From: "Amardeep Singh" <amsp-AT-lehigh.edu>
Subject: postcolonial blogs?
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 10:18:51 -0400


Are there any postcolonial-oriented blogs out there? I am trying to compile a list. 

If not, I wanted to make a short plug for blogging as a potentially serious form of intellectual activity. 

For those who may have missed it, weblogs ('blogs') have become a major force in the mass media of late. Somewhere in the range of 4 or 5 million people keep them. Many blogs are like diaries, but recently a number of scholars, from graduate students to full professors, have begun to use blogging as a new mode of serious academic conversation. Some example are Crooked Timber (a group blog), Butterflies and Wheels (another group blog), Michael Berube, Erin O'Connor, Invisible Adjunct, Timothy Burke, Cliopatria (a group history blog), and my own blog (currently much inferior to the others mentioned). All of these can be quickly found through a google or vivisimo search if you are interested. (Hint: you will understand the advantages blogging better when you actually spend some time looking at what people are doing.) 

I have high hopes for this medium. In the short run, blogging will obviously be seen as less important than one's more formal scholarly work. But I have long felt that an alternative to scholarly journals was needed -- something immediate enough to respond to recent developments, and sufficiently public to *perhaps* have some impact on the course of discussion taken by non-academics. Scholarly journals, by contrast, are really only accessible to scholars, and they are usually six months to a year behind the rest of the world. 

Blogs are very easy to put together and to update. You can do it for free through Blogger.com, for example -- it requires almost no technical skill. You can even use your university personal webspace for it, though that is slightly more difficult. (If you have any technical questions, feel free to email me off list. No guarantees I will have answers ;-)

I hope that this message will encourage people who have been thinking about doing it to start. As it is, voices in postcolonial humanities and/or the critique of globalization, have been quite rare in the "blogosphere". 

Amardeep Singh 


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