Weekly Reading List: Adrian Piper is a Visionary Bo$$ Edition

Stuff I’ve been reading on the internet instead of Jeff Chang’s Who We Be.

Orlando

It’s ok for your heart to break and it’s ok to feel nothing. It’s ok to read all of the articles and none of the articles. I’ve been in mourning. These are just a few articles amid the rubble.

• SACRED GEOGRAPHY: A QUEER LATINO THEOLOGICAL RESPONSE TO ORLANDO
• Biphobia and the Pulse Massacre
• Orlando Survivor: “The Guilt of Feeling Grateful to be Alive Is Heavy”

National

• What the Cultural Appropriation Conversation Leaves Out About Asians – All around writer bae Lilian Min writes about the fluidity of racial categories and how that complicates the cultural appropriation conversation. Feeling this one.
• Before Hillary Clinton, there was Shirley Chisholm – Edumacating myself on the first black female candidate for president from a major party.
• Melissa Harris-Perry: I’ve Failed, Over and Over Again – “What happens when I try to speak French can only be described as failure.” Eso, MHP. Eso.
• Descendants Of Chinese Laborers Reclaim Railroad’s History – There’s a method to my attention to media about Asian Americans – tryna create a syllabus for Black-Brown-Yellow solidarity.

Regional

• After Texas Booted Planned Parenthood from HIV Program, County Replacement Hasn’t Performed a Single Test – People who think Texas is a cool place to live are probably straight. P.S. This is the same county where Sandra Bland was killed.
• On being half-Asian in the Mississippi Delta – Some initial thoughts on what it means to interrupt the Black-White binary in the South.
• 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues – Texas valedictorians are undocumented and badass cuz #Texas! Texas valedictorians get immediate shamed and criticized cuz #Texas.

Arts – Dallas

• The Lost History of Dallas’ Negro Parks – “Joy and suffering exist in tandem in the telling of the story of the Negro parks. Celebration and violence go hand in hand. Whatever peace the parks maintained, they existed in a world that was surrounded by hatred.”

Arts – Other

• VISUAL CULTURES OF INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS
• Cannibalizing the Culture of Colonizers and Other Artistic Strategies
• Art For the Art-World Surface Pattern
  1. We can ignore political problems, but we cannot avoid them.
  2. We avoid political problems by: refusing to read the papers; OR reading the papers BUT refusing to understand what we read about; OR acknowledging or complicity in the problems we read about BUT refusing to admit we could solve them through a personal commitment to change; OR admitting we could solve them through a personal to change BUT refusing to admit that we should make that commitment; OR making that commitment BUT avoiding acting on it.
  3. We avoid acting on a commitment to political change by: refusing to acknowledge the interdependence of the personal and political; OR acknowledging the interdependence of the personal and political BUT refusing to acknowledge the political impotence of our personal lives qua personal; OR acknowledging the political impotence of our personal lives qua personal BUT refusing to recognize its dependence on a system of political oppression of others that makes our personal lives possible: Recognizing this but trying desperately to rationalize our lives by invoking other values like personal freedom, aesthetic pleasures, the right to privacy, etc., etc.- As if such values could have any meaning in the absence of true political freedom.
  4. Art for the Art- World Surface Pattern surrounds you with the political problems you ignore and the rationalizations by which you attempt to avoid them.
  -from the “Paris Biennale 1977” catalog (Paris, France Mus’ee d’Art Moderne, 1977
  Adrian Piper