Academia: the Last Refuge of the Coward

I am currently on a most-expenses paid trip to Singapore. I'm staying in an incredibly nice house for free, just down the block from the French Ambassador, I get to hang out with family I haven't seen in a long time. I should be ecstatic.

But no, oh no. See, I'm a grad student in a department that likes to focus on global concerns and problems of representation.

This means that I've read Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place for two separate seminars. I'll probably read it again. At the rate I'm going, I'll probably end up teaching it. If you've never read it, it's an excellent, moving non-fiction work about the island of Antigua, its colonial history, its postcolonial present, and the problems of identity and living in a tourist-driven economy.

This means that I can't exist in Singapore without feeling massive, massive guilt. "Oh, well," I thought to myself, "At least I won't be staying in a hotel. It won't be that bad." Failing to reckon, of course, with the fact that the cousin with whom I am staying has a Filipina housemaid. Who is incredibly nice and makes all the meals and sort of generally, well . . . servile.

I tell you, you work and you slave and you build up your ideology and you buy organic and you learn postcolonial theory and at the end of the day, you're still the white oppressor. Guess I'll go on down to the Raffles Hotel tomorrow and throw back a couple of Singapore slings and be all fat and American. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.