EMILIA-AMALIA SESSION VI:
MEMES/FUNGIBILITY
Monday, 14 November 2016, 6–9 PM
Facilitated by Yaniya Lee and Merray Gerges

Taking Aria Dean’s essay, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” as a starting point for a discussion about the relationship between Black culture and the Internet, this session continues the group’s ongoing conversations about the politics of practices of citation by thinking about how modes of knowledge circulate online, and how this circulation appropriates Black creativity. In her essay, Dean roots memes in Blackness to examine how spectatorship, appropriation, surveillance, privacy, circulation and representation come to bear on it.

By looking at examples of memes, and at contemporary artworks that employ their mechanisms, the discussion will address questions of authorship, appropriation, Black fungibility, Internet aesthetics, representation and context, and will invite participants to adopt the form of the meme to consider how these forms provoke spectatorial discomfort, relatability, or both.

Text: Aria Dean, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme” (2016), (Please read in advance).

Conversation: Illustrative memes online and in contemporary art that addresses intersectionality.

Writing Activity: #relatability. Drawing on examples from our own lives, this exercise will ask participants to adapt a meme to respond to the critical issues raised by Dean’s essay. Please come to the session with a meme or an example from the online circulation of culture that speaks to the themes in Dean’s text.