NPR : India Benefiting from Reverse Migration.
America's loss.
"Just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else." --Toni Morrison
Church and State in Italy
It seems to run much more smoothly than in the U.S.. Two interesting quotes:
And also:
I could live with that.
Abortion is legal here and not much debated anymore. Yet religious sentiment runs deep enough that Friday night comes in Italy with the adventures of Don Matteo, handsome crime-solving priest. One study, in fact, showed that 27 percent of all protagonists on public television are priests, nuns or saints (though it is also hard to ignore that other large percentage on Italian television: near-naked women).
And also:
--Perhaps the most Catholic politician in Italy is not a conservative, as might be expected in America, but Romano Prodi, the former European Union chief and leader of the center-left.
--Italians routinely ignore the conservative Pope John Paul II in matters of private morality, like contraception, divorce or marriage (far fewer Italians are marrying, in the church or out), but admire him deeply for his stands on issues like caring for the poor or his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq, unpopular in Europe.
--Crucifixes may hang in public schools, but without the heavy political overtones that come with displays of, say, the Ten Commandments in public places in America.
I could live with that.
Delinquent Chacha, by Ved Mehta
Delinquent Chacha - Ved Mehta. The Complete Review has read this novel, not me.
This blog post is just an excuse to savor (and promulgate) the title. You can also see the original cover of the novel at vedmehta.com.
[BTW A 'Chacha' is a younger paternal uncle]
This blog post is just an excuse to savor (and promulgate) the title. You can also see the original cover of the novel at vedmehta.com.
[BTW A 'Chacha' is a younger paternal uncle]
Rushdie Praises Urban Grime, Tired Princeton Students Remain Awake
Via the Literary Saloon, I read this article in the Daily Princetonian about Salman Rushdie's recent visit there.
Hard not to agree.
"I almost have an ideology of dirt," he said. "Whenever anybody wants to 'clean things up' -- ethnic cleansing, for example -- people start dying. What we need is a little dirt. Cities are more dirty, and therefore more democratic and freer."
Hard not to agree.
Overworked Software Engineers Unite!
In Salon: "keyboard jockeys" at Electronic Arts are filing a class action lawsuit to get back pay of thousands of hours of uncompensated overtime.
As much as we academics like to complain about overwork, it's people in high tech who really get stuck with it. (Doctors and lawyers too, but that much we already knew.) Academics work plenty (sometimes), but we have the small side-benefit that -- at least in the humanities -- we can do much of our work from home.
But regarding the EA employees, is any of this legally actionable? I'm skeptical. Judging from the Salon article, at most they can get compensation, and even that is questionable, since California exempts computer programmers from laws limiting overtime. Interestingly, the best shot legally for the EA employees filing the suit is if their work is considered part of the entertainment industry -- in which case the exemptions to overtime laws don't apply.
Note to software friends: you might have less difficulty with these things if you had unions...
(Then again, I'm an academic. What's a union?)
As much as we academics like to complain about overwork, it's people in high tech who really get stuck with it. (Doctors and lawyers too, but that much we already knew.) Academics work plenty (sometimes), but we have the small side-benefit that -- at least in the humanities -- we can do much of our work from home.
But regarding the EA employees, is any of this legally actionable? I'm skeptical. Judging from the Salon article, at most they can get compensation, and even that is questionable, since California exempts computer programmers from laws limiting overtime. Interestingly, the best shot legally for the EA employees filing the suit is if their work is considered part of the entertainment industry -- in which case the exemptions to overtime laws don't apply.
Note to software friends: you might have less difficulty with these things if you had unions...
(Then again, I'm an academic. What's a union?)
According to your latest novel, you have Alzheimer's
Iris Murdoch's last novel, in comparison to her early works, shows a reduced vocabulary and simplified verbal patterns that point to early Alzheimer's.
I guess it holds together, but this type of study still makes me feel a little queasy.
I guess it holds together, but this type of study still makes me feel a little queasy.
International AIDS Day. And, some unhappy anniversaries.
International AIDS Day. India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV, which is the second most in the world after South Africa. (Also see Crooked Timber)
No one really knows how many people are infected with the disease in China.
We are also approaching the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster at Bhopal, where 2,000 people died immediately (and 6,000 would soon die of injuries), and where no one -- still -- has been brought to justice. (See Sepia Mutiny)
And just a month ago was the 20th anniversary of the assasination of Indira Gandhi, which was followed by widespread communal violence against Sikhs in India.
1984: a really, really, really bad year. (I haven't even mentioned what was happening in Sri Lanka... or Northern Ireland... or Ethiopia)
2004: not so great either.
