February 2012
27 posts
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Junot Diaz Announces New Book →
Díaz returns to the short story form and focuses on the topic of love in This Is How You Lose Her, scheduled for a Sept. 11 release. A description from Riverhead books:
The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, by turns hilarious and devastating, raucous and tender, lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of our all-too-human hearts. They capture the heat of new passion, the...
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Vulture on Hollywood's Resistance to Black... →
On the list of the top-grossing 100 movies released last year, the only ones with a central African-American cast were Madea’s Big Happy Family, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, and Jumping the Broom. (There was also The Help, which, two Oscar-nominated African-American actresses aside, was a movie told from a white point of view, with a white lead actress, white director, and based on a...
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“I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way I am tied to...”
– Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
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“One’s involvement in other peoples’ lives gave one numerous small...”
– Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
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“Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the...”
– Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
I often see many South Asian Americans on social media platforms attempt (often uncritically) to claim forms of victimhood. This quote (though specifically related to the most extreme forms of marginality) speaks well to the frustrations I feel when I see people casually...
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January 2012
21 posts
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Premiere: M.I.A.: "Bad Girls" →
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"Exhalation" by Narendra Patil
‘Merely an exhalation’
Circumstances
have slapped down a suit
on the burning thoughts in my mind!
They’ve put all burning minds
in custody.
Incarcerated
all gardens of dreams.
But how long can this bird
remain in thei dungeon
whose very walls tremble
with his very exhalation?
Translated from by Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, this poem is featured in Poisoned Bread:...
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NYU Student Launches Email Campaign Against Occupy... →
Professor Caitlin Zaloom assigned a class to do an ethnographic study of Occupy Wall Street. One student, Sara Ackerman—who objected to being “forced,” in her words, to interview “criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people, and of course, the few competent, mentally stable people”—did not like this. She seems to have complained several times, eventually attempting...
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“i have learnt to listen to the thump of blood in my ear/ i have learnt its brief...”
– Kamala Das, final stanza of “Wood Ash”
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December 2011
26 posts
6 tags
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