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.
SourceOrnamentalism
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?
SourceTeju 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.”
SourceA 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.
SourceCockroach
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.
SourceŠamaŠ Soleil Noir Soleil
ŠamaŠ Soleil Noir Soleil was created by Zad Moultaka was exhibited in Beirut Lebanon at the Sursock Museum in June 2018, in Helsinki, Suomenlinna Island from August till October 2018. His project for the Lebanese Pavillon unites visual architecture and sound composition. He combines the artist's musical and visual research in sinergy of forms, materials and sounds.
SourceThe Arab Apocalypse
L’Apocalypse arabe is a book-length poem composed in French by the Arab American poet Etel Adnan. It was published in 1980; Adnan’s English translation first appeared in 1989. The Arab Apocalypse may be read as a hybrid text, visual poetry, surrealism, translation, postcolonialism — it is its nature as a work of witness because it was written in response to and in the immediate context of the Lebanese Civil War (which broke out in 1975).
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