This post is by Rajbir Singh Judge.

As I wrote Prophetic Maharaja, I often recalled that libraries cull their collections. This common practice is called ‘weeding,’ which, as the American Library Association has it, “is critical to collection maintenance and involves the removal of resources from the collection. All materials are considered for weeding based on accuracy, currency, and relevancy.” The task has become more onerous as budget cuts, the promise of the digital, limited space—the need for open student study spaces—and the overall destruction of the university further extends weeding. Publish and (eventually) perish, unless one can remain accurate, current, and relevant—a laborious task—especially so since destruction “can always happen faster than any creation, production, construction” to borrow from Gil Anidjar.

And yet creation, production, construction continue even as we witness continuous destruction in Gaza. The questions academics can ask then seem obscene: How does one remain adequate to the accumulation of knowledge over time? What does it mean to introduce time, as currency, into a community? What to make of the (in)sufficiency of narration in a historical moment, as Basit asks in this forum? For academic books, journals, and articles, we have a system in place that saves one from weeding: the prestige of the publisher, the number and substance of reviews, institutional affiliation, awards and, more concretely, the number of citations, neatly measured by the h-index. It is, perhaps, a professionalism that allows for ideological reproduction; a restricted economy emerges within the promises of the dwindling library. We can then say that to keep—and now even find—its place on the shelf, a book must be generative both in and of time, but certainly not wastefully so. One must overcome the remains and rubble, which, as Samera Esmeir writes, the colonial state can only look to conquer: a “progressive conquest” (49).

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1. One of the things for which I have come to rely on Rajbir over the years is his unfailing attentiveness to the dynamics of loss: one that is unsentimental and non-indulgent. (Against the empire of trauma and the weaponization of victimhood, to say nothing of wounded attachments and left melancholia.) Of course, this is not to say that one can stand apart from loss, either; simply that the language of loss is ubiquitous: it does not make you special or confer some kind of election. And this despite the manifold claims of loss today, when the political and media classes run breathless about identity politics, however “for” or “against”. These claims are everywhere; they populate the discourse of the institutions that shape our lives, even into the methodologies that now promise epistemological emancipation (“autoethnography” and “lived experience,” ad nauseum).

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This is a guest post by Satbir Singh. Satbir grew up and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a BS Biology from UCLA, and MD from the Medical College of Wisconsin. He completed general psychiatry residency at UCLA and child/adolescent fellowship at USC. He has been Clinical Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, and currently works at a community mental health center and child/adolescent hospital

Rolling up to the Met Gala embodying the problematic caricature of a turbaned, orientalized Black dandy, the world’s “top Asian celebrity,” Diljit Dosanjh confounded the visual assignment to undo creative hierarchies, not only by carrying the Sikh’s Gurmukhi alphabet in literally on his back. His outfit replicated the lavish garb of a hereditary Punjabi prince including aigrette and sword. Per the designer Prabal Gurung, the outfit also configures “motifs of the lotus—India’s national flower—and the peacock, India’s national bird,” and per Prakriti Anand, studying ancient Indian History at the University of Delhi, “on his sleeves, [conspicuous] ancient emblems of the Sooryavanshi and Chandravanshi lineages, sun and moon, symbols that once appeared on royal insignia and temple murals.” (1) 

Why would this otherwise savvy, hip-hop appropriating artist, exit the creative script with a childish act: “it’s about carrying your identity with pride right?” The exhibition catalogue upon which the gala theme was shaped describes “dandyism as a dialectic—a movement between being dandified and taking on dandyism as a means of self-fashioning.” (2) When the racial spectacularization that Diljit Dosanjh steps into harnesses principles of alternating pleasure/punishment, making America grate again (by, in other words, switching between satiating the psychoanalytic oral/anal drives), we get a discreet balancing act of Black dandyism alongside the spectatorship of lynching, shackled deportation, or the dandified-to-symbolic-death. What is the disconcerting dissonance that makes the camera teeter away, the moment Diljit enters the frame of the live broadcast, to an interview of FKA Twigs, who just released “Childish Things,” written by Jeremy O Harris, author of Slave Play?

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