How to Hide an Empire

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I remember playing a pool game when I was young where one person chose a category and then called out options until the specific example one of the other players had secretly chosen came up. If I recall the game correctly, you then had to race that person across the pool. On this day, I chose the category “empires,” which left the other players wracking their brains trying to come up with enough empires for each to have one. There was the Roman Empire, sure, and the British Empire. Were the Aztec an empire? Maybe? Being a know-it-all at that age, I rattled off a bunch more (Inca, Mongol, Persian-Achaemenid, Parthian, etc, etc) before choosing another category.

I would not have included the United States in my list of empires. My understanding of the United States and its possessions at that time was what Daniel Immerwahr calls “the logo map.” That is, the lower 48 states with little corner cutouts for Alaska and Hawaii. I knew of other possessions at that time, including both bases and territories, but they did not register as parts of the United States. For Immerwahr, that gloss is part of the problem. From there, it is just a short hop to a sitting US congressperson referring to Guam, a US territory for longer than she has been alive, as a foreign country.

Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire is an intensely sophisticated, yet immensely readable history of the United States beyond the logo map. To do this, he offers two interlocking investigations.

First, how did the United States get colonial possessions and how were those possessions treated? Here, Immerwahr starts with the very early days of the American Republic, using Daniel Boone and the Indian removal acts to explore the imperialism that created the logo map and how those borders quickly became treated as eternal. Starting in the third chapter, though, Immerwahr sets sail beyond those territorial borders, first landing on the guano islands (literally islands buried under tons of bird droppings) that fueled 19th century industrial agriculture and later landing on Spanish territorial possessions around the world.

Suddenly, the United States had territorial possessions, just like the countries of Europe. Welcome to the club, wrote Kipling, with a heap of racism:

Take up the White Man’s burden—
    Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
    The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
    Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
    The judgment of your peers!

However, for the United States, these possessions marked a turning point. Most of the states had begun their existence as territories that later applied for statehood. Would these new territories have the same privilege? The Philippines had millions of residents and a city in Manila nearly as large as any in the country. Just putting the territories to scale against the logo map was revealing (naturally, cartographers made a point of not doing this).

Of course the answer would be “no.” Even if the civilizing mission took, as they saw it, the people of the Philippines weren’t Americans. Some, and far more than most Americans thought, spoke English, but they weren’t white, which was itself disqualifying. But neither would the United States give up the territorial claim, which led to the brutal repression of the archipelago, including extensive use of “water torture,” a forerunner of modern water-boarding.

With this empire gained, Immerwahr sets out to tackle the second part of the book: why don’t people consider this an empire? After the second world war, the United States began to divest itself of imperial holdings. Alaska and Hawaii did indeed become states, while The Philippines became independent. The US kept most of the small islands, which it still uses to house military bases, but during this period it also expanded the global network of military bases that had developed for the purpose of fighting the war. Thus, Immerwahr argues, the United States went from being a territorial empire to being a “pointillist” one, capable of extending military power almost anywhere in the world. But the change in form only serves to hide the imperial structures of the United States.

How to Hide an Empire is not a celebration empire, and Immerwahr does not shy away from the atrocities committed in the name of civilization, but neither is it simply anti-imperial. Rather, Immerwahr aims to understand the consequences of this empire, identifying any number of social and cultural developments from birth control pills (developed in tests on Puerto Ricans) to the Beatles (coming of age in the shadow of a US military base) that are the consequences of American imperialism.

I have been meaning to read How to Hide an Empire since hearing Immerwahr talk about this research a few years ago. It does not disappoint. This is a meticulously researched book that offers a timely reconsideration of what the borders of the United States look like — so much so that I am seriously considering this as one of the book I assign when I get a chance to teach US history next year.

ΔΔΔ

I am still plugging away at writing about books I’ve read, and will at least be writing about Arkady Martin’s A Memory Called Empire. Since the last books post went up, I have finished Anne Zouroudi’s The Lady of Sorrows, a seven deadly sins novel that brilliantly evokes the Greek Islands. I just started C. Pham Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold.

Caste

Posted on by Josh Nudell

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 might have been heralded as a the final triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, and with some reason. Millions of Americans voted for a well-spoken African American man whose middle name was Hussein, which prompted speculation that the United States had finally put to rest the ghosts of history and begun a post-racial society.

