Frottage

Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Macharia moves through genres—psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry—as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.

A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Machariamoves through genres—psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry—as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.

Fiction. This remarkable debut work brings together two powerful novellas that take a hard look at twenty-first century Southern California life and come up on the wry side of compassion. In a twist on the epistolary form, FROTTAGE collects letters from a patient to her analyst that plainly, sometimes shockingly, hide in writing what should be said out loud, piecing together a narrative of sibling secrets and their troubled aftermath. EVEN AS WE SPEAK takes place a few years after 9/11 and follows six disparate characters whose lives crash at the story's start. From the eco-terrorist whose disaffected wife has threatened to expose him, to the college student whose life is tragically complicated by her parents' love triangle, to the middle-aged accountant escaping an alcoholic lover all of them are, in one sense or another, on the lam. By sheer circumstance, they all end up in the same roadside gas station on the same afternoon, at which juncture their lives get entangled."

This fascinating publication sheds light on a medium that combines the qualities of drawing with those of sculpture, printmaking, and painting, and is the first to focus exclusively on the art technique known as frottage, derived from the French word frotter, meaning "to rub." Over 100 pieces, ranging from contemporary conceptual works to rubbings recording tombs and inscriptions, are assembled and sumptuously reproduced in color. More than 50 artists--including the famous, like Max Ernst, inventor of the term "frottage," and the relatively unknown--are presented. Four thematic sections explore different aspects of frottage: its roots in Surrealism and the practice of automatic drawing; the notion of trace, of either a place or an idea left behind in a rubbing; the "apparitions" or ghostlike attributes that can appear on the surface of an artwork; and the associations between rubbings, death, and memory. Distributed for the Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: Hammer Museum, UCLA (02/08/15-05/31/15) The Menil Collection (09/11/15-01/03/16)

Austrian artist Marko Lulic (born 1972) investigates Yugoslavian and international modernism, addressing utopian aspects of the 20th century in different political contexts. This catalog accompanies an exhibition of his large-scale installations, video, posters and public works at Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz.