Welcome to the skies over Longmont, May 2020 for Longmont Public Media and Staff Astronomer John Ennsworth. I'm going to take you into the news and the skies. Well, we're back to Beetlejuice again. This is your third update on Beetlejuice. If you recall from previous months, we were concerned the Beetlejuice is a star up in the upper left from your point of view, not Orion's point of view, the upper left corner of Orion that was dimming, dimming, dimming through the fall into the winter.  Well, it's not. There's where Beetlejuice is located in the constellation of Orion. And it is back to its full brightness and even some measurements have taken it beyond 100% of normal brightness. Pretty much back to normal. The dust is cleared, nothing to see here except a star that you can see very clearly because it's one of the brighter ones in the sky. Not covered here, but something that's been in the news in astronomy is Oumuamua. This is the first interstellar traveler that we have observed. It is a very elongated, rocky body that we figured out its orbit. We determined that it was traveling between the stars. So its velocity was so high that it zipped past the sun and is now heading out of the solar system and in a few thousand years it will be technically outside the solar system. We are still trying to look over the data that we got from it as it passed. If you've ever heard of the book or the book series because there are some sequels by Arthur C. Clarke, rendezvous with Rama, it really matched the trajectory and shape of the spacecraft in Rama. So that got people excited for a little bit. Then we noticed that it is accelerating a bit as it heads out and that got people excited again. What? Rock accelerates. Well, a rock that is comet like does that has some ices, gases, frozen inside of it that warmed up when the rock got close to our sound, its jets could give it a little extra kick. Astronomers have looked at a number of different scenarios that could cause this acceleration and that's the best one and it's very plausible. So once again, sorry, probably not a spacecraft. Another neat mystery solved or at least hypothesized by I wouldn't say solved. How did this thing form? It's very elongated, we don't see things like that in our solar system, nothing that extreme. Astronomers modeling this hypothesized that something that is larger than Earth sized body might have swung around its own star or maybe another star and its travels between the stars in a really close approach. Tidal forces and the heat of this star would have melted this body completely or mostly then tidal forces would further stretch that molten material out which would then fragment, cool into a whole bunch of these elongated large rocks. So that means that Oumuamua may not be one of a kind, maybe many elongated previously melted bodies traveling between the stars. Last month we talked about a comet coming in atlas, 4,000 year period, it would get very close to the Sun, a quarter of the average Earth-Sun distance away. We believe it's part of a comet that broke up over 5,000 years ago that one of its sibling pieces created a great comet, but we believe that its potential might be brighter than Venus as it gets close to the Sun, close to Earth. That closest date is about May 23rd, its path will be down through the constellation Perseus and past the Pleiades and the constellation Taurus, bright red star Aldebaran, this is all to the upper right of Orion but now getting kind of low in the western sky in the evening, but big yellow capital letters there, it's breaking up. Hubble and other telescopes have shown that it's fragmented in at least four pieces, maybe more, maybe some of those other things. Historically when we see comets break up like this, that's pretty much the end of them. They've given up most of their gases and dust very rapidly and there just isn't material to make a big coma, the head of the comet and the big long tail that would put on a beautiful show. Sorry about that, we've lost that one. There's another comet called Swan out there and it's looking pretty good too but it's very close to the Sun, so you'd have to be sort of a skilled observer to pull that one off. An update on big star parties, well the Texas star party was on last month but they have now decided to cancel it, that's May 17th to 24th in Fort Davis. Looking often to June because we do have to kind of plan ahead, the Royal Astronomical Society General Assembly, I think I can see you there, sorry about that, June 5th through 27th is now canceled but the boot, leg, spring, star party in Illinois is still at this point on. Grand Canyon Star Party has been canceled on mid-late June, Bryce Canyon Astro Festival is still on and the Rocky Mountain Star Stair, one that we could get to in Gardner, Colorado at this moment is still on. I encourage you to Google those if you're interested in going to one or take a look to theskymtelscope.org 2020 Star Parties Update page because like everything else, news continues to change very rapidly. For your Astro 101 lesson this month, we're going to ask what is a constellation? If you look carefully there you might see something very familiar, yeah, coming right down to the horizon there, a very clear dark location, that is the Big Dipper. There's the handle and the three, there's the ball right there and that's not a constellation, ah, I will do sorry, there's the Dipper though, no one knows that shape. This is actually a constellation of Ursa Major, the big bear. This convenient pattern of bright stars inside this easy further only to pick out even when there's a fair amount of light pollution or hazy clouds is an astrism. There's a number of constellations that have more recognizable sub-patterns in them than the original official constellation itself. Here's more of what is considered part of Ursa Major, you've got the legs back here, you've got the front end of the nose of the bear, and you've got the front leg of the bear there, there's the bears back, bears along the tail, anyway bears don't have long tails, well they do if you need to get them up in the sky, you have to take them by the tail, you've got to swing them around for a while and let them go, stretches the tail out. There's an artist's picture of what the bear looks like, that's the actual constellation of Ursa Major. Four constellations, there are a lot of other stars nearby, they're all considered part of Ursa Major, you can see these faint lines here exactly the same as state boundaries or national boundaries are in the U.S. You can walk to a state boundary and also having a marker there, there isn't a line of dirt or in the grass that says hey you've walked from Oklahoma into Kansas, it's just an arbitrary demarcation of leaving things in the sky. 88 constellations in all are officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union, and that was done back in the 20s, late 20s. But if a new star flares up here or our comments traveling through here at this moment, it's said to be in Ursa Major even if it might not be near the official constellation itself. Take a look at the sky above your backyard for May 2020. We have the moon at the beginning of the month, actually the very end of April was at first quarter. Full moon is May 7th, last quarter May 14th, you can see very clearly one week apart. And then due to the fact that it isn't exactly a week, it's about 28 days for the moon to go through its cycles. May 22nd is the new moon, and then we actually squeeze in another first quarter moon on the last day of the month, May 30th. The planets are now beginning to change, we're seeing some good shifting in the planets position from our first briefing a couple months ago. In the evening sky, venuses begin to sink towards the sun. To be more accurate, it's moving between but off the line of the sun and the earth. So it's called an inferior conjunction, not that we think Venus is inferior, it's just generally between the sun and the earth, a superior conjunction when Venus is on the other side. Only Venus and Mercury have an inferior and superior conjunctions with the sun. Mars and outward are always beyond us and can travel all the way around the sky. So Venus is sinking and the sun is overtaking Venus at the same time. It's the super bright object still in the southwest sky, in the western sky, you can't miss it. I actually got a phone call from a friend who said, I see something, it looks like a hovering helicopter in the west. Yeah, that's just Venus, super bright. Venus is even then given, especially when it's low in the western sky, clearance to land at airports. Back in the day, radio contact wasn't essential. You don't want to