Browsing by Author "Zamler-Carhart, Tis Kaoru"

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Open Access
The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators
(punctum books, 2024-09-06) Zamler-Carhart, Tis Kaoru
In The Diary of Anna Comnena, or The Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators, Zamler-Carhart impersonates the 12th-century Byzantine princess and historian Anna Comnena as she comes out as trans and tries to write her father’s imperial biography, The Alexiad, while in exile in contemporary West Africa. Outside the Empire, categories become fluid and elevators stop on strange floors. Prose slips into graphic poetry, medieval Christianity into mystical Sahelian Islam, Byzantine chronicles into erotic gore anime. Anna’s first-person diary careens down a series of sinister African elevators and intersectional magic spaces. She is an outcast of the Empire but also a product of it, exploring the dynamics of contemporary African textile production, vernacular theater, animal husbandry, jihad, urban design, television, and coin metallurgy from the perspective of a 12th-century trans Byzantine engineer. The Diary of Anna Comnena initially adopts the same Empire-centric perspective as the historical Alexiad, but the dystopian confrontation with African reality forces Anna to reflect on what it means for her to be specifically in Africa, and not just in a generic outside space. Together with the author’s previous work, The Diary of Anna Comnena forms a gelatinous ongoing treatise where seriousness is an emerging property, and the distinction between speculative fiction, design theory, and political philosophy is probably just matter of scale.
Open Access
The Goths & Other Stories
(punctum books, 2023-02-28) Zamler-Carhart, Tis Kaoru
In the winter of 476 AD, the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban refrigerator, Abidjan has 12,756 streets with no way to go from one to another, and the poetics of car accidents, capitalist consumption, and anarchist terrorism unfold at a Southern California car dealership. Readers of all centuries will feel at home in this book, as an apocalypse of tax law and classical mythology quietly descends upon their living room and reveals a medieval theology of design, theater, and light. The Goths & Other Stories is a collection of short works at the intersection of prose fiction, experimental poetry, philosophy, and design theory. The book’s six stories are set in different times and places—sometimes within the same narrative—but have in common a slippery approach to the boundaries between fiction and theory, between ontological planes, between the comical and the moral. Together they also form a treatise on the nature of writing as a branch of design—one whose medium is easier to reveal than to define.