In a 1995 interview between Lisa Lowe and Angela Davis, Davis states that, “A woman of color formation might decide to work around immigration issues. This political commitment is not based on the specific histories of racialized communities or its constituent members, but rather constructs an agenda agreed upon by all who are a part…
We are pleased to share the publication of our third issue! “For Many Returns” is written as a correspondence between Nasrin Himada and Ruanne Abu-Rahme and Basel Abbas’s The Incidental Insurgents. Engaging with writing as a process, this piece takes up the task of writing alongside, and with the artwork. In this first iteration of “For Many Returns,” Himada grapples with the limitations of grief as it is felt in relation to the poetic images of a desolate, post-apocalyptic Palestinian landscape. “The Beloved” is the transcript for a video piece with the same title by Candice Lin. Lin takes the reader through our…
I want to move away from thinking about art writing. Not as an analytical tool, but as a relational one, and not as a review that explains the object in question, but as a way to extend the work by seriously confronting my love for it, why I love it. So instead of using theory,…
Around 90 to 95 percent of tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled. As Anne [Gardulski] told me, “Nobody dies of old age in the ocean.” —Christina Sharpe, In the Wake Today the ocean may seem like a coherent body of water, as if all the scars made from…
Let me be your leg and carry you over mountains your gangrene cannot go. Let me describe to you the plants I found, the shape of their many leaves, how they flower in the winter, and change sex when they begin to smell. When your leg was so swollen it was the size of two,…
“I went to see great works of art before barbarians who cannot even recognize great works of art destroy them.” B. Frank Earnest, spokesman for the Virginia chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans, speaking about Confederate statues in Richmond on NPR’s Code Switch podcast, August 23rd, 2017. In the fight to contend with the…
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…