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”
For a long time, similarity was out of fashion. Difference was in and likeness was out; comparisons were odious. To see or assert likeness, the thinking went, was tantamount to denying irrefutable factual differences, often ones related to identity and … Continue reading “Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol“
The frenzied pace of the news cycle in the age of Trump has a magnetic pull that makes it hard to take a step back and think strategically about the recent history of popular anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles that have … Continue reading “Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present”
I wanted to show you something that would give you pleasure the kind of pleasure I sometimes feel listening to Joanna Brouk or standing in the middle of a gallery in the Met not focusing on a particular art work … Continue reading “from a feeling called heaven“
A house. There’s a dream of a house, like there always is. The house has blue walls. It’s four years ago. I have a boyfriend. He is the only boy I’ve ever dated that my parents have liked. … Continue reading “from Socialist Realism“
Hell is good. To live here, it is good. I really like it! It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s the crowning joy of my life to exist in Hell. It’s amazing. It’s so sweet and charming. … Continue reading “Welcome to Hell”
I am told that Brussels is the new Berlin, what Berlin was twenty years ago. What this person means is that it is the only spot left in Europe where artists can afford to be artists. I walk to the … Continue reading “Journal from Brussels and Paris”
If I have to hear another argument about the relative importance of race versus class, I’ll scream. Long a staple of graduate theory seminars, late-night Facebook rants, and the various circular firing squads of the Left, the argument exploded into … Continue reading “Towards an Insurgent Politics of the Particular: A Review of Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity“
In the face of structural dispossession and intensified border regimes, what does it mean to demand or to defy “more visibility” and “better representation” as an undocumented migrant? This is a central question in Rebecca M. Schreiber’s recently published The … Continue reading “Reconfiguring Representation: Rebecca M. Schreiber’s The Undocumented Everyday“
In January 2016, I had the opportunity to dialogue over email with sound artists Mendi and Keith Obadike. We discussed their site-specific work, Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin](2015), jointly commissioned by the Harlem Stage and the Vera List Center for … Continue reading “On Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]: A Conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike”
Lacking blankets sleep mapped out a march of ice with a mind of April thinking today is the day rain prosecco tipped off flamboyant spray shed their own Pittsburgh blew us mindlessly dove. Flick the tongue of my cradle speech … Continue reading “Bureau to Counteract the Demonstration”
Author’s note: Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (13 November 1917 – 11 September 1964) was a Hindi poet, a literary critic and theorist, a short story writer, and a journalist who wrote extensively on the geopolitics of the period. A concerted Marxist … Continue reading “Translating “To a Formless Void” by G. M. Muktibodh”
“When they go low, we go to war.” —Anonymous “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” —Nina Simone 1. Incivility is anger directed at unjust civil ordering. It is a rage directed at … Continue reading “Eleven Theses on Civility”
The following is an edited interview between Jordan Alexander Stein, associate professor of English at Fordham University, and Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox–just out from One World–and professor of eighteenth century literature, gender and sexuality studies, and … Continue reading “Jordan Alexander Stein in Conversation with Jordy Rosenberg”
