NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

When the French philosopher Jacques Derrida died in October of 2004, I had intended to write something about it on my blog. Unfortunately I never got around to it. I was reading an interview with Gayatri Spivak the other day and I was reminded about how I hadn't written anything about Derrida yet. Like most people I have had a back and forth, regularly conflicted relationship with the work of Derrida. When I first read Of Grammatology many years ago, my first reaction was "bulls*it!" From the perspective of someone who is from a "non-modern" culture, the idea that Derrida proposed that in European philosophy "speech" is privileged over "writing" was not just wrong, it was insulting! The reason that a text like Destiny's Landfall which is extremely comprehensive, bringing together most all acknowledged sources on Guam's history can nonethless be problematic and often written atop racist assumptions, is simply because for the writing o

When I first began writing my most recent master's thesis, I toyed around with using the term "act of decolonization." I was at that point reading way too much Zizek and was engrossed in his conception of authentic political act or the Act. Although I didn't end up running with the notion of "act of decolonization" because it became too cumbersome to define and demarcate what exactly it meant, but you can still find traces of it in the way I discuss how to break the decolonial deadlock in my last chapter. Throughout the writing of this thesis, people often asked me the obvious question which I can answer anecdotally, conversationally and everyday prescriptively, but not theoretically in any systemic way and that is "why is an act of decolonization." What I mean by this is that in writing out my ideas about decolonization in an academic text, it was too too easy to second guess myself and perform my own unproductively self-deconstruction page after

Michael Lujan Bevacqua Professor Da Silva 200b Theories in Ethnic Studies Thinking Fragments, Jane Flax (apologies for the unfinished sentences) I’d like to begin with a few banal statements which will hopefully help in finding a way to begin talking about this text. As I am typing, and thinking about the ways in which I might begin, I am resisting the urge to respond directly to the response papers which have already been circulated. That would be a more satisfying and engaging experience than blandly describing the text using such romance killing words such as “generative.” The writing of papers which elaborate on the main points of any text is always a difficult task for me. In thinking of this, I am reminded of an interview Derrida gave for an American documentary crew, where the initial inquiry boiled down to “love, elaborate.” He responded that he couldn’t do it, and that he had an empty head for love in general. When assigned these sorts of things for