But the ghosts of history are not so neatly exorcised. President Obama was repeated lynched in effigy while white critics — including a future president of the United States — openly questioned the legality of the election on the charge that he was not an American citizen. President Obama himself charted a moderate, technocratic approach to governance that won a second term, again with historic numbers of people voting for him, even as some white people who voted for him the first time began to grumble that that he was playing the race card. Discontent has only grown in the years since President Obama left office. Celebrations of diversity and conversations about appropriation have prompted bitter accusations of bias and deep-seated identity politics being weaponized against marginalized people.

For my part, I have spent the last few years working to educate myself, particularly by reading scholarship by African Americans, including Carol Anderson’s White Rage and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning. These books peel back the curtain on the painful history of race in America in ways that clearly demonstrate the historical roots of structural issues, often while providing a vocabulary to talk about race. However, they also tend to cover similar ground. What Isabel Wilkerson brings to the table in Caste, a beautiful book layered with history, reportage, and metaphor, is a big picture assessment of how structural racism works and why everyone ought to care.

The second chapter of Caste captures each of these elements. This chapter, “An Old House and an Infrared Light” begins with an extended metaphor of a housing inspector evaluating a bowing of a ceiling. “With an old house,” Wilkerson writes, “the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be.” When the storm comes, your basement floods, but you can’t just ignore it because “whatever you are ignoring will never go away…ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.” The United States is this house. Whether one was there when it was built does not matter. If you live here now, it is your responsibility to deal with it.

Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but, rather, will spread, leach, and mutate, as they already have. When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in an old structure. They put up buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase. The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.

At this point one might be forgiven for asking what, exactly, caste is and what it has to do with the function of race in the United States. If you have heard of caste, you probably know it as an archaism of Indian society where certain Hindu texts established a four- or five-fold social hierarchy. Brahmin (priests and teachers) were the highest caste, Kshatrya (warriors and rulers) were the second, Vaishya (farmers, traders, merchants) the third, and Shudra (labourers) the lowest formal caste. Beneath these were the Dalit (untouchables), regarded as impure. The history of the caste system is somewhat more complex in that it developed in the modern sense through the canonization of certain Brahmin texts in 19th century British India that hardened the lines of social categories. Nevertheless, the caste system in India came to be accepted as an eternal truth about social hierarchy.

Wilkerson juxtaposes this social model against the systems of the United States and Nazi Germany. The fact that Nazi Germany looked to the Jim Crow south as a model for its legal restrictions is at this point well-documented, but Wilkerson’s inclusion of India allows her to go beyond those two explicitly racial ideologies and their legal restrictions. All three developed a caste system designed to eternally reshape the social hierarchies of their populations, and thus allow her to offer a concise definition of the phenomenon:

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis on ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race is the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

The problem in the US, Wilkerson suggests, is that while the worst of the Jim Crow legal restrictions are gone, the caste structures remain in place. Some problems come from out and out racism, but she also offers anecdotes where the way someone treated her changed once he stopped seeing her as a black woman and started seeing her as Isabel Wilkerson — that is, as a person. This, she says, is the problem of caste. It conditions people to assume that she (as a woman, as a black person) is someone who can and should be ignored, thereby priming the environment for micro-aggressions and causing constant stress that leads to negative health consequences, to say nothing of reproducing the caste system.

Oddly enough, the instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept.

I found Caste to be entirely compelling. Wilkerson simultaneously avoids pointing fingers at any one person while pointing fingers at everyone: “A caste system persists in part because we, each and everyone one of us, allow it to exist” She acknowledges in her epilogue (“A World Without Caste”) that the United States is heading toward a caste-induced identity criss that is already leading to “anticipatory fear” about the changing demographics. I often think about these fears and the ways in which they have been stoked for monetary and political gain over the past few years. Wilkerson elegantly points out that a rejection of caste will set everyone free, but when she (correctly) argues out that the only way to destroy the caste system is for everyone to reject its authority, I worry that there are too many people invested in seeing the old house come down around them for no other reason than that they believe the house is theirs and theirs alone.

