n t r o d u c t i o n

Lourdes

Dávila

with the Esferas editorial team

What new knowledge and forms of agency can we gain when, as human beings shaped physically and intellectually by our “terrestrial habits of movement” we agree to perform what Melody Jue terms a conceptual displacement (Thinking through Seawater) in order to think from, within and through the water? How can we dive “offshore” to develop a “map of what it means to be human in certain parts of the world” (Nadia Huggins) and understand, imagine and theorize otherwise our particular histories and environments? How does this mapping bring to light new relational geographies that allow, as Yolanda San Miguel explains in “Colonial and Mexican Archipelagos. Reimagining Caribbean Studies,” a re-definition of the term archipelago, in order to integrate seemingly disparate island chains, thereby complicating “our conceptualization of the Caribbean in conversation with other regions that share a similar set of conditions?” This is a difficult task, since, as Jue tells us, our language originates from our experience as land animals:

If one agrees with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life, then it is clear that human languages have taken form within a range of terrestrial and coastal environments that, at minimum, all share the experience of gravity and horizontal (rather than volumetric) movement. (Jue 2)

It is precisely this task of seeing, experiencing, thinking and theorizing otherwise that the NYU Cross/Currents Humanities Lab explores, taking water as essence, conduit and dynamic force and working across disciplines to build new vocabularies and imagine new forms of theorization and agency:

The Cross/Currents H-Lab takes the word currents as its inspiration, as both a metaphor and a tool, enveloping not only its main definition in relation to water and its movements, but also its broader reverberations. By connecting the words cross and currents, our main goal is to bring into dialogue environmental humanities and migration studies (with an emphasis on race, diaspora, and indigeneity). In our work together we hope to rehearse ways of bringing literary and artistic analyses to bear on issues of the environment and migration, and vice-versa. We have outlined three main trajectories around the notion of Cross/Currents: mobility, transmission, and flow. Mobility considers how water has been a conduit for migration—the movement of people and non-human elements—with its historic and contemporary iterations defined by violence and trauma. Transmission engages recent scholarship in media studies, the history of science, and the history of technology. It pushes us to think about the material aspects of technologies, and to consider newer models of communication like undersea cable systems or transoceanic internet traffic. Finally, we use the flow of water and air as points of reference from which to build new critical vocabularies and frameworks for knowledge production beyond traditional conceptualizations of human agency. Our ultimate purpose is to decenter an anthropocentric and imperialistic understanding of global interconnection and exchange (“Cross/Currents. End of Year Report”).

The editorial team of Esferas 14 is delighted to partner with the members of the Cross/Currents Humanities Lab to think about and expand on the questions and theories proposed in their study. This partnership is quite fitting as we celebrate the 10th year anniversary of our journal. Our very premise is to create a transdisciplinary space for the production of and reflection on a wide variety of topics, with the belief that the dialogues that arise offer new perspectives and modes of experiencing and acting in the world. It is essential for our team to give equal value to the work of new and seasoned artists, critics, theorists and scholars, and we believe Esferas 14 is exemplary in this regard.

We have been fortunate in the past to work on similar partnerships: Issue 12, Migration and Asylum, was done specifically in association with the H-Lab “Asylum and Im/migration” and Issue 13, Spaces/Institutions/People, celebrated the 25th anniversary of the KJCC and worked in tandem with the undergraduate class “Institutions, Archives, People.” The Cross/Currents Humanities Lab is a collaborative project spearheaded by professor Luis Francia from the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and professors Jordana Mendelson and Laura Torres-Rodríguez from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, with the essential participation of PhD students Dantaé Elliot, Fan Fan, Erica Feild, Linda Luu, Michael Salgarolo, Emilie Tumale, Mariko Chin Whitenack, and Lee Xie. The team brought in guest speakers from various backgrounds over the course of the spring 2022 seminar, “Cross-Currents Lab: Ocean as Myth and Method,” including Sint Maartener and Dutch artist Deborah Jack, Puerto Rican artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente and curator Arnaldo Rodríguez-Bagué, NYU Courant Professor Andrew Ross, Professor Vicente Díaz, the team from the Billion Oysters Project, chef and restaurant owner Amy Besa, and playwright and actor Claro de los Reyes, among others. The Cross/Currents Humanities Lab is generously supported by Dr. Georgette Bennett in honor of Leonard Polonsky CBE under the guidance of Molly Rogers, associate director of the NYU Center for the Humanities. With their help, Esferas is able once again to provide a platform for artists and authors to showcase their works and encourage others to engage with them.

