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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...

The manifesto of art collective Bruce High Quality foundation, the subject of an essay by Legacy Russell in this issue, states its intention to provide ‘amateur solutions’ to ‘professional problems’ All evidence of any manifesto ever drawn up by The White Review’s editors has, happily, been destroyed Yet the notion that small, independent ventures might be better placed to address, from without, the institutional problems afflicting the representation and dissemination of contemporary culture chimes with our own ambitions in starting the review This edition pursues that aim by seeking to provide a platform, however small, for work unjustly banished to the fringes of our culture Lauren Elkin, in her essay on écriture feminine, writes passionately against the exclusion of female writing from the literary mainstream, contending that the publishing industry’s conservatism has reduced women to ‘barking from the margins’ The novelist Deborah Levy, now winning belated acknowledgement as one of Britain’s foremost avant-garde writers and interviewed in these pages, might agree   Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić, who fled her home country to escape the oppobrium heaped upon her for her opposition to the war that tore Yugoslavia apart in 1991, provides living proof that disruptive voices are forced into exile The art critic, novelist and filmmaker Chris Kraus and artist Sophie Calle – both interviewed in this edition – are others who strive to present different perspectives on the way that we experience the world   Elsewhere we continue to mix new talent with established writers and artists we admire We are thrilled to publish a new poem by the great John Ashbery alongside work by Jack Underwood, Sumana Roy and Eugene Ostashevsky Claudia Wieser contributes a series of collages which take as their starting point, appropriately enough, pages from books; Guy Gormley’s startled photographs attend to the febrile beauty of the peripheral and fleeting   We are delighted to include fiction from Eley Williams and China Miéville, who has done so much to redraw the skewed boundaries of what is considered ‘serious’ fiction in this country The issue concludes with Claire-Louise Bennett’s ‘The Lady of the House’, the winner

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


READ NEXT

poetry

June 2011

Beautiful Poetry

Camille Guthrie

poetry

June 2011

‘Being so caught up So mastered.’ Yeats     I was too shy to say anything but Your poems...

fiction

March 2016

Red

Madeleine Watts

fiction

March 2016

It was the first week of 1976 and she had just turned 17.   The day school let out...

Art

September 2014

On the Ground

Teju Cole

Art

September 2014

I visited Palestine in early June 2014, just before the latest wave of calamity befell its people. For eight...

 

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