Bassam Sidiki

Blue poster with images of newspaper article headlines on problems faced by 'Harijans' marginalised castes regarding being 'stranded' at partition, not allowed to migrate, their evacuation, and townships for them.

#IndiaSky, please share as received from Minee Pratiksha on a forthcoming workshop:
Call for Papers
Caste, Exclusion, and Memory: Dalit Narratives of Partition

www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Jake gave me such useful feedback on this essay in its earlier stages. Thank you my friend!

Having to change BlueSky account handle from super-bass because Nicki Minaj is now a fascist was not on my end of 2025 bingo card

he sees you when you’re sleeping: the santopticon

South asian man in glasses, brown turtle neck and cognac leather jacket holding an apple

Back from deactivation to reveal my headshot for book publicity. PARASITIC EMPIRES: INFECTION, INSULARITY, INTER-IMPERIALITY is now in production at UNC press.

Advice for female associate profs on balancing academias gender inequities, including vastly unequal workloads, inverted pay, and engaging productively with male admin?

Looking for resources, conversations, and more!

Here for you buddy

Essentially, what happened was that the inventors of poppers were like: how do we get non-queer folks to sustain the same level of brain damage? And so AI was born.

From @kathyfagan.bsky.social's book, Bad Hobby: bookshop.org/a/862/9781571315458

#poem #booksky #writing

Feline Feces (lib catturd) @kitttenn.bsky.social M dashes (the long dash) are a dead giveaway. LLMs love using them for some reason, while actual human beings have no idea how to type that into the computer. They also love sets of three, overtly parallel structure, and impersonal writing. July 6, 2025 at 2:16 PM 1 quote 12 likes

Stop spreading this garbage about em dashes in ACTUAL EDITED PROSE OH MY GOD.

Plenty of actual human beings know how to type em dashes! We’re called “writers” and “editors” — maybe you’ve heard of us?

the fact that anyone in America can think this & feel comfortable saying it out loud represents a profound failure of public education— like, a breakdown at the systematic level

🤌🏽🤌🏽

What we do is literally “knowledge production,” not “knowledge consumption.” Also I still find it so unfair that MFAs in most departments can sit in PhD seminars but not vice versa. The gatekeeping is real.

I love adding pop culture slides to theory lectures in my poco class. when I teach Spivak I start with the photo accompanying her interview with Aesop skincare. When I teach Bhabha I have a slide of his son Satya on New Girl. This fall, when I teach #Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, I’ll include:

This is definitely what happened. Mad king behavior.

(“The process could be a little like fossil-fuel extraction: old, specialized, or difficult writing could be utilized, in condensed form, to power new thinking.)” This part of the article so pithily captures the author’s complete “bracketing” of the colossal environmental impact of AI.

“But if what I’m after is the story, the vibe, the suspense, I might be justified in feeling that I’d ‘read’ the book. Certainly, I’d be unlikely to seek out the unabridged version.” Not to gatekeep or whatever but you have not, in fact, read the book.

This article is going to turn me into the Joker. Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat 😩😩😩

You got this!

30% off with code SPRIDE25 A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States From Margins to Mainstream

It’s been a bit since I shared this one, pub’d in Feb—A HISTORY OF TRANSGENDER MEDICINE IN THE US, from @sunypress.bsky.social. 794 pp of empirically grounded info, personal experiences, & trans history BY trans ppl, physicians & scholars. Now 30% off w/ code SPRIDE25. sunypress.edu/Books/A/A-Hi...

Tenured!

Any historians of the late British Empire on here? Can you suggest any sources on the of colonial governance in the 20s onwards? I read somewhere that with this retreat of the colonial state, private orgs took up the onus of services like public health. Does this sound right? Many thanks 🙏🏽

Good to know! Looking forward to reading it

Going to my first American Lit Association conference in May for a health/environmental humanities panel to speak about my ongoing work on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death, and as I was researching more fiction on the Panama Canal I found that two historical novels about it came out in 2024 👀

This is Pikachu

If you are interested in:

🔹legacies of the 19th century in the 20th/21st
🔹modernism’s uses of the Victorian
🔹imperialism & its afterlives
🔹ripple effects of Atlantic slavery in indentureship, bonded labor, migration
🔹aesthetic effects of delay, recursivity, suspension

PLEASE SUBMIT TO NAVSA 🌿🙏

How the student uses evidence to argue effectively/tell a good story

66.3’s second essay cluster, “Textures of Empire,” is organized and introduced by Jason Rudy @jasonr75.bsky.social, and features essays written by Meghna Sapui @meghnasapui.bsky.social, Bassam Sidiki @super-bass.bsky.social, and Erin Cheslow.

The racist uber driver taking me from the NOLA airport to my airbnb was spewing the exact same nonsense. When I told him I’m from Austin but prefer Houston he was like “after Katrina all the Blacks [sic] went there and crime went up 400%.” My blood was boiling.

Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe Exclusive: First months of conflict produced more planet-warming gases than 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in a year, study shows

a Guardian piece from exactly one year ago

www.theguardian.com/world/2024/j...