In this April edition of Prisons, Prose & Protest, I share an overview of a book about immigration policing and “sanctuary” policies, recommend two podcasts from the past month, several recent articles and essays, and more… open.substack.com/pub/prisoncu...
¡Sí! Casi me muero cuando mi Mamá me lo dijo.
Important investigation into failures with ICE medial care that have likely caused multiple deaths.
I'll note that these failures are common in the criminal justice system, and are just as deadly there, which is one reason why a solution is to heavily restrict the use of immigration detention.
New Puerto Rican wisdom:
Depression is excess of the past
Stress is excess of the present
Anxiety is excess of the future
Depresión es exceso de pasado
Estrés es exceso de presente
Ansiedad es exceso de futuro
It's a full sentence.
No.
Well, Josh Duggar, of the extremely judgy religious cultists the Duggar family—also known (by me) as "The Kardashians of Christ") Isn't the only sex pervert in that "family values" family. Joseph Garrett Duggar, 31, has been charged with molesting several young girls.
www.wjhg.com/2026/03/18/d...
Removing Cesar Chavez’s name from Chicano/Latino/ethnic studies centers and programs is a good first step. The next step is to seriously tackle the hegemonic forms of masculinity that continue to pervade these fields as well as academia more generally.
🧵 Trump administration AI policy is widely described as deregulatory. This description is misleading. What's happening is not the absence of governance but its rearrangement--intensive state intervention operating through mechanisms we don't typically call regulation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Thinking about this clip from @nahir.bsky.social at #RaceB4Race Love last month on doing scholarship and research after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. What a gift.
You're the best! You make everything we do more sophisticated and better. I am so happy we did this together.
Black History Month!
Check out this special feature that I co-edited with brilliant @nahir.bsky.social: Introduction to “Race, Racialization, and Whiteness before and after The Invention of Race” | PMLA | Cambridge Core - bit.ly/4anHgVM .
Yesterday Benito was us.
It was amazing! The show was amazing! Talking to my students about it was amazing! I am overwhelmed with emotion.
I gave them context and answered questions, but they guided the conversation. They noted the detail and care, the community themes, and the earnestness of the show.
They mentioned that the sugarcane were people dressed as sugarcane. And I just thought, I bet those sugar canes were Puerto Rican. 2/
Today, I told my students that as a resident Puerto Rican (and expert), we would watch Benito's Bowl and go over it with a critical lens, and that I would answer all their questions.
We watched the show. They took notes, and they did most of the talking--mentioning all the things they noticed.
1/
Teaching 1001 Nights, I pointed out to my students that it is one of the most radically feminist texts of that time period
I also ask why every semester I get 1 - 3 essays saying 1001 nights is sexist, but I don't get similar essays about Gilgamesh or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
I got silence
AMEN. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Lol! Yes!
It was completely spontaneous in my part. Zero regrets 🤣
🚨History Job: Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History (Permanent) 🗃️
Come work with us at Warwick! You will join a group of excellent early-modernists and one of the nicest bunches of historians around!
👇👇👇
@uni-of-warwick.bsky.social
warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/lang-en-G...
I peaked as a teacher on week 2 of the semester! 🤣😂
In a discussion of the relationship btw Gilgamesh and Enkidu:
Me: They meet by fighting each other, and their relationship turns to one of deep love. What is the modern equivalent? Oh, I know. Have you heard of Heated Rivalry?
Students: screamed, laughed, went red ... in unison!
“I don’t need to love a field that fails to love me. I don’t need white supremacy to tell
me my worth.” 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 #RaceB4Race #ShakeRace
Recognizing the Stranger demands that our path to liberation never forgets the human condition, the art we create, and the place of Palestine in our collective struggle. Isabella Hammad is an award winning British-Palestinian author. Her other books include Enter the Ghost and The Parisians
The next book in our "MfP Recommended Read" series is Isabella Hammad's Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative" (Black Cat 2024). Recognizing the Stranger argues for the world of literature as a venue for thinking through the political fights of our time.
Background of a keffiyeh pattern. On the center top, MfP Recommended Read. On the center bottom the book cover of Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba.
Background of a keffiyeh pattern. On the left top, Why MfP Recommends It. On the left center, the book cover of Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. On the right, the following bullet points: -Examines how Zionist settlers acquired and used land alongside and eventually in replacement of Indigenous Palestinians. -Illustrates that, while the Nakba was a violet event of displacement, it roots lie in policies of landholding under the British Mandate. -Challenges the belief that "Left" or "Liberal" Zionism was not complicit in Palestinian displacement. -Explores how the expansion of Zionist settlement, Left Zionism, and the Nakba are represented in historical memory.
The next book in our recommended reads is Colonizing Palestine by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury which shows how, in the decades before the Nakba of 1948, Zionists settlements, including "left-wing kibbutzim," were integral to the slow displacement of Palestinians.
This year I was lucky enough to get to choose to do mostly things that aligned with my beliefs and values. I’m grateful, because the year was a doozy in all other ways. Here are a few I’m most proud of:
The white backlash that is materially devastating democracy, marginalized people, and the planet is all b/c of symbolic gains. As Juliet Hooker writes, white grievance leads to real grief for the rest of us (but also for themselves in the end, because there is only one world).
