the four moments of the work?
2. Continuing with the theme of symmetry, what do you notice about use of mirrors in the four pictures? A framed mirror is placed on the simple dressing table, and a smaller hand mirror is held by the artist in her left hand as she applies make up. What might be suggested about mirror imagery and the mysteries of gender: how might we perhaps, be invited to move, through the looking glass, to a place in between the conventional contrast between maleness and femaleness? (You may wish to compare this mirror imagery with other works in Here, include the mirror in the bathroom in Tarek Lakhrissi’s Out of the Blue, in which the alien or angel appears to the protagonist, or the mirror at the beginning of Tobi Onabolu’s film, “Dear Black Child,” which the protagonist appears to travel as he journeys into the other world of the sacred forest?
3. What do you think is the red and white substance glimpsed on the top of and the lower level of the dressing table? Might it be cloth, or meat? What might it be suggestive of?
4. Why do think the exhibition designers have placed this sequence in this particular elongated alcove of the exhibition, leading from the main entrance, near Ṣọlá Olúlòde’s large Eternal Light, to the west gallery, devoted to themes of Spirit and Futurity? In this particular alcove, the Van-Bene “froZen” sequence is framed by a delicate small print by Zanele Muholi of Pam Dlungwana, and a enormous blown up image by Zanele, “Muholi, Muholi. The small image of Pam is female-presenting, and the large image of “Muholi, Muholi”, in which the black faced artist wears a hat, is male presenting. Is it perhaps significant that in between these female and male poles the designers have placed the Va-Bene sequence, which hovers somewhere between ‘female” and “male” poles of being? Might the four images by Va-Bene be escorting us into the final gallery of the show, to themes of spirituality and mysterious futures?

I have been fascinated by the sculptural installation “Subject to the Tide” (After David Hamons) (2018-2025) by artist Oluseye Ogunlesi (sometimes known as Oluseye), now accessioned into the National Gallery of Canada’s permanent collection.

Subject to the tide (After David Hammons), 2018-2025 Twill flag, salvaged fence from Africville 11 x 6 x 1 ft

Artist’s Statement: “Inspired by Hammons’ famed transformation of the American flag, this installation reimagines the Canadian flag in the Black Nationalist tricolour created by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s — red for the blood of Black people, black for our skin and racial identity, and green for the verdant lands of Africa.

The flag is integrated with a fence salvaged from the shores of the Bedford Basin in Africville, Nova Scotia, becoming a powerful symbol of cultural reclamation, unity, and the resilience of Africville—a Black community forcibly displaced in the 1960s that remains a poignant marker of systemic erasure in Canada.”

Mark Auslander’s commentary: The work’s title, “Subject to the Tides, ” seems to have multiple associations. In a manifest sense, the metal gate washed up on the shore of the Bedford Basin where the artist recovered it, was subject to the local tides, taken away from the beach and finally flowing back in. More broadly, the phrase presumably evokes the complex, often tragic fate of the Afro-Canadian community of Africville, subjected to the tides of historical vicissitude, since the 1840s, culminating in the area’s ”urban renewal” clearance between 1964 and 1970. (See the Mapping Memories of Africville project ) The fisher folk of Africville were people of the tides in another sense, surviving through their deep knowledge of local currents and waterways. As descendants of captives in the Middle Passage, they and their ancestors were subject to the tides of an even longer historical trajectory, forcibly relocated, under horrific conditions, by maritime vessels from their African homelands to the Americas and the Caribbean. Many were “subject” to the British Crown in British Colonial North America of colonial Jamaica; then after the American Revolution, the Americans were subject for a time to United States rule under the slavery regime, and then once again were subjected to the Crown, either as former Loyalists in the Revolution as as Black Refugees during the War of 1812, transported to Nova Scotia, and then subject to often unequal conditions under Canadian sovereignty.

The recycled metal gate that frames the composition would seem to embody the condition of twoness or double consciousness long ago articulated by WEB DuBois. The tattered gate evokes both Nova Scotia’s early status as sanctuary or open door for Black freedom-seekers as well as Afro-Canadians’ repeated historical experience of being locked out, the gates slammed in their face by the nation’s enduring system of white domination. The metal grill, behind which the Afro-Canadian flag is positioned, may also signal the fraught position of Black Canadians in the nation’s mass incarceration system, within which Black inmates are disproportionately subjected to solitary confinement and harsher treatment than their white counterparts. Afro-Canada is simultaneously part of the proud Pan-African world and, in many cases, confined behind bars. (Echoing Oscar Mischeaux’s 1920 silent cinematic condemnation of US racism, the work may be taken as a visual denunciation of all that which transpires “Within Our Gates”)

