Julietta Singh (author THE BREAKS) virtual convo with Gabrielle Civil

THE BREAKS celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girl-hood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary US discourse. With nuance and generosity, Julietta Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces—climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism—inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future. In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. In order to survive looming political and ecological disasters, Singh urges, we must break from the conventions we have inherited and begin to orient ourselves toward more equitable and revolutionary paths.

Julietta Singh is a writer and academic whose work engages the enduring effects of colonization, current ecological crisis, and queer-feminist futures. She is the author of two previous books: NO ARCHIVE WILL RESTORE YOU (Punctum Books, 2018) and UNTHINKING MASTERY: DEHUMANISM AND DECOLONIAL ENTANGLEMENTS (Duke University Press, 2018). She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her family.

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer originally from Detroit. She has premiered fifty performance artworks around the world. Her performance memoirs include SWALLOW THE FISH, EXPERIMENTS IN JOY, ( GHOST GESTURES ) and IN AND OUT OF PLACE. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.