Moving away from postcolonial thought’s accounts of internationalist failure in the 1990s, this essay asks, how might anticolonial thought agitate in the present? Agitation, from the Latin agito, denotes a…
Contemporaries Essays
Failure
Postcoloniality as a formation is haunted by failure. After the dismantling of European empires in the mid-twentieth century, the promise of decolonization dissipated quickly, as crises of governance, and flawed…
Introduction: Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Describing his unsettling return to Cambridge in 1945 after World War II, Raymond Williams ponders the “new and strange world around us” where people “just don’t speak the same language.”1…
Charisma
From charismata to rizz, the concept of charisma continues to swell and transform in intriguing ways. The Oxford University Press declared the slang term “rizz” the 2023 word of the…
Marriage Hygiene
“Marriage hygiene” may not be a keyword now, but it was in the 1930s, when it was used chiefly as a euphemism for birth control. It appeared prominently in Lysol…
Uses of Obviousness in Seven Controlled Vocabularies
The OED provides the pejorative definition of obvious as “lacking in originality; banal, forgettable.” As any reader of Tan Lin’s work knows, he is a proponent of art that is…
Anybody Who’s Everybody
In “Disco as Operating System, Part One,”1 Tan Lin proposes that to consider disco would be to miss the point. “No one really listens to disco,” he assures us, “not…
PowerPoint Poetics
PowerPoint is slow, simple, boring, dull, beautiful, ugly, chaotic and evil. I love PowerPoint. I hate PowerPoint. I am obsessed with this strange piece of software. I use it to…
Quantum Raciality and the Becomings of Mourning: Tan Lin and His Ideal Forms
In Tan Lin’s work, there has long been an affective interchangeability between people, objects, texts, and images. I suggest that there is a continuous throughline between Lin’s experimentations with affect,…
过眼烟云(字): an homage to Tan Lin
“People can be so sentimental. Twelfth Master is not himself.” —Rouge (1987) It’s difficult for me to write about Tan Lin’s work because for a long time now, I’ve felt…