Equally of interest is the locally-sourced twill fabric out of which this Garveyesque flag was produced in Côte d’Ivoire. The highly prized textiles of the Ivory Coast had a complex relationship to the slave trade. As a major source of ivory and fabric, the Ivory Coast was spared some of the worst depredations of slave trade, yet cloth was a significant medium of exchange in the slave trade throughout the African continent. (In the Ngoni communities of eastern Zambia in which I work, the most beloved song is a piercing lament that recalls “Long ago our Ancestors suffered terribly” because of the cloth for which their loved ones were sold away.) Twill, created out of diagonal weave, conveys particular strength to fabric such as denim. Hence the diagonal weave patterned twill, out of which the flag is composed. would, like the gate, seem to have multiple meanings, recalling long duree history of suffering grounded in the Europe-Africa colonial nexus, while also celebrating threads of African unity and resilience, epitomized by post-independence Côte d’Ivoire.

A possible reading is that the entire assemblage constitutes a map of the Black Atlantic, tracing the centuries-long history that led to Black settlement and residence on Nova Scotia. The horizontal and vertical wire cross hatching of the metal gate may echo lines of longitude and latitude, its quadrant borders recalling the equator and prime meridian. The black lines that radiate across the flanking green fields of the flag from the central black square may trace innumerable Middle Passage voyages from Africa to the New World, as well as marking the historical Black settlements throughout the Maritimes. We may also glimpse in the lines the numerous Loyalist, Refugee and Maroon voyages from the British colonies in North America and Jamaica, and from the United States during the War of 1812.

Speculatively, might the installation be conceived of as a kind of altar, into which far-flung worshipers through the Diaspora may lay down their fears, suffering, and deepest aspirations, as they seek blessings from the invisible world? Perhaps, those gazing into this multi-colored matrix honor Yemaya (Yemoja) orisha of the oceans and the tides, or perhaps the redness of the central maple leaf honors Shango, orisha of thunder, lightning, fire, justice, and virility, or Oya, divinity of wind and storms; perhaps the metal of the gate summons Ogun, orisha of iron; or the central cross signals Elegua , Lord of the Crossroads. Whatever the precise cosmological referents, the gate, cast up on the shore by the tides, which are themselves governed by the ancient lunar cycles of destruction and creation, may be much more than a closed barrier; it may equally be a dynamic portal, opening up those who stand before it to the transformative tidal forces of the hidden universe.

My students and I in ANTH215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to works on display in the exhibition, “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Here is a guide to Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s Every Moment Counts (Ecstatic Antibodies), 1989.
Chromogenic print




Description: The bearded artist, clothed as a priest or friar in a red cloak, gazes upwards reverentially, his head in a halo-like crown of white beads, perhaps in the mode of a Byzantine icon, with possible hints of a Yoruba white ritual crown. Small red lines protrude from the crown perhaps reminiscent of Dirk Bout’s Christ Crowned with Thorns, c. 1470.

His right hand is crossed over his chest, his left hand cupped in a manner reminiscent of Christ in Bouts or other early Renaissance Christian works. Resting on his shoulder is a younger man, whose torso is unclothed, his eyes cast downwards.

Background: The rather painterly photographic series Ecstatic Antibodies, drawing on classical European and Yoruba artistic traditions, was created in the 1989, the year that the artist knew that he was infected with HIV-AIDS, Complications from this disease would take his life December 21 of that year.

Interpretive Notes: The work would seem to to fuse Catholic and Yoruba iconography. The work may be a direct citation of Caravaggio’s St Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c 1598, in which the bearded robed friar gazes heavenwards, his right hand held faithfully over his heart.

As noted above the hagiography of Bouts and his contemporaries may also be at play. At the same time, white beads in Yoruba regalia and sculpture, particularly on beaded crowns (ade) tend to connote purity and spiritual connections to ancestors and the orisha. The friar figure may thus be cast as an intercultural sacral intermediary, leading the younger man towards a space of spiritual sanctuary, under the benevolent divinities

The term “ecstatic” in the series title “Ecstatic antibodies” may conflate the sexual meaning of ecstasy (evocative of the gay scene in 1980s New York and London) with the spiritual meaning of the term, implying a standing out of oneself in mystical union with the Godhead. Under conditions of intense immuno-suppression from the retrovirus, imperiled antibodies may have taken on the quality of saviors, rather like spiritual guardians. In this light, the reverent friar may himself be a kind of healing antibody, protecting the younger man from the scourge of disease. Or, as noted above, he may be a spiritual guardian, guiding the young man from this world to the next.

Prompts to closer looking

1. Note how multiple lines converge to highlight the face of the younger man. These includes a line proceeding downwards from the upturned eyes of the friar and his right arm, and the implied line proceeding from the white beaded halo-crown’s right side. What is the effect of this compositional strategy?

