By Harold Henderson
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“In a fragmenting nation, the duty of progressives seems clear: halt the fragmentation,” writes Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (January 22). “The logic of identity politics, and its multicultural offspring, seems to lead to chaos. If African-Americans can insist on Afrocentric curricula, for instance, what’s to stop Lithuanian-Americans from demanding their own specific version of history? What about Korean-Americans? This cacophony of relativism would feed directly into the right’s xenophobic agenda, progressives fear. Instead of uncritically celebrating the politics of difference, they argue, the left should be exploring ways to more effectively bridge those differences.”
“I sometimes think I may actually be more fortunate than men writers today,” writes the University of Wisconsin’s Kelly Cherry in her new book Writing the World. “The ground of female being is a territory less literarily charted than the ground of male being. A woman writer, if she has an adventurous spirit, can go anywhere, and almost everywhere she goes will be a new and subtle place.”
Why shouldn’t you attend school in a banana republic? Because the government could shut down at any time. Writing in UIC News (January 10), Laurent Pernot reports that as many as 150 UIC foreign students who went home over winter break were unable to get visas in time to return for the new semester, because of the government shutdown. “Worse yet, because the Department of Labor is still closed–workers are getting paid again but no funds were allocated by Congress for the department’s operations–the university cannot secure permission to work for some international researchers and visiting faculty.”
