This essay is a meditation on the place of grief in graduate student life, an accounting for the ways that the pandemic has shaped research and the work that disabled graduate students have had to do to stay afloat. I begin by meandering through the grief of a family bereavement into the range of other kinds of crip grief that emerged at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thinking with grief across scales, I ask the following questions: what might it mean to research and to write when our fields of inquiry shift even as they are being studied? How might we hold on to hope as a political practice even as undercurrents of grief work to wash it away? Where and how might we find and work with methodologies and practices that prioritize our embodied experiences during precarious, difficult times? Drawing on Melissa Kapadia’s work on chronic illness methodology and Gökce Günel, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe’s manifesto for patchwork ethnography, I attend to the place of patchwork as a survival strategy for and beyond field research. Ultimately, this essay works with grief’s non-linearity, patching together memories and experiences to document one experience of the early years of the pandemic as means of making the aloneness of our graduate journeys less commonplace.
Keyword: memory
Review of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam by Thy Phu (Duke University Press)
Thy Phu’s Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam draws on archives of the Vietnam War that center Vietnamese perspectives to complicate the historical and contemporary visual representation of Vietnamese identities that have been filtered through the Western narrative of the Vietnam War. Her book emphasizes the significance of typically denigrated visual materials including propaganda and vernacular photographs. She focuses on the complex deployment and reception of photographic objects as politicized symbols, sources of memorialization, and identity formation.
How Do You Grieve During an Apocalypse?
This essay is a rumination on loss during the pandemic—not only the physical loss of loved ones but the loss of experiences and time. Focusing specifically on the death of my aunt, Joyce Dana Apostole, I reflect on what it means to mourn, not only as an individual but as a collective. Through the retelling of significant moments in Joyce’s life and recalling our relationship, I consider the questions: How do you navigate grief when you cannot congregate with others? How is that grief compounded by institutional failures—medical, governmental—and informational lack? And how does social response to individual and mass loss reflect philosophies and policies that (continue to) devalue—and prove detrimental to—the lives of disabled people? Ultimately, this essay is not only a reflection on grief, but it is also a eulogy, an opportunity to fully recognize my aunt and her complex history, a life shaped by illness and disability in ways that counter popular narratives of recovery and overcoming. It is an archive of not only what was, but what wasn’t, necessary documentation within a culture in which “return to normalcy” can become synonymous with forgetting.
On Remembering Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969: An Assembled Interview
This assembled interview centers both Elaine Mokhtefi and Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969 (PANAF), a festival which she organized and attended as a part of the Algerian Ministry of Information, noting it as an exemplary instance of the power of performance at the nexus of political ideology, activist history, and the subsequent nostalgia for that era of liberation. It is equally an attempt to overcome a distant relationship to each, reflecting on the potential of oral histories to open up new pathways through the past. This history—of entangled international relations negotiated under the guise of a festive performance, a complicated trajectory of global politics which culminated in a remarkable event of celebration and solidarity—remains understudied, a footnote to more “political” concerns of Third World agendas, decolonial reorderings, and capitalist critiques. Yet through Mokhtefi’s testimony, interwoven with searching tendrils of archival detail, we can see that this festival was not a superficial exaltation in extravagance, but a pivotal moment in foreign affairs. More importantly, through her personal history, we can trace the central role that women played in these politics, if often unacknowledged. Edited in 2020, it also counters the pejorative label of non-essential labor applied to most cultural activities during the contemporary pandemic response to COVID-19.
Aestheticizing the City Through Storytelling and Walking: Dublin’s 1916 Rebellion Walking Tour
The main concern of this article is situated in the theatrical experience of the 1916 rebellion walking tour as a broader mode of aestheticizing performance, focusing on the ways it traces the process of the tour to ask what the appeal is for international tourists in experiencing often tragic historical events through the use of performative strategies, namely, acts of walking and storytelling. By employing Walter Benjamin’s notion of storytelling and Michel de Certeau’s approach to the walking, this article intends to explore how the 1916 walking tour as a cultural practice rearranges and recreates the Dublin landscape, and how these new meanings are constituted aesthetically beyond their entertainment value. Furthermore, by placing this tour as performative genre, this article investigates how this historic event is embodied by the guide, perceived and transformed by tour groups, thereby creating tourists’ kinesthetic empathy during the tour, by way of the guide’s storytelling with their walking. In doing so, this article will offer a broader context of staging this historical memory that commemorates past events by way of physical engagement with this tour.
Toward a Queer Temporality of Hip Hop: An Annotated Playlist
Hilary Berwick’s annotated playlist suggests that black musical practices enact temporal interventions within which currents of desire, identification and memory reshape the boundaries of what is representable. Indeed, Berwick’s discussion of haunting as a primary mode of hip hop representation demonstrates the potential contributions that engagements with sonic culture could make to explorations of the erotic and psychoanalytic dimensions of black historical memory and practices of remembrance, particularly as it relates to reckoning with trauma.