On Heart of Darkness and Moby-Dick as examples of salvage capitalism: Moby-Dick tells of a ship of whalers whose rowdy cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with our stereotypes of factory discipline; yet the oil they obtain from killing whales around the world enters a U.S.-based capitalist supply chain. Strangely, all the harpooners on the Pequod are unassimilated … More Anna Tsing
One of my students has been working in queer theory and there is far more of it than I had realized. This piece on “gay shame” seems important for a number of reasons, having to do in part with some people I once knew. Axé.
In shorthand. Important to note for this week is how I was taught that normalcy was a façade. In reality we were barely tolerated: we hadn’t been wanted, we were not liked, and it was wished that we would go away. Our successes were events carefully arranged for our amusement by our parents, and if … More Education and Reeducation
I really do not get out enough. My students should know about Mario Bellatín, Hilda HIlst, Pedro Lemebel, Naty Menstrual, and Eugenia Prado. It seems that they, together with Diamela Eltit and others, wrote or are writing the nueva narrativa femenina latinoamericana. I should have told my student about Sarduy, Escrito sobre un cuerpo, and … More Famous writers I should have known about, or should have worked with more
Alan Watts on Chesterton. Paul Preston on the Spanish Civil War — as holocaust. The Holocaust Encyclopedia actually has an entry on the Spanish Civil War. U.S. economists are always wrong. Hattie says: There was also an excerpt from Chris Hayes’s new book, A Colony Within a Nation. As he says, “In the nation, you … More Things people have sent me to try.
– Thursday is César Vallejo’s birthday and he will be 125. – This, as we know, could also be about Vallejo, as it is about many: Living in Budapest, connected to a self-confident and industrializing West but set apart from it by language and often religion, Polanyi and his contemporaries embodied one of the central … More Encore des nouvelles. On modernity, and on race.
Here is a book about how to be an academic administrator and it looks quite good. It is from 2006 but glancing at it I thought it would be older, as it seems to come from an era so much kinder and gentler and humane. The university was already savage, of course, but it really … More “Where you stand is where you sit”
¿Y qué aportan esos ‘detritus del sistema’, como usted los llama? Inventan nuevas formas de relación personal y política que se salen de una coordenada que engancha con las políticas coloniales del siglo XV y que tienen que ver con la familia, la nación, la raza. Esa línea se ha agotado, hay que abrirse a … More Beatriz Preciado
I have to get this book at Tulane. It is so tempting to just click “buy,” but no. Ideally, I not even check the book out: I will go there, read, and leave having actually conducted research. Or I will become very serious and use interlibrary loan, despite not liking to do this online. I … More She is Cuba
I have been reading and lying low, but tomorrow I will have to write, and work out, and socialize over an interesting film. Reading of some interest includes Steal this university, a 2003 book one should have read then (I read the reviews, but one should have read it and taken action on it). It … More Steal this university
coldhearted scientist وداد 