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Women and Migration

 | 
Deborah Willis
, 
Ellyn Toscano
, 
Kalia Brooks Nelson

Part six. Transit, transiting, and transition

30. The Performance of Doubles: The Transposition of Gender and Race in Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation

Kalia Brooks Nelson

Texte intégral

Fig. 30.1. Ming Wong, still from Imitation of Life, 2009, CC BY 4.0.

Introduction

1This chapter explores an example of how women’s stories migrate through film. In particular, I am interested in the ways we learn about race and gender through Hollywood cinema, and how those stories are interpreted and interpolated in other cultures in the world. I shall focus on Ming Wong’s depiction of gendered race in his artwork Life of Imitation (2009), a video based on the movie Imitation of Life (1959). Race and gender are not discreet representations, but simultaneous expressions, and the term gendered race best describes their intersection as an image-identity on screen. This chapter focuses on the transformation of gendered race from its articulation in the cinematic version of Imitation of Life in 1959 to its new appearance in Ming Wong’s artwork in 2009.

2Gendered race, although not an invention of mass media, derives its meaning in large part from the mythology that images create. The mass media uses images of race and gender to invent narratives that shape collective identification. Herein we will explore how collective identification, as it relates to race and gender, is manifest through film. There is an inherent connection between the images we see and how we identify or are identified, and the silver screen has been highly successful at mediating this delicate relationship to both detrimental and productive ends.

3When the image-identity of gendered race appears on screen, it is typically through the performance of doubling — an enactment used to mark sharp distinctions between the physical appearance of actors, or to signify a change within an actor from one mental state to another. It is important to note that doubling sets up a solid differential between who a character is, and is not.

4Binary image-identification is a conventional form of doubling that is experienced in the male/female, Black/white dichotomies of socially constructed identity positions. The binary is a cultural reality that has been substantiated in cinematic images. I refer to this form of doubling as unproductive: it is meant to draw sharp, impassable lines between white/Black, male/female and so on, and is a system of classification that is grounded in the inequities of the patriarchal, white supremacist colonial social structure. Cinema has been exploited to instill this messaging into the collective consciousness.

5Using Wong’s remake, entitled Life of Imitation, I make the case for a productive doubling — an enactment of image-identification that acknowledges, but is liberated from, the old practices of racial and gender-based individuation. This performance of doubles accepts that identity positions are not static, but rather in a state of flux. Productive doubling is an embodiment that transcends the ‘one or the other’ prescription of appearances. It is a way of being that seeks a tertiary experience, which breaks from old pathological binaries, recognizes the image as myth, and carries the potential for new forms of radical identification.

Imitation of Life

6Before I continue with Wong, I want to briefly provide background on the movie adaptations of Imitation of Life in 1934 and 1959. The cinematic debut of Fannie Hurst’s popular 1933 novel came to the silver screen in 1934, directed by John M. Stahl. The film was an unconventional visualization of race relations in the United States, not because it broke away from the use of gender-based racial tropes, but rather for its honest portrayal of the complexities of racial identity through the lives of four women. The story brought to a mass audience the economic predicament of two single mothers, one Black and the other white, in which race played a critical role in both enhancing and deforming the social bonds created between them. It also exposed to a mass audience the social taboo of racial passing.

7The phenomenon of racial passing was a common practice among lighter-skinned Blacks in American and European society. Given the systematic disparities of racism, and the mental damage that came with it, racial passing was seen as a remedy for Black people who looked similar to white people to be accepted as white by their peers. This was accomplished by severing their connection to any part of their life that would jeopardize the newly assumed identity. That meant embodying the cultural norms of white privilege at the expense of Black people, even those to whom you were related. The practice of such self-identification in Imitation of Life causes the ‘white-looking’ daughter to denounce her ‘Black-looking’ mother. Stahl’s film was the first to portray racial doubling by enacting the inter-and intra-personal dynamics of the maneuver on screen.

