You Want To Read This Book!
Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas by Professor Candice Amich
A Recommendation by Associate Professor of English Emily Lordi
Professor Candice Amich’s new book Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas uses visceral descriptions and stunning analysis to show how contemporary artists across the Americas—in Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, the United States, and elsewhere—use art forms such as milk, chalk, sculpture, poetry, and video to remind us that, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, “another (more just) world” is possible. When artists such as Regina José Galindo put their own bodies on the line in their performance art, for instance, they dramatize not only the precarity of human life, but also the fragility and untenability of our current, everyone-for-themselves neoliberal system. Amich explains that this system disciplines our minds and our bodies, making us afraid to touch one another and often unable to imagine working together toward a better world. The art works she studies nudge or thrust us toward that—not by directly protesting those in power, or even by outlining “blueprints” for reform, but by reattuning us to the grief caused by our current ways of life, and to the very real human networks through which we might change them. Precarious Forms is therefore a bracing account of specific artists and their works; but it is also a model of how to read art that is not explicitly “about” politics as performing crucial political work: that of seeking to alter people’s sense of their connection and responsibility to one another, including the departed and the yet to come.
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