Pirate Days

I'm listening to Culture's Two Sevens Clash for the first time in a good five or six years, and it's far better than i remember it being, which is saying a lot, because i liked it quite a bit back in high school. The lead singer/songwriter's name is Joseph Hill. Joe Hill. Hmmm. (I had forgotten that the great Tommy McCook, one of the foundational figures in Jamaican pop music, who passed away in 1998, played tenor sax on the album, but given McCook's prolific ubiquity, I probably shouldn't be to surprised. I repurchased Two Sevens Clash last week along with that fantastic Linton Kwesi Johnson anthology (Independant Intavenshan)that came out back in 1998 that convinced me for quite a while that "Reggae Fi Peach" was simply the single most powerful song ever written. (I's still up there.) (My original copies of both of these CDs were lost when I went to college and forgot to bring them with me.) Also listening to The Heptones's Party Music, which, political commitments aside, sounds nothing like their work from the Rocksteady and Ska eras, but is pretty powerful synthy, popp roots reggae, and Amadou et Mariam's Dimanche á Bamako.

I've been thinking for some time about a possible project which might even turn into a dissertation. I want to write a history of the institutional relationships of the modern university with imperial capitalism and racialized knowledge, specifically looking at the centrality of not only the university as a site of knowledge production to the strategies and tactics of empire, but also at the centrality of empire to the organization and ordering of the university itself. I first began thinking about this as a concrete project earlier this summer, but it really comes out of the questions i tried to consider in my senior essay and out of themes raised by some of the organizing going on in the Yale fight. (d4T, etc.) I have no interest in writing solely about Yale at this point, but it's also impossible to ignore Yale's own imperial history and present if I'm going to try to grapple with the themes i want to take on. And of course the Farallon campaign's attempts to create a network of university students and casualized workers to expose the imperial dimensions of university endowments and articulate alternative and better possibilities for universities' futures merits some careful consideration. I'm nervous about writing about Yale while not involved in the struggles there, and I'm thinking it might make sense to look at the Western university as a transatlantic formation, but I don't even know if this proposed uniformity is a valid assumption to make...

UPDATE: Dimanche á Bamako is incredible. Find some way to hear it. Now.