Site Archives
Ali Smith Now, Contemporaries Essays
Contemporaries Essays, Dark Academia
Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis
Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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….
Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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…