This is a guest post by Samaah Jaffer. Samaah is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University.

Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja has arrived “in the face of unyielding violence and a political horizon drenched in loss”—and, how could it not. Over the past few months, and the months which preceded it, I have been trying to think about what we might, or should do with the accumulation of unyielding and uncontainable loss, and more specifically with the grief that enshrouds it. Wrested, as we are, by multiple, ongoing, and anticipated catastrophes, the desire for an ethical intervention is severely heightened. What are we meant to do as bombs continue to be dropped, people continue to be starved and disappeared, and movement, speech, and assembly continue to be suppressed? What might we do as we inhabit the tribulation that is existence itself? Under such conditions, there is a strong desire to look to other times in an effort to return to a prior status quo, albeit no less afflicted, or, at the very least, to mourn those who have been martyred, and the irreversible dissolution of the pretenses we held, about ourselves and the world we live in.

Rajbir warns that as “troubles increase we find continuous calls for more historicization rather than its end—concerned reminders that we need alternative genealogies, new methodologies, and better archival reading practices in order to finally create a generative history where we previously found impediments.” (16) Refusing such historicist demands, Prophetic Maharaja contends with the creative potential of loss and desire, which, as Rajbir notes, are often entrapped in tragic narratives of the past. Sitting with the movements and individuals that surround Duleep Singh, we encounter impossibility and failure—of narrative, history, and the restoration of the Khalsa Raj—as generative. Instead of working to uncover, or capture more or better history, Rajbir suggests, and enacts through the book, a “rekindling without repair,” which refuses to theorize loss, but rather, to dwell “in the various rhythms of loss.” (13)

Rajbir reads mourning and melancholia, through the psychoanalytic tradition, as two ways historians might respond to loss. Mourning, Rajbir teaches us, “is the project for historians.” It enacts what David Scott calls “reparative remembering” and, according to Sigmund Freud “normalizes the relations to loss.” Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Jacques Lacan, Rajbir suggests:

Historians first posit the past as past but repair our relation to the past by disinterring the dead and bringing them into the present […stabilizing] the present’s relation to the past. This movement of reparative remembering performs […] funerary rites […] This has been a goal of many scholars focused on the Khalsa Raj, Duleep Singh, and the Sikh tradition: to properly bury Duleep Singh, to mourn his lost sovereignty by situating and stitching the man into his time. Such a move suppresses the enigmatic questions raised by death. (15)

While history, which “offers mourning in the present, a proper burial through the conquest of time,” aims to stabilize and metabolize the lost object—settling the past and repairing our relation to it—melancholia “can function as an appropriation and preservation of loss itself, in which the ego defends against loss while reinscribing the very object it ‘lost.’” (16-17) While careful not to delimit mourning and melancholia along normal and pathological lines, or to romanticize loss as a site of political possibility, or to collapse melancholia and fetishism, Rajbir suggests melancholia “enables us to witness creative relations to loss,” and that “the relation to loss marked by the fetish could also index a promise.” (17) He clarifies:

Following this reading, a frozen and static Sikh community did not internalize Duleep Singh. Instead, in melancholic and fetishistic incorporation, the very constitution of discrete subjects and objects are challenged as we are forced to grapple with the production of meaning as contradictions and anxieties appear constantly. This persistent grappling provides the opportunity to foreground reciprocity without capture. (19)

Ultimately, by grasping and ungrasping Duleep Singh, Rajbir foregrounds a Sikh “ethics of remembering” as a practice that does not require a central, stable lost object. He argues:

Sikhs cultivated an ethics of remembering and association around sovereignty that does not seek to settle relationships with the Khalsa Raj by forgetting it or turning it into a lost object, thereby creating a melancholic afterlife. (20)

It is by attending to the death of the subaltern and subaltern studies, and through the concept of tradition as developed by Talal Asad, Rajbir articulates and enacts this ethics of remembering.

 “Following Talal Asad,” Rajbir writes: “disjuncture and displacement should not be understood as oppositional to tradition, since tradition itself is a series of simultaneously affirming and displacing contestations within a historically continuous argument between assumed narrators and audience.” (119). Like rumors, the temporality of tradition “allows for the working through of coherence without demanding historical intelligibility.” (140) The Sikh tradition, which refuses totality, does not therefore become “the site to memorialize loss—incorporating loss,” but instead, as the text reveals, remains in a struggle both within itself and against the limits of the colonial state. (144). Such struggle, Rajbir demonstrates, was palpable in reform movements, specifically the Singh Sabha, which refused to separate the spiritual and the temporal.

Asad famously concludes “The Idea of the Anthropology of Islam” by stating that to “write about a tradition is to be in a certain narrative relation to it, a relation that will vary according to whether one supports or opposes the tradition, or regards it as morally neutral.” While there will never be “such a thing as a universally acceptable account of a living tradition,” he argues that declarations of moral neutrality “are no guarantee of political innocence.” The ethics of remembering enacted throughout Prophetic Maharaja unsettles the aspiration to moral neutrality that the work of historians often attempts. Rajbir’s account of loss and sovereignty reads as a deliberately political approach that, by refusing closure, is neither indifferent to the survival of the Sikh tradition, nor to those who keep it alive.

The method by which Rajbir attends to the movements that emerge and mobilize around Duleep Singh, has given me a lot to consider as I think about a different narrative of failed resistance, based on a contested claim to communal sovereignty, most often “emplotted as a tragedy.” (12) The seventh-century uprising led by Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, culminated in his martyrdom in Karbala, alongside members of his family, a handful of close supporters, and the imprisonment of those who were not killed. The narrative crystallization of Karbala has rendered it as the paradigmatic encounter of good and evil, oppressed and oppressor, truth and justice. Parallels have been drawn between Karbala and “contestation[s] of various forms of hegemony,” including the asymmetrical violence of colonial occupation and dispossession, from Palestine to Kashmir.

 In Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory, Syed Akbar Hyder differentiates between three, albeit not perfectly demarcated, “communities of interpretation”—the commemoration of the Twelver Shia, the celebration of the Sufis through qawwali, and the emulation of twentieth-century socioreligious reformers. “Commemoration” is most clearly distinguished by its various mourning rituals, which are repeated annually during the months of Muharram and Safar, and at other times throughout the year. Parts of these rituals resemble funerary rites—a mnemonic performance, staged with replica coffins and tombs, to remind us of those who were left unshrouded and unburied in Karbala

While Duleep Singh was not a shahīd in the conventional sense, the formation of communities around his claim to sovereignty, the injustice of his predicament, the repetitive and varied invocations of his narrative, name, and image, the conviction that his actions were subordinate to hukam, or divine will and intervention, and the coalescence of a tradition around him that refuses closure, ring familiar with various visions of Karbala. The merits of grieving for the martyrs of Karbala are extolled as a practice of the Quranic prophets, from Adam onwards, who are said to have preemptively mourned and experienced a part of the pain and tribulation of Karbala. Yet, the insistence on remembering and grieving the loss that took place at Karbala has been pathologized as a cult of mourning and variously read as the source of a “schizophrenic and categorical split between a politics of despair and an aesthetic of formal emancipation” and a “stubborn fidelity to a lost cause.” While the accounts of Karbala can be and are contested on historicist terms—subject to questions of how can we really know what happened when extant written sources only appear centuries after the battle itself—the tradition demonstrates that historicity is not the point.

Ali Shariati notably differentiated between Red Shiism, the revolutionary tradition of martyrdom, and Black or Safavid Shiism, which displaced its freedom-seeking prior form, recasting Shiism as a religion of mourning. He argued that mourning for Hussein and his family was akin to cooperating with Yazid, the Umayyad ruler who ordered his assassination, as it announces the end of the martyr’s task, ultimately the end of their story. Far from advocating for a suspension of grief over Karbala, Shariati insisted on interrupting the cycle of “everlasting mourning” by responding to the invitation of the martyr to bear witness to what their lives and deaths tell us about the truth of this world. Yet, his conception of historical truth is not one that mourns and enacts a burial as a reparative measure, with the historian as a practitioner of orthopedics (180), but instead relies on the work of martyrdom to perform the resuscitative gesture as the “heart of history.” He states: “In the same way that the heart gives blood to the body, a martyr gives it to history […] to the dry dead and motionless corpse of society.”

Over the past year and a half, the incessant obliteration of Palestinian life has drawn renewed attention to the figure of the shahīd as well as the potentialities of mourning. The work of mourning, as Jacques Derrida accounts, is a perilous endeavor, bound by a sense of duty to converse with the dead, yet always open to the possibility of bad faith, delusion, denial, narcissism, self-interest, and political calculation. For those of us removed from immediate proximity to the catastrophe and those it has claimed, the desire to remember and mourn is further accompanied by the failure of comprehension, or apprehension of what we claim to be “witnessing.” Historicist repair is impossible, as its fundamental claims “that justice is rooted in evidence, that truth leads to action, and that seeing is believing” do not stand. In “Can the Palestinian Mourn?” Abdaljawad Omar responds to Judith Butler’s invocation of mourning as a “departure strategy from the logic and cycles of violence, a space where cycles of retribution may be interrupted, and a new ethical relationship may be inaugurated though a recognition of shared suffering and vulnerability,” by emphasizing that mourning is not possible for Palestinians in Palestine.

He writes:

The Palestinian collective endures within a temporal chasm, wherein the durée—essential to the rites of mourning—is systematically arrogated and denied. This denial of chronal refuge, this impediment to commence the formal rites of mourning, even as uncompleted work, enunciates a collective state of perpetual deferral of mourning. This condition is formed and shaped through historical contingencies as Palestinians navigate the attrition of their physical space—the killings, the politics of postmortem incarceration and defilement, the carceral system of mass confinement, and the Palestinian subjectivity entangled within a temporal suspension—a “deferral” is formed within a chronology knotted by the magnitude and recurrence of loss, where Palestinians are barred from mourning, but also refuse to start the work of detaching themselves from the object of their loss.

Omar further argues that Palestinians remain in a “collective state of perpetual deferral of mourning” and that “to grieve” under the conditions of asymmetric power that render it impossible, “is to engage in a betrayal of sorts.” In Prophetic Maharaja, Rajbir’s orientation towards loss similarly regards efforts to repair, settle, heal, and detach from the object of loss as the unethical method of secular history, insisting instead on an ethics of remembering that persistently grapples with the impossibility of closure.

By way of conclusion, Rajbir asks: “What does it mean to be ‘coeval with the dead’ who are neither buried nor present? […] Is it possible to rethink another relation to death itself, a different rapport with the Other?” (182-3) Thinking with the unburied dead in Gaza, of bodies denied and awaiting funerary rites, Omnia El Shakry, asks us to consider burial not merely as, quoting Hans Ruin, “laying to rest and storing away” but as a starting point of a set of practices and rituals of caring for the dead, including the act of writing history as an encounter with the dead in the liminal space of the barzakh. Just as Rajbir refuses to properly bury Duleep Singh or “render him in the past or subjunctive tense,” in fidelity to a living tradition and Sikh relations to his sovereignty, El Shakry’s approach suggests an alternative ethical relation through which we may inhabit space and time alongside the dead—an opening, perhaps, to ask the “enigmatic questions raised by death” that are otherwise suppressed by history, and to listen for a response. (135, 15)

In a lecture on “The Sects” of Islam, Ignaz Goldziher cites A. F. Badshah Husain, saying: “In paradise we will mourn for Husayn. It is the condition of Muslim existence,” and “Mourning for Husayn is the token of Islam. It is impossible for a Shi’i not to weep. His heart is a living tomb, the true tomb for the head of the beheaded martyr.” In this expression, grieving enacts a burial not in the past, but within those who remember, and while it may resemble melancholic incorporation and fixation, here, the shahīd is not dead. As the Quranic injunction instructs, we are not meant to think that “those who are killed in God’s way are dead; they are alive, though you do not realize it.” (2:154) Through this opening, and Rajbir’s invitation to refuse the historical rendering of lifelessness, we might begin to consider the possibilities of relating to, learning with, and caring for those unjustly buried in the past—inconclusively and without closure.

