Oh, week 6.....and OMG, SHOEZ!

This week has been an exercise in terror. For real.

To begin, we had a Halloween part at the house last weekend. It was a resounding success. I was the Queen of Hearts, complete with red mesh petticoat and knee socks. Ryan was Mr. Smee (his Peter Pan and Captain Hook sadly did not make it down from San Francisco), and Vik was a kangaroo. As it was Vik, it was a slightly perverted kangaroo. We also had Imperialist Barbie, Wagnerian opera stars, the Virgin Mary (complete with Black Baby Jesus), a zombie MAC girl, and a startlingly realistic gorilla. I tapped out early, which is one of the perks of hosting a party when you have roommates. I was tired, and knew I had profound amounts of work the next day.

Sunday I locked myself in my office for about 7 hours and wrote 12 pages of my Rwandan independence movement article. When I got home, I sort of stared at the wall for a couple hours, and then went to bed. RIDIC.

Monday was not much different, only it was about 5 hours, and 7 pages. 19 pages in 2 days. I turned in my draft of 23 pages (incomplete, but better than the 10 page prospectus from June, which was the last I had produced on the subject) at 5pm, and went to see the Michael Jackson documentary to celebrate. If you haven't seen it, DO IT. There's only one more week, and it is so worth it. I saw it twice. That concert would've been phenomenal. Say what you will about MJ, but it's impossible not to love his music. When he was on stage, he had it all together.

This week was pretty much a nightmare. I had about 60 student papers and outlines to grade, and I didn't get them back on time, resulting in a lot of mad students. They have to deal with it, but damn. I hope the next batch of papers are better. I usually have a lot of A's, but my overall average on this last one was quite a bit lower. I don't know if it's that they didn't really understand the assignment or what. Most of them seemed to understand the material but had a really hard time expressing that. Organization was a problem. So was analysis. I hope it was just the assignment and not me being unclear. Sigh. I guess we'll see.

Also had to present on Durba Ghosh's Sex and the Family in Colonial India and Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather in seminar this week. If anyone would like to purchase me a copy of the former, I would happily accept. It's a very good book, thoroughly and meticulously researched, carefully argued, etc. It's exactly what one's dissertation should be. McClintock, on the other hand.....WOO. I love her. I know she probably went WAYYYYYYYY over the line with some of her critiques (the whole King Solomon's Mines male anal birth thing left me scratching my head with a disgusted look on my face), but she sure knew how to start a conversation. I think expressly political work has an important place in academia. I will come back to this in a minute.

My presentation, I felt, was a little haphazard. I thought my questions were a bit too broad, and I completely blanked on doing my own response paper, which I need to do because we're getting down to the wire. But I felt really lobotomized by Tuesday night (NOT a good thing), and just forgot. Talked to the prof about it, and she was super supportive and awesome. I've heard some real horror stories about grad school, but my own experience so far has been fantastic. I've gotten nothing but reinforcement and encouragement from the faculty I've encountered. The criticism has all been constructive, and everyone I've found has been really good at remembering that, even though we're students, we're also human beings with lives outside of academia, and while we need to focus on our work and be good scholars, we also need to be complete people. I don't know if it's just my department (or just the people I happen to work with), but it's really awesome.

I also had a meeting with my advisor and some other colleagues on Tuesday evening about our campus African Studies Research Focus Group. My friend Franklin (a brilliant anthropologist) and I are heading up the graduate group for the RFG this year, and we wanted to figure out what precisely our responsibilities were for the group. So we met with the two faculty conveners (my advisor and the very talented Christina McMahon) and planned a bit for the year. We're going to try and have a really great speaker this Spring. If we are able to get him to campus, I will certainly be writing about it (not least because I'd really like for him to be a dissertation reader down the road.....I have a title now, damn skippy I'm going to use it!).

I also had a meeting with my advisor on Wednesday about teaching next quarter. I'll be the only TA for his Survey of African History from 1800-present, which means that the class, which is usually over 100 students, will only be open to about 60. We were trying to find ways to accommodate a few more without me going over my union contracted hours. I HATE BUDGET CUTS. It's ridiculous that so many students are going to be left out of this course. I'm already getting emails from former students who want to take it and are asking to crash. I'm a sucker for former students and want to get them all into the class, especially now that I know so many are having trouble just getting the minimum number of credits to keep their financial aid. Oh, California, why are you so stupid? REPEAL PROP 13!!! (and Prop 8 while you're at it. I know it's not really economic, but it's bigoted and awful and makes a lot of my friends into second-class citizens and hates on them and their families, and civil rights should never be up for a vote anyway.) The fact that the state has systematically seen fit to divest from public higher education over the last few decades is becoming apparent; this is what happens when no one wants to pay taxes. Anyway, we talked about readings for the students, and I'm going to do a guest lecture on the last quarter of the 19th century in Rwanda and how it facilitated the encroachment of German power in the region by 1896. As I pretty much know this stuff like the back of my hand, I'm hoping to totally rock this. I just need to find the right reading for the kiddos. I really like having a little bit of creative input on the course; this is the advantage of TAing for a smaller course instead of one of the humungous ones (not that I'm not having fun this quarter too, though!).

Thursday was my biweekly meeting on the independence movement article. I was pretty terrified going in that she was going to rip it apart and tell me I had no idea what I was talking about. Let's face it, after writing 19 pages in 2 days, there was a distinct possibility that it wasn't even in recognizable English anymore. Fortunately, this was not the case. In fact, it was just about the best meeting I've ever had regarding my writing. While it is clearly a work in progress, she really thinks I'm onto something. It was some much-needed positive feedback. I have some theory reading to do this weekend, and then I can have another draft ready a week from Monday. I'm quite a bit more energized on it now.

There still remains the precolonial paper, of course, the abstract of which has now been accepted to 2 conferences in March. Eek!! It's crunch time (and not least because I currently have an "F" on my transcript....). So that's going to be my focus this week, especially on my glorious day off on Wednesday (Thank you, veterans, for the day off and, you know, the whole "serving your country with your life" thing....).

We're having a launch party on Wednesday for our new department t-shirt on Wednesday, which is, like, totes exciting. I'm going to wear the lovely shoes featured above. They are Michael Kors. I love them. They are exceedingly comfortable (not joking) and obviously dead sexy. Also having my voice midterm on Tuesday, the first time I've actually sang in front of people in a LONG time (other than weddings and karaoke, but this is a very different, potentially-getting-judged-in-front-of-professionals thing). Deep breath.

October 27: Tuesday

7am, I hate you. 8:30 bus, almost late. Forgot the papers I've been grading, and therefore was destined to be no use at my TA meeting.

9am- TA workshop on student writing. It's really hard to grade student writing because, while we're responsible for teaching them history and grading history assignments, a lot of students cannot write at all. I don't know if this is a failure of the education system or if they're just lazy, but damn. Some of these kids just can't write. They have trouble with complete sentences, writing thesis statements, and understanding writing prompts. No matter how many times I explain that it's not a thesis, I will inevitably get "There were many similarities and differences between the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic that were both similar and different." NOT A THESIS. Argh. So basically any strategy that will help explain these apparently RIDICULOUSLY COMPLICATED concepts to students, I'm all about it. An hour well-spent.

10am- ran to the library to get some of the million and a half interlibrary loans that came in, all of which I really need to get through by this weekend. My estimate? 10 of them. None of which will be the ones in French.

11am- TA meeting. As I mentioned before, I was pretty much useless. Luckily, I have worked for this professor before and she thinks my grading is fine.

12pm- Lunch with the soon-to-be Dr. Bengry. Awesome, as usual.

2pm- Lecture. Students were exceptionally rude, as usual.

3:30pm- Lecture. Colonial masculinities and wage labor in Nigeria. Rawr.

5pm- went home and commenced studying. Finished reading for tomorrow morning's seminar. I think Nicholas Dirks' Castes of Mind is AWESOME. While he is writing about India, a lot of what he has to say is extremely relevant to colonial/postcolonial Rwanda, and I'm going to incorporate it into my article. I think it will make it even more awesome. Then read a bit of an MA thesis on Rwandan military culture through the colonial and postcolonial periods. It had a really helpful bibliography and some good summaries of historiography. It must go back tomorrow.

Now to study for my French quiz tomorrow, and mentally prepare for another ridiculously long day. But happily, I get to end the day tomorrow with dinner and "This Is It" with my Sweet Baboo. Definitely looking forward to that!

October 26: Monday

Mondays are relatively calm days. Today a little more so because I was out of town this weekend and slept 14 hours when I got home yesterday after attending the kickoff event for our Center for Cold War Studies and International History. Fun stuff. (No, I don't really work on the Cold War. But the article I'm working on now is about decolonization and the UN mission in Rwanda, which does, in fact, involve paying attention to the Cold War. And, you know, my work is definitely international. so there we go.)

So....

8:30am woke up. Unpacked a bit, wrote out grocery lists, and checked a whole lot of email, as I've been away from my school email since Thursday. Ended up skipping French this morning because I didn't do the reading and I was sleepy.

Went to the office about 11, and scoured the music library for some scores to choose a song for my voice midterm next week, and for my recital at the end of the quarter.

Noon- had lunch with my favorite Anglo-Canadian. We talked a bit about terminology for writing about "gay" people outside of a contemporary Western context. This is a really contentious issue. "Gay" or "homosexual" mean very specific things, and using them in, say, a 19th century African context is really just inappropriate. So what do I say? Male same-sex relationships? Homosocial space? Men who love men? This particular friend has dealt with similar issues in his own work (which is fascinating, fyi), so I found his input to be really helpful.

2pm- Voice lesson. I really love this time every week. I'll be singing "The Man That Got Away" for my midterm and recital this quarter. It's super fun to do this kind of work, so different from what I normally do.

3:30- went home and to the grocery. Came home and made whole wheat bread in my bread machine (yummy!) and some cheese-crusted chicken, which turned out really well (props to my cousin Nada for the recipe and Penzey's Spices for the cheese).

There has not been much work done today. I skimmed a little of an MA thesis on the Rwandan armed forces today for some sources. I think it will be helpful and I plan on getting into it a little more tomorrow. I also found out that I can't ILL some of the UN documents I need, so I'm going to try and schmooze it up at the Special Collections department, and see if they can't help me get a few of these things. I'm planning on making a trip up to Stanford the week of Thanksgiving to dig a bit (they own Rene Lemarchand's papers), so hopefully I'll get a lot of info then too.

Going to grade papers now. I hope they don't suck. Seacrest out!

October 21: Wednesday

7am. I hate 7am. Any day, doesn't matter. No French, as much as I need to. 8:30 bus, print out response paper....

9-11am, British Empire seminar. We discussed Edward Said's Orientalism and some of his critics, including Bernard Porter, who is a snarky douchebag. There, I said it. Why, you ask? His tone, his general dismissal of any responsibility for imperialism, and the fact that he thanked his dog in the acknowledgments. RIDICULOUS. Imperialism is bad. It sort of astonishes me how much people don't want to acknowledge that EVERYONE is implicated in imperialism, not just the elite politicians. European economic strength was built on the backs of slave labor. The working-class included. No one got to sit it out. (The American empire, fyi, is the same. You're reading this on a computer. You are implicated. I'm writing this on a computer. I'm implicated. There is no excuse for ignorance.) If Said was painting the "West" with too broad a brush, perhaps he was merely mimicking the main thrust of orientalist scholarship up to that point. If it makes you feel a little squeamish, perhaps you need to question the way in which you perceive the "East." We must constantly question our assumptions, our positionality, our privilege. It is the only possible way to be a responsible scholar. There is no way to not exploit, but at least freakin' acknowledge that you exploit. And then don't wallow in your guilt: do something constructive that has the potential to liberate. Rant over.

11-12:15, French class. Had a quiz today. TOTALLY mistranslated convaincu qu'aujourd'hui, but otherwise did OK. Translation ability will kick up when I start translating real documents next week when I get them from ILL. I'm pretty excited about that, actually. I am slowly becoming able to figure out sentences. It's really slow, but, you know, it's getting better. That class, on the other hand, is boring as hell. And I had a headache today, which didn't help. It's the only chance I really have at this point to be the smart-ass kid in the back of the classroom, so I sort of revel in it.

1-2pm, meeting for New Sexualities Research Focus Group. I'm really stoked about being a part of this this year, meeting other people doing sexuality research, and potentially getting some more feedback on my own work. I love interdisciplinarity, intersectionality....LOVE.

2-2:30pm, met with my advisor. We ragged on bridezillas for a while, then talked about work stuff. He's definitely on board with my idea to take Arabic next year, and we talked a bit about my two projects. I feel quite blessed to have such a supportive advisor. Seriously, it doesn't matter what kind of a hare-brained, half-thought idea I come in with, he always listens and then finds a way to make it sound totally rational. LOVE. It was a good meeting.

3-5pm, taught 2 discussion sections. Students were supposed to read Fichte, Daniel O'Connell, Stickney Ellis and Darwin. We talked about nationalism. They did a good job with the articles and parsing out what nationalism is and is not.

