#amber husain

[fairest]

“The graduate workforce of the 2010s had internalised the capitalist realism described by Mark Fisher as an ‘anti-mythical myth’. Tracing the roots of the present beneath the rubble of antiquity, the Italian writer and mythographer Roberto Calasso pinpoints a transformative moment within the ancient practice of sacrifice. While in the practice’s earliest form, the sacrificial victim was deemed irreplaceable, it later became acceptable to use a stand-in victim. In the mythos of the Trojan war a sacrifice had to be made before the Greeks could first set sale: the king had to kill his daughter for the winds to go his way. Yet in certain tellings Iphigenia is snatched from the altar, replaced at the crucial moment with a deer of equal worth.

Such acts of replacement conform to what Calasso describes as a reduction of sacrifice to ‘pure exchange’. This, he argues, immeasurably expands the power of those who trade. Indeed, as long as the exchange is ‘fair’, the irreplaceable beings who profit from these transactions do so without judgement, or even recognition. The violence of these acts of substitution comes to be obscured by the syntax of exchange, portending the imagined neutrality of the godless invisible hand. ‘In the end’, writes Calasso, ‘the world will be inhabited only by substitutes, hence by victims unaware that they are victims, because the irreplaceable priest who raises the knife over them has no name and no shape’.”

— Amber Husain, from Replace Me

[littlebrownmushroom]

Recently received Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh by Amber Husain

[lligkv]

the admission of complicity; the extension of grace

Are there principled contrarians worth respecting? Ones who don't make a fetish of their contrarianism—make it into a compulsion in which they take special pleasure? Or is “principled contrarian” a contradiction in terms? If your tendency to buck the trend is at the point where people give it a label, you might already be making it a fetish.

I was thinking about this question as I read Jessa Crispin's book My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains, an account of her return to her native Kansas to grapple with various ghosts there. Some of the ghosts are emotional or spiritual: memories of growing up the odd one out in an evangelical family shrouded in misogyny; the specter of a childhood teacher whose support of her interests and intelligence gave Crispin great comfort—and who later killed his entire family in a murder-suicide; the legacy of the patriarchy that Crispin feels drove both her teacher's and her family's behavior. And some of the ghosts are literal; the book opens with an account of her experience in a house with the ghost of a man named Charlie, who seems to both feel affection for her and want to control her. Ultimately, “contrarian” might be a bit strong to describe Crispin—but pieces of hers I've read, most notably on the heels of her book Why I Am Not a Feminist, gave me a sense she prides herself on a perceived willingness to say things no one else will say, and sometimes speaks as though she's the only one who's ever had a certain thought. Parts of this book did too.

Generally she writes from a place of radical individualism relative to a neoliberal culture that, while putatively individualist, often encourages conformity via all the means you’d expect: foreclosing more and more access to affordable housing, welfare, healthcare, and free time and thus all possibilities for life besides the possibility of eking out a living in an increasingly precarious market. She encourages the practice of eclectic, individual gnosticism over fidelity to organized religion, for instance, and the practice of a kind of cosmopolitanism that accepts a multiplicity of ways of living and being without collapsing into liberal bromides. Broadly, I can forgive the stance. The experience of being alive in a Western country now is basically the experience of being let down by every institution you know and cast adrift in a sea of bad-faith actors jockeying for your allegiance—and next to that, an urge to cultivate trust in yourself and in what you know to be true seems natural and necessary. But the voice Crispin assumes in elaborating her position is often so hectoring, aggressive, or snide.

Early on, as Crispin talks about the Rosenstrasse protests in Berlin in 1943—when a group of two hundred Aryan women staged a protest outside the building where their Jewish husbands were being held for the camps, demanding their return—she adds,

It's heartwarming, isn't it? To think of women putting their lives on the line to save the men they love. It's a good story, but I always want to interfere with a good story, get in its way, break its narrative spine.

In this case, the interference in the story is merited: Crispin notes how many men chose to divorce their Jewish wives rather than protest as the Rosenstrasse women did, and how few people protested on behalf of Jewish people who were not their spouses, not related to them by the mechanics of the family, which reflect darker, harsher realities of history and human nature we can’t afford to elide. But from the opening question, with the turn it forecasts and the way it judges sentiment that it assumes the reader will feel, to the way Crispin casts herself as the one who’ll break the story’s spine...

Reading so many passages like this one, I was reminded of a line from Andrea Long Chu’s review of Maggie Nelson’s book On Freedom—the idea of “position[ing] the subtlety of one's own views against the crudeness of those who do not share them.” It also reminded me of the parts of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour that most rankled me, the ones on the “fixers” whom Heti alleges flatten reality’s complexities and thus obscure truth. Which makes me think there's a Gen X angle to all this too. And it makes me think, can we stop publishing these books in which white women of a certain age and artistic background tell us how to feel by hectoring us? Advertising how much better they are?

I don't mean to make that the sum total of my judgment of My Three Dads. It's an honest enough examination of a world in which I too live; many of the thoughts Crispin has are ones I've had, even the uncharitable ones. She has a gift for storytelling; her account of arriving in Lincoln, Kansas as a child, and getting to know Mr. Pianalto, the teacher who’ll later kill himself and his family, is riveting. There are many moments of interest, complexity, and beauty in the book.