2. How do you understand the title “Every Moments Counts” (shared by other images in this series)? Is this an exhortation to seize the day, given the ephemeral nature of life amidst the pandemic? Are the two figures perhaps each representative of a temporal moment, a precious sequence of events at the close of life?

3 Contrast the two figures portrayed here with the double figures in the adjacent work by Fani-Kayode, Nothing to Lose  IX  in the Bodies of Experience series. In each work, do you have sense of the lower figure being directed upwards, to a higher plane, perhaps being moved on to state beyond this mortal domain to a higher level of existence?

For further reading:

W. Ian Bourland, Bloodflowers; Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography and the 1980s. Duke University Press, 2019

My students and I in ANTH215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to works on display in the exhibition, “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Here is a guide to Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Nothing to Lose  IX  from the Bodies of Experience portfolio (1989). Large format C-print

Notes by Mark Auslander

Visual Description: In a large format, richly colored photograph, the artist is viewed in profile, unclothed except for a leather and metal harness that criss-crosses his neck, chest. and waist area. He is prostrate in front of a standing Yoruba-style sculptural figure with a red face, and a forehead marked with alternating vertical red, blue and white stripes. The sculpture, evidently created by Fani-Kayode’s collaborator Alex Hirst, does not directly resemble any known work of African art, but may evoke the iconography of the orisha Eshu, (or Èṣù, also known as Elegua), ambiguous Lord of the Crossroads.

The configuration may be read erotically as implying the sculpture is sexually offering itself to the crouching male figure. Alternately (or in a complementary fashion) it may be read as the male paying reverence to his spiritual precursors or to divinities on the threshold between this world and the next.

Background: The rather painterly photographic series Nothing to Lose, drawing on classical European and Yoruba artistic traditions, was created in the 1989, the year that the artist knew that he was infected with HIV-AIDS. Complications of the disease would take his life December 21 of that year.

Interpretive Notes: As the title suggests, the “Nothing to Lose
 series may be read as a letting go of conventional reservations and hesitations, fully embracing the terrors and possibilities of death and the ultimate journey into the unknown, shortly before the artist’s death.

The novel sculptural form standing above the kneeling artist, generally held to be evocative of the orisha Eshu, might be read as a kind of ritual portal between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors, into which the dying man is preparing to journey. Since Eshu at times transmits prayers from mortal worshippers to the orisha and conveys their blessings, it may be that the artist is expressing hope that his prayers and final aspirations may be answered, either in this world or the next.

The leather and metal chains that clothe the otherwise naked body of the artist may be read as evocative of sado-masochistic pursuits of pleasure, or as chains of desire (or of stigmatization) from which the artist will soon be released as he moves beyond this earthly coil.

An alternate, or complementary reading, is that the sculpture is an emanation of the artist’s own person, hopes, and dreams. The black pendant hanging around the sculpture’s neck may resemble the harness worn by the artist, and the red coloring of its surface is not unlike the redness of the artist’s skin.The sculptures right arm seems to be directed towards its groin area, which may be true for the right arm of the naked artist. These shared features may suggest a deep affinity between the two figures: perhaps in that sense the sculpture is an externalization or outwards projection of the artist’s inner state of being, especially as he explores his own Yoruba spiritual heritage. Eshu is classically conceived as a trickster and perhaps Fani-Kayode here acknowledges his own trickster and interstitial proclivities.

Speculatively it is possible that the sculpture may be an elaborate erect phallus, arising out of the artist’s middle section, evoking his power or agency in the world.

Prompts to closer looking:

Consider the relationship between frontality and profile perspectives in this image, as well as the question of what is visible and what is obscured. The standing sculpture is viewed front on, with a horizontal line bisecting its face. The artist’s kneeling body is viewed in profile. The pubic area of the sculpture partly obscured by the artist’s head and knee, and the artist’s own pubic area is obscured as well. What kind of doubleness and contrast between the two figures is evoked by this composition?

2. Compare the positioning of the organs of perception in the two figures. The artist’s face is obscured here, nestled behind his bent knee. Only his left ear is visible. in contrast, the eyes of the sculpture are fully visible, staring directly out at us. (The artist’s ear is arrayed on a line parallel to the sculpture’s eyes_. What effect is caused by this contrast? Might this hint at complementary or interdependence between these two beings? Does the artist in a sense only “see” through the standing sculpture, and does the sculpture only “hear” us through the artist?
3. How erotic or sensual is this image? Is the sculpture implicitly sexually or romantically offering itself to the artist? Or is the sense conveyed here beyond eroticism, evoking a joining that is spiritual but not necessarily grounded in the flesh or carnal desire?
4. Contrast the two figures portrayed here with the double figures in the adjacent work by Fani-Kayode, “Every Moment Counts” (from the Ecstatic Antibodies) series. In each work, do you have sense of the lower figure being directed upwards, to a higher plane, perhaps being moved on to state beyond this mortal domain to a higher level of existence?

