Portrait of an Anti-Fascist Gravedigger

For my new piece on The Ostracon, “Portrait of an Anti-Fascist Gravedigger,” I profile Jack Zipes, perhaps the world’s leading expert on folk and fairytales and a retired German professor here in Minneapolis. We discuss the role of storytelling in social change, his response as a Jewish man to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, and his efforts to republish out-of-print antifascist children’s stories in the era of Trump:

“I am a gravedigger,” writes Jack Zipes in the preface to the book Yussuf the Ostrich. “I do not dig graves to bury the dead. I dig up graves to bring the dead back to life.” In the last portion of his own life, the 84-year-old folklorist and retired German professor is doing what he’s always done—studying, translating, adapting, and publishing folk tales from decades and centuries past, but with a new focus. Through Little Mole & Honey Bear, the imprint he founded in 2018, he’s unearthing anti-fascist and pacifist children’s books that have fallen out of circulation and republishing them for readers today. “I feel in my last days, in my old age, I’m doing what I can. In everything that I do, I want to resist what’s going on,” he recently told me. “I’m unburying these books before I’m buried.”

An illustration from Emery Kelen’s 1943 book Yussuf the Ostrich.

A Closer Look at Art’s Peripheries: Creative Capital Interview on The Ostracon

“One idea Nicole and I talked about is dispelling the idea of the ‘hero-industrial complex.’ So, much of what we’re interested in is looking not at individual artists but at the people who inspire and inform them or the folks who don’t necessarily get acknowledged for thinking that can (or, if it’s not, should) inform artmaking today.”

Special thanks to Shiv Kotecha, Manager of Grants and Services at The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, for this new conversation on The Ostracon, the arts-writing site I cofounded with Nicole Caruth thanks to a Creative Capital/Warhol Arts Writers Grant. Read The Ostracon.

New on The Ostracon: From NOLA to Minneapolis, a movement to revitalize Indigenous names grows

“If someone comes into my house and tries to rename my cat, that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m going to call the cat. This is not theirs to do. And that’s how I feel about Bulbancha.”

—Jeffery Darensbourg

For several years, Jeffery Darensbourg and the artist Ozone504 have been engaging in what they call “one-word activism,” most notably around the Choctaw name for what today is called New Orleans. The area has been called “Bulbancha,” or the place of many tongues, for hundreds of years prior to the founding of the city in 1718, and Darensbourg argues it’s a better, more descriptive, and more inclusive name for New Orleans. In my new essay for The Ostracon, I link the story of Darensbourg, a writer, researcher, and enrolled member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation, with other figures and movements for Indigenous rights, from Dakota activist Kate Beane’s successful efforts to rename Minneapolis’s largest lake to botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings to the movement to remove racist statues and change racist sports team names.

The cover of the zine Darensbourg and Ozone504 created as a counter-narrative to the 2018 tricentennial of New Orleans.

Bulbancha is somewhat unique among Indigenous place names as it doesn’t describe a sensory experience or physical feature of land but refers to human interaction—the coming together of people and languages through the superhighway of wetlands long used for cultural and commercial exchange. And that legacy is more befitting New Orleans than a name derived from a French duke who never set foot in the city.

Alexandre de Batz’s 1735 painting Desseins de Sauvages de Plusieurs Nations includes mention of Bulbancha (Balbancha) on the bottom edge.

Says Darensbourg:

When I say ‘Bulbancha is still a place,’ I’m not saying everybody else go home. People here say, ‘No matter how weird you are, wherever you live, you could move here and you’re probably not that weird here.’ Obviously, the land that was Bulbancha is still a piece of land. But we’re also talking about those fundamental interactions between people, that diversity, the values of those people, the way that they would all come together and form this sort of place of interaction, place of cultural exchange. That is still a place, and Bulbancha means that place better than any European word.

READ: Bulbancha Forever: From NOLA to Minneapolis, a movement to revitalize Indigenous names grows

New on The Ostracon: What to do with a broken democracy?

