I. Video Games and the Importance of Media Specificity As a graduate student in the humanities, questions of media specificity have come up repeatedly throughout the course of my research and teaching, and have oftentimes provoked the most fruitful lines of inquiry both for myself and the students in my writing courses. Since taking a […]
Hydrological media: informational tsunamis and clouds
At one point in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Ruth (an intradiegetic avatar for the author) is researching the origins of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster, which was itself triggered by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that occurred on March 11. Poring over the International Atomic Energy Agency’s logs […]
[monism] A person is born from deep conditions of the world.
“A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave” (194) This is a monist viewpoint cf. Anaximander, Monism requires the establishment of a relationship between the target and a […]
“Teach the students you have, not the students you want”
I’ve carried this article on procrastination in my back pocket for a while, and recently shared it with a first-year student who’s been struggling with anxiety and perfectionism. It came to mind as I was going through the regular end-of-term slog of grading and found myself once again stymied by a student paper that wasn’t […]
[Meta] Restrained creativity vs. endless novelty: or procrastination and Kierkegaard’s rotation method
I’ve overindulged in limitless resources and entertainment, and need to constrain myself toward a focused goal. Expertise vs. mastery: T-shaped breadth and depth of knowledge to know the most elegant tool to apply to a given situation, after contriving thousands more overwrought. If every hour is the same, what concentrates your attention so that it […]
Chinese Caribbean Transnational Infrastructures?
As I was skimming through V.S. Naipaul’s (1975) Guerillas and Patricia Powell’s (1998) Pagoda, one interesting throughline that I noticed was the presence of Chinese characters tied to groceries. I know that ethnic niche business networks aren’t a novel idea (Cambodian donut shops, Vietnamese nail salons, Korean hair care product stores), but it is interesting how […]
Aime Cesaire (1969) A Tempest
Published 19 years after Discourse on Colonialism Cesaire casts Ariel as a mulatto intellectual who willingly collaborates with the colonizer Prospero, doubting the ethics of the actions he carries out on his behalf yet remains convinced of (i) his brotherhood with Caliban in suffering, slavery, and hope, and (ii) anti-violent appeals to Prospero’s conscience, in […]
Nishime & Williams (2019) Racial Ecologies
Foreword (xi) ecological disasters are historic and ongoing features of colonialism, capitalist resource extraction, and racialized and gendered labor exploitation (xi) Marx’s primitive accumulation → Harvey’s accumulation through dispossession (xi) Indeed, this book suggests that different energy industries have historically mediated between settler colonialism and … racial capitalism Introduction (4) Racial ecologies > environment; embodied […]
Dionne Brand (1990) No Language is Neutral
ref. to Derek Walcott’s Midsummer Lii I. Hard Against the Soul Caribbean — Trinidad & Tobago II. Return Return I Phyllis (Coard), PRG political prisoner; hyena, biology > science, ‘the skill of your womb’ Jackie (Craft; Minister of Education of Granada/PRG, KIA during coup) Return II Amelia Still (17-19) Blues Spiritual for Mamie Prater — […]
Galloway (2013) The Interface Effect Ch. 1 The Unworkable Interface
Chapter 1. The Unworkable Interface Galloway 1. The Unworkable Interface (26) Serres, alongsidedness (disintegration of self/other into contradiction) vs. mediation as realization of the other (and thus self) (27-28) ludic capitalism = Romanticism+ cybernetics, Marx + Freud Romanticism (Schiller, play-drive: abundance, creation) Cybernetics (homeostasis, system interactions, ecosystem of interplay/corresponding economic flows + balances (28) play […]