Nalini Malani’s Medea Project: Gender and Nationhood in Postcolonial India
In 1996, renowned contemporary Indian artist Nalini Malani embarked on what would become a decades-long project exploring the Greek myth of Medea as an embodiment of postcolonialism. Considering Medea’s historical interpretations as a mistreated wife and a villainous mother, this thesis examines how Malani transforms Medea into a metaphor of resistance to British colonialism and anticolonial nationalism in post-Partition India. Against the backdrop of the 1947 Partition and subsequent political events relating nationhood with the female body, Malani negotiates Medea as an emancipatory figure who shifts essentialized notions of womanhood into more complex narratives of violence, subjectivity, and liberation.
My Art History honors paper was published by Macalester College in May 2020. Beginning in June 2018, this project was developed with the support of Macalester’s Art History Department and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.
But First, Our Bodies: Trauma-Informed resistance to the criminalization of students of color
The School to Prison Pipeline (SPP) describes the disturbing process in which primarily low-income students of color are pushed out of schools through exclusionary discipline policies and implicated into the criminal justice system. While valuable in exploring the intersecting state structures criminalizing communities of color, the SPP often fails to encompass forms of violence beyond educational and penitentiary structures, including sexual abuse, domestic violence, sex trafficking, and ill-supervised child welfare programs. Within these systems of abuse, students of color are more likely to experience racialized and intersectional trauma than their white counterparts, and their reactions to trauma within the classroom are often misinterpreted as behavioral problems in need of punitive discipline. In order to combat this criminalization of trauma, this initiative aims to implement trauma-informed pedagogy and policy into educational spaces, ultimately contributing to an institutional shift away from exclusionary discipline and towards practices grounded in compassion, joy, and love.
My Educational Studies Capstone project was developed with the support of Macalester’s Educational Studies Department.