In his introduction to this book event, SherAli makes reference to a formulation of Talal Asad that I have found to be haunting as a regulative ideal: “Life is essentially itself.” The truth of this is what makes friendship appear across the symbolic register, but also requires attention to the ways that each term—life, being, essence, itself—may be captured within the colonial frame and betray friendship that remains impossible. For me, this brings to mind a guilty pleasure of mine, romantic comedies. Specifically, romantic comedies that take interracial relationships as their focus. In those films there is often a scene where the two protagonists come face to face with the reality of trying to love each other in a world where their racial identity matters and structures how they might live. For example, in the (admittedly middling) 2023 film You People, Ezra (Jonah Hill) and Amira (Lauren London) fall in love and are able to inhabit that space together joyfully and erotically. That is until they make their relationship known to their respective Jewish and Black communities. Once they make their love visible within the community—casting their love as subject to what the community is able see—they confront the reality that who they “really” are is not unmoored from how they inhabit the world within the symbolic register. That they love each other in a way immanent only to themselves is no less true than the reality that they must face being racialized within the world that imposes distance and transcendence to their experience. 

Reference to such a middle-brow film might seem strange in the context of engagement with such a rich text as Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja, but what is common despite the low and high-quality of the two is a kind of yearning for the impossible while having to contend with the reality of loss, and rumors of even greater losses. The abyss between a shared life that is only immanent to itself and life that can only be communicated through the symbolic might be another way to describe loss. Attention to this gap might be another name for mourning and melancholia. Rajbir’s book—which flows between the historical and deeply theoretical, all while deftly dealing with the imposing demands of a historico-disciplinary institutional machine—offers no simple nostalgia for a lost sovereignty, nor a kind of defense of a future sovereignty to-come. In a line that is undeniable in its understated desire, and draws me in for that reason, Rajbir writes, “I am ambivalent about loss, affirming and denying it, resisting it and acknowledging it, working through it and against it, and interrogating its nature, its ground or presuppositions, its form and its failures. […] the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss (13, emphasis mine).” 

Part of what has been lost, I take Rajbir to be teaching us, is even the ability to see what has been lost clearly. What is the rhythm that emerges when the Sikh community is drawn toward the possibility of a lost sovereignty when the language of that loss is irreparably changed by the presupposition of “a Christian paradigm (8)”? Might we even say the language is “infected” or is this too much? Does that notion of infection not itself presuppose a Christian paradigm of biopolitics? Instead, maybe we can say the rhythm is now inflected, but still the rhythms that were are now no longer. They are new, which is perhaps something to mourn, but can the loss even be related to when this new beat, this new notion, remains stuck in our head? Ambivalence becomes a powerful stance here.

This relation to loss is what I think allows Rajbir something unique and rare in academic work today, especially academic work in the so-called Western academy that often relegates work like this to “area studies” or even to the discipline of history itself, sold as it is amongst a million different cultures where stories can be heard and understood. The nefarious nature of Christian-secular hegemony also creates spaces within the Western academy where borders are policed in the name of fighting for some form of recovery, where seemingly “provincial” concepts get recast into and for Western academia. Rajbir’s book moves with a kind of beloved ambivalence between concepts of European origin and those of Sikh tradition. He passes across these borders seemingly without anxiety, precisely because this ambiguous relationship to loss undermines claims that some final or complete knowledge of Duleep Singh will be found anywhere. What the Punjab and Europe share in common is not an understanding of sovereignty, but that they “appear to have ‘failed’ (13)”. Failure is common across the divide, across the traditions, across lives lived essentially as themselves. 

I find that there’s something enjoyable, even if is not reparative, in knowing that even if the colonists think they’ve won, my god, how they have failed! How much they have lost! I realize that Rajbir’s book is not about the colonizers, but given my own relationship to colonialism, I did find myself thinking of them. I don’t know if this is failure and I can accept it if it is. But I was drawn in particular to the concept of “rumor” in the book, a form of knowledge that is totally lost on the colonizers. I think rumor identifies another resource that works on loss (like mourning and melancholia) and is truly a philosophical concept. I was drawn at first to the way that rumor is described by Rajbir as exceeding what the colonizers’ can understand, what they can know. For example, in the chapter following “Rumor,” we find the British consular agent in Pondicherry reporting on the rumored increase in supporters of Sindhanwalia (who was working to restore the Maharajah to the throne) with the admission, “what this means I do not know (156).”  

Rumor is a kind of knowledge, but without clear or secure meaning. Rajbir connects such an understanding of rumor to gossip, “Rumor and gossip contest the tightknit relationships between public and private, outer and inner, world and home, central to both colonial rule and nationalist thought (117).” Agamben turns to gossip as a philosophical idea in his book on St. Paul, The Time That Remains. He doesn’t fully flesh out the idea, but I find his description as fascinating as it is dense: 

This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement] (Agamben, p. 8).

Gossip does not have to be accurate in order for it to be closer to truth than fact is. Yet, the truth gossip is close to is still far from being information. When Agamben tells us that it is inelegant to treat gossip in this way, we can extend the argument logically to see that treating information as if it were truth is equally as ignoble. This confusion of truth and information, even a fear of gossip and rumor, is at play when the colonial occupiers work to categorize and track individuals as information amongst the Sikh community. 

Is rumor, as Rajbir describes and traces it, distinct from Agamben’s philosophical gossip? If gossip in Agamben’s text brings to mind catty scholars leaning in over drinks to share what they heard, rumor has a distinctly more insurgent character. Rajbir builds upon Ranajit Guha’s argument that, “As a spoken utterance, rumor, […] was central in creating rebellion in the colonial era, since rumor spread more urgently and dynamically than the written word (118).” Fanon, who appears elsewhere in this text, might also be instructive here, writing in the “On Violence” chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, 

Colonized peoples are not alone. Despite the efforts of colonialism, their frontiers remain permeable to news and rumors. They discover that violence is atmospheric, it breaks out sporadically, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime. The success of this violence plays not only an informative role but also an operative one (Fanon, p. 30).

Rumor is insurgent because its relation to law in the political realm shares something with gossip’s relation to truth in the metaphysical realm. Colonial violence is presented as law which hides its identity as violence through the myth of meaning. Colonialism’s conception of the law is mythic in structure because law presents itself as the meaning of violence. The way that rumors can spread, both anonymously and without the requirement that the speaker or the hearer believe in the rumor, reveals the underlying disjuncture of law and truth. The distinction that Walter Benjamin finds in his “Critique of Violence” is that between law, taken to be universal, and justice, which is always particular. 

Rajbir’s conception of rumor again returns us to the question of the community and tradition that runs throughout his book and is both a place of dwelling with loss and what is lost. In the discussion of rumor we see Rajbir repeating a structure that flows out of the his stated relationship to loss. On the one side, the community and tradition are real and operative, “Though open to improvisation, rumor remains grounded in local credibility, within the parameters of tradition” (119). Rumor is not universal, and when the British attempt to turn it into information, they will necessarily miss what it has said, may say, and is saying. The particularity of the community is what allows rumor to remain rumor, to let it speak truth without turning it into a dead letter of information or law.

On the other side, though, rumor “is not simply about local credibility or precoded political thinking, but about disjuncture and displacement, which both creates and restricts possibility for political struggle (ibid, emphasis mine).” Rumor, and the insurgent violence that may emerge from it, is not a simple matter of the community’s moral affirmation or condemnation. The truth that this tradition—any tradition—is itself not secure, complete, or finished, is understood in rumor. Rumors tell us that this tradition is no more sovereign than the colonizer is or the rule that was lost was. What is particular is also displaced, particularity requires displacement or else it is simply captured and circumscribed by law. 

I suspect some readers of Rajbir may find his ideas of loss too melancholy, even rumor lacks something of the healthy mind real strivers have. Too melancholy too those concepts that flow out of his dwelling in that loss, both within failed European traditions and in the failure of Duleep Singh. Of course, heart to heart, I do not find them too much. For those who listen and can move to it, there is something beautiful in the rhythms of loss that Rajbir plays out for us. A reminder that the colonial borders repeated in the university between academic disciplines are not real, even if they are deadly (sometimes for our bodies, sometimes for our spirits). Yet, the rhythms of loss allow for movement anyway. A little ambiguity about any of the claims that, once lost, we can be found, allows for a wild theoretical freedom still controlled like a dancer pushing the boundaries of the body while the rhythm keeps that body in time. 

When scholars and intellectuals refuse loss, what is it that they are so scared of? When reading Rajbir on rumor, I was surprised to find myself quoting Matthew 24:6, “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.” So much loss, and yet I still cannot fully get rid of this tradition, which I suppose I could claim, however tenuously, even if it does not claim me. What are they so scared to lose, when the reason the loss hurts so much is that it is never fully lost, there’s no certainty in the loss to remain lost? Are you scared that when you get what you want you’ll still be lost? Rajbir says of the colonizers, “They refused to consider the possibility of rumor outside of the certainty of their law (137).” I have heard a rumor that two people fell in love, that friendships were formed, despite the world they live in, and rumor says that they’re totally fucked, but they might just make it. Though, I do not know what this means. 

• Milestone

This is a security-focussed release for FreshRSS 1.26.x, addressing several CVEs (thanks @Inverle) 🛡

A few highlights ✨:

• Implement JSON string concatenation with & operator
• Support multiple JSON fragments in HTML+XPath+JSON mode (e.g. JSON-LD)
• Multiple security fixes with CVEs
• Bug fixes

Notes ℹ:

• Favicons will be reconstructed automatically when feeds gets refreshed. After that, you may need to refresh your Web browser as well.

This release has been made by @Alkarex, @Frenzie, @hkcomori, @loviuz, @math-GH
and newcomers @dezponia, @glyn, @Inverle, @Machou, @mikropsoft

Full changelog:

• Features
  • Implement JSON string concatenation with & operator #7414
  • Support multiple JSON fragments in HTML+XPath+JSON mode #7369
• Bug fixing
  • Fix escaping of tag search #7468
  • Fix CLI parsing of Boolean flags #7430
  • Fix API for labels with slash #7437
• SimplePie
  • Fix support for feeds with XML preamble + DTD #7515, simplepie#914
  • Merged upstream #7434
    • Upstream fix simplepie#912
• Security
  • Disallow <iframe srcdoc=""> #7494, CVE-2025-32015
  • Disallow <button formaction=""> #7506
  • Improve favicons hash to avoid favicon pollution #7505, CVE-2025-46339
  • Add Content-Security-Policy HTTP headers to favicons #7471, CVE-2025-31136
  • Web scraping forbid security HTTP headers in cURL #7496, CVE-2025-46341
  • Add some HTTP headers Referrer-Policy: same-origin #6303, #7478
  • Use HTTP POST for logout #7489, CVE-2025-31482
  • Make update URL read-only #7477
  • Fix for extensions: Restrict valid paths in ext.php #7479, CVE-2025-31134
  • Fix for extensions: Secure serving of user files #7495
• Extensions
  • Fix file serving for symlinked extensions #7545
  • Catch extension exceptions in override #7475
  • JavaScript: new event to detect context loaded #7452
• Deployment
  • Apache: add check for mod_filter to ensure that AddOutputFilterByType works #7419
• UI
  • Accessibility: Add :focus style to some dropdown menus #7491
  • New size option for the Mark as read button #7314
  • Update bcrypt.js from 2.4.4 to 3.0.2 #7449
  • Various UI and style improvements: #7168, #7526
• I18n
  • Rework credits #7426
  • Improve French #7432
  • Improve Italian #7540
  • Improve Polish #7508
  • Improve Turkish #7442
• Misc.
  • Improve PHP code #7431, #7488, #7534
  • Update dev dependencies #7480, #7482, #7483,
    #7484, #7485, #7486,
    #7487, #7533, #7535,
    #7536, #7537, #7538

The resonances between my own work and Rajbir’s felt obvious on the surface. We both work with 19th century figures and materials that are routinely routed toward historicist and redemptionist ends. The sense of an impossibility of recuperating what has been lost and refusing to simply repeat a narrative of fulfillment drives both of our analyses. While working with different histories of loss and narratives of redemption, the resemblance between the Western forms of statecraft and social order that have produced discourses of racial classification and their juristic and imperial enforcement means Rajbir’s work has significant implications for thinking and rethinking something like 19th century black internationalism.

