What if young Asian men had fought in the Civil War? This question motivates Bruce Yonemoto's remarkable photographic series of portraits of young Asian men, styled in the pose and setting of US Civil War photos that once cast young white men into the patrician role of valued soldiers headed to the front.Footnote ¹ Both Union and Confederate soldiers posed for such portraits. Even as we know they fought on opposites sides of a brutal war between North and South, in these photographs the men – many mere boys – are all rendered as the same kind of man, standing tall on elaborately tiled floors, framed in part by neoclassical columns or a theatrical curtain, holding their musket just so, hand on a chair or a balustrade, foot forward, eyes toward the camera. The sepia seems to render more similarity than difference between the Blue and the Gray. The portraits present them as a particular kind of American man: we see the masculinity that unites them on either side of the Mason–Dixon line.

When Bruce Yonemoto creates re-enactments of such portraits, he doubles the already theatrical staging of these originals: theatrical in their setting, theatrical in their citation of other portraits of famous actors and famous men, theatrical in the way that they cast the men ‘as’ soldiers, ‘as’ brave young men with requisite costume and props. If the originals are already citational performances of a particular white masculinity, Yonemoto's photographs are re-enactments of such (re-)enactments. Entitled ‘North South East West’, the series does indeed interpose a series of ideological and historical contingencies associated with the ‘East’ into a primal scene of US North–South conflict. What if Asian men had fought in the Civil War? The dense geographic associations we have about the Civil War as the war that ended slavery are somehow unhinged, set slightly askew, by the presence of the young Asian man wearing the Blue and the Gray: these bodies in this place seem out of place, and the fissure that opens between our expectations and the image unleashes a series of questions. What if there were Asian men in the Civil War? Wait: were there Asian men in the Civil War? Where were Asian men, then, when those white men were pictured in the Civil War?

Fig. 1

Bruce Yonemoto, Untitled (NSEW 3), 2007. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY.

In the discussion that follows, I put Yonemoto in dialogue with two contemporary performance and visual artists from the Americas: Susana Torres, from Peru, and Liliana Angulo, from Colombia. Like Yonemoto, both experiment with how certain forms of re-enactment – or impersonation – function as valuable critical historiography across the Americas. Yonemoto, for one, uses re-enactment to question the place and role of Asian men in the Civil War, in the ‘union’ over which it was fought and which it was forged, and in the history of its documentation in photography and other media. In doing so, he raises important questions about the compass we use to measure ‘America’, revealing limits in the ideologically burdened ideas of East, West, North and South. Following this implication, I pursue a broad claim, too vast to be anything more than sketched here. Like that ideologically battered NSEW compass, studies of performance and culture ‘in the Americas’ or ‘Hemispheric performance studies’, of which my own work forms part, remain haunted by a geographic determinism that seems to justify its scope and range by geography alone. The ‘Alaska-to-Patagonia’ concept flattens the deep and textured relationships and practices that have bound so many lives in the Americas together (of course it flattens them literally, rendered everywhere in that S-shaped outline of the hemisphere). I want to suggest instead that the Americas – the idea of the ‘hemispheric’ – may be usefully engaged as a set of connected practices in deep time rather than as a continental mass in uniform space. To set askew easy assumptions about where and what America is, I suggest we ask when America is.

Fig. 2

Col. A.G. Faulke; A.N. Duffie. (Between 1860 and 1870, Library of Congress Civil War Glass Negative Collection.) Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Hemispheric deep time

