Cole Heinowitz Writes a Signal Piece on Ammiel Alcalay

At Boston Review, Cole Heinowitz writes about poet, novelist, translator, scholar, professor, activist, editor, and "signal force of cultural recovery" Ammiel Alcalay. While his work on Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, "a cooperative project he directs that publishes little-known texts by central figures of the New American Poetry," is an articulation of a general "refusal to accept the terms of administered knowledge," "a commitment to knowing and speaking his own experience as an act of conscious resistance," as Heinowitz puts it, it's only one aspect of a greater scope. More:

Alcalay’s work expands the established parameters of what it means to be an individual and to be in relation with others, with time, and with the world. His method is to reassemble the threads of the historical tapestry that have been torn apart so that we can see the constellations formed by global political and economic conditions. Take the year 1944, a central moment in Alcalay’s view of history, when Robert Duncan publishes his landmark essay “The Homosexual in Society,” indicting “the Zionists of homosexuality [who] have laid claim to a Palestine of their own.” What might shift in our sense of political and literary possibility if we considered young gay poets in America as sharing common ground with Palestinians fighting for land rights? Or take 1969, another seminal year in Alcalay’s work, when the Jewish political prisoner Abraham Serfaty hosted a delegation of the Black Panther Party in Morocco and Algeria while “COINTELPRO was running campaigns and planting infiltrators at home to paint the Black Panther Party with the brush of anti-Semitism (a little history). What might change in our capacity to imagine new political alliances if we remembered that before the rise of identity politics in the United States, radical blacks and Jews discovered a mutual vocabulary for liberation in the struggle for African decolonization? What would it look like—on a picket line, at an academic conference, in the military, on the bus, at a poetry reading, in your local grocery store—if people’s understanding of who they are were expanded to include others whose identities they have been told are alien or unacceptable? What would it mean to act, be it in a small community or in the larger world, according to a more capacious, broadly connected sense of being? How does one go about overturning the dominant narratives that prevent such assertions of autonomy?

Read the rest of "Strategic Interruptions" at Boston Review.