Full Description
This book was conceptualised prior to the global reckoning with 'this mortal body' unleashed by the Covid pandemic. It is an attempt to (re)turn attention to the body as that through which so much of our humanness is experienced, mediated, enjoyed, suffered, understood and expressed. But Covid forcibly returned us to the body in ways that none of us could ever have imagined. Perhaps Notes from the Body could not be more timely. The variety of possible bodies for which the contributors seek a voice reminds us of the multiple ways in which we may be human. Through various creative forms, the pieces in this volume present the body as, among other things: sick, violated, racialised, healed, performing, ageing, (multiply) gendered, spiritual, abused, 'disabled', broken, sexual, animalised, medical, controlled, interrupted, failing, rejected and abject. Several themes recur: humanisation and dehumanisation; the loss or recovery of agency; dignity and humiliation; violation of the bounds of self; the integrity or wholeness of the body; the body's betrayal; and mourning or celebrating the body.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Darkness of Covid-Death
Chapter 2 Architeuthis
Chapter 3 Survivor
Chapter 4 Theft
Chapter 5 It's when everything seems to be falling apart
Chapter 6 Notes by a Mother on Bipolar Disorder
Chapter 7 Notes from an Archive of the Body in Movement
Chapter 8 'Between Substance and Shadow': Investigations into the Cynanthropy of Gary the Dog
Chapter 9 World Remaking: Visual Impairment and the Process of Somatic Reorientation
Chapter 10 One Body, Different Minds
Chapter 11 White Flight
Chapter 12 Lines Land Slant
Chapter 13 Finding the Words in Ten Movements
Chapter 14 Lights Out!
Chapter 15 Staring Death in the Eye: Revisiting the Tribulations and Joys of Hospitalisation in Post-apartheid South Africa
Chapter 16 Unmade
Chapter 17 For My Father
Chapter 18 Photographs
Chapter 19 Cancer Survivor around My Mother's Neck
Chapter 20 Lego
Chapter 21 It's Only a Question
Chapter 22 Alice, in the Waiting Room
Contributors
