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Part of the book: Citational Media

Edited by Annie Ring and Lucy Bollington

Visual Culture 7

Legenda

ContemporaryFilmopen

Abstract.  Rita Indiana and others’ thirteen-minute performance video After School was filmed in a former school in Puerto Rico on 27 August 2020, at a moment of widespread and heightened attention to racial inequality. The Covid-19 pandemic had disproportionately affected people of colour in the USA (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021) and the Black Lives Matter movement had gained global momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Puerto Rico was still in a long process of recovery following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017 and the 2019–20 earthquakes on the archipelago. The effects of Hurricane Maria, in particular, were compounded by the woeful US federal response under Donald Trump. Both the hurricanes and the earthquakes resulted in schools being closed on top of a general trend of closures from the 1990s onwards, which had picked up pace from 2016 as part of a series of austerity measures under Puerto Rico’s then Governor Ricardo Rosselló and Secretary of Education Julia Keleher. In this chapter, Sánchez-Rivera and Tanna explores how the video draws attention to obscured colonial histories and imagines the future undoing of coloniality and capitalism through a queer/anti-racist alliance. This reading of the video as counter-archive draws on the work of critics who have centred issues of racialisation and dehumanisation in theorisations of and engagements with colonial archives and archival practices, and discusses whether the video unwittingly re-enacts racial hierarchies through ‘mestizaje logics’, despite its anti-colonial stance.

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