[Vwoolf] Kabe Wilson interview

Mon Jun 8 00:29:33 EDT 2020

Dear Elizabeth,

Thank you so much for starting this conversation, and for everyone who’s chimed in with excellent resources.   I heartily second a group bibliography — and Zoom fall chat (Zoom isn’t going anywhere anytime soon) — to talk further about reading lists and pedagogical practices on these crucial issues.

I found myself this past Thursday with Orlando on the syllabus in my "VW in the Age of #MeToo" course, in the penultimate week of our remote quarter, and had a student comment (with deep pain) in emails before class on the apparently casual and iterative acts of violation on the black man’s body with which it opens, as they merged in her mind with the images of George Floyd’s murder.   I found that reaching out to colleagues — my MAPP teammates, and now (thank you Liz!) this timely list — has helped me help students confront what Susan rightly calls the ‘interlocking oppressions’ Woolf’s texts deconstruct, while not shying away from what Erica calls Woolf’s ‘failures in racial consciousness’.   Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a colleague here who heads American Studies, sent me a list of videos she has compiled to teach the history of race in the US, and I append it here (with her permission) because its first video on Ida B. Wells allowed me, the night before class, to discover that Wells has been awarded recently a posthumous Pulitzer for her anti-lynching journalism, and this posthumous recognition chimed with other long form class discussions on archives, women, class, race, and occluded recognition.  And it was through this lens, and the journalistic photographic inserts (and the images left unpublished) in Three Guineas, which allowed us a way into thinking about frames of reference in Orlando, in a class that otherwise might have veered off course, in more ways than one.

In terms of other citations, I was thinking of Elizabeth Abel’s keynote at last year’s Woolf conference on Woolf and Baldwin — I’m not sure if that’s published yet (Drew would know?) but it was superb.  And also Tuzyline Allan’s work on Woolf and Larsen and Walker and her book Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics.  MAPP continues to solicit and publish peer reviewed biographies of authors and press workers in the orbit  of the Hogarth Press; a recent  and very full biography of Mulk Raj Anand with new archival information can be found here http://www.modernistarchives.com/person/mulk-raj-anand

Susan, thank you for mentioning Wilson at the MSA in 2018 — I looked him up then and there, and realized how perfect his art installation would be for talking about Room in the #MeToo course.  I added a section to the syllabus called “Whose Room?” and the students were really engaged by it.  Thank you for opening up this crucial channel for us all and Trudi as well for all the onsite information at Cambridge which I’ve used to good effect in my classes on Wilson’s work.  My students this year asked if he’d published his book, and I didn’t know, so it’s interesting to know he might be willing to share the pdf.  Another thing the faculty in Feminist and Gender Studies here has been talking about is how we might — with resources — offer honorariums for creative artists and public intellectuals to speak in our classes in our continuing efforts to diversify texts and speakers.  I am on leave next year, but I’m definitely going to try and outreach to Wilson to see if he would be interested in an interactive Zoom class the following year (as I say, Zoom may not only be ubiquitous now, but could facilitate access to those we could never afford to fly in).

I look forward to this growing list of resources, Liz, on this topic and to further discussion in the fall (and congratulate you too, on your recent election to the MSA Board of Directors!)
Best wishes
Alice

Alice Staveley
Senior Lecturer
Department of English
Stanford University
Director | Honors English
Director | Digital Humanities Minor
http://www.modernistarchives.com

On Jun 7, 2020, at 8:42 AM, Susan Friedman via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>> wrote:

Hi All, If Woolfians don't yet know about Kabe Wilson's project, I would urge you to find out. Google Kabe Wilson, or get his dazzling interview on YouTube. He is a multi-media artist living in Cambridge, UK. In 2014, he performed "The Dreadlock Hoax" in a Bloomsbury drawing room where Woolf apparently lived briefly. Dressed up as Woolf and in his natural dreadlocks, he was shadowing The Dreadnaught Hoax of 1909 when Woolf joined her brother and others dressed up in blackface as Abyssian royals and fooled the British Navy. In the performance he described his 5-year project of remixing, recysling every word of A Room of One's Own--and only those words the same number of times Woolf used them--into a novella about a mixed race scholarship queer student at Cambridge who experiences terrible racism, finds Black Power books from the 1960s US civil rights movements (Carmichael and Brown) and determines to burn down university libraries, including the MSS of A Room on display. However, the MSS doesn't burn, and Olivia decides she can re-order, refresh, re-mix Woolf's words to make them deal with race, class, and gender issues of the 21st century. It's called Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N'Gowfri (an anagram of Woolf's name and title). It's utterly fascinating! Kabe Wilson is unwilling at this point to publish the novella, although he has been very generous in sharing the PDF, which has allowed a number of people to teach it in their Woolf classes.  He conceives of the project as an art installation, and the re-ordered words cut and glued to a large scroll have been exhibited a number of times in the UK. He was the keynote speaker at the conference Recycling Woolf in Nancy, France June 2019--a volume based on the conference is in process, and in it Kabe Wilson and I have a lengthy "conversation" about his work, especially carrying its implications into current issues of race and of environmental crisis.
     I was inspired by discovering his work to edit a book, Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art (Bloomsbury, 2019), now in paperback--a very transnational discussion of various forms of recycling the past for the future, covering Syria, Egypt, Pacific Islands, South Africa, Netherlands, UK, etc. The introduction and my essay in the book center on Kabe Wilson. I would be happy to send anyone a PDF of my essay upon request. Wonderful essays in the volume focused on Woolf include Margaret Homans on Orlando and trans issues; and Elizabeth Abel on Woolf and Sebald.
    As Woolfians well know, there are endless ways to teach Woolf in conjunction with the present and the future--paired especially with works taking up issues of huge contemporary concern, like race, neocolonialism, feminism, sexuality, trans issues, environmental crisis, economic crisis, social in/justice and on and on. Living through the pandemic, I wonder what her experience was in 1918-1920. Living through the massive demonstrations for fundamental change on institutionalized racism in the US and around the world, I go back again and again to Three Guineas and to Woolf's willingness, in spite of her own limitations, to ask fundamental questions about interlocking oppressions.
Greetings to all, Susan

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 3:37 PM Dr T Tate via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>> wrote:
Dear Elizabeth,

Re. Kabe Wilson's work on Woolf.

Kabe Wilson has spoken several times on our Woolf summer courses, and
brought along his remarkable rewriting of A Room of One's Own, which is
an interesting artefact in itself, all on one huge sheet of paper.

There are a couple of links here which might be useful for your class:
https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/kabe-2019

Best wishes,
Trudi
---
Dr Trudi Tate
Literature Cambridge
www.literaturecambridge.co.uk<http://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/>
_______________________________________________
Vwoolf mailing list
Vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:Vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf

--
Susan Stanford Friedman
Hilldale Professor Emerita in the Humanities
Virginia Woolf Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies
7103 Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park St.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: 608-258-8080
Fax: 608-263-3709
_______________________________________________
Vwoolf mailing list
Vwoolf at lists.osu.edu<mailto:Vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20200608/d713c93c/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 47 Free  Films on Racism Just a Click Away.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 69998 bytes
Desc: 47 Free  Films on Racism Just a Click Away.docx
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20200608/d713c93c/attachment-0001.docx>