Hello, this is Carl Ackerman, host of Journeys of the Mind. You know, today I have the lovely co-host, Sherry Nakamura, who is gonna be asking our wonderful guest from the beat in Berkeley, Roger Dillahunty. And of course, the show was talking about dancing into the studio because Roger has had such a long-term career in dance. And of course, Sherry has had two. And so this should be an interesting conversation about dance. And I will be asking Roger some biographical questions and Sherry will leave it to Sherry to talk about dance because she's the expert. So, Roger, tell us about your journey. I know you grew up in Southern California because I went to high school with you. So tell us about your journey in Santa Monica and then going to the Bay Area and how you got involved with dance. Well, thank you first of all, Carl, for having me here. And it's a really wonderful meeting you, Sherry. Well, in Santa Monica, I actually was more into music. As you know, we both were inquired together. And so it wasn't until I actually moved to the Bay Area that I actually started to get involved in dancing. And so, but my experience with dance started even before I lived in Southern California when I was in Arkansas as a child. This was in the 50s. I would listen to these vinyl records that my mother and my aunt would play. I would listen to music and I would dance around. And even at school, I danced and we had contests and we had productions. And so those are my early experiences with dancing and I fell in love with dancing. But it wasn't until I moved to the Bay Area that I decided I wanted to take dance. Sherry, we mentioned a person, a mentor, my Celia Martha. I met Celia Martha and her sister, Elvia at a party and they were so inspirational to me. I kind of left my body when I danced with them. And at the end of the party, there was a person who came up and said, oh, you guys are such beautiful dancers. And I said, no, I'm not a dancer. They're the dancers. And they both looked and said, baby, you are a dancer also. That was the beginning of me really, really having the bug for dancing by me. But it wasn't until a couple of years later that I actually started to take formal training. My first classes were at Laney College where I started a modern dance class. And then I started taking some jazz and ballet. And I decided I wanted to further my teaching experience and training, so I went to the College of Alameda. And all of this happened in 1976. And between 76 and 78, I did some intense training. I ended up being like the TA for all the dance instructors who were on staff at the College of Alameda. And that was how I got sort of my formal teaching training. I had mentors that were wonderful. One of my teachers was a dancer. She went on to do chorus live. She was in the National Company for Chorus Live. So this was all in between 1976 and 1978. Then in that same timeframe, I got involved with a group called the Planet of Dance. And this was my first professional job where I got paid. The Planet of Dance was actually a program that went into the schools. We did assemblies in the different schools around the Bay Area. And we would teach children the similarities and the differences between the different dance forms, you know, like comparing ballet and it's cousin modern. And it is weird cousin modern, they called it. And then there are distance cousin jazz. And then they had these distant relatives, which was the African dancing and also the classical Indian dancing. And of course we had a child that was the same age as those children who were the person who took us on that journey to the Planet of Dance. And that was a wonderful segue for me to start my teaching. So I started teaching children. And I taught in over 40 schools all over the Bay Area. And that's the beginning of my dancing. Well, I'm gonna let Sherry, our co-host, ask you questions about dance now because as I said, she's an expert. And what I didn't say is that Sherry danced on Broadway. So she's the perfect person to ask Roger questions. Well, thank you Carl for this opportunity. And Roger, even in that short snippet, I do have a number of questions. So myself included, I didn't start taking ballet as a child, but I realized or I came to know when I went to New York to study that it is foundational. Cause I was a jazz dancer. My era was the Michael Jackson era and I wanted to dance in music videos. And so I started there, but then I went back and studied ballet as well as some contemporary. So I had to sort of backtrack. And it sounds like you did that a little bit too. Was that difficult for you to go from sort of a free, a movement genre to a more strict genre in the classical dancing structure? Yes, it definitely was because I had no idea what it entailed. I didn't have the flexibility. I started very late. I was 23 when I just danced. So yes, it was very difficult in the beginning, acquiring a level of technical skills. That was one of the things that was really, really difficult for me. But I fell in love with it. So even though there were hard times and we struggles, it was a challenge and I rose to the occasion. Right, right. So you must have had pretty amazing teachers and mentors along the way that gave you some encouragement, specifically because you were a late starter. And maybe you can talk about some of those teachers who influenced you and helped you along. Yes, let me think back. The first teacher I had was Jones Agata. She was a black belt and karate. Her husband was the karate instructor at the College of Alameda. She was a strict disciplinary. I mean, I couldn't do any of the things that she did in the beginning. It was very, very challenging and difficult, but she was a wonderful mentor in that she was nurturing. And so it was very, very encouraging. And she was the person that really helped me when I had my first major dance injury. It was through her that I was able to get and seek the medical help that I needed to help me get through that. I also had a wonderful teacher, Pam Drake, told me one of the dancers that she danced with Dance Between the Lines, which was a professional show that was being held in San Francisco. Henry Garvin was the choreographer. And Pam Drake was really instrumental in helping me to become a teacher. She was really a mentor. I mean, I acquired a lot of skills through her. And she later on went to do Chorus Lie with another dear friend of mine, Woodrow Thompson, who was in the international company. But I also worked with, there was Yvonne Daniels, who did the Donham Techniques. So I did Donham Technique through Yvonne Daniels, Eleanor Barnes, who was a jazz instructor. I took through her. Naima Gwen-Lewis, who was, I think she's in Washington, DC now. She was also very instrumental in helping me and was a wonderful mentor. And I also got to, as later on, when I acquired more technique and started to experience a bit warmer, I started to work with more renowned teachers and there's a whole list of things that I'm interested about. Right, so Carl, you may imagine that in the dance world, right, we come across these artists and we can learn from them and build our own artistry through the influence of others. I'm kind of interested about your performing career. It sounds like you had a performing career and also a teaching career. And probably I'm assuming you're also a choreographer. So maybe you can speak a little bit about your performing career. Maybe what was the most, I don't know, euphoric experience or memorable experience in your performing career. We'll start with that. Well, I have had a lot of opportunities to perform. There are a lot of highlights. And for example, in 1983, I had the opportunity to do the Universidad Games up in Edmonton, Canada. So that was a wonderful experience for me because it was, I got the opportunity to choreograph the show that we were presenting. It was through a theater arts group out of San Francisco. And we went up for the games for the week that was held in Edmonton. But also that following year in 84, I was a part of the Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles. And so we performed down in Japan town. That was a wonderful highlight. And the same year I went to Martinique, where my choreography was featured in the opening number for an international festival in Martinique. And that same summer, I had the opportunity to travel throughout Germany and went throughout Europe. And later on, had the opportunity to do workshops in Berlin, workshops in Vienna, in Austria. I did a decade of performing up in Juneau, Alaska through Juneau, a limited, which is a dance company that would host guest artists from all over the states. And so I had the opportunity to go there for almost, for over a decade. And that was wonderful. Have you been to Juneau? I've never been to Juneau. No, so yeah. So I have a whole list of performance experiences. I also got the opportunity to work with Alonso King, was a member of a six-member dance company called City Center Dance Theater. And we danced together for about 10 years. Originally there were six of us. Later on, we opened the company up for other members to join in. And that's who I went to Martinique with. But Alonso King set a piece on our company. I got the opportunity to work with Diane McIntyre out of New York, Kale, Tali Beattie, who set a piece on us. So I've had a number of wonderful experiences in the same amount for y'all. It sounds like it, it sounds like it. Let me just interrupt here. I'm just for a second, Sherry, sorry. Roger, because Sherry eloquently talked about your teaching part of your career also. And I'm very interested in how you establish your studio. And I've heard stories from Sherry about how difficult it is to be in the arts and where she made her career in New York City and was, and actually was able to make it as an artist and as a dancer. But my question is, how did you start the beat? And I wanna, you know, if you go into your wonderful studio there's a picture of Gregory Hines and you later told me in conversation because I just happened to ask about an old friend of mine someone who I knew as an undergraduate at Berkeley. She was in law school, I was an undergraduate named Fonda Davis, Angela Davis and sister. And you said that both women have frequented the beat studio. So I'm curious about your following on Sherry's fine question about your teaching but more importantly, how you establish this business. Oh my goodness. Well, you know, for me it was kind of a hard transition to go from being a teaching artist to a business person. It has some experience because as an independent contractor most dancers are independent contractors. As an independent contractors I had to know where my money was going and where it was coming from. And so I had to establish a way of being able to do finances and that. But I also got a lot of training through the Jillian Oregon in Berkeley that did collaborative work with the Lincoln Institute out of New York. And so I got to learn a methodology of teaching that not only enhanced my teaching as a teaching artist in the schools with the children but also with adults and also credential teachers. So I got to do that collaboration. But through them I also got the experience of being able to facilitate. So that allowed me to be able to see that I could run a dance studio. But it was difficult because that changed from the teaching artist to a business person took a lot. So what I had to do and