This will be the last essay and update till next year.
It’s customary for writers to end the year with some kind of a roundup. But I’m exhausted and burnt out. I’ve literally not left Cook County for a couple of decades, and have not had any kind of a real break over that period of time, not even a staycation. For next year, my plan is to take periodic breaks over the year — pretend to be European, in other words. It’s not that I now, magically, have the means to pretend, but I’ve realised that an endless grind without a break is not doing me any good, physically or mentally. I’m not actually taking a break from work, which continues, but I’m taking time off from posting these Update essays and Daily Posts on social media in order to focus on long-simmering projects. I will keep posting new work on the site, and be back with regular emails to subscribers sometime in mid-January.
If you’re new to my site and my work, I recommend looking at my various “Update” posts or just peruse this site. The search box (top right) is very useful, as is this list of Categories. Feel free to write and ask if I’ve written on a particular topic. I have written essays on everything from shit to queer politics to Kamala Harris.
A few scattered thoughts as we end the year, some more cryptic than others:
We are vastly underestimating the extent to which local and global politics have sapped our energy and our minds — but who can blame us, giving the visceral evidence of carnage and death-making everywhere? Much of what is happening is hardly unprecedented: I have warned, for many years, that the immigration “rights” movement and its major agencies were leading us towards disaster, and here we are. Today, the same immigration agencies that helped bring about the current disaster by insisting that only “good” immigrants deserve to be protected are reaping the benefits of massive public support. Consider how often you will hear and read — and perhaps echo — the refrain that those being rounded up like cattle are in fact “innocent” or “actually citizens” or “not the criminals.” And then consider how that kind of discourse and calls to action do absolutely nothing to end the reign of terror and only extend it. Would it actually be fine with all of us if “hardened criminals” were dragged out of houses and cars and trussed like cattle? Is that the world we want to live in? Criminality is a construct, but the current immigration discourse ploughs on as if everything we understand about “legal” and “illegal” categories of behaviour and even personhood were somehow self-explanatory.
There is no sense of history about all this, no accountability at all within the immigration rights organising world and among its allies, and I fear that we are doomed to the same cycle over and over again: create the material and discursive conditions that make immigrants starkly vulnerable, and then funnel money and support into the places that created the problems in the first place. I will have more on that next year but for now, you can read this, this, and this. I’ve also been writing, for many years, against the notion of exceptionalism and you can read more about that here, and here, for starters.
Still, there is also much that provides cause for optimism: people, everywhere, are rushing to the aid of complete strangers. And I sense and see that there is a slow but real radicalisation of political energy. At this point, the Democrats are running to the right of the general population. The conventional left still has no real sense of how to think about the changes underfoot, and is also running to the right of the general population — something I’ll expand upon in 2026.
There are, broadly defined, two kinds of left organising factions: one is the traditional “Marxist” left, the kind dominated by white men (keep in mind that whiteness is not a matter of skin colour), that refuses to believe that people’s identities do in fact determine their life outcomes. The other is what I call the Social Justice Left, the sort that relies too much on identity, calls for land acknowledgements at every meeting, and relies on cheap and worn ideas of “doing good” as if changing the world as we know it is a matter of personal self-regulation and even self-congratulation, not systemic change. (Yes, all of this is a broad characterisation, but bear with me.) The resistance we see right now is certainly a result of both of these segments of the left having been prepared, for decades for much of what is happening now, but it also comes from hundreds of thousands of people who never expected to see themselves in the fight. I have long disliked the word “resistance” but I have been forced to acknowledge its valence in light of what we have seen in Chicago, Portland, Charlotte, New Orleans, and elsewhere: people literally not giving a damn, and flying into the arms of danger for the sake of strangers. Something is activating all of them — what that “something” is, exactly, is the subject of both my current book project and several forthcoming articles. All I can say for now is that the Left, such as it is, will keep losing as long as it refuses to actually be the left. And to be on the left requires us to insist that no one should be left behind.
I am not wildly optimistic about the left, but I also think it is where we can find and forge actual blueprints for real change. I am hardly alone in my ambivalence and perhaps it is exactly that sense of not-quite-belonging that will bring about the world we need.
