Coming Distractions

Before too long, I want to use this space to think specifically about recent events and more broadly about an issue or two that has occupied my mind for a while in a somewhat inchoate way.

So, coming up:

A post on missing discourses in Chicago's mayoral election. One candidate is promising to put Chicago right on the backs of poor Chicagoans, the other seems uncritically enthusiastic about the old institutions that got the city into the difficulties it is, and never took care of vulnerable Chicagoans anyway.

A post on the prospect of permanent statelessness in Palestine. Bibi, among others, promised never to acknowledge the people pushed out so Israel could exist, and Israelis resoundingly agreed. The post wouldn't be an excursus on Zion-shaming but thinking about Americans' relationships with our settler-colonial alter fellows and their possible futures.

A post or posts on the privilege of narrative and authorship in modern Western fiction. I wouldn't write a post like this to address the whole of the late-20th century debate about the "death" of the author or questions of the historicism of "author-driven" texts, either in Western traditions or in others'. It would be more about the conventions of authorship as it does or does not "tread" on religion as in the thought of Talal Asad and Walter Benjamin and how it is held as the standard of civilization and culture in the postcolonial world.

Those are the three ambitions for this after-hours school-space, and who are we without our ambitions? Let me know your thoughts.