On my first readthrough of a document, I try to make my way through it with as little interruption as possible so that I can try to craft a cohesive picture of the source—its message, its rhetorical style, and my initial feel about its credibility and biases. To minimize distraction, I go through with only a highlighter as I read, marking words and phrases that seem important, as well as words or concepts that are new or unclear to me.

I try to form a narrative of semi-full sentences out of the highlighted text, which helps me understand the important parts coherently when I read the document again later. I picked up this practice from debate, where passages are similarly marked into full sentences that convey the meaning of the text using very few of the existing words. This saves me the time of writing down the ideas separately on the first run.

I was able to make sentences out of most of my highlighting during my first read of Thakkar, which made it easier to read the second time around. I picked up that the document uses the definitions of different kinds of protagonisms and the historical contexts of the Cold War and the Soviet thaw to analyze how the six protagonists of I Am Cuba—the four characters, Cuba, and the film itself—interact to argue an imperative of individual inclusion in social decisions.

While researching the Algerian Revolution for my essay on Carrie Mae Weems, I found that Fanon's A Dying Colonialism formed a literature for the discussion of how veils connected to the war. Reading it, I found it informative at parts but ideologically and linguistically problematic. I then found an article by Faulkner discussing Fanon in the same vein, and also connecting Djebar's newer novel Women of Algiers in Their Apartment to criticisms of Fanon and as new context for the veil.

Generally, how much research I put into the source and its author depends on whether I am interested in a conversation I think would naturally arise from the content of the source. In the case of Fanon, I was immediately interested in connecting the veil from my essay to a real event like the Algerian Revolution, so I spent much of my time reading on the topic. If I disagree generally with an argument or the author's treatment of it, finding a critical article by someone else can certainly expand my own argument in a more positive direction, and could even help me incorporate the critique explicitly if it is relevant to my work.

Luckily, Thakkar has flagged a supplemental work explicitly: Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano, a documentary on the creation and resurgence of Soy Cuba, which Thakkar states is an “important source for any study of the film” (83). One question Thakkar raised for me was why Soy Cuba was unsuccessful until a later resurgence, and this documentary seems promising in helping me answer that question.