Academic freedom is the condition under which the intellectual submits herself to the normative model of the settler. –Fred Moten, “Statement in Support of a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions” Whenever I hear academics defending “academic freedom” as a supposed … Continue reading “What’s Academic Freedom Got to Do with Us? Nothing, Absolutely Nothing”
1. On the day I won a university award named after Rosa Parks, I learned that a student was weighing an invitation from Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss an article he wrote that condemned my course on American political thought. … Continue reading “Cultivating the Weeds”
I was going to, was going to, do it, that is, by which I mean, stay in bed, like I was supposed to, or at least, for the most part, so-called should have, as in, for my health, for the … Continue reading “from Active Reception“
I live in my TV. Over the past year, I have shifted more and more of my daily social, psychological and affective life into the long running television shows that I substitute for a vital somatic, interpersonal, and interactive existence. … Continue reading “Queer QuaranTV”
The Weak Spot (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2021), Lucie Elven’s debut novel, is a timely fairy tale about the sorcery of disbelief. The book opens when a young woman runs away to a secluded town, in the mountains, only … Continue reading “Once Upon a Time: A Book Review of Lucie Elven’s The Weak Spot“
Cow Lonely Are You? On the internet of wildflowers a white flower is not what I see blue furling dress petal a flower is part dress part animal part vegetable part face an internet a lighted shape of light on … Continue reading “Four Poems”
When you close your eyes and picture a pig, what do you see? A curly, spring-like tail? A pink belly caked in mud? A curious snout nosing at the dirt or a trough? If I asked you to imagine pigs … Continue reading “On Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm“
North Bay I can’t be near you today When I’m writing I need A universe of space. It’s real When I see among all The boys’ fluttering asses Peeling into the ocean’s White crashing surge. Three Of them are so … Continue reading “Four Poems”
In her recent book of poetry, I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), Alli Warren looks at the world skeptically as she explores the nature of desire and the sublime in the present. Warren describes desire for a utopic, alternate … Continue reading ““I did it for the enduring light”: On Alli Warren’s I Love It Though“
In Esopus, a small town in upstate New York, a monument dedicated to Sojourner Truth was erected in 2009 (fig. 1). Truth was born in the area then known as Swartekill, some time in 1797, and lived in bondage in … Continue reading “Saying Her Name: What Monuments to Sojourner Truth Can Teach Us about Memorializing Black Lives”
In an attempt to shed new light on transnational solidarity, Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple UP, 2020) poses a question: How can we think of Palestinian (and Black) liberation when history repeats itself … Continue reading “Palestinian Liberation and the Limits of the Present: A Review of Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea“
In a moment when the voices of the oppressed are ringing out across the world, Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance brings us toward the literary beginnings of modernism so that we can learn to listen for difference, which … Continue reading “On Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance“
Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse observes that “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle” (72). This, in short, … Continue reading “The Politics of Aesthetics in Anticolonial Thought: A Review of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz”
Jazz, declared saxophonist Archie Shepp in 1966, “is anti-war; it is opposed to [the war in] Vietnam; it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people. That is the nature of jazz. That’s not far fetched. Why … Continue reading “On Free Jazz Communism“
Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (AK Press, 2020) is (a) concise, necessarily unsettling, Black anarchist work. Here, the propinquity between “Black” and “anarchist” may confuse the reader, as the Black radical tradition and anarchist politics are not … Continue reading “On Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness“