give Venus clearance to land, that would be bad. So at the beginning of the month, it stands 36 degrees above the horizon. Remember that from last month's, after 101, that's a fist, at arms length is 10 degrees, so 10, 20, 30 for 3, and then about 3 fingers is 5 degrees, so that's about 3 fists and 3 fingers up off the horizon. By the middle month, it's down to 25 degrees, and then by the end of the month, we lose it. It'll be gone in line with the sun up in the daytime. In the right conditions, you can see Venus in the blue sky, but it's just close to the sun. If you're interested in seeing Mercury, it's always very close to the sun and is the innermost planet. It is quite a challenge to get it in a glare of sunset. You really don't get Mercury by itself in a dark starry sky, because the sun needs to be further down below horizon and Mercury will have set by then. But on the 21st, Venus and Mercury will be right next to each other, so Venus is so easy to see. The night before or the night after, the night of the 21st, if it happens to be cloudy, is the time to go out, look for Venus and look for a bright but much dimmer, steady light, or not twinkling light near Venus. It's a general rule because planets have some angular size in the sky. They don't twinkle as easily as stars do. For the most part, they're always true. Planets don't twinkle as stars do. Mercury beginning a little higher in the sky, its best view will occur at the beginning of next month. Uranus is lost in the glare of the Sun this month. If you did happen to catch it in a small telescope or binoculars last month, good for you. It's gone for now. It'll be back in the morning sky in a month or so. You know, set at midnight, not much is up. But in the pre-done sky, we still have our trio, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. Neptune is emerging from the Sun's glare, but it's a tricky object to find. Again, the binoculars or telescope is needed for that. At the beginning of the month, you can see in the constellation Capricorn, Capricorn is Jupiter on the right, Saturn, and then Mars closer to the Sun, where the Sun is going to be coming up. That won't change you very much in the months. Just go out in the morning sky and take a look for those three. At the beginning of the month of May, sunrise is pretty much 6 a.m. By the end of the month, it's about 5 30 in the morning. Sunset is just before 8 p.m. I guess that's the howl just before the howl of the Sun goes down. By the end of the month, it's just before 8 30. So we go from about 14 hours of daylight, almost to 15 hours of daylight. At noon, local noon, the Sun will be 65 degrees above the southern horizon, and then by the end of the month, it'll be up to 72. You can see its climbing rate is slowing as we get close to June. June will be when the summer solstice occurs and the Sun no longer gains height. It holds steady for a while and begins to drop again. Our feature object this month will be Ursa Major itself. I've already used it as an example of a constellation. I'm going to show you up at the top here is the same map of Ursa Major and the Big Dipper. The green line on the left is the path of the Sun and the planets, and the dot in the center is the North Star Polaris. As we put the night into motion, you can see the entire sky is turning around the North Star like a clock. There comes sunrise. You can see the Sun pop up here in the east. There's Big Dipper down the bottom. Everything here is a circumpolar constellation for our location here along the mount. We're 40 degrees north of the equator. So this angle between the North Star and the true horizon is 40 degrees as well. What's neat is when you find the Big Dipper, you can get the bowl there. The last two stars in the bowl opposite of the handle and in the direction stuff would pour out of the spoon or the dipper point to the North Star Polaris, which, as we just saw on the map, is directly above the North Point on the horizon. And it doesn't matter what time of night or what time of year you go out to see this phenomenon. The two stars here are pointing really close to the North Star. Go through the night one more time, but the earth spin. The North Pole of the earth is just pointing this direction in space right in the center here, which is at less than a half degree, less than one full moon width away from the true North Point in the sky. And so those pointer stars at the end of the bowl still pointing in and everything up here within 40 degrees or so is always up. Never sets. Now the neat thing, if we go from 40,000 years in the past to about 70,000 years in the future, all the stars in space have their own velocity and they can wander around kind of like bugs and bees in a swarm. And so as we go right now, there's present day and there's 70,000 years in the future. You can see how the shape of the dipper has changed over time. Let's go back to 40,000 BC, present and then in the future and see it kind of warp interestingly and all the other stars moving around a little bit as well. If anybody's around 70,000 years from now, you can tell me if this is how it works. Your observing challenge for this month is the full moon, which occurs in the beginning of the second week of May, but you can do this every month right around full moon time. Is the time that people think that the moon is coming up much larger than it is high in the sky. There's many different possible explanations for this illusion, but it actually is an illusion. Due to how the atmosphere deals with light traveling through it, the true size of the moon is a tiny bit, one and a half percent smaller than it is when it's high up overhead. But due to this illusion, people swear that it's bigger and my favorite explanation goes to this optical illusion over here that these like railroad track pattern here. And your brain says anything that's sitting on the tracks here must be close to me. So it's a small thing to fit between train tracks. But anything that's off in the distance over the horizon must be gigantic, so your brain fills that in. So same thing in the sky as the moon's coming up at your brain says, hey, it's behind the mountains, behind the trees, behind my neighbor's house, behind that part of the distant town if you're up on a hill. So wow, that must be something big. So it just attaches big to it and you're happy with that. One of the tricks you can get to trick your brain into not falling for this is to turn your back on the moon, bend over, put your hands down on the ground and look from between your legs, kind of like you're almost doing a handstand. You're about to do a somersault. Looking upside down at the moon, your brain loses its references. It doesn't really automatically know what's up literally. And so the moon will look normal sized and kind of small again. Remember, from last month the moon is only half of the width of your pinky finger at arm's length in angular size in the sky. Let's find the events near Longmont for May. The Longmont Astronomical Society has a planned solar viewing event at the Lewisville Public Library from 10 a.m. to noon May 30th and that is still on as I record this. Again, check longmontastro.org if you're interested in going to see if there are any modifications to that. Likewise, that evening 8 30 p.m. to 10 30 p.m. at the Longmont Astronomical Society and Boulder County Parks working together in the Star Party at Rabbit Mountain beginning at 8 30 p.m. running at 10 30 p.m. And if exciting things are happening, people may stick around longer. That is also still on for now. Check the website longmontastro.org. Little time to observatory. It's going to be closed through June, July is it's normally closed because nights are short and days are long. It's very hot. So that's usually the month that they're closed for maintenance improvements and cleaning for the next year. They will remain closed through the end of July. Check starkids.org. Brought dates on that. As this Park Memorial Observatory is closed at least until June 1st. Check angels above.org to see if they open in June. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society May 7th. They're going to have Robert Arne speaking on night scape photography via webcast. That's something you just get from the comfort of your home. It's 6 15 p.m. at nocoastro.org. If you have any additions or corrections, comments or suggestions, you may reach out to me at johnonsworth at gmail.com. If you have any meetings club outings or observing nights that you're aware of, I'll take any submissions that you've got. Love to include. This has been the skies of a long month. For May 2020, I'm Staff Astronomer Johnonsworth. Keep looking out.


