Periscope articles and content
Species extinctions are not new. Scientists say that evolution is relentless and ecology is incredibly dynamic: species have always been disappearing and emerging across multiple scales of time and place. Mass extinctions (i.e., cataclysms that wipe out three-quarters of … Continue reading “The World is Dead. Long Live the World.”
India’s strong man Narendra Modi embraces President Barak Obama. The photograph was taken during President Obama’s second visit to India, in January 2015. Obama has made two visits to India, more than any other US president in office. Source: … Continue reading “Indian Democracy and Hindu Populism: The Modi Regime”
Above, a volunteer for the Election Commission carrying Electronic Voting Machines calls for directions to a polling centre that he was to help set up and man in Hajipur, Bihar as it goes to polls in the second to … Continue reading “Modi Will Be Put to the Test”
After casting his vote quite early in the day, Yangala Chittiah (pictured above), a resident of Pydipalli in West Godavari, Andhra Pradesh, spent the afternoon waving at voters heading to the polling station dressed as former chief minister YS … Continue reading “Regional parties are dead? Long live the regional parties!”
Indian resident Maqbool Alam Siddiqui watches a bank of televisions featuring images of Narendra Modi taking his oath as India’s Prime Minister in New Delhi at a multi brand electronic showroom in Mumbai on on May 26, 2014. New … Continue reading “Modi's Media”
Engulfed in a momentary dust storm induced by Bharatiya Janta Party candidate Narendra Modi’s helicopter as he departs from a public meeting in Robertsganj, Benaras (Varanasi), members of the crowd attempt to cover their faces and eyes as dry … Continue reading “The Majority of Democracy”
Much like an imitation of reality, a Narendra Modi fan watches the Ganga Aarti [ritual worship] on the banks of Benares (Varanasi), with a mask of the leader placed behind his head, facing away from the priest. Photo by … Continue reading “They Always Speak with their Eyes Cast Down: Dalits on the Margin of Indian Democracy”
My early university education at the then-very white University of Cape Town coincided with South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to democracy. Stuart Hall didn’t feature much, despite the fact, as I would later learn, I was indirectly influenced by … Continue reading “Stuart Hall's South African Legacy”
This Social Text: Periscope dossier arises from a two-day intensive seminar, Queer Temporalities: Reading Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds, a collaborative event co-organized by The(e)ories: Critical Theory and Sexuality Studies, which was held at University College Dublin, Ireland in November 2011. … Continue reading “In a Queer Time and Space: Slowly, Closely, Over Reading Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds”
I want to “linger, to dally, to take pleasure in tarrying” over Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of slow reading. Indeed, I want to read slowly, to take time, to take my time. Ever since the advent of New Criticism in the … Continue reading “Slow Reading”
The promise of a voluptuous encounter with the past is arguably one of the most seductive aspects of Time Binds. Emboldened by a refusal to “give up on sex and sociability” (xxii) in the face of what she identifies as … Continue reading “‘Erotic Effusions’ in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories”
Susan Stryker’s 1993 performance piece, “Transgender Rage” later became “My Notes to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (Rage). Sometime later, after queer theory had been declared dead, resurrected, dismembered and sutured together again several times, … Continue reading “Trans Forming Time”
One of the many achievements of Beth Freeman’s Time Binds is its persistent interrogation of how temporality produces subjectivity, as opposed to the other way around. This preoccupation which is defined by Freeman as “queer temporality” is a queer project … Continue reading “Après-Coup in extremis: Futurism and A-Historicity in the Work of Freeman, Lacan and Woolf”
Analyzing the sexual citation of chattel slavery in interracial S/M role play, Freeman reaches a hopeful conclusion from what might seem unpromising material, given the structural racism that has endured into the present as one legacy of colonial dispossession and … Continue reading “Dead Time: Queer Temporalities and the Deportation Regime”
Elizabeth Freeman admits that in this book she is committed to overcloseness, to an overreading practice as overdetermined as queerness itself. She explains that “’Queer’ cannot signal a purely deconstructive move or position of pure negativity” because that would “risk … Continue reading “Time’s Tangles”
