TORCH: Movement, Its Depictions, and Two-Way Tickets
The experience of migration lies not in binaries—pleasure-pain and triumph-catastrophe—but rather, like life itself, it resides in the space in between.
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Posts Tagged: borders
TORCH: Over the Borderline
I’m writing about the border through the eyes of children because the border is a problem of the imagination.
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Spaces of Exception vs. Spaces of Redemption: The Films of Ana Lily Amirpour
Diasporic communities live inside a host nation, but they also live with difference.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A bookstore in Wyoming has banned laptops and cell phones so customers can live like its 1993. The former headquarters of Borders Bookstores has become a tech hub. Can bookstores help America heal? The Denver public library has found a new way to raise money: selling books. Booksellers see a growing demand for books in […]
...moreWe Tell Ourselves Stories to Tell Ourselves Stories
It’s not like we can all launch a Kickstarter or write a book—there’ve been hundreds of books about the border, and we still have the same problem. So I get angry, and perhaps it’s less about my feeling that all this testimony is useless and more my way of raging against my own impotence toward […]
...moreDrawing a Line
Because borders are so weird, words proliferate. Along with arbitrary, nonsensical violence—and strange, unpredictable exceptions—people talk a lot and lots of papers get filed, even as all of it is, in practice, evacuated of meaning. For The New Inquiry, Aaron Bady thinks through the poetics and the “Kafka-esque” violence of borders. His thoughts culminate in […]
...more“Borders” and Brand Controversy
MIA’s video for “Borders” is controversial in many ways: it’s full of refugee imagery, MIA rapping in the middle of boats packed with bodies. But its biggest backlash comes from what seems like its least controversial gesture—in some shots, MIA is wearing a shirt with a doctored logo, changing “Fly Emirates” to read “Fly Pirates.” One would think that critiquing […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Hong Kong is dominated by two kinds of bookstores—the independent shops specializing in political books and pornography banned by China and the shops secretly owned by Beijing’s communist government. A Tokyo-based bookstore hosting a book fair centered around democracy and freedom suspended the event after criticism. Customers nostalgic for Borders bookstores need only to head […]
...moreBorders Bookstore and Sharia Law
Borders bookstores might have withered away in bankruptcy stateside, but internationally the store continues to operate, and the chain is at the center of a censorship dispute. Melville House reports that a Borders in Kuala Lumpur was raided in 2012 and the manager, Nik Raina, arrested for selling Allah, Liberty, & Love by Irshad Manji. The […]
...moreThe Return of the Indie Bookstore
Could Amazon actually be helping indie bookstores? It seems counterintuitive, but after a devastating reduction in numbers in the late ’90s, the American Booksellers’ Association has finally started to grow—albeit slowly—since 2005. Nate Hoffelder at the Digital Reader argues that by killing off (or mortally wounding) big-box bookstores like Borders, Amazon has made room in […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
I was out last week on vacation, but I’m back. And there’s a lot to catch up on. Here goes … In Turkey, you can go to jail for using the letters Q, W and X. (via) Even Bill and Ted might have gone to this library. The anthology Love is a Four Letter Word […]
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