What does it mean to think through or with a hemisphere? Do the contours of a massive continental formation truly suggest meaningful ways to account for performance, art or culture? In the US academy today it has become common to refer to the study of the ‘Americas’, pluralizing ‘America’ as a means to redress and reshape categorical practices and disciplinary boundaries that have rendered the formative and often politically repressive relation between the United States and its southern neighbours invisible: practices and boundaries which have made the ongoing conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples on the continent invisible and unacknowledged. The disciplinary conceptualizations of ‘America’ under which many of us operate at US universities are a legacy of the Cold War: ‘American studies’ was, initially, a government-supported project designed to document, theorize, and celebrate the ‘exceptionalist’ story of US democracy and freedom;Footnote ² ‘Latin American studies’ was developed, in part, in a Cold War cartography that mapped the world in a series of geopolitical units within the ideological struggle against communism. Latin America was studied as ‘Latin America’ because it made sense, from the United States, to imagine everything south of the border as a single geopolitical unit.Footnote ³ The many recent gestures to reconceptualize the Americas as an integrated plurality reflect our new political times as well: in a world governed by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994), the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR, 2004), the ‘interconnectedness’ of American nations is newly on the table. As George Lipsitz eloquently put it: ‘In our world, crossing borders and changing identities is the project of capital as well as the experience of labor. The question is not whether we will be transnational, but how? On whose terms?’Footnote ⁴ More than contest the limits of prior area-studies models, hemispheric American studies in the humanities has instead shifted its focus and frame to the new geographies of power, emerging most often as a strident critique of the neoliberal and neocolonial logic of such socioeconomic geopolitics.

In this same moment of post-Cold War socioeconomic restructuring, the field of performance studies began to retheorize social formations in the Americas, arguing for the relevance of transnational approaches to cultural production, particularly in relation to questions of race and nation. The foundational critical studies were Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996).Footnote ⁵ For Gilroy, the ‘black Atlantic’ was the necessary geographic paradigm for understanding African diasporic practice from the West Indies to contemporary Britain. Roach, in turn, proposed the ‘circum-Atlantic’ as a means to theorize the complex routes of social, cultural and economic circulation, exchange and substitution that gave shape to the colonial world and to its legacies today. Both outline a performance geography that follows the triangular vortex between Europe, Africa and America – what Roach names an ‘oceanic interculture’ – originally carved out by the transatlantic slave trade. These field-shifting studies challenged performance-studies scholars to reimagine the geographies that underwrite both the history and the present of performance in the Americas. Put differently, they challenged scholars to reimagine how performance has participated in the histories that produced colonial, neocolonial and neoliberal geographies in the first place.

Rising to this challenge, a hemispheric approach to the study of performance, then, illuminates the different tropes, genealogies and cultural forms that shape or are shaped by performance in the different cultures of imperialism in the Americas and in their contemporary legacies. The hemispheric focus delineates the shared historical experiences of North, South and Central America – conquest, native genocide, colonialism, slavery, independence wars, nation formation and histories of migration and deterritorialization – and illuminates the formative role of performance in these historical contexts.Footnote ⁶ When brought into dialogue with the critical geographies of the Atlantic, these hemispheric approaches to cultural formation in the Americas also make visible the competing tensions – moving on a north–south and east–west axis – of imperial settlement, anticolonial struggle and neocolonial domination that inform the histories of nation, community and identity in the Americas. An exemplary study informed by these different critiques is Shannon Steen's Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre (2010), which casts ‘America’ as the meaning-making space of crossing between two vast racialized and intercultural circuits – the Black Atlantic and the Asian Pacific. Rather than oppose the North–South orientation to an East–West, or oppose a continental system to an oceanic one, Steen suggests that social formations are articulated through a far more complex geometry across and through these geographies and their social imaginaries.Footnote ⁷

Hemispheric performance studies does not imagine that it is the first to link the Americas in a single critical frame, but instead the opposite: such an approach recognizes and engages the violent histories of hemispheric thinking that have shaped the grounds on which we now stand. The logic of manifest destiny and its manifestation in the Monroe Doctrine is easily the most powerful and least admirable avocation of a hemispheric way of thinking imaginable: America is for the Americans, so its logic went, where ‘America’ referred to the hemisphere, and ‘Americans’ referred to the United States. The ideological slippage between these two Americas – one that refers to the broadest collectivity and another that refers to a select ruling few – informs the many violent histories enacted in that document's name. Mark Rifkin asks how geographic conceptions of ‘American’ space have been mobilized to suture that difference between ‘Americans’ and those the US state has internalized (Indians throughout Indian removal, Mexicans after 1848) and comments, ‘The image of U.S. territorial coherence . . . mediated class, regional, federalist and diplomatic tensions by treating the supposedly incontestable obviousness of domestic space as a physical manifestation of the ideal of a national union constructed of, by, and for the people.’Footnote ⁸

