December 2011
3 posts
SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE:... →
schomburgcenter:
On this day, 50 years ago, Frantz Fanon passed away. A psychiatrist, Pan-Africanist, writer, and revolutionary, he was born in Martinique in 1925. In 1952 he published Black Skin, White Masks, which exposed the negative effects of colonization on the mental state of subjugated peoples.
As a psychiatrist in Algeria, he joined the FLN (National Liberation Front), which...
Troy Davis' sister has died →
Amnesty International issued a statement Thursday night hailing Martina-Correia as a “Hero of the Human Rights Movement.”
“Our hearts are breaking over the loss of this extraordinary woman,” Amnesty International CEO Curt Goering wrote. “She fought to save her brother’s life with courage, strength and determination, every step of the way. She was a powerful example of how one person can make a...
November 2011
2 posts
Fuck Yeah Radical Literature!: Book: This Bridge... →
First published in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back has been out of print since the expiration of its contract with Third Woman Press in 2008. Hopefully the digital copy will find its way to those who will circulate it and possibly build up pressure to have it printed again.
URL Set:
…
The Paris Review - Arundhati Roy on Walking with...
I want to ask you about your “political journey” of the past decade or more. Among Indian writers, you’ve come to occupy a unique place—not only have you remained in India, you’ve been extremely vocal and critical on a variety of national subjects. Is this a role you’ve embraced?
Yes, I have, but only reluctantly. You see, when you live here, inside of all of this, you end up writing to refuse...
September 2011
1 post
“Texas Gov. Rick Perry has authorized more executions than any governor in the...”
– “Death Penalty: Applause for Rick Perry’s ‘Ultimate Justice’ at Republican Debate”, ABC News
This is where US politics have arrived: probably the most crowd-pleasing moment of last night’s Republican debate was an enthusiastic ovation for killing people. And it’s not just the GOP: the most popular...
July 2011
1 post
Uh, what do asylum issues and alleged ties to... →
The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.
“Strauss-Kahn Case Faces Test in Hearing”, NYT
Also: really?
June 2011
1 post
SMALL FATES - Teju Cole
In Ikotun, Mrs Ojo, who was terrified of armed robbers, died in her barricaded home, of smoke inhalation.
I think what all of these have in common, whether they are funny or not, is the closed circle of the story. Each small fate is complete in itself. It needs neither elaboration nor sequel. The small fates, I feel, bring news of a Nigerian modernity, full of conflict, tragedies, and narrow...
April 2011
3 posts
“If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for...”
– Self-Help for Fellow Refugees by Li-Young Lee (via whale)
Detroit’s Financial Martial Law Hits School for... →
“The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on...”
–
Though it’s often glossed over, particularly by those on the right who want to appropriate him for their cause, towards the end of his life Martin Luther King Jr became convinced that economic justice was key to building a good and just society.
Today, as Anna Holmes notes, is the 43rd...
March 2011
4 posts
“Citizenship is constructed daily by our work. It is constructed by making our...”
– Dispatch from El Salvador: Obama’s Drug War Feels Eerily Familiar - Robert Lovato
via Colorlines
Rapes of Women Show Clash of Old and New India -... →
In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon which the capital increasingly encroaches. The victims are almost invariably young, educated working women who are enjoying freedom unknown even a decade ago. The accused are almost always young high school dropouts from surrounding villages, where women...
James Baldwin: A Delicacy of Heart →
allthingsjamesbaldwin:
When I moved out from America, I began to see it from a different perspective…
I can see now what happened to so many people who had perished around me and I could see that it was a political fact, a political disaster, and that I, myself, was in any case a political target; and menaced by forces which I had not seen as clearly when I was in America.
I also...
"Life Chances" →
lowendtheory:
Guernica: I’ve noticed that you often use the phrase “life chances.” Why not just say “the distribution of wealth”?
Dean Spade: I think that to me “life chances” is a phrase that captures the many, many vectors of harm and well-being that are being distributed in ways that I’m concerned about. For example, whether or not fresh groceries are available in your community, whether...
January 2011
3 posts
“God when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human...”
– - from The Joys of Motherhood [1979], by Buchi Emecheta (via derica)
Piers Morgan interviews Condoleeza Rice:
“Do you dream of a fairytale wedding?” he asked.
Rice smiled and said, “I think I’m well beyond the fairytale marriage stage.”
2 tags
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Preface” to the fiftieth edition...
lowendtheory:
“I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of...
December 2010
11 posts
1 tag
“Anonymity is one of my favorite things. I mean, that’s why I moved to New...”
