A Common Fire

2011-09-01T14:36:00.000-05:00

We've been busy lately.

New jobs, new cities, new projects.

And now summer's coming to an end and classes start up again. Living in close proximity to college students, September always makes me think about change and my first weeks at college. Even though I tend to remember happy memories over anxieties and complications, in this case, I don't remember being excited, but I do remember being apprehensive. In fact, when I see the freshmen and their parents unloading their cars, the ghostly shadow of that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach returns. Why did I think it was a good idea to move 1000 miles away from home, again? I worried about finding someone to sit with in the dining hall and figuring out where my classes were meeting, and I can distinctly remember getting up early on a Sunday morning and going in search of a newspaper because I wasn't sure what else to do with myself. The student union was empty, the dining hall was closed, no one else was awake, and there was a stranger still sleeping on the bunk below me. Of course, by the end of that first week, I had made friends - many of whom are still my friends - and the sensation of the world atilt had subsided. A day spent exploring Chicago with two new friends had helped, as had the bonding experience of smooth-talking our way into a cocktail party being held in the Hilton penthouse. How could they say no to three bright-eyed college freshmen who just wanted to see the view of Grant Park and the lake?

Since I am now advising a few first-year students as well as teaching a first-year seminar, I try to keep these memories fresh. Are my students experiencing similar anxieties? Probably. At least to some degree. I don't want and can't get a window into their worlds, but I wonder if cell phones, Facebook, and Skype make going to college different than it was ten or fifteen years ago. It's different to reconnect with high school friends five or ten years on than never to lose touch in the first place. With friends on speed dial, on Facetime, and posting regular updates of their first weeks of college, the jump from home to away-from-home must be less harrowing.

Debating the Past?

2010-01-15T18:37:00.002-06:00

To continue the previous post:

As per this report, it is disheartening to discover that the people setting the curriculum for K-12 history books are more concerned about the political affiliations of various historical figures than about creating standards that would contribute to students' understanding of the past. It seems that with a few exceptions, professional historians have been excluded (or have chosen not to participate) in these hearings. It is difficult to imagine a similar set of hearings about cancer prevention, say, that would not include top-ranked physicians.

I was also disappointed that one of the testifiers complained that "American exceptionalism" had been replaced by "American imperialism." The speaker had little understanding of the relationship between the two terms, or the fact that they are not necessarily exclusionary (indeed, one could argue that America is exceptional precisely because of its methods of imperialism; the United States was, after all, a post-colonial nation that developed its own complicated ways of balancing between a democratic republic and an expansionist occupier of other people's (and nations') land).

God, America, and Texas Textbooks

2010-01-12T09:43:00.003-06:00

This week the Texas State Board of Education will decide on new curriculum standards for Texas public schools, and the big debate centers on American history. The 9-person committee on social studies includes several conservative members, including Bill Ames. A quotation from the Texas Tribune article:

Ames, for instance, may have been speaking for the elected board’s majority when he tried to push through a standard on “American exceptionalism.” Depending on how it’s interpreted, exceptionalism can mean simply that the country, particularly its founders, did exceptional things. Or it can mean — in a definition endorsed by Ames in his treatise — that America is “not only unique but superior,” that its citizens are “a chosen people, divinely ordained to lead the world to betterment,” and that it is “not destined to rise and fall. Americans will escape ‘the laws of history’ which eventually cause the downfall of all great nations and empires.”

Ames failed to get such notions through the committee. “He believes we’re ordained by God to play this role. It’s like the modern version of Manifest Destiny, which gave us the conquering of the West, the slaughtering of the Indians and all that,” said Julio Noboa, a University of El Paso history professor who served alongside him on the history standards committee. “He wanted a nice whitewashed view of American history, with no pimples. We said no. Students need to understand there are problems within the capitalist system … Politicians aren’t going to give our rights to us on a silver platter. Democracy is evolutionary.”

The committee didn’t necessarily object to any mention of exceptionalism as theory — it was first coined by French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-1800s — but members recoiled at Ames’ casting of it as unassailable doctrine. “Our take on that was that you can’t force your beliefs on students in a history book; It has to take a non-biased view,” said committee member Margaret Telford, a 34-year educator who currently teaches in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District.

The question of American superiority likely will come up again at next week’s SBOE meetings, Lowe said. “The state board members had given them (committee members) clear direction in the spring that we wanted that concept included, so it’s surprising they voted it down,” she said. “We don’t have to tell students what to think, but any educated person should have learned about American exceptionalism.”

Asked if she supports the same definition Ames had offered, Lowe said: “I don’t believe America is the chosen nation the same way (I believe) Israel is the chosen nation. I do believe we have a special and unique place in history. We are not one of many.”

“We’re Texans,” she continued. “We believe our state is better than all other states, too. Why wouldn’t we believe the same about our country?”

I teach graduates of Texas public schools, and believe you me, they already think that the United States is pretty exceptional.

If I had one wish to inject into the social studies curriculum it would be the concept of historiography - that what counts as a part of the historical narrative changes over time. It's a bit meta, sure, for third graders, but I think that it could be introduced in middle school history classes, and that it should absolutely be a part of high school history. In relation to the American exceptionalism question presented here, for example, why not teach about de Toqueville; Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis; the Progressive Era's Charles and Mary Beard who argued that the US's founding was based on the founding fathers' economic greed; Perry Miller's homage to Puritans and American destiny; Bernard Bailyn's Cold-War-era focus on ideology, and the ties between British Radical Whigs and the American revolutionaries; and the recent surge in America and the World, like Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations?

Then, the question moves from "Is America exceptional? Is America superior to other countries?" to "How has the idea of American exceptionalism changed over time?"

If history classes are meant to teach children about the events of the past, why shouldn't history classes also teach about how interpretations of those events have their own history?

Desmond Tutu and the Christian "Yes" to Life

2009-11-12T19:07:00.002-06:00

As an anecdote to the melancholy musings of Simone Weil, I looked up some speeches and interviews of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Aside from being extremely moved by his commitment to forgiveness and reconciliation, with which we are all familiar, I was especially struck by his manners, affect and humor as the pure embodiment of joy. Indeed, one has to ask the question, what is Desmond Tutu laughing about? Born and raised in the evil regime of apartheid, Desmond Tutu watched his people experience daily humiliation, imprisonment, torture and abuse. Even after the extraordinary moment of liberation for black South Americans and the initiative of peace and reconciliation, South Africa is still plagued with corruption, the AIDS epidemic, and violence. But it is clear from the speech he gave at UC Santa Barbara that Archbishop Tutu laughs, tells jokes and dances - in fact, much more than the average white Americans who have not come even close to experiencing the evils that he has witnessed in his lifetime.

Christians so often fall into trap of warm-bath pseudo-theology (how nice it is to be told once again by some feeble-minded preacher that "God loves us all!" "Jesus loves us all!") that it would be easy to mistake Desmond Tutu's radical Christian rhetoric of hope as one of false optimism. But there is nothing easy about Archbishop Tutu's claim that God loves Bin Laden and George W. Bush, too. It is not easy because he is not saying that they are not guilty. Nothing can be farther from the truth than the claim that Desmond Tutu is indulging the brutal white oppressors. He makes it clear that he is far from granting them innocence. In fact, the concept of forgiveness would have no meaning if the forgiven person were to be found innocent. Responsibility being an urgent question in modernity (nowadays it seems that every criminal has the right to his or her crime based on his or her childhood traumas and adolescent misadventures), Desmond Tutu is holding the criminals responsible yet holding open the door.

Desmond Tutu's feat lies in his application in the political realm of two Christian notions that on the surface look like the most a-political notions of all: forgiveness and confession. These two notions do not sound as political as "the first will be last, the last will be first," the notion that makes the Christian roots of socialist revolutions unmistakable. Both forgiveness and confession are about surrendering power and rights. To forgive, as Desmond Tutu puts it beautifully, is to jettison one's rights to revenge. To confess, one admits one is wrong: both in the confessional booth or in mass, one is asked to kneel in order to display a physical sign of humility. Both confession and forgiveness give away power, which is why they are much more unpopular than their weaker kin, namely justice.

The word "justice" holds much more power in secular society, both as a name for our legal apparatus and for our so-called humanitarian activities, which often has "social justice" written all over their brochures. One wonders if the enormous satisfaction we get out of watching television shows about the court or the police has also to do with the momentary exhilaration of watching the bad guys get caught, prosecuted, etc. What is radical about Desmond Tutu's theology and political action is that he wants to go beyond justice, because he knows that justice does not restore equilibrium and harmony. There is almost something ecological about his way of handling human affairs: the issue is not so much who are the evil-doers, who threw the poison into the river, but how do we get the poison out of our community so that we all may drink good water again.

Without in any way disagreeing with Hannah Arendt's assessment of Adolf Eichmann as a buffoon, I wonder how the 1200 or so pages of his testimony (the inanity of which made Arendt laugh out loud instead of cry) would have been different if he were asked not to defend himself but to confess. I wonder if Arendt could have been spared her enormous irritation with the sob stories of victims (the very irritation that got her in trouble with the Jewish community all over), if they were not asked to perform their victimhood, if it was acknowledged as the premise of the trial that they had been hurt. Obviously this would not have been a conceivable model for the Jerusalem court, but is there any surprise that the defendant should always be someone who closes oneself off to the accusing party, for defense means no other than closing one's fortress, closing one to truth? Is there any surprise that a system based on justice and retribution would require that the accusing party to demonstrate their grievances?

Desmond Tutu's radicality lies in his transformation of the system of justice from the defendant-plaintiff model to the confessor-forgiver model, whose political value lies in its openness. What is interesting is that Archbishop Tutu's "political ecology" is only possible with a notion of evil that is not attached to a person but is something that takes a person hostage. It is a system that assumes that all human beings strive for life and the good the way plants strive for the sun and water. Nietzsche famously accuses Christianity of slave mentality, and whether he is right or not, he is calling attention to the inherent pessimism and perhaps masochism in a religion that is based on the idea of turning the other cheek. But in Desmond Tutu, we are reminded that if the good is on the side of the oppressed, it is also on the side of joy, harmony and peace. While the image of Eden might be a dangerous trap for the kind of utopian thinking that leads to bloody revolutions, it can easily be mobilized in Desmond Tutu's ecological ethics as the imaginary in comparison to which oppression and evil cannot but appear as an aberration. Eden, as an image of flourishing, of life, of harmony, is not so much our dream but "God's dream for us." Maybe the image of Eden is the secret to Desmond Tutu's seemingly perpetual smile, a smile that is as warm and genuine as it is enigmatic.

In listening to Desmond Tutu, one is struck by the sense of exaltation that permeates all his speeches and interviews. The use of metaphors such as an eagle being let free off the cliff, to "fly, fly, fly" certainly presents a very different image of Christianity than the "no to life." If only Nietzsche could have seen, instead of depressed, myoptic, crouching German Protestants of the 19th century, this African elder who laughs, who tells jokes, who shouts "Ubuntu! Ubuntu!" who leads his people away from violence, revenge and destruction and into the joy of life. No doubt, Nietzsche is right that Christianity as a tradition is itself largely responsible for secularism, disenchantment and the nihilism that ensues in the west. But it is perhaps not so much the presence of Christianity but the absence of "Ubuntu," the being of person through other persons, that made the white man so depressed, alone and full of resentment. Perhaps this is all the more reason that the white man needs the man of color to bring him back his humanity. The individualist white man needs the black man to teach him once again that life is joy only when it is not simply "my life" but the life principle itself that every being shares.

Peasants and Beggars

2009-11-04T00:11:00.005-06:00

Jackie asked me about articles on beauty in urban neighborhoods, so my mind wandered as I thought to myself, "But what do we really mean by beauty? Whose beauty? The Anglo-Saxon ideal or the African-American ideal?" (The recent exchange on music in the church included a comment by Jackie that some folks can't get beyond the 19th century, which I assume to be Victorian, Edwardian culture, etc.) I then started to think about why the contemporary discourse on poverty, illness, old age and death is so insufficient in this era of speed, beauty and health. We have no patience for melancholy (psychiatric over-prescription is a real problem), for old people who walk and talk slowly, and needless to say, for the poor.

Beauty is indeed the question; I have been advocating it in my last posts as part of elite Episcopalian social responsibility. I am not taking those thoughts back, but I wonder if we should also think about representations of the socially marginalized. I did a quick search for images of the beggar in the history of western art, and intriguingly I found that pre-modern depictions of beggars and cripples are usually absent of any psychologism or sentimentality. More importantly, as demonstrated by the great northern painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting, Peasant Wedding, there is no fetishization of the poor as the "other." Where are the "poor" in this painting? The decor of the room is bare and simple; the celebrants of the feast are in humble peasant attires and their manners naive and rough; the food looks like soup. By our standards, these northern European peasants of the 16th century would be poor. But in this painting, they are the hosts of a feast; moreover, they're letting the beggars into the party in the upper left hand corner. The beggars, for that matter, don't seem to look as miserable as the modern bourgeois would like. We are more used to romanticized depictions of near naked children, bare-footed yet doe-eyed, sitting on the road. If they happen to be dark-skinned, it sets them even farther away from our comfortable lives and allow us to shed even more tears of pity. But this painting presents a raucous scene of festivity that is completed by the entry of the beggars. If they are taking away resources, the beggars also add joy and merriment.

