"It's not that I'm trying to dis these historians ... [but] even sillier than thinking of erasure as an arts and craft exercise, is the avant-garde desire to locate erasures beginning in the 1960s, or to suggest that language poets were the originators of the post-modern (read: post-colonial--when you hear 'post-modern', read 'post-colonial'...) shift in western literature. It's not only a historically silly idea, but it misses much of the exquisite point of the vastness of erasure's reach, and, even more importantly, the vastness of literatures by people of color.
Read MoreImage from 'Between the Lines' by Ariana Boussard-Reifel, an erasure project that cuts all the words out of a white supremacist text. In Boussard-Reifel's words: "It is a white supremacist text that I cut every word out of. Essentially imposing the doctrine of RAHOWA, colour-based segregation, on the book itself, I removed all the black from the white, rendering it meaningless as a consequence... The end result is a work, quietly beautiful, reminiscent of old-world lace work and ancient languages. Its meaning is found in its absences and its voids as much as in what remains." (source)
Our stay at Mile Post 5 has been a phenomenal experience. We have enjoyed having a large space to ourselves in which we’ve been able to not only exhibit the entire (and continually expanding) collection of books, but create a space where we’ve hosted readings, offered writing workshops, provided room for meetings, and enabled writers and artists of color to interact with each other, as well as the local community. Here’s an overview of what' we’ve done this summer.