Scholastic literature is, more often than not, a very dry attempt to toss as much information onto a page as possible with very little regard to whether or not the reader is hooked. This article, however, grabs hold of the reader, slams the pedal to the metal from word one, and never relents.
What is, at first, a seemingly abstract and roundabout description of a quick jaunt through archival analysis quickly plunges into a self-aware critique of the teaching and understanding (or lack thereof) of history in today's context. The diction is unrelenting and rock solid. The article's main argument is reiterated time and again, though from different approaches, until finally one must realize that, perhaps the way they've been thinking about history all along is worth a second look.
Please take the time to read this article. Not only is its subject matter interesting and unusual, but the actual writing itself is superb. Any writer who strives to convey information with confidence and to stand out while doing so should appreciate it for the literary masterpiece that it is.
Edit: Link to article removed for copyright purposes.
First, I'd like to extend heart-felt gratitude to all those who speak up on this subreddit. Like you, I imagine, I'm equally surprised by employers' insensitivity to the humanity of their employees, especially when an employee offers critique, quits, or resigns and the employer likens the company to family and the employee's resignation as a breach to the bonds of familial love. The analogy is not only between the family and the company, but the family as an integral social unit that undergirds social harmony.
While reflecting on some scholarly work, I couldn't help but find parallels in Saidiya Hartman's brilliant (although difficult to read) analysis of slavery and sentiment in her famous text, Scenes of Subjection. Allow me to provide the caveat, making the analogy between "slavery" and our present "wage slavery" (or are present state of exploitative capitalism) is not an endeavor I enter into lightly. In fact, it's been done before, particularly in the debates that precipitated the Civil War. But, in the spirit of Nikole Hannah Jones' and others' work in the 1619 Project and, generally, other Critical Race Theorists, I do believe the answers to our present predicament lie in the history of this country's legacy of slavery, slavery as but one of many historical technological formations under racial capitalism.
To contexutalize the moment of my reading, Hartman is puzzled by ambiguities in Southern slavey society regarding rape. Fundamentally, the enslaved black is not permitted to bear witness before the law. The enslaved black is defined by its absolute subjection to violence, violence by any white person, slave owner or otherwise. In her analysis of a few select court cases, mostly in which the state prosecutes enslaved women who, in clear acts of revenge, killed slave masters who raped them, Hartman is puzzled by the law's difficulty to articulate a clear rationale for punishing the enslaved black woman and upholding white male power. She notes that the law begins to abide by a "doctrine of 'perfect submission'" in order to reconcile the forms of violence necessary in slavery. But, oddly enough, and here's the point of my post, the law starts to think differently about violence, or even rationalize and obscure violence by a transformation. Hartman notes:
"The benign representation of the paternal institution in slave law depicted the master-slave relationship as typified by the bonds of affection and thereby transformed relations o
... keep reading on reddit ➡Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic and cultural theorist whose work includes the award-winning 2016 book “The Argonauts.” Her newest work, “On Freedom,” pierces right into the heart of America’s founding idea: What if there’s no such thing as freedom, at least not freedom as a state of enduring liberation?
And more than that: What if we don’t want to be free? Perhaps that’s the great lie in the American dream: We’re taught to want freedom, but many of us recoil from its touch.
Nelson describes herself as a “disobedient thinker,” someone who enjoys looking at “the difficulty of difficult things,” and this conversation bears that out. We talk about when and whether freedom is hard to bear, the difference between a state of liberation and the daily practice of freedom, the hard conversations sexual liberation demands, what it means to live in koans, my problems with the “The Giving Tree,” Nelson’s disagreements with the left, the difficulty of maintaining your own experience of art in an age when the entire internet wants to tell you how to feel about everything, and more.
