Category: Non-fiction
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Forgiveness Work (Arzoo Osanloo, 2020)
Photo taken from medieval manuscript by Qotbeddin Shirazi (1236–1311), a Persian Astronomer. The image depicts an epicyclic planetary model. In Forgiveness Work, Arzoo Osanloo offers ways of understanding an Islamic notion of justice by looking closer at experiences and infrastructures that illustrate the centrality of compassion and mercy in Iranian criminal law. She argues how the compulsion to…
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Inscrutable Surface
Java – Topeng: Ken Angrok.: Wayang Topeng play “Ken Angrok” performance at Java Institute, Jogjakarta [Yogyakarta]. Photo: NYPL/ Claire Holt Vivian Huang’s first book, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, examines the ways in which Asian and Asian American artists have advantageously reconfigured the erstwhile detrimental stereotype of inscrutability as “a dynamic antiracist,…
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Holding Everything Dear (2021)
Wrote a short section introduction to Holding Everything Dear (2021), a compilation of selected writings from Degree Critical edited by Jessica Holmes, Lune Ames, and Cigdem Asatekin. Foreword by David Levi Strauss and afterword by Nancy Princenthal. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dgVMcIXx29uHVCT3DV6Z5vLEH-8l4d_T/view
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The Outsider Speaking for the Other
A serial reading of Andre Breton, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, might give the impression of a direct intellectual lineage. That’s not what I’m going to do here. I’d like to think of this as a commentary from the sidelines; of what would have been possible had these thinkers sat…
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Visual echoes
How many ways has photography changed our view of nature and how has our overwhelming dependence on photography impacted our ability to experience nature and our efforts to preserve it? Robin Kelsey offers a trenchant critique: we relish the view of nature more than nature itself; photographs have “obscured the process by which land becomes…
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Mythological tricksters in Indonesia and the Philippines
There, tricksters tend to come in a paunchy and less nimble guise, as either apes or tortoises. In one such tale, an ape is said to have befriended a heron, and they engaged in the common practice, at least among the humans who told these tales, of delousing one another. The heron went first and…
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Protected: Land of the Morning: The Philippines and Its People (Asian Civilizations Museum, 2009)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: Outline of Philippine Mythology (F. Landa Jocano, 1969)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Protected: Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines (Richard Q. Lieban, 1967)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Magic Kiss of Death
Pope Francis kisses the feet of South Sudan President Salva Kiir April 11, 2019 at the conclusion of a two-day retreat at the Vatican for the political leaders of African nations. The pope begged the leaders to give peace a chance. At right is Vice President Riek Machar. (Photo Catholic News Service/Vatican Media via Reuters)…
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Villem Flusser on Artistic Freedom
With his statements in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser opened a new understanding of photography, and gave the term a new meaning. While he describes the photograph as a “flyer-like image distributed by the apparatus,” the Photographer for Flusser was a critic; a gadfly: “a person who attempts to place within the image,…
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Seeing is Believing
Through Greek, Judeo-Christian, and the Post-literate societies The common interpretation of the cultural aphorism “seeing is believing” is that “you need to see something before you can accept that it really exists or occurs.” Throughout its modern usage, it is usually uttered as a rebuke to assumptions made without visual evidence. In the Oxford Dictionary…
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Havelock in the Boondocks
Many accounts of Homer’s life circulated in classical antiquity, the most prevalent being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, in present-day Turkey. His biography, written by Pseudo-Herodotus is now considered legend, the story of a blind man trapped in eternal darkness, being led to a gathering of people to recite his epics.[1] Perhaps it was a…
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A New Prince Must Rise
Review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘Assembly’ It’s all a question of assembly: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri know how really productive work can break the common good. Yes, they did it again: after “Empire”, “Multitude” and “Common Wealth”, now comes “Assembly”, the latest delivery in the series of subversive feel-good books from H…
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Proletarian Nights (Jacques Ranciere, 2012)
The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France Politics occurs when those who do not have the time, take the necessary time to live as a resident of a common space, proving that their mouths do not only speak with a voice but with a language, which signifies the pain. […] Politics consists in the division of the sensible,…
Geronimo Cristobal 