Transliterative Tease: A Radical Reader
Drawing on the form of the board book or reading primer, and in particular its avant-garde heritage and pedagogical mission in the former USSR, Transliterative Tease: A Radical Reader, takes up the problem of worldbuilding through language acquisition, albeit a century later: that is, a decidedly decolonial one where Soviet books were imperialist, a queer one where the former were decidedly heteronormative, a heteroglossic one where the Soviets were almost Muslim in their emphasis on unicity.
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Drawing on the form of the board book or reading primer, and in particular its avant-garde heritage and pedagogical mission in the former USSR, Transliterative Tease: A Radical Reader, takes up the problem of worldbuilding through language acquisition, albeit a century later: that is, a decidedly decolonial one where Soviet books were imperialist, a queer one where the former were decidedly heteronormative, a heteroglossic one where the Soviets were almost Muslim in their emphasis on unicity. Transliterative Tease thus imagines such queer, multilingual, multiconfessional, internationalist visions of solidarity through the sensuous activity of reading a book, and producing one at a cost that does not reflect a precious, rare art commodity, but rather—like the Soviet reader—can be made widely affordable and available. In a meme and tumblr dominated world, this project aligns with a crisis in bookmaking and seeks to experiment with the boundaries of the form of the book, harnessing the performative and sensuous as modes for upending the standardizing, ordering principles of late-capitalist modernity in our distracted, social mediated present.