A study in complicity with crushing state violence and an invitation to a chilling, remarkable debut.
Civil Service probes the razor-thin borders between ally and accomplice, surveillance and witness, carcerality and care--the lines we draw to believe ourselves good ..
In this astonishing debut, Claire Schwartz stages the impossibility of articulating freedom in a nation of prisons.
In a series of lectures, traces of that fugitive voice emerge as fragmentary declarations, charging the reader to dwell beside it and transform meaning such that Amira might be addressed.
The dominant meanings of that space preclude Amira\'s full presence, but those conditions are not fixed.
One sequence imagines an interrogation room in which a captive, Amira, refuses the terms of the state\'s questioning.
Interwoven with bureaucratic encounters are rigorous studies of how knowledge is produced and contested.
As a result, banal authorizations and personal compromises are exposed as the ordinary mechanisms inherent to extraordinary atrocity.
In these Poems populated by characters named for their occupations and mutable positions of power--the Accountant, the Intern, the Board Chair--catastrophic events recede as the demands and rewards of daily life take precedence.
While the spectacle of state violence fleetingly commands a collective gaze, Civil Service turns to the quotidian where political regimes are diffusely maintained--where empire is the province of not a few bad actors, but of all who occupy and operate the state.
A study in complicity with crushing state violence and an invitation to a chilling, remarkable debut
