There is a furious, frenetic energy to writing in Peripathetic, Cher Tan’s debut collection of essays. In part this is stylistic – Tan’s writing is fast-paced, peppered with acerbic one-liners that she deploys to devastating effect and layered with details, often understated and left to resonate with what surrounds them. But this energy is also borne along the vast range of the ideas and thinkers Tan engages with across these essays – cultural, queer and economic theorists, artists and writers of many different kinds – which she draws together in unusual and often invigorating combinations.
Peripathetic is interested in work and capitalism and the ways these complicate and impinge upon the selves we are able to make within and around such a totalising system. There are essays on social media and the self as a commodity, on “shit jobs” and their conditions of labour, on the hope and promise of the early internet, and on punk and the impossibility of counter-culture within a system that seeks to co-opt or commercialise difference. All of these are united by an interest in outsiderness and precarity – what it means to exist on the periphery, and what might be possible from this position.
