Anna Watkins Fisher. The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 292p. Paper, $27.95 (ISBN 978-1-4780-0970-2).

Abstract

When I started reading Anna Watkins Fisher’s The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance, I was already in the middle of reading Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, a very different book that is also about intersections of art and sociopolitical reality. I mention Laing’s book here because she and Fisher both introduce “hospitality” as an important conceptual frame. To Laing, who borrows the term from John Berger, hospitality is about the potential for art to create critical openings that can help us connect and be free. For Fisher, hospitality, like everything else in the neoliberal, technocratic system(s) the title of the book references, has already been co-opted and redeployed as a tool for coercion.