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Under the right conditions, each day contains two brief moments when the rising or falling sun hits at an angle so precise it arrests the eye. In this issue of e-flux journal, Oraib Toukan shows that there is more to what filmmakers and photographers call the “golden hour.” The unmistakable light of a brief interval also reveals things exactly as they are. In this time of Gaza’s devastation, Toukan explores the power and limitations of words and images in conveying the depth of Palestinian grief and dignity amidst what appears to be an ongoing ethnic cleansing. The grounding concept of turbeh (soil) emerges as an axis for knowledge and justice, urging readers to look beyond the surface and into the soil grain of images. Editorial Editors Twenty-One Sunsets Oraib Toukan On Paralysis, Part 2 Evan Calder Williams Will AI Remember the Days of Slavery? Charles Tonderai Mudede The Oikos of the Earth, the Nomos of the Black Hole Antonia Majaca Counterinsurgent: Cop City, Abolition Ecology, and the Aesthetics of Counterreform T. J. Demos The Greatest Distance Between Two Points Is a Straight Line Claudio Medeiros and Victor Galdino Let’s Call It Art! Luis Camnitzer, https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-143/?ref=unknown

e-flux Index is a bimonthly publishing project that synthesizes two months’ worth of contributions from the five separate sections of the e-flux publishing enterprise, from e-flux Architecture, e-flux Criticism, e-flux Education, e-flux journal, and e-flux Notes respectively. Each of these sections has its own independent editorial agenda as well as publishing temporality. This first issue presents the pieces published by e-flux in December 2023 and January 2024. The metadata gives some indication of its breadth, spanning 48 pieces, 52 authors, and over 150,000 words. Following its wider editorial ambitions to co-articulate multiple discourses, the Index removes the identity cards anchoring these pieces to their original provenance, and instead “meta-edits” them into nine emergent thematic strands., https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-index-1/?ref=unknown

The illogic of exclusion and exception is seductive. Perhaps we will all know ourselves better when we advertise our own place in the world by taking sides with regimes that masquerade as fixed identities and project illusory strength while actually being irreparably fragmented from within, just like we all are. The oppressed, on the other hand, know that a much larger struggle can only be sustained by distinguishing faithful from false witnesses among their own ranks as well as the enemy’s. True identity is forged by how we choose to bear witness, by what endures and grows in meaning as it is transmitted. Editorial Editors Who Pierced the Eyes of Assum Preto? Thotti Afro Asia and the Ethics of Friendship Joan Kee in conversation with Serubiri Moses The Critique of Form (excerpted from Anteaesthetics) Rizvana Bradley From Tragic Mulatto to Cinematic Blackout Katherine C. M. Adams Hija de Perra: Writings from a Poor, Aspirational, Sudaca, Third World Perspective Julia Eilers Smith Filthy Interpretations: How “Queer Theory” Colonizes Our Poor, Aspirational, South American, Third World Context … Hija de Perra Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy in Historical Perspective, Part 1 David Morris Critical (Auto) Theory McKenzie Wark, https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-140/?ref=unknown

“Black Rave”—that’s a great way to think about the sonics of insurgency, a phrase that brings politics back into dance music and culture. Electronic dance music comes from a place of politics, as much as musical purists and Twitter trolls love to insist that “race doesn’t matter” or that “it’s just about the music,” never mind who gets booked to play that music. In the issue, Blair Black and Alexander Weheliye do a wonderful job reminding us of the strategic ways that Blackness and queerness have been removed from electronic music. Which is why the word “rave” is such a racialized one, even as Black people have been raving from the jump… Editorial: Black Rave madison moore and McKenzie Wark Dark Banjee Aesthetic: Hearing a Queer-of-Color Archive within Club Music Blair Black Don’t Take It Away: BlackFem Voices in Electronic Dance Music Alexander Ghedi Weheliye Do You Remember When We Just Lived? Dion McKenzie aka TYGAPAW I Didn’t Have Any Choice But to Become an Artist Jasmine Infiniti A Whale Unbothered: Theorizing the Ecosystem of the Ballroom Scene Julian Kevon Glover A Universal History of the Afterparty Leo Felipe Dissonance: A Suite on Trans Femme Noise Eva Pensis Hood Rave LA: Framing The Black Femme Underground Kumi James aka BAE BAE Don’t Techno For an Answer Tavia Nyong’o Mix: Black Techno | Queer Rave MORENXXX Mix: Aural Battle Armor Femanyst Contents Under Pressure: A (Queer) Techno Manifesto madison moore, https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-132/?ref=unknown

