Progressive culture since 1954
As a global pandemic joins a long list of catastrophes that have simply become a fact of ordinary life, it seems more urgent than ever to revisit and reimagine the fictions governing the accident. Conditions of debilitation, and the bodies that suffer them, deserve nothing less.
Early internet culture, its openness and penchant for performativity—found on the French Minitel, Tumblr, and even the Buffy chatroom—is innately queer. It is important for us to call on this past, to understand its performative nature, and to reckon with its unrealised potential.
The answer to the demonisation of drugs, which has caused incalculable harm and so far deprived us of a more complete understanding of their risks and benefits, is not evangelism. Rather, the revival of interest in the kinds of compounds extolled in How to Change Your Mind presents us with a unique opportunity to reevaluate our relationship with them wholesale, good and bad.
Fifty years ago, on 4 August 1972, three La Trobe University students were released from Pentridge Prison after serving, respectively, four months, three months and six weeks. Hardly any other political prisoners of that period in Australia had served such lengthy terms, with the exception of some of the draft resisters.
There is a great risk in the translation of decolonial poetics: namely, of reducing this forging of novelty to a mere relationship of influence, or, at best, a subversion of the Occident. As the complexity of the global is poetically remade in the poets of the Global South, it is necessary they be disseminated in the very languages and spaces of the North that they would remake.