Throughout On the Inconvenience of Other People, in both its main text and its footnotes, Lauren Berlant repeats a certain phrase. It takes the formula “From x person I learned to think about y thing.” At the end of the introduction, for example, they write: “From [Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick I learned that it’s not an idea until you circulate it, whatever stage it has reached. From [Stanley] Cavell I learned that showing up with the bruised fruit of one’s perspective is what the argument requires to reshape the dynamic processes always on the move from and toward forms of life” (30). Beyond the standard citational systems of quotation and footnote, with page numbers and book titles, which allow the curious reader to read more and the suspicious reader to check if the writer is right, this practice calls these authors to Berlant’s own text. It marks Berlant’s writing as...
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Review Article|
June 01 2024
Writing with Bruised Fruit
A review of Lauren Berlant,
On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham, NC
: Duke University Press
, 2022
).
Daryl Maude
daryl maude is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He works on contemporary Okinawan and Japanese literature and on queer and feminist theory. His chapter “Learning Queerness: Pedagogy and Normativity in Tagame Gengorō’s Otōto no otto” appeared in Multiple Voices in Japanese Literature, 1989–2019, edited by Angela Yiu (2024). His translation of Shinjō Ikuo’s essay “Male Sexuality in the Colony” appeared in Beyond Imperial Aesthetics, edited by Mayumo Inoue and Steve Choe (2019).
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Qui Parle (2024) 33 (1): 211–221.
Citation
Daryl Maude; Writing with Bruised Fruit. Qui Parle 1 June 2024; 33 (1): 211–221. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-11125547
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