Prasannachoudhary - Wandering Mind

REVISITING NATIONALISM - 1

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 1

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 1      

Prasanna K Choudhary

NATION, NATION-STATES AND NATIONALISM

1648.The Thirty Years’ (1618-1648) European War ended in the Treaty of Westphalia. In this devaststing war, fought in the background of the Reformation, the…

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IMG_7809 by Pooja Pant

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

Best GIFs of 2012:

patakk

Today marks the 28th Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It also marks 28 years of reducing the legacy of radical social justice and antiwar activist into that of loving quotes on racial reconciliation. Ultimately, think back to what you were taught about Dr. King and you’ll most likely remember…

Video: Starving on the Streets

Nicholas Kristof travels to South Sudan, where a famine brought on by drought and civil war threatens five million people.

Nicholas Kristof travels to South Sudan, where a famine brought on by drought and civil war threatens five million people.

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration.

James Joyce in Araby

Song: “Lovesick Misery” by Sanders Bohlke

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