ΔΔΔ

I have again reached a point of the semester where my reading of books has outstripped writing them. I still have hopes of writing about Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy in some form — I liked it, but also wanted to unpack a few things in the series about belief that I found interesting — and have firm plans to write about Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire and Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire, both of which are excellent. By contrast, I didn’t have nearly as much to say about Alexandros Papadiamantis’ The Murderess, a 19th century Greek novella that offers a grim commentary about the value of women…by following a bitter old woman who kills little girls. I also recently finished Boris Akunin’s The Coronation, a novel about his detective hero Fandorin who I was told was a Russian Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, but who just wasn’t, and Un-Su Kim’s The Plotters, a Korean mystery centered on an assassin-for-hire who who doesn’t always follow the plots. The Plotters had several clever ideas and scenes — receiving hospitality and words of wisdom from a target, commentary about business capitalism taking over the assassin business, and perpetually under-estimated women — but it never really came together for me enough to want to write about it.

What is Making Me Happy: Lake Street Dive

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Following the model of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and, to a lesser extent, the Make Me Smart daily podcast, I want to remind myself that there are things that bring me joy. These posts are meant to be quick hits that identify and/or recommend things—usually artistic or cultural, sometimes culinary—that are making me happy in a given week. I am making this quick format a semi-regular feature, usually, though not always, on Friday or Saturday.

This week: Lake Street Dive

I have been listening to Lake Street Dive since 2017, but at this point I don’t have any memory of how I came across them. It might have been when Spotify started populating its suggestions for me with their 2014 album Bad Self Portraits that then led me to their 2016 album Side Pony. But I might have also come across them from their delightfully quirky cover video of Bohemian Rhapsody that they put out at about the same time. Since then, they put out Free Yourself Up (2018), which I think got a bit more play since I would hear its lead single “Good Kisser” at the gym.

The original four members—Rachel Price doing lead vocals, Mike (McDuck) Olson on guitar and trumpet, Bridget Kearney on stand-up bass, and Mike Calabrese on drums—met at Boston’s New England Conservatory in 2004. (LSD is now a quintet, having fully incorporated keyboardist Akie Berman in 2017.) What developed in the early, experimental years was a collaborative ethos where the group shares songwriting and arrangement, which, in turn, informs their eclectic sound.

As much as I love the funky sound and lyrics, though, my favorite thing about Lake Street Dive is that everyone in the band can flat-out play. This means that where an album and music video might be good, the live performance is spectacular. Take this performance, with Rachel Price just belting out the lyrics of The Kinks’ “Lola”:

Or Hall and Oats’ “Rich Girl”:

Or you could look to their Tiny Desk Concert performance in 2016, performing songs from their album Side Pony:

Lake Street Dive dropped their most recent album Obviously. I haven’t a had chance to consume the entire album yet, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, I enjoy the version of its lead single, “Hypotheticals,” they performed on Colbert better than the music video:

I think I might just like watching these musicians play.

The Shadow King

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Ettore, bear witness to what its happening. Make living your act of defiance. Record it all. Do it relentlessly, with that stubbornness and precision that is so very much like your father. This is why I gave you your first camera. Do not let these people forget what they have become. Do not let them turn away from their own reflections—

Every photograph has become a broken oath with himself, a breach in the defenses that he set up to ignore what he really is: an archivist of obscenities, a collector of terror, a witness to all that breaks skin and punctures resolve and leaves human beings dead.

Haile Selassie at the League of Nations, image credit.

Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, delivered a speech in Geneva, Switzerland on June 30, 1936. An Italian army had invaded his country the year before, attempting to for the second time to conquer the last uncolonized region of Africa. The people of Ethiopia had resisted, but the Italians unleashed the horrors of modern warfare, including chemical weapons, on soldiers and civilians alike. The world had imposed minor sanctions on the Italians and proposing resolutions to the conflict that Benito Mussolini simply ignored, claiming that this war of conquest was, in fact, an act of self-defense because of a frontier clash on the frontier with Italian Somaliland. He simply denied the accusations of chemical warfare. Now Haile Selassie addressed the League of Nations general assembly, speaking in Amharic, begging the member nations to stop this fascist aggression. Haile Selassie might have been a head of state, but whether the league was toothless or the members ambivalent about expending resources to help an African state, his appeal fell on deaf ears.

In The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste’s difficult and beautiful novel, the horrors of this campaign are given life.

