Periscope articles and content
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”
I. There are some things that seem too volatile to be touched, that confound consideration. Moments, that when they appear, time opens up, reaches across space, prods, squeezes, cathecting pain and pleasure. These moments pivot between fragility and indestructibility and … Continue reading “On Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Black (Diasporic/Nordic) Arts”
Almost a decade ago, Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez published Los migrantes que no importan, first in Spain and then in Mexico, recounting his journeys with Central American migrants as they traveled through Mexico to the US border. It remains one … Continue reading “Introduction: On the Accumulation of Bodies”
My first encounter with Capitalismo gore was in 2012. Back then, I was living in Barcelona with a group of activists and academics, and we were asking each other about the violence in Mexico, represented in the European media through … Continue reading “Escape Routes to Capitalismo Gore“
I first encountered Sayak Valencia’s brilliant Gore Capitalism accidentally, sometime in 2012. During one of my visits to Tijuana, my hometown, I made a trek to Librería Sor Juana, the city’s feminist bookstore, where Capitalismo gore seemed to pop out … Continue reading “Finding Meaning in Gore”
In 2012, Los Angeles artist Rafa Esparza used the following materials to stage his performance STILL in LA’s Elysian Park: soil, artist’s breath, translucent balloons, jute rope noose, shovel, and a cardboard box. Only a few spectators experienced this performance … Continue reading “Time Dislocated: Masculinity and the Performance of Breathing”
J. Marion Sims describes the first time he saw a vesicovaginal fistula as if he had been gazing at a captivating portrait. “Introducing the bent handle of a spoon, I saw everything, as no man had seen before,” writes the … Continue reading “In the Flesh”