We should also recall, however, that thinking hemispherically has never been the special provenance of the powerful nor of those in the North. In the very moment that manifest destiny was ideologically ascendant, the US abolitionist and author Martin Delany also looked South to find an alternate imaginary of social and racial solidarity in the hemisphere. Unlike US speculators surveying Cuba, Texas and northern Mexico for the expansion of the US slaveholding territories in the 1840s and 1850s, Delany cast his eyes south and saw vast untapped possibility for the radical refusal of white empire and its systems of racial domination (what Delany calls ‘the American system-politic’). ‘Where shall we go?’ asks Delany of black peoples in the United States in the early 1850s. His response was to advocate black emigration to Central and South America and the West Indies: black North Americans would find interracial solidarity with ‘a vast colored population’ – he estimated over 21 million – that far outnumbered white Europeans. Paul Gilroy enlisted Delany's novel, Blake, or the Huts of America (1859–62), whose black hero travels from the US South, across Cuba, to Africa and back, as he plans a slave insurrection, as an early and important articulation of the ‘black Atlantic’ as the geographical imaginary of black experience. Delany's writings lend themselves equally, if not more, to hemispheric imaginings: for Delany, moving south, rather than east (‘back’) to Africa, was his first suggested ‘political destiny of the colored race’, as he argued in an 1854 book of that title. Delany's radical conception of a black Latin America recalibrated coordinates of race, language and citizenship then the norm for ruling parties in both North and South America; he imagined Latin America as the site of self-determination and future hope for all coloured people: ‘blacks and colored people are the stars which must ever most conspicuously twinkle in the firmament of this division of the Western Hemisphere’. Like the later Martí, Delany imagined a new form of racial identity as the basis for the new structure of American belonging: the ‘colored race’ intentionally elides differences between indigenous and African Americans. To give that America a common language that could transcend the historical divisions between ‘colored’ peoples imposed by empire, Delany entreats all coloured persons to learn Spanish: ‘no foreign language will be of such import to colored people, in a very short time, as Spanish. Mexico, Central and South America, importune us to speak their language’.Footnote ⁹

One problem, then, with the term ‘hemispheric’ is that it is a staunchly spatial term, when the logic that lends it coherence as an organizing structure for our thinking is thoroughly and radically temporal: history made geography, and not the other way around. How can we avoid that snaking ‘Alaska-to-Patagonia’ cartographic image when we invoke the word ‘hemispheric’? We should note that in Delany's vision, what joins North and South America is affiliation and a curious form of anticolonial ‘destiny’; not manifest, but chosen, built from analysis, calculation and choices – to move south, to learn Spanish. There is nothing geographically essentialist in his view. Nor should there be in ours.

I propose that we explore an approach that understands the hemispheric as a set of connected practices in deep time as a way to attenuate the cartographic impulse. The term ‘deep time’ is borrowed from its usual life in the sciences of geology and archaeology, where it denotes a temporal measure that far exceeds the clocks of human history to open onto the so-called prehistorical, the pre-human. My interest in the term lies less in finding a window onto the pre-human than in naming an experience of time that exceeds the lineaments of European monochronic temporality. To think through deep time is to be alive to the heterogeneous character of time: alive to the fact that while for you ‘five hundred years ago’ may be beyond the pale of memory, for another it is a raw reality in whose snare we still live, alive to the fact that for many time ebbs and flows to a pace quite other than a Swiss clock. Wai-chee Dimock makes a similar argument in relation to the burning of the Iraqi national library in 2003 during the US invasion, which some Iraqis compared to the destruction of the same by Hülegü Khan when he sacked the city in 1258. What is the distance between 1258 and 2003? ‘For an Iraqi, the distance between 1258 and 2003 is nothing like the distance between these dates for an American. There is nothing empty about this stretch of time.’Footnote ¹⁰ As Dimock well argues, deep time thus acknowledges but thinks beyond the standardization of time that both Benedict Anderson and Anthony Giddens understand as the ‘mark of modernity, linked to the rise of the nation-state and the rule of the mechanical clock’.Footnote ¹¹

