Sandy Hill again

300 images taken today on Sandy Hill

Jin me Yoon

Chinatown Saturday Feb 24th 07

Saturday morning, overcast

Saturday morning, the best and the last

on Sussex Drive...

These two images are in my collection. I put them together because...they were taken on Sussex Drive (not in the same date though). These images have nothing to do with Sandy Hill, where I went to work yesterday and today. They are chosen because of ... what I dreamt lastnight. An weird but interesting dream... I met and had some discussions with Trinh T Minh-ha. Ididn't read her books recently either. The day before yesterday I saw her name as one of the keynote speakers in AHH anual conference on CONTESTATIONS http://aah.org.uk/conference/index.php

...The theme for the 33rd Annual Conference has been motivated by the specific ‘post-conflict’ situation of Northern Ireland. Belfast, for instance, is a city in which both material traces and representations of competing historical formations are strikingly evident in everyday life. At a global level, contestation defines the present situation in which manifold interests, intentions and investments clash and grapple with each other. Art historians, artists, theorists, cultural and media analysts are invited to think about the idea of contestation: How do we experience it? What are its processes? How do we understand it in our various areas of activity?

No, actually I paid more attention to one of the sections which will be about photography:

The aim of this session is to examine a recurrent question in the recent literature on the place of the photographic medium in contemporary art. It concerns the multiformity of the use and ways the photograph manifests itself in diverse artistic practices today. Central to the debate is the question whether photography has a hybrid character because it can be part of entirely different multimedia/mixed media works of art, such as the combination of photographs and text, photography in painting, slides in video installations, digital photographs in computer art, photographs in installation art, etc. Or does the photo-image nowadays mainly serve as a useful tool to make a renewed kind of ‘tableaux’, often marked by a rather noncommittal and ‘poetic’ visual imagery? When photographic practices actively aim at raising a critical debate on the internal workings of the artistic system itself or on broader social problems, is the photograph then able to distinguish itself from a merely ‘political’ statement or a pamphlet? Does this ambiguity make photography a pre-eminently suitable tool for an artist in an ‘Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Krauss, 1999)’? Can we define the medium specificity or ontology of photography, or is its singularity contestable?

I like the fact that these questions are not new and have been asking all the time. Do we need conferences with brandy new questions? May be we do or I don' t know. It depends on how the questions will be asked?

Still, all of these have anything to do with my dream lastnight in which I had some chats with Trinh T Minh-ha, filmmaker, writer, composer, cultural critic, proferssor of Women Studies and Rhetoric?

Why it was Trinh T Minh-ha? Did I chat with her in English? Yes as much as I remember...I chatted with her in English when we both looked at a picture of a woman who has an 'Asian' face...

working on Sandy Hill project

night

late

tea

at 2.30pm

Lunch

Noon

Notes of Today Reading

On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection by Susan Stewart, Duke University Press (1993)

Morning

www

Photography between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art

http://www.aah.org.uk/conference/2007session07.php

The aim of this session is to examine a recurrent question in the recent literature on the place of the photographic medium in contemporary art. It concerns the multiformity of the use and ways the photograph manifests itself in diverse artistic practices today. Central to the debate is the question whether photography has a hybrid character because it can be part of entirely different multimedia/mixed media works of art, such as the combination of photographs and text, photography in painting, slides in video installations, digital photographs in computer art, photographs in installation art, etc. Or does the photo-image nowadays mainly serve as a useful tool to make a renewed kind of ‘tableaux’, often marked by a rather noncommittal and ‘poetic’ visual imagery?
...

http://mocp.org/collections/permanent/le_an-my.php

An-My Lê was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1960 and came to the United States in 1975 as a refugee. She holds a BAS (1981) and MS (1985) from Stanford University and an MFA from Yale University School of Art (1993). Recent solo exhibitions of her work include 29 Palms at Murray Guy, New York; Small Wars at PS1/MOMA Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York; and Vietnam at Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco.

