For artist, scholar, and educator, Gina Athena Ulysse, anthropology has been stuck in a time warp. Yet rather than beholding herself to the discipline’s conflicted standing between the humanities and social sciences, Ulysse’s work explores the productive tensions within both art and anthropology. Whether through the page, stage, or material objects, her work is committed to the practice of rasanblaj, or the assembly of ideas, things, people, and spirits.
In this interview, Ulysse reflects on her experience as an artist-anthropologist by illuminating her place within a constellation of ideas, scholars, and approaches. The conversation below suggests the inherent connection underlying these networks, which rejects the individualism so often valorized by anthropology as an institution supported by legacies of capitalism and colonialism. Through the practice of making, Ulysse invites us to reexamine where our obligations lie to the discipline, ourselves, and each other.
Salwa Tareen (ST): As AES’s first Artist-in-Residence, what are your plans and goals for this unique position? In what ways does this position help highlight the arts as a source of anthropological theory and praxis?
Gina Athena Ulysse (GAU): When Ken [Kenneth Guest, current president of the American Ethnological Society (AES)] first mentioned the idea, there was a timeliness to this opportunity, as I had been invited by the Artistic Director, Salimata Diop, to participate in the 15th Edition of the Biennale of Dakar held November 7 – December 7, 2024. I appreciate the nod, because I served briefly as an AES councilor and left the position to commit to the Biennale of Sydney in Australia in 2020. In many ways, this made sense because my entire career, I have occupied and crisscrossed spaces within the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
As a Black feminist ethnographer with an aesthetic imagination, I have not adhered to the fragmentation of intellectual divisions because life itself is not lived along disciplinary lines. I have been making things for a long while; for me art-making is also ethnography. Over two decades ago, at the 2003 Spring Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I had organized a panel “Recycled Ethnographic Collectibles: Boleros, Clay, and Spoken Word,” with sculptor Ella Maria Ray, and curator, the late Marvette Perez, who went on to curate the phenomenal exhibition on Azucar: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz. We were all ethnographers also working in other media. While here is a longer history of creative anthropologists making and finding professional homes elsewhere, some of us have stayed in academia and are figuring it out.
In that sense, I don’t read this position as a turning point. At 182 years old, AES is the oldest section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Being AES’s first Artist-in-Residence has a bit of cheekiness to it for me given the discipline’s history. Questions about what art is to anthropologists and whether or not it is and can be form of ethnography remains underexplored. This is reminder that what happens in AES needs to be kept in context, as it is not indicative of changes in journals and departments throughout the US, where we are. Though I should note American Anthropologist (AA) does have a multimodal section.
Decolonizing the discipline remains an ongoing project as minoritized scholars are still writing about the need for a more inclusive anthropology. It is a fact that Black women creative anthropologists had a fraught relationship with the discipline. But then, there are also younger generations of artist-scholars, like Mario Lamothe and Maya Stovall, inside and outside of academe who have sustainable creative practices. They are also producing scholarship—the monograph—which in most cases remains the primary expectation for professional advancement. I see how this can stump the imagination. I remember decades ago being told I should not do my creative work if I wanted to get tenure. Of course, I did not listen. I have no regrets.
I welcomed the role because when the conversation began, it made sense to me given the theme of the 2024 [AES] Spring Conference in Pittsburg was “Repair.” This theme remains in alignment with my interests as we navigate this current phase of the great collapse. I think back to my first year at the University of Michigan and the publication of Richard Fox’s Recapturing Anthropology (1991) as bible for what it means to be doing work in the present when things fell apart centuries ago, to paraphrase the late Michel Rolph-Trouillot. The fact is that the arts matter now more than ever in these times of hypernormalisation. My plan is to offer a still unnamed rasanblaj series with international artists and we are conspiring to revive some ghosts at the AAA [Annual Meeting] in NOLA next November.
Calabash preparation for the installation at the 15th Edition of the Biennale of Dakar in Dakar, Senegal, May 2024. Photo credit: Gina Athena Ulysse.
ST: From Ramallah to Port-au-Prince, we seem to live in a never-ending wave of unprecedented violence. Yet, anthropology as a discipline often remains tied to the dichotomy of here and there, where the ethnographer must either be in the field to observe or away from it to respond. In the face of such immediate violence and uncertainty, how can anthropologists respond to the urgency of our times?
