Cathy De Monchaux: Beyond Thinking (2018)

In other words, Cassandra is not just a translator, she is also an embodiment of the very function of translation: her prophetic speech often appears to be suspended between languages, like Benjamin's translator who operates in the realm of 'pure language' that is beyond any single linguistic code. Cassandra takes and reformulates and incomprehensible message from the future and becomes incomprehensible in the process, (re)producing a message in such a way that it demands a second, or third or fourth translation. Sometimes she descends from a trance-like state of prophecy to initiate the next link in the chain of interpretations herself, reframing her own message in more prosaic language, only to find that this speech too is received with confusion. Her utterance is always both a target and source text at the same time. The proliferation of translation acts within her single body evokes a kind of never-ending self-translation; like the self-translator, Cassandra suffers a splitting of the self, one part of which is committed to the spirit of the original composition, while the other struggles to reframe it for a new audience that can never grasp the meaning of the original.

Emily Pillinger, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature

Lahore (1949)

hello pauline, greetings from the other side✨ i have been struggling with reading non-fiction for a while, feels like my brain is rotting :( could you please help me out/ recommend things i can start with which are interesting and not that hard to comprehend. thank you so much for you help. love and light to you 🌟

I feel you, I’ve just started reading academic papers for uni again and I hadn’t realized how much I missed reading non-fiction! On this list there are some I’ve read, some I’ve started but haven’t finished and others I’m looking forward to read. I would say all the essay collections and memoirs (except maybe for that of Wojnarowicz) are pretty accessible, maybe the political writings are a bit harder to understand depending on the subject (and I guess level of specificity and/or radicalism as well)

Obligatory readings (so like, my favourites, essays/collections that have shaped who I am): - The Book of Delights by Ross Gay - All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks - The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing - Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver - Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley - The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Some very touching/harrowing memoirs: - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson - Little Weirds by Jenny Slate - The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion - Bluets by Maggie Nelson - The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch - In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado - The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria* Marzano-Lesnevich (I think they no longer use that name but it’s the name under which it was published) - The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher - A House Of My Own: Stories From My Life by Sandra Cisneros - The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde - Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz

More political non-fiction: - The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and I Am Not Your N**** by James Baldwin - Women, Race & Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis - Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks - Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander - Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire - A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn - This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Others: - Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith - What Poetry Is All About by Greg Kuzma - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari - Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer - The Crying Book by Heather Christle

Fyodor Dostoevsky ― Crime and Punishment

decolonial art history starter guide

really tired of seeing AH on the internet/tumblr talked about w the same extreme reverence for the classics that has dominated the field since its conception and has led to the proliferation of white supremacist ideals in this course of study i love very much so decided to channel that by collecting some of my favorite readings on decolonizing art history, with a particular focus on the ancient/classical world. note: this is by no means an extensive list, but rather a selection of pieces i found helpful when starting to explore decolonial art history - with this list i'm focusing more on broad issues than highly specific case studies

reflections on the painting and sculptures of the greeks. jj winckelmann: giving this one a preface as it is quite literally the least decolonial art historical text you can find but also the one that kicked off classical art history studies as we know it (winckelmann is largely seen as the father of art history). as such it is worth a read to understand what these arguments are based around - in more recent years this text has been used extensively to support the white supremacist idea that aryan art came from the great green past and that anything not pertaining to the greeks was ‘degenerate’

decolonization is not a metaphor. tuck and yang.

empty the museum, decolonize the curriculum, open theory. nicholas mirzeoff.

decolonizing art history. grant and price.

decolonization: we aren't going to save you. puawai cairns.

why we need to start seeing the classical world in color. sarah bond.

beyond classical art. caroline vout.

classics and the alt-right: historicizing visual rhetorics of white supremacy. heidi morse.

decolonizing greek archaeology: indigenous archaeologies, modernist archaeology and the post-colonial critique. yannis hamilakis.

how academics, egyptologists, and even melania trump benefit from colonialist cosplay. blouin, hanna, and bond. (i'd like to flag this one in particular with a nod to tumblr's obsession with maintaining a certain aesthetic linked to what you study).

The costume of Medea worn by Maria Callas in Pasolini’s Medea (1969).

Persephone the Wanderer (I)

by Louise Glück

In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm:

we may call this negative creation.

Persephone’s initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth “home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness, of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?

She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you.

White of forgetfulness, white of safety—

They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother’s beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?

Manuel Bujados (1889-1954), ''La Esfera'', Vol. 8, #380, 1921 Source

Or did she learn to be colder when she got older and now she saves them the pain?

A cobra is dangerous only when it is coiled, ready to strike in an instant; when its body is completely erect it is quite harmless. Similarly, the kundalini is dangerous only in its form of the diffuse life energies, which fuel the unillumined person's hankering for sensory and sensual experiences, entangling him or her ever more in worldly karma. When the serpent power is erect, however, it is not poisonous but a source of ambrosia, because it is erect only when it has entered the central pathway leading to liberation and bliss. As Jayaratha explains in his commentary on the Tantra-Aloka (chapter 5, p. 358), when one strikes a serpent it draws itself up and becomes stiff like a rod. Similarly, through the process of "churning" the kundalini stretches upward into the perpendicular pathway of the sushumna, reaching with its head for the topmost psychoenergetic center. Georg Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, Chapter 11: Awakening the Serpent Power.