Georgina Colby

Firewood/Foreword to Reading Experimental Writing, ed. Georgina Colby

Reading Experimental Writing
Edited by Georgina Colby
Edinburgh University Press (2020): NOW OUT in cloth
Paperback will be published in August 2021

The essays comprising this conceptually rich and astutely edited volume read contemporary experimental writing in terms of its engagement with a genuinely historical present moment, unfolding at manifold sites of turbulence. The result is a set of extraordinarily timely essays on aesthetic activism, reflecting an array of perspectives while sharing a sense of the contemporary as emergent and still incomplete. This is a powerful contribution to the moment, and one with long term significance.
Lyn Hejinian

Firewood/Foreword, Charles Bernstein (full text below)
Introduction: Reading Experimental Writing, Georgina Colby
1. “‘Fog is My Land’: A Citizenship of Mutual Estrangement in the Painted Books of Etel Adnan, Jennifer Scappettone
2. Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian, and Others, Alex Houen
3. Experiment, Inscription and the Archive: Kathy Acker’s Manuscript Practice, Georgina Colby
4. Rereading Race and Commodity Form in Erica Hunt’s ‘Piece Logic,’ Chris Chen
5. Contemporary Experimental Translations and Translingual Poetics, Sophie Seita
6. On Joan Retallack’s Memnoir: Investigating ‘the Experience of Experiencing,’ erica kaufman
7. A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall's Hyphenated Practice: Toward an Interdependent Model of Reading, Susan Rudy
8. Reading Language Art in Digital Media: Reconfigurations of Experimental Practices, John Cayley
9. Charles Bernstein’s Walter Benjamin, Among Other Things, Peter Jaeger

Forms of solidarity

“The voice of the poem transposes Kruger’s feminist dissent to the context of Trump’s inauguration; the President becomes Kruger’s boy-child clenching his fist to flex his bicep, an unnecessary ‘hero.’” Above: Vanessa Witter at the 2017 Women’s March in LA, holding a sign in the style of Barbara Kruger’s protest art. Photo by Scott Witter.

On April 9, 1989, over four hundred thousand women marched on Washington in the March for Women’s Lives. Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) is perhaps the most lasting image from the protest. Kruger divides a photograph of a woman vertically, half in black and white, half in negative, light and dark reversed; an aesthetic of conflict.

On April 9, 1989, over four hundred thousand women marched on Washington in the March for Women’s Lives. Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) is perhaps the most lasting image from the protest. Kruger divides a photograph of a woman vertically, half in black and white, half in negative, light and dark reversed; an aesthetic of conflict. It is a work made directly for the purpose of protesting for liberation from legislation that prohibited women’s reproductive freedom.

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