International Visitor Spotlight: Adams Bodomo

Adams Bodomo

By Armine Pillikan

Adams Bodomo, an FSI- Humanities Center International Visitor in October and November of this year, has been researching a relatively new and unexplored phenomenon: the migration of Africans to China and the type of Sino-African relations emerging from this process.

Bodomo is currently African Studies Programme Director at the School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong, as well as Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics. We asked him to tell us about how migrant African populations interact with Chinese civilians on a daily basis, and how this is creating types of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic collaboration.

Tell us a bit about communication between these two populations.

Africans don’t know much Chinese; they don’t speak, read or write it, and vice versa. One of the most unique communication techniques I’ve seen is what I call “calculator communication.” In a buying and selling situation, the African customer approaches the Chinese seller and points to the commodity, and the seller types out the price on the calculator and points to it, and this goes on until the sale is either agreed upon or aborted. I’m seeing that it’s possible to use all media available to us to communicate!

How does this migration affect language?

Africans have developed a form of pidgin, just picking up small words and intermixing them with their own language. So there are mixes of Swahili and Chinese, Arabic and Chinese, Hausa and Chinese. The primary way Africans in China communicate is through English or French.

What’s interesting is the influence that their presence has on the way that the Chinese learn to speak English. This phenomenon comes about because many Africans who have set up shops decide to employ Chinese salesmen. These salesmen end up beginning to learn English and they learn it in a way that is very clearly African-English, not Chinese-English.

Arts Visitor Spotlight: M.K. Raina

M.K. Raina

By Armine Pillikan

M.K. Raina, an international visitor and SiCa Arts Writer/Practitioner this October, is known as one of the most prominent theatre artists throughout India and Southeast Asia. He speaks 13-14 different languages, has traveled and taught from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, and works not only with professional performance artists, but also children who’ve had very little exposure to the arts.

Recently, his work has included revitalizing theatre and visual arts in his birthplace, the Kashmir Valley—a place that has suffered from militant terror for many years. During a presentation in the Humanities Center Board Room on October 11, he discussed his creative work in folk and experimental theatre, as well as with his goals to rehabilitate orphaned Kashmiri children and to set up educational opportunities for performers.

What are some of the struggles the Kashmiri artistic community faces?

 The country has suffered through terrorism, and there has been a ban on performance arts. These people are very poor. They don’t even have land for agriculture, much less the time and venues to put on plays, so they haven’t been able to perform for 10 to 20 years. Imagine a person who couldn’t play his instrument or paint for that long! This also affects school children’s engagement with art. Violence had reached such a point that children could not go to schools. They had become victims of this violence and it impacted their minds, their imaginations. They don’t really know what it’s like to have a normal day, to go to school, play, come home—it’s not there. But I believe that through education and culture, I can break this frozen situation.


Describe some of your work with the Kashmiri folk performance group Bhand Pather.

I’m not letting the tradition of performing arts die out under the current circumstances. Recently I helped direct and make possible three different plays: two traditional plays, and King Lear. Five thousand to ten thousand people attended the plays, sat on hills and watched the performances.


How did the group engage with Shakespeare?


King Lear was definitely a challenge, since the performers do not read or write. I had to tell them the story, and then together we discovered the subtext and interpretation of the story. I began to see that they completely understood the depth of the play. We merely adapted it to our language and traditions. When the performers compose the dialogue, they are fantastic. They made it their own King Lear. It was Shakespeare, yes, but the way they see it, the way they experience it.

In the storm scene, when King Lear realizes what he’s done, the performers felt as though Lear reached a stage where he realizes what life is all about, what the world is all about, what people are all about. They saw this as Lear taking this first step into the Sufi traditions, and so he sings a Sufi song.


Tell us about your work with Kashmiri youth.

My goal is to reclaim cultural space, to intervene through culture. So I organized a group of people: child psychologists, educators, painters, film-people, artists, creative writers, and we started helping children through the arts. We did four or five creative workshops.


How did the workshops start?

I gave them a lot of colors to paint with, but at the beginning, they painted only using one color, someone only green, another only brown. They couldn’t see the colors in front of them, even though they live in such a colorful valley! So I had to devise new exercises, new methodologies, to get them to start enjoying culture, to teach them to see color.

What did the children create as a result of these new ways of thinking?

They shared a scroll many feet long to create their paintings. It took them almost all day to paint it, and then we held it up and all the kids stood there with their eyes wide open. There were all kinds of things: peacocks, boars, and huge lions. It was a wonderful mural painting. I told them to find stories in their painting. Out of one scroll they came up with 10 different stories. We weren’t telling them anything; it was all their imagination! And then we said: now enact a play out of this. And then they started to write songs for the play. There was one girl who by the end of the program was writing poetry and then singing those poems.

Fellows Spotlight: Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey

Sarah Carey, a Stanford alum and former resident of our very own Casa Italiana, has spent the decade since she’s graduated developing a new lens through which to view nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature—through the lens of an actual camera. With a PhD from UCLA, she returned to Stanford as a Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow last year. Carey’s work on campus includes developing her new book Envisioning Italy: Photography and the Narrating of a Nation, alongside teaching a class based on the intersections of photography, literature, and cinema in Italian art. She will be introducing and screening Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “The Passenger” at the first meeting of this year’s Humanities Circle on October 26, 2011 in Building 260, Room 113 at 6:00 pm.

You teach several courses at Stanford. Can you get into depth about one of them?

I’m most interested in the course that I’m teaching right now, which is based on my primary research interest: the relationship between photography and Italian literature and film. I am very interested in looking at texts with students that not only describe photography, but also include images, as well looking at films that seem to draw upon the aspects of still photography.

What I’m asking students to think about are the ways in which visual culture influences national identity: how do photographs give us an idea what Italian identity might be, what Italian nationhood might be? What I’ve found from my own research is that photography has been used, ever since it’s invention and dissemination, to create a visual representation of the nation that the citizens can then identify with.

It’s great because it’s so interdisciplinary. It’s not tunnel vision on one subject, but it opens up into many other fields. It gives students a lot of flexibility on what they want to do for a final project: they can work on film, the history of photography, or even hybrid texts that use both photographs and prose.

What is it that’s really particular about the way photography functions in Italian culture, that sets it apart?

Well take the Civil War. It was heavily documented in that States by photographers, right on the field. But that didn’t happen in Italy.

What’s interesting is that Italy, even in comparison to the United States, is a very young country. It didn’t become a country until 1861, and that was about twenty or thirty years after the first inventions of photography. So those first couple decades of photography happened to be a time in which the Italian peninsula was in a lot of turmoil, and in the process of unification.

You would think they would have documented a lot of these events with photographers on the field. But it wasn’t used during those years. It was used after the unification. Oddly enough, they wanted to use photography to recreate the events during that time. So they would stage certain battles, or even take pictures of locations and then paint in representations of what had happened. So photography didn’t serve its natural documentary purpose, but as a way to tell a story, sort of after the fact. They used photography to narrate, rather than to document. I think this appeals to Italian writers and directors. For a scholar in any art field this would provide a lot of material that has not yet been explored, and there could be a lot of projects that delve into archives that have not yet been tapped into.

Any ways to get involved with Italian culture?

Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco is a great reference point. On campus, I lived in Casa Italiana, which has a lot of great events. It’s funny because I taught a course last year which I had to take when I was a student, “Italian Literature and History.” And actually, the study abroad program in Florence was probably what led me to pursue the path that I’m on right now. So it’s a blessing to be back at the place that started it all.