Wrap Up from Spring Teaching: "Writing for the Internet"

Writing for the Internet: A Wrap Up from Spring 2013

Earlier I had mentioned I would be debuting a new course called "Writing for the Internet" this spring. Below are my reflections on the course as it actually transpired. I will certainly try and do the course again soon, though I might alter it or refine certain parts of it in some ways, and would welcome feedback from readers as to how to do this.

It's hardly revolutionary to use blogs or blogging in writing courses. I myself had used blogs in courses before, but generally as a secondary feature in courses where conventional papers constituted the bulk of the grade. Students in those courses generally didn’t care too much about the course blog: it didn’t really reach outside readers, and the students saw it as a chore, not so different from logging into Blackboard/CourseSite to write a response paper.

I wanted to make online writing the center of this course, not a secondary feature. I also wanted to try and create an ecosystem where students would actually be interested in reading each other’s works and find it convenient and simple to do so. I also had hopes of connecting students with outside readers – so I was going to ask them to post on the open internet (of course, with the option to use a pseudonym). This mean we would need to move beyond firewalled courseware options.  

To help students feel that their writing was “live,” I decided to use Tumblr, a free social networking oriented blogging platform.  Admittedly, the Tumblr platform has some pretty substantial design limitations which would make it hard for me personally to commit to Tumblr as a primary platform for longer posts. Also, the broader stylistic norms on Tumblr emphasize a sense of immediacy and short comments rather than longer, more substantial writing. Successful Tumblr bloggers tend to be aggregators, image hunters, and meme generators rather than serious writers (which is not to diminish the value of skillful aggregation – but it’s a different skill from composing a convincing argument).

For the purposes of this class, however, we didn’t need to worry too much about those stylistic norms – since the goal was to create a closed Tumblr loop for the 19 students in the class and myself. This was fairly easy to do. (You can see my root blog for the course here: amardeeplehigh, with a blogroll consisting of student blogs on the right column.)

Fall Teaching: Global Cities

[This fall I will be teaching a new graduate course on postcolonial literature that I am calling "Global Cities." The following is the "short" course description.]


English 479: Global Cities (For Fall 2013)


This course will focus on literary and theoretical texts connected to London, New York, and Mumbai. It is also intended as an introduction of sorts to postcolonial literary studies, though one targeted to a particular set of themes: urbanization, immigrant narratives, and the idea of cultural hybridity. Many of the issues in the course will also be relevant to students interested in immigrant literature of the United States and multiculturalism in contemporary England.


We will begin by reviewing some of the classic literature of urbanization from the late Victorian period, and then move to consider the increasing diversity of these three urban spaces. A city like Mumbai, built by the British, is often seen as haunted by its colonial past, still visible in the Victorian architecture and English place names that dominate its landscape; analogously, there are signs and traces of the Empire scattered across both the map of contemporary London and the English literary canon. From the late Victorian Imperial metropolis we move to the first wave of post-colonial migration – where patterns of immigration to London and New York from the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Asia almost seemed to suggest a kind of reverse colonization (one thinks of the famous activists’ slogan: “We are Here because you were There”). The post-colonial rewriting of the Anglo-American metropolis has been be followed by a third wave of immigration, tentatively understood as tied to globalization, characterized by heightened mobility and the decline of fixed borders, constant connectivity enabled by the internet and mobile technology, and the creation of new transnational cultural formations.


Literary selections include Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Zadie Smith’s NW, Amitava Kumar’s Bombay-London-New York, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Nonfiction narratives by writers like Suketu Mehta, Sonia Faleiro, and Katherine Boos will also be discussed, along with selections from postcolonial theory and globalization theory.

Consequences Day: A Modest Proposal for the 19th of March

The U.S. has a number of important civic holidays: Veterans Day (equivalent to the British Armistice Day), Memorial Day, Labor Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and of course, Independence Day. In the past twelve years, a new de facto patriotic holiday has also emerged -- September 11 Day.

Some of these holidays tend to emphasize straightforward patriotism, while holidays like Labor Day and MLK Day tend to provoke internal reflection regarding the injustices in American history.

I think we need a new holiday (or perhaps an anti-holiday) in the spirit of MLK Day and Labor Day: a day to memorialize the tremendous folly, waste, and injustice of the second Iraq War, which began on March 19 2003 -- ten years ago to the day. For readers who have forgotten about this long burning corner of horror, Juan Cole has a helpful set of reminders, with a post called "What We Lost: the 10 Ways the Iraq War Harmed the U.S." I highly recommend it.

I would call my proposed day of remembrance (it is not quite right to call it a holiday) Consequences Day. Here is what I have in mind for Consequences Day:

1. We need a Consequences Day first and foremost because the United States started a war on spurious grounds, and against the advice of friends and allies, and now has to pay for it. We are still dealing with and paying for the Consequences. (And we are still seeing those Consequences in the headlines of the news -- if we choose to notice them. Fifty people were killed in bombings in Baghdad today.)

President George W. Bush and his team have never publicly addressed the consequences of their actions. Bush is now retired and apparently spends his time painting dogs. I do not think there is any mechanism for any of these people to ever come forward and acknowledge their failures and their mistakes; I wish there were. At the very least, I hope their retirement is troubled from time to time by reminders of what they did -- the questioning of the occasional disabled veteran, for example.

2. We need a Consequences Day because the U.S. invaded a country without any sort of plan for following up after the initial invasion component was completed. As Cole points out, and many others have stated, the U.S. did not have very deep knowledge of the country it took charge of in 2003, and indeed had actively excluded some of its most knowledgeable people from participating in the rebuilding of Iraq. Waste and mismanagement ensued, followed by a protracted and bloody insurgency (or Civil War) that left tens of thousands of Iraqis dead and hundreds of thousands permanently displaced.

Americans have been paying financially for the Consequences of this war, and will continue to pay for it for generations -- to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Iraqis, for their part, have had to pay for it by having a broken country (see more about that at another Juan Cole post: "What We Did to Iraq").

3. We need a Consequences Day because many political figures (especially in the U.S. Senate) and social institutions (the New York Times, along with a huge swath of the journalistic establishment outside the Times) who might have questioned the build-up to the war, including the very vague and questionable evidence that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, failed to ask the right questions or say "no" when they had the chance.

For the people who failed to say no, Consequences Day needs to be a time to think about how we handle decision-making and how we approach dissent. A number of Democrats in the Senate, for example, clearly made the calculation that voting against the war would be a political loser. The consequence ought to be that they are forced to see the error of their ways. Similarly, many important writers and journalists (two who stand out in my mind are Fareed Zakaria and Salman Rushdie) signed off on Bush's war; I want them to address the consequences of that support.

