\n\tIn the sprawling, splashy \u201cNew Humans\u201d exhibition inaugurating New York\u2019s newly expanded New Museum (sound new enough for you?), a mechanical apparatus quietly whirrs. This tumbler, by the artist Steffani Jemison, is slowly but surely agitating and refining dredged debris: glass, coins, stone.<\/p>\n
\n\tHaving studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, Jemison often moves between writing and art in thoughtful if seemingly unlikely ways, as in her novella A Rock, A River, A Street<\/em> (2021) and her solo show opening this month at Westf\u00e4lischer Kunstverein in M\u00fcnster, Germany, which explores the \u201clanguage of birds.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tJemison\u2019s spare works are underpinned by deep research, often into alternative literacies that have functioned as tools of resistance and that blur the boundaries between drawing and writing. She discussed several examples memorably in a 2019 essay for Artforum<\/em>, where she writes, \u201cI am looking for a route to drawing, and a route to writing, that does not pass through any masters at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIntrigued by her unique lens on literature, I asked her to single out five books on her shelf: books she keeps coming back to, finds herself recommending often, and so on. She spoke about her choices below with a calm yet exacting clarity\u2014a rare kind of clarity that manages to expand instead of foreclose. \u2014Emily Watlington<\/em><\/p>\n
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Counternarratives<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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by John Keene<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tThe short stories in this collection fill historical gaps. Keene plays with historical language and documents and points of view; it\u2019s super nerdy. The first story reminds me of the way Hernan Diaz plays with epic storytelling across generations in Trust<\/em>. A few years after this book was published, Saidiya Hartman\u2019s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments<\/em> came out; she uses the term \u201ccritical fabulation\u201d to describe the process of imagining Black stories that never entered the archive. Her project is very aligned with what Keene was doing.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cRivers\u201d retells Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim\u2014it predated Percival Everett\u2019s novel. \u201cAcrobatique\u201d is a first-person fictional experiment in the voice of a well-known Black circus performer from the 19th century painted by Degas [named Miss La La, or Anna Olga Albertina Brown]. And \u201cBlues\u201d is written in the voice of Richard Bruce Nugent.<\/p>\n
\n\tKeene is a poet writing fiction, so he enters that space with no baggage\u2014he doesn\u2019t hold himself to any conventions around what a short story should look like, and that leaves the question of what we really know about the past productively open. In my work, I think about the open-ended relationships between past and present. There can be a tendency to treat the contemporary as a predicate of history, but I don\u2019t think of it that way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Black Aliveness<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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by Kevin Quashie<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tThis is one of the books I recommend most frequently. A student recently told me she was interested in theoretical material around Black studies that does not refer primarily to enslavement. I thought that was such an interesting provocation\u2014one that almost felt inconceivable to me based on my own training, which was shaped by the influence of writers like Toni Morrison, who wrestled deeply with American history. That request, though, sent me back to this book by Kevin Quashie.<\/p>\n
Black Aliveness<\/em> uses Black feminist poetics as a starting point for a theory of Black world-making grounded in the world-making that is already happening. It\u2019s a beautiful, celebratory text. It\u2019s accessible even though it\u2019s scholarly, written in dialogue with Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and others, with lots of long quotations from beautiful poems. It can feel really affirming in moments of existential and political despair, because it insists that world-making doesn\u2019t have to be confined to what we think of as \u201cpolitical.\u201d One chapter is about the subjunctive tense\u2014the present-speculative as an orientation toward the world that leaves space for articulating into being the relations, community, and aliveness that energizes us. My pessimist friends hate it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Essays One <\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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by Lydia Davis<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tFew craft collections focus on the technical intricacies of writing at the level of language itself.\u00a0Craft books tend to lean\u00a0broad\u2014focused on plot, on show-don\u2019t-tell\u2014but what\u2019s amazing about Davis\u2019s book is its attention to the process of revision, which feels especially generative\u00a0given how tightly constructed her own writing is.\u00a0She also\u00a0offers a generous genealogy of her writing practice, and shares multiple drafts of the same text alongside close readings of some of her favorite authors. And it\u2019s a genuinely pleasurable read; she writes beautifully about painting, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Blacktop Wasteland <\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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by S.A. Cosby<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tS.A. Cosby is a younger Black crime novelist whose work is sharp and funny. His books capture aspects of Black life in the South I\u2019ve never encountered in any novel before: the world he describes is very working class. The book begins at a drag race, I never really see these referenced even though they\u2019re very present in rural Southern life. It\u2019s such a rich cultural context.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn an interview, Cosby once said that he writes his novels while watching TV at night! A friend responded that this was why his books aren\u2019t literature, but I think it speaks to the amazing porousness of the writing process: you can just do it all the time and accept any and all input.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Slow Mania<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/figure>\n
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by<\/strong>Nazareth Hassan<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tI saw two of Hassan\u2019s plays this past year. Bowl EP<\/em> is a text built around a dialogue between two characters that explodes into another form: it\u2019s narratively playful and experimental from beginning to end, with vignettes that feel almost song-like. Practice<\/em> had an extended run at Playwrights Horizons and is a reflection on the process of artistic production itself. Both are among the Blackest things I saw this year, in an incredible way; they poke and provoke and open up the experience of being a Black artist. I both loved it all and found it complicated.<\/p>\n
Slow Mania<\/em>, published by Futurepoem, is a beautiful extension of that energy. The book includes both photographs and language, and some of my favorite parts capture something about the texture of living in Brooklyn right now. The space they create is very dreamy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Steffani-Jemison-REVELATiON-2017_1.jpg?w=1024″] In the sprawling, splashy \u201cNew Humans\u201d exhibition inaugurating New York\u2019s newly expanded New Museum (sound new enough for you?), a mechanical apparatus quietly whirrs. This tumbler, by the artist Steffani Jemison, is slowly but surely agitating and refining dredged debris: glass, coins, stone. Having studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, Jemison often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1973209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1973209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1973209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1973209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1973209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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