User:Senka/Notes Thoughts and Annotations

Saidiya Hartman Venus in Two Acts & Intimate History, Radical Narrative

I read both of these texts for a research fellowship I'm doing and was really blown away. Critical fabulation as a method might be one of the most important writing and thinking tools I have encountered, in relation to archival practices but also on it's own. It really searches for loopholes in oppressive archival structure and dares to imagine otherwise, an alternative. In one of the talk I listened to, Saidiya also described how does she go about shifting the power dynamics through her writing. Because many times, she'll encounter these archival material that are filmed, recorded and preserved by the white gaze. So she gave the example of an image of girl on a balcony that was taken. Instead of narrating from the perspective of the photographer, she will narrative from the perspective of the girl observing the camera man. By doing so she destabilizes who is perceived and observed.

Wendy Chun Queering Homophily

This piece was dense but really asked me to reconsider some ways in which I perceive behavior and the online realm. It poses that homophily, the idea that we love people who are like us, has been treated as if it's a biological fact. It's just how we as humans are, yet this is not really the case. It is just a weapon to further perpetrate segregation.