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Showing posts with the label Foucualt

Ode to Grandma

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--> English is my mother tongue, in the sense that it is the language that I grew up with and speak most comfortably. It is my first language. It is however not my favorite language, not the best language and certainly not i mas takhilo' para Guahu. I am a non-native speaker of the Chamorro language as I learned to speak it when I was 20 years old. It is natural for me in some ways, but still unnatural in others, primarily when talking about things that are difficult in general to express in a Chamorro lexicon. This is not only something that I struggle with, but as the Chamorro language has become more and more limited in how and where it is used, many people find themselves constantly switching to English since a potential part of their conversation is something few people have actually used the Chamorro language to convey. For example, on the rare occasions that I've tried to discuss Foucault or Derrida in Chamorro, when speaking in general about it, there

Of Epigramology

I'm working furiously on finishing up my dissertation, and other than the filling in of my 700 footnotes, one of the fun tasks left to finish is the choosing of epigrams from the start of each chapter. An epigram is a quote or passage that you place at the start of the chapter to help set the mood or the tone. It can be tragic, funny, serious, boring, whatever you'd like, but it provides a extra bit of spice, meaning or flavor to help give your chapter a sense of presence or meaning, even before the reader has actually read any of it. For my dissertation I'm torn between using jokes passages, or all passages meant to be silly or funny. So for instance, in one of my chapters on the United Nations, sovereignty and the way the claims of indigenous people for decolonization are reduced to domestic concerns or effects of the nations, I thought about using this quote from an Eddie Izzard show: “So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and th