The Whatcha Reading Thread

[Wadani]

Safferz;942767 wrote:

No problem Wadani, I'm still reading but that's what I'm getting so far. Theorists are always unnecessarily dense, this was a sentence in a chapter I was reading last week from Homi Bhabha's "The Location of Culture":

 

 

:mad:

lool, the funny thing is I think if embedded in it's original context I'd have an easier time navigating this passage than ur convoluted pre-jilcis paragraph.

[Safferz]

Wadani;942783 wrote:

lool, the funny thing is I think if embedded in it's original context I'd have an easier time navigating this passage than ur convoluted pre-jilcis paragraph.

lol that wasn't my paragraph, that was from the back of the book! I think good writing is simple writing, someone just needs to tell academics that

[SomaliPhilosopher]

^^we cant hemingwayize academica. It is a matter of self-esteem and self-validation for both the reader and the writer

[Wadani]

Safferz;942792 wrote:

lol that wasn't my paragraph, that was from the back of the book! I think good writing is simple writing, someone just needs to tell academics that

lool true. There are those in the hard sciences that argue that this overly dense and jargon filled writing style is a means of masking the academic fruitlessness of most research in the humaniities/social sciences. They claim that it's an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the 'real' academics that forces social scientists to compensate and to micmic the rigour employed by scientists/mathmeticians in their works. I'm sure ur familiar with the Sokal affair.

[Safferz]

SomaliPhilosopher;942794 wrote:

^^we cant hemingwayize academica. It is a matter of self-esteem and self-validation for both the reader and the writer

It's why the best and most popular history books are the clear, accessible ones written by journalists and other non-academics who understand good writing, while academics write books that are only owned by a few university libraries and never read by anyone except colleagues in their subfields and the grad students they assign it to as reading. Academic jargon is problematic, and often serves to create the illusion of substance.

[QansaxMeygaag]

Clan Cleansing in Moga by Prof Ladan...I am somewhere in the intro pages where she is presenting her frameworks, everything from ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and other interesting theories, can't wait to dig into the meat of it...Togane features quite a lot, don't know why kkk

[Safferz]

QansaxMeygaag;942945 wrote:

Clan Cleansing in Moga by Prof Ladan...I am somewhere in the intro pages where she is presenting her frameworks, everything from ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and other interesting theories, can't wait to dig into the meat of it...Togane features quite a lot, don't know why kkk

Report back when you've finished! I'm interested to hear what people think of the book.

[Safferz]

 

The Global South has become shorthand for the world of non-European, postcolonial peoples. Synonymous with uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states, and nations fraught with corruption, poverty, incivility, and strife, it is that half of the world about which the Global North spins theories. Rarely the Global South is seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events. Yet, as many nation-states of the Northern Hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, state privatization, corruption, ethnic conflict, and other crises, it seems as though they are evolving southward, so to speak, in both positive and problematic ways. Is this so? How? In what measure? Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff take on these questions, reversing the usual order of things. Drawing on their long experience of living in Africa and teaching in Europe and the U.S., they address a range of familiar themes democracy, law, national borders, labor and capital, religion and the occult, liberalism and multiculturalism with the imagination and agile prose for which they are well known. They ask how we might understand these things anew with theory developed in the South. Their ethnographic eye stresses the salience of the local without losing sight of the large-scale processes in everyday lives that are everywhere enmeshed. This view from the South renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists.

[SomaliPhilosopher]

Safferz tus tus ba la yiraada. War was this thread made to show us all the big books your reading :rolleyes: ?

[oba hiloowlow]

QansaxMeygaag;942945 wrote:

Clan Cleansing in Moga by Prof Ladan...I am somewhere in the intro pages where she is presenting her frameworks, everything from ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and other interesting theories, can't wait to dig into the meat of it...Togane features quite a lot, don't know why kkk

I read it, BS book biased as F

[Safferz]

SomaliPhilosopher;943344 wrote:

Safferz tus tus ba la yiraada. War was this thread made to show us all the big books your reading :rolleyes: ?

lol no I wanted a thread where we could all share what we're reading, it's not my fault more of you aren't posting

[Safferz]

oba hiloowlow;943345 wrote:

I read it, BS book biased as F

Can you elaborate? I like Ladan's work a lot but haven't had the chance to read this book yet. I was thinking of suggesting her as a speaker at my university next semester, we have a weekly African studies workshop with grad students and professors presenting their recent research and I'd love to see someone talk about Somalia.

[SomaliPhilosopher]

^^ http://www.hiiraan.com/op4/2013/mar/28686/an_open_letter_to_professor_kapteijns_a_rejoinder.aspx

[SomaliPhilosopher]

^^Oba wrote the review

[oba hiloowlow]

^^

 

read that Safferz