December 2011
1 post
“This was primarily a U.S. event and we wanted to make sure the Western media was...”
– U.S. military spokesman Col. Barry Johnson, explaining why Iraqi media weren’t invited to the U.S.’s Iraq withdrawal ceremony. (via officialssay)
October 2011
2 posts
September 2011
1 post
10 tags
August 2011
1 post
The Atlantic: What People Don't Understand About... →
theatlantic:
theworldkeepsgoinground writes:
It’s 95 degrees and the humidity is 80%. People don’t understand that. People see a man with a shovel in his hand working on a job site and think he’s lazy because he’s just standing there. What they don’t see is the struggle going on inside your brain. The…
July 2011
2 posts
2 tags
“However unrealistic it may seem to you, I would not remain a teacher of the...”
– Gayatri Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103: 2/3. 2004. Pg. 523-581
1 tag
The Demand for Order and the Birth of Modern... →
Too dope.
fuckyeahradicalliterature:
Note: Digital Read
URL: http://www.mediafire.com/?opg167fachei183
Opening:
“The police become necessary in human society only at that junction in human society where it is split between those who have and those who ain’t got.” -Chairman Omali Yeshitela
Why were the modern police…
June 2011
5 posts
2 tags
“Wat a joyful news, miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people...”
– Colonization in Reverse - Louise Bennett.
Turn history upside dung!
3 tags
“First of all, we are speaking here of a ‘common sense’, that is a...”
– From Richard Seymour’s post entitled, “Class and Common Sense”
Some suggestive thoughts on a term that I find useful and want to pursue further.
Since the dissertation is finite—intellectual growth, thankfully, isn’t—the avenues of commonsense I pursue now interface local...
2 tags
May 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Diasporic Memorial Day
Fela Anikulapo Kuti
1 tag
Memorial Day
1 tag
Al Qaeda Confirms Osama Bin Laden's Death, Vows... →
theatlantic:
In an internet statement, Al Qaeda confirmed the death of Osama bin Laden, reports Reuters and the Associated Press. The statement appeared on militant websites today pledging that bin Laden’s blood “will not be wasted” and the terror network would continue waging jihad. “We stress that the blood of the holy warrior sheik, Osama bin Laden, God bless him, is precious to us and...
April 2011
3 posts
3 tags
WatchPeople in Hyderabad celebrate after India’s victory over Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup semifinals. April, 2011.
3 tags
A reply from Prashad
Prompted by Vijay Prashad’s article in Frontline, and other “anti-interventionist” arguments, I posted the following question on his Facebook page.
Prof. Prashad, I’m genuinely torn over this issue. My work on issues of genocide prevention makes me skeptical about nation-state sovereignty, but as a student of imperialism, I understand sovereignty’s use, both...
March 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Two people talking
My friend JJ and I talked about our general political principles, which we already knew to be different. The point wasn’t to convince each other of our positions but simply to have a conversation. This exchange took place on Facebook, obviously, and I want to archive it here for future fun. ———— Shashi Thandra To summarize: The US has massive budget deficits; manufacturing and other...
3 tags
Benton Books
Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900. Cambridge, 2009
A Search for Sovereignty maps a new approach to world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed...
1 tag
“Up to a certain point, the increased wear and tear of labour-power, inseparable...”
– Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 17, section 3, last paragraph.
February 2011
8 posts
1 tag
Two simple points: 1) The formalism of rights and rights discourse does not mean that they are without worldly consequence. Nation-state sovereignty is a right too. 2) No discourse lacks problems or upshots. Rights discourse makes situations and peoples legible in enabling ways without exhausting other modes of address and attack; they are one prong of a necessarily multi-modal solidarity.
2 tags
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“The view represented in this passage is that British colonialism knowingly put...”
– Viswanathan. pg. 17
3 tags
“Indeed, Williams’ main contribution is in offering a dynamic model that...”
– Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Columbia: 1989. Pg. 10
The excerpt’s arguments feel dated, as if these insights are now theoretical commonplaces. Viswanathan’s language, however, still provides a useful vocabulary that helps articulate by...
2 tags
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Planetary Martial Arts
I am in Berlin and recently decided to practice at the Aikido dojo next door. A French Sensei teaches this gorgeous Japanese martial art in a mix of Deutsch, Français, and to help me, English. A Turkish, Peruvian, Spanish and Japanese student join me as fellow diasporics, all speaking Budo.
