Spring Break
Preface
Stephen Pasqualina
Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007
IMAGINE A FRAME: its powers of inclusion, exclusion, its ability to introduce subjects into our line of sight and force us to imagine-an imaginary mode of vision Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes later in this collection as "the ability to think something absent and not mine." The frame as oppressively exclusive, as intrusive, as potentially homogenizing and as an arbitrary border: this is what this journal seeks to call into question, to reconsider. It asks us to imagine the frame as vision, our common mode of vision, and as potential blindness to what is externalized. This collection seeks to stretch frames, the American frame that has traditionally privileged whiteness, masculinity, national interiority or self-reliance, and capitalism, and the broader Western frame that has, for centuries, imagined itself as a socio-political center. It seeks, in the language of Thomas Sayers Ellis, to erase the idea of the "other" and reconsider the identity of the subject as "another," a phrase that does not exclude what is absent from within the frame, but instead admits the vitality of that marginalized "other" in constructing the privileged center, the positive content of the canvas, thus internalizing what has been too often considered external.
Cicero's well-known dictum that has served and continues to serve as this journal's motto takes on a new meaning in the context of this particular collection. If our thoughts are, as the translation suggests, "free," then our frame might have room for expansion in an imaginary mode of vision. And while the frame might be stretched, while the "other" might be elevated to the status of "another," the limitations of the frame remain, what it includes and excludes, and the humanities, the underlying subject expounded on in the journal's final composition, become our weapon in a struggle to continually stretch our frames, to include what we might be unconsciously excluding. The ambiguity and irony of Cicero's words parallel this edition's particular project, both struggling to break out of an inherited mode of vision while admitting the necessity of the visual image.
Cicero's well-known dictum that has served and continues to serve as this journal's motto takes on a new meaning in the context of this particular collection. If our thoughts are, as the translation suggests, "free," then our frame might have room for expansion in an imaginary mode of vision. And while the frame might be stretched, while the "other" might be elevated to the status of "another," the limitations of the frame remain, what it includes and excludes, and the humanities, the underlying subject expounded on in the journal's final composition, become our weapon in a struggle to continually stretch our frames, to include what we might be unconsciously excluding. The ambiguity and irony of Cicero's words parallel this edition's particular project, both struggling to break out of an inherited mode of vision while admitting the necessity of the visual image.
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