Pieter Bruegel represents a school of painting that is relatively indifferent to the aesthetic standards of the art academies, which in Italy and France began to flourish based on a systematization of artistic achievements of southern Renaissance. Instead, Bruegel is known for enigmatic, ludic scenes that derive from the vernacular, the folkloric. He is the painter of the peasants and their non-ideal faces: crooked noses, fat chins, missing teeth. Yet no one who has spent some time looking at Bruegel's paintings could remain untouched by the unruly tenderness that he gives to these figures. They are paradoxically both ugly and beautiful: they occupy the ambiguous zone between the real world and the fairy tale. In this strange way, this painting does not separate the world into the rich and poor, the beautiful and the ugly. Instead, it divides the world into the hosts and the guests, both of whom have a right to fill the house where food abounds. I wonder if there aren't some things to be learned from such a view of the world.

The need for beauty is human, but it is also essentially fascist and totalitarian (there are hundreds of books and articles about fascism as the aesthetization of the world), unless we commit ourselves to loving only what is both beautiful and good, and what is good must be real. Crooked nose and missing teeth are real; the uncouth manners of the peasants are real; the bare benches and pots of brown-ish soups are real; and the disruption of the party by the hungry beggars is real. But Bruegel seems to be charmed by such realities; he muses on them; he transforms the beggars and the peasants, not by idealizing them as 19th-century bourgeois novelists would do, but by distancing himself just enough to give us a totalistic view of how the world is composed.

I think this painting is the perfect image for Jackie's community kitchen, because it includes the beggars into the world. Ultimately, homeless people and bourgeois people still belong to one world, they still tread the same ground on God's earth - this is the greatest mystery of all.

"Elation. Elegance. Exaltation."

2009-11-02T09:03:00.003-06:00

This past Sunday, All Saints Sunday, Christ Church Cathedral in Houston hosted a jazz mass featuring an improvisational piece called The Gospel According to John Coltrane (based on "A Love Supreme") in lieu of the sermon. The composer's jazz quartet performed the majority of the service music gleaned from African American spirituals and Americana: "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," "Let Us Break Bread Together," and a rousing "When the Saints Go Marching In" at the end of the service; the composer of the Love Supreme piece also arranged the music for the Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei with the choir.

As I glanced through the bulletin while listening to the bassist tune his instrument and the saxophonist warm up, I had my doubts. Not only had I had my own personal spirituality-and-Coltrane horror story (imagine a seminar on African American religion in which the young (white) instructor requires all of the students lie down on the floor and listen to "A Love Supreme"), I also got the sense that the cathedral's highbrow choir and congregation are much more notable for their appreciation of exquisite traditional song settings than improvisational music paired with Coltrane's psychedelic lyrical musings about how all thoughts and vibrations trace back to God. They might appreciate Coltrane in the abstract, but this was a different animal.

Early on, it became clear that the cathedral was getting pretty full - almost to Christmas and Easter numbers - and that it was a mix of people, including a good number who aren't the usual Sunday crowd. The opening hymn was a traditional Ralph Vaughan Williams accompanied by the organ, and then came the Gloria. An upbeat gospel tune. The presiding priest continued with the Collect, adding in some extra phrases (oh yes we do!) as she prayed in her Texan accent, and the congregation chuckled and then laughed loudly as we all sat for the first lesson. Clearly the jarring presence of this kind of music, the fullness of the church, and the awareness that we were mostly white folks had created a level of nervous energy that needed some release. Charismatic we are not.

Things settled down after that, and then the Love Supreme piece began: like the original Coltrane recording, it was a four-part orchestration that combined spoken word (a choir member performed the reading of the words of Coltrane's poem that he "speaks" through the saxophone), parts of the poem set to music (the choir in the background), and the music of the jazz quartet. The most jarring part: the extended drum solo. The most moving for me: the duet between the saxophone (moved to the rear of the church), and the trumpet, still in the front. From wailing and mournful to ecstatic, the two instruments played off one another, filling the entire building with their plaintive cries. All throughout, Coltrane's four beats (the part where he softly sings "a love supreme") continued, driving the music forward underneath all of the improvisation - the choir softly sang "we thank you God" from time to time as well.

I was sitting next to an elderly woman and a visitor their for the jazz (he didn't take communion), and I realized that this is what church should be. This is what Episcopalians can offer: openness and experimentation some Sundays, Anglican plainsong on other Sundays - a whole range of voices and experiences that speak to a whole range of people. If anything, I felt a strong and stirring sense of community with everyone who was in the cathedral experiencing this unusual and striking composition, and all of this came together even more poignantly when the presiding priest proclaimed that All Saints Day was for mourning and for celebrating life - she listed all of the names of those who had died in the past year, and we renewed our baptismal vows.

The service ended perfectly with a very New Orleans version of "The Saints Go Marching In" - the choir, instead of processing, gathered at the front of the church, next to the jazz quartet, and clapped, as did we all. Somehow reconciled with this uncharacteristic display of joy in church, everyone burst into extended applause at the service's end.

Le style c'est l'homme meme

2009-10-31T15:32:00.003-05:00

Quoted in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession:

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and the broad outlook of a group are visible. It is also the vehicle of expression within the group, communicating and fixing certain values . . . . It is, besides, a common ground against which innovations and the individuality of particular works may be measured.

From Meyer Schapiro (an art historian), "Style" in Anthropology Today, (Chicago, 1953).

Episcopalianism and A Sense of Style

2009-10-27T00:22:00.002-05:00

This is following up on multiple conversations on the front of the Episcopal church, beauty, art and style with Jackie and Gale. Jackie would love to have hipsters at her church; Gale teaches her students (sometimes in vain) that a sense of style is important in the White House and the American identity. These are fruit for thoughts. Lots of blue-blooded Episcopalians have a profound sense of beauty and culture - though, curiously, this is not the same as being hip. Are English hymnals and William Morris hip? Probably not - it's probably considered old-fashioned. After all, IKEA made this rather vicious campaign against English "chintz," urging the English to throw out their Victorian furniture in return for Billy bookcases and Paong chairs. But what English hymnals and William Morris have is a sense of coherence: they are linked by tradition and a set of values.

Jeremy and Gale came to the conclusion long ago that one of things that make us and our group of friends not so "bobo" is that we went to church. Most church people are not exactly hip. (And what is the sociological makeup of hipsters anyway? Gale, any thoughts? Do they not come from Episcopalian families?) Being cultivated is not the same as looking glamorous - there aren't many dandys around in this country. But the value of hipsters is perhaps their youth and their glam. If everyone thought that it was so "cool" to help out at St. Paul's soup kitchen, then social justice might be advanced. So how do we make social justice hip? (Why isn't it? Eating organic surely is.)

Bread & Roses in Massachusetts

2009-10-25T14:20:00.003-05:00

http://www.breadandroseslawrence.org/

Jackie, is this organization anywhere near you? They have the right idea - and I think the Episcopal church is in the position to broaden this to the arts, because it's what the Episcopalians have more than any other Christians in this country.

The Right to Beauty (In Response to Jackie)

2009-10-24T23:01:00.002-05:00

I had to post because my comment got too long.

I am preparing for my spring course on the *History of Design* and have been relatively unmotivated because I know little about the subject or how it's important to students. But this exchange between us is very inspiring. You're absolutely right to fight for the right of Ralph Adams Cram's church; I incidentally looked him up and found out that he's totally the arch-gay Anglo-Catholic aesthete that our friend Eric would surely appreciate. (Yes, Eric's music program in such a church would indeed bring a glimpse of beauty and love into the mills.)

Too often, Episcopalians don't connect their own love for the arts with social justice, you are the exception, and the other is a lay parishioner at St. Paul in Hyde Park who gave this ravishing sermon one year on Good Friday. She asked us to reflect on the true meaning of beauty: is it just for us to consume and feel good about ourselves as privileged Christians who could afford fresh flowers and professional musicians at our services? No, she said, it's so that we could feel the miseries of the world in a even more profound way.

I remember watching a Chicago elementary school teacher receive the Golden Apple Award last year, a young Hispanic woman who took her Hispanic students to have high tea at the Four Season's, with the reason that "I want them to know that they are good enough for this, that they have the right to this." The Dominican priest Alain-Marie Couturier also told the workers of Vance that they deserve the Matisse chapel that they helped build: "Don't ever resort to the false humility that you are too simple to understand this art, because it's below your dignity as Christian, nothing is too high for you..."

Idealism of the fool? No - I was in Gary, Indiana last November canvassing for the Obama campaign, and it was a spiritual illumination to listen to the steel workers, who told us how dejected they feel because their city lacks beauty. No one cleans the sidewalk, there's trash and weed everywhere. How can you not become depressed, how can you not gradually lose pride (pronounced "prad" which means in African-American idiom a kind of dignity, strength, resilience) in yourself, how can you resist from slowly identifying with your own unhappiness, if everything in your immediate physical environment spells "misery"?

The poor and the miserable need beauty more than any of us. We've been in it for so long that we have the power of the imagination, but they depend on beauty's physical, earthly manifestations, in the lovely chapel, in the music, in people who believe that "they are good enough for this." I am very sensitive to food not only because I like to eat, but because it is often food that divides the rich and the poor. Any mystery why Christ used the bread, the wine and the table to unite his people? At least once a day, people need to be reminded that EVERYONE, the poor above all, deserves to eat and drink, and not only that, at a table covered in white table cloth.

As Episcopalians, we need to turn our love for the arts and beauty into a form of productive outrage: we cannot morally acquiesce to a world where some people are led to believe that they don't deserve the white table cloth. To think that we've done Christ's work just by feeding the poor - as if they were just animals, as if they should be grateful to us just because we gave them soup in plastic cups in some dim, fluorescent-lit church basement - is simply bourgeois false consciousness and un-Christian.

A lot of people criticized the Arts & Crafts movement and the likes of Morris, Mackintosh and Ruskin because their socialist ideals did not prevent their decor and furniture from becoming commodities for the rich. But your case about Ralph Adams Cram's church proves that this is not entirely true. The poor too can enjoy the legacies of the Aesthetic Movement in interior design - no one has to pay to come to this chapel. Culture is there to be shared, because it is like bread, it is organic and vital. It provides a sense of wholeness without which no human being can live a meaningful life. This sense of wholeness should not be the privilege of the rich, unfortunately, it is increasingly the case in our capitalist society, where the poor are deprived of even spiritual resources to create their own culture. When we lose our sense of connected-ness, we become vulnerable and we fall prey to fanatic ideologies and political demagogy. This is what happened to the poor Muslims in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is also what happens to the American working class and farmers.

Very few of us can really go be with the poor the way Mother Theresa or Simone Weil did. But the very least we can do as elite Christians is to fight for the preservation and sharing of beauty, which is nothing other than the material manifestation of God's hope for us.

Episcopalians, know thyself!

2009-10-24T15:08:00.004-05:00

I had a nice evening out with a colleague of mine, a young Latin Americanist in my department. She turned out to be a southern Californian and, unsurprisingly, episcopalian by upbringing. We had a conversation about Episcopalianism not as a religion but as a community, a culture, a tradition, and yes, as a set of weird ticks shared by a paradoxically privileged yet discrete group of Americans. My colleague was very amused by my observations and she said, "I've never thought of it like that, but now my entire life makes sense!" It amuses me too, that so many of the cradle Episcopalians I have met never looked at themselves as an "ethnic group," precisely because they are so "liberal." Race theorists might well be right to say that being "white" and "privilege" somehow makes you "normal" and "colorless," namely, cultural diversity includes you being surrounded by other colors that are not white.

