21 hours ago
Trump is forcing us to confront the myth of the American dream itself
At the height of the Covid pandemic, a philosopher and an academic in the US began writing to each other discussing everything from careers to chronic pain. These letters have now taken the shape of 'The End Doesn't Happen All At Once: A Pandemic Memoir'.
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In a conversation with
Shruti Sonal
,
Ragini
Tharoor Srinivasan, an English professor, and
Chi Rainer Bornfree
, who co-founded a school for activists, talk about the Covid years and the impact of
Trump
You've spoken about how writing about the pandemic — something people have been eager to forget — felt like looking directly into the sun. What drove you to publish this series of letters?
R:
This is a deeply lived-in book for me — one that allowed me to attend, in both an intimate and expansive way, to what it meant to be alive during a time of dramatic social, geopolitical, and technological upheaval.
During the pandemic, we were all aware of tragedies unfolding on multiple scales, even as we experienced moments of joy, beauty, and connection in our own lives. How could we hold all of that complexity together? How might we stay with it, rather than turn away? We published this memoir as an offering to readers who might be moved by the way we valued our own and each other's lives, and who might find strength in what one reader described as our 'deep and curious' friendship.
It's important to remember those years not only because they were marked by loss and devastation — much of which has not yet been adequately grieved — but also because they revealed new possibilities, moments of radical awakening, and potential solidarities.
Covid and measles cases are rising, and vaccination rates are falling. Do you think any lessons have been learnt?
C:
There was learning — briefly — but after the initial shock, there was much more forgetting and active suppression of what we learned.
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With cases rising in the US of bird flu and measles, I hope that masking and other acts to care for public health will surface quickly from our societies' muscle-memory. But I worry that, like someone who persistently misspells a common word, too many Americans are clinging stubbornly to the wrong lessons from the pandemic: that we can't trust the experts, that it's 'us against them', or that 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'.
Ragini, in one letter, you write about the dilemmas of being an Indian writing in English, a colonial bequest and the language of the elites. How do you see the current push for translated literature in India vis-a-vis the future of Indian writing in English?
It's a very exciting time for Indian literature — from the global success of translated works like Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp' to the growing practice of literary translation between Indian languages that no longer relies on English as a kind of neutral mediator, as was so often the case in the past.
As an Indian American who writes in English and works primarily on the contemporary, I'm especially interested in the decentering — even provincialisation — of Indian diasporic writers, Anglo-American literatures, and Anglophone ambassadors for India in the West. In a very real sense, India no longer needs English (the language or its writers) to speak for it. At the same time, it would be foolish to deny that English is already an Indian language, with its own indigenous life.
In my recent book on literary studies, 'Overdetermined', I examine how Indian English writing is made 'American', so to speak, through its circulation in ethnic and postcolonial literature classrooms. In one chapter, I argue that the challenge now is to be careful not to allow demotic, so-called 'vernacular' English texts to stand in for — or crowd out — the urgent need to read and publish works in translation.
As an academic in the US, how do you see the Trump administration's assault on universities? Is this the beginning of the end of the great American dream for many immigrant students?
R:
In many ways, the violence the Trump administration has inflicted on US higher education is only accelerating a trend that's been underway since the turn of the century: immigrant students, especially from India and China, choosing to return 'home' because the future — politically, economically, and intellectually — is increasingly centered in a rising Asia, in a post-American world.
But yes, in another sense, it does feel like the beginning of the end of the American dream for many immigrant students. My parents came to the US for college and graduate school in the early 1980s, and it's hard to imagine their particular trajectories being possible today. If there's a silver lining, perhaps it's that we're being forced to confront the myth of the American dream itself — recognising that it was never universally accessible, and that many have experienced it as a nightmare.
As an academic, I still hope we can preserve what's best about our universities: as spaces of meaningful knowledge production and critical inquiry, and as institutions committed to broad-based access and opportunity.
Chi, you run The Activist Graduate School (AGS). What role is it playing as students in the US get arrested and deported for their activism?
AGS is an experimental set of courses on activism that my partner Micah Bornfree and I started because we saw that movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter had achieved huge mobilisation very quickly, but failed to realise enduring material transformations.
We wanted to enable activists on and off campus to break with groupthink and tired modes of protest, and innovate new methods of seizing power. Ragini and I both went to the University of California, Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s which paved the way for much student activism today. Those rights are now being eroded.