5-6pm, ate Wendy's and hung out with my favorite Anglo-Canadian. We keep each other from the edge of madness. I will miss him soooooooooooooo much when he finishes his totally amazing dissertation in December and leaves me for more civilized places that have universal healthcare. Or maybe just to hang out with monkeys in Borneo (there are monkeys there, right? I'm not making that up....)

6-7pm, taught last section. Only 9 students showed up out of 21. They were a good group, though, and several of them spoke for really the first time all quarter. I'm always impressed with the stuff this group comes up with. They keep me on my toes when I'm really dragging.

Meant to catch the bus at 7:24, but it was full. I mean, to the point of not letting people get on. The next bus wasn't until 8:23, which would mean that I wouldn't get home until 9:00, and since I had to pack to go home tomorrow, that was just not going to work. Luckily, my Sweet Baboo came and picked me up and took me home, because he is the best person in the world. No, he's not my boyfriend, we are not dating, and we don't even occasionally make out. Just friends. I call him my Sweet Baboo because, well, it just fits.

Now I'm packing, watching "Top Chef," and enjoying some red wine with my roomies and the cat. This weekend: grading, wedding, general debauchery in Louisville. Holler!

October 20: Tuesday

Up at 7:30 (after being woken up at 5am by a text from my mother replying to a text I sent her 12 hours before, then at 6am by my credit card company thanking me for paying my bill....). No time for French today, too sleepy. Managed to eat some turkey bacon and a tomato. Hurriedly went over Weber notes. Caught the bus at 9:30.

Meeting with paper advisor at 10am, which didn't really happen until 10:15. She is on Latin American time. I'm not being racist, just repeating her excuse for being constantly 15 minutes late for everything. But I like her and we totally had girl bonding politics time today, so no worries. She's really into my project (the one on the Rwandan independence movement). I have a draft due November 2. That's kind of frightening, as I have like 10 pages of disheveled material at the moment. But here goes.

TA meeting at 11am. I was 5 minutes late. Talked about next week's teaching, and grading the papers we got today.

Went and got a Coke with Justin. Did not get run over by skateboarders. Filled out requisition forms (finally) to reimburse my fellow HGSA (History Grad Students Association) officers for expenses. Dropped off requisition forms at the org office and checked about how to access our online account, which I haven't been able to do since I was elected Treasurer in June (a job I am WHOLLY unqualified for, fyi).

Lecture, 2-3:15. Collected 60 student papers beforehand, 3-4 pages each. Checked off each student to make sure they were on time. I have 2 students out with some form of flu, and their papers will be late.

Seminar on Gender and Power in Modern Africa, 3:30-4:45. My advisor's class. Always gets me thinking and I have 4 million ideas that I have to write down right away so I can incorporate them later. MAJOR brain wave on the precolonial paper regarding the use of Weber and Arendt. HUGE, potentially game-changing. But only if it works. Am up to 11 pages on that paper, and still have 2 sections to write. Ideally will finish this draft by the first week of November. A big deal, given it was due in June. (FYI: there are no deadlines in grad school. just be a grown-up and do your work.)

Rode home on the bus and started reading response paper for tomorrow morning's seminar. Re-reading Said's Orientalism and getting pissy about imperialism. It is thoroughly impossible for me to read about imperialism without getting angry. In my opinion, I should be allowed to write "a bunch of greedy motherfuckers stole a bunch of shit from a bunch of other people, enslaved, raped and murdered them, and then got the hell out so they could watch the world burn" and be done with it. That does not cut it, however, in terms of sophisticated analysis. So 250 words later I am parsing Said's methodology and sources, which are perfectly fine, thanks. A little miffed at the continued assumption by every single freakin' scholar that British and French imperialism are the model by which all imperialisms should be judged, because, well, they were both exceptions. In fact, there is no rule. I don't know why people want to write a grand theory of imperialism. There is no grand theory of imperialism, other than the one I just crudely put out there. But oh well.

Watching "The Life of Brian" on IFC. Brain dangerously close to shutdown, and it's only 10pm. That is not good.

Tomorrow is my early morning, and longest day. 9am to 7pm, including 3 hours of teaching. So off to bed I go.

October 19: Monday

Woke up at 8am. Checked email and sent feedback on 3 student papers, which are due tomorrow. Did 30 minutes of French. Got ready and caught the bus at 10:30am. Phone conference with BFF while on the bus, annoyed fellow passengers.

