PUBLICATION · HOME · 2016
PUBLICATION · HOME · 2016
Fear Eats the Soul
Fear Eats the Soul
Fear Eats the Soul
Fear Eats the Soul (HOME Publications, 2016) is an edited anthology by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks, published to accompany Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, an exhibition at HOME Manchester also curated by the pair. Taking its title from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul — itself a remake of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows — the book traces a lineage of adaptation and re-adaptation running from Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life through Sirk’s 1959 film, Fassbinder’s remake, and Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002). The editors use this notion of adaptation as a way into questions of how race, gender and queer identity are performed and represented across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Fear Eats the Soul (HOME Publications, 2016) is an edited anthology by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks, published to accompany Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, an exhibition at HOME Manchester also curated by the pair. Taking its title from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul — itself a remake of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows — the book traces a lineage of adaptation and re-adaptation running from Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life through Sirk’s 1959 film, Fassbinder’s remake, and Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002). The editors use this notion of adaptation as a way into questions of how race, gender and queer identity are performed and represented across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Fear Eats the Soul (HOME Publications, 2016) is an edited anthology by Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks, published to accompany Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, an exhibition at HOME Manchester also curated by the pair. Taking its title from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul — itself a remake of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows — the book traces a lineage of adaptation and re-adaptation running from Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life through Sirk’s 1959 film, Fassbinder’s remake, and Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002). The editors use this notion of adaptation as a way into questions of how race, gender and queer identity are performed and represented across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
THE ANTHOLOGY
THE ANTHOLOGY
The anthology gathers poetry, fiction, dialogue and critical essays from an international group of writers and artists, including a specially commissioned poem by Jackie Kay, a short story by Sarah Perks (“Fannie and Zora,” imagining a fictionalised road trip between Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston that gave rise to the original Imitation of Life novel), a dialogue between artists Jacolby Satterwhite and Charles Watson-Tuck, and contributions from Sophia Al-Maria, Zachary Cahill, Pamella Dlungwana, Martine Syms, Monica B. Pearl, Zach Blas and co-editor Omar Kholeif. Together the pieces move between memoir, speculative fiction, art criticism and dialogue, using melodrama as a lens onto racial passing, motherhood, domesticity, queer desire and the politics of representation.
The anthology gathers poetry, fiction, dialogue and critical essays from an international group of writers and artists, including a specially commissioned poem by Jackie Kay, a short story by Sarah Perks (“Fannie and Zora,” imagining a fictionalised road trip between Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston that gave rise to the original Imitation of Life novel), a dialogue between artists Jacolby Satterwhite and Charles Watson-Tuck, and contributions from Sophia Al-Maria, Zachary Cahill, Pamella Dlungwana, Martine Syms, Monica B. Pearl, Zach Blas and co-editor Omar Kholeif. Together the pieces move between memoir, speculative fiction, art criticism and dialogue, using melodrama as a lens onto racial passing, motherhood, domesticity, queer desire and the politics of representation.
As co-editor and contributor, Sarah Perks helped shape the book’s structure and wrote its introduction alongside Omar Kholeif, as well as contributing original fiction to the collection — an early example of work sitting at the intersection of curatorial practice and creative writing, interrogating adaptation through a red thread that runs into her later collaborative projects.
As co-editor and contributor, Sarah Perks helped shape the book’s structure and wrote its introduction alongside Omar Kholeif, as well as contributing original fiction to the collection — an early example of work sitting at the intersection of curatorial practice and creative writing, interrogating adaptation through a red thread that runs into her later collaborative projects.
For a limited time, the full book is available to download here, courtesy of the editors, to mark its tenth anniversary.