Them and Uz: Harrison and me

The working-class writer, having moved into a middle-class dominated field, often feels alienated from their old and new cultures – separated as they are from their heritage and not quite grounded in the new elite circle. The markers of working-class culture are much harder to define in our hyper-modern situation, and this exacerbates the alienation. This position opens up possibilities in perception and expression from those in the margins and off-kilter positions. Tracing the multivoiced qualities of Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ and R. M. Francis’s poetics, alongside biographical and autobiographical details, this hybrid article argues that off-kilter and outcast voices, like those in the aforementioned class liminality, are in the best place to explore and discuss the difficult to navigate cultures, communities and identities. This fusion of personal essay, poetry and literary criticism considers the unusual, marginal and liminal positioning of working-class writers, researchers and academics.

Conjuring Barbara

This personal essay remembers the filmmaker's encounters with Barbara Hammer as teacher, mentor, and friend. It traces the production of So Many Ideas Impossible to Do All (dir. Mark Street and Barbara Hammer, US, 2019), a film that considers Hammer's epistolary relationship with the poet Jane Brakhage.

Thoughts on Making Films with Barbara Hammer

This personal essay articulates filmmaker Lynne Sachs's experiences working with experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Sachs conveys the journey of her relationship with Hammer when they were both artists living in San Francisco in the late 1980s and 1990s and then later in New York City. Sachs initially discusses her experiences making Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (US, 2018), which includes Hammer, the conceptual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann, and the experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson. She then discusses her 2019 film, A Month of Single Frames, which uses material from Hammer's 1998 artist residency in a Cape Cod shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds, and kept a journal. In 2018, Hammer began her process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds, and writing from the residency to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Sachs explores Hammer's experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a way to be in dialogue with both Hammer and her audience. This essay provides context for the intentions and challenges that grew out of both of these film collaborations.

Bruce Chatwin

This article is an attempt to answer the question Bruce Chatwin posed in the title of the last book published during his life: What Am I Doing Here. A critical focus on Chatwin’s masterwork, The Songlines, and its exploration of nomadism paired with wandering, leads to an exploration of his lifelong quest for spiritual renewal and ascension. Part literary criticism, part personal essay, the article makes personal connections with Chatwin’s life and work. Included here are several book lists, featuring an extensive list of books that Chatwin read and references in his own writing, assembled possibly for the first time.

Revisiting Distant Relations

In 2000, I published Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America, a non-fiction exploration of my own family’s involvement in North American colonialism from the 1600s to the present. This personal essay reflects on the context, genesis, process, and consequences of writing this book during a decade of intense ferment in Indigenous–settler relations in Canada amid the revelations of horrific abuse at residential schools and the discovery that my highly respected grandfather had been involved with one. Considering the book from the perspective of 2021, I consider the strengths and limitations of this kind of critical family history and the degree to which public discourses and academic discussion of Canada’s history and settler complicity in colonialism have changed since the book was published. Arguing that critical reflection on family history is still an essential part of unlearning colonial attitudes and recognizing the systemic and structural ways that colonial disparities and processes are embedded in settler societies, I share a critical family history assignment that has been an essential and transformative pedagogical element in my university teaching for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

Exploring the Diversity of Everyday Experiences through the Humans of the University of Wisconsin-Stout Facebook Assignment

In this personal essay and research article mash-up genre, I reflect on my Humans of the University of Wisconsin-Stout first-year composition Facebook assignment, which was developed to teach my predominately white students about the diversity of everyday experiences. I share with readers how my positionality, as a former evangelical Christian Republican who left Christianity and became a liberal progressive a few years before this assignment, and the context of my university, a predominately white, midwestern polytechnic university, shaped my assignment design. I include Humans of UW-Stout Facebook stories, corresponding student reflections and homework, and my own personal reflection on the curriculum to empower instructors to teach diversity-focused FYC assignments and to inspire instructors to reflect upon how their own political and religious beliefs shape their curriculum.

Berørte kroppe: Forsinkede anklager, affekt og afmagt

The metoo-movement has sparked intense debate about the public accusations raised against named individuals for sexually transgressive behavior. A recurring point of ­discussion has been the timing, or rather the delay, of alle­gations, as many of them concern violations dating back ­decades. Through textual analysis of the affective-emotional dimensions of a charge presented in the form of a personal essay, this article reflects on the plausible reasons why victims may stay silent for years before speaking up. It suggests that some allegations must come with a delay, since the affected body may be in an epistemological crisis not allowing a robust narrative to be constructed, and, to present an allegation, a ­shared terminology for the nature of the offense is needed. Hence, the article explores conditions of possibility for the agency of abused bodies

Waterbearer: A Reading From the Book of...

In the following piece, I examine the relationship between color and water (Baby Suggs and Beloved) in Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, as a type of synesthetic coping mechanism meant to disrupt the encroaching normalization of an anti-Black world postslavery. Early in the text I posit two questions: What if Baby Suggs’ appetites shifted, not as some kind of woeful trauma response but as a very deliberate solution to the problem of a world where everyone else’s senses lie askew? What if Beloved likewise rose up from the water, not as a vengeful haunting but a haintful reminder for those living who had lost their way? Building upon this theory, I expand its reach to establish a continued relationship to water and the sensory which Black people have inherited today as our own surreal legacy - one which requires a constant mental reorientation toward freedom. In constructing my thesis, I reference Beloved but also several other critical works of Uction, nonUction, poetry, visual art, Ulm, and sound, each framed as meditation on a particular color and liturgical text ("a reading from the book of... ") to create a mixed media ekphrasis that mimics the surreal in both citation and physical form. The Unished product can be described, at its simplest, as a braided creative nonUction essay or, at its most complex, as a hybrid blend of cultural commentary, personal essay, poetry, and scholarly article.

Giving Away the Game – Scattershot Notes on Social Class and Other Afflictions

One of my earliest jobs was driving for an unregulated car service in New York. In the days before Uber they were called ‘gypsy cabs.’ One night I found myself on the business end of a revolver. Telling the tale to my dispatcher next day, he was staggeringly nonplussed. ‘Ya gotta put up with a lot,’ he said, ‘when you’re tryin’ t’ get ahead.’ ‘Yeah,’ I replied, disgusted, ‘even gettin’ your head blown off.’ Some time later, another driver, an African-American in a similar scenario, didn’t make it, emphasizing how much higher the stakes for a person of color. These are the real wages of work, I thought, and the rules of the game. My dispatcher’s nonchalance bespoke how invested in the game he was; in a set of beliefs, assumptions, and animating myths that keep the wheel of fortune going. Like the Monty Python skit about the collapsing tower, if too few invest in those myths, the entire edifice crumbles. The following is a personal essay that attempts to navigate the game’s parameters - social class, aspiration, and its attendant neurosis - and the myths that animate such notions as ‘getting ahead,’ ‘climbing the ladder,’ and the ‘American Dream,’ my country’s main (ideological) export. The approach is less theory-driven than empirical, phenomenological. Hence the numbered sections, a style popularized by Wittgenstein, Herbert Read and others. Here it doesn’t represent chronology so much as the elusive, episodic nature of the beast.

Pedagogical Consciousness-Raising: Teaching Race, Gender, and Science in the Pandemic

In this personal essay I explore how the pandemic crisis has helped transform my general education undergraduate course, Race, Gender, and Science, into an experience of pedagogical consciousness-raising, especially for members of vulnerable student groups that have often felt understandably negative toward, and alienated from, science. I base my observations on student comments and anecdotes shared during my fully online Fall 2020 semester. I conclude that STEM-adjacent classes such as mine might productively leverage the pandemic crisis —including the legitimate outrage and frustration of students of color and women —to facilitate a stronger sense of emotional investment by students in the value and practice of science even as legitimate critiques of science are strengthened and deepened.