WRITING
Writing
Die!Live
Feckless Belletrist | 17 April 2024
Give a poet a spring bouquet, it seems, and they will see death.
An-My Lê: Manning the Rail, USS Tortuga, Java Sea, 2010.
The Mississippi and the Mekong
New York Review of Books | 24 Feb 2024
An-My Lê’s anti-imperial aesthetic. “Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières” at MoMA
Georgia O’Keeffe, Canyon with Crows
A Book of Hours
Orion Magazine | Winter 2022
In the wide-open field, it is always one of the lyric years.
Tentful of marks (Tunbridge, Vermont, 1974). | © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos
The Sorrow and the Self-Pity
The Baffler | 65 | October 2022
High imperial aesthetics in midcentury America.
All the Sleeping Women Are Now Awake and Moving
LUX | 2 | August 2021
The freethinking feminism of early twentieth-century Japan.
People attend a candlelight vigil in Queens, NYC, for the eight victims of the mass shooting in Atlanta. (Sipa via AP Images)
The Violent Embrace
Boston Review | 5 April 2021
The Atlanta shooter comes from a culture shaped by decades of American empire-building in Asia, one that has linked Asian women to sex and violence.
Abolition Plaza at City Hall Park, New York City, June 2020, by Jessie Kindig.
Washington County, NY, by Jack Norton.
There Is Always Outside
Verso Books and n+1 | May 2020
Introduction to There Is No Outside: Covid-19 Dispatches, an urgent essay collection on the global pandemic.
Protest banners hang on the perimeter fence of Camp Schwab, a United States military base on May 30, 2018 in Nago, Okinawa prefecture, Japan. Carl Court / Getty Images
“No Rape, No Base, No Tears”
Jacobin | 29 November 2019
Women in Okinawa live in a “war of stories”: Akemi Johnson’s Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the American Military Bases in Okinawa.
Albert Anis, Waldorf Towers, Miami Beach, Florida, 1937. Photo: Mickey Luigi Logitmark.
Living With Water
Artforum | 9 August 2019
Climate change, art deco, and historic preservation in Miami Beach.
Witches protest Trump and white supremacy in 2017
All the Witches They Could Not Burn
Boston Review | 4 December 2018
A woman’s body is both a site of exploitation and a site of resistance. It is out of this vexed space that the witch is conjured.
Winthrop, WA. Photo by Ashley Siple.
Defensible Space
Boston Review | 22 October 2018
Wildfires are now a staple of life in the West. How we talk about them illustrates the tension at the heart of the western myth itself.
1951, Korean War. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.
Peace Regimes
Boston Review | 20 June 2018
The first U.S. peace regime in Korea was a military occupation. The second was a war. The third was anticommunism.
Louise Bourgeois, Spiral.
Introduction to Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo
Verso Books | February 2018
Women have always, it turns out, told about sexual violence, fought it, struggled to write it and say it. Women have fought to tell it to themselves.
Pablo Picasso, Massacre en Corée, 1951
Statue commemorating the Wednesday Demonstrations outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul
Nightmares Must Be Told
Jacobin | 14 August 2017
For twenty-five years, survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery have demanded a reckoning.
Mural at Daechuri Art and Peace Village, South Korea
"Someday this Army Is Going to Leave"
Jacobin | 22 July 2017
Korean farmers face off against the US military's largest overseas base.
Photo courtesy of the Center for the Study of the Korean War
The Violence is the victory
n+1 | 21 May 2017
The history of American expansion can be traced by the severed body parts left in its wake.
"Annie Oakley's heart target," by Annie Leibovitz
Tear the Prison Down
Jacobin | 16 February 2017
Annie Leibovitz's "Women: New Portraits" is as compelling, urgent, and unfinished as feminism itself.
Photo courtesy of the Center for the Study of the Korean War
Looking Beyond the frame
Radical History Review | #126, Oct. 2016
Snapshot photography, imperial archives, and the U.S. military's violent embrace of East Asia.
Flyer for Margaret Sanger's Brownsville Clinic
The feminist city
Jacobin | 10 February 2017
New York City is one of the historic flashpoints for the feminist movement. Anti-abortion protests will not go unchallenged.
Photo by Dorothea Lange, Weill Public School, San Francisco, CA, April 1942 (Library of Congress)
The ghost of japanese american internment
Jacobin | 30 December 2016
Government and military officials believed wartime imprisonment to be prudent and humane. America’s concentration camps were no such thing.
Contestation and Counter-conduct in the Imperial Pacific
American Quarterly | 68:1 March 2016
Review of new books that map the imperial Pacific by emphasizing the journeys of people traversing a world of twinned movement and exclusion.