Beijie Village: A Land Grab Case, A Village Election, And A Microcosm Of China

Our quote of the day is from the Irish poet W.B. Yeats

The Wayland Rudd Collection A project organized by Yevgeniy Fiks

The Wayland Rudd Collection focuses on the representation of Africans and African-Americans in Soviet visual culture. A point of departure for this project is Fiks’ collection of over 200 Soviet images (paintings, movie stills, posters, graphics, etc.) of Africans and African-Americans spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s. Fiks invited contemporary artists as well as activists, historians, sociologists, political theorists, and specialist in cultural studies to select one or more images from this collection and asked them to respond to it either via artwork, performance, lecture, or other forms.

Wayland Rudd was an American actor who began performing in the Hedgerow Theater in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania under the directorship of Jasper Deeter. Rudd first received critical acclaim for his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones.” Frustrated over racism in the entertainment industry, Rudd moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 where he began a successful career in Soviet Theater and Film including work with the famed Russian Director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He later received a degree from the Theatrical Art Institute in Moscow and worked at the Stanislavsky Opera and Drama Theater. Rudd died in Moscow in 1952.

During Wayland Rudd’s twenty year-long career in the Soviet Union, he appeared in numerous films, theatrical performances, and plays. He was also used as a model for paintings, drawings, and propaganda posters and, in many respects, defined the image of the “Negro” for generations of Soviet people. Although only a small section of the assembled images in The Wayland Rudd Collection are of Wayland Rudd, the project is given his name to commemorate this American-Soviet actor’s personal story as a case in point of the complex intersection of 20th century American-Soviet narrative.

The images in The Wayland Rudd Collection present a very complex and often contradictory mapping of the intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context. The participatory aspect of this project adds the needed dimensions to show this complexity—giving the viewers the capacity to digest this history. This project investigates the promise and reality of Communism vis-à-vis the issue of race in the 20th century through the Soviet experiment. It presents this issue as unresolved, revealing the Soviet legacy on race as a mix bag of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, Communist ideals as well as exoticization, otherness, racist stereotyping, and hypocrisy.

Participants: Suzanne Broughel, Maria Buyondo, Dread Scott, Jenny Polak, Michael Paul Britto, Nikolay Oleynikov, Ivan Brazhkin, Haim Sokol, Kara Lynch, Dr. Allison Blakely, Dr. Romy Taylor, and others

St. Mark’s Square II, Venice, 2007, Guy Sargent

'An ideal society should be mobile, should be full of channels for conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts. In an ideal society, there should be many interests consciously communicated and shared. There should be varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. .. This is fraternity, which is only another name for democracy. Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen.' Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), 'Annihilation of Caste'.

From Laughing Squid, 3D-Printed Paintings of Nanomolecular Structures by Shane Hope.

Shane has a pretty interesting website:

Q: Is your work deliberately trying to be opaque, and if so, what are the benefits of hyper-complexity (both conceptual and aesthetic)?

A: Many have been too hypnotized by technocratic solutionism to see that not all clarity is benevolently about accuracy and not all lack thereof should be immediately suspect. Getting obsessive-compulsive about the future can be counterproductive inasmuch as it often precludes a greater gamut of adaptability. Ambiguity, opacity, allusion, metaphor and semantic slippage can all serve as really important tools when making artwork, or realities for that matter. From the butterfly flap you choose, emerges the superstorm you deserve.

Hm.

IMG_7795 by Pooja Pant

The COVID-19 Pandemic is the ‘Most Discriminatory Crisis’ Females Have Experienced, Says the Head of U.N. Women — TIME

The COVID-19 Pandemic is the ‘Most Discriminatory Crisis’ Females Have Experienced, Says the Head of U.N. Women — TIME

UNITED NATIONS — The head of UN Women called the COVID-19 pandemic “the most discriminatory crisis” that women and girls have ever experienced on Monday, pointing to women losing jobs far more often than men, a “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence, and 47 million more women being pushed into living on less than $1.90 a…The COVID-19 Pandemic is the ‘Most Discriminatory Crisis’ Females Have…

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Genesis of Capital in India

Genesis of Capital in India

My book ‘Genesis of Capital in India’ in Kindle Edition. https://www.amazon.in/GENESIS-CAPITAL-INDIA-Prasanna-Choudhary-ebook/dp/B01MRTPPTA?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=genesis%20of%20capital%20in%20india&qid=1480937433&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1  

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Mask

Tsimshian

1800-30

National Museum of the American Indian

JNU Violence: JNUSU President Briefs Media Hours After She Was Brutally ...