Temporality can be defined through other logics, and hence we have seasonal time, oceanic time, carnival time and more. Thinking through deep time allows us to take measure – a different measure – of the conflicting and overlapping temporalities of social, political and geological time. Consider Hurricane Katrina: anchored in the year 2005, the destruction that unfolded in the wake of the hurricane can be measured in oceanic time (one storm among hundreds of thousands), in the lifespan of a colonial city, in the social trajectory of slavery that produced the asymmetrical demographic of vulnerability and death in Ward 9, in the smaller political scale of the last administration's federal oversight of the locks that did not hold back the water. These heterogeneous temporal scales are interarticulated when catastrophe brings a halt and a crisis to all of them simultaneously. Deep time helps us differentiate all of those scales and learn their interrelation at the same time. Thus deep time is not necessarily about time long ago; it is time with multiple dimensions.

Deep time does not obviate social time or social action: the concept of deep time allows us to see sociality against the relief of other temporal scales. On one hand, respect for deep time allows us to acknowledge – again – that our shared lives here in ‘America’ began long before the idea of America was even a waking dream – long before the cartographies and calendars of Europe began their relentless charting and measuring the continents. A grasp of deep time should slow that easy slip-slide between a time that is named ‘precolonial’ and one that is ‘prehistorical’; a slip that assumes no meaningful register of time can be imagined outside a rationalized European temporal logic. Deep time is an optic that might, similarly, allow us to take seriously the existence of multiple temporalities in our midst, an argument anthropologists and authors, from Nestor Garcia Canclini to Eduard Glissant, have long argued is a signature of Latin American and Caribbean modernities.Footnote ¹²

Most relevant for students of theatre and performance, deep time offers us a register in which to grasp the temporal work of artistic endeavours that draw analytical or affective relations between multiple temporal coordinates. Deep time allows us to think about an idea of extension that is not spatial, but temporal; a means to think about ‘occupation’ – in every sense of the word – that is less about territory and more about performance. Critical practices of impersonation are especially generative in this regard. Impersonation, as I have argued elsewhere, names an act of occupation – an act through which one takes possession literally or figuratively of the site of another.Footnote ¹³ While impersonation is at the very heart of any theatrical practice, the social impersonation explored by these artists leads them to draw, traverse or complicate lines of differential social power that produce such categories as race, gender and ethnicity in the first place. Their ‘occupation’ of distinctly racialized roles, I will argue, allows us to critically engage the ideologies of race that underwrote, and continue to underwrite, the colonial geographies of America.

We can consider the work of Peruvian visual and performance artist Susana Torres, who, like Yonemoto, uses impersonation and re-enactment to wrench open questions about race and national formation. Torres poses her own body and that of others against the backdrop of a precolonial past, simultaneously evoking its radical loss and compromised presence in our contemporary moment. ‘Las trenzas’ (The Braids, 2005) is part of a longer series in which Torres cast her own face into a range of painted or embodied contexts related to the commercial production of Inca heritage for national and international consumption. ‘Las trenzas’ casts Torres (at centre) into an advertisement for Inka Kola, Peru's long-time favourite soft drink. Reproducing the image and logic of advertising, Torres draws on a staple of pop art, and here she has merged two different advertising references: that of Inka Kola (the blue lettering, Andean textile frame, and yellow backdrop of the Kola itself), and that of Coca Cola (in the lettering of the brand name and the substitution of ‘Cola’ for the usual ‘Kola’.) Of course Peru long ago copied and rivalled the Coca Cola brand by producing its ‘own’ cola (in 1934), whose corporate and national brand hinges only on its ‘Inca’ namesake. Inka Kola is not particularly ‘Peruvian’ at all, but is instead a Peruvian version of a global US commodity.Footnote ¹⁴ For Torres, then, the pop art ‘merger’ between rival c/kolas sets the stage to consider the commodification of race/ethnicity and gender in the production of ‘Peru’ and its ‘national’ products.

