Views of Aging African American Women: Memories Within the Historical Context

This article examines the generational experiences of older African American women using case studies of two women born in 1911. Through the telling of their life stories, these women recount their memories of their own lives. By viewing their life histories within the larger historical context, we gain a clearer understanding of their life experiences and their perspectives as older African American women. These women lived through the Jim Crow era of blatant racial discrimination and segregation in the South and raised their children in this environment. The segregation statutes, or Jim Crow laws, were the public symbols and constant reminders of the subordinate position assigned to African Americans, and the code lent the sanction of law to a racial separation that extended to churches, schools, housing, jobs, eating and drinking. Using a lifecourse perspective, the past is viewed within the context of the present, considering historical and cohort factors that have affected the life situation of individuals. Through the women's telling of their life stories, they outline the chapters of their lives and describe how their experiences have made them the strong older women they are today and helped shape their values.     

Exploring Gender in South-Asian Cultural Memory Through Artistic Process

Abstract

My artistic inquiries draw from gender and sexuality in public space and use performance as process. In inspiration, the works emerge as aesthetic responses to post-colonial, gendered public identities and as negotiations with the cultural politics of modernity. Dwelling on the interaction of Indian modernity with cultural memory through myth, ritual, traditions and colonial histories, I hope to touch upon multiple influences of the Indian public sphere. Through a fragmented contemplation on guiding impulses, this discussion propositions the production of works as potentials to re-eroticise the public sphere.