Sobering thought

I think I'll need to start writing more, not just assignments, but in general. I'm starting to find that writing doesn't come as easily to me as it once did. This is partly because I'm writing denser (& hopefully more sophisticated) arguments, partly because the stakes are higher and I'm therefore more cautious about what I write. But it's also because I don't write as much anymore, on my blog or for assignments. Yes, I write much longer papers now, but I don't write as MANY papers. I need to get into the habit of writing stuff / nonsense again.

Doing work while grouchy

When I'm working while feeling a bit down and out, things like this REALLY piss me off: "The first is the structural poverty of the African continent. By structural poverty, we refer to the lack of structures, both concrete and ideological, that function to ensure social continuity."

The offending phrase is 'structural poverty'. 'Structural poverty' could mean economic poverty caused by structural factors, but the author uses it to mean the poverty of structures, in which case shouldn't he have used something like 'lack of structural capacity'????? Or why didn't he just use 'lack of structures'???? Save himself having to define it again in the next line? What benefit is there in using 'structural poverty'? In any case his definition is so broad that it covers everything - policy structures, administrative structures, transport and communications, legal structures, political structures, social structures, ideological structures. Plus what do you mean by 'ensuring social continuity'????? Geographically? Temporally? What is social continuity anyway? You might as well draw a smiley face in place of all that crap.

Sometimes the quality of articles in supposedly academic journals is horrendous. I need to smash my head against a wall. Admittedly I have to find a hard enough wall.

Today it seems as if the whole world has forgotten how to use their brain and mouths (and pens. and handphones) at the same time. *glares at LSB*

Also, typos! What are typos doing in a peer-reviewed journal?????? It's typos galore here! Wth!

Have finished reading the whole article, and am still disgusted. He starts off with talking about various strands of Pan-Africanism, gives us a whole list of difficulties with African integration, and his conclusion has no relation to what he's talked about earlier. It's a version of 'I argue X because of A, B, C, unfortunately, A, B, & C are irrelevant to my argument'.

Today had better not get any worse.

note from LSB's book

"Guha thought of consciousness - and therefore of peasant subjecthood - as something immanent in the very practies of peasant insurgency. Elementary Aspects is a study of the practices of insurgent peasants in colonial India, not of a reified category called consciousness. The aim of the book was to bring out the collective imagination inherent in the practices of peasant rebellion. Guha makes no claim that the insurgent consciousness that he discusses is indeed conscious, that it existed inside the heasd of peasants. He does not equate consciousness with the subject's view of himself. Rather, he examines rebel practices to decipher the particular relationship - between elites and subalterns and among subalterns themselves - that are acted out in them and then attempts to derive from these relationships the elementary structure, as it were, of the consciousness or imagination inherent in those relationships."

- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, pp.15-16

"Heteroscedasticity"

... was the word I didn't understand in an article I was reading today. Was hoping it'd be something cool, but checked wikipedia and turns out it's some statistics thing. Blah.

The Literature Available to Me

A sample of titles on Africa available at Borders:

The Rebel's Hour

Where Soldiers Fear to Tread

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky

Escape from Slavery

Black Skin, White Marks

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We'll be Killed with our Families

Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles

Unbowed

Come on now. I don't know why everyone says Borders is good for acad books. It actually sucks for international relations (& apparently Africa too). Not that Kino is any better for Africa, but at least it has more academic IR books.

Also, I'm feeling nervous about Aber, and wondering why online guides on Aber seem to list more pubs than restaurants.

Cry, the Beloved Country

"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much."

- Alan Paton

Hedley Bull is the coolest

In his introduction to Martin Wight's International Theory:

"Wight's atttitude towards the behaviourists was the source of one of my disagreements with him. I felt that they represented a significant challenge and that it was important to understand them and engage in debate with them. The correct strategy, it appeared to me, was to sit at their feet, to study their position until one could state their own arguments better than they could and then - when they were least suspecting - to turn on them and slaughter them in an academic Massacre of Glencoe. Wight entertained none of these bloody thoughts. He made no serious effort to study the behaviourists and in effect ignored them." p.xi

Pissed

with African historians.

As much as it's not very PC to say so, and insofar as my rather scanty knowledge of the literature allows me to make sweeping statements on the subject.

But if they don't start acknowledging that the Europeans weren't the only brutal murderers in their history, they should stop writing.