When the brilliant mathematician and humorist Tom Lehrer was asked, way back in 1973, why he was no longer crafting satirical songs as he had done in the 1950s and 60s, his response was that the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize that year to Henry Kissinger had rendered the writing of satire impossible. Some 30 years after that, an Australian newspaper put the same question to him during the run-up to the Second Iraq War, and his response was that he did not so much wish to satirize the administration of Shrub Bush as he wished to vaporize it. How on Earth he could top that now, I do not know, but it is certainly difficult to come up with satirical exaggerations in this moment of Trump, The Revenge Tour, versus Feminists and Genderqueers for Raping Jews and Progressives for the Iranian Republic of Theocratic Fascists.
I have nevertheless made the endeavor, because dear reader, I can think of no other course of action that would not involve bodily injury to myself or others. Therefore, I invite you to peruse the following catalog for the coming semester’s courses at Amity University’s new Center for Postcolonial Studies. Check out the links to each course’s inspiration to see how little work the poor satirist has to do in these final days of the Benighted States of America. The satirist has but to make sure that she, he, or they has “paraphrased or reproduced the language of others without quotation marks and without sufficient and clear crediting of sources,” as a panel of distinguished Harvard euphemists put it recently, in order to provide the proper context to explain just what that august institution’s president had been up to. For more detail, please consult Professor Lehrer’s immortal song, “Lobachevsky.”
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Here at Amity University in Arkham, Massachusetts, we pride ourselves on staying on the right side of history, even if we were founded back in 1697 by Reverend Decrease Mather, the lesser-known younger brother of Cotton Mather and youngest son of Increase Mather. It is therefore our humble duty to acknowledge that we are hosted on the lands of the Miskatonic Indigenous People, who had been eking out a living on the banks of the river to which they gave their name for over a thousand years until Decrease and his Puritan congregation drove them out with muskets and blunderbusses in the late fall of 1696.
With pride, we can say we are making amends for this historic crime through the establishment of the Amity Center for Postcolonial Studies, thanks to a generous $453 million grant from that most progressive gentleman, the Emir of Qatar.
Postcolonial Studies is a field of study that addresses indigenous peoples’ history and heritage, such as that of the worst-oppressed of all nations, the Palestinians. Our renowned scholars are experts on terrorists’ collective memory, settler colonialism in Palestine, and more. Postcolonial Studies courses draw from critical Ethnic Studies, settler-colonial studies, critical media literacy studies, and decolonial Arab feminisms as an intersectional set of knowledges, methodologies, and practices. If you understood the previous sentence at all, please text Marge in the departmental office right away, she has a lectureship open for you.
In our classes, impressionable students explore various cutthroats’ history of resistance and struggle towards their right of return and justice in a settler colonial context. These courses support students in making connections between the historical struggles of heroes such as Abu Nidal, whose men threw a wheelchair-bound American Jew into the sea, and ethnic and Indigenous groups in the Benighted States, regardless of how the latter may feel about it.
These courses introduce students to Palestine as a site of resistance and knowledge connected to other anti-racist and anti-colonial freedom movements in the world and the United States, explaining patiently to the uninformed that civil rights marches and sit-ins are the exact same thing as burning and decapitating settler-colonialist babies. They are aligned with CPS’s commitment to the indivisibility of bullshit.
The Postcolonial Studies courses explore an array of historical content from assorted murderers’ lived experiences, oral histories, literature, and world media. They also explore examples of contemporary terrorist music, film, and art.
The Amity Center for Postcolonial Studies further promotes the academic study of Palestine by supporting research, teaching, and intellectual collaboration among scholars and gang-rapists from Arkham to Gaza and beyond. CPS provides an institutional home for faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and students in fields that include history, literary studies, the social sciences, religion, philosophy, law, archaeology, architecture, hostage-taking, and the arts. CPS also builds connections with other gangs of killers and scholars to strengthen the academic study of mass kidnapping as a wholly legitimate “resistance” tactic throughout the Middle East and the world.
These courses are designed for students in many programs across colleges at Amity who are interested in or curious about issues related to raping Zionist girls and women, colonialism, and social transformation generally.
Our exciting range of courses includes:
· Introduction to Palestine Studies: History, Land, Resistance, Justice, Airplane Hijacking, and Daily Stabbings for a Better World.
· Gaza: Threads of Identity. Preserving Palestinian Costume and Heritage Through the Suicide Bomb Belt. Bombmaking 101 is a prerequisite for this upper-level course.
· Identity Formation in a Time of War: Womyn, Gender Fluidity, Politics, Power Relations, and Sucking the Mullahs’ Balls in the Postcolonial Muslim World
· Decolonial-Queerness, Gender Studies, and Sexuality as Expressed Through Liberationist Electric Cattle Prods in a Progressive Mukhabarat Prison
· Queering Ancient Egypt with Gender Fluidity, Because the Pharaohs Are Safely Dead. Living Israelis, however, can be safely raped without any fear of Me-Too turning on the socially just rapists!
Last but not least, mark your calendars now for our thrilling, of-the-moment teach-in next Monday in the H.P. Lovecraft Hall of the Inhumanities: Why Iran’s Missile Attack on the Zionist Settler-Colonial State Was Progressive!
Professor E. Tierna Obfuscattah explains: “The Resistance Camp led by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left. It is extremely important that we understand that! We can still be critical of certain dimensions of the Islamic State of Iran’s policies. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides beating to death girls who refuse to wear the holy hijab in Tehran, or alternatives to throwing queers off tall buildings in Gaza. But it is not our place, as Westerners, to make post-imperialist judgments about a culture and a religion that have been othered and Orientalized for so long, especially when they are engaged in bringing justice from the river to the sea!”
Emanuel Goldstein 