Textual Trimmings

 This is the last of my end of the year trimmings (in other words pieces that I wrote throughout 2021 but did not publish). It is also the last of a series of commentaries I wrote on Obama's memoirs, A Promised Land. While a lot has been written about the book, I feel that the question of empire has not been centred enough in extant reviews and commentaries. This is what I try to do here. The Black President, the White House, and the Parable of the Two Butlers In his reminiscence of the early days of his presidency, Barack Obama recounts the story of two black butlers who showed excess diligence in their service of their first African American “first family.” Against the Obamas’ attempts that their butlers lighten up while serving them, one of the butlers responded “We just want to make sure you’re treated like every other president,” while the other emphatically charged “See, you and the First Lady don’t really know what this means to us, Mr. President. Having you here…You

  This is the second in the series of unpublished pieces that I wrote throughout this year. The first could be found here. This year I wrote, in Arabic and in English , about the Kyle Rittenhouse case. A paper I submitted over a year ago to Radical Philosophy discusses the hierarchization of fire in Western thought, and opens by discussing the shooting scene in Kenosha, wherein Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two and seriously injuring the third. The editors suggested I focus the paper more on the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which was still recent then. I reformulated the paper to centre the argument that the impunity with which Rittenhouse carried out the shooting is rooted in a Western epistemology that entrusts the white man with the advanced forms of fire (the fuller argument can be found in the Radical Philosophy paper , and hopefully in a forthcoming paper on incendiarism and hysteria- perhaps parts of a future book project on fire). About two weeks before the paper’s publi

Yesterday, I published an article  at Middle East Eye on how the show Friends and especially its universalisation , regardless of the intentions of the show's creators, has played an imperialist role in the Middle East. In the spirit of this blog being intended as a set of "textual trimmings," here are two sections that I chose not to include in the final of the published article. They deal with how the universalising role played by Friends is cited and carried over in two other television series.  Friends and the Universal: The Case of  Skins In an episode of the British television dramedy Skins,  the show’s protagonists encounter a young Russian woman whom they assume would not speak or understand English. The woman then surprises the show’s protagonists and audiences that she speaks fluent, colloquial, American punctuated with local pop American references; having learned from “like, the best American show ever” (i.e. Friends ). As a running gag throughout the rest of

  This, or an earlier version thereof, was originally written in reaction to Trump’s Stormy Daniels scandal. It was largely in response to a self-righteous CNN article that was more interested in virtue signaling and in depicting Trump as a licentious and uncivilized sexual freak than criticizing his policies. I have no interest, obviously, in defending “Trump sexuality,” but I felt the attack on Trump’s (in this particular case consensual) sexual misconduct serves to cast, by contrast, mainstream American   and imperial (sexual and non-sexual) misconduct as normative. I particularly worry about the civilizational, and potentially racial, aspect of this discourse, and of course about how the discussion concerning the private misconduct of people in power can divert attention from their public crimes (crimes in which they are partners with others who lead normative private and sexual lives but are equally criminal when it comes to their exercise of public power). I was recently remind

  The gorgeous shots of the Paris landmarks, the attractive lead actress, and the lighthearted comedy of the show, all got nearly everyone talking about Emily in Paris. Here is why I tried to watch the show, and why I couldn’t.   Why I tried to like it First, of course, there is the show’s setting: the city of Paris itself. No no no no, this is not going to be about any of the fantasies surrounding “the city of lights” or clichés about the “city of love”; je m’en fous about everyone’s (largely unrequited) love affair with that place. Paris is a city I love to hate. I have never passed on a chance to visit (even during layovers, as long as I had a valid Schengen visa and enough time to go in and out of the airport; I happen to have even entered Paris twice on the same day but that’s a different story for a different time), and yet I never stop complaining about it. If you think of it, partaking of whatever joy the city brings while endlessly complaining about it is the most s

غربة؟ تقف فيروز في الصورة، مبتسمة على غير عادتها، ويقف ع لى مسافة آمنة منها الرئيس الفرنسي إيم انويل ماكرون مبديا احتراما يليق بالسيدة فيروز، لم ي بده وهو يواجه السياسيين   في لبنان أو وهو يملي أجندته على عموم اللبنانيين. ربما بعثت ابتسامة فيروز النادرة نوعا من التفاؤل واستدعت أغنيتها المتأخرة "فيه أمل إيه في أمل". ربما فرح الناس بظهور فيروز المعروفة بعزوفها عن الإطلالات الإعلامية. وربما شعر بعض اللبنانيين بالفخر بسفيرتهم إلى النجوم التي أصبحت كذلك سفيرتهم إلى زعماء الغرب، والتي تمثلهم وتمثل ثقافتهم بخير ما يمثلها سياسيوهم. فلماذا تلَقَّى بعضُنا إذن، وأنا منهم، الصورة كأنها طعنة في الظهر؟ أو كما لو كنا أهل جبال الصوان، في المسرحية الشهيرة التي تحمل الاسم ذاته، وهم ينتظرون غربة (فيروز)، ابنة مدلج الذي مات وهو يقاتل الغازي "فاتك المتسلط"، لتكمل مسيرة أبيها وتخلصهم من المحتل كما وعدتهم الأسطورة والنبوءة، فتقع عليهم، كالصاعقة، الإشاعة التي اختلقها رجال فاتك: "هربت غربة!"   لم نختلق فيروز المقاوِمة من عدم؛ فهي تأتينا من غربة جبال الصوان (1969، في مر