What I am Reading Now…
Hardeep Pandhal
February 2021

Straddled between social bubbles, the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 forced me to live more itinerantly, demanding more versatility from everyone implicated in my life. The works of fiction I present here resonated with me recently because they are imbued with the sort of mindful agility that I believe is essential to sustaining an art practice during this tumultuous time. 

I am into fantasists who can arrest and transform barriers to speak beyond their respective subjectivities, offering genuinely edifying forms of interdependence in their worlds. These texts bear testimony to the risk-taking necessary for radical re-storying. Myths are renewed convivially through the idea of fiction as protest. Traumatic wounds aren’t simply erased, but take on the appearance of keloids, gradually becoming more monstrous and complex in processes of becoming. They confront and work through emotions caused by dispossession and dislocation.

Much of what I seek in fantasy fiction has been nurtured by the critical work of Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992) and Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978). If the imagination is a battleground, we need to understand that fantasies of race, difference and darkness do influence polices of oppression. Fiction and reality do converge. 

By embracing practices of associative and mutative thinking, I hope the range of fantasies presented here encourage approaches to reading and writing that bolster a daring, imaginative and considerate syncretism; beyond the noise of black and white politics.