8In 1959, Douglas Sirk remade Imitation of Life at a time when race, at the center of the film’s plot, was at the forefront of social, cultural and political discourses in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The civil rights movement in the United States was well underway, and issues of race, as well as greater numbers of Black actors, were finding their way into cinema. Depictions of women at this time remained limited, however, and, in the instance of Sirk’s rendition of Imitation of Life, were less progressive than portrayals from the 1930s.

  • 1 J. Hoberman, ‘Two Takes on “Imitation of Life”: Exploitation in Eastmancolor’, New York Times, 14 (...)
  • 2 Ibid.
  • 3 Ibid.

9Fannie Hurst’s bestselling novel arose out of the Jazz Age, and it represented in mass media one of the earliest depictions of the modern, independent woman in American culture.1 J. Hoberman wrote of John M. Stahl’s direction of the 1934 movie that ‘it was not without progressive intent and, released during the second year of the New Deal, addressed issues of race, class and gender almost head-on.’2 One of the obvious amendments in Sirk’s version was to the portrayal of class so that Annie (previously known as Delilah) was ‘downgraded from corporate asset to live-in domestic servant.’3 Sirk’s movie rehabilitated the role of the traditional Black maid, played in his version by Juanita Moore. Lana Turner played the white heroine, Lora Meredith. Lora too had been rewritten from self-made businesswoman to aspiring actress. This reflected a greater reluctance in the 1950s to show images of women who obtained wealth through the strength of their mental prowess rather than their looks or their domestic labor.

  • 4 Ibid.

10Sirk’s film, more so than the 1934 original, enhanced the visibility of the double. Hoberman accurately noted of the film, ‘everyone is doubled and everything is mirrored.’4 The contrast between both mothers is heightened by Annie’s palatable lack of agency and Lora’s exemplary passion to make her own way in the world. They are both representatives of gendered racial ideals, so that the image of the Black woman is selfeffacingly obedient in order that the image of the white woman stands out as a symbol of glamorous, self-determined achievement.

  • 5 Ibid.
  • 6 Michael Rogin, ‘Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice’, Critical Inquiry,(...)

11Along with this, the oppositional images of the daughters are driven by Sarah Jane’s (Annie’s daughter) self-hating mania, as the unfortunate inverse to Susie’s (Lora’s daughter) conformity to the image of her mother. In Sirk’s film, Susie was the mirror image of Lora with her platinum blonde hair. Also like Lora, Sarah Jane (previously Peola) ‘seeks to realize herself in show business.’5 Michael Rogin, in his essay entitled, ‘Blackface, White Noise: The Jazz Singer Finds His Voice,’ (1992) pointed out that the practice of doubling to portray the character’s shifting identities has a tradition that goes back to the time of silent film. He pointed to The Student from Prague (1913, 1926) and Charlie Chaplin’s The Idle Class (1921) as precedents for the ‘magical doubling device.’6 Sirk’s film gave the audience a powerful dose of the unproductive binary. This kind of bifocal representation of gendered race is challenged by Ming Wong’s remake of the film.

Four Transpositions

  • 7 Excerpt from Imitation of Life, 1959.
  • 8 Ibid.
  • 9 Ibid.
  • 10 Ibid.

12Wong focuses on the reunion scene from Sirk’s 1959 film. Annie enters the room and asks if she can sit down. Sarah Jane abruptly stops her mother from sitting and tells her, ‘somebody is coming.’7 Annie explains that she has arrived unexpectedly because, ‘I just want to look at you.’8 Her daughter abruptly replies, ‘I’ m somebody else.’9 She turns to face the mirror and proclaims her new identity — ‘I’ m white!’10

13Ming Wong’s production of the scene undoes the legibility of the double. Under his direction the actors enter speaking the pathological language of racial inferiority. Oscillating between sadness and anger, the mother and daughter confront the existential outcome for a mulatto or light-skinned woman in a racist society. The crescendo of the scene at which Sarah Jane proclaims her whiteness is precisely the moment at which Wong intervenes. He grew up in Singapore, the small island nation off the tip of southern Malaysia, and his appropriation of this scene at first seems a curious choice. Then it becomes evident that the artwork is an exercise in visual transposition (transferring the context of Imitation of Life from Hollywood to Singapore) in order to disrupt the cinematic tradition of the subjective double. I have identified four examples of such transpositions.

