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b. 14 November, 1932, Columbus, Ohio, USA
d. 18 September, 1989, New York, New York, USA

Artists who choose to pursue counter-paradigmatic work often do so at great personal costs to themselves, their families and associates. In their implacable drive to accomplish their self-appointed mission, some artists are plainly confrontational. They may court opposition and hostility from those within their immediate professional circles or farther afield, from powerful political quarters.

As Jack Smith (born in 1932), visionary filmmaker, photographer and avant-garde performance artist lay dying in 1989 of an HIV/AIDS related illness at New York’s Beth Israel Hospital, he was still as irascible as ever. Performance artist, Penny Arcade, and poet and filmmaker, Ira Cohen, were two of the remaining figures from New York bohemia who still possessed the stomach to endure Smith’s impossibly ornery disposition. When Allen Ginsberg visited him, Smith derisively called him “a walking career”1, a derogatory term for an artist who sold out or upheld the apparently despicable values of careerism. Interestingly, Arcade who spent 45 years outside of mainstream United States culture disagrees with the notion of an artist selling out. Instead, she argues, that what usually happens is that the media and public ‘buy in’ and then an artist achieves a good degree of material success and sometimes, even fame.

Smith was raised in trailer parks in Ohio and Texas and had a life-long fascination for kitsch, camp and trash. Although Flaming Creatures is his most iconic and most influential movie he had made other movies before it, namely: The Buzzards of Baghdad (1951-56) and Scotch Tape (1961). His obsession with kitsch primarily began with his abiding love for Hollywood B-movie star, Maria Montez, who never failed to send him on unfettered transports of the imagination. Montez was by no means a great actor but she was striking and melodramatic in appearance, “the apotheosis of the drag queen” as she has been aptly called. Even on his death-bed Smith did not fail to evoke her name; “O Maria Montez, give socialist answers to a rented world!”

This article focuses on Smith’s particular articulation and experience of outsiderness as a filmic artist. Smith’s outsider experience was both circumstantial and deliberate. He was not able to gain access to mainstream industry probably because he lacked formal training and exposure. But he also fostered his outsider status by focusing on risqué and transgressive themes that were usually anathema to the wider society.

However, Smith also had a difficult and often problematic relationship with his associates within the New York based counterculture. Traumatised by the hostile reception his film, Flaming Creatures received, he became unduly suspicious and antagonistic towards those who might have supported his work. His approach to art became increasingly self-referential, insular and solitary. If mainstream culture could reject him, he in turn, would spurn every ‘normal’ conception of art by traveling down a route of extreme individualism and idiosyncrasy.

An Artist and the Counterculture

Irving Rosenthal, author of the countercultural novel, Sheeper, issued by Grove Press in 1967, was labelled “a control freak”2 by Smith when he attempted to visit him in hospital. Rosenthal had planned to preserve Smith’s iconic filmic work in a vault in faraway California but the latter wasn’t enthused with the idea of his work being locked away in some remote place.

Rosenthal, just as Ginsberg, was more than merely an artist; he was also a major culture catalyst and facilitator. In other words, he acted as a bridge between the avant-garde world and mainstream culture in conveying the artistic significance of underground works of art. This, undoubtedly, is an important role.

Throughout his life, Smith was fortunate to meet such catalysts of transition, the first of whom was Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, culture critic, activist and archivist. Indeed the entirety of US or in fact global counterculture was quite small. And Smith arguably had productive dealings with both Mekas and Rosenthal.

Mekas established the Anthology of Film Archives and the Filmmaker’s Cooperative for the purpose of showcasing and preserving films produced by the counterculture. In 1963, Smith had directed the landmark, Flaming Creatures, which broke all rules of traditional cinematography. There is nudity aplenty, a graphic rape scene and elaborate ritualised performativity in addition to a strict non-reliance on storyboards and ‘normal’ narrative structure. The film, when released, could only be shown after midnight and not in typical daytime theatres.

