Sunday reading list

Tayari Jones's "Symbolism and Cynicism: On Being a Writer During Black History Month" [The Believer]

Countee Cullen was not the first to declare that he wanted to be a “writer” rather than a “Negro writer,” and Percival Everett certainly will not be the last. The politics surrounding Black History Month have made the decision to accept or refuse an invitation far more complicated than matters of scheduling. There are writers who adopt an unnuanced stance, flat-out refusing to read during Black History Month. When their in-boxes start to fill in November, they request dates in March. If the sponsor agrees, fine. If not, not. Other writers ask for the March 1 booking, as a test of the sponsor’s politics: if the sponsor agrees, the writer will backtrack, accepting the February date. This dance is just a part of the ongoing conflict that black artists struggle with as we wonder if we are being used as symbols or tokens. I have been asked to read at institutions in February and I have been fairly confident that I would not have been asked were it not Black History Month. If my schedule allows, I accept the booking anyway, although I know many who would refuse.

Brian Cook's "Joys of 'The Wire'" [In These Times]

But ultimately, the show ['The Wire'] is most enjoyable because...the value it holds most high is struggle. Its heroes and anti-heroes might be victims, but they are not passive. Rather, they are actively driven by a dissatisfaction with the status quo. What marks the show’s few villains are their complacency and acceptance of “the way things are.” What defines the show’s heroes is that they will fight—their clueless bosses, their politicians, their rivals, their lovers, their addictions, themselves.

Joseph Nechvatal's "Jean Baudrillard and a Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess" [International Journal of Baudrillard Studies]

I wish to hypothesize and demonstrate here a counter-mannerist art of latent excess which attempts to re-establish a critical distance – but an ambiguous private critical distance: a distance achieved through the challenge of (and disparity between) pleasurable frustration. This is an art that demands of society an active visualizing participation in private interpretations – and thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement. But this is not an anti-Baudrillard art (well it is only so if you take seriously his end-of-art implications, which I do not) but rather a post-Baudrillardian one. This is because I accept his point that numerous people today dwell (but not totally) in the expanse of infotainment, with its potential instantaneous non-separability and ubiquity. But I want then to ask just what can art's contribution be to the enlargement of understanding of our conspicuously excessive Western society? I am certain that it need not be confined to what Baudrillard says its role is now; asserting the “insignificance” and “meaninglessness” of a society already null and void.

Arjun Chowdhury's "The Colony as Exception (Or, Why Do I Have to Kill You More than Once?)" [Borderlands]

To the claim that colonies are states of exception, I pose the factical disintegration of sovereign power in those spaces, specifically that of colonial regimes. This indicates at least a point of difference with a generalized state of exception, which maintains sovereign power indefinitely. This observation is my point of departure to mark the specificity of the exception, namely its undertheorized politics of visibility, which is predicated on life as human, marked by rights. When we turn to the colony, however, we find that the native does not necessarily start out as human in the eyes of the colonizer, suggesting that the distinctively modern rubrics of state of exception, sovereign power and biopolitics may misrepresent colonial situations. Bluntly put, the exercise of violence by state authority does not automatically equate to a state of exception. Violence in the colony is a symptom of the weakness of sovereign power, not a sign of its strength.

Simon Romero's "A Global Journey, Relying on Kindness and a Donkey" [NY Times]

“Are you an athlete?” one of the children asked him.

“Or a missionary?” “No,” Mr. Dunham replied. “I’m just a guy.”

In fact, Mr. Dunham is just a guy searching for the meaning of life.

His quest began more than two years ago in Portland, Ore., where he was working as a substitute teacher in the public schools. One day, he decided to start walking south, down through the western United States. From Texas he crossed the border into the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, where he stopped for a while. He said he hoped to walk for two more years across the rest of South America until reaching Patagonia.

Slavoj Zizek's "Ideology I" [Lacan.com]

Subjects are literally holes, gaps, in the positive order of being: they dwell only in the interstices of being, in those places where the job of creation is not done to the end: the very existence of a subject is a proof that God was an idiot who bungled the job of Creation. Far from being the Crown of Creation, a subject bears witness to the fact that there are spots of unfinished reality in the order of things: the objective correlate of a subject is a proto-real spectral object-stain which is not yet fully actualized as part of positive reality. The problem is that, when we are in front of a human being and see only the visible half, we automatically de-subjectivize it by way of filling in the void, by way of projecting onto the darkness the imaginary wealth of personality: the de-subjectivized other becomes a full "person," the face turned into a Levinasian fetish, the sign of the abyssal depth of the person's inner life, and the two halves (the outer face and the inner psychic life) are combined into the rounded Whole. What is difficult is not to perceive the wealth of personality beneath the face, but to avoid this trap, to ABSTRACT from the mirage of this wealth and to acquire the ability to see the de-fetishized reality of the subject: to see the gap, the darkness, without filling it in with the fantasmatic content of "inner life" that is supposed to shine through it. In other words, the difficult thing is to see reality in its pre-ontological status, as not fully constituted, to see the nothing where there is nothing to see.