becoming-cow bros
Category: essays
Bearing witness to the wake-differend’s of slavery.
How can one tell the story that can't be told, which must be told? M. NourbeSe Phillip's seminal poetry collection Zong! seeks to answer this pertinent question. Her answer through 'not telling'. This essay proposes a collation of the works of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard's The Differend with Christina Sharpe's In The Wake to bear witness to stories that cannot be told; by bearing witness to the wake-differend.
Performing manhood: Hypermasculinity and quare representation in Moonlight and The Dark Knight.
An essay exploring the problems with hypermasculine presentations in Nolan's 'Dark Knight' trilogy. And how Barry Jenkin's 'Moonlight' presents a deconstruction of Nolan's hypermasculine tropes through a bildungsroman celebrating black quare life in its ontological negation and difficulties.
A Necropolitical analysis of the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs:
An essay exploring the nature of being at the margins in the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. This essay explores the notion of the pushing of the slave subject's body to the margins of life; therefore, the subject is controlled through Achille Mbembe's notion of Necropolitics.
‘You Have Always been the caretaker’: A DeleuzoGuattarian analysis of Maya Derren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Meshes of the Afternoon, has long been read under the dead, myopic lens of psychoanalysis. This, short, essay attempts to provide a schizoanalysis, one that resonates more with the texts representations of dreams and desire to construct the notion of a fluxed female identity.
A Twin Fantasy of an Exeter cell and a Leeds drunken stroll:
A tirade, written by a student, a prisoner, in their halls reflecting on life in isolation both in halls, and at home - the urban environment is essentially being trapped in a constant feeling of day release, so I am imprisoned in both realities, both fantasies.
Ecocritical analysis of Carl Sandburg’s ‘Wilderness’:
An essay analysing the poem 'Wilderness' by Carl Sandburg through an ecocritical lens.