Claudia Marion Stemberger

Art Historian | Curating • Writing • Teaching | Studies women artists in South Africa | She/her

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“One must ask: what were Kant’s sources of information on non-European peoples and cultures? As a philosopher notorious for his provincialism, how did Kant manage to accumulate so much ‘knowledge’ of Africa, Asia, and the Americas?”

—Emmanuel Ch. Eze [The Color of Reason, 1997]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“May the subjugation of man by man – that is to say of me by another – cease.”

—Frantz Fanon [Black Skin, White Masks, 1952]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond.”

—Audre Lorde [Eye to Eye, 1984]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Although it is well understood that African artisanship of all kinds underwent important redefinition ... as a result of the colonial experience, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the actual process.”
—Sidney L. Kasfir [African Art and the Colonial Encounter, 2007]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Modernity and modernism were always already syncretic in practice, while in discourse they have remained normatively Eurocentric until quite recently.”

—Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips [Inside Modernity, 2018]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Why has it seemed obvious until recently that non-Western objects should be preserved in European museums, even when this means that no fine specimens are visible in their country of origin?”

—James Clifford [The Predicament of Culture, 1988]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Performance analysis allows us to argue that we strategically perform, that [...] we have agency and choose to perform even when we know viewers use our performance to reconsolidate stereotypes about us.”

—Stephanie Nohelani Teves [Indigeneity and Performance, 2021]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Political independence did not automatically entail a process of cultural decolonization.”

—Sarah Van Beurden [Culture, Artifacts, and Independent Africa, 2018]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“We are, in the truest sense possible, creators or co-creators with the higher powers, and what we do has immediate importance for the rest of the universe.”

—Vine Deloria Jr. [If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True, 1999]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“There is a need to expand art criticism and visual theory to include a discourse read across Indigeneity, colonization, and sovereignty.”

—Jolene Rickard [Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors, 2011]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“What if in conceiving of a trans-Indigeneity rather than transnationalism as our model we centered our goals on relationships to land and water?”

—Mishuana Goeman [Indigenous Feminisms Roundtable, 2015]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“What is it about a work of art by a Native artist that makes it Native? Iconography, subject matter, or aesthetic sensibility? Is it a relationship to land or ties to traditional art forms?”

—Nancy Marie Mithlo [No Word for Art in Our Language?, 2012]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“It is preferable to consider style in media in terms of historical contacts, social setting and agents’ purposes and not according to a uniform assumption of technical constraints.”

—Monni Adams [African Visual Arts from an Art Historical Perspective, 1989]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Does focus on indigenous culture play into dichotomous mainstream/indigenous thought paradigms which, while opening some doors, actually serve to sustain ourselves as ‘other’?”

—Gcinikhaya Dase & Siziwe Sotewu [Two Xhosa-Speaking Ceramic Artists, 2007]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“The blackout exhausts the position of characterological standpoint, exhausts the epidermal episteme of racialized spectatorship.”

—Katherine C. M. Adams [From Tragic Mulatto to Cinematic Blackout, 2023]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

@abstratfusion Good luck with your paper! https://t.co/VliYpVepyN

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Diasporic intimacy can be approached only through indirection and intimation, through stories and secrets.”

—Svetlana Boym [Immigrant Arts, Diasporic Intimacy, and Alternative Solidarity, 2011]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“We as women really need to hear from one another about how we communicate feminist thinking to men.”

—bell hooks [Talking Back, 2015]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“Whatever our obligations are to others (and theirs to us) they often have the right to go their own way.”

—Kwame Anthony Appiah [Ethics in a World of Strangers, 2006]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“What is involved in modes of telling? What are the sensory and affective responses to the material production of research? What are the forms of violence committed in narrating the stories of ‘absent’ others?”

—Nkule Mabaso [Drinking from Our Own Wells, 2019]

[Claudia Marion Stemberger @ARTANDTHEORY]

“For those of us associated with academia, we remain deeply, even if unconsciously, culpable because of the depth of the unrecognized prejudices we have imbibed and continue to privilege.”

—Enver Motala [We Too Are Culpable, 2023]