Afrasian Entanglements and Generic Ambiguities in Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai

This article looks at Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai (2012) which focuses on Sakina, a member of the Satpanth Ismaili community living in mid-twentieth century Kenya. Based on nine years of research and interviews with Khoja women who now reside in Western Europe and North America, Bead Bai is generally described as a “historical novel” or an “ethnographic fiction,” yet it also can be thought of as pertaining to the genre of what Brett Smith et al. (2015) call “ethnographic creative nonfiction.” I discuss the ways in which the ‘genre-bending’ aspects of Bead Bai participate in retracing the little-known history of Afrasian entanglements for Asian African women who sorted out, arranged and looked after ethnic beads during colonial times in East Africa. More specifically, I will suggest that, by toying with the boundary between fiction and ethnography, Somjee opens new gendered avenues for reinserting the category of the imaginary at the heart of Afrasian entanglements.

Six Ways of Looking at Fractal Mechanics

In this creative nonfiction essay, I traverse through permutations of “fractal mechanics” as a means of processing experiences of oppression and imagining revolutionary futures. I introduce fractal mechanics as a method for thinking through how “the institution,” broadly understood, travels and transmutes from physical structure localized in place to a set of internalized rule sets that bind themselves to transinstitutionalized “host bodies”—a NeoLiberation. Through a series of vignettes illustrating violent experiences of “inclusion,” I explore how the institution is reproduced in neoliberal constructions of inclusion, liberation, and justice. I then integrate critiques of liberation within neoliberal frames with crip imaginings of justice-in-relation to explicate how fractal mechanics can be understood not only as a method of oppression but also a method for revolution. I close with a series of imaginaries that encourage us to prefigure, or dream, a fractal politic of intercommunal connection.

Visual Retrospection: Rhyming Art with Access

This work of creative nonfiction memoir reflects on the philosophical, ethical, and creative perspectives that informed the author’s book-length lyric essay, Visual Inspection. The essay connects the practices of art-making and access-making as concomitant ethical activities.

Safety Measures

A solo cross-country bike adventure. Safety Measures is a lyric collection of creative nonfiction and prose poetry. This creative response documents my solo cross-country 4,300-mile, 59-day bicycle ride from Anacortes, Washington, to Bar Harbor, Maine. I planned a route to begin and end in Minnesota because my family’s summer vacation was held at Leach Lake as a kid. Biking, fishing, beachcombing, and other lake events with my dad had instilled an adventurous spirit. I hoped to reconnect with the fierce energy of the young gal I once was. After the first day of support to make sure my bicycle, Lexa, worked, I rode alone for three weeks heading east. As planned, once there, my husband arrived to drive support. At Bar Harbor, we drove west, with a few bonus miles of bicycling along the way. Out west, my bicycle, Lexa, was lost, but someone found her, and she was repaired. Then I got going again towards Minnesota. Ultimately, the 59-day bicycle journey included nine days of bonus miles. For 78% or 39-days, I biked it alone with Lexa. The journey let me reflect on what it means to be a woman, self-supported, and safe. I felt scared, intimidated, and bullied. Harassment, threat, and being followed left me shaken. To be fair, nothing really happened. Sheriffs swept the road everywhere, making everyone behave. Semi-drivers scooted over, good stewards of littler riders like bicycles. Fellow bikers exchanged advice on the road ahead. I thanked, waved, or called, Safe travels, to such companionable travelers, grateful for their presence. I kept a journal during the ride, upon which this book is based. I held to writing assignments, challenges, and intentions. I collected data with a fitness tracker watch and cyclometer. Sports technology malfunction caused some rides to be recreated online. I logged this data, as well as other data points, in a spreadsheet and online. The data in this collection is based upon this record keeping.

“Kicking and Screaming” or “Gracefully Conceding”: Creative Nonfiction Stories of Aging With Multiple Sclerosis

Aging with multiple sclerosis (MS) is a complex phenomenon. Some individuals report physical and cognitive dysfunctions regarding these combined experiences, whereas others report perceived improvements in quality of life. Beyond this, little is known regarding how people make sense of, and come to embody, negative or positive experiences of MS. Thus, our objectives were to (a) explore how people made sense of aging with MS and (b) present this in an artful, engaging, transformative way. To achieve this, we conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with older adults who had MS, analyzed data using pluralistic narrative analyses, and presented results through two creative nonfictions. We detail our process of creating the nonfictions before presenting the different stories of aging with MS, namely “Kicking and Screaming” and “Gracefully Conceding.” We then offer recommendations and implications for using these stories as knowledge translation devices, and further critique the limitations of these stories in practice.

Paint and decay: A colloquial conversation on preserving the urban heritage

This paper is an attempt to converse about urban heritage preservation and its experience. To converse is to colloquially discuss ideas that comes to mind while we are looking back at the 2019 photographs of some parts of Kota Tua Surabaya (The Old Town of Surabaya) and reflect upon our knowledge background, one of architecture, the other of history. This conversation is created through a form of creative writing, creative nonfiction, where we begin with our personal thoughts, one of experiencing ruination and the other of witnessing complexity of urban heritage preservation, one of decay and the other of paint. We involve relevant discourses and the use of visual materials such as collages, diagrams, and drawings as a form of visual inquiry and visual illustration, showing the interpretation, reality, and the imagination of fragments of Kota Tua Surabaya. The process involved in creating this conversation could be one of the ways to creatively build collaborative knowledge and have the writings and the visual materials based on personal voice, expanding the academic form of writings.

After Crip, Crip Afters

What does it mean to be attached to crip? What might such attachments make possible, and what might they foreclose? In this hybrid essay—part scholarly article, part creative nonfiction—the author reflects on the concepts of crip and crip time. In an attempt to mark crip time through form, the essay proceeds across two sets of numbers: the list that comprises the body of the text and the list of endnotes that accompany it. Readers may choose to read the two sets concurrently, following each endnote as it appears, or read the two parts consecutively, so that the endnotes function as a kind of afterword. The essay critiques the reduction of crip time to slowness or extended time, noting how both are often sites of debilitation and violence. Centered on the question of what might come after crip and on the possibilities of crip afters, the essay challenges approaches to disability that presume it has a discrete before and after. How do logics of innocence and punishment undergird such models of disability? And how do such notions then determine who is seen as deserving of care?