I appreciated the distinctions that were made—say, between what Crispin calls community and society. The former, she argues, is premised simply on affiliation and implies or even requires homogeneity; the latter works on a shared sense of obligation toward others and responsibility for each other that serves to preserve room for difference. (Though she doesn’t say what creates this sense of obligation or keeps it going.) And I appreciated Crispin’s insight into why so many putatively liberatory communities, like Womantown, a separatist refuge for lesbians in 1980s Kansas City, come to fall victim to their own oppressions (in the case of Womantown, racism)—a desire on the parts of those who’ve been wounded for protection, the easiest means for which is to exert control—as well as the solution she proposes: that we all learn to gain the “internal organization” of true individuation; the ability to see and know our own selves clearly, to be able to acknowledge our own pain so we can learn to see ourselves and others as whole beings—and, crucially, acknowledge the pain of others. I also appreciated the discussion of the Dutch beguinage, which allowed women in twelfth-century Amsterdam to escape marriage while preserving the interdependent fabric of truly nurturing life—as opposed to the independence that Crispin has won through capitalist means now, which can be so isolating—and her subsequent argument about the potential for family and society both to be structures of care rather than mere setting for the performance of roles or the exchange of money.

I appreciate all these discussions because in them, Crispin is working toward elucidating something, not just advertising her own unique intelligence or insight.

It was also interesting to read Crispin’s discussion of John Brown and the way Kansans simplify his complicated legacy to better be able to sanitize their own conservatism in the present with an antislavery past. But the parallel drawn between Brown and Scott Roeder—the antiabortion activist who bombed the clinic of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009, killing him—as men who, being “disappointing” in ordinary life, as workers and fathers, used politics to compensate for that disappointment—feels perhaps too provocative. The two worked toward radically different aims; do those aims not matter? And the savage verdict Crispin delivers on all revolutionary violence feels like claiming moral superiority at the expense of a full spectrum of action. On principle I can agree that, as she puts it, “there should always be institutions that allow people to both see the evil of the system and their participation in it, and then they should be helped to take responsibility”—but anyone alive now or ever can see how rarely such institutions really emerge. I don’t mean to write as though this question is simple, or without stakes, or as though I have engaged or will engage with revolutionary violence in any way beyond the theoretical. But—if you're not willing to entertain the possibility of revolutionary violence against an oppressive system, what might you do to change it when it doesn’t respond to democratic means?

More valuable, to my mind, because it's more sensitively done, is Crispin’s discussion of the human damage that can be wrought by fanaticism, and the way that a violent liberatory cause that fails—as with the Provisional IRA’s attempt to see a free, united, socialist Ireland—renders the violence purposeless: “The act of killing no longer had its original meaning, and those deaths could no longer be disregarded as a terrible necessity. The ends didn't come, so they were stuck with the means, and not all of them could bear it.” That’s what I want discussed in considerations of revolutionary violence. A clear-eyed assessment of the arguments for it and the costs of it, knowing we live in a world where it's possible, that some cases of it may be justified in ways others are not, and that its undertaking has material and moral consequences.

I also appreciated Crispin’s discussion of the counterculture, whose loss she laments. It's a space of collectivity and experimentation—and it’s not necessarily meant to create something new and durable. Rather, it’s a place for people to land when they realize society is in many ways sick, and from there attempt to do new things—some of which are meant to be coopted; some of which are meant to fail.

Crispin goes on to argue today’s left has abandoned such space in favor of criticizing culture, rather than building it. It’s a hackneyed critique as she makes it—she never defines the wokeness she seems to rail against, nor talks about the neoliberal market and government as uniquely powerful agents for coopting what counterculture might try to make and withdrawing the material resources they might use to make it—but it’s not without its core of truth. Especially against her point that the right, broadly, moves to appease grievance—against neoliberalism, against consumerist culture, against the sense of enervation in society that results—in the assertion of social control through law and order, in the reassertion of Judeo-Christian morals as a source of meaning, and at the extreme, in allegiance to fundamentalist or White nationalist futures.

Finally, Crispin’s account of resolving her struggle with faith in gnosticism is also beautiful—particularly the endpoint she reaches, asserting that the seeking of truth is the point of life, rather than a means by which to get to the Protestant end of salvation, as she has been told since she was a child. At the start of the book, Crispin describes a love ritual she seeks from a witch she knows, Katelan, to break herself of a pattern of involvement with married men—one that she realizes comes from experience of an abusive relationship. (It’s one of the book's most electric insights: “Once you've been knocked around a bit, or screamed at and humiliated in public places, or stalked, or trapped in a car with someone who isn't sure whether he should be pointing the gun at himself or at you, the full attention of a man in love can seem too dangerous. Better to deflect it a bit, get another body in there to hide behind at times…”) The pair mix flowers and herbs, write on a piece of paper the kind of man Crispin wants, burn the paper and a little wedding candle of a couple in effigy, and summon the spirits; they look to the shapes that form in the wax to see what the relationship will be like. Later, as Crispin leaves Katelan’s home, a storm sprouts up; proof, she says, that the spirits heard them. “Four months later,” Crispin writes, “I was married.”

It sounds too simple or strange to work—and generally, Crispin expresses doubt about the occult as often as affinity for it. But in the end, she sides with the perspective that people can “move through symbol and metaphor to ritualize the natural world and our role within it and find a way to understand [their] own mortality,” and there is something beautiful in that.

When I went to that witch and asked for a ritual for love, it wasn't out of a belief that it would work. It's easy to disprove magic. I did it out of faith that there was something not inherently disgusting and unforgivable about myself, and that that part of myself might be loved.

Which is to say, the ritual is meant less to achieve a result than to consecrate this nascent sense of self Crispin feels emerging, or to incarnate it, to give it the strength it needs to manifest.

But again it's hard to miss how so many such lovely, courageous moments on Crispin’s part are dogged with harsh judgment of others. Right after the story of this beautiful ritual, and Crispin's account of her interest in Wicca and Tarot as a teenager, comes a passage in which Crispin viciously judges the witches on TikTok who, in 2020, gained minor notoriety online for an attempt to “hex” the moon:

The TikTok witches, it seems, decided to hex the moon. And the Twitter witches got upset, saying you can't hex the moon, there are consequences to that kind of impertinence. Some of the Twitter witches insisted they had, in their rituals, talked to Apollo, and now Apollo was pissed and wasn't going to do things for them. They didn't say what those things were, but it was probably along the lines of getting Justin Bieber tickets.

For some reason the whole thing sent me into a rage. “You did not talk to Apollo!” I wanted to yell. Who do these girls think they are, lighting candles in an Ohio basement, thinking the god of poetry is going to take their call? Thinking they won't face madness or torment while trying to find the language of the divine? Thinking the saints who wandered in the desert for years begging god to speak to them must just not have used the right crystal? You don't get to talk to god and then just go to your job at the mall.

It's all so spiritually thin, this generation of witches making demands without devotion, looking to the stars to tell them when things will get good for them rather than asking what they can offer of themselves...

To which I ask: why so harsh? Yes, the whole thing is a bit stupid; everything on TikTok is at least a little dumb. But the witches are effectively seeking for meaning, even if their expression of seeking feels goofy. And how much offering of herself was Crispin doing when she was young, anyway—a misfit in a conservative Kansas family, dying her hair black, hunting down books on Wicca and astrology, turning to paganism as part of a project of figuring out what she really believed, how powerful she really was?

In the end, what really distinguishes the kids on Tiktok from Crispin's own teenage self is a sense they're still subject to illusions she's broken free from. It's that radical individuality again—but deployed in the service of judgment of others, in a spirit that seems to contradict the generosity of the internally organized individual that Crispin elsewhere counsels us to cultivate. Let kids do the work of individuation, I say, however stupid it seems. As for those of the TikTok witches who aren’t children, well, I think love and not judgment is what helps spiritual thinness flesh out.

Late in the book, after she’s settled in Kansas City, Crispin sees an old church across the street that will soon be torn down for condos:

I imagine that when a developer looks at this building, they see lost profit. They see the structure transformed or replaced, filled with young professionals, maybe with a coworking space on the ground floor. I imagine that when a priest looks at the building, they see lost souls. They imagine it filled with the wayward sheep lost to a secular culture, the ghosts of the godless filling the pews. I imagine that when a community organizer looks at the building, they see a space for organizing. They see it filled with the work of local artists, or support groups for a very specific marginalized population…

Here one sees the drive to classify, to split society into types (developer, priest, organizer) or sectors of society (the religious right, capitalist money culture, the right, the left). These labels do describe legible demographics, and a certain degree of such abstraction is necessary for a polemic, or any piece of nonfiction about society broadly—but they become so reductive when all they're used to do is harangue. The building is renovated, and an arts nonprofit moves in. “But of course people don't dream of adequately feeding someone,” Crispin says:

they don't go to med school in the hopes of providing basic care in exchange for a sustainable income. They dream of expansion, not maintenance. They dream of art, not groceries. They dream of leading a movement, not participating in one. They dream of the glorification of their own desires, not the meeting of other people's needs. Or they dream purely of profit, which means selling low quality in high quantity with little overhead, and of course treating employees decently and making sure they don't drop dead of a preventable disease counts as overhead.

Who is “they” here? I think. Anybody but you? And without any clear referents, what is anyone supposed to do about this? Who are they supposed to target, to change the way things are, and how?

I wonder how this passage might've been different if Crispin had named the nonprofit, or identified the bourgeois biscuit shop that later moves into another abandoned building in her part of town. Put someone's skin in the game. It would be a small move toward the kind of specificity in analysis that might actually make change happen; it could also be less alienating than what we get.

People often complain about the “personal essay industrial complex,” or they criticize “informed exceptionalism”—Amber Husain's excellent term for the kind of writing, a la Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror or Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, in which the writer uses the admission of their own complicity to effectively excuse that complicity. But reading this book, I missed the specificity of those writers’ subject positions, the pains they often took to elaborate them and to locate themselves in the networks in which we're all culpable, and to do these things with humility.

Ultimately, if informed exceptionalism is the midpoint in a continuum of autobiographical writing—and the position of ambivalence that refuses absolution that is assumed by, say, Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless, per Husain’s argument, is a progression (though, crucially, not an endpoint; there’s more progress yet to be made)—the stretches of pure harangue we get in this book mark a regression. And next to them, I'll take an honest admission of the writer’s own complicity—and the extension of that same grace to even the witches on TikTok hexing the moon—any day.

[factoringprimes-blog]

"If there are those who would describe burning bridges as an enactment of the Freudian “death drive”—an impulse to self-annihilate tantamount to a disavowal of life—it is also possible to think of this brand of arson in more affirmative terms. In burning a bridge, we may foreclose for ourselves some variety of fulfillment, yet we do so in the necessary hope of one much greater." Amber Husain on the Great Resignation.

[twentyminutemiso]

11-13th

Texting chiara, getting ready for pxssy palace, venting to han and zaahid about what chiara said to me. I feel quite disappointed and annoyed about her defensive reaction, which seems to have limited empathy, she wasn’t putting herself in my shoes. But she’s preoccupied with her relationship so she might not have time for other people’s shoes. Can’t help but feel that’s so boring. I want to be a good friend but not sure how much i can intervene

Taking several hours to get into my korra costume, playing hinky pinky with zaahid and han on the train, attractive proactive, type A personality, han forgetting their ID and going home, me being smashed already from half a bottle of that lidl vodka, two patron shots, a ‘pussy juice’ for me and for mina (mina’s birthday), mina being sasuke’s brother, saw afi shani khadija jasmine darlington bilan ray. Sin kai wan complimented my outfit and said they were tony leung. Anairin took a video of me. At least 4 people recognising who i was. 2 asking if i was katara and 1 asking if i was chun li. Going home hink pink, zaahid made caramelised banana pancakes.

Throwing up and being in bed all day saturday with han and zaahid caring for me. Going to amber’s party with her walthamstow mates who always nourish me with their secondary school banter. Jamilla, thomas, aasiyah, amber and al-husain catching up on the gossip between their schoolmates. So and so is pregnant now, also that tiny boy (motioning with a hand at waist level to indicate small stature) who tried to shoot his shot in amber’s twitter dms. Amber’s mum splitting up with her stepdad and she’s moving back to their house so it’ll be amber george and her mum. Vanessa’s friend who has a boyfriend called pro (very sunnily clarifying Professional) and she identified, like amber, as a lesbian with a boyfriend (‘there are many of us’)

Thursday 10th

SOAS, meeting Anna for a steak sandwich, the Soane museum, feeling the start of summer.

Jeng and Kaitlene came round, I didn’t stay because I went to see piglet at avalon cafe. Beautiful harmonies and a saxophonist. Two mancunians(?) theo and hester. Two people in the warmup band, osian and a dude with a curly bob. Running to get the bus.

Sunday 14th

Mina’s birthday party and it’s funny cos the two demographics shes a part of are gay Asians and gay northerners

A walk through covent garden to reach the southbank. Finding dad’s spot. Feeling emotional walking through the piazza and something about making me cry. Occasionally do cry when I think of my dad these days, probably because I miss him but there’s something more than that. This specific past iteration of my dad in covent garden triggers my emotions more than when I see him. It must be like how kevin cried about grandad being senile but wouldn’t hang out with grandma even though we were all in China. It comes from something sore inside ourselves rather than only something about the other person. Mum, dad and kevin don’t really vocalise things that upset us. They try to put them out of their minds. Afterwards when I called dad he said the thought of going back there made him want to rage, which probably is part of why I was sad too. I’m very sentimental and I don’t like the thought that something that was a big part of us is gone now. I told him it’s pretty good that he managed to get 20 years out of it. To be honest what street performer today would be able to get a mortgage off their earnings?

Rachel, elete, sandy, christine, audrey. Bumping into naila and rojda. Sonia Jeunet. Was happy to catch sight of edi as i walked out. For ages talking to micha’s sister paz’s friend who goes to soas who had an upset with a tiramisu date who changed his hinge profile AFTER agreeing they were dating exclusively.

[artbookdap]

Please note! 'Art on the Frontline: Mandate for a People´s Culture,' by Angela Y. Davis with artwork by Tschabalala Self,' is a New Release this week! ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ In her stirring and influential essay “Art on the Frontline,” American scholar and activist icon Angela Y. Davis asked, “how do we collectively acknowledge our popular cultural legacy and communicate it to the masses of people, most of whom have been denied access to the social spaces reserved for arts and culture?”⁠⁠ Originally published in 'Political Affairs,' a radical Marxist magazine, in 1985, the essay calls into question the role of art in the pursuit of social and racial liberation, and asserts the inequities exacerbated by the art world. Looking to the cultural and artistic forms born of Afro-American struggles, Davis insists that we attempt to understand, reclaim and glean insight from this history in preparing a political offensive against the racial oppression endemic to capitalism.⁠⁠ Working in the context of 2020’s racial uprising some 35 years later, New York–based painter Tschabalala Self responds to Davis’ words with new, characteristically vibrant and provocative collaged works on paper. Her three series emerge collectively as something greater than their parts, suggesting a joyfulness in their ebbs and flows.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Read more via linkinbio.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ 'Art on the Frontline: Mandate for a People´s Culture, Two Works Series Vol. 2' is published by @buchhandlungwaltherfranzkoenig & @afteralljournal and edited by Amber Husain.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ @_angeladavis1944 @tschabalalaself #angeladavis #tschabalalaself #artonthefrontline https://www.instagram.com/p/CRMd26YsFNy/?utm_medium=tumblr

[iammumblrrr]

by Indians, for Indians, of Indian

Geography: Prof. Majid Husain (Roorkee) M.A. in Geography (Gold Medalist), LL.B and a PhD DR Khullar Physical Geography: Arthur Newell Strahler was a geoscience professor at Columbia University who in 1952 developed the Strahler Stream Order system for classifying streams according to the power of their tributaries. Wikipedia Born: 20 February 1918, Kolhapur Died: 6 December 2002, New York City, New York, United States Education: Columbia University Notable student: Marie Morisawa

Polity: M. Laxmikanth (Hyderabad), Masters from Osmania University (’89). Director, Laxmikanth’s IAS in Hyderabad

Economics: Ramesh Singh (Delhi) Alumnus, Delhi School of Economics; Director, Civils India-Karol Bagh

Art & Culture: Nitin Singhania

Modern History: Bipin Chandra (1928-2014,Kangra, Himachal Pradesh) Rajiv Ahir, Ramachandra Guha (Dehradun),  Mridula Mukherjee (1950, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi) Sumit Sarkar is an Indian historian of modern India. He is the author of Swadeshi Movement. Wikipedia Born: 1939 (age 79 years) Education: University of Calcutta, Presidency University, Kolkata Upinder Singh is a historian and the head of the History Department at the University of Delhi. She is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of Social Sciences. Wikipedia Parents: Manmohan Singh, Gursharan Kaur Siblings: Daman Singh Education: McGill University, St. Stephen's College, Delhi Grandparents: Amrit Kaur, Gurmukh Singh Uncles: Surinder Singh Kohli, Surjeet Singh Kohli, Daljit Singh Kohli Mohammad Tarique (JMI, New Delhi)

Medieval History: Satish Chandra (1922-2017, Meerut, Allahabad),  B.A. (1942), M.A. (1944), and D.Phil (1948) under R.P. Tripathi. His doctoral thesis was on the Parties and Politics in 18th century India.  Satish Chandra belonged to the group of historians, along with Romila Thapar, R. S. Sharma, Bipan Chandra and Arjun Dev, who are sometimes referred to as "left-leaning" or "influenced by Marxist approach to history." In 2004 his textbook was reintroduced in the national curriculum after a hiatus of six years.

Prof. Irfan Habib (1931, Vadodara, Aligarh)  following the approach of Marxist historiography. He is well known for his strong stance against Hindu and Islamic communalists. He has authored a number of books, including Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707.  Irfan's wife Sayera Habib (née Siddiqui) was Professor of Economics at Aligarh Muslim University. The couple have three sons and a daughter. The elder son is a scientist in America. The third son, Amber Habib, is head of the department of mathematics at Shiv Nadar University, and is married to Abha Dev Habib, a professor at Delhi University. Irfan's second son, Faiz Habib, is a cartographer at the Center of Advanced Study in History. His daughter, Saman Habib, is a scientist.  He is an Elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Royal Historical Society since 1997.

Ancient HIstory: Prof. Ram Sharan Sharma (1919-2011, Barauni is an industrial town situated on the bank of the river Ganges in Begusarai, Bihar). He was an eminent historian and academic of Ancient and early Medieval India. He taught at Patna University and Delhi University (1973–85) and was visiting faculty at University of Toronto (1965–1966). He also was a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a University Grants Commission National Fellow (1958–81) and the president of Indian History Congressin 1975. Romila Thapar is an Indian historian whose principal area of study is ancient India. She is the author of several books including the popular volume, A History of India, and is currently Professor Emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Wikipedia Born: 30 November 1931 (age 86 years), Lucknow Parents: Daya Ram Thapar Education: University of London, SOAS, University of London, Panjab University, Chandigarh, Panjab University Awards: Padma Bhushan, Kluge Prize Siblings: Ramesh Thapar Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi was an Indian mathematician, statistician, philologist, historian and polymath who contributed to genetics by introducing Kosambi map function. Wikipedia Born: 31 July 1907, Portuguese India Died: 29 June 1966, Pune Parents: Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi Children: Meera Kosambi Education: Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Harvard University Ramesh Chandra Majumdar was a historian and professor of Indian history. Wikipedia Born: 4 December 1884, Faridpur District, Bangladesh Died: 11 February 1980, Kolkata Succeeded by: Mahmud Hasan Education: Presidency University, Kolkata, University of Calcutta Dwijendra Narayan Jha is an Indian historian, specialising in ancient and medieval India. He was a professor of history at Delhi University and a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research. Wikipedia Born: 1940 (age 78 years) Known for: Authoring books about Indian history Arthur Llewellyn Basham was a noted historian and Indologist and author of a number of books (incl. The Wonder That Was India [A.L. Basham] ). As a Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in the 1950s and the 1960s, he taught ... Wikipedia Born: 24 May 1914, Loughton, United Kingdom Died: 27 January 1986, Kolkata Education: SOAS, University of London

Policymaking: Dr. Saumitra Mohan, (Kolkata), IAS’2002.  PhD (Int’l Org) from JNU. MJMC from IIMC, New Delhi and M.Ed. from IGNOU. Before joining IAS, he has worked with PTI, New Delhi as a Journalist, as a Lecturer with the Meerut University and as an Assistant Regional Director with IGNOU.

