In her masterwork Home is a Foreign Place (1999)—from which we borrow the title and cover image for this volume—the artist Zarina wrote, “The titles of my work always come to me before the image. Language ties my work together. Urdu is home.” Titled Home, this is the first of thirty-six woodblock prints that recall the artist’s childhood residence in Aligarh, India. Even a partial list of Zarina’s titles—Threshold, Courtyard, Shadows, Fragrance, Despair—reveal how the viewer is invited into the sensorium of Zarina’s elusive idea of home.

In “Ejecta,” Ari Larissa Heinrich reflects on artist Jes Fan’s melanin sculptures and the geology of metaphoric language. Tan Lin’s “The Fern Rose Bibliography” is a meditation on the loss of his parents through an olfactory exploration of his family’s books. M. Neelika Jayawardane’s “‘This is not the correct history’” questions the evidentiary nature of documentary photography foregrounding the slippery ethics of reading images of the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. In “He Brought a Swastika to the Summer of Love,” William E. Jones closely reads the fascist iconography in the films of Kenneth Anger for their prescient, unnerving connections to our contemporary political moment. In “Racial Chain of Being,” Shaka McGlotten updates the chart of representations that was Donna Haraway’s provocation in “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in the process forging connections between familial legacy, Black radicalism, and the classroom.

Cookie Jar 1 | Home is a Foreign Place is a publication of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, New York 

Editors: Pradeep Dalal and Shiv Kotecha
Project Coordinator: Julie Evanoff
Copy Editor: Deirdre O’Dwyer
Design: Studio Remco van Bladel
Photos: The Book Photographer