When an empire is lurching to a halt at its very end, it might be the moment when it begins, or is forced, to re-imagine its relationship to a national insanity.

The lumpen and the miscreant walk a long, long way together into a bar. That bar is a landmass, is an empire, is an institution, is a painter, is insistent laughter through death. Deep gallows (sometimes humor) built for survival. The lumpen are kin to that famous glom of the proletariat. The miscreant treads earth in overlapping circles.

This book of essays, written by the artist Mary Walling Blackburn between the 201 0s and the present, moves with near-psychedelic precision across American time and its surrounding spaces. It begins near the annals of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum, March 1883. Conspiring sugar planters, descendants of missionaries, overthrow indigenous Hawaii in 1895. A child learns how to split screens: hardcore film, documentary, destruction, and queer care in 1970s Times Square and in SROs in 1980s Salt Lake City. In 2020, protestors meet BORTAC-trained soldiers under skies choked with noxious propellants.

Facing a spiraling empire, Blackburn insists on showing volumes of teeming, vibrant, life. The essays and works collected here are movies of America in parallax view.

Copublished by e-flux journal