Capital New York

hyperallergic:

Mythological Moments from India’s First Biennale

Wangechi Mutu, “Dutty Water” (All photos by author)

KOCHI, India — I finally made the trip to…

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““Depression can be political, can be a process of breaking through. What others—family members and bosses, in television commercials—see as depression can be in fact the use of one’s own body as a site of refusal to participate and function fully in capitalism, (hetero)normative social behavior, or gendered labor: an ongoing space to cultivate one’s self as a political and sovereign subject by shutting down. Why is Cvetkovich in such a hurry to get over depression? Perhaps what appears as a space of nonaction and passivity, is actually a site of activism, a strike of sorts, of bodily contemplation, of working through. The girl in bed can be a type of activist. Perhaps there is something worthwhile in her failing and flailing and documenting it. In Cvetkovich’s reclamation of the ‘girl culture’ of diary writing, she notes rightly that this practice now most often happens on the Internet, yet in this wild confessionalism of Tumblr girls, both white and of color, I see the potentially radical that diverges from Cvetkovich’s project. Online I see contemporary examples of the agitated and restless and hopeless, of Ahmed’s ‘angry black woman’ and ‘feminist killjoy’ who are well-versed in the discourse of therapy and sometimes refuse rehabilitation — ‘self-care’ being an ambivalent, popular hashtag. These are girls who have come of age reading feminist confessional literature and affect theory, and they’re performing this constant awareness of the self in their diary entries and selfies, performing rage and sadness as if against the culture and all its desirous consumers and consumptives. They posit that the petty too, and all of our tremendous feelings, can be political.””

- kate zambreno on ann cvetkovich’s depression: a public feeling at the new inquiry. this is relevant to many discussions. i like the part about needing new forms of writing to counteract the mainstream depression memoir; the mention of barbara’s i’m trying to reach you (obviously); the idea of linking despair to “the often humiliating experiences of capitalism”; and that this article is related to my last post.   (via karaj)

“For me revolution was never an interim ‘thing-to-do’ before settling down; it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or new kind of social life—made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.”

- Angela Davis, An Autobiography