The core of The Shadow King weaves together two stories.

The first follows Hirut, an orphaned Ethiopian girl in the household of the local nobleman, Kidane. The lady of the house, Aster, makes Hirut’s life miserable. She takes her frustrations out on Hirut, viewing as a sexual rival and accusing her of theft—first falsely, then accurately. After the Italians invade, Kidane even confiscates Hirut’s prized memento from her father, an antique rifle called Wujigra to use in the war.

The second story is that of Ettore Navarra, a Italian photographer of Jewish descent charged with documenting the invasion. His is a complicated relationship with the invasion: he harbors the Ethiopians no particular ill-will and is deeply disconcerted by the atrocities, but he is also Italian and this is his job. However, even in Ethiopia, Navarra cannot escape the radicalization taking place back home where Benito Mussolini’s fascist state is beginning to draw sharp lines between Jews and “real” Italians.

Inexorably these two plots come together. The women of Ethiopia refuse to stay home while Kidane’s forces wage a guerrilla war against the Italian forces, a war that continues even after Haile Selassie fled the country. First Aster and Hirut follow Kidane’s men to care for and supply the men, but gradually become more involved. Eventually, they hatch a plan to choose a “Shadow King”—a lookalike stand-in to inspire the people to resist the invasion—for whom they serve as the guard.

On the other side, the Italians and their African ascari begin to dig in, and Navarra documents it all. His commander, the sadistic Colonel Carlo Fucelli, puts his men to work building a prison where they can hold captured Ethiopians, to say nothing of debasing them. Naturally, this prison will serve as the focal point for a final showdown.

These two stories would make for a compelling book on their own, particularly given Mengiste’s gift for characterization. For instance, even the brutal and vicious Colonel Fucelli, who earned the nickname “The Butcher of Benghazi” for his cruelty in Libya, is not a straightforward fascist caricature. He is undeniably cruel, yes, and racist, both traits on display in his sexual relationship with the African courtesan Fifi, which itself violates the ban on such couplings. Fucelli is also willing to ignore orders forcing him to out Navarra as a Jew, at least for a while. Mengiste leaves his motivations for both decisions masked: perhaps Fucelli simply believes that the rules don’t apply to him, but perhaps his prejudices are not quite as deeply held as one might think—not that that changes how much one might root for him to be punished.

However, what elevates The Shadow King to my list of favorite novels is how Mengiste layers other voices onto these two stories. She imagines interludes where Haile Selassie reflects on the plight of Ethiopia, often invoking Verdi’s opera Aida, whose eponymous character is an Ethiopian princess. Elsewhere, choruses of Ethiopian women raise their voices up in an echo of Greek tragedy:

Sing, daughters, of one woman and one thousand, of those multitudes who rushed like wind to free a country from poisonous beasts.

Photographs captured in text punctuate the narrative:

A woman slumped against a walking stick, paralyzed leg dangling beneath her long dress. A row of braids that fan out to thick, dark curls. Tattoos gracing the line of her throat to her jaw. bruises near her eyes, at her mouth, a thread of blood dried against her ear. She is mid-sentence, her tongue against her teeth, curving around a world lost forever.

A boy in a stained shirt rests his cheek against a tall boulder as if it were a father’s chest. He stares at the camera, doe-eyed and curious, his lips folded around a mouthful of food, a stream of words, a cry for help, a burst of laughter. One palm balances against the hard surface of stone, his finger raised and pointed ahead, the gesture an accusation and a plea for patience.

These layers harmonize with the two core stories, reinforcing them, expanding them, and humanizing them, before building to a climax years later during the last days of Haile Selassie’s reign when Hirut meets Ettore Navarra once more to return his pictures.

I found the combined effect of this novel stunning. Mengiste is a beautiful writer, to be sure, but it is also a brilliantly structured novel. It would have to be. Mengiste tackles themes of race, identity, gender, and memory, all of which are easy to do poorly, either because they come across as caricature or moralizing. This goes double with fascism. There are no easy answers in The Shadow King, but each element adds to the texture that earns every moment.

ΔΔΔ

I’m still working through the recent list of things I’ve read with these posts, and particularly want to write one about Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy. I am now reading Kim Un-su’s The Plotters.

