1. Michael Jackson in a Borneo Village; or Autobricolage and Other Acts of Erasure.
- Subjects
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PACKAGING recycling , *HISTORICAL reenactments , *DECOLONIZATION , *CULTURAL property , *INSCRIPTIONS , *EXILE (Punishment) , *MEMOIRS , *VILLAGES - Abstract
Summary: This blended genre piece politicizes place through poems, narrative, and musical mash‐ups. It uses ethnography, memoir, and spoken‐word song, a creative technique I call autobricolage. Refusing conventions that create immediate access to meaning, this narrative allows me to present a world in motion and time as non‐linear. Sacred temporality disrupts ordinary instances of time and place and enables the erasure of colonial inscriptions. My returns to and reflections on Borneo life and Dusun kin decolonize and re‐voice a living history. As a metaphor for death, loss, and illness, Michael Jackson is included in my title to express the lure of popular culture in Borneo's villages. This inclusion shatters the norms constituted in the packaging of cultural heritage and shows how things have a life of their own beyond the West. Acts of collecting stories to reproduce ancestral memories (tangon di gulu gulu) express the fragility and familial in the communal. I am both pilgrim and exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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