Hold Still

Reading Print Culture Like a Work of Art

New Directions in Print Culture Studies: Archives, Materiality, and Modern American Culture, eds. Jesse Schwartz and Daniel Worden, Bloomsbury (2022)

Excerpt

My reason for trying to “think like a work of art,” is to find still another way of relating to historical and aesthetic worlds that are ultimately irretrievable. Like [Stephen] Best, I am not trying to recover them in order to suture the genocidal politics of the nineteenth century with oppositional politics of the twenty-first. ... What I try to reencounter in these images are the linked and unstable channels of geography and time.

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The Queer Digital Touch of Racial Sight