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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...

Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, contributors and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2021   This year, we’re taking our annual fundraiser online The White Review depends upon the support of its readers, and with your support we’ll continue to create space for new art and writing in 2022 and beyond   Lawrence Abu Hamdan   Kim Ghattas and I may be in parallel ideological lanes and yet the cluster-fuck constellation she accumulates around 1979, in her book BLACK WAVE (Wildfire), is a revelation (not least because we may finally have the answer here to who killed Moussa Sadr) Much closer to my filter bubble is Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller’s INVESTIGATIVE AESTHETICS (Verso) An undeviating announcement of the subversive potential of contemporary aesthetic practices The essential contribution here is that to aestheticise politics is, under the right circumstance, not to decorate or to inappropriately beautify it, but rather an essential mechanism to make it sensible I also got a lot from Harry Sword’s book/long form playlist MONOLITHIC UNDERTOW (White Rabbit), which surveys the leaking of what seems like a singular drone through genres, epochs and ideologies And from another time completely (1915) I read for the first time this year Jack London’s STAR ROVER A remarkable encounter with a book whose narrative is built from a singular question: where can the mind go when the body reaches its maximum threshold of experience?     Amy Acre   I was blown away by Natasha Brown’s ASSEMBLY (Hamish Hamilton): a searing account of everyday othering from both the maligned and the well-intentioned, with passages of staggering beauty and an ending that slayed me Similarly devastating: NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS by Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury) reveals a world painfully recognisable, utterly surprising and finally, deeply moving Late to the party, I read and loved Maggie Nelson’s THE ARGONAUTS (Melville House): radical intertextual discourse and romantic ass-fucking on the first page – what’s not to love? JEWS DON’T COUNT by David Baddiel (TLS) was a deeply personal read, moving me to confront my own feelings of Jewish shame Too many poetry books, but NOTES ON THE SONNETS by Luke Kennard

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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Art

Issue No. 4

The Land Art of Julie Brook

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession...

poetry

December 2011

Sonic Peace

Minashita Kiriu

TR. Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

Beneath the sun My interchangeable routines Are formed from superfluous things Managing this place is A metal will, swelling...

poetry

January 2012

Mount Avila

W. N. Herbert

poetry

January 2012

‘el techo de la ballena’   Time to be climbing out of time as the wild city rates it,...

 

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