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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 13th, 2023 06:50 amJust finished: Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum
This one's been on my list for awhile and it was So. Much. Fun. It's about what Ruthnum dubs "currybooks," fiction and memoirs about the South Asian diaspora, which often include a scene harkening back to a mother making curry, a second- or third-generation child's struggle to get the recipe right, a wistful nostalgia for an imagined old country, and so on. It's not, as I expected, a scathing deconstruction of these books and how they appeal to a white book club audience (though, of course, there is a bit of that). It's rather a thoughtful meditation on culture and authenticity. What does it mean, for example, to talk about "authentic" Indian food when, for example, the chili spice in curry is not indigenous to the Indian subcontinent (never mind that no one can actually agree on how to define curry in the first place)? Also, Ruthnum's aside that he didn't struggle to recreate recipes because his mom actually taught him how to cook because he was expected to one day be a grownup made me grin. This one's short and highly enjoyable.
Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan. Imagine you took the brilliant insights of educational theorists like Paulo Freire and bell hooks and fed them to a highly paid educational consultant, and that person chewed them up, vomited them back into your mouth, and that vomit was somehow a book? This would be that book. My issue is not that I disagree with the fundamental thrust of the argument, which is that schools are an example of institutional racism, standardized tests are bad, actually, and quite a lot of the system needs to be dismantled and reimagined. But that has actually been the mainstream position of teacher education where I live for the entire time I've been a teacher. The problem is that the solutions offered here are things like "pound the pavement," "centre the margins," and "flip the table," empty bureaucratic-speak that conceals any tangible advice towards decolonization or anti-racist education that the book is ostensibly trying to promote. It's also very top-down (do they think that I wouldn't abolish standardized testing in a hot second if I had that power?) and some of the suggestions they give are actually illegal. The hardheaded refusal to engage in actual statistical analysis means that there are obvious blindspots, like parent consultation will always favour the most involved—i.e., the most privileged—parents, and present a skewed image of the broader population. Give this one a pass unless you are one of those people who like flowcharts with a lot of shapes and arrows on them.
Currently reading: Sacrifice: Themes, Theories, and Controversies by Margo Kitts. This is about why cultures engage in ritual sacrifice (of both other humans and animals), which I am reading for background research into a mostly undisclosed project. It's pretty interesting? Essentially just an analysis of different theories as to why we do this. I have a slight obsession with the idea that the sacrifice of the young is a commonality amongst many cultures (I won't universalize and say all) and expressed in different ways if it's not channeled more productively, and there exists a contradiction in Western society between the rhetoric of "think of the children" and our public comfort with actual children dying. Does this book explain that contradiction? Nah, it's just background reading, but pretty thorough background reading.
This one's been on my list for awhile and it was So. Much. Fun. It's about what Ruthnum dubs "currybooks," fiction and memoirs about the South Asian diaspora, which often include a scene harkening back to a mother making curry, a second- or third-generation child's struggle to get the recipe right, a wistful nostalgia for an imagined old country, and so on. It's not, as I expected, a scathing deconstruction of these books and how they appeal to a white book club audience (though, of course, there is a bit of that). It's rather a thoughtful meditation on culture and authenticity. What does it mean, for example, to talk about "authentic" Indian food when, for example, the chili spice in curry is not indigenous to the Indian subcontinent (never mind that no one can actually agree on how to define curry in the first place)? Also, Ruthnum's aside that he didn't struggle to recreate recipes because his mom actually taught him how to cook because he was expected to one day be a grownup made me grin. This one's short and highly enjoyable.
Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan. Imagine you took the brilliant insights of educational theorists like Paulo Freire and bell hooks and fed them to a highly paid educational consultant, and that person chewed them up, vomited them back into your mouth, and that vomit was somehow a book? This would be that book. My issue is not that I disagree with the fundamental thrust of the argument, which is that schools are an example of institutional racism, standardized tests are bad, actually, and quite a lot of the system needs to be dismantled and reimagined. But that has actually been the mainstream position of teacher education where I live for the entire time I've been a teacher. The problem is that the solutions offered here are things like "pound the pavement," "centre the margins," and "flip the table," empty bureaucratic-speak that conceals any tangible advice towards decolonization or anti-racist education that the book is ostensibly trying to promote. It's also very top-down (do they think that I wouldn't abolish standardized testing in a hot second if I had that power?) and some of the suggestions they give are actually illegal. The hardheaded refusal to engage in actual statistical analysis means that there are obvious blindspots, like parent consultation will always favour the most involved—i.e., the most privileged—parents, and present a skewed image of the broader population. Give this one a pass unless you are one of those people who like flowcharts with a lot of shapes and arrows on them.
Currently reading: Sacrifice: Themes, Theories, and Controversies by Margo Kitts. This is about why cultures engage in ritual sacrifice (of both other humans and animals), which I am reading for background research into a mostly undisclosed project. It's pretty interesting? Essentially just an analysis of different theories as to why we do this. I have a slight obsession with the idea that the sacrifice of the young is a commonality amongst many cultures (I won't universalize and say all) and expressed in different ways if it's not channeled more productively, and there exists a contradiction in Western society between the rhetoric of "think of the children" and our public comfort with actual children dying. Does this book explain that contradiction? Nah, it's just background reading, but pretty thorough background reading.
