My final project will be a banner made from cloth and a number of other mixed media. I’ll argue that our world has progressed beyond the Eurocentric, distorted generalizations depicted through colonialist attitudes, and that disparate peoples are merging through globalization into blended races and cultures defying classification. I want to do this type of creative physical artwork because I was inspired by multiple intriguing experiences on two campuses.
Here at WSU, the Wordle site introduced in our class fascinated me with displays of common themes from each text individually, as well as collectively. I decided to use those, either solely for research, or also included as word clouds in the final product. As I thought of how our stories showed colonialism as Eurocentric and unreasonably biased against the far-flung geographical areas they exploited, I contemplated the deception of traditional, distorted Mercator maps we learned of in DTC 375, and decided to have my banner be an abstracted global map more accurately following the proportions of Goode/Gall-Peters projection. It will be centered on the Pacific Ocean, so Britain is literally “put in her place” at the edge, away from the center, and sized closer to reality (smaller) compared with other parts of the world. I might even turn it upside down, which is an alternative, legitimate scientific view, but one that greatly disturbs us. In Digital Diversity, we tried to classify people into races from photos of their faces, and realized how diverse parentage and broad variety within heritage boundaries breaks stereotypes we’ve acquired. In this project, I want to break away from the expected, accepted colors and patterns we’ve grown up pairing with Africa, China, India, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom, and replace them with unexpected pigments and prints we’ve explored in our global tour of literature.
While on campus at Spokane’s Whitworth University for Parents’ Weekend last month, I collected more ideas: I was delighted by a triptych using printed maps cut with a craft knife into non-geographical shapes in the art gallery. I’d like to stitch that treatment into my piece using country maps showing city names we’ve studied. I also rediscovered the joys of Craypas at Whitworth’s gallery, and imagined the different colors the authors painted the regions in our novels--through the foliage, the fabrics, the foods. Our sons’ fiances’ created new apartment decor using pages from novels, shawls, and beads, inspiring me to remix similar “found objects” into this design--maybe rosary beads from Cal, and bits of pages from the texts (using St. Vincent de Paul versions, rather than Norton critical editions). Whitworth also has wonderful gigantic glass, cloth, nylon, and ribbon banners cascading down two stories in open foyers and dining areas that cemented the banner concept in my plans. A white ribbon might delineate Europe from “the other,” and a red ribbon in China could fray into threads as communism falls apart at the seams.
This hanging will need to be seen with light behind it, rather than flat up against a wall. Sections of a blue bubbled swimming pool solar cover I have on hand will make up the oceans, with Easter grass or shredded green plastic for seaweed in the Sargasso Sea, projecting from underneath the “water” out onto the surface. I’ll incorporate translucent and transparent sections of clear bubble wrap, glass or plexiglass, and sheer fabrics, tucking surprise symbolic elements behind them. Small segments of mirror will reflect our own images into the collage of cultures and draw us into the diverse narratives. I want this to be a memory piece for those of us in class--like a literary “I Spy.” I’ll hide each author’s name, and attempt to create “ah ha!” moments as viewers get the connections.
Bold, vibrant cloth patterns and colors sewn into the continental areas on which we focussed will be tied to themes from each story--not to typical cultural generalizations; maybe some tiger stripes and cowboy print in China, for example. Pastels, muted colors, and smaller patterns unrecognizable as distinctly from one culture or race will border the edges where the present meets the future. On these margins of our imagination, increasing intermarriage will break the familiar high-contrasts, bold colors and large prints into blended, subdued hues with more complex, less identifiable shapes. On these horizons where the continents on the banner meet the spaces outside the scope of the current work, continued globalization will merge existing differences into abstract forms and swirling tints.
Sources I intend to use will include:
Brada-Williams, Noelle. “Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies as a Short Story Cycle.”
Brada-Williams offers shared themes from Lahiri’s cycle of stories that can be depicted visually, such as Indian foods and marriage. These will influence the fabric patterns I select for India, and provide ideas for “found objects” to incorporate.
Carson, Rachel L. “The Sargasso Sea.” Wide Sargasso Sea. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: Norton, 1999.
“The Fuller Projection Map.” Buckminster Fuller Institute. Buckminster Fuller Institute. 2007. Web. 18 Nov. 2009.
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Fuller’s Projection Map shows the world divided into triangles which can be separated multiple ways to display the oceans and land masses in accurate proportions on a flat plane, but oriented sideways or upside down from the traditional Eurocentric view. This will support both my argument and my art, since it shows “new” ways to witness the world with Europe out of the middle, and off to the edge, with whatever the viewer chooses placed at the center or the top--both literally and figuratively.
Harley, Brian J. “Maps, Knowledge, and Power.” Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective. Ed. George Henderson and Marvin Waterstone. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Harley argues that mapmakers hold the power to influence their users’ scope of knowledge, to limit what is perceived as factual, and to shape their ideologies. I will implement his interpretations of imperialist nations’ distortion of continents, the symbolic colors they chose for colonized countries, the labels and features they used for natives’ territories and uncharted heartlands, and their use of foreign images as decorative art surrounding map borders.
Loxton, John. “The Peters Phenomenon.” The Cartographic Journal 22.2 (1985) 106-08. Print/Web.
“Maps Are Territories.” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 28.2 (1991) 73-80. Print/Web.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994. Web.
Shohat and Stam demonstrate how “Others” are depicted off-handedly in our culture in generalized, stereotypical ways through a European colonialist lens. Their ideas will steer my project away from accepted, distorted, and inaccurate ways of representing the world’s cultures.
