Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a scholar, speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism. Ama is a PhD candidate in Psychosocial Studies with Dr Gail Lewis and Dr Margarita Palacious at Birkbeck University of London. Her research takes a queer, decolonial approach to speculating and archiving interdependent, pleasurable Black climate changed futures in Ghana and across the Black diaspora. Ama’s wider praxis thinks through sustainable economies and ecologies of care and survival for BIPOC womxn in the arts and academia. Ama is a curatorial fellow with Frame Contemporary Art Finland and EVA International (Limerick), and was the 2020/21 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism with BARD College (New York). She has had essays, short fiction and art writing published internationally, and has been exhibited across Europe. Supervisors: Dr Gail Lewis and Dr Margarita Palacious
INSERT: Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries, 2023
To research climate colonialism as a Black woman in Europe is to live through the atrocities of i... more To research climate colonialism as a Black woman in Europe is to live through the atrocities of imperialism from behind a thin veil of clingfilm. Cheap flimsy stuff from the pound shop, the kind you could sever with the strength of an outstretched tongue... Exploring her Black feminist methodology for thinking ecologies, pleasure and Blackness together under the gaze of Western Academia, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone presents “Pollination as Praxis” as a method attempting to encapsulate scapes of time, place, embodiment, and ecology through an erotics of interspecies call and response.
4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that exc... more 4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that excavates remnants of London and border control and aeroplane food and obroni foreign-ness. I try to purify my flesh, to wash away the colonial motherland before today’s most sacred pilgrimage. Crouched with my buttocks hanging low between slippery thighs in the tub, lifting a neon blue cup up to rinse my face, arms, arse, feet; carefully redistributing generations of thickness to get between the toes and under the soles. I try to calm my beating heart. The Ghanaian National Archives are of course open to the public. That is, the patriotic, airbrushed, white-walled upper floors are open to tourist and nationalist alike.
The following conversation took place via email over a series of weeks between Ama Josephine Budg... more The following conversation took place via email over a series of weeks between Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, and Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao. After meeting on a panel at the IAS on 6 February 2019, Ama and Xine have become friends, correspondents, collaborators, and allies. This conversation on the work of the incredible Octavia Butler is a minuscule window through which to view a fraction of the wonderful, weird, empowering, and inflammatory challenges/corroborations that have since taken place.
As the effects of climate change are felt with increasing violence along its multifarious front l... more As the effects of climate change are felt with increasing violence along its multifarious front lines in the Global South, the futures of human and non-human life on the state-demarcated peripheral are cancelled out by both naturalising Euro-American discourse and the disavowal of what has been termed “climate colonialism”. Speculatively thinking with two photographs from South African visual activist Zanele Muholi’s series Somnyama Ngonyama (2012–ongoing), the article explores the theoretical landscape of the “anthropocene” through the prism of creative and academic work by Black, queer and indigenous practitioners whose works resists its homogenising narrative. Utilising bell hooks’ notion of the “oppositional gaze” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the article reflects on how Muholi’s seemingly exposing photography in turn exposes the depoliticisation of ecological neocolonialism. The science-fictional and resistant practices of the artist reimagine the agential capacity of queer Black bodies in relation to environmentally changed futures.
4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that exc... more 4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that excavates remnants of London and border control and aeroplane food and obroni foreign-ness. I try to purify my flesh, to wash away the colonial motherland before today’s most sacred pilgrimage. Crouched with my buttocks hanging low between slippery thighs in the tub, lifting a neon blue cup up to rinse my face, arms, arse, feet; carefully redistributing generations of thickness to get between the toes and under the soles. I try to calm my beating heart. The Ghanaian National Archives are of course open to the public. That is, the patriotic, airbrushed, white-walled upper floors are open to tourist and nationalist alike.
INSERT: Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries, 2023
To research climate colonialism as a Black woman in Europe is to live through the atrocities of i... more To research climate colonialism as a Black woman in Europe is to live through the atrocities of imperialism from behind a thin veil of clingfilm. Cheap flimsy stuff from the pound shop, the kind you could sever with the strength of an outstretched tongue... Exploring her Black feminist methodology for thinking ecologies, pleasure and Blackness together under the gaze of Western Academia, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone presents “Pollination as Praxis” as a method attempting to encapsulate scapes of time, place, embodiment, and ecology through an erotics of interspecies call and response.
4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that exc... more 4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that excavates remnants of London and border control and aeroplane food and obroni foreign-ness. I try to purify my flesh, to wash away the colonial motherland before today’s most sacred pilgrimage. Crouched with my buttocks hanging low between slippery thighs in the tub, lifting a neon blue cup up to rinse my face, arms, arse, feet; carefully redistributing generations of thickness to get between the toes and under the soles. I try to calm my beating heart. The Ghanaian National Archives are of course open to the public. That is, the patriotic, airbrushed, white-walled upper floors are open to tourist and nationalist alike.
The following conversation took place via email over a series of weeks between Ama Josephine Budg... more The following conversation took place via email over a series of weeks between Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, and Dr Christine ‘Xine’ Yao. After meeting on a panel at the IAS on 6 February 2019, Ama and Xine have become friends, correspondents, collaborators, and allies. This conversation on the work of the incredible Octavia Butler is a minuscule window through which to view a fraction of the wonderful, weird, empowering, and inflammatory challenges/corroborations that have since taken place.
As the effects of climate change are felt with increasing violence along its multifarious front l... more As the effects of climate change are felt with increasing violence along its multifarious front lines in the Global South, the futures of human and non-human life on the state-demarcated peripheral are cancelled out by both naturalising Euro-American discourse and the disavowal of what has been termed “climate colonialism”. Speculatively thinking with two photographs from South African visual activist Zanele Muholi’s series Somnyama Ngonyama (2012–ongoing), the article explores the theoretical landscape of the “anthropocene” through the prism of creative and academic work by Black, queer and indigenous practitioners whose works resists its homogenising narrative. Utilising bell hooks’ notion of the “oppositional gaze” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the article reflects on how Muholi’s seemingly exposing photography in turn exposes the depoliticisation of ecological neocolonialism. The science-fictional and resistant practices of the artist reimagine the agential capacity of queer Black bodies in relation to environmentally changed futures.
4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that exc... more 4am. I thread the nylon-fibred Sapor deep under my fingernails, building up a dense foam that excavates remnants of London and border control and aeroplane food and obroni foreign-ness. I try to purify my flesh, to wash away the colonial motherland before today’s most sacred pilgrimage. Crouched with my buttocks hanging low between slippery thighs in the tub, lifting a neon blue cup up to rinse my face, arms, arse, feet; carefully redistributing generations of thickness to get between the toes and under the soles. I try to calm my beating heart. The Ghanaian National Archives are of course open to the public. That is, the patriotic, airbrushed, white-walled upper floors are open to tourist and nationalist alike.
Uploads