Translation is something I encounter on a daily basis. As soon as I say my name I’ve put myself outside the border; I have to crawl back into the center. When a stranger asks me my name—and they ask maybe four or five times a day—every time they ask they’re telling me “I don’t know […]
Women’s Diasporic Literature: – No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff (1987) – The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat (2004) – Sula, Toni Morrison (1973) – Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2014) + Short Stories and Essays Weird Fictions – Kindred, Octavia Butler (1979) Butler’s obituary – Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Something about Kathy… – Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (1955) […]
“How do we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly?” —Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological lmagination Gordon explains that “[t]he ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost […]
Adrian Piper My Calling(Card) #1, 1986 Offset lithograph on brown paper; published by Angry Art Image/sheet: h. 2 x w. 3 1/2” (5.1 x 8.9 cm)
Heureka! “Whereas I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded – and which I had to […]
“We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought to fear and hate and love.” “This Nettle, Danger…,” 687
“I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very […]
I just read Citizen: An American Lyric and I was struck by the urgency with which it touched me, made me want to handle it, read it again as if I had never experienced her words. There was so much truth in this book that, for a moment, I didn’t understand that it was not written just […]
Hilary Mantel, when describing how she writes, refers to a passage near the beginning of her earlier novel Beyond Black, about a performing medium, Alison: She takes a breath, she smiles, and she starts a peculiar form of listening. It is a silent sensory ascent; it is like listening from a stepladder, poised on the […]
“6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics’: There’s a world of urgent discourse beyond Dyson, West, and Gates.” From Robin D.G. Kelley: I don’t play pundit because I’m not interested in ‘influencing popular opinion’ if it means sacrificing analytical rigor. Our job as intellectuals is to ask the hard questions, interrogate inherited categories, take nothing as self-evident, […]