We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
Our new arts anthology explores whether and how we can repair from terrible ruptures, life-threatening illnesses and pandemic, toxic politics, racist horrors, and more.
We bear deep wounds, individually and collectively. All have been worsened by a period of destructive politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, we believe that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal.
This anthology draws together a wide range of artists and thinkers, established and emerging. In essays, memoir, poetry, fiction, and comics, contributors explore what it might look like to repair. Topics include the Salem witch trials, climate catastrophe, the January 6 siege of the Capitol, gender identity, the failures (and hope) of Western medicine, and the entwined horrors of racial, sexual, and colonial violence.
No single text in this volume offers a definitive answer for what it means to repair. But together, they reveal a promising vision for where to go from here.
We cannot simply put the past behind us. The framework of transitional justice offers a promising path forward.
. . . I am
nott afrayde of swells
that lift mee
off my feet,
or of a strong
undertow
our bloom game too strong / altar stays red candle cinnamon-lit
sweet flicker cracking into prance
Racial redress should be modeled on the global anticolonial tradition of worldbuilding.
Toni Morrison’s novels imagine a society governed by an ethic of care, devoted to restoring and repairing those who have been harmed, and giving them the space for transformation.
An Abortion Ban
is a body snatcher,
is an ethnic cleansing.
The uterus is a cave,
is an incubator, is a vault,
is a self-destructing bomb,
is a thoroughfare.
The therapist says,
Picture a bird in your mind
What kind of bird is it?
Every city I’ve lived in has been filled with racism, whether out in the open or hidden in an invisible dialogue of economics and housing. Birmingham taught me to never question what it meant to be a Black American.
Narrative medicine claims to champion the experience of patients—but it does so by requiring that the sick “earn” their care by telling a redemptive tale about what is wrong with them.
Order our Winter 2022 book today to read more.
Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned, but ancestors to be cared for.
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