International | Department of African American Studies

What is Tamil for Loss? Remembering the Sri Lankan Civil War

Thursday, May 23, 2019

by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Warscapes Magazine

My grandmother always reminds me: you have lost your mother-tongue. When I return to Sri Lanka for brief visits, she tells me how I used to understand her. Like my nephews and nieces do now when I was a child, I would listen to spoken Tamil and reply in English. There is nothing I can say to her accusation except to agree. Yes, I have lost my mother tongue, the words, the sounds, the rhythms of speaking to which I was born. I willfully lost this language, after we moved to Australia where my voice, my skin, my body continually marked me as foreign, different, other. As we all know, primary school children can be cruel: losing my mother-tongue was a way to survive.
Photography into Paint by Prof ARABINDAN-KESSON

Monday, Mar 25, 2019

by Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Barkley L. Hendricks’s work has been compared to the realism of artists like Philip Pearlstein and William Bailey, both of whom were included in an exhibition entitled Seven Realists held at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, in 1974, the same year that Family Jules (No Naked Niggahs) 1974 (Tate L02979) was painted.1Hendricks’s art has also been discussed in relation to the photorealist work of artists like Chuck Close, whose portrait paintings – based on photographs – present close, geometrical studies of his subjects.
Notes From The Field: Following The Routes Of U.S. Deportation Through History

Monday, Apr 8, 2019

by Olivia Mena, Department of African American Studies

Over the spring break, we set out for London in search of the archives and traveling histories of some of the itinerant and exiled thinkers we were studying. We followed the route of several deportees from the U.S. back to Brixton, a neighborhood in South London where Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James and his compatriot Claudia Jones ended up after their deportations from the United States during the 1950s at the height of McCarthyism.
El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale

Friday, Mar 8, 2019

by Chika Okeke-Agulu

El Anatsui's survey exhibition "Triumphant Scale" at Haus der Kunst – the first ever in Europe – is the most comprehensive and detailed presentation of his oeuvre thus far. Occupying the entire East Wing, the exhibition comprises key works from five decades of the artist's career. At the core of the exhibition, which focuses on the triumphant and monumental nature of El Anatsui's groundbreaking oeuvre, are the bottle-cap works from the last two decades, with their majestic, imposing presence and dazzling colors.