Spill The Tea – a positionality workshop by Smriti Mehra and Claire Undy
This positionality workshop is being developed to further the dialogue that was started by Maia Conran, an Arts Fellow at the Horniman Museum, in response to the 茶, चाय, Tea (Chá, Chai, Tea) exhibition at the Horniman Museum. Through practices of sharing and hospitality, this project proposes not ‘the story’ but ‘stories’ of tea as a social and collaborative process.
Idioms are a quintessential part of the English language, and one of the hardest elements for a student of the language to comprehend. For the English, expressions like ‘tea and sympathy’ or ‘just my cup of tea’ might feel cosy, informal and familiar. For the non-English speaker, these phrases can be confusing, ostracising- a secret code that cannot be directly translated but must be learned. Cockney rhyming slang becomes even more cryptic: a reference within a reference, only understandable to those in the know. ‘Tea’ becomes ‘Rosy Lee’, shortened simply to ‘a cup of Rosy’.
Tea is one of the most common subjects for idioms in English culture due to its omnipresence in the lives of people of every class, from a ‘builder’s brew’ to ‘tea with the Queen’, drunk with a raised little finger. Tea has been folded into an impression of Englishness within popular culture, however the dialogues within the 茶, चाय, Tea (Chá, Chai, Tea) exhibition at the Horniman Museum demonstrate to us that tea is anything but English.
While we may be increasingly familiar with the human cost of the English tea industry, how we address this colonial legacy in the present becomes an uncomfortable question with no singular answer. Traditionally, postcards are a souvenir of lived experience, capturing something of the ‘foreign’ to share with those back home. These Spill the Tea postcards (named after another idiom, encouraging people to talk openly) offer a tool with which to initiate dialogue, unpacking the appropriation of tea into a popular notion of English culture, and allowing disparate viewpoints and perspectives to co-exist.
Bibliography
Mani, L., 2022. Myriad Intimacies. Duke University Press.
Mani, L. (2009). Sacred Secular. New York: Routledge.
Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practicing within the disciplines. Improving Student Learning – Ten Years On. (pp. 412-424). Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.
- Postscript*
- Any further references for this workshop would be appreciated