Azsaneé Truss Makes New Knowledge
For a few months at Annenberg, the walls of the library were adorned with arresting collages thanks to recent Annenberg doctoral graduate Azsaneé Truss. Her dissertation, Conspi(racism): Subversive Ideas in Black American Art & Media, explored the same ideas behind an ongoing series of projects she has titled “The Conspiracy Mixtapes.”
The art exhibit — which included a series of 16 collages, magazines, vinyl records, books, posters, and
other archival materials, and a soundscape — visually and sonically explored conspiracy theories within the Black public sphere. Utilizing a nontraditional academic form, Truss showed, along with her dissertation, how these conspiracy theories are grounded in critical understandings of racialized oppression.
In her dissertation, Truss outlined this argument by revealing how conspiracy theorizing among Black Americans is an ongoing exercise in anticipating and subverting white supremacist power.
In addition to researching artistic and mediated expressions of conspiracy theories, she also engaged with several different mediums to make this argument.
“Multimodality is important to me not only as a methodological intervention, but also as an epistemological intervention,” Truss said. “What we know is fundamentally married to how we know. As multimodal scholarship takes seriously the plethora of forms knowledge can take, it opens us up to new ways of conveying our knowledge as well as new knowledges altogether.”
In addition to the library exhibit, “The Conspiracy Mixtapes” also includes a film that utilized interviews, archival research and a listening-party-as-focus-group to jump through time and document and reanimate critical perspectives theorizing the CIA-Contra-Crack Conspiracy — as well as a mixtape.
For Truss, her scholarly practice is inseparable from her artistic practice. “I see my art as thought, thinking as an art,” she said. By blending research, storytelling and aesthetic experimentation, Truss hopes to challenge dominant narratives and imagine new possibilities for sharing knowledge.
