Insurrectional Arts: Restoring a Politics and Ethics of Attention

Abstract

This chapter is inspired by contrasting passages in two stories. The first is in Jamaica Kincaid's story, ‘The Embassy of Cambodia'. Her narrator, who is following a transversality between two forms of atrocity: those practiced by states, as in the case of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge exterminism and that inflicted on abused migrant domestic workers from third world countries. The narrator notes that people in her village are too distracted to heed peoples’ afflictions: ‘The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world … we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to necessary tasks … ’. In contrast, in Daniel Alarcon's story, ‘Collectors', a seasoned convict is explaining to his new cell mate how to survive by reading signs as you watch the men in the prison yard:Did they have their arms at their sides, or crossed in front of them? How widely did they open their mouths when they talked? Could you see their teeth were their eyes moving quickly, side to side? Or slowly, as if taking in every detail?The chapter goes on to focus on the concept of attention and ends with a reflection on our responsibility to heed the ‘ethical weight' of other.