The Bare Life Review

06/17/2020

Statement from the editors:

The Bare Life Review was founded on a mission equal parts artistic and ethical. As such, we feel a keen responsibility not only to promote the work we publish and to help it find as many readers as possible, but to do so in a way that aligns with our organizational values. Occasionally, these responsibilities come into conflict, as has occurred lately with regards to our participation in social media, specifically on Facebook and its sister platform, Instagram.

Increasingly, it has become clear to us that Facebook’s complicity in the spread of misinformation and propaganda does material harm to the very populations this journal is committed to championing.

Examples abound, and include the mining, beginning in or around 2013, of user data by Cambridge Analytica to create micro-targeted propaganda that was subsequently spread widely across Facebook’s platform, and contributed to the rise of neo-fascist, anti-immigrant movements in the United States and abroad. More recently, even as Facebook has been used increasingly as a source of news, they have refused to enforce adequate journalistic standards, allowing the perpetuation of lies about migrant peoples and especially the undocumented. More recently still, they have failed to enforce their own policies on hate speech and incitement of violence amid worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, not only allowing, but promoting slander of the late George Floyd.

Facebook’s relentless use of the First Amendment as a shield against these indictments represents a grotesque act of cowardice and dereliction of responsibility. It is also manifestly dishonest, since the algorithms they use to promote news material are hardly neutral to begin with. Plainly, their actions placate the powerful in order to avoid taxation and oversight with regards to anti-trust law, precisely to the detriment of democracy and free speech.

For these reasons, we have concluded that engagement with Facebook and its affiliated platforms is no longer appropriate for The Bare Life Review. Please continue to follow us on Twitter .

05/29/2020

"As we read their contributions, we were struck, alongside this diversity, by a common ethic, a recognition that what is precious in the everyday and the commonplace is not diminished but enriched by mortality, the assertion of which, like migration, is basic to the human story. "

A note from the editors on the conclusion of our special series.

Thank you to all our wonderful contributors:

Arash Azizi
Mehdi M. Kashani
Maija Mäkinen
Jianan Qian
Rrooja Mohassessy
Donna Hemans
Subha Sunder
Anca Roncea
Sergio Aguilar Rivera
Iheoma Nwachukwu

Two months ago, in the bleak early days of Coronavirus isolation, when the pandemic’s impact could be sensed like a shadow, but its severity and pervasiveness were not yet known or charted, we sent an email to our contributors inviting them to write something about it. It was not, to be frank, a d...

05/20/2020

From Mehdi M. Kashani: a new essay in our series, on the uncanny familiarity of quarantine.

Check out "In Isolation, But For Once Not Alone"

The pandemic is global and [as such] relatable, a shared reality. By virtue of this ubiquity it imposes upon the world a veil of fairness. The sense of isolation... applies to everyone. But to us Iranians there is a kind of familiarity about it, a hint of jaded déja vu.

05/15/2020

Our COVID series continues with "The Sound of Sirens," Maija Mäkinen's moving meditation on loss, memory, and what it means to stay home.

“Under the quiet skies I hear the sirens of ambulances and think of my grandmother, dead since 1993. We in the city are used to the constant wail of emergency vehicles, but these sirens are too frequent, and you cannot help but be aware of each one. In some moments you’ll be listening to one when another begins in a different direction, and the sounds join together like the howling of wolves in the night.”

https://www.barelifereview.org/post/the-sound-of-sirens

05/01/2020

Excited to publish Arash Azizi for our latest piece in the Covid-19 Series:
May Day Without Crowds: A Historian Reflecting on May Day and the Pandemic

“The arrival of Covid-19 might cause us to ask: Are we now condemned to live through previously unimaginable gravities that would make real for us the violent lives and eras we study?”

Read the full piece here ⤵️

A Historian Reflecting on May Day and the Pandemic Arash Azizi Long before I decided to become a historian, taking part in May Day always made me think historically. The commemoration of the workers’ rally in Chicago on May 4, 1886, the “holiday of the proletariat,” has long had that historic ...

04/28/2020

The latest piece in our COVID19 series:

Good Neighbors Are Hard to Find by Iheoma Nwachukwu

The US president and the Nigerian president share one thing in common. A fascination with borders. After Trump erected barriers at the US-Mexico border, Buhari battened down Nigeria’s southern frontiers... The novel coronavirus has marched into both countries, undeterred by these artificial fetter...

04/22/2020

What better way to celebrate Earth Day 2020 than by submitting your writing to our upcoming volume: the Climate Issue!

Link to submit is here: barelifereview.org/submit

As a reminder, we’ve expanded our eligibility criteria for the this issue only, to include non-immigrant artists who have experienced displacement as a result of climate disaster. Send us your words!

Submission guidelines for The Bare Life Review.

04/21/2020

It’s Tuesday! That means our latest piece is up.

Pestilence, a poem by Rooja Mohassessy with accompanying artwork by her uncle Bahman Mohassess. Read the piece in full here: ⤵️

barelifereview.org/post/pestilence

A poem by Rooja Mohassessy. "...Carnage is infectious, I can't help / touching my face. I pray someone will touch / me when my turn comes..."

04/17/2020

"What separated us from the rest of our family, even more than the languages we spoke, were our names."

A new dazzling essay by author Mina Hamedi on a special Friday issue of The Latest. https://barelifereview.org/post/epithet

Our special series on the COVID pandemic will continue Tuesday.

Mina Hamedi I’ve never called my sister by her name. I say abla which means “older sister” in Turkish. When I say Leyla in conversations with other people, it doesn’t feel natural. My tongue: unsure. Abla sounds the same in most languages. In our Hamedi home, we communicate in three language...

04/14/2020

“House Cleaning in the Time of Corona”

Next up in our , Sergio Aguilar Rivera speculates about how the coronavirus will impact undocumented workers and the families who regularly rely on their labor.

http://www.barelifereview.org/post/house-cleaning-in-the-time-of-corona

04/10/2020

And just like that, the first piece in our COVID-19 series is out with a bang 💥

Read it NOW ⬇️

There are two times I have felt the most vulnerable as a Chinese national living in the United States. The first time was in 2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected. Perhaps I was just over-sensitive, but as I walked down the streets in Iowa City, I felt that people were looking at me different...

04/07/2020

More info here:

http://barelifereview.org/post/special-series-on-the-coronavirus-pandemic