I read and I write...read and write...

And two months later, I suddenly remembered I have a journal!

I've been buried under work lately.  The work is good, satisfying, new, interesting, and all-consuming.  Every day I read and I write, and then I read some more and write some more before finally shutting down my brain for the night and indulging in media - movies, bad TV, YouTube.

I never thought I'd become on of those people who sits around watching hours of video on the internet.  But, when you live in a town with no movie house, and no late night bars and restaurants, watching funny (anti)Asian karaoke on YouTube is a refuge from boredom.  I'm properly ashamed.

The reading has pushed me to the outer edges of my very limited (mis)education.  If not for wikipedia, I'm not sure I'd be able to keep up with the new vocabulary words I'm encountering.  For instance, any of you ever hear of the word "irredentism?"  What about "plantocratic?"  Care for a little "despoliation?"  Or would you prefer to "bricolage?"

Yet I perservere.  Here are a few of the greatest hits in my reading:

Subaltern:  a term in post-colonial social theory to refer to everything (and everyone) that lives under the thumb of empire.

Marronage:  a verb referring to the act of escaping and becoming a fugitive of slavery, often forming marroon communities.

Diaspora:  the movement or migration of a group of people away from an established or ancestral homeland, often by force, as in the Korean diaspora following the Korean War, and the African diaspora driven by the slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries.

Manumission:  the act of a slave owner freeing his or her slaves.

Antinomy:  a fundamental and apparently unresolvable conflict or contradiction, as between freedom and slavery.

I'm sure by now you have a pretty good guess regarding the subject matter of all of this reading.  Those of you who are in the human rights field are probably closest to the mark.

I am reading about all things related to what one of the authors on my list, Howard Winant, refers to as "the world historical dimensions of race...the new world racial system" which presents itself as "beyond race," "color-blind," and, most vehemently, post-racial, even as "the disparities between the world's North (more white than not) and it's South (more dark than not) are intensifying, and when northern fears of 'swamping' by immigrants" is growing ever greater as we head toward a future, right around the year 2050 to be precise, when whites in the U.S. in particular will find themselves living in a country in which no one racial group will dominate (and that I'm guessing will be an economic subaltern to China).

If you see me around San Pancho, finally getting out and enjoying the beautiful weather we've been experiencing lately, ask me how all of this relates to the most recent U.S. national elections.  I will talk your ear off.