Hillbilly Ethnography
A well-meaning, best-selling memoir promotes dangerous myths about racial determinism and racial innocence that form the bedrock of
TONIGHT: Kate Zambreno w/ Laurie Penny @ Unnameable Books
This Friday join The New Inquiry at Book Court to celebrate the release of Kate Zambreno's new memoir in the form of a history of…
Sunday Reading
"Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task / Does not divide the Sunday from the week." -- Marcellus in Shakespeare's Hamlet
Rome, 1974
Mothers spat at cops and cops spat at mothers. The south spat at the north and the north spat at the south. Rome spat at itself.
Five Questions with Michael Davidson
When I was younger I took the body for granted; it was just “there” and would always supply the same predictable access to the world. Because it was eternal, it could be abused more generously.
On Hurricanes and Beauty
When it's clear that no matter how hard we plan, there's only so much we can really control, the concept of beauty—no matter how illusory it might be—becomes particularly potent.
Oh go to hell.
Heroines
An excerpt from the book Heroines, now available from semiotext(e)
Interview with Kate Zambreno
An interview with Kate Zambreno about her new book Heroines, now in stores.
The Strangers
The appeal of the pre-modern is in its strangeness, its estrangement from us, its trust in a system we’ve since jettisoned.
Pronunciation as Death Sentence
It was called the Parsley Massacre because the Dominican border guards would conduct a linguistic test of all dark-skinned people to see who was Haitian, asking the people to pronounce the word perejil (Spanish for parsley).
“What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”
If we think of censorship in purely negative terms, none of this will be all that interesting.
Iambic Spooktameter
Nothing says Halloween like hauntingly bad doggerel
Visitors
Presenting "Visitors" - an original mix from Old Money and Lamin Fofana with nods to black secret technology, ancient civilizations, Haile Selassie, and various strands of diasporic influences, all funneled through hard, 4th world electronics.
No Hay Nada
To a privileged tourist from the north, Cuba’s apparent reciprocity, simplicity, and warmth seem like enviable qualities that are missing from our own lives. But will the country's increasingly aggressive quest for dollars throw Cuba into the global marketplace and obliterate its alluring difference?
As crazy, as crazy, as crazy as I am /
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SZBLAovd28 / nothing can parallel the very non-parallel fact of those pants and that floor
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
Liquid Border
An excerpt from The Law of the Sea by Annalisa Camilli
United States v. Scott Daniel Warren
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
Abolish the ICE Prison Complex
A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons
Border Theories
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
Soft Borders
The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.
Fash at Sea
The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over
Operation Streamline
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.
In the Water
An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility--they might become our neighbor
Cross-Border Operations
It is no longer plausible to describe the state’s borders as geographically fixed or the state as distinguishable from capital or “markets.”
Empire Records
Guantánamo Diary's missing passages connect it with the US empire's deeper history of far-flung capture and detention networks