Holding Our Sights: A Conversation with Professor Leniqueca Welcome
By Chinonye Alma Otuonye (CUNY)
We are sitting in front of our computer screens for a Zoom interview, and Professor Welcome’s background is filled with an array of cameras. The camera has become a vehicle in which her relationship to anthropology, ethnography, and Black life continues to change, seeks to disrupt, and acts as a form of relation. Molded by the works of Black feminists, Professor Welcome recounted her relationship to thinking with a multimodal lens as simply engaging in a way of being that felt “like a natural way of working for many Black feminist scholars.” Multimodality was less a question of thinking anthropology differently and more a question of being in tune with what it means to be a Black feminist scholar.
Through collaging, she confronts the complexity of Black urban life and the ways “people are enacting freedoms for themselves” despite and because of the ways in which processes of violence haunt. But breaking down the binary between researcher and interlocutor, she makes clear that this haunting is never simply that which is studied but always must be contended with in our own lives. Collaging becomes not simply a mode of thinking about the world but also a release: a way of making sense of the feelings that arose during fieldwork and a way to think of herself in intimate relation to her interlocutors in the world.
Her vulnerability in sharing her own process was a reminder for me to sit with feelings of discomfort that are emerging as I embark on my own fieldwork journey. Throughout the interview, I found solace in the recognition of how essential community always is, both within the confines of the university and beyond it. Professor Welcome encourages us to continually ask ourselves who our intellectual labor rests upon and where we draw our power from. It is these communities, in their various forms, that have guided and continue to guide Professor Welcome’s ability to think capaciously about Black life while also holding deeply the question of accountability when engaging in research in which extraction cannot be escaped. Her work in Trinidad specifically focuses on the depiction of low-income urban Black peoples. In thinking about the ways in which narratives and processes of violence condition Black life, she ultimately invites us to ask ourselves how we can conceive worlds “where life can be unconditionally precious.”
Over-exposed, 2020. © Leniqueca Welcome
Multimodal Anthropology and Black Feminism
CAO
The question I wanted to start with is an identification question. Given that you work in the visual realm, would you describe yourself as a visual anthropologist? If so, what does that mean for you?
LW
Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this question, and on a couple of levels. In my bio, I’ve gone back and forth about what I identify with. I used to say “visual anthropologist,” but I don’t anymore. I think maybe now I would say I am a multimodal anthropologist. Because I think and I present the collages that I do with ethnographic vignettes, and the relationship between the collage and the text becomes important, so it’s not just the visual, and maybe why I use multimodal more in making myself legible to people.
But I think maybe more than that, or maybe how I kind of more simply describe myself or what I try to be, is a Black feminist anthropologist. I think particularly because looking at the history of Black feminists working in anthropology and beyond, they are the people who’ve been doing this kind of work that reaches across disciplines and modes before it became a kind of thing to do, before it had a name like “multimodality.” I find myself most in conversation with or most inspired by Black feminist scholarship, and I would say that’s how I try to identify or what I aspire to.
CAO
I want to think about your relationship to anthropology as a discipline because you sort of found yourself in the discipline in an interesting way. But more than that, how has your relationship to anthropology changed with multimodality, and more specifically with collaging as practice/process?
LW
I think I was really fortunate because I entered anthropology not really knowing what anthropology was. It’s sort of embarrassing to say, but it’s the truth. And it’s been the most freeing thing for me. I was doing my architecture degree, and I had lots of questions about the world, about space, about people’s use of space, and at some point, I realized I didn’t think I wanted to be a full-time designer. So, I ended up in anthropology basically because it was suggested to me that anthropology could be a good space to ask the questions that I wanted to.
For my undergrad thesis, I contacted an anthropologist at the University of West Indies, Dr. Dylan Kerrigan, and he agreed to serve on my committee because I went to school in Arkansas and there weren’t many faculty who knew anything about Trinidad. After I graduated and I moved home to work for a firm there (in Trinidad), we stayed in contact with each other.
When I was thinking that I wanted to go to grad school and was thinking about anthropology, I visited him and he had a shelf of books and said “pick a couple books that feel interesting to you and read.” So, I took off Walter Mignolo’s Darker Side of Western Modernity and I started reading. “Read” is probably a generous word, but I made my way through it, and then it was like, “OK, this is very difficult, but also this is very interesting.” And then from another architect, I learned about David Scott. I got Conscripts of Modernity, and then I was told about Deborah Thomas, and I got Exceptional Violence. I say this to highlight that the three books that I engaged with before grad school aren’t traditional ethnographies, or even all considered anthropology, but that was anthropology to me.