French class, 11-12:15.

Checked email and wrote back to 3 more students regarding papers. Worked for 5 minutes on revising a conference abstract. Completely blew a conference proposal deadline at noon. Boo. This one would have been a sure thing, and was really close.

Office hours 1-1:45pm. 4 students' drafts about the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Britain. Realized I hadn't completed my song list for my voice lesson. Quickly finished it and emailed it, as there was no time to print. Dashed across campus to voice lesson, which I was late for.

Voice lesson, 2:15-2:45. Got out late and was late for office hours. 2 text messages from colleagues about students lining up outside my office.

Office hours, 2:45-4:45. 12 more students. 2 of them have not started writing papers that are due tomorrow, and neither have any idea at all what the assignment is or how to write it. Not looking forward to grading some of these. Others are writing beautiful and creative papers. Those will be better. Checked and replied to 5 more student emails by 5pm and decided to go home and work for the evening.

Ate first food of the day at 6:08pm, a bowl of chicken noodle soup and some cheese.

6:15-7pm, checked and replied to 5 more student emails.

Still to do:
1. Finish reading intro to a bibliography on African governmental systems from 1968 and take notes on how it relates to Max Weber.
2. Read bibliography of books on Congo and Rwanda published in the US between 1940 and 1958.
3. Finish reading "Charisma" chapter in Weber's Economy and Society and take notes.
4. Go over all Weber notes to prepare for meeting tomorrow morning about article in progress.
5. 30 more minutes of French.
6. Hopefully get to bed before midnight.

Tomorrow is one of my 2 crazy days......more entertaining, I hope.

I actually do real work.

So, one of the things that bugs a lot of academics is the charge that our work isn't "real" or "important." There are a lot of reasons for this, I suppose, but I think the biggest one is that most people outside of the academy think that we're all a bunch of overgrown college students. I would like to dispel that image.

I really loved college. I did not go to graduate school because I wanted to continue to be in college forever. I went to graduate school because I love what I study. I love it so much that I was willing to give up financial security in order to continue to study it. Graduate students, for the most part, live dangerously close to the poverty line. This is a choice we all make. Generally speaking, we will all make a decent living when we get out of graduate school. But academia isn't some sort of cash cow. For some reason people believe that college professors make tons of money; I'm not really sure why people think that, but it's untrue. Further, most of us will also be saddled with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars of loan debt when we finally finish school. It's all well and good to look at salaries at the largest state schools in the country and say, "Oh, look, they make over a hundred thousand dollars a year." Well, that's true. A few very senior, very famous professors do make that kind of money, toward the end of their careers. The vast majority don't even come close. We make around what most high school teachers make, and we don't start earning that until well into our 30s or 40s, usually. It can take a really long time to finish grad school. (That's another post for another day.)

So what in the world do we do all day? Well, a lot of things. Academic graduate programs in the social sciences and humanities (as distinguished from professional graduate programs) are basically about becoming a scholar. That means you pretty much need to know everything there is to know about the field in which you specialize. So, first and foremost, we read a lot. I mean A LOT. Like, several books a day sometimes. Do we read every single word? No. Do we read them closely enough to know what the argument is, how it's structured, and where the author got their material? Yes. In my particular program, they test us on this around about our third year in a series of torturous things called "comprehensive exams." As I am only in my second year, I will not take these until next year. If you read this blog (the, you know, 3 of you who do), you'll hear more and more about these as they approach. That should be entertaining.

So I read a lot right now. Today, I've read about 7 government/UN publications on the structure of Belgian colonial rule in Rwanda. I'm looking for information on how the colonial government structured the society, how they defined ethnicity, etc. I'm doing this for a specific paper that I'm writing on the revolution that led to Rwandan independence between 1959 and 1962. This is really important because a lot of people who have written about Rwandan history since the 1994 genocide contend that ethnic divisions didn't really exist prior to colonialism, and that is is basically the fault of the Europeans that there has been so much violence in Rwanda since the 1960s. While you can certainly blame the Belgians for a lot of things, you can't blame them for the ethnic divisions. Not entirely, anyway. So I'm writing an article that basically argues that if you want to understand Rwanda since colonialism ended, you actually need to look at Rwandan history since the early 19th century.

That's all well and good, I can hear you say, but no one's going to read that. It doesn't mean anything in the real world, to working people and whatnot. Not so fast.

