Why silly bus?

A lot of the formative art I consume and hold dear to my heart do not appear — SURPRISE! — on any assigned reading list or syllabus. Maybe because they’re too weird, un-neatly categorizable, or not cis-white-straight-male-dead “canonical” enough for school or undergrad education in the U.S. Or maybe because certain texts and certain gaps just never came up. At the top of my head, I think of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-defying, experimental magnum opus Dictee. So does Fernanda Melchor’s violent, brutal, and throbbing novels on the violence in Mexican society. Or Japanese-British pop star Rina Sawayama’s album that’s an invocation for queer diasporic women. What syllabus makes room for these texts, transnational and cross-medium, to exist in conversation with each other?

Well, luckily I’m unbound by the perpetual precarity of being an adjunct or tenure track academic. I’m also opinionated enough to push what I want to add, though I will warn in advance, that my opinions will never be flawless or truth. I have a lot of ego, but not enough to delude myself of that.

Without further ado, in silly bus, here it is: a syllabus of artists and works that have lied in the peripheries of mainstream attention, fawning, or profitable movie-adaptations. I hope that you find something meaningful here. Especially for readers whose identities elide mainstream narrative plentitude, I hope that you find something formative, a nudge, a gesture; to affirm that simple existence, wherever you are, is not any less valuable or radical than the “canon.”

Join the class

Be a student, truant, auditor, or friend. Come read, think, and opine with me.

Have questions? Or things to say? Shoot me an email at kbkim45@gmail.com.