a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun—by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and, apparently, in company with the strange ship entering the harbor

ship’s general affliction

Her keel seemed laid, her ribs put together, and she launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones.

which, wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante’s one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta.

Surmising, at last, that it might be a ship in distress

continued to watch her

Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms.

he ship was not brought to anchor by sunset, he need be under no concern; for as there was to be a full moon that night, he (Captain Delano) would remain on board ready to play the pilot, come the wind soon or late.

Take her

To take them, with the ship, was the object.

With creaking masts, she came heavily round to the wind; the prow slowly swinging into view of the boats, its skeleton gleaming in the horizontal moonlight, and casting a gigantic ribbed shadow upon the water. One extended arm of the ghost seemed beckoning the whites to avenge it.

The cultural work of Black Belt thus emanates from all ofthe artists’ ability to redistribute signs of Orientalism and combine Asianand Black cultural forms to point to the possibilities of those signs to alsocreate an emancipatory cultural politics of race, ethnicity, sexuality, class,and nation.

Brown’s images use racial markers, but neither of these subjects bearsmarkings of one stagnant racial interpretation. Instead, Brown’s paintingsuse and mix stereotypes, Asian ethnic signs, and hip-hop culture to re-mark on the complex histories of imperialism and cultural appropriationwithin Black and Asian cultural configurations. In so doing, Brown createsinterethnic corridors into the diverse and global subculture of hip-hop.Since there is a blurring of the ethnic configuration of the subjects viabrownface in the artist’s work, the mixture of ethnic markers, such asAsian and Black, and the mixture of cultural forms, such as hip-hop andAsian ethnicities, create new, rather than timeless, subjects for spectators.

salience

Despite the transgressive and reconstructive gender and racial signsin Elliott’s video, Orientalism still wreaks havoc via a visual iconographyof sporadic signs of Asian language characters and the use of Chinatownas an ethnic and geographic periphery.

wear kimonos, chopsticks in their hair, and exaggeratedeyeliner to emphasize an almond eye shape, and they mimic rhythmicmovements associated with geisha performance

where Rhymes receives an erotic massage by several scantily cladwomen who are physically marked as Asian.

Jay Z stands next to a woman of Asian descent who wears a red silkdress with a dragon appliqué on the side

Theperformance of racial skinning in Black music videos appears to work as aventure in repairing a fragmented identity that allows Black bodies to cre-ate and consume Eastern exotica free from the perceived confines of ra-cialized Blackness

epistemological

Through the Occiden-tal gaze, both groups are objects of racial and sexual misrepresentation invarious forms of minstrelsy for the masturbatory consumption of thedominant culture.

We followedwhat the blacks did. Within the whole Asian Americanidentity, part of the black identity came with it. Usuallywhen you say Asian American, you are going to havesome aspect of the Black experience, too.

The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite postponement of the signified, the Text is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier; the signifier must not be imagined as “the first part of the meaning,” its material vestibule, but rather, on the contrary, as its aftermath;

The Text is a methodological field.

there can be “Text” in a very old work, and many products of contemporary literature are not texts at all.

Confronting the work–a traditional notion, long since, and still today, conceived in what we might call a Newtonian fashion–there now occurs the demand for a new object, obtained by a shift or a reversal of previous categories.

The universal is a fantasy. But we are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defining the universal, still, as white. We are captive, still, to a style of championing literature that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it—that it “transcends” its category. To say this book by a writer of color is great because it transcends its particularity to say something “human” (and we’ve all read that review, maybe even written it ourselves) is to reveal the racist underpinning quite clearly: such a claim begins from the stance that people of color are not human, only achieve the human in certain circumstances.

For that unknowable portion of the human mind is also a domain of culture—a place crossed up by culture and history, where the conditions into which we were born have had their effect.

There is a deep strangeness, an alterity, in the individual human mind, a portion of ourselves that we never fully comprehend—and this is what writing taps, or is at least one of writing’s sources, one of its engines.

That’s the injury, that their whiteness has veiled from them their own power to wound, has cut down their sympathy to a smaller size, has persuaded them that their imagination is uninflected, uninfiltrated.

In a sense, it doubles-down the force of race—you feel it, you feel the injury, the racist address, and then you question yourself for feeling it. You wonder if you’ve made your own prison.

Racism often does its ugly work by not manifesting itself clearly and indisputably, and by undermining one’s own ability to feel certain of exactly what forces are in play.

the scene of race taking up residence in the creative act.

For writers of color, transcendence can feel like a distant and elusive thing, because writers of color often begin from the place of being addressed, and accessed

don’t want to have race dirtying up the primacy of the imaginative work

The decoy itself points to the whiteness of whiteness—that to write race would be to write “color,” to write an other.

I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

vast veil

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design.

A subtle chain of countless rings