14Firstly, Wong transposes the title, shifting it from Imitation of Life to his Life of Imitation. He therefore releases the narrative from its prior literary and cinematic history, which gives him space to make revisions. The title change is also a hint to the viewer of a familiar tale being retold. In the narrative, Sarah Jane’s search for a new identity (acquired through imitation) is equivalent to the pursuit of a life. She is implicated in the original title as the imitator or imposter — the anti-heroine who is envious of the authenticity that her white counterparts claim as part of their racial inheritance. She resents the burden of her Blackness.

15The pathology of racism, which gives rise to her mental dysfunction, is emphasized through the emotional bond between Sarah Jane and her mother, which essentially frees society from the responsibility of inflicting racial violence through structural and cultural norms. Rather, Sarah Jane is the impostor, the outsider who desperately wants to be accepted by the same culture that stigmatizes and maligns her. In the face of de facto racism, her self-hatred is expressed as a personal problem that could be solved by the pretense of living as someone else. Because her difference is a stain, she is condemned to hiding even as she seeks to be recognized as someone else.

16The transposed title given by Wong, Life of Imitation, removes the emphasis from Life as the normative feature and replaces it with Imitation. This slight shift in wording reorientates the value of identification (as it pertains to the embodiment of gendered race) from its position on the periphery and locates it as a central feature in the human enactment of reality. Identities develop through processes of imitation as a result of creating one’s appearance in the world. When we perform the self, we are living in a uniquely human social reality that is not a product of nature, but rather exists parallel to it. Furthermore, imitation is a phase in all forms of self-identification, not just for those who find themselves marked by difference. Wong’s video indulges in the mimicry of performing the roles of gendered race. This shift in the primacy of two words removes the stigma of imitation by rejecting the notion of an original life. We are, therefore, not impostors, but incarnate beings with the ability to inhabit, release and move through different manifestations of the self as a requisite activity of human life.

17The second transposition takes place in Wong’s choice of actors. He directs male actors to perform traditionally female roles. His actors are dressed in the likeness of the characters from the 1959 version. In so doing, he challenges the stability of the gender roles that are portrayed in the film. Hollywood, especially in its ‘Golden Age’, produced images of women that were designed to represent a bodily ideal of ‘woman’. The audience was intended to identify with these images and consume them through the movies. That era in Hollywood celebrated a particular type of woman, and the role of the ‘leading lady’, was typified by Lana Turner’s performance. She embodied a level of feminine glamour that only existed as a fantasy to the masses of viewers who watched her on screen.

  • 11 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: New York, 1990) (...)

18The performative aspects of femininity and race in Imitation of Life are ‘fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs.’11 The danger here, according to Judith Butler, is that:

  • 12 Ibid., pp. 135–36.

[The] disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain. The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender — indeed, where none of these dimensions of significant corporeality express or reflect one another.12

19Wong not only subverts the legibility of gender identity for the audience, but also, and just as importantly troubles the discourse of sex and sexuality within the film itself — opening it up to narratives of homosexuality that are perhaps latent in both the literary and cinematic versions of the story, but certainly not overt.

  • 13 Ibid., p. 137.

20The structures of impersonation reveal one of the main fabricating mechanisms through which the social construction of gender takes place.13 This is evidenced through Wong’s second transposition in which the cultural practice of drag or cross-dressing parody the concept of an original or primary gender.

21The performance of cross-dressing has been a site of contestation in feminist theory. Butler sought to recoup the potential of drag as a site of criticality by writing:

  • 14 Ibid.