his right that can be so quickly and often read as ambitious or entitled, but I think his politics of entitlement to these particular dreams is really, really fascinating. Yeah, and can easily be read as kind of ambitious or the work of a trickster, but I think there's a lot more running through it than that, while there's also ambitions and a certain element of trickster tactics going on as well. Right, because, you know, something that was so striking about all three papers in a way is how, you know, each of you has in a way tried to recuperate these quite marginalized figures who have acted in a sense as sort of intermediaries or brokers, you know, between these overlapping spheres of power, and each of them has their own kind of really complex personal geographies and, you know, complex post-colonial subjectivities even, or colonial subjectivities in the case of the artists that Toshio mentioned. And I wonder perhaps if we could begin perhaps by talking, you know, about some of the methodological challenges that each of you has faced, you know, has it been quite tempting to refer, for instance, to biography, you know, what, what, could you maybe talk us through the process in your research? Could we perhaps begin with Toshio? Oh, I think you might be over there. Yeah, now you can do it. Okay, it's a big question. In one way, I tend to almost bump into things while I'm doing something and then something interesting turns up, et cetera, et cetera, so I'm not type of scholar who I'm just doing this, so let's forget everything and this is interesting. Suddenly, two things collide, and in fact, the serendipity, I don't know whether serendipity can be called methodology, but I think the important thing is just to have a nose for serendipity. And suddenly you see things, and in fact, my first part of London, but I only got the serendipity last Friday. So I have to rewrite my London part completely. So it's open up a completely new avenue of how you see landscape. And I was interested anywhere in the history of modern landscape in Japan, and also its connection with the nationalism and also the new modernity and so on. And I had a separate interest in Japanese garden studies, garden history, or modern, and suddenly, why is this person, this person is very strange. I mean, he doesn't pop up in my Japanese studies, and only in my watercolour studies, suddenly he popped up, and then I pursued, and he's really a botanical fanatic. And his notes in Japan, he just talks only about plants mostly, because other people are more interested in women and children and festivals, and he has a bit of that. But most of the time he's just interested in plants. And then suddenly I connected with William Robinson, and of course William Robinson had those connections with Ruskin. And in the 90s I did a big exhibition together with Yuko Kikuchi on Ruskin's impact in Japan. You see, and suddenly sort of everything started connecting, and just about connection and then picking up and then try to connect. I don't know whether that's a methodology, more like a peculiarity of how I do things. But anyway, so the basic thing is curiosity. And I even ran us that talk. It's so resonating. And I made you notice that even I put in few sentences after Anna's talk. So that's how I went on with this. Absolutely. I think that these, you know, these kind of entangled histories and the act of trying to disentangle some of these. Some of these narratives and so on is really fascinating and always leads on to different avenues and patterns as Ming says, you know, the kind of tracing the history of botanical of kind of colonial botany, I think itself is also really, you know, was was was done so brilliantly in your paper.  How did you come across Jeffrey. Well, first I will say that that the other stories, like such an obviously important exhibition and it's really telling that Jeffrey spent 20 years in the US and only a few in the UK. And that it's because of different relationships to Empire, but also because of Rashid Orion that he has a place in in British art history and I, I was thinking in this paper but I didn't mention it but I think that there's a lot of similarities between Orion and Jeffrey in terms of their trajectories and maybe and maybe that's why they kind of, you can see it in a couple of their letters where they kind of come up against each other a little and that's productive and interesting. I came across Jeffrey's work completely by accident, I had encountered his artworks while I was in Pakistan he's had a show of his more contemporary works. But I was doing research in the Rockefeller archives related to a set of exhibitions and he came up in a search. There are files and files of his letters there that I really recommend that people go and see if they're interested in his work. Because the Rockefellers kept everything because they could afford to so it's, it's like truly an extensive archive for all sorts of problematic reasons. Yeah, I started looking through these papers and and was really struck by them. And I'm really interested in. I mean, I'm interested in what I mentioned at the end of my paper we're really ambivalent about which is institutions and nationalisms and, and all of these frameworks that, especially in global modernism that we have to kind of fight against taking into account at the same time I mean this goes to dicties kind of comment as well. And then I think if we don't take them into account then we're kind of also playing into a Western canonical universalist autonomous idea of the artist that Iqbal interestingly claims while also having these fights with institutions, really fascinating engagements with institutions. So so I couldn't not spend time thinking about and working on his work. But it was really it was really by accident that I first encountered some of his letters in that particular archive. And again the kind of politics of archive in that, in that kind of meeting his work. And that's the Rockefellers and so many problems in the Rockefellers and their place in in modernism so yeah, which which brings us back to this idea of privilege as well that that did she mentioned, did you want to elaborate a little bit more in that Sure, sure. And thank you again for keeping patience with me those those bells and those knocks justice we were starting the Q&A with all my building folks being very concerned that my internet had come back or if I was able to get back into the talks or what happened so they were trying to get inside the house from all possible base. Sorry, no we could still follow your argument perfectly so no worries. Yeah, so I means I agree with in that sense like I could go on with similar stories as to what Toshio and Gemma are saying about serendipity and accident and the time you know how when you arrive at certain when you find certain material but I think what I want to emphasize is a little bit both the question of archive and the question of classifications and historiographies of different fields right and when you are trying to when you're even you know as as Gemma was saying as to how Jeffrey wants to be labeled or does not want to be labeled or how he gets labeled or what are the ways in which art history places him within certain boxes right So in some ways I feel like one is constantly working within various boundaries like one is working within the boundaries of different fields so if I'm thinking about the field of South Asian painting per se but the only interest has been you know or a good part of the interest has been about like what are the paintings that can be attributed to Cassie or not, and that how he is really not a great artist compared to many of the greats that are there before him So even if I am working against that historiography as I'm trying to work through the material and find through the material, I also am training myself in some ways with some of the tools from that historiographical space that is enabling me to track the artist right and while fully knowing that the artist over there is something that's coming from a problematic framework as well and he's working in a workshop and all of those kind of things right and when I'm thinking about the various kind of circulations that are taking place in terms of what he's doing for the company, what he's doing for the court, so one is also in some ways in that sense trying to work with the boundaries of different archives so the Royal Asiatic Society you know they've been very cooperative with