So my post-undergrad life is starting to take shape. Partly as a result of this e-mail I received last week:
Congratulations! The scores you achieved on your Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) qualify you for the next step of the Foreign Service Officer selection process, which is your prompt submission of a personal narrative for review by the Qualifications Evaluation Panel (QEP).
This is the first post in what will become a recurring series entitled Everyday Orientalism. In this series, I hope to look at ways in which abstractions of Arab-Muslim culture are represented in American popular culture. I will be using my experience in ethnomusicology, critical literary studies, and political analysis to see how and why these idealized and Orientalized figments of our collective imagination keep popping up––but I hope even more to foster a sense of curiosity that can allow all of us to take a closer look at the culture in which we are immersed and to recognize the role that Orientalism continues to play in it. And it should be kind of fun and interesting.
The inaugural post will examine a woman at the vanguard of popular music (and my iTunes Top 25 Most Played songs): Ke$ha (née Kesha Rose Sebert).
In an effort to completely saturate every social media outlet, and as a result of my current transient employment status, I have decided to bring back this blog. I will be doing a lot of reading over the next few weeks in preparation for the Foreign Service Officer Test and as a means of keeping busy, so the scope of posts will probably widen from the original France-centric format.
Most of what I write will still most likely be viewed through the prisms of post-colonialism, constructivism, and anti-Orientalism that have been sculpted through my educational and professional experiences.
I want to preface by saying that I apologize for not writing in the past few months. I’ve had a lot going on here in France, and I sort of got pessimistic about the fact that few people read anything I write, but I decided that it was just as important for myself to have a space to write at length about issues which interest me, using my experiences in France as a sort of contextual backdrop. This post is in response to an op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman, who some may know as the author of The World is Flat and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I usually love Friedman’s work, but this one struck a nerve somewhere deep inside me and merited a response. (Be warned that it is kind of long.)
WARNING: This is a personal, wishy-washy post. Don’t expect to learn anything.
It was bound to happen, and not even the thousand Lyonnaise cathedrals I pass on my way to school could stop the momentum with which this certain malaise has taken over my psychological well-being. I feel like a namby-pamby for bringing it up, but I think it’s definitely a part of the experience of living abroad.
It’s not Novel A1N1 Influenza, though by the amount of coverage it’s getting in the press, I half expect to find my feet replaced with severely un-Kosher, un-Halal pigs’ trotters. (Did you know that France has both the largest Jewish and Muslim populations in all of Western Europe?)
It’s homesickness.
I’m not coherent enough to write another deep post. So some uncharacteristic levity and brevity will be taken.
Ask an American what the Frenchiest French things fresh from France are, and she’ll probably list off some of the following:
These are all more or less true.
Something that has stuck me since coming to France is the frankness and easiness with which people dispense racially-charged drivel. White French people from housewives to professors to men on the street seem to see no problem in labeling a whole immigrant population as cheap or sexually promiscuous or unhealthy or ruining the economy.
First, a quick primer in the racial composition of France.