In grad school, reading works by Sylvia Wynter, Tina Campt, and Alex Weheliye changed my life. I think in an interview, Aimee Cox said that for her it’s like you just build your tool kit, whatever you need to answer the questions that you need to answer. I think for many Black anthropologists, that is what anthropology is. So multimodal anthropology never really changed what anthropology was for me per se because I just always thought that is anthropology. Mainly, I always thought of anthropology as a really capacious thing, and not this fixed discipline. I was really fortunate to have people that gave me a space of anthropology that I wanted to be in. So I credit having the support of people like Deborah Thomas, John Jackson, Nikhil Anand, and Adriana Petryna, who have been champions.
Black Placeness
CAO
You’ve spoken a lot about how your real project is thinking about global processes of violence, and so I think part of what I was also interested in is the ways your images open up space for thinking about Trinidad in relation to other places. It begs us to think about Black urban life with and beyond Trinidad. So could you talk a bit about the sense of place that emanates from your work. In other words, how does place become both implicit and explicit in how you’re thinking about sovereignty (if “sovereignty” is the correct term for you) in relation to processes of violence that condition Black life and dreams/formations of futures that people develop for themselves.
LW
Yeah, I like how you framed it. At its very core it’s a project of understanding global processes of violence and how they become embodied—and in particular, how they shape Black life. And I’m looking at the specificity of Trinidad, but in conversation with how these processes shape Black life globally. However, I do this because my real interest is: How do we forge a world where life can be unconditionally precious? How do we form a world where people are free unconditionally? My project is very much thinking with abolitionists about freedom not as a particular endpoint but as something we’re constantly enacting and making the space for in the now.
So, the work in the collage is always trying to think at different scales at the same time, and sometimes I get it and sometimes I don’t, but it is thinking about the specific local things that are happening in the space of Trinidad. But it’s always thinking about Black life more broadly because it’s a project about thinking about what it means to be free and how that freedom entails dismantling the missions of the nation-state as a project more broadly. So, sovereignty becomes—or the sovereignty that I would be interested in or feels meaningful is—when one feels free in one’s body. When I write about this, I would say that freedom in one’s body must also be conscious of others that one is in relation to. The focus becomes what it means to feel free.
So, the collages, while depicting sociopolitical relations across space and time that make life precarious for Black low-income people in Trinidad, are always still thinking about what it means to live free. I always try to capture that and hope people read that, but I usually don’t say how to see that. I’m always trying to capture that Black life is never reduced to death and abjection but that there are conditions that make Black life haunted by death and abjection. Yet even still, there is life, and people are always enacting their freedoms in the ways they can.
To a Fallen Soldier, 2019. © Leniqueca Welcome
Collaging: A Practice and Process of Embodiment
CAO
I think it’s unique and helpful, the way you’re thinking about the image and kind of breaking it up, playing with the visual. Could you describe your process? Particularly the transition from what may be considered a traditional photographic lens to collaging as a practice and mode of thinking.
LW
Yeah, great question. It always sounds cleaner when you retell the story than it was in real life. I was working visually prior to coming to grad school. So, it was in some ways a kind of a return to thinking beyond text. I got into photography really because I was searching for something that I could feel a little bit more in my body, and then after starting to get some formal training in photography, I started seeing possibility in it for the ways that one could represent the kind of sensory experience of the fieldsite. But then I think what brought me from photography to collaging were my anxieties about the image . . . about its limitations and potentiality, especially in a place like East Port of Spain, which is a highly represented space. I had anxieties about producing my own images of this space, particularly given the ways people are trained to read images on the surface.
So, especially since the beginning of the 2000s, when the annual murder rate rose in Trinidad, and East Port of Spain was seen as a prime hotspot for murder, it really started to get heavily depicted in the media and particularly understood through the language of crime. People from Trinidad who don’t live in East Port of Spain don’t typically go into that area. Because of its location (it flanks some of the main thoroughfares into the capital city), people have to drive past it, but they won’t go in it. So, their relationship to that area or how they come to know that space is often through media representations of the space. Understanding the kind of visual language that was developed around this space, I started to have anxieties about how any image, even if it was trying to be a counter-image, would be taken up, and the kind of battle to push against preexisting images and stereotypes of the place. I was also struggling, when I was choosing images, to find ones that would capture the kind of complexity of the stories I was collecting. And I think that’s what brought me to try collaging. I started thinking through how multiple images could be used and layered to tell a story, to capture some of that complexity. It brought me to kind of play with multiple images and see if I could explode what’s happening in regular images so that what’s brought to the surface are multiple times in space.
