02: Navigating An Endless Stream of Things to Learn From and Of
I began the year reading Lydia Davis's shorts, then Merve Emre's Once and Future Feminist. By March I was only panic-reading the news. Then I tried to digest the pandemic by reading Paul Preciado's "Learning From the Virus,” but also digging back to Virginia Woolf's "On Being Ill," and other seminal texts on illness, ailments, and culture.
At the time George Floyd was murdered, I was in Chicago with my partner, probably reading about a bored celebrity in their mansion or watching Breaking Bad. The world changed overnight. Perhaps because everyone was tired of being either inside or essential; perhaps because Black and Brown people were disproportionately affected by the pandemic; perhaps because of all of the other events that had transpired in the past 400 years, it felt like a time for action.
Shortly after the protests began there was a flood of organized documents, reading lists, and spreadsheets. The endless bounty of knowledge omitted from American pedagogy could fill, well, a library. There are so many things on my reading list now: books I'm upset I wasn't given in my youth, books I'm ashamed I didn't know about. And to be clear, my reading list isn't exclusively about race. There is so much to learn about the world, but the lens through which I intake these things is always going to be through what I have learned in the American school system—a system predicated on race.
I'm trying to read, listen, and act in equal measures in order to interrogate my own spheres of references and knowledge. Because it's been so hard to sit down to read a book, I am starting with the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the NYT. I am a maximalist, and this project has it all: podcasts, long-form journalism, extensive criticism, poetry, compact phone-legibility, and more. It's such a robust bank of information about the insidious genesis of contemporary racist structures and systems. At once poetic and disruptive, it provides deep learning for thirsty allies. It's hard to review a compendium of works in medias res, but I can safely guess that there is no conclusion to the 1619 Project at this time. What happens next? I think we're trying to answer that right now.
I've definitely gone past 30 seconds. 4.5/5 stars—half a point deducted because it is not a book and this is a book review column. But, anything Ted Cruz decries as propaganda is probably going to be excellent.
–Tizziana Baldenebro
Tizziana Baldenebro is a Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Her practice emphasizes critical research and documentation, privileging historically undervalued and underrepresented artists and designers. Tizziana received a Masters of Architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.
