Defense of Truth

Part of my creed as a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (nicknamed the Mormons ) came as a response of founding prophet Joseph Smith to a journalist who was essentially asking what made us different. The text goes as follows: "We claim the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men [sic] the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may." I've had this eleventh verse in a series now known as the thirteen Articles of Faith memorized since I was about 10 years old, and still regard it as a profound and profoundly tolerant moral code for how I should regard the deeply held beliefs of others. This does not mean that I should not use all the persuasive powers I can muster to bring those with false beliefs into a knowledge of a true basis for judgment--this was the essence of my reason for volunteering to serve a two-year mission in the Côte d'Ivoire as I did--bu...

In a brilliant critique of the postcolonial concept of "hybridity" as a cosmopolitan goal for the mixing of humanity, Jonathan Friedman defines racism and essentialism in a surprisingly clear way before explaining how the implications of these concepts ensure that hybridity is a self-defeating philosophy. First, there are two separate arguments that are made in conjunction with racism: "All X are bearers of a set of traits, physical or cultural" Cultural traits are reducible to physical ones Point 1 above is racism proper (eg. all blacks have small brains but athletic physiques, or all blacks are naturally animist), and point 2 is merely essentialism--the idea that beings have an essence from which their traits and practices can be derived (eg. Blacks are naturally animist because their brains are too small to understand reason and empirical evidence) Which seems the more insidious to you: racism or essentialism? My reflexive answer would be essentialism of course, ...

More literary theory today from a paper I'm proud of. I may comment on Thiong'o's equation of culture with language later, but for now you need an intro… How humans determine what is self is a topic of much theoretical debate. However many of these theories of self-identification highlight the twin fundamental notions of culture and language as unavoidably instrumental in the construction of identity. The most germane of these to our discussion derives from the French neo-Freudian psychologist Jacques Lacan's extrapolations on Ferdinand de Saussure's principles of semiotics. Mainstream linguistic thought from its inception as a separate discipline in Saussure's time, has pointed out the arbitrary nature of the link between the signification of any given (linguistic) symbol and its associated signifying form (whether graphic or phonic). Dividing a sign into signifiant and signifié is a powerful way to theorize language, since it emphasizes its social nature. I...

I didn't want to become one of those grad students who takes forever to find out what he wants to study, so I entered the Masters program at PITT with an idea what I wanted to do as a dissertation: national identity in the Ivory Coast. It sounds like a straightforward enough concept, but I encountered an article while I was taking a history course which looked at several case studies of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities over a variety of geographical locations and historical periods that made me radically re-think the entire concept of identity . It's a concept that makes intuitive sense to most people, I would imagine. It means who you are, right? The layperson could also probably understand quite readily that there seem to be many different levels at which our "identity" can be determined or constrained. A black person may feel more of a racial component to identity than a white person, for example. My religious identity takes primacy over my...

As part of my dissertation, I'm preparing to study the problem of the concept of "Nation" (as opposed to state, or ethnicity) in Africa. It's a particularly knotty problem in a lot of ways. First, one of the conditions the world imposes on itself is that there be states, governmental entities, with sovereign control over territories (whether they choose to enforce borders, or any other measure of their sovereignty is another matter and does not touch the at least formal equality of sovereignty that is assumed to exist among all nations of the world for the purposes of international communication, trade, diplomacy, and all other relations). The globe has been mapped, and boundaries have been in place, imposed or not, and now circumscribe groups of people which derive their rights only as citizens of states. African states cannot "enter", as it were, conditions of modernity, or any rapport with the world outside, without first developing states which operate ...