Fig. 3

Susana Torres, ‘Las trenzas’ (The Braids), 2005. Reprinted courtesy of the artist.

The three women in the image satirically render Peru's use and abuse of its indigenous past. The women on either side represent the alleged Incas in this scenario. Their presence, however, is akin to the presence of Tahitian women in Gauguin's early modernist paintings: ‘primitive’ bodies on which modernity can stake its dreams of progress. Torres, cast as a white 1940s starlet at centre, takes the place of the image of the Inca in the original logo: instead of a monolithic ‘Inka’ headstone, Torres is styled as an Yma Sumac lookalike – that Peruvian ‘songbird’ who, in the 1950s and 1960s, was the iconic Hollywood face of the Inca princess in such torrid classics as the 1954 Secret of the Inca. When Torres/Sumac is paired with the Incas, we also see a gendered rendering of the deep myth of mestizaje, that projection of thorough racial hybridity on which so many Latin American nations, Peru included, have founded their national identity and eclipsed indigenous claims to territory, rights or autonomy. The women are bound together by their braids that trace the pattern of the Andean textile design. What has this mixing, this braiding of white and Indian peoples, produced? Inca-Cola, literally and figuratively conjuring an idea of the Inca packaged as a drinkable commodity.

In this image, Torres orchestrates a series of historical referents to create a reflective moment within hemispheric deep time. In this single pop image, Torres offers a gendered rendering of conquest, as the ‘native’ women stare at their travestied replica in Sumac/Torres; she captures the presence of natives and their perpetual misrecognition in colonial encounters, linking the shared fate of indigenous peoples from Tahiti to the Andes; she evokes the shared project of colonialism and modernity, as an entire history of conquest is casually enlisted as the logo for a product of mass consumption; and she further evokes a new form of economic colonialism, where the global marketplace will confer value, meaning and title to the products of a colonial past. The image uses citation, impersonation and re-enactment to put these vast processes and temporalities into a single frame, not so that the whole process can be grasped or named at once, but to present them as a sort of prism that might refract the present through these different angles.

In a related work, Torres literally casts herself in the clay image of the indigenous past, creating her own series of the well-known ceramic ritual jugs (huacas) associated with the Moche period (AD 50–800). Instead of moulding the sharp geometric features, polished red faces and lavish adornment of the Moche ‘portrait jugs’, Torres offers her own self-portrait in the same form. The effect is unsettling: so used to seeing abstracted ‘indigenous’ faces on the jugs that populate the shelves of every major anthropology museum in the Andes, or their tourist reproductions across shelves of tourist shops from Machu Picchu to Nazca, the features of a white woman are out of place and especially out of time. In one installation image (Fig. 4), Torres presents her own face next to that of her portrait on a jug, along with a jug of Yma Sumac, and one of her young daughter. These are impossible objects, whose anachronism opens a fold in the temporal order that both separates and links AD 800 and the present.

Fig. 4

Susana Torres, from the series of autoretratos-huacas (self portraits-huacas), 2007. Left to right: Yma Sumac, Susana Torres, child, Susana Torres. Reprinted courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 5

Liliana Angulo, Series Pelucas porteadores (Porter/Portable Wigs) from the larger series Un negro es un negro (A Black Is a Black), 1997–2000. Reprinted courtesy of the artist.

What happens when a white woman translates her face into this form? Can the form tell us about her and her (racial) meaning? What might it tell us, in turn, about appropriations of indigenous forms by white performers – whether Yma Sumac or Susana Torres herself? Do Yma Sumac or Susana Torres also commodify themselves, reproducing themselves as variants on ‘Andean’ or ‘Peruvian’ identity? Who are the audiences for such consumption, in Peru and far beyond, and what relation do they have to the consumption of a Moche past? How is ‘Peruvianness’ made or reproduced? Torres offers an image of her own child, perhaps suggesting her daughter's continued interpellation in the racial and gendered logic of national self-making. What is the ‘face’ of Peru? Whose face should be on which side of the museum looking glass?