When I first began reading Prophetic Maharaja and about Duleep Singh, sometimes called the black prince, I immediately thought of W.E.B. Du Bois’ novel Dark Princess. Written in the years of Du Bois’ waning influence in America, the novel follows the African American protagonist Matthew Towns, who, exiled in Berlin, finds himself introduced into an international movement for the darker peoples of the world against European imperialism. Through his relationship and repeated rescue by the Princess Kautilya, the Maharanee of Bwodpur and Sindrabad who is his love object, Towns staves off a crisis of faith in the radical democratic vision of a global socialist movement animated by solidarity amongst people of color and Europe’s internal revolutionary forces. The novel ends with Towns and Princess Kautilya welcoming their son, fulfilling the need to provide a ruler to Bwodpur and Sindrabad and staving off England’s rule. Instead, they renew Indian autonomy against the ever encroaching forces of the white Western world and empower those once enslaved with a singular and global historical contribution to the revolution against empire. Crowning him the Maharaja of Bwodpur, “Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds,” Princess Kautilya and Towns’ child represents, not only the hope and possibility of an Indian nationalist vision, but also an internationalist sign of the future overthrow of the forces that have captured African Americans and all other darker peoples and workers of the world, condenses the messianic and the message in the figure of the child ruler.

Rajbir’s Prophetic Maharaja takes up the kinds of messianic messages generated in Du Bois’ novel by considering the impossible figure of Duleep Singh, a former child ruler, as the hopes for a restored Khalsa Raj circulate around his unstable form. The weight of possibility placed on Duleep Singh can often lead to anxieties that drive a quest for the fulfillment of dreams more than staying with the texture and effects of the dreams themselves. Reading Rajbir’s work at this point in my own writing of a book manuscript was also, at turns anxiety producing, deeply challenging, compelling, and always tinged with the excitement of uncertainty. This uncertainty, I take as an effect of Rajbir’s approach to narrating the figure of Duleep Singh in terms that depart from the strictures and reassurances of the salvation that so often and uncritically underwrites thickly descriptive histories. Rather than the engorgement of an alternative and recuperative history, Rajbir’s book takes knowledge’s inadequacy to its object as a point of departure for a different question: “How do we drive at the impossible Duleep Singh–a Duleep Singh we can never arrive at?” (183)

Rather than attempting to arrive at a settled and known sense of Singh, this uncertain terrain, too, becomes an unexpected means of revelation through Rajbir’s examination of loss, not as a known and accomplished fact, but as dynamic effect of the work that constitutes a living community. If the messiah is also the messenger and his figure circulates as the message and in the messages generated around his body, what is it that he communicates? What is it that he stimulates even as what is communicated exceeds his sovereignty and self? I was very struck by Rajbir’s examination of the prophetic’s effects on the fashioning of publicity and the press, for instance. He shows how loss, sovereignty, dreams, and history converge and deform colonial logics as “aspects of the community that had been presumed lost, such as the Khalsa Raj and Duleep Singh, continually erupted into public discourse”(66).

What Rajbir brings to the fore, here, is how the unexpected reappearance of what was presumed lost staves off the success of a recuperative act, fulfilling a salvific quest for fulfillment through the recovery of what was. Instead, what is revealed in the secret that the impossible Duleep Singh makes visible is that “there is no secret to be revealed” (87). Rajbir contrasts this lack of a secret revelation with readings of what the instability of meaning circulating around Duleep Singh reveals. In part, the revelation generated by his instability is the work by which “Colonial administrators regulated the public by creating a typology of racial difference” producing the possibility for the revelation of the secret that is “essential because it functions as a presupposition that sustains the entire order of things” (58). But, a distinct difference to the secret’s function in colonial societies lies in its establishment of the public as lacking in the judgement that would set up an exchange of trust and legitimation to circulate between the public and imperial rule. Instead, the distrust that structures the colonial relation depends on the denial of knowledge to the colonized public. Rajbir’s deft insights here expose the production of concealment and revelation as an effect of the colonial state’s censure of publicity in order to manage the threat of disorderly knowledge.

The irruptive, disruptive, ordering, and disordering circulation of the impossible figure of Duleep Singh also extends to his name. The press’s threat resided in its ability to “[expose] excitable forms of belief to the danger of an impossible unity through the name Duleep Singh” (70). The contestations of colonial racial classification that Duleep Singh’s name makes possible depend on an eroticism that exceeds imperial orderings of race and belonging to go about the work of fashioning a dynamic and uncertain mode of oneness. Sikh’s gathering around, under, and against the name of Duleep Singh generate possibilities that, even in their not coming to fruition, refuse the anticipatory assumptions of knowing on which colonial logics depend. In this way, “the public emerges as a knot unable to be adjudicated into historical form” (87).

That historical form so often serves as a way of resolving the knots that undermine colonial logics is reflected in the pressures of history that attempt to measure the “success” of an idea, a movement, a cultural product, in terms of its historical accuracy or faithfulness to a historical form. In recounting the reception of Du Bois’ Dark Princess, for instance, Claudia Tate highlights the mixture of defense, criticism, embarrassment, and incomprehension that Du Bois’ romance—which is routinely identified as a “historical novel”—engendered:

The reviewer for Hampton Institute’s The Southern Workman defends Dark Princess against claims that it is unrealistic by identifying its problem as the search for “the plan of emancipation.” The reviewer adds, the problem “is not, however, solved; but is discussed from many angles” (336). Allison Davis’s review in The Crisis argues that Du Bois “has raised the dead weight of our stolid depression by propaganda at once eloquent and sane.” He further adds that Dark Princess “must be evaluated” for its “spiritual influence in Negro life,” for its “propagandic purpose” (339). Despite the efforts of these sympathetic critics to efface the novel’s eroticism and to recast the work in the more favorable light of racial propaganda, privately, they seem to have regarded Dark Princess as a dirty old man’s fantasy that should never have been published.

Reviews of Du Bois’ novel routinely set the spiritual against the material, the idealism of propaganda against historical fact, the eroticism of fantasy against the sober chastity of reality, and the stability of policy against the quest for a “plan of emancipation.” Rajbir’s challenge to the historicist presumptions that underwrite distinctions between the political and religious would teach us well, here, and have implications for all of us interested in the study of race, religion, and politics.

I first read Dark Princess when I was maybe 18 or 19, having had it recommended to me by my sometimes conspiracy theorizing oldest brother who had stumbled across it in the public library. I was totally taken by the book, pushing through even the many moments I did not understand because something about its eroticism and mythic sensibility, its internationalism and religiosity, stirred up a drive in me to see the novel through. Upon the novel’s end, I remember feeling in a haze. I could not put into words what the novel was “about,” nor what I was “taking” from it. I could probably recount some plot points and significant events, describe the key players and the protagonist and his love object. But the thing I’ve carried with me most from this book, over the nearly 2 decades since I first read it was the impression of a vision, almost a fever dream, and a sense of possibility that could never be foreseen in advance or fully articulated and encapsulated in words. The novel was certainly historical, and Du Bois’ place in black history gave gravity to it, but what the novel actually does, by refusing to be a realistic historical representation of black internationalism actually offers a more powerful counter to the strictures of a imperialist binaries.

I felt, upon reaching the novel’s last page, that I had been shown something about the possibility of an internationalist sense of black life, culture, and literature that exceeded the standard narration of black possibility, built on redemptive logics of reproductive futurity, that I had inherited. Having been exposed to this unstable and open sense of possibility, I was relieved of some of the pressure of following the redemptive Americanist narrative of our great overcomings from slavery to freedom. If Du Bois, one of the most prominent black leaders of the late 19th-20th century, could produce an at times irrational and affecting, didactic and poetic, political romance predicated on the mythic work that makes an international solidarity of darker peoples of the world possible, then perhaps what I thought I knew about black culture, black history, black romance, needed to be upended. Yes, this was a romance. Yes, it was an ostensibly historical novel. Still, what it amounted to with its inadequacies and incoherences held a salvific satisfaction at bay.

Upon reaching the final pages of Rajbir’s book, I felt that his treatment of Duleep Singh reminded me of the feeling of a fever dream that Du Bois’ novel stirred up in me. The lack of a salvific satisfaction, which is not identical to the lack of eroticism. Rajbir highlight’s prophecy’s ability to reroute our staid senses of sovereignty into a much more critical but also creative and curious direction. Rather than treat the dreams and myths and prophecies stirred up by the figure of Duleep Singh as irrational forms in conflict with political forms, Rajbir makes clear what Cedric Robinson, in his Terms of Order shows, which is the fundamentally mixed-paradigms that serve as the basis of human fashionings of order and authority. Indeed, these mixed-paradigms are central to the ongoing work of learning that undermines colonial certainty. As Rajbir notes, this also can have the effect of taking the pressure off those of us attempting to write in the wake of these stories of loss and stories of history. Approaching the messianic and the messenger as sites of learning, we may find that

[i]n our learning there might be no need to conclude, which means that there is no need to convince, to produce a final conviction about our loss in the carceral operation of history that arrests a community, a tradition, and the very questioning of sovereignty. (185)

Repeating the announcement of a knowledge that exceeds our words, Rajbir’s reminder of our freedom from the need to conclude, convince, or produce a final conviction, offers a lesson in learning to stay with the uncertainty as a way of staying with the singularity and totality of what is at once a tradition and a dynamic and open-ended effect of communities in, across, and against time.

Scientists used fluid dynamics to learn how to get the most flavor from pour-over coffee.

For many years, I have been using my Amazon Wish List as a vast “to-read” list — including recommendations, books of which I’ve read interesting reviews, books I want to remember for my research, etc., etc. (I very rarely actually buy the book from Amazon; instead, I’m free-riding on their easily accessible database of virtually every book ever published.). Over time, the list became so unwieldy as to be useless, and this year I resolved to attack the problem from two directions. First, I would go through the list and be honest with myself about whether I would actually read certain titles (or groups of titles on topics I have lost interest in). Second, and more interestingly, since I am between research projects, I wanted to use my ample commute time to actually read a good chunk of them by fully leveraging my access to interlibrary loan.

The result has been an enjoyable semester of miscellaneous reading that is often pegged to certain times of my life or certain friends. It was so nice to get off the treadmill of work-oriented reading that I even resisted writing up a blog post, because it would potentially make it “feel like work.” But as an aid to my own memory, I present the list here:

• Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture — this was a good way to consolidate memories of my trip to Rome, overlaying what I had seen with its broader historical significance.
• Shabbir Akhtar, The New Testament in Muslim Eyes: Paul’s Letter to the Galatians — this is related to a long-planned article on Paul and the Qur’an; I found it to be extremely strange and borderline unreadable, to be honest.
• Robert O. McDonald, Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life — I already blogged about this one.
• Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism — I’ve read a lot on Soviet Communism but comparatively little on China, and a review article on Ci’s work in NLR made this seem like a good starting point. It was pretty bracing, presenting Mao’s career as marked by magical thinking and a weird secular eschatology.
• John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System — an effortlessly authoritative overview of science fiction studies, through the lens of the ways that commercial culture transforms the meaning and function of “genre” compared to classical models.
• Seth Benardete, Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero — this was recommended to me way back when I was first prepping Shimer’s senior capstone sequence. I probably should have read it back then!
• Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey — This wasn’t a “recommendation,” but I figured I enjoyed Achilles and Homer so much I would check this one out. It gave me a lot to think about for particular details of the Odyssey, but I’m not sure I understand the overarching argument about how Homer is somehow Platonic in approach (such as it is discernible in his almost Gillian Rose-like severe style).
• Zdravko Planinc, Plato through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues — This was a recommendation from my summer seminar on Plato and Homer; it similarly gave me a lot of insights for future teaching.
• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners — my friend Bruce Rosenstock, who passed away in 2023, recommended this to me way back when I was working on Awkwardness. Since I didn’t have reliable library access at the time and wasn’t planning on making it a scholarly book, I left the recommendation aside — but picking it up semi-at-random now, I enjoyed the morbidly fascinating tidbits of medieval manners, as well as the introduction in which he uses his own sociological method to account for why the sociology of his time sucked.
• Erving Goffman, Stigma: The Management of Spoiled Identity — another Bruce recommendation from the Awkwardness days. This is remarkable for the author’s matter-of-factness about the negative valence of certain traits in the context of mandatory “normality.” I was also struck by how his discussion of affinity groups, complete with publications, for most stigmatized identities anticipates the explosion of similar groups in online settings.

