Reading List: Our Current Political Moment

Current Curiosities

​[Reading] ​Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons by John Paul Brammer
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[Listening] Britney Spears Greatest Hits: My Prerogative

[Watching] Shōgun


Selections From My Bookshelf
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• Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi — This graphic memoir depicts the Nakba (violent removal of Palestinians during the formation of Israel in 1947) and the establishment of the permanent titular refugee camp. 

 

• Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life — This theoretical work traces how easily citizens are stripped of their rights from the Roman Republic to the present.

 

• Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza — This part-memoir, part-theoretical text explores the impacts of navigating between dominant and colonized cultures on the southern U.S. border. 

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• Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message — This piece of travel writing investigates contemporary segregation and colonial violence in Senegal, South Carolina, and Gaza.

 

• J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K — This novella recounts how Black bodies in apartheid South Africa were documented, tracked, and restricted in their movement. 

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• Edwidge Danitcat's Brother, I'm Dying — This memoir details how People of Color become caught up in Kafkaesque U.S. immigration policies, the explosion of for-profit prisons, and the deadly consequences of both. 

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• Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This — Part investigative journalism and part memoir, this text reckons with contemporary colonialism and its violent consumption of land and bodies with an emphasis on the ongoing genocide in Palestine. 

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• Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punish — This theoretical work investigates the history of surveillance and may help frame current corporate and governmental digital surveillance (e.g. Meta or DOGE).

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• ​Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed — Relying on community-based research, this theoretical text explores the pitfalls of Western educational systems through the dynamic of colonizer and colonized.

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• Regina Jackson and Sairo Rao's White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Do Better — The text is perfect for interrogating niceness, especially for readers in the land of Minnesota Nice, and is a call to action to dismantle white supremacy. 

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• Miriame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice — This text explores collective liberation through the abolition of the prison industrial complex. 

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• Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place — This travel jeremiad chronicles the deep connections between Western capitalism and Black bodies, using Antiguan tourism and the slave trade as its lens. 

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• Audre Lorde's ​The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House — This essay examines white supremacist power structures and strategies to dismantle them. 

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• Larry Mitchel's The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions — This allegorical novella depicts the coalition of LGBTQ+ people surviving and challenging the violences of heteronormative culture.

 

• Joseph Osmundson's Virology: Essays for the Living and the Small Things In Between — This essay collection examines viral structures (e.g. HIV or COVID-19) and the political systems that impact our daily lives.

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• Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric​ — This poetry collection probes the experiences of being a Black person in the U.S. and how even wealth and fame cannot protect you (i.e. Serena Williams and racist French line judges). 

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• Ziwe's Black Friend​ — This essay collection comically, poignantly, and terrifyingly explores simply exiting as a Black woman in the United States.

If you're a Fargo-Moorhead local, be sure to check out More Than Words Bookshop in person or support them online via their Bookshop.org storefront. 

Thank you very much for your time. If you have recommendations or curiosities, please fill out this nifty contact form.

Sending y’all supportive, well-caffeinated vibes, 

Creighton 

Today’s Pen(cil): TWSBI Go [Fountain Pen] | Noodler's Firefly [Ink]

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If you're curious about my former life as an academic and teacher, check out "On Common Books, Civic Engagement, and Claudia Rankine's Citizen," published by the brilliant Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.