[S]uch parodic identities have been understood to be either degrading to women, in the case of drag and cross-dressing, or an uncritical appropriation of sex-role stereotyping from within the practice of heterosexuality, especially in the case of butch/femme lesbian identities. But the relation between the ‘imitation’ and the ‘original’ is, I think, more complicated than that critique generally allows.14

22It is precisely the psychological and social discord between the embodied relation of the ‘imitation’ and the ‘original’ that is at the center of the tension in Wong’s video. We learn from the movie the self-destructive effects that Sarah Jane’s quest for racial authenticity can have on an individual, and with the additional layer of drag Wong introduces a further destabilization of the image of a primary gender identity. The addition of the gender principle is yet another rendition of life’s imitations. In this regard, Butler remarked that:

  • 15 Ibid.

The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance.15

23Her recognition of a third dimension, which I referred to earlier as a tertiary experience, is an essential subversion of the binary structure of identity formation that relies on the notion of a stable, unified self. It is precisely this emergence of alternate planes of self-image that reveals the transience of the image itself, and more importantly its dislocation from any original source. By relinquishing the authority of the primary self, identity becomes subject to a multitude of discursive relations that always point back to the arbitrary production of representation overall.

24The third transposition is connected to the second in that it involves the combination of race and gender, and occurs when the actors, dressed as women, began speaking the language of race. The actors represent each of the main ethnic groups in Singapore: Chinese, Indian and Malay. In the third transposition the cultural/social phenomenon of ethnicity is simplified into the binary lingual system of race. Wong conflates the British traditions of racial categorization that are the legacy of its imperial footprint in the diverse geographic regions of Asia and the Americas.

25In Wong’s rendition the colonial encounter creates a proximity of racial experience between Singapore and the United States. By using Hollywood film as his source, he encourages the audience to witness the mechanisms of colonization that were carried out through the image-generating machineries of Hollywood cinema. Racially speaking, the audience is thrust into considering the parallel circumstance of the Oriental and the Black.

  • 16 Edward Said, ‘Orientalism’, The Georgia Review, 31:1 (Spring 1977), 162–206 (p. 204).
  • 17 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1952), p. 95.

26Edward Said wrote, ‘to speak of Orientalism is to speak mainly […] of a British and French cultural enterprise.’16 The Oriental was the product of the British and French colonial expansion in the East, while the Negro was the product of the European colonial project in the western direction. The word Oriental pointed to what Franz Fanon described as the ‘new type of man’ that, like the Negro, was an invention of the white, colonial gaze.17 Just to elaborate on the geographic distinction: the Negro, as Fanon stipulated, was the main product in Africa and the West Indies. The Oriental, on the other hand, was the product of the European’s imagination of the people who populated the vast regions of Northern Africa, the Middle East, India, the Far East and Southeast Asia. Orientalism as a way of seeing distorted the cultural traditions and differences among people from these regions as a means of reinforcing European superiority in all aspects of colonial life.

  • 18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962), p. 464.

27The Oriental (as with the Negro) had no private character. Her body emerged as other than the normal, from a world already given, and because of this it was a public entity. She did not have the capacity to achieve pure ontological being, as her body both equated to, and negated, sameness. The other did not experience ‘ecstatical Being-in-theworld,’ — because her body, as Fanon and Said would agree, was over-determined by the processes of othering.18 The former British colonies of the United States and Singapore shared an uncanny kinship in the representation and reception of race. In Wong’s video, the limiting, binary language of race is revealed through his inclusion of a third form (again, the tertiary) that is represented through ethnic variation.

28The fourth transposition Wong establishes for the audience relies less on language and more on movement. It is a transmutation between characters as each of the actors rotate through the two roles of mother and daughter. The constant shifting that occurs among the three actors as they inhabit both characters evokes a new performance of identity on screen, one that exposes the insufficiency of the colonial language of race to give meaning to the way individuals move through identity positions. This transience indicates a culture in which passing as a means of hiding is superseded by passing as a kind of ‘coming out,’ or exposure to the fallacy of the unitary self.

29In Wong’s video the characters are uprooted from the viewer’s trained expectations about their appearance by the constant movement between the roles and the actors who portray them. This fluidity marks a shift in the way doubling functions in society — subverting it from a plane of limited representation to a process in which the emergence of new forms became inevitable.