For the summer, I’m going to need to shift gears back toward class prep and research for most of my reading, so this is where I leave this particular project. I think I’m going to make an effort to do something similar every few years, though. Undirected reading is really important for keeping one’s mind fresh and nimble.

This post is by LL Hodges, a writer, historian and professor based in Los Angeles. They focus on queer history and questions of memory, loss and time.

It was the Monday in November after the daylight saving time ended. Riding my bike home in the City of Quartz after work suddenly meant navigating a setting sun. I was unprepared. So, I rode on the concrete sidewalk portion of the bridge over the Los Angeles River instead of on the road. That’s when the sign came into view. From the corner of my eye, I saw bright red and yellow and stopped pedaling. Cars sped behind me as I turned to look. Had this always been there? And so it was that during the reminder of time’s construction, rolled back an hour and plunged into darkness, I saw— perched on a rooftop and written in neon—Concrete is Fluid.

I’d had the pleasure of reading the introduction to Rajbir Singh Judge’s book Prophetic Maharaja by then. Ideas of loss, mourning, and grasping perseverated. Not to mention the claim: “One could say that mourning is the project for historians (Judge 15).” Full disclosure: I am a historian. This means many things. For starters, I should believe in determinate negations and aufheben (truthfully, I shouldn’t even know what that is since I was trained in the U.S. and not supposed to learn theory). I’m supposed to take out my thread and needle to repair our current/past loss, progressing society forward with each suture. I build narratives across space. Doesn’t concrete do the same? Isn’t it an example of how “success is grasped through a frozen hold on time” (Judge, 16). 

As a kid I used to dial a number on our house telephone and, at the tone, hear what the time would be. But on that evening of all evenings, just after the state exercised its power over time, my mind was left malleable. Concrete. Space. Time. As a trained historian, I want to eschew the prickliness that disrupts teleology promise (Arondekar, For the Record, 17). Yet the time-change lingered in unfixed aches that day as it worked itself through my unadjusted body. I could not ignore it. I started to lose my grasp on history. Queerness has a way of ungrasping.

Concrete is not solid. This became clear, freeing even. Thus, the idea conjured queerness. It brought the orbits of Jean Genet and Gerry Bibby together with Gayatri Spivak and Anjali Arondekar and Rajbir Singh Judge. These orbits aligned or even crashed in the space of my brain. Is this a fair collision? It is in this post. And not to worry, the event did not signify an end or a conclusion. I am still floating in that space.

In the writer Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant d’Amour, the queer desires of men in prison exceed their concrete walls of confinement. The film revels in its homoeroticism, but that isn’t my concern here. Instead, I pull out two themes that recall the discourses of Duleep Singh’s public and hidden transcripts (Judge 30). Publicly, there is a swinging of flowers. Privately, there is a blowing of cigarette smoke. 

The film opens as a guard walking to work sees two arms hanging outside of the barred prison windows. From one window an arm swings a string with a bouquet of flowers tied at the end. The waiting hand of the next window over tries to grasp the bouquet. He misses. Again, the bouquet pendulum swings, again a miss. Loss becomes continuous. This opening, like the opening to Prophetic Maharaja, asks the viewer to sit with Spivak’s idea of “simultaneously grasping and ungrasping,” as Rajbir reconceptualizes it (25). We are not asked to grasp and hold on. In this book Rajbir asks of us to keep grasping. I cannot think of a more intellectually caring call to arms. Be wary of redemption, keep letting go.

What might this mean for an archive? Rajbir turns to Arondekar for “an archival approach that articulates against the guarantee of recovery” (Judge 60). I turn back to Genet’s afterlives. In 2010 and then again in 2023, the artist Gerry Bibby performed an ode to Genet. Once called Un Chant. Grotto Giganta: stalactite/stalagmite (2010) and later Un Chant/A Shoe/Achoo. We’re gonna have a Good Time: For BP (2023), Bibby’s performance centered on the swinging bouquet. Rather than swung between two hands, a bouquet swung back and forth above a photocopy machine. Bibby tried continuously to capture a photocopy of the bouquet, all while reading the technical manual to the copy machine out loud. These fleeting moments of desired intimacy evaded capture, despite the drone of technical, administrative operation. 

Then, like Rajbir, I, too, turn to Arondekar, imagining the copy machine spewing attempt after attempt. “What if the recuperative gesture returns us to a space of absence? How then does one restore absence itself? Put simply, can an empty archive also be full?” (Arondekar, For the Record, 1). Subverted, the question echoes: Can a full archive also be empty? Yes. “The colonial archive is thus most empty precisely when it is most full” (Arondekar, For the Record, 12). This is Bibby’s archive of photocopies gathering in the machine’s receptacle. A full archive moves towards what Rajbir explains as the colonial politics of “securing the world” (2), one that creates a “carceral register” (20). 

A pile of paper can easily become an archive. “The carceral operation of history” (185), however, is not without its difficulties. The frustrations of the colonial apparatus, of mechanical administration and bureaucratic systems is the site of queerness constituted against capture or redemption. The machine does capture something, but only the right-before-vanishing.

Here, Dhurm Singh transitions us, in a slippery way, from the outside of concrete to the inside. A man with good intentions and lucky timing. As Rajbir writes, he was “both meager and many, lacking and copious, absent and present, Dhurm Singh had arrived at his destination and disappeared” (85). Could a poesis be at play here? This suspension, to be empirically determined but lost, to live on the edge of the limits of the state, slips through time. Like the failed photocopy of the bouquet, Dhurm Singh appears as a sort of blur. In this blur he avoids becoming objectified and overdetermined as an archival subject. In these current times of heightened surveillance, there is a way of being here that I find inviting. With AI object recognition technologies trying to “secure the world,” how might we endeavor to live in blur.

Now within the prison walls, there is another kind of grasping at play. In Genet’s film, two men in neighboring cells share cigarette smoke through a hole in the concrete wall between them. The act arouses them, frustrates them.

We should not be surprised by such little holes. Prophetic Maharaja reveals the tears and the holes of the carceral operation, to show, for example, how everyday practices like taking amrit render the colonial order “a sieve” (105). Like a sieve, the concrete wall allows for movement. The smoke moves like rumor, dissident and uncapturable, as irreducible as air. Sometimes the man ignores it, sometimes he inhales it. Desire itself becomes unfixed and free within concrete.

Genet’s film ends with the hand firmly grasping of the bouquet. Maybe affection is allowed to be secured. But Bibby’s performance, ends without a clear photocopy, leaving a lingering suspension, exceeding placement. This feels more apt to Rajbir’s work.

Prophetic Maharaja rejects a neat conclusion into the future, instead asking for the present act of learning. Specifically, it asks of us “to learn without closure” (185). But its opening challenge moves further, “to learn…without end, without satisfaction, and open to the possibility of failure” (26). What might it mean to have a failed history? Not a history of failure, not a failed historian, but a history that reneges on The Promise?

Recall that mourning is the project of historians. In our desire to secure the present through interpretations of the past, we are tied to the future. The secure past works to secure the future. They are inseparable for many. I might go as far as to say that to the extent that we spend our time in the past, we are stuck in the future. Perhaps this is why, after discussing research on the past, a historian is liable to face the question: “So, what do you think will happen?” The common historian answers, “Well, I study the past, so I can’t see into the future. But…” and continues. Orthopedics, indeed. 

Yet Prophetic Maharaja asks us to avoid satisfaction. What, then, if there is something satisfying in the lack of satisfaction? 

By now the sky was dark purple and reaching for black. The city’s skyscrapers glowed in the distance as the Los Angeles River trickled down its concrete banks below. The neon sign continues its challenge: Concrete is Fluid. I looked this up later and found it part of the artist Lauren Bon’s greater project to hack the LA River’s infrastructure. It seems possible. But of course, concrete is also solid. It builds and it traps.

In Los Angeles, the weight of concrete has its own character. According to Mike Davis, who spoke with a piece of concrete in his hand at the 1998 Critical Resistance conference , the substance used to hold promise, but now seems sinister. Now it holds “the stink” of, among nefarious things, claustrophobia. I think back to the pile of photocopies growing during Un Chant, of the historian wading through piles of documents. Davis opened by saying the Romans invented concrete, thus evoking empire. If one could trace the development of concrete, would they find it paired with the development of the archive?

I looked down at my watch and realized the time. My watch is powered with help of a quartz, a component of concrete. This moment both could not have happened on any other day and continuously happens ever since. I turned and rode my bike home. 

This is a guest post by SherAli Tareen, Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College.

At its core Rajbir Singh Judge’s dazzling monograph Prophetic Maharaja presents an argument for “dwelling in loss” rather than seeking the enticing yet entrapping desires for restoration, recovery, and healing. By writing a “historical narrative that refuses to historicize,” Judge pushes his readers to examine notions of sovereignty and history that the practice of dwelling might make available. Conceptually, through the example of Duleep Singh (d. 1893) and the politics his life and memory make possible, the book seeks to interrupt dominant scholarly notions of historicism and colonial logics of religion and sovereignty, that reappear in varied apparitions in contemporary scholarship as well. It is very rare for a monograph, and even rarer for a first monograph, to offer an example of close and patient reading that rattles deeply held and deeply prized normative assumptions of one’s field of intervention. Judge achieves precisely that. And he does so in multiple ways and registers.

In Panjab Studies, there is a pervasive trend of excavating a redemptive narrative of a Panjabi cosmopolitan ethos that might offer the fantasy of traversing and transcending the alleged juggernaut of religious convictions that according to this view stifle such “cosmopolitan” pasts and futures. The Sikh tradition, under the calculus of this desire for “Panjabiyyat” or “Panjabiness” can either work as a quintessentially hybrid religion that naturally inheres pluralism or as a model for a colonial infested discursive machine that can only be repaired through the prophylactic of secular baptism. Judge entertains none such fantasy. In fact, Prophetic Maharaja conducts a devastating indictment of the politico-conceptual coherence as well as the desirability of the secular quest for Panjabiyyat by presenting a reading of Duleep Singh’s quest for sovereignty that does not seek to resolve, recover, overcome, or redeem any restorative project of liberal redemption and goodness.

Through an analysis both painstakingly layered and theoretically vivacious, Judge masterfully walks his reader through a terrain of political theology populated by visions of sovereignty neither liberal nor secular, but rather nestled in the refusal to exercise the sovereign decision to historicize, humanize, and heal any alleged ruptures of history. Judge’s analysis of Duleep Singh’s attunement to the loss and possibility of sovereignty propels the reader to confront and wrestle with a grammar of life that is not driven by or available for secular projects of dividing that life into binaries like religion and culture, state and society, plural harmony and exclusivist bigotry. Life, Judge teaches us, taking a cue from anthropologist Talal Asad, is “essentially itself.”

