“I understand [an] aesthetic education as a “means to reconfigure how I construct “myself”, my relationship to others and my intellectual habits.” (4) In my senior thesis I focused on texts by Ranjana Khanna, Frank Wilderson III, Fumi Okji and Fred Moten, exploring notions of subjectivity in their work. In reading and writing about these texts, I practiced the central task of an aesthetic education: “at all cost to enter another’s text” (Spivak 2012, 6)
I practiced remaining open to the text’s difference. This disposition is also about understanding subjectivity as heteronomous.”
I read texts and wrote about them to understand their conceptual arguments. I was also attentive to how they work to constitute me as a reader, even as I constructed and constituted them through reading.
Part of the motivation of this project was reconfiguring how I understand my own subjectivity, and how that subjectivity is formed or woven out of a relationship to other people and texts.
Subjectivity is neither a stable origin nor a point of arrival at the end or beginning of a teleological progression” (6)
Senior project director: Netta van Vliet
I share below a poem that I wrote as part of my senior thesis:
“Once More, With Feeling”
I sigh over ruins tenderly, phrase by phrase.
For my rain-stained home, an elegy, phrase by phrase.
Midst banana leaves, my Russian novel
Dissolves into my morning coffee, phrase by phrase.
Beads of dew that wet a succession of postcards
And the light, pierce me equally, phrase by phrase.
You conjugate patois, in oily plaited lines,
assembling nouns from necessity, phrase by phrase.
Rebuilding my broken bicycle with string, glue,
And echoes of your cacophony, phrase by phrase.
I am filmed in spice and sweat, after your labour:
A rhythm laid in two stresses, une vie, phrase by phrase.
You name me with care and pain, repeating, “Mihir,
Make every first sunrise holy, phrase by phrase”
