27. meme, myself & i
thinking about chapter revisions and dog sweaters
Hi there! 👋 I’m Ida, and this is tiny driver, a newsletter about research, pedagogy, culture and their intersections. Thank you for being here. Reach out anytime by just hitting reply, I love hearing from you.
Good morning, and happy Monday. For those of you who have this holiday off, I hope that you take some time to rest and/or do something that will restore you for the week to come. Although I'll be working for most of the day on lesson plans and chapter revisions, I decided that I'm going to consciously and intentionally step away from my desk at 5pm.
So often, I find myself still sitting at my desk in the evenings, either reading emails and articles on the internet or watching YouTube videos. While I don't really see these moments as "working" after 5pm, it is a bit disconcerting that I am still in the same 4x4 space that I have designated as my "office" in quarantine. I want to take this evening to remind myself that I have a couch, and that it is nice to sit on it from time to time.
What I write.
My friend Sara A. shared this recently on Instagram, and I truly cannot relate harder:
This month, I'm starting the process of revising my dissertation into a book. (What that means, I am still trying to figure out. I'll let you know if I have any insights in the future.) It is absolutely impossible for me to get through any section of my dissertation without thinking about the ways that it may have led us to our present moment. It is impossible for me not to spiral out from my work, thinking about the ways that everything and nothing has changed all at the same time.
For those of you who don't yet know, or are new subscribers to tiny driver, I wrote a dissertation about the relationship between US-Iran foreign policy and Iranian racialization in the US from 1953 to the present. (This is just a semi-fancy way of saying that I write about how Iranians in the US are read as white and then brown [and then white and then brown, and on and on] over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And the way that they are racially understood correlates with the changes in the diplomatic relationship between the US and their homeland.) Now that I've finished the dissertation, my new task is to turn it into a book (eep!).
I decided to start my revisions by taking a look back at my fifth chapter that covers Iranian racial formation in the post-9/11 era. Although it's my final chapter, it's the one I wrote first, so it's definitely BEEN A MINUTE since I've fully engaged with it. But going through this chapter at times has been an existential crisis. I see the seeds of our present moment sprinkled throughout.
One of the cultural objects I look at, for instance, is The Freedom Sculpture, which is a WILD piece of public art that was commissioned by a LA-based, Iranian American organization and first unveiled in July 2017. (Hopefully, I'll soon be able to share with you why it is, in fact, WILD.) I wish, so badly, that this public monument was unveiled one year prior. I wish I could say that my dissertation ended with the Obama era, because Trump makes things so damn messy (The Muslim Ban, WWIII with Iran, ending of the Iran deal, etc etc). But here we are. The sculpture's purpose, production and unveiling are touched not only by the era in which it was conceived (Obama), but also the era in which it was erected (Trump). And we are still (unfortunately) living through the consequences of the latter in a way that complicates my approach to this object's significance in the larger scope of my project.
Back in April, the former national security adviser to Obama wrote that in light of COVID-19 and the way that it has "transformed the way Americans live," The 9/11 Era is Over. And two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Michigan representative and former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin tweeted that the "post-9/11 era is over. The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division." The way in which both of these claims are framed centers the (domestic) United States in a way that discounts its many ongoing imperial projects and the violence it has brought upon and continues to bring upon countless communities both within and outside of its borders. And this fact is both upsetting and entirely unsurprising in that it comes from individuals invested in the imperial apparatus of the U.S. nation-state. But the fact that this periodization is even brought up is something that also boggles my mind as I enter into these chapter revisions.
I don't know if what I need is time away from this chapter, or if what we are living through is central to the urgency with which I should revise it. Thoughts are welcome.
What I consume.
In the Bookshop:
Currently Reading: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee + Know My Name by Chanel Miller
On Deck: Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria
Item(s) of note.
The above tweet actually made me laugh so hard. So wholesome! So pure!
I saw this newsletter issue by Nisha Mody of The Healing Hype as a perfect complement to what I wrote about last week.
Very glad that I am not a member of the American Political Science Association.
We love a good Sunday routine.
This video paired with this comment:
A pup-date.
It's getting colder in the Bay, so Girlie is wearing her little turtle neck sweater. It helps her focus on what's really important, like effectively using her paws to optimize stick eating.
As always, thanks so much for reading through, and I'll see you in the next one!
Warmly,
Ida
"The way in which both of these claims are framed centers the (domestic) United States in a way that discounts its many ongoing imperial projects and the violence it has brought upon and continues to bring upon countless communities both within and outside of its borders."
Okay, this is super interesting. There clearly always has been far more reason to be concerned about domestic white supremacist terrorism than anything else, and I think the shift towards paying greater attention to it is probably good on the balance, but it's a really good point that this kind of framing can be used in a variety of ways to take heat and attention off of continued imperialism. It's the difference in reactionary and liberal approaches; the former says "bomb the [Muslims/"terrorists"/brown people] and latter says "investigate [neo-Nazis/QAnon/white nationalists]," but both discourses are part of the overall methods for securing consent for various kinds of violence. (Not sure if I've over-reading what you're saying here, but still--thanks.)
loved this