GAU: When have we not lived with violence in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the Middle East, North America, Asia, and Europe? Is the violence new and unprecedented or just more visible and readily available to us via multilayered wireless networks? To respond to your question (which reflects a particular paradigm and time frame) with another questions: Is it anthropology that is tied to the dichotomy of here vs. there, OR is it its professionalization? The discipline is an institution. It is crucial that firstly, I note and practice discernment to not confound the two. Second, you and I must admit that there is not and there has never been a WE.
Folks in the discipline are and have always been differentially positioned and reflective of a broad set of ideas, praxis, and politics, with many minoritized folks placed at the margins. Sure, in many sections, there has been a shift from margin to center, to quote bell hooks. For me, that so-called line between here and there was always a fictive one that academics especially were expected to observe, along with the false narrative of objectivity, to reinforce a distance not all of us could claim. Individual anthropologists have always had the choice to respond to the urgency of our times. Many have been bold and refused this dichotomy, as is evident in works from Anténor Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races ([1885] 2002) to the brilliant recent study Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (2024) by Omer Aijazi.
I say this because I don’t have any expectations beyond my constellation. I have always operated on a small scale rooted in community, and I believe that building trust is necessary to offer support at the most immediate level. I always have one foot in and one foot out of academe, having learned from elders/mentors if I wanted to be effective and do certain kinds of work, I had to look elsewhere. M. Jacqui Alexander sums it up in “Groundings on Rasanblaj”: “The point is we cannot only live in spaces of domination, spaces of hegemony, if we want to think and act radically—and by ‘radical’ here I am meaning ‘the root.’ For true radical thinking to occur, one has to move outside the academy, in this instance, however one wants to constitute that outside.”
ST: In a recent piece in Anthropology Now, you urge readers into activation after a period of global stagnation following the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, you call upon rasanblaj as a means of “gathering selves, things, spirits and ideas. // perhaps in that order this time.” Can you explain the role of rasanblaj in activating your artistic and anthropological practice? How does rasanblaj help weave together discourse and material objects? And what are your hopes for activated anthropologists?
First, let me add some additional context here. I became founding editor of the [Rasanblaj] section [of Anthropology Now] in 2017 a couple years after Caribbean Rasanblaj had been launched at the Hemispheric Institute. In 2019, I was invited to participate in the Biennale of Sydney in Australia by artistic director, Brook Andrew, to essentially undertake my first large scale installation. The process of making the work “An Equitable Human Assertion” required reorientation; I learned new ways and methods of engagement with materiality as my ethnography was not only becoming more visual but, most importantly in this instance, tangible and tactical. To be frank, I had been playing with things, materials all along. Of course, before that, there was the Haiti Illumination Project in 2002 and my participation in the Black Atlantic Project at the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2004. So, it should not be surprising that my third book, Because When God is Too Busy (2017) included photographs, performance texts, and the Tet Gridap (lamps) series. Because I have always had an aesthetic imagination.
It is apropos for me to note that rasanblaj did not activate my artistic and anthropology practice for a couple reasons. First, I have never thought of my art and anthropology as distinct from each other. That divide is, and has always been, very much a professional and institutional one. In the foreword to Why Haiti Needs New Narratives (2015), historian Robin D.G. Kelley says it best: this divide exists mostly on paper. And second, to give credit where it is due, it was Dr. Kyrah Malikah Daniels who pointed out that I had been doing a rasanblaj my whole life.
Kenkeliba tea, Dakar, Senegal, November 2024. Photo credit: Gina Athena Ulysse.
The theoretical articulation of rasanblaj was an act of naming a practice that had been in action for decades and begged for deeper explication, which I have resisted. We are now developing the RasanblajLab and studio recognizing that we have been engaged in innovating multidisciplinary, transhistorical, and translocal practice that is informed by Haiti’s place at the forefront of avant-garde. For more about this, see A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics. This praxis was fully manifested in Senegal with the work presented at the Biennale of Dakar.
