This Book Is Full of Holes

Holes command attention. They make us giggle, squirm, and wonder. But what do they really mean to us and why are they so often surrounded by surprising discourses of power and control?

For millennia, the figure of the hole stood as the cornerstone for idioms and expressions that denote emptiness, lack, absences, and voids. Approaching a hole makes one wary of imbalance or depravation. A hole demands to be filled. This Book Is Full of Holes challenges these hollow associations, offering instead a range of unexpected (and provocative) religious, sociosexual, philosophical, and scientific discourses.

Through an analysis of a wide range of literary and cultural objects, yasser elhariry brings disparate discursive spheres into conversation. He nimbly juxtaposes the holey relationships between ancient Hebrew riddles and Hollywood space movies, ’90s grunge and Black astrophysics, Swiss cheese and philosophy, sacred ritual and postcolonial feminism.

Satirical, dead serious, and deeply personal, elhariry’s treatise on this seemingly dead-end object—holes—illuminates the paradox that they nonetheless maintain a persistent hold on the imagination. His stylish analysis reveals their overlooked racialized, gendered, homophobic, and corporeal histories. Holes have been weaponized. This Book Is Full of Holes disarms.