Haute Couture: Fashion Fair and the Empowerment of the Black Community
<p>I recall flipping through <em>Ebony</em> magazine as a child in the 80s and often seeing pictures of Fashion Fair models. It didn’t dawn on me then how the power of fashion was being used to inspire an entire community. After seeing “Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair” at the North Carolina Museum of Art, it became clear to me. I developed a deeper sense of the importance of John and Eunice Johnson’s creation.</p>
<p>The Johnsons started Fashion Fair in 1958. This quote by Mr. Johnson, which was a part of the exhibit, placed Fashion Fair into greater context for me:</p>
<p>“<em>Ebony</em> was founded to testify to the possibilities of a new and different world. In a world of despair, we wanted to give hope. In a world of negative Black images, we wanted to provide positive Black images. In a world that said Blacks could do few things, we wanted to say they could do everything.” –John H. Johnson, from his autobiography, <em>Succeeding Against the Odds</em>, 1989</p>
<img width="600" height="464" src="http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/john-johnson-ebony-quote.jpg" />
<p>Fashion Fair was more than models strutting the runway in expensive designer clothing. It was an empowering and uplifting cultural force and antithetical to the negative portrayal of Blacks at the time. Fashion Fair debunked commonly held beliefs about Blacks. It showed them as beautiful, successful, glamorous, classy, and dignified. Ebony Fashion Fair ended in 2009. Yet, it cemented its place in history.</p>
John and Eunice Johnson
<em>Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair</em>, an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art
2017
Olympia Friday, Digital Engagement & Marketing Coordinator, National Humanities Center
fashion-fair-black-community
Identity and Its Development in our Everyday Lives
I am a second-generation Turkish American. However, how does this hyphenated identity impact the daily interactions I have in society? When taking an intercultural communication course, I was introduced to Boylorn and Orbe's Critical Autoethnography book. In it, they explore the everyday interpersonal and cultural experiences that they and fellow contributors have had with society. Through their lived experiences and personal narratives, readers are invited into the multiple ways in which we navigate our personal selves in the societies that we live in. In section three, “Negotiating Socially Stigmatized Identities,” contributors explore what it is like to live with an identity that has been stigmatized in society.
As I read the stories of these individuals, each one resonated with me and had me question the position and presentation that I place on myself. One story stood out among them all. It was the narrative of an Arab-American, Jewish, and nonheterosexual middle aged individual. Their daily interactions demonstrated the struggles and challenges they faced in American society. While I do not share a similar identity with the individual, It did have me question the ways in which society restricts and impacts how I strategically perform my identities in society. It began to have me look back at special moments in my life where my identity had been challenged.
The reason this moment stands out is that it was the first time I questioned and desired to explore my position and the impact my identity has had in society. It has taught me the importance of identity and that how we communicate our identities can impact how we are perceived and adapt our identities in society. Moreover, it guided me to my interest in examining the construction and negotiation of one’s identities and their performances in society. In reading this text, I was moved. It invited me to examine scholars' lived experiences and how it impacts their identities. Moreover, it made me question and look inward to examine how my identity as a second-generation Turkish American plays a role in the interactions I have in society. Since this moment, I have heavily examined and questioned more the ways that our identities influence the interactions we have in society. I am forever grateful for this text and the moments it has given me.
Critical Autoethnography
Summer 2020
Ahmet Aksoy, 33, Doctoral Candidate, Media and Communication, Texas Tech University
identity-development-everyday-lives
El yawar punchau verdadero: The time I discovered Jose Maria Arguedas
I hadn’t noticed until now how little I remember about the time I first read <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>. I know I had already received my bachelor’s degree and was working as an engineer. Was it 12, 15 years ago? I don’t know the exact time, nor the reason I decided to pick it up. Also, no matter how hard I try to remember, I can’t picture myself in the process of actually reading the book. I just remember a feeling. The feeling of knowing that my life was not going to be the same. The feeling that things will never go back to what they were before. With a feeling like that, I guess the details are not that important. <br /><br /><em>Yawar Fiesta</em> is Jose Maria Arguedas’s first novel. Arguedas was a Peruvian anthropologist and writer. <em>Yawar Fiesta</em> narrates the intended and unintended consequences of the prohibition of a traditional Indigenous way of bullfighting by the Peruvian government, under the excuse that the practice needed to be banned to protect the “savage Indians” of an Andean town from themselves. In the story, the Native inhabitants defy the prohibition, which leads to a series of events that force all citizens of the town to challenge and question their identities, and to reconsider their connection with their Indigenous heritage. <br /><br /><em>Yawar Fiesta</em> illuminates all the complexities and contradictions of the Peruvian national identity, one that at the same time incorporates sanitized notions of “Indigenous culture” and rejects Indigenous peoples’ full membership in the Peruvian society. <br /><br />Before reading <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>, my only previous interaction with Jose Maria Arguedas’s work had been a really bad one. While in high school, I was assigned <em>Agua</em>, a collection of short stories. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it slow, and its blend of Quechua grammar and Spanish words impenetrable. I also lacked the relevant sociohistorical background to connect, as a coastal Peruvian citizen attending a private school, with these stories set in the rural Andes. Sadly, my school didn’t provide any of that background. So at the time, my conclusion was that Arguedas’s work wasn’t for me. <br /><br />When I read <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>, I realized that not only Arguedas’s work was indeed for me, but that it was exactly what I needed to rethink and reshape my identity as a Peruvian, and my ideas and attitudes about the country, and its past, present and future. It’s been more than a decade since I first read <em>Yawar Fiesta</em>, and it still feels as relevant as ever. When I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in Native American Studies, Arguedas’s work and life informed and inspired my decision. I aspire to become a scholar that shows a level of care and love for the people I work for and with as the one Arguedas’s had for his interlocutors. And I hope that my scholarship, like Arguedas’s, aids in the fight of Indigenous peoples in Peru and all over the world to dismantle the sociopolitical structures that sustain the racism that directly affects them.