No one really knows how many people are infected with the disease in China.
We are also approaching the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster at Bhopal, where 2,000 people died immediately (and 6,000 would soon die of injuries), and where no one -- still -- has been brought to justice. (See Sepia Mutiny)
And just a month ago was the 20th anniversary of the assasination of Indira Gandhi, which was followed by widespread communal violence against Sikhs in India.
1984: a really, really, really bad year. (I haven't even mentioned what was happening in Sri Lanka... or Northern Ireland... or Ethiopia)
2004: not so great either.
Harvard Law Professor is Unseasonably Optimistic
William Stuntz is an Evangelical and a Law Professor at Harvard. In this column in Tech Central Station he argues that the Red-Blue divide might not be so very great, particularly on the question of Evangelical Christians.
He has some decent insights along the way on the substantial similarities between University rituals and Church rituals. Universities are, indeed, still a bit churchy at times. (To Stuntz's points of comparison, I would add: the religious origin of the words "Dean" and "Canon," and the pseudo-priestly get-up worn at graduation.) Stuntz reads these similarities of ethos, ritual performance, and intellectual bent as signs that Evangelicals and University Professors might one day soon be holding hands again. It's all fine -- if a little sketchy, except for one glaring puddle of lump: he just isn't convincing at all on the question of how to get over the abortion divide.
These men and women vote Republican not because they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and hope for the best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In evangelical churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.
That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe -- and I think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.
Nice try, but I don't see it. Is he suggesting that the way for Dems. to win the hearts and minds of Evangelical Christians is to a) give up on abortion rights, and b) go all out for the redistribution of wealth?
Thanks to Tyler for the tip.
Melvin Durai, humorist: Indian accents and airplane passengers
Via Sepiamutiny, I read a self-deprecating piece of satire by Melvin Durai about Indian accents. Certainly, Indian accents come in for a lot of ridicule. (Meanwhile, Colin Farrell's overrated incomprehensible mumbling is considered "sexy")
But I have two small objections. 1) Some of us actually like Indian accents! And, 2) there are different kinds of Indian accents, depending on what Indian language a person speaks primarily. Gujurati speakers speak English quite differently from Tamil speakers. Also, a person's class-background and education make a huge difference. The bottom line is, the nasal/musical sounding Indian accent that many American comedians make fun of doesn't sound at all like most of the Indians-from-India I know.
You may or may not like Durai's piece on Indian accents (I'm not very fond of it). But at Durai's website you can find links to other columns he's written. Some are pretty funny. I like the following paragraph from this column on airplane security:
I'd like to draw your attention to the back of the plane, where you'll see that we have an Indian man flying with us today. Please do not panic. He has been through a special 16-hour security check. We even tested the oil in his hair. You'll be glad to know that it isn't flammable. Among the items we've confiscated from this man are two sharp pencils, one orange and a bottle of a caustic, tongue-burning substance that he claims is lemon pickle. Anyway, I just want you to know that this man will soon get up to use the restroom, escorted by three armed flight marshals. His activities in the restroom will be observed with 206 cameras, one for every bone in his body. He has been instructed to keep his hands raised above his head at all times, so you might not want to use the restroom after him.
Ah, the joys of Flying While Brown.
By the way, I met Melvin Durai a few years ago, when I gave a lecture on the history of Sikhs in America at a Sikh youth camp in Pennsylvania. (This was back in my "Sikh American pride" phase; I'm over it now.) He reported it for the local newspaper, and quoted me. I gave out a handout with information drawn from this UC Davis website.
India’s first Professional DJ Academy
Via BoingBoing.
There is an article in Mid-Day about DJ Nasha, who is starting India's first professional DJ academy. The reference to drug abuse is just kind of silly.
There is also a link to a DJ Nasha audio session on BBC that I haven't listened to yet (I never got around to installing RealPlayer in my office).
New Naipaul Book Chases Old Scapegoats
James Atlas reviews Naipaul's new book, Magic Seeds, in the New York Times. He writes at length about Naipaul's career before finally revealing a plot summary that resembles about a dozen of Naipaul's other books. For me, the key moment in the review is the paragraph where Atlas acknowledges that this novel is in fact not so different from many others Naipaul has written:
What is the significance of these corrupt revolutionaries in Naipaul's work? Why do they weigh so heavily on his mind? My own surmise is that they represent the reverse of his own response to statelessness. Not that Naipaul is a supplicant, eager to erase all traces of his origins and become a lord dozing in his armchair at the Athenaeum; he has maintained his independence with fierce pride. Rather, he deplores their nihilism; its futility humiliates and enrages him. ''Sometimes in a storm beautiful old trees are uprooted,'' says Willie's sister, Sarojini. For Naipaul, the answer to rootlessness is not to mindlessly uproot, but to nurture one's own identity -- to plant.