Two women sit at a sidewalk cafe in Manhattan. There are others around: suited bros poring over a spreadsheet, a possible fashion blogger, generally well-dressed white people. The women engage in dialogue and play a game. They talk Platonism, Nietzsche, femmunism, and also traps. The initial point of the game is to decide who has partaken in a particular sexual act, and who has given it or been taken by whom. As they speak, the women, in a dialogue written by McKenzie Wark, create a trans-for-trans space for communication, for a world both part of and separate from the cis one. As one woman tells the other, “They think they know our little secret, but we have information about being that they will never know.” As she says earlier, “We turn the cis gaze back on itself.” Editorial Editors Trap Metaphysics McKenzie Wark Inappropriate Gestures: Vogue in Three Acts of Appropriation Sabel Gavaldon Images Are Masks Sohrab Hura Cultural Wars and the Politics of Diplomacy Hanan Toukan from Tournesol Lynn Xu I Want Something Other Than Time Lewis Freedman Do Better White People Peter BD Two Poems erica kaufman Neither Hopeful nor Pathological: A Theory of South African Art Serubiri Moses Authoritarianism and the Cybernetic Episteme, or the Progressive Disappearance of Everything on Earth Irmgard Emmelhainz, https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-122/?ref=unknown

Who remembers the title of last year’s Venice Biennale? One long year and change later, it seems that nobody’s worst enemy could have made a threat, a promise, or a curse that we may live in times quite as … “interesting” as the ones we find ourselves in now. Arguably, anyone paying even the most distant attention to 2019—or to history and the evolving present in general—could have foreseen what we were heading towards. It’s hard to imagine, though, that someone could have envisioned just how deadly fascinating these times would turn out to be. In any case, here we are. ..., https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-111/?ref=unknown

Forces of Art investigates the way in which artists, artworks and cultural organizations affect people and their social environments, and explores how cases of creative practice have been operational in empowering people, communities, and societies in their given contexts. It is a dense, multi-layered, polyvocal compendium of current thinking about the impact of art on civil society and social change, and contains a large number of essays and case studies located all over the world, from Central Asia to Meso and Latin America, from Africa to Central Europe, from South and South-East Asia to the Middle East. The driving force ..., https://www.librarystack.org/forces-of-art/?ref=unknown

On April 27, 2019, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was the site of a very special convening. It was the brainchild of Simone Leigh, and shared its title with her 2019 exhibition at the museum. Organized by Leigh, Saidiya Hartman, and myself, “The Loophole of Retreat” was an exhilarating, rejuvenating, and inspirational daylong gathering dedicated to the intellectual life of black women that brought together an international constellation of writers, artists, poets, filmmakers, and activists. This special issue of e-flux journal seeks to lift up the extraordinary voices, thoughts, and conversations that emerged at the convening and share them with a wider audience. In doing so, I and my coeditors, Leigh and Hartman, seek to extend the dialogues of the “Loophole” in the hope of including others and inspiring future gatherings which, like the Guggenheim convening, will honor and celebrate the intellectual and creative labor of black women… The Loophole of Retreat—An Invitation Tina M. Campt Extended Notes on the Riot Saidiya Hartman Images from “Loophole of Retreat” Simone Leigh bound together by this matter Simone White The Music of the Spheres Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts A Gathering of Aporetic Form Rizvana Bradley Maps Dionne Brand Suspended Munition: Mereology, Morphology, and the Mammary Biopolitics of Transmission in Simone Leigh’s Trophallaxis Zakiyyah Iman Jackson Beauty Is a Method Christina Sharpe Selvage/Obsidian: A Response Vanessa Agard-Jones Still images from ILLUSIONS Vol. II, OEDIPUS Grada Kilomba Politics of Marooning and Radical Disobedience Fra, https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-105/?ref=unknown

