1ST ED. 2023
Lisa A. Lowe
This work helped me think through connections between some of the material-based research I have done into global commodities like porcelain, tea, cochineal, indigo, opium and sugar. I thought about these connections in relationship to domestic interiors depicted in the Victorian literature I grew up reading, as well as between Asian indentured labor, plantation slavery, and the plants and products that emerged from these plantation economies and labor.
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
Mel Y. Chen
Coming from an art semiotics background, I immediately loved how Mel used a linguistic framework to think through the racial, sexual, and gendered rhetoric surrounding charged matter and deftly dealt with heavy, dark histories with precision and perversity.
The Tiger Flu
Larissa Lai
The Tiger Flu is this amazing science fiction book (loosely connected to Salt Fish Girl, also by Larissa Lai) that thinks through virology, regeneration, cloned and hybrid species entanglements, corporate control of the environment, new forms of kinship, deep memory, and time. I haven’t loved a science fiction story this much since N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
Voyager
Srikanth Reddy
This poem is an erasure poem written from the autobiography of Kurt Waldheim, the UN Secretary General whose voice is on the Voyager Record NASA sent out into space in the 1970s to greet extraterrestrials or future humanity with a representation of humanity (full of all the limitations and problems you can imagine such a project would expose). It becomes a poem about power and world in the most sparse and heart-hitting way. Reddy cuts Waldheim’s text, originally a bit of a soft-power pedaling to try to exonerate himself from Nazi war crimes, and it becomes a tale into the inferno of human greed, desire, and violence. I’ve made work in response to the Voyager record’s history and Reddy’s poem, teach his poem in my classes, and continue to return to it all the time.