This Book is Full of Holes: yasser elhariry book launch
Holes command attention. They make us giggle, squirm, and wonder. But what do they really mean to us and why are they so often surrounded by surprising discourses of power and control? Discussion between professor's yasser elhariry and Jill Jarvis.
For millennia, the figure of the hole stood as the cornerstone for idioms and expressions that denote emptiness, lack, absences, and voids. A hole demands to be filled. This Book Is Full of Holes challenges these hollow associations, offering instead a range of provocative religious, sociosexual, philosophical, and scientific discourses. Drawing on a wide range of literary and cultural objects, yasser elhariry brings
disparate discursive spheres into conversation, nimbly juxtaposing the holey relationships between ancient Hebrew riddles and Hollywood space movies, ’90s grunge and Black astrophysics, Swiss cheese and philosophy, sacred ritual and post-colonial feminism. Satirical, dead serious, and deeply personal, elhariry’s treatise reveals why holes maintain a persistent hold on the imagination. His stylish analysis reveals their overlooked racialized, gendered, homophobic, and corporeal histories. Holes have been weaponized. This Book Is Full of Holes disarms.