Finally, I wrote the piece you referred to while on an artist residency in Bogliasco, Italy during Fall 2023, as we bore—and continue to bear—witness to brutality and madness all over the world. It has been truly terrifying to apprehend such widespread desensitization, and it begs the question: how many more times will we charge genocide and say enough is enough? I don’t have hope for “activated anthropologists.” Way too many unpredictable variables. My hope is anyone present in their communities will be inspired to strive to be their best human selves, more conscientious about our entangled places in the world. Nesha Haniff’s Pedagogy of Action: Small Ax Fall Big Tree (2022)—a project on teaching an HIV module—exemplifies the significance of small things especially in the ongoing political madness of these times.
ST: In Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, you write about your position to Haiti as an “outsider within,” to borrow the phrase from Patricia Hill Collins. How does this perspective continue to shape your relation to Haiti today, especially in the longue durée of political instability and social precarity since the 2010 earthquake?
GAU: Actually, I was referencing Faye V. Harrison’s Outside Within: Reworking Anthropology in a Global Age (2008) who was citing Patricia Hill Collins. It’s important to point to that nuance both to point to the conversations among black feminist scholars and in the spirit of the call to #CiteBlackWomen.
As someone who migrated at a very young age, I have been mindful of my positionality as a US citizen compared to that of Haitians whose lives are rooted in the country. This is particular to my work concerning issues of representation of Haiti in the media, which is non-ending, and the fact that we do need to listen to those who are living the realities that too often folks abroad (as experts) end up speaking for and representing. For me, it’s an opportunity to get out of the way and not be a mediator. I am also aware that there are moments when the expert voice is needed and others when it becomes another form of erasure.
Fully aware of diasporic privileges, in the Coda of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, I bluntly stated I was done with the epistemic violence and done with deconstructing these gross stereotypes and misrepresentations. In the future, I would just do “the work” of new creating narratives with performance and visual arts. I have stayed on this track since and changed institutions where there is more space for my creative work. My relation to and work on Haiti is mostly behind the scenes, though there are a couple unplanned projects that I could not walk away from.
“For Those Among Us Who Inherited Sacrifice, Rasanblaj!” (2024) by Gina Athena Ulysse. Installation at the 15th Edition of the Biennale of Dakar. Photo credit: Marc Théophile.
ST: As an aspiring self-proclaimed badass, I am moved by your unapologetic celebration of new type of “organic intellectualism,” as framed by Antonio Gramsci. How does this approach inform your mentorship of young artist-scholars?
GAU: Let me begin by stressing that following Arlene Torres, I also make a very clear distinction between advising and mentoring. Advising, she notes, happens in the office and mentoring around a kitchen table over tea. Part of her point is to highlight the personal connection (if it is there) that is integral and inevitable part of mentoring. In the last three decades, I have advised students and while at an undergraduate institution, I have mentored my share of younger and mid-career scholars, few among them were artist-scholars. As I have written, I have done this to pay it forward because I still benefit from a slew of mentors (formal and informal) from whom I continue to learn how to remain truthful to my aspirations as I navigate the academic terrain; and it never ends.
I have done some type of creative work and engaged art practice (public or not) since I was in graduate school in the 1990s. That’s nearly four decades. So, current movements in my career are the result of my longevity—the maturity and obvious evolution of my work. Charting one’s own way within a discipline in a profession wedded to its strictures requires accepting that any decision to deviate from what is considered a normative career path will have consequences. That is a subjective endeavor. There are some real risks involved in the process and everyone has their different sense of vulnerabilities.
My so-called self-certified badassness (I was reminded recently that I have earned notable professional certification) is not something I can teach, nor pass it on. I wasn’t always that confident about what I do. That has come with time. But I have always had a rebellious tenacity against injustice. I remember the pushback before tenure when I started saying to myself: “I am going to keep doing what I do, let me know when you catch up.” Because I felt and knew I was being held back. When I think about the challenging conditions within which I forged this career I have, I buy myself flowers out of respect for sticking to my trajectory. This came at very high price. It has been a battle. In some ways, it still is, as I enter new territories. I always quote dancer and choreographer, Bill T. Jones, who said: “You have as much freedom as you are willing to pay for,” at Wesleyan University in 2006. His words became my mantra. I don’t believe you can teach or mentor someone to take risks. It must be something they want to or choose to do. To that point, I tell those who ask for advice to accept that anthropology is an institution like any other. There is still no fast track, so the question is then what do you want your relationship to that institution to be.