We know that pop art of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Britain often explored serial repetition as a rejection of the modernist investment in the production of original works of art, and even to celebrate the loss of what Walter Benjamin theorized as the ‘aura’ of the image through its mechanical reproduction. We need think only of the iconic Warhol images of Marilyn Monroe or Mao as prime examples. For metropolitan centres, pop art confirmed the entry into a definitive ‘post-auratic’ moment. Torres, however, engages that post-auratic moment from the periphery; the mass production in question is precisely the opportunistic invention or use and commodification of indigenous heritage for elite consumption both in Peru and in a global tourist market. The serial reproduction of Marilyn Monroe or images of indigenous women are simply not the same: yes, both images are evacuated of particularity and unique meaning to function as icons (as ‘star’ or as ‘typical Andean’); but unlike Marilyn, the serial reproduction of the Andean woman is most often used to reinvest that same image and ‘type’ with supposed national authenticity and attendant ideas of racial or ethnic purity. Torres crosses impersonation with a pop art strategy to illuminate the very logic of colonial serialization to begin with, not to deplete representations of the Inca of ‘auratic’ meaning, nor to claim an alternate authenticity in its place, but precisely to illuminate the vexed line between aura and authenticity in the ongoing colonial production of the national, ethnic and racial in the global periphery.

For Colombian multimedia artist Liliana Angulo, strategic impersonations illustrate the different logics of racial containment and connection within the legacies of New World slavery.Footnote ¹⁵ Angulo's series Pelucas porteadoras involved casting persons of color – typically afrocolombians – into/under massive wigs made of spun steel wool, each connected to several others by the one thick metal strand. The resulting images meditate the politics of hair that, in part, connect black peoples across both space and time. The proposition is wry, almost funny: the length and weight of this hair is a bountiful form of afrodescendent connection through generations and through history, a curious version of the black Afro, with attendant connotations of black beauty and black pride. On the other hand, the steel strands that connect one black person after another suggest chains – a visual invocation of the chains of chattel slavery that undergird the African diaspora everywhere in the Americas. Their name ‘pelucas porteadoras’ means something like a wig of/for ‘porters’, where ‘porter’ would connote a racially marked labor position, the servant who carries luggage and bags for the white elite. The wig is ‘for’ such downtrodden porters; the wig is also the figurative baggage that black people continue to carry today.

In her Mambo negrita series (2006), Angulo aggressively reoccupies icons of a blackness past to illustrate their weight on and in the present. This series reworks the image of the bandana-clad mammy inherited from the Cuban blackface teatro bufo, US blackface minstrelsy, Hollywood film and the racialized caricatures of black domestic labourers in Colombian popular memory. Exploring a range of sentiments from eroticism to rage, the series offers the negrita in a range of poses and with different props that each mark a degree of distance from the stereotypical norm (see Fig. 6). We know, for example, that the negrita is routinely sexualized: but do we expect her to take the pose of a (usually white) pin-up girl, or a demure Marilyn Monroe blowing kisses? We may find nothing surprising in the presence of everyday domestic objects – a plunger, a frying pan, a cooking knife (see Fig. 7) – but we are less accustomed to see them used as weapons in a gleeful or angry pose of threat.

Fig. 6

Liliana Angulo, Mambo negrita series: ‘Mambo azucar’ (Mambo Sugar); ‘Mambo tropicana’, ‘Mambo chisme’ (Mambo Gossip), 2006. Reprinted courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 7

Series Mambo negrita: ‘Mambo chupa’ (Mambo Plunger); ‘Mambo sartén’ (Mambo Frying Pan), ‘Mambo navaja’ (Mambo Knife), 2006. Reprinted courtesy of the artist.

