A conceptual “course packet” of readings around and inspired by the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha.
What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “postfeminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the “well-written,” and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal? How can we be subjects that believe in land and not borders? What influence has technology and digital space had on the “making and unmaking of identity”? How do we navigate a cyclical eruption of decolonizations?
Driven by the central question “What are we learning from artists today?” the second volume of A Series of Open Questions is informed by themes found in the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha, such as cultural hybridization and fluidity of identity, digital and migratory aesthetics, memory and landscape, decentered realities, feminist approaches to storytelling, meditations on death and myth, post-coloniality and decolonization, and women’s work as related to cultural politics. The contributions to Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus? embody Trinh’s own weariness around categorization and investigate the ways production can come from and be based in positions of unknowing.
