Mirrors and murals: Reflections on embodied and state violence

ABSTRACT

On 29 April 2022, a new mural called ‘Home is Where We Make It’, designed and installed by Amrisa Niranjan, an Indo-Guyanese artist was vandalized, just three days after completion. Black spray paint attempted to cover the artist’s name, and the letters ‘USA’ were printed over the portrait of a hijabi woman. Other signs saying ‘USA’ were taped to the mural and removed by police. By that same evening, the Star of David had been added across the woman’s face in an attempted erasure of her presence. Drawing on an interview with Amrisa Niranjan, I discuss the implications of being Indo-Caribbean migrants at the nexus of Islamophobic, xenophobic, and sexist rhetoric that mark us as ‘unbelonging’. In this paper, I address this event as part of a continuum of white supremacist racist, sexist and xenophobic violence that gets played out at the national, institutional, and interpersonal levels. This incident highlights how border policing occurs in everyday spaces, from microaggressions to overt acts of violence and erasure, in communities, universities, and even in supposed sanctuary spaces, where hatred is hidden under banners of diversity and inclusion but resurfaces in these moments.

KEYWORDS:

• Public art
• Indo-Caribbean
• Islamophobia
• New Jersey
• xenophobia
• refugee
• immigrant

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan is an Indo-Trinidadian queer scholar-activist. Her book Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (2022, Rutgers University Press) has won the Gordon and Sybil K. Lewis award at the Caribbean Studies Association. In the text, same-sex-desiring women chart their safe spaces while simultaneously providing insight into how their racial, ethnic, gender and other subjectivities shape their relationships to space, self and society.