– Ani DiFranco
1 tag
Knowing Coves: Rejecting the Language of the... →
zuky:
[ Originally posted on my old blog on July 13, 2009 and cross-posted at Feministe, reposted now in the context of the Tea Party era and the resurfacing of “the immigration debate” and the DREAM Act Congressional showdown. ]
“Obviously every society requires laws, ethical norms, rules of social conduct. But law should elevate society rather than debase it, and the sleight of...
2 tags
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das Unheimliche
“Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I’m always missing someone or someplace or something, I’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing.” - lizzie wurtzel, prozac nation.
1 tag
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny →
The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche — literally, “un-home-ly”, but ideomatically, “scary”, “creepy”) is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.
“I believe in such cartography- to be marked by nature, not just to label...”
– from The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
November 2010
1 post
2 tags
on listening in a world of talking heads
from Les Back:
When Studs Terkel was asked if he had any advice to pass on to would-be journalists or interviewers, he replied: “The first thing I’d say… is … ‘Listen’. It’s the second thing I’d say too, and the third, and the fourth. ‘Listen… listen… listen… listen.’ And if you do people will talk. They’ll...
August 2010
1 post
Our Western Privilege is the Legacy of Historical...
A prescription for Palestinian pacifism amounts to saying to a people under the gun: “Oppose the violence that I pay for, and throw your body on the machine. Some of you will die, but it will be better for you. Trust me. But I will not throw my body on the war machine. I will not throw my body on the war machine of which the war machine that is oppressing you is a cog. I have nothing to do...
July 2010
4 posts
“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people...”
– Dorothy Allison, “A Question of Class” (via withnoapology) (via curate)
2 tags
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June 2010
22 posts
2 tags
Now it may be cold on the east coast but on the... →
they tell meeeeee…
“Sometimes I feel real calm and wise and accepting and other times I’m totally on...”
– Lucy Grealy, to Ann Patchett
“The “securitisation” of civil society has spread beyond America as other states...”
– Derek Gregory in “Defiled Cities”
1 tag
DEFILED CITIES
The claim to an identity has had exceptionally grave consequences. There are fundamental differences between al-Qaeda and Hamas, between the Taliban and the Palestinian Authority, but the rhetorical fusion of America’s “September 11” and Israel’s “December 2” has given Bush and Sharon carte blanche to erase them. As a result, “terrorism” has been made polymorphous. Without defined shape or...
The First Poor People’s World Cup on African Soil →
Therefore, in contrast to the FIFA World Cup, we have created our own contra-World Cup for the poor communities by the poor communities that is not exploiting people or marginalizing people, but involving people and creating new spaces of exposure and participation. To all the tourists: don’t stay only in the controlled spaces bounded by FIFA rules and regulations,...
2 tags
“One thinks of the quaintness of the tv series The Wire, in which the Baltimore...”
– Gareth Jones, LSE Professor of Geography, commenting on the pace of technological innovation.
ON THE ROAD: AMERICAN WRITERS AND THEIR HAIR || BY... →
derica:
Ms. Smith wrote this piece expressly to be read aloud in Philadelphia, PA, July 26, 2001 @ Neal Pollack’s Timothy McSweeney’s Festival of Literature, Theater, and Music
I have just completed a book tour, which is somewhat like being on safari but without the attendant dangers of thick bush-land, extreme heat, guns, or wild animals. But book tours offer their own perils to the young...
3 tags
“In other words, we have this cliché that commodities and emotions are opposed:...”
– Eva Illouz, via Guernica
3 tags
Guernica / Love in the Time of Capital
Interview with Eva Illouz:
Guernica: I’m interested in your view of Howard Gardner’s concept of “emotional intelligence.” What flaws do you see in the belief that each of us is endowed with a certain amount of quantifiable emotional response capacity?
Eva Illouz: Well, I think that what it ends up doing is flattening and standardizing emotional styles. This is something one can sense in the United States—I hope I won’t offend you. But this is the common experience of foreigners in the United States. The emotional style of Americans in the workplace is fairly predictable and follows standard rules. So if you know that to be emotionally intelligent is to pay attention to the person, to mildly agree with them, to speak in an assertive but non-threatening way, then you will have hordes of people adopting the same emotional style. So one of the effects is to standardize emotional interactions of people in the workplace.
Another consequence is that you end up building scales to create hierarchies of people in a way that will actually end up excluding whole groups of people. Think of somebody who grows up in a difficult environment. His parents yelled at him a lot. His emotional style will be one that is maybe reactive or hot tempered and this type of emotional style is utterly disqualified today from the workplace as reflecting incompetence, basic professional and human incompetence. Now, that is a problem.
£3m funding for CCTV cameras in Muslim areas of... →
“Just because the funding has an interest in counterterrorism doesn’t mean that for us, that is our focus. For us, it is about community safety.”
more like a city under siege
