After Sass
After Sass is a production of Booklyn, Inc. in cooperation with Interference Archive and curated by Neta Bomani. Illustrations by Sarula Bao.
After Sass evolved out of Sass + Zines, an annual zine fair initiated in 2017 by a small group of talented cartoonists and zine creators of color. This beloved program of Booklyn, Inc. provided a space for emerging, established, and historically marginalized artists and publishers to exhibit, share, and sell their work. It was presented again in 2018 and in 2019. After a two-year hiatus during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, this program emerges with a new name, After Sass, a provocation that reminds us that representation isn’t enough.
This program is made possible in part by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the NY City Council.
"Zines have been a critical tool for creative and political expression among queer gender variant people of color in print for a long time. Zines are a mechanism for community education and an expression of our personal stakes in taking ownership of our information and knowledge production.
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They belong to a long history of radical counterculture & print media from the anti-slavery pamphlets of the 1700s, anti-lynching pamphlets of the 1800s, Du Boisian pamphlets and the Harlem Renaissance’s little magazines of the 1900s, aboveground underground newspapers of the 1960s, 70s, & 80s, to the punk & Riot Grrrl zines of the 1990s & beyond.
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Yet in today’s age of neoliberal capitalism, it’s increasingly difficult to express oneself and avoid cooptation into the status quo in the name of representation. To truly support and celebrate each other we must remember the radical history that makes zines possible, sharpen our political analysis and revive the rigor from which we approach the community care that sustains our zine-making practices.
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We welcome you to join us as we learn and unlearn an intergenerational and queer history of zines through After Sass conversations, workshops, and publications." —Neta Bomani, Curator, After Sass 2022
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The following is a conversation facilitated by Neta Bomani with Joan Zahra Dark and Jay G. of the Bluestockings Collective, in which they were asked to bring zines from their personal collections and to pull materials from Interference Archive’s zine collection to do a “show-and-tell”.
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This next event is Community Zine Jam!, where four NYC-based zine makers created a publication live at Interference Archive (Brooklyn, NY) and was broadcast to the public via Instagram live stream.
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Thank you for visiting After Sass! The Community Zine Jam publication will be available on our website for purchase in fall 2022.
You can find out more about Neta Bomani here.
Interference Archive can be found here.
And Bluestockings Cooperative can be found here.
Thank you to our program participants Aliyah Blackmore, Kameelah Rasheed, Kathryn-kay Johnson, Joan Zahra Dark and Jay G.!
Explore zines in our catalog