For more reading:

W. Ian Bourland, Bloodflowers; Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography and the 1980s. Duke University Press, 2019

My students and I in ANTH215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to works on display in the exhibition, “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Here is a guide to two linked videos by the Kenyan multimedia artist Jim Chuchu, Invocation: The Severance of Ties, 2015, and Invocation: Release, 2015

Excerpt of Invocation; The Separation of Ties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSmAbIOo6b8

Excerpt of Invocation: Release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM1_8ugk2no

Notes by Mark Auslander

Description: In Invocation: The Severance of Ties (2015), a swirling young male body in black silhouette dances, to rhythms that in other times would summon an invisible presence into visible flesh. A disembodied male voice pronounces, to a beat that is simultaneously ancient and techno: “I am not your son. I am not your blood.” Letters and a pulsing curser flash across the screen, alluding to duty and love and evil, traces of an anguished email correspondence between parent and son. In Invocation: Release, the same young man’s silhouetted profile moves on and off the screen, as waves upon waves of smoke billow out of his mouth, releasing toxins of self-loathing and despair accumulated over a closeted lifetime. He confronts mirrored images of himself, and at last embraces one of them.

Background: The project emerged out of the artist’s (evidently involuntary) coming out, following the release of his 2014 LGBTQ+ film, Stories of Our Lives, made with the Nest Collective in Nairobi. Chuchu’s family members raised concerns that he was despoiling the memory of a specific ancestor. In this work, the artist reenacts the trauma of receiving words of condemnation from his family members, and his release of the toxicity associated with their disavowal of him.

Interpretive Notes: The two videos can be read as psychedelic rites of techno-possession, as the artist pronounces his own separation from his natal family.

Rites of possession in Africa have long afforded individuals oppressed within the lineage or clan into which they were born the possibility of rebirth into a secret society, made up of those who have learned to live productively with their possessing spirit. In Invocation, Chuchu remixes this ancient template to envision an even more radical separation. A swirling young male body dances, to rhythms that in other times would summon an invisible presence into visible flesh. A disembodied male voice pronounces, to a beat that is simultaneously ancient and techno: “I am not your son. I am not your blood.” Letters and a pulsing curser flash across the screen, alluding to duty and love and evil, traces of an anguished email correspondence between parent and son.

As in ancient rites of possession in Africa, this act of invocation, while arising from pain and unexpected injury, is transformed into a purposeful ritual of strength and empowerment. The artist’s body, swirling like a Sufi devotee seeking oneness with the godhead, pulses with growing energy, growing the multiple arms of a Hindu divinity, emerging out of a chrysalis toward some other form of being. In the other video, Release, the same young man’s silhouetted profile moves on and off the screen, as waves upon waves of smoke billow out of his mouth, releasing toxins of self-loathing and despair accumulated over a closeted lifetime. He confronts mirrored images of himself, and at last embraces one of them. Like the ancient initiate, he loses one family, only to gain another.

Prompts for closer looking:

1. Consider the narrative sequence of these film in terms of the tripartite structures of rites de passage first articulated by Arnold van Gennep and further developed by Victor Turner; separation-limiality-reaggregation. How is the artist-subject removed or separated from ordinary life, then suspended in an intermediate state betwixt and belief normal planes of existence, and then reintegrated, as in rituals of initiation, back into ordinary life, at a higher level of psycho-social integration?
2. It would be interesting to contrast these works with others in Here, in which an artist dismembers an older (often stigmatized) identity in a quest, at long last, to enter a promised land. It would be especially interest to compare the Chuchu films with Tobi Onabolu, “Dear Black Child,” 2021 (directly adjacent in the gallery). How do these different work envision processes of separation and subsequent connection with queer, accepting counterparts?

3. Consider the relationship between word and image in Invocation: the Severance of Ties. In what ways, perhaps, does the stamping of words from the letter or emails from disapproving family members cut like a knife on the body of the artist-subject? How do the rhythms of the dancing body and the flashing words reinforce the impact of the narrative unfolding in front of us?

4. What does the artist accomplish by placing kinetic solid black figures on a white field, in silhouette style? It might be interest to compare this visual strategy with the well-known appropriations of 19th century silhouettes by Kara Walker in her remixing of the imagery of race, gender, and sexuality.

For further reading:

National Museum of African Art. https://www.jimchuchu.com/invocations

Mark Auslander, “ReMixing Possession: Dreaming Futures Past in the Work of Jim Chuchu,” General Anthropology Bulletin 22 (October 2015): 14–15.

