Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal

“Cities today have become portfolios of investment properties with token patches of green. The cost to live in a fortress-like luxury housing complex in London or Manhattan is so high that most of us can’t afford it. As the masses move to the suburbs, the construction industry responds by churning out clusters of the same barracks-style row houses, ensuring that, there too, one can live in utmost privacy and security. But what do these buildings say about us? Do they have anything to do with the way in which most people actually want to live?”

La ville analogique : repenser l’urbanité à l’ère numérique

“L’avènement de l’univers numérique a mis à mal notre rapport à la ville tangible, que nous avons désertée au profit d’une hyperconnectivité qui n’est pas sans conséquences sur l’espace public en tant que lieu de sociabilité. Et l’arrivée annoncée d’un soi-disant «métavers» ne fera qu’amplifier ce phénomène. La dépersonnalisation des relations interpersonnelles et le transfert des décisions humaines à des machines menacent, à terme, la part d’humanité qui nous relie les un·e·s aux autres. Loin d’y voir une fatalité, l’auteur défend l’idée selon laquelle la migration quasi intégrale de notre vie collective vers l’internet serait au contraire une invitation à réinvestir la ville en chair et en os afin de faire contrepoids à nos existences de plus en plus désincarnées. S’inspirant de la technologie analogique, il convoque les formes urbaines du passé pour imaginer la ville de demain, en évitant le piège de la nostalgie.”

Patti Smith’s Eternal Flame

Patti Smith quote "The thing that bothered me the most was when I had to return to the public eye in ’95 or ’96 when my husband died. We lived a very simple lifestyle in a more reclusive way in which he was king of our domain. I don’t drive, I didn’t have much of an income, and without him, I had to find a way of making a living. Besides working in a bookstore, the only thing I knew how to do was to make records—or to write poetry, which isn’t going to help put your kids through school. But when I started doing interviews, people kept saying “Well, you didn’t do anything in the 80s,” and I just want to get Elvis Presley’s gun out and shoot the television out of their soul. How could you say that? The conceit of people, to think that if they’re not reading about you in a newspaper or magazine, then you’re not doing anything.

Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan’s early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

Démarche de Kim-Sanh Chau

Chorégraphe active depuis 2015, j’ai à ce jour, présenté mes pièces au Québec et en Asie du Sud-Est, en théâtre (MAI, Tangente, SIDance Corée) et en galerie (L’Arsenal, The Factory Vietnam). J’ai aussi une activité en tant que travailleuse culturelle, interprète et réalisatrice vidéo. Bien que d’apparence dispersée, ces quatre pans sont en réalité combinés et dirigés vers l’accomplissement de ma démarche professionnelle. Ainsi, mon travail scénique et vidéo se concentre sur la création d’onirismes, ancrés dans un passé aux identités colonisées et un futur fictionnel et fantasmé. Ces processus sont la fois vecteurs d’échappées, et de révélations. Un profond souci d’équité, d’antioppression, et surtout de partage et de collaboration, anime l’ensemble de mes actions. En surface, je crée et diffuse mes pièces, puis sous les flots je tisse des projets secrets, dont une chaine souterraine de dialogues entre artistes en danse du Tiers-Monde et un site web éphémère recensant des œuvres censurées.

About Montréal Steppers

Founded in 2019, Montreal Steppers is a group that is committed to the art form of step. Stepping is a style of dance that uses the body as an instrument to create rhythms, sounds, beats through foot stomps, claps and chants. Focusing on values of teamwork, discipline, character building, black history and resilience, we allow participants the opportunity to learn step, experience success and use their bodies to tell their own story.

The Turn to Diaspora

This essay argues that diaspora must be understood as a condition of subjectivity and not as an object of analysis. I propose an understanding of diaspora as first and foremost a subjective condition marked by the contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession. In focusing on the problem of subjectivity and subject formation, I am suggesting that diasporas are not just there. They are not simply collections of people, communities of scattered individuals bound by some shared history, race or religion. Rather, they emerge in relation to power, in the turn to and away from power. Diasporic subjects emerge in turning, turning back upon those markers of the self—homeland, memory, loss—even as they turn on or away from them.

