[Embodiment as the reimagination of mastery]
As an art history student trained under the American tradition, I was taught to address subjects and narratives that are worthwhile of grand intellectual attention. We keep chasing one historical mapping after another. Naturally, the scholar is disembodied from their research, or they will risk articulating unnecessary information.
Rather than understanding the notion of embodiment as a foreground of expertise, I consider it a reimagination – if not an outright rejection – of Western-Eurocentric intellectual mastery; an ethno-specific articulation of identity; a gendered gesture; a way to reclaim one history from and/or out of dominant historical genealogies.
This can be seen from my current research on the embodied political anxiety of Vietnamese curators dealing with national cultural censorship, which emphasizes the importance of articulating the affect of curatorial practices and the metaphoric/ritualistic aspects of the practices themselves.