me but there are structural issues right for me to get to London and to look at some of the material which is not even catalog was earlier never digitized or available has been a good 12 to 15 years and I still haven't seen many of the drawings of Cassie that are not catalogued and partially that has to do with my ability to get there and my visa denials and all of those kind of things and then on the other end you're dealing with archives where the gatekeeping might be happening through us while princely families right so there are different kinds of you know historiographical borders that are there there are different kinds of archival borders and the reason I'm emphasizing these borders and boundaries is because I think they have both positives and negatives the negatives I think are very obvious in terms of how the work happens through serendipity. I think that the positives are that you dwell in some of these things for such a long time that you keep on coming back to them with the fresh eye, and you keep on coming back to them with realizing how your own kind of temporal dwelling that these artifacts enables you to think about what kind of complex ways in which they might be struggling certain depictions of certain very kind of times which are very very very fraught right and so where is that space being kept that it could be interpreted going in various kinds of temporal spaces whether it's referencing something from the past leaping out to an idealized future leaving it open at least for me that has played a very important role and yeah and I think just like I've just scratched the surface and realize that actually in this month on the bar there were many artists from different quotes that were brought. There are many other paintings to be tracked. But the most interesting part is that you know I don't find anything from the British side where there is an interest in tracking these that bars are visualizing these that bars at this time. And that is something really interesting to think about because by the 1870s 1880s, the 1911 their bars who have tons of photographic albums and a lot of work has happened on them. So, there's also a way in which one would be able to think about the, you know, if we think about not just the idiom of the Mughal Darbar and its legacy, and trying to create a certain kind of colonial space and authority, we may be actually sitting on a lot more that the that kind of visualization itself and the urge to visualize it to this extent might be coming from an earlier moment, then actually the regional powers are spending more time in a certain kind of a technological apparatus to claim authority, even though authorities completely slipped by this. Thank you so much for that really detailed answer and give us a lot of food for thought and there are a couple of questions from the audience. So we have one from Julian Forrester. It's addressed to Gemma thank you for fascinating important talk. And she's got many questions but she's going to just ask one, have there been any solo exhibitions of Jeffrey's work since the late 1960s, where the works and archival materials dispersed, other than those you have shown. Yeah, I'll try and I'll answer that quite quickly. He had some big solo exhibitions in the 70s in the US. And of course, in, in Pakistan and in South Asia there have been shows of his more recent collages. One of the and I mentioned this kind of touched on it briefly in the paper but one of the consequences of Jefferies moving around is that work art paintings often got got lost and and have been permanently lost occasionally will crop up at auction but that's, that's a huge that's a huge struggle I think for many of us working, you know throughout throughout these these parts of the world that just how much the work is is not with us anymore. And Jeffrey was and remains a prolific letter writer. And so you will find him in many, many, many archives, but really it's been it's been that Rockefeller vanity of literally keeping everything, which is unusual. It means that there's a kind of a way to reconstruct his career in that one archive and he had a tendency to he loved Xerox, and would often Xerox or forward correspondences that he was having with other people to his different correspondence again all under this kind of rubric not necessarily of art, but of a kind of broader ethic practice. And so it's possible to piece together his relationships to multiple institutions through that kind of practice of circulation of his own works. So, there needs to be I'd love for there to be some shows of his work I really want more, more people working on this practice. It's just so generative. There's the ways that it connects to adult guard conversations but also doesn't, but then also calligraphic modernisms and, and an abstraction and all sorts. So, but yeah the, they haven't been really the other story was the main one and, and he's in dozens and dozens of archives but the Rockefeller one is the main one to hit to go to first. Thank you, Gemma. So we've got a great question actually from Tim Berenger and that's addressed to all of the speakers. Tim says these are terrifically rich and powerfully conceived papers. Thank you. Zule asks us to unlearn imperialism. And you have demonstrated that it is possible to discuss empire without reproducing its ideologies and hierarchies. So, let's talk about the ways in which ideas of empire might be used critically in your different subfields to open up new topics, for example and pursuing trans regional and intermediate inquiry. Who would like to type of this one first. To Toshio. Oh, sorry, you're on mute Toshio. Sorry about that. Yes, another big question. In fact, when a lot of discussion about decolonization is going on. Right, sort of slight tongue in cheek accused of Eurocentrism in the discussion of decolonization. And as Rana rightly said, Japanese empire was huge. You see, and that is very often rather neglected though more recently, again, there are lots of works done by both Japanese and overseas or whatever I can call it sitting here in Oxford scholars, but there was a huge gap. And this is very recent. And even I remember when I was a kid growing up in Japan. I didn't talk about war. I just had a primary school. He was a Baptist. And school and he was actually a He ended up in the middle of China when the war ended. And he told us lots of stories about how awful this was. And then also how the many soldiers coming back. But some Chinese really helped the poor Japanese soldiers though they were oppressed and so so there are lots of that story. That was almost the only story I heard when I was a kid. And that's now changed quite a lot. But I think one thing which not to Japanese don't even realize Japanese Japan is still a colonial power. Okinawa and again some people say Hokkaido is in the colonial occupation by the Japanese. And that aspect is very neglected. And even, and obviously, in the United States is even a big umbrella of the number that we call it American imperialism. So the Japanese government is close to powerlessness in getting Okinawan peoples will realize in Okinawa. You see, I mean this is really serious problem is still now here. Looking at gardens in the memory of Pacific War. So I'm very much involved with this. So yes, Japanese Empire, please don't forget about it. That was a very interesting and well timed glitch there. Thank you Toshio as well for your really interesting and evocative response to Timber and just a question. I think we actually might have time for a couple of other questions. So I think we have got one from Aparna, Aparna Kumar, who was one of the contributors to another panel, who has a question for Gemma. She was taken by the discussion of Jeffrey's case against MoMA and wondering if you could tell us more about MoMA's reaction of any to the case and how the impact of the case on Jeffrey's later practice. I was repeatedly struck by in your analysis by the entanglements of Jeffrey's legal training and his artistic practice. And wants to hear more about how is that all Jeffrey's legal activism and literacy enables his mobility between art roles in this period, as much as it exposes his exclusions from and generative confrontations with them. That's a great question, Gemma. Yeah, it's like a few questions. But yeah, completely, the legal and accountancy roles do play a role in the kind of privilege that Jeffrey had to move around and to be gainfully employed. There's a class conversation