Sociology: M. Senthil Kumar (Chennai), Director of Times IAS Academy, Chennai, holds an MA in Sociology along with BSc. and MCA.

Int’l Relations: Prof. Pushpesh K. Pant (1947, Bhimtal, Kumaon, Uttarakhand, Delhi) Author, India: The Cookbook, International Relations in 21st Century. Professor of International relations from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Pavneet Singh (Delhi), MA, MBA(Marketing)-International Management Institute, Delhi

[beenasarwar]

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Following the recent statement signed by prominent academics including Noam Chomsky against the growing censorship in Pakistan, over 70 Pakistani journalists, editors, columnists, media persons from across the media landscape in the country as have signed a joint statement also expressing serious concern and condemning the ongoing curbs on freedom of expression in the country. These curbs include several articles being pulled off media websites in Pakistan like Babar Sattar’s oped (published in this blog) as well as three other pieces in The News on Sunday this past weekend. Others are not published in the first place, like Mobashir Zaidi’s oped in The News, and Gul Bukhari’s article for 16 April that The Nation didn’t run (published in Naya Daur). Below, the journalists’ statement and initial signatures obtained within the first 24-hours below in alphabetical order.

Pakistani journalists, editors, media persons protest against ongoing censorship

We the undersigned journalists, editors, columnists and media persons, express our serious concern and condemn the ongoing curbs on freedom of expression in Pakistan.

Beginning with a crackdown against select media groups and banning the broadcast of various channels, there now is enhanced pressure on all media houses to refrain from covering certain rights based movements.

Media house managements under pressure are dropping regular op-ed columns and removing online editions of published articles. One media house even asked its anchors to stop live shows.

There is growing self censorship and increasingly, discussions on “given news” rather than real news, violating the citizens’ right to information.

These examples represent a fraction of the kind of censorship taking place across the country in different ways.

We strongly protest against all forms of censorship imposed on free media and freedom of information and stand united against it.

(Signed – alphabetical order)

Abbas Nasir, former editor Dawn

Abdul Sattar freelance journalist, Islamabad

Adnan Rehmat, freelance journalist

Afia Salam, freelance journalist, The News, Dawn

Ahmed Noorani, reporter, The News

Allah Bux Arisar, district correspondent daily Dawn and Dawn TV, Umerkot

Annam Lodhi, journalist Media Matters For Democracy

Annie Zaman, Global Voices

Asad Baig, founder, Media Matters for Democracy (MMFD)

Asad Hashim, freelance journalist

Alefia T. Hussain, Consulting Editor, The News on Sunday

Ammara Ahmad, freelance journalist

Amber Rahim Shamsi, freelance journalist

Asma Shirazi, journalist and TV anchor Aaj News

Babar Sattar, columnist, The News

Beena Sarwar, editor, Aman Ki Asha

Farah Zia, editor, The News on Sunday

Farieha Aziz, freelance journalist and co-founder Bolo Bhi

Farooq Mehsud, TV journalist, Chief Editor Waziristan Times

Fauzia Shahid, former Secretary General Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ)

Hamid Mir, columnist and TV anchor

Haroon Rashid, editor BBC Urdu

Hamza Rao, Assistant editor, op-ed, Daily Times

Husain Naqi, senior journalist and former editor Sajjan, The News, Jehd-e-Haq

I.A. Rehman, former editor Pakistan Times

Imtiaz Alam, Secretary General SAFMA

Iqbal Khattak, freelance journalist and RSF Pakistan representative

Irfan Husain, columnist Dawn

Ishtiaq Mehsud, journalist, D. I. Khan

Ismat Jabeen, freelance journalist

Jawad Zulfiqar, journalist, Pakistan Today

Kamila Hyat, former editor, The News Lahore

Kashan Akmal, News Anchor DBTV

Kiran Nazish, independent journalist

Khurram Husain, Business Editor, Dawn

Maham Javaid, assistant editor, The News on Sunday

M. Ziauddin, former editor Express Tribune

Marvi Sirmed, journalist, Daily Times

Mehmal Sarfraz, journalist and producer Neo TV

Mona Kazim Shah, freelance journalist, correspondent DW

Murtaza Solangi, journalist, TV anchor, former Director General Radio Pakistan

Nasim Zehra, journalist, TV anchor Channel 24

Nosheen Abbas, freelance journalist

Nighat Daad, media and censorship researcher

Nusrat Javed, TV anchor, columnist

Quatrina Hosain, independent journalist

Rana Muhammad Azeem president Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ), editor Forum 92 News, Lahore

