Current Projects
Institute for Popular Arts & Education
The Institute for Popular Arts & Education (IPAE) recognizes folklore as the future. IPAE contests the academy’s monopoly on education and knowledge production in favor of the undercommons. People everywhere deserve a sophisticated creative and political education. IPAE reappropriates the tools of education to offer courses, reading groups, installations, audio media, and publications.
| Conceptual art institution |
A New Peasant Question: Epistemic Violence and
Material Dispossession in the Yugoslav Region
Book manuscript in progress
A New Peasant Question exposes how the invalidation of peasant knowledge over the past two hundred years has covered over the violent dispossession and exploitation of peasant populations in the Yugoslav region. This research builds on previous work in folklore, anthropology, and performance studies, which has problematized the colonial investments of anthropology and the racism undergirding white modern artists’ infatuation with the visual cultures of colonized peoples. My book extends this line of analysis to representations of Yugoslav peasants and their cultural practices (most commonly referred to as “folklore”). I consider how and why peasants in the Yugoslav region came to be widely seen as backwards, superstitious, and obstinate. To understand this process and its consequences, I examine ethnographic photography, peasant painting, nationalist folklore, performance and video art, and contemporary village healing practices. Combining visual and discourse analysis with ethnographic and archival research methods, this book traces the changing representations of peasants’ relationships to land in the Yugoslav region from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. As the Yugoslav region currently witnesses some of the worst air quality in the world, an unresolved waste management crisis, and the damming of the last “wild rivers” in Europe, the enduring contradictions of nineteenth and twentieth-century responses to the Peasant Question provoke us to both think critically about the peasant’s historical trajectory in the region and also find opportunities for actualizing alternative horizons.
Book manuscript in progress
A New Peasant Question exposes how the invalidation of peasant knowledge over the past two hundred years has covered over the violent dispossession and exploitation of peasant populations in the Yugoslav region. This research builds on previous work in folklore, anthropology, and performance studies, which has problematized the colonial investments of anthropology and the racism undergirding white modern artists’ infatuation with the visual cultures of colonized peoples. My book extends this line of analysis to representations of Yugoslav peasants and their cultural practices (most commonly referred to as “folklore”). I consider how and why peasants in the Yugoslav region came to be widely seen as backwards, superstitious, and obstinate. To understand this process and its consequences, I examine ethnographic photography, peasant painting, nationalist folklore, performance and video art, and contemporary village healing practices. Combining visual and discourse analysis with ethnographic and archival research methods, this book traces the changing representations of peasants’ relationships to land in the Yugoslav region from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. As the Yugoslav region currently witnesses some of the worst air quality in the world, an unresolved waste management crisis, and the damming of the last “wild rivers” in Europe, the enduring contradictions of nineteenth and twentieth-century responses to the Peasant Question provoke us to both think critically about the peasant’s historical trajectory in the region and also find opportunities for actualizing alternative horizons.