It fell upon Mekas to promote the film which was awarded a prize by his periodical, Film Culture. The journal also became the vehicle through which Smith developed his ideas on film in essays such as “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” and “Belated Appreciation of JVS (Josef von Sternberg).” Through such writings, his influential remarks on trash were disseminated; “Trash in the material of creations. It exists whether one approves or not.”3

Flaming Creatures

As soon as Flaming Creatures was initially exhibited in the United States, the censorship battles commenced. Prints of the movie were confiscated by police working on behalf of censorship boards. Mekas, on the other hand, served as a judge at an underground film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium and fought for the film to be shown at the event but was prevented. In protest, Mekas resigned as a judge and exhibited the film in his hotel room before an audience comprising film luminaries Agnes Varda, Roman Polanski and Jean-Luc Goddard.

Smith crossed paths with another major cultural figure, Andy Warhol. Warhol claimed Smith was the only movie artist he could ever imitate and had indeed learnt much of his filmic practice from, especially whilst Smith was shooting Normal Love in the mid ‘60s. During that period, Warhol had absorbed the significance of improvisational skills in filmmaking and the Smithian credo that the performance invariably supersedes the character.

After the difficult circumstances surrounding Flaming Creatures release, Smith’s practice rather than being made more accessible was further radicalised. This was demonstrated in the manner he chose never to formally complete another movie. His subsequent works, Normal Love and No President remain uncompleted in the usual understanding of the term. At each showing of both films, he was constantly re-editing them, adding new scenes and deleting some others, most probably in an attempt to elude the intrusive power of the censors and other unsympathetic authorities.

This approach conflicted with ideas in the underground movie scene in which a sacrosanct, in other words, complete and finished work is required. On this score, he parted ways with his benefactor, Mekas who thought Smith was simply being crazy. Through Smith’s approach, film and performativity were hurled into a state of flux which made improvisation and experience the key elements in the appreciation of a film. This idea was truly revolutionary but the infrastructure through which it could be explored and developed was lacking. Not even an important culture facilitator such as Mekas was willing to provide a welcoming platform.

Smith’s grouse with Mekas is quite puzzling. He associated Mekas with a capitalist super-exploitation – he disparagingly called it landlordism – of his work but it is instructive to note that Flaming Creatures was banned in 22 US states and at least four European countries, demonstrating that mainstream channels of filmmaking had very little appreciation of, and were in fact offended by, his work. And so it was left for Mekas to basically attempt to salvage an untenable situation in which an underground artist might have been indefinitely consigned to obscurity and isolation. Instead of appreciating Mekas’s enormous sacrifices, Smith would go on to ridicule and vilify him. The majority of Smith’s sulfurous invectives directed at Mekas are embarrassingly puerile. 

And so when it became too financially prohibitive to continue to make films, Smith turned to performance art of which he has been called “the daddy” by Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company4. His practice of performance art went on to be exceedingly influential with its DIY origins, inexpensive yet sturdily imaginative make-shift sets and its shifting and protean creativity. In spite of its charmingly rudimentary and minimalist features, and ceaseless interrogation of the links between art and life, its creative basis remained resolutely Smithian; somewhat odd, self-contained and free.

As a performance artist, Smith evolved a practice that abolished the distinction between art and life. Part ritual, part rehearsal, part formal performance, part stretches of ennui, Smith courageously deployed this fusion of elements that totally destroyed received opinions regarding traditional theatre. He sought to attain the magical through a conscious transmogrification of the self, and by extension, the collective, which in this case, meant the audience. However, this transmogrification, akin to an intense spiritual experience, came at a steep price; it entailed the expulsion of “the scum of Baghdad”5 as Smith labeled those deemed unworthy of the communal experience due to their impatience, lack of rigour and stamina. As for the price of admittance for the chosen, it came as a crucible of endurance, the patient awaiting of the moment when the transformative dimension unexpectedly appeared. The elitist overtones, although Smith might disagree given his socialist inclinations, couldn’t be clearer. Indeed, this belief would contradict Smith’s view of art as constituting a leitmotif of the social fabric thereby creating tensions between visions of an elitist art and a populist art. This conflict extended to Smith’s distrust of capitalism in relation to socialism since he often had problems making his rent. In his view, nothing was more predatory than the omnipresent figure of the landlord in our predominantly capitalist world.

In Mary Jordan’s fascinating documentary, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, Smith continuously rails against the commercialisation of art, which in his view, has led to its devaluation. According to him, capitalism equals the “mutilation” of art when it ought to be advancing its dissemination and establishing its centrality in everyday life.

