Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilization / Hamid Dabashi

Sitting at the seder table alongside three women: a movie star, a small business owner, and a landscape architect, I eavesdropped on their conversation as I ate my matzoh ball soup. And the businesswoman mentioned that some of her workers took time off when they had their periods. She could understand it in the case of one of them who had a medical condition that caused her immense pain and discomfort, but the practice had become habitual among workers she wasn’t sure required it.

All three women began chiming in about the virtues of pushing oneself past one’s perceived limitations when feeling unable or reluctant to expend the effort to accomplish something, particularly something athletic like waking up for a dance class at six ay em or dragging oneself to the bathroom after an insufficient night’s sleep or exercising past the point of pain or exhaustion.

They lost the thread of the workers wanting time for themselves, but implicit behind all this self-congratulation for being such tough, rigorous women was that millennials these days didn’t want to do that pushing-through-limitations thing. I was thinking, “How do you know that they’re not pushing themselves in some other arena of activity unrelated to their jobs?” Because being a waiter or bartender or member of a kitchen staff might not necessarily be their passion. That might lie elsewhere. And when they’re taking time for themselves, they may not just be groaning with cramp pain, but might be using the time for a purpose of which you are entirely unaware.

I didn’t say that, of course, because all three women were, by common standards, far more accomplished than I have ever been or ever will be. And it is well known that my political doctrine of non-excellence, non-participation, and non-achievement has put me in the precarious economic position where I now find myself. I did take the opportunity to praise napping, though. But it brought home how misunderstood my calls for a universal work stoppage was destined to remain.

It also brought to mind Gayatri Spivak, the Indian feminist literary critic, and the concept from Gramsci of the subaltern, about which I understand very little. The subaltern, as the notion has developed from Gramsci through Spivak and now through my misbegotten filter, is anyone or anything who is left out of the assumptions of a given discourse by virtue... read more

Sitting at the seder table alongside three women: a movie star, a small business owner, and a landscape architect, I eavesdropped on their conversation as I ate my matzoh ball soup. And the businesswoman mentioned that some of her workers took time off when they had their periods. She could understand it in the case of one of them who had a medical condition that caused her immense pain and discomfort, but the practice had become habitual among workers she wasn’t sure required it.

All three women began chiming in about the virtues of pushing oneself past one’s perceived limitations when feeling unable or reluctant to expend the effort to accomplish something, particularly something athletic like waking up for a dance class at six ay em or dragging oneself to the bathroom after an insufficient night’s sleep or exercising past the point of pain or exhaustion.

They lost the thread of the workers wanting time for themselves, but implicit behind all this self-congratulation for being such tough, rigorous women was that millennials these days didn’t want to do that pushing-through-limitations thing. I was thinking, “How do you know that they’re not pushing themselves in some other arena of activity unrelated to their jobs?” Because being a waiter or bartender or member of a kitchen staff might not necessarily be their passion. That might lie elsewhere. And when they’re taking time for themselves, they may not just be groaning with cramp pain, but might be using the time for a purpose of which you are entirely unaware.

I didn’t say that, of course, because all three women were, by common standards, far more accomplished than I have ever been or ever will be. And it is well known that my political doctrine of non-excellence, non-participation, and non-achievement has put me in the precarious economic position where I now find myself. I did take the opportunity to praise napping, though. But it brought home how misunderstood my calls for a universal work stoppage was destined to remain.

It also brought to mind Gayatri Spivak, the Indian feminist literary critic, and the concept from Gramsci of the subaltern, about which I understand very little. The subaltern, as the notion has developed from Gramsci through Spivak and now through my misbegotten filter, is anyone or anything who is left out of the assumptions of a given discourse by virtue... read more