I have a list of things because I won't remember everything. Let's see the structure of put the studio together. Of course, one has to get a business license. You have to have an employee identification number which is the E, the E-I-N. And now I think California causes the U-E-I which is the unique entity identifier. You also have to have a big, I can't even say it, business name and a mission state. So I created a mission state and I also had to get a 1023 form filing. I had to get the IRS 501-C3 which, you know, my studio is a non-profit. Had to get the state of California Department of Justice, a letter from them. We had to get an SOS which is the secretary of the state, a letter from the secretary of the state, management record fees, liability insurance. So all of those were the technical aspects putting together the business. But the history itself didn't start with the beat, the Berkeley Performing Arts. Originally, the studio was known as Studio J. And Studio J was actually started by a woman named John, John Flint, and Studio J was actually her initial. And John hired me to come in to be one of the first jazz instructors and she was lovely. And, but she only had the studio for three years. She passed away in 88, but this was 85 when I started. So the studio went from Studio J and it was run after she passed away by two ladies up until 1999. In 1999, it became the beat Eddie Brown Center of the Arts. Now Eddie Brown Center of the Arts was run by a woman named Babs Yo-hai who was also friends with, cause Carl mentioned Gregory Hines. She was also friends with Gregory Hines and Gregory Hines had frequent Studio J a number of times. He would do master classes, but they were in house master classes. It wasn't open to the public. So a whole students and teachers at Studio J in the beginning were able to attend the later on, the beat Eddie Brown Center of the Arts. And in 2006, I became the manager of Eddie Brown Center of the Arts. And as the manager I came in and there were some priorities that the owner at the time wanted to oversee to bring the studio up. This was I think during the beginning of the dot com crisis. So a lot, there were a lot of closures. A lot of studios were just all in like dominoes. In fact, during those years, I lost a lot of my work, you know, 45 years at a school, Cabrillo Elementary School, 10 years at the Japanese by links top. It's the C third way, all of those studios close the C city center dance theater. A lot of places had the problems where they couldn't keep up with their rents and stuff like that. So a lot of things changed. So becoming the manager was a segue for me to get more experience in my business. And in 2008, I took over and then that's what I went in. And I, as I mentioned before, I got my business license, I got incorporated, you know, and we got our nonprofit status that same year and we became the beat the Berkeley Performing Arts. So as a 2008 to presence, that's where we stand. And just a follow up comment that I'm gonna let Sherry ask another question and that is, you know, you had mentioned to me when we talked about this interview that you had to figure out how you're gonna not be at the beads because you had classes going on. So we're really grateful for your attendance here, Roger and this you being here and answering questions. So before I get to Sherry, I wanna also mention that, you know, your career in music also, because you share that with Sherry, was quite significant. And I think you're being very modest about your choir experience in Santa Monica High School because of course, sitting near you was Jubilant Sykes who's gone on and had a wonderful singing career.  And I have to make this comment, it's a personal aside is that I was always very happy because you're also very kind to someone who is Elizabeth Hicks now but was a 2D acrobat at the time. And you're always so kind to 2D. So Sherry? Well, no, I don't, it's not that, I don't have any questions at the top of my head, but I just wanna make a comment. I know how difficult it is to maintain a dance studio, especially through the years and turbulent economic time. So it's really a testament to your creativity and your discipline and the effort you've put in. And so it's very, very impressive. I wanna take your class actually. So I hope you have any video classes online still. Well, it's, I mean, I know, I love dancing myself. I actually still teach dancing at a ballet studio. I teach basic ballet to adults.  But then the music starts and you're with the students and you're actually moving to music and it's what it's all about. And afterwards I always say, I'm so glad I'm doing this.  So really it hats off to you for sustaining a studio or actually even taking over the studio and making it your own.  You mentioned that you've been in Berkeley for a long time and, you know, I can't give enough praise to that city because I love good and I spent many years there going to college, but why Berkeley, Roch? Well, what is it about and the location of your studio, which is right near this where they're renovating and there's all these shops and everything looks so great and you're not too far away from the San Francisco Bay. Why Berkeley and, you know, why the beat where it is today? Well, you just said it. It's the location and the people. I'd love the Bay Area and when I first moved here was Oakland and, you know, and I enjoyed where I was staying when I was in Oakland. When I moved to Berkeley, it just, it felt like home. You know, I mean, I've traveled, I had the opportunity to travel all over the world and I always appreciate when I come back home and I know all in the house I lived in, but I've lived in it for 46 years and so to me that is my refuge. And we're near everything. I mean, we're close to Redwoods. San Francisco is just across the bay. You know, we have the mountains, we have the sea, we have the bay. All these things are factors, but Berkeley is just a wonderful place to be. I love it. I just think, oh, no, Sherry, you go. Well, no, I just, I mean, it's probably gonna be a long answer, but I'm curious to know how you approach school kids and dancing because of course there are kids who already have sort of a natural ability, but there are those who don't. So how do you spark the interest for these little people?  So I first make them aware of all the different intelligences they use to be able to process. So visually, auditorily, aesthetically, analytically. And so we do, I actually put together a lesson plan or each class that is kind of like a script. And it basically shows what we're gonna do from the beginning to the end, get introductions and using all these different activities that's engaging, that helps them to be able to do only visual things, to be able to only rely on, be able to use their eyes to be able to take your information and or only using their ears. So no talking, just being able to see and hear and feel patterns. I have a line of inquiry, which is the question that is gonna be the umbrella of the things we're gonna be covering over all sessions. But then I have guiding questions that the activities are created around and those are the lens and the threads that go back into the lot of inquiry. And so everything is reinforced, and in this method, the kids love it because it's their own creativity. There's no wrong answers, it's all open-ended. And so it really, really helps them to be better listeners. They'd be more attentive, being able to use their eyes. And the most difficult thing is silence, being able to be still, that's a hard thing to do. And so, all the classes reinforce all these things, visually, auditorily, both, embodying all these different qualities. That's very cool. And I have to say, observing both of you, that it's really a credit to both of you in your hard work to have established careers in the arts. So, I wanna ask this question of both Sherry and Roger. If you have to give advice to younger people who are gonna be watching this video on the show, on Think Tech Hawaii, what advice would you give them in terms of they're like a high school kid and they wanna go into the arts professionally? Well, what advice, and we don't have much time left, but short advice, let's start with Sherry and then go to Roger. I would encourage it, but tell them that it's hard. It's hard work, but I would, if they wanna do it, I have support of all the way. And I did it, I also did all that in that it's very, very difficult. It's hard to see how a person sees himself as being successful, for example. And so, what happens is we tend to make goals for ourselves that are too hard for us to achieve. It's when you want something, you have to work for it.  Do it in increments. Set goals that are easy to be achieved and you can succeed. Because once you get to a certain stage, you can look back and you can say, oh, I was there, but now I'm here. And so, but if you make it too high and too far, then one of the problems I find is the children are too impatient. If they don't get it instantly, they don't wanna do it. Oh, I'm bored. I don't like this. It's too hard, nothing comes easy, but if you work on it, you can set your sights on something and you can achieve anything that you go for. So, I would just say if you wanna dance, dance. And that's a great way to segue to the end of this show because you're dancing into the studio. Mr. Roger Dillahunti, thank you co-host Sherry Nakamura. This is Carl Ackerman, host of Journeys of the Mind for Think Tech Hawaii, Hui Ho and Aloha Toll. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you, Roger. Thank you, Sherry.


Today in healthcare we're not managing health, we're managing illness, we wait on people get sick before they come into contact with the system. In the future we're going to have to manage health throughout the lifespan. Now how are we going to do this? Well the first thing we have to do is we have to consider a very proactive approach to healthcare where all the stakeholders are involved in the system but going to be able to make the best decisions of the best time. Essentially that means that we have to give them information and knowledge and giving healthcare practitioners, patients, all the other stakeholders knowledge means you're giving them power. The only way we can give them knowledge is by unlocking value from all the data that we have access to and in recent years we've had an unprecedented kind of expansion in our capacity to generate and access data. Data from the molecule, data from the person, data from population and data from the system and if we can harvest all of that data and use very smart analytics to unlock knowledge from it then we can build a new model for healthcare where we have early detection of disease, use of persuasive technologies that are based on hard data and good analytics of that data to try and engage people in management of their own health. That's what we're trying to do an insight, particularly in the personal sensing group. We do a lot of work where we take sensors and try and understand how we can use those sensors to unlock value from them but essentially by means of trying to better understand and enhance human behavior and performance. We do a lot of work with patients with chronic disease and people who have sports injuries, people who are involved in sports who want to try and find a better way to you know have a better sporting performance as well as populations who are at risk of falling etc.


