These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781609388416)

In These Dark Skies, Arianne Zwartjes interweaves the experience of living in the southern Netherlands--with her wife, who is Russian--and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis across Europe and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Balkans. She probes her own subjectivity, as a white American, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer, and as a witness.

The essays investigate and meditate on a broad array of related topics, including drone strikes, tear gas, and military intervention; the sugar trade, the Dutch blackface celebration of Zwarte Piet, and constructions of whiteness in Europe and the U.S.; and visual arts of Russian avant-garde painters, an Iraqi choreographer living in Belgium, and German choreographer Pina Bausch.

This is a lyrical, timely book deeply salient to the political moment we continue to find ourselves in: a moment of incredible anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment, a moment of xenophobic and misogynistic violence.


Author: Arianne Zwartjes
ISBN-10: 1609388410
ISBN-13: 9781609388416
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Language: English
Published: 06/15/2022
Pages: 284
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 7.60h x 5.80w x 0.90d