Fanon & Embodiment

“Walking with Fanon: Towards Decolonized Embodiments.” Interventions (2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2023.2191862

This essay reconsiders the role of Fanon’s corporeal metaphors in his political writing and the range of possible embodiments for the decolonized nation. I cross-read two movement descriptions in Fanon’s clinical and political writing about blocked and moving bodies in examples of distorted walking: 1. the 1958 case study medical article “On Torsion Spasms,” 2. the evocation of decolonized people walking together in the conclusion of Wretched of the Earth. Reading these two descriptions of walking together opens up interpretations of decolonization’s embodiments.

Debt Poetry

“Errors in the Exchange: Debt, Self-Translation, and the Speculative Poesis of Raquel Salas Rivera.” New Centennial Review 20.1 (June 2020): 75-102. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.1.0075

This article analyzes the self-translation techniques by Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera and argues that he deploys these same discursive techniques in his representation of the power dynamics of the debt's exchanges. I focus on the correspondences between mistranslations of language and miscalculations in the exchange and redefinitions of words and reconfigurations of numerical value to demonstrate how Salas Rivera uses the linguistic to access the material impacts of the debt on Puerto Rican people, ecologies, and institutions.

Reterritorialization

“Reterritorializing Haiti and the Dominican Republic in Alanna Lockward's Online Performance Curation.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 15.3 (August 2019): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2019.1669357

Focusing on a collective online performance of the mid-twentieth century Dominican poet Jacques Renaud Viau using Google+ Hangouts within a multimedia digital performance art exhibit as curated by Dominican intellectual Alanna Lockward, this article considers how the curation of performance on internet platforms interacts with (trans-)national spaces through the digital representation and reorganization of those spaces. This article analyzes questions of access, digital smoothness and roughness, and the performance of listening on the Google+ Hangouts platform, and how the networked solidarity gestures towards a reterritorialization of contemporary Haitian and Dominican geopolitics.

Slow Walking

We Won't be in Sync, But We Will Be Together: The Belonging of Slow Walking. Dancer Citizen, 6. http://dancercitizen.org/issue-6/jeannine-murray-rom%C3%A1n/

Theorizing kinesthetic temporality in the community practice of slow walking, this article offers a performance analysis of corporeal balance in time and place in the context of twenty-first century United States politics.

Douen

"Twitter's and @douenislands's Ambiguous Paths." sx:archipelagos (May 2016): https://doi.org/10.7916/D8S46S1S

The Douen Islands project was cofounded in 2013 by a group of Trinidadian artists, including poet Andre Bagoo, graphic designer Kriston Chen, and artist Rodell Warner, among others. Its name refers to the folk figures of douen, whose backward-pointing feet create backward paths. This essay uses a Twitter-focused analysis to explore the representations of the douen in two Douen Islands projects: first, considering the social mediatization of the text and the performance event the artists created, and, second, exploring how a backward-reading practice impacts possible interpretations of the douen's persona as tweeted in these two projects. 

http://smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/issue01/murrayroman-douenislands.html

BEUR Literature

"Hom(e)ing Devices: Locating Identity in the Work of Tassadit Imache." French Review 77.6 (May 2004): 1140-50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479616

In three of her novels, Tassadit Imache depicts characters who are inheritors of both French and Algerian communities, but only in her first, semiautobiographical novel, Une Fille sans histoire, are beur thematics explicit. Her following novels, Le Dromadaire de Bonaparte and Je veux rentrer, insist upon social, geographical, and personal mobility. This author examines Imache's attempts to carve out a literary home for herself by creating spaces of self-definition.



Glissant&Jardin créole

“Care webs and the creole garden in Manthia Diawara’s Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation.” French Screen Studies 22.1 (2022): 77-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/26438941.2021.2003555

This article explores how the techniques of surviving Atlantic slavery leave legacies of care, notably in the creole garden, as a counter-plantation practice of mutual distribution. By taking up Édouard Glissant’s theorization of the jardin créole in Manthia Diawara’s documentary, Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation, the author shows how Diawara’s staging, filming and editing of Glissant’s remarks amplify how the jardin créole functions as a care web. In its visual dialogue with the jardin créole, Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation demonstrates the role of documentary film in illuminating the ethics of care.

Making Manifestos

“A Manifesto on Making Space in Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 34.1 (Jan 2019): 9-28. https://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2019.0020

"A Manifesto on Making Space in Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music " argues that Decades can be read as a manifesto. Focused on Mac's use of the Lesbian Avengers' "Dyke Manifesto" and Whitman's "To a Stranger," this article shows how, through performing texts and devising audience exercises, Mac creates a manifesto for contemporary politics: to make space for those who have been historically displaced, to endure things that go on too long in order to stay committed in direct political actions, and to draw on queer pleasure as a means of sustaining these two processes.

Sexile’s Pedagogy

“Sexile's Counterpathological Pedagogies at the Intersections of Trans*, Exile, and HIV-Prevention Experience.” Feminist Formations 31.2 (2019): 155-180. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2019.0020

How can the layering of trans* and exile narratives make HIV-prevention discourses hearable to queer communities of color? Published in 2004, Sexile explores this question by telling the story of performance artist and trans* activist Adela Vazquez as part of the Institute for Gay Men's Health initiative on HIV prevention. This article argues that Sexile develops what Ayala, Cortez, and Hebert term "counterpathological" pedagogies for safer sex instruction and condom use advocacy by drawing from Vazquez's articulation of how she centers pleasure in her exilic and trans* experiences.

Chaos

"Re-reading the Diminutive: Caribbean Chaos Theory in Wilson Harris, Édouard Glissant, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 46 (March 2015): 20-36. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2873323

In the early 1990s, chaos theory captured the imagination of Caribbean writers by offering a new approach to interpreting scientific data. In its analysis of Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation alongside Antonio Benítez-Rojo's introduction to The Repeating Island and essays by Wilson Harris, this essay proposes that Caribbean thinkers are drawn to chaos theory because it articulates how they already envision and describe the complexity of Caribbean cultures. For these three thinkers, chaos theory makes possible a radical rereading of the diminutives of Caribbean space and offers them a methodology for destabilizing the world's (post)colonial orders. 

LITTÉrATURE-MONDE

"Literary Tourism, Littérature Monde, and the Ethics of Conversation in Ernest Pépin's L'Envers du décor." International Journal of Francophone Studies 12.2/3 (December 2009): 289-304. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijfs.12.2-3.289/1

Advocates for jettisoning the term ‘francophonie’ in favour of littérature-monde argue that francophonie, as a word and a concept, represents the legacy of a colonial relationship that places France at the centre of the globe. One of the pernicious effects of such an organization is how the francophonie label prepares readers to approach the text as a sociological tract or an opportunity for literary tourism. This article focuses on this last problem: how can one shift the way that readers approach a text? In analyzing Ernest Pépin’s L’Envers du décor (2006), it suggests that Pépin offers one path for the transformation of tourists and by extension, of readers. Informed by Édouard Glissant’s theorization of la poétique de la Relation (1990), this reading of Pépin develops a theory of the conversation as a means of answering the question posed implicitly in the littératuremonde manifesto, transforming the relationship between readers and texts within the French literary sphere.