Friday, March 27, 2026. 12:00 noon-3:00 pm Eastern USA
Webinar

https://american.zoom.us/j/96865201403

Meeting ID: 968 6520 1403

Conveners: Mark Auslander (American University)
and Abdi Osman (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

“There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved.”
― Flora Nwapa, Efuru (1966)

“I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in
introducing invention into existence.”
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967)

This International remote roundtable considers the dynamics of creativity and crisis in making sense of LGBTQ+ art produced within Africa or Africa-adjacent contexts. Confronting waves of institutionalized homophobia and transphobia, perpetrated by state and non-state actors and networks, queer artists and activists have pursued aesthetic interventions characterized by edginess, verve, absurdity, humor, joy, camp, and parody, suffused at times with mourning, outrage, and pathos. The remarkable range of work presented in the new exhibition, “Here” Pride and Belonging in African Art,” (curated by Kevin Dumouchelle and Serubiri Moses) at the the National Museum of African Art, illustrates the dynamics of inventiveness in moments of personal and collective crisis. We consider as well the curatorial challenges of mounting such an exhibition at this moment of history, and the coordinated creative energies called forth by the “Here’ production team under unprecedented circumstances.

Our point of departure is the famous dictum in Flora Nwapa’s 1966 novel, Efuru: “There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved.” Our discussion is equally informed by Frantz Fanon’s call, in the face of historical crises of structural oppression, for unruly “leaps” into unscripted territories that “introduce invention” into everyday existence. Where, at the edge of new horizons of the possible introduced by the “Here” artists, might we now go traveling?

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Public Ethnography Lab, American University, Washington DC

For more information, please contact: Mark Auslander, markauslander@icloud.com

Run of Show

12:00 noon- 12:10. Welcome and acknowledgements from Mark Auslander and Abdi Osman

12:10-12:40. Curatorial Reflections : Serubiri Moses and Kevin Dumouchelle, moderated by Lwando Scott (with questions by Lwando)

12:40-1:40. Artists’ Panel, moderated by Musoke Nalwoga

Each artist speaks for five minutes

Artists: Tobi Onabolu, Jim Chuchu, Kudzanai Violet-Hwami, Ṣọlá Olúlòde, Leilah Babirye, Paul Emmanuel,

then resposes to questions by Musoke, and from the other artists

1:40-2:00, Expanded discussion: Additional scholarly reflections and questions (5 minutes each)

Alvaro Luis Alima and Mark Auslander

2:00-2:50. General Q & A, Moderated by Abdi Osman (reading selections questions from the posted Q &A)

2:50-3:00 pm. Concluding reflections by Serubiri and Kevin, moderated by Mark Auslander

3:00 pm End.

Co-conveners

Mark Auslander, PhD, a sociocultural and historical anthropologist, currently teaches at American University in Washington DC.  He has published extensively on art, ritual, race, and the politics of difference. He is author of the award-wining book, “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family” (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and co-editor with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston of “In Search of Lost Futures: Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).  Mark has served as a curator and museum director, with emphases on natural  science, cultural history, expressive arts, and community engagement.  He is the author of the chapter, “Transgressive Energies: Crossing Gendered Frontiers in African Art, Ritual, and Moral Imagination” in the volume “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art” (Smithsonian Books, 2026, forthcoming, edited by Kevin D. Dumouchelle.

Abdi Osman is a Somali Canadian multidisciplinary artist based between Buffalo, New York, and Toronto, Ontario, whose work focuses on questions of Black masculinity as it intersects with Muslim, queer and trans identities. Osman’s practice has been concerned with representing and complicating the gaps evident in hegemonic or normative representations of Black/African peoples to unsettle and broaden ideas about what Blackness is, was, and can be. He has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions, biennale, festivals, screenings, and programs across North America and internationally. His writing on art has appeared in BlackFlash, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, PUBLIC Journal, Transitions, Journal on Images and Culture, among other publications. Osman is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Art at SUNY Buffalo..

Participating Curators

Kevin Dumouchelle, Curator, National Museum of African Art. Curator, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art. Editor, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art (Smithsonian Books, 2026, in press.)

Serubiri Moses, Curator, Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art. https://curatorsintl.org/collaborators/7349-serubiri-moses

Participating Artists

Jim Chuchu. Nairobi-based artist Jim Chuchu works across music, film, photography, and visual arts to explore intersecting worlds. His practice braids together blackness, queerness, and spirituality to create works that challenge conventional narratives and imagine new possibilities for African cultural expression. Featured works:  Invocation: The Severance of Ties, 2015, and Invocation: Release, 2015” 

Tobi Onabolu is a London-born artist-filmmaker, writer, and cultural producer, based in Grand Popo, Benin Republic. His interdisciplinary practice spans moving image, installation, performance, sound, and the creation of long-term cultural platforms, approaching art as a living process rather than the production of isolated objects. Director of Dear Black Child . See: https://tobionabolu.com/dearblackchild/ (Photo credit: Elijah Ndoumbe.)

