Malika Imhotep and 'The Bank of Hysteria' Featured on The Root
Malika's NWMEDIA 190/290 project 'The Bank of Hysteria' was featured on The Root! The article, "Black Women, Don’t Throw Up Hands—Call the Bank of Hysteria to Vent" by Angela Helm, covers her' inspiration and thought process behind the project. Excited to see our students' coursework gain a larger audience across the internet!
From the article:
Sexual harassment got you down? Microaggressions become too much? Poverty a pain in the ass? Racism got you fucked up?
But one University of California, Berkeley, doctoral student, Malika Imhotep, 24, has created a space, the Bank of Hysteria, to deposit (ahem) the wrath that so many of us feel.
Imhotep explains her idea in a callout for participants:
Too often, those angry voices are dismissed as irrational, but we think that anger is valid and should be heard. 510-985-9986 is the number to the Bank of Hysteria Toll-Free Rage Hotline. Call and/or text to invest in your anger. Leave an honest message, say the things you’ve been holding in for fear of being labeled as “angry” or “too emotional.” What angers you? What enrages you? What people, places or things have tried your patience or attempted to silence you? Let us help you invest in your rage.
Imhotep says that the Bank of Hysteria grew out of a course she’s taking on ways of using new media tools to produce socially engaged art projects. Imhotep says she was placed in a group focused on gender.
Imhotep says that Audre Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” speech, given at a feminist conference in 1981 (and also found in the seminal black feminist text Sister Outsider), informed a lot of the project. Lorde gave voice to the fact that often her response to racism is anger, but so often she was not able to express it, which can be destructive to the spirit.
Read the rest of the article and more from the Root here.