by Brian Bergen-Aurand The goal for January 2019 is to read these six books, in no particular order: American Humor: A Study of the National Character by Constance Rourke Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand I’m stretching the boundaries a bit with this list, mentioning some books that brush up against or intrude upon our usual definitions of disability in order to broaden and disturb our conceptions of what disability memoirs and crip lit might exclude. (Synopses from Goodreads.) 1. A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Almost halfway through Helen Keller’s The Story of my Life, which first appeared in installments in Ladies’ Home Journal throughout 1902, is a chapter recalling what Keller labels “the one cloud in my childhood’s bright sky.” Chapter 14 tells the tale of the author’s first adventure in writing–her composition at the age …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Sundays are free admission to the Henry Art Gallery on the campus of the University of Washington, so we made it a family outing to see the new installation Fun. No Fun. by Kraft Duntz featuring Dawn Cerny. I had read Travis Vogt’s interview with Cerny in City Arts, “The Comedic Architecture …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (1903) Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic (1976) The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (1980) The Me in the Mirror by Connie Panzarino (1994) The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait by Frida Kahlo and Carlos Fuentes (1995) Gary …
by Saravanan Mani The films I list here are tentative, incomplete attempts or “essays” that reflect on a theme while initiating conversations with narrative cinema. These films are fictional and non-fictional explorations that start in specific narrative premises but venture beyond those beginnings to interrogate the film-making process through the making of film. While such …
13/20 March 2017 Morning En Route to the Hospital Snow wafts off the little lake along route 66, momentarily encasing the car in a trance of glitter Live with your puny, vulnerable self Live with her ~Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes The past two weeks have been consumed with close readings of several articles …
6 March 2017 I first tasted electricity in 1959, when I was six. In accordance with my desires at the time, I was exploring the house. Under the couch I found a fresh 9-volt battery. Having no idea what it was, I touched the terminals to my tongue and was appalled to feel the vile …
by Reagan Jackson I hate horror movies. They linger. Long after the screen goes black I am reliving every cringe-worthy moment. So when I saw the preview for Get Out, I was like wait: Is this a horror movie or is this racism? Is this a horror movie about racism? Oh hell no. I definitely […] …
When I think of queer Berlin, I think – albeit narrowly – of the men dancing with me to DJ Boris at the Snax party at Berghain last Easter Sunday: thousands of sweaty revelers, some wearing leathers, some wearing nothing, grinding away all night to the best techno on the planet, seeking out their […] via …
27 February 2017 After a weekend spent revamping the Foreign Influence website, I am ready to return to some projects put on hold at the end of 2016. Four topics in particular continue to hold my attention–Crip Theory and the development of a curriculum for Disability Studies, the ongoing search for the best ways to …
by Courtney Weaver Remember this house and do not forget who built it… Last weekend I sat in the Ark Lodge theater in Columbia City to view the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro the recent adaptation of the legendary writer and public intellectual’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, directed by Raoul Peck […] …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Tention—condition of being stretched or strained, or in which pressure is exerted I have a penchant for exhibition catalogues. Ever since my first encounter with Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, written to accompany the 1990-1991 exhibition of the same name he arranged at the Louvre Museum, …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Spending the last several years studying the thought of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to ethics and comedy has led me to Emma Willis’s 2014 Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others, a book about ethics and tragedy written somewhat at the collision of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Rancière around questions of …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand I’ve spent the last two days rereading sections of Carrie Noland’s 2009 book, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, and I’m even more impressed with it this second time around. I enjoyed reading the book and learned a good deal from it the first time I encountered it about a year ago. …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new. ~Jesmyn Ward Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013) is a memoir of her life growing up Black in rural Mississippi, the generations that came before her, and the men …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand An early installment in Arsenal Pulp Press’s QUEER FILM CLASSICS series, Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s Farewell My Concubine (2o10) takes a queer cultural studies approach to a close reading of Chen Kaige’s 1992 Chinese film, starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li. After reading this one short (120 pocket-sized pages) study from …
by Sam Cahill Don’t mess with the lady in black, the lady in black, the lady in black. Don’t mess with the lady in black when she’s on the attack. … A spirit so quick to deliver a beating To the enemies of peace, love, logic, and reason. ~ “Lady in Black,” Haroon and Adil …
Originally posted on Singapore Review of Books:
“Politics begins in disappointment”. So goes Simon Critchley’s useful aphorism.[1] Naomi Klein’s version thereof could go “politics begins in missed appointments” – from the first warning shots about a “metabolic rift with nature” during the industrial revolution, through to burgeoning science about climate change from the likes…
by Brian Bergen-Aurand In 2014, Foreign Influence was viewed by about 6000 folks. Where do they all come from, you ask? Although folks clicked on Foreign Influence from 81 different countries this past year, most visitors arrived from these ten locations: 1. Singapore 2. United States 3. Brazil 4. Philippines 5. United Kingdom 6. Canada … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Recently, I made the claim that perhaps we can read Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching through the lens of structural sexism, where the multi-generational female characters–most especially Miranda–are trapped in the domestic sphere not through overt actions taken directly against them by individual actors, but, rather, by a system of social … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand On the morning of 4 December 2014, a small group of concerned Singapore folks stood in protest of the EU Human Rights Seminar’s invited speaker, former Nominated Member of Parliament Dr. Thio Li-Ann, who was scheduled to address “International Human Rights Law and National Courts in Asia”. While four members of civil … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand One of the accepted modern understandings of dis/ability is as a lack or shortcoming to be overcome. Being dis/abled is associated with loss, vulnerability, and dependence. Something to be avoided, especially because of its “nature” as less than normal. Rarely, if ever, has deaf culture, blind culture, dis/abled culture been thought of … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Although the trailer does not do it justice, the sound of Ossos (Pedro Costa, 1997) is what I cannot get out of my head. [While most of the film has no music on the soundtrack, the trailer has an engaging rock song laid over it.] If you do not already know Ossos … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Having just experienced a preview performance of the play Absence–Presence, I cannot help thinking about the relations among desire, intimacy, art & commerce, and touch. I was not sure where the play was going to take me or how it was going to get me there, but by the end I could … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Of late, I’ve encountered a number of objections to my critical speculations based on the idea that anarchism and similar non-hierarchical, non-coercive collective political theories have no place in an “Asian” setting. The argument against them is that they are simply another set of imported European philosophies, another paradigm of cultural Imperialism, … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand What is the first question of Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005)? According to Catherine Wheatley, in Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (Berghahn 2009), the primary question we ask while screening a Haneke film, such as Caché, is “Succinctly put, the brutality of Haneke’s films prompts spectators to ask themselves … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand September is comedy month around here. Actually, every month is comedy month around here. However, September is especially funny right now since I have two large projects due in the next ten or so days. One of those projects is involved with the journal SCREEN BODIES. The other, is a book on … Continue reading
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