“Even in Another Time”: Benjamin, “Sappho,” and the Phenomenology of Aura

In this essay, Liv Evans takes an encounter with a Pompeiian fresco often associated with Sappho as an opportunity to place Walter Benjamin’s better-known and more polemical account of aura in conversation with his other writings on translation and history, as well as with a broader tradition of queer scholarship concerned with how we relate to an absent and fragmentary past. By complicating the apparent opposition between aura and reproducibility, Evans explores the possibilities that arise from reconceiving their relation as entangled and generative, suggesting that reproduction may be understood to emerge from and itself become a site of auratic distance. As this exploration unfolds, Sappho becomes both the imagined subject of the painting and a philosophical voice through which to think about the ethical and political significance of aesthetic and temporal relations, and about what auratic distance, when freed from institutional authority, might offer: the possibility of re-encountering, re-creating, and remembering, “even in another time.”

Por un futuro que es mío y mestizo

In this critical reflection I focus on themes of cultural identity and hybridity in the age of AI through an exploration of the challenges I faced when AI generating a CV to communicate my skills, my strengths, and most importantly, my story to a potential employer. This essay analyses the ways that AI perpetuates Western colonial frameworks and, in doing so, fails to capture the complexity of hybrid identities when crafting personal narratives. For a deeper understanding of the conflicting feelings that emerged through this process I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon and Gloria Anzaldúa. Through this reflection I explore both the depths of my hybrid identity and my opposition to any attempts to constrain this ‘mestizaje’.