Surely, many people who supported the war did so because they were "freaked" by the seeming political paradigm-shift represented by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For them Consequences Day should be a reminder that tragedies can multiply themselves if we don't respond to them appropriately and dispassionately. Instead of remaining focused on solving security issues raised by 9/11, we created an entirely new tragedy which has cost more in American lives (4000 soldiers have been killed, and tens of thousands more have been rendered disabled) than were killed on 9/11.

Every American is crystal-clear on what happened on 9/11, but many, if not most, are pretty fuzzy about the fallout from the Iraq War. We need a Consequences Day to rectify that.

One writer who clearly has accepted the Consequences of supporting the Iraq War is Andrew Sullivan, for whom the war was such an epochal catastrophe that it has effectively reversed his political orientation. I am not clear why this hasn't also happened for others. Admittedly, some (one thinks of Tom Friedman) are just too callow and complacent to really even be aware of how their support for the Iraq War has damaged their credibility. (Clearly, between Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole, bloggers come off much better than institutionally supported journalists when it comes to accountability and the ability to see the truth in front of our noses.)

4. We need a Consequences Day to reflect on the many abuses of human rights conducted by American soldiers and intelligence agencies during this war, and the War on Terror more broadly. American soldiers treated prisoners unspeakably at Abu Ghraib, and the CIA widely used torture at facilities like Guantanamo (but not just Guantanamo). The rest of the world knows that now, so that too has consequences: any American efforts to compel other countries to check the use of torture against detainees will in effect be stillborn until there is some sort of accountability for this.

Consequences Day in, short, is intended as a day of reflection and self-criticism -- borrowing something from the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur (the day of "Atonement"). It would be a day for Americans to stop and take stock of and collectively grapple with the results of this large national failure. While some of it can be pinned on a few terrible public officials who engineered the catastrophe (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld), or to a larger number who assented and were complicit (Rice and Powell, but also John Kerry and Hillary Clinton), in truth the failures of the Iraq War also point to broader structural and social failures that apply in some ways to all of us. How can we do better as a society -- to try and ensure that something like this doesn't happen again?

Not the cheeriest of commemorations, to be sure. But unlike some other civic holidays, a day to focus on the Consequences of our mistakes might actually help us avoid repeating them.

An Open Letter to Narendra Modi

[Cross-posted from 3 Quarks Daily. The following essay is intended as a satire.]

Dear Chief Minister Modi,

You don’t know me, but I’ll spare you a Google search: I am one of your loyal subjects! I’m a proud Indian --technically Indian American, but never mind that. I may have been born in America but at heart I am a true Indian. 

Respected Chachaji Modi, I heard the story about how you got invited to speak at a conference called the Indian Economic Forum at the Wharton School of Business, only to have the invitation get cancelled this week because of Marxist Professors who were acting as the Sepoys for the Whites (as Mr. Rajiv Malhotra has written in a Tweet). Quite shocking! Disrespectful behavior!

Chachaji, I have heard many of our friends, referred to by pseudosecularists and their ilk as “Internet Hindus,” complaining about this incident as a problem of freedom of speech. The pseudosecularists, for their part, say we have to remember the past. But like you I am a man of the future! I think it is time to put the past behind us. We have to think of India’s development, not the immediate past!

However, there are a couple of things bothering me about the recent past that I was hoping you could explain to me. I have been wondering about some things people say you did a few years ago. The word “riot” is so dull, it doesn’t really explain what happened does it?

Anyway, no one is saying you caused the riots – or whatever they were –  but… There is some talk, Chacha, that you told your Bajrangi goonda acquaintances they could do whatever they wanted for three days. Is that true? Some hack journalist at Tehelka taped a bunch of thug types saying things like that in 2007. I never heard you say it didn’t happen, or explain why all these guys would say this when they thought they were speaking in confidence, among friends.

Also is it true what they say about your refusal to send help to Ehsan Jafri? That you said something about him “firing” at the mob to Sanjiv Bhatt? The number of people who were killed at the Gulburg Society alone makes me a little hairaan – 179 people, was it? I wonder why you didn’t respond to his direct call to you, or even to L.K. Advani who called you from Delhi specifically to find out what you were doing to protect him?

Chachoo, do you ever feel just a little bit bad about what happened to those 179 people, or the other 800 who were killed in those riots (or whatever they were)? Do you ever lose sleep about this happening in Our New India? I do, which is strange, because I didn’t even have anything to do with it.

I know, I know, Jafri was a Muslim and all. But he was also a Member of Parliament! One of the “good” ones! Loyal, maybe even... (And I say this as a Sikh who only wanted a Sikh nation to secede from India for a little while… when I was about 12 years old. I didn’t like the way my family was threatened in 1984.)

Oh right, 1984! Modi-saab, I knew you would want to talk about that somehow. Yes, some Congress bad guys were behind it, and only a couple of the thugs were ever tried for it (go figure: some of those guys remained in elected office for years and years – kind of like you though, isn’t it?). Most of the people who organized the mobs in 1984 got off scot-free! What is wrong with the Indian judiciary? And don’t get me started on that thug Rajiv Gandhi! (Really, don’t. He was bad on so many levels, it would get quite dull to read.) It still bugs me, but you see, Uncleji, I can’t help but think talking about it is a bit of a distraction from the question of what you did not 30 years ago but 11 years ago. 

Another thing that bugs me is this whole thing about Haren Pandya. Did you or didn’t you have anything to do with him getting assassinated? He was one of your guys, a BJP/RSS guy to the core. I’ve always wondered how he managed to get killed just around the time he decided to testify about the things that happened in February of 2002.

I know, Chachoo, your Indian American nephew sure seems to have a lot of questions! But the thing is, you have tried very hard not to answer these types of questions for the past few years. I know what it is—you want everyone to forget. You are a man of the future! But you see, the longer you go on without answering these questions, the more they build up. Like a dam.

By the way, I like development! I like Tata Nano and Ipod Nano, both. I like big dams and little dams too. I am not one of those Marxist Gandhian ban-Monsanto-farmer-suicide types. I say forget Gandhi and Gandhis! I know you agree with me on this.  

And I like freedom of speech! And I am very angry that the wicked pseudosecular sepoy Marxists at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business revoked their invitation to you to speak by teleconference.

And just one more thing. All of your friends say you are “incorruptible,” which means a lot these days in India, truly the country home to the maximum amount of dirty money. But I wonder why you have resisted efforts to open an accountability and anti-corruption office in the State of Gujarat? Are you worried that all of your famous business deals with multinational corporations who have opened shiny new offices in your state in the past 10 years may not have always been entirely straight? Chachoo, please tell me – was there any black money involved in the Gujarat “miracle”?

