Thoughts on Turning 40: Two Stories of Survival

Internet friends, I'm turning 40. 

I decided not to confine myself today to the brief announcement and smiling picture combo that's kind of the thing to do these days. Part of what's so annoying about social media is how shallow it can be; the need to always project a positive image means we are sometimes just being false.

Today I want to share two stories about two difficult moments I have faced in the past decade. One is my experience with cancer in 2007. The other is the challenge I faced in my bid for academic tenure in 2006-2008. There are morals in both stories that I will give away up-front.

What I took from my experience with cancer is simply this: don’t take your life for granted, it could change radically at any moment. Love the life you have and, as much as you can, the people who are in it.

What I took from my tenure experience was also pretty simple: you can’t go it alone. Your career is definitely your own, and you have to sit down and do real work to succeed (in academia, this is work you often have to do by yourself). But there may be times when you need to ask for help – and depend upon what might turn out to be pretty extraordinary generosity of professional friends, colleagues, and maybe even a few anonymous strangers. That is what I had to learn to accept about academic life: you need to do the work, but you need other people to read it, appreciate it, and vouch for you. To paraphrase the Beatles: you get by with a little help from your friends, colleagues, and advice from the Dean.

Both stories have happy endings. I have been cancer-free for six and a half years, which means I am as close to “cured” as it gets. I received tenure at Lehigh, and continue to enjoy contributing to a department and humanities culture at the university that only seems to get better every year. However, it hasn't always been so sunny on my end of things -- as we'll see.

Call For Papers: "Academic Prose and Its Discontents" (MLA 2015)

I am organizing the following panel for MLA 2015. 

How do academic writers navigate stylistic conventions associated with differing rhetorical contexts? Is academic writing in literary studies a necessary set of conventions to be learned and mastered, or merely an intellectual impediment to be circumvented? Do academic prose conventions, argumentative styles, and specialized jargon help or hinder the effort to “defend the humanities” from the perception that it is under attack from other compartments of the university as well as a broader educational climate that values STEM fields at the expense of the traditional liberal arts?

This set of questions of course has a considerable history. The “bad writing” contest sponsored for some years by Denis Dutton’s Philosophy and Literature became so influential in the late 1990s and early 2000s that it inspired a number of theory luminaries, including Jonthan Culler, Gayatri Spivak, and Judith Butler to respond in a collection of essays called Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford, 2003). Some contributors to the collection (Culler especially) responded to the “Bad Writing” accusation quite directly, while others focused on the value of and context of “difficulty” more generally.

The debate was renewed quite recently in response to an essay by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (“Professors, We Need You!”; February 15, 2014) and a follow-up column by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker (“Why is Academic Writing so Academic?”; February 21, 2014), as well as many responses by practicing academics in the mainstream media, on blogs, as well as Twitter.

Notably, alongside critics of narrowly academic prose (such as Kristof and the New Yorker’s Louis Menand), one also sees academic writers such as Michael Bérubé, who in a variety of rhetorical settings frequently find ways to make difficult concepts in literary theory accessible and relevant to broader social and political debates. This might seem to be another kind of response to criticism such as Kristof’s. What cultural or political work does this sort of “translated” theory do?

This panel, sponsored by the MLA’s Division on Nonfiction Prose, invites arguments and polemics on all sides of this debate.

On the one hand, we are curious to see defenders of academic style argue for the value of academic writing as an aspect of the discipline of literary studies that remains central to the identity of the field. Is it not possible that the stylistic conventions and jargon of literary studies and literary theory are simply a specialized discourse such as may be found in any intellectual discipline? Can we not see “difficulty” in academic prose as requiring a readerly discipline akin to “going to the gym” (as Spivak has described it)?

We would also welcome fresh critiques of the conventions of academic writing from scholars invested in non-traditional modes of writing, including “creative nonfiction,” web publication formats such as blogs, social media, and literary memoirs. How and why do scholars dissent from academic writing conventions? Have the new technologies (i.e., the digital humanities turn) encouraged more experimentation with academic writing conventions?

Prospective panelists are encouraged to be as narrow and focused in their proposals as possible. Owing to limitations of time, papers will likely be limited to twelve minutes, meaning careful focus will be of the essence.

Panel sponsored by the MLA’s division on Nonfiction Prose. Five hundred word abstracts by Monday March 17 to Amardeep Singh: amardeep@gmail.com. Email inquiries welcome.

MLA 2014: Notes and Comments

I was at MLA from the beginning all the way to the end – somehow I managed to draw a panel in the second session of the entire conference on Thursday, and a second panel at the very end of the conference. So I was in Chicago for a full four days.