I think there are younger scholars who entered the discipline with the intent of being artist-scholars and are having a difficult time because they are still being told they must wait until after tenure to do something creative. To them, I say be strategic, learn to protect your creative spirit, and do remember that the AAA issued guidelines on public scholarship in 2017. Those of us doing the non-ending service of writing copious tenure and promotion evaluations at all levels are still using and quoting this document because the discipline in many ways has yet to join the 21st Century.
Night view of installation (15th Edition of the Biennale of Dakar). Photo credit: Gina Athena Ulysse.
ST: Following your exhibition at the Dakar Biennale, what are you working on now? What do you intend to create in the near future?
GAU: The 21st Century is here and I have found myself moving further into the arts, though I still teach courses on Black Feminist Ethnography and ethnographic methods, as well as my “Post Zora Interventions: On Art, Anthropology and Activism,” which has been a staple in my teaching repertoire. What has changed in my teaching is the joy of incorporating creative expressions in tandem with the textual to offer students a broader sense of the landscape within which these anthropological studies were conducted. This is an inevitable turn as I become so ensconced, especially in the visual. As my first book was auto-ethnographic, a serendipitous full-circle moment for me recently was the publication of Bwapin Rasanblaj, the artist’s visual work and interview with Lyndon K. Gil was featured in the Autotheory/AutoEthnography special issue of Feminist Studies.
That happened as I was preparing the work for the Biennale of Dakar. I spent nearly three months in West Africa, including a site visit and four weeks residency in April. I also visited Benin and Togo for the first time. The culminating work, “For Those Among Us Who Inherited Sacrifice, Rasanblaj,” is evidently driven by encounters and presence of my time with new interlocutors on the land. It is encouraging that the work is being recognized and I am engaged in new conversations with other artists and interlocutors. Two things I can say post the Dakar experience: I am no longer afraid of scale and I have learned so much I am eager to share.
For more information on Dr. Ulysse’s recent work at the 2024 Dakar Biennale: https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/11/ginaulysse-biennale.html.
References
Aijazi, Omer. 2024. Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Alexander, M. Jacqui and Gina Athena Ulysse. 2015. “Groundings on Rasamblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander” Emisférica 12 (1). https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj/12-1-essays/e-121-essay-alexander-interview-with-gina.html
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Firmin, Antenor. [1885] 2002. The Equality of the Human Races: Positivist Anthropology. Trans. Asselin Charles. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Fox, Richard G., ed. 1991. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Gill, Lyndon K., and Gina Athena Ulysse. “Bwapin Rasanblaj: A Curated Conversation.” Feminist Studies 49, no. 2 (2023): 328-351. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915912.
Harrison, Faye V., ed. 2008. Outside Within: Reworking Anthropology in a Global Age. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Haniff, Nesha Z., ed. 2022. The Pedagogy of Action: Small Axe Fall Big Tree. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hill-Angus, Eve. 2024. “Dreams of Dakar: The 15th Biennale Of Contemporary Art in Senegal Evokes Postcolonial Wounds While Fostering Ebullience.” Art Forum Diary. November 22nd . https://www.artforum.com/columns/eve-hill-agnus-dreams-of-dakar-2024-1234721784/
Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2015. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2016. “Introduction.” Anthropology Now 8 (1): 125–27. doi:10.1080/19428200.2016.1154772.
Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2017. Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me, and THE WORLD. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2023a. “Activation.” Anthropology Now 15 (2–3): 162–65. doi:10.1080/19428200.2023.2321076.
Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2023b. A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics. Athens: RLS Greece.
Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything is Forever Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, New Jersey; Princeton University Press.
Salwa Tareen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research explores the interplay between religion, gender, and the politics of care in Muslim South Asia. Salwa’s academic and creative writing can be found in The Muslim World, The Aerogram, and Protest Magazine.
Cite As: Tareen, Salwa and Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2025. “The Expectations of our Constellations: An Interview with Dr. Gina Athena Ulysse,” American Ethnologist website, 03 February 2025 [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/the-expectations-of-our-constellations-an-interview-with-dr-gina-athena-ulysseby-salwa-tareen/]