One of the great lessons of this book that I found particularly striking and productive concerns its theorization of loss and its simultaneous recognition that loss escapes and exceeds any neat theorization. Judge is at his most brilliant and intellectually courageous during moments in this book when he meditates on the aporias of his own encounter with the conceptual constitution of his project. And remarkably, and again in a rare achievement, these are precisely the moments when his argument is most piercing and compelling. His discussion of loss is a great example of this. As Judge writes very early in the book (in its Introduction), signposting an analytical attitude and conviction he sustains throughout the monograph: “rather than provide a new theorization of loss-which cements a relation to loss-this book endeavors to reckon with the powerful resources that work on loss, such as mourning and melancholia, and what they have already provided.” Judge continues, in a flash of utter brilliance, “I contend with loss instead of transcending it through recovery [emphasis mine]…I do not tie a thread throughout the text that provides an adequate answer to loss because there might not be any answer to it. In this sense the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss. My goal is not to recognize loss and provide it taxonomic space but to sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the text” (p. 13). This mini paragraph I have just cited represents a moment of tremendous significance in the study of South Asian History and Religion. Note, in the interest of careless readers who will rush towards the inconsiderate gesture, all too pervasive among historians of a certain ilk, to dismiss or undermine careful theoretical interventions as Judge’s here as convoluted high theory. Note particularly that dwelling, in Judge’s account, as both an analytical concept and as a mode and practice of life, is anything but passive inactivity. Exactly to the contrary, dwelling represents that aggressive commitment to a politico-conceptual ethic of refusing to repair and overcome loss through secular gestures of managing and healing the violence of history.

Dwelling in loss, instead of activating the secular instinct of historicizing, humanizing, and supposedly transcending loss makes possible a horizon of the political that comes to live with rather than attempt to overcome the aporias of life. Judge’s invitation to his readers to “sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear” in the passage of a text or in the passage of history is I believe a profound call for suspending sovereign confidence in compensating for loss and treating the wound of historical contingency through the fantasy of historicist rigor, of returning life to its immanent materiality. What sort of politics and possibilities of sovereignty might become available by dwelling in loss, by sitting with rather than treating with the prophylactic of secular historicism the vertigo of historical conjunctures such as the one involving the loss, renewal, and diffusion of Duleep Singh’s aspiration for sovereignty? In asking and addressing this question, Judge successfully offers pathways for recognizing and exploring the political power and philosophical sophistication of imaginaries of sovereignty, like Duleep Singh’s, that are otherwise conveniently though perniciously catalogued as sorry tragedies of a colonized subject. Making Duleep Singh’s example speak back to and interrupt the alleged tragedy of his quest for sovereignty, Judge undertakes a critically important endeavor of decolonizing both colonial and contemporary secularist models of South Asian history populating the Western academy. This forum brings together outstanding scholars, conducting theoretically cutting edge critiques of secular power from multiple disciplinary perspectives, to engage, wrestle with, and celebrate a book with major ramifications and consequences in the study of religion, history, philosophy, and South Asia. The Prophetic Maharaja is in many ways a model and master seminar in bringing together invasive attention to the particularity of an archive and theoretical reflection that paves as well as shifts the terrain of multiple fields of knowledge simultaneously.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and currently a Patricia Crone member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for the academic year 2024-25. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. His second book is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023) which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Textual Studies category.

Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach. Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published in 2024, and over the next few weeks we have a series of contributors who’ll be offering their reflections, followed by a response from Rajbir. I’ll update this post with links to the other posts as they’re published:

Introduction by SherAli Tareen

LL Hodges, ‘Claustrophobic Archive‘

Amaryah Armstrong, ‘Black Internationalism, the Black Prince, and the Pressures of History‘

APS, ‘”What this means I do not know”: Loss and Rumours of Loss‘

Samaah Jaffer, ‘The Contention of Mourning‘

Marika Rose, ‘A Matter of Fantasy‘

Satbir Singh, ‘Dandy (de)livery‘

Basit Iqbal, ‘Non-redemptive Narration‘

Response by Rajbir 

There’s something about Trump that draws comparisons with Communism. The one I’ve heard most is the Cultural Revolution, where Chairman Mao incited a rebellion against the state he ostensibly led, with the Great Leap Forward (rapid economic transformation through absurd magical thinking) as a close second. Mao does not exhaust the field, however. There is a rich vein of ironic parallels to be found in the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. Here I am drawing on Vladislav M. Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, which I discussed at greater length here.

There are any number of parallels that immediately leap to mind — such as their strange trust in their country’s historical enemies (Reagan for Gorbachev, Putin for Trump), their tendency to indulge in personal projects instead of governing (writing Marxist theory for Gorbachev, golfing for Trump) or even the fact that both have a bizarre visual feature on their head (the birthmark and the combover, respectively).

More informative, though, are the parallel dynamics of their careers. The first is that both shocked the political establishment with their radicalism. In both cases, establishment figures assumed they would be a fresh outsider face (Trump as a political novice, Gorbachev as the first Soviet leader born after the Russian Revolution) who could be controlled. In fact, in the case of Gorbachev it was likely that the need to control him didn’t even occur to most of the relevant power brokers, since he had previously been such a “go along to get along” kind of guy. But both Gorbachev and Trump 2.0 moved much faster and made much bigger changes than anyone was anticipating. In Gorbachev’s case, the establishment was too blindsided to do much of anything prior to the abortive coup attempt (famous for the Soviet TV station’s decision to play Swan Lake on repeat for the duration rather than report on events), and this time around it doesn’t seem like much of anyone with institutional power is making serious plans to counter Trump.

The nature of those rapid changes also bears comparison. Perhaps most notably, Gorbachev’s decision to simply leave the Eastern Bloc countries to their own devices was as shocking to Soviet insiders as Trump’s omni-trade war has been to their American counterparts. This decision is representative of a broader trend — their rapid changes tended to be strangely self-undermining. Gorbachev seems to have believed he would gain some moral authority and shed an economic burden by abandoning the Warsaw Pact, just as Trump claims to be righting a major wrong in the world trade system by fighting back against our allies’ supposed parasitism. In practice, though, both moves seriously undercut the sources of the respective superpower’s sway on global events.

The same was true domestically. Gorbachev styled himself as a new Lenin, instituting a renewed revolution to fully actualize socialism in its ideal form — including an eventual transition to democracy. Ironically, though, he ruled more purely dictatorially than most post-Stalin Soviet leaders, even as he continually undercut the sources of his own power. Key to his plan to democratize the Soviet Union was the ambition of reenvigorating the individual republics and their local “soviets” — moves that wound up stoking nationalistic fervor that had mostly lain dormant, which (shockingly!) proved to be counter to Gorbachev’s socialist goals. And though this analogy is admittedly a bit strained, both also made changes to the “official” history of their countries that hurt their legitimacy — Gorbachev by belatedly admitting the truth that the Baltic states had been annexed by force (morally good, tactically stupid) and Trump by hamfistedly imposing a white supremacist narrative to counter the scourge of “woke” (morally evil, also tactically stupid).

Similarly, the attempted reform of the Soviet economy took on a DOGE-like “move fast and break things” tone, as the few people who still had some idea how the planning system worked were sidelined and the functioning systems were gummed up. The attempt to make the constituent republics “real” again also had the effect of severely disrupting supply chains, similar to Trump’s antics. Contrary to the hagiography by which Gorbachev wisely oversaw the inevitable dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of his rule were chaotic and unpredictable to almost everyone involved, due to the unique combination of naivety and recklessness he brought to the table.

In summary, both were aspiring revolutionary dictators, aiming to revive an idealized heroic national past, and both relentlessly destroyed the state capacity necessary to carry out their stated goals. Both responded to economic discontent by heedlessly making things even worse. Both abandoned allies and cozied up to long-time enemies who did not actually have their nation’s interests at heart.

Where the parallel begins to break down is that Gorbachev’s intentional stoking of intra-Union nationalism wound up creating independent power centers that ultimately dissolved his country out from under him. A few months into the Trump administration, we don’t seem to be very far down that road — though arbitrarily witholding federal funding to “blue” states could do for state-level identification what Trump’s abominable threats have done to Canadian nationalism. Maybe Gavin Newsom will turn out to be America’s Boris Yeltsin, withdrawing the single biggest constituent unit from a tottering federal structure (though of course California is proportionally nowhere near as dominant as the Russian “Republic” was within the USSR).

And of course, for most Western readers, the parallel rankles because Trump is bad and Gorbachev was good. Personally, I’m not so sure that dissolving a major world power, permanently racheting down the life prospects of everyone in the successor nations, and abandoning a major region of the world to what amounts to mafia rule was an unalloyed good. If the choice were between the continued existence of the USSR and the constituent republics becoming nice, normal, prosperous liberal democracies, obviously the latter outcome holds considerable appeal — but it is not remotely what happened, nor is there really any reason to imagine that option was on the table. Meanwhile, judging from the early days of Trump’s second term, the world may well regard the dissolution of the United States with relief by the time he’s done.

If that sounds impossible to you, well, the dissolution of the Soviet Union would have sounded impossible to everyone in the early 80s — from Gorbachev and Reagan all the way on down. A superpower doesn’t just destroy itself! That would be crazy! But sometimes crazy things happen. We unfortunately seem to be living through one example — hence the value of thinking through a previous case.

Here is the latest release of wallabag.

⚠️ This release follows the 2.6.11, which is a security release.

📈 To update your instance, just run make update. Don't forget to make a backup of your instance (database and files).

🤝 A little reminder that you can support our work on wallabag by sponsoring us on Liberapay or subscribe on wallabag.it. Thanks!

Human summary

We forgot to update the dependencies of the project in the last release.

What's Changed

Fixes

• Fix changelog by @yguedidi in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/8135
• Update dependencies by @yguedidi in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/8136

Technical stuff

• Prepare 2.6.12 release by @yguedidi in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/8137

You can read the full changelog on GitHub.

Download wallabag 2.6.12

To download, install/upgrade wallabag, please read our downloads page.

Need help?

We are on Matrix, ping us!

You can also open a new issue on GitHub.

How can you help us?

By using wallabag, by reporting bugs, by translating wallabag and its documentation, by talking about wallabag to your friends, ...

You can also help us by donating via Liberapay.

Here is the latest release of wallabag.

⚠️ This is a security release of wallabag.

📈 To update your instance, just run make update. Don't forget to make a backup of your instance (database and files).

🤝 A little reminder that you can support our work on wallabag by sponsoring us on Liberapay or subscribe on wallabag.it. Thanks!

Human summary

Adding protection against CSRF on several endpoints.

What's Changed

Security fix ⚠️

• Protect actions with a CSRF token by @yguedidi in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/commit/99c8a06594d6ee7480ce4d041ccff3025b353656 (reported as GHSA-5pm7-cp8f-p2c2)

Fixes

• Fix redirection after action in search results by @nicosomb in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/7827
• Fix title tag filter by @nicosomb in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/7846
• Change NB_ELEMENTS in pocket importer to 30 by @j0k3r in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/7993
• Fix entries counter for annotated entries in the menu by @j0k3r in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/7999

Technical stuff

• Prepare 2.6.11 release by @yguedidi in https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/pull/8133

You can read the full changelog on GitHub.

Download wallabag 2.6.11

To download, install/upgrade wallabag, please read our downloads page.

Need help?

We are on Matrix, ping us!

You can also open a new issue on GitHub.

How can you help us?

By using wallabag, by reporting bugs, by translating wallabag and its documentation, by talking about wallabag to your friends, ...

You can also help us by donating via Liberapay.

[Editor’s note: While preparing for my frequent course “Deals With the Devil,” which centers on the Faust theme, I discovered that one of my favorite filmmakers, Éric Rohmer, wrote a doctoral dissertation on F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust. To force myself to read it, I put it on my syllabus, hoping that it would set up an exercise where my students could build connections between the Faust theme and a major work not obviously based upon it, in this case, My Night at Maud’s. As you will see, it turned out that much of the material in the book was not directly relevant to the course, but Rohmer does have some good stray observations about Murnau’s reworking of the Faust theme and his relationship to Goethe in particular. I share the text of the handout I will be distributing to my class in case anyone might find it interesting or useful. My translated excerpts below are drawn from Éric Rohmer, L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977). Page numbers refer to this edition.]

