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.

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.

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.

Towards what justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education

Toward What Justice? brings together compelling ideas from a wide range of intellectual traditions in education to discuss corresponding and sometimes competing definitions of justice. Leading scholars articulate new ideas and challenge entrenched views of what justice means when considered from the perspectives of diverse communities. Their chapters, written boldly and pressing directly into the difficult and even strained questions of justice, reflect on the contingencies and incongruences at work when considering what justice wants and requires. At its heart, Toward What Justice? is a book about justice projects, and the incommensurable investments that social justice projects can make. It is a must-have volume for scholars and students working at the intersection of education and Indigenous studies, critical disability studies, climate change research, queer studies, and more.

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?

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.

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.

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).”

Dancers’ health in a globalizing, postmodern dance world

The language of ballroom culture