Hello! How are we doing? Feeling good after lunch? Perfect. All right, so let's go ahead and get started in the next few moments. Thank you. So I'm sure a few of you have already heard a few times today so I'm sorry that I'm repeating it it's getting annoying at this point but I am Brianna Williams and I'm a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies and Writing Department here at MIT. This afternoon I will be introducing Dr. Kelly Moore, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU, and the author of the newly released work Legal Spectatorship, Slavery and the Visual Culture of Domestic Violence which I highly recommend by the way. A bearing witness seeking justice we hope to incorporate creative forms of media namely visual media and our development of new frameworks for social justice. In Dr. Moore's work she furthers our understanding of how the image of domestic violence has altered and can continue to alter legal and extra legal spaces. She does so by examining how witness testimony and witness flesh is translated and transformed once absorbed into legal processes and the political knowledge surrounding domestic violence. She encovers historical and ongoing efforts by state powers to subjugate the presentation of both the crime and the victims without full regard for their autonomy or consent ultimately compromising their agency as they seek justice. It's not difficult to expand our interpretation of the domestic sphere and projected implications beyond the private household. In our national home the United States and beyond its borders state-sanctioned violence occurs daily and it's the images of these abuse, their uses, interpretations, their transmutations that have often maintained the recurrence of a violent history but now offer us the tools with which we can redefine that history. If only we hold fast to our agency as Dr. Moore posits, do mediation, authentication and solidarity. Since earning her PhD at UC San Diego completing her postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley and publishing extensively Dr. Morris found a new home for her vital research. At the Center for the Humanities she continues exploring the potential of a method used in her past work courtroom watching to further expose media history, its use of trauma narratives and the popularization of certain forms of evidence some real and others falsified. No doubt understanding the pre-existing frameworks that define courtroom aesthetics will allow us further agency and forming our own in the pursuit of justice, namely legal justice, which is why I'm so excited today to be introducing Dr. Kelly Moore in her presentation moving images in absentia courtroom looking in the age of hyper mediation. Welcome Kelly. Thank you very much Brianna for that very kind introduction and I want to express my tremendous gratitude to Professor Kenneth Manning for hosting this event and inviting me to it very generous very generous invitation as well as Samantha Fletcher who helped with a number of link logistical issues and everyone else who whose hands and labor touched this conference in any way. Thank you so much. It's been really wonderful to be here and I would like to also think the fellow fellow scholars here who's critical instead of the public who has passed efforts toward the question of visual culture and criminal justice are shifting our ability to understand what so many repressed and silenced communities have already known and experienced of the mediation of criminal justice and its origins in the Anglo-American legal context. So I am a scholar whose work brings together law, media, black studies and I'm interested in how we come to the milios through which we come to the truth, the architectures that we use, the spaces that we inhabit to come to legal decisions. I'm interested in questions of what makes something testimonial and that's what I'll talk about today using some materials from my book and then if there's time and that's actually maybe the better argument, if there's time I'll talk about a project that comes out of my first monograph. This symposium is brought together a number of leading scholars conducting some of our deepest inquiries into the identity and origins of photographic evidence, the effective dimension of photographic evidence, videography and its influence on expressive and narrative legal cultures. The work has expanded the analytical lens of video by emphasizing the sonic elements of videography making ways of hearing the image co-eval with ways of seeing the image. Importantly these timely projects here at the conference do not take for granted the presumption of the availability of the audience as structuring of the history of witnessing and its political importance. The need for evidentiary photography and moving images assumes an audience to view it, post it, like it, tweet it, comment, follow, curate. This is where I'll try to ought to focus a few interventions and provocations. This afternoon my remarks are concerned with the interaction of law and visual culture in the era of ubiquitous social media and I will submit there are our political moment where we depend less and less on formerly trained media professionals i.e traditional journalists for documentation of state oppression in a time of greater awareness of cultures and amnesia where the routines of police work are ever more scrutinized by a techno-savvy public we need to return to those spaces where the live production of recording is forbidden. Absented, erased, confiscated, left unthought, under theorized to comprehend the limits of public witnessing in order to strategize where to push further to access a more thoughtful critique, more transformed justice, more life. I'll put the provocation up first. Is it possible that the democratization and decentralization of the so of social media technology we use to proliferate our witnessing participates in the centralization of state control through courtroom power? Second, how do we put into conversation the fact that the U.S. public that in the U.S. public witnessing is on the increase in the same political moment courtroom trials are on the decline and I'll talk more about that. Legal scholar Jocelyn Simonsen draws our attention to our current post-trial world in which 95 percent of criminal convictions result from plea bargains meaning that juries have fewer roles and responsibilities to represent the public in courtroom trials. Today, bearing witness is mediated by Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok in ways that should make us curious for the whereabouts of juries but also and more importantly wonder about the status of the courtroom and its audience which is to say that bearing witness should also happen in the courtroom more. This talk is about the space and social dynamics of courtrooms where photography and videography are interdicted. As such my talk today focuses on the control over recording visual evidence in the courtroom milieu and by courtroom milieu I mean the historical communication pathways between law enforcement's criminal investigation and the players in the courtroom judges, police, attorneys, court officers, juries and the audience. I suggest that the absence of photography and videography has a binary and closed circuit relation to the proliferation of photography and videography which demand our attention. The proliferation of citizen photography and videography and analysis must be understood as a system of cybernetic control which I'll explain a little bit later. In the spirit of a feminist killjoy, I'll offer some cautionary points and clarifications concerning the social media transformation of public witnessing and its interdisciplinary study. These points and clarifications will draw from examples from my own study of the ascendance of visual evidence in domestic violence in the U.S. courtroom and public culture. I'll then turn to how this study expanded into a founding of a court watch at my university. So I came to this project through looking at coming across images of battered women in a life a few couple of lifetimes ago when I was working in a courthouse as a researcher in New York. And I'm going to show a couple of those images and this is sort of I guess it's my trigger warning which I completely deconstruct with students. The images, a few of them are authentic but the majority of them are art and performance pieces. These are cosmetically simulated domestic violence images. This is an actress whose name I forget and a model. These are images used to advertise public awareness of domestic violence. This one here for the Baltimore Ravens and the Superbowl and the uptick in domestic violence during the Superbowl and this is another just an interview with an actress I believe for People Magazine where they stage her in this way because reasons. These are faked images. Images like these began for me a macabre connoisseurship of some really unsavory digital files and this is the conference for that because I think I've learned all of these colors here have this collection of really unsavory material. And one of the affordances of social media is its flexibility in modifying filtering deconstructing and simulating the truth. While trick photography has been around since the inception of the medium and rituals of cosmetics even longer the ubiquity of social media particularly digital photography has brought ever more opportunities to fake it. Faking it in this case in this case the wounds of domestic abuse using social media has also made its way into law. When I allowed myself to be led by representational motif and genre as is typical in photography studies these images were about violence against women. What Marianne Hirsch studies among other things is the idea of post-memory they were about that. They had also to do with the shadow archive of 19th century domestic portraiture.  The sauciness of the images and here I'll show you this image of Donna Ferrado as a photographer who is embedded with a husband and wife named Garth and Lisa in early 1980s. She was working for an issue of Japanese playboy on counter-cultural marriages and so she was embedded living with them with her young child at the time and she's following them around and one night she witnesses this fight and she very famously documents this violence. Ferrado's piece was cut for being obscene and she cut a lot of flak for taking the picture rather than intervening right. I'll show you with this other photograph I'm going to show it quickly it's of the artist Anna Mendieta who while she was getting her MFA at University of Iowa she was by the way known for working with animal blood a lot of the male artists were doing the same. A murder happened while she was in school and what she was moved to engage in a series of performances which she called Tableau of Violence where she read the police material about the described this murder of this young woman on campus and she sort of replicated what the police found and she invited some friends over to her home one evening posed in the way that this young woman's body had been found she didn't say anything to the guest it was a project that involved duration and she is sloped over a table here's the image really quickly and eventually the the folks that she invited to her home started taking photographs and talked about what they saw. Anna Mendieta was herself a victim of domestic violence and her husband the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre was accused of pushing her out of a high-race building many years later and like as I said this was a project that was part of her early juvenile you might you might call it and I got interested in this period of feminist art performance it's a moment in the 1980s where they were calls by critical white feminist artists who were saying what we need to do is stop following the tradition the male tradition of representing our bodies and take our bodies out of circulation stop appearing nude in our art stop making our art be about our naked form and what made me interested in these images given what I had shown you about the faked domestic violence public public awareness campaigns was the fact that these women were not doing that these artists and photo journalists were were straying from that and what I found really compelling was that though these are forms of art performance they were actually mimicking a new form of police photography of domestic violence of battered women and I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that it's precisely this these kinds of images that got the police to take domestic violence seriously right previously for decades the police would ask Carl