Archive for 2022

Grammars of Refusal

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…

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…