My Rwanda Story Won Kat Howard's All Hallow's Read Contest!

To top off a perfect Halloween weekend (really, unbelievably perfect) my story about reading Stephen King's "It" in Gisenyi, Rwanda, won me a copy of Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book and an excuse to email Kat Howard, both of who's (whom's?) blogs I regularly follow. I'm excited in a way that verges on embarrassing. Big yay.

Orientalism And Pop-Culture in Head-On Collision, Academic Nerd Geeks Out All Over

John Lennon once wrote a letter to someone who did his laundry proclaiming in big, swirly letters, with many exclamation points, that, among other things, "MRS YOKO ONO LENNON DOES NOT, WILL NOT, HAS NOT DYED HER HAIR" but goes on to say, of far more interest to someone who recently waded through quite a bit of Edward Said's "Orientalism": "SHE DOES NOT SWEAT (MOST ORIENTALS DO NOT SWEAT LIKE US)."

It's the use of the label "oriental" there, as well classifying all "Orientals" as people who do not sweat simply having been in the acquaintance of one - and here we will have to take his word for it - who does not, as well as the specific, highlighted differentiation of "US" from "them" (and how did Lennon know the nationality or ethnicity of the people doing his laundry, anyway? I'm not going to assume he did, frankly, just because he implies it, a Beatle though he may be) that begs the question: can the Lennon/Ono relationship be re-examined through Said's lens? It would be completely fascinating, and would certainly leave room for the argument that not only did Lennon Otherize the Orient, but that Ono allowed and even encouraged it, perhaps even exploited it. The Beatles had, by this point, certainly exoticized India and Hinduism, among other things. It definitely adds a new and, if you're a huge dork, compelling dimension to an already complex, oft-examined, and probably little-understood public relationship.

We Dream Our Worlds Into Being

Reading the amazing and brilliant Patricia J. Williams' "Seeing a Color-Blind Future" for class, I came upon a reference to the Notting Hill Riots, a historical epoch in the UK of which I had somehow never heard. Post World War II, Carribean immigrants began moving to England in large numbers - by the mid-1950's, roughly 100,000. Race relations were awful and getting worse, particularly exacerbated by the battle between white families and "black" families for housing, a battle that was apparently exploited by unscrupulous landlords. On August 24, 1958, nine white men assaulted five black men throughout several low-income neighborhoods. After two weeks of unrest and protests, riots broke out on August 30th and continued through September 5th. It sparked a lot of conversation around the UK and led to advances in civil rights. Several violent incidents that followed are believed to have been the inspiration for the Notting Hill Carnival, a way of showing community spirit and unity. A nice answer, I think, to something ugly, although if papers have never been written on this subject using carnivals as a metaphor for race relations, I will eat my hat.

It should be noted that my hat 1) is super adorable and would therefor be a shame to lose and 2) looks quite like this fetching one on Miss Angelina and would therefor be quite difficult to eat, which I hope illustrates the seriousness of my assumption. And, you know, any excuse for an Angelina pic to brighten up a Thursday morning.












Racism and riots: apparently not just for Americans anymore!

Yeah I know - tell it to the French.

On Marriage

It is a privilege, a great privilege, to have the choices in marriage (or not-marriage), in the state of my singularity, as it were, that I have as a middle-class, increasingly well-educated white multi-sexual woman in this country. Reading Gayatri Spivak's "If Only", her twenty-year follow-up to her article "Can the Subaltern Speak?" makes me sad that I have to acknowledge that my options constitute a privilege, although I am no less grateful for them.

The first privilege, of course, is that the state of my singularity will not determine, by and large, my safety or my economic status. Because in this country I can own property, vote, shop, earn a living, and declare myself without a partner's validation, I am not forced to make a choice between being married and being safe. For many women, that is not the case. In this country, I am better off, in purely economic terms, being single than being married to a man or woman who would inhibit my ability to earn through abuse or misuse of mutual funds. So I can decide to be single, or not, based on other considerations.

