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Drag Performances Without Clubs? :Cross Dressing House Parties in Communist Poland: The Case of Lulla la Polaca and Ryszard Kisiel
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‘So Clear That One Can See the Breaks’:Colonialism, Materiality, and the Lyric in Jen Bervin’s <i>The Desert</i>
Full text linkThis essay places Jen Bervin’s 2008 artist book The Desert in conversation with lyric theory. It argues that Bervin disrupts the lyric as it has developed since the nineteenth century, restoring its suppressed materiality and contesting the imbrication of the lyric in colonial practices of land use. By doing so, the essay argues, Bervin restores the social world of material production and communal labour on which the lyric depends
Decolonialities and the Exilic Consciousness:Thinking from the Global South
Full text linkThis chapter is a journey of thought exploring decolonial critique as a situated practice while thinking through exilic consciousness and its constitutive conditions. I begin by reflecting on decolonialities to gesture toward varied forms of decolonial projects that need to be situated, given that each location generates different sets of questions/problems that demand different answers. In this way, I reconfigure the exilic condition, and the space of displacement in general, as a plurilingual space that unsettles various colonial forms of epistemic monolingualism predicated on the self-sufficiency of thought. To this end, I reflect on the potentiality of exilic consciousness to generate decolonial critique when thinking from/about the Global South. Finally, this chapter demonstrates the significance of acknowledging the diverse locations and trajectories of decolonial critique and the plurality of thought embedded within the exilic intellectual formation that can potentially undo colonial forms of knowledge-making and being in the world
From Lichen to Human Life:Symbiotic Organisms as Models of Social Organization
Full text linkThis talk examines the historical use of model organisms in symbiosis research, focusing particularly on bipartite interactions like the plant root-rhizobium relationship and algae-fungi symbiosis in lichens. The latter has been pivotal in shaping diverse images of (i) societal structures and (ii) human individuality. This talk will scrutinize debates about lichens since the late 19th century in order to address (i) hierarchical relationships in biological and social systems, which span from master-slave dynamics to ‘symbiotic’ social companionship. Additionally, the talk will explore (ii) how model organisms in symbiosis research have influenced ideas about biological and social individuality, autonomy, and heteronomy. In recent years, for example, the works of L. Margulis and D. Haraway have shown how organisms like lichens can be understood as signposts for the interwovenness of human individuals and global environmental settings, for the loss of individualism, or for the legitimation of collective responsibility. Finally, the talk will draw on the studies of holistic theoretical biologist A. Meyer-Abich in order to problematize these two dimensions. In the 1940s, based on his analysis of lichens, A. Meyer-Abich developed the concept of holobiont. This concept anticipated key elements of Margulis’s later theory of endosymbiosis. On the one hand, A. Meyer-Abich endorsed quite different sociopolitical imaginaries (e.g. national-socialist views of symbiotic companionship); on the other, he highlighted the importance of agential autonomy and the independence of partners in ‘social symbiosis’. This intricate case serves as a catalyst for broader reflections on the nuanced role that model organisms for symbiosis play in comprehensions of both the social fabric and the individual aspects of human existence