SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900552
Delali Kumavie
{"title":"From Where Do We Draw Breath? Air's Absence and Blackness","authors":"Delali Kumavie","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900552","url":null,"abstract":"Amid an ongoing global pandemic that targets the respiratory system, access to air, to breath, and to life has become a metaphor for ongoing systemic inequalities and exclusions. It is a moment, as Achille Mbembe notes, that renders breath a “fundamental right to existence” that cannot be “confiscated and thereby eludes all sovereignty” (62). Yet, as the fundamental ground on which human life is premised, breath has—during the transatlantic slave trade, through regimes of colonialism and imperialism, and continuing through the present in state-sanctioned murders of Black women, men, and children by the police—functioned historically as a site of racial terror. In other words, the deprivation and weaponization of breath and air often constellate at the Black body. Kimberly Bain observes that Black breathlessness is nothing new, and that its violence echoes repeatedly across the capture of slaves, the hold of the ship, and the repeated forms and structures that deprive Black people globally of air and breath (241). In this essay, I interrogate how the Black body has been figuratively and literally deprived of air. I compare how air’s absence is structured into the architecture of the transatlantic slave trade with the narrativization (and later spectacularization) of African stowaways on airplanes. By focusing on the language of the stowaway as accruing a racializing index that bears the traces of transatlantic slavery, I argue that at the foundations of airlessness and breathlessness is the fact of blackness, an ever-expanding archive that converges at the global border.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46315565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900556
Imani Perry
{"title":"Asthma: Strangling the Caged Bird (Something Like a Prayer)","authors":"Imani Perry","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900556","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47155032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900565
P. Harris
{"title":"Breathing with Mountains","authors":"P. Harris","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900565","url":null,"abstract":"Under the suffocating circumstances of lockdown, COVID conditions inevitably wafted their way into the stoned thinking of Pierre Jardin.2 The pandemic atmosphere made air apparent, and breathing became personal, political, and planetary. People sought perspective in sometimes surprising ways. While many turned to the Stoics, Jardin turned to stone. Suspending his disbelief in “The Hammock of Relaxation” (fig. 1), Jardin stretched his imagination, and set himself adrift in diffuse reveries of rocky respiration. Jardin composes a life centered in absorbing stone(s), encompassing both a physical process of soaking in a substance slowly and psychological experience of becoming engrossed in it. He feels alive with stone and stone alive in him; literally and metaphorically, he has spent hours looking at stone, listening to stone, and touching/being touched by stone. But he had never seriously considered breathing stone. Immediately, a slew of questions arose: Do rocks breathe? Do mountains? Does the Earth? What would it mean to breathe with a stone, or with the planet? Jardin’s pursuit of lithic and lithospheric respirations came to comprise his geologic aspirations, which are set out here.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42006261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900541
P. Youngquist
{"title":"Overtones: A Collage","authors":"P. Youngquist","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900541","url":null,"abstract":"Mom leans against the keyboard of the old upright piano in the den. She puckers her lips and gently fingers the valves. A couple of times a month, she frees her trumpet from the purple velveteen lining its case—out of love or frustration I can never tell. She stares hard at the bell, pointed somewhere near my feet. She inhales deeply, pressing the silver mouthpiece to her crumpled lips. A silent moment passes—torn by a noise pitched past the sun, a shrieking flare sound. Another follows and another, bright glissandos blinking out somewhere below middle C. They shatter everything I know about her. Everything I thought I knew. What sound was that, what cry? What aspiration to be free? After those initial stabs, she falls into familiar melodies: “Bugler’s Holiday” by Leroy Anderson, maybe, or “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I’m unsettled for the rest of the day.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42136967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900525
Luk Van den Dries
{"title":"Breathing","authors":"Luk Van den Dries","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900525","url":null,"abstract":"This text, “Breathing,” was conceived for the book From Act to Acting: Fabre’s Guidelines for the Performer of the 21st Century (2021). The book was conceived and designed by Jan Fabre, author, theatre artist, and visual artist, active since the 1970s. The book was written by Luk Van den Dries, dramaturg and theatre researcher of the University of Antwerp, in tight collaboration with Jan Fabre and the three most important performers/teachers of the Belgian theatre company, Troubleyn (Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, and Ivana Jozič). The book sheds new light on the physical, mental, and vocal training of the performer and furthermore gives insight into Fabre’s revolutionary thoughts on contemporary theatre.1","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46929615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900561
M. Froger, D. F. Bell
{"title":"Pairing breaths: Rabah Ameur-Zaïmech's Terminal Sud (2019)","authors":"M. Froger, D. F. Bell","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900561","url":null,"abstract":"Asphyxia Never had I felt such a sense of suffocation watching a film by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche.1 The poisoned atmosphere of Terminal Sud (2019) recalls the atmosphere of the Algerian War (1955-1962) and that of the decade of darkness (1991-2002) in that country. The filmmaker chose not to make a historical film, however, but rather a dystopia that fuses together periods and places. The story appears to be contemporary, in a country bathed in the colors of southern France, apparently in the grip of all the violence that French and Algerian memories are nowhere near forgetting.2 Bandits wearing combat uniforms, policemen wearing outfits sporting an acronym that strangely resembles one used by Islamist Algerian groups,3 and generals evoking the French putschists of 1961 all fight against each other—ransoming, threatening, kidnapping, killing, and torturing the local population. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, guerrillas (maquisards4) try to care for their dying leader, like North African freedom fighters (fellagas) were doing before them, and this in turn evokes French Resistance fighters in the 1940s. The film’s work on confused memories, which, according to Thierry Kuntzel, is related to the condensation, overdetermination, and displacement of dreamwork, transforms being out of breath into a symptom that hounds the doctor, played by Ramzy Bédia (“Inhale...Exhale...Inhale again...Hold your breath...Exhale”), a state of the world in the form of a trap that threatens to suffocate him—and launches the quest for a filmic poetics of calm through the pairing of breaths. Peeling façades with tightly closed doors, lowered metal shop shutters, narrow and tense streets: the doctor, his wife Hazia, and their family slip outside in fear of kidnapping and gunfire, climb up stairs breathing heavily, anxiously await by the window, their bodies obscured in starkly contrasting shadows cast by glaring light, hug each other with endless sighs. As they share their grief, they have barely enough breath left to sing to the memory of someone who has disappeared,5 as if after an argument,","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44755073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SUB-STANCEPub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900554
Kieran M. Murphy
{"title":"The Air of Liberty: A Transatlantic Perspective","authors":"Kieran M. Murphy","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900554","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48129760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}