What is AI? AI is everywhere, but where is it exactly? What does AI look like? What does AI act like? What does AI think like? And, most importantly…how intelligent is AI, really? These questions comprise a mere fraction of … Continue reading “On You Look like a Thing and I Love You“
The new film The Assistant has instigated a breakthrough in the public conversation about sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace. Rave reviews in the mainstream media, including The New Times, the New Yorker, the Daily Beast and Time Out, … Continue reading “On The Assistant“
name/brand on a windy day breaking those hottest Midwestern months where most everything is wishing for death or winter, a single dried petal from that little blue flower with a cute colloquial name, shrunk beyond its living … Continue reading “Four Poems”
Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the university today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of Truth, or the Truth as Subject. Readers of this introduction will likely recognize the epigraph above … Continue reading “Introduction: Can the Subaltern Fabulate?”
Years ago, at a conference, Tavia and I talked about what to do in our responses to the theoretical turn to negativity in black studies. The sound of this turn was roaring all around us, and we had to shout … Continue reading “In Our Dark Times”
“I have a right to show my color, darling! I am beautiful and I know I’m beautiful!” The opening pages of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life summon the specter of Crystal Labeija. In a now-iconic scene from the … Continue reading “Afro-Fabulating in the Shadows”
What does it feel like to describe an appearance that hasn’t quite come into being? To conjure a sensation at the edges of haptic awareness? To make a case for a time yet to announce itself as present and always … Continue reading “Dark Descriptions of Black Appearance”
Film plays an important role in Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life and offers a kind of historical starting point in the 60s and 70s for the contemporary span this book covers. Nyong’o introduces his project via … Continue reading “A Dark Cinema”
Blackness is both elastic and not. Blackness is ascribed to many who can trace ancestry to the African diaspora, a relation that has been determined by the transatlantic slave trade. Here, blackness is tethered explicitly to people and their lives. … Continue reading “Blackness, the Virtual, and the Work of Fabulation”
I. There are some things that seem too volatile to be touched, that confound consideration. Moments, that when they appear, time opens up, reaches across space, prods, squeezes, cathecting pain and pleasure. These moments pivot between fragility and indestructibility and … Continue reading “On Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Black (Diasporic/Nordic) Arts”
EP 430511 B1 20010207 Chimeric gene in sunflower and sugar beet as a model for enhanced plant resistance to glutamine synthase inhibitor and herbicide Insect-resistant tomato plant is capable of fending off aphid cutworm flea beetle hornworm nematode and whitefly … Continue reading “selected patents from Monsanto Ballooning“
I. Around phenomena a glow surfaces humanity is politically predefined, all space is personal and every clock emphasizes wartime “Going dark” on cell phones a way to generate data (absence as a form of data) during demonstrations while the stars … Continue reading “we are all dangerous until our fears grow thoughtful”
Surfeit Writ, with Time Constraint A green collection in the field. Or try again without opprobrium. Make better work for good. The copula will see to that whatever word One puts down will suffice to grow the poem as a … Continue reading “Two Poems”
A slight striation brings us to an opalescent aquapit of algae-grazing crustaceans and pedal boat taverns. Take I-94 West past the tropical shrublands, along a spidery slum of houses built on planks of sun-bleached ipe and thatch. Next … Continue reading “The Suburbs”
I drag an archive of icons across the desktop. I am always drawn to wilderness. I square the mass of lines, their accumulated, gossiping cells. My grandmother planned to become an engineer, but got pregnant and left university. I sift … Continue reading “from Intramural“