Ocean Vuong | On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Join us in the Rare Book Room as Ocean Vuong sits down with multi-award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson to discuss his shattering new book. 

PRÉAMBULE 21.22 | 6 : Châu Kim Sanh (Équivoc’) - BLEU NÉON

Dans un Vietnam lointain et fictionnel, se croisent des échos de musique pop sur cassettes et de rap vietnamien actuel. Châu Kim Sanh y traverse des états de corps générés par la présence de néons colorés. 

Ornamentalism

For a long time now there have been two primary conceptual frameworks through which many of us conceptualize racial embodiment: Frantz Fanon’s “epidermal racial schema”1 and Hortense Spillers’s “hieroglyphics of the flesh.”2 The former denaturalizes black skin as the product of a shattering white gaze; the latter has been particularly instructive in training our gaze on the black female body and the ineluctable matter of ungendered, jeopardized flesh. Yet, has the “epidermal racial schema” hardened for us into a thing of untroubled legibility? To what extent have the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” prevented us from seeing an alternative materialism of the body?

Teju Cole et Krista Tippett : On Being with Krista Tippett

Writer and photographer Teju Cole says he is “intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all.” He attends to the border, overlap and interplay of things — from Brahms and Baldwin to daily technologies like Google. To delve into his mind and his multiple arts is to meet this world with creative raw materials for enduring truth and quiet hope. Teju Cole is a photography critic for The New York Times and the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. His books are Blind Spot, a book of photography and writing; a collection of essays, Known and Strange Things; and two novels: Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Teju Cole — Sitting Together in the Dark.” 

A Map to the Door of No Return : Notes to belonging

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

Living a Feminist Life

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

Cockroach

Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described thief has just tried but failed to commit suicide. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but wilfully blind, citizens who surround him.

Ottoman History Podcast: Layers of History in Downtown Beirut with Rayya Haddad

Podcast

Towards Arabfuturism

It is hoped that, by increasing deposits, digital or otherwise, these ideas can contribute to a growing counterculture of thought and action that through time will be found and used in the construction of alternative states of becoming.

On Orientalism

Edward Saïd's book ORIENTALISM has been profoundly influential in a diverse range of disciplines since its publication in 1978. In this engaging (and lavishly illustrated) interview he talks about the context within which the book was conceived, its main themes and how its original thesis relates to the contemporary understanding of "the Orient." Said argues that the Western (especially American) understanding of the Middle East as a place full of villains and terrorists ruled by Islamic fundamentalism produces a deeply distorted image of the diversity and complexity of millions of Arab peoples.

Concepts: Chaos vs. Complex Systems

Advances in the scientific study of chaos have been important motivators/roots of the modern study of complex systems. There exists some confusion about the relationship of chaos and complexity. Chaos can be more or less strictly defined. A reasonably strict definition is that chaos deals with deterministic systems whose trajectories diverge exponentially over time. This property is expected to be found in the behavior of complex systems. However, how it can be related to various properties of complex systems continues to be an important area of research. Models of chaos generally describe the dynamics of one (or a few) variables which are real (ie represented by a decimal number). Using these models some characteristic behaviors of their dynamics can be found.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (documentary)

A Phenomenology of Whiteness (suggestion by James Oscar)

“The world too is inherited as a dwelling. Whiteness might be what is ‘here’, as a point from which the world unfolds, which is also the point of inheritance. If whiteness is inherited, then it is also reproduced. Whiteness gets reproduced by being seen as a form of positive residence: as if it were a property of persons, cultures and places. Whiteness becomes, you could even say, ‘like itself’, as a form of family resemblance. It is no accident that race has been understood through familial metaphors in the sense that ‘races’ come to be seen as having ‘shared ancestry’ (Fenton, 2003: 2).”

Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformation.

Dancers’ health in a globalizing, postmodern dance world

The language of ballroom culture