ArtsEverywhere

https://artseverywhere.ca/2021/01/21/fan-fiction/ The inaugural essay in this series, Potatoes or Rice, poses a question: Lacking the robust physical immediacy that is so useful for politics, what will help literature fully host its contentious plurality of readers and writers? One answer comes from Stephanie Burt’s 2017 New Yorker piece on fan fiction, in which she wrote that fanfic requires neither cultural capital nor much actual capital to make. You don’t have to ta...ke a class, or move to the city, or find an angel, or find an agent; most of your readers may never know your offline name. For all these reasons, fanfic can give its creators a powerful sense of participatory equality. Fan fiction makes everyone a potential author, able to contribute their own imperfect contribution. To write fan fiction is to re-author a story that already has a place in the vast landscape of literature, even if we might not think of it as literary, even if we might not think of this writer as an author. It is to claim a place, to assert one’s own right to storytelling. Perhaps most importantly, it is to refuse to accept that the stories one has received must be left as they are: unquestioned, unchanged. Fan Fiction is What a Polity of Literature Looks Like by Juli Parrish is the 23rd piece in our Polity of Literature series at artseverywhere.ca. Link above. . . . #fanfiction #fanfic

https://artseverywhere.ca/2021/01/21/fan-fiction/ After de Certeau, and following scholar Henry Jenkin’s influential 1992 book of the same name, fan fiction writers called themselves textual poachers. But other metaphors proliferated, and, as American fanfic scholar and writer Juli Parrish argues here, it matters which ones we use as we try to understand our political experience as readers and writers. Parrish looks back, before Jenkins, to a less well-known scholar, Con...stance Penley, who borrowed from de Certeau the more complex metaphor of Brownian motion, a term in physics for all of the minor, invisible events that are only ever seen in tiny shifts on the macro scale (as in the weather). Parrish argues that this metaphorBrownian motioncorrectly focuses our attention on processes, like literature, and not on heroic actors, such as poachers and authors and the writer. In a Polity of literature, riven with Brownian motion, we focus on our collective achievements, not on who gets to claim ownership of them. This piece is illustrated by Ken Krimstein. Fan Fiction is What a Polity of Literature Looks Like by Juli Parrish at artseverywhere.ca. Link above. Juli Parrish is a Teaching Professor and the Writing Center Director at the University of Denver, and a co-editor of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Literacy and Composition Studies. She wrote her doctoral dissertation about the creative processes that fan communities use to write and read fan fiction during her studies at the University of Pittsburgh. . . . #fanfiction

https://artseverywhere.ca/2021/01/21/fan-fiction/ In fan fiction the readers of popular stories, such as Star Trek and Harry Potter, write their own invented episodes, torquing the original to serve their concerns and preferred narratives. It’s merely, as Michel de Certeau described, reading as poaching, but a wholesale reinvention of the relationship between writers, readers, and texts. In fan fiction, to read is also to rewrite, so that both activities become inheren...tly politicalpractices negotiated within a conflicted plurality. Fan fiction is what a polity of literature looks like. While it might sound like an outlier or a niche, fan fiction is so strikingly similar to the essential operations of interactive gaming that one could reasonably argue that it is the dominant mode, by far, in the current encounter of readers, writers, and texts. Fan Fiction is What a Polity of Literature Looks Like by Juli Parrish is the 23rd piece in our Polity of Literature series. Artseverywhere.ca - Link above. #fanfiction

https://artseverywhere.ca/2016/07/04/in-the-shadow/ In the 1980’s and into the 90’s, eminently queer neighbourhoods in cities like New York gentrified before its residents’ eyes. As scores of gay men died in their rent-controlled apartments, their lovers were evicted and rent prices were raised to market value. Meanwhile, higher income, heterosexual suburbanites with a taste for city-life, began to occupy these spaces, imposing their cultural aesthetic on the neighbourhoods.... This period wasn’t just apocalyptic for queers, it was also devastating for the many immigrants and lower income folk who lived in these areas, which went from being affordable hotbeds of cultural difference, creative thought, and social change, to become overpriced urban malls, where public cruising was outlawed. Worst of all, the memory of who had been there before was paved over, completing a phase of sanitation. Schulman characterizes gentrification as the removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity the familiar interaction of different kinds of people creating ideas together. This echoes a broader form of homogenization happening worldwide, whereby a reduction of biodiversity is weakening global ecosystems. In the Shadow of an Epidemic - by Mike Young at artseverywhere.ca. Link above #gentrification

https://artseverywhere.ca/roundtables/nonartistic-practices/ I am trying to put the students I work with in situations or in roles that are unfamiliar to them, but which require them to give a creative response. In this way I create conditions for collaboration, improvisation, mistakes, and opportunity. It is very important that my role be as subtle as possible and that the process be managed by the students. Because of this, the results are never predictable... I am interes...ted in reflecting on topics that address a past in which ideas such as solidarity and equality, for instance, were being activated. How can we reflect on these kinds of topics nowadays without a direct, physical experience? It seems that history without experience comes across as some sort of fiction. . . How can we articulate certain ideas in this contemporary moment if they cannot be fully reproduced, but need to be reinvented?... A Parallel Education Program - an interview with Maja Hodoscek based on her collaboration processes with various high school students, can be found at artseverywhere.ca. Link above.

https://artseverywhere.ca/roundtables/nonartistic-practices/ Through workshops with high school students she tries to infiltrate the existing educational system and raises questions that will encourage young people to become active members of society. She wants to inspire a collective sense among youth as well as introduce social and political topics in the field of education through contemporary art. Along these lines, among other topics Hodoscek also recalls the Non-Ali...gned Movement as the third option in the extremely polarized Cold War world, as well as the Partisan school as a form of resistance to the occupation of Slovenia during World War Two. Hodoscek contemplates the political background behind the decision to have such topics either completely erased from the curriculum, or presented in a one-dimensional manner and interpreted from a colonial perspective. A Parallel Education Program - artseverywhere.ca. #pedagogy