So those are my questions, Chachaji. If you would be so kind as to answer them publicly I would strongly consider telling those pseudosecularist hypocrites at the University of Pennsylvania to shove it. They say you should go to jail. Also shocking, and absurd since you have been duly elected by the people of Gujarat three times and cleared by the Indian judiciary, which is always right! Still, all I am seeking are some answers to these few questions, so my heart, the heart of a true Indian, will beat at peace.  

Sincerely,

Your Favorite Pseudo-Colonialist Post-Secular Nephew

Narendra Modi @ Wharton: is Freedom of Speech the Issue?

As many readers will already know, this week the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania had to retract a speaking invitation to Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of the Indian State of Gujarat. Modi was to speak to a conference at Wharton via teleconference, as he has, since 2005, been denied a visa to visit the United States by the U.S. State Department. 

The withdrawal happened after a group of faculty at Penn wrote a letter to the president of the University, objecting to Modi's participation. The full text of that letter can be found here. Today there is also a clarifying interview with one of the faculty involved, Ania Loomba, at the New York Times' India Ink blog. Needless to say, there has been widely covered within India -- see stories at the Hindustan Times and Deccan Chronicle for starters.

As Ania Loomba herself points out in the interview at the New York Times I linked to, doing this keynote at Wharton was clearly intended to serve as part of the rehabilitation of Narendra Modi's image in the West. This rehabilitation is important to Modi as he is thinking of leading the BJP and competing for the Prime Ministership in next year's nationwide elections.

Many Indians have questioned Penn/Wharton's decision to withdraw its invitation to Modi, with "freedom of speech" cited in several columns and blog posts I've come across in the past couple of days. The Wall Street Journalist columnist Sadanand Dhume criticized the move, for instance (though his column on this appears to be paywalled and I cannot access it or link to it at present), as did the ostensibly liberal writer and politician Shashi Tharoor (see here).

Let's look at this a little bit more. First of all, here's what Ania Loomba says about the freedom of speech issue in response to a question from the Times' India Ink reporter:

Q: [NYT] In 2007, Columbia University invited President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, a highly controversial international figure, to address its students, amid protests by a host of groups. In a culture that embraces free speech, some have asked, should Mr. Modi’s address have been boycotted?

A:
[Loomba] It is part of a vibrant democracy to dissent and indeed to boycott speakers. Our letter to the student organizers of the Forum simply expressed our objections to their invitation. There is a big difference between shutting down free speech and raising principled objections to inviting a man with a sordid human rights record. 

Let us be clear: we are not opposing his right to free speech. He has those rights, and avails of them on a daily basis: he has full and immediate access to the news media in Gujarat and India. What we are opposed to is the Forum, which is an element in a larger institution of which we are a part, granting him a position of honor to increase his personal legitimacy, and thus further a political agenda which we find reprehensible.

Finally, the media has been presenting it as a few professors shutting the desires of students. But many students were signatories too. As well as doctors, lawyers and concerned citizens. We did not speak from a position of any authority because student groups at Penn have the right to invite anyone they want. And, of course, anyone has the right to raise objections to that. Why did the organizers change their mind? Was it only because of us? According to the organizers, there were several “stakeholders” whose opinions influenced their views, including members of the alumni. (link)

I think it's really important to note that this isn't a question of not allowing a person advocating a particular point of view to speak. What's really at stake is whether a person with Modi's particular record -- his connection to actions that suggest criminal liability -- ought to be given a platform that confers respect and authority at an institution like Penn/Wharton.

To that effect I believe I have a slightly different approach to the freedom of speech question than does Ania Loomba in this instance. 

First, people with views in line with the BJP/RSS have no problem at all on American university campuses. Many American college campuses do have student organizations that support what might be seen as Hindu right/Hindutva positions -- there are Hindu Student Council and VHP-A groups at many college campuses. These groups do their thing, inviting speakers, and expressing their views alongside all of the other campus groups. They are not harassed or bothered; their freedom of speech is respected. 

Second, Modi was not actually going to speak his mind on communal issues at this venue; since 2002 he has actually done everything he can to downplay and minimize what happened in February of that year. The event where he was to speak was the "India Economic Forum," and one could reasonably expect that he was not going engage the communal issue in such an address. In recent years, it has been part of Modi's strategy of reinvention to not come across as particularly communal. But he has done so without ever acknowledging any responsibility for the deaths that occurred in 2002 while he was Chief Minister -- or even the slightest smidgen of regret. 

That said, we should be clear that the intention here was to prevent Narendra Modi from speaking, not on the grounds of views but on the grounds of actions. The question is this: is someone who is implicated with mass deaths, who should be considered therefore a person with criminal liabilities, be given a free pass to reinvent himself as a "Development Man," as if that's all he is? 

Incidentally, for people who maybe aren't totally clear on what Modi did in 2002, the best thing I have seen on the subject was published at Caravan Magazine in 2012. Look closely at the sections related to what happened to Ehsan Jafri's compound (where I believe 100+ people were killed and there is strong evidence that Modi knew all about it and did nothing), and what happened, later, to Naren Pandya after he spoke against Modi in a private commission on the 2002 riots. Then: should we still be worrying about his particular freedom of speech? Shouldn't we start with asking him to be accountable for the lives of those people?

Text for Lehigh Valley THATcamp

[Lehigh is hosting its first digital humanities conference -- a THATcamp -- Friday and Saturday. I am facilitating the session on "Academic Blogging" that will occur on Friday. Below are my notes for the session. These introductory notes are intended for an audience coming from very different levels of familiarity with blogging, social networking sites, or the digital humanities.]

Academic Blogging Workshop: Notes

For THATcamp Lehigh Valley, March 2013
Facilitated by Amardeep Singh (amsp@lehigh.edu)

Workshop Description

This is a non-technical session designed to introduce participants to the world of academic blogging. Time will be evenly divided between practical “how-to” questions and more general questions related to the pros and cons of academic blogging, and the role of blogging in the digital humanities. No particular experience in web programming or design is necessary, as blogging software has evolved to become ever more easy to use.

The first half of the session will address practical questions, such as: 1) What blogging platform might be right for you?; 2) How do you get your own domain name, and how should you arrange for your blog to be hosted? Does it cost money? 3) How to promote your writing using social media? Some time during this session will be spent demonstrating how to start a practice blog, so participants are encouraged to bring laptops or tablets to the session for this purpose.

The second half of the session will pertain to broader issues regarding the value of academic blogging, including 1) How can your further your “serious” research with a blog? 2) Does blogging ‘count’ as Digital Humanities work? 3) What are some different models for academic blogs and 4) What are the implications of academic blogging for hiring, tenure, and promotion in academia?

