Felicia de Jesús spends her quarantine days behind a sewing machine making reusable masks on the balcony of her home. She sells them for $3 dollars apiece, a price she considers affordable for her neighbors, and just enough to cover the cost of materials. She lives four blocks from the...

 In late April the Chinese Cultural Centre in Vancouver’s Chinatown—just two blocks from where I live—was vandalized with anti-Asian racist graffiti, setting off a wave of anxiety and fear that caused many in the Asian community to withdraw and seek protection in physical, social and cultural isolation. There was,...

The eleventh piece in our Polity of Literature series: Concluding our trilogy about “the hole in the donut”—that rule-bound space within which our readings of others can have shared, verifiable legitimacy (see PoL #10 and Addendum to PoL #10)—Dutch artist and writer Niels Bekkema looks at the different kinds of...

Addendum to the tenth piece in our Polity of Literature series: In Ralph Severijns’ analysis of the state’s reading of refugee stories—that is, in the crucial “free narrative” that asylum seekers tell when they apply for asylum—some problematic stories come up (see PoL #10, “Refugees Tell Their Stories to the...

MIRROR | CINEMA | CITY: KARACHI CAPRI Althea Thauberger: The Capri Cinema Project By Zarmeené Shah Through a small window in a closed door, we see the world outside from within a darkened interior space. A man walks by across the street, past a shuttered healthcare shop. It is daytime...

A Shaft of Light Inside a 12 x 7-foot cell, a shaft of light passes through a narrow window positioned high above a small mattress and a bed frame of poured concrete. Instead of landing on the achromatic prison wall or the dusty TV bolted to the ceiling, the light...

“I really think it’s time to go,” our guide says as he nervously glances at his phone that glows half past five. Around us, as if on an unspoken cue, the air of urgency and anxiety thickens, and it strikes us that we have lost track of time and we...

Chapter 1 – Holes in the Sky MYITKYINA, KACHIN STATE, NORTHERN MYANMAR The half-dozen works of art hanging on the bare wooden walls depict family scenes—they are painted in bold primary colors with rudimentary strokes. Human figures hover ghostlike above the ground. They have no faces, nor do they reveal...

On the evening of Friday, April 19th, 2019, at the invitation of ArtsEverywhere, Pony Zion (De’von Webster) and Benji Hart (Benji Ninja) gathered in a conference room at The New School on 5th Avenue in New York City to discuss social justice and the contemporary Ballroom Scene. This two-hour conversation was...