November 14, 2015
It is so important to keep in touch, to speak up and out at this moment, with the terrifying immediacy of the attacks in Paris, because common reaction is not automatic. Even for those of us who share a deep sense of intellectual community, solidarity is not without struggle. Events in Paris are not synonymous with [read more»]
A lot of people tuned into the podcast Serial Fall semester. I was one of them. But after five episodes, I was put off enough that I Googled “Serial podcast racism” to see what came up. I found the two articles (among others) that affirmed my disquiet. I stopped listening and I started writing about why.
Noise itself – the sirens and the booms – produces fear and anxiety. It creates a feeling of danger, of violence and of imminent destruction. However, for those in Tel Aviv, this violence and destruction never came. It was felt only through these everyday noises, these sounds that remind Israelis that their “right to exist” is threatened and create the [read more»]
The best answer I have—and I imagine it was part of whatever I said in response to my interlocutor all those years ago—is to say that my solidarity is grounded in a call for justice. I would like to think that the best work I do, as a teacher and scholar and writer and editor, circles around this question of [read more»]
Stalwart CGSC member Anthony Alessandrini’s important new book is now available: Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different (Lexington Books, 2014).
Like journalists, academics are used to working with hard evidence, things that can be shown and proven. The concern is that we may be wrong in imagining the lives of others very different from us, that we may impose our own biases and positionalities onto what we imagine as their interior lives.
For the past few years, the CGSC have been especially concerned with the adequacy of inherited categories to grasp the contemporary situation. We were thus quite interested in Chatterjee’s reflections on the contingent conditions through which the Subaltern Studies collective and conversation developed, the scholarly and worldly situation into which they were intervening, and the subsequent shifts that may [read more»]
We launched the semester with a lively seminar discussion of Partha Chatterjee’s essay “After Subaltern Studies” and a public roundtable discussion of Ann Laura Stoler’s edited volume Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, both of which I will discuss in a separate post. But first, here is the schedule of our upcoming events.
