This text comes out of the University of California Humanities Research Institute residential group on “Queer of Color Formations and Translocal Spaces in Europe” (though the regions we work on also include the US, South Africa, India, and the Caribbean). The fellowship allowed eight of us to spend ten weeks together at UC Irvine in…
In Paris and in the Middle Ages sewage—human and non-human waste—was routinely dumped onto unpaved streets before working its way to the River Seine, from which people drank directly. Throughout the nineteenth century, sanitation extended far beyond Parisian urban development, into colonial governance, and serves today as a tool for imperial control. Pleating health, sanitation,…
We want to begin by thanking you for your work in the Boston Review and for your art writing, particularly on Mark Bradford, and for your pivotal book, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. We have been learning so much from your tweets, your website, your words. We were incredibly struck by…
She was more than just a snapshot you have seen on television, more than just a victim of a terrible crime, more than just a woman in a hijab who apparently inspired anger in a man she hardly knew. She loved and was loved; she cared for others and was cared for by them; she…
Grace Hong: One thing that I wanted to talk to you about is, you and I have known each other for a really long time, and there was a distinct moment in our mutual acquaintance when you started becoming this total art collector. And almost at the same time, you also started writing about art.…
contemptorary: We are so grateful for your existence and presence in the world. We have been avid readers of your critical race and legal scholarship — and we were so excited to learn that you also have an art practice. We were curious what the field or the practice has offered you. So we wanted…
1. Currently you are beloved, apoliticized, or, capitalized. We think of one of your names headlining Hirschorn’s gentrification project, your name invoked as a shield against his. No mention in the headlines of your anti-fascist activism, your writing against the artist bourgeois, vulnerable education systems. It is as if you existed solely, in your own…
1. Despite my disdain for predictability and repetitiveness, I have found myself starting all correspondences with friends and loved ones with the same greeting: I hope you are surrounded with lots of love and support amidst fascism! Although I am aware that no amount of love or support may protect one from fascism, I find…
Under the neoliberal police state, U.S. acts of protest often proceed like a performance: a permit from the city officials required for large groups to march the street, the mapped out and agreed upon distance, the weight of returning home to continue with other daily chores. While a group of established artists and writers have…
Too often radical debates become reduced, or settled with representational politics. Without dismissing the severity and damage that the lack of representation means to communities under siege (as we are intimately invested in the stakes of representation here), we’ve increasingly become interested in expanding the horizon beyond representation, canon-interruption, and inclusion. In The Reorder…