NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Whether you call it the Muslim Ban or the Travel Ban, I cannot help but think of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer whenever the issue of Trump's poorly conceived executive order blocking immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations. It is intriguing the way that Trump's candidacy and now his presidency has ended up revealing so much of the guts of the political game in the United States, that it threatens to rend the whole thing asunder. What I mean by this is that politics is a game that is designed to keep anyone from fundamentally changing or challenging anything. A narrow range of ideological options are offered, neither of which would change much about the structure of society or the distribution of power. As long as everyone plays their roles, you could argue that revolution in both positive or negative sense is avoided. But Trump's refusal to be a typical politician or leader or even just a serious, mature person is leading to a crisis where the guts, the bones, t

Being back in the states has made me nostalgic for when I was a grad student. The nostalgia primarily comes out around book stores, because that was one of my favorite pastimes while I lived in San Diego. A friend of mine who I haven't seen since I left grad school and finished my Ph.D. is on the verge of defending her dissertation in Ethnic Studies. All of this is for some reason reminding me of my dissertation. The days I would spend in coffee shops working on it. The hours spent poring through books and articles researching it. The times I would spend while driving across California contemplating it and then rushing to write hasty notes on anything I could before a random, but precious thought escaped me. One of the central scandals that drove my dissertation was the issue of "symbolic" or "fake" votes for the delegates from the colonies of the United States. It was a site that was so rich with material for illustration my arguments, I could have written