The Beautiful Struggle
A meditative syllabus on Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
Abolish the ICE Prison Complex
A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons
Border Theories
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
Soft Borders
The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.
Fash at Sea
The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over
Operation Streamline
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.
In the Water
An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility--they might become our neighbor
Cross-Border Operations
It is no longer plausible to describe the state’s borders as geographically fixed or the state as distinguishable from capital or “markets.”
Empire Records
Guantánamo Diary's missing passages connect it with the US empire's deeper history of far-flung capture and detention networks
Dreaming of NAFTA
Tejano star Selena represented the cultural promise of a more open U.S. Mexico border. Her death presaged the ultimate fate of that dream.
One If by Land, Two If by Sea
To turn the U.S.-Mexico border into the Border, America had to erase its Caribbean history
Dinner with Lydia Maria Child
I began the Dinner series in 2016 with “Dinner with Caligula.” Much to my shock and sorrow, Caligula did show up to dinner. But history…
The Beautiful Struggle
A meditative syllabus on Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Pyttipanna (Links for the Week of July 21, 2019)
Image: Boston Public Library Pyttipanna: Swedish for “small pieces in a pan.” Black-owned restaurants are gaining in numbers and popularity One meatless slideróor even a…
Vol. 71 Editors’ Note: Escape
How the hell do I get out of here?
Pyttipanna (Links for the Week of July 14)
Image from Geo H. Gennawey, Rocky Point, R.I., “Shore Dinner, Rocky Point, R.I.” (1935). Rhode Island Postcards. 273. Pyttipanna: Swedish for “small pieces in a pan.”…
Pyttipanna (Links for the Week of July 7)
Image from the Ice Cream Trade Journal (1922) Pyttipanna: Swedish for “small pieces in a pan.” Greening “food desert” communities, one school at a time…
Pyttipanna (Links for the Week of June 30)
Image via archive.org Pyttipanna: Swedish for “small pieces in a pan.” A recent expose of ongoing institutional discrimination at the USDA. Did SCOTUS just clear…
Ramadan Diaries, Day Thirty-One
We can’t seem to grasp the patience it takes for a tree to grow
United States v. Scott Daniel Warren
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
Pyttipanna (Links for the Week of June 23)
Image from Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s My Cookery Books (1903) Pyttipanna: Swedish for “small pieces in a pan.” Nevada passes $10 million food bill—but it doesn’t have…
Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty-Nine
She is the kind of person who understands that nothing that can flow needs to be forced
Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty-Seven
The battle over email is one over which I hold a false sense of equilibrium
Ramadan Diaries, Day Twenty-Five
I am the algorithm's targeted audience for work-mode motivational posters
The Limit Does Not Exist
An interview with Marxist philosopher Joshua Moufawad-Paul about the science of revolution at a time when socialism is supposedly becoming mainstream
Death by Association
Calling on “black cyberpunk,” Roy Christopher’s book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future bestows the genre with a ghostly pallor, risking its political potential