I don't buy it. I am more pro-Naipaul than many of my colleagues. I have written several papers on him; there is a section of my book on his changing relationship to secularism. But there is no excuse for writing the same book a dozen times. Also: How is the idea of middle-class Europeans (or westernized third world intellectuals) joining third-world revolutionary struggles relevant to our era? I can't see it. And who is this writer who favors the "nurturing of one's own identity"? It isn't Naipaul -- no way, no how.
Spoons Collective Shutting Down; Group blog idea
The Spoons Collective is shutting down. Spoons is a collection of academic "theory" listservs that has been running since the mid-1990s. Here is an excerpt from an email I received from Malgosa Askanas, the sole remaining founder of the Collective -- who is taking responsibility for the decision to shut it down:
I have been a subsrcriber to the Spoons Postcolonial list off and on since probably about 1995 or 1996. Early on (I was just starting my Master's work at Tufts in the fall of 1995), I found the list exhilarating. It was also a little dangerous, as discussions with people from incredibly various backgrounds, many of whom were anonymous, often tended to get out of hand. I know of at least one case where someone's academic career was seriously threatened by a comment posted to the postcolonial list! The flame wars led me to unsubscribe from the list, I thought, for good, about three years ago.
But I relented and re-subscribed a year ago, only to find that the list had become boring and superfluous. At some point a couple of years ago, the decision was made to make the list a moderated one, which is an improvement in that it dramatically cut down on useless posts that cluttered my inbox, as well as the kind of ad-hominem attacks that made me want to mass-delete. But because the moderator generally takes a week to ten days to approve emails sent to the list, it often feels pointless to post anything. By the time an interesting nugget on something actually appears, it is quite possibly fully obsolete.
Why listservs are bad. Now the list is shutting down, and frankly I won't miss it. Listservs at their best are a little frustrating. Information and arguments come at you in bits and pieces; most of it gets read quickly, when it's not instantly delected in the interest of reducing Inbox spam and clutter. And at their worst listservs are the worst kind of "info-noise." Blogs and internet forums are much more useful, first because they are 'pull' resources -- that you only go to by choice. They are also fully public, searchable, and pretty user-friendly. In addition to providing the opportunity to connect with other scholars (professional internet sociality), they are permanent, public resources that potentially benefit all kinds of people. And blog/discussion board comments that can be organized by thread (thematically) are miles above the endless disorganized patter of emails that arrive one by one (chronologically).
Finally, listservs preserve a centralized and overly taxonomic model of academic conversation. They encourage segregation by period as well as discipline. Hyperlinked and search-engine friendly resources, by contrast, are potentially much better at enabling conversations to happen according to elective affinity. Subscribers to the postcolonial list, for instance, are divided between people who are associated (as scholars and activists) with the critique of globalization and "American Empire" on the one hand, and those who are interested in postcolonial literature purely as a professional and scholarly pursuit on the other. There is some overlap between the two, but in my own case I prefer to keep "politics" separate from "knowledge." I'm interested in what the folks whose primary motivation as academics and intellectuals is to fight globalization and "American Imperialism" have to say -- and at some moments I find myself agreeing with their arguments and supporting their causes. But it's not really what I'm interested in using electronic communication on the Internet for.
Rhizomes are better. I believe that Postcolonial Studies is too big. It needs to divide at least in half (politics on one side; historicist scholarship on the other), and probably more than that. At the same time, the ideas associated with it are deeply intertwined with any number of academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. Conversations could be at once less taxonomically determined and more complex and heterogeneous; they could be, in short, more rhizomatic.
Group Blog idea. As my final post to the postcolonial list, I suggested starting a group postcolonial studies blog, with a focus on news and current events of interest to postcolonial scholars. I have some ideas about how this might look, but for now I'm simply thinking of it as something that might evolve following the interests of participants. As a starting point, I went ahead and grabbed postcolonial.blogspot.com.
We'll see if anyone bites. Meanwhile, if anyone reading this is a scholar (at any point in your career) who might be interested in collaborating on something like this, please email me or drop a comment below.
Over the years, however, our relationship with our lists gradually changed, and we now find our collective endeavor basically reduced to an indifferent performance of a not-excessively-bothersome piece of labor. The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex - the first and simplest one, perhaps, being that the same group of people has been doing the same thing for 10 years. If our goal had been less the stability of existing lists and more the preservation of our own passion, we probably could have done better. In any case, we find ourselves a bunch of burnt out and apathetic bureaucrats.