Melodrama in Milwaukee: a Review of "American Dervish"

[Cross-posted at The Aerogram]

When the topic of South Asian diaspora fiction came up on blogs like Sepia Mutiny (or now, happily, The Aerogram) the conversation would inevitably come around to Jhumpa Lahiri--though not always entirely happily. Many readers have complained over the years that Lahiri’s characters are too narrowly of a certain class and milieu – highly educated, upper-middle class Bengalis. Where, many readers wonder, is the second-gen novel that sounds more like ‘regular’ desi life?

Reading The Namesake years ago, I should say that I did not particularly share that frustration, since actually Gogol Ganguli’s experience at Yale resembled my own experience at Cornell in some uncanny ways. The one difference was really the Ganguli parents – Lahiri’s immigrant parents have a sort of stateliness and dignity that the Punjabi aunties and uncles I knew growing up in DC did not exactly have. In contrast to the characteristic quiet in Lahiri’s stories, my experience was most definitely loud: full of melodrama, over-the-top arguments and fantastic fights.

That sense of Punjabi shor-sharabba is something I immediately noticed and found gripping n Ayad Akhtar’s excellent debut novel, American Dervish. Fathers say crazy things after a night’s drinking, wives curse about their husbands’ affairs (“Another of his white prostitutes decided she was sick of his promises!”), and children playing video games in the living room hear it all.

Much of what I have written so far pertains to the Punjabi elements of this story. I should also address what is really the core theme of the novel – the boy protagonist’s troubled relationship to religion. Hayat Shah is about eleven years old when his mother’s best friend from Lahore, Mina Ali, comes to stay with him and his parents in the Milwaukee suburbs.

Hayat’s own father, a doctor, has turned against Islam in large part because he feels that so many of the observant Muslims in the Pakistani community in Milwaukee are hypocrites or fools. But the boy latches on to his new auntie – and she begins to introduce him to her unconventional brand of Islam, one suffused with elements of Sufism and Mysticism. Hayat’s auntie Mina Ali was divorced by a callous husband in Karachi, and decided to leave Pakistan to avoid having to lose her son to his custody – as, under Pakistani custody laws, she would have been obliged to do. Mina Ali is a curious and paradoxical character – a feminist and freethinker, she is also a devout and committed Muslim who resists the idea of ever marrying a non-Muslim despite her earlier bad experience in Pakistan.

Hayat begins to develop an intense pre-adolescent crush on his auntie, which leads him to do some rather unpleasant things to keep her American suitor, a friend and colleague of Hayat’s father, away from her. This forms the core of the novel’s plot, about which I won’t say too much here for fear of giving too much away. What I can say is that his feelings for his Auntie lead Hayat into a pretty intense period of religious study; his immersion in Islam starts as an attempt to please and get close to Mina, but over time it develops a life of its own.

One aspect of American Dervish I particularly appreciated was Akhtar’s willingness to “go there” with some serious community dirty laundry. In this case, the particular dirty laundry is the presence of a continuing strain of theological anti-Semitism amongst some Muslims. This is carefully and thoughtfully explored in the novel – it’s one of Akhtar’s central themes. I was also impressed by Akhtar’s willingness to tell hard truths about how religion can be used as a tool for hurting and suppressing free-spirited women in particular. American Dervish is often powerfully – though also subtly – feminist.

[To be clear, every South Asian religious community has its share of dirty laundry. Like Ayad Akhtar (and like his character Hayat in the novel), I grew up in the 1980s and 90s. For Sikhs recovering from the shock of 1984 that was a difficult time, and I overheard many bitter and angry conversations amongst men of my father’s age expressing anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu statements. So when Hayat hears his local Imam making some pretty nasty anti-Semitic comments in the Khutbah at the Masjid, it definitely resonated.]

In the end the young Hayat turns away from the brand of Islam practiced at the local Masjid, but Akhtar eschews the kind of harsh medicine advocated by activists like Irshad Manji. His rebuttal of intolerance within certain strands of Islamic practice is much more nuanced, grounded in the alternative Islamic discourses of the Sufis. Hayat’s solution to the quandaries over religion he faces do not involve rejecting the faith outright, but rather a subtler reorientation to faith that recognizes how deeply our love for the religious beliefs and values of the people we love might impact our own relationship to religion.

I should say that I “read” this novel as an audiobook, on my daily long commute to and from work. Part of my pleasure in listening came from its being read so incredibly skillfully – with none of the mispronounced Punjabi or Urdu words one sometimes encounters in audiobook versions of South Asian themed stories. It wasn’t until I reached the acknowledgments track at the very end of the last CD that I realized the audiobook was done by the author himself; Ayad Akhtar’s training as an actor and background as a playwright clearly informs his recorded performance of his novel – with emphasis on performance. (As a side note, Akhtar’s play Disgraced was recently performed at Lincoln Center and well-reviewed by the Times.) Many times I felt so drawn into his verbal portrayal of certain scenes that I decided to wait in my driveway or in the parking lot at the university just to hear how a particular crisis moment might end up playing out.

In short, this is a very solid and thought-provoking debut novel and a definite contribution to the rather short list of really good novels about South Asian diaspora life. The audiobook version is so good that it might even be recommended above the text version of the novel.  

On Teaching Blogging in a College Classroom (a Response to Gawker)

Gawker has one of those sneering snarky posts that seems to be giving everyone a good chuckle this morning:

So then, it's a new academic program straight outta Duke University: "Write(H)ers," which will, according to the Duke Chronicle, "create a community of feminist-oriented writers," by, you know, teaching women how to blog. Specifically—direct quote—"The 23 members of the program will participate in personal blogging." This new program is officially sponsored by the Women's Center at Duke University, a school with a tuition of $43,623 per year.

As strong supporters of feminist-oriented writers and bloggers, let us be very clear: this is a total fucking scam. (Source)

Whenever you want to make something unconventional at an elite university sound ridiculous, all you have to do is bring up the tuition. Sex week at Yale? They pay $45,000 a year for that? Just about anything college students might do at any such expensive institution could be made to sound ridiculous with that sticker price. Invoking tuition is, in short, an easy rhetorical move (a bit cheap).

Once you get past the tuition shock, the reason Nolan gives for claiming that the new "Write(H)ers" program is a scam? You can also learn how to write online for free -- just by doing it:

The finest bloggers, meaning the finest writers who happen to write primarily online, got good, like every other writer, by reading, and writing. These things—particularly the writing part—can be accomplished for free, without ever paying a penny to Duke or any other university, and without filling out an application form to an academic program. I hear Tumblr.com works well. Contributing "three blog posts over the course of the semester" is not going to help you. Sorry.

It so happens that this spring I am teaching a course called "Writing for the Internet." It is a writing course, and blogging is a major component of what I have been asking my students to do. The platform are using is Tumblr. It actually does work well. You can see what my students are blogging by starting here. We've used Tumblr's Dashboard / social media design to create a "blog circle" -- where everyone in the course follows everyone else.

I do not know enough about the Duke program to defend it directly, though the Duke Chronicle article cited by Gawker does help a little. For one thing, any university education in the humanities is as at least partially about socializing in future professional networks. And an important part of "Write(H)ers" seems to be oriented to just that. The program has several influential feminist bloggers visiting the campus, and students in the program will be interacting with them. The Duke Chronicle has a helpful quote from a participant named Sara Van Name along those lines:

“This program was a dream come true for me because I read a lot of feminist blogs and several of the women who write these blogs now have the opportunity to come to Duke and explain to this new community how to follow in their footsteps,” Van Name said.

Gawker asks whether it's worth their tuition dollars for students to get access to people like Jill Filipovic (of Feministe) or Rebecca Traister (of Salon) by enrolling in this program; I tend to think the answer would have to be yes for those students, especially if down the line they might want to think about writing for Salon, Feministe, Jezebel, etc.

The other question, which of course this snarky post on Gawker won't bother with, really boils down to whether there's any value in teaching writing in a college classroom to begin with. Over the years many successful authors, especially creative writers, have at times made arguments to the effect of: "there's no point teaching writing in a college classroom, you just have to get out there and do it." (Here's a recent one by Anis Shivani.) But for every commercially-successful novelist that has said something along those lines, there are 20 published and well-reviewed literary novelists who make far better salaries teaching in various university MFA programs than they ever would by selling books alone. I would tend to expect that they believe that what they do when they teach writing has value--that writing can, in fact, be taught. (Though perhaps it's right to acknowledge that not everything about good writing can be taught.)

Could you learn to write well entirely on your own? Yes, surely, if you were very motivated. But teaching can also be part of it: there is value added in working with students to help them learn the mechanics of effective sentences, as well as effective and interesting arguments. They could probably learn some of these skills by going out there and trying to blog "for real," but is Hamilton Nolan really going to argue that it hurts them to have help?  Didn't he have his own modes of help as he learned his own chops at Gawker -- for instance from editors at Gawker itself? Professors in writing workshops often approach their task as exactly that: a first editor. In any case, that's the role I have tried to assume for myself this spring, in "Writing for the Internet."

[Update: a friend pointed out to me an additional point, which I had neglected to mention, that the Women's Center at Duke is not an academic program, and that this is not a part of any course curriculum -- it's extra-curricular. ]

The Killing of Sunando Sen Was Not a "Hate Crime"

The death of Sunando Sen was tragic. For people who ride the subway everyday in New York City or other cities, the second incident of a subway pushing in a month is also frightening -- an Erika Menendez could be anywhere. I have heard at least a few friends in New York mention to me that of late they have started standing further back on platforms for fear of being pushed. 

One thing the subway pushing is not is a hate crime. It is true that Ms. Menendez said some hateful things about Muslims after being picked up by police, but I would argue that because she is so evidently disturbed, her statement is immaterial.

People who defend the use of the hate crime label for this tragic death argue 1) that it matters from the point of view of potential victims of other hate crimes: we have to watch out in case someone else does the same thing. They also argue 2) that her particular fixation on Muslims (and Hindus) comes out of a climate of racial and religious intimidation. She may be mentally ill, but anti-Muslim sentiments are so readily available that there was, in effect, a "ready made" group for her to hate.

Let us deal with point (1) first. To me, what's clear from this killing is that the issue should be the way the U.S. handles severely mental ill people in general. There is no evidence that Ms. Menendez had a history of racial or religious animus (and as anyone who has ever followed a case related to hate crimes surely knows, this matters). Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that she was a violent and severely disturbed person, and she might well have targeted anybody at all; her targeting of Mr. Sen might well have been arbitrary. It's also probably worth mentioning at this point that her comments were actually pretty incoherent: was she targeting Mr. Sen because she thought he was a Muslim? Why then did she later say she hated both Hindus and Muslims? This is a very unusual pairing to pick as targets. (While one can easily imagine hatred of either religious group individually, it's unusual to have both without the additional presence of generalized xenophobia. And yet in her statement to police, Menendez didn't mention anything about immigrants, dark-skinned immigrants, etc.)

Along those lines, here are a few paragraphs from the New York Times article dealing with Ms. Menendez's mental history:

There were ample warnings over the years concerning Ms. Menendez. 

In 2003, according to the police, she attacked another stranger, Daniel Conlisk, a retired firefighter, as he took out his garbage in Queens. 

“I was covered with blood,” Mr. Conlisk recalled on Sunday. “She was screaming the whole time.” 

Just two months earlier, Ms. Menendez was accused of hitting and scratching another man in Queens. She was also arrested on cocaine possession charges the same year. 

Since then, according to friends and people familiar with her record, she has been cared for at mental health facilities in Manhattan and Queens as her problems worsened. 

Between 2005 and February this year, the police responded five times to calls from relatives reporting difficulties in dealing with Ms. Menendez, reportedly stemming from her failure to take certain medication, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly about her medical history. In one of these instances, in 2010, she threw a radio at one of the responding officers, the official said.

 “She has been in and out of institutions,” another law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Within the past year, she was discharged from Bellevue, according to a person with knowledge of her medical history. (link)

Note the random nature of her targets, particularly the guy (who I'm presuming is Caucasian) who was violently attacked while just taking out his trash.

People more experienced with this subject than I am have also pointed in this direction following other attacks by mentally ill people where a "hate" dimension was involved. In June, 2011, Eugene O'Donnell of the John Jay College of Law, published the following comments in the New York Times:

It is impossible to ignore the mental health dimension in the Holocaust Museum attack and an earlier assault at the Federal Reserve headquarters by James von Brunn. There may also be serious mental health issues with Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. Tiller.  

There is a gaping hole in our mental health infrastructure which will not be easy to fill, but needs urgent examination and action. Far too many potentially dangerous people are left to fend for themselves. Even when there are concerned family members or friends in their lives, these guardians are often worn out from trying to help, or do not know where to get dependable care.

