Laura Torres-Rodríguez
“Bearing in mind the phenomenon of coastline erosion, which things (infrastructures, institutions, etc.) would you like to see eroded or battered by the water-edge?”
This was the prompt that researcher and curator Arnaldo Rodríguez-Bagué and visual artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente proposed to our students in preparation for their visit to our class. I have to say that the question stayed with me, but also with the students, as the works published in this dossier show, since the question not only captures the aesthetic and political reflections of these Puerto Rican artists after Hurricane María (2017), but also illustrates the type of pedagogical practices and reflections that emerged from the collective course “Cross-Currents Lab: Ocean as Myth and Method.” The course was team-taught in Spring 2022 by Luis Francia, Jordana Mendelson, Lee Xie, Emilie Tumale, Mariko Whitenack and I.
The question posed by the artists invited us to think about the political and creative agency of atmospheric events, to think with and through nonhuman agencies. We had read a concrete example for class that day of this type of speculative practice. In Edouard Glissant’s “The Black Beach,” the behavior of Le Diamant beach, its “system of relation,” generates a specific way of thinking in the philosopher. The coastal ecosystem works as a platform for the production of situated knowledge about Martinique that requires a methodological and conceptual shift. Glissant reflects on the failure of “those fantastic projects” to “ save the country” based on external and colonial models and forms of imagination (123). Inspired by the way in which the beach “organizes its economy,” its impermanence, and its chaos, Glissant proposes a different form of political action based on “an intense acuteness of thought, quick to change its heading,”(127) and, “to return to the sources of our culture and the mobility of their relational content, in order to have a better appreciation of this disorder and to modulate every action according to it” (125).
Likewise, the works and artistic trajectories of Sofía and Arnaldo invited us to think about water as an artistic medium—although this also implicated a painful reflection on its destructive capacities, on what we have lost to the water, and on the collective forms of mourning. For example, in her series Assimilate and Destroy (2018-2020), Sofía exposes celluloid, the very skin on which the visual memory of the 20th century has been inscribed, to elements such as salt, humidity and mold. As the artist describes: “Assimilate & Destroy is a series that makes visible the forms in which climate conditions memory in the tropics, experimenting with biodeterioration processes on celluloid to register and accelerate the impermanence of images and the material evidence of history. The title refers to two processes that occur simultaneously during the decomposition of film due to humidity, considering their poetic and strategic implications in order to digest political processes.” Sofía asked us in class: what would need to be decomposed or destroyed in order for us to process a loss, change, or radical transformation? Or, going back to the initial question: what infrastructures and institutions do we have to let go of in order to decolonize?
Melody Jue, in her book Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Sea Water, proposes a similar reflection by asking how concepts hold up under conditions of oceanic submergence? (21) “Underwater, any in-script-ions would be eroded, washed away, or overgrown with marine plants and animals” (28). This act of submerging concepts in water encourages us to rethink the very conditions in which we inscribe, store, or transmit information (29).
Of course, these readings made us think about our own pedagogical practices. How do we design a course that does not rely exclusively on what Jue calls “dry processes?” Can our dry classroom pedagogies really be inclusive? Here, the dialogue with different scholars and practitioners, almost all belonging to transoceanic and diasporic communities, was invaluable to help us create more immersive pedagogical practices. In the course, we had guest speakers from ocean science and physics with artists, writers, activists, actors, chefs, Indigenous studies scholars, and canoe builders. Claro de los Reyes, the founder and director of Atlantic Pacific Theatre, shared his teaching philosophy based on the creation of experiences with us. Most students retain information better through active participation. As Jue mentions about the way in which marine squids transmit information, they “make their impressions through memory rather than through marks on pages or stone” (30). In other words, they transmit information through different forms of theatricality. To put his philosophy in practice, Claro organized with us a theater workshop based on a participatory reenactment of the Filipino-American War. The participation helped us reflect and feel the ongoing effects of US imperialism in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the city.
Similarly, Vicente Díaz, another of our recurring visitors and a leading scholar in Comparative and Global Indigenous studies and the founder of The Native Canoe Project, gave other examples of immersed pedagogical and conceptual practices that occur in active interaction with the ocean’s ecosystems. For example, in “No Island is an Island,” Díaz analyzes how navigators from the Central Carolinas and Marianas use forms of ritualistic narrative performance that, if sung properly, function as a non-paper mnemonic map of navigation, and are therefore invulnerable to damage by water. These songs sometimes announce the appearance of the destination island’s native fauna, flora, clouds, currents, smells, and waves. These traveling elements indigenous to a particular island “expand or contract” its circumference. In the navigation technique called etak, or “moving islands,” the position of a canoe traveling from one island to another can be calculated by triangulating the speed of the starting island and the destination island in relation to a third island that appears to be “on the move.” In these techniques and narrative acts, the canoe is conceptualized as “static” and the islands are mobile, expanding and contracting, and their temporal and spatial coordinates span the entire distance that their native creatures travel.
These are bodily practices and narrative acts that challenge the imperialist and scientific construction of the islands as isolated territories, available for occupation, instrumentalization or invisibilization, and doomed to extinction due to rising sea levels. Arnaldo, for example, has analyzed in his research what he calls forms of “archipelagic performance:” artistic practices that are produced, staged, and developed on the coastline, and that attempt to problematize sharp distinctions between land and sea. These performances also reactivate forms of affiliation and reciprocity with non-human or more-than-human marine life: “These responses counter-map the island’s futurity by going against the grain of Western environmental scientific discourses.” In the conversation with Sofía and Arnaldo, but also with Dantaé Elliott and Lee Xie about artist Nadia Huggins, and with Mariko’s class on Kanaka enviromental epistemologies and ontologies, a speculative reflection arose on the submerged futurities of the archipelagos, and on how to better perceive and grasp their pasts.