The truth is that Episcopalians, when scrutinized closely with an anthropological lens, betray all the signs of being a very distinct community, with a basis in Anglo-American culture. They usually drive beat-up cars (Toyotas or Suburus) and spend lots of money on wine. They have dog-eared books at home on anything from Hannah Arendt to Baudelaire to Franz Boas (Jackie, your copy of "Primitive Art" is on my shelf!), but they haven't read them for a long, long time. Many of them are very progressive but have a bizarre idealization of history, which distinguishes them from the European left-wing. They might not advocate return to pre-Revolutionary time, but they can't give up their grandparents' Queen Anne furniture even if they don't manage getting them re-upholstered. Many of them also don't consider "Jingle Bell" a proper Christmas song. They support women's liberation and the use of contraceptives, but are often closeted papists who get very excited about visiting St. Peter's and getting a glimpse of the pope. Nature and culture in their unadulterated form are what Episcopalians love: so they either have a cabin in the mountains, a cottage by the lake, or spend that money on family vacations in Europe. (Italy is top on the list - I suspect that it's thanks to English Romanticism, Ruskin, Keats, etc.) Little reproductions or actual Byzantine/orthodox icons may be spotted in their living rooms. Episcopalian men are often one of the rare species of American males who can be both very macho and love Titian. Episcopalian women are often very good at writing "Thank You" notes and organizing potlucks and auctions; they apply such skills to areas as diverse as art history departmental social hours and Hyde Park Jazz Society fundraising. Aesthetically, they are contradictory: their personal manners are very restrained, but they love the exaltation of the arabesque (look at the legs of their furniture). Politically, they are both Republicans and Democrats (which is why they're interesting). And, as pointed out by Gale a long time ago, their are united by having cocktail hour at 5pm, no matter what name they might grant to the occasion.

These are quirky observations but I think that Episcopalians should realize more that they are a kind of ethnic-religious group much like the Jews. This might permit them to be more self-aware as a large constituency of the American elite. They should be more courageous in promoting a socially responsible and culturally intelligent form of Christianity in the US, and dare I say, in the world. I find it insidious that Episcopalians are so powerful and discrete about their identity - the American Jews at least have a very visible role in public life due to their strong identity. The advantage of coming to terms with your religio-ethnic identity is that you can better see what your contribution to the world can be.

Amira Hass, Guardian of Truth

2009-10-22T19:40:00.004-05:00

The left-wing Israeli journalist Amira Hass won the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women in Media Foundation this week, and for days now I have been in a kind of elation. I was spellbound by her 2003 interview at UC Berkeley, where she spoke with the relentless energy, impatience and honesty of someone who loved truth and justice more than herself. (I admit I cried through half of it.)

In Amira Hass I saw the ghosts of Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, two of my heroines. I think about what unite these three women: their gender, their Jewish background, but more importantly, their incorruptible search for truth, their tireless efforts to share that truth even when no one hears or believes it, and their willingness to expose themselves. Arendt went to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann's trial, subsequently exposing herself to the attacks of Jews and Germans alike. Weil went to work in the vineyards and the factories, exposing herself to harsh physical labor and dangerous working conditions. Hass went to live in Gaza as well as Romania under Ceausescu in order to report on oppression with lived experiences and observations. What strikes me about all of them was how little they seem to be concerned with themselves, their reputation, their career, even their influences. When Amira Hass spoke of her "lifelong achievement" as "lifelong failure," she is dismissing the opportunity to glorify herself and risking the favors of those who honored her. When she says that she has not made an impact (because Israeli colonization of Palestine continues to justify Palestinian self-destruction), she is not complaining that people are not listening to her; she is complaining that people do not listen to truth.

Once, Hannah Arendt was asked by a journalist what kind of influences she had hoped to have on others. Her response is perhaps the only feminist moment in Arendt: "But it's so masculine, to always want to be influential! I just want to understand, and if I can help other people understand along the way, then I am happy." I wonder if Arendt has touched on something that she, Weil and Hass all have in common, namely, a voluntarism animated by a love for the world, a love that does not ask for any returns. These women remind me of why women have a place in public life; more specifically, they show why some women are particularly suited to be guardian angels of truth. Perhaps part of the problem with patriarchy is that it was a system of pride and delusions of grandeur, which prevents people from seeing the truth. What blocks truth more powerfully than anything is the attachment of the self to illusions.

It gives me such satisfaction to know that, in the 20th century and perhaps the next, it is female geniuses like Arendt, Weil and Hass who reveal the true meaning of philosophy: the love of wisdom that overpowers the love that the rest of us give too much to ourselves.

America: Home for the Brave – and the Unfeeling?

2009-10-22T19:36:00.000-05:00

I had a small dinner party last night at my house, gathering old and new friends. At one point during the evening, we touched upon a subject that came up often in my interactions with non-American friends: why (white) Americans (in their view) do not seem to valorize human relationships. One of my guests mentioned that Mexican restaurants and supermarkets are so much friendlier than the white American establishments. When she visited the Mexican deli shop in her neighborhood the second time, the people immediately recognized her and asked if she had enjoyed the guacamole that she bought the last time (her first visit). Any white American establishment, however, would never betray their recognition even if they did remember you from the fifty times that you had bought coffee there. Another of my guests used a stronger term: she said that the Americans seem de-eroticized (ent-erotisiert), since they almost never express sympathies (distinct from the friendliness) with strangers. She also told me that I am thus far her only social contact in Eugene whom she feels comfortable calling and inviting; the colleagues in her department kept saying that they ought to “do lunch” – but only in two weeks, because they are too busy now. Her comment reminded me of an Israeli friend who once said that Americans pencil friendship into their work schedule. “What do you mean you have to look at your calendar? If I am your friend, I’m calling you and knocking on your door all the time, and you’d do the same to me,” he said, completely baffled by what he perceived as the lack of spontaneity in American social mores.

As someone who has several great (white) American friends, I am slightly defensive of this perception of Americans as unfeeling, professional-minded robots, but this perception has been put to me so often that I feel like there has got to be some reason behind it all. It is true that friends in Paris handled social relationships in a different way, and people in the same neighborhood solidarized much more than in the United States. In Paris, the butcher flirts, the boutique owner tells the trouble with her business, the professional cook invites me to lunch in his workshop, and the bookseller stays until 1 o’clock in the morning in the shop because we spent three hours talking about religion and politics. This bookseller in particular, who owns Tschann Libraire in Montparnasse, remembered me from 2001 when I first spent four months in Paris; I was 22 then, and when I came back to Paris again I was 27. I told him that his hair had turned gray during those five years. Once, I got locked out of my apartment, and instead of paying 200 euros to get a locksmith, I had the owner of the brasserie across the street come up to save me: His trick involved a radiogram and 15 minutes of nonstop banging on the door.

These memories are now particularly poignant to me because I find that the “friendly Oregonians” can sometimes be so cold to strangers. This morning, the bus driver turned away a whole station full of students, carrying heavy backpacks in the chilly fog, on the basis that the bus was full. It was not true at all: by the standards of Chicago or Paris, we could have easily fit 15 passengers more into the bus. (In India, perhaps another 50.) But that would require strangers to stand shoulder to shoulder, which is perhaps too much contact for them. Later, on the same bus, an old lady struggles to get up from her seat in order to get off the bus, and the student standing in front of her did not have bother to lend her a hand. Instead, she simply moved her body slightly to be out of the old lady’s way. Everything is so calculated and utterly absent of spontaneity.

I don’t know why civic life in Oregon here seems cold, but I do think that professional life in America forces people to turn off a large part of their affective needs in order to be perceived as self-sufficient and invulnerable. I noticed that almost all of my American friends were made during college, with one or two exceptions. College was the romantic time of our lives: we stayed up all night listening to jazz records and had useless intellectual debates about literature, existentialism and other such things. I am not nostalgic about college, but I do wonder what happened to that spontaneity after we became professionals. I strongly suspect that American professionals are often circumspect in their approach to friendship because the risk of exposing one’s humanity (that is, weaknesses and imperfections) in a professional context is too great. At the same time, I find it hard to believe that anyone would not want friends. Wasn’t there a theory that TV shows such as “Friends” and “Sex in the City” owe their success to the yuppies’ unfulfilled longing for close friendships, which were out of reach for them in real lives?

What disturbs me about the foreigner’s perception of American social relationships is its oblique but real link to our attitude toward social welfare and above all healthcare. David Brooks has long pointed out that the Republican party is especially successful in reinforcing a false version of American optimism, which has little tolerance for discourses about failure and needs. But what about the liberals? I don’t find them personally warmer than the selfish, unfeeling Republicans who deprive us of healthcare. Is it because they also don’t like weakness, and the need for human contact is considered a weakness in professional America?

Youth Springs Eternal, for good or for ill.

2009-10-21T09:51:00.004-05:00

In reading last week's New Yorker (the one with the books on the cover), I was surprised and fascinated by the review of picture books, and Rebecca Mead's article on the YA-lit factory, Alloy Entertainment. It's also interesting to think about these things in relation to the success of the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are.

The picture books article shows how contemporary parenting styles trickle into children's books, and how children in today's picture books run all over their passive and bedraggled parents who insist that their children "use their nice words" and get played by their tyrannical three-year-olds. I'm not sure what this says about my personality, but when I was little, I liked orderly books - these disorderly and disobedient children would have made me anxious. I distinctly remember getting stressed out reading the Cat in the Hat. I completely supported the fish, urging the Cat to stop making such a mess. I was better with Dr. Seuss's other books - the Lorax. Speaking of autocratic books, my family also read a lot of Bernstein Bears - it's all about order, decorum, and self-control. Maybe this stifled my rebellious streak early on, but I think that it was already embedded in my personality, even as a six-year-old.

The Alloy Entertainment article ("The Gossip Mill") is very interesting for other reasons. The translation of news, political scandals, and adult novels into young adult novels, and the mode of presentation is fascinating. I rarely read these sorts of books when I was a young adult - the Christopher Pike horror/thrillers, VC Andrews' romance novels, Sweet Valley High (the Gossip Girl of the 80s?) - and so on some level, I don't understand the appeal. I've just gotten to the part in the article when Twilight enters into the picture - and I wonder if the unexpected and surprising popularity of the series throws a kink into the YA factory. I feel like teenagers' likes and dislikes seem easy to decipher, but they can also turn on a dime and embrace the least expected trend. They're also quick to sniff out when they're the targets of marketing campaigns, and I wonder what this means for Alloy's future success.

Along those lines, I also just read this Times article on Sherman Alexie whose long career took off when he published an autobiographical young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I want to read it and see how it compares to written-for-adults coming-of-age fiction (Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, Lev Grossman's The Magicians), and if there is a distinction. Is it all in the marketing? Probably. And I also wonder if teenagers drove the sales of Alexie's book (I do know that it's a popular summer reading assignment), or if adults are behind its success?

The Open

2009-10-13T00:30:00.004-05:00

I am reporting back to the common fire after months (years?) of silence, this time from Eugene, Oregon, a small university town with a very visible aging hippie population and, as I am slowly discovering, real money hidden in discrete quarters. Having come from Chicago and Hyde Park, I am used to the company of Democrats. A long-time member of American liberal academia, I am used to things like feminism, post-colonial studies, race theories, Marxism, Frankfurt School, etc and etc. None of these things seems to suffice in describing the climate in Eugene, however.

In Hyde Park, being liberal means supporting Barak and pledging to the Hyde Park Jazz Society. In Eugene, it seems to imply buying locally grown heirloom tomatoes and organic tampons. This town has no shortage of fancy organic grocery stores, cooking boutiques and bike shops. All things are ecological and green. The most peculiar thing is that everyone disappears into the mountains at the end of the day. Every upper middle-class professional seems to own a house somewhere on the hills in south Eugene. When the sun goes down, they retreat from civilization into their private garden and palace, often spectacular. In their private kingdom, they need not deal with the ugliness of the American society.

A colleague told me that this town went mad last November during the presidential campaign. People had 20 Obama signs in their yard and entered into fierce fights with their neighbors across the Williamette River, Springfield, which is a predominantly working class town of Republican persuasion. (A colleague at the university whom I met at a reception referred to my town Covina in Los Angeles County as a place for "rednecks"; I corrected her by saying that it was inhabited by the working-class and immigrants.) Springfield is far from being a charming town; it looks just like the kind of town for the Simpsons' and has lots of strip malls and large retail shops. At the same time, I felt indignant as I started to discover that liberal Eugenians speak of the "redneck" Springfielders with contempt. I realized that they are liberal but not exactly Marxist. The boys at the Social Theory workshop at the University of Chicago might wear nice shirts (some of them), but at least they make a point of drinking beer and eating Doritos. The liberal Eugenians don't even pretend to solidarize with the workers, who are white, overweight and anti-Obama.

