The Biennial Statement The written curatorial statement from the organizing committee of the 11th Havana Biennial arrived via email the same day that we were preparing a dossier for the Romanian magazine IDEA. As we put together a brief … Continue reading “Decolonial AestheSis at the 11th Havana Biennial”
Hong Kong cinema has been in a state of ambivalence for a long time despite the fact that it has always been so unambivalently commercialized. This is less a cause than a consequence of the fissured condition of cultural production … Continue reading “Decolonial Moments in Hong Kong Cinema”
LOOKING BACK — The Decolonial Aesthetics Exhibition at Duke University The Decolonial Aesthetics Exhibition (May 4-June 5, 2011) at Duke University’s Fredric Jameson Gallery and The Nasher Museum of Art, among other venues, curated installations by scholar-artists Guo-Juin Hong … Continue reading “What/Where is "Decolonial Asia"?”
How do decolonial aestheSis accord with but also depart from a “post-” sensibility, be it modern, structural, or, perhaps, even colonial? Édouard Glissant is instructive in this respect, when he comments upon the metropolitan poststructural heritage as a French citizen … Continue reading “Be.Bop 2012. Black Europe Body Politics”
I always ask my students, grad and undergraduate, for the mid-term “exam”, to write a letter to whomever they wish. It should be an educated person who is a little bit familiar with the topic, or not necessarily. The question … Continue reading “Decolonial Aesthesis: From Singapore, To Cambridge, To Duke University”
Long ago, on the lip of memory, when wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were offered as ways to deliver the world from terror, I recall reading a report on what U.S. military planners took to be the political limit … Continue reading “Moving Violations”
Rumor/Contagion Here’s a story: In late 2012, a rumour circulated throughout the Bangladeshi community living in and around Mile End, London. A vampire was sucking the blood of children dry. This vampire would strike late at night and in … Continue reading “The Axiomatic of Counter-Terrorism”
In the month of January, 1970, the New York Times published an article, “Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random.” [i] [ii] The lottery to which they were referring, of course, was the “life and death” lottery that selected … Continue reading “Mayberry R.F.D. Will Not Be Presented Tonight”
War appears as eventual. Whether via the state’s incitement of its citizens to hate, fight, and kill or the pacifists’ moral injunctions to lay down arms, to desert or refuse, war waged by states is presented as if it … Continue reading “No War but Class War”
dead land Mewat, waste land, dead land, empty land. Codified in the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, modified in the early 1920s as Britain re-structures the colonial governance of Palestine, and surviving today in the Occupied Territories through a series … Continue reading “a possible history of oblivion”
What’s left to be said about time or space or war? Let’s face it — in the piles of books and papers written on violence in modernity, on time-space compression, on spatialization vs. temporalization, on the militarization of everyday … Continue reading “Sensing Distance: The Time and Space of Contemporary War”
On January 28, 2003 President George W. Bush delivered his third State of the Union Address focusing on global security. In its name, he both defended the U.S. War on Terror invasion of Iraq through lies about weapons of … Continue reading “Securing Blood: PEPFAR and Neoliberal War”
In July of 1945, just as the conclusion of World War II was coming into view, Vannevar Bush, former dean of engineering at MIT, then administrator of the twin war-time revolutions of radar and the atomic bomb, founder of … Continue reading “As We May Think, 2012”
I just untied my copy of Critical Making, edited by Garnet Hertz. When I pulled it from the hand addressed brown paper envelope I was startled by its handmade, twine-wrapped beauty. It has the spirit of an old school zine, … Continue reading “Untying Critical Making”
CUNY Graduate Center, Center for Humanities Apr 11, 2013, 6:30pm, room 9206 Education outside of a traditional classroom is on the rise. Again. Spurred on by DIY culture, a tidal wave of student debt, and changes in technology, new non-traditional … Continue reading “Experiments in Extra-Institutional Education”