Tech is never simply technology. It never appears in the abstract, any more than the characters “H2O” appear anywhere on water. Tech is always specific. How old should someone be when they first have sex? How old before they get their first cell phone? This sequence unsettles us because it is hard to think about either inevitability. Sex and technology are instruments of desire, the objects and system of adult unfreedom. Children at play are so analog. Young is life before text. We clutched love letters, in the past, when we couldn’t clutch each other. Now our phones get warm and vibrate. Eventually, they die. As a proxy for a body, technology is never better than the next best thing. Too often, it’s the only one. Today the image of the beloved appears most against the canvas of the phone, carved into polymer, inscribed onto text messages, recorded in electronic memory. Our relationships with our phones are our relationships, most of the time… Editorial—”Art Ontologies of Silicon Valley” Editors What if There’s No Next Big Thing? Douglas Coupland Light Industry: Toxic Waste and Pastoral Capitalism Ingrid Burrington The Artist Leaving the Googleplex Andrew Norman Wilson Asynchronous! On the Sublime Administration of the Everyday Mike Pepi Love Machines and the Tinder Bot Bildungsroman Lee Mackinnon The Artist-in-Consultance: Welcome to the New Management Elvia Wilk Jodi’s Infrastructure Alexander R. Galloway Contra-Internet Zach Blas No Man’s Space: On Russian Cosmism Marina Simakova, https://www.librarystack.org/e-flux-journal-74/?ref=unknown

We think that to deal with art we ought to present it, not talk about it. For four months we opened our window to artists producing the finest work in Nigeria, Africa and elsewhere, and the result is what you will see. Seeing is ultimately a trafficking in subtlety, especially if that process of seeing is influenced by art. What, exactly, is art? Since at Saraba we’re open to this kind of questioning that is essentially a voyage, the kind that assembles literary content, art is a process as well as an outcome. Art is the reverberation of colour; art is approaching an image with ambivalence; art is looking at a story or a poem and feeling within oneself for emotions and experiences; art is the experience with yourself. We understand the power of the image in a world over-zealous about representing itself. Our contributors helped us create a landscape of metamorphosizing colour, themes, and outlook. Our landscape stretched from Victor Ehikhamenor’s unsentimental rendering of face, to Neo Ntsoma’s warmth-filled glance at Soweto’s fashion. Then Olalekan Jeyifo’s drawings feels prescient, ideational, the existent sci-fi. Paul Sika is our master that uncovers the drama that is performed in everyday spaces, by everyday people. Serge Jay deals with liquor as a guilty alcoholic would, giving it a recognizable face, and in that attempt, calling its bluff. And then with 3bute, Bunmi Oloruntoba moves to claim a new territory for storytelling, for narratives that blur the distinction between the digital now, the analogous past and the speculative future. Beside these images are words. We granted our contributors the freedom to roam the human mind. Our fictional oeuvre, we must say, is audacious. Complex narratives are woven around seemingly quotidian tendencies. Sex and illness meets credit crunch in Olisakwe’s Spiritual Attack. Affection is found in a tumultuous wrestle against physical handicap in th, https://www.librarystack.org/art/?ref=unknown

There is a statement, “Africa is a country,” used to satirize Western‘ preconceptions about Africa. With billions of people, thousands of ethnicities, several colonial histories and varied post-independence struggles, the continent is spoken of as a single plane that is beset by bad leadership, unending poverty, and the odd scenery. Yes, the continent has these, and yes, there really are some similarities across the different countries and cultures. But, the question remains: Is that all that can be said? And there is another question: How can you represent what truly is Africa? For us at Saraba, we set out to have the issue explore the complex narrative that is Africa. But, reading through the writings, and the art, of this issue, I became aware of the mundane in the stories that were told. Africa, like Europe, like Latin America, etc, is a place where some people are living out their existence. In this issue, a boy takes a girl out in Richard Ali’s The Attempted Killing of Faruk; two girls have a conversation while riding a bus in Tosin Akingbulu’s Thirteen; and two grown-ups talk about having sex in Sefi Atta’s A Safe Indiscretion. And, yes, these stories come with their own unique spin, because Africa has undergone its own speciation. This issue, in some way, answers the questions I raised at the beginning. We take a glimpse at some of the different happenings of, and in, life, which the setting may have played a part. The setting is Africa., https://www.librarystack.org/africa/?ref=unknown