It would be tempting, if you were a theoretical physicist working on the first atomic bomb, to imagine yourself as a demiurge. To frame the process as spiritual longing for God’s wrath . . .
The Women We Inherit: Ayodele Olofintuade’s ‘Swallow’ and the Reclamation of Queer Histories
Our history is in the bodies they tried to straighten, the stories they would not write, the lives they refused to archive.
Elegy Already: Millennials at Middle Age
We were kids together. And now we are not.
Mouthing Off: Oral History as an Anticapitalist Form
An oral history is a unique form of nonfiction where, from the beginning, we are given no promise of truth and the editors make no claims toward a clear, ideologically-specific thesis about their subjects.
The Appearance of Urban Memory in Ukrainian Poetics
This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities,” edited by Michelle Chan Schmidt. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here. Ukrainian poetics function as a mode of defense against disappearance and a mode of remembrance in the city. I will address the […]
What makes a place utopic? Or rather what is it that makes a place received in people’s imaginations as utopic?
In Search of Impossible Places?: Lublin by Manya Wilkinson
Lublin is not only a road trip on foot in central Europe, nor a coming-of-age novel . . . It is the translation into fiction of the economic migrant’s existential condition, caught and lost in the endless borderland that extends between their deprived place of origin and the metropole’s illusion of socio-economic elevation and fulfillment.
Navigating Capital Cities in Chinatown and Lungo Cammino as the Undesired
Love at Last Sight: Writing Hong Kong in Taiwan
Hong Kong is often represented as a port city—a colonial emporium, a gateway to China, a non-space of transit, a stop in multigenerational migrations, a floating city amnesiac about its past and uncertain about its future.
Inorganic City: A Living Autopsy of Tirana
To a certain extent, living in a “cool” city was the promised land that allowed people to swallow the bitter pill of the 1990s neoliberal shock doctrine.