I DON’T WANT TO BE // A PROLOGUE TO HISTORY

I’m starting a reading list because I hear about interesting things that interesting people say or write, and then I forget/never get around to reading those for myself:

• Cultural Anthropology, by Tong Enzheng (a major critic of the PRC’s wholesale adoption of Marxist anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s five-stage outline social evolution in its ethnic policy before his death in 1997; also an important post-Cultural Revolution writer of science fiction and an activist in the 1980s pro-democracy movement that culminated with the 6/4 Tiananment Square Massacre)
• Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said (I’ve read most of Orientalism but I’d like to read something published more recently… as recently as the 90s anyways)
• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (I told my favourite professor that I liked road stories and he recommended this to me; I told him I had started it, which I had; this was a while ago…)
• Der Sandmann, by E.T.A. Hoffmann (a short story by the German Romantic; Philip Pullman’s Clockwork (was muchly inspired by 19th century fairytales and engages the contemporary trope of the automaton; apparently there’s a lot of Freudian castration anxiety in it too?)
• The Promise of Happiness, by Sara Ahmed (she visited McGill to give a talk which sounded fascinating, but I couldn’t make it)
• Kanikōsen (The Crab Ship) and March 15, 1928, by Kobayashi Takiji (early Japanese communist and author of proletarian lit – a Japanese studies prof at my uni teaches his work as part of her curriculum and it’s an aspect of Japanese culture I’ve never touched on otherwise)

I’d also like to get through Oxford’s Migration Studies reading list, including journals, in the near future (5 years?), before I more seriously ponder my prospects in the field. And fiction too; I need more 小说 in my life I think.