An Asian/American Positionality


In her book Unsettled Visions, Professor Margo Machida opens with the question: how do artists of Asian heritage, whether foreign or U.S. born, conceptualize the world and position themselves as cultural and historical subjects through the symbolic languages and media of visual art?  In the first chapter, Machida maps out multiple thematics available for considering the […]

memory + mapmaking


I was quite interested in this week’s discussion on the relationship between personal and collective memory, and the role art plays in contesting both because of the dialogic way memory works. Machida emphasizes the way in which memory is not “stored” but rather constituted through sociability, “Remembering, therefore, is necessarily dialogic, as it involves a […]

Asian American Identity


The reading “Unsettled Visions” by Professor Margo Machida opened my eyes to issues of immigration and the process of identity formation in a new country. Machida gives us a detailed description of how Asian American art has long been used as a way to invoke cultural similarities among Asian Americans and create a social presence […]

Mapping Beyond the National Bourgeoisie


Reading Lesser and Fanon together can be a way of thinking about Fanon’s argument as a framework to think through the locally specific ways in which the national bourgeoisie continues power relations from colonialism and prevents the creation of an “authentic national culture.” In other words, Lesser is the local speaking to the universals about […]

The Consciousness Manifesto


In “Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” Frantz Fanon delivers a scathing indictment of the national bourgeoisie. Rather than take up its true “heroic and positive” mission of utilizing its skills and privilege to serve the people, it panders to the former colonial elite (99). According to Fanon, the national bourgeoisie of “underdeveloped” nations—the native […]

National Consciousness, Immigration and Brazil


  In “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” Frantz Fanon argues that newly independent nations often fail to activate the so desired national consciousness, promoting mass repression instead. In order to explain his argument, Fanon gives us a psychological analysis of post-colonial societies, blaming the wealthy class as the major source of repression and […]

Torres Garcia’s “Inverted Map”


Myths of Continents raised the issue of power in relation to the ways in which space is imagined/constructed. In particular, the reading historicizes geographical categories for dividing the world (East, West, Asia, America, Africa, etc…) in order to point out their relative elasticity and how this trait comes to function in relation to (nationalist) ideology. […]

Gendered Developmentalism in Eurocentric Cartography


Today’s introductory readings from Lewis & Wigen explore, as well as critique, Orientalist cartographic discourses of East vs. West, epistemological object vs. rational mind. In mobilizing the map as not only image but also metaphor, the authors dismantle, while not entirely rejecting, this Cartesian dualism and its Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge and reason. For Lewis […]

Why Boundaries?


Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen in “The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography” address important questions regarding the world’s geography and the way in which it shapes people’s understanding of the world. Despite being commonly accepted principles, geographic divisions of the world such as countries and continents can be incredibly misleading. Thus, these spatial concepts […]

The Necessity of Categories


I’m interested in exploring two important points that Lewis and Wigen make that I feel are a bit overshadowed by their otherwise enlightening undoing of the logic of the geographical divisions we often take for granted today. The first is that “the main problem with abandoning a set structure of nonproblematic geographical entities, in exchange for an […]