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a French filmmaker associated with the New Wave movement pioneered by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Like Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer actually started out as a film critic and scholar, and he did his doctoral dissertation on Murnau’s silent film adaptation of Faust (1926). As a film critic and aspiring filmmaker himself, Rohmer is much less interested in the plot of the film than in Murnau’s cinematic technique. In fact, he believes that the familiarity of the plot was what allowed Murnau to be so innovative in the way he presented it—all his attention was focused on technique rather than narrative. Nevertheless, Rohmer does make some very insightful remarks about how the film functions as an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Here I will provide an overview of Rohmer’s work and a translation of those passages. My hope is that this will help us to make connections between the Faust theme and Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969).

Rohmer opens the book with the claim that “Of all filmmakers, F.W. Murnau is perhaps the one who knew how to organize the space of his films in the most rigorous and inventive way” (9). He defines three different kinds of space that a film can create. The first is the pictorial space, which talks about the way that individual shots or frames are composed. The second is architectural space, which refers to the way a film creates the illusion of a “real world” that the characters are moving through. The third is filmic space, which refers to the way that the film creates a sensation of movement.

The main chapters of the book go through these versions of space one by one. In the first chapter, on pictorial space, Rohmer claims that most filmmakers of Murnau’s time were inspired by photography, but Murnau preferred to use painting as a model. Rohmer goes through many individual painters he believes inspired Murnau’s broad style, including Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer. He also mentions several specific paintings that he sees as models for particular scenes and refers, in broader terms, to the way that illustrations of Goethe’s Faust may have influenced him as well. This chapter basically does not discuss the plot at all and hence does not include any substantial passages relevant to our class discussion.

In the second chapter, on architectural space, Rohmer does a detailed study of the layout and décor of the various spaces that appear in the film. This chapter includes some analysis that is so detailed that it may border on the insane—for instance, at one point he provides a chart listing and categorizing every single object that appears on screen (80-82). He also includes sketches where he tries to reconstruct the layout of Faust’s study (67), Gretchen’s house (71), and Martha’s house (72). More relevant to our discussion is his inventory of the scenes from Goethe that Murnau excluded or modified, which leads to an analysis of Mephistopheles as a character:

Now let us precisely determine, while examining each scene in detail, the places that are in Goethe and those that have been modified. Auerbach’s tavern disappears, but it is in a tavern that we see Mephistopheles provoke Valentine and engage in a feat of sorcery, here more terrifying than burlesque: the flame shooting out of the wine. If the character of Mephistopheles retains all the comic force of his literary model (without going beyond it, except perhaps in Martha’s house), Murnau wanted, however, to preserve the seriousness of the wonders he shows us, whereas Goethe tinged the legacy of the Volksbuch [a term for the original Faust legend] with derision. The demon is not presented to us, as in the play, in the form of a poodle; it is Faust himself who evokes him, just as in the legend; and the sinister monk who emerges, though sarcastic, cannot provoke in us the slightest chuckle. Murnau will equally avoid showing us the gallery of animals that is the witch’s kitchen (Hexenküche); it is in his study that Faust’s rejuvination is carried out. Walpurgis Night, which inspired painters and musicians, has also disappeared, but I do not see how a cinematographic translation of that satiric-philosophical interlude could be given, except in a spirit of Goya-esque masquerade, which is quite far from Murnau. (60-61)

Rohmer then takes a step back to think about Murnau’s relationship to Goethe more broadly:

If Murnau and Kyser [the writer of the screenplay] ultimately remain so faithful to Goethe, despite their apparent desire to distance themselves from him and return to the sources of the myth (“an old German legend,” as the credits say), it is perhaps also the case that the play carried the seed of its cinematographic transcription. It is true that the settings of the scenes, in this philosophical drama that was made above all to be read, even if they do not play a truly active role, assert their presence more forcefully than in many works better conceived for staging: that of Shakespeare, for example, or the Greek tragedies. The “tragedy” of Faust is indeed more cinematographic than theatrical, in its first and second parts. We never find in it a banal waiting room, an anonymous place, but always a well-defined place, which makes up an integral part of the old myth and of what Goethe himself forged, in the same way as the names of characters or the epoch when the story unfolds—which no one would dare change. (61)

Later in the chapter, after his reconstruction of the various sets and his listing of all the objects, Rohmer reflects further on the idea that everything in the film has a very defined purpose:

In Murnau, the same thing holds for clothing as for objects: it is never a means, a tool, a weapon for getting what one wants or seducing someone. We are in a world made of relationships of force, not of persuasion. Not of a lover’s courtship: the woman does not play the flirt, the man does not play the rake. In this universe of pure desire, there is room only for predator and prey: whether he uses the fascination of his looks or pure violence, it is all the same. Each being is for the other a vampire or a victim. Each knows what he is after from his counterpart, or what he fears. Deception is impossible. There is no need to strut about: one passes immediately to action, which is to say to assault or its simulation. The love scenes are conceived as battles where now the man, now the woman is attacking or attacked, pursuing or pursued. Thus, for example, the scene in Martha’s garden… (86).

This concreteness holds especially for costumes:

To a change in clothing there almost always corresponds a profound transformation of one’s being, and Faust, with its theme of rejuvenation, puts out in the open a theme that is elsewhere latent [in Murnau’s other films]. Moreover, the transition is not forcefully abrupt. It would be more fair to speak sometimes of blossoming or blooming. In the famous scene with the jewelry, reduced by the filmmaker to a simple necklace, or in the one where Valentin offers a shawl to his sister, the two faces of Gretchen are revealed, today a reserved young girl, tomorrow a woman and a lover. The fact of wearing such and such clothes is not for Murnau a social act, but a natural phenomenon of evolution, of growth or decline. (87-88)

In the third and final chapter, Murnau analyzes the idea of filmic space or the creation of motion. Here he emphasizes Murnau’s use of sudden appearances, which leads to another massive table listing and categorizing every example (96ff.). This chapter also includes a long section where he provides multiple abstract sketches of different scenes to trace the direction of the main movements (125ff.). He discusses the overall pattern of motion in the film as a kind of strategy, which is sometimes apparently violated by the actors. In this context, he talks about individual performances, particularly those of Emil Jannings (Mephistopheles), Yvette Guilbert (Martha), and Camilla Horn (Gretchen):

Certainly one can say that Emil Jannings and Yvette Guilbert “go too far.” It is certain that the gestures of these two actors, especially in the scene where they meet, appear indifferent to the general dynamic of the film’s strategy. They are gestures that bear a significance without reference to the global conception of the mise en scène. Their direction owes nothing to their inscription in the space of the film… But one must not confuse the direction of the film and what is proper to each filmed element…. This mode of expression is the responsibility of the characters…. It is not Yvette Guilbert, nor Jannings who “goes too far,” but Martha and Mephistopheles…. This comic verve, though due in part to the personal rapport of the actors and though apparently foreign to the general spirit of the mise en scène, is ultimately integrated successfully into the film’s modelling and its motor scheme….

By opposite means, Murnau obtains with an unknown, Camilla Horn, in the role of Gretchen, the same result…. Did he lead his actress to find some of these poses and gestures herself, or did he suggest them right from the start? It is of little importance whether he uses one or the other method. The fact is that he succeeded there as well in perfectly marrying what came from him and what he owed to the actress, giving us the impression of cutting her to the quick, of forging a new being who would be, from birth, “Murnauian”… This second nature which she is granted renders her always absolutely “natural.” (108-110)

In the footnotes to this chapter, Rohmer also returns to the notion that the Faust legend is more intrinsically cinematic than theatrical. Here he quotes Goethe’s version of the wager, where Faust defies Mephistopheles to give him happiness so great that he will declare, “Beautiful moment, please do not pass away”:

It is an idea more cinematographic than theatrical, because tragic theater, whether Greek or Shakespearean, puts the accent on the impossibility of innocence, not of happiness, having in view action rather than contemplation. The feeling of the incompleteness of the moment, associated with that of is fullness, we find in a vague way in almost all films, in the guise, most often, of a “sentimental” optimism, in search of one of those “suspensions”… that the screen is well suited to achieve by its magic and that of the soundtrack. In this sense, the “happy ending” of Murnau’s Faust appears to be more in line with the typical mythology of the cinema than with the ambiguous conclusions of the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust. (123)

There are a number of candidates for “the book that predicted Trump,” from Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient near-future dystopia that purported to “Make America Great Again” to Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. I have occasionally quipped that Creepiness is the book that truly deserves the title. There is a moment of truth there — I do argue that the creepiness trend was in large part about the breakdown of white masculinity — but it was mostly just a joke about the almost overwhelming creepiness of Trump himself. More recently, though, it has dawned on me that another book in the series may deserve some prophetic credit, namely Why We Love Sociopaths. Or rather, it seems to have initially dawned on Aaron Bady, who tweeted about it a few times, and that prompted me to realize that Trump fits my cultural diagnosis in that book in a way that is, dare I say it, almost creepy.

My argument in Why We Love Sociopaths is that the remarkable prevelance of sociopathic characters in 2000s television was a symptom of a broken cultural contract. With the decline of the Fordist order and the rise of neoliberalism, one long-standing narrative about social mobility and merit had been discarded without being replaced by a plausible alternative. This situation gave rise to a growing sense that the only reliable means to get ahead in the system is to cheat. Certainly we can read Trump 2.0, and especially the seeming public indifference to his flagrant violation of laws and constitutional structures, as an extreme outgrowth of that basic tendency.

I organized my account around three types of sociopaths, all of which seem in retrospect to capture the Trump phenomenon in some way. The first category was the Schemer, which I mainly associated with cartoon shows where the characters are attempting to get away with mischief for its own sake. My key example was Eric Cartman from South Park, the strangely charismatic and resourceful child who periodically comes close to taking over the United States and even the world. Though Trump obviously lacks Cartman’s discipline and focus, there is something of the childish schemer in Trump — though that element is less prevalent in the embittered end-state we are now witnessing.

The second was the Climber, who stops at nothing to climb the social ladder. My key examples here was Don Draper from Mad Men. Here the connection to Trump is admittedly more distant, since my analysis was focused on meritocrats of the Obama type, who I argue should not be counted on to challenge the basic terms of the system that enabled their rise. Yet I do start out with an analysis of reality television, which I present as a “dumbed-down” version of the same basic worldview we see in prestige dramas like Mad Men and The Wire, and so I want to claim partial credit due to Trump’s association with reality TV.

The final sociopathic archetype was the Enforcer, the lawman who breaks the law in order to save it. My key example here was Jack Bauer of 24, who murders and tortures his way to stopping terrorist attacks that only see seems to have the insight to predict. Trump himself has identified unambiguously with this category, in his infamous quote (attributed to Napoleon) claiming that it is impossible to violate the law in service of your country. Clearly he is counting on his fellow citizens to decide that it doesn’t matter if he follows the legal niceties as long as he gets things done — nor is there any way to deny that the system as constituted on January 19, 2024, was basically incapable of delivering any meaningful results in a way that would be legible to the public.

Not only does Trump fit, in some way, into all of these categories, but his appeal depends on his ability to pivot among them. His status as a Cartman-esque provocateur gives people license to dismiss his scarier or more nonsensical declarations as mere bluster; his reputation as a (sort of) self-made businessman is key to his appeal; and his promise to “get things done” by any means necessary both emboldens his supporters and cows his enemies into submission. You can’t hold all three of these images together simultaneously, but they often combine in a kind of one-two punch. Cartman Trump seems most useful for such strategies. For instance, the existence of Climber Trump allows people to use the Cartman Trump to dismiss his destructive economic plans as bluster, while the frightening ambitions of Jack Bauer Trump can be rendered more palatable by reference to Cartman Trump. But on the less jovial side, it is precisely the Climber Trump that renders him plausible to many as a Jack Bauer figure who won’t be beholden to political restraints.