the husband to take a walk around the block right and nothing really was done about about what was happening domestically here is another of the famous photographer Nan Golden this is a an authentic image the image she calls the image Nan one month after being beaten and she it's an image of her with a black eye that she received from an ex-boyfriend and she's also put rouge put makeup on her face sorry okay this is an image that she would show regularly in an art performance piece that that she did in the 1980s very famous photograph of her and what was compelling about this image is the makeup and the bruise together in all of these cosmetically simulated images what i find compelling is the fact that makeup is being used in a in a radical makeup is being radicalized right makeup is being used in this activist way makeup being sort of one of the one of the essences of feminine masquerade like one of the ways that you highlight femininity one of the ways that you highlight womanhood and so i was quite interested in the ways that makeup could be used by these female these women activists in this way in this particular image that i just showed you kind of has those two things going on at the same time okay so how did we get to this place of advertising law by circulating faked images of the very real evidence needed during domestic violence trials rather than exclusively following the configuration of women's bodies in these images right where have i seen this configuration of bodies before right rather than ask that question the motifs of genre that i've that have organized film and these are the motifs and genres that have organized film and photography free studies i was led instead by the dominant terms we use to refer to these images images of battered women pictures of intimate partner violence domestic violence images of dv the images are used to advertise the medical legal term is sorry these images are used to advertise the medical legal terms for a particular kind of victim of a particular violent crime these images were also used to bring awareness to policy changes brought about by the bipartisan efforts of the violence against women act of 1994 which we'll talk more about shortly what i wanted to do however was not merely tell the story of these images in terms of their the more prominent content but rather to see what forms of law were represented through the image and so i was really thinking about domestic violence that term and if you are in any way connected to the court system or the social service world you know that dv is a shorthand a shorthand that's commonly used to describe these kinds of crimes so i realized that i had seen dv elsewhere and it's in the united states constitution in article four section for the guarantee clause which says the united states shall guarantee to every state of the union a republican form of government and shall protect each one of them against invasion on the application of the legislature or the executive when the legislature cannot be convened against domestic violence so it's quite interested in how this little d big v can become and this is the argument of the book that little d big v can become big d big v and what i mean by big d big v is the way that those two letters appear in court documents to signify a domestic violence case it's a way of quickly identifying through the docket number might be 2004 dv and then a series of other numbers that's a quick way for you to identify through court documents that this is a domestic violence trial and that that sign opens up those particular cases for particular forms of analysis and monitoring that are quite different than other criminal cases or other other forms of charges so this book is really about this transformation which i argue is a transformation that has to do with the archive of slavery it has to do with the evidence the archival history of new world slavery even when that evidence appears to not be present right so even when the voices or lives of slaves appear to be absent from art from the archive that absence is actually a presence since i wanted to bring the archive of slavery to bear upon this change a change that begins to code legal files are you with me does that make some sense okay so the interesting thing about this moment in the constitution this guarantee clause is that the united states is becoming a republic it cannot be a monarchy it cannot be a dictatorship though maybe it can be but it has to be a republic and in the moment of the constitution when this is being debated this clause by the southern and northern states the southern states interpret domestic violence the little d big v they interpret that as the utter cultural and economic catastrophe that will ensue should slaves become free so domestic violence is not what you think it is right it is actually about a debate of black folks gaining freedom and so the image of domestic violence and i i use some abolitionist photography the image of domestic violence early on might be lithographs or engravings of the civil union army attacking southern plantations that's domestic violence so how do we get from an image like that to these image that i just that i began the talk with that's just really what the book is about and what i try to do is to take attention away from the intimate romantic couple and the visual evidence used to adjudicate it and throw attention more on to the neighbor the intimacies of the police interacting with with with citizens okay i'm gonna fast forward a lot in black studies particularly black feminist theorists this memoir slave memoir is extremely important it is the incidence of a life of a slave girl by Harriet Jacobs who very famously hid in a garret for seven years on her captor's property and had a people in the garret that she was hiding in and through that garret could see her children playing and her children didn't know that she was hidden away in this space for this amount of time and in the book i make a connection between that garret space with the people and the camera obscura which is a really important and foundational pedagogical tool for those folks who study visual culture and photography and film and i won't explain how the camera obscura works but it's a very similar form that i could that you can imagine in the photography what that you can imagine in the the slave memoir but also that gets made here by a white artist named ellen driscoll who renders Harriet Jacobs loophole of retreat as she called it i also think about this social media crazy dilemma about the dress and the different ways you could see the color the signification of the color blue and how the salvation army would hack that campaign and say why is it so hard to see black and blue right what you should be gathering here and much of the evidence that i've shown you are that these are images of white women's bodies the white women's body this is a really old art history and visual culture argument that's nothing really new there um but what what i what it allows me to say is that if we go back to this um guarantee clause and we know that domestic violence had been something else having to do with black freedom but it makes us ask about this that what's being that something is being ghosted here and it's the freedom struggles of black folk okay i won't go through this one but you should take a look at it later um as another pedagogical tool i look at the power and control wheel this is the sort of cybernetic aspect of things this feedback loop that is used as a pedagogical tool in court cases um and the reason i call this a cybernetic thing is that um cybernetics is a is a is a language it's a way of describing the division of labor of machines how do you program a robot to be able to do labor and this kind of circular wheel cycle function is a similar way of describing a feedback loop of the the exchange of the power dynamic between the couple and these are tools that attorneys and experts will use in court domestic violence court cases to help explain to the jury why women stay in these cases and why they sometimes um for very good complicated reasons sabotage their own cases why they they be overwhelming majority of women do not want to participate in this okay so quickly this leads me to another project which i'm calling critical marginalia um this is yeah this text appears somewhat small but as i said at the beginning um you cannot bring any recording materials into a courtroom you have to be low tech it is an extremely low tech environment and the first and sixth amendment of the constitution are both a right they are interlocking amendments meaning that we have the right to assemble and we have the right to a trial of one's peers we have the right to be seen being accused and those two um those two amendments interact interlock again i'm using the work of jocelyn sidenson um so we have the right duty and obligation as audience members not juries but audience members to be in a court so i bring my students in this class i've created this court watch clinic and we go and we have i give them a notebook i insist that the notebook be anonymized and they go and deal with the overwhelming boredom utter boredom and confusion of the courtroom they have no idea what's going on these are folks um my campus is really international they've they revealed to me that they've never been to a courthouse in their own country they've never been to one in this country it's incredible for them it gets them moving um and it gets them telling a different set of stories and i was very intrigued um a by elissa richardson's book which i adore um but also her talk yesterday and she really um digs into the photographs and to what the photographs and what holding a camera in a student holding a camera can the power of that and i actually want to make a somewhat different argument there's something about the courtroom space where the phone is not a tool is not available to young people that forces you to go low tech and low fi and it forces you to draw and it forces you to write and what i find interesting is when i um have students they they engage in drawing activities such as this they engage they have to write in language that accounts for themselves in the courthouse they have to deal with the the grindiness the smelliness of the american court system the courts are often in disrepair there's a reason for that um i have a student who um you know they get up they get tied into how out of date and old and grimy things are rather than taking a photograph and saying we got the picture we're woke we understand we have the critique what my study is suggesting because it's located in the courtroom you is these folks do not are not ideologically the same they do not carry the same ideas about what it means to document evidence precisely because they are meant to deal with the utter boredom and confusion of legal language it slows everything down in a way that your ability to use a smartphone does not do and so i i highly recommend this as a pedagogical and storytelling potential um another um this is a woman who's from korea who was got really tied into the clothing that they wear these are also folks that you can see have a manga practice who very quickly are able to engage in storyboarding and that's how that's how cognitively they're able to process the confusion and and boredom of the courtroom i like the circle that she's making this feedback loop that she comes to make um people question the architecture of the court they end up questioning what women are wearing what what defendants are wearing right you really have to ask yourselves i mean i where i asked myself what is it that i have here in these reflections and these images that they're drawing i don't think i have anything but i think that there is something here precisely when you put it into context when you read it against the smartphone and what it can do and the speed with which people can very quickly capture an image um and with the the kind of ideological unity or commonality that we assume is in place in the moment of bearing witness here's another um that really sort of documents very nicely the slow creep of the smartphone in the courtroom when court watchers when sorry when court officers bodies are at rest they get bored and they bust out the phone and they're not allowed to but they do it anyway so the phone is slowly making its way into into the court system and that find i find that fascinating um let's see these are moments also where rather than meeting the police in the streets you're meeting them on their turf you're meeting them or we're meeting my students i are meeting them in their home and it makes them