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Tausif Noor
Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art history. His writing on art, literature, and visual culture appears in Artforum, frieze, The Nation, The New York Times and other venues, as well as in artist catalogues and various edited volumes.

Articles Available Online


Devil in the Detail: on Leesa Gazi’s ‘Hellfire’

Book Review

July 2021

Tausif Noor

Book Review

July 2021

British-Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam’s debut A Golden Age (2007) tracks the early stirrings of revolution in East Bengal from the 1950s to the climax...

Art Review

May 2019

Simone Fattal, Works and Days

Tausif Noor

Art Review

May 2019

For the last five decades, Simone Fattal has produced works that refract the particularities of the present vis-à-vis a...

‘When I arrived in Paris for school, all these bourgeois kids would say Eddy Bellegueule, what a funny name’   A year before the publication of his internationally acclaimed first novel, The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis edited a collection of essays in homage to the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu Like Bourdieu, Louis identifies as a ‘transfuge de classe’, which can translate as something between class-crossover and class ‘defector’: someone who has been impelled by class humiliation to transcend their social identity In the collection’s opening essay, Louis describes the ‘folie sociale’ (social madness) which took him over after moving to Paris in his late teens, when he started actively and obsessively pursuing entry into the capital’s most selective milieux out of a desire to erase his modest social origins Bourdieu’s work on social distinction and class identity — which describe his own successive social reinventions — informed Louis’s own writing on that transfer; it also influenced the work of two of Louis’s contemporaries and literary models, Didier Eribon and Annie Ernaux, who each contributed an essay to the collection Like Louis, Eribon and Ernaux have written about their respective transfers from poverty to middle-class life through their access to education and, later, to writer status Bourdieu wrote, referring to Flaubert, of his own futile desire to ‘live all the lives in one life’ All these writers, too, address their ambitions to live multiple lives at once, and interrogate the problematic nature of that ambition All are confronting a complex problem: is it possible to write about the transcendence of working-class condition in a way that is not effectively betrayal, or an implicit praise of bourgeois life?   I grew up in a Picardy town about 100 km west from Louis’s home village of Hallencourt, and many moments in Louis’s autobiographical novel take me straight back to childhood: the image, for example, of three children riding a single bike around a stone structure commemorating the dead of the First World War, the kind that peppers the landscape of so many towns in northern France

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art...

INTERVIEW WITH ANAND PATWARDHAN

Art Review

July 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

July 2018

By the late 1990s a right wing government in the shape of a BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had come to power for the first time...
Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away

Art Review

April 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

April 2018

‘When you love, you are nailed to the cross,’ says a character in Rainer Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). In...

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Prize Entry

Issue No. 20

The Refugee

Kristen Gleason

Prize Entry

Issue No. 20

Brian Ed waited outside the ration house. Merlijn took his time coming to the door, and opened it slowly....

poetry

September 2014

Breath-Manifester & Drones

Ned Denny

poetry

September 2014

Breath-Manifester   Each bared morning is a swell time to die, Leaving the town’s ornate maze for the level...

feature

Issue No. 7

The White Review No. 7 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 7

A few issues back we grandiosely stated ‘that it is more important now than ever to provide a forum...

 

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