Religion is not exactly popular here, especially the ones that involve Jesus. (My colleague who teaches colonial Latin American art got hostile student evaluations expressing anger that she was trying to convert them to Catholicism by teaching them about Catholic art.) However, they do have three Episcopal parishes. I went to two: one was smug and had an ugly chapel, the other was low church and does folk mass once a month, but it has an interesting female priest who is visibly concerned with social justice. I decided to stay in the second one for now (while avoiding the guitars on the third Sunday of the month). The congregation is still very white; they don't lift every voice and sing either. (Interlude: I know that I will forever miss Sunday mornings in Hyde Park, when Hispanic and black families all come out in their best clothes for church. The black grandmas at St. Paul the Redeemer would sit in the pews with their fantastic hats, with little lace trims and flowers on top; sometimes they wore white gloves like my own grandmother used to do. I would pretend to follow along the hymnal while checking out my professors amongst the faithful: Rob Nelson the Byzantinst from my department who is always at the front, David Wellbery the Germanist who is always at the back, and my friend the Islamicist Fred Donner who sings in the choir.) But at least here, in the Church of Resurrection, I can see elite white people being open. Here, they are quiet and listening, instead of complacently advertising themselves as they do at receptions and potlucks. They have a very interesting priest, a younger woman who reminds them that being well-t0-do and content is not enough, that the world is filled with people who are treated as non-persons, and the obligation for every Christian is to not be content with what is but to imagine what may be. Here, they confront their own frailty and finitude, and for that reason, I can share their company. More importantly on a social level, they are taking responsibility for their own spiritual tradition, not becoming consumers of exotic occultism (there are many shops here where they could purchase paraphernalia of various kinds) or aggrandizing their ego with popular forms of atheism.

As time goes on, I hope to find other people in Eugene to whom I can talk about the plight of the American working class, and who will not speak of the religious right as if they were the devil. Maybe I will even find one or two people who could understand why I put U2's *Rattle and Hum* on the same level as Bach's kantatas, Latin plain songs and Negro spirituals. But before then, I think the progressive Episcopal church here in Eugene is my best bet in finding the intermediary ground of openness without which I would suffocate.

In many worlds, including the world of the English gentry in Evelyn Waugh's novels or of the French noblesse in Proust, church-going was the sign of respectability. In Eugene, respectability is marked by shopping at the right stores, eating at the right restaurants, etc. This makes the church-goers somewhat non-conformists. After all, they didn't have to go. (Many of them are also old and very frail.) If they did go, it must mean that they, too, understand that eating organic vegetables alone does not suffice in making one a good person. At least I have that in common with them.

Firebugs

2009-09-14T08:40:00.002-05:00

This is an unusual posting, to be sure.

This morning, I awoke to the sound of circling helicopters, and soon after, heard on the radio that there was a fire in a residence two blocks away from my house. This was the ninth fire in the past couple of months, all only several blocks from my house (I live between 8th and 9th streets, the fires are two streets over, between 10th and 11th.) There's an arsonist at large who targets residential buildings (this morning's was a garage apartment, fortunately uninhabited at the moment) in the very early hours of the morning. No one has been hurt, so far.

I don't have a great deal to say about this, except it's disturbing. And I know there are psychological disorders involved, but I still wonder what motivates a person to become a serial arsonist. I understand insurance fraud and revenge, but this is clearly something else.

Reading List

2009-09-04T08:50:00.004-05:00

The New York Times reminded me today of one thing I will very much miss about New York City: reading on the subway. Lately I've had the unusual luxury not only of having stumbled upon two remarkable and compelling books, but also of possessing broad swaths of time unoccupied by things legal in which to enjoy them. I expect this time of luxury to end next week, as the school year sets in for real and I return to the academic doldrums. But, as the Times points out, we in New York all have to get where we're going, and the subway is blessedly free of internet and cell reception, which means I get a good hour every day to burrow into some good fiction. I'm taking recommendations, and I'd love to hear what people are reading on this blog. Here's my list.

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman. Thanks to the tip from NPR via Gale, which billed this book as Harry Potter for grownups. Actually, it's a good deal better than that. Grossman writes beautifully, takes seriously our lonely childish longing for fantasy, and, unlike JKR, is unafraid to give his characters' flaws real and irrevocable consequences. Anyone who read C.S. Lewis and T.H. White as a kid and harbors mixed feeling about HP should read this. Plus, Grossman himself is a Yale CompLit PhD drop out like yours truly, so I feel a special affinity.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. Thanks again to Gale. I was skeptical of the title, the bestseller-y-ness, and the sexual violence, but you got to give to these Scandinavians, who really know how to write dark, quasi-philosophical, and incredibly satisfying mysteries. I couldn't put it down AND it made me think, which is more than I can say for most of what I read these days.

Next on my list: Motherless Brooklyn, the fourth Twilight book, and The Girl Who Played with Fire (next book in Larsson's triology). Anything else I should add?

Storm King

2009-06-09T11:16:00.003-05:00

From Storm King, a sculpture park north of Manhattan.

Missionaries.

2009-06-09T10:59:00.003-05:00

This morning I was working on a chapter about how black Jamaicans ignored the American missionaries' attempts to control their family lives. The doorbell rang, and lo, a young woman Jehovah Witness was at my door. Wearing a nice sun dress and holding her well-worn Bible, she nervously asked me if I read self-help books, and if I ever thought of the Bible as a self-help book. I answered: well, no, but I can see how some people would see it that way. She then opened to read a verse from Timothy, her hands and voice shaking. I politely told her that I wasn't interested, then returned to my own missionaries, imbued with a new sense of empathy for black Jamaican "sinners" who politely listened, most of the time, to the Americans from Oberlin, and then went about doing things as they saw fit. Maybe they even felt a little sorry for the white Ohioans in their midst.

I also wished the young Witness "good luck" as she left - is that the proper response to a missionary with whom I disagree? I suppose I also have sympathy for missionaries as well as the would-be converts.

When I was home from college one summer, I invited a door-to-door missionary named Gwen into my parents' house, and we talked for a long time about religion, mostly because I was curious about what she was trying to do. We didn't agree, needless to say. She did follow up with a number of phone calls and mailings, so I suppose she viewed the conversation as a success, a potential conversion. I read somewhere that Mormon missionaries rarely convert more than a handful of people in their two-year missions, and I wonder what the conversion rate is for Jehovah Witnesses going around my parents' neighborhood in the mid-morning of a weekday. Not many people are home; and those that are don't, I imagine, convert. But they still go out, even when they're so nervous that their voices are shaking.

The Hill Country

2009-03-28T09:22:00.002-05:00

From the trip Laura and I made a few weeks ago . . . it was very dry out in Central Texas, but Spring was in the air, nonetheless.

An apt metaphor

2009-03-20T11:40:00.003-05:00

A picture of the AIG Building, a towering presence to the west of downtown Houston. I can see it from my office window. This week it was buried in the fog . . . see more pictures here.

In other blog-postings related to economic matters, I find the Planet Money discussion about the AIG bonuses to be especially lucid at a time when a pitchfork populism rages.

Lenten Thoughts

2009-03-06T12:05:00.004-06:00

It's been awhile since posting. I read this in David Chappell's A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, and I thought I would share.

It comes from an Easter greeting written by Bayard Rustin in 1952:

"Everyone saw Jesus as a lot of trouble, but even crucifixion could not get rid of Him. 'Easter in every age . . . recalls the imminence of the impossible victory, the power of the impotent weak.' Rustin took the opportunity to note that Jesus' followers 'need to be reminded that Easter is the reality, and that the awesome structures of pomp and power are in the process of disintegration at the moment of their greatest strength.' He was surely aware that he was echoing the Prophets' scorn for human institutions. But he could not have known that he was prophetically anticipating a key phrase in a new prophet's greatest speech: 'Easter is the symbol of hope resurrected out of a tomb of hopelessness.'"

11.04.08 at Grant Park

2008-11-05T11:24:00.003-06:00

From Amy:

I have never seen such a huge space so completely filled. The entire park was jammed, and it is a big park. There were something like 8 jumbotron screens spread through the unticketed crowd. And thousands of cell phones and digital cameras waving in the air at every second. I only saw one lighter held up, compared to maybe thirty thousand shining cell phones with their flashes going off constantly.

I walked downtown alone around 5pm because the people I knew that were going had tickets and I didn't. There was basically nothing to do but watch CNN en masse for 5 hours, and I kept thinking there would be fights or problems but people were mostly content to just stare at the giant screens and snap pictures and scream their heads off every time they projected a win for Obama. Seriously, when Pennsylvania and Ohio were called, the crowd went insane. I almost left after that because I was worried about getting home. But then they fucking CALLED VIRGINIA and I was like, okay, as soon as polls close in on the west coast there is going to be a concession, so I stayed through Barack's speech.

I have 250 new texts on my phone from last night, sent and received from my parents, Lara, Alissa, you, Gale, the people in the ticketed area, my friend Nina who was sitting at home crying and like most black Chicagoans not really believing it was going to happen. When they called it for Obama she texted me, "I'm so scared." I couldn't text her back (or anyone) for half an hour because literally everyone in the crowd was trying to use their cell phones at once. It was like a weird reverse image of 9/11. Nobody could get through because everyone wanted to get through to everyone else they knew in the world.

One thing I didn't anticipate was a certain shift in the crowd once the election was called. I don't know quite how to put this, but there was literally a collective surge of pride and emotion among the blacks in the crowd. Everyone in the crowd was ecstatic, but in the black spectators it felt like something was unleashed that they had been holding back during the race. In addition to the crying and the hugging and the cheering there were statements like "They better just try to fuck with us now." It wasn't violent, but it was definitely aggressive - like there was a new level of visibility and recognition, like the balance of power in the crowd shifted. It wasn't exactly comfortable, but it was exhilarating. Instead of melting away racial lines, Obama's victory seemed to make them suddenly visible; young "post-racial" white voters had seemed to own the campaign at the beginning of the evening, but by the end of the night the African-Americans in the crowd had claimed it for their own.

The most exhilarating part of the evening was the mass exodus from the park into downtown after Obama gave his speech. They had corridors marked off downtown with police lines, which could have been extremely unsettling since it was clear they were anticipating possible riots. But everyone was so blissed out - people were literally skipping through the streets. Blacks and whites were sort of marching side by side in the same direction, not really together but headed in the same direction. I heard a white guy comment to his girlfriend in this blissed-out voice, "I guess they just want to keep an eye on us tonight". Later a black woman asked a black policeman standing in the line to pose so she could get a picture of him "on this day", and he broke his stance and mirrored her huge smile back at her. It was like being in a parade. I haven't heard about any problems, which seems like a miracle given how many people were there, and I got home on the blue line around midnight.

My election night.

2008-11-04T23:51:00.002-06:00

At first we went to one bar in Rice Village - and there was a somber mood and some trivia. The waitress switched the televisions to Fox News, and we decided to move onto another bar across the street. Using the presence of some black people as our guides, we stayed to watch the final results of the election.

The television with CNN competed against a Rockets game . . . and as half of the bar cheered when the Rockets evened out the score against the Celtics, all of a sudden there were whoops from the other side of the bar - Virginia goes to Obama . . . seconds later . . . CNN runs the banner - Obama as President Elect! Cheers erupted! A rush of blood and adrenaline flooded into my head, and everyone leapt to their feet, cheering. But, this being Houston, a few very vocal guys in dress clothes started yelling "Where's my welfare check?" "Spread the beer!" "Socialism!"

After McCain's fittingly honorable concession speech, we left, preferring to hear Obama's remarks at home rather than with the angry and moderately drunk McCain-ites.

To me, the most lasting image was the sight of the thousands (hundreds of thousands) of people gathered at Grant Park. It speaks to a renewed kind of patriotism, a coming-out-of-the-closet for many Americans who have felt the need to change the channel when the President comes on television to speak. It also represented an urban president, facing the skyline of Chicago, a crowd representative of the diversity of the city, the country, the world. The lines in his speech about America's genius - its ability to change and to move - is right out of any American historian's book. David Brooks suggested that this event will be the opening of a new chapter in future U.S. history textbooks, and I think that might be one of my favorite lines of the night. Obama will face challenges, he will disappoint us, he won't be able to make everything right, but the optimism, excitement, and motivation he has brought to politics, to government, and to the idea of service is inspiring and, I think (I hope!) will last beyond this particular moment of historical import.

November Fifth

2008-10-25T10:03:00.003-05:00

What do you think Wednesday, November 5 will be like?

On NPR yesterday, they did a story about race and the election, and they interviewed black and white voters in York, PA. At one point, a white woman expresses her fear that with an Obama victory, blacks would riot, and with an Obama defeat, blacks would riot. Then everyone expressed their concern that with an Obama victory, white supremacists might rally. [Lots of other interesting things were also said].

I wonder if some Republicans will think Obama and the Democrats "stole" the election - I think the Acorn scandal is laying the groundwork for this argument. If Obama loses, though, I think that Democrats - of all races - will think that something fishy went on since he's currently ahead in the polls.

Predictions?

Indiana

2008-10-21T09:18:00.001-05:00

Joyce, maybe your calls are working! McCain's lead in Indiana narrows . . . according to the poll numbers.

Whither the Republican judge?

2008-10-20T09:27:00.002-05:00

The Houston Chronicle suggests that Harris County might gain some Democratic judges. The whole idea of electing judges is an interesting phenomenon. Even stranger is the idea that all judges in my county are Republicans.

Toss up?

