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…
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Contemporaries Essays, Gestures of Refusal
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…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
Reading Interculturalism After Kalamandalam
In the first half of the last century, scores of Western artists and art historians traveled to India to have a firsthand experience of its variegated heritage of performing arts…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
In the Same Room, Again: Anecdotes about Feminist Meetings
A Light Loose Commitment When I was a graduate student in New York, I worked as the managing editor of a feminist academic journal that focused on art and performance…