to be had there about like background cash. I think what's really productive and this kind of goes to Tim Barringer's question about like what, what can, what can Empire do, or how can we think Empire and open up subfields or kind of ask different questions. I think about this in terms of, you know, Gita Kapoor makes this amazing comment about like the canonical story of the avant garde right from Paris to New York is just too easy. But it just helps to uphold the kind of center, the center of the canon. And that to think about the global modern is to is to kind of destroy that idea and break it apart and especially to recognize how much Empire has played a role in what is and isn't possible for artists from contexts like India and Pakistan. And so the fact that Iqbal to go to a partner's question now has a, you know, legal practice and an artistic practice and tries to hold them quite separately, albeit within this formation of ethics. It is a really interesting contrast for me with that canonical idea of like the avant garde where it all just becomes art, which is this this universalist way of thinking about things. And it's all about kind of tearing apart the idea of art and institutions which, in many cases, Jeffrey wants to uphold. So I think that yes absolutely the difference between these legal practices and Jeffery's insistence on them having their own truth and integrity and keeping them somewhat separate while they, they often overlap is interesting and yes it's a form of privilege but it also enables forms of analysis and ways of thinking about global modernism and the avant garde that I find really interesting. So let's go to the MoMA question MoMA chucked out most of their correspondences with him. So I only know again through his proliferation of some of those correspondences to other interlocutors, and that they mostly treated it as a headache. So actually, his case against the institution. He didn't really have a, he didn't really have a case, legally, because the artist in relationship to the institution is a really gray area. The artist showing in an institution is not a visitor. So it's not a it's not a place of public facility. Neither is an artist, an employee of the institution so can't really be subject to employment discrimination rights. So what Jeffery actually did first was he applied for a job at MoMA and he applied for a menial job with all of his many qualifications in order to have employment discrimination as part of his case against against the museum. Like most of his cases it didn't really go anywhere. But that wasn't really the point the point is to is to use law to make a series of artistic statements. And I'm thinking that I'm working on that case against MoMA because it just really crystallizes so many of these problems and questions but one of the things that it especially marks is the way that MoMA and it doesn't want us to remember that now that it's apparently a new MoMA, but that at this point MoMA was on the one hand a local and a national institution and a Cold War institution. And so it's shipping art across the world as part of a Cold War Rockefeller agenda, and then kind of dealing with the idea of American art at home, especially in the context of civil rights as someone like Jeffery who's here as a as an as an immigrant and from a country that's really only recognized in a Cold War context at this time falls right between these two projects of MoMA at this point and so his case really connects those things together as well. It's completely fascinating. He was also he also sued the JDR. The third fund, most of his employers spent most of the 70s and 80s in Chicago was a lawyer and again using using civil rights law and recent passage of civil rights law to to fight for an epic truth at all costs. Yeah, fascinating. A lot to talk about. Thank you so much. I think just before we just before we end, I think it's only fair that we allow Dipty to briefly if possible answer respond to Tim's question. Go ahead. Yeah, thank you any and thank you Tim for the question. I means, I certainly what you're saying in terms of more trans regional more intermediate work. But just like Gemma was saying, it's the, the question of trans regional and comparative work across with geographies is something to think about that there can be different significant geographies and ocean that Fred just our senior brings up. Just in terms of thinking about south south in that sense in a way which I find at times very cliched but that, but that there can be significant geographies between very, you know, across places that might be thought of as very insignificant locals, and significant localization. So I think that's one thing to think about them as we think about the question of the trans regional. The other I would say is like, one, don't accept any cataloging classifications. You know, that's where you might find material that might have been classified in different ways at a different time. I think more work with more vernacular sources in that sense. But I think at a structural level I think the question of infrastructure and by that I don't mean just resources and availability of time to do this kind of work so that you're thinking about, you know, the question that you raise that how do you read against the empire through a variety of sources is also I think making more space and infrastructure for collaborative work, which I think is is not something that is taught through very carefully history, at least in my experience from the get go. So I think we have to really think about those kind of infrastructures as well if we want to think about if you want to think through a variety of sources through more vernacular mediums through in more kind of in trying to see like you know that what are the intermedial archives that need to talk to each other or what are the translational archives that need to talk to each other. Thank you very much. I think that's a fantastic note to end the panel with. And I'd like to thank all our presenters today for their really rich and fascinating papers and for the audience as well. And I'm now going to hand back over to Sarah, I believe, who will tell us a bit more about the what's next in the lineup. Great. Thank you so much, Wendy, for chairing that really productive and thought-provoking session and to all our speakers as well who we're starting with Ron Amita and then with such a broad ranging paper and then seeing you know you helped us to think through Empire from such different places and contexts and your different ways into your own scholarship was just really quite inspirational and mind blowing. And thank you to the audience as well you so engaged and we've run over a little bit but so many people are still with us which I think is testament again to the generosity of the speakers ideas and the audience's interest in them. And as we've mentioned we have got another event. I mean I can hear you all want more. You all need more London Asia art world in your life even after three and a half hours. I can feel the energy and the enthusiasm permeating through my screen. So if you have got that energy in just over half an hour at 5pm British standard time or whatever time that is wherever you are in the world. I invite you to get a drink some snacks and come and meet us on a different platform to zoom in quite incredibly called air meet and we're experimenting with different social spaces in the conference. I think it's one of the, you know, one of the great positives about doing an online conferences, we can kind of gather together from our different locations but we do lose something sometimes of the conversation and the conviviality of a conference in a physical space so we're trying to experiment with different ways of meeting and gathering so the air meet platform might allow a bit more conversation it's a bit like the net the coffee break or the you know the glass of wine and the reception. So we've got a performance by Sam Reynolds one of our queer Asia artists to kick things off to set the mood it will be informal, it probably will be fun we hope, and so we hope many of you will be able to join us for that after a screen break of half an hour so thank you to all our panelists today, and from myself and my co conveners, Hamad and Ming and the events team at the poor melon center we're so pleased that all the panelists and all our, all our audience members could join us today for such a rich discussion so thank you. Bye everyone.


