BOOK LAUNCH: T.J. DEMOS IN CONVERSATION WITH KODWO ESHUN
Wednesday March 27, 2013

The Showroom in London  is pleased to announce the launch of two new books by London-based writer and critic T.J. Demos: The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) and Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Demos and Eshun will discuss and expand on themes in the books such as how contemporary artists are critically exploring the image regime of neoliberal capitalism and crisis-globalisation. Both T.J. Demos as well as Kodwo Eshun were guest speakers at Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman ? 

Song of the Broad-Axe, by Walt Whitman (extract)

1

Weapon shapely, naked, wan,

Head from the mother’s bowels drawn,
Wooded flesh and metal bone, limb only one and lip only one,
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown, helve produced from a little seed sown,
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be lean’d and to lean on.

Strong shapes and attributes of strong shapes, masculine trades,
sights and sounds.
Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music,
Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great organ.

2

Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind,
Welcome are lands of pine and oak,
Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig,
Welcome are lands of gold,
Welcome are lands of wheat and maize, welcome those of the grape,
Welcome are lands of sugar and rice,
Welcome the cotton-lands, welcome those of the white potato and?sweet potato,
Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies,
Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings,
Welcome the measureless grazing-lands, welcome the teeming soil of?orchards, flax, honey, hemp;
Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands,
Lands rich as lands of gold or wheat and fruit lands,
Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores,
Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc,
Lands of iron–lands of the make of the axe.

 

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