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APPROPRIATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

This collaborative project between Huey Copeland (at Northwestern University during the time of the project, now BFC Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania) and Athi Mongezeleli Joja (South Africa based art writer and MFA candidate at the  University of the Witwatersrand during the time of this project) has focused on comparative approaches to theories of cultural appropriation, with a particular emphasis on the global circulation of black bodies, discourses, and art forms from an Afro-pessimist perspective. Copeland and Joja developed a bibliography that became the base for graduate and undergraduate syllabi and a series of events that critically interrogate the ways in which blackness variously functions across and between the global North and South.​ In the spring of 2020, Copeland collaborated with Professor Sampada Aranke (the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) on a third syllabus on Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics.

 

Watch Huey Copeland, Sampada Aranke, and Athi Mongezeleli Joja speak on the concepts of Afro-Pessimist Aesthetic, the practice of Appropriation in Art, and the relationship of Art History to Critical Theory.

Watch "Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power," a pre-publication book workshop with Sampada Aranke and Huey Copeland (Responders: æryka hollis o’neil, Jordan Mulkey, Harrison Graves, and Alex Weheliye). Aranke subsequently published her book, Death’s Futurity with Duke's University Press.

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Athi Mongezeleli Joja

 

Mellon predoctoral Fellow and graduate student in the PhD Program in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sampada Aranke

 

Assistant Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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