Countable Bean, Have You Been in Benin?

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.