As the year draws to a close, I encourage everyone to find solidarity and community wherever they can but to also understand that both words signify fraught and fractured realities. In a world dominated by social media “takes,” we tend to look for and sometimes believe in overarching grand narratives, and we seek easily recognisable frameworks through which to understand, well, everything. I encourage everyone to, instead, inhabit more fully that space of not-knowing, of acknowledging the space of deep grief in which we find ourselves as we watch a world of kidnappings alongside the endless destruction of a people and their land, and to acknowledge the anger we feel. But most of all, I encourage people to not hold to time-worn ideas of what constitutes the “left” and to push back against leftists who would have us believe that bodies are immaterial. In the past year, we have seen people being accosted and hog-tied and sent to prisons in countries they have never known or visited or into hellholes in the United States, and all of that has had massive ramifications for our collective emotional and psychological well-being. It has also meant economic costs for everyone, even those who think they don’t know any immigrants. A true left would try to understand the immense complexity of all this instead of deciding, like Bernie Sanders, that workers snatched away from fields are not workers and part of the labour force, but merely an identity to be used in rallying calls, as and when convenient.
I will stop here. In the next year, you can expect work on these and other subjects, including something on fashion, yes, fashion. This, “Forthcoming Work,” lists some of the essays and books to expect. If you’d like to support me, here are the many ways. Money is especially and always welcome, but there are multiple options. I know that a lot of us are cash-strapped: reading and disseminating my work in any way is massively helpful and I appreciate it so much.
I have, over the past many years, gained a number of supporters like you, and you are the reason I’m able to continue to produce work that does hew to conventional ideas of what constitutes the “left.” Your support has enabled me to stay “ultra left” as some have called me, and forge my own path. I’m reminded here of someone who wrote this to explain their reactions to my work: “Reading [Yasmin Nair] often makes me feel this: ‘yes, yessss, dude YES hell yes, thank you yes, wait, what? ehhh, aight. like, yes but.’” Someone else wrote that they often don’t agree with me, but are always glad to read my work (I’m paraphrasing). These are exactly the kinds of reactions to my writing that I want. I don’t write to look for and find acolytes who will agree with everything I say: I write for people who are willing to be startled and even shocked by what I write and to allow my writing to push them towards new and different ways of thinking. It is fashionable, especially in moments of deep crisis (which is to say, all of time) to insist that intellectual work and writing and even art-making are all pointless — but without all of that, what kinds of revolutions can we ever hope to forge? I hope and believe that my work prompts you to rethink old paradigms, keep the ones that work, and allow new ways of bringing about the utopia I fervently believe in.
I write this with an admonition: that you cite my work as and when it becomes relevant to you, even within the informal structure of social media posts. All too often, people will alight upon my writing, take what they find most useful (often all or most of it), and then proceed as if they came upon the insights on their own. My work is frequently plagiarised because, in part, of race and gender: women and people of colour have, historically, had their material pillaged and reformulated by others for obvious reasons (power, to put it bluntly). But my work is also often pilfered because people think I lack the resources to seek retribution. While I may not have actual resources, I am extremely resourceful — this is how I was able to prevent a writer from stealing my entire book, for instance.
As I have written here and here, my work over the next many years involves short and long-term projects to combat a rising tide of plagiarism, one that is going to get worse as more academics and writers lose their jobs, realise they have to somehow keep churning out work for which they no longer have the time or resources (welcome to the world of freelancing!), and resort to plundering the work of those they imagine are too powerless to resist. To be clear: my work (undertaken with others) is not simply about gaining restitution for myself but of dramatically changing the very culture of publishing, one that has so far looked the other way while vulnerable writers watch their work taken from them. All of which is to say: I am not asking people to please not plagiarise my work or that of others. I am stating that there will eventually be both short-term and long-term consequences: the changes could mean retroactive penalties which include having your precious Critics Awards being taken back or your books pulped. (And to those who ask: no, this does not involve sending people to prison; fines and payments will suffice.) It takes no effort at all to add the words, “As John Smith has argued…” Don’t be sneaky about it by showily citing some otherwise banal point by John Smith (“He points out that the sun is yellow”), and then use that as cover to filch some actually original work of his without citing him. I’ve been subject to this a couple of times, and it is a mendacious and vile form of plagiarism. And remember: while originality is a troublesome concept and not always easy to prove, it is in fact possible to trace the genealogy of an idea.