We continue to leap at the chance to declare actions criminal despite the fact that attacks like this museum shooting are rooted in an extremely irrational and bizarre world view, and are thus outside the scope of traditional criminal notions of “punishment” and “correction.” And of course, even where the criminal justice system is utilized, extended post-release mental health supervision needs to explored, in some cases for the whole life of the ex-convict. (link)

In short, what Sunando Sen's death reminds us is that we need to be focused on the American mental health system, particularly the metrics and regulations governing how potentially violent individuals can be involuntarily committed to mental health institutions. (This was also apparently an issue in the truly horrible shootings in Newtown Connecticut a few weeks ago.) This is not a matter of simple criminality because people this disturbed are not committing "crimes" based on rational motives -- which are the basis of any theory of criminal law. As Professor O'Donnell points out here, the concepts of "punishment" and "correction" are also inapplicable in such cases.

Attempts to label the killing of Sunando Sen a hate crime imbue a sense of rationality and motive to Ms. Menendez that does not exist, if her prior history is any indication. The labeling of Sunando Sen's death as a hate crime also weakens and cheapens the real problem of violence motivated by hatred of religious and racial minorities.  It gives the appearance that community advocates may be overplaying their hand, which, just a few months after the ghastly shooting at the Gurdwara in Oak Creek Wisconsin, they surely do not need to do.

There is a legitimate question about whether the general cultural climate in the United States at present makes it easy for mentally deranged individuals to pick up on it and deploy anti-Islamic or anti-immigrant sentiments and use them as channels for violent and anti-social behavior (see point 2 above). However, if this is a cultural problem, it likely needs a cultural, rather than a legal, solution.

Americans might be justified in feeling a bit afraid riding the subway after events such as the killing of Sunando Sen. But South Asians in particular are mistaken if they feel this attack is directed at them. It really affects all Americans, and will continue to do so as long as the American mental health system remains broken. 

Notes on MLA 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has already put up some stories about MLA 2013, including this article covering the growing attention payed to "Alt Ac" (Alternative academia) career tracks, and this one focusing on the general theme for the conference, "Avenues of Access," which was explored by the MLA's President, Michael Berube in his address, as well as in numerous presidential forums interspersed throughout the conference that focused on facets of "Access" broadly construed. (The panels on that theme were on everything from "Open Access" journals, to questions of access and diversity in the Digital Humanities, to disability studies.)

I would recommend the above Chronicle links (not paywalled, I don't think) for anyone looking for a general sense of the MLA this year. (Update: or check out this link at Inside Higher Ed, on the MLA's Big [Digital] Tent.)

Below are my own particular notes on the panels that I ended up attending, starting with the one I organized. My goal in writing these notes is not to "opinionate" about the papers or evaluate them, but rather to simply give some thumbnail sketches, and maybe offer up a link or two for people interested in these topics who weren't able to attend. The notes and links are also, needless to say, for myself -- there's lots of "further reading" for me to do in the links and references below.

In general, I attended three "Digital Humanities" panels, two panels related to South Asian literature, one panel on modern Anglo-Irish literature, a panel on "Public Poetry," and a panel on Modern British Literature and the State. I also branched out a bit from my core interests and saw a panel on 19th century American literature ("Secularism's Technologies"), which featured both Michael Warner and Amy Hollywood -- two scholars I admire -- talking about secularism.

Click on "Read More" to read my notes on the panels I attended.

Debating "La Bayadere" a bit on Tumblr: Exoticism, Orientalism, etc.

I came upon this string of comments related to the above animated Gifs on Tumblr:

1/5. Why you should see “La Bayadere”

The drama: Love triangle story that ends in death

yroymustang:

warcrimenancydrew:

searchingforknowledge:

crackerhell:

inheritedloss:

i was extremely confused and for a minute i’m like

why would all these indian people have white makeup on

then i realized it was just white people

and now i has a sad

op means why you should NOT see this pos right?!!

where’s the section called “the racism”?

My first reaction was “Oh look, only white passing Indi… WAIT, THOSE ARE WHITE PEOPLE REPRESENTING MY CULTURE!”. White people representing my culture, I am not surprised, I’m merely mildly infuriated. 

Here were my own thoughts on seeing the above:

First, I respect the reaction, and believe me this bothers me a fair bit as well. 

But we can do more than simply label it "racism." Are we unhappy because these are white dancers performing Indian characters, or because of the whole context of this ballet -- including its original choreographer (the Russian Marius Patipa), as well as the modern choreographers and designers who have produced the Paris Opera Ballet's 2012 version (from which these Gifs are derived)?

This is a ballet called La Bayadere, first performed in 1877. It's part of a long tradition in European high art of using "exotic" Indian themes and settings with all white casts. (Another classic example is the opera Lakme.) It was produced as a reaction to a visit from real temple dancers to Russia in the 1870s. 

Such stories are usually based on actual Indian sources. While there are many elements of La Bayadere that are clearly historically inaccurate (a Rajah's daughter would never be involved in dancing publicly, as the character does in this ballet), it's not entirely out of the question that a story like this could be recuperated and rethought to make it more relevant and 'true' to real Indian culture. 

A future version, for example, might rework some of the original choreography using elements from classical Indian dance formats. And yes, use dancers of Indian origin. (Presumably one reason why they might not be casting any Indian dancers is that there may not be very many who are trained at this level in western ballet. If they change some of the choreography to include Indian classical dance, the complexion of the cast could look very different.)

In short, I'm not thrilled about what I'm seeing in the images above, but maybe this Gif series might be an opportunity to get educated, not just mad. 

Das Racist: Shutting Up and Sitting Down

So: Das Racist has split up.

I have mixed feelings about it. As an Indian American kid raised on hip hop in the 1980s and 90s, I was for a while quite taken by the promise of a rap group with two Indian-American members suddenly becoming famous (cover of Spin! K Mart commercials!), even if they were a generation younger than me. But I was also often frustrated with their choices and actual performances (i.e., the terrible performance on Conan), and in some ways I'm not really that surprised or unhappy they've broken up.  Below I have some thoughts about what I really liked about Das Racist and what I also didn't like; and I end with some unsolicited "uncle-ish" advice for the Sepia-toned trio that they can take or leave.

* * *

I've been aware of Das Racist since Abhi blogged about them on Sepia Mutiny in 2009, though truth be told I didn't actually bother to click on the link & listen until Phillygrrl did her two-part interview (Part 1; Part 2) with Himanshu Suri that September.

I also saw the band perform exactly once, at the Roots Picnic in June 2010 (an event that was photographed and described a little [not by me] here). I meant to write something about my thoughts after that event but didn't. Briefly now: I thought the rise of a rap group with a strong Indian-American presence was kind of amazing, and I wanted to love them -- but the actual live performance was a little disappointing. By that point I had been enthusiastically listening to band's mixtape, "Shut Up, Dude," for a few weeks, and even knew some of the verses to songs like "Ek Shaneesh" by heart.

