What we are reading | Issue No: 7

Francesca Recchia

• Giorgio Agamben: On the metropolis

• Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart. An unfinished diary of nowadays

• Gillian Darley, Intimate spaces 

• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1994 (1958).

Asim Rafiqui

• “There Is Wealth In Them Holy Words”

• “The Revolution That Never Came.”

• “Killing Water.”

•  “What We Want Is Only The Earth Beneath Your Feet.”

• “Kamal Daoud’s Turn To The Comprador.”

• “Spray”

• “From The Archive Of American Colonialism.”

• “Booker, Of The Man-Booker Prize, Being Bad.”

• “New York Times Sleights Of Hands.”

• “Babar, The Racist Elephant.”

• “Agamben’s Cure For Headaches.”

• “Backlash, In Other Words.”

• “What Is Guantanamo, Again?”

Suchitra Vijayan

• If I Were God: The Writings of Forough Farokhzad

• The Master of Exile: Sargon Boulus (1944-2007)

• What Machines See: Trevor Paglen on Invisible Images

• “Black Masks, Rainbow Bodies: Race and Psychedelics”

Psychedelics is a “white thing”. It is a common idea. Many people of colour view “tripping” as an effete practice of the privileged that the oppressed cannot afford. The sentiment is mirrored by the near invisibility of race as a topic in official, often all white, psychedelic conferences. Against white silence and black suspicion, more youth of colour, some affluent and integrated are experimenting with psychotropics. Using literature, history and personal testimony, we can map how psychedelics have been interpreted by Black America. What did Malcolm X say about it? Or modern day Afro Futurists? Can the promise of ego dissolution work when black ego defences are needed to withstand racism in America? Does the black experience re-frame as hypocritical, the grandiose, Utopian claims of the psychedelic movement? Or does it free people of colour to embrace a radical humanism, where the spirit arcs across the sky of history like a rainbow?