Andrew Brooks

Andrew Brooks is a writer, editor, artist, and teacher who lives on unceded Wangal land. He is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW whose work investigates media and mediation, infrastructural inequalities and policing, race and racialisation, and aesthetics. With Astrid Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate and their book, Homework, was published by Discipline in 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection, Inferno, published by Rosa Press in 2021.
Photo: Jonno Revanche
All essays by Andrew Brooks
Silverfish, Weevil, Ibis
This object might best be thought of as an ecology, a network of living, changing relations. We woke up early the other morning to read a little before the day became dominated by the rhythms of work. Our cat hurried into the front room, punctuating the silence with a series of yells that seemed to announce his surprise at finding us awake at this hour, and then stretched out on the firm yet inviting pages of the object in question. These pages invite use, suggest inhabitation, become part of the fabric of the house.
Always Incomplete: A Mixtape after Moten and Harney
We continue to study and dance and sing and eat in order that we might remind each other of our own incompleteness and continue to assemble again and again and again. Or we make a mixtape so that we might feel the intensity of pleasure, and in doing so find our way back to the principle of incompletion – a small reminder that undercommon sociality cannot be stilled by enclosure of flesh and land that is the imposition of private property.
Race Still Matters
Lentin’s objective in Why Race Still Matters is to provide analytic tools that foster anti-racist struggles and encourage coalitional politics. She insists that race still matters because race is still a structure of domination that produces misery and inequality. She tells us that race still matters because racists still exist. And she articulates the value of an epistemology that foregrounds the standpoint of those who experience racism without slipping uncritically into a performance of deference that fragments collectivity. Why Race Still Matters is a vital book for those who wish to understand race, and more importantly, desire to make it matter less.
Wayward Revolutions
Lately, I have been asking myself why it is that Black Feminist study is so central to my understanding of how to live a political life. Why, as a Brown settler also shaped by colonialism and living on Indigenous land in the place often referred to as Australia, do I find myself reading and re-reading Saidiya Hartman’s work? What is it that Black study offers?