I personally find thie prolongation of this situation no longer tolerable or sensical. As a result, I have (1) announced that I am quitting the Spoon Collective; (2) decided to close down a number of lists that I have been responsible for; and (3) declared the end of the Spoon Collective as a certain historic formation, and stipulated that the name no longer be used for whatever the present members may undertake in the future.
I have been a subsrcriber to the Spoons Postcolonial list off and on since probably about 1995 or 1996. Early on (I was just starting my Master's work at Tufts in the fall of 1995), I found the list exhilarating. It was also a little dangerous, as discussions with people from incredibly various backgrounds, many of whom were anonymous, often tended to get out of hand. I know of at least one case where someone's academic career was seriously threatened by a comment posted to the postcolonial list! The flame wars led me to unsubscribe from the list, I thought, for good, about three years ago.
But I relented and re-subscribed a year ago, only to find that the list had become boring and superfluous. At some point a couple of years ago, the decision was made to make the list a moderated one, which is an improvement in that it dramatically cut down on useless posts that cluttered my inbox, as well as the kind of ad-hominem attacks that made me want to mass-delete. But because the moderator generally takes a week to ten days to approve emails sent to the list, it often feels pointless to post anything. By the time an interesting nugget on something actually appears, it is quite possibly fully obsolete.
Why listservs are bad. Now the list is shutting down, and frankly I won't miss it. Listservs at their best are a little frustrating. Information and arguments come at you in bits and pieces; most of it gets read quickly, when it's not instantly delected in the interest of reducing Inbox spam and clutter. And at their worst listservs are the worst kind of "info-noise." Blogs and internet forums are much more useful, first because they are 'pull' resources -- that you only go to by choice. They are also fully public, searchable, and pretty user-friendly. In addition to providing the opportunity to connect with other scholars (professional internet sociality), they are permanent, public resources that potentially benefit all kinds of people. And blog/discussion board comments that can be organized by thread (thematically) are miles above the endless disorganized patter of emails that arrive one by one (chronologically).
Finally, listservs preserve a centralized and overly taxonomic model of academic conversation. They encourage segregation by period as well as discipline. Hyperlinked and search-engine friendly resources, by contrast, are potentially much better at enabling conversations to happen according to elective affinity. Subscribers to the postcolonial list, for instance, are divided between people who are associated (as scholars and activists) with the critique of globalization and "American Empire" on the one hand, and those who are interested in postcolonial literature purely as a professional and scholarly pursuit on the other. There is some overlap between the two, but in my own case I prefer to keep "politics" separate from "knowledge." I'm interested in what the folks whose primary motivation as academics and intellectuals is to fight globalization and "American Imperialism" have to say -- and at some moments I find myself agreeing with their arguments and supporting their causes. But it's not really what I'm interested in using electronic communication on the Internet for.
Rhizomes are better. I believe that Postcolonial Studies is too big. It needs to divide at least in half (politics on one side; historicist scholarship on the other), and probably more than that. At the same time, the ideas associated with it are deeply intertwined with any number of academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. Conversations could be at once less taxonomically determined and more complex and heterogeneous; they could be, in short, more rhizomatic.
Group Blog idea. As my final post to the postcolonial list, I suggested starting a group postcolonial studies blog, with a focus on news and current events of interest to postcolonial scholars. I have some ideas about how this might look, but for now I'm simply thinking of it as something that might evolve following the interests of participants. As a starting point, I went ahead and grabbed postcolonial.blogspot.com.
We'll see if anyone bites. Meanwhile, if anyone reading this is a scholar (at any point in your career) who might be interested in collaborating on something like this, please email me or drop a comment below.
Chokher Bali
In addition to hanging out with family and friends in Maryland, the highlight of the weekend so far has been watching Rituparno Ghosh's art-film Chokher Bali, which is based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore. The key social issue at the core of it is the role of widows in Indian society. There's also lots of good anthropologically-minded details.
This review does justice to the rather intricate plot. The flaw of the film, if there is one, is that it is a little too novelistic; there's lots of dependence on exposition. Some events, also, aren't explained. But it definitely motivates me to go and read the book.
This review does justice to the rather intricate plot. The flaw of the film, if there is one, is that it is a little too novelistic; there's lots of dependence on exposition. Some events, also, aren't explained. But it definitely motivates me to go and read the book.
Race War! .... ?
I'm trying to decide whether this has any merit. Maybe the review doesn't do enough work to make the argument in question coherent?
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