"DUMMY is a new magazine of criticism dedicated to the obscure, difficult or overlooked. It will feature long-form writing on innovative, boundary-pushing work by artists and writers from historically underrepresented backgrounds and those supported by independent presses. Issue 1 is guest edited by Rachael Allen and Josie Mitchell.
In the essay that opens this first issue of DUMMY, Sarah Bernstein recalls teaching a course on the ‘politics of difficulty’, where she and her students learned to slow down and attend to the unsettled feelings a ‘difficult’ text can provoke – bewilderment, anger, disgust, fear – responses that can complicate, eclipse or enrich a reader’s sense of pleasure.
The essays gathered here all, in different ways, attend to the consequences of what it means to designate something as difficult, experimental, or above us in some way. To presuppose a person’s preferred reading material is to presuppose many things besides – reinforcing constraints that are neither neutral nor necessary.
Issue 1 contributors: Fatema Abdoolcarim, Batool Abu Akleen, Sarah Bernstein, June- Allison Gibbons, Remi Graves, Jennifer Hodgson, Stewart Home, Mira Mattar, Taylor Le Melle, Huw Lemmey, Rey Conquer, P. Eldridge, Lucy Mercer, and Zsófia Paulikovics. Designed by Rose Nordin."
