Ivette
Parhizkar
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Current Monograph Project: Acts in Inventory
As a comparative hemispheric study, Acts in Inventory asks: where and what are the objects that diasporic peoples gather to narrate loss from within empire? To answer, I contend with the cabinet of curiosities, or wunderkammer, as an enduring blueprint of colonial aesthetics––one that can be found across twentieth century and contemporary aesthetic forms in surprising ways. While western museums, institutional archives, and domestic collections all inherit qualities of the early modern cabinet as a site of colonial knowledge production, I read how literature, art and performance by diasporic peoples of the Americas unsettle such knowledge in their curation of alternative “collections” of curious objects. Thinking through collections as inventory, I show how such acts unsettle forms of accumulation that rely on the objectification of diasporic subjects in and from the Americas.
My expansive reading of diasporic reckonings with material accumulation both builds upon and departs from scholarship on collecting in twentieth-century aesthetics. I do so by drawing upon decolonial poetics, critical ethnic studies, performance studies and material culture studies to analyze and theorize through several forms of diasporic aesthetic practices, with a focus on African American, Caribbean, and Latinx creative thinkers working in North America. Among them are writings by Dionne Brand, Jamaica Kincaid, William Archila, and Yvette Siegert; installations by Amalia Mesa Bains and Fred Wilson; and performances by Mbye Otabenga, Rosa Covarrubias, and Sun Ra. At times I read their practices against the grain of specific institutional collections; at other times, I read them as self-made antidotes to their own experiences of racialized objecthood. Taken as a whole, this capacious study argues that uprooted subjects assert their existence in modernity––and thus, their inextricable humanity within it––by paradoxically re-possessing things that elude physical grasp.
Central American Futurities Conference
In April 2024, María Aguilar Velasquez, Eileen Michelle Galvez and I co-organized Central American Futurities at Yale University, the first international Central American studies conference to be hosted at the university and the first to be hosted in the northeastern United States. Among the goals of the conference were bridging conversations in the Central American diasporas and the isthmus; centering Black and Indigenous isthmian epistemologies and perspectives; and gather a transnational community to reframe thinking on how the region, its past, present, and future, are considered through, scholarship, arts, and activism.