Victory in Defeat

Venus Williams doing an interview at the US OpenTennis fans may know that Venus Williams lost in the U.S. Open yesterday. What I found interesting during a weekend report from her post-match interview, was a turn of phrase that I’ve heard many times in sports — in fact, in an interview from the same day, when he advanced but only after a surprisingly close match, Roger Federer said pretty much the same thing in his post-match interview. Continue reading “Victory in Defeat”

Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That…

Templeton Rye Rye WhiskeyNPR ran a story the other day based on a Daily Beast article about the disappointing reality that a lot of popular craft whiskeys that cater to the discerning consumer with an appreciation for the finer things are actually not produced in artisanal small batches at all but instead hail from the large Midwest Grain Products (MGP) factory in Indiana. How to tell you’re getting the “real thing”…? Check whether the product is “distilled by” or “bottled/produced by” the company—a big difference when looking for the origins of the whiskey you’re consuming. Continue reading “Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That…”

Unspoken Nationalism

A black and white photo of five elderly women sewing the American flagMultiple cases of the shooting deaths of unarmed men (who often are African-American) in the streets of the United States at the hands of people who are supposedly working to protect others from violence (and who typically are not African-American) have generated important discussions about institutional racism, hatred, and the militarization of police. In “What White People Can Do About the Killing of Black Men in America,” an editor at the Huffington Post writes,

White Americans like me have to stop channel surfing all the outrageously bad news from around the world and focus on the death that is happening in our own cities to our fellow Americans.

Continue reading “Unspoken Nationalism”

Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Cultural Symbol

An engagement ring with a gold band

When I got engaged twenty years ago, my then-boyfriend purchased me an engagement ring that looked very much like the one above. While both of us were from working-to-middle class families, it was a well-known custom in our corner of the world (as it remains in many places) for men to save up months and months of their salary – even perhaps selling things of considerable value – to procure a ring deemed suitably large, beautiful, unique, etc. for their brides-to-be. Despite the fact that I might do things differently now, at the time it never occurred to me to question this process. Continue reading “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Cultural Symbol”

“New Books on the Edge” with K. Merinda Simmons

The cover of Changing the Subject by K. Merinda Simmons

New Books on the Edge” is an ongoing blog series, which engages forthcoming manuscripts by Edge collective members.

Changing the Subject: Writing Women Across the African Diaspora

From diaspora to class, gender, subjectivity, migration, labor and much more – take us behind the scenes of Changing the Subject — how it came to be, what sorts of questions are raised in this project, and what data is being engaged?

My disciplinary training is in literary theory, and I have long been puzzled by a tendencyI see working in that domain of scholarship. Namely, while so much of the field has been influenced by what many—myself included—see as important poststructuralist intellectual moves, I nonetheless keep coming across analyses by prominent scholars that focus on “authenticity” in one manner or other. This seems an especially noticeable phenomenon within scholarship on texts deemed marginalized—and, as my data set when I began the work that would ultimately become this book was comprised of narratives by women of various African diasporas, I decided to delve into how and why the emphasis on something called authenticity appears in the criticism surrounding these texts. Continue reading ““New Books on the Edge” with K. Merinda Simmons”

Filters, Filters Everywhere

A blue birdMy family is a family of identifiers. Whether it is a bird, tree, or salamander, we are often dissatisfied until we know which species it is. Thus we have binoculars and a whole shelf of Field Guides for identifying much of the flora and fauna. While others can certainly dissect the psychological interests behind the desire to know these names, the process of observation intrigues me. Continue reading “Filters, Filters Everywhere”

Creative Accounting

a cup of Canadian penniesI was in Canada over the summer and had forgotten that they’d done away with the penny — until, that is, I was trying to figure out why I got short-changed in a store, which blithely rounded up the cost of my purchase and cheated me out of a few cents.

But then I remembered…

Coz what do you do when it costs more to make a penny than the value that’s ascribed to it? (Phasing them out is estimated to save the Canadian taxpayers $11 million per year!) Continue reading “Creative Accounting”

I’m Just Here for the T-Shirt

National lampoonsPhoto credit: http://traduzioniclick.it

As I write this, I am returning from Germany, where I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a short course at the University of Hannover. When I wasn’t teaching this past week, I spent some time doing what most tourists do: wandering the city looking for trinkets to bring back to my family. When I asked my students where I should look for some gifts, most did the equivalent of rolling their eyes while telling me there was nowhere cool in Hannover to go (one student, in particular, humorously – and yet repeatedly – directed me to Berlin).  But despite the fact that I was armed with a good map, a subway ticket, and directions to the shopping district, my task ended up much harder than I thought it would be. Continue reading “I’m Just Here for the T-Shirt”