Convoluting the Dialectical Image – Special Issue, The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 2019, “Lonely Visions of Anxious Objects”
In much of his work, Benjamin details perennial exclusions, inequities and vulnerabilities to violence not as sudden eruptions, but as repeatable scripts. Indeed, foundational to his formulation of ‘historical catastrophe’ is repeatability. The catastrophe becomes historic – and the historical becomes catastrophic – when each is revealed as a manufacturing of repeatable practices of dominance. Following questions of coloniality and marked difference, The Arcades Project in both form and content demands we think through both travel as chosen and movement that is forced. Benjamin’s Arcadesreflects his flâneurism, his displacement, his lonely observations, his chosen and forced movements. How to navigate these documents of Benjamin’s marked and different consciousness, his fugitive absorption in displacement? Offering insight is Benjamin’s emphasis on historicising the domestic interior – collections of both objects as well as illusions, which reveal anxieties of coloniality and its markers of difference. Convolute I The Interior the Trace moves through questions of furniture as armament. Throughout, Benjamin’s meditations are haunted by colonialism, an anxiety made more precise by the lived experience of Benjamin the immigrant, Benjamin the refugee, Benjamin the different.