New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Julietta Singh announces her new book, curiously titled No Archive Will Restore You (out November 13th with Punctum Books), which is a culmination of her restless journey-all rebel heart and punk ethic-into adulthood. Hers is a resoundingly warm memoir that uses real-life experiences as conversation starters to break down female experiences such as sexuality, violence, and eating disorders. Here, "archive" refers to the social and material baggage a girl inherits the moment she's born.
"Femininity is an endurance test," Singh explains. "It's impossible to perceive yourself in a neutral way." True empowerment, she suggests, stems from confronting assumptions about you that have been passed along through society and family alike, and breaking that cycle. No Archive can best be described as a poetic and philosophical life-hack."This book is a radical act of re-crafting what you are," she says, "seeing what you've always been, even if it hasn't been written into your 'script.'" No Archive follows in kind, transparently and evocatively recalling her experiences as a brown, queer woman. No Archive Will Restore You will be available through amazon.com and in selected bookstores on November 13th.
After dropping out of high school and failing out of university on her first attempt, Singh pursued an undergraduate degree in literature and was a renegade in her approach. She says, "I felt an urgency to pursue writing and thinking that spoke to differences." She earned a university Gold Medal upon graduation, then went on to earn a Master's degree and a Ph.D. Throughout, she crafted an enlightened miseducation: "In some ways, I skirted past a canonical education, because I was so passionately drawn to brown and black literature, to global writing by women, to queer perspectives." Earlier this year, she published Unthinking Mastery (Duke University Press), her first major academic book, where her interest in re-crafting narratives about the self began percolating. Her philosophy is at once reflective and forward-thinking. "The body is always changing, moving, morphing, generating, and regenerating," Singh continues. "This book is weird and interesting for conversations about why our bodies are essentially compilations of things and stories that make us who and what we are."
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