The Future is Another Country
One of the major purposes of the humanities is to expose students to new points of view, especially the views of minorities and other disadvantaged groups whose voices are often neglected. The Civil War Era is a particularly useful period for such considerations, as it prominently featured racial division that continue today.
The more answers about Negro History Week I found in Du Bois’s papers and collections associated with his life and times, the more questions surfaced. These inquiries have pushed my research on Du Bois and Negro History Week into broader considerations of the mixed methodology he used in the production of black history, and the black radical internationalist framework of his historical imagination.
The festive season is a time when we’re confronted with the best and worst of ourselves as a society. But for academics, and particularly for those of us still toiling away in graduate school, the chance to reconnect with friends and family brings with it a formidable challenge—the perennial task of explaining, to the satisfaction of your interlocutor, what exactly it is that you study anyway, huh?
Staying with Prexy in Chicago reenergized me. I felt better about my own scholarship, and wanted to continue it. Moreover, I determined to start drawing more connections to the injustices I saw in the present.
My grandmother was right; my high school students needed me. What my grandmother may not have anticipated though was the extent to which I needed my students.
Then a huge articulated lorry came thundering past, so close and so fast the Landrover shook wildly. “Shit!” Uttering that expletive, Njoloma woke and rubbed his eyes. “Well that’s better!” he proclaimed while starting the engine and driving on.
I feel lucky that I found my own hive through the humanities. The only difference is that our home is not the cracked trunk of a pecan tree but cells in a worldwide colony. Still, our shared values keep us connected.
Unless those who profess the importance of raising modern-day knights confront white supremacy, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ hate head-on, this is a genre that should become a relic of the past, much like the real medieval knights of the Middle Ages.
Under the guise of entertainment, fantasy, and allegory, the Trojan horse of Sci Fi sneaks in big questions about the implications of science and technology that students would do well to ponder.
David Foster Wallace knew the likes of Brett Kavanaugh quite well; the author’s experiences as witness to, and perhaps participant in, this privileged culture should be the primary angle at which we view the novel, at the nexus of masculinity, race, and sexuality.