But I also wanted to create something that forces people to slow down and think about what’s happening and hopefully foster a deeper engagement with the image. Also, taking images in a space that’s so highly overexposed, I don’t want to add to people’s exposure or to the knowing of them. I think that’s been often the critique launched against the ethnographic project—that a lot of it is making “the Other” known to people who get to consume their humanity—so I think particularly because I’m working in this fieldsite where people already face marginalization, particularly because I’m working with Black people, one of the things that I’ve been really thinking through is how not to reproduce that project. I have tried to understand the potentiality of image making and what it can do but also the ethical responsibility to not continue to put people on display for us to know.
Interestingly, as well, once I had a professional camera on my neck, people would always ask me to take their picture. A lot of that was because they had this critique against the visual archive that’s being made about their space. Many people would ask for the pictures afterward, and I think that’s important because these images were important to people because for them it’s also an archive for themselves of their kin. And so there’s a whole visual life of the images that happens that’s independent of me. But I feel like that works in collaboration with the collages because, at the end of the day, the project is about creating a space that narrates the kind of beauty and richness of Black life.
CAO
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I think that’s how I felt seeing your series. I felt very much like I was forced to think about not only the space but the time frame, right? And thinking about how nonlinear time gets portrayed in the collage because you’re right about the ways in which you are kind of trained to read an image in a very flat way.
Since you used the word “play” earlier in opposition to planning your collages, could you talk a bit more about what that looks like for you? The ways you’re playing with images aren’t merely spontaneous; there’s an intention there. So, could you say a bit more about how you leave yourself open while being intentional about your collages?
LW
I think explaining my process is probably one of the questions I struggle hardest with. I try not to have a story that I’m particularly trying to tell my audience. So, what actually happens is that I’ve collected all these images through my various points of fieldwork, and usually there are images that stay with me or images that strike me. So, I just start with an image that particularly sends me somewhere. Sometimes it’s tied to a particular event or there’s something in it. But I just start with an image that feels like it needs to be worked with. And I kind of just cut out the fragments from that, layering it and building on it until it feels done.
One particular collage came about after a particular moment in fieldwork where I ended up in the community where Akani “Dole” Adams was murdered. This was about three weeks after his murder. One of his relations took me to see the spot where he was murdered, and it wasn’t a planned fieldwork trip. They wanted me to take photos of the spot, so I took pictures of the particular fisherman locker where he was murdered, and that image kind of just haunted me for a while, and so that was the starting image for To a Fallen Soldier.
When I accepted collaging as a method for the research, I started to understand it as part of my means of processing some of the things that I experienced in fieldwork or was told in the field, and a way to start making connections that I wasn’t ready to consciously write about. Working through images allows me really to play, as you say, and to not have to know what I’m trying to say before it gets said.
CAO
Thinking about that which couldn’t be written about yet, you’ve talked about collaging as something that was helpful for you to process what you were feeling during your ethnographic process. Within that process, you spoke about having to deal with various forms of grief and how collaging was a sort of release within the different relationships you were entering and as someone connected yet disconnected from the everyday realities of Trinidadians in East Port of Spain. Could you possibly talk more about the relationship between your ethnographic work and grief?
LW
Yeah, and I think it’s been productive because more people, more anthropologists, are having conversations about this, and I think Savannah Shange has spoken about the relationship between ethnographic work and grief in an interview, but I struggled with this a lot. In the field, I particularly struggled with thinking about grief and positionality and privilege and guilt and the kind of weird relationships we establish when we do ethnographic work. You enter into these relationships that are at once kind of intimate—and it can be really intimate, even though not in a very conventional way—and not, because even though you don’t completely leave those relationships, you do in some ways leave it when you “return” from the field. And it’s complicated particularly if that field is home.
You enter these relationships with your interlocutors often at different positionalities. Even as a Black woman from Trinidad, I still enter it in a very different place. No matter what your economic status and background might be, you’re still, as a researcher, connected to a university, so if you are working in a space marked by economic and social precarity, you come in at a different position no matter what might be happening for you at home. When you encounter people in the field, typically you’re coming from a different space than them and you have a kind of ability to leave when you encounter very difficult things. Understanding that, there was just a point in time in fieldwork where I would just set up these meetings through different people who thought of themselves as gatekeepers, so people from places that I wanted to go who could vouch for me. We would set up these interviews to go talk to someone weeks in advance, and the night before the meeting somebody would be murdered. Somebody close to that person that we were going to interview. And this happened multiple times. And so I would show up understanding that this morning or last night someone was murdered. I would be hesitant about going, but the gatekeeper would be like “Yeah yeah no no no we should still go.” So, you go and you’re trying to talk about whatever you’re trying to talk about and it’s weird because people are answering you but you know they’ve just lost someone close and sometimes there would be kind of externalized grief that you could see. I think that sometimes made it easier than times when we’re talking like nothing happened.