You can continue to plagiarise in the belief that your dean or your editor or billionaire publisher will protect you, but you are quite likely to wake up one morning and find that your entire department has been wiped out or that your newspaper was just bought out by a trillionaire who thinks your work can be done more cheaply by AI (and, in truth, given your career built on plagiarism, that is probably true in your case). Cite the work of people whose work has influenced your own, regardless of whether or not you like them or what you think of them, and whether or not your whiny online “friends” like them. In short, act like a goddamn adult.
Consider this another warning shot.
Onwards. Below are some links to interesting work by others. I will only be on social media intermittently, and will not be publishing the usual Daily Posts (DPs) from the archive till the new year.
Meanwhile, here’s a roundup of the work I linked to above, and a few more:
Kamala Harris’s Memoir Shows Exactly Why Her Campaign Flopped
Why Is America Turning to Shit?
Gay Marriage Ruined Everything
On Trump, Immigration, and the Failure of the Left
On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative
“Undocumented”: How an Identity Ended a Movement
DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now
On Titan, Migrants, and Mourning
Support Your Media, Or Watch It Die
The Italian collective Me-Ti has just published an anthology of my previously published work, Manifesto for Strategic Pessimism: Writings on Transfeminism, Trumpism, and Neoliberalism and you can buy it here. (I’m not making anything from this: the money is funnelled towards publication costs.)
And if you’re looking for a holiday gift, you can’t go wrong with this evergreen book: Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion.
ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB!
Speaking of ambivalence: I attended a recent Zoom meeting centred on this new book, Ambivalent Activism: Working with Contradiction, Hesitation and Doubt for Social Change. I have not read the book or any of its chapters, so this is not a full-on endorsement of the text, but I did find the discussion interesting and relevant to both academics and activists and to those who occupy that sometimes fraught space between academia and activism. You can find a recording here.
Jonathan Ben-Menachem on Zohran Mamdani and Jessica Tisch, in the Nation.
On the same track, Eric Blanc asks, “Should the Left Criticize Zohran?” (Added a few hours after this went up; many thanks to W.)
On a related note: here’s Alex Skopic, in Current Affairs, with “Of Course the Left Should Primary Hakeem Jeffries.”
Kate Lindsay on takes, takes, takes.
The Appeal, which focuses on the incarcerated, has teamed up with Truthout.
The Evergreen Review has published Sue Coe’s engagement with William Hogarth, and it is glorious.
Jad Salfiti on “Why Palestine Matters So Much to Queer People.”
Rachel Herzig, also in Truthout, with “Here’s How Organizing to Abolish the Prison Industrial Complex Works in Practice.”
Nathan J. Robinson, in Current Affairs, about “Candace Owens and the Decay of the American Brain.”
Here, in the brand new Equator, is Benjamin Moser with “We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves.”
Here’s “A Working-Class Writer Is Something to Be,” by Jake Trelease, in Tribune. It shares the title with an earlier essay, “A Working-Class Writer Is Something to Be,” by Candi Martin, also about class and publishing.
Block Club Chicago on “How The Feds Used Propaganda To Frame Their ‘War’ On Chicago: ‘They’re Lying Constantly.’”
The residents of the South Shore building that was the target of a raid must leave, according to a judge, as reported in The Tribe.
The last Update Essay is here, “What Is This Place?“
I can be found onTwitter (@NairYasmin) and Facebook (Yasmin.Nair),LinkedIn, andInstagram (Bekargyan). “Bekargyan” is Hindi/Urdu for “useless knowledge.” I am no longer accepting friend requests on FB, but you can always use the “follow” option there. Following this website is a sure way to keep up with my work, or I can add you to an old-fashioned email list (no spam ever, and it’s not a listserv; let me know at nairyasmin at gmail dot com if you’d like to be added). There will soon be an RSS link here, if that is preferable. If you would like to support my work, you can do so in several different ways, with or without money.
Stay well. I will see you in the new year. They have promised us another Polar Vortex, and I could not be happier.
Here’s a seasonal favourite, Ferron’s “It’s Snowing in Brooklyn.”
Image: “Snowy Morning” by Settai Komura, c. 1924
