Mailing List


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...

‘A crisis becomes a crisis when the white male body is affected,’ writes the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, interviewed in this nineteenth print issue of The White Review Braidotti’s work on the posthuman challenges all forms of supremacy – from humans’ abuse of the environment to deep-rooted racial and gender inequalities – in favour of a more expansive, less hierarchical view of humanity At a time when accelerating movements in global politics are propounding constricted views of who may be classed as ‘human’ and accordingly entitled to bodily autonomy – those who are white, male, heterosexual, rich, native-born – it feels imperative that we continue to seek out voices and narratives outside this shrinking mainstream We are wary, however, of providing another platform for agitprop and the conveyor belt of hastily expiring hot takes Instead we have sought to put together in this issue a collection of writing that is nuanced and reflective, curious and exacting; that will provide solace where required and spur inspiration elsewhere   Since the US election campaign, where debates turned on whether or not a female candidate was capable of withstanding the strain of a presidency, women’s bodies – coded as weak and frail, somehow imparting irrationality, and requiring subordination to male control – have been at the forefront of Trump’s sickening boasts and discriminatory policy-making Women who terminate pregnancies must be ‘punished’, Trump said in March 2016, before using one of his very first acts as president to police women’s control over their own bodies by reinstating a 1980s law denying funding to organisations which perform or provide information about abortions (‘Pro-life’ campaigners might note that during the 1950s and ‘60s, when abortion was legal in only four states, ‘back alley’ terminations accounted for 17 per cent of maternal deaths) Our protest comes in the form of fictions, essays, poems and works of art which interrogate constructions of the female body Jacqueline Feldman follows a group of Femen activists who have turned their bodies into vehicles of protest, and explores the way these women have been alternately vilified, patronised and objectified for exposing their bodies in

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

feature

March 2013

Celan Reads Japanese

Yoko Tawada

TR. Susan Bernofsky

feature

March 2013

There are some who claim that ‘good’ literature is actually untranslatable.  Before I could read German, I found this...

feature

November 2015

Anatomy of a Democracy: Javier Cercas

Duncan Wheeler

feature

November 2015

20 November marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of General Franco. And while the insurrectionist’s victory in the...

poetry

January 2014

Three New Poems

Antjie Krog

poetry

January 2014

Antjie Krog was born and grew up in the Free State province of South Africa. She became editor of...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required