2008-10-20T09:06:00.003-05:00

According to Real Clear Politics (see map on previous post), Georgia is now only "leaning McCain" and Virginia is "leading Obama." I also see that North Dakota has become a toss up, and Montana is pink, not red. I wonder what else might stem from the Powell endorsement and all that cash . . .

The Election

2008-10-19T18:52:00.003-05:00

After twelve days without power and a frenzy of job applications, I am finally posting again. My new problem is that I have a manuscript due soon, but I can't stop checking the electoral maps and polls compulsively. Does anyone else have this problem? It's not as though West Virginia is going to become a "toss up" between 3:30 and 4:15 on a Sunday, but I'm there, checking just in case.

I like NPR's map and the Real Clear Politics map. It has nice historical features to boot - how many states did Nixon win in '72? Oh yeah, almost all of them.

My parents' neighborhood

2008-09-16T11:31:00.003-05:00

What Ike left behind

2008-09-14T11:36:00.007-05:00

Here are some pictures of my street, Rice, and the area. Fortunately, the uprooted trees were ONE block over from my house! Still no electricity, although Rice's generator is supplying me with a daily chance to charge my phone and check the news. I have to say my 1990 Walkman tape player/radio has served me well.

I like Ike? (yeah, cause that's not getting old . . .)

2008-09-11T14:43:00.003-05:00

As I've spent the day running around, getting batteries, securing garbage cans, and preparing food to eat if the electricity goes out for several days, I've been in and out of the media coverage of the storm. I've been listening to NPR, which breaks into the mournful music of the day (since it's 9/11, of course, we have a lot of requiem action) to air press conferences from the mayor, the county judge in charge of Harris County's issues, and then, just now, a press conference with national FEMA reps.

I wasn't scared until this press conference: Will my windows break and shatter? Will my roof come off? Is a tree coming through my front wall? Let's hope not, but Michael Chertoff seems to think it's a distinct possibility.

In a moment of analytical clarity, I thought: maybe in our post-Katrina world, it's so politically damaging to preach calm before a potentially devastating hurricane, the officials opt in the other direction. Yet in Houston, after the Rita evacuation debacle (6 hours, 35 miles, no AC and a really hot and angry cat in my relatively mild case), there's also a strong sentiment to encourage people to shelter-in-place. Located between these two very different situations of mass chaos of the 2005 hurricane season, local and national officials understandably hedge their bets. I'm skeptical, though, of what this means for us on the ground. Who do you believe: the "this is not a Gustav; this is a serious storm" line from Chertoff, who as we know cannot appear anything less than 100% alert and concerned, or the "use common sense, we'll all be okay" message coming from Bill White who, Lord knows, can't deal with another 2 day traffic jam between Houston and points West.

Well, I shelter in place, with some friends, probably several gin and tonics, and our flashlights and candles.

Obama, or re-incarnation of W. E. B. Dubois

2008-09-10T10:40:00.002-05:00

Many thanks to everyone for keeping up the passion and interest in American politics and the upcoming election in this time of autumn melancoly and désoeuvrement.

In response to that article by Jeff Sharlet on the supposed failure of Obama to live up to the liberational theology modeled after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "dream," I feel like something was missed in measuring Obama against the criteria of the Civil Rights movement only. As someone interested in the history of black radical thought, I feel like Obama has many more compatriots to whom he can be equally contextualized. I am thinking in particular of the early W. E. B. Dubois (before he started entertaining the idea of a separate black existence in white America as the condition of the genuine advancement of blacks). Obama resembles Dubois not only in his background (black-white métisse, raised by white mother) and life experiences (stellar student who made a splash in a mainly white elite university, socially involved in black communities and interested in promoting grass-root forms of self-embetterment). I don't know if Obama has the culture of a Dubois (in ancient philosophy, Shakespearean sonnets, Negro spirituals, German music, etc.), but I do find that his philosophy bears many resemblances to Dubois's vision of a black elite, particularly in the essay "Of the Training of Black Men." In this essay, Dubois makes clear his distaste for the (white) notion that black folks should mainly be trained for vocational purposes and not be expected to attain the lofty ideals of higher eduction. Dubois recognizes that the idea that black students ought not read Aristotle and instead should concentrate a technical eduction is deeply racist. As someone who had graciously received "the gift of New England to the freed Negro," which was not money "but character," he could not tolerate the idea that blacks should be excluded the rights of all human beings with spiritual aspirations and be urged to content with being "an ignorant, turbulent proletariat."

When Dubois demands for the right of black folks to ask, like all dignified human beings, "Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?" he is recognizing that "liberation" from material depravity MUST be accompanied by an inner, psychological, spiritual sense of self-worth. The emancipation of the Negro must be understood as both material as well as spiritual, and this cannot be done without a projectile, as it were. That is to say, there needs to be some kind of materializatio (incarnation) of a spiritual ideal, not of what is but what is possible. Here I quote Dubois:

"Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universities centuries before the common schools, that made fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness."

Is this elitist? No, I think it is realistic and historically accurate. It is not in any way contradictory to the egalitarian ideal of Christianity, since we all know from the history of Christianity itself that the idea of absolute equality of men and women, slaves and masters, whores and emperors had to stick around for more than 2,000 years before we ever saw something resembling like an institutionalized form of that equality in modern democracy. This goes to show that ideal is important, because it paves the blue-print for future change. There is nothing un-American nor un-Christian about the notion of a responsible elite: in fact, we in this country even have a rather glorious tradition of patrician philanthropy. I am getting off-track, but I just don't agree with the view of Obama as a failed or compromised liberationist. I believe Obama to be a true American, a re-incarnation of the possibility of material and spiritual liberation of not only the black folk but all folks. In that sense, he is also a true Christian, despite the fact that he might not practice the form of Christianity that I myself identify with.

Liberation or Liberalism?

2008-09-10T09:02:00.004-05:00

Jackie sent this short article by Jeff Sharlet, a journalist who covers the evangelicalism and politics beat.

He compares liberation theology and the origins of the Obama campaign, in contrast to the current more liberal and Social Gospel oriented message of recent days. I think Sharlet is right in his perception of this shift, but I also think that it is inevitable. Can a radical liberation ideology be contained within the limits of existing institutional structures, like the presidency or a presidential campaign, for that matter? I don't think it can. It is by nature an outside agitator.

I find Sharlet's description of the Social Gospel as paternalistic to be interesting as well. A combination of manly overseeing, racial uplift (elite blacks in the nineteenth century also invoked this kind of message), but Sharlet doesn't get to the many many women who did similar social work with less overbearing methods. Imperialism at home, imperialism abroad. I'm not sure what this means for the twenty-first century because I think that ultimately, the Obama-Social Gospel comparison starts to break down when we look at foreign policy points, among other things.

Restoring the Faith

2008-09-05T14:48:00.003-05:00

In an effort to make me feel less despair-y, let's list optimistic things about the next 60 days . . .

1. The McCain people can't be THAT good when apparently they put up an image of Walter Reed Middle School instead of Walter Reed Hospital as a backdrop for McCain's speech on Thursday night. Is this their A-game? I think Obama might be okay.

2. The image's vast green lawn once again gave McCain a green-screen background so that Stephen Colbert might play.

Others?

How do you like your media?

2008-09-04T12:06:00.001-05:00

Politico's journalists apologize for their impolite and untoward behavior towards the new GOP nominee for Veep.

Can . . . Not . . . Compute . . .

2008-09-03T15:33:00.004-05:00

This and this represent just one of the things that is working to convince me that 2008 will be a key turning point in women's history to come. Perhaps it's the true end of the feminist movement, as defined by the second wave.

2008 is the year when race and gender when mainstream with the Clinton/Obama campaign, requiring women's historians the world over to rub their eyes when they saw Elizabeth Cady Stanton facing off with Frederick Douglass on the front page of the New York Times' "Week in Review." Now we see a modern-day Phyllis Schlafly, a school board activist following a long line of politically active anti-feminists, becoming a candidate for VP. YET: it's no longer cool rally your female troops by hating feminists, as Schlafly notoriously did at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977.

So now the GOP embraces the Republican feminists who it slowly ejected from the party during the 1970s? All of a sudden, socially conservative women embrace Hillary Clinton and the idea of working mothers? At the same time that the Schlafly faction is loud and proud and fighting for even more socially conservative programs on the GOP platform?

David Brooks on Palin

2008-09-03T06:32:00.003-05:00

So, I read this David Brooks column on Palin, thinking it would ruin my morning (because David Brooks usually does), but in fact it was quite interesting. He buys the Palin-as-McCain's-soulmate line - "she seems to get up in the morning to root out corruption" - but he thinks this is exactly the problem with the choice. Because they're too much alike, she doesn't make up for McCain's weaknesses - not in the political campaign, but as a governing president.

Brooks argues that McCain's "maverick" qualities come from a "tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political one." Basically, McCain's a crusader. He likes "to rally the armies of decency against the armies of corruption," but he lacks an overarching governing philosophy, which is why he's always jumping ship and failing to support Republican philosophical credos, like the need for small government.

Brooks thinks McCain's years of experience have taught him to deal with complex issues that aren't black and white battles between decency and corruption (although, interestingly, Brooks classifies Putin as one issue that can in fact be dealt with as such a black and white battle, which, imho, is exactly the attitude that got us into this mess with Georgia). But he still thinks McCain needs someone with a well-developed governing philosophy to rein in his free-wheeling moral intuitions. Palin certainly isn't the person for that job, and Brooks doesn't like the thought of two unmoored moral souls guiding this country through troubled waters.

This is an interesting way to think of McCain, and I'm not sure I agree with it. Any thoughts?

A thoughtful roundup

2008-09-01T15:06:00.002-05:00

I think that the various posts and discussions here are quite good on the GOP VP front. I highly recommend a visit.

That said, I also think that the liberal bloggers and some major media outlets are spending an awful lot of time talking about how we shouldn't be talking about Palin's mothering skills, family-work decisions, etc. Are these meta conversations providing a sheen of acceptability for conversations that would otherwise be unacceptable? And I say this realizing that I am totally contributing to this phenomenon, on a much much smaller scale.

To continue the thought - I saw a GOP strategy session of sorts on CSPAN last night where GOP pollsters surveyed a group of delegates in St. Paul about Palin. Several of the women delegates were highly supportive, although others were not. One woman said patently - I don't think you can be a mother and work at the same time because you'll always make decisions thinking about your children first and the country second. The pollster (a man) was a bit flustered and didn't know quite how to respond.

From the New Yorker

2008-08-30T15:24:00.001-05:00

An excerpt from this recent interview with Palin:

Before she was running against him, Sarah Palin—the governor of Alaska and now the Republican candidate for Vice-President of the United States—thought it was pretty neat that Barack Obama was edging ahead of John McCain in her usually solidly red state. After all, she said, Obama’s campaign was using the same sort of language that she had in her gubernatorial race. “The theme of our campaign was ‘new energy,’ ” she said recently. “It was no more status quo, no more politics as usual, it was all about change. So then to see that Obama—literally, part of his campaign uses those themes, even, new energy, change, all that, I think, O.K., well, we were a little bit ahead on that.” She also noted, “Something’s kind of changing here in Alaska, too, for being such a red state on the Presidential level. Obama’s doing just fine in polls up here, which is kind of wigging people out, because they’re saying, ‘This hasn’t happened for decades that in polls the D’ ”—the Democratic candidate—“ ‘is doing just fine.’ To me, that’s indicative, too. It’s the no-more-status-quo, it’s change.”

I can see the Obama ad now.

Thoughts on Palin

2008-08-30T09:19:00.003-05:00

Sorry, Gale, but McMain is a wise man - who wants to think about the convention now when all the buzz is about Palin? So, some first impressions.

The experience issue. I sure hope this sinks the McCain/Palin ship (reports from the Republican homeland indicate this may be a deal-breaker, especially among male fiscal conservatives), but if the pundits on the right start arguing that Palin has nearly as much experience as Obama, I'm going to be very upset. Obama's experience in political office may not be great, but he has had his head in weighty national and international issues for decades. In stark contrast, salon.com reports that Palin hasn't even thought about the most pressing foreign policy issue of this election: "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

Social issues. Palin is a nightmare when it comes to social issues: staunchly pro-life, proponent of intelligent design curriculum, NRA member. The question is whether as VP she will be visible enough and hold out enough promise to mobilize and turn out the socially conservative base and the religious right. And what of the uber-conservatives who believe women should be subservient to their husbands?

Women. I could be totally off here, but I really don't see Hillary supporters defecting to support a pro-life, evangelical, NRA member. But then, I never knew any of these supposedly bitter, Obama-hating women and continue to believe that they are a media-generated myth. All the Clinton supporters I know are loyal Dems who would never ever support someone like Palin.

