Paper short abstract:

Parca is a Belizean woman who plays Boledo, the national gambling game. She wins more often than she doesn't. This paper compares the conjuring acts of winning picks and writing as forces of an emergent affective attunement, an expression of relationality in a precarious Paradise.

Paper long abstract:

Parca is a Belizean woman living in a beach town that has "gone crazy" for tourism. She plays Boledo. Boledo is a national gambling game of Belize. The rules of the game are simple. Pick numbers and play as much money on them as your seductions dare you to. Parca's picks are a conjuring act, something about them agitates a world into refrains of endurance and sustainability that urges the incommensurate and the otherwise of her life in Belize. Parca's picks, my writing: both modes of expression, practices that gesture toward something generative in everyday moments of hunkering down, of dipping and dodging, and deep curiosity or some eerie apotheosis that takes her picks and my writing beyond some description of a fraying "good life" tropics and toward some figure of futurity. How do Parca's picks keep her poised at the chancy edges of the sensible where bodily agitations bother official images of Paradise to keep me attuned to the affective atmospheres of life expressing an ecology of the insensible and a poetics of relationality. How does it matter to write tethered to Parca's picks as an emergent otherwise, itself a swirling wave of repetition and difference composed of both potentiality and loss or to write connected to Parca's stiff attempts to maintain traction in a neoliberal present on the precipitous edges of Empire, in the spaces that "take place" in the course of historical forces of eroding edifices, images, and attachments? How are picking and writing enactments of change?