30According to Stuart Hall, the concept of representation is the sphere of human activity that houses the formation of the subject:

  • 19 Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, Documents, 7 (1989), 441–49 (p. 446).

Representation is possible only because enunciation is always produced within codes, which have a history, a position within the discursive formations of a particular space and time.19

  • 20 Ibid.
  • 21 Ibid., p. 441.

31Conversely, representation is described in cultural studies as most commonly grounded in a ‘mimetic’ theory in which ‘one images a reality that exists “outside” the means by which things are represented.’20 Hall used the examples of the ‘anti-racism and post-war Black experience in Britain’ where the struggle over the access to the right to representation was at the center of cultural politics.21 This phenomenon was akin to the civil rights movement in the United States. He wrote:

  • 22 Ibid.

Politically, this is the moment when the term ‘Black’ was coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain and came to provide the organizing category of a new politics of resistance […].22

  • 23 Ibid.
  • 24 Ibid., p. 444.

32In this case, the term ‘Black’ was reformulated from a stigmatizing marker to ‘a critique of the way Blacks were positioned as the unspoken and invisible “other” of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses.’23 The recuperation of the term ‘Black’ as Hall outlines, was an attempt to establish a cultural politics that indicated a shift in the way former colonial subjects were represented in music, fashion, literature, visual arts and cinema. Hall focused on cinematic manifestations of the Black image in Britain in the 1980s, which transgressed the old mimetic conflict over the rights of authorship to produce more agnostic images that opened up a space to critique ‘the essentially good Black subject.’24

  • 25 Ibid.

33Hall’s commentary on cinema helps us think about the historical position of the Black image in film (such as in Imitation of Life), as well as the potential for cinema as a site for new representations. Hall emphasizes that Blacks in Hollywood cinema had typically been objects in the space of cinema, but rarely subjects. ‘The struggle to come into representation’ as Hall asserts, was primarily grounded in a critique of ‘the degree of fetishization, objectification and negative figuration, which are so much a feature of the representation of the Black subject.’25 This was a concern that went beyond the absence or marginality of the Black experience in cinema to specific contestation with its simplification and stereotypical character.

34Hall wrote that the cultural politics that developed around the critique of Black representation in cinema had two principle objects:

  • 26 Ibid.

First, the question of access to the rights to representation by Black artists and Black cultural workers. Second, the contestation of the marginality, the stereotypical quality and the fetishized nature of images of blacks, by the counter-position of a ‘positive’ black imagery. These strategies were principally addressed to changing what I would call the ‘relations of representation’.26

35These ‘relations’, Hall argues, are grounded in a mimetic theory, and are unproblematic because they do not challenge the basic structure of knowledge by which the idea of the ‘Black’ came into being — keeping it a rather static form of representation. The ‘positive’ character of the mimetic Black image is unproductive because the moralist approach also limits the discursive capacity of the subject. Simple transference of the image from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ still works to conceal the unstable grounds by which racial categorization was built. For Hall, cultural politics had to get beyond the moralist approach in order to confront the complexity of subjectivities (many of which are held in conflict) within a particular racial group. He identifies this field of complexity within representation as the discursive sphere. It was a new phase in cultural politics that was no longer mimetic. The discursive emphasized how the processes of representation were constructed within meaning, and as such opened the space for a kind of othering (what I call productive) that embraced difference rather than rejected it.

The Tertiary Experience

36Within the British context, the discursive aspect of the politics of representation marked the end of the essential (or mimetic) Black subject. Hall writes:

  • 27 Ibid., p. 444.

The question of the Black subject cannot be represented without reference to the dimensions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.27

37This is precisely the question Wong addresses in his remix, Life of Imitation. The video challenges the cinematic legacy of the essential subject as it pertains to race and gender. You will recall that he explodes the image of the Black subject and the oriental by inserting into the scene men dressed as women who represent the three main ethnic groups in Singapore. The dimension of class as it intersects with gender is readymade within the narrative, so Wong does not need to alter the scenario of the live-in domestic, and her daughter who seeks to gain fame, independence and a new identity as a dancer in the entertainment industry.