Like both Yonemoto and Torres, Angulo explores the series as a mode of social production, and plays with both anachronism and anomaly within the series. For Yonemoto the Civil War portrait is a particular machine for rendering diverse bodies similarly masculine and patriotic. The apparent anachronism of an Asian face within the series reveals the deep logic of serial racialization that the Civil War portraits help to naturalize. Similarly, when Torres casts her own white face in the place of the already-appropriated native, whether in the Inka Kola logo or on a huaca, she too makes visible the patterned neocolonial production of the ‘native’. Angulo, in turn, casts black women (including herself, with the frying pan) into the scene of a highly codified racial type, of the mammy/negrita. Like Torres, Angulo explores the underlying commodifying logic that organizes this type. As in the United States, in Latin America in general and the Caribbean in particular one finds images of kitchen-bound black ‘domestics’ as smiling logos gracing cans of sugar, bars of chocolate and a host of other ‘domestic’ products for cooking or cleaning. The blackface on black skin underscores the ways in which such commodified blackness is endlessly ‘put on’, in every sense of the phrase: projected by the eyes of others; made up, to satisfy such viewing pleasures; literally laid onto the skin of real bodies. The different poses seem to play in and against the limits of the blackface role, yet Angulo uses this limiting scene to explore a kind of vengeful fantasy of what black women might do to that role.

In Negro Utópico (Utopian Black, 2000), Angulo presents herself as the ultimate domestic worker, so fully at home in the vinyl-covered kitchen that her clothes – her entire body – are almost indistinguishable from its walls. Background and foreground oscillate, while she explores the many joys of the kitchen: dancing with a broom, savouring juice (Fig. 8). This scene does not cite an obvious racialized image, but rather offers us a conglomerate of images of race and domesticity, a palimpsest of household kitsch, decor and appliances that trap her, like a fly on sweet sticky paper, in the ambivalent bliss of the kitchen. The image aggressively conjures the politics of blackness in that space: the politics of hair via her outrageously large steel-wool wig; the politics of domestic labour both in her consignment to the kitchen (because she ‘wears’ the kitchen, it will travel with her even when she leaves the room) and in her apparent pleasure at not working (is she resisting labour? Is this a fantasy of freedom from the drudgery of the kitchen?); and the politics of black entertainment, as she poses (right) in a show-stopping finale à la Al Jolson. Whose ‘utopia’ is figured here? The one in which she cooks, cleans, dances and apparently loves every minute of it? Or the one in which she refuses to cook or clean, dances and eats instead, and keeps her knife nearby as a precaution?

Fig. 8

Liliana Angulo, Series Negro Utopico (Utopian Black), 2000. Reprinted courtesy of the artist.

If we return to Bruce Yonemoto's fabricated Civil War photographs, we can see similarities in these different works. All three cast bodies into scenes where, in theory, they do not quite belong: Asian Civil War soldiers, white female huacas, negritas in multiplying racial drag. They also open a critical relation with the past. In Yonemoto's images, for example, the Asian men occupy the space of the white men; and in their pose, open a kind of portal of deep time, where a line between contemporary queer Asian youth culture in Los Angeles might have some relation to the culture and the stance of the soldier, fighting for or against the Union and about the cause of slavery. We are called upon to imagine a relation that is temporal without being historical; that is about history (its movements, its claims, its absences) without being reducible to it – it opens a temporal dimension in deep time.

That temporal relation is, for me, absolutely hemispheric: to draw that connection one must trace the full circumference of forced migration and hardship across two vast oceanic economies – the Pacific, the Atlantic – that brought Africans and Asians to the Americas, and the complex histories of racialization in the Americas, then and now, that have continually alienated black and Asian bodies from full occupation of citizenship. Entering this social terrain through a temporal register not only reveals shared histories in the hemisphere, but, like Delaney's non-essentialist map of the racial future, may also suggest alternate hemispheric maps. Rather than imagine any simple compass with coordinates as simple as NSEW, we may instead begin to see the range of interconnected practices, often shared practices of struggle, across a neocolonial landscape.