It was on the whole a good conference for me -- I got to see a number of old friends, eat interesting food, and connect in person with a few people I've only met online. I had a great 'power' lunch with my copanelists where we worked through our issues with the recent "post-secular" turn, and revived my involvement with an anthology project where I had earlier withdrawn my name. I even went to a party...

Just a quick disclaimer about the notes below... I generally try not to give away too much about what panelists were saying in their papers so as not to "jump the gun" on their ideas if and when they are going to be published. My notes below are intended to give readers a quick thumbnail indicating what people were talking about, and maybe a brief comment from me in connection. 

* * *

1914 in 2014: Body of War. #s28

The research on this panel was very solid and the papers were well-researched and interesting. Stuff I wanted to investigate more: H.G. Wells’ World War I novel “Mr. Britling Sees it Through” (1916); Mary Borden, “The Forbidden Zone (1929) – an experimental nurse’s narrative. Another panelist was working on another nurse’s narrative, Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates (available on Gutenberg). The third panelist, David Lubin, was an art historian from Wake Forest University, working on images of plastic surgery. He mentioned Dr. Harold Gillies, the famous plastic surgeon ("the father of plastic surgery") who performed thousands of plastic surgery operations on wounded soldiers during and after the war. Soon afterwards, plastic surgery for cosmetic improvement took off -- especially in the U.S.

One line that stood out to me from Borden: “There are no men here so why should I be a woman?” The panelist (Sarah Cole) was doing some really interesting work with gender in Borden's narrative.

This was also the first time I’d seen Wilfred Owen’s poem “Disabled.”

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. 

About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,
— In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.

Beautiful poem -- not sure how I'd missed it earlier, since I've taught Wilfred Owen numerous times over the years.

Panels at #MLA14 on my radar

I took a few minutes to look at the MLA program for this weekend's conference. The following is as much a bookmark for me to follow as it is a possible guide for other conference-goers.

First, I am presiding over this one:

76. The Manifesto Revisited

http://mla14.org/76
Thursday, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Nonfiction Prose Studies, Excluding Biography and Autobiography. Presiding: Amardeep Singh, Lehigh Univ.

1. "'Mind It Doesn't Bite You': D. H. Lawrence's Obloquy against Psychoanalysis," Tamara Beauchamp, Univ. of California, Irvine

2. "History Repeats as Tragedy: The Algerian Crisis as a 'New' Dreyfus Affair," Roderick Cooke, Haverford Coll.

3. "What We Talk about When We Talk about the Hijab: Alain Badiou's Manifesto on the Headscarf Ban in France," Nagihan Haliloglu, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Univ.

4. "The Premediated Manifesto: On the US Reception of The Coming Insurrection," Daniel Burns, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

I co-organized this with Roderick Cooke of Haverford. I think there are some very interesting papers here; hopefully we will have a good crowd.

Reagan and Apartheid -- a Few Reflections

When Nelson Mandela's death was announced earlier this week, I had just a few minutes at my computer before my kids needed to be fed their dinner.

I tried to think of something that reflected my own experience with the South African freedom struggle, and this is what I posted on Facebook:

The South African freedom struggle, which reached a climactic phase my freshman year in high school, introduced me to the idea that the United States could act on the wrong side of history -- that this country, led by supporters of Apartheid like Ronald Reagan, was not quite the noble bastion of real democracy our school textbooks told us it was. It was a difficult but necessary education. RIP Mandela.

A Facebook friend -- we'll just call him "BK" -- soon wrote in with a "correction":

I'm usually the least likely person to defend Ronald Reagan, but this is just wrong. His policy toward South Africa and the ANC was all about anti-communism. That was a hideous failure in judgment and morality, but it doesn't make him a "supporter of Apartheid."

This started a long thread that I won't recapitulate here. Some unpleasant things were said; some people ended up getting unfriended. Enough said.

(In fact, it seems like this debate is not just happening on my particular Facebook feed; it's happening in the media more broadly as well. This conservative site, for instance, is clearly taking note of all of the "liberal" commentators taking jabs at Reagan in the wake of Mandela's death.)

I did think it might be appropriate to do two things that are difficult to do on Facebook: 1) expand out the personal / biographical component of what I wrote, and 2) have a somewhat more nuanced and annotated discussion of Reagan's South Africa policy.