Paradoxically, Smith’s art is about seeking a rare transformative moment of experience that abolishes the – for Smith – unbearable profanity of the mundane. In other words, it is akin to a relentless search for the sacred albeit without a surfeit of corny spirituality. Wittingly or otherwise, Smith contradicts himself but the ideological thrust of his art is clear enough. His art is about embarking on an arduous experiential journey in which the ordeal of systematic elimination is a constant reality. With this being the case, the experience of gaining ultimate satisfaction from his art can only be at best limited. This characteristic remains definitive in his singular art.

The other definitive feature of his work is its inevitable confinement to the counterculture. His art, variously described as “baroque and broke”6 represents a direct opposite of pop culture as exemplified by Warhol. Where Warhol embraced and celebrated the capitalist ethic, Smith went for trash and de-commodification. Whereas Warhol learnt from him and utilised his concepts, Smith could gain nothing from probably the most capitalist of all artists in the latter part of the 20th century. And their temperaments couldn’t have been more different. Warhol seemed to find and make art in everything while art for Smith appeared in rare and irretrievable moments, an outlook that eschewed rampant productivity in favour of the ineffable amid seemingly arid and desolate interludes of ostensibly fruitless contemplation. In other words, Smith sought the ephemerality of the sublime and he did so often with the utilisation of base materials.

Allen Ginsberg

Eventually, Smith also shunned the likes of Mekas, Ginsberg and Rosenthal, veritable facilitators and supporters of the counterculture. The role Ginsberg played as editor, agent and publicist of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch is well-known. Ginsberg was also responsible for much the media furore that engulfed the Beats as a movement. Indeed, beginning from the 1940s, Ginsberg had a finger in every sizeable countercultural pie. Some of his most significant accomplishments as a catalyst include participating in the emergence of the post-World War II British underground scene when a gathering of poets performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1965. Poets, writers and artists present at the occasion included Alex Trocchi, Michael Horovitz, Harry Fainlight, Joey Esam, Dan Richter, Adrian Rubin, Aselm Hollo, Ernest Jandl, Barbara Rubin and Heathcote Williams. Culture analysts often claim that this single event profoundly altered the direction of British, and in some respects, world culture.

Ginsberg also helped establish the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at what is now Naropa University (then Institute) in Boulder, Colorado. In this haven of free thought, various artists of diverse anti-establishment backgrounds were able to nudge students toward exploring alternatives to mainstream culture. Without Ginsberg, the life of Harry Smith, avant-garde cineaste, painter, ethnologist, archivist and influential compiler of Folkways’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) would have been far more intolerable. When Smith hit hard times and became homeless, Ginsberg had taken him in and eventually found him a position as philosopher-in-residence at Naropa. Ginsberg is noted for other legendary acts of magnanimity. For Smith to treat such an important figure of the counterculture with such gross disdain is tantamount to hacking off his own legs.

Another notable figure Smith might have treated better is Rosenthal. Rosenthal had published portions of Naked Lunch after it had been rejected by City Lights (San Francisco) and Olympia Press in Paris. The Chicago Review, the outlet provided by Rosenthal, was a student literary journal published by the Chicago University Press. By that singular deed of bravery, Rosenthal lost his position at the journal and had to establish another, Big Table, where Burrough’s work was eventually featured.

Rosenthal went on to edit Naked Lunch and act in a minor role in Flaming Creatures where he features in a tableau vivant. He also acted in a more significant role in Normal Love. Rosenthal and Smith clashed violently – supposedly over Rosenthal electing to keep his beard – during the filming of No President when the former attempted to create what came to be known as gender-fuck. Smith ended up hurling Rosenthal down a staircase shattering his jaw in the process.

Soon afterwards, Rosenthal left New York for San Francisco where together with George Harris he founded the Kaliflower commune from which emerged the Cockettes, a gender-blending performance troupe that blithely mixed deliberate gaucheness, trash, cheap glitter and transsexual tropes. Henceforth, Rosenthal’s work entailed a subversion of the capitalist ethos via a rigorous ethic of self-sufficiency, fastidious Indian mysticism and counterculture outsiderness. Indeed his notion of ‘dropping out’ incorporated an almost spiritual component that reached deeper than the more popular view promoted by the existential adventurists and flower children of the ‘60s.

