Sad Sack : Collected Writing – Sophia Al-Maria

Softback

Book Works

ISBN: 9781906012823

Sad Sack is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’; opposing ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.’ Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her ‘premature’ memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of ‘Gulf Futurism’, towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.

Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, interrogates the enduring orientalist gaze and residual histories of resource extraction and colonial authority in the context of contemporary culture and society.