I'm skipping my department holiday party and neglecting emails i should be writing and i missed The O.C. too, in order to research a paper on Postcolonial Marxisms, The United States, and the long 1960s, for which I am in the midst of reading Cynthia Young's Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, which I like immensely. Young's articulation of race, gender, class, New Left aesthetics and their vanguardist omissions, and labor in the formation of what she terms a "Third Worldist" structure of feeling, her historicization of the Internal Colony in lefts old and new, and her account of the prison and third worldist theorizations and activism concerning it are valuable interventions into the historiography of the 1960s, deindustrial urban spaces, and post-Cuba social movements. What i find particularly valuable reading this today, though, is the chapter on 1199 and its cultural programs as a central component of Third World subjectivity, looking at the lifeworlds of the working class black and puerto rican women and men who constituted the rank and file of the insurgent union's social movement organizing during the late 1950s and on, and giving us yet another vantage point from which to historicize and understand the struggle currently taking place at a hospital in New Haven where 1199 has left its imprint more than once. (Of course, Young knows this, given her own involvements in New Haven labor history, as, among other things, one of the three women made to appear before the university's kangaroo court tribunal in the aftermath of the grade strike which she helped lead.)

Alright, back to work.