The following is drawn from a manuscript tentatively titled Reversi: a group of letters written to Em Bohlka, who died in the 2016 Ghost Ship fire. Reversi also engages with Othello as a core text, jumping off from that play … Continue reading “from Reversi“
Two years ago, shortly after the General Election of 2017, I wrote a piece about the UK election nights I’ve experienced over the years. It was a personal piece, reflecting on the strange mix of emotions they’ve evoked in me … Continue reading “The British General Election: The Nightmare before Christmas”
With her new book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia 2019), Wendy Brown joins more than a few scholars now reconsidering what we thought we knew about neoliberalism. Her previous book, Undoing the … Continue reading “On Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West“
In his Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, the linguist Roman Jakobson writes about a treatise published in 1718 titled “Sur la fille sans langue” (“On the girl with no tongue”). The irony of this title was that the girl … Continue reading “Speech Work”
The British Indian Muslim reminds one of a Matryoshka assembly, a nesting of several closely related, yet discrete, wholes. The category, on the one hand, invokes the history of South Asian Muslims under the British crown from 1858 until 1947. … Continue reading “The Muslim Matryoshka: Vlogging Immigration and Citizenship in Brexit Britain”
Business as usual is no longer an option when it comes to carbon emissions. At a press conference following the release of the IPCC’s “Doomsday” report, panel chair Hoesung Lee commented that “limiting warming to 1.5 is not impossible, but … Continue reading “Academia and Climate Change”
On April 22, Lisa Duggan convened a conversation between Gabriel Hetland and George Ciccariello-Maher, moderated by Macarena Gómez-Barris, at New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. The participants have edited their remarks to present here. Thinking with Venezuela’s … Continue reading “Crisis in Venezuela: The US Left, Solidarities, and What Is to Be Done?”
Allegory of Information Quality I’m responsible for potatoes. Huge quantities of potatoes are being harvested and brought to storage facilities by enslaved people. The soundtrack is ethnomusically informed jazz. I’m supposed to be counting the eyes on the potatoes, but … Continue reading “Alongside the Marketing”
Dear Kay— A letter in seven arguments. 1. On Lies In another poem a man compares me to pussy, and then it happens again. Rosario says straight men don’t even like pussy, an attack so devastating I took it vicariously. … Continue reading “You Say Wife”
In 1964, incarcerated men in a segregated Texas state prison gathered before an ethnographer’s field recorder and sang work songs, toasted, and told tales known intimately to them. Bruce Jackson, a Junior Fellow at Harvard, listened and recorded the various … Continue reading “Pneumatic Memory: Listening to Listening in The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” a Record Album Interpretation“
this dude next to me has been listening to clips of a cover of “Work” by Rihanna over and over for like 15 minutes. already I hate him. it sort of looks like he’s listening to it on a Zune. … Continue reading “work work work”
With Stones In Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire, edited by Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, is an ambitious collection of essays that draws important connections between the perceptions of Islam in the twenty-first century and the enduring … Continue reading “Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana’s With Stones In Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire“
Under Cover Extolling the virtues of theft Meaning makes less in a week than Your masterpiece is for smashing Porcelain pink panther Punching a canvas til it’s money We listened to ArtPop and dream what could’ve been Genderqueer porn suggesting … Continue reading “Three Poems”
For a couple of years, I was the president of a fan club on a proto-internet online service, called Club Cruehead, a board for devotees of the dinglewood hard rock band MÖTLEY CRÜE. The service, Prodigy, limited users to thirty … Continue reading “From The Tragicall History“
Now you’re here too in the apocalypse your ancestors made. –Natalie Diaz It’s not fucked up to want to feel safe. We were drawn together by that desire. In Providence, in Oakland, in Charlottesville. Circumstances make it feel so impossible, … Continue reading “A Western”
