By the time you read this, I will be lying on a beach in Vieques, Puerto Rico -- no longer the site of U.S. bomb and weapon-testing and responsive protests. What's on my summer reading list? In addition to starting Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up under the Khmer Rouge, a well-regarded memoir of a childhood in the "killing fields" and finishing Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, an engrossing non-fiction investigation of modern Mumbai by an emigrant whose criticism is underpinned by his longing for an idealized India (think V.S. Naipaul, only less self-hating), I hope to get to Christina Duffy Burnett's article Untied States: American Expansion and Territorial Deannexation. This piece explores the Insular Cases, a series of early-20th-century U.S. Supreme Court decisions holding that the Constitution did not “follow the flag” to territories annexed by the United States after the Spanish-American War -- relevant not only to my vacation spot of choice but also to current issues in foreign affairs. Wish you were here!
Postcard from Puerto Rico
By the time you read this, I will be lying on a beach in Vieques, Puerto Rico -- no longer the site of U.S. bomb and weapon-testing and responsive protests. What's on my summer reading list? In addition to starting Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up under the Khmer Rouge, a well-regarded memoir of a childhood in the "killing fields" and finishing Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, an engrossing non-fiction investigation of modern Mumbai by an emigrant whose criticism is underpinned by his longing for an idealized India (think V.S. Naipaul, only less self-hating), I hope to get to Christina Duffy Burnett's article Untied States: American Expansion and Territorial Deannexation. This piece explores the Insular Cases, a series of early-20th-century U.S. Supreme Court decisions holding that the Constitution did not “follow the flag” to territories annexed by the United States after the Spanish-American War -- relevant not only to my vacation spot of choice but also to current issues in foreign affairs. Wish you were here!
