The Status of Appearance in Sea of Poppies

In Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 novel Sea of Poppies, appearances play an unexpected role in identity formation. The novel takes place in the 1830s at the dawn of the Opium Wars at different locations in the British Empire, including Bengal in British India and the island of Mauritius off the east coast of Africa. The most

The Road to Chicago, the Road beyond Chicago

I don’t know when exactly this story begins, because it may in fact begin at birth, but in my mind, it starts in high school. It was there that I first became aware of a certain character flaw that has defined my life. It was there that my decisions put me on a path that

What is a mentor?

Context: I recently became a personal mentor for students preparing for and applying to college; as such, I thought it was important to ask myself the question “what is a mentor?” A common way to begin an essay is to provide the definition of a word from a reputable dictionary. I hate this way of

On Training

There is no reason you need to read this, but there is a reason for me writing it. Yesterday, in a post on Instagram, I claimed that “training fundamentally changed who I am.” I said this because it has, but how do I know this? How exactly has training changed me so fundamentally? And what

Tolerance in Two Recitations

The prompt for this paper asks students to compare the cultures of toleration in Heda Margolius Kovály’s Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 and Ian Burma’s Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance.[1] Assumed in this directive is a definition of tolerance,[2] but exactly what definition that is

Onward into the past

As many of you know (assuming the majority of people reading this are people I know), I will start graduate school at San Francisco State University next week. But that statement isn’t quite accurate. What I should have said instead was that, next week, I will restart graduate school, for, what many of you don’t

Globalizing Palestine

The historian James L. Gelvin, in The Modern Middle East, claims that “in spite of the fact that the size of Palestine and the number of people directly affected by its political problems are minuscule in comparative terms, the dispute between Israel, on the one hand, and the Palestinians and various Arab states, on the

Oil, Geopolitics, and Neoliberalism

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey makes an intriguing argument about why neoliberalism-in-theory did not equate neoliberalism-in-practice (neoliberalization).  For him, the neoliberal turn of late 1970s was, more than anything else, “a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (19).  This explains why

Questioning Transnationalism

Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way open their article “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis” by stating that “Transnationalism is a much abused word,” then by asking, “is it the same thing as globalization? As internationalism? Is neoliberalism a particular period in the history of the political economy of transnationalism, or something else? Was