English

          A Country Called Prison’s preface, along with chapter 1, provides an introduction on mass incarceration, which as claimed by the authors has led to the development within the prison system of a separate culture from the rest of the country. In this sense, the authors view prison as a hypothetical country in its own. The book’s first chapter reviews the history of punishment in the United States and in the Western world. The authors examine how different theories have historically guided the kinds of punishment governments have used for years. Statistical data on the US Prison-Industrial Complex and its racial disparities are compared to data from other industrialized countries: the US incarceration rate is notably higher.

i am unhappy to announce that my head injury has set me back on my work on this project!!! it still hurts quite a bit to look at words on a page or on a screen for extended periods of time and after a little bit of reading the words are swimming, my head is pounding, and my eyes are strained. i apologize that my progress has more or less been halted-i want to rest my brain, doctor's orders, but i also really need to try to starting this paper.

You'll remember that I kicked off our syllabus for Big Books by asking you to look @ Candice Benbow's  Lemonade Syllabus,  as one in a sequence of contributions to a genre including the charleston syllabus and a

I do not yet know what I will write for my independent study. I have yet to become passionate about any of the topics I've been thinking about. Masculinity. Black masculinity. Trans black masculinity. Gay immigrant masculinity. Teaching a boy how to become a man. Teaching through music. At this point it seems like I will be focusing on Getting Mother's Body, Between the World and Me, or The Book of Salt. I will do some more reading and reflecting this weekend to see what sparks interest. 

I feel like maybe I should write a paper trying to explain afro-pessimism and situate my own thoughts into that? the posting on marriott is still relevant, but this might not be the most practical use of my time (this being trying to write a paper within afro-pessimism when i'm still trying to figure out how to explain afro-pessimism/an ontological approach to blackness to those around me. so, maybe I can still use marriott as a supplement to that explanation. I imagine centering the paper in fanon's black skin white masks, then using wilderson to show the more current work being done with fanonian ontology. 

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questions i wanna ask:

what is afro-pessimism?

          The United States, which is about 1/8^th the size of China and India combined has more prisoners than those two countries put together. The United States, which only a little but bigger than Indonesia in total population, incarcerates 14 times more people than that nation (x). The United States ranks second in the rate of incarceration for every 100,000 people of population. The United States incarcerates 707 people out of every 100,000 (xi). Most nations other than Russia and the United States that have high incarceration rates are small and poor. The US’ crime rate is lower than Germany’s and almost the same as Germany’s (xiv). The average yearly salary for a correctional officer is $38,970, or $749 a week (xvi).

Managed to not post last week, but I want to do/am doing my independent study around third culture individuals, nationalty and the role it plays (or doesn't, or is assumed to) within identity, privilege surrounding questions around From-ness... stuff like that. I'll be using Americanah and a TEDtalk by Taiye Selasi, "Don't ask where I'm from, ask where I'm local," as my primary texts. I will be supplementing these with texts from Taiye Selasi's reading list attached to the TEDtalk, like Moustafa Bayoumi's ""Where are you from' is not the right question" and Josef Joffe's "Rethinking the Nation-State: The Many Meanings of Sovereignty," as well as the reading list as a text of its own.

I liked the note that Anne left me on my last post about Appiah's "[refusal of] the binary that structures Said's thinking...by calling "overdone" the conventional contrast...between 'rootless cosmopolitan' and the rootedness of traditional societies." I picked up The Ethics of Identity from the library and I've been flipping through it to find some thought-provoking quotes:

"By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them." (Appiah, 222)

I've finished reading Americanah, and it left me wondering, "Why did Ifemelu go back?" Throughout most of the book, it seemed natural to me that she would want to return home, but at some point when she was back in Nigeria, it stopped making sense to me, and now I'm wondering if the only reason was to see Obinze again. I'm also curious about Ifemelu's self-righteousness, the way she uses her position as an outsider to judge both America and Nigeria.

So since last week I read a couple of theoretical pieces:

"Transgender People of Color at the Center: Conceptualizing a New Intersectional Model," by Kylan Mattias de Vries - using the image of a multifaceted prism, de Vries talks about intersectionality and standpoint theory, using them as lenses to explore the experiences of a number of trans POC whose experiences differ drastically from white trans folks who are interviewed (thus unsettling popular notions of "trans experience"). Importantly, de Vries names the fact that many trans POC may not identify their gender identity as identity that is most significant to them, particularly in a society where racial profiling is often the initial cause of violent interactions with white authorities.