It's true that very few people will probably ever read this article, or my dissertation, or anything else that I write (and I'll get into the dissertation in a minute). However, there are some people who DO read this stuff, and what they read is very important. They are people in charge of making decisions about foreign aid, military strategy, international security, and other things that people generally consider "important." As a taxpayer, you want to know that your tax money (in the form of foreign aid) is going to actually do some good, right? It would really suck if all this foreign aid was being wasted on social and political programs that don't take into account the reality on the ground, right? Well, how do you think we know anything about the reality on the ground? Someone has to research this stuff. In this case, I'm that someone (at least, if this gets published).

There still seems to be a perception that History is supposed to be the study of old, dead white men and their wars. Don't get me wrong: that's what got me into History in the first place. Sometime in my college years I fell in love with Peter the Great and I've been hooked ever since. But I learned really quickly that what we consider important enough to study has a pretty profound impact on the world today. If the actions of white men are the only ones worth studying, what does that say about all the women in the world, all the POC in the world, etc.? Don't you think the majority of the world should matter? I do.

Academia isn't about navel-gazing or trying to be superior. It's about trying to understand the world as it is. It's realizing that everyone has personal experiences, and that those experiences shape the way they behave. It's understanding that we cannot address the world's problems without understanding the world. And sometimes it's about exposing the false perceptions we've been raised to believe are true. My work is unabashedly political: I have an agenda, and I'm not shy about that.

To wit, my major project (which will eventually be my dissertation, and hopefully my first book) is an investigation of male same-sex relationships in the Rwandan military in the 19th century. I realize that sounds really obscure to people outside the academy (and frankly, to most of the people in it). I'm used to that; we all are. But there are a number of reasons why this is actually important.

1. A lot of people believe that homosexuality is something new or contemporary, and that it is abnormal. It is neither. As long as there have been humans, there has been love and sex between people of the same-sex. It's recorded on every continent, in every time. The reason you probably don't know that is that nobody bothered talking about it or studying it for a very long time. Historians didn't really start asking questions about sexuality until the 1990s. When we did, we figured out pretty quickly that it was important. Human beings do a lot of things because they are motivated by sex. I'm not joking. And I find it really offensive that people act like homosexuals are abnormal or victimized or sick in some way. They're not. It's important to know that every society in the history of humankind has been comprised of both heterosexual and homosexual people, and that all those societies have grown and flourished just the same. In fact, the ones that have allowed for many variations of sexuality have often been the most successful, because they didn't stunt the happiness of their own people. A shocker, I know. Did you also know that many of the HIV/AIDS prevention programs in Africa completely ignore homosexual sex? It's one of the reasons that a lot of these programs haven't been very effective. A lot of people believe that there aren't any gay Africans, and that assumption has made its way into the scientific and medical community. Ignoring a reality like that has literally caused people to die, by the thousands. Might be a little important to correct that.

2. A lot of people believe that Africa doesn't have history before white people got there and enslaved them. That's a big fat lie. Africans all over the continent had political and social structures, family structures, architecture, religion, and all that other "civilisation" stuff way before Europeans got there. I'm not just talking about Egypt or the, you know, 2 other places in Africa that people normally learn about. I'm talking about all of it. Why should we care? Because the premise that Africa has no history or civilisation has excused the exploitation, degradation, and dehumanization of African people for centuries. I think it's a worthy cause to contribute to stopping that.

3. There is nothing un-manly about a man loving another man. In fact, in some societies, the height of masculinity was expressed through male same-sex love. Rwanda is one of those societies. The relationships I study were in the elite warrior class, the alpha-males of the society. This includes famous and respected warrior kings. This was not conquestorial or violent sex, nor was it rampant promiscuity. These relationships were premised on love and respect and devotion. All in the context of one of the most advanced warrior cultures on the African continent.

4. Europeans are not exceptional. Not in any way, actually. A lot of scholarship on Africa since the 1960s has vociferously argued that Europeans were not special in having advanced political or economic systems, or anything "positive." And they weren't. They also weren't exceptionally cruel or brutal or violent. Humanity, in general, is cruel and brutal and violent. We have been forever. Africans have never been any different. But we also know how to love, and in that, we are united as well.

Ultimately, then, I'm writing a dissertation about love and war, the two things that remind us that we're all human and deserve respect and dignity. Sort of important, maybe? Even to "normal" folks?

That's enough for the moment. I'm also planning a post on what a week looks like for me and other students, as well as something to address the whole "pretentious academic" charge. Stay tuned.