While in my conclusion I do offer up the feeble hope that, in a broken system, we might all benefit from being more sociopathic — a counterintuitive soundbite that was for a time picked up by Slavoj Žižek in his public lectures — my overall assessment of this trend is negative. It does offer a diagnostic of our broken system, sometimes even (in the case of The Wire in particular) a remarkably insightful one, and I admit up front that I enjoyed many of these shows (including South Park and some reality TV).

But its dominance of the entertainment field was, I believed, socially corrosive, and I think events have proven me correct. Trump 2.0 is not just politics as entertainment, which is bad enough, but it’s politics as 2000s entertainment, it’s politics as designed by people who watched way too much South Park, 24, and reality TV. I’m not making this up. Literal Republicans say as much, about themselves. Ross Douthat wrote a famous column on the rise of “South Park Republicans,” motivated primarily by a brash anti-PC attitude rather than any positive ideology. Supreme Court Justice Scalia — supposedly “the smart one” — literally cited 24 in an opinion, and the current conservative supermajority are all intellectual heirs of Scalia. As for the influence of reality TV, Trump’s trajectory speaks for itself, and clearly neither J.D. Vance nor any of Trump 2.0’s luminaries are “here to make friends.”

Obviously sociopath TV is not the only cause of Trump — nor am I saying as much. I’m saying the trend itself arose as a symptom of social breakdown, which it then helped to exacerbate. The one thing my diagnosis excludes is social media, for which I can perhaps be forgiven since I was writing in 2012 (and the book was after all about TV). But I think that many of the attitudes inculcated by South Park, reality TV, and 24 — the reflexive anti-PC “provocativeness,” the endless zero-sum competition for “clout,” and the ambient menace of violent fantasies — have shaped the social media field as well.

I’m not sure how much credit I really deserve for this prediction, since the fact of having written the book didn’t help me to predict either Trump’s success in the primaries nor his Electoral College technicality. But then, like most sane people, I had not up till that point given Donald Trump — who was little more than a vapid media phenomenon — much thought. If I had, perhaps I would have seen how well the cultural trends I diagnosed in Sociopaths converged in him. The cost, though, is that I would have squandered some of those precious remaining years and months before I was forced to spend so much of my time and energy thinking about one of the most worthless human beings ever to live. I stand behind that trade-off, even if I had no way of knowing I was making it. And if it turns out that my little book about TV trends, properly contextualized, could have prevented Trump’s rise — all I can do is apologize.

From mid-April to early May we’ll be hosting the next AUFS book event on Rajbir Singh Judge’s recent book Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia. Rajbir is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach, and the book explores loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. Do get your own copy of the book and join us to talk about it. The event is currently scheduled to run as follows:

15th April: Introduction by SherAli Tareen

17th April: Marika Rose

21st April: LL Hodges

23rd April: Amaryah Armstrong

25th April: Basit Iqbal

28th April: APS

30th April: Samaah Jaffer

2nd May: Satbir Singh

5th May:  Response by Rajbir 

As a Gen X parent of Gen Z teens and young adults, I'm used to cringing at things from 80s and 90s movies that haven't aged well. However, a beloved movie from my youth that I didn't expect to be problematic, "Dead Poets Society," sparked some unexpected negative responses in my kids, shining a spotlight on generational differences I didn't even know existed.

I probably watched "Dead Poets Society" a dozen or more times as a teen and young adult, always finding it aesthetically beautiful, tragically sad, and profoundly inspiring. That film was one of the reasons I decided to become an English teacher, inspired as I was by Robin Williams' portrayal of the passionately unconventional English teacher, John Keating.

The way Mr. Keating shared his love of beauty and poetry with a class of high school boys at a stuffy prep school, encouraging them to "seize the day" and "suck all the marrow out of life," hit me right in my idealistic youthful heart. And when those boys stood up on their desks for him at the end of the film, defying the headmaster who held their futures in his hands? What a moving moment of triumph and support.

My Gen Z kids, however, saw the ending differently. They loved the feel of the film, which I expected with its warm, cozy, comforting vibe (at least up until the last 20 minutes or so). They loved Mr. Keating, because how can you not? But when the movie ended, I was taken aback hearing "That was terrible!" and "Why would you traumatize me like that?" before they admitted, "But it was so gooood!"

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

The traumatize part I get—that film gets very heavy all of a sudden. But in discussing it further, I uncovered three main generational differences that impacted their "Dead Poets Society" viewing experience and what they took away from it.

1) Gen Z sees inspiring change through a systemic lens, not an individual one

The first thing my 20-year-old said when the credits rolled was, "What? That's terrible! Nothing changed! He got fired and the school is still run by a bunch of stodgy old white men forcing everyone to conform!" My immediate response was, "Yeah, but he changed those boys' individual lives, didn't he? He helped broaden their minds and see the world differently."

I realized that Gen X youth valued individuals going against the old, outdated system and doing their own thing, whereas Gen Z values the dismantling of the system itself. For Gen X, Mr. Keating and the boys taking a stand was inspiring, but the fact that it didn't actually change anything outside of their own individual experiences stuck like a needle in my Gen Z kids' craw.

2) Gen Z isn't accustomed to being blindsided by tragic storylines with no warning

To be fair, I did tell them there was "a sad part" before the movie started. But I'd forgotten how deeply devastating the last part of the movie was, so my daughter's "Why would you do that to me?!" was somewhat warranted. "I thought maybe a dog would die or something!" she said. No one really expected one of the main characters to die by suicide and the beloved teacher protagonist to be blamed for it, but I'd somehow minimized the tragedy of it all in my memory.

But also to be fair, Gen X never got any such warnings—we were just blindsided by tragic plot twists all the time. As kids, we cheered on Atreyu trying to save his horse from the swamp in "The Neverending Story" only to watch him drown. Adults showed us "Watership Down" thinking it would be a cute little animated film about bunnies. We were slapped in the face by the tragic child death in "My Girl," which was marketed as a sweet coming of age movie.

Gen Z was raised in the era of trigger warnings and trauma-informed practices, while Gen X kids watched a teacher die on live TV in our classrooms with zero follow-up on how we were processing it. Those differences became apparent real quick at the end of this movie.

3) Gen Z fixates on boundary-crossing behavior that Gen X overlooked

The other reaction I wasn't expecting was the utter disdain my girls showed for Knox Overstreet, the sweet-but-over-eager character who fell for the football player's cheerleader girlfriend. His boundary-crossing attempts to woo her were always cringe, but for Gen X, cringe behavior in the name of love was generally either overlooked, tolerated, or sometimes even celebrated. (Standing on a girl's lawn in the middle of the night holding a full-volume stereo over your head was peak romance for Gen X, remember.) For Gen Z, the only thing worse than cringe is predatory behavior, which Knox's obsessiveness and pushiness could be seen as. My young Gen X lens saw him and said, "That's a bit much, dude. Take it down a notch or three." My Gen Z daughters' lens said, "That guy's a creepo. She needs to run far the other way."

On one hand, I was proud of them for recognizing red flag behaviors. On the other hand, I saw how little room there is for nuance in their perceptions, which was…interesting.

My Gen Z kids' reactions aren't wrong; they're just different than mine were at their age. We're usually on the same page, so seeing them have a drastically different reaction to something I loved at their age was really something. Now I'm wondering what other favorite movies from my youth I should show them to see if they view those differently as well—hopefully without them feeling traumatized by the experience.

This article originally appeared in January

• Milestone

This is a bugfix release for 1.26.0, addressing some regressions 🐛

A few highlights ✨:

• Fix regression with cURL HTTP headers breaking conditional HTTP requests
• Fix regression with saving states of user queries
• Fix regression with dynamic OPML

This release has been made by @Alkarex, @FromTheMoon85, @marienfressinaud, @math-GH
and newcomers @abackstrom, @BryanButlerGit, @culbrethj, @EricDiao, @Karvel, @ViPeR5000

Full changelog:

• Features
  • Add cURL version to page about system information #7409
• Bug fixing
  • Fix regression with cURL HTTP headers breaking conditional HTTP requests #7403, FreshRSS/simplepie#33
  • Fix regression with saving states of user queries #7400
  • Fix regression with dynamic OPML #7394
  • Fix update of the user’s last activity on login action #7406
  • Fix setting category option Maximum number of articles to keep per feed #7416
  • Fix priority field when processing a new feed from an extension #7354
• Deployment
  • Fix regression with 64-bit timestamps on 32-bit platforms #7375
  • Fix back-compatibility with cURL 7.51 (we require cURL 7.52+ for CURLPROXY_HTTPS) #7409
• UI
  • Use case-insensitive sort for categories #7402
  • Improve dark mode of Origine theme #7413
  • Added API password indicator #7340
• I18n
  • Fix (es, fa, sk): do not translate XPath code #7404
  • Fix date bug in Finish #7423
  • Add Portuguese from Portugal #7329
  • Improve Hungarian #7391
• Misc.
  • Improve PHP code #7339
  • Update dev dependencies #7386, #7387, #7388

Maybe there's no such thing as a "basic" taste after all

I recently had the privilege to appear as a talking head on Dr. Anna Sulan Masing and Lucy Dearlove’s podcast series “To Be Delicious: A Cultural Context of MSG in the UK.” Across five episodes, Masing and Dearlove examine MSG and umami from multiple angles, investigating how they can be understood through both science and culture, and how it connects to larger concepts like nostalgia, racism, language, and a sense of place. The podcast clearly differentiates between MSG and umami (it bears repeating: they are not the same thing), while also explaining their inseparability and universality. MSG and umami feature in all cuisines. Literally all of them. But their specific forms, the way they are used, and the way they are understood all vary widely from culture to culture.

I went back through my old blog posts and college essays (embarrassing) to see if I could pinpoint when I first learned about umami.1 In November 2004 I wrote a paper called “Adaptation of the Chinese Noodle in Pre-Modern Japan” that explains umami and key umami ingredients, such as katsuobushi and soy sauce.2 By December 2006, I was mentioning umami casually in recipes for chowder on my blog. Back then, umami was novel to me, but also relatively unremarkable. It wasn’t the gastronomic buzzword or international phenomenon it is now. I remember noticing it on a lot of Japanese food packaging in banal contexts: as an ingredient (うま味調味料 umami chōmiryō (umami seasoning)), or in marketing copy and descriptors, such as this “rich taste” (深い旨み fukai umami, literally “deep umami”) nattō sold by Lawson.

In both instances, you could translate umami as “savory,” and it would make sense, and adequately describe the flavor or ingredient in question. But! Note that “umami” is written differently in each instance: うま味 for the umami seasoning, and 旨み for the “rich taste” nattō. This is a difference I only recently came to understand. The former refers specifically to umami the basic taste – you can think of “umami chōmiryō” as analogous to the word “sweetener” on English food labels (though of course that applies to sweet compounds rather than umami ones). The latter is more vague – just like the other umami, it derives from “umai,” which means “tasty,” but in this sense it implies a satisfying, balanced flavor. The Umami Information Center’s Japanese site has an explainer about this, which doesn’t appear on their English site. They take for granted that in English, umami is understood only as savoriness.

Except… it kind of isn’t! There’s still a lot of confusion about what exactly umami is, and some of this confusion comes from how umami as a concept is communicated by the Japanese outwardly, to a global audience. On the podcast, I said that my understanding of umami is really “umami in translation.” But it might be more accurate to say that my understanding of umami is actually limited to the relatively straightforward English definition of umami, which avoids the Japanese issue of homophonic ambiguity. Even so, some of the fuzziness derived from that ambiguity persists in English; the secondary Japanese definition of umami as “deliciousness” isn’t so much lost in translation as warped in translation.3

Back in 2015, The New Yorker published an article by Hannah Goldfield provocatively titled “You Think You Know Umami.” At the time, I felt it badly misrepresented what umami is, while also overcomplicating it, leaning hard into stereotypical characterizations of Japanese cuisine (and Japanese culture generally) as mysterious and inscrutable. (It’s annoyingly common for people writing about Japan to take the position that if they don’t know something, then it must be unknowable.)

