Even as I've been thinking about the lives of the books that get taken up.
So, a book is published. If it gets any traction—which is a terrible way to think about it, but it's true—it's taught in upper level undergraduate and graduate classes.
Assume that a grad student in the last year of their coursework takes up that book, they will complete their dissertation in 3 years, if super fast–I'm talking U.S. context—or, more likely, in 5-7 years.
Aug 21, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I like that syllabus.
And now I'm wondering what a similar syllabus with works published in the 1970s—excluding Orientalism—would look like.
In part because one of my all time favorite essays is Owusu, Maxwell. "Ethnography of Africa: the usefulness of the useless." American Anthropologist 80, no. 2 (1978): 310-334.
Aug 21, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
look, I get it
I really do
but
I think it does not serve us well
In a recent webinar, Profs Barbara Boswell, Grace Musila, and Pumla Dineo Gqola spoke about their deliberate citation practices, how they engage each other, and teach others to engage them.
That's been sitting with me.
Aug 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Best Sexy Message at 5:30 am
"I wake up thinking about you."
Stop it. Your thoughts are interrupting my sleep.
Aug 20, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
"the acme of legal omniscience"
"cross-pollination of legal ideas"
Mar 20, 2021 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
"Why am I being asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s?"
theguardian.com/books/2021/mar…
I return, as always, to Althusser, who teaches me to ask not simply how toxic systems PERSIST but also how they are DELIBERATELY and CONSISTENTLY REPRODUCED.
Mar 20, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
(it's all so hedgehog)
(I think—THIS IS SPECULATION—many people are incredibly bad at describing what they want from romantic entanglements
there's so much DO NOT DO THIS and DO NOT PLAY WITH ME and I WILL FUCK YOU UP and I AM NOT THE ONE all over
much less "I want tenderness" and "I want kindness")
Mar 20, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Let me laugh.
The wave is the problem?
Not reopening bars and clubs?
Not reopening schools?
Not the lack of reliable mass testing?
Not the provision of PPE to medical personnel?
Not the state's disinvestment in public health?
Not the long list of broken promises about public health measures?
Mar 20, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Yesterday, I was thinking about how we now have a nice group of people doing something called queer african studies that we can now track different regional and country genealogies for queer work and braid entanglements.
For instance, it's been interesting to see the shift from queer work primarily focused on health (HIV prevention) and sex work to NGO legal stuff in Kenya.
And to see leadership move from sex workers and vulnerable people to the professional class.
Mar 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"I have felt seen and kept"
"the first moments that we knew we existed"
blowing my mind
@AlexisDeVeaux "the future is your next breath"
Mar 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"he didn't say this is true—he said remember this"
"how do you know your ancestors weren't queer?"
Mar 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
"the book is an invitation"
"trying to fill these chasms with these kernels for survival"
Mar 18, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
as I'm listening to this talk about colonial archives, I'm thinking about how working through those archives, especially those of colonial modernity, works itself through minds and bodies
I guess my question to those who work in those archives would be how they prepare themselves mentally and emotionally to enter them, how they care for themselves while working in those documents of unhumaning, how they repair after working in those spaces of deracination
Mar 18, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
back on one of my hobbyhorses: Giovanni's Room is Baldwin's "most successful" novel in terms of structure and pacing and all those technical things.
All his novels featuring Black characters cannot be sustained by the novel form. They are glorious messes *as* novels.
There are too many Baldwin scholars for me to ever publish about this, but I am very interested in what happens to form, how blackness "anarranges" the novel for Baldwin.
Mar 18, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I am baffled.
theguardian.com/science/2021/m…
You're going to "decolonise" stuff by putting up descriptions of how that stuff was obtained?
Do Cholera: "Cholera might kill you, but you will lose weight first!"
Do Malaria: "Malaria might kill you, but it will destroy your red cells first, and that will give you fewer cells to carry."
Do a Fatal Accident: "A Fatal Accident will kill you, but then you won't have to pay bills anymore."
Do Migraines: "Migraines are very painful and will impair your ability to do anything, but you will rest as you recover"
Oct 7, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
some notes on ethnonationalism
1. I use ethnonationalism instead of “tribe” to mark a set of power relations and practices.
2. Attachment of identity to place, and the idea that being rooted in place is what provides and affirms identity.
THIS MEETING IS BEING RECORDED
"let me take a sip"
Oct 7, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
now I'm wondering what version of an origin story I'd tell
my grandfather, for whom I'm named, was a teacher
he'd have been in the first generation of Kenyans taught to read and write by the British colonizers—generation is a weird term to use here
he taught primary school
about his father, I know very little
I've thought for a while that there's something about how "family history" disperses in polygamous families, something about how it fragments, and is difficult to collect
