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Skye Arundhati Thomas
Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.

Articles Available Online


Interview with Bani Abidi

Interview

Issue No. 33

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Interview

Issue No. 33

In the three-minute short Mangoes (1999) by Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi, two women sit next to each other on a white table, each with...

Art Review

February 2019

Simryn Gill, Soft Tissue

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2019

I walked into Simryn Gill’s exhibition SOFT TISSUE at Jhaveri Contemporary on one of the worst days of an...

POET AS CYBORG PORNSTAR   It starts with the turn Their slender edges, the slow reveal from margin to bombshell, the hormonal show of the real: whatever it is, you know it’s fucking hot I promise, I would do anything to get you off I am peeling my skin 4 u Let’s talk about it: how we fabricate intimacy, the wet scapes of the world scolded back to rigid, flashy                                                         direction Don’t                                                         you think every hero must grow to love their algorithm? Chemical action without consequences, good feeling, bad feeling—young, dumb, and full of poems! With her long French tips and how their bodies work Outsource ur erotics to the moneymakers This month, we are proud to be partnering with Donna Haraway in building a new kind of human-shaped sex robot who wants to write poems Would a friend catch the dog-ear, unreadable script, whir of systems, artificially leathered voice—       POEM AS ZERESHK POLLO   The white owner of the Persian restaurant says they keep wages low to avoid gentrifying the area with higher prices I think of the recipe from the place I used to wait: zereshk (barberries, or you can use dried cranberries if you can’t find barberries), saffron (use yellow food colouring as an alternative) Keep them guessing You are a classical text in the emperor’s encoded vision—sour red berries reclining on a carpet of chicken thighs, jewels set in broth like simmering gold If European culture generally has digested the Orient, what am I but a ferment of exotic things? A dish, a soul, a curated image—every time I chop and fry an onion I have to wonder what it means for my place in the market So what do you think? I mean, of all these grains, letters, this hot tahdig, this oil fallen into syntactic place, this formal glaze beneath which bubbles the threat that in some mouths even this could tell an unintended joke? Every way I look I can feel the cool twist, the crisp euphemism of middle-class taste, and I wonder how much this too will sell for How much would you pay? How good will it look on your plate?     GHAZAL                                                               My eyes were very stop look smell

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.

Bani Abidi & Naeem Mohaiemen, I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter 1)

Art Review

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2018

Loneliness is mostly narrative. It also has an aesthetic: an empty tableau in which the lonely act is performed. In Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled...
The characters in We That Are Young reside at ‘The Farm’ – a sprawling house in New Delhi complete with its own topiary of fat peacocks, bulbous pink flowers with English names, Fendi furniture, and a room in which it snows at the press of a button It’s not far removed from reality – Antilla, the world’s first billion-dollar residence for a single family of four, is a 40-storey building that towers over the suburbs of South Mumbai, replete with a staff of over 600 people, its own electrical power grid, ten-storey parking for a collection of unusable vintage cars, and a room, of course, where it snows on demand In dialogue with Shakespeare’s King Lear, Taneja’s debut novel explores the lives of a family that owns a multinational conglomerate, ‘The Company’, to which each character’s fate (and inheritance) is inextricably tied We have our patriarch, the Lear figure, Devraj; his three daughters Sita, Radha and Gargi; and his right-hand man Ranjit’s two sons, Jeet and Jivan The embarrassment of riches makes for an irresistible, if outlandish, setting; Taneja vividly indulges our intrigue in the way the rich conduct their daily lives, letting her words ooze out their luxury – filthy, yet so desirable After a particularly gruesome scene in which Radha administers the plucking out of a man’s eyes, she steps back into her suite and calls for a pot of first flush Assam, and rose macaroons   A reinterpretation of Shakespeare is the perfect postcolonial conquest: he remains the epitome of the Western canon, patriarchal, and repeatedly failing to include representations of the ‘other’ without recourse to parody Mainstream appropriations of Shakespeare in South Asia, such as Bollywood filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello), and Haider (Hamlet), have generally taken us to rural settings, wherein tragedy is relegated to a matter of the lower castes Taneja, a Shakespearean academic and human rights activist, eschews such stereotypes, and goes straight for the jugular: the innate hypocrisy of the Indian class and caste system ‘It’s not about land, it’s about money,’ states the first line of the book, taking
Preti Taneja’s ‘We That Are Young’

Book Review

October 2017

Skye Arundhati Thomas


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feature

June 2015

Uneasy Lies the Head

William Watkin

feature

June 2015

Last October I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for espresso to trickle from the spout of our imposing...

Art

June 2015

Sisterhood

Chelsea Hogue

Art

June 2015

A woman appears onscreen. Her hair is short. While the film is black and white, by the colour gradations...

feature

Issue No. 9

The White Review No. 9 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 9

This ninth print issue of The White Review is characterised by little more than the continuation of the principles...

 

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