I have had a hard time the last couple of days, I wanted to take them off but it seemed I couldn’t get a cat sitter, so I engaged in heavy procrastination. Or did I? I read a lot of news and thought about it, and I enjoyed that, actually, although I felt I should be doing other things. And I did a few other things. But I felt Tolkien’s shadow and should probably work with it, and find something out again about the Jungian one. We are in the shadow because this is now a MAGA run state and it scares me.
I am looking at this MLA special session for my Cecilia work, and the Luz Gambás novel came. I could present on it in Nachitoches, actually. I’m interested in the way the text works to claim Louisiana as territory, and uses certain tropes about the French that seem hackneyed to me. (I think Yuri’s New Orleans novel peca de recycled French stereotypes that were newer to him than they are to me, and that Canarias project is acritical like many similar French ones.) So what are the texts that make up Louisiana, I think it’s like the chronicles of colonial Mexico, all saying they are original and true but relying more on Cortés than they admit.
I signed up for Tropical Marxism, which is March 1 and 2.
Stephen Salaita has a piece that brings us back to the topic of the shadow. He talks about wholeness: “Make whole” is a legal term with specific connotations, but I’ve never felt whole in the aftermath of the Illinois fiasco. I’ve never felt whole after certain kinds of harassment. One is supposed to, so that he doesn’t is interesting.
Salaita uses the word unipolar, which I now see as part of the red-brown vocabulary, and I see he is tweeting for Russia against Ukraine (and has commenters who cite the Grayzone). And/but: The only revolutionary potential in the United States exists in the disreputable spaces of capitalism’s human surplus, the spaces of Blackness, the spaces of migrancy, the spaces of transgression, the spaces of Indigeneity.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 