Raza Rumi, editor, Daily Times

Saleem Asmi, former editor Dawn

Sirmed Manzoor, freelance journalist

Saba Eitizaz, journalist, CBC

Sabahat Zakariya, Deputy Editor,  The News on Sunday

Sadaf Baig, co-founder Media Matters for Democracy

Sailab Mehsud, journalist, Mashal Radio

Shabana Mahfooz, freelance journalist

Shahzada Irfan Ahmed, Senior Reporter, The News on Sunday

Shahzad Ahmad, Country Director, Bytes For All, Pakistan

Shahzaib Walia, journalist, France 24

Sheen Farrukh, journalist, editor, Inter-Press Communication

Saadia Salahuddin, Assistant Editor, The News on Sunday

Taha Siddiqui, journalist, France 24

Tanzeela Mazhar, TV news anchor

Umar Cheema, reporter, The News

Umber Khairi, Producer, BBC Urdu Service

Umer Ali, freelance journalist, Herald, News Deeply, Thomson Reuters

Waseem Ahmad Shah, senior correspondent, Dawn Peshawar.

Xari Jalil, reporter, Dawn

Zahid Hussain, journalist and columnist, Dawn, Newsline

Zebunnisa Burki, deputy editor oped, The News

Zofeen T. Ebrahim, freelance journalist, IPS News, Dawn

Zohra Yusuf, former editor, The Star Weekend, Herald Publications

Pakistani journalists protest growing censorship Following the recent statement signed by prominent academics including Noam Chomsky against the growing censorship in Pakistan, over 70 Pakistani journalists, editors, columnists, media persons from across the media landscape in the country as have signed a joint statement also expressing serious concern and condemning the ongoing curbs on freedom of expression in the country.

[kellyjohnsonme-blog]

05-31 CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND - MAY 31: Home Secretary Amber Rudd takes part in the BBC Election Debate hosted by BBC news presenter Mishal Husain, as it is broadcast live from Senate House on May ... http://dlvr.it/PHYw4D

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what will we do, expecting no reward?

The copy on the back cover of Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory asks a question: “Can we avoid repeating history?”

The answer to that question lies in determining what we’ve been doing thus far and changing it. But many of the essays in the collection focus on the possibility of empathy and compassion at the expense of much discussion of what these feelings might help us to do. See for instance Gabbert, at the end of the essay “I’m So Tired,” growing maudlin over the state of the world until her activist friend justly snaps at her to “Stop despairing! That’s not a strategy.” Some time later, he relents; he grants that writing may be her form of activism. Should it be? Maybe we’ve really reached the end of what “personal essays” can achieve for either those who write them or those who read them.

Many of the essays in The Unreality of Memory are about the anxiety that the average middle-class person—the person who has a job in an industry like marketing or tech, has a healthy social life, keeps herself reasonably informed, and makes sure to vote—feels when she considers natural disasters, climate change, war, and mass death. Because this person is seldom at risk herself, the regard for others she experiences is often nominal rather than meaningful. “Worry, like attention, is a limited resource,” as Gabbert says in the essay “Threats,” and what we do with it depends on how immediate the threat we face is and whether it poses a risk to our individual survival. Often, we offload our worry onto experts who can tell us, for instance, where and how to build a structure to keep it safe from earthquakes.

But offload too much of your worry, leave too much of your responsibility for experts and systems to take up, and when a crisis comes that no one set of experts can address, you’re reduced to paralysis.

And there are limits to what any one expert can address when the crises and the systems wracked by them are big enough. When he was president, Barack Obama was a symbol of the systems, domestic and international, that claim to represent us and to work for our collective welfare. In the essay “In Our Midst,” Gabbert shares Obama’s response to a reporter’s question about South Sudan at one of his final press conferences:

Mike, I always feel responsible. I felt responsible when kids were being shot by snipers. I felt responsible when millions of people had been displaced. I feel responsible for murder and slaughter that’s taken place in South Sudan that’s not being reported on, partly because there’s not as much social media being generated from there. There are places around the world where horrible things are happening and because of my office, because I’m president of the United States, I feel responsible. I ask myself every single day, is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn’t deserve to suffer. So that’s a starting point. There’s not a moment during the course of this presidency where I haven’t felt some responsibility.

Gabbert takes this in good faith, as a genuine reflection of Obama’s deep capacity for care. I found it harder to do that. Reading the passage in 2020, I think: Is this expression of care anything more than mere expression? Did Obama work to stop what happened in South Sudan, or did he just feel bad about it?

I grant I’m overestimating the ability even the US president has to act to regulate conflicts fueled by global interests—not least that of the country he leads. The problem is probably the question Obama was asked. “Do you, as president of the United States, leader of the free world, feel any personal moral responsibility now at the end of your presidency for the carnage we’re all watching in Aleppo, which I’m sure disturbs you?” To that, I think: The president can feel as much personal moral responsibility as he likes. What will the systems around him let him do with that responsibility?

So often when we consider global catastrophes or natural disasters as responsible, empathic, suffering individuals, we end up stuck pathetically in the realm of affect. We know things are bad and we need to act to change them and we have no idea how. We don’t know what action even a president could take that would cut these knots we’ve so long tied. All we can do is talk about how bad it feels to be stuck—our fears and obligations and how it feels to contemplate them.

