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Ulterior Emergencies: Aesthetics, Labor, and Re-Sighting Policy

Sat, November 10, 4:00 to 5:45pm, Westin Peachtree, Floor: Twelfth, Piedmont 3 (Twelfth)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

Often, the word 'emergency' is omitted in policies developed to protect or maintain health protocol and public safety, yet such legislation inherently shapes the cultural invention and management of emergency, as a concept, image, or set of embodied gestures. This panel addresses those ulterior emergencies, that is how policy in which 'emergency' is never named gives an inverted shape and form to emergency, thereby mobilizing containment and control by becoming a present-absence. Papers presented by this interdisciplinary group of scholars, including art historians, poets, visual artists, and performance studies scholars, will examine how cultural producers have confronted, critiqued, or reclaimed strategies of un- or non-naming 'emergency' in order to expose links between the construction of public safety and the violence of policies that produce a ‘common sense’ consensus about 'emergency' (or bodies as 'emergencies-in-waiting') by never naming it directly.

The labor of un- or non-naming as a conduit of anticipatory crisis refracts the entanglement between what is and isn’t said, and how and why certain bodies, spaces, and resources are ‘protected’ or exempt from harm whereas others aren’t. Each talk, though attuned to distinct cultural and historical events and periods, moves through questions of surveillance, social justice, and the violence of care, highlighting the perpetuation of hidden leverages within the ‘protection’ of individuals and their data, and how cultural producers imagine strategies for confronting these imposed infrastructural mechanisms of control. In reference to her family’s non-retrievable record from two years spent living in Hong Kong refugee camps, Hương Ngô confronts the creation and performance of a stateless archive to better understand how collecting practices inherently shape an idea of the citizen based on the potential or latent presence of the enemy. With a shared focus on the management of space, Jackie Wang examines how the rhetoric of risk and security are used to authorize the expansion of “smart” carceral infrastructure in the urban environment and online, and Jasmine Mahmoud analyzes the aesthetics of Mirror Casket, a coffin covered with mirrors and walked from the site of Michael Brown’s death during Ferguson October, to consider how St. Louis-region urban policies that have displaced and divested from black people in the name of “renewal” have produced contingent dehumanizing emergencies. Taking up the rhetoric of the ‘healthy’ or ‘treatable’ body, Sarah Wilbur positions Dance for Veterans, a joint effort between psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and dance educators at the Greater Los Angeles VA Medical Center, as a point of departure to discuss the conditions surrounding the current uptick in arts-based health interventions and the stakes in restoring a sense of bodily authority among retired service members through dance, and Faye Gleisser draws out the racial and gendered politics of prevention that has informed performance artists’ risk-taking vis-a-vis the Privacy Act of 1974. By confronting an array of archives, visual artists, poets, choreographers, and dancers, this panel aims to reconsider how various bureaucratic policies regarding health, safety and renewal—from the privacy act to homeowner exemptions—have been deployed as methods of containment and control that inherently sculpt notions of risk, criminality, and culpability exploited by officials to maintain racialized, gendered, and classed social order.

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