But at the DR show I went to the sound levels were set so high that it was impossible to hear any actual lyrics. And Heems, Kool A.D., and Dapwell just seemed to be running around the stage like maniacs--not working at all to win over the crowd or draw in potential new fans. DR was followed that afternoon by a Black Thought side project (Money Making Jam Boys), and you could instantly see the difference between Das Racist's self-referential, semi-comic "rap in quotation marks" and the serious posture and delivery style of Black Thought and his peers. Black Thought seemed to care about what he was saying and wanted the audience to hear it and understand it; to my eye, that afternoon, Das Racist did not.

Of course, Das Racist has been, from the beginning, as much interested in commenting on rap music and hip hop culture as they have been in actively participating in it. Even the band's name refers to a famous  MTV meme from 2005 (the band was clearly ahead of the curve in naming themselves after a meme that involved a Gif!). Also, their debut track, "Pizza Hut/Taco Bell," was intended as a kind of clowning version of a rap song, and several of the band's songs on "Shut Up, Dude" seemed to "do" rap more referentially than literally. (The most compelling of these efforts is of course, "Fake Patois," which is beautifully explained and decoded via crowdsourced hypertext links at Rapgenius.)

Still, you can only get so far in rap -- a medium that prizes authenticity and the singularity of the voice (even if those values are present more in the breach than in the observance) -- while performing as a kind of postmodernist simulacrum of a rap group. Either you have to start being real and aim to have an actual career in the music industry, or the joke has to end.

I don't want to suggest that Das Racist didn't write some really amazing lyrics. On their recordings they seem to take their task quite seriously, writing witty and even, sometimes, brilliant verses.

Good vibes PMA
Yeah, believe that
Listening to Three Stacks, reading Gaya spivak
Listening to KMD and feeling weird about Naipaul
Fly or Style Warz, war-style Warsaw
Listening to jams with they pops about dem batty boys
Listening to  Cam while I'm reading Arundhati Roy
Yeah, yeah my pops drove a cab, holmes,
Now I drop guap just to bop in the cab home
[Again, see Rapgenius for help decoding some of the obscure references here]

Seeing the references to Gayatri Spivak, V.S. Naipaul, and Arundhati Roy alongside Andre 3000, Cam'ron, and the notorious homophobia of dancehall reggae all in seven short, witty lines is pretty exhilarating. (Not to mention the element of personal biography: Himanshu's father did briefly drive a taxi when he first came to the U.S.)

In a way I am the perfect listener for this sort of song -- as a postcolonial theory scholar and old school hip hop fan, I'm exactly the kind of person who, in college and then graduate school, might have been culturally multitasking on precisely these terms. At some point, I'm pretty sure I've listened to Illmatic or Enter the Wu-Tang while also trying to figure out Homi Bhabha's frequently baffling Location of Culture or Spivak's even more baffling Critique of Postcolonial Reason (interestingly, both hip hop and postcolonial theory can involve readers & listeners hustling to get to the bottom of deeply obscure references).

Despite the exhilarating moments, in the end I often felt a little let down by Das Racist tracks, mainly because the political self-consciousness and desire for critique seemed to lose out to a broader enthusiasm for lazier reference points: the banalities of middle-class American consumer culture, and of course the endless references to weed and booze. The booze in particular often troubles me (I'm agnostic on the weed), especially since so many accounts of Das Racist performances in recent years have described the trio as drunk on stage (Google "Das Racist drunk" to see what I mean). From Das Racist I wanted to hear more songs like "Ek Shaneesh" and "Fake Patois" and fewer that contained verses like this one:

Finna spark an L and have myself a Big Mac Attack
Known to rock the flyest shit and and eat the best pizza
Charge that shit to Mastercard, already owe Visa
Catch me drinking lean in Italy like I was Pisa
We could eat the flyest cage-aged cheese for sheez, ma
[Rapgenius]

Pizza, big macs, mastercard, visa, the leaning tower of Pisa... Oy, vey. Can we go back to talking about Arundhati Roy, Gary Soto, and Junot Diaz again? I was feeling that more.

To his credit, Himanshu has taken an approach on his solo mixtapes that seems a little more serious. There were the amazing Punjabi tracks on Nehru Jackets, for one thing (see especially "Chakklo," track 15).  But even more than that I was impressed by the searing condemnation of police brutality and corruption in "NYC Cops" (see Rap Genius again), which suggested, for a minute anyways, that Himanshu might be growing out of the consumerist small talk.

Himanshu's second mixtape, Wild Water Kingdom, wasn't quite as strong as Nehru Jackets overall, though I did think the track "Soup Boys," which samples the viral Indian pop hit, "Why this Kolaveri Di?" and nicely mixes the postmodernist randomness of Das Racist with elements of protest and critique (drone warfare, Islamaphobia, Hinduphobia... lyrics at Rapgenius).  Much of the rest of the mixtape, unfortunately, doesn't sound too great -- on several tracks, Himanshu's voice sounds ragged and hoarse, like he's been yelling too much. (Time to give the vocal chords a little rest?)

There's another story here too, which has to do with the way the band treats its women fans. A few weeks ago, a young woman in Iowa posted a pretty horrifying account of the band visiting her town to do a show on her Tumblr blog. It's an unverified [edit: uncorroborated] account, of course, and one should probably take the specific details with a grain of salt. Still, the picture it presents, of a booze-driven group of guys aggressively hitting on (or sexually harassing) female fans suggests a band culture that is seriously out of whack.

If this is what Das Racist is really like, then I can't help but be a little glad that they're calling it quits. Time to take some time off: sit down for a little, dudes. Put down your drinks and your ells. Reconsider. Then start again. 

Bal Thackeray: Not to be Mourned, Not to be Honoured

Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray has died. Some Indians will only remember him as a "great man" who founded and led a regional political party.

This is unfortunate, because he had the blood of more than a 1000 souls -- mostly Muslims -- on his hands. He should not be mourned, should not be honoured.

In particular, he played a key role in the riots of 1992-3 in Bombay. Here is a little bit describing his actions using evidence gathered by the government's Srikrishna Commission later:

The Srikrishna Report is clear just where the blame lies for the 1992-1993 riots. On the basis of the welter of evidence before him, the Judge concluded that "the communal passions of the Hindus were aroused to fever pitch by the inciting writings in (th e) print media, particularly Saamna and Navakal." "From 8th January 1993 at least," he concluded, "there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in organising attacks on Muslims and their properties from the level of Shakha Pramukh to the Shiv Sena Pramukh Bal Thackeray who, like a veteran General, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organised attacks against Muslims." He blamed "effete political leadership, vacillation for political reasons and conflicti ng orders issued to the Commissioner of Police" for the State's failure to contain the attacks on Mumbai's Muslims. 

