Hi dear fellow TASC people,
I would like to make you aware of two new free resources, a website and a DVD of the Anarcha Project, a large-scale performance-based project that investigated public history, disability culture and African-American culture, and used non-traditional forms of documentation to chart this social justice performance work.
The Anarcha Project researched the practices of J. Marion Sims, the 'father of American gynecology' who experimented on slave women in 1840s Alabama. The project explores connections between disability culture and African-American culture, and charts the echoes of Anarcha's story in contemporary health care, healing practices and disability and race oppression.
1. Our large, 150+ page website, the Anarcha Anti-Archive, was just published in the current Liminalities journal:
http://liminalities.net/4-2/
The website also contains two longer essays, including one that charts the historical background to the project, the writings by and about J Marion Sims, and his place in contemporary bioethics discussions ('Remembering Anarcha'), and a meditation on the process of the project ('With Anarcha'). It contains material created in student workshops, community workshops, residencies across the nation, and from cyber participants from the US and beyond.
Note: The website foregrounds its own materiality, and is not a transparent knowledge source: you will encounter some strange choices as you navigate in it. If you come across any problematic links, or have problems with access, let us know.
2. We also now have the DVDs of the Anarcha Symposium (Ann Arbor, April 2007) available, and are sending those out for free to anybody interested. It contains the core collaborators' performative lecture (Aimee Meredith Cox, Tiye Giraud, Anita Gonzalez, Petra Kuppers and Carrie Sandahl), created after residencies and work with over a 1000 people, and the performance responses created by the activists, artists, scholars and healers who came together in the symposium to explore how art-based methods can intersect public history.
Please send your snail mail address, stating that you would like to receive a copy of the Anarcha DVD, to the project assistant, Catherine Calabro, ccalabro@umich.edu, or to me, Petra Kuppers, petra@umich.edu.
Petra Kuppers
