This capacity is both subject and object, content and container, of Black’s breathless address. It’s a canny dramatization of the absurd, unhappy impasse posed by the discourse of anthropocentrism, which, in its attempt to “decenter” people in favor of a more inclusive worldview, must also mute the capacity that enables discourse (and community, identity, thought) itself. Animals, here, are outside the realm of representation, in both the legal and the semiotic senses. And so the debate begins.īut it’s really a monologue: Huxtable speaks only rarely her nonhuman “kin,” never.

The CGI places human and nonhuman characters on a fair-and very low poly count-playing field of unreality. There are two humans, but they’re dressed as creatures: “Juliana Huxtable,” the defense, is costumed in furry -esque bunny ears, which mirror the headdress worn by the prosecution, and “Hannah Black, genus homo, species sapiens ” recalls the animal-headed Egyptian god Ra (in Derrida’s reading of Plato, the father of reason or logos ). The judge is an animal, the members of the jury are animals, too from the beginning, power and numbers are on their side. For this reason, I enjoyed Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable’s animated film Penumbra, which stages a court case against a nonhuman defendant-“representing all animals or the animal as such”-that is on trial for crimes against human beings in contempt of human reason. I frequently feel saddened and angry that animals-whom I love, sometimes feed, and never eat-mostly ignore or even run away from me. Press image courtesy of the artists and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. And Caio Fernando Abreu sits in a hospital dying of AIDS, meeting with angels and writing letters in which he repeats “all I can do is write” like a mantra.Penumbra (2022), by Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable. Poet Angélica Freitas details a disturbingly familiar world in which women are divided into rigid binaries-clean or dirty, good or bad-with stark language that builds into utter absurdity. In fresh and poetic prose, Raimundo Neto brings us lesser-known narratives of queer life in rural Brazil, including the story of a boy determined to become the “harvest bride” at a the local annual harvest dance.

This far-reaching, bilingual assortment of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and photography-erotic and personal, revolutionary, hopeful, joyous, and bitter-continues the legacy of defiant queer expression in Brazil and demands its prolific, unapologetic future. For the first time, and against the backdrop of Bolsonaro’s emboldened far-right regime, Brazil’s legendary and pioneering queer writers appear together in English translation.

Cuíer by Caio Fernando Abreu