My new piece at The Ostracon, the arts writing site Nicole Caruth and I created, offers a pre-election parsing of the site’s name while presenting some principles from ancient Athenian democracy that might merit revisiting in the era of Donald Trump: ostracism (“the ultimate in accountability,” according to John McKesson Camp, the director of excavations at the Athens Agora), dokimasia (“an examination to check the qualifications of an individual before entering office”) and euthynai (“a formal rendering of accounts at the end of a term of office).

The piece looks at voting using ostraka, or shards of pottery with the name of people selected for ostracism on them, when deciding who to send into exile for 10 years due to tyrannical leanings. FSU Classics professor Jim Sickinger explained the nuances:

Those who were ostracized, or sent into exile by ostracism, weren’t always government officials, Sickinger adds, although they often were. “What does seem to be the case is that most individuals who were ostracized were deemed to be ‘too big for their britches’ (my phrase) and to display anti-democratic (or aristocratic) traits, [but] some ostraka actually refer to the sexual practices of their candidates. Others accuse candidates of crimes (like bribery) and possibly treason. There was no precise definition of what made someone susceptible to ostracism, so it really boiled down to strong public sentiment against an individual.”

The images on this one, taken from documentation on the website of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, were designed by Ian Babineau.

The Ostracon: In Minneapolis’s Third Precinct, a restauranteur puts justice at the heart of rebuilding plans

For The Ostracon—the writing platform I started with Nicole J. Caruth, thanks to an arts writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts—I recently profiled Ruhel Islam, the charismatic owner of Gandhi Mahal, a beloved Minneapolis restaurant that was destroyed in the uprising following the murder of George Floyd by local police. Upon hearing news his business had burned to the ground, Islam’s words, overheard by his daughter and posted on Facebook, went viral—“Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served: put those officers in jail.”—sparking more than 33,000 shares, 40,000 reactions, and 3,100 comments, expressing love, thanks, and pledges of support and drawing the attention of media outlets worldwide, from the New York Times, CNN, and the Boston Globe to London’s Daily Mail, The Times of India, and the Dhaka Tribune.

A month later, after the news frenzy had died down, I met with Islam to discuss what’s next for his restaurant and his mission to “bring peace through pleasing the palate.” His dream for the design of his new building: “addressing every single issue we have in our life. One of the main goals I want to achieve is a fully fed community. And everyone means every part of our community: people, plants, trees, bugs, birds, animals.” He aims to incorporate all the elements he did in his old restaurant—from solar panels, an on-site bee colony, and basement aquaponics garden to hiring ex-offenders as staff and sourcing produce from a network of backyard gardens in the neighborhood—while adding new features, including intercultural housing, room for raising chickens and goats on the premises, and a LEED certification.

Ruhel Islam at Bullthistle Gardens, one of the backyard farms that sources produce for his restaurant. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

As David Gray, a friend of Islam’s and an urban farmer who sells produce to Gandhi Mahal, tells me, Islam is driven by his Bangladeshi culture and his Muslim faith, not to mention his memories of home.

“He envisions Bangladesh,” he says. “He wants a village. He wants a true, sustainable way of living. If you could walk to Uptown and there were fruit trees you could pick from, vegetables growing everywhere, raised boxes, people growing things on the rooftops, just a complete free-for-all based around food—that’s what he sees.”

To support to the rebuilding of Gandhi Mahal or the community of Lake Street businesses impacted by the unrest over George Floyd’s killing, check out the Gandhi Mahal GoFundMe site and WeLoveLakeStreet.

READ: In Minneapolis’s Third Precinct, a restauranteur puts justice at the heart of rebuilding plans

A mural from a boarded-up business near the site where Gandhi Mahal once stood. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

Launching Soon: The Ostracon

Early next month, Nicole J. Caruth and I will be launching The Ostracon, a new art blog funded through an arts writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In the meantime, please visit our splash page and click the survey link to share ideas on people and issues on art’s periphery and beyond that we should know about. (Thanks to Jasio Stefanski for bringing his design and web development vision to the project!)