By María DeGuzmán and Carisa R. Showden
These photographs accompanied by haiku poetry deal in miniature forms—photographs of figurines or “minikins” less than one inch tall and three-line poems—that imbue their smallness with ambiguity about what is perceived as “reality,” and, consequently, as the past, the present, and the future.
Both the photographs that fool with scale and the haiku that cut across habitual ways of seeing and understanding—and especially the two forms together—attempt to arrest viewers/readers on the cusp of self-consciousness about their own perceptions and, thus, to draw them into a more active engagement with the matter before their eyes.
In this sequence of four photo images and haiku we take up perceptions of and reactions to the ongoing demographic changes of the United States. As such, these pieces reference dynamics of exclusion, inclusion, and perceptions (always political) of the cultural sea-change embedded in the past, present, and future of the Americas and of the United States of America as part of América.
María DeGuzmán is Professor of English & Comparative Literature and founding Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of two books: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, August 2005) and Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, June 2012). She is also a conceptual photographer who produces photos and photo-text work, both solo and in collaboration with colleagues and friends. She has published essays and photo-stories involving her photography. Her images have been chosen as the cover art for books by Cuban American writer Cristina García and the poet Glenn Sheldon and for books by scholars.
Carisa R. Showdenis Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the author of Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work (University of Minnesota Press 2011) and co-editor (with Samantha Majic) of Negotiating Sex Work: Policy, Activism, and Unintended Consequences(University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2014). She was also co-organizer of the 2013 Southeastern Women’s Studies Association conference on Outrage!: Discourses, Practices & Politics of Protest and Social Transformation held in Greensboro, NC. All of her work eventually circles back to questions of identity, agency, and perception and the ways individuals and groups come to think about themselves in the political and social intersections of privilege and oppression. She began writing haiku in earnest three years ago.
María and Carisa have co-authored a forthcoming book titled Conjuring Worlds: A Queer Phenomenology of the Miniature and have exhibited some of their work from that book in The Carrack Gallery of Modern Art in Durham, North Carolina.