It was not all long lines of connection and utopia.
It was a brackish stream and it went through the field beside our
           house.
But we let into our hearts the brackish parts of it also.
Some of it knowingly.
We let in soda cans and we let in cigarette butts and we let in pink
           tampon applicators and we let in six pack of beer connectors
           and we let in various other pieces of plastic that would travel
           through the stream.
And some of it unknowingly.

I know that I don’t have anything original to say. And I’m not trying to have something original to say. I would like to be able to say, at the end of it all, that there would be moments in which I was actually able to become an instrument. It’s difficult to do that. Betty Carter has this great song called “Ego,” and the punchline of the chorus is, “your ego got in the way.” My ego is constantly getting in the way of my being an instrument. But having something to say is the least of my concerns. To me, poetry begins with the willingness to subordinate whatever the hell it is that you have to say.

- Fred Moten in an interview here

My own sense is that our feminist political hopes rest with over-sensitive students.
Over-sensitive can be translated as: Sensitive to that which is not over.
All of these ways of making students into the problem work to create a picture of professors or academics as the ones who are “really” oppressed by students. 
[...]
We need to support, stand with, and stand by, those students who are fighting to survive hostile institutions.
It is our job.
- Sara Ahmed in Against Students

I Heart Demerits

Even in an academic context that gives lip service to diversity and interdisciplinarity, there is little to no reward—and perhaps even demerit—for learning a language one has not already “mastered” by age 22 in order to become a slightly more attuned citizen of the world. There is little to no reward for bringing under discussion, let alone translating, books hailing from cultures that are not already broadly thought to possess copious amounts of cultural capital. There is suspicion of work in translation, as if the very basis of Western culture had not come down to us at third (or fourth, etc.) hand. A slowly mutating shortlist of foreign authors that one ought to know circulates through polite conversation (sometimes without acknowledgment that they have been translated), but one can pass as culturally literate more fluidly if one doesn’t make interlocutors uncomfortable by invoking foreign authors with unpronounceable names. This provincialism is as much historical as it is cultural.

- Jennifer Scappettone in this Roundtable on Translation


Things I jotted down at an event against the deportations of Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitians in the DR: 

A possessive investment in each others oppression - Junot Diaz

Role of extractive industries on Hispaniola - Quisqueya

Racism without racists - "No somos racistas" campaign in the DR and on social media

Here to be "Hispanic"=white in Miami
No consciousness here about "Hispanic" racialization

This has always been a faith based activity
We seek to increase our capacity to live other peoples oppression
This has always been a small group
We always want more and call for more 
but all strategies can work simultaneously. 
No one strategy will lead us to the promised land.
The thing that seems irrelevant now 
will be the most relevant down the line.

This is so helpful:

[T]hree different criteria [...] can work to create race: lineage, appearance and cultural assimilation.

- Lisa Martín Alcoff

Mom, racially you're human, culturally you're black.

- Rachel Dolezal quoting her son on the Today Show

(And I don't mean to say I support this equation. I find the idea of her son saying this to her, or the idea of her saying on national television that her son told her this, to be so deeply strange, delusional, touchingly off.)



La canción del día empieza a los 48:24:

Si me quieres, dímelo, 
si te gusto, dímelo, 
y si me odias, también dímelo.

 ¡Quiéreme más, quiéreme más!

No tengo nada 
que decir
y lo estoy posteando 
en mi blog
en español.

Pasará desapercibido
como es mi gusto.

Quebec finds itself too exotic to be easily digested by the Canadian and U.S. market, but not exotic enough to compete with the appeal of something new from Indonesia or Iceland. To North American readers, especially, I think it’s at once too different and too familiar. 

 - Peter McCambridge in this article from the New Yorker on Quebecois lit