reading conquest

I finished school over a year ago and I can safely say that I haven't made it through more than five books since then. I have made it through about a million blog posts though. When Mimi Ngyuen described riot girl culture as a feminist "teaching machine," I immedietly thought that this is what women of color blogging are doing; they're working together to run a teaching machine for other women of color. Because even though I've been trying for almost two years to read 'Conquest' and I never made it past the foreward until yesterday, I found that I was familiar with a lot of the concepts and analysis because of reading other women of color blogs.

I thought that now was as good a time as any to read the book because it comes at the intersection of Andrea Smith's fight for tenure, an internal struggle between myself and academia/art (i.e. I'm through with school and don't want to go back but in what other world but grad school can I pursue my passions like research, travel, arab american's digital self-portraiture, comparing riot girl and women of color feminist media making/artistic production, and making self-memorializing art? ), and the coming 60th anniversary of the creation of the state of israel and the massacre & forced displacement of indigenous palestinians (which pushes me to reflect on, among other things, my status as a citizen of the u.s. and the massacre & forced displacement of indigenous people here).

More later...