Leilah Babirye, Featured work: Nosamba II, from the Kuchu Ngagi (Antelope) Clan, 2021

Paul Emmanuel, artist (Johannesburg, South Africa) Featured work: Untethered/Retethered, 2025 (See close looking guide at: https://markauslander.com/2026/02/05/close-looking-guide-to-paul-emmanuels-untethered-retethered-multimedia-video-installation-2025/

Ṣọlá Olúlòde, artist (Brixton, UK) Featured works: Eternal Light; Stitched to You.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami. Represented by Victoria Miro (London/Venice) Featured work: Hosanna, hosanna. 2018 Oil and acrylic on canvas

Participating Scholars

Lwando Scott holds a PhD in Sociology, and is currently a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar with a focus on gender and sexualities, on how these categories must be linked to ideas of freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. Scott is interested in the nature of post-apartheid freedom, in thinking with and through the South African Constitution, to upend legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racial domination whose effects extend into the contemporary moment. Thus, Scott’s scholarship is engaged in the complex ways gender and sexuality are sometimes omitted in discussions on the legacies of colonialism and apartheid and the impact of this omission on contemporary understanding of these categories.

Musoke Nalwoga is an independent curator and researcher with a focus on contemporary art. Born and raised in Uganda, she currently lives and works between Amsterdam, and Antwerp. Nalwoga’s curatorial practice is forging new institutional structures that hack, subvert, and productively add to the systems that exhibit, exchange, and archive the specific art (his)stories of African diaspora. Nalwoga is the founding director of MOTORMOND; a black queer Art Space that is dedicated to circulating critically grounded Pan Diasporic Cultures. Nalwoga has been appointed as co-curator of the Noorderlicht Photography Biennale 2027. Instagram: cyborgtruffle

 Álvaro Luís Lima. Assistant Professor of African Art, University of Florida

Opening Remarks by Mark Auslander

Welcome I’m Mark Auslander. Joining with my collaborator Abdi Osman, we’d like to welcome everyone to our webinar, “Inventive Leaps, Unruly Voyages: A Roundtable on “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” As many of you know, “HERE” has several components: First, it is a a dazzling, sophisticated exhibition current on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, featuring the work of thirty artists originating from Africa, nearly all of whom identify as LGBTQ+. The exhibition is co-curated by Serubiri Moses and Kevin Dumouchelle. Second,”Here” refers to the forthcoming catalogue book from Smithsonian Books, “The Here Project,” edited by Kevin, with significant contributions from Serubiri, which explores the work of about seventy artists from across the continent. Third, “Here “ refers to an ongoing collection and research initiative anchored at the National Museum of African Art, highlighting art that cuts across, interrogates, and transcends gender binaries throughout Africa and the Diaspora.

Our tone today is both celebratory and critical. We are well aware that under current circumstances it seems nothing short of miraculous that this magnificent exhibition is actually on display, on the National Mall no less, and that the catalogue book “The Here Project” is soon to see the light of day. Those of you who have seen the exhibition in person know that it is brilliantly conceived and organized, a testament to the remarkable intellectual depth and range of connections that Serubiri and Kevin have developed throughout their careers. The entire staff at NMAfA has pulled together together to create an exhibition that is gorgeously mounted; here we see a museum team at the absolute top of their game, integrating stunning works of art with hard hitting, thought-provoking yet accessible text. We all look forward with delighted anticipation to the book launch of the catalogue over the next few months. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am the author of the one of the catalogue chapters, and am very proud to be included in the publication).

Having said that, we acknowledge that this exhibition, as brightly as its light burns, is surrounded by encroaching and deepening shadows. Homophobic and transphobic violence, physical and structural, is extensive throughout Africa. Ideological and material assaults on queer people are, in tragic respects, being normalized in many sectors around the world, including here in the United States. Transphobia, homophobia and xenophobia all intersect in complex and disturbing ways. Many LGBTQ+ artists have been forced into exile, and artists of conscience everywhere need to summon up special reserves of courage, verve, and imagination to move forward. Here at hom museums themselves are increasingly under siege, as Federal funding dries up and powerful institutions, even those that might be considered anchors of civil society, are are times tempted to engage in self-censorship. Perhaps more than any time since the 1930s, artistic creativity and museum practice proceed within a state of crisis, as the future of democracy, diversity, and a culture of compassion stand in the balance.