Formally and ideologically speaking, the work of the Cross/Currents H-Lab refers back to work we have published throughout our journal in the last ten years. In her introduction to the dossier for this issue, Laura Torres-Rodríguez underscores the work Assimilate and Destroy (2018-2020) by the artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente, which explores the process of deterioration and impermanence of images on celluloid. We think back on Issue 9, Tracing the Archive, and the work of Jens Andermann “La ausencia fulgurante: archivos virales en Restos Cuatreros de Albertina Carri,” where the author considers Carri’s work within the affective materiality of images and the significance of luminous traces that face continuous processes of natural erosion. And as TorresRodríguez thinks with Jue about the way that marine squids transmit information and maintain memory, or about the “bodily practices and narrative acts that challenge the imperialistic and scientific construction of the islands as isolated territories,” we refer to the dancer and philosopher Marie Bardet, who in several issues of Esferas spoke of the implications of a human body that bears weight as it moves and weighs thought with its movement (“Extensión de un cuerpo pe(n)sando,” Issue 6, Turn to Movement); the possibility of “turning our backs into fronts” (“Making a Front with our Backs,” Issue 8, Precariousness); or the narration and re-enacting of the archive through practices of the body (“‘Hacer memoria con gestos’. Relato de una conversación colectiva y diseminada.” Issue 9, Tracing the Archive). The H-Lab course’s work with the Billion Oyster Project, and the “Letters in Conversation” in this issue written by Eleanor Macagba, Bry LeBerthon and Gray Cooper Mahaffie, respond to an invitation to “smell, taste and touch [as a] first step in the creation of a more reciprocal relationship with these [originally Lenape] lands and waters.” From the very beginning of their work, the authors of “Letters in Conversation” grappled with how to transfer their situated knowledge into written narratives, and settled on letters in dialogue as a format, following the inspiration they received from “On Water, Salt, Whales, and the Black Atlantics: A Conversation between Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Christina Sharpe.”

At stake here is how we think of our bodies in relation to the spaces we inhabit; in this sense Marie Bardet, considering Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy, speaks of the skin as a relational membrane that approaches the disappearance of full interiority and exteriority and admits a certain degree of porosity and transparency while maintaining interior and exterior as sediments, accumulated and in constant movement, of past and present relationships (Bardet 142). Her workshops “des-orientarse pe(n)sando,” read by Lourdes Dávila in Tracing the Archive, saw the creation of the terms “afuerándose” and “adentrándose” (a tendency toward the outside; a tendency toward the inside) while working on the skin as a membrane at the limit between inside and outside. Within this issue’s dossier we have the work of artist Nadia Huggins and three of her photographic series: Transformations, Circa no Future, and Disappearing People. Of her diptychs forTransformations, Nadia Huggins states:

This space [between the body of the photographer and the underwater organisms in the diptychs] represents a transient moment where I am regaining buoyancy and separating from the underwater environment to resurface. My intention with these photographs is to create a lasting breath that defies human limitation. The transformation exists within the space in between photographs. It is in this moment that the viewer makes the decision if both worlds are able to separate or merge.