By the time we reach the epilogue of Unreality—a book written by an essayist considering the idea of catastrophe as an anxious, curious, empathic, suffering individual—Gabbert’s investigations culminate in banalities. “I don’t think most people are good, or bad, for that matter,” Gabbert says. “I think most people are neutral”:

It seems to me that “good people” can become “bad people” when provided the opportunity within an existing power structure—to claim and exert power at a deadly cost to others and get away with it.

I don’t think Gabbert needed to write this whole book to come to that conclusion. That could’ve been the premise she started from.

It led me to think we probably don’t need essayists to comment on this moment at all; all essays about how our current moment feels will be empty, reflexive, performative gestures that just don’t need to be made. And what we really need are critics and theorists who can give activists and laypeople an understanding of the power structures they live in and identify concrete ways to make those structures change, stop the people who exert power within them, and hold those people accountable.

In the epilogue to the book, as she considers the question of what we can ever know of the world, Gabbert writes of her attraction to the German biologist Jakob von Uexhull’s idea of the Umwelt—which is the name he gives to the information an animal picks up from its surroundings, often limited to just what the animal can sense given the equipment it has and what it immediately needs. Think of a tick: all it knows to pay attention to is the temperature and particular odors that will help it find blood. “Like a tick or a bat,” Gabbert adds, “we only know what we know.” But that seems wrong. At the risk of stating my own banality here, humans aren’t ticks or bats. They’re humans. They’re the one creature on this planet with a mind that is equipped to know what it doesn’t know and what it’ll need to figure out. And to pretend otherwise feels like dithering as we approach an event horizon.

I know Gabbert doesn’t have any answers to the questions of climate change or war or putatively democratic systems that no longer respond to the will of the people. No one person does. But to do so much pontificating instead is frustrating.

But I don’t mean to pile on. I’m essentially in Gabbert’s position myself. I didn’t go to many of the past summer’s protests either; I was generally too leery of getting or spreading COVID. I regularly write and think and talk more about problems I see than I act in ways that might solve those problems. I generally enjoyed this book. And I’m generally sympathetic to the authors accused of falling into the reflexivity trap—Katy Waldman’s term for the idea, often implied in contemporary essays and works of autofiction, that to be aware of your own privileged position is to be absolved of it; that awareness alone is sufficient. I liked Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror; I liked Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley; I like Sally Rooney’s novels, basic though they might be, even as the ranks of today’s literary critics have closed around the positions that her books don’t bear out her politics and aren’t worth the time the mainstream press gives them. Or more accurately, I feel empathy for those writers, and for Gabbert. I suspect we were formed by the same pressures.

Many of us writing today grew up under similar narrow, capitalist, rightward political horizons; we were given the same withered political vocabularies and feeble political imaginations. And so, today, there are many artists whose work doesn’t really reflect their stated politics; there are many (left) positions that are more easily stated than lived; there are many changes we want to see in this world that we have no real way to make. And often, all we can do is say how much we want to make them and confess over and over that we can’t. Doesn’t an individual’s ability to effect change depend on whether systems respond to her efforts? And do ours? To what extent can political orientations or commitments to combat climate change be meaningfully lived when political life for so many is voting once or twice every few years, for politicians who don’t listen to us or can’t or won’t deliver what we need, while systems stay gridlocked?

In her review of Trick Mirror, Lauren Oyler wrote that what people in the reflexivity trap often do is shield what is really a demonstration of their priorities and desires under the guise of “surviving” in a compromised world. And as Amber Husain wrote in The White Review, the sort of informed exceptionalism exhibited by Jia Tolentino or Anna Wiener, the apparent belief that if you write convincingly perceptively about the morally compromised systems you participate in, you can avoid being held to account for that, is not enough.* You have to interrogate your own desires, refuse to indulge the ones that make you complicit in an unethical world, and consciously choose to satisfy desires and imperatives that are productive or just. Having read The Unreality of Memory, I feel the desire to write about how we feel when we think about, say, the climate changing, the desire to dramatize that feeling, isn’t a productive desire. But it feels that way. And because it ends in a result, in a concrete thing like an essay or a book, it feels better than the impossible work of trying to act in a way that might curb climate change or mitigate the damage of our next fire season. That work, by contrast—it’s hard to figure out what it would look like. And just contemplating the issue is unsatisfying, difficult, grinding, humiliating. It hurts.

But that’s a pain we need. I think also of a recent conversation between Donald Glover and Michaela Coel in GQ, in which Glover says, “Every generation has a job they need to do,” and “the job is always the same, which is to plant a tree you won’t eat from.”

...you need to plant a tree right now. And you don’t get to eat from it. Maybe your kids don’t even get to eat from it. You just teach them to water it, but their kids get to eat from it. And you do or you go on, you transition, knowing you did the right thing.

Enough about how we feel; we know the answer is “bad.” And on to the question: what will we do, expecting no reward?

*The connections I’ve made here come courtesy of Haley Nahman’s “Maybe Baby” column: specifically, “#24: The Emily Ratajkowski effect,” in which Nahman writes about Emily Ratajkowski’s “Buying Myself Back” and the position of the culture worker who both profits from the culture and agitates against it. I’d read both Oyler’s piece and Husain’s as they came out, but I hadn’t made the connection until I saw it so well elaborated by Nahman.