Piranesi

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I realized that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if we ever discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

I resisted my first introduction to Susanna Clarke. Friends had told me that there was a fantastic historical fantasy called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but any interest I had in that premise withered and died the moment they told me that it was shades of Austen and Dickens. When I finally read JS&MN a few years ago, I was entirely blown away. Without taking anything away from those people who ate up the comparisons to Austen and Dickens, neither of whom have ever done much for me, this novel was a thousand pages of immersive storytelling that took the deceptively simple plot of a magician and his apprentice and set it at a specific historical time and wrapped both of them in the richly-textured cloak of folktale. The result was one of the best piece of fantasy literature I have ever read.

Clarke’s first book since Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Piranesi could not be more different from her debut, but it is every bit as good.

Piranesi’s world consists of the House, a labyrinth of beautifully austere halls populated by statues. His favorite is an enormous faun with a slight smile and a forefinger pressed to his lips, but there are all sorts. A woman carrying a beehive. A gorilla. An elephant carrying a castle. Two kings playing chess.

Piranesi considers himself a scientist studying the world around him. The House, which stretches out for miles, exists across three floors. The lowest levels, the Drowned Halls, consist of a deep and powerful ocean with tides that can flood the upper floods of the House—particularly at the confluence of the three Tides that happens every eight years (or so Piranesi says). But if the ocean can be dangerous, it also provides Piranesi with sustenance, and he has a great reverence for all things provided by the House.

According to Piranesi, “since the world began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people.” There is Piranesi: a man in his early thirties, 1.83 meters tall, and of slender build. The second person is The Other, a man somewhat taller than Piranesi, and nearly twice his age who Piranesi meets twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. The remaining thirteen are skeletons. He knows other people might exist, of course, which is what drives his impulse to diligently record his findings for posterity, they exist primarily as an abstraction to him.

The Other is different. He is impatient, considering the House an endlessly dreary and dead place, and rarely moves past one or two rooms because he gets easily lost.

The overlapping mysteries at the heart of Piranesi are evident practically from the opening paragraph: Who is Piranesi? Where is the House? How did he get here? The irony is that Piranesi initially doesn’t have these questions. He is a scientist, after all, and confident in who and where he is.

The House is the extent of Piranesi’s world, but there is also a larger world—our world—that cannot help but intrude on the House. Some of this is linguistic. Piranesi has words for items like “biscuit” that don’t exist in his world, for instance, so the House is clearly an adjunct to our own, but he has no memory of how he arrived there. The Other might offer insight here, but Piranesi has no reason to distrust his friend and fellow scientist. It is only when the outside world begins to impose itself on the House that Piranesi is forced to reconsider his prior assumptions.

I am being cagey about the second half of this haunting book because discussion of the house and the relationship between Piranesi and The Other requires giving away major plot elements. Suffice it to say that the answers come in the form of Susanna Clarke’s typically precise take on magic and obsession.

Clarke took the title Piranesi from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an 18th century classical archaeologist and artist who penned a series of sixteen prints called “Invented Prisons” (Carceri d’invenzione). These prints took the tradition of capricci, a style of art that depicts monumental buildings, and applied it to enormous labyrinths of the sort that make up the House.

The Lion Bas Reliefs form the second edition (Wikimedia Commons)

Piranesi is a spare, beautiful book about isolation, identity, and the search for knowledge, and the sort of story that has a way of staying with you. In casting about for a parallel, I could only come up with Neil Gaimon’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane or, to an extent, Patrick Rothfuss’ The Slow Regard of Silent Things, other slim, cerebral novels that benefit for how starkly they contrast with the author’s other books.

ΔΔΔ

I remain behind on writing about books I’ve read. In addition to Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy and Maaza Mengiste’s brilliant The Shadow King, I have finished Isabel Wilkerson’s excellent Caste, Boris Akunin’s mediocre The Coronation, and am now reading Un-Su Kim’s The Plotters.

Lucky: A Reflection on the Academic Job Market

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I signed a contract this week. In August 2021 I will be taking up the position of Assistant Professor of History (non-tenure line) at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO.

In many ways this has been an improbable turn.