very nervous and they start being excessively nice but sometimes they let something slip they say things under their breath and these are really interesting moments for us to capture without the use of without the use of a phone this is a student i'm compelled by this image because of the way that she shows the shackled hands and the back um i might you know i would put this into conversation with the history of reading the back um in in images the archive of slavery but also images of criminality the sagging back what that means effectively one of the things that i tried to do in the book is take the attention away from um all of the affect of reading the face but located in reading other aspects of the body flesh the way that your head hangs etc so conclusions here i'm just restating the um the the provocation about the the closed circuit relationship between evidence and the state the state controls it all they control the authentic images but they also control the fake ones and we need to be cognizant of that i want to also suggest that their um that the courtroom audience their lives and the way that they move through the audience is an absolute labor history we need to understand it that way and that um what they produce in terms of the drawings um and and and and reflections with reflected diverse set of ideologies they do not agree they are not all left-wing they are and they have some very conservative ideas um and they those ideas are present in the moment of the court system rather than what we might assume or prefer they believe and following toran monahan um the interaction between law and counter archival or surveillance practices which are these forms of critical marginalia that i'm talking about they may serve to blunt their radical potential because as he says as people are entrained to participate in systems of data production they become compliant surveillance subjects whose labor generates value for others often unbeknownst to them end quote such that quote the very mechanisms that allow for and encourage participation by users in data creation also afford opportunities for artistic and for interventions that illustrate the insidious logic of supposedly rational systems i could answer questions about any of those things um or i'll be happy to clear up any other things okay thank you the question i'm curious kali how did violence against the state legally become violence against the flesh and then eventually violence against feminine white flesh in the book um i talk about i try to orient the question fundamentally to the violence of new world slavery and what that means in terms of restricting the freedom of black bodies i use the work of hortense spillers to try and answer that question where she makes this very famous distinction between the flesh and body and lots of scholars have dug into that moment in her text where she makes that distinction the flesh is something as i read her that can be used to um you can control the body but there's something also there's something um different or extra about the ability to control the flesh and i think that that meaning in her in her text changes and i try to show that through the way that the look the ideal look of the domestic violence evidence begins to appear as a white woman whose body is used as a blank canvas to show us what domestic violence should look like and when you put that in conversation with the cosmetically simulated images what you get is a sort of nice way to train people on how to see these photos in court right the at my fundamental argument or one of my arguments is that the court controls them both and it opens up by by my saying that it opens up questions around what kind of um art practices do certain groups engage in if you were to look at an art history of black women art performances you don't begin to see bare breasts of of black women artists artists until late in the game that's not the case with the way that white women um are engaging in radical art practices the way that they use their bodies and you could and i wouldn't i mean this is a very American centric project i realized but i really would like to see myself in conversation with um the way that other folks are theorizing our our practices i hope that makes sense it does thank you all right so i'm going to start at the right right side of the room with questions and then we'll move over to the left i'm a doctoral student at brown university in modern culture and media and my work is actually on the trial as a narrative form so this talk and your book have been really really inspirational for me and i was wondering because you mentioned at the beginning of uh your talk that public like we're at the highest point of public witnessing in the united states while the actual courtroom trial is decreasing yeah and i think uh first i think it's interesting that some of like the most high profile like media mediated trials have been civil trials recently with the amber heard johnny deb case and then i've personally been watching the live stream of alice jones's defamation trials um and i was wondering how this kind of decrease how do you think this decrease in like the actual trial like actual case is going to trial squares with maybe the popularity of true crime media but also kind of in like sleuthing and the act of kind of investigating especially on social media in general it feels very interesting that in reality like there's not that many cases but it seems like yeah yeah um i think the the camera obscura i think can help us think about your question which is i think a very good one thank you um that this was a scientific object the camera obscura it reveals natural phenomena and it's used for scientific purposes but as you see oh you don't see it uh thank you um as you see uh these other quadrants this is used by the bourgeoisie as a as a as a leisure as a form of entertainment right so particularly you know in the west there is a long cultural tradition of inhabiting machines and even the lives of others for entertainment purposes and i think that's part or a lot of what's going on and people's appreciation of true crime um lifetime television for women there are even uh i was at a legal studies conference this summer and heard a wonderful talk about um conferences that happen in in las vegas that are about uh women staging themselves in you know these horrific you know violence against women acts um as a form of of leisure activity right as something that's interesting to watch that's that's fun um the same ways that we like or similar ways that we enjoy horror other sorts of genres that seem distasteful they are very very pleasurable and i'm quite interested in and describing what kind of aesthetic category do we need to describe that feeling or that the participation in those kinds of activities um yeah i hope that answers it hello excuse me excuse me charise leprey associate professor at new house how are you i i have two kind of very divergent points but um one of which i can't and going through your talk i can't help thinking about todd atkin achin and his comment i think he passed away a few years ago about legitimate rape right and legitimate rape women have a whole women's bodies have a whole way of shutting that thing down um and you know this idea of what is legitimate violence and what is illegitimate violence and when we talk about violence against say black and brown bodies and we've had those conversations um that it's technically legitimized right because it's part of the rules of state and so on and so forth but at the same time the emphasis on visual evidence keeps us from understanding say emotional violence so i think i don't really have a question but i feel like there's this real intersecting positionality of what we can bear witness to what we can see versus what we can't see and what we choose not to see yeah um with respect to the racialized understanding of what is legitimate violence against which bodies yeah thank you um i your talk makes me think again about these instruments these power and control wheels and all the things that are not represented the archive of slavery is not in this in these instruments um and the assumptions that we bring to these instruments are that the and and this is borne out in in the in the cases is that we are always thinking that these are cases of female victims and male perpetrators and that is what you see overwhelmingly it's what i saw overwhelmingly um in the ethnographic work i did watching these trials but the dynamic here describes the trans couple it describes the queer couple um it describes all couples it describes female perpetrators as well and so i think your your comment really makes me um think about that and and really try to i would like to think that the book can open that question up too that that we're in this moment where we're you know finally celebrating queer lives and people loving who they like but there is uh there's a whole bunch of work that's going to need to come out about violence and control in those relationships as well and how that goes down just as it does for street folks and very briefly the other note that i wanted was um and that work is already ongoing sorry is uh and not to make it about myself today is my fifth year anniversary and so i'm here and my husband is not um but we got married in the courthouse right and so you know thinking through that experience of there was only two couples getting married that day and all of our families were there to literally bear witness to this courtroom process but there were also people who were there for courtroom processes and i think the woman that i remember most clearly was the woman who was bearing witness to our wedding unintentionally because she had something else coming up after we did this whole marriage thing for these happy couples and i really am excited about the idea of what it means to bear witness in a courtroom when there is no videography or that you can participate in that videography is taken out of the hands of the people and i don't know it now i'm just i really wonder who that woman was and i kind of want to go back and find out who bear witness to our wedding our marriage uh for very very different reasons very very different reasons thank you there were two very different contracts being put into play your marriage contract and her perhaps way of using visual evidence to contract her way into the violence against women act which is the this act that takes the pressure off of the victim to charge the batterer right it's not women it's not the victim who brings those cases it's the state right that discretion is that agency is taken off of the victim's hands for all sorts of reasons i'm quite interested in how the law ends up having to do that given the the nature of the kind of power control dynamic that's being described here which i which has just haunted me for for the longest time thank you for that yeah my name is jakes aslo and i was really fascinated by your discussion of boredom and i think attention and coming from a music background there's a lot of ambient music studies about how in a space where there is little that's actually going on the attention tends to really hone in on very different topics than you would in a much busier context which i think you discussed greatly with your students at reservations so i was wondering for you personally though what do you tend to notice in those places of boredom what really begins to draw your eyes in those courtrooms um i'm really a theory person so i i'm really interested in what the boredom might suggest and the ways that boredom has to be an overcome and i use a theorist theorists by the name of cn nye to talk about that she's i think one of the most offered some of the most intelligent thinking about aesthetic categories and she has this idea of she sort of looks at the history of affect an emotion and how we study it in in liberal cultures and the emphasis when we're in studies of emotions the human affect system let's say and feelings the emphasis is always on what she calls the grand affects shame joy anger really big topics really big grand affects but her she wants to place emphasis on something that she calls the minor affects confusion concern disorientation boredom those things don't seem very serious but she makes this really interesting political argument that it's precisely those minor affects of which awkwardness is included that we really need to turn to to address problems in a liberal democracy it's precisely the when awkwardness has the power to stall a conversation that confusion actually produces all sorts of legitimate misunderstandings amongst groups and people