In March 2020, as campus life shuddered to a halt and v.1 scrambled to reconfigure in the midst of overwhelming disorder, one of us editors was gifted a copy of Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a series of lectures by Italo Calvino. It quickly became a primary quarantine reader, pored-over and quoted, dog-eared and marked-up.

Feeling the anxiety of a new era approaching with fifteen years left in the second millennium, Calvino centered each lecture around a “value” of literature that he felt should be maintained and celebrated: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity (the sixth lecture, on Consistency, was, ironically, never written). These memos served both to reappraise what was behind and to illuminate the path ahead, to analyze the past and offer a guide to the future. Calvino intended to perform these lectures in the fall of 1985, but he passed away, unexpectedly, that September.

A year after we first found Six Memos, two of Calvino’s values in particular still ring out to us. Lightness, as Calvino describes it, is a “reaction to the weight of living.” Lightness balances the heaviness, inertia, opacity of the world; it is the only thing that keeps the world from “turning to stone.” After all, he points out, it is Perseus’s spry use of wind, winged sandals, and his aversion to Medusa’s direct stare that allows him to conquer her. He reflects her gaze through a mirror—“His power derives from refusing to look directly while not denying the reality of the world of monsters in which he must live.” The second value we might readily recognize today is Multiplicity: the ambitious aim to engage with as many stories, images, and ideas as possible toward reconciling disparate worlds. Multiplicity means radical inclusivity, it means ceaseless exploration and research, it means to reach beyond the self and into the infinite matrix of other people. Calvino exalts the “encyclopedic epics” of James Joyce, Georges Perec, and Jorge Luis Borges to explain that “the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various ‘codes’ into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.”

The chaos of the new millennium has proved to be beyond what anyone—even Calvino—could have predicted. Six Memos doesn’t attempt to provide an antidote to chaos; instead, it offers a methodology with which to process, document, and understand. It presents a coping mechanism, a roadmap, asking that we treat language with reverence, care, and intention. That we believe in literature and invest in the power of association and simultaneity.

The notion of simultaneity is crucial for us to move forward. Impossibly, there is hope in the shadow of tragedy and vice-versa, there is complacency in the shadow of urgency and vice-versa, there is abnormality in the shadow of normalcy and vice-versa. An acclaimed art installation murders its viewers. A densely populated city appears empty. A failed attempt at pie presents a silver lining. An arbitrary hunk of metal becomes a standard unit of measurement. The shape of the universe emerges in the pursuits of fictional characters. Life is generated as kombucha ferments. We find ourselves through being other people. The future is accessed only through the grief and reflection.

Despite the challenges and restrictions of the past year, v.1 has sought to do for RISD’s literary scene what it has always sought to do: to archive the past, to understand the present, and to speculate on the future. Given the circumstances—physical dispersion, emotional overwhelm, intellectual burnout—we’ve attempted to implement Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity selectively, alternately, and/or simultaneously (like Calvino, no comment on Consistency). In the first months of the pandemic, we opted for an urgent, portable stream of publishing: a “pandemic publishing” issue online that was agile, instantaneous, and vivid in the face of unstoppable, invisible doom. In the fall, we convened readers, writers, and new students for a Zoom reading, and found equal space for both celebration and mourning in our Fall 2020 issue. Our Spring 2021 issue finds a new threshold of familiarity in the wake of these changes with a new online issue, and the anthology you’re holding in your hands.

The print edition documents the Multiplicity of these past 14 months holistically, moving not chronologically but atmospherically through the various themes and motifs of this year: our contentious relationship with normalcy, our personal and cultural archives, the push-and-pull of art institutions, the pursuit of togetherness. The anthology collects poems, images, essays, and fiction to weave together a quilt from the loose threads of the past three semesters. The result is a fabric that attests not just to the qualities of the individual strands, but also to the places where the tapestry as a whole might thin, fray, or rip. This selection, of about half the stories published online, represents the variances, glitches, contradictions, and simultaneities of RISD voices throughout this era. We arranged each piece intuitively, through association and rhythm, through their varying weights, speeds, contours, opacities, and singularities.

What we “used to” and what we’re “used to” have intermeshed; we are finding ourselves doing recognizable things in recognizable spaces for what feels like the first time ever. A year of Google Drive folders and Canvas modules made desperate the need for something grabable, shelvable, foldable, stainable, even disposable (you can’t use a PDF as a makeshift coaster). We are printing v.1 again, “just like before,” but this time, it exists in simultaneity with the ongoing digital archive, with the new forums and approaches, the new chronologies and coping mechanisms. This physical anthology serves to ground our readers and writers in the tangible reality we can look forward to facing again, together: something concrete that contains dog-ears, mark-ups, notes, and bookmarks. To hold the material in your hands is to feel the paper, its weight and its lightness, to have proof of before, now, and soon.