First, my own story:

I started high school in 1988. It was a new start -- I had just transferred from a public junior high school in Potomac, MD to an elite private school inside DC, the Sidwell Friends School. Before Sidwell, I had spent most of my childhood in a relatively protected suburban world, with little exposure to politics. Because of repeated trips to India (especially in those anxious and difficult years after 1984), I probably knew a little more than some 14 year old suburban peers that the world of Nintendo, black felt Guns n' Roses posters, and Redskins' paraphernalia was not the only world out there. But in truth I tended to bracket off my Indian experiences from what I considered proper teen stuff (some Indian experiences: the anxious nights waiting to hear news from family members during the riots; the vehement fights over Khalistanism at the Maryland Gurdwara; and in India itself, the police checkpoints, the sense of fear, bribing corrupt policemen on the train...). I didn't then have the tools to realize that this India stuff was important, because at junior high in the suburbs at least the only thing you had to know pretty much was that Led Zeppelin is awesome and Milli Vanilli sucks.

"The First Four" -- Women Faculty in the Lehigh English Department

One of my students was involved with the making of a documentary about the first women faculty in the English department. I had a chance to see the film a few weeks ago at a public screening, and it's terrific -- probably of interest to anyone interested in gender issues in academia. Happily, permissions have been ensured to allow the film to be posted online (on Vimeo). An embedded link to the film is below.

A bit of background. At its inception in 1865, Lehigh University was an all-male college mainly focused on engineering. The university was founded by Asa Packer, a railroad tycoon, and over the years the university had connections to the steel and auto industries as well (major buildings on campus are the "Iacocca Building" and "Packard Lab" -- named after James Packard, who founded the eponymous car company). Colleges of Business, Arts and Sciences, and Education were later added; today they are highly ranked and well-funded.

The university moved to include women as students in 1971 (see "40 Years of Women at Lehigh"). As part of that change, the university also began to attempt to diversify its faculty (which was, not unlike other American academic institutions of that era, universally white and male). A large number of the first women faculty hired by Lehigh in those first years (1972-3) were in the English department.

Three of the first four women faculty were still part of the department when I joined the faculty in 2001. Rosemary Mundhenk, Elizabeth Fifer, and Barbara Traister are friends and have been mentor-figures to me. (Another faculty member hired in this period who also played a mentoring role for me, Jan Fergus, joined the department a bit later.) I consider myself lucky to have started my career as a professor in a department with a strong cohort of senior colleagues who were women. That said, as you'll see from the documentary, things were not easy for these women in the early years.

Finally, I'm quite proud of my student, Laura Casale (@lauralehigh on Twitter), who is one of the four students involved in putting this documentary together. Well done!

The English department's intro to the film is here:
https://english.cas2.lehigh.edu/

And the film itself:

THE FIRST FOUR from Lehigh IMRC on Vimeo.

"He couldn't provide any descriptions about his assailants, and it seemed to me that in some way, he didn't want to remember them."

As many readers have probably already seen, a Columbia University professor named Prabhjot Singh was attacked by a large group of men on bicycles a couple of days ago in New York City (at the edge of Central Park -- 110th Street and Lenox Ave.). The incident is being investigated as a hate crime. You can read Simran Jeet Singh's account of the incident at the Huffington Post here. There is also a video interview with Prabhjot Singh at NBC New York here (including brief footage of his broken jaw).

A friend who is a journalist wrote me asking for a brief comment. Here's the statement I sent him. 

I don't know Prabhjot Singh personally, though we have many mutual friends and this incident has been saddening and disturbing for many of us.

Most Sikhs in the U.S. know that they are potentially subject to verbal abuse and hostility at virtually any time, though especially in large crowds. We also know that supposedly cosmopolitan cities like New York and San Francisco are actually not any better or worse than small towns when it comes to encountering mean-spirited people and thug-like behavior. What is admittedly a surprise is when that kind of name-calling turns into something else, as seems to be what happened here.

As always, with incidents of Muslim-bashing / Sikh-bashing, it seems important not to dwell on the fact that Sikhs are not Muslims. For one thing, the attackers may not care that much one way or the other. But more importantly, one doesn't want to sanction hateful speech or violence against any vulnerable group based on "correct" identification.

The attackers here appear to be young men in a large crowd thinking they own the city. A lone Sikh with a turban and beard presents a very visible possible target, especially in a relatively quiet place like the edge of Central Park at night. I can't help but suspect that the person they chose to target could just as easily have been a gay person (rightly or wrongly identified), or a woman.

I was especially struck by the following sentence in a post by Prabhjot's friend Simran Jeet Singh, which was published yesterday in the Huffington Post. Simran Jeet wrote, "He couldn't provide any descriptions about his assailants, and it seemed to me that in some way, he didn't want to remember them." This rings true to me. With many crimes of this sort (does it make sense to call it casual racist violence?), it seems the attackers may not know or care that much about the identities of their victims. But it goes both ways: for those of us who may be targeted in such attacks, the particular motivation that drove the attack is, from our perspective, much less important than our overwhelming desire just to be able to walk down the street safely -- and go about our business.

