Blog / Colloquies

What We Can Learn from History

October 29, 2020 - By Richard T. Chu

Richard Chu

The anti-Asian xenophobia we are experiencing today is not the first instance of anti-Asian discrimination. We have seen in history several cases of such xenophobia: the exclusion of the Chinese in 1882; race riots against Filipino farm workers in the 1920s; the barring of Japanese, Korean, and other Asian immigrants under the Immigration Act of 1924; the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the crackdown against the Chinese suspected of being communists in the 1950s; the rise in anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1970s due to the economic slowdown in the U.S. automotive industry; the unjust deportations of refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam; the racial profiling of Indians and...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 9

October 27, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

Read Part 8 here

“Now we are back to normal”

Munich agreed, peace in our time promised, and September done and dusted, MacNeice can settle back to work. The fall term is beginning and MacNeice must “return to work, lecturing, coaching, / As impresario of the Ancient Greeks.” Finally, after sections saturated with anxiety over impending war, he can relax back into the mundane worries of the teacher and professor: what is the value today of this hard-won knowledge and understanding I have of a far distant past and its ways of thinking?

There is much to recommend the Greeks, MacNeice writes. Living on the Mediterranean diet...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 8

October 20, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

Read Part Seven here

(Station platform in London. The Independent: Getty Photo)

            “Save my skin and damn my conscience.”
Remember when the sun shone easy, say eight years ago, about this time of year? Remember when life was comfortable, life was fine? Sure, plenty remained undone, but we’d come out of the worst of a disastrous economic downturn, the machinery of electoral politics looked to be functioning smoothly, neither the...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 7

October 13, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

Read Part Six here

“a howling radio for our paraclete”

As September winds to a close, leaves beginning to turn color and fall, warm days washed out by rains moving from west to east or up the coast, protests continue in parks and public squares. The cooling air is charged with tension as critical moments of decision loom. Though democratically elected, autocratic leaders have used crises real and manufactured to amass power, they have gutted the institutions long supposed to stand as bulwarks against just such abuses, and they have passionately argued on one occasion for the inviolable...

Autumn Journal on Autumn Journal: 6

September 29, 2020 - By Michael Thurston

Read Part Five here.

“And I remember Spain”

It is, I think, no accident that MacNeice concludes section V of Autumn Journal with “the day is to-day” and then spends section VI remembering Spain, but the juxtaposition requires some explanation. The connection is neither chronologically nor narratively obvious. The poem’s present moment is mid-September, and the trip to Spain recalled here happened at Easter. The poem’s present is 1938, but MacNeice traveled to Spain in 1936. From the poem’s beginning, the story MacNeice has told has focused on his current experiences—return from vacation, sleepless nights,...