We’d like to emphasize that this gathering is an informal one, that is not organized by any institution, and which proceeds without a budget. We are all drawn together by our sense of wonder in the remarkable art showcased in HERE. While we are very grateful to our friends at NMAfA and across the Smithsonian, with whom we are in constant dialogue, this is a fully independent enterprise. We are grateful to the Department of Anthropology and Public Ethnography Lab at American University, which has made it possible for this webinar to be hosted by AU, and to Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, which has helped get the word out to its supporters. I have special gratitude to my students at American University in Gender and Sexualities class, who, working with Paul Emmanuel and the Tour de Force Foundation, are currently creating close looking guides to the artworks in HERE. I learn something new about the art of HERE every day from my students. Most important, we are grateful to the participating artists, curators, and scholars whom we will hear from today, who have freely given of their time and imagination. This truly is a labor of love.

Close Looking Guides to “Here”

The students and faculty in Dr Auslander’s Anth 215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to the art work in the HERE exhibition:

• Va-Ben Elilem Fiatsi’s froZen (Rituals of Becoming) 2016.
• Jim Chuchu, Invocation: The Severance of Ties, 2015, and Invocation: Release, 2015
• Paul Emmanuel. Untetherered/Retethered (2025)
• Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Every Moment Counts (Ecstatic Antibodies), 1989.
• Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Nothing to Lose IX from the Bodies of Experience portfolio (1989).
• Tarek Lakhrissi. “Out of the Blue” (2019)

Notes by Mark Auslander

My students and I in ANTH215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to works on display in the exhibition, “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Here are my initial notes on Tarek Lakhrissi’s stunning and enigmatic video “Out of the Blue” (2019)



See stills from the video at: https://tareklakhrissi.com/Out-of-the-Blue

Description: This mesmerizing 13 minute French-language Afrofuturist video work stars Sorour Darabi, the Iranian-born, Paris-based choreographer, dancer, and artist. The film follows the character Mejda played by Darabi (identified halfway though as the “The Chosen One” (“L’élu” ) on a surreal journey of self-realization. In the opening scene the protagonist walks, perhaps a little swishingly or mincingly, through a banlieue, a lower income Parisian suburb, as night falls. They enter a green modernist building and attend screening of a film. Wearing a purple hoodie, they fall asleep in their seat as futuristic electronic music is heard in the background. (The ensuring scenes may comprise a dream sequence).

Awaking and walking out of the theater, the protagonist encounters a man and woman racing in from the outer door; the man warns him not to go outside, there may be aliens invading.

We then cut to a hilarious out of this world newscast, delivered by beautiful lighter skinned Black woman (played, I believe, by Anissa Kaki) sporting an Afro, in front of a montage of outer space scenes. She reports that the city (presumably Paris) is under attack by aliens, who have kidnapped corporate CEOs while leaving untouched the most vulnerable among us.

She runs through various conspiracy theories about why this is happening: perhaps an explosion of the capitalist system or a US scheme to revive the shows X-Files and Roswell, or an illustration of the “Grand Replacement Theory”, the far right paranoid claim in the US and Europe that shadowy forces are promoting a demographic take over by people of color from the global south (In France, there is a particularly Islamaphobic tilt to the theory.) She then emits a riotous laugh and notes that some speculate that these events are consonant with great feminist thinkers, from science fiction author Octavia Butler to cultural theorist Donna Haraway, to poet-philosopher Audre Lourde (who famously called for the dissolution of “all hierarchies of oppression.”)

We cut to the protagonist in a bathroom gazing into a long horizontal mirror. A beautiful Black woman (perhaps Cherry B. Diamond) with white straight hair appears beside Mejda, perhaps an angel or a space alien. She tells them they are the Chosen One (“L’élu”), that the pyramids are reversed. She repeats, “You are the chosen one, my sister, You know it.” She continues “I know you hang out in radical spaces, including ones in which people discuss the latest Audre Lourde book to be translated into French.” She laughs, telling Mejda not to look at her, but that they have a power to see, a gift to open the pyramids, as the apocalypse is reversed. They embraces her, then gazes into the mirror and declares, “I am the Chosen One.”

We cut to a blue lit hallway where the hero walks slowly, in full diva splendor, wearing a fur coat, seen from behind. They turn to the left. A young man tells them the aliens are looking for you, gesturing inwards, noting that the show will begin. Our hero advances dressed like an elegant lounge singer, towards a beautiful light skinned Black woman sporting an Afro (perhaps also Annisa Kaki?) seated at a piano. As Mejda advance sthey slowly take off their fur coat, allowing it to drop to the floor, revealing their long black cocktail dress and a black choker around the neck.

The Chose One takes a breath and places their right hand on the piano, hand on shoulder.

They recite a prose poem, as the pianist plays chords, a little reminiscent of Debussy.