Swing workers. Maybe the greater threat could be her appeal to moderate workers who don't feel strongly about social issues but feel alienated by Obama's supposed elitism. (Have I mentioned that I hate David Brooks and his stupid speech to the delegates?) Nevermind that the whole reason McCain's POW days are so well documented is that the North Vietnamese considered him an elite...

Also, who the hell names their kids Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig?!?!

Just my uninformed first thoughts. What do y'all think?

Thoughts on the Convention

2008-08-29T09:10:00.003-05:00

Impressions? What part did you like best? What will the GOP have to do next week?

Follow up on Separatists

2008-08-27T10:34:00.002-05:00

This article in the Times today lays out some of these conflicts in a handy graphic.

Breakaway Republics and Nationalisms

2008-08-26T13:16:00.003-05:00

I thought I would move up the discussion of nations, nationalisms, and disintegrating empires up from the South Ossetia post into a new place. I've always been rather unconvinced with nationalist arguments against separatist groups, although I realize that the chaos caused by a national schism is almost always violent. Here are my rather unpolished musings on the subject as I tried to brainstorm examples of relevance. It seems to me that if the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were all about the rise of nations and the decline of empires, we are now dealing with the beginnings of some kind of post-nationalist moment.

Related to Spain, for example, I think that the Spanish government should allow those regions who claim to have their own language, culture, etc. split - they'll be tiny and economically weak, and I bet they'd come back to Spain eventually. Or else perhaps the way Europe is going is toward a complete reorganization of its borders so that all ethnicities and linguistic groups will relate via the European Union rather than to national governments.

Western Europe's old empires weren't all that different from its modern national boundaries (with obvious exceptions in the territory disputed in the two World Wars), but in Eastern Europe and in the Caucuses, the situation is obviously different with the historical Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire looming large.

Some places, like Lebanon, build incredibly delicate systems where sectarian identification divides up political rule - and then they just stop taking censuses for fear that new numbers might disrupt the existing order.

Others, like South Ossetia, emphasize their Russia-loving Ossetian majority over the Georgian minority. If so, why does Georgia want them so much?

Others look to the impossible question "who was here first?"

In China and Taiwan (or Chinese Taipei as Taiwan agreed to be called in the Olympics), it's a question of dueling political parties and how China and Taiwan both have connected past history to their national myths.

I think that as an American, it's hard to understand what's so difficult about living in a pluralistic society, and perhaps this is where my disconnect lies. So many Americans take diversity (even if it's just lip service) as our central identity. Yet the perennial controversies associated with immigration show that there are still fundamental knee-jerk ethnic ideas of who is and cannot be an American. I think there are like 90 history books written on this subject, so I'll just stop there.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, Part II

2008-08-26T08:09:00.002-05:00

I saw this in the Chronicle of Higher Ed . . . one response to the article posted by Laura a couple months ago.

Meditations at Whole Foods

2008-08-26T07:41:00.002-05:00

This is SO funny. I am clearly one of the 78 dorky people in this country who think so. Be sure to read the original Hass poem, too. Ah, Obama, arugula, Whole Foods...

South Ossetia

2008-08-12T07:17:00.003-05:00

Just a quick query: has anyone come across thoughtful articles on the current Russia-Georgia conflict? Having been preoccupied with moving and other sundries, I haven't had time to seek out decent commentaries, except for this thoughtful post on Crooked Timber, which I highly recommend to anyone worried about the situation and its broader implications.

The Loss of the Real

2008-08-07T22:03:00.004-05:00

As part of the customary rounds that I have to make around whenever I come back to Covina, California, I was taken to one of my uncles' last night, where I walked into an enormous and newly remodeled home, and, in the corner, my youngest maternal cousin stands in front of the television set, obviously engaged in a video game based on virtual reality. (I know there must be a technical name for this.) The game allows to you play different sports virtually: golf, bowling, even boxing. It is indeed a bizarre scene to watch the little boy fight a phantom - from a medieval point of view, he would be wrestling with a demon, as Jacob wrestling with the angel. My instinctive question, namely, why not go play golf, bowl and box in real life? dissipated as soon as I thought it, for I knew that the world in which this question would be intelligible is shrinking as we speak. Soon, the question as to why people would prefer virtual reality to real reality will be as absurd as the question "why not wash clothes by hand?" We have to face it: the decadence of art in the modern west that had begun soon after the Renaissance was largely based on the invention of "window into the world," whose logical consequence is the society consisting merely of windows into worlds, without showing how to step out of the house. Watching my little cousin play virtual video games has confirmed nearly every fear of the avant-garde thinkers whom I study: it is a civilization that continues to degenerate until it no longer has any access to the real real.

A discussion initiated by Laura the other time had to do with women and fiction, and it is true that the female reader of fiction in the late 18th and 19th century was an essential component to a changing literary world. The demand for fiction was higher than ever; poetry soon was hit with a rapid decline. Nowadays, the joke in the publishing and writing goes: If you are at a party with poets and writers, you can immediate recognize the poets as those who are talking about words and writers as those who are talking about their book deals, because poets don't get book deals. Poetry, because it is not fictional, lost its importance in a society hungry for more stories: not mythologies about mishappenings of strange gods, not fairy tales filled with enigmatic creatures and puzzles that remain closed unless the magic word is spoken, but stories about bourgeois life (romance, marriage, divorce, investments, bankruptcies, etc.), with characters like our meager selves (no fairy mothers, no carpenters, no kings, no princes, no talking bread...) What is so disturbing is that even in the world of children, we have been witnessing an "embourgeoisement" since the 1950s. Roland Barthes was shocked that we made toy version of Citroen cars for kids - were they not supposed to live in a more enchanted world than gas stations? They have the rest of their lives as adult to pump gas at gas stations, why deprive them of childhood? I experienced the same shock last night: why on earth is my 10-year-old cousin playing virtual GOLF?

Fortunately, everything that I want to say has already been said with much more vitriol and force a century ago, by that courageous generation of artists and poets in Europe and then elsewhere who had the nobility of spirit to stand up and speak out against a mediocre and failing civilization, and moreover, to create feverishly more language and more forms than humanly possible, not so much to save Europe but so that whoever comes after cannot say that we were left with nothing. To have taken the responsibility for a civilization and a society to which they deeply objected is almost like assuming the debts left by a delinquent father: it takes courage, pride and the highest form of love, a love that goes against the grain of reality. That reality is tragic: we ARE left with nothing other than this bourgeois, capitalist life, we survive by feeding on virtual realities that range from mutual funds to video games to romance novels, and we believe in nothing (neither the "chef of the sky" as we Chinese call God and his kin, nor the "ancestral mother" as we Taiwanese call Virgin Mary and her kin), we will neither be condemned nor forgiven for our personal excesses (including the excessive frugality and austerity) and failings.

And yet, we cannot say with fairness that we are left with nothing. What makes this highly virtualized reality real nevertheless, somehow, is that not ALL individuals are uncaring, not ALL individuals are conformists. In the darkest of times in the 20th century, modernism and the avant-garde movements, Surrealism above all, had enough love going around them to share nothing other than a daring possibility, namely replenish an impoverished with dreams made out of its own material. It is a project that resembles a bridge I once saw in the mountainous village of Ronda, Spain, which links two sides of a canyon with the very stones carved out of those cliffs. In that way, nature and artifice are united: the engineers had taken stone from nature and given it back, as it were, in the form of a bridge. The avant-garde had shown us a way of taking materials out of reality and giving it back in human form, the goal being to replenish the world with more enchantments. This is the opposite of our virtual reality, which takes fuel out of reality, flattens it into an image and a few schematized action, and store them in the form of virtual data in a computer or television screen. The former adds to the world, the latter subtracts from it. The former creates, the latter consumes.

I know that this distinction is merely for me and my friends: the world shall go on as it is. But it does give me an extraordinary sense of decorum to be able to recognize these people (the way a Clarissa Dalloway recognizing the martyrdom of Septimus Warren Smith at the end of Woolf's masterpiece) as having truly done the thing, to have created, to have protested, to have fought heroically, and to have had this much love for the world despite all its failings.

Consumerism as An Art

2008-08-07T00:09:00.003-05:00

I am writing from Covina, a proletarian suburb in Los Angeles county, where my immediate family immigrated and where my parents still live (along with all my maternal uncles, aunts and their children). In the past few days or so, I have been re-introduced to the great consumerist culture that is such an integral part of American life, which, to her credit, my mother and her sisters have mastered with incredible virtuosity. Since I am often the beneficiary of her activities, my critique of it is not and cannot be a complete condemnation. Here are some tricks that my mother, my eldest aunt and her daughter (my eldest cousin) have mastered:

1) Regular visits at stores such as TJ Max, Marshall's, Home Goods, which might be the most interesting sector of American retail culture, as they collect unsold merchandise from high-end stores and re-sell them cheaply. Some observations about TJ Max: even in Chicago (which cannot compete with L.A. in terms of racial and ethnic diversity), it seems to be frequented by an enormous number of foreigners, especially Italians, the French, Poles and Russians. Here in southern California, TJ Max stores are populated by Filipinos, Hispanics and Chinese/Taiwanese. I myself find that these stores magically embody several locales in one: you find, displayed in the format of the Ye-She (night market) in Taipei or the "brocante" in France, merchandises that belong to proper department stores like Nordstrom's or Galerie Lafayette. In other words, one hunts for bargains, and sometimes one even bargains, that is, verbally, because the goods are often unlabeled that prices are assigned to them randomly. It is, however, shocking to find items abstractly priced at $150 marked down to $19.99, suggesting that all these numbers are more fiction than anything else. Often, there is no material aspect in the item that tells us what its real value is, a very disturbing thought. (Footnote: I came to the realization that, for many sellers, the difference between $20 and $19.99 is that the latter marks the status of the item as being "on sale" - namely, even the price does not refer to the monetary value but to the "status." Mind-boggling.) At the same time, as my mother and aunts claim, it is the best value to shop there, and I am afraid that they are right.

2) The use of coupons: sometimes even expired ones, sometimes even one coupon per item to get the maximum dollars off. Seriously, why does it make sense for stores such as Bed Bath & Beyond to aggressively send off coupons to all its potential customers? Might it not be more efficient to simply lower the prices? Or is the point to encourage visits? Also: apparently it is possible to buy coupons on e-bay (totally mind-boggling for me).

3) e-bay: where my mother and her sisters shop for their favorite brand of Italian bags and purses, which is not on sale in the United States. Since they are all devoted e-bay checkers, my eldest cousin Charlene always courteously informs the rest if she plans on bidding for an object, thereby avoiding competition and price-jacking. But again, it seems virtually surrealist to me that one could "buy" coupons on e-bay, meaning that one is buying a discount. Is the stock market this complicated? The latest masterpiece: My mother gave someone a penny on e-bay for a secret (we are literally back in the world of Indo-European fairy-tales, aren't we, when secrets have to be bought), namely, how to get a discount coupon from Crate & Barrel. In other words, the man did not sell her a coupon; he sold her the advice as to how to obtain one. Now should I speak, or perhaps I will save this secret to sell on e-bay?

All in all, it would seem that shopping in the US is quite an art, the way it is not in the Old World. Paris, for example, is a tempting city, a city filled with beauty that can be purchased. Although I could resort to the excuse that I am an art historian and therefore in the business of beauty, I wonder if there isn't something much more primitive at work, something that drives species of bower birds to collect blue objects or rats to take home shiny buttons - in short, it is difficult (for me) not to follow the trace of a glimpse of shiny stones, lovely tea pots, enticing book titles, pretty dresses, etc. But shopping in the Old World is also old-fashioned: one goes out with a purse, takes money out of the purse, buys the object and goes home. Since one is likely to have tried on the dress, discussed it with the salesperson, looked at it together in the mirror for half an hour, commented on whether it looks alright, perhaps being offered to tailor the dress to one's size (if you are difficult like me), one is likely to be pleased with the purchase - they don't take returns any way.

Things are hardly this simple in the United States. The first week after my repatriation, during that week of my ecstatic reunification with Chicago, I strolled into Macy's/old Marshall Field's since I thought that my perfume is nearly out, I could get a second bottle. As soon as I came up to pay, I was bombarded with an "option": Would you like to apply for a Macy's credit card to get 20% your purchases today and tomorrow? I was dumbfounded - how could I say no? The lady, with her very heavy Polish accent and beguiling smile, asked me if I liked shoes, since the store is having a big shoe sale upstairs... Thus, the irresistible Sirens of Sales lured me into the labyrinth of consumer goods, and though I slayed the Minotaur and accomplished the task that brought me there (that re-charge for the perfume) I also came out with other victims. The incredible thing is that the episode is not over. Macy's has my address now and has started aggressively to court me by more sale's coupons and offers in the mail. The long psychological battle between me and Macy's has begun, until I take that inevitable initiative to break up: by canceling my credit card.

