Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus? (A Series of Open Questions, #2) by Jeanne Gerrity


Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus? (A Series of Open Questions, #2)
Title : Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus? (A Series of Open Questions, #2)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 3956795695
ISBN-10 : 9783956795695
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 256
Publication : Published June 10, 2021

What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “postfeminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the “well-written,” and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal? How can we be subjects that believe in land and not borders? What influence has technology and digital space had on the “making and unmaking of identity”? How do we navigate a cyclical eruption of decolonizations?

Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus? (A Series of Open Questions, #2) Reviews

  • Noor Al-Shalash

    Super interesting collection of writing on a range of topics. I think you can find most of them online if anyone is interested in reading them. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

    "Great Mothers are recalled as the goddesses of all waters, the sources of diseases and of healing, the protectresses of women and of childbearing. To listen carefully is to preserve. But to preserve is to burn, for understanding means creating...speech is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched...every griotte who dies is a whole library that burns...My story, no doubt, is me, but it is also, no doubt, older than me. Younger than me, older than the humanized. Unmeasurable, uncontainable, so immense that it exceeds all attempts at humanizing." -Grandma's Story by Trinh T. Minh-ha

    "Asian cultures are cleaved cleanly from their complex histories and rich meanings, decontextualized, mixed sloppily with signs of other Asian cultures, and used to undergird and embellish an environment for white protagonists to inhabit without its progenitors...if these are forecasts of a cultural melting pot, why are the leads and inhabitants almost entirely white? Or is this a manifestation of white people's fears of being colonized, enslaved, trafficked, reeducated, and bred (that is, being subject to what they have wrought on so many Brown and Black populations)?" -Asian futures, without Asians by Astria Suparak

    "I know these slopes and ridges, and I don't know why. I hear stories winding their way over roots and alongside creeks...The unconscious is a lake that knows everywhere it has been in the cycle of time." -of castles in Spain by Tamara Suarez Porras

    I also really enjoyed Forms of Politeness by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, This Is the Voice of Algeria by Frantz Fanon, and Harbour by Amy Fung.