He taught me to respect tools, and to always, when taking something apart, have a container for the little pieces so I could find them when I needed to put the thing back together. He had tool boxes, and voltmeters, and oscilloscopes. My father lost seven jobs for his politics during the McCarthy era, but we never went hungry because Dad could fix things and people would pay for repairs. My mother grew up on a sugar plantation where anything bought came at a high price from the company store, and therefore, almost nothing was bought. I heard laughing stories about the pages of the Sears catalog used as toilet paper, and the fabric from old rice bags turned into underwear. All my life, I have known people who use their hands, who use tools to grow food, to make, to fix, to transform discards into useful things. I am the daughter and granddaughter of makers. As a feminist, therefore, I do not discount my own experience. Feminists start with the experience of women in order to ground theory in the lived reality of a group whose perspective and insight is cordoned off and called irrelevant by the gatekeepers of received wisdom. The Personal is the PoliticalĪ basic tenet of feminism, “the personal is the political,” is the first part of the “why”. I will use the rest of my time to answer the “why” and to suggest that idiosyncratic utopian gestures are relevant to constitutional theory, law, and justice. There are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to the Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra:Īctually, there is probably a third group of negative, doubting haters, but we will not address them in this lecture. Mesdames et Messieurs, may I present the Next Dada Utopian Visioning Peace Orchestra and Manifesto of Radical Intersubjective Collectivity and Imagined Possibility. The filmmaker, Chris Kahunahana, is an Indigenous Hawaiian who is making his first feature film. This lecture includes the first showing of this video, the world premiere, right here at McGill. “gave complaint.” “It is hard,” the instruments seemed to say, “but we will do it, we will transcend our declared status and send beauty into the world.”Ī young filmmaker volunteered to make a short video of the performance and the manifesto reading that went along with it. A poet in the audience penned a poem about the experience, valorizing the struggling instruments that she said I recruited Professor Charles Lawrence, a critical race theorist, to conduct our public performance. Īlong the way I met people who were not afraid of odd, creative endeavors and I invited them to join the orchestra as musicians. The goal was to transform so-called post-consumer waste into instruments that could play Bach. I made an orchestra out of objects from the waste stream: household items relegated to the trash bin, pieces of buildings left in the junk yard, scraps of wood and metal, a broken guitar, a sewing machine, glass lamp shades, and a library card file drawer. With a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum.Įndeavoring to be developed historically. Someone is trying to make music somewhere,

Dada next train out of mymind