My feeling is that consumerism in the US is truly an epic battle, and it is no longer between the merchant and the buyer. My family, as old-world people tend to be, were good at verbal bargaining, and now with immigration to the US they have transformed that skill into different kinds of tricks in order to out-smart the consumer's market. If capitalism is clever and manipulative, let us try to out-smart it by its own poison - seems to be their attitude. And it is this obligatory engagement in the epic battle of buying that is the predicament of middle-class life in the US. It is mentally exhausting and sometimes morally humiliating - why on earth should I occupy my mind with such matters as calculating pennies? But we have just had a discussion about race in America, and to turn the discourse slightly, doesn't it seem that consumer culture is what brings whites, blacks, Asians, Filipinos, Hispanics and the rest all together? Never mind slave-holders and slaves, Catholics and Protestants, indigenous or colonials, English-speakers or non-English speakers, we all understand that it is good to pay $400 for something that is sold elsewhere for $800.

I don't think that I am being cynical, only realistic. From the point of view of a capitalist society, to get different people to shop in the same shops might just be the communitarian feat. This is not to say that they actually understand each other; only, from the point of view of the social, what ELSE would count as a sign of them having understood one another? What ELSE is there for Asians and whites to understand about one another, for example, that would actually be meaningful to American society? I don't think Asians and whites "understand" each other - they don't need to. They shop at the same places, and the new immigrants aspire to a vulgarized version of WASP lifestyle. (Thanks, Gale and Jeremy, for illuminating me to the fact that I've been living in a nest of WASPs!) All this is pointing to something like an internal leveling mechanism based on income and consumer habits. What I would find interesting is if the topic of race can actually put some pressure on this way of conceiving the American life, because, from the point of view of consumerism, the only excluded group would be the group that does not purchase and has little purchasing power, skin color matters not.

The "conversation" on race in America

2008-08-01T18:40:00.006-05:00

I've just published an entry about this on my blog but it's something a feel pretty strongly about so I thought I might write about it as my first entry here at a common fire (hello!). It seems that all the cable shows on politics are fixated today on the question of the supposed "playing" of the "race card" in the presidential campaign, and whether Obama or McCain played it. I think this very metaphor may be a distorting and unconstructive one. Can one be serious about race in America by using poker metaphors? I suppose. But the figure of speech itself is trivializing. Even using it to talk about politics demeans political discussion.

Mike Barnacle on MSNBC just said again that the race issue is "tedious": he had earlier said he was "tired" of it. It's strange to hear this repetitious mantra from white commentators that seemingly unanimously agree that it's bad for Obama if race is in any way whatsoever spoken of in connection to the campaign. (From what I've seen, black commentators are of the same opinion.) So the issue is tiresome, tedious, etc., and we (we white commentators?) would prefer if it just went away, or -- a more precious view which I heard Heidi Harris offer on MSNBC -- we wonder 'Didn't we get past all this already?', and yet still categorically say that if there's any talk about race at all, well, that's bad for the black candidate. What does all of that taken together mean? It seems to be a pretty unequivocal admission by everybody that has this rather privileged position as a face and a voice on the cable networks that race is in fact a major factor in American life, so much so that the Obama campaign ought to do everything in its power to make sure it disappears. (I know I probably overestimate the talking heads as a measure of whatever the actual state of opinion about these things in America is).

How can people who hold that view then say the issue is tedious or tiring? It's silently an absolutely definitive one if it has that much power. As I said on my own blog, as I watched the rather loud and emotional exchange between Leo Terrell (black) and Heidi Harris (white) I was struck by the uncomfortable and sad realization about how childish we Americans are as a people regarding race in our country, both its past and its present. I don't mean to sound superior about this. I know we are all often rather childish about sensitive issues, even (perhaps especially) in our own personal relationships--I've been married for two years and I feel like I know very well that I often fail to really act how I imagine a mature adult acts. Yet it is even more important with respect to something that socially divides so much of the citizenry to be able to at least, say, half of the time, be able to talk without raising our voices and outright yelling at each other: which some of our leading lights in public discourse can't seem to manage for five minutes. I believe I've seen maybe one actual, intelligent, respectful discussion of these issues. If I remember right it was on some show on PBS; probably the Jim Lehrer News Hour. Which we all know is so representative of the American public.

A bit disappointed,
-J

P.S. I've just read through some of the old entries y'all have written here, and I'm relieved to see that race has been a topic here already. I look forward to reading some more of what's been said here. Greetings again, everyone!

The Women of Fan Fiction

2008-07-19T13:11:00.003-05:00

So, I came across this article on the legality of fan fiction on aldaily today. The legal issues themselves are nothing fascinating (although, I do think it's a travesty if copyright law stands in the way of fan fiction, whatever of you think of it - once an author's characters are out in the public domain, seems to me it's her problem if her fans can do more with them than she can). But what I found interesting about the article is its assertion that women are responsible for most fan fiction. Since fan fiction seems to arise mostly around sci-fi and fantasy creations, generally considered male genres, I find this curious. Am I guilty of stereotyping if I suggest that perhaps women are equally compelled by the worlds created by sci-fi and fantasy writers, but want writing about these worlds that is more driven by relationships and more interested in character development - and, not finding this in most genre writing, take on the task themselves? Does anyone know if women really are behind most fan fiction? And if so, why aren't they just writing their own character-driven sci-fi and fantasy novels in the first place?

Universals! Universals?

2008-07-08T17:11:00.002-05:00

My friend Rainer Rumold, a.k.a "Feuer" responds to my entry on "Were You There?" and the universality in the arts...

Universals! Universals? Why are we in contemporary academia so
sensitive to the claims that come with this term? Is it because it
sounds so hollow and disingenuous when we look at global developments
dominated by the ups and downs of the international stock markets which
in spite of cracks showing along the lines of dollar vs. euro alliances
and emerging rifts in Asia between China and India seem to assure the
one obvious and shared result: the rich get richer and the poor get
poorer. The present meeting of the G-8 in Japan has just decided to hold
off on the aid promises previously made to a continent in distress until
"next year." No wonder then that African artists today find themselves
in a catch 22 situation when they attempt to incorporate in their work
the language of Western modernism, which we consider as
"universal," even if they use that language in order to critique and
criticize economic and cultural globalization made in the West. While
highly praised in the West, these modernist artists are found at
home to be either still enslaved by Western culture, or, when they try
to go 'native African,' they are speaking to no one in particular-
except to us. As there is no common African language, nor is there a
common artistic expression that is 'Africa.' The making of "African"
masks is considered a commercially motivated retro appeal to tourism
from the Eur-American sphere which in the wake of the historical
avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century has adopted and
maintained the view of a "universal" significance of "African" art.

Or is it , on the other hand, that we Amer-Europeans are still
touched to the core by the claim of the universality of the arts upon
which our humanist education was/is grounded? Such claim are
representative of a certain desire felt at the core of our
self-understanding, of which Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote so articulately
-in the 1820s and 30s- in one of his great essays on language and its
influence on the spiritual development of mankind ( I translate quite freely):

"The inkling of a totality and the endeavor toward it is given
immediately with the feeling of our individuality, and it becomes
stronger in the same degree as the latter becomes more pronounced, since
every single human being bears in him/herself the total essence of man,
albeit only in terms of a single path of development. We do not even
have the most remote idea of any other but an individual system of
consciousness. But this endeavor and the concept of mankind which is the
seed of that ineradicable yearning and desire do not allow the
conviction to vanish that the separate individuality be but an
appearance of a conditional existence of spiritual being."

After all, for Humboldt, the basis for that self-understanding of a
"total essence of man" lies in language itself, and "it is not an empty
play with words, if one understands language as derived only from itself
in independence and as divinely free." Humboldt is music to my ear, but
is it the music which we hear around the globe? For that matter, do we
hear the spiritual "Were you there?," Joyce is writing so brilliantly as
well as touchingly about, around the globe? Why then can we not be
content - or are we after all - with hearing that "universal" music in
our insular elitist libraries or in our Christian churches, Anglican or
other ( in the United States increasingly a base for "conservative"
politics), and let the "rest" be "the rest"! Am I still as immature as
I was in the late 1960s, when I , a new graduate student at Stanford
University, approached my future "Doktorvater," an international known
specialist in the thought of Humboldt, with the happy tiding that
"Sprache ist ein objektiver Sozialbesitz" ( language is an objective
social possession)! Or was this admittedly vulgar Marxist dictum, a
robotic slogan of the day that has had its day, however mindlessly
repeated, perhaps after all a masked form of that " ineradicable yearning
and desire [which] do not allow the conviction to vanish that the
separate individuality be but an appearance of a conditional existence of
spiritual being"? Finally, to furher complicate the issues or to end in
a question as I began with a question: Is such a desire for the
"universal" only a Eurocentric creative malady- do 'the Chinese" or the
Indians of the Andes, for example, share such "ineradicabl yearning"? -
Universals! Universals?

The Painted Churches

2008-07-08T08:11:00.004-05:00

In uploading my pictures, I also found these from when Jeremy and I went to visit the German/Czech painted churches that lie between Houston and San Antonio. Built in the late 1800s, these Catholic churches stand oddly alone in tiny towns, representing the small European villages from whence their makers came. The insides are intricately designed with trompe d'oeil designs, floral patterns, and sentimental Virgins and Jesuses.

Many central Europeans immigrated to Texas in the 1850s after the 1848 revolutions collapsed into conservative regimes, and they found themselves out of place in this slave state that had just joined the United States. They were Unionists as the Civil War approached, voting to remain in the United States while most of Texas voted to secede. It's their accordions and polka beats you hear in Tejano music - the Catholic Tejanos and the Catholic Europeans (and Cajuns from Louisiana) stuck together.

Jazz, the universal language

2008-07-07T21:46:00.009-05:00

This is a Post-script to my entry on Universality.

Last night, I went to the Checkerboard Lounge in its new Hyde Park location with two friends, one of them having been there when we went to its old location as undergraduates. Then, the lounge was literally in a Chicago ghetto, and the audience was a mixed between intensely dressed up black folks (suits, high heels, gold chains, hats) from the neighborhood and frumpily dressed white tourists (a bus full of Germans came to occupy a very long table, clapping not quite on beat) and white undergrads. By the time we came out of the lounge, there was no bus anymore in a neighborhood where no taxis visit. We got home thanks to a catering man, who knew that we needed a ride. He sometimes swung by the neighborhood for precisely folks like us, just to make some cash.

Here, in a Harper Court now owned by the University of Chicago, Checkerboard Lounge has undergone a makeover. It has clean floors, clean bathrooms, a very spacious main room and large stage. Most importantly, however, it was no longer clear who is from the neighborhood and who is not. In fact, I would venture to say that everyone in the room - white, black, Asians, old, young - was probably from Hyde Park or the vicinity. The place is now the heart of the Hyde Park Jazz Society, and organizers urged people to join and leave their addresses. In the new Checkerboard Lounge, it is no longer the black regulars and the white tourists (including urban tourists from Evanston like ourselves), but a neighborhood where blacks and whites took civic responsibility together.

As to be expected, the musicians on the gig last night were all African Americans, but toward the end of the second set, they invited their friends to come and play, namely, the white folks sitting in the front row who turned out to be bass and piano players. I was rather moved to see all of this, having been away from the US for the past two years. It is perhaps one of the few places in this country where black and white Americans can be seen interacting in a healthy and fertile relationship. This does not mean that race does not matter or disappears. The scene much resembles the congregation in St. Paul (my local Episcopalian church), where the white folks came in beach sandals and shorts, and the black folks came in bright colors, slick suits and panama hats. The cultural difference is glaring. It is also clear that jazz is a shining feat of African-American culture, and the whites in the audience are perfectly respectful of that. It is as if the whites knew themselves to be guests in a black household - but wanted guests.

However, as soon as the white jazz musicians get on stage, it becomes clear that jazz is a universal language, too, that transcends race. The African-American musicians very visibly have enough respect for their own music to want to share it with others. It also becomes clear that it would be impossible for the white musicians to remain white if they want to be good jazz players. Just like non-homosexual men of the theater are not quite straight either, the white jazz players are not quite white. This was just affirmed by a show on PBS mentioning the African-American troops fighting the Germans in France (under French command, too, because the American command could not deal with their race), and the French were utterly transfixed by the music they brought. It makes complete sense that jazz in the 1920s and 1930s was to transform modern French culture; Duke Ellington was featured in avant-garde journals as the new hero.

In short, I simply want to affirm that, not only is it possible and imperative that we speak of universality in the arts, it might be the case that the arts is the only place where we can truly speak of transcending identities. The arts is the locus of human life where the leitmotif is metamorphosis, and things are never what they quite appear.

Jamaica

2008-07-07T18:40:00.006-05:00

A few pictures from Jamaica. The first is the Eliot Church, up on top of a hill among mountains because I think the missionaries liked to be closer to God. It was one of the most stable missions because the long-time minister, Loren Thompson, was a good preacher and everyone appeared to like him. He came to Jamaica in the early 1840s (after a brief career as a traveling Bible salesman and a few years at Oberlin), and he died in New York, during a sabbatical, in the mid-1860s.

