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Tension appears in many contexts and carries diverse meanings. It tends to be viewed as something to be avoided and reduced in politics; to be explained, worked through, and resolved in therapy or science; to be endured and sustained in modern art; or to be sought after and enjoyed in popular culture. This volume brings together contributions from several academic and artistic fields in order to question the self-evidence of the deceptively simple term 'tension' and explore the possibility of productive transfers among different forms und understandings of tension. Refusing the temptation of a stabilizing synthesis, it establishes a dense web of approaches, providing a new critical paradigm for further inquiry. ; Tension/Spannung , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010)

AbstractThis article analyzes the history of trans identities and intersex subjectivities to understand intersex and trans intercommunity relations and identify coalitional strategies. Citing Black and postcolonial studies scholars such as C. Riley Snorton and Zine Magubane, it concludes that trans identity and intersex subjectivity share a colonial racial history. Specifically, it builds on Snorton's "analysis of gender as a racial arrangement wherein the fungibility of captive flesh produced a context for understanding sex and gender as mutable and subject to rearrangement in medicine and law" to account for how the same racial arrangement of gender also formed intersex subjectivity. Trans identity and intersex subjectivity, then, have roots in colonialism and slavery, and the ungendering of Black flesh made interchangeable goods. This history has left a legacy of intercommunity tension in the form of whiteness. Consequently, addressing sex/gender as a racial arrangement is necessary to address tensions and build coalitions.

The 10,739 square miles which make up Burundi constitute one of the smallest countries in Africa. Burundi's population of between 3.5 and 5 million experienced six governments during the three years between independence in 1962 and the eruption of major ethnic violence in 1965. In 1966 the army took power in a coup that proclaimed Burundi to be a presidential republic. The change was not sufficient to resolve ethnic tensions, however, and by 1969 these were further complicated by regional divisions. During that year ethnic violence erupted once again but received little notice in the foreign press. The violence has pitted factions of the Hutu majority against factions of the Tutsi minority. Burundi's pre-colonial social system (which was grounded in a traditional monarchy) and its particular colonial experience account for the fact that the Hutu have had very little power over the country's political and economic affairs.

Based in the hilly, unglaciated Driftless Area of the upper Midwest of the United States, Common/Place is a self-organized, off-the-grid platform for ecological resilience, cultural inquiry, and land-based pedagogy. The rustic setting offers a space to examine how such rural spaces have been both produced by and mobilized within the linked projects of capitalist extraction and settler colonial extermination and to connect and grow the nodes of resistance always present within such systems. Our primary project up to this point has been a series of experimental seminars assembling artists, writers, and cultural workers to learn from and with naturalists, historians, farmers, citizens of the Indigenous Ho-Chunk Nation, and the land itself. This grounded creative research and pedagogy generates a network of informal relationships that connect the urban and rural to break through the present moment of political retrenchment and set the stage for social and ecological cooperation in the face of the climate chaos to come. This practice-based, epistolary essay reflects on the first four years of Common/Place, highlighting constitutive tensions and continued negotiations around property, relationships, ecology, and time—individual, generational, and geological—that can quickly become sedimented in infrastructure and no longer open to question.