Reposted by Omedi OchiengKye @kyebarker.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Robinson, Black Marxism, pgs. 80-81 121
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 30/09/2026I hate nostalgia. Now get out of my face so I can listen to Phil Collins in peace. 020
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Never forget www.nbcnews.com/news/uc-sant...nbcnews.comWindowless, billionaire-designed UC Santa Barbara mega dorm horrifies the internetA consulting architect for the university's design review committee quit in protest, describing Munger Hall as a "social and psychological experiment." 121
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Another illustrious alum of the Buckeye School of Critical Theory—Eve Sedgwick. 030
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 28/09/2026I genuinely aspire to Raymond Geuss's unadulterated scorn for John Rawls. 110
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 25/09/2026I see the value of keyword projects but in our conjuncture of non/ana/cata-performatives, we are probably lacking far more in Biercean Devil's Dictionaries than keyword projects. 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 25/09/2026"I do not share the optimism, or the theories which underlie it, of that popular kind of inter-war and surviving semantics which supposed that clarification of difficult words would help in the resolution of disputes conducted in their terms and often evidently confused by them.’’ (Raymond Williams) 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 10/09/2026One thing I've learned from bitter experience is to never ask an upper class or middle class Kenyan follow-up questions on their socio-political views. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 07/09/2026"At the beginning of the twentieth century, 'metaphor' was one of the rare terms to survive the great shipwreck of rhetoric, and this miraculous survival is obviously neither fortuitous nor insignificant." -- Gérard Genette 100
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 07/09/2026"Normie" is obviously a reactionary social construct. Up there with "public opinion" in the destructiveness it enables. 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 07/09/2026Daniel Immerwahr wrote a book entitled "How to Hide an Empire." Kind of delicious that he's now paid by the New Yorker to write instruction manuals on how to hide an emperor. 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 06/09/2026Was about to say Germans are returning to their vomit but then remembered that they never left it in the first place. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 06/09/2026In the last decade or so I keep encountering this phenomenon in which peer reviewers in critical humanities journals read every Black radical critique as Afropessimist. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 05/09/20261/ Most people are alert to Zionist strategy as a largely top-down, elite project, largely dedicated to the savage repression of dissensual popular sentiment. 110
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Living in an enchanted world feels... exhausting. 110
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 21/08/2026Are there other newspapers doing what the New York Times did with its sports desk? Different sections of the newspaper (news, opinion, sports, books, lifestyle, etc) outsourced to separate (non-unionized) entities? 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 16/08/2026I think it is very revealing (in ways that are both edifying and dismaying) to ask one's colleagues in the academy which disciplines (or specific subfields in their discipline) should be abolished, why, how, and by whom. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 16/08/2026I think it's a difficult tactical call and I'm not sure how effective it is in the current climate, but anybody with a modicum of heft in the public sphere should advertise their refusal to work with or be in dialogue with liberals who platform Nazis like Hanania, Yarvin, and Rufo. 120
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 16/08/2026"No, Omedi, what happened in the states is the Red Scare, not the Red Terror." "Speak for yourself." 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 12/08/2026Vulgar theory you shall always have with you. It's called hegemony. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 11/08/2026I can see why the elite capture/appropriation thesis is very attractive to a certain kind of person invested in the articulation of a project of left-liberalism. 100
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 07/08/2026The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting which Z library domain is the real one. 131
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 30/07/2026 Prof. Tom Goodnight was a fine scholar and incredibly generous soul. Rest in Peace www.whiterivernow.com/2026/07/30/o...whiterivernow.comObituary: Dr. Gerald Thomas GoodnightIn Loving Memory of Dr. G. Thomas Goodnight With profound sadness and deep gratitude for a life exceptionally well lived, we announce the passing of Dr. G. Thomas Goodnight—beloved husband, father, sc... 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Northrop Frye was so anxious to break from the New Critics that he hit them with the pentafecta of Otherness (race, gender, class, religion, and caste). New criticism is "delicate learning"; they are a "mandarin caste"; their methods are "vaguely sacramental"; given to "ritual masonic gestures." 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 28/07/2026Not saying they were better, but once upon a time “cultural workers” had a bit of an appreciation for mediation, sublimation, and the transmutation of capital (Bourdieu). 130
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 27/07/2026The photos of Mitch McConnell reminds me of one of Gore Vidal’s deepest cuts, writing about Reagan in 1968 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 27/07/2026The Boghosian/Appiah ten are symptoms of an anti-intellectualism that I long struggled to make sense of in my first years of graduate school. 100
