The Future is Another Country
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.
It’s not every day that a CW drama features a storyline about power dynamics and romantic relationships in academia, but Jane the Virgin did just that in its March 2, 2018 episode “Chapter 75.”
In a sense, I knew what I was getting into. I entered well-aware of the institutional, systemic norms that have precluded Black women from doing this work and creating knowledge that seeks to disrupt many of the corrupt, perverse, misguided myths about who we are and what we have done. My awareness, though, has not made my short journey less arduous.
As an individual, there are so many identities (or labels) that apply to me: a Pakistani, a Muslim, a man, a historian, and so on. On their own, these identities are not too different from millions of others in the world. But it is the combination of all these identities that made me pursue a career as a historian, and it is also the combination of all these identities that acted as the biggest roadblock in doing so.
I wouldn’t be a historian if it weren’t for my disability. At the age of 12 I was diagnosed with a degenerative condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, and I may, at some unknown date in the future, be totally blind.