Asher White
Reilly Blum
Corinne Ang
Shelby Shaw
Sabo Kpade
(editors, v.1)

 
Defying the Shadow, on view at the RISD Museum until December 18, presents the notion of anti-portraiture as an act of resisting the white supremacy of the traditional gaze, as well as the need to be understood, categorized, or labelled. This curatorial concept is thoroughly laid out for visitors in the 14th issue of Manual, subtitled “Shadows.” The show, curated by Anita N. Bateman, Ph.D., Former Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, spans from the Fain Gallery on the 4th floor through the Prints, Drawings and Photographs rooms and brings together about 77 pieces, including a wall of polaroids, paintings, prints, and drawings. The works date from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

The work challenges the historical narrative of oppression, othering, and domination of Black bodies and explores the feeling of being constantly watched and under the threat of violence and persecution for simply existing in the world while Black. We are asked to consider the “defiant body” as a versatile form, malleable and adaptable to the perpetual challenges of authoritarianism in forcing Blackness to overcome the constant, unrelenting violence of living.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Lost Portrait of the 18th Marquess, 2018, a secretive portrait of a figure half hidden within the bushes, plays with the poetics of privacy. This life-size rendering fits into Odutola’s canon of sumptuous portraiture, exploring the figure absorbed and secured into plant material, betraying publicness, owning their narrative. A marquess is a noble ruler of a borderland. This Marquess rules the border of public and private; luxurious in its drama and use of shadow, it resists the visitor’s gaze, fading in plain sight.

On the far wall of the exhibition’s final room is The Means to an End … A Shadow Drama in Five Acts, 1995, by Kara Walker. This silhouette etching with aquatint is a discursive piece of massive proportions. Walker’s ability to materialize generational trauma is a potent reminder of the relentless everydayness of this master/slave, oppressor/victim power imbalance that remains and continues to persist in the present. Walker subverts the mode of Victorian portraiture to place Blackness back into the narrative, forcing the gaze to surrender.

Glenn Ligon’s Untitled, from the portfolio In the Year Three, 2003, incorporates writing into his photomicrograph of a cross-section of paint. The quotation “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation” posits that history does not follow a “wonderful arc” but rather a narrowing, hollow darkness that infinitely swallows. Ligon presents a collective portrait without apology here; there is liberation in casting more darkness on the shadow.

Kerry James Marshall too, in his etchings Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, both 2010, presents an unequivocal blackness, a subtle emergence from the shadow, subverting this portrayal of Black bodies as monstrosities into authentic, unflinching nude portraits, reclaiming the shadow as a refuge.

Returning to the light, there is unmistakable hardship and glory in Under the blood red sky, 2007,  by Faith Ringgold, a print from a larger series by the prominent civil rights and gender equality activist. Largely symbolizing Ringgold’s move from Harlem to Englewood, NJ, the text in the border recounts the journey of two runaway slaves migrating north through the Underground Railroad. But the whiteness of the home and the underlying blood red in everything in tandem with the words tell a story of resilience through generational trauma.

Lastly, it is crucial to mention the inclusion of both professional and found, vernacular photos in Defying the Shadow. In the 1850s, cartes-de-visites (Polaroid-sized calling cards) were in vogue and used by Sojourner Truth to curate and own her image as a person and an abolitionist. On each card was inscribed, “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” meaning she sells her likeness to support herself as a freedwoman. Her commissioning, styling, and selling of these portraits are the most radical declarations of resistance and self-ownership in the show, fervently presenting what defying the shadow really stands for. This stance is boosted by the works of Roy DeCarava, Carrie Mae Weems, James Van Der Zee, and Gordon Parks, Black photographers who confirmed their being and agency in the White world through the image and demanded a new form of looking. In contrast to these examples, a wall of found photos from 1920-1970 develops both the mundane everyday and the joyful moments of Black life. Removed from their contexts, each carries a rich personal value through various stages of discoloration.

Ultimately, the curation of this exhibition comes together as a significant and thoughtful meditation on viewership, ways of seeing, and resistance to definition. It also confronts the predominantly White visitors with an unwavering declaration of independence and ownership without straying from the lyrical movement between light and darkness. We are left with questions about Black erasure in the American museum, uncertain histories, and reparative futures.