Maurice Blanchot’s “The Strange and the Stranger” (1958) is an essential text for understanding Blanchot’s thought, its development, and its enduring importance. He presents an early account of the impersonal “neuter” in subject-less experiences like “alienation,” “alteration,” “dispersion,” “disappearance,” and “absence.” These experiences of strangeness threaten thought, which is only “itself and for-itself its own experience.” Relatedly, they also reveal “the neutrality of being or neutrality as being.” With reference to both Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, Blanchot clarifies the meaning (...) and exigency of a neuter that can take “upon itself the reality of alienation.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Quan Zhou Wu and Linaje’s GenealogyJulia Haeyoon Chang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuENJOY (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuUNA DE ELLAS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan ZhouWu Digital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 6] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuMEMORIAS RETORCIDAS(Linaje (...) 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,NEGATIVOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuELLAS Y YO (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 49] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,STATEMENT (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuLAS ARTISTAS QUE NO FUIMOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 75]Quan Zhou Wu’s followers will surely be struck—as I was—by the multisensory digital exhibit “Linaje” (“Lineage”), which was published in 2024 and departs, perhaps unexpectedly, from the artist’s previous well-established oeuvre. Before delving into the work in question, it may be fruitful first to have a glimpse at the artist’s iconic aesthetic. In 2015, and at the age of twenty-seven, Wu, a self-taught artist, debuted her first graphic memoir, Gazpacho Agridulce. The book commences with her parents’ newfound life in Spain after leaving Qingtian, a province of Zhejiang, China, to run a restaurant in Algeciras, a municipality of Cadiz. The opening pages of Gazpacho pack a punch, depicting Wu’s dramatic and untimely birth in a taxicab en route to the hospital.Gazpacho’s publication initiated a crucial sea change in the predominantly white Spanish publishing world, which would soon after be rocked by a boom of racialized1 authors penning anti-racist memoirs and other works of non-fiction.2 Gazpacho would also eventually become the first of the author’s trilogy of graphic memoirs, which was completed by the sequels Andaluchinas por el mundo (2017) and the most recent La agridolce vita (2023).Wu’s narratives capture the familial, identarian, and social conflicts that erupt from cultural disloyalties and racism—direct consequences of migration. She and her sisters, for example, loathe their family’s rigid Chinese and Christian mores and long for the cultural markers of an ordinary Spanish childhood, structured of course by U.S. global consumer culture, e.g. Barbie, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s.An illustrator, cartoonist, and podcaster, Wu’s talent as a storyteller lies in her complex use of humor. With great care for her subject and her reader, Wu deploys humor to tend to the uncouth, raw, and ugly parts of life. In so doing, the author invites us to laugh and ultimately reckon with our own discomfort as we with sit with the heaviness of racism, sexism, and post-migration melancholy—using humor as a salve.At her best, Wu serves irreverence, rawness, and wit. To be immersed in her books is to rub up against the rough-hewn emotions that bring her characters to life. The vibrancy of her palette and the whimsy of her pen strokes are inviting, animated, and deceptively light-hearted. In an instant, lines and pigment rearrange into abstractions dense with affect. Fiery hollowed eyes, a gaping mouth, and flushed skin burn through the frame—making the volcanic rage of a migrant mother immediately palpable. It’s so emotive, it practically singes your skin. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Cover of Wu’s first graphic memoir Gazpacho agridulce: Una autobiografía china-andaluza[End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Excerpt from Gazpacho agridulce (courtesy of the artist)[End Page 103]While... (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno are both post-Shoah philosophers who experienced refugeedom. In different contexts, both discuss the question of a linkage between language and soil, and ultimately show that the distinction between the native and the foreign is untenable. I suggest that Levinas’s evocation of linguistic soil illustrates his understanding of Jewishness as defined by a ceding of ground, thus showing that Levinas’s thought relies on a conception of ground in order to then reject it. Adorno, in evoking a (...) “language without soil,” argues for a conception of language that rejects organicism, seeing both loanwords and Jews as examples of difference without foreignness. (shrink)

This essay reads Helen Phillips’s extraordinary novel of motherhood, The Need (2019), alongside recent theorists of post-politics. Phillips’s novel is illuminating because it reveals how an adequate understanding of the post-political requires supplementing current accounts with the categories of gender and heterogeneous time. The Need subverts the postfeminist articulation of politics as an arena in which “feminism” is practicable only in preemptively curtailed and diminished form. It does so by cracking open the “reality” enforced by neoliberal motherhood to show how (...) its apparent solidity rests on the excision of alternate times—on a foreclosure of the temporal otherness that is the condition for historical change. (shrink)

Amidst the “lavender scare” of the Cold War, James Schuyler, “the great queer voice of the New York School,” subverted the state’s auditory surveillance of queer life. Refunctionalizing its tools of espionage as poetic tactics, Schuyler eavesdrops on errant conversations (the espoused) and joining (espousing) them in paratactic assembly. In so doing, Schuyler expands José Esteban Muñoz’s “queer optic,” the utopian capacity to see beauty amidst ruins, beyond the visual into a queer otic that drags into being a world of (...) freer espousal. I survey the aural surveillance of mid-century queer life before tracing Schuyler’s détournement of bugging, wiretapping, and overhearing in his 1969 Freely Espousing. In turn, I uncover the queer political commitments lurking beneath Schuyler’s classification as a pastoral lyricist concerned only with “leaves and flowers and weather.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LinajeQuan Zhou WuWith “Linaje,” I wanted to explore the fine line between fiction and lies. Fantasy.I attended a workshop on embuste flamenco with artist Mateo Chica in Villanueva del Rosario. Mateo said that embuste is art, “that lie associated with oral flamenco, which is transmitted with a sort of distraction from real time, to be able to immerse oneself in a fun fiction, that leads to another possible place.”Mateo (...) explained to us that there are embustes that endure over time, like the mythical phrase about Lola Flores, “she neither sings nor dances but don’t miss her” from the New York Times that was never actually published, but immensely helped her in her career.“Linaje” is a work that respects orality, the one that happened, and the one that never was. The stories lost for being lost in translation. The stories misunderstood due to our language barriers, and those we collected incompletely due to language interferences. Where, thanks to different artificial intelligences like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, and Chat-GPT, it has been possible to create that “almost real” universe, perceptible and concrete.But above all, “Linaje” is a question:Where will our memories remain?Once my contract with the web server ends, once my hard drive rusts, my space in the cloud expires, where will this story remain?Who will pick up the pieces of us, those of us who walk as secondary stories in this Western world?What is truth? What is a lie?In this piece, perhaps that does not matter. [End Page 7]Email: [email protected] © 2023 Cornell University... (shrink)