There’s a moment in Severance, before the beginning of the end, when Candace Chen finds herself crying on the fire escape of her East Village apartment. It’s an in-between moment,…
Archive for 2020
On Being a Person of Use
Shortly after the US began its waves of lockdowns, academics took to Twitter to scold one another about working. “Productivity in a crisis,” in Summer Kim Lee’s characterization of leftist…
Coolie Pathology
Shen Fever enters the public consciousness slowly and unassumingly. It had been “in the news through the summer,” Candace recalls at an office-wide meeting on the subject, “like a West…
Right Time, Right Place
Severance, published in 2018, is about a fungal disease that originates in Shenzhen and takes down most of the world population in a few months. We probably don’t need to…
Epilogue: From Antigua to Algérie: The Particularity and Promise of the Afro-Arab
“Je ne m’enterre pas dans un particularisme étroit. Mais je ne veux pas non plus me perdre dans un universalisme décharné. Il y a deux manières de se perdre: par…
Hijacking Imaginaries: On Having Feelings for Decolonization
Some years ago, I found myself sitting among distant cousins at a family reunion; at some point in the long evening I asked, apropos of nothing: “when you were a…
The Incessant War
Emergencies make periods. Not just in what one perceives to be individual consciousness, when the subject in emergency clings to the before and after of seemingly incommensurate realties, when the…
On the Afterlives of US Forever Wars: Insurgent Aesthetics as a Queer Practice of Freedom
Oh, how we long for “a day after” now!1 I am drafting this essay from the Great Indoors on the Northwest side of Chicago on the ancestral lands of the…
Great Games
They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam. Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances. This is not…
“We cannot conquer it — we cannot leave it alone”: Victorian Afghanistan and Its Afterlives
My father spoke English with a slight British accent, a lasting mark of the schools he attended in Kabul in the 1940s and early 1950s. He would regale us with…