The article made me so angry that I ranted about it on my blog, and later adapted that rant into an explainer of umami in Vegan JapanEasy. Here’s one particular snippet from the article that triggered me:

When I asked him to describe what umami tastes like, he grew philosophical. “It’s something that’s kind to the body,” he said. “It’s mild, and, after eating, it’s not heavy on your stomach. It helps you wake up better in the morning. That’s what deliciousness is about. It’s about feeling good after eating.” The most balanced meals, he said, have the same level of saltiness as exists naturally in our bodies, and umami in other countries can be too heavy on the stomach. “In Japan, we talk about it tasting good, sleeping well, and clean bowel movements.”

These statements were made by Kazu Katō, a representative of JRO, the Organization to Promote Japanese Restaurants Abroad. Though JRO’s stated purpose is to promote restaurants, what they really promote are Japanese exports, via the businesses that sell them. They operate mainly at expos and trade events, but also run occasional public campaigns like last year’s Japanese curry stamp rally in London. Umami itself is one of their most prominent marketing assets. But JRO was initially conceived as an organization that would not only promote Japanese food, but also regulate and certify it. Ted Bestor explains the background in an article in Devouring Japan:

In the mid-2000s, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Matsuoka Toshikatsu complained about “inauthentic” Japanese restaurants after visiting a Colorado emporium that featured both sushi and Korean barbecue on its menu. In response, he advocated a system of certification to be applied to restaurants outside of Japan that represent themselves as serving genuine Japanese cuisine.

The proposal was ridiculed in the Japanese press, as well as in government circles; the project came to naught. Nonetheless, the notion of “sushi police” was picked up by the Japanese media and has remained in popular consciousness, perhaps as a shorthand for referring to officious gatekeeping of what is and what isn’t actually Japanese cuisine. Indicative of such popular derision is a 2016 Japanese television anime series entitled Sushi Police… [which] portrays bumbling Japanese officials, accompanied by a robot powered by soy sauce, pursuing inauthentic sushi in the United States… and elsewhere.4

Although Matsuoka’s specific proposal never materialized, it morphed into JRO, which tacitly certified restaurants by including them in campaigns, or by endorsing them in designated restaurant guides. Furthermore, the MAFF scheme turned out to be a hydra: its head may have been cut off, but two more grew in its place: JETRO’s “Japanese Food Supporter” designation, and the completely opaque Nintei Nihon Restaurant accreditation program (apparently initiated by a Japanese restaurant owner in London, with no connection to any other governing body).

This is all to say that umami has been used by Japanese government ministries and trade organizations like JRO as a political and economic tool to support a narrow, generally conservative image of Japanese food, and Katō’s comments should be understood in that context. Elsewhere in Devouring Japan, Yoshimi Osawa investigates the idea of umami as Japanese cultural property in her article “We Can Taste but Others Cannot”:

[Some] Japanese now commonly assert that umami is a taste recognized only by Japanese or that the Japanese understand umami better than foreigners… There are at least three technical reasons why these claims exist: (1) all three umami substances (MSG, IMP, and GMP) were discovered by Japanese scientists, (2) Japanese is one of only a few languages to have a word to describe the umami type of taste, and (3) the existence of umami as a fifth taste was not believed outside of Japan until the discovery of the umami receptor in 2000.5

Osawa’s research included interviews with a number of Japanese chefs in both Japan and the UK, some of whom were absolutely damning in their appraisal of non-Japanese palates as inferior and unable to perceive or understand umami.6 And is it any wonder, when official explanations of umami, such as Katō’s, can be so esoteric and abstract that they invoke sleep quality and bowel movements? Mythologizing umami like this creates a feedback loop between Japan and the West that supports an Orientalist/exceptionalist view of Japan while making umami out to be something more difficult to grasp than it actually is.

The New Yorker article also features commentary from Adam Fleischman,7 founder of the now mostly-defunct Umami Burger. The whole idea of an “umami burger” is irksome to me, because burgers are already inherently umami, especially if they contain accoutrements that bring their own umami compounds to the party: common toppings such as cheese, tomatoes, ketchup, or pickles. Even at their most basic, burgers express an extraordinary level of umami intelligence. That’s why most of the world’s best burgers are not that different from ones that would have been made one hundred years ago. Adding high-concept condiments such as Fleischman’s “Umami Master Sauce” or “Umami Dust” is… fine, I guess, and probably quite tasty. But it’s also unnecessary. I get the impression that in the case of Umami Burger, umami was deployed primarily to generate marketing buzz, and only secondarily in the service of making a better burger.

The Japanese, [Fleischman] told me, define umami as “an over-all harmonious state of perfection where the ingredients come together, a really rounded and harmonious dish. They have a sort of zen way of looking at it.”

The invocation of Zen says it all: umami is meant to be something mystical, rarefied, profound. But one of Osawa’s interviewees, a Japanese food TV presenter, offers a counterpoint: “To be honest, umami is a convenient expression. If I cannot find an appropriate expression to describe the taste of food, I sometimes use umami instead of just saying oishii (tasty).”8

Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe in which the chemical compounds responsible for the subtle but distinctive taste of savory food were isolated by an Italian scientist, who named this taste “gustosità” or something. I wonder what the discourse surrounding gustosità would look like. Would the Italian government use it to promote anchovies and cheese and tinned tomatoes, and to support the idea that Italians have superior palates? (Lol I can’t even keep a straight face writing that – of course they would.) Would non-Italians be producing podcasts and writing lengthy think pieces about it, like this one?

Or would we all just shrug and say, “Oh yeah, gustosità – I get it, savoriness. American food is savory, too. Burgers are totes savory.”

Clearly, I am very dismissive of the notion that umami is anything more than just a universal basic taste – too dismissive, in fact. Masing and Dearlove’s podcast – which compellingly connects umami to feelings of comfort, satisfaction, nostalgia, and self-care – has made me rethink my hardline, just-the-facts position on umami. Because taste is not just a matter of, you know, taste. How we perceive food and understand our relationship to it, and its relationship to the wider world, has a lot to do with how we contextualize it and talk about it.

Katō’s musings about how umami is “kind to the body” and helps you poop sound pretty woo-woo, but a more open-minded and perhaps less arrogant interpretation would be that he’s expressing an aesthetic sensibility related to umami, rather than trying to define the term in a purely academic way. And certainly, that approach has merit, especially because when it comes to describing sensations, words often fail us miserably.

In a way, it’s no wonder we’ve all latched on to umami so excitedly. We don’t have a lot of words to describe tastes, so when a new one comes along, it’s like finding a key to a door that’s been locked our whole life. Now we can name it; now we can talk about it, explain it, move in and make it our own.

Discussing the sensory characteristics of food often involves metaphors. We describe tastes in terms of other things, and vice versa: a bittersweet memory, a sour expression, salty language. But savory…? That’s a bit trickier. We can savor a moment, or meet an unsavory character, but the actual word “savory” doesn’t appear in any English figures of speech that I can think of. Perhaps this indicates that we don’t have strong, definitive associations with the word. It may be worth noting, as Osawa does, that Japanese dictionaries also define umami as “a skillful thing to relish, especially techniques in art” and “profit that is easily gained in business.”9 As a more familiar, more lived-in word (and again, a homophone), umami naturally has other connotations in Japanese.

How on earth would you describe a savory taste to someone else? How would you describe any taste? It’s actually kind of impossible, which is why using metaphors, using narratives, and expanding on the emotions we associate with a taste can be useful – as Masing and Dearlove and their interview subjects have done, and indeed, as Katō does in his explanations. The language Katō uses to explain umami is delicate and calm: “kind,” “mild,” “feeling good,” “sleeping well.” They’re the same sort of words you might hear in a meditation app. Now, compare this to Adam Fleischman’s cookbook:

To quote Clive Badger from Fantastic Mr. Fox: Explosions! Flames! Burning things! The back cover copy boasts that this book will teach you how to “detonate flavor”! Kaboom! Could this take on umami be more American?10 Of course it’s to be expected that in a country where there are more guns than people, even umami is weaponized. Goldfield points out that “Fleischman’s approach — Where do I find the umami, and how can I get as much as possible? — is distinctly American.” She also reports that in 2013 David Chang set out to create something he called “the New York umami.” What does this even mean? If you want New York umami, eat a slice of pizza. If you want American umami, just eat any normal cheeseburger. In his cookbook, Fleischman acknowledges the inherent umami of pizza and burgers – but it’s not enough for him. And maybe that’s the American approach to umami, as Goldfield suggests: to ramp up, maximize, exaggerate, explode.

Umami is a basic taste – and I still think that’s the best and simplest way to understand it. But perhaps basic tastes just aren’t so basic after all. Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami: we associate all of them with particular things outside the realm of food, and it is in those associations that they take on new, more complex meanings, which will inevitably vary between different cultures and languages. Tastes are like colors: we all see the same red, blue, and green, but how we interpret them as symbols depends completely on our cultural vantage point. We are what we eat – that’s a given. But we are also the way we talk about what we eat.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, you may like some of the articles I’ve written for Pellicle, which also explore how symbolism and sense-memories connect to taste and flavor.

• “The Fast and the Curious – Discovering the Wider World of Citrus”

• “Bitter Thrills – On Kinnie and Escapism”

• “Kōji, Culture, and Community – Part 1 (Miso and Collective Memory), Part 2 (Sake, Storytelling, and Japanese Aesthetics), and Part 3 (Soy Sauce, Enzymes, and Transnationalism)”

1

I remember my MSG “aha!” moment clearly. When I was living in Japan, at some point I clocked that the salt shaker on the table at my go-to yakitori joint wasn’t just salt. It was aji-shio, or “flavor salt,” a mixture of salt and MSG. So that’s why it makes everything taste so good, I thought. This came after growing up in America and seeing “no MSG” labels on food packaging for years and years, and hearing about MSG primarily in the context of widespread, casually racist demonization of Chinese food. I never really knew why people thought MSG was bad, and it didn’t take much Googling for me to realize that it wasn’t.I’ve been all in for Team MSG ever since.

2

The paper also refers to synergistic umami, although only in a misspelled citation that took me a while to figure out: “sojo-kaka,” which should have been “sōjō kōka” (相乗効果). To be honest, re-reading this paper made me feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels for 20 years when it comes to communicating about umami!

3

This is a pretty common occurrence in popular writing about Japanese culture. So many Japanese words have undergone a similar treatment, like ikigai – I really enjoyed this article explaining how it’s been misrepresented in the West. And it’s worth pointing out that we already have cultural concepts analogous to ikigai: raison d’être, or simply one’s life purpose – just like we already have the concept of savoriness. Do we even need “umami”?

4

Bestor, Theodore. “Washoku, Far and Near: UNESCO, Gastrodiplomacy, and the Cultural Politics of Traditional Japanese Cuisine.” Devouring Japan, edited by Nancy K. Stalker, 109-110. Oxford University Press, 2018.

5

Osawa, Yoshimi. “We Can Taste but Others Cannot: Umami as an Exclusively Japanese Concept.” Devouring Japan, edited by Nancy K. Stalker, 127. Oxford University Press, 2018.

6

Osawa 126.

7

“Butcher” in German; literally “meat man.” Is that nominative determinism or what?

8

Osawa 121.

9

Osawa 121.

10

Out of curiosity, I Googled うま味爆弾 umami bakudan (umami bomb in Japanese), and there are actually quite a lot of results. (The first and most interesting one is for 3D-printed canapés!). So maybe this idea of a violent, explosive umami isn’t so all-American or un-Japanese after all.