Díaz writes, “We need to learn how to feel and smell our cultural and political futures through a sniffing and feeling out of our pasts” (100). In “Stepping in it: How to Smell the Fullness of Indigenous Stories,” Díaz helps us reflect about the way education privileges sight and literacy, “the supposedly higher senses,” versus ways of learning that center our sense of smell, taste, and touch. One of our course objectives was to invite students to feel the city as an ecological and geographical archipelago where many migrant and island communities coexist. Even more, we tried to create pedagogical experiences, like our visit to the Billion Oyster Project, that could reflect on the indigenous and environmental histories of a city built on Lenape land and water. To be more attuned with our senses of smell, taste and touch could be a first step in the creation of a more reciprocal relationship with these lands and waters. In our visit to Governor Island, we were able to touch and smell the live oysters that the organization seeds in the bay and visit the shell piles collected from different restaurants in the city. Oyster reefs are native to the New York Harbor and provided food and materials for the Lenape people that taught the settlers how to collect them (Liang). The Billion Oyster Project is an organization that seeks to put back one billion live oysters into New York Harbor. The project also allowed us to reflect on our city’s food chain from restaurants back into the harbor beyond the nature/culture divide.
The reflection about embodied forms of knowledge and memory was what inspired us to dedicate an entire unit to food and taste. Luis Francia and Emile Tumale invited chef and restaurant owner Amy Besa from Purple Yam, who talked about the colonial, imperial, and indigenous stories behind the transoceanic circulation of ingredients in Filipino cuisine and about her experiences researching and cooking rice heirloom varieties. Based on these discussions, students produced cookbooks, food poems and short fictions, and a video titled “Migratory Meal” documenting the process of cooking their traditional dishes together (Korean, Nigerian, Filipino, Chinese, Jewish) and the conversations they shared about imperialism while eating.
In one of our first meetings as a research group, Michael Salgarolo said that we could taste, feel, and see the material legacies of the Manila Galleons, the imperial and colonial maritime route that forcefully linked the Atlantic with the Pacific and the Caribbean and Pacific archipelagos, in the juxtaposition of different East and South Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean restaurants on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. He also mentioned the irony in the name of the avenue—the politics of imperial naming. Above all, the Cross-Currents project allowed us to link global and historical processes to our city, but also to our personal histories and trajectories. Many of my conversations around the course with Luis Francia and Jordana Mendelson were about the long legacies of 1898 and pedagogical forms that could help interrupt the reactualization of those legacies in the present.
In January 2020, after the publication of my book, Orientaciones transpacíficas [Transpacific Orientations], a book that talks about the Mexican cultural history of the 20th century from the Pacific, I was invited to participate in a panel titled “Puerto Rico and the Pacific.” As a Puerto Rican who writes about Mexico and the Asian Pacific, the call invited me to think for the first time about my own relationship with the research to which I had dedicated the last ten years. For that occasion, I decided to write about the Puerto Rican writer Manuel Ramos Otero’s short story collection Página en blanco y staccato (1987), which he wrote while living in NYC during the AIDS crisis. I argued that the five short stories of the book explore the deep histories of 1898 through a literary speculation on the transpacific aspect of Puerto Rican history. As the Cross-Currents project did for me, the book’s skill lies precisely in observing (events and oneself) from the Asian-Pacific region and its history, which deploys a different field of visibility and contention. In Ramos Otero’s narrative, the Puerto Rican connection to the Pacific is not necessarily understood as an alternative spatial cartography but rather as a relation that can only be grasped temporarily. 1898 gets fictionalized as a kind of temporal seismic fault line whose reverberations destabilize all notions of progressive linearity in the events, and where different temporal and narrative modalities are exhibited. In this book, Ramos Otero proposes that it is through storytelling and different narrative acts that Puerto Rico’s history can be explored from the improper terrain of the Pacific, and seeks to produce visibility for instances of transpacific memory. For example, one of the short stories is a letter of a Puerto Rican agricultural worker in Hawaii, another is a detective story about an Afro-Chinese Puerto Rican character that murders his white criollo narrator to avenge the execution of his formerly enslaved ancestor. Hence, the writer problematizes both nationalist and imperialist productions of discrete, differentiated geographies, [The Caribbean or the Pacific], to propose a “we” that is always in dispute, and which is only located within the modifiable temporality of the narrative. It is in this sense that the Cross-Currents project was, above all, an exercise in collective storytelling.
Bibliography
Díaz, Vicente. “No Island is an Island” Native Studies Key Words. Eds Michelle H. Raheja,
Andrea Smith, Stephanie N. Teves. University of Arizona, 2015. 90-108.
_____ “Stepping In It: How to Smell the Fullness of Indigenous Histories.” Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies. Ed. Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien. Routledge, 2017. 88-92.
Gallisá Muriente, Sofía. “Asimilar y destruir”, https://sofiagallisa.com/Asimilar-y-Destruir-1.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. University of Michigan P, 1997.
Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media. Thinking Through Sea Water. Duke UP, 2020.
Liang, Wenjun “The Oysters of New York Past,” May 21, 2021.
Ramos Otero, Manuel. Página en blanco y staccato. Editorial Plaza Mayor, 2002.
Rodríguez Bagué, Arnaldo. “Archipelagic Performance #1 (v.1)” Matorral.
