Research and Writing

 “Apologetic Forms of Relation and the Indexical Present in the Performance Art of Adrian Piper and Vaginal Davis." Amodern. Issue 11: Body and/as Procedure. https://amodern.net/article/the-danger-of-the-situation/ 

“As true as I can tell it”: Responses to and in Apologetic Form from Contemporary Indigenous Poetry and Performance 

In this paper, I examine the poetics of formal apologies by nation states to colonized populations, engaging both their potential for reparative interpersonal and narrative work, and as tools of narrative control both for the singular or collective apologizing, as well as for the individuals receiving the apology or implicated in its terms. Treating these apologies as part of a narrative genre—inclusive of more codified literary genres such as the apologia—opens the apology as a discursive form that brings ways of relating into relief. Focusing on US Public Law 111-118 and Stephen Harper’s “Statement of apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools,” I open up a way of reading these apologies not so much as empty gestures: rather as actively emptied reparative gestures which anticipate and fend off the possibility of material reparations. I draw out the narrative work of apologetic form, and put pressure on the act of “contextualizing” or invocation that establishes a relationship between apologizer and recipient as the ethical pressure-point of the apologetic form, rather than attending to the speaker’s sincerity or expressions of contrition. I then consider a complementary genre of alter-apologetic literature and artwork that take up the form of the apology in order to leverage a critique of the apologetic relationship and offer different forms of relation in the aftermath of harm. I read works by Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Jordan Abel (Nisga’a) and the ongoing collaboration between settler artist AA Bronson and Adrian Stimson (Siksika), A Public Apology to Siksika Nation (2021). The use of lyric and apologetic forms in these works reveals an understanding of the politics of form in their interventions—at the level of grammar and syntax, speaker and listener, line break and world-making—in a politics whose exercises of power come about through justificatory instruments that are bureaucratic, archival, and issued on paper. Their performative and interpersonal intimacy refuses the historicizing gestures and narratives of progress that often structure the apologetics of multicultural liberalism.

“Unsettling Racialized Regimes of Documentation in Divya Victor’s Curb” 

This paper examines the formal interventions that several contemporary poets use to examine, by rewriting, the racialized policing of displacement and migration at the level of the bureaucratic strictures of nation-state as well as the interpersonal violence of everyday nationalist encounter. I focus on Divya Victor’s Kith and Curb as part of a larger archive of contemporary poetry—including the work of Solmaz Sharif, Bhanu Kapil—which manipulates the nationalistic enunciations, rituals, and paperwork that occur on (and create) geopolitical and social borders and seams of affiliation and exclusion—margins with deadly consequences for those who migrate across them. Victor’s Curb reckons with the absurdity of the bureaucracies of immigration, the sacrifices that migrants must make in order to become legible to the nation state, what can be lost in that translation onto and into paper, and the ways racialized bodies made so legible are then often misread with deadly consequences. Victor reads the legal proceedings and news coverage of murders of South Asians in public spaces in the United States, alongside DMS coordinates, soundscapes, textures of pavement, metal, and the grass of suburban lawns. She plays with the marks of language and varied pronunciation that are often over-read and shaded into place and race: the dot and the line emerging as bindi, target, and locus of slur, as well as diacritical mark and borderline. Victor by inhabiting the layers of relationship, recognition, and complicity that purport to “naturalize” this deadly quotidian. Victor, and the other poets discussed, use the tactics familiar to documentary poetics in order to open deadly and differential contours of navigating public space, and to illuminate, an accounting of colonial myth of the United States of America that is in Victor’s words, “responsible for the force of feeling and action” that serves to justify murder.

 Shipwreck Aesthetic: Documentary Poetics of Traumatic Aquatic Archives

In this paper, I examine the formal interventions that several contemporary works of poetry—particularly Asiya Wadud’s Syncope and Caroline Bergvall’s Drift—use to examine and rewrite the historical archive of the coercive movement of racialized bodies, and the continuing displacements and migrations of the global present. Though these works use many of the recognizable tools of documentary or investigative poetics—estranging and revealing the ideological mechanics and material structures that constituted a historical event by rearranging, fragmenting, and excerpting an archive—the methods by which authors re-arrange their evidence are all insistently aquatic. Certainly, the image-choice is related to the settings of the events at the center of each text and the historical facts of the transatlantic slave trade, but comparison reveals the texts makes use of a set of formal choices enabled by material circumstances of the documentation. The paradigm of the archive as “shipwrecked” or soaked comes with a set of material possibilities that these authors take seriously both as a poetics and as a kind of positional ethics of diffused witnessing and oblique engagement with their archive. Notably, wreck implies rescue, and many of these works situate themselves as criticisms of or attempts at “salvage” by retrieving or preserving from potential loss or adverse circumstances. In this paper, I make use Kamau Braithwaite’s concept of the “tidalectic”, M. NourbeSe Philips’ backmatter in Zong!, and Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferriera da Silva’s responses to representations of the migrant crisis. I read Wadud and Bergvall’s work as part of a growing archive of contemporary poetry that manipulates a fluid, damaged, and variously fragmented archive to position the reader as spectator of a cataclysm, and as responsible for the aftermath and the logic of recomposing the soggy mess according to the structures—racial, material, political—that enabled it.