So what we're gonna be doing, we're cutting a layered haircut on wavy hair. So we're gonna work interior layering. So I wanna work from the inside of this cut out. What do I mean by working interior to exterior? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pivot. So we're gonna take vertical sections and we're gonna pivot across. And I'm only worried about occipital bone. So right from here and up. I'm not worried about the hair underneath. I'm gonna cut that blunt. I want a nice thick feeling on the bottom of the hair. I just wanna layer this interior. I'm gonna lift the hair up. Light tension. So I'm using the wide teeth of the comb. I'm not holding the hair real tight in my hands. We're gonna come up just like this.  Now you could point cut as well. You wanna create a little extra texture in there. That would be fine. All right, took a vertical section. Now I'm gonna take and pivot and grab a little bit more. Grab a little bit of the old section. Bring it up in my hand. And now I'm gonna push my guide over to the new hair. So just like this. Push the guide over. And I want the guide to meet halfway with the new section. Just like that. Here, can you take a look at what you've cut? Can you take a horizontal section? Lift it up. That's some of the hair from the other side. You lift it up and you look at it horizontally. You'll see a nice rounded edge to the haircut. That's the other side as well. So it's got a nice little rounded, kind of beveled feel to it. That is the round section that we're creating. So we're cutting rounded layers around the back crown area. Now we're gonna continue opposite side. Weaker side. With the side sections, a lot of times what I like to do is disconnect a little bit of this area because, and this is something that you guys will learn from me as well, I love working with disconnection. It makes the most sense to me. If I lift all this hair up and layer it the same way I did in the back here, what's gonna happen is it's gonna be so much lighter because this has this much density and this has this much. So it's a lighter piece of hair and if I elevate it the exact same, now all of a sudden I'm getting a more broken effect around the face and I want it to be nice and full. So I'm gonna take half of this right around that parietal ridge area and bring it up. I want this to be more of a balanced feel.  Like I said, I want the line of the layers to be horizontal, not diagonal at all.  I'm also gonna over direct this up and over the head and cut it condensed.  So now, how are we going to cut the heavier side to make it kind of match up to feel the same as this side? What I wanna do is I wanna cut two different sections. So I'm gonna comb this hair up directly up and over top of the head just like that. I'm gonna grab my guide from underneath here again and this is gonna help collapse this entire section. So I'll point cut across just like we did on the other one. So now that drops down. Then the top part of this section, I'm gonna over direct even more and cut it even a little bit shorter. Now what I'm doing is I'm taking this top section that's gonna be the heaviest and I'm bringing it, I'm grabbing a little bit from my previously cut side, the weak side. That's gonna be my guide. I'm gonna bring it all the way over to me and I'm gonna cut. Now, what do we get? We get a line vertically that is short to long and falls and the layers start a little bit shorter right there. So now before I move into the fringe, I'm gonna cut my baseline. I'm gonna part this straight down the center and then I'm just gonna take some horizontal sections around now. Here's the thing, I don't have to cut all of the hair. That's why I do this last. I only have to cut the hair that gets to the bottom. So my layers are already there. So what I'll do is I'll take, depending on what I want the outer perimeter line to be, take a slight diagonal forward parting, clip this nice and tight. So just like that and then my finger angle will mimic. So we went over this in the VCC today. Oh, my finger angle will mimic. I'm gonna cut a good amount because she has pretty damaged hair. Her ends are pretty damaged. So I wanna remove as much as I need to because the internet will tear me apart if her hair doesn't look beautiful at the end of this. So I'm being selfish, taking what I need. Take a horizontal parting towards the face so right here, horizontal, comb it down, not much to cut there. Won't be a lot to cut. It's just really smoothing it out, connecting it through from the interior. So there's nothing left to cut here. So that's good. And now we're gonna finish the last side over here, right here, horizontal line across. I take my time and I get this sectioning exactly the way that I want it before I cut hair. Cutting hair off is easy. Like I can cut this section off. No problem. What I can't do is comb it awesome every time. Combing is the hard part. Sectioning is the hard part. Left is the fringe and then we can start diffusing. I'll let down my fringe area. In wavy hair, it's obviously important to understand that it's gonna pop up a little bit. So making sure that you have the right length is important. I usually go, kind of a standard rule for me is if I'm gonna cut it at the nose, to be sitting at the nose like kind of a fringy area, then I'd probably cut it at the chin. So I go about two inches. Then when I blow it dry, I can see how long it is and then do some techniques to cut it a little bit shorter if I need to or maybe it's fine. But that's kind of my golden rule there. So I'm gonna go here and I'm gonna bring this hair over to me and because she has this curly hair, I wanna do a couple things. So I'm gonna show you guys a fun technique. It's gonna be long. Remember chin, I'm gonna go chin length here. So first off, I cut my length and I first cut my line. Now I have my line. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna weave. You guys have seen this like that. Take this section and then just kind of work through it. So now you get the same kind of line but you get two different lengths, which is a short and long. So they kind of go together when we toss it over to the other side. So I'm gonna do it again. Section on this side. Here we go. I bring this section over. Got a guide from the other side and all I'm gonna do is keep this nice and low. Just like that. One thing I wanna do is just connect this a little bit. I'm gonna slide in. Okay. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna load this thing with some products. I've got enough product in the hair and I'm gonna take this into sections. Right here. Here's my fringe. Comb that up. I'm gonna twist it. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start to diffuse. The few tips that we're gonna talk about, we got our diffuser attachment but this does, it calms the air down, the air flow through the hair. So it's not direct air hitting the hair. It kind of spins it and diffuses it. So then these little fingers can help hold some of this in the nozzle. So I'm gonna connect that on. I'm gonna run this at low, high heat, low air flow. How we pop some volume into that heavy side. So you can see the volume in it but then you can see the thickness and the full feeling of the weak side and that's kind of the goal. So you don't get that Christmas tree effect which we talked about at the beginning. You get more of a balanced kind of rounded round but a nice soft effect to the layers throughout the cut.


