Periscope articles and content
The hallmarks of poet and novelist Kevin Killian’s style are various—variousness, in fact, may be counted among them. Writer Dodie Bellamy, who married Killian in 1985, speaks of his “protean slips between high and low culture,” modeling an absolute equality … Continue reading “Extreme Remedies”
In 2017 Daniel Benjamin and I organized Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today, a gathering of writers and scholars to celebrate and complicate the work of a group of writers that has not often been considered by academic criticism. We … Continue reading “Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Remembering Queer Theory’s New Narrative”
Society for Sick Societies is a diagnostic project. Built as a series of episodes, each one of its vignettes sets out to analyze an expressed symptom of a sick society–a practice, pattern, gesture, proverb, or technique that seems to encapsulate … Continue reading “Society for Sick Societies: Media Itineraries”
Any poetic writing about and through pop culture wants to flush the residues of a Romantic ideology of original virtuosic composition without also thereby disposing of the subject. Kathy Acker describes the insouciant fun of unoriginal writing: “It’s like a … Continue reading “Action Kevin”
The adage “this too shall pass” is perhaps a source of hope in living through the current COVID-19 crisis. But, when the conventional notion of safety is put into question and when precarity is distributed unevenly across different “safe spaces,” … Continue reading “Home Sweet Home: Everyday Precarity in Lockdown”
In his own words, Kevin Killian’s “Tagged” was a project in which he photographed “individual artists and poets, mostly male, naked, their junk covered often by a squarish drawing, almost a caricature, of a cock and balls by Raymond Pettibon.” … Continue reading “On Kevin Killian’s “Tagged” Project”
In the time of COVID, I do a lot of laundry. At first it was because I was finally still; no longer traveling so there was more time and a backlog of dirty clothes. Then, it was for other reasons. … Continue reading “Sweat”
It’s something of a relief, when, late in Fascination, Kevin Killian reflects on the cruelty of the youthful romances that he’s been narrating: “…as I look back I see that I had a ruthless streak; I could be horrifyingly manipulative” … Continue reading “Very Good: On Kevin Killian’s Fascination“
The nation state shuts its borders. It has frozen all transit and freezes you into place. The benevolent state, you are told, now fully controls the airways and highways. It sets up roadblocks and checkpoints. It organizes your intimacy. You … Continue reading “The Impossible Ritual”
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”