As for Warhol who operated at the opposite end of the capitalist spectrum, the creed was about espousing the features of mass production, instant advertising, glamour and celebrity; it was also about demonstrating that even ‘the scum of Baghdad’ were entitled to their own 15 seconds of fame and glitter. Populism had a value and could in turn become a product of the market.

Flaming Creatures: A Blaze of Silvery Lights

Female figures with dark oriental looks appear imbued with fantasy and ornate sexuality. A jaunty cast emerges and figures flit before it. The music appears flinched from classic Hollywood B-movies. Indeed Smith described his 43-minute featurette as “a comedy set in haunted music”. Evidently, this brief description does not reveal everything about the movie. 

There is a short segment on the techniques of applying lipstick shot in documentary style. Both males and females explore styles of daubing lipstick thereby accentuating an essential androgyny. A limp phallus is futilely prodded by a hand as if to compel it into full erect mode.

A now famous rape scene ensues in which a woman in a dark dress is held down while a gathering of lascivious men – some with fake grotesque noses – grope her, kissing her arms and breasts and ultimately invading her genitalia. 

Initially, the scene is overlaid with innocuous Italian-sounding music or what sounds like strains from an aria. Her screams are slightly muted until the music dwindles away and her bawling gains prominence. And then the assault gets more violent. At its peak, the violation can be likened to a raging storm and the deliberately unsteady camera-work mirrors the ongoing turbulence. The storm ends when her violators suddenly disappear and she is left spent, denuded, in the arms of a few sympathetic females who provide her with care and succour.

Flaming Creatures

Rapidly, scenes of joie de vivre, dancing and merriment undercut by the same European sounding music unfold. Indeed they mark the almost beautific calm after a storm. The dancing continues under pseudo-grandiloquent circumstances and the music ends with rock and roll music after the bout of lavish entertainment. Flaming Creatures is clearly an ode to sexual and artistic freedom. It addresses unfettered self-expression in addition to themes pertaining to camp, transgression, violation and redemption. 

The movie could also be perceived as a sly rumination on the unpredictable exchange between repose and turbulence. There are also uncomfortable dialogues between dominance and submission, resistance and violation, sound and silence. The exploration of these disparate motifs and subjects are executed with a free-flowing imagination and an almost strident non-linearity. Such an approach would certainly not have endeared Smith to a mass audience.

He chose, instead, an independent route in pursuing his work and he only accomplished notoriety through a form of unabashed transgressivity. Arguably, this factor, even more than his unusually difficult temperament, would have hindered a wider public exhibition of his clearly iconic work.

As mentioned earlier, the camera-work is frenetic in parts and often shaky but the overriding drive towards freedom and catharsis is dominant. The concatenation of scenes conveys, by turns, density, space and graceful mobility. Rather, than being an epic, the movie is a powerful paean to unbridled lyricism and intimacy and the irreverent breakdown of constricting mores, visually, artistically and morally.

In addition, Smith’s Flaming Creatures addresses the then taboo themes of androgyny, de-gendered and de-centered sexualities (as noted, an exposed phallus is unable to act as one and remains resolute in its flaccidity, or perhaps its value is no more than an ornament for an enchanted circle of odalisques), transvestism and nudity and undercuts any suggested attempt at populism. Drag queens, transgender and transsexual urchins and outlaws are plunged into a separate and self-sufficient universe beyond the reach and control of patriarchal heteronormativity. 

Transgression and Sublimation

Furthermore, there is something dark and mysterious about the manner in which Smith chose to interrogate those themes which are a far cry from the New Age philosophies of flower-bedecked children of sunny California. The iconic film makes wanton escapism not only desirable but also credible in which evidently flawed diurnal characters are transformed into superstars, a motif Warhol wholly adopted in fashioning his own cinematographic template and oeuvre. Smith’s films, as such, could only become an acquired taste and to become so, they required a thriving counterculture environment. Within that small and off-beat ambience, Smith painstakingly fabricated a striking universe of make-belief out of inferior film stock, trash and social cast-offs all magnificently shrouded in garish lights. Smith’s work seems to advance the view that through a sleight of osmosis, smut and garbage could alchemically become art. Many insightful critics claim that Flaming Creatures is an extraordinary feat of the imagination, courage and innovation made on no-budget. Indeed Smith needed each and every major figure of that artistically incestuous scene for his work to find a sympathetic critical reception but he wound up alienating most of its players.