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 27/07/2026Characteristically good analysis by Winant that speaks to something I've been alluding to. We are going to see a lot of "populist"-oriented theoretical frameworks that carve out phenomena at meso-scales to foreclose ruthless critiques of totality. 241
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 27/07/2026In the 1950s, some theorists repackaged Marxism in existential garb for the age of McCarthyism, e.g. Kenneth Burke. I suspect we'll have a few of those in the next decade. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 27/07/2026The Continent is offering some of the best reporting on Africa, in my view, comparable to the best work that came from the New African in the 1980s/90s. I just wish they’d bring on board some sharp analytical columnists in the vein of New African's "Baffour's Beefs" www.thecontinent.orgthecontinent.orgThe Continent | AfricaThe Continent is an award-winning African newspaper, designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 26/07/2026I think we should put some respect on the epithet, “lakeside elite." There’s something far more surreal and incomprehensible about standing on the beaches of Lake Michigan and beholding its ocean-like waves than looking at the Pacific. 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 25/07/2026Just heard the news that the executive committee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) plans to shut down the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). 101
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 25/07/2026Seems to me there are at least 5 overlapping currents of anti-intellectualism that have converged and are fueling the attack on scholarship/universities. 130
Reposted by Omedi Ochiengs @chachoghot.bsky.social · 16/06/2026I wonder what has made the publisher so cautious.... 011
Reposted by Omedi Ochiengs @chachoghot.bsky.social · 16/06/2026Reading Joe Sacco, which won't be published in India. m.thewire.in/article/book... 111
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 25/07/2026Jim Clyburn is not a metaphor (“Vertretung”); catachresis ("elite capture"); or kolakeia (Adolph Reed's characterization of Black representational politics). He's something far worse: apophasis. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 24/07/2026A colleague recommended SS African Mercury and I was excited to check it out but this obtuse muddle in one of its first issues doesn’t really inspire confidence 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 23/07/2026Many reasons to hate the New York Times including the fact that their website doesn’t have anchor links to allow for convenient navigation. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 22/07/2026Mamdani was either lying when he said that he would look into whether he had the authority to arrest Netanyahu or (the obviously correct answer) he knew very well that the NYPD would not obey his orders if he authorized it. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 22/07/2026Rod Dreher is an incomprehensibly peculiar ghoul ourtime.substack.com/p/rod-dreher...ourtime.substack.comRod Dreher Will Not Read JD Vance's New BookPossibly because it's about him? 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 20/07/2026Here's where I'd start for those of you interested in exploring the fraught questions of Otherness, defamiliarization, coevality, and self-knowledge 100
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 18/07/2026Every small liberal arts college has a philosopher on its faculty who has taught there for 60 years, a Religious Studies professor who is one of the leading international experts on Yūzū Nembutsu, and a poet who was awarded the MacArthur prize last year. 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 17/07/2026This made me chuckle: "Kenneth Burke's charts, hierarchies, pentads, bureaucracies have nothing to do with literature." (René Wellek) 120
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 15/07/2026Once you find out that middlebrow liberalism is essentially a theory of politics but not political economy, you begin to realize why they can envision only two theories of power: vulgar conspiracism or pragmatism all the way down. 110
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 14/07/2026James Currey's "Eastern African Studies" series has had an astonishingly good run, and not just for its quality but also its stylistic variety. 010
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 09/07/2026I am genuinely disturbed by how much this poem says almost everything one would need to know about why I turned out the way I did poetryinternationalweb.org/pi/site/poem...poetryinternationalweb.orgTHE CHRONICLES (poem) - Togara Muzanenhamo - Zimbabwe - Poetry InternationalThey still drew the old roller over the cricket pitches with menyoked like a team of oxen to the stubborn iron wheel.The grass smelt as the grass did, all rich beneath the … 000
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 09/07/2026I'm looking for a word to describe colleagues who always show up, get the job done efficiently, competently, and cooperatively, and are a joy to be around. But I don't like the phrase "good citizen" for obvious reasons. What word comes to mind? 200
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 08/07/2026Devastates me with an intensity I can’t explain to see that minstrelsy is huge among young ‘uns vying for a niche in the attention economy. 110
Omedi Ochieng @omediochieng.bsky.social · 07/07/2026Grateful to Emma Frances Bloomfield and Leah Ceccarelli for this stringent and courageous critique of Isabela Fairclough's anti-trans keynote at the 2024 International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) conference link.springer.com/article/10.1...link.springer.comBad Arguments, Bad Science, and Bad Consequences: A Response to an Anti-Trans Keynote - ArgumentationWe argue that poorly reasoned, scientifically unsound, and materially harmful anti-trans arguments should be rejected when they are submitted to scholarly spaces. Taking as a case study Isabela Faircl... 320
