“Take this down carefully,” a man told the Los Angeles Times over the phone on the morning of September 13, 1972. “I just bombed an Arab’s house in Hollywood. No Arab is going to be safe in this country. Never Again. Never Again. Never Again.” (1) That day, the Jewish Defense League ( JDL) detonated […]
Los Angeles Intifada Read More »
In editing this special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, an issue on persecution, I didn’t figure I’d find the intimacy of these poems, stories, and essays.
Foreword: A Requiem For Suffering Read More »
I. The gale seems to blow up out of nowhere just as the two of us are lumbering John’s dory into the river. Whipping past the headland, wind and rain sledge me in the chest. I’m shoved back, off-balance. Trying not to lose my grip on Selkie, I stretch out towards her from the landing,
Auguries of Heavy Weather Read More »
In both Europe and the Americas, art was important to African slaves because it offered them the possibility of what I will call a socially transcendental existence; it could be marshaled into everyday life as a condition of survival against the laws that mapped out the place of the black as being outside the framework of modernity…Just as the aesthetic could become a key index in the violence of modernity, it could also provide the subjects of this cruelty with the hallowed place where utopian dreams could be nurtured and secured.
Race and the Idea of the Aesthetic Read More »
The sea fools you. The Turkish coast is across from where we stand on Chios island. It doesn’t look like it is that far away. Only a few kilometers separate us. When the weather is calm, is it worth 1,500 Euros per person to put wife and children on inflatable cheap dinghies to make it
I don’t know if I’m writing a love song or a lament
This Land, This Water Read More »
Until now, the lakes and life had been generous in their gifts, and abundant. Water buoyed us. People I loved lived. I handled the loss like someone who’d gone around believing the things she cherishes would be around forever.
Big Water, Little Water Read More »
In an artworld so clearly molded and regulated to serve the needs of the dominant and most privileged sectors of our society and their ways of doing business-the same sectors which benefit from the perpetuation of major conflicts of national, class, race and gender interests-what are the possibilities for oppositional, critical practices to assert themselves and be received?
Wait Till Donald Trump Buys the Whitney Read More »
[…] I understand that China has no use for my affections. They will not save me from what many in this country see as the unforgivable fact of my foreignness, my blackness. Most pressingly, these affections will not save any of us from the long-term effects that exposure to this environment is having on our bodies.
Easterly: Notes From a Black Life in East Asia Read More »
We want to ignore racism and our participation in it, to see our part as pure progress, ourselves as good. We want to believe in white evolution.
Trespass and Gentrification Read More »