and individuals that that where cross talk ends up happening and so you don't end up really connecting with a person and really listening or really understanding and boredom in the courtroom is one of those spaces where you really the students and and i we really have to deal with our bodies and our feelings in that moment to come to understanding i think it'll i think i think you know using you know nice theory it i guess it helps me understand the conditions of having your consciousness unfold you know in a way that i think is different when you're taking a picture and and it makes you more attuned to why you don't understand something why you don't understand the the genre how you how it is that you have to deal with drawing a picture and accounting for yourself while also listening to other people account for themselves communication is very difficult when it's a miracle that it happens it's a miracle that it works so i hope that somewhere in there that's a there's a response to it thank you any other questions i'm trying to see you because the the light sorry this is more of a statement rather than a question um why if the person what is a question well what if the person is not viable to listening and like the only way of listening is seeing pictures to like tell their story or to get other people to hear their story rather than them listening because you're talking about in the courthouse where they're not listening um there's a thing called double consciousness and people know that you're not listening people know the stereotypes that people have for you so like what would you have to say about that um different forms of communication get enacted in that moment right when you're not heard all sorts of you know calamities can ensue you know through physical uh violence um that can happen other people engage they run through a litany of ways of communicating when listening breaks down um in the in the courtroom cases in the around the issue of domestic violence um one thing that happens that i could tell you about is there are some photographers who work with battered women i talk about this in the book there are photographers who work with battered women um who engage in a kind of therapeutic practice with them by having giving them a makeover and then photographing them and showing them the beautiful pictures that resulted and a lot of those women those victims of of dv they are really engaged by that kind of therapy and it really they cry they're very moved they're very happy to see themselves as they should be seen rather than the ways that they have regarded themselves in mirrors for example with bruises on their bodies etc so this is a way that has nothing to do with anything being said it's a kind of therapeutic practice that's led by photographers to just put makeup on in the same way that um survivors of cancer your friend you know friends might shave their heads you know during chemotherapy or um refuse to wear a wig or wear a wig or do some sort of other um makeover kind of cosmetic activity right this doesn't have anything to do with being um heard in terms of you know spoken language right it's other ways of of um of engaging with people communicatively that seems to be very helpful yeah I hope that can answer your question a little bit we have time for one or two questions um so I have a question I struck by your research and some of the parallels with some work that I'm doing right now as well regarding the way the visual press can and cannot cover executions in the united states and how cameras are kept outside of the building while the state is able to kill another human being and my question to you is is whether we're talking about domestic violence cases within the court or something like an execution what what ought we what would we like the public to be able to see because clearly there's certain things that we we don't want them to see but normatively what would we like them to be able to understand visually about what is happening before us regarding the state and violence and the state's power here yeah that's a really beautiful question um and I I don't quite have an answer except to say that for example my book was not written to try and get some policy changes about how to improve images for when women are or victim other victims are dark skinned it's a problem it's a problem of the technology and how your skin behaves on camera and the light and all that but I didn't write this book to try and get the images to improve that's not quite the question that I was interested in and I don't know that that would work especially given the ways that we know I mean that the Rodney King trial has come up many times in the sessions here and all of the you know the evidence in a number of other cases that we've been through them the last you know 20 30 years etc it's not about improving the image or the angle at which you are shooting the material or shooting shooting the events and I think perhaps in the case of of state executions I'd almost wish the public would have to do on the one hand I would wish that the public would have to see it all and hear it all the loss that the relatives are going to experience on both sides right and then on the other hand shoot I'm losing my train of thought oh and then on the other hand if you look at the history of people going to court houses it was a bunch of racist sexist paternalistic people who went to courthouses really dotafully and was really happy to watch executions very happy to watch you know horrible decisions that ended up getting people lynched thrown in jail etc so even the history it's I don't want to suggest that that court watching is you know any kind of cure all right or the disclosing information in that way is any kind of cure all because the history of the watching is not a nice one so I I think your question really opens up an impasse and I appreciate it I don't know the answer to that actually but thank you that's a yeah that's a good question can I add one other piece of evidence to that thought process is where the flag draped coffins post-arock war that we were not allowed to see or there was you know legal efforts to prevent the publication of those images through because of state-sponsored violence legitimate violence right so I just wanted to put that one out there to add into the formula yeah yeah yeah no it's good there is a really beautiful talk I went to yesterday by an indigenous of Maori scholar named Latoya I don't have the last name she offered a beautiful memorial in many ways of a relative who was killed using a spit hood and her family kind of replicated that killing through the use of the spit hood but they used they represented it artistically and similarly to the faked the cosmetically simulated images that I talk about what happened it is a way of memorializing her family that was killed was they they called upon the very forms of the state they got allies to dress up in uniforms that looked like prison guards they got a car that looked like you know a police car prison vehicle and they fed it back to the system so to speak and I think that kind of work that kind of project Cherise you're helping me maybe triangulate between this question that I just got before you about finding ways for the state to see what has been done to us but then again we have this art practice of really enjoying inhabiting the lives and pain of others in in our leisure activities right we enjoy watching that stuff and participating that stuff so this actually helps bring us back to this cybernetics question and the loop this feedback that we just don't seem to be able to to break out of and and I think perhaps I think that I feel that that's where I where I've ended the project in a way and I'm really beginning to think about that feedback loop and how to live and work outside of it yeah so to theorize that space in a different way I have a final question related to that feedback loop because throughout your talk I was wondering in understanding that your project is very much scrutinizing our scrutinization of the visual imagery why is the courtroom the best space to analyze these visual images or this evidence knowing that it does strip a lot of the context away from the victims as opposed to say some kind of entertainment the one that comes to mind might be the color purple that traces the connections between slavery and domestic violence quite clearly yes I don't claim that the court is the best space it's the space that I was brought to in this first project one of the things that the project opened up for me through thinking about the court space and thinking about art and law and authentic things and fake things is this concept of theatricality which is not the same as performativity and I there's something about the forms of the theater the law of the theater how the theater works such that we know we're in a theater such that we know when something is official versus not official and I and it's a difficult concept to define in performance studies there's some discussion about it so i'm thinking about that at the moment so it's I don't claim that the court is the best space because and if I did come claim that I wouldn't be able to really engage people who genuinely like true crime or watching theater and that you know there really is good television and good theater out there that produces change I mean it that does happen I if I were to say that the court is the best space I couldn't speak to those folks very well right so that's kind of the next step yeah awesome yeah we're out of time thank you so much thank you


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Last week, a party was held on the grounds of the Africa Museum of Presence. This party had a so-called African theme and a huge controversy arose when people came with black faces, pith helmets and all sorts of exotic-seeming African costumes. All these issues brought to the fore the question of Belgium colonization in Africa and the impact of it even today. To talk more about this, we have with us Pabir So last week we saw this event happening and there was an uproar on by various organizations, African organizations in Brussels, other parts of the world. So could you actually talk a bit about the context in which and especially the context of Belgium, Belgian colonization also? You know the interesting part of it is that it should have come so late in terms of shall be say addressing Belgium's both culpability in what happened in Africa, particularly Congo and also the fact that it has really not decolonized the minds of its own people. See, forget about few people coming in costumes and blackened faces, caricaturing as it were, the people they supposedly are representing. But leaving that out, the point is King Leopold statues are there all over Belgium and in Brussels. King Leopold II, the second, was the architect of what happened in Congo from 1885 to 1908 in which estimated 8 to 10 million people lost their lives, children were killed in large numbers, people's hands were cut off and taken as kind of trophies to show how strongly they were executing Leopold's policy of extracting rubber for selling abroad. So all of this history is known to only a select few people. But the fact that you do not have the decolonization of the minds is because you put up statues all over, you celebrate the Belgians shall be say the colonies, you celebrate Belgium's history in Africa and you are not able to, you are not willing to talk about what really happened there. The brutality of the colonial regime and the fact that it is still to say, still to apologize for its colonial record. The only apology Belgium has given has been the apology that it took away mixed parentage children from the parents. That is the only apology Belgium has made till now. The fact that more than almost half the population, not more of Congo was actually killed during that 20, 25 years that we are talking about that has not elicited any apology, neither the rest of its colonial regime in Africa and when it took over Leopold's private fiefdom which is what Belgium, Congo was supposed to be, its own complicity in both maintaining Leopold's rule in that period and subsequently. All of it has not been something which Belgium has addressed. I think this is the key issue. In fact, this museum we are talking about came under the United Nations report which said that this is insensitive that does not address the colonial past and in fact, it does not really have quote unquote any apology for Belgium's record. It has presented the exotica of shall we say it is African by demonstrating African objects, exhibits and so on but it does not address