In her debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (un)belonging, Cher Tan turns her maverick attention to the possibility and power of resistance. Tan’s essays rise out of a defiant, DIY sensibility and sustain a dissident energy. They examine how meaning, purpose and change can be wrought within – and in opposition to – our digitally networked, late-capitalist world.
The nine essays interlink around identity, technology and counterculture. They investigate topics such as internet culture (“Speed Tests”), precarious work (“Shit Jobs”), weirdness (“Who’s Your Normie?”), punk and DIY cultures (“The Lifestyle Church”) and the work of writing (“This Unskilled Life”).
But to list them this way feels reductive. They are essays of great breadth and ambition, equally about migration, inequality, subversion, survival, how we come to know the things we know, and what we do with that knowledge. As their titles suggest, they also carry a sharp wit and ready humour.
