Table Of Contents
Note From The Editor
I. Contemporary Problematiques: Tensions Slavery, Colonization, and Accumulation
- The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism
- The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents
- Chanting Tahreer and Compassion: People as Poetry
- The Wages of Non-Blackness: Contemporary Immigrant Rights and Discourses of Character, Productivity, and Value
II. Intimate Poetics
Poems
- Freedom
Radio Gaza
Morning in the Streets
A Drawing of Breathing
A Guide to Being Palestinian - Document for U.S. Citizens Who Have Never Applied for a Visa and Have Just About Had It with These Aliens Who Go On and On about Some Letter
Deep English
and Autumn Leaves
Works
III. Erotics of Co-Existance: Paintings/Photography
- Between Signs, Symbols, and Signals
- The Lonely City
Call For Papers⁄Art
The Lonely City
Cliff Davidson
In a world of over 7 billion people, over half live in cities. The city is its own ecology—a container holding individuals together and providing them with chance, opportunity, needed work. But the city can also be lived as an enclosure—a series of enclosures. I moved into a room in Brixton and stared out my window at the apartments across the street for weeks. My voyeuristic gaze made me think about (dis)connections. About interiority and exteriority. Outside, it takes organization to come into contact with somebody I recognize. At the bus stop, you can stand close and not exchange a word. It is easy to go unacknowledged.
This city is a place of strangers. It can feel cold, especially when its hustle and bustle is strangely absent, yet eerily prevalent. It is lonely and familiar at once. It is touchingly ugly. Commonly used spaces seem desolate, banal objects get discarded, people become the consumed. The Lonely City questions ideas of engagement and disengagement, inviting you in even as it makes you know you should probably want out.
Artist Bio
Cliff Davidson is a Canadian born Sociologist/Photographer and a recent graduate from the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work has been shown in various galleries in London, UK, and The Netherlands. His interests lie in the everyday, people, juxtapositions, travel, the strange, childhood and youth, emotion, consumerism, flows, and the ‘real’/‘authentic’. Cliff uses his camera to document and write his own pictorial biography as well as a memory-creation tool.