Over the past couple of weeks, starting with the news of Rachel Nicole Good’s murder and continuing to the current protests against ICE and the ruling of medical examiner in Texas that ruled that Gerald Lunas Campos, detained at an ICE facility in Texas, was murdered by a guard who performed a chokehold on him, I’ve been listening, on repeat, songs such as the Idles’ … Read More Fear Leads to Hate! Will You be a Sycophant or Resist?
A few days ago, as I am wont to do on occasion, I walked through the stacks at my local library, immediately making a line towards the French literature section. I did this, partly, because I had just read Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization and wanted to see if I could find some of the works by Didier Daeninckx, André Schwarz-Bart, and … Read More Ágota Kristóf’s “The Illiterate” and the Loss of One’s Self
On March 25, six plainclothes DHS agents “arrested” Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year Tufts University PhD student in child psychology and development. Öztürk, a Turkish national, earned a master’s in developmental psychology from Columbia University where she attended on a Fulbright scholarship, and she continued her study at Tufts on a F-1 student visa. The agents grabbed Öztürk as she left her home to meet … Read More Who deserves to be heard?: Rümeysa Öztürk and the Power of Listening
Years ago, when I taught in Louisiana, I remember a student walking into the classroom with an “Angola, a gated community” t-shirt. I grew up in Louisiana, I knew about Angola, specifically that it rests on the lands of a former plantation and its long record of humanitarian offenses. I also knew it was the largest maximum-security prisons in the United States. I also … Read More Amidst the Cruelty, Where Do You Stand?
Interminable Rambling 