I discovered his poem “A Cachoeira de Paulo Affonso,” and it is interesting. I also discovered a book that discusses Castro Alves, about five years old, from WVUP. Amazingly, our library has e-access to this and other works by the author! I have to re-find and re-study all of this. Of course the enslaved woman’s … More Castro Alves

I said what follows to someone but should gather good defenses of the humanities here. “Well, humanities profs don’t always respect their own discipline so they define it in terms of skills only. This is partly the fault of Teaching Goals where you are supposed to be training students to do things. My department now … More Defending the humanities

(Honestly, I should just keep writing things up and stop over-censoring myself. I said that Louisiana participates in both U.S. and Latin American constructions of race and racial meaning.) I said historical work on individual Creole women is important because literary representations are often a-historical. In Latin America the woman of mixed race has been … More What I said to the Creole society decades ago

It was a symposium on the Atlantic world I went to at Rice years ago and I felt so intelligent, the papers were so intelligent. I have very fragmentary notes. Let’s just type them and see if they make sense later. Instabvility of race as signifier Racism as a condition under which freedom could be … More Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations

Every time I go into files I find notes to self about working in my department at UL. I’d be doing research projects and needing access to self to do them and be having trouble with it, and have revelations about how the abuse in my department was eroding me. These are not very legible, … More Addendum to my December moulting

I hadn’t paid attention to him so far, and I am missing an interesting reading of some of his work in an interesting venue right now, but at least missing this reading has brought him to my attention, so at least there is that. I should get his Amazonian poems and use them in my … More Mazzotti

I can’t seem to comment on my other post so I will say here: What the grievance guy said: yes, the chair should be chair to the whole department and yes, you should say these things to him; All of Spanish, and the French graduate students, suffer from the practices of the elite-French, and they … More Meanwhile

The authoritarian mindset is hard to break. Here are things I would like to express to leadership in our department but don’t think I will be allowed to. I despair of being comprehensible, although I consider these things simple, so I’ll note them for the future. They are things are to save the department, whose … More Countering the Authoritarian Mindset

More on hiring. The hire I want, one person to replace a just-retired professor and a retiring instructor, will be a forward-looking person with at least some of these characteristics (and/or other similar ones): * a research program they like, and that they can bring students in on, including for undergraduate research * the ability … More On hiring

I should write an article for Academe on this. People in their effort to be kind to the NTT are ending up speaking ill of their fields. A fundamental point, perhaps, is that people, including alleged progressives and union members, forget that tenure is about INTEGRITY. The AAUP says academic freedom and shared governance but … More On the value of the PhD and tenure