My people invented karma.
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politics, culture, theory, bollywood.

Chicago transplant, now in San Diego. Literature Ph.D. student, working on South Asian/diasporic cultural studies, and transnational feminist and queer studies. Badu-listener. Chai-drinker.
"It should not be possible to be antiracist without being against oppression. Yet race-liberal hegemony has been so effective that today in the United States everyone is antiracist, and yet oppression is banal and ubiquitious. We live with it, accepting the idea of racialized no-go zones in cities and new vulnerabilities to premature death for disposable classes; we eat it, consuming bananas harvested by dispossessed Indians in Honduras who work under the threat of gunfire and grapes picked by migrant laborers who are hunted by the same people who enjoy the literal fruits of their labor; we pay for it, supporting militias in Iraq that stake their territorial claims on women’s bodies; we study it, publishing research showing that human trafficking is more pervasive than ever and that under the curent system blacks will never gain wealth equity with whites—findings that receive scant hearing and generate less uproar. The unifying power of state antiracisms has become our stumbling block. Although they put white supremacy in permanent crisis, having been made to work for U.S. global ascendancy, and, now, neoliberal sovereignty, have dematerialized antiracism to the degree that dematerialized antiracism is now disintegrating the collectivity of social life. Once, civil rights activists were red-baited as communists for trying to desegregate lunch counters and schools, and today the accusation of socialism is launched against the concept of the public good itself… Racialization procedures must turn round, so that instead of legitimizing processes of accumulation so extremely uneven that the lives of some must appear without value, racialization—in the sense of the differential worth of human beings—will signal the necessity of altering material conditions. In order to accomplish this two-way rearticulation of the empirical and the epistemological, the materializing cultural power of reading, teaching, and the humanities must be harnessed. ‘Otherwise,’ to quote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘who crawls into the place of the ‘human’ of ‘humanism’ at the end of the day, even [or, now, precisely] in the name of diversity?’" -

Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. 49-50. (via lowendtheory)

really looking forward to reading this soon.
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