The poem contains the repeated couplet, “Bitter is the Truth/You will have to get used to it”

Other lines include:

“Incomplete as much as the Absolute can be””

“Freedom is scary”

“What the shadow reflects”


There are cuts to the audience members, perhaps the Space Alien guests. These are phenotypically of varied complexions, which might primarily be read as “Black,” at least in the US. At one point the young man who invited the Chosen One into the hall, looks admiringly at them through the curtain.

Another line references “My hand on my stomach and the other on my thorax.” (Perhaps an allusion to the upper part of the torso, where breathing takes places)

The poem concludes:

“We are constantly waiting, for the alignment of the stars, while acting in the moment. I know that nobody will improve themselves in my place. Bitter is the truth.”

The screen fades to black.

Interpretive Notes: The whole work is perhaps an enormous joke on The Matrix (1999), with touches of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” mediated through Black Queer and Black Feminist critical stances. The protagonist is called “ L’élu” (The Chosen One), the same phrase used in French translations of The Matrix for Neo, the hero played by the white actor Keanu Reeves, who learns to see beyond surface illusions and achieves supernatural powers in his struggles against the villainous machines of the matrix universe. In Out of the Blue, the hero undergoes a radical transformation, across lines of gender, to see themself anew, embracing radical self love in a metropolis that normally expresses little love for persons of color or the non-binary.

There may also be allusions to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001, in which mysterious advanced extraterrestrials guide human cognitive evolution through transformations administered through a humming monolith.

Some viewers may be puzzled as why by Lakhrissi has given this French language video the English language title, “Out of the Blue,” as opposed to a French equivalent phrase, such as “Comme une coup de tonnere” (Like a thunderbolt). Perhaps the implicit reference to the sky in the phrase “Out of the Blue” works with the concept of space aliens descending from the sky. The phrase may resonate with penultimate scene in which the Chosen One walks slowly down a blue hallway, then stands in a cocktail dress by the piano and recites a beautiful poem, a evocative declaration of radical self love, evincing a consciousness that seems to have descended like a bolt from above.

It may be significant that the first known published use of the term “Out of the Blue” was in Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 book The French Revolution: A History. In Book 3, Carlyle writes about the epochal date, the 15th day of March, 1794, when the Revolution began to turn on its former partisans: “Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue, has hit strange victims.” (see: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1301/1301-h/1301-h.htm_ ) Perhaps the dream vision of the film envisions a sequel to the Revolution, the new battle waged not on the streets but in the “radical spaces” of art and performance sites.

Prompts to closer looking:

1. Consider carefully the uses of glass windows, screens, mirrors and reflective surfaces in the film. What might be suggested or implied about the fluidity and transformations experienced the protagonist?

2. Look carefully at the transitional passage scenes through the video: the first walk through the neighborhood, the exiting from the theater, the long slow walk down the blue lit hallway, the slow entrance towards the piano. How do these scenes of movement operate and what do they seem to suggest about journeys of self discovery?
3. In what ways does the video reference or explore the power of film itself, or highlight the complex relationship between dreams and cinema? The Chosen One falls asleep during a film screening, and perhaps crosses over to the other side of the screen, into a space of fantasy and utopian dreaming.
4. It would be fun to research the feminist visionaries referenced in the newscast, including Octavia Butler, Donna Haraway, and Audre Lourde. What aspects of their thinking and imagery are reflected are played with in the film?

5 . You may also wish to contrast the bathroom scene with other scenes in the history of art or the history of film in which a chosen one is visited by a guide and informed of their destiny: such as the Annunciation in which the angel Gabriel informs Mary she will conceive Jesus, or the scene in The Matrix in which Morpheus tells Neo he is the Chosen One. How has Lakhrissi played with and transformed this mythic scenario?

6. You may also wish to trace other visual citations in the video, referencing other works in the history of cinema.

7. How do you understand the repeated line in the concluding poem, “Bitter is the truth/You will have to get used to it”? What is bitter and yet necessary about the truths that are revealed in the poem and the film as a whole?

8. It would be interesting to compare Out of the Blue with other works installed in HERE, including Paul Emmanuel’s “Untethered/Retethered”: https://markauslander.com/2026/02/05/close-looking-guide-to-paul-emmanuels-untethered-retethered-multimedia-video-installation-2025/ In the Emmanuel installation a screen takes us in another kind of dreamtime, in which protagonists explore rather edgily the outer boundaries of gender in a landscape on the threshold between joy and despair. What is different and perhaps parallel in the ways that the two works navigative utopian and dystopian possibilities in our world?

For Further Reading

See interview with Tarek Lakhrissi: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2020/05/19/bitter-is-the-truth-tarek-lakhrissi-interviewed/