Techno plays from outdoor speakers at the beach restaurant in Tel Aviv. I scan faces, trying to place them— Poland? Russia? Tan, lipless men toting wives and kids, giving me dirty looks as I suck my shisha. The … Continue reading “Hellraiser”
A Wavering Wager “Modern India” has always been a gambit. Not because modernity in this part of the world remains hobbled by obdurate traditions, as some would have it, but because such a project has to navigate logistical as well … Continue reading “Introduction: National Life in the Wake of the Pandemic”
“How dare you?” These are almost the last words my friend Surekha said to me, in a text message. I had LOL’d. She said, “I’ll see you soon dude.” She had just moved to Bombay, from Delhi. That was on … Continue reading “How Dare You?”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit India around March 2020, it began a great urban unravelling. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in characteristic style, imposed a draconian nation-wide lockdown at four hours’ notice on the evening of March 24th. With the announcement, … Continue reading “The Coronavirus and the Great Indian Unravelling”
Signal and Noise, or the Balcony Scene 5 p.m. on March 22, 2020. The clamor starts near the end of a one-day “Janata Curfew” (People’s Curfew) declared across India by the central government a few days prior to what would … Continue reading “Superimposition: App-Based Contact Tracing in the Indian Pandemic and Its Unexpected Intimacies”
Let us hope that the coronavirus pandemic, as the plague in Ancient Greece before it, results in a paradigmatic historic event such that human conscience becomes attuned to life’s intelligence; such that the Aristotelian syllogism, “all men are mortals,” is … Continue reading “Re-encountering Mother Earth: The Urgent Task of Building Buen Vivir”
The ways we tell big stories of social change are born of the perspectives gained by hindsight, and this story exemplifies such hindsight. The Paradigm Shift that occurred during the twenty-first century emerged from relentless struggles for justice conjoined with … Continue reading “A Possible Decolonized, Indigenized Future”
The digital public humanities project A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado, comprising scholarly essays, artistic contributions, and much more, maps the many ways the nuclear arsenal has shaped the state of Colorado. It is the first installment in an even more … Continue reading “Nuclear Knowledge Otherwise: A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado“
Gabrielle Daniels’s new book Something Else Again: Poetry and Prose, 1975-2019, was recently published by Materials / Materialien in London and Munich and by Dogpark Collective in the US. Daniels’s essays, stories, and poems have appeared in the print and … Continue reading “An Interview with Gabrielle Daniels”
River by Joni Mitchell Happy holidays angel, from Chicago. Oh how I wish I had a river, that I could skate to you on. Here’s hoping the snow, never leaks through those boots of yours, to touch your feet, … Continue reading “Two Poems”
The contributions to this Social Text Periscope dossier are the outcome of a pandemic year’s worth of online conversations between scholars, artists, and activists on themes related to my 2020 book Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of … Continue reading “Introduction: Revenge Politics, Revenge Economy, Revenge Culture”
I write from the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation to address revenge in fiction and in fact—what it is, why it’s compelling, and how the concept might transcend its reactionary connotations to be part of a … Continue reading “Climate, Literature, Revenge”
Writing—through poetry, essays, and stories—has become a medium for Lumad students to remember their communities: the mountains and rivers, their farms, the vast lands of their ancestral domains that they could have inherited and enriched had militarization stopped. As … Continue reading “Writing to Resist, Writing to Remember: Lumad Youths’ Narratives in the Time of Duterte”
Before community lockdowns were enforced in the Philippines in March 2020, Gantala Press, a feminist small press and literary collective, had plans to participate in an exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Library that was to publicly launch … Continue reading “Sewing Dissent: Making Cloth Books During COVID-19”
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”