As New York based author Gary Indiana wrote regarding Smith, “the world that he lived in had great appeal, and it also had a terrifying lack of boundaries. Within his hermetic realm, it was utterly logical, and everything he did made perfect sense. Outside that magical kingdom, he was quite mad, and though his madness was essentially benign, it could wear you out.”7

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

Toward the end of Mary Jordan’s documentary, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, Smith bemoans what appears to be his lack of commercial success; “It’s my fault. I haven’t been organized properly…I was never organized nearly enough. I didn’t know those things.”8 He didn’t also know how to ingratiate himself but knew extensively how to offend and alienate people. Basically, by his subject matter and approaches to art, he could only have encountered a degree of appreciation within counterculture circles. That he never seemed to understand this truth is rather baffling. In a fit of pique and despair, he had instructed Penny Arcade to burn archives of his work in order to deny posterity the privilege of judging him. However, he openly pined for widespread acceptance even as he broke every rule and code leading to that ordinarily treacherous route. Indeed it is remarkable how such an otherwise visionary artist could be so lacking in insight regarding such a crucial aspect of his own work.

Smith’s work is not meant to be forced down the throat of mass audiences as harmlessly as ice cream. It is meant instead for questing artists in search of inspiration, courage and innovation. Inevitably, those seduced by his uncompromising vision usually end up as disseminators of his non-conformist art. Indeed, meat as tough as Jack Smith could never be devoured whole by the uninitiated.

Smith had his most impactful artistic breakthroughs just before the Stonewall riots, and so in a sense, he is essentially a product of that eventful and highly politicised era. His art, properly speaking, belongs to a demanding bohemian subculture, an implacable alternative to the encroaching and also inevitable gentrification of mass consciousness. As such, his oeuvre realistically, could only constitute a curious rarity in relation to the rampant banalities enforced by the collective will.

The difficulty of Smith’s art stems not only from breaking the codes of traditional filmmaking but also in the relations he pursued in the environment of the counterculture which did its best, given the circumstances, to promote his work. He, on the other hand, sought to offend and alienate people when and where possible and by some uncommon twist, expected to be rewarded in return. It is hard to imagine that the sheer illogicality of this frame of relations might by its remarkableness elicit some degree of endearment but albeit manages to do so in an unusual kind of way.

On the surface, Smith’s work resists easy categorisation or canonisation because it may appear fragmentary, childish and averse to totalisation. But these attributes of internal resistance and subversion are equally what lend his work its iconic flavour and appeal. The systematic recoil from completeness can be regarded as an aesthetic statement about the nature of art, in other words, an art which is able to seek and retain its own teleology without the necessity of leaving tell-tale traces.

But why is Smith important as an artist? First of all, his immense courage, self-assurance and the strength of his uncompromising vision are truly remarkable. He employed discarded film stock in making his movies, enlisted amateur, often first-time performers and transformed them into underground superstars. This form of transformation is similar in its overtones to a spiritual conversion, an epiphanic event. By extension, the expulsion of the “scum of Baghdad” may be likened to the repudiation of dross, worthless base material in order to secure the alchemist’s gold or perhaps the painstaking shedding of old skin in a bid to acquire a new being

And in making his idiosyncratic art, the entire process of assembling the filmic scenes, getting actors dressed and all made up took on the compelling elements of a ritual, the journey enshrined in the process itself became thoroughly ritualised and ultimately transformative. Part of Smith’s power as an artist which is akin to the often inexplicable appeal of cult leaders is in being able to get his co-travellers to believe in the transformative dimensions of his singular art events. Devoid of crass materialism and virtually no form of mainstream support, the journey and experience were essentially edifying and often life changing. The fact that an artist can adopt lowly, discarded film materials (in other words trash), marginal people and seemingly marginal subjects, operate in marginal and disavowed contexts obviously provide the grounds for transmogrification, indeed the conditions through which an alchemist such as Smith might prove his mettle and which he did with aplomb and almost incredible results.