Jose Maria Arguedas
<em>Yawar Fiesta</em>
2003-2006
Carlos A. Tello Barreda, 36, Ph.D. candidate in Native American Studies
yawar-punchau-verdadero-discovered-Jose-Maria-Arguedas
A Painting, A Baby, and Jacques Lacan Walk into a Syllabus...
This summer, I am working with the Syracuse University Art Museum to create English-specific teaching resources. The goal is to make the museum's collections more accessible to instructors for both teaching and research purposes. The job came with the underlying assumption that artwork is a valuable tool for all kinds of academic or humanistic endeavors: close reading, interpretation, question-asking, theory application, etc. <br /><br />As I dug around in the collection, I came across a piece by Louisa Chase, "Baby, Baby" (1991) and had a breakthrough moment. The abstract work, and Chase generally, uses geometric shapes to shadow or mimic forms--in this case, rectangles and squares to mimic a baby--and chaotic, heavy lines to disrupt the image. The work is striking in itself, but I was inspired by the way in which it perfectly represents the Lacanian idea of the "Mirror Stage." <br /><br />A professor I work closely with describes pre-Mirror Stage identity as the formless, wild, confusing, cloudy, and chaotic experiences of an infant's sense of "self." And Chase's work shows that exactly, without the use of so-called "high theory." I was excited to show my professor, who was equally excited, and I went on to develop an entire module on the "Mirror Stage" and Identity out of paintings, photographs, cartoons, and other artworks of diverse mediums. <br /><br />This module, once completed, will hopefully help to illuminate Lacan's theory by showing how humans find (or construct) their identity via images, representations, objects, and other things on the outside. I'm excited to continue to research the collection this summer to identify other artworks that can help students and scholars achieve understanding, find inspiration, and communicate ideas.
Louisa Chase
"Baby, Baby" by Louisa Chase (1991). Etching on aquatint.
June 2021
Madeline Krumel, 24, Ph.D. Student
painting-baby-jacques-lacan-walk-syllabus
Reading and its Superpowers
I cannot remember who first introduced me to the work of Roald Dahl, but it is his books that sparked a lifelong love of reading for me. I grew up as the only girl between two brothers and our house was peppered with sports equipment; our calendar was controlled by games, practices, and tournaments. We all played sports, and I was frequently the only girl on the boys’ baseball teams, in the age division, and for a long time, in the league. Off the field, I loved school, reading, and arts & crafts. So, at times, I felt a little different or out of place. Like most kids, I often wondered how to act or how to be. <br /><br />I can’t remember now exactly when I read Dahl’s <em>Matilda</em>, but I remember identifying with the storyline about a young girl who felt out of place and who found comfort in stories. She was young, but was smart; she was independent and self-sufficient. She read books far beyond her age. Eventually, she learned she could control objects with her mind and she used these powers to outsmart the terrible people around her. In short, she became a hero. <br /><br />It wasn’t that our situations were the same that I felt an affinity with Matilda – I certainly wasn’t surrounded by terrible people as she was – but I think it was because she, too, felt a little different and she too, liked to read. I loved reading before <em>Matilda</em>, but I think that story made me feel like reading could lead to superpowers. She wasn’t a boy with a cape; she couldn’t scale buildings or fly; she didn’t have some extraordinary strength (and to be fair, it wasn’t the reading that gave her her superpowers, but that is what stuck with me). Rather, she had a library card and some quiet time and a few people that believed in her. So, it was also <em>Matilda</em> that made me feel that reading curled up in the back of the school bus or sitting out recess to finish a book wasn’t something to be embarrassed of, because that’s what she did. I wanted to have the mountains of books she did; I wanted to read everything she had. <br /><br />Now, I am sure I haven’t read everything Matilda did and I have been privileged to have had no real terrible things or people to overcome personally, but one part of her story did resonate. I did stumble into some superpowers. From reading stories, I learned empathy and kindness, connection and perspective, humility and humanity. I could hear stories from other people who were not me, who did not grow up in the world I did, who did not express their stories in the same ways as I would. It isn’t only children’s books that did this and continue to do this for me, but back then, Roald Dahl and so many others started it. <br /><br />These days, I mainly read and write nonfiction. I love how language creates moments and images; I love how writers make words live together on the page. I now study essays & poems, but sometimes I still think of them as kinds of stories. And I still think reading them (or listening to them) leads to those superpowers of connection, compassion, and humanity. <br /><br />But my connection with this children’s book goes beyond that, because it has also taught me why representation is so important. All young people should be able to see themselves in a story, to have that moment of realization, identification, and inspiration. Everyone deserves to see themselves as the hero, no matter their age, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, or disability. No matter if they read themselves in a book, hear themselves in a song, or find themselves in dance, theater, or the fine arts. The ability to see glimpses of our own stories in others is important, because I think it prepares us to be open to other stories completely different than ours. For me, it started with <em>Matilda</em>. And as an adult now, I am still a woman who loves to read and who still believes in its superpowers.
Roald Dahl
<em>Matilda</em>
Bailey Boyd, 32, Ph.D Candidate
reading-superpowers