Teaching which is not meant to apply to anything but the examples given is different from that which “points beyond” them. — Ludwig Wittgenstein1 Fascism is the triumph of the…
Archive for October, 2022
We Should All Be Sisters
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again…
Breathing Lessons
“Things were not gentle, not ever, then.” “So you open your heart and it hurt. You stand up straight and hold your shoulders back to let your heart out, and…
On Not Translating: Don Mee Choi’s Anti-neocolonial Poetics
I think of refusal as one of the most highly effective modes of resistance. I refuse to be faithful. — Don Mee Choi In the world of translation, no term…
Watertongue: A Lyric Essay
Lake In dreams, I circle a page. It is lapis, lapping, with arms of water. I wake up on a November morning and write: I meet at the page: water….
Ambivalence as Misfeeling, Ambivalence as Refusal
Introduction How can ambivalence operate as oppositional emotion work for women of colour activists in Europe? As the “simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotional or cognitive orientations toward a…
Gestures of Refusal: Introduction
“Better the errant path than the known world.” — Saidiya Hartman1 In a time marked by the worsening social, political, and environmental crises of late capitalism, gestures of refusal have…
Afterword: Ten More Sites of Ambivalence in the “Open”
In the introduction to this special issue, we argued that ambivalence is a disposition animating all criticism, even if only its disavowal, but that ambivalence becomes particularly charged in criticism…
Caribbean Conflagrations: Camouflage, Ambivalence, and Anti-Analogical Entanglements
Beauty’s Blemish: Figuring Caribbean Landscapes The environmental figures that seek to portray the Caribbean’s strange place in the world can be easily recalled and most attributed to the work of…
Racialized Femininity and Representation’s Ambivalences in Trajal Harrell’s The Return of La Argentina
The audience is seated several rows deep, facing a blank gallery wall. As they wait, their chatter buzzes through the room. From an open panel at one side, Trajal Harrell…