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&Now 2015: Blast Radius has ended
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Friday, March 27 • 10:00am - 11:15am
Occult Geographies

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In our creative-critical presentation, we ask how the occult, as geography, is a making of energy that creates, represents, contains and contests the narratives lived as and through our bodies. Our presentation will explore occult geographies as both concept and artistic practice in its material, theoretical and textual manifestations and valences.  

We will interweave our pieces as a performative reading that seeks to amplify the presentation’s arguments and inquiries. In the place of a single-authored and delivered paper, we offer a collaborative, contrapuntal engagement that embodies the constitutive practices we discuss in our presentation. We ask how the occult, what often remains hidden or beyond our allowed knowledges and understandings, is a navigating force that invites us to embody alternative epistemological and narrative perspectives.

We ask how tracing occult geographies may catapult us into a different destiny and reform our bodies and ways of being. We explore how such attentions make visible embedded forms of state violence, including the built-environment and its manufactured realities. In accord, we analyze narrative treatments of the body as a polluted site and divining rod in contested social spaces. 

We examine the 19th century Victorian practice of using female clairvoyants to perform psychic explorations. Thus, how do female writers negotiate an audience that expects, condemns, and craves her otherworldliness? Further, we turn to current work on non-human materialisms and its challenge to humanist-centered discourses to map how what we inhale, swallow, rub against and commune with are often less-visible or avowed agents in our lives. 

Speakers
avatar for Harold Abramowitz

Harold Abramowitz

Charles R. Drew University
Harold Abramowitz’s books include Blind Spot, Not Blessed, Dear Dearly Departed, and Man’s Wars And Wickedness: A Book of Proposed Remedies & Extreme Formulations for Curing Hostility, Rivalry, & Ill-Will (with Amanda Ackerman). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus... Read More →
AA

Amanda Ackerman

Amanda Ackerman is the author of the chapbooks The Seasons Cemented (Hex Presse), I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck (Insert Press Parrot #8), and Short Stones (Dancing Girl Press).   She has co-authored Sin is to Celebration (House Press), the Gauss PDF UNFO Burns... Read More →
avatar for Teresa Carmody

Teresa Carmody

Teresa Carmody’s writing includes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. She is the author of three books, including Maison Femme: a fiction (2015) and The Reconception of Marie (2020). Her work has appeared in The Collagist, Los Angeles Review... Read More →
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Andrea Quaid

Andrea Quaid is co-editor of Acts + Encounters, a collection of works about experimental writing and community. Recent critical and creative publications include the American Book Review, BOMBlog, Jacket2, Lana Turner, LIT and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She teaches in Bard College’s... Read More →


Friday March 27, 2015 10:00am - 11:15am PDT
Faculty Center

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