HEFFERNAN, Tara; SHERWOOD, Joel (eds.)
un Magazine 18.1 Badaud / 18.2 After-care
un Magazine 18.1 Badaud features essays, reviews, short fiction and artwork that confront the manifold manifestations of badauderie today. Typically cloaking a writer’s complicity with the status quo and happy compliance with market trends, the art-word refrains of ‘openness’ and ‘ambiguity’ (sometimes elaborated as asking questions, not providing answers) are often defensively wielded to avoid expressing a coherent worldview or forgo defining a serious set of aesthetic or political commitments. Rather than cede to ineffectual platitudes, the contributors to this issue have a point to argue. Along with the suggestion that trivial pursuits, passive consumption and faux experience might be bad for us (and art), this issue reinforces the importance of critical writing as a bulwark against dubious appropriations and the obfuscating veil of good intentions.
Though we may all be ‘part-time’ badauds, perhaps we should be wary of untempered badauderie.
[from the editorial of un Magazine 18.1]
Increasingly one might expect a person sensitive to our settler-colonial situation to acknowledge that we are occupying a space that rests and operates within multiple likely unceded territories. That this place has always been [insert place name] a network of intersecting Indigenous movements. If this acknowledgement is performed by one claiming Indigenous ancestry, one might expect assertions of Indigenous nationhood. This performance claiming a wealth of selective specificity, a privilege of naming, owning a continual connection to a particular space may cause unease and alienate as it opens up questions of legitimacy in terms of claiming lineage as proprietary and of claiming any land for our own. It might be slightly unnerving. But instead of just posing our settler-colonial reality at the outset and then getting on with things, can we delay the satisfaction and gratification of this acknowledgment and resulting acceptance?
[from the editorial of un Magazine 18.1]
Published by un Projects, 2024
Design by Zenobia Ahmed & Dennis Grauel
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