Book Recommendations:
Possibilities by David Graeber
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
The Force of Nonviolence by Judith Butler
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
I don't want to step on anybody's toes here, but the amount of non-dad jokes here in this subreddit really annoys me. First of all, dad jokes CAN be NSFW, it clearly says so in the sub rules. Secondly, it doesn't automatically make it a dad joke if it's from a conversation between you and your child. Most importantly, the jokes that your CHILDREN tell YOU are not dad jokes. The point of a dad joke is that it's so cheesy only a dad who's trying to be funny would make such a joke. That's it. They are stupid plays on words, lame puns and so on. There has to be a clever pun or wordplay for it to be considered a dad joke.
Again, to all the fellow dads, I apologise if I'm sounding too harsh. But I just needed to get it off my chest.
Do your worst!
Really enjoyed it. For those who aren’t familiar, it was a book released in 1986 that imagined the life of Tituba, the first woman accused of witchcraft in Salem and the only black woman so accused. It’s a pretty politically radical novel - Angela Davis wrote the foreword - and is a great application of Saidiya Hartman and others’ theory of fabulation to fill absences in the archive. It’s also very readable!
So, in sum, looking for politically conscious fiction with well-developed prose; could also be interested in speculative fiction or historical fiction in the right circumstances.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/how-octavia-e-butler-reimagines-sex-and-survival
NEW YORKER: HOW OCTAVIA E. BUTLER REIMAGINES SEX AND SURVIVAL
The parasites, hybrids, and vampires of her science fiction make the price of persisting viscerally real.
By Julian Lucas 2021.03.08
In Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower” (1993), a climate-change Book of Exodus set in a scorched mid-twenty-twenties California, a preacher’s daughter named Lauren Oya Olamina tries to convince a friend that their world has veered off.
Disaster surrounds their fortified suburb of Los Angeles: water shortages, a measles epidemic, fires set by drug-addicted pyromaniacs, and bandits who prey on the unhoused multitudes that roam the lawless highways. Outsiders throw severed limbs over the walls of their neighborhood, “gifts of envy and hate.” Lauren knows it’s time to get out:
>"I’m talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people outside decide to come in. I’m talking about what we’ve got to do before that happens so that we can survive and rebuild—or at least survive and escape to be something other than beggars. . . . We’ll be hit and hit and hit, then the big hit will come. And if we’re not ready for it, it will be like Jericho."
Her friend demurs: “My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.” Others take refuge in criminal enterprises, Christian worship, or even indentured servitude, exchanging their freedom for security in a neo-feudal company town. Only Lauren, a teenager afflicted with “hyper empathy,” has the courage (or inexperience) to imagine an alternative: a survivalist gospel of constant adaptation that she calls Earthseed. She leads a band of refugees north, dreaming of an extraterrestrial future; in a sequel, “Parable of the Talents” (1998), her small sect confronts a fundamentalist President who wants to “make America great again.” It’s often observed that the “Parables,” already prescient when they were published, now read like prophecy. Isaac Asimov captured the spirit
... keep reading on reddit ➡I'm surprised it hasn't decade.
For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.
I said "hey look, an escaPEA"
No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!
Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂
It really does, I swear!
Because she wanted to see the task manager.
They’re on standbi
Pilot on me!!
Nothing, he was gladiator.
Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.
This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.
If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.
Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.
What did 0 say to 8 ?
" Nice Belt "
So What did 3 say to 8 ?
" Hey, you two stop making out "
I won't be doing that today!
hey!
I ask tons of colonial related questions. I'm wondering what the best 3-5 histories would be to get a good grasp on the roots of colonialism and it's implementation. That means, who was driving it in Spain, France, and England. How was it funded? What role did trading companies play? What role did missionaries play? How did natives first react to meeting the colonial powers? How did colonialism play out differently in its implementation in a place like India versus a place like the Philippines? How did tactics change over hundreds of years?
I've read an academic Maori history - and honestly, it was too dry and took me a long time to finish. I have King Leopold's Ghost. I've listened to some podcasts like Pax Brittanica. But if anyone has a short reading list they could recommend me I'd really appreciate it.
[Removed]
Where ever you left it 🤷♀️🤭
When I got home, they were still there.