I entered graduate school without a real sense of the academic job market, despite oblique but well-intentioned comments from my professors. All of that had changed by the time I finished my PhD, but I decided that I wanted to give it a go anyway. With the blessing of my partner, I resolved that I would give it my all for three full cycles past graduation before pivoting to other employment. That space of time, I reasoned, would give me time to put out some publications, expand my teaching portfolio, and polish my job documents and, if it didn’t happen by then, then I would be okay throwing myself into another field.

The three cycles worked out about how I anticipated. I published some. I taught a lot. Things were harder than I anticipated, but I started getting interviews. I was a finalist. But I could say the same of dozens or or sometimes hundreds of other people who applied for most or all of the same jobs that I did. The structural factors that have gradually squeezed the humanities even above and beyond higher education generally simply create too few jobs, leading to a battle royale for the few that remain. The scars created by this cycle are not quite as bloody as those in the Kingji Fukasaku movie of the same name, but they are every bit as real.

Then everything exploded last spring. The remaining jobs I had applied for cancelled their searches, which was a microcosm of what happened across the employment market.

I watched as the third anniversary of my graduation came and went and since my partner was still employed there was no reason not to apply for academic jobs again even as I started revising a resume that I hadn’t touched in a decade. Eventually I scrapped that document and wrote a resume from scratch. While I never got to the point of actually applying for non-academic jobs, that was at the front of my mind for most of the past year. Simply put, there weren’t many academic jobs on offer this year. I applied to two, with just a handful more that passed on or where the dates hadn’t come due yet. This after applying to more than a dozen in each of the past four years, which is low when compared to many of the job seekers I know.

Job hunting is draining under any circumstances. For an academic job, the application usually requires anywhere from four to seven discrete documents, several of them bespoke, as well as often reaching out to professional references for letters, all for a first-round interview. There does seem to be bit of movement to reduce requirements for initial applications, but these are still the norm. A drain in normal times, these applications were exhausting while teaching five classes at three different institutions during a pandemic, on top of keeping up a research profile and trying to weigh other career options. I was continuing to apply for as many of these as I could, but I was also ready to walk away. I want this job, but it is important to remember that it is a job.

This is not to say that thinking about that transition was easy. It often led to existential dread. I can keep writing history, I told myself, since I already treat as a second job given my contract(s), but how would I make enough money to eat? I feared that any employer would see my interest in their position as feigned, even if I was fully resolved to branch away from academia.

Of course, I didn’t get that far. I was just starting the process of doing informational interviews to build my network when I landed this opportunity, but I plan on following through with them anyway, should they prove useful sometime down the line.

Rejection is a normal part of academic life, but when you have trained for so long and written so much of your academic person into an application, it is hard not to take the news personally. To then also celebrate someone else landing a position you applied to can be bittersweet.

I used to reframe the question away from why them? to why not me, too?, but even this fed into the sense of isolation and exclusion, particularly when the answer comes back to seemingly inexorable austerity. Sitting in the corner (or at my computer) watching other people announce successes—whether a job, a PhD at your dream program, a fellowship, or be part of a great panel that you weren’t invited to be part of—can feel like being an outcast watching the “cool kids” do things. Trust me, I’ve been there. I am there. I will be there again. But it is important to engage and redirect these thoughts, not because of some influencer mantra about vibes, but because they are dangerous to your mental health.

I have actively resisted thinking about the people I am up against when I apply for these jobs. In part this is a matter of imposter syndrome and I would absolutely freak myself out, but it is also a matter of personal philosophy. I only have control over my performance, for one, but, even more, they’re only my competition in the most technical sense where we are up for the same scarce resources. I want to be part of a community of scholars online and more broadly that starts from a position of generosity and reciprocity (within reason: there’s no room for sexual predators here, for instance). For me, this means celebrating other people’s successes even when I am also envious.

People on Twitter have summed up the academic job market better and more colorfully than I have here: there is almost no profanity that it doesn’t warrant. I am still in disbelief that I have accepted a job after going through this cycle year over year. Sure, the position is not the gold-standard that is a tenure-track position, but a full-time and renewable position is pretty good in a world where academic employment is becoming increasingly adjunctified—to say nothing of the group of people I will get to work with or the students I’ll get to teach. Higher education is changing and there is a long way to go to ensure a more stable future, but, for now, I am just excited for the chance to be part of it.