Illegible Imperatives: Filipinx American Identity, Anti-Blackness, and the Artwork of Crystal Z. Campbell

ABSTRACT:This essay follows artist Crystal Z. Campbell and her excavation into our collective will to forget specifically through her work on Henrietta Lacks’s immortal cell line and her participation in the Filipino American Artist Directory. In particular, this essay examines what Campbell’s work brings to bear on Black and Filipinx American relationalities through an enactment of the illegible. Arguing that Filipinx America is rendered illegible through the contradictions inherent in imperial and (neo)liberal knowledge production, this essay is interested in the ways that Campbell troubles notions of “identity” and reveals its limitations as a way to understand Filipinx American being. Given Campbell’s interest in archival research, including what gets left out, obscured, or fictionalized in the archive, this essay reads the indexing of Campbell’s work in the Filipino American Artist Directory, a space that relies on the cohering logics of identity, as a strategic move that comments on the intimacies between imperial violence, (neo)liberalism, and anti-Blackness. Ultimately, Campbell’s participation in this archive gestures towards the radical possibilities and relationalities that Filipinx America can enact by embracing illegibility.