Spring time/New year’s reading:

• The Single American Woman is a new class of citizenry.
• Universities should divest from all hedge-funds.
• How Abortion-Opponents Secretly Bought an Abortion Clinic to Deceive Women.
• Feminism and the 2016 primary [podcast].
• The Rise of American Authoritarianism.
• During Steve Locke’s Sabbatical, 262 Unarmed African-Americans were Killed by Police.
• Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive:

Human history, by definition, is history beyond whiteness. Human history is about the future. Whiteness is about entrapment.

Whiteness is at its best when it turns into a myth. It is the most corrosive and the most lethal when it makes us believe that it is everywhere; that everything originates from it and it has no outside.

We are therefore calling for the demythologization of whiteness because democracy in South Africa will either be built on the ruins of those versions of whiteness that produced Rhodes or it will fail.

In other words, those versions of whiteness that produced men like Rhodes must be recalled and de-commissioned if we have to put history to rest, free ourselves from our own entrapment in white mythologies and open a future for all here and now.

• The Myth of the Barter Economy.
• Smugglers Work the Dark Side of Rwanda’s Plastic Bag Ban.
• Why Does the Arizona Legislature Hate Public Schools?
• Luanda Taxi, a fieldwork playlist – music from Angola.
• On Claire Underwood’s permanent high heels.
• Les Sapeurs of the Eastern Congo: Stylish and Subversive.
• Political Vernaculars: Freedom and Love:

Readers of Ngugi wa Thiong’o will already have some framing of the vernacular: Vernaculars are “home” languages banished from colonial institutions, especially schools; they are anti-oppression tools used by those excluded from elite institutions; they are frames through which we apprehend the world, following Fanon; and they are ­practices for building community. In colonial and post-­independence Kenya, vernaculars were also framed as elementary languages—the languages taught in lower primary classes, up until standard 3 or 4, at which point English and Swahili were introduced as “more mature” languages. Vernaculars are ways of claiming and shaping space.

Vernaculars also discipline, producing habits and dispositions, ways of acting and feeling and thinking. Most of Kenya’s official political vernaculars—corruption, impunity, national security, for instance—are disciplinary. They name real issues, but they also manage how those issues are handled. One notes the repeated cycle: Identify an issue, call for investigations and firings, establish a commission, commission a report, then file the report in the graveyard of reports. Even those who are aware of how this cycle works—even those most critical of it—cannot imagine anything else. And thus, each new scandal enters the established cycle of the political vernacular.