Primary and secondary schools have resumed in Nigeria and many parents are lamenting the hike in fees. Some private schools have increased fees by 300 percent. Government schools have also seen an increment in fees, all of which have raised fresh concerns over dropouts and increase in the number of out-of-school children. Nigeria already holds the record of the country with the highest number of out-of-school children of primary school age. This is our first heart topic. Vice President Kashim Shatema, accompanied by the Minister of Agriculture Abu Bakr Kiare and Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology Uchen Naji, amongst others, will be representing the country at the G77 summit in Cuba. The summit holding from 15th to 17th of September that is starting today will deliberate on development issues facing members mainly from the global South. Obviously the VP will be continuing the FDI drive of this administration on his trip. This is our second heart topic on the breakfast this morning. We'll also be taking a look at the front pages of some national dailies to find out what stories made it to the front pages. I am Maureen Menongwese. It's so good to have you join us this beautiful Friday morning. Take you straight to our top trending, first top trending. The management of the University of Lagos on Thursday beefed up security at the school entrance ahead of the planned protest by students leaders over the increase in tuition fees. The school management reportedly stationed security personnel at the entrance to check in students following the increment in tuition fees. By the school management students have been protesting and demanding a reversal. There are group students on Wednesday staged another protest despite a heavy downpour and alleged intimidation by the police as the place barricade. The students insisted that exorbitant fees were making education inaccessible to many deserving students and putting a heavy burden on those already embroiled. Following the protest, the student solidarity group against fee hike in a statement on Wednesday disclosed that the uni-like management would on Thursday hold a meeting with the representatives of the students of the school and the National Association of Nigerian students that's NANDS. The students have argued that exorbitant fees are making education inaccessible to many deserving students. All right, from there we'll take you to our second top trending. Electricity supply has been restored in Nigeria hours after a nationwide blackout due to the collapse of the national grid on Thursday morning. Well, this was disclosed by the eco electricity distribution company in a post on its ex-formerly Twitter handle on Thursday. There had been a blackout in the country's major cities and towns due to the grid failure in the early hours of Thursday morning. The grid reportedly collapsed around 12.40 a.m. on September 14th, leading to the massive loss of supply to power distributors nationwide. The Enugu Electricity distribution company PLC also issued a notice titled, quote, notice of total system collapse on Thursday, end of quote. It is a first notable power grid collapse since the last one happened around September of 2022. The CCN had last month disclosed that the power grid has maintained uninterrupted stability for over 400 days. Okay, so yesterday when the news went out that power has been restored, it was a mixed feeling really because some parts of Lagos didn't have their power restored. Maryland didn't. Allen Avenue didn't. Matter of fact, it was until around 1 a.m., that's midnight, that Maryland had the light restored. But this morning, I imagined that every part of Lagos has lightened and other parts of the country where power was disrupted. And 2022 was actually worse for us with regards to the grid collapsing because in 2022 alone, we had six, recorded six times when the grid collapsed. This is the first for 2023 and we hope it will be the last because we really hate it when things like this happen. I mean, with the increase in the cost of fuel, how many people will be willing to burn fuel now to power their generators? Not many. All right, so we're taking a break now. Come back with of the press. Stay with us. Our analysts will be joining us then to analyze the stories that have made it to the front pages of some national dailies. It is the Friday flex edition of the breakfast on plus TV Africa, 15th September 2023.


The BU men's hockey team is back at it, taking the ice for the 2014-2015 season. On game days and in practice, expectations are high and the boys have hit the ice running. We can expect big things. We've had a long off season, we've been working hard. We are prepared mostly because we put all the hard work in this past summer. After Jack Parker stepped down from his 40-year coaching reign, a new coaching staff under head coach David Quinn was at the forefront of last season's battle. Last year was a lot of change and this year I think we have a team that's grown into the changes that we're making and we're showing signs early that it's a team that's adjusting well and learning what we have for expectations. Ten wins, 21 losses and four ties later, the team leaves last season behind and holds tight to their new mantra, never again. Just kind of means BU hockey is back on the map. Whether it's freshman, sophomore, junior or senior, we're all working hard and freshmen have definitely been carrying their weight too. The young talent in this year's recruited class here at BU is already turning heads. Among them is freshman forward Jack Eichel, who is projected to be a top two pick in the 2015 NHL draft. Right now we're the youngest team in the country and our youth in a lot of ways is going to help us. It's a lot of energy, it's a lot of young guys that are trying to make impressions. This season the team says fans can expect a fast-paced and offensive-minded breed of hockey night in and night out. We just hope that they keep supporting us because it means a whole lot to us here.