If Transformations explores vividly this relationship between the “afuerándose” and “adentrándose” of the human body in water, Hannah Siegel’s work, “The First Object Which Saluted My Eyes was the Sea (And the Slave Ship),” inspired on one of Nadia Huggins’ photographs in her series Circa No Future, extends the relationship of bodies in and with water to think about colonial objects (namely the bronze statue of colonial-era slave trader Edward Colson) flung into the sea and “dominated by different qualities of pressure, light, salinity, and a world of organic creatures.” What happens to the colonial legacy, Siegel asks us, “when we soak it?” Should we make it endure as part of a project of punitive justice? Or should we allow the water to erode, with its climatic violence, the very structures that sustain colonial history?

Arnaldo Rodríguez Bagué poses this last question in “Oceanic Decolonial Ruination.’’ In their essay, Rodríguez Bagué reads Teresa Hernández performance in the Vieques’ Fortín Conde de Mirasol, a 19th century Spanish military fort on the northern coast of Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the aftermath of Hurricane María (2017). They conclude: “By specifically bringing ruin upon the Caribbean islands’ colonial-built environment, the Knife Woman’s acceleration of climate change’s oceanic futurity uses the geological monumentality of Vieques’ Fort as a sculptural medium for carving out a Puerto Rican decolonial future as part of Hurricane María’s recovery process.” Before the dossier, we walk with Eduardo Lalo’s poem “San Juan de los demonios”’ and his photographs of San Juan along with an intimate depiction of a city “from which the sea was stolen and hope was turned into waste by looters.” If Rodríguez Bagué looks at climatic and colonial violence and considers the possibility of a decolonial future and a recovery process through the performance art of Teresa Hernández, Lalo’s work dwells on the present and the love born within an island ravaged by colonial and imperial powers. Movement (as the poet walks through the city and takes photographs) is key to the resistance posed by the author of “San Juan de los demonios.” In “Ensueños a/sombra de agua // Reveries in the Shadow/Awe of Water” Rolando André López Torres grounds his reading of Foreign in a Domestic Space in a devastating subtitle that appears on the screen to speak about the reality of life in Puerto Rico after the passing of hurricane María: “We still don’t know, at least not yet, how to move freely.” This quote, from André Lepecki’s “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics,” is a chilling comment on life in the island after María that politicizes stasis and places it as the tragic effect of colonial and climatic violence. The quote also sets the stage for a “complete aesthetic submersion into a multiplexed narrative of estrangement and belonging” that is the project Foreign in a Domestic Space.

Mario Bellatin’s “Placeres” (reworked for this issue of Esferas) is a tight grid where words containing elements from across his writing function as a skin or organic membrane enveloped by and immersed in liquids (“Agua. Petróleo. Fluidos del cuerpo. Sangre. Aceites. Ácidos. Lágrimas. Esperma.”). It is these liquids that both fix and erase the limits of bodies and their representation. Bellatin pairs the blood produced through violence and needed to “write on the walls the motives of crimes” with the chemicals necessary to fix a photographic image and to make the image emerge from a plate. In this way, the very technology of the photograph is accused of imperial fixity and violence as Bellatin continues to write, using water as the fluid that contains all histories (from the writing of the codices to the present), all forms of violence, all forms of potential ablutions and transformations. And yet, “Nada de eso existe. Salvo en lo líquido. Dentro de su estar acuoso. A través de los siglos. Tiempos que se sobreponen, unos a otros, hasta formar un cuerpo. Único. Compacto. Desecho. Diluido. Una materia sostenida, solamente, por la fruición con la que millones tratan de mantener intacta su pureza. Piel y sustancias. Ofrezco líquido. Exijo líquido.” The body (of Bellatin’s writing) offers a sense of continuity where limits are erased in a mediality of endless transformations while invoking an endpoint in a grid that fixes itself in itself. In water. “Bálsamos. Cinco poemas de Tito Leite” selected and translated by Manuel Barrós, seems to establish a dialogue with the work of Bellatin and his use of water by looking at the origins of the relationship between water and language: “Antes do homem,/ os peixes brincavam/nos grânulos da linguagem” (“Antes del hombre,/los peces jugueteaban/en los gránulos del lenguaje”). And of course, Oscar Nater’s work for this issue of Esferas includes images of Jacobo el Mutante, a performance his company ÍNTEGRO developed following Mario Bellatin’s writing.

