UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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Afterglow
Full text linkYou can see Afterglow in motion at https://tiny.cc/uc_afterglow or https://youtu.be/kjKQr38c7qA.This mixed media piece explores the relationship between memory and home videos. The chosen scene is an everyday glimpse of childhood recreation: my cousins and I swivel in the sand at the water’s edge. I have a distinct memory of the sunshine wicking water droplets from my skin with its radiant warmth, but when I return to re-watch the home video, the light projecting from the screen is an undeniably overcast grey. Even with this discrepancy between my body memory and the recording, I question how much my recollection is a testimony of the immediate sensory experience and how much it is an adaptation of the home video that I have seen replayed so many times. It is one of few recordings that capture my cousin Oliver and me together; 2022 marks the fourteen-year anniversary of his death. The light that bounced off of our forms, that summer afternoon, is re-animated with each replaying of the video. Memory is re-minded with each re-watching.My process developed as a response to this shifting palimpsest of recollection. After transferring twelve evenly-spaced video frames to canvas, I hand-painted and beaded the degraded stills to match the coloration of my mind’s image. In their final iteration, the canvases are presented in sequence as a lenticular print. Moving in tandem with the viewer, the effect mirrors the physicality of body memory. Each retouched frame can only be viewed in a fugitive moment. The sequence provokes the viewer to waltz around the scene, back and forth, through impressions of time. In contrast, the vertical plastic lenses of the lenticular print recall the striations of traditional televisions. Painterly textures and interactive motion compete with an impression of flatness and locked recording.It is false to say that the screen is incapable of putting us ‘in the presence of’ the actor. It does so in the same way as a mirror . . . but it is a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of which retains the image. (Bazin 97
"Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present" by Robyn Maynard
No full text"Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters" by Aph Ko and Syl Ko
No full textChronotopographies: Chronotopes and the Crafting of Fictions
Full text linkIn this paper, I delineate the workings of my concept of chronotopography. Starting from Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope—historico-poetic forms combining time, space and subjectivity—I define chronotopographical fiction as exploring radically other ways to combine and recombine the three elements of the chronotope. In the first section, I review some of the basic characteristics of the chronotope in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. In the second section, I bring a definition of fiction in order to develop the concept of chronotopography as a unique kind of fiction that confronts existing chronotopes. I conclude that emphasizing the chronotopographical aspects of fiction can show us how to identify and compose new fictions that challenge hegemonic conceptions of time, space and subjectivity
Water Memory
Full text linkSilvia Federici writes,
"Starting from an analysis of "body-politics," feminists have not only revolutionized the contemporary philosophical and political discourse, but they have also begun to revalorize the body. This has been a necessary step both to counter the negativity attached to the identification of femininity with corporeality, and to create a more holistic vision of what it means to be a human being." (15)
I wonder, what does it mean for my body to live on different land than my parents'? How do I reckon with the gender binary, and with having a body and a gender that exist outside of normative narratives? What does it mean to dig into sexuality in a world of gender-based violence, of body negativity, of sex negativity, of moralism? What does it mean to fully grieve in a culture that obliges the body to be quiet and pretty? It is strenuous to seek embodiment in a world where the body is a site of so much violence and pain. Nonetheless, I am curious, and I am committed to the revalorization of the body as a site of liberation and wholeness.
“Water Memory” is the story of the traumas that continue to live in my body—ancestral and current. It is written as an invocation of intimacy partnered with grief. It encourages relationships (with the self and with others) that not only allow, but revel in, the fullest embodiment of the body’s experience.
I write from a place of queerness, of transness, as a first-generation Greek/Turk/Uke Canadian with chronic pain and a mood disorder. Yet, I insist, my body is not the enemy
Editorial Essay
Full text linkThe opening editorial for Volume 20 of UnderCurrents.Find full text in .pdf below