The one he focuses on in Volume 1 is the following. He argues that this very rising cost, let me put it a different way, the way to deal with this inequality, he doesn't really argue so much that the surplus could rise, but the way to deal with the inequality is for this to fall. Now, you could say, okay, this could fall and or this could fall, but I'm going to focus on what his argument is of Volume 1 is that the inequality gets solved by this falling. In other words, capital accumulation, the K star, diminishes in order to solve this problem. The very rising costs make it more difficult for the capitalist to expand, and the way they deal with that is to purchase fewer labor powers, purchase fewer means of production, why? Because the prices of those inputs have risen. And you can also add to that, absolutely, that the impact here is that the capitalist may go out and hire fewer managers, borrow less from banks, why? Because the cost of management and the cost of credit has risen. So I did not do this, but clearly this lambda is having an effect upon other markets, which would be the credit market, management market, land market, and so forth. As this is increasing, what does this mean? The demand for managers are shifting to the right, just like we talked about a moment ago about the demand for labor power. The demand for management's labor power is shifting to the right. The demand for credit is shifting to the right. The demand for land is shifting to the right, and hence prices of those other inputs are going to start to rise. That is, the interest rate is going to start to rise, the rents are going to start to rise, managers' salaries are going to start to rise, and hence there's going to be increased costs there, too, that the capitalists have to face. So in general, there's rising costs, rising prices of inputs throughout the capitalist economy. And that feeds back to affect the capitalist expansion. Here we can see then that there will be these new subsumed-class payments that have to be made, and indeed more subsumed-class payments would have to be made to banks and to managers and for research and development and so forth, which would be generated from this expansion. And Marx argues then there's going to be a cutback, and the cutback he focuses upon is this one. So I'm going to follow the logic of volume one, in particular, and focus upon this one, raise the board and then go back to our markets, go back to the markets and ask, okay, what's going to now be the impact on these two markets, the supply of means of production, the demand for means of production. Let me now, let me put the price so I don't lose this, price of labor power, the price of means of production. And supply, demand, supply, demand. All right, let me write the old curve, the demand for labor power in red. If you recall, it shifted to the right, demand new. If you recall, it shifted to the right because of expansion. The expansion bid up the prices. As a result of that, Marx is assuming here that the demands for means of production and the demands for labor power, that K star plus lambda, are going to now start to diminish because of these rising costs. So what he's assuming here graphically is that these curves are going to start to shift back. Notice the two shifts. Notice the two shifts. We started with a shift this way as a result of expansion. The shift that way caused the prices, I'm going to put them in here, the prices to rise, the prices of means of production to rise, that's the N is the new. I just put in the blackboard, we conceptualized that as additional subsumed class payments that had to be made to labor power and means of production, that created the crisis in which the demands on the surplus were greater than the available surplus. Kapless reacted that by purchasing fewer labor power, fewer means of production, which means the curve is shifting back in order to solve the crisis. So focusing upon this one for the moment, we can see that the dotted red is shifting back just for the moment to kind of get it. Let's assume the curve shifts all the way back to the original line. What do we then have in this market? If this red curve shifts all the way back, well, we have then an excess supply of people. This here is called in economics an excess supply of people unemployment, unemployed labor. So unemployed labor results in the market because the demand curve shifts back. By the same logic, this is an excess supply of means of production. The way the market works is this unemployed labor, this excess supply of means of production, will put downward pressure on prices as you can see. The downward pressure on prices to correct this excess supply of means of production, excess supply of people. Marx comes up with a dramatic term for this unemployed labor as a result of the contraction of the demand for labor power. He calls it the reserve army of the unemployed. So this in Marxian terms, lovely term, reserve army of the unemployed. And the reserve army of the unemployed is internal to the system. It results as a consequence of the demand for labor power shifting back, my green, and I'm just making it dramatic, shifting it all the way back so you can see this reserve army of the unemployed and the point of the reserve army of the unemployed, two points to it. One, it pushes down the price of labor power to correct the disequilibrium in the situation. Number two, it disciplines the workers so they will accept a lower price of labor power otherwise they're going to be getting rid of. That is the workers who are already working. So the reserve army of the unemployed pushes down the market price to the unchanged value and thereby corrects the situation. The excess supply of means of production pushes down the prices in the market, the market prices of means of production and lo and behold, if that works, we have the following. We put it all together. Expansion causes a crisis because of rising input prices. And that crisis serves to correct the crisis by diminishing demands for labor power, diminishing demands for means of production and pushing down the very prices. So in a bizarre way, the crisis sets in motion the forces in society which correct the crisis. It's kind of a bizarre way for capitalism to expand. The expansion creates a contraction but the very contraction will solve the problem that brought it about by bidding down prices. So Marx has an argument here of how business cycles result internally within capitalism. You don't have to look outside in terms of sunspots or agriculture or whatever. Inside industrial capitalism is the mechanism for the ups and downs. You might, looking at the board, you say, well, does it necessarily have to go here and here? There's no control over these markets. So we can have the demands shifting all the way to the left. Demands for means of production shifting all the way to the left and prices could thereby fall. And the very prices falling in that situation will create opportunities for capitalists to purchase this relatively cheap labor power and the relatively cheap means of production to set in motion once again the capitalist expansion. So that's one part of this story. The other part of the story which I'm going to develop next time is that this contraction need not occur. There's no necessity for the contraction and that's the next step. So the first step is, yeah, capitalism has the potential for creating these downturns but they need not happen. If you look at these two markets for the moment, they need not occur because it's quite possible for the supply of labor power to shift to the right. That is, the demand for labor power could be increasing but if the supply of labor power shifts to the right, that price need not rise. And Marx is going to develop that argument in Volume 1 and it's a very interesting and fascinating example in England of the time. It's also important in understanding the United States over the last 30 years how the changes in the labor power market and how the changes in the labor power market specifically, how a shift in labor power to the right need not caught. Doesn't necessarily... The shift in the labor power to the... The shift in the supply of labor power to the right can offset any tendency for the price of labor power to rise. And by the same token, the supply of means of production can shift to the right and hence a rising price of labor power means of production need not occur. There can also be other changes in the economy which is that besides a shift in the supply and a shift in the supply of labor power it means of production to the right. For example, I focused on rising costs to the capitalists of having to pay labor power more. But that means that the workers have more earnings. So that means that the workers can take their earnings and go out and purchase more consumer goods and in so doing bid up the price of consumer goods. So the capitalists have to pay more for their input labor power and means of production but they're also in a favorable situation in which they can sell their goods for higher prices because the workers are getting higher money wages. So I want to develop these contradictory results in the next presentation. Thank you.