really the colonial history of Belgium and its brutal atrocities and massacres that it carried out there. And it is also more important considering that all this information for the longest time was completely hidden and it is only much more recently that this information has come to light. Yes, in fact, it came to light because there was one diplomat, career diplomat Marshall, who was there in Belgium's service. He was posted in one African country and he found references to Belgium's massacres in Congo and he was very upset because he thought it is a canard and he wanted to refute it. So he asked Belgium can I get some documents of the period so I can show that this is wrong. So he was told that these documents are not available to you. We went back at some point to Brussels and tried to access the archives. He was too junior to be given access. So these records were not even accessible to Belgian civil service or to its diplomatic core. It's only when you receive the certain seniority that he had the requisite shall we say access rights and he goes to the history and is horrified that this was the brutality with which this whole things were carried out and the massacres, the record. Of course, Joseph Conrad in his book The Heart of Darkness does show all of this. People thought it's an allegorical account. They thought evil was not real. It was really imagined. But the evil that Conrad wrote about and he is by no means criticizing it. He in fact criticized the excesses of colonialism, not colonialism itself. In fact, you can argue that he is actually a defender of colonialism or shall we say legitimizer of the colonial rule. So this whole history where he is able to access it, he gets horrified. So he wrote five volume history of what happened under a pseudonym and later on he does come out in public about it after leaving the civil service and Hokesfield's book King Leopold's Ghost is really based on that research which was there. So it's now quite clear that this was the real brutal history of Congo and it is based on the archives of Belgium. It is not based on anything else, archival history as seen in the Belgian archives. Which again, I don't know to what extent they have been made accessible now. But all of this actually is not just Belgium. It's also the rest of the colonial countries who have hidden their history, hidden the archives, tried to sanitize it, fought bitterly over returning the plunder of Africa or other colonies and also not refusing to apologize or accept for what they have done. So this is a part of a much larger history that while Western Europe claims to be the so-called harbinger of civilization, enlightenment and so on, all this has gone hand in hand with the most brutal atrocities you can think of and Africa becomes particularly brutal because it was late colonization and it came really with the intent of loot and very little else. So the kind of massacres that took place in Africa, the after, of course, the slavery exercises, the brutalization of its people by the so-called shall we say representatives of the civilized order is something which still needs to be addressed, still needs to be known and I think therefore Belgian younger people not knowing their history is not surprising. That's a history that's not being told to them. That's a history that is being glorified. That's a history which is being celebrated in different forms even today and therefore every generation believes that Belgium had a glorious colonial past. Maybe some blemishes the king was a little brutal but in large they think they had a civilizing mission in Africa as well as in other places and this is by and large whether you have a Neal Ferguson kind of historian, you have other historians, this is by and large the kind of history that's repeated again and again to its internal audience. Even the French with Haiti for that matter. French with Haiti and French in Algeria for that matter, its own colonial history in Africa is not much better and you have basically people who are supposed to be the enlightened people writing about how you this is what is called the science of war being practiced in Algeria and how genocide is a necessity of trying to get colonies and colonies are important French has to contest England and this is how the Algerian war is framed in French to the French people and this is done by people who are supposed to be really shall we say the forerunners of civilization, the forerunners of enlightenment, the forerunners of shall we say democracy in the world. So this is a part of the colonial history and the European shall we say legacy that is there which European particularly western Europeans who are the colonizers refuse to address and it's also all the more important considering for instance the neocolonial phase starting with Lumumba and Belgium's role in that in the 60s and even now today considering the kind of extraction that is going on in Congo of course that in some senses it is a continuation this lack of historical awareness is also a huge problem there. You know Congo is the richest country probably in the world in terms of natural resources and that is its curse the fact that it is in natural resource terms so rich so you today have Ebola in Congo you have the collapse of say basically the civil infrastructure of Congo due to civil war why do you have civil war as you have rightly said you come to Belgium's history when the handover quote unquote handover because they are virtually forced to they are no longer able to maintain a colonial administration over such a large territory then you find that they have really not built any local capabilities entirely being run by Belgium the Belgians coming to Congo and running everything they had not built schools colleges I think the total number of graduates in Congo at the time was something like 500 and when the Lumumba and others take over of course there is a huge hostility to them attempt to break up Congo there is attempt to create secession of the most mineral rich part of Congo all of that is a part of Congo's history which is post-colonial history so to say and it happens as you said in collusion with the Americans who then regard Lumumba whose main really interest was nationalism to be controlled by the Congolese and that becomes a huge enemy for the ex-colonial states as well of course the United States who backed the colonial states and then of course Lumumba is killed brutally killed and we still don't know what has happened to his body so this is the history of shall we say the post-colonial history of Congo and the fact that civil wars have continued in Congo it's not because the Congolese won civil wars but because of the natural resources it has and therefore the need to control it means weakening Congo really arming different sections and different times letting them fight so that Congo remains weak and cannot control its own natural resources this is the resource curse of Congo but Congo is the biggest state in Africa it has as we said the richest mineral resources so this state once it's able to raise from the shackles of colonialism and really coalesce into a country which is why the colonial powers will not let it do that so easily it can be the motor of African development and I think that is what the ex-colonial powers in the United States are so scared of that Congo will become then the as a as a powerful economy and a powerful state and that will take Africa in a different direction so therefore weakening Congo is the primary goal at least in southern Africa that is very clear thank you that's all we have time for today keep watching news click


Yeah, it's dropping off the floor That's a big one. Oh my god, it's a first cast first cast on a spinnerbait No freaking way no freaky Bradley Here in the morning actually about to go Get some batteries in the boat as you guys know we've been having all sorts of problems lately just with everything Broke my camera that camera's toast try to buy a new one yesterday. They're out of stock We're gonna be fishing the mid-river today. That's what we're gonna start calling it Bradley We're fishing the mid-river There's a tournament tomorrow so we're practicing today for it. So today's a big day Today's gonna determine where we need to go tomorrow if we're gonna even visit See if the big ones are biting but We're gonna go out there give it our best shot Hopefully find some big fish. It's gonna be a good day. We're gonna go inside get some drinks Put it out up get some gas don't get batteries All right guys just get to the boat ramp we actually stopped by we had to put new batteries in the boat as I was talking about Spin about a G spend a thousand dollars on freakin batteries. We got the north star AGMs in there We have five batteries total in my boat, so I'm running the big birds when I got that 16 inch I've talked to a lot of people and they're like man. You got to put an extra battery in this boat So yeah, we're all good to go on that think the batteries are all good. We're all charged up I think we're gonna be good today. What's up? Yeah, we forgot the ice and the cooler that's gonna be a hot one But like I said pre-fishing day, we're gonna rock it today if you guys are new to the channel Please hit that subscribe button hit the notification bell also hit the like button This is pure bass fishing on this channel guys That's all we do and I'm sure you guys enjoy the videos if you're new to the channel But um where to go ahead and get started unhooked the boat backer in the water and start finding some fish today Here we go boys kick a mobile Back in a zing got a little intern Brad Back in a sin in today's video Just go ahead and get this rock in and rolling. I'm excited. We got to find some fish today I'm gonna tell you that we're gonna be fishing new bodies of water new areas on the river today That we haven't fished before so excited about that should be a good day Hopefully these batteries are gonna run good too But we should be good.  What are you doing back there boy? Got the old poles down got the rub guard up here. We're good to go. We're ready for blast off today intern Brad You ready today? I mean, we just got to catch this 10 pounds.  I'm big fan or not We're a life Jackie save lives what in the world is going on here We got a very fresh tree. I must have happened Like last night Actually that actually probably happened this week. All right here. We are to get it started I'm gonna start off with a chatter donk. I'm really just hunting for them big fish today I want to want to see how we can catch them big ones. It's actually the rivers flooded Or it's a lot higher than it was. I wouldn't say flooded, but as you guys can tell these banks right here All the water got up in that grass Now that might be a good way to get Some good bites thrown around there I'm gonna throw a chatter donk a good bit. Oh my god. That was so bad. Good way to start it That crank fight's been nasty. You can find the right stuff I think it'd be a way to catch a really big fish. So we're just gonna cover water back in this first little spot See if we can find some good fish They're gonna be all up in this new vegetation. Oh, yeah, that's what I'm saying.  Yeah, fluke might not be a bad idea One ounce weight Like I flip in that I'm talking No, oh No freaking way No freaking Bradley Just doubled up, baby Did you see him almost take the rod out of my hand? I wasn't really in the bait. He just like literally started Whistling my rod Okay Okay Yeah, I went in mine these the other day you thought he was big didn't you? Maybe he hammered it good, didn't you? See, there's no mistaken on that type of rig. Look at that guys Literally we double up on our first fish of the day I was watching Bradley and I had my crankbait pause and it was floating What I think happened is the bait was floating up and the fish grabbed it all the summer raw was just going These are nice. These are two good keepers.  That was the most messed up bite. I've had on a crankbait ever I was literally watching you dude and the rod just goes rump. He did it all himself Yeah, that was cool that fish that I just caught dude. I didn't even I He literally hooks at himself and my rod just started taking off and I'm like what? I mean you don't Yeah, you don't gotta worry about it either you got braid you flip over trees as long as just the goal is when you hook them You got to keep that rod up and reel That's the only thing with that big rig like that As long as you keep that rod up and you reel and crank that fish in I don't care how big he is Yeah, you got to get them out. But if you if you try to I'm talking the moment you hook set dude You're no setting the rod down there.  