The second is a picture of a farmer, Robert, working the "family land" near what was once the Brandon Hill school, an out-station of the American mission in Jamaica. You can see, sort of, the mountains in the background. In spite of their appearance, it is all mostly cultivated land, planted with coffee bushes, banana, mango, yams, breadfruit, casava, etc.

After slavery, freed people took small plots of land and claimed them for their own. Many left the enormous sugar estates of the coastal plains and came up into the mountains where they could get land. Unlike the European way of doing things, a person's land was not left to an eldest son, but it passed on to all of the children in a family, and they cultivated it together to pass onto their children. This infuriated the missionaries who could never quite understand why husbands and wives worked on separate yards.

The fecundity of the island should be clear - my guide said that there's a Jamaican joke - if you plant a pencil you'll grow an eraser tree. The tiny plots of land are sufficient for growing a diversity of food, and people trade with their neighbors for whatever they don't have.

Who’s Afraid of Universality?

2008-07-06T12:06:00.003-05:00

On the occasion of a conference on the avant-garde in Gent, Belgium this summer, my friend Rainer and I got ourselves into an impassioned debate on whether we can still speak of the old Enlightenment notion of universality in art and literature. Both of us are scholars of the avant-garde (he is albeit one generation more advanced than me), thus we are both perfectly aware of the ideological implication when a westerner evokes the universal value of humanism, which by our time has only to be extremely cautious of its own provincial definition of the human as no more than homo sapiens, with a sovereign individual consciousness and impeccable capacity of reason and to legislate to itself.

At the same time, it is not clear whether humanism can be said to have found an alternative thus far. My own discontent with the conference (see entry) had to do precisely with the fact that the organizers’ eagerness to show its liberal, friendly face to an emerging multi-culti Europe has unwittingly encouraged nationalism in its mediocre, provincial form. Not only that, it seems to have fostered a culture whereby the supposedly culturally neutral, privileged white North Americans find themselves seduced by the exoticism of cultures having suffered isolation under Stalinist totalitarianism. Exoticism in this case has literally to do with the quality of being on the outside: Slovakians, Czechs, Hungarians have become “exotic” not due to being minor cultures at the crossroad of empires but by virtue of having been excluded by “Europe.” In short, my feeling is that the fear for being labeled an imperialist “universalist” has led to an unhealthy sanction for provinciality and, in worse cases, ghetto mentality. The paradox is that it would be humanly impossible for me to recuperate the notion of universality by speaking universally, because (as Hegel teaches) universality has no meaning unless understood in dialectics with particularly. I will thus make the predictable move of telling stories from the world of the particular and idiosyncratic.

In the two years that I have spent in Paris, I have never felt my American identity more strongly affirmed than on Sunday mornings, where I typically found myself in St. Georges Anglican parish in the smug, pristine, bourgeois 16th arrondissement. I identified strongly with the Anglo-Catholic liturgy and felt at home with the genteel, graciousness of the English priests, but after months of singing nothing other than English and German hymnals over and over again on every Sunday, I realized that I was missing the African-American hymnals that many American Episcopalian churches have incorporated into their worship. One Sunday, ennuyée by music that contained no minor chords and always ended in perfect cadences, I started browsing the hymnbook to see what the musical canon of the Anglican church consisted of. To my surprise, I saw the very song that had convinced me years ago for once and for all of the greatness of the African-American musical tradition, namely “Were You There?” which for many American Episcopalians is the standard and indispensable part of Good Friday liturgy.
What is extraordinary is that, even though the smug Anglo-Catholics cannot be expected, for example, to clap their hands and stump their feet to an Afro-Caribbean sanctus, “Were You There?” is nevertheless recognized by the Anglican Communion as an English hymn. “Were You There?” in its impeccable combination of folkloric simplicity and the grandeur of the tragic, has been recognized as not only a song particular to African-American form of worship but is a magnificent contribution to universal Christianity. In other words, the Anglican church (whose particular history, tradition and place in Christianity at large also must be recognized) incorporated
“Were You There?” as a way of valorizing the trans-national, trans-racial relevance and beauty of this poetic and musical masterpiece.

One of the unfortunate consequences of universality and canonization of any work of art or any text is that it permits many of us to become intellectually lazy, as if we have only to accept all things that the great masters told us are great (the culture of the “great books” that my institution, the University of Chicago, is famous for sustaining). We no longer ask ourselves why they are great, we no longer seek empirical proof for ourselves as to why it is this book (and not many, many others) that must be read. It is therefore important for anyone who claims the universality of anything to demonstrate its greatness empirically, which is what I would like to do here.

The foremost virtue of “Were You There?” is its simplicity. The first stanza goes:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh…! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble,
Tremble…

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
The interrogative phrase “Were you there?” is perhaps the simplest way of imploring others to partake in an event that they did not experience firsthand; in short, it is an unpretentious way of revealing one’s identity as a witness. By saying “Were you there?” a triangular configuration is introduced: victim (“my Lord”), witness (the position of the speaker) and a third presence (the listener, the position we occupy as we listen to the poem). It also must be noted that there is no proper name in this entire stanza: no Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate, no Romans nor Jews, no name of the disciple, not even the name of Jesus himself. I suspect that it is one of the secrets as to why, amidst numberless great African-American hymns (including the passionate, emancipating “Go Down Moses”), it is this one that has become the testimony of suffering, not of one group, one individual, one race, but of every human being. It does not matter, then, where the atrocity took place; what matters is whether the song can convince “you” of the terror of what “they” did to “him,” there. As a historian of modern art, I never fail to see the image of Picasso’s wailing woman with a dead child in her hand (a modern Pietà) when I hear this hymn.

The second virtue of the song is its magnificent expressivity that miraculously avoids any sentimentality or mannerism. This is accomplished musically and not discursively, thereby avoiding the danger of the rhetorical. (It is not as if the listener needed to be persuaded, as in the situation of a politician giving a speech to an audience. The listener must be made to share the pain, not to be convinced of any particular ideology.) It should also be mentioned that the entire tune is in a major key (I think that it is even best performed in the grand, open and nearly naïve C Major), a key that in the Anglo-Germanic musical tradition would have signified neutrality, at times even gaiety and lightness. (I would be interested to know if ethno-musicologists have come up with explanations as to why happy music in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern tradition is often in minor keys whereas sorrowful tunes in the African tradition can often be carried in major keys. Did not Walter Benjamin say once (to children of Berlin) that Gypsy music, even when happy, sounds sad?) The neutrality of the major key, I believe, here works magically to suppress any sign of emotional manipulation. The song thereby becomes the very opposite of, say, Spanish flamenco or Portuguese fado where the lamentative has been perfected to such a degree via a plethora of musical tricks (modulations between parallel major and minor keys, from E Major to e minor, for example). The first three note – So-Do-Mi – of the verse forms a major triad (third inversion), emphasizing once again the simplicity and plainness, a form of modesty and pudeur.

Since the major key has reined in the expressive domain and structurally prevented the rhetorical, the singer is now free to be as expressive as she or he wants; there will be no risk for falling into sentimentality. The proper way to sing this song (I believe to have witnessed excellent performances on Good Fridays throughout the years) is to begin the first verse in a soft, plaintive but timid tone, with a crescendo toward the end of the phrase, followed by a refrain of the same verse, this time in a louder (ff), sterner, emphatic manner. Needless to say, while the first verse is discursive (literally asking the question “were you there?”), the second verse has a non-discursive quality that might suggest that the narrator knows perfectly well that the listener was not there, did not experience the event. Depending on the singer’s choice, the second verse can be made to express sorrow, grief, even reproach.
Then comes the long exclamation, “Oh!...” where a singer trained in the Gospel tradition would want to demonstrate her virtuosity. This can be made to resemble a grief-stricken sigh, a painful wailing, a cry of protest, all depending on the singer’s choice. The exclamation goes to its peak and descends once again, caught, as it were, by the word “sometimes,” signifying the return to the discursive (to reason, to testimony, to narrative). “Sometimes” here breaks up the temporal continuity of the narrative, for it is no longer clear how long ago the event in question took place. “Sometimes” is also an alternative to the more assertive “always” or “all the time,” suggesting that the narrator’s discourse is a subaltern one, which only “sometimes” gets heard.

Now the peculiarity of the use “causes” instead of “makes” in the verse “Sometimes it causes me to tremble” might be explained by the fact that lyrics was written in Elizabethan English (I cannot confirm this at the moment). But “causes” in our language today has a particular ring of impersonality, as if “I” was “caused” to tremble much like the wind makes the leaves of the tree tremble. Once again, what would have been a sentimental expression of grief is now turned “tectonic,” as it were, by its proximity to natural phenomena. It goes without saying, then, that the singer’s triple “tremble…tremble…tremble” would be then sung in such a way as to perform the rhythmic oscillation that we envision in objects trembling. The stanza then finishes off with the refrain – this time merely to mark a sorrowful but graceful resignation (one might imagine the St. Peter’s Pietà transformed into song), “Were you there…when they crucified my Lord?” There is a musical round-ness and internal closure (as if the mourning were complete).

The following stanzas is each a classical iconography from the Passion, from the Crucifixion to the Deposition. Its simplicity can only be described as hieratic, and each one can be imagined as a discretely cloisonné scene on the predella of a medieval altarpiece.

Were you there when they nailed him to the tree…

Were you there when they pierced him in the side…

Were you there when the sun refused to shine…

Were you there when they laid him in the tomb…

I will end my analysis here, but I think that it is clear that “Were You There?” both represents and transcends African-American form of Christianity. It embodies universal qualities that can be applied not only to all art traditions but all artistic media: expressive without being expressivist, lyrical without being affected, pathétique without being sentimental. Its qualitative equivalent in the Christian artistic tradition would be Quattrocento painting, which combines the hieratism of Byzantium and the Internationl Gothic with the humanism of early Renaissance.

My final word – coming back to the question of universality – is that the universal, like the particular, is a quality that we can ascribe to a work of art by means of our experience of it. That is to say, it is not an intrinsic attribute to the object (the way “white” is an attribute to “dove”), rather, it is an experience as fugitive and contingent as all human experiences, such as freedom, happiness, and so forth. It makes little sense to say that Marlene Dietrich is “universal,” but it makes perfect sense to say that the song “Lily Marleen” in the years of the Second World War, insofar as it addresses the homesickness of soldiers fighting far away from home and mustering up their spirits by conjuring images of their beloved, became an universal phenomenon so much that a French and English version of the song had to be written, and (the final evidence of its unforeseen universality) the Nazis, realizing that a song that was written to boost the morale of the Wehrmacht had started to make not just German but French and English soldiers weep, put a ban on the song. The invisible figure of “Lily Marleen” the German popular re-incarnation of “Lou,” whose photograph Guillaume Apollinaire wanted to show to fellow combatants in the trenches of the First World War, to make sure that they remember that beauty exists in the same world as barbed wire fence and gas attacks.

I myself remember my surprise when, upon meeting my friend Paroma Chatterjee for the first time, I learned that the poet Tagore was a Bengali national hero. For me and my childhood friends in Taiwan, Tagore was nearly our poet, as his poems in mandarin Chinese translation were a very refreshing alternative to the 300 poems of the Tang dynasty that we were required to memorize, and, in many ways, much closer to the egocentric pomposity of adolescent idealism than those hermetic texts that speak of nothing other than flowers falling at night and moonlight upon one’s bedstead. Tagore, as the first poet from the Asian/Oriental part of the world to win the Nobel prize in literature, was a universal poet for us insofar as reading his work represented the possibility of reading literature outside of the canon of merely Chinese nationalist literature sanctioned by the schoolmasters. We read Tang poetry in class, but we read Tagore on lunch breaks, sometimes hiding it under the table… At the same time, it is in listening to Paroma tell me how beautiful Tagore’s poems are when recited and sung in Bengali that I began to be fascinated by Bengalis and Bengali culture. Tagore led me to the particularity of Bengali culture precisely because he had been a universal phenomenon that was able to touch Taiwanese adolescents growing up under the KMT regime.

The experience of universality, in short, is not only valuable but instrumental to the dignity of human beings who wish to step out of the particularities of their own language, ethnicity, race, gender, and wish to see the world from another’s point of view. The fear for universality will destroy particularity because it makes particularity utterly meaningless. Only by recognizing who we are in our particularity can we figure out what it is that we can bring to the table of universality; inversely, only by recognizing that the world is much greater and much more heterogeneous than the Anschauung carved out by our particular language, ethnicity, race and gender can we develop the capacity to try to enter into the particularity of another culture, be it German, French, Taiwanese, African-American or Bengali