38We can use Hall’s remarks to better understand the politics of representation at play in the final scene between mother and daughter in Imitation of Life. The original script, which Wong’s actors recite, was indicative of the mimetic phase of representation. It was the archetypical Black/white dichotomy in which the individual performs the image-type that precedes her. The mother, Annie, does this with great success as the maid of soon-to-be wealthy Lora. Sarah Jane, on the other hand rejects her prescribed Blackness mainly thanks to her lighter skin color, which allows her passage into a white identity. This is not a welcome transition however, within the mimetic phase of representation in which the politics of race are deeply entrenched and racial categories are strictly upheld in spite of corporeal ambiguity.

39The audience of Imitation of Life witness Sarah Jane’s fleeting desire, but are unable to sympathize with her conflict. She is scripted as the antagonist — the villainous ingrate who is unable to return the affections of her Black mother and is envious of the white family who sheltered her. The original script did not problematize race, the conditions that gave rise to the event of racial passing, or the ill-fated social effects of the broken home. Instead, it reinscribed racial categories by portraying the antagonist as a failed anti-heroine — unsuccessful at every attempt she makes toward her goal. Hall goes on:

  • 28 Ibid., p. 445.

Just as masculinity always constructs femininity as double […] so racism constructs the Black subject: noble savage and violent avenger. And in the doubling, fear and desire double for one another and play across the structures of otherness.28

40In the above passage Hall points us to a site of critical intervention in the process of othering. The double becomes a motif to be exploited, challenged and pulled asunder — not in the affirmation of the status quo, but in the generation of multiples that unveil the instability of the essential image. Wong complicates the recitation of the original script by doubling the screens in his installation. The two monitors play simultaneously, one version in English with Malay subtitles and the other in Malay with English subtitles. The sound echoes from the two-channel video installation as double, and mother and daughter are doubled by the actors switching between roles on both screens. The discursive politics of representation in Wong’s video mesh the questions of racism inextricably with questions of gender. As a cinematic remake it includes the narrative of race, but it is also, and most distinctively, intermixed with the dimensions of class, ethnicity and gender that are inseparable from cinematic representation of the Black subject.

Bibliographie

Bibliography

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: New York, 1990).

Fanon, Franz, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1952).

Hall, Stuart, ‘New Ethnicities’, Documents, 7 (1989), 441–49.

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962).

Hoberman, J., ‘Two Takes on “Imitation of Life”: Exploitation in Eastmancolor’, New York Times, 14 May 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/movies/homevideo/two-takes-on-imitation-of-life-exploitation-in-eastmancolor.html?_r=0

Rogin, Michael, ‘Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice’, Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992), 417–53.

Said, Edward, ‘Orientalism’, The Georgia Review, 31:1 (Spring 1977), 162–206.

Notes

1 J. Hoberman, ‘Two Takes on “Imitation of Life”: Exploitation in Eastmancolor’, New York Times, 14 May 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/movies/homevideo/two-takes-on-imitation-of-life-exploitation-in-eastmancolor.html?_r=0

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Michael Rogin, ‘Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice’, Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992), 417–53 (p. 431).

7 Excerpt from Imitation of Life, 1959.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: New York, 1990), p. 131.

12 Ibid., pp. 135–36.

13 Ibid., p. 137.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Edward Said, ‘Orientalism’, The Georgia Review, 31:1 (Spring 1977), 162–206 (p. 204).

17 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1952), p. 95.

18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962), p. 464.

19 Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, Documents, 7 (1989), 441–49 (p. 446).

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 441.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., p. 444.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., p. 444.

28 Ibid., p. 445.

Table des illustrations

Légende Fig. 30.1. Ming Wong, still from Imitation of Life, 2009, CC BY 4.0.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/8113/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 165k

Auteur

A New-York-based independent curator and educator. Brooks Nelson is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Brooks Nelson holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts in 2006, and was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program 2007/2008. She has served as a consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and Gracie Mansion Conservancy. Brooks Nelson is also an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York.

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