Description
Fiction. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Emily Abendroth's SOUSVEILLANCE PAGEANT is a hybrid work that coasts restlessly between the categories of poetry, novel, and nonfiction essay. The text's primary figure, whose name is also Sousveillance Pageant, functions not only as an individual character but as an unruly and deviant guiding principle, who desperately longs to be guided by others in turn. If surveillance describes that which watches from above (be it the state, the police, a financial institution, or a private data tracker), then sousveillance describes that which watches from below (fixing an unflinching but also quixotic and wandering eye upon the nature of power and its mechanisms). This book asks: what are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we as humans cannot live without, and what are those forms of recognition or ways of being seen that we cannot possibly live with (or which make life unsurvivable)? One inimitable encounter and discomfiting event after another push the Pageant to consider what constitutes security or safety, under what conditions, and for whom. In the words of historian Dan Berger, "SOUSVEILLANCE PAGEANT is our abolitionist avatar, our determined alter ego marshalling collective wisdom against the punitive surveillance state with an ingenuity all her own. Follow her rebellious spirit."
Author Bio
Emily Abendroth is the author of SOUSVEILLANCE PAGEANT (Radiator Press, 2021), the poetry collection EXCLOSURES (Ahsahta Press, 2014) and The Instead, a book-length collaborative conversation with fiction writer Miranda Mellis. She has also released chapbooks with Albion Press, Belladonna, Horseless Press, Little Red Leaves, and Zumbar. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and was named a 2013 Pew Fellow in Poetry. She is a founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration, as well as LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty.
Author City: PHILADELPHIA, PA USA