Periscope articles and content
In this flighty article, I will look closely at the logo of the German company Lufthansa, taking the 2018 re-branding of the airline as a departure point to investigate the inherent temporalities that lay in the crane’s design. I. “The … Continue reading “From Crane to Plane: Temporalities of a Bird-Inspired Design”
To what gods is one supposed to pray in this place, conveniently located at FRAport’s Terminal 1, Gate Z, where something so obviously glitzy as an undulating, wavy ceiling with a polished-gold finish can pass for “weltanschaulich neutral”? When one … Continue reading “Groves of Post-Criticality: Quiet Rooms at the International Airport”
This animated map made by Max Galka shows passenger air traffic over a year. Every small dot stands for around two thousand people. We are all probably familiar with these visualizations showing the marvel of global mobility at scale. I … Continue reading “Airport as a Bordering Process”
The title of this piece refers to dreaming, an experience one can have awake and asleep alike. Dreaming takes you somewhere else, on a somewhat miraculous journey–pretty much like floating in mid-air. Boarding an airplane is still an exceptional situation … Continue reading “Dream with Me about Unwinding”
In the past year, political uncertainties in the Korean Peninsula have been pronounced. While much can be said about the oscillating tensions between North Korea, South Korea, and the United States, it has been abundantly clear that official peace agreements … Continue reading “Introduction”
I purchased two bundles of postcards during my travels to the DMZ, more specifically to Panmunjom and the Joint Security Area–one from ROK (South Korea/SK) in 1995 and one from DPRK (North Korea/NK) in 1998. I selected five images from … Continue reading “Both Sides Now”
The February 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea set the stage for the historic inter-Korea and North Korea-US summits, which occurred in quick succession in the following months. The North and South Korean leaders, Chairman Kim Jong Un and … Continue reading “Women as “Dupes,” “Stooges,” and “Armies of Beauties””
In this act, performed along the banks of the Imjin River in South Korea in 2015, I provide an offering that gestures to the relationship between the living and the dead in contemporary society. By providing seven paper boats to … Continue reading “Offering, Seven Boats”
Figure 1. South Korean soldiers erect a tower of loudspeakers along Korea’s Demilitarized Zone. Figure 2. South Korean soldiers adjust the broadcasts from inside a control room. The sounds of militarized division have permeated the landscape in and around Korea’s … Continue reading “The Sounds of Demilitarized Peace”
By the end of Japan’s colonization of Korea (1910-45), over two million Koreans lived in Japan. My grandfather, for instance, came to Japan as a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army. (I don’t know when.) Others had come to supply … Continue reading “Unmaking Borders to Demilitarize Peace: A Zainichi Korean Experience”
This Social Text Periscope dossier offers reflections on Jasbir Puar’s work from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times to The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. With The Right to Maim’s release occurring on the tenth anniversary of Terrorist Assemblages, … Continue reading “Introduction: Relation, Exception, and the Horizons of Critique in Jasbir Puar’s Work”
Terrorist Assemblages brilliantly illuminates the imbrication of race and affect. While not dispensing with the complex histories that have shaped racial categories, Puar’s book draws our attention to race as an affective landscape—pulling materiality, discourse, and emotions into the fray … Continue reading “Race, Affect, and Assemblage: Toward Brown Jouissance”
Jasbir Puar’s work in The Right to Maim is crucial to understanding not only that the nature of settler colonialism is genocidal but also how that genocidal nature operates. Settler colonialism is, in each and every case, a state operation, … Continue reading “blackpalestinian breath”
Jasbir Puar’s argument in The Right to Maim of Israel’s deliberate debilitation of Palestinians—by bodily and psychological injury, social exclusion, economic stunting, and political encumberance—is a poignant one. Indeed, one simply has to turn on the news to see tens … Continue reading “Maiming Palestinian Time”
