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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

This issue of The White Review – which marks the tenth anniversary of its foundation – takes up questions that have driven the magazine throughout its history: the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the possibilities of form, the question, as Lydia Davis puts it in an interview here, of ‘how one tells a story’ Several of the pieces that follow seek to subvert or expand received notions of narrative and history, asking how we interpret texts and images from the past, and what might be at stake in the stories, places and relationships we choose to remember and forget In a detailed interview, the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola describes how she sets out ‘to question the stories we tell ourselves’ and explore ‘the messy human element of history’ Her work – shown on this issue’s cover, and in a series inside – creates a rich interplay between reality and imagined worlds, and dissects the way myths and dominant narratives are shaped by power   In his essay on the photographic work of Rabih Mroué – in particular his images of gunmen in Syria, drawn from the cameraphones of protesters or civilians in their sightlines – Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa argues that seeing is a ‘necessarily social practice’ Discussing the responsibilities incumbent on the spectators of images of catastrophe, Wolukau-Wanambwa suggests that a close attention to the way images act, and a sensitivity to their possibilities and ambiguities, may ‘sunder the linear division of sequential time by making pasts happen again and again in new and evolving presents’ Taking up this proposal, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s essay ‘All the Stain is Tender’, which layers personal experience over a history of anti-Asian legislation in Australia, examines the corrosive effect of generational trauma, and the way languages and ‘official’ histories have long been co-opted as means of oppression Through archival research into discrimination against immigrants and the buried history of the West Melbourne Swamp, Yu makes a case for ‘racial grief’ as a way to understand the insidious, unquantifiable way that ‘the past embeds itself in your body’, writing against the colonial narratives that

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

READ NEXT

poetry

November 2011

One Night Without Incident

Eoghan Walls

poetry

November 2011

Freak July mists blurred all from Portsmouth to Reading in a late summer sky turned wholly unfit for bombing,...

poetry

February 2013

Social Contract

Les Kay

poetry

February 2013

Formally, I and the undersigned— What? Use, like Mama said, your imagination if you still have one where scripts...

poetry

September 2014

Breath-Manifester & Drones

Ned Denny

poetry

September 2014

Breath-Manifester   Each bared morning is a swell time to die, Leaving the town’s ornate maze for the level...

 

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