Elsewhere in the issue, it is water as a ritual of/and for movement that is summoned. Artist Quan Zhou’s project Aquel verano (a series of acrylic paintings that originated in the photographs taken during the first summer she and her parents went together to the beach on the south of Spain) questions the monolithic narrative of migrant suffering to focus on the quotidian enjoyment of a day at the beach. Aldi Jaramillo gives us in “Water Is Healing” a visual portrayal of the curative power of water. Visual artist and choreographer Oscar Naters speaks of his work in ÍNTEGRO and about the permanent presence of water in his creative experience, reminding us how water belongs in an expansive space that is profound and mysterious. Sophia Moore, in “Diasporic Whales,” highlights the migrational history of colonialism and engages with the Cape Verdean diaspora in New England and its relationship to “seafaring histories, especially concerning whaling, shared between Portugal and the United States.” Moore concludes that “[t]he connection between Cape Verde and New England, today the home to the largest Cape Verdean community in the world, rests on [a] shared aquatic history forged through the whaling industry.” We can also trace a relationship between movement and migration with Olivia Ochoa’s story “Mira,” Michel Nieva’s science fiction story “La guerra de las especies,” and Lorraine Olaya’s poems. “Mira” is a narrative staged as a facetime conversation between a young woman who has migrated to the US and her family; the story looks into the tensions of leaving home with the promise of attaining social mobility. In “La guerra de las especies” the narrator enters into a war for profit between racoons and rats in Inwood Hill Park after the pandemic closes all borders and prevents him from returning home, although“while the restrictions may have meant [he] couldn’t go back to Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires had come back to [him]” as a nightmare. And Lorraine Olaya makes movement the very basis of her poetic interpretation of cumbia, the rhythm of the drums and the languages that oscillate between embodiment and burial, between English and Spanish.

This edition of Esferas explores the idea of currents and transformations through gender. In “The Flowing Gender” Mina Chen dissects Alain Badiou’s “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought” in conversation with the iconic dance Swan Lake. Chen centers her argument on the relationship between nature and human and points out the preexisting strict gender roles that exist in the world of dance while underscoring possible elements of hypocrisy in Badiou’s argument on the effaced omnipresence of the sexes. In “Una masculinidad agresiva: masculinidad destructiva en ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!” Iván Brea analyzes a scene from the 1936 Mexican film and argues for the director’s anti-machismo view throughout the film, allowing for a more complex and flexible masculinity. And “La fémina poderosa” is a narrative in comic form in which Mahir Rahman traces the story of colonization and leads us to see that equality and land, as well as access to fair food practices, are synonymous with justice for all women.

There are many other wonderful texts that we invite you to read in this issue. Among them, an excerpt of the journal DAHA, developed and directed by Stephanie Farmer in NYU Buenos Aires with fellow colleagues from NYU.

As is our tradition, we are proud to share with you the abstracts of our senior honor theses; whether working with computer technology to create the prototype of a game that addresses kitchen Spanish in New York City restaurants, or tracing the movement of the painting Las Meninas to consider the political appropriation of art, or looking into the role of religious figures in Mexican film, or understanding the history of commodification of dual language/ dual immersion programs in New York City public schools, our seniors continue to push the envelope of our discipline and give vibrancy to a department that bases its scholarship on interdisciplinarity and diversity.

Please join us in celebrating our 10th year anniversary and enjoy Issue 14 of Esferas!

Works Cited

Bardet, Marie. Perder la cara. Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2021. Jue, Melody. Thinking through Seawater. Durnham: Duke University Press, 2020. San Miguel, Yolanda. “Colonial and Mexican Archipelagos. Reimagining Caribbean Studies” in Archipelagic American Studies. Durnham: Duke University Press, 2017, 155-173.