Shifting Narratives

Session Objective: to recentre ideologies marginalised by white supremacist approaches to modernisation and globalisation

As we take a bit of a breather from our regular Wednesday meetings, you are invited to engage with content that furthers this week’s required Learning Log about representation.

Watch: Emma Morgan-Bennett’s special session on race, representation, and humor in visual media with the Spring 2021 Climates of Resistance course, which included both Syracuse students and community members in attendance. Laugh to Keep from Crying examined the use of parody and humor in media portrayals of race and racism. You will see several clips from various forms of media, as well as Emma’s analytical commentary and a conversation with attendees.

Laugh to Keep From Crying (Emma Morgan-Bennett).mp4

Emma Morgan-Bennett

Emma is a visual media artist and activist-scholar particularly drawn to questions surrounding race, reproduction, and the body. Committed to Black Radical Joy, Emma sees liberation within the creative celebration and engagement of those who have survived and thrived in spite of the odds.

A born and bred New Yorker from Washington Heights, Emma recently earned her masters degree in filmmaking at Goldsmiths, University of London as a Marshall Scholar. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2020 with High Honors having written her Medical Anthropology thesis on Radical Doulas and the Black Maternal Mortality Crisis in Austin, Texas.

Outside of the classroom, Emma spends her time working as a full-spectrum doula (physically and emotionally supporting pregnant people through their reproductive journeys), working on her creative projects, and writing.

Examine: the way Tony Capellán’s work critiques histories of colonisation and neocolonial views of the Caribbean, centring the sea and impoverished communities while showcasing the violence of unequal globalisation.

Tony Capellán's Mar Caribe [Carribean Sea]. This piece features several flip flops stacked on top of each other and spread out. This particular image is a close up shot of the whole piece giving an even more overwhelming visual.

Mar Caribe [Carribean Sea] (1996)

Trained as both a painter and printmaker, Tony Capellán’s work has always been charged with an intense sociopolitical consciousness, referencing the brutal legacies of colonialism such as racism and poverty. Mar Caribe is an installation whose dimensions vary according to the placement of objects. This constant shift within the presentation of the work itself is undoubtedly reflective of both the physical change of the Caribbean Sea and the social displacement of the marginal people who traverse it. The piece consists of some 500 green and blue rubber flip flops that the artist found on the banks of the Ozama River in the Dominican Republic. The sandals are the “remains” of the poor that have passed through this geographic area. They can be arranged either as a rectangle or as a circle, thereby projecting a panoramic vision of the sea. Capellán alters the flip flops by replacing the rubber pieces that hold the toes with barbed wire. The barbed wire is used to keep people in or out; it tears flesh and makes it bleed – a blunt reminder that beyond the beautiful blue-green colors of the Caribbean, this sea and region remain places of exploitation and suffering.