Being forced to endure a state of chronic marginality usually implies coping with a state of abjection and sometimes the more abject the state of marginality, the more acute the yearning for sublimity, elation and eventual release becomes. Smith began his pursuit of art from a positionality of outsiderness. The pursuit eventually led to a mastery of a form which in turn led to a search for sublimity. Of course, any quest for sublimity necessarily entails an ethos of dematerialisation.

During this undoubtedly unpredictable journey, Smith found his calling and obviously experienced intimations of catharsis. The search for catharsis also entailed a distillation and elimination of materials, visions and beings. This rigorous process of elimination almost led to creative sterility at the end of Smith’s life. Faced by unfavourable material conditions, he completely stopped making films and then turned his attention on performance art with himself as the sole protagonist, more precisely, puppet master, of his productions. Under such dire circumstances, his art could only become relentlessly minimalist. This single-mindedness can also be read as a sign of defiance against a world that failed to understand him. Weak and debilitated on his hospital bed, he breathed his last in a state of defiance.

An Unknown Oeuvre

A certain ambivalence is also discernible in Smith’s attitudes to art. At a point, in Jordan’s documentary, he expresses his blatant frustrations regarding an ultra-capitalist existence. Adrift beneath an impersonal maze of high-rise buildings in downtown New York, he states that art should be made freely available to the public, that there ought to be more park benches to recuperate and for leisure. Yet, this is the same Smith who rails against the philistinism and unworthiness of “the scum of Baghdad”. As mentioned earlier, a more appropriate response would be that Smith’s frustrations with the capitalist ethic stems from the perennial difficulties in making his rent, in having to cope with the challenges and absurdities of conforming with the commercial imperatives of art making and ultimately, the disappointments of not receiving due compensation and recognition for his invaluable work in his lifetime.

A sense of irony emerges from Smith’s frustrations. Indeed he had very real objections to the manner in which art was defined, made and consumed in the (post)modern world. And he had fought gallantly to create a parallel cosmos for art making, consumption and appreciation which eventually ran afoul of the dominant structures and values of his time. But just as Orson Welles, his failures make the successes of many other mainstream artists appear puny, in other words, his supposed failures were simply magnificent. Here, I refer to the preference within underground circles for ‘complete’ works of filmic art – promoted by Mekas – whereas Smith opted for an ethic of incompleteness and cyclicity once he had experienced the trauma of rejection following the adverse critical reception of his first major film. Also, in an age of ceaseless consumption, Smith’s discontinuation of the art of filmmaking may seem like a cop out when in fact it was a refusal to accept substandard conditions.

Enrique Vila-Mitas argues that the contemporary writer – and he may well have been speaking about artists generally – faces three main options regarding her work. First, she could elect to shackle herself to the rules of the market and thus become a “grey, competent writer9.” She could also choose to pursue an underground and totally unknown oeuvre; and finally, she could enter the publishing industry and break as many of its rules as possible until her subversive activities are eventually noticed and she is unceremoniously expelled. John Waters, renowned underground cineaste, points out in Jordan’s remarkable documentary that Smith’s uncompromising nature, apart from his uniquely transgressive vision, was making his work less accessible, and at the same time, unquestionably more obscure. Obviously, Smith chose to pursue an underground and unknown oeuvre even if he wasn’t always enamoured of the outcomes.

Filmography

  • Buzzards Over Baghdad (1952)
  • Scotch Tape (1961)
  • Flaming Creatures (b/w, 46 minutes) (1963)
  • Normal Love (120 minutes) (1963)
  • No President (a/k/a The Kidnapping of Wendell Willkie by The Love Bandit, ca. minutes) (1967)

Endnotes

  1. http://pennyarcade.tv/friends/the-last-days-and-moments-of-jack-smith/
  2. Ibid.
  3. Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez”, Film Culture, Winter 1962/63
  4. Mary Jordan Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, independent release, 2006.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Ibid.
  7. https://www.artforum.com/print/199708/gary-indiana-52089
  8. See Mary Jordan Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis.
  9. See Enrique Vila-Matas, “Writers from the old days”, The White Review, July 15, 2015 https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/writers-from-the-old-days/

About The Author

Sanya Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (Expanded Edition) (2021) among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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