Justice Srikrishna's observations were based on the mass of evidence before him. Dozens of witnesses before the Commission identified Shiv Sainiks as those who attacked them. Reshma Umar Makki, who converted to Islam when she married Umar Makki, had to h ide her husband when a mob of Shiv Sena workers attacked her home on January 9, 1993. Two days later, another vigilante group broke into her home, and "abused her as to why she got married to a 'landya', and whether all Hindus were dead." "She identified the mob," the Report records, "as comprising inmates of Andhra Chawl, out of whom she clearly recognised Umesh, a Shiv Sainik living near Sundar Hotel. He and three to four other boys entered her house, placed a chopper on her head, and threatened her that, if she spoke up, she would be stripped, raped and killed."

SOURCE: http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1716/17160110.htm

"The Gotham"

My son created the image below, with no help or oversight from me, via a website called Weavesilk.com. He decided he wanted to call the image "The Gotham," for reasons I couldn't quite fathom. Click on the image to see a larger version:

Click here to try it.

Beyond "We Take Care of Our Own": Hopes for Obama's Second Term

As the confetti fell last night after Barack Obama's acceptance speech just after 2am, viewers at home were treated to the familiar sounds of a Bruce Springsteen song: "We Take Care of Our Own."



Though the Obama campaign's official Spotify playlist contained a number of other inspiring songs from diverse genres, including country, pop, hip hop, and R&B, it will be "We Take Care of Our Own" that will go down as the campaign song of 2012. (Sorry Chubb Rock!)

"We Take Care of Our Own," despite its powerful chorus, is somewhat of an unusual choice to be an uplifting anthem. Like that other great Springsteen anthem with a killer chorus ("Born in the U.S.A."), its patriotic language and tone is countered by a deep sense of tragedy and failure recounted in the verses of the song itself. Let's start with the second verse of the song:

From Chicago to New Orleans
From the muscle to the bone
From the shotgun shack to the Super Dome
There aint no help, the cavalry stayed home
There aint no one hearing the bugle blowin' 

We take are of our own

Where ever this flag is flown

Of course, the clear historical reference point here is 2005 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which left tens of thousands of people in New Orleans stranded, without basic supplies or help, for an unconscionably long time. It was one of the lowest, most shameful moments I can remember from the past decade -- a national trauma that I don't think Americans have really worked through fully enough.

So when the chorus kicks in: "We take care of our own," there's a sense of irony. In fact, in 2005, under George Bush's FEMA, we actually didn't take care of our own at all. The chorus is therefore partly a rebuke for that failure, not just a clean statement of a compassionate ethos.

Now take the third verse:

Where're the eyes, the eyes with the will to see
Where're the hearts that run over with mercy
Where's the love that has not forsaken me
Where's the work that'll set my hands, my soul free
Where's the spirit to reign, reign over me
Where's the promise, from sea to shining sea
Where's the promise, from sea to shining sea
Wherever this flag is flown

For me this is the most moving and interesting part of the song. The series of rhetorical questions starts out implying that a crucial part of the American dream has been neglected: as in, "Where are the eyes with the will to see?" But of course, there's just enough hope in the lines to forestall an utterly bleak posture, and as the verse progresses the questions start to become answers. Lines like "Where's the love that has not forsaken me" and "Where's the spirit to reign, reign over me" suggest that a constructive, transformative energy (the "spirit") keeps us from falling over the cliff. Where is the love? Where is the spirit? Why, it's here in this song. It's in Bruce Springsteen. (And the Obama campaign wants to say: it's here too, in our campaign, in our candidate.)

So the chorus can be positive and constructive despite the evidence given in the verses of the song suggesting that there might not be much reason to hope that "We take care of our own" is a promise that anyone is actually interested in fulfilling. (And if you listen to the rest of the songs on Springsteen's "Wrecking Ball" or his earlier album "The Rising," there is plenty of bleakness to be found. See for instance, "Death to my hometown.")

One hopes that the sense of the vision of compassion in the United States encapsulated by "We Take Care of Our Own" turns out to be true in Barack Obama's second term. In the first four years of the Obama presidency, there were some signs that it was -- Health Care reform, the various efforts taken to rescue the economy from the brink of disaster -- but also a certain worrying coziness with regards to the Obama administration's alignment with corporate interests and the financial industry. (Will Obama's response to the recent "Superstorm Sandy" be appreciably better than George Bush's response to Katrina? I hope so, but time will tell.)

And I have a deeper frustration with "We Take Care of Our Own" that isn't just about the ideological question of whether the United States is a society that believes "we're all in this together" or "you're on your own" (to reprise one of Obama's standard talking points). As a person whose family originates in India, I can't help but wonder about the nearly seven billion people in the world who don't count as "our own." Do we, as the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, have any obligation to those who live, and sometimes struggle, under flags that are not the American flag? 

I admire "We Take Care of Our Own" and the other recession-era anthems on Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball. And I remain a pretty passionate supporter of Barack Obama, while recognizing his limits and flaws. But when I hear the chorus of this song, part of me is always held back from fully embracing it by its grammar. The truth is, "we take care of our own" simply isn't enough for me. 

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 hoping that his international connections and background -- a father from Kenya, years spent living abroad in Indonesia -- might lead to a new kind of transnational understanding and a shifting away from the rhetoric of American exceptionalism in our foreign policy. But that hasn't happened (though admittedly, during this past campaign it would have been politically suicidal for Obama to make any noises in this direction). I believe the United States has an obligation to take care of its own, but I also firmly believe in the obligation of privileged countries to try and better the circumstances of people living in poorer countries. 

Can we still get there? My hopes for the foreign policy agenda of the second Obama administration might entail: 1) rethinking the disastrous "no distance from Israel" policy that has led to a complete stalemate in progress towards a two-state solution (while the Palestinians continue to suffer under occupation); 2) rethinking the drone war and targeted assassinations in Pakistan and Afghanistan;  3) rethinking the approach to "American jobs" that means that jobs, growth, and development in other countries -- such as China and India -- is only registered a bad thing or a loss for Americans; and 4) a serious investment in working to combat global climate change.

Yesterday, a UC Irvine professor named Mark LeVine published a hard-hitting essay on Aljazeera.net arguing that in actuality Barack Obama doesn't really get the Bruce Springsteen whose message he exploits -- that he doesn't deserve the mantle of a populist or the embrace of the guy who wrote "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

I am more upbeat on Obama than Professor LeVine -- I do hope that President Obama, in his second term, might earn and fulfill the promise of compassion to American citizens that Bruce Springsteen represents. But I hope he'll go beyond the Boss as well: we take care of every one.