I think encountering that a few times, I started to have a conversation with myself about what that meant to me, and I started to realize that I didn’t want to write anymore, or I just didn’t want to go and do fieldwork anymore. And I had this period of time where I didn’t write and I was hanging out at my mom’s house, because my mom still lives in Trinidad, but not doing fieldwork. I ended up, like I mentioned before, going to the site where Akani “Dole” Adams—“Dole” is his nickname—was murdered.
And I think that was when it hit because that was after a series of this happening, like showing up somewhere after someone had died and just feeling like I don’t really want to do this anymore. I think what I felt initially was guilt for a while because I felt like I didn’t have a language for what grief looked like in that situation. I wasn’t related to these people, I wasn’t really friends with these people, and I kind of chose to go into this space and to do this work and I very much could leave. I was feeling pain, but I felt privileged with that pain. And encountering people who were in intimate relationships with those who died and understanding that they don’t always get this space to grieve. And so feeling also like “Who am I to feel grief?” If other people, who these are the conditions of their everyday life, don’t get to choose to remove themselves from that, they don’t get the space to grieve in this way. And I struggled with that and struggled with why it felt so paralyzing to me.
I think I really started to get some language to understand grief in this space while talking to my friend. She also did a PhD in anthropology and works on violence and Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous populations in the land known as Mexico. We had a call, and she was also processing a lot, and I told her I just don’t know what to feel. I understood, of course, that a person died, and even if society seeing them as a “criminal” didn’t treat them like it, they were a being deserving of love who was killed. But I didn’t quite understand a feeling of grief I more associated with personal relationships. What she kind of articulated to me was that “I think what feels particularly palpable to you, as this is what you work on and constantly engage with, is that you understand that it’s happened before, it’s happening now, and it will happen again.”
So, because you’re involved in a process of theorizing the fact that these are the grounds on which particularly Black low-income life is conditioned, you kind of grieve for the situation. It’s not just about an intimate relationship with a person but that because you’re trying to contend and your job is to deal in the larger picture of this, you grieve for the individual, yes, but also that these are the conditions that people are made to live under day after day after day. And I think that opened something up for me in understanding a space and what grief can mean for someone involved in this kind of research. The grief is not a feeling of empathy or sympathy but feeling “in relation” to others. So yes, grieving for the larger situation, understanding your levels of complicity in it, the ways that you too are affected by it and kind of grieving for the whole thing of this being the world we have now. But then thinking how that grief moves us to thinking about creating a new/different reality.
Out of Order, 2019. © Leniqueca Welcome
Ethnography: What Stays, What’s Felt, What’s Learned
CAO
I remember reading about that conversation you had with your friend in “Abstraction, Witnessing and Repair.” It struck me because I had read it when I was spending a lot of time in institutional archives and feeling the weight of lives and possibilities lost in the Biafran war both in the past and in contemporary iterations. So, reading your piece was helpful to process my own feelings because I just felt a deep sense of loss that left me feeling paralyzed, like you said. But the conversation I think also spoke to the idea of community and questions of care in intentional and unintentional communities.
LW
Definitely for me, care has become central. The only ethnographic work we should actually do is work rooted in care. And that particularly means (to go back to something you said earlier) to think beyond the historical divide between researcher and subject, and that doesn’t mean to disavow privilege and accountability, but to understand that we’re in relation with people and that we’re implicated in these very global processes that we’re studying, particularly the violent ones. And that’s been a critique leveled against anthropology and disciplines beyond anthropology, that a lot of times there are these different rules for what happens in the academy and what happens out there, but it doesn’t actually exist, right? For me, it’s not about telling a story about people’s lives. It’s about making certain global processes legible that are conditioning people’s lives and understanding how we’re implicated in these processes in relation to each other.
So, my writing about someone or taking a photograph is an understanding of ways I’m positioned with these people. Understanding the ways that we’re positioned together under a category of Blackness, but the way that because of a particular kind of social capital, I don’t experience my Blackness in the same way on a daily basis—not to say that I can’t in certain encounters, but in my regular experience I get a certain amount of protection in my daily life. So, to understand the limited amounts of privilege that I have when I’m writing about these things and to make sure the ways I’m telling these stories don’t further expose people to violence. It’s about really thinking about the fact that we’re dealing with people that we’re working with, and we have an ethical responsibility to care for what happens to them. So not only do we care for what happens to them in and through the very processes we’re studying, but we care what happens to them from the material that we’re producing that takes from their words. I think that conditions why I work in collage and how I write in text.