Faculty Writing: Towards a Collectivist Humanities and “Massgirl”
For Yale’s Iberian Connections, Rachel Stein discusses the recent and uniquely “Cervantine” spray-painting of a Miguel de Cervantes statue in Golden Gate Park on Juneteenth 2020. Stein writes, “The anonymous protestors, like so many propelling the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, were asking questions fundamentally Cervantine: What would happen if the whole world stopped playing along with the trappings of the current order, gave things new names, new landscapes to inhabit, and used different vocabularies and definitions to reshape, re-signify, and conceptualize our lived reality?”
Nominated for the Montreal Poetry Prize, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s “Massgirl” dotes on its namesake:
“…
I run until my lungs explode
and everyone who rows the Charles can taste the blood
innard molasses copper dust
I read until the library is empty
break my face on the Timaeus
the liquid gildings, the colliding bodies
I want to be a liquid gilding, to edge us all in gold
and burn with hot metal wrath the margins of everything
…”
(excerpt from Massgirl)