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bell hooks, your essay on claiming the margin as a space of radical possibility stays with me as a key that led me into the rich discourses of Black feminist thought, intersectionality, and solidarity. When you wrote that “I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me,” I felt sparks igniting the fuel I’d received in a conference on Artistic Research in Karlsruhe, Germany in the summer of 2018, and giving that fire a heat and power that I hadn’t recognized in that predominantly white European context. When you wrote that “Language is also a place of struggle,” I felt the colorful clouds of my inarticulate ideas expand from the rows of black-and-white type that I’d been struggling to strap them into, and imagined myself joining discourse that took as its starting point the fact that every voice and body and gesture had meaning in this fraught society in which we were embedded, and that centering those colors and tones and feelings and points of friction was an act of generosity and generation, a way to make space for wholeness from the broken overlapping margins that held fully embodied knowledge of the ways in which the language of dominance was incomplete.

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