Anais Duplan > Quotes

“I want to suggest performance as lived reality, the site of performance being located neither 'inside' nor 'outside,' but at a threshold, at the stage of one's skin.”
― Anaïs Duplan, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus

“does our relational language, already imbued with oppressive cultural meaning-making, necessarily preclude the possibility of speaking about freedom? How can you speak about freedom if you can't speak freely? Does the way that we talk about this problem make a difference in how we try to solve it? Does the question as I've phrased it fail to adequately exhaust the possibilities?”
― Anais Duplan, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus

“Somewhere in my mind, freedom is about empowerment, about envisioning a future for yourself—or even being certain of such a future. The freedom to imagine is power. If your worldview is built on your subjugation, if you—to whatever conscious or unconscious extent—normalize your own abuse, where does the freedom to imagine come from?”
― Anais Duplan, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture