Sep 29, 2023 | 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Angela Aujla, MA, Prasad Bidaye, PhD
Diasporic Palimpsests and Outernationalist Dub in the Work of Angela Aujla and Indigenous Resistance
While diasporas tend to be formed through collective experiences of violence and strife, they can also generate valuable spaces of critique and creativity. These critiques may be aimed at the homeland that a community has migrated from. Conversely, they may draw attention to the inequities and oppressions of the nation-states that the same community has settled in. Most importantly, diasporic expressions exemplify visions and strategies that people – communities, organizations, and movements, but also artists working individually and in collaboration – have developed for the pursuit of social justice and change in both contexts, if not more. In all these ways, diasporic spaces of creativity are equally transnational, challenging nationalist regimes and monocultural spaces.
This panel will focus on two art projects, both of which operate within a transnational framework. The two presenters in this panel will also engage these projects through the dual positionality of being both participants in the creation of these projects as well as detached observers and scholarly readers.
Through engagement with material culture, archival documents, and family photographs, Angela Aujla’s artistic practice creates a visual discourse that disrupts colonial narratives and reanimates the lives of those excluded from dominant histories. Her visual storytelling illustrates how her grandmothers and their contemporaries practiced and made culture in Canada in the shadow of patriarchal traditions and racist hostility, alongside the difficulties of being dislocated from family and community networks based in both the Panjab and its diaspora. Reflecting on the concept of the palimpsest, and the idea that traces of the past remain part of the present, Aujla considers the layers of history that continue to inform diasporic identity and culture. Her work is an entanglement of historical, fictive, and autobiographical memory that encourages us to reposition our understanding of national history and consider how traces of the past endure through generations.
Dr. Prasad Bidaye is a member of Indigenous Resistance (IR), a decentralized and globally dispersed arts and activist collective. In this presentation, he will look at IR’s recent work across multiple media forms, including dub recordings, short films, dialogical writings, photo essays, and social media interventions. One of the common threads across these selections of IR’s work is their outernationalist vision. Adapted from Jamaican sound system culture, the concept of outernationalism is an overtly political mode of transnationalism. It parallels Arundhati Roy’s “globalization of dissent” as a counter-narrative to celebratory, capitalist-friendly forms of globalization discourse. Outernationalism is also conceptualized here as an extrapolation of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. While Gilroy foregrounds the networks and exchanges between Black, African, and Caribbean communities across the world since the Middle Passage, IR’s outernationalism focuses on the relationships, dialogues, and collaborations between subaltern, marginalized peoples - especially people marginalized through ongoing histories of modern European colonialism and its political descendants. The key difference is that outernationalism is not limited to Gilroy’s singular racial, and ethnic focus. Ultimately, the outernationalist methods and aesthetics in IR’s work enables two sets of critical interventions for transnational and diasporic theory: 1) they challenge Eurocentric forms of transnationalism which typically operate on a Black/White or Western/Non-Western binary and 2) they focus on the cross-cultural spaces of creativity and collaboration between communities involved in multiple anti-colonial struggles, recognizing that each struggle is stronger when doubly engaged with others.
Angela Aujla, MA
Angela Aujla is a Panjabi Canadian visual artist and cultural studies professor whose research-based artwork is a confluence of her academic practice and her personal history. She engages with archival photographs and documents, and cultural objects to explore the interplay between culture, memory, and colonial histories. Her vibrant, narrative artwork takes the form of embellished photography, collage, drawing, and mixed media installations. She is fascinated with the ways that material objects come to carry meaning, memory, and nostalgia – particularly in diasporic, postcolonial contexts. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in private collections internationally. She has published her research on South Asian diasporic women in scholarly and non-scholarly publications including Canadian Woman Studies, and The Gendered Society Reader. Recent contributions to public art include installations in Toronto, Vancouver, Barrie, Innisfil, Oro-Medonte, Midland, Hamilton, and Burlington. Since 2015, Aujla’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including OCAD University (Toronto), UC Berkeley (California), and the MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie). Her work is held in private collections internationally and is part of Humber College’s permanent art collection (Toronto). Her work has been featured in publications including the Times of India (Delhi), Scroll Magazine (Delhi), Gal-Dem (UK), Canadian Woman Studies (Toronto), and Living Hyphen (Toronto).
Prasad Bidaye, PhD
Dr. Prasad Bidaye teaches in the Department of English at Humber College ITAL in Toronto, Canada. His writing has been published in scholarly and non-scholarly publications, including University of Toronto Quarterly, Canadian Literature, Exclaim!, Africa is a Country, Indigenous Resistance’s Afreekan Dub Biographies series, and the edited collection, Transnationalism, Art, Activism (2012). His areas of focus include South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, Afrofuturism, electronic music, and DJ culture.
