Introductions can be awkward…
The future, as Joe Strummer once reminded us, is unwritten. And that’s what makes writing this introduction a little tricky. As a new venture, The Break can be ‘about’ anything. It offers all the possibilities associated with open horizons and blank pages, notoriously unbridled and unruly spaces. And — understandably, I think — the last thing I want to do is to cut pathways and erect fences and signposts across this raw ground. Of course, I have ideas and wantings for what I would like The Break to be and to become — and I will get to those — but I have no manifesto. When it comes to intellectual adventuring, I prefer to follow my nose than a satnav.
Consequently, rather than trying to definitively map The Break’s territory, I thought I’d share with you some of its observable and perennial features, its clutches of rolling drumlins, its broadleaf forests, its bays and sounds and pounding rivers, if you will. But what good is a backdrop without a backstory, or in superhero parlance, an origin story. The aboutness of The Break may yet be unresolved, but I can still tell you what I am about.
My thinking here is plain: by getting to know what I’m passionate about — including my deep and incurable love of em dashes — you’ll not only get a rough lay of the land, but you’ll get to know me too. (What follows is a condensed version; you’ll have to stick around and keep reading The Break to find out more…)
Origin Story…
I have always loved books and stories, particularly illustrated ones. Moreover, as a child I knew, or rather felt, that I wanted to be around them, to be about them, to be, above all, in cahoots with them. And why not? Considering the universality of stories and their utility, it’s not such an infantile wish. (As I have grown, so too has my appreciation of the myriad forms stories take, a rewarding insight broadening my subject field immeasurably.)
Stories — fabrications of facts and fictions — show us ways of being in the world. They are powerful self- and worldmaking tools. We treat them lightly, at our peril. Yet as my abiding affair with alternative culture, street art, and radical cultural production confirms — together with my experience studying the US superhero genre and its fandoms — many stories and storytellers are trivialised, ignored, or outlawed.
Invoking Pierre Bourdieu, a powerful cultural taste judgement — binaristically organised, good/bad, high/low, legitimate/illegitimate, and so forth — sees subaltern stories fail to garner the attention and respect afforded to other forms of storytelling, for myriad reasons I won’t go into now (but I imagine I often will in subsequent posts). This arbitrary distinction, or ‘social weapon’, sees such stories calculatedly judged disposable, mindless, troublesome, and low. (Holding similar opinions, I should note, for those producing and studying them too.) The manner and degree to which ‘times are changing’ can be debated, and again, I will likely do so in future posts.
For the moment though, it’s enough to say that this discouraging distinction did not stop me from making this ‘low culture’ realm — or as per Jack Halberstam and Lauren Berlant, this ‘silly archive’ — my home. If anything, this awareness led me to start questioning more studiously why we venerate some stories, storytellers, mediums, and genres over others.
A question speaking, of course, to the broader hierarchicalisation and conditioning of culture. For when we figure identity itself a fiction — with very real consequences — we can see my concern as a query speaking beyond itself, one intimately connected with, and embedded in, systems of power. A query leading to other questions, as all good queries and questions should. How, for example, do people marginalised by ‘grand narratives’ (‘identity’, neoliberal capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, class, and so on) set about reimagining and rescripting such narratives. How might they take the story into their own hands? What kinds of stories might they tell, and worlds make, and how do they do so?
I can offer a brief example. An aspect of my doctoral research considered how fans historically marginalised within mainstream US superhero culture engage with its notoriously troublesome terrain. As my thesis illustrates, radically creative imaginings and (counter)storytelling strategies allow them to survive, resist, and ultimately transform the genre’s exclusionary, hostile, and toxic stories and spaces. (If you’d like to learn more about all of this, you can check out my forthcoming book, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds, punctum books.
The example, here, was superhero culture, but superhero worlds (texts and cultures) replicate the synergistic hierarchies and interlocking systems of privilege, oppression, and exploitation structuring our material world. This allows my research to speak beyond its compass, to how marginalised people might use stories to resist, survive, and transform the material world too.
These are the forces — the breaths and beats — animating my work, and thus, animating The Break.
Scene-setting: The Break 101
Part critique, part call to action, part memoir, The Break presents engaged critical responses to the stories and storytellers (mis)shaping our world and our ways of being in the world.
Taking a cultural artefact or happening as its starting point, each composition creatively explores and reveals how cultural practices relate to broader systems of power and resistance, around bodies and identities, for example. The range of artefacts and happenings tackled is broad — from films, comics, poems, quotations, and artworks to cosplays, vandalised murals, protest signs, and beyond — but emphasises radical and DIY cultural production, analogue and digital activism, and counterstory culture.
Given the traumatic and climactic times we’re living through, The Break will also and necessarily confront real-life events, especially those concerning intersecting issues of social equity, racial justice, predatory capitalism, and abrupt climate change.
The Break’s stance is fiercely queer, anarcha-feminist, and intersectional (consonant with Kimberlé Crenshaw). Following the lead of the Combahee River Collective and many other Black feminists, Indigenous feminists, and feminists of colour, The Break holds fast to Audre Lorde’s credo that there’s ‘no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives’ and to the organising principle that liberating the most oppressed of us will uplift and free all of us.
If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
— Combahee River Collective
Compositions will be mostly long-form essays, building into themed collections, such as The Break’s forthcoming series, ‘When Walls Talk...’. Sometimes they’ll be short-form pieces, anything from fieldnotes, letters, and reviews to ‘from the archive’ selections. No matter the form, the writing will always be playful and rich with thick descriptions, going beneath surface-level observation to reveal the stories within the story, often overlooked and untold.
Compositions standalone but common threads and themes suture each to their companions. Foremost amongst which are the transformative power of (counter)storytelling, the radical imagination, coalitions and international solidarism, and, of course, revolutionary love (à la James Baldwin and Cornel West). I also talk a lot about social inequality, predatory capitalism, structural violence, and system change, always asking how we can build international solidarity and the diverse, inclusive movements needed to turn moments of rebellion into revolution.
You’ll find more information about The Break (including on the origins of the title) over at my website. You’ll also learn more about me and my work there too, and if you’re an editor, find details on how to commission me.
My childhood love of reading, especially comic books, poetry, and encyclopaedias, was then like a late-night knock on the door and a fetching invitation to follow a white rabbit, scilicet reading stories started me on a love-fuelled intellectual adventure, one radically changing my way of seeing and being in the world.
As you can see, I’m still following that coney today. I hope you will join me.
If you enjoy reading The Break…
I care deeply about the subjects I cover in The Break and want my stories to reach as many people as possible, and you can help me do that by sharing posts and telling people about the newsletter. Oh, and by subscribing to The Break too…
And finally…
All material on The Break is free. I’d like to move to a mix of paid and free content, but that’s a decision for down the line. Let’s see how this goes first. Meantime, if you find yourself enjoying my work and would consider becoming a paying subscriber, let me know! Your feedback would be super-helpful (and much appreciated) when thinking about next steps…
Logo & Cover Image: ‘Under the Wave off Kanagawa’ by Katsushika Hokusai, adapted by sjrankin. I’ve further modified the image, but all thanks and credit to the original creators.
CC license details: "神奈川沖浪裏 or The Great Wave off Kanagawa Wallpaper 1" by sjrankin is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
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