That's not a keeper. That's a keeper. I got three I don't really like fishing like this before I really got him another one on that big flippin rig. Golly. They've been thumping it good Oh, oh, I mean like they're on me I don't know No, uh first cast first cast on the spinnerbait That's a good one too Doubled up back to back baby. This is kicking their bets. We already got a we got over a linear Is that five fish that's five fish intern brad with the fish. All right. That's what I want to do I don't want to fish. No, I I want to go back there all the way to the back Yeah, don't don't yeah, don't don't cast anyone I'll jack that son too Yeah, these are six sense ones. Yeah Bradley why are you casting? I All right intern brad too many monsters Enter brad's had about seven too many monster. We already caught six fish We're not supposed to be catching them brad.  Oh, bro. Spinner bait done for Well, that's Remember last night. That was a good That was a good uh good conversation like three I mean brad we're talking. I told I was like texting them all all that was like I'm thinking this we're thinking this we're thinking about the fish late last night. Yeah, don't cast right here anymore And it goes that way Oh, dude, this is where we're starting Bradley, what are you doing? That's a huge one. Bradley. That's like a four Oh my god, that's a free that's a four pounder I'll get a picture Bradley stop Dude, we got that that's another fish that we ain't gonna catch tomorrow. That's a four pounder Yeah, I can get your picture, but Jesus christ, Bradley I just said don't cast over there and guess what he does you cast a spinner rate 10 times over there Bradley yes, sir, baby. We making this video half in a day brad's on the track All right brad calm down Yeah, don't throw the spinner bait anymore. I was literally coming over this tree just to drop in the middle of it to see if it brad just Don't throw a moving bait you need to be shaking some off Like I said, I want to go back here because it could be like this is the thing I don't want to come here during the tournament And then catch this, you know have to go all the way back there for nothing But then again, if they're biting that good, they should be biting there, but yeah, they're biting Yeah, you want to idle us back there. What are you throwing? They're eating that spinner bait. Oh my god. Look at this come off my rod. Oh my god All right, let's leave. I'm serious actually idle to the back It's Bradley. I couldn't even get him off the rod bro. I wasn't I didn't even hook set him Give me some for the video. Give me some for the video, baby. Is that like fish number eight, bro? Dude, we gotta calm down. Yeah, we gotta calm Dude, this fish is oh my god. Look at the water temp, dude. That cooled off the water that rain They're munching like we just gotta leave I do want to go in the back though. These trees are good. We don't need a cast on these anymore. Okay, brad I think they like this heavier weight because it falls faster. Yeah, I do too Did you see me trying to get them off? Are you shaking? I never hooked that he was just like Until he got down in there and I was like, I ain't breaking this rig off over a fish All right, let's idle to the back because like I said, I want to look at that Yeah, that's stupid So guys, we just came to the back not the the very back is right ahead of us And we're about to the quarter point before we reach the back So we're gonna try right here just see if we can get a few bites And once we get a bite, we're just we're gonna go all the way to the back try that If we get a bite there, we're out. We already caught way too many fish in here. I wasn't expecting this honestly the waters rose And I don't think people could get back in here and there's actually deep holes. This is 12 foot of water. This is juice Oh my god, yeah, I don't want to catch anymore They just hooked theirself honestly. All right. Well, we were done fishing in here What's up guys? So we're gonna go over what we're doing today. We're actually kind of punching slash flipping We're throwing a one ounce weight. I like to use two bobber stops and a three odd six cents hook The crawl because we're that's yeah, that's not the best. It's not the ideal bait Honestly, even a striker would be a lot better on there just because it's but the prawn the prawns That's what we got some we got some we need to try this But I'm throwing on a heavy rod and it's ready for two ounces I'm throwing on 65 pound braid with the dial High-speed reel. I think it's an eight of one flipping in that thick cover Where traditionally you couldn't get a texas rig. So you were punching through that little mat layer Feeling tug on it and just ripping them out of talk about the fall of the bait because I think the fall of the bait is a big key Yeah, so the fall of the bait is you want to pair your weight up So like when you're throwing a one ounce you're getting a really fast fall compared to that three ounce that we Three eighths ounce that we traditionally throw on the main river and around typically You get a real faster fall rate and it makes the fish react when it hits the bottom Because it's just resuming right by their face So pretty much what brad was saying getting up in that stuff where you can't get a texas rig like You got these bushes right here and you can literally I mean Bradley probably thinks i'm crazy for doing that but you you can really get up in those trees and in those areas Yeah, you normally couldn't get in when you're when you're throwing braid like this and pretty much This is the only downside and the only downside about this is honestly that speed crawl like the speed crawl is not meant for this Is there any prawns yet the prawn see this is i'll tell you guys exactly why the prawn would be a lot better than this What All right, they're prom of six cents if you want to get a discount, but let me explain why So pretty much this is a beaver bait. Yeah The reason you want a beaver bait, so all right, we got a we got a zoom speed crawl and we got the prawn next to each other The reason you want this beaver bait is the way it's shaped Okay, so when that goes down in that stuff It's going to go down a lot smoother rather than a big crawl with a bunch of big pincers The bait's designed to go through stuff like that see all the head shaped and then see all the tails tapered off So this bait's going to go there go through that stuff a lot Better than your standard crawl. So if you're like flipping if you're punching some thick stuff I prefer a beaver style bait, which this prawn is The one thing I love about the prawn Is that it's actually more of a finesse beaver Um, and I know that sounds a little weird You don't really hear that but in my opinion I call it more of a finesse beaver just because it has a honestly a smaller profile than Some of the beavers out and i'm a big fan of that because A lot of the times a beaver won't won't get bit a ton, but usually when it does it's a big fish But the good thing about the prawn it's a good middle hybrid So it's not too big Of a beaver it's right there in the middle. So you rig it up just like that pretty basic And then pretty much we're flipping around some of these cypress trees, which normally I want to do with a big weight like this You just want like a smaller finesse texas rig, but they're eating it And what we were talking about is the rate of fall with that one ounce weight So pretty much when you're lifting your rod that bait is deaning all the way down on the bottom instantly So that's the good thing about that So you're flipping up there the bait goes right to the bottom rather than that slow fall And I think that's really what's triggering those bass today knowing that they were a little active eating that spinner bait They're a little more active than usual. They're not slow On what? On a fluke Hey, you saw them schooling bass. They might be small, but um anyways what I was talking about just flipping in there I'm letting it hit the bottom that's that quick fall and I really think that's what's triggering this fish I don't know if it's just the lake that we went into guys. That's how it was that one tournament You know, we just found one place that was really We found more fish in other places, but you find that one area where there's just so many fish condensed and like Big trees see how quick you can move with this thing too throw it in there give it a couple hops The fish ain't taking out of your hand reel it back in Pitch it again up in there on the different angle of the tree Do the same thing repeat So then we got the stump right here Flip right up on that stump let it hit the bottom pop it a couple times All right, fish doesn't have it really back in Flip onto the next piece of cover and keep doing that So guys we talk about when it when it floods and the water comes up and the bass come up on the bank Eat all the insects you won't believe what we just found you see all those things on the water looks like feathers Those are all caterpillars That is Dude, that's crazy. Those are all caterpillars though. Yeah Yeah, it's going well, it's just going to be leading up to the storm. So it's going to be a low Just these fish get so far up in these trees Or you almost can't get to them Unless you're catching the ones cruising on the edge See this is the thing like a lot of them fish will be pushed up But then you're gonna have this fish cruising the edge that are eating those bluegill popping You know, so there's bluegill popping at the edge Like there'd be bass out there just cruising Just like that Look how he ate it Knocks slack on my line See up in these trees guys The problem is these fish get so far up in the trees If you notice the difference between that bank and everything else is open water all the way to the bank Therefore we could get our bait up in there. So these fish, you know, it just rained These fish are getting way up in this stuff. So you got to get your bait back in there And what's happening is you're either going to catch them way back up in there I started fishing to jump to Or you're going to catch them on the edge because we've seen bluegill popping along the edge of these willow trees It's what this bass would do. This fish that are roaming the edge eating the bluegill. That's That's another Great way of catching them up in this stuff. I'm just wondering if there's fish back in this stuff You're wearing a foot of water. So it deepened up a little bit Yeah, it's dropping off the floor now Uh-oh, that's a biggin. That's a biggin. That's a biggin Yep, right in the back Jesus Christ. That's a good fish It's a really good fish for the river guys. You'd be surprised. We just came all the way back in the spot Didn't have any bites, but we were just thinking all the way in the back Right there That's exactly where I thought he's gonna be That's a good bass. One of the best today second best Golly Yeah, I gotta see it. Oh my god, Bradley Yeah, it's got natural water pouring in here. Oh my gosh Can I catch one bank fishing the river? So if you guys notice Got this little creek coming in Pour natural water bit in the back of this place We can't get back here in the boat. That's the only problem and I can't Get out there in the tournament I don't think so at least There's some froggy and punchy looking stuff back there too Looks so good. I think the line is kind of creepy This is a low key kind of sketch So clear in there. Oh my god. Oh my gosh.  I gotta catch one bank fish in the river. That's an accomplishment There's one right over there. I didn't stick him. He just pulled the rod on my hand. I don't think he's big Right there. Yes. Oh my god This is actually kind of ballsy for me to do. I really think much about it. I'm just like I guess I'm going on the bank Oh my god Oh my god I didn't even get the gopro on until a second ago. Yes, baby on the flipping stick.  Let's go win this tournament tomorrow. We need two of these. That's a big, you know why you know why? She got that big bass in her chip, baby. Okay. I'm I would Let's say something, but we're not See, you know, Bradley got that big bass All right, bro. You're not picked with this thing so we can do it.  So that's one more big that we we aren't going to catch tomorrow But there's got to be more. There's got to be more. Give me someone that that's a good fish Two fish in here for about seven and a half pounds. That's uh, that seriously took us over the top of the day Yeah, I should get much You see that? Dude, I slung his butt right in the corner of the bottom of the jack. I'm so sorry bud. That was Swam off perfectly fine. Dude that fish. Well, you didn't even see where I skirted them on the floor