The Fiction of truth, the truth of fiction

Wednesday, October 27, 2004 A Few Good Words By Christina Waters, AlterNet. A new book offers a provocative lens through which to reconsider words suffering from deft right wing manipulation. "At this moment, peace, that word so glibly appropriated by all sides, feels soiled, tired, and beaten-up." So says artist Sushma Joshi, summing up the reaction of many Americans battered by escalating political rhetoric. "Security," writes journalist Mary Louise Pratt, "is one of those words, like 'celibacy' or 'short' that invokes its opposite. As soon as you mention security, you suggest there's a danger, or a potential danger. Otherwise the subject wouldn't be coming up. So talking about security is one of the most effective ways to cause fear." More and more words have acquired strange, new inflections. "Imagine you are a U.S. state governor or corporate CEO who wants to slash spending, fire employees, close branches or plants, and a...

Tuesday, September 07, 2004 "'Cheli-Beti' Discourses of Trafficking and Constructions of Gender, Citizenship and Nation in Modern Nepal" appears in the anthology Sexual Sites, Seminal Atttitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia Editor: Sanjaya Srivastava Publisher: Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd Pub Date: 02/2004 Pages: 360 The book was put together from papers presented at a conference of the same name in Deakins University, Australia in 1998.

Bregje van Eekelen Jennifer González Bettina Stötzer Anna Tsing editors If you don’t know what to say about global war, you need a dictionary. Shock and Awe: War on Words (New Pacific Press: Fall 2004) is just that: a keywords book that participates in a battle over the imagination, acknowledging the force of words, concepts, and images in framing our everyday lives. Located in the borderlands between scholarship and public culture, it re-appropriates our vocabularies by exploring the political trajectories of world-making words, projects, and images. You hear yourself use the word terrorism, and uncannily find yourself participating in its life, its proliferation, its reality. Willy-nilly you’ve become a participant in a world-making project of anxiety and antagonism. While it is impossible to completely give up on terms like peace, family, and security, to use them is to become a stranger in one’s own world. Yet how can we envision an alternative if our very imagination, the very def...

WAITING FOR THE WAR TO END I see the black smoke of bodies charred and burning up my dreams, the red tears of my dismembered country – Nepal, you used to be a canvas, green and radiant, now painted darkly with the brush of human despair and the sticky patina of blood, hope disemboweled by rusty khukuris and AK-47s and old helicopters given for free by friendly countries wanting only security, but do they see – do they see the dead bodies? We have become a nation where the mountains and the fields and especially the rivers are flooded, flooded, flooded – over and over with the sacrifice of human corpses - and once again the soul is at large, like modernity torn forever, mixed with too much hate and ideology once again we come back to this time and place back to this impasse, back to this place of power where the struggle is less for the future than it is for the bloody now, so here we are, all of us, here and now and breathing still, waiting for the wa...

The End of the World received a hyperfiction prize from East of the Web. http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/EndWorl.shtml It has been republished in The Cold River Review (winter, 2006) http://www.riverreview.org/previous%20issues.htm It has been used by English as a Second Language sites: http://www.eslme.com/article/1344/1355/1341/2006/200608023100.html And its been translated in the Vietnamese by Sai Gon Tiep Thi Online. Read "Ngày tận thế": http://www.sgtt.com.vn/web/tintuc/default.aspx?cat_id=649&news_id=15491

I had a solo exhibition of my paintings at Gallery 9, an independent gallery started by artists in Lazimpat, Kathmandu, in 2004. This report was published in Kantipuronline.com, the online venture of the Kathmandu Post which has since been incorporated as part of the digital online presence of the newspaper and is no longer a separate entity. The reporter who filed this report was quite young, so I wanted to clarify some points: I was explaining to him that Claire Burkett, the founder of the Janakpuri Women's Art Project, had rented an apartment in our home when I was 18, so I was influenced by the piles of folk art which I saw in the house. Despite taking courses at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in visual art, I wanted to draw in a more simple manner, so I deliberately tried to copy their folk style. The uneven crosses took me some time to draw, because I needed to un-train myself from drawing perfect lines. I was mimicking the Janakpuri women's bo...

Mar 21, 2004 - CONFLICT in nepal "The People's War in Nepal," with speaker Sushma Joshi, 2 pm, Flushing Library, Queens, NY. The library is located at 41-17 Main St. Free.