A Post-9/11 Essay Fragment: "'War on the Rag-Heads': Learning the Meaning of Racism..."

This is an essay I started writing shortly after 9/11, a time when I was in shock -- and as preoccupied with suddenly being branded as "the enemy" as I was with the massive tragedy that had transpired just 90 minutes away in New York City. I think I wrote this with the idea that it might be published somewhere as an Op-Ed or something, though in the end I didn't do anything with it. 

In the archives of my computer, this file is dated 9/18/2001. I returned to some similar themes a year ago, in the blog post I wrote after the shooting at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin by a right-wing extremist. 

One word that I used that today I'm not sure of is the word "backlash." It wasn't really a "backlash" that many of us experienced that fall; more of a kind of ethno-cultural realignment and displacement from a position of complacency and relative privilege. Until that fall I felt that at heart I was really an American, despite my connections to the Indian subcontinent and my visible religious difference. After that fall, I came to feel that perhaps I didn't really know anymore what "American" might mean. 

* * * 

“War on the Rag-Heads”:

Learning the Meaning of Racism in the Midst of a Backlash

9/18/2001

Many in the Sikh community in the U.S. are amazed at the kind of hostility they have been encountering in the wake of last week’s world trade center attacks. Some of the attacks have been extreme – one Sikh man in Arizona, for instance, has been killed by a “patriot,” while many others have been assaulted, verbally and physically, around the country. Mosques Gurdwaras and Mandirs have been vandalized, firebombed, even rammed, in one instance, by a mad motorist. Whether or not we have been harassed in such a manner, nearly everyone who looks different (even vaguely Arab) has felt the glare of a newly virulent hostility. Sikhs in particular are gawked at openly on the streets where we have lived for years, as if we just appeared there yesterday; kids torture us in schools, where we are present inevitably as micro-minorities of one or two individuals in masses of thousands; on the highways we are confronted by a juggernaut of obscene gestures; and we are skewered on American talk-radio by callers and even, at times, by the hosts of the shows. As a particularly egregious example of the latter, Howard Stern has suggested that America “declare war on the rag-heads.”


Sikhs have been doing their best to respond to the hostility in a constructive manner, though some of the things people have been saying have been problematic. Sikh leaders protest that "Sikhs are not Arabs, we are not even Muslims"; the attacks, they claim, are “misdirected,” as if attacks against innocent Arab-Americans would somehow be appropriate. Sikh and Hindu leaders seem outraged by the obvious ignorance of the attackers, and the highly vague definition of the Americans who are now being singled out. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister of India, even went so far as to call George W. Bush to ask for help in protecting the Sikh American community. For their part, Sikh community leaders around the country are working overtime to try and get media coverage for the incidents of racially-motivated murder, assault, and racial profiling that have been occurring, along with elementary descriptions of the Sikh religion and the meaning of the Sikh turban. One hopes these educational efforts may make some difference in the long run, especially if they develop a wider base and more systematic implementation. Sikh educational efforts also, one feels, ought to be deployed in direct cooperation with Muslim groups that want to accomplish the same kinds of things.

On N+1's "World Lite"

I'm teaching a graduate class called "Global Cities" this fall, and when I was casting about for a text to use for the first 75 minute session it occurred to me that the recent essay by the editors of N+1, "World Lite," should be it.

I just got out of that session and it seemed like it worked: my students seemed engaged and interested in the arguments. Most had not heard of many of the authors the editors mention. The exercise gave me a chance to do quick spiels on Mario Vargas Llosa, Ngugi, Benedict Anderson, and a few others. So before we go any further I should credit the N+1 editors for writing something provocative and stimulating.

At Tehelka, Pooja Rajaram and Michael Griffith posted a spirited and intelligent critique. The editors have responded to that critique with some clarifications of their main intention and argument.

I'm not going to take issue with the central claim the N+1 Editors are making in "World Lite"; in any case, I feel pretty sure that the editors have defined their terms loosely enough that my main criticisms could be easily parried. As I understand it, their primary interest is in criticizing the "Global Lit" marketplace, and positing instead an "internationalist" literature that preserves (or revives) some of the confrontational energy and edginess of an earlier generation of postcolonial authors from the 1970s and 80s ("angry Rushdie," "angry Gordimer," and early Ngugi are favored; later Rushdie, "Wizard of the Crow" Ngugi, the abstractions of Coetzee, Murakami, Pamuk, and many others are not).

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.

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. ]