I have always recommended the Shades of Noir website to my students but, to be honest, I have never used it directly as a teaching resource. Browsing the site, I realise that there are a wide range of articles, journals, bibliographies, interviews etc. to draw upon. I read an interview with Neil Rumming on the place of religion in fine art practice, noted multiple views on the notion whiteness (which chimed with Roxy Minter and Paul Goodwin’s CCW ‘Persectives’ talk in March) and looked through the Terms of Reference journal ‘Belonging: Navigating Artificial Borders’, all of which will be of specific interest to individual students on the MA Painting course at Camberwell.
I was drawn to the Terms of Reference journal: ‘Ethics: Preserving Voices Vulnerable to Erasure’ by the image on the front cover by Charmaine Watkiss, graduate of the MA Drawing course at Wimbledon College of Arts, whom I knew from my time running the MA Painting course there. Within the journal, there were more artworks by Charmaine that explored the often hidden or overlooked histories of people of African descent in the UK. Elsewhere, there was also an article by Dr Michael McMillan, associate lecturer in cultural and historical studies at LCF whom I had seen give a talk at Wimbledon a few years ago. His research explores the material culture of migrant aesthetics in the home, Black diasporic food cultural practices and sound system culture in the UK.
This journal raises important questions about archives and collections – the stories they tell and who is excluded. In the introduction, Jessica Crilly cites Stuart Hall’s observations on the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project that used archival research to interrogate the national British story that tends to focus on the act of abolition rather than on the slave trade itself. At a time when national histories are being contested as never before, these articles can help to shape debates within my course’s seminars and reading groups.
The fact that the contributors to this publication include MA students, PhD researchers, lecturers, designers and artists is important as it creates the sense of shared endeavor by researchers and creatives at different stages of their careers, which encourages students to feel that they can contribute too, that their voices and opinions will be taken seriously.
I regularly integrate the research of individual students into the course curriculum through student-led seminars, whose subjects are suggested by the students themselves. Earlier this year, one of the MA Fine Art Painting students at Camberwell – Augustus Nweke – ran a seminar on the museum collection and colonial violence. This was prompted by a critique that Gus wrote in response to a short promotional film for Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise from 1956 that I showed as an introduction to a talk that I gave at the beginning of the spring term. He compared the film’s opening line: we leave the last outpost of civilization and push off into the upper reaches of the Amazon with Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and his description of travelling up the river Congo as travelling back to the earliest beginning of the world. Gus extended his original references for the seminar from ‘Heart of Darkness’ itself and Chinua Achebe’s ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’sHeart of Darkness’ to include a podcast interview with Ariella Azoulay regarding her book ‘Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism’ (2019) which shaped the ensuing discussion around the colonial histories of collections and archives.
I can now see that the Shades of Noir website, and the ‘Ethics: Preserving Voices Vulnerable to Erasure’ journal in particular would have added much to this discussion. At the end of the journal is a bibliography and further reading, an invaluable resource and one that, in retrospect, Gus and I would have used to supplement the contexts and references that were used directly in the seminar. This, of course, is just one example, but it demonstrates that the Shades of Noir website can be an invaluable resource and one that I will be using in the future.