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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
Born in Haiti and raised in the U.S., Vladimir Cybil juxtaposes culturally specific symbols and techniques to carve out an interstitial space. Scholar Jerry Philogene talks with Cybil about the visual bilingualism in her paintings and installations.
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Mexican artist Vargas-Suarez Universal is often mistaken for a collective, and indeed his practice—which uses sound, science and the archives of organizations ranging from the Queens Museum to NASA—is as varied as any many-authored project.
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Carlos Eire, a professor of history and religion at Yale, won a National Book Award for his first nonhistorical effort, Waiting for Snow in Havana, his memoir of a privileged childhood in Cuba disrupted by the revolution.
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Novelist and poet Evelyne Trouillot comes from a prominent Port-au-Prince family of writers and intellectuals. Novelist Edwidge Danticat queried the writer on Haiti’s past and its future.
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In his latest film, Ama: The Memory of Time, Salvadoran poet and filmmaker Daniel Flores y Ascencio records the oral history of shaman Don Juan Ama, who witnessed the murder of his uncle, the leader of a 1932 indigenous revolt in El Salvador.
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Damas “Fanfan” Louis is both master drummer and houngan asogwe, high priest of Vodou. The painter Michael Zwack, caught up with him in New York to discuss Haitian rhythms and Fanfan’s involvement in a cultural center for dance, drums and Vodou.
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Haitian choreographer and drummer Peniel Guerrier was trained in traditional Haitian and African movement, and his choreographies acknowledge each tradition’s rhythms and rituals while fusing them in unexpected ways.
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In her book Modernity Disavowed, theorist Sibylle Fisher calls the Haitian Revolution a non-event, precisely because it is the main event of nineteenth-century Caribbean history that has been systematically left out of many analyses of that period.
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Confronting the condition of anti-colonial utopias that have “withered into postcolonial nightmares,” David Scott proposes in Conscripts of Modernity not that we give better answers to old questions, but that we radically refashion the questions.
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