Notes of Today Reading

Diaspora and Cultural Memory by Anh Hua in Diaspora, Memory, and Identity, A search for Home, edited by Vijay Agnew, University of Toronto Press (2005)

Diaspora

Diaspora the word suggests networks of real or imagined relationships among scattered peoples whose sense of community is sustained by various communications and contacts, including kinship, trade, travel, shared culture, language, ritual, scripture, print, and electronic media (Peters 1999, 20, see also Hua, 192)

Diaspora subverts nation states. Although they are not innocent of nationalist aims, diasporas are not exclusively nationalistic. (Clifford 307) (192)
They exist in tension with the norms of nation states and with nativist identity formations. They are ‘dwellings-in-displacement’. Disaporic communities live out a mediated tension: ‘the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/ desiring another place’(311)

Usefulness of diaspora as a concept

Diaspora theorizing opens up the discursive or semiotic space for discussion of many ideas: identification and affiliation, homing desire and homeland nostalgia, exile and displacement, the reinvention of cultural traditions in the New World Order, and the construction of hybrid identities, as well as cultural and linguistic practices, the building of the communities and communal boundaries, cultural memory and trauma, the politics and return, and the possibility of imagining geographical and cultural belonging beyond and within the nation-state formation. (191)

Diaspora is useful concept because it permits feminists, cultural theorists, and social scientists to think through some vexed issues: identity and solidarity, belonging and geography, spatialization and subject personalities, the politics of representation, and relation between roots and routes, transnational and intercultural forms and productions, and the politics of home. (197)

Diaspora theorizing is urgent and important as it allows us to reconfigure the relation-ship between citizens, nation states, and national narratology.

Some cautions notes on theorizing

It is important to differentiate between specific historical diasporas and diaspora as a concept (179)

Moreover, it is important to challenge and rethink earlier versions of diasporic narratives with their fixed notion of home, identity, and exile, where the homeland is perceived nostalgically as an ‘authentic’ space of belonging, and the place of settlement as somehow ‘inauthentic’ and undesirable.

It is critical to remember that diaspora identities and communities are not fixed, rigid or homogeneous, but are instead fluid, always changing, and heterogeneous.

Radhakrishnan (1996) also warns us against the uncritical nostalgia found in some diasporic narratives about the home country. Often when we are dissatisfied with the place of settlement and its unwillingness to change the dominant injustices, we turn our gaze back to the homeland.

Yet as Radhakrishnan notes, this uncritical, nostalgic gaze may ignore the realities of the homeland that has nothing to do with contemporary history, or one may pretend that the homeland has not changed since one left its shores (211-212) (196)

Working process of memory, why memory is significant to diaspora studies and to feminism

Separate from their homelands by geographical distance and political barriers

To resist assimilation into the host country, and to avoid social amnesia about their collective histories, diasporic people attempt to revive, recreate, and invent their artistic, linguistic, economic, religious, cultural, and political practices and productions.

Such interconnection is made possible by changes in the new technologies, global communication, and increased travel in our present world of late capitalism. As a result, collective memories, myths, and visions of the homeland become manifest. (193)

Theorizing memory

Memory refers to the capacity for converting certain information’ or ‘a group of psychic functions that allow us to actualize past impressions or information that we represent to ourselves as past’ (Legoff 1991, 51). Rather than mental imprints or iconic likeness, memory is formed through elaborate mental mappings that change over time. Memory is the construction or reconstruction of what actually happened in the past. Memory is distorted by needs, desires, interests, and fantasies. Subjective and malleable rather than objective and concrete, memory is emotional, conceptual, contextual, constantly undergoing revision, selection, interpretation, distortion, and reconstruction (Bertman 200,27).

Cultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history. Because cultural memory is political, and because different stories and representations struggle for a place in history, memory is crucial to understanding a culture since it reveals collective desires, needs, self-definitions, and power struggles.

For feminists Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, cultural memory involves acts of transfer in which individuals and groups construct and perform their identities by recollecting a shared past if contested norms, conventions, and practices. These memorial acts of transfer involve the dynamic negotiation between past and present, the individual and the collective, the public and private, recalling and forgetting, power and powerless, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, consciousness and unconsciousness, fears and desires.

Remembrance is not simply to document but to construct the new to move us into a different mode of articulation

Some cautions notes on theorizing

There is the need to differentiate between memory and nostalgic yearning and memory as an intention to remember critically, to understand our relation to the past, history, and time (M.Jacqui Alexander, 2002)

Can we intentionally remember, all the time, as a way of never forgetting, all of us, building an archeology of living memory which has less to do with living in the past, invoking a past, or excising it, and more to do with our relationship to time and its purpose. There is a difference between remembering when – the nostalgic yearning for some return – and a living memory that enable us to remember (96)

Notes of Today Reading

Diaspora, Memory, and Identity, A search for Home, edited by Vijay Agnew, University of Toronto Press (2005)

Completed! The two pieces, which I like the best are Diaspora and Cultural Memory by Anh Hua and Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women’s Life Stories by Pamela Sugima. In a way the two pieces are most relevant for my research while the rest of the book helps me to think how to frame the interviews when I am going to do some intensive interviews with the Vietnamese Diaspora community in Ottawa Chinatown.

I like this piece by Dunlop

I hear them behind me in another continent
accross the Indian Ocean
crossing the floors, soft sweep of sandals
in my mother's country. I was born there four
decates ago at 2am. My birth certificate reads
One Living Female Child

Today my passport reads nationality: Canadian.

http://www.asiancanadianwritersworkshop.com/

imaginASIAN Bedtime Stories Collection program
Ricepaper Staff, February-01 2007

Ricepaper Magazine launches the “imaginASIAN” Bedtime Stories Collection Ricepaper Magazine would like to call on Canadians of all ages and ethnic backgrounds for their original bedtime stories that weave together both Asian and Canadian culture. “imaginASIAN” seeks to generate a new legacy collection of fun, witty, and imaginative bedtime stories for all Canadian children and in particular those of Asian background. Created as part of the 2010 Arts Now program, the goal of the “imaginASIAN” Bedtime Stories Collection is to celebrate the unique experience of Canadians of Asian descent.

into the year of the Golden Pig

...

Notes of Today Reading

Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese-Canadian Women’s Life Stories, By Pamela Sugiman in Diaspora, Memory, and Identity, A search for Home, edited by Vijay Agnew, University of Toronto Press (2005)

Past events after all are very much situated and represented in present-day society. As such they cannot be accessed in “unmediated form”.

These personal testimonies present memory as a meaningful sociological concept. Tima and temporality are essential to the telling of stories.

Memory is always already secondary revision. It is neither pure experience nor pure event. Memory reflects personal and historical transformations, ideological shifts, changing relations of power, strategy and struggle.
As a social process, memory then is selective. We remember what we need to remember, what is safe to remember, what we have the cultural tools to express. Memory is shaped by its audience (Tokin 1992:9, see also Sugiman 2005: 51)
The author highlights the ways in which Nisei women’s memories bring together biography, history and sociology. These memories are the products of intermingling of past and present lives, the creation of a complex dynamic between the individual and the collective, recalling and forgetting, trauma and nostalgia (Hirsch and Smith, 2002, 4, see also Sugiman 2005: 52)
As the author notes “The fluidity of these memories may also linked to my implicit feminist approach”
- placing emphasis on private experiences – experiences that may have been located in family households, in school play-grounds, in circles of friends.
- What is seemly small and everyday can be of political significance.
To some extent, the narrators’ identification of meaningful events in their lives, their presentation and interpretation of these events, were no doubt shaped by the researcher own academic relationship to time and sense of history. (53)

Questions:
what are the differences between a piece of memory and that of a narrative? Do we decode them in the same ways?
Think about women’s construction of memory in relation to their mothers (and less often their fathers)?
In sharing their memories how do they compare their personal experiences to those of others in the community?

Nostalgia

In Halbwachs’s view, nostalgia permits a transcendence of the irreversibility of time, thus enable us to selectively emphasize positive experiences and aspects of the past (Spitzer 1999, 91-91. see also 64). In this sense, nostalgia has a librating potential; it permits both au understanding of the past that may not have been originally possible, and allows for an escape from coercive social bonds and from the trials of the present (Vromen 1994: 76 see also 64).
Acording to Vromen, nostalgia offers a world in which pain and suffering have been removed. It permits a selective emphasis on the positive, and thereby has important implications for individual as well as collective identity. (64)

Judy Giles (2002), while nostalgia can function as a repudiation of an escape from “the modern”, it also has the potential to serve as a means of critiquing it. The figure of one’s mother, for example, can offer ‘not only psychic regression to maternal plenitude, but also a temporal and spatial return to the secure past of childhood and to the private world of home. (28 see also 64).
While it is not specific to women, nostalgic memory does have different meanings for women and men. It may serve as one way in which a woman actively attempts to make herself at home in a world that continues to deny women like herself power and dignity (Giles 2002:30, also 65).

Questions:
If nostalgic memory allows an escape from “the modern” to many women, who have experienced difficulty in integrating into a new life in Canada such as economic insecurity, language barrier, cold climate and Canadian social norms to name a few, longing for an idealized past seems to be appropriate. However, incase of the Vietnamese diaspora community, the past was also associated with traumas of wars and loss. This is especially true for boat people, whose homeland was severely devastated by wars and political turmoil, let alone offered them a secure ‘home’.

How an idealized past is constructed by the Vietnamese diaspora in general and by Vietnamese women in particularly?

This blog is simply called "everyday-lens".

"Everyday-lens" serves my personal and research interests, which can be found at the intersections of diaspora, identity, cultural memory, architecture and photography.