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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...

Letter from a New City to an Old Friend     [SEAside          Gra-                         -im Ronny Burhop 1987-2010                                                                      ffiti]   [adjust             Even the white noise here is different—        trACKing] there’s no boulevard, no blue and breathing ocean The streets—more quiet now, winding through rain, hidden parks and open markets— [chriiiiiiiing] are cobbled, and twist off into alleys less sinister than ours There’s history [REprise] in the street names, true—but the mystery, the footsteps’ muffled click, the concrete sea bRZeE rolling below my window is tame, bloodless… [BRiX ‘98] We fell off the world for years in LA [SoDen I can only remember the haze now,             eAcH       corP how our vista was never really clear                                       oWn of smog, or planes, or neon bellied clouds                                           a sOul?]   I split Left you standing with a pocket [My grambag                full of lock-                            of                  less keys, a few bucks, two lighters and I tRixY                         drove the forty miles back home Years later, rEds]                                        I’m hoping, perhaps we can just look back,                                         tuchhhh—                                                                                —MIDAZ recall it before the cards were flipped— our own Cassidy and Sundance era?    (EPIX x I turned my back on California,                             X) on those two-for-one, from out the Honda [Malverde]       hustlers, sunburned illegals, los santos… And I have thought about nothing else, since   I heard about your dazzling surrender [oUr buRnT-    Guess I should ask ‘from whose bourn’ and all that, but I can’t fucking see how it matters oUt      SCAPE]                                                           Anyways, it’s probably December right now in your coastal town, every crow                 * JauREZ— crowding the power lines, jostling Each one                                       Bosnia vacant, thinking only of its single                    del SUR* green walnut, the distance to the pavement                             ‘grAFT’                                                             -NoV16, 2009-    

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

May 2013

Ad Tertiam

Saskia Hamilton

poetry

May 2013

Rows of pines, planted years ago – so many, were you to count them on your fingers, you would...

fiction

Issue No. 3

Forkhead Box

Jeremy M. Davies

fiction

Issue No. 3

What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice. In his spare time. Sirens, ozone, exhaust...

Art

February 2013

Haitian Art and National Tragedy

Rob Sharp

Art

February 2013

Thousands of Haiti’s poorest call it home: Grand Rue, a district of Port-au-Prince once run by merchants and bankers,...

 

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