I do not need to get married if I do not fall in love, and I can get married even if I do not fall in love. I can marry for companionship, for economic stability, for fun, for increased social acceptance, for wedding gifts, for a million and one reasons. I can also leave the gay-marriage question mostly out of this post, because I live in Massachusetts, where I can marry anyone I damn well please, if I please, THANKS.

My year kicked off with a wedding. I toasted the New Year standing in a big room filled with round tables filled with place cards, wearing a floor-length satin dress that, when I stepped out of it, stood upright on its own, supported by its own infrastructure, bridesmaid to a cousin making the somewhat rash decision to marry a man she had fallen in love with less than a year prior and had only been engaged to for a few months. Since then, my other-little-brother and a high school peer have announced their engagements, and weddings have been a theme in my program; one woman got married last weekend, and my beloved N, two years younger than I am (!!!) is planning a spring wedding to her partner. I suppose with weddings invading my favorite holidays, my personal life, my history and my academic program, it makes sense that I have given them a lot more consideration this year than ever before. Disturbing, certainly, but logical. But I think this nonsense stops here. I think the wedding mania gets a year, and no more. You've had your fun, SIR. With a new year coming up in multiple senses, I think I will appreciate my singularity, and live in the singular, with not only enjoyment but purpose, and be grateful for the right and the opportunity.

How is "every man for himself" a nation?

I am reading Henry Giroux's "Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability." In its specifics, it is a brutal examination of how the Bush Administration's policies were, in practice, a "biopolitics of disposability", in which certain groups - specifically the poor, brown, and black - are regarded by the government as disposable in that they are simply not worth protecting. And because they are not invited or allowed to speak for themselves - when was the last time you saw a poor African-American woman invited to speak about economic policy on CNN*? - they are rendered invisible, and a narrative about them is created by other people, more powerful people, who have an economic incentive to keep them invisible and frame them as lazy, incompetent and living off hard-working taxpayers. Because if you can see for yourself that there are helpless poor people being buried and drowned by a natural disaster, you might want some of your tax dollars to go towards helping to stop that, rather than your tax dollars going towards military spending that is 20 TIMES what any other country spends. Or, you might want some of that money simply re-directed - for example, some of the money we, the taxpayers, spend on homeland security re-directed towards securing homes in New Orleans rather than wire-tapping private citizens. Just some. Just enough to make a difference. Because despite what occasionally feels like all evidence to the contrary, I genuinely believe Americans want to make a difference. But if we can't see a difference needs to be made somewhere, we won't feel the need to fight for it, and before Hurricane Katrina made undeniable hardship and poverty in our own backyard visible to us and the rest of the world, I would say that I, at least, wasn't really aware of just how badly a difference needed to be made.

In the generalities, what Giroux is examining is how "neoliberal" (NOT to be confused with liberal, thanks) policies are undermining what I would term a "level-playing field." "Fairness" in the sense of "everyone should have access to equal education and health care" is replaced with "fairness" in the sense of "I worked for my money, I earned it, why should I have to share it?" "Nationalism" in the sense of "we are all Americans and must support and better one another" is replaced with "Nationalism" in the sense of "support our troops, while they are at war" (they often become a subject of this biopolitics of disposability when they return).

So this brings me to my point: how is "every man for himself" a nation? How are we Americans when our primary argument is that we should, as individuals, achieve, and we should, as individuals, benefit? I'm a staunch capitalist, but I'm also a nationalist. I believe in the American dream. I believe in the dream that individuals can achieve for themselves and their families. But that dream has been distorted. To achieve for yourself, you must step on to a level playing field with other players and see who hits the hardest. You cannot step onto a field wearing a t-shirt and shorts and face an opponent wearing padding and a helmet and call that fair. In the instance of, say, children who lived through Katrina in New Orleans facing someone from my hometown in Massachusetts when vying to get into college or get a job, it is, frankly, a lot more like a skinny kid walking onto a field by him or herself to face a bigger, better-fed opponent wearing pads, surrounded by friends, and holding a hammer.

I would be, in this scenario, the kid with the hammer. But I can't see my opponent. I don't know that as I fight tooth and nail for a job in an economy where those are becoming ever-scarcer that I am swinging at a kid half my size without any of my advantages. The opponents I actually see look just like me, and I know that I am going to beat them because I am better, because no matter what school they went to or what experience they have, I will work harder. The position in life I was born into gave me, as it were, a "fighting chance" at the American dream. But if tomorrow I lost my ability to walk in a car accident, I could just as easily become disposable. Unable to get places easily without help, I would become a burden on my family and friends. Unable to navigate easily, I might be late for interviews and lose out to someone who had the decency to show up on time. Looking for support from the government, something for those taxes I paid back when I could contribute, I would find that resources for people like me have been slashed, and the bus that used to run a few times a day to give someone like me a sense of independence and a chance to move around and gain access to things that I need, like work, no longer runs due to economic constraints - sorry.

We should believe in a national identity in which we are all Americans and we all deserve a level playing field because it is right. But if that isn't enough incentive, believe in it because there but for the grace go us all - and in our current unstable times and economy, there are fewer and fewer of us with the necessary safety nets at our personal disposal.

*The rarity of seeing ANY African-American woman on CNN not withstanding**...
**Although there's quite a bit of talk on CNN right now, actually, about being Black, due to that special time of the year, the time when they air the "Black in America" special, about which @Sistertoldja has quite a lot to say on Twitter, if you want to check her out - she links to her blog.

It Starts With A Question (blogging my way through this)

Actually, it starts with several questions, most of them panic-induced: how did I get here? Why am I here? Why am I staying here? Am I supposed to be here? And then just a lot of question marks, exclamation points, unintelligible muttered noises and some breathing into a paper bag or some such.

Once upon a time, I up and moved my whole, personal, self-contained life to Washington D.C., where I had no safety net, no friends, and only a few scattered family members (who were, nonetheless, supportive and awesome). I wrote my way through that, both personally and professionally, largely while working for Media Matters (side note - MMFA, what is up with the new weird HuffPo type design on the mainpage? this is not a good look for you). When my internal clock there said my time was up, my Boston wife and I took off for Africa - like you do - and we blogged our way through that. And then the tornado picked us up again, whirled us around, and when we landed, I was in Boston in an MA program at Simmons in Gender/Cultural Studies, and she was tumbling into a position at the prestigious Fenton in NYC - and living with my adorable sister in Harlem.

And I am in Boston. I live here and work here, I drive here (painfully, with a degree of terror - how must the non-natives feel?) I cook and eat and drink quite a bit here, and I want to write here. I want to write myself into Boston, express it, construct it. I want to build a Boston and an experience here all my own, with my words. I want to write about the strange ways I relate academic discourse and theory to the things around me, particularly pop culture, because I am afraid that if I don't, I will lose the ability to communicate concisely what I mean, what I think about something.

Academia can be very circular and insulated. This is at once highly productive - get into a pressure cooker and see if you don't cook a little faster than you would in a regular oven, just see if you don't - and slowly alienating. The language is different than the vernacular I am accustomed to, and frankly prefer. I want to master this - I am here, after all, to achieve a Mastery of this material, an odd and disconcerting thought, and one I frequently fear I may not live up to - but I would like to still be able to hold a conversation with someone outside my department by the end of it. It may be touch and go. I am easily influenced by my surroundings.

I am used to working, and while I still work, my priority is learning, and trying to live up to the standard that my lovely, incredibly smart peers have set for me, and the example set by my freakishly, unnervingly brilliant professors. I often feel lost. And I am reassured to know that almost all of feel that way, most of the time. I think our department is made up primarily of a bunch of the Lost Boys; none of us are quite sure what we're doing, we all feel a little behind, we're all finding our way slowly, convinced once in awhile that we're probably slowest, relieved when we discover we're not.

All in all, for all the lost in the woods feeling, I feel I am not lost alone, and I feel privileged to be in the presence of my travel companions. Not all who wander are lost, you know. On the other hand, the breadcrumb trails left by various theorists in my field seem to lead only in circles, and I feel they may have constructed it that way on purpose.