Periscope articles and content
When Terrorist Assemblages was published back in 2007, the world looked different. The association between queerness and Islamophobic nationalism—which Puar’s pathbreaking book described so well—was just coming to the forefront as a new and odd phenomenon. Centering her attention on … Continue reading “The Political Economy of Homonationalism”
Building on the analytics she advanced in Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. In The Right to Maim, we see the tenuous inclusion of … Continue reading “Disabling Wounds: Genocidal Violence, Paradoxical Indigeneity, and the Logic of Elimination of the Native”
As scholars, activists, and artists, how can we address spaces of ruinous capitalism to raise the possibility of decolonial futures? This Periscope issue is a collaborative effort to think about and provide responses to this complex question from a number … Continue reading “Decolonial Futures”
In her 2010 Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech, Vandana Shiva asserted that the “bigger war”—bigger than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—was “the war against the planet.” With the slogan to make the United States “energy dominant,” the Trump administration, … Continue reading “Resisting the War on Alaska’s Arctic with Multispecies Justice”
Entropy (noun) 1. a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder 2. chaos, disorganization, randomness There is a scarcity of platforms that make space for Indigenous youth to represent themselves and speak back to the stories … Continue reading “Indigenous Youth, Standing Rock, and the Rise of Anti-Colonial Entropy”
I began to investigate the El Quimbo hydroelectric power project on the Magdalena River after reading the following headline in March 2012: “The River Refuses to Shift its Course.” El Quimbo is a dam built on the Yuma River–the Indigenous … Continue reading “Hunger as a Teacher”
Economic modes of extractivism, austerity, and disaster capitalism increasingly intertwine in Puerto Rico, where at present we are witnessing the privatization of the public sphere on a massive scale. The path to austerity for Puerto Rico was already set before … Continue reading “The Other Puerto Rico”
The islands now known as the US Virgin Islands have a long and complicated relationship with racialized processes of capital accumulation. Along with neighboring islands across the Caribbean region, St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John served as important nodes … Continue reading “Beyond the Fragments of Global Wealth”
The Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo’s Minimum Monument (cover image above) is an ephemeral public art project comprised of hundreds of tiny human ice figures positioned in urban spaces. From the moment they are installed, the sculptures are already in thaw, … Continue reading “Monumental Extinctions”
Jaden Smith’s music video Fallen (directed by Miles Cable and Jaden Smith, USA, 2016, 4 min and 39 sec.) staggers and then collapses face first into settler-imperial iconographies of occupation. In the video, Smith–the actor, musician, model, and self-proclaimed living … Continue reading “Sampling the Land and the Trappings of Empire: Jaden Smith’s Moving-Image Settler Aesthetic”
On the third floor of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, couched between dinosaur skeletons and luminescent gems and crystals, sits the Tom Hunt Energy Hall. Plans for the hall were announced in 2008, declaring it … Continue reading “The Cinema of Extractions in Dallas, Texas”
Singapore has been engineered as the paradigmatic example of “Global Asia,” a place where curated narratives of “Asian culture” attract global capital. Amid the city-state’s iconic markers of cosmopolitan modernity (modern architecture, a multilingual population fluent in English, and food … Continue reading “In Search of Alternative Globalities: A Critical Aesthetics of Global Asia”
This is an admittedly grandiose title for a short essay, one that playfully references the name of the journal I edit, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and highlights a key characteristic of work on Global Asias, namely its ambitious imagination … Continue reading “Always Verging on the (Im)possible: the Structural Incoherence of Global Asias”
What would it mean to examine the current European migration crisis from a Global Asia framework? This question only seems odd when adopting the perspective of European state actors rather than those of the Syrian refugees who are the largest … Continue reading “Dead Refugees and Immortal Nations, Sights and Sites of Global Asia”
Global Asia is, to use Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s term, a constellation of geopolitical, economic, and cultural forces creating a set of mediated and mutable linkages for analyzing how images of Asia circulate around the globe historically and how … Continue reading “Noir Fiction in Malaysia and Singapore as a Critical Aesthetic of Global Asia”