Seeing me move comfortably, the teacher asked what sport I played.
“Kung Fu”
“Ah,...
January 2011
4 posts
2 tags
“In this manner, every attempt by the narrator to comprehend the “natural...”
– Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, pg. 276.
This excerpt reads Beckett’s How It Is an an attempt to think through the “concatenation of boredom and astonishment—a bringing together of what “dulls” and what “irritates” or agitates,” which Ngai calls stuplimity. As...
grand citizenship sale
foragreyday:
passports for everyone, the adventurer, the moral apostle, the health or wealth seeker, the political convict, the lover and parentless child, the jet setter and cosmopolitan, the security obsessed and the refugee, the driven soul, the persecuted, the hopeless, the cynics and the eternally homeless… prices may vary according to content. transit visa for the undecided are available...
1 tag
“Under-Appreciated People Five: The real N’avi. The people of Kalahandi,...”
– Dissenting Avatar.
Proof that even the stupidest cultural artifact, if distributed widely enough, enables.
From Johann Hari’s article on the year’s underappreciated people.
December 2010
5 posts
2 tags
“The arbitrariness of the will—revolutionary and imperial—has now entirely taken...”
– Jacques Ranciére. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. pg. 54.
3 tags
“The pedagogical fiction works by representing inequality in terms of velocity:...”
– Kristin Ross’s introduction to Jacques Ranciére’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pg. xx.
Including “backwardness” strikes me as rather strange when thinking about “velocity,” but prods further analysis of pedagogy’s spatial dynamics. I’m thinking not...
2 tags
“It’s possible to get acquainted enough with alienation to navigate, by it, a...”
– Rei Tarada. “Two Hundred Years of University “Reform” and How to Dream It”
Writing about the California student protests, Terada articulates beautifully how we respond to crises that seem overwhelming, against enormous and inexhaustible forces when our struggle “has no...
1 tag
“Insight, ignite, and then men might, see love and hell
Hell and right, then...”
– Rza meets Ranciére.
Rza, “A Day to God is 1000 Years.”
November 2010
2 posts
2 tags
“Something lives yet, there is smoke among the rubble. Live embers. The phoenix...”
– Wole Soyinka. The Bacchae of Euripides. pg. 2.
To student protestors everywhere.
3 tags
“But bigger than them all was the house, his house.
How terrible it would have...”
– V.S. Naipul. A House for Mr. Biswas.
The prologue’s closing paragraph, written in the past tense infinitive records the travails overcome to arrive at the imperfect present. Beginning with the present, “at this time,” and writing backwards to the moment of...
October 2010
7 posts
1 tag
“Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she’ll have no lover, for...”
– Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, pg. 166.
Rochester determining his revenge.
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“Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the...”
– Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, pg. 125-6. Final pages.
Selvon’s book provides insights into the African diaspora’s London experience, which rhymes wonderfully with Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story Without a Plot and its focus on vagabonds in Marseilles. The places and times...
1 tag
a simple flash
Reading Ashis Nandy’s The Savage Freud helps bring a third dimension to my understanding of British colonialism in India. Surrounded by colonial logics, this dimension houses the Indian middle classes who both bought into their Western training and appropriated it, ran it through indigenous cultural prisms and produced new colorful texts. Between Nandy and Bret Benjamin, I’ve learned...
4 tags
Little Thinks
I just finished rereading H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and want to make a few brief notes. Surely, everything I say merely repeats a century of literary criticism. To avoid some of that, I’ll skip the obvious intervention it makes in the vivsection debates raging at the time of its publication as well as its place in Wells’s larger concern over scientific progress. Even...
2 tags
“Indeed, much more than a new set of financial instruments at the IDA’s...”
– Bret Benjamin, Invested Interests, pg. 70.
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A valuable reminder that thinking “infrastructure and superstructure in a dialectical relationship” can be both “potentially productive” and sponsor financial colonization. Or, more broadly, undercutting binaries is not always a...
4 tags
“In concert with these globe-girdling movements (or at least in attempting not to...”
– Bret Benjamin, Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank. Pg. xxvii
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Some great affirmations here for me. First, academic labor must to be transnational in scope and action. Second, such global aims heighten, not absolve, the importance of the classroom and pedagogy as a mode of...
2 tags
“I told Zinoviev that I came to Russia as a writer and not as an agitator. When...”
– Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home, pg. 173.