Art and Race in the Time of Covid-19

Trump and his administration brought with them an inflammatory rhetoric that reduced complex issues into the simplified polarity of "us" and "them." With this as the dominant paradigm, racism was encouraged and spread like a virus throughout the nation, appearing in heightened jingoism against other nations, anger towards fellow citizens and violence towards neighbors. When the pandemic Covid-19 spread throughout the nation and the world, it became politicized, used by Trump as a novel corona vehicle help inflame intolerance. He repeatedly associated China and Chinese people with the virus to forward his political agenda regarding US trade with China and he used the resulting demonization of China as a foil for his complicity with Russian crimes. In response to increased and well-publicized acts of violence against Black Americans, systemic racism against Black people is finally being noticed. However, anti-Asian violence has largely been disregarded. This paper discusses both the increased violence against Asian Americans and the lack of attention to it. Dividing the paper into three sections, I correlate an artwork to the main issue in each section: the state-of-affairs provide a context in which to understand the artworks. Reciprocally, because artworks evoke an embodied understanding, involving our senses as well cognition, artworks change our relationship with issues from topical to personal. The artworks recontextualize what we thought we already knew and present possibilities for constructing the world differently.

Play and Interruption as a Mode of Action in Arendt, Dostoevsky, and Kharms

This essay uses Hannah Arendt’s theory of action and her critique of modern politics to explore the themes of predictability and unpredictability in human affairs, and the political meaning of interruption and refusal. It draws on the life and literature of the Russian avant-gardist, Daniil Kharms (1905- 1942), alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky and several contemporary theorists, to offer a reading of action as taking the form, specifically, of playful interruption and generative refusal. A marginal figure whose deeds and writings were disruptively strange, Kharms is taken as an exemplar of action in this ludic mode. This serves to elaborate upon Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality, while challenging some weaknesses in her theory of action as a whole.

The Balkans Geo-psychoanalysis

In the 1990s, Julija Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek developed a unique discourse within psychoanalysis - the psychoanalysis of the Balkans. Their cultural and political analysis represented the Balkans as a pathological region of nations suffering from the syndrome of an “archaic mother.” They propose in their different ways that the subject (nation) must radically separate from oedipal attachment to the attachment to nationalism as unemancipated Oedipus and subordinate to the authority of the symbolic father, that is, to the West. At the heart of such an approach is a conservative policy of labeling the Balkans as primitive behind Kristeva and Žižek loom self-orientalization and geopolitical de-identification with the Balkans as a precondition for their cosmopolitan and universalist identity.