Well, Jim, perhaps you’ve altered the sober substantive science of Professor Loopia, but surely if your table accurately represents his presentation, we must interrogate him about his unseemly use of the hegemonic preposition “from.”
Take a portion of this email recently sent by a Paupa New Guinean colleague about this: “We have no way of knowing whether this so-called ‘male from Benin’ is Beninian, Beninian-American, Beninian/American, a global citizen of Beninian heritage, or if he even has been in Benin. But ‘from’ assumes a unidirectionality of civic identity formation, and thus is freighted with hegemonic import. The preposition suggests he is less of an American and thus less of a citizen.”
“Now, if we were to truly internationalize , as I have advocated, and thus rename the APSA the PSAA(that’s the Political Science Association in America—those who think it should be PSAMTA, for the Political Science Association Most of the Time in America, seem to my mind pointlessly precise), this would not matter, for then we would dispense with all labeling, and merely ask what PWS (Population-Weighted Sector) of the globe the individual in question hailed from, of course adjusting for genetic make-up discrepancies by the best available formulas, and perhaps adjusting for interest areas(you know, the problem of the Paraguayan who spends all his time with Russian novels or such) and thus arrive at the Most Internationally Representative Professorship Distribution, which of course ought to be mandated for hiring and course approval, although the model could be used to evaluate these democracy schemas being debated by APSA.”
He went on to argue why PWSs were the most reliable and democratic rubric, given the endless disputes that would be generated in the determination of HWSs (hegemony-weighted sectors), a topic I see your grad students are interested about, Jim, but alas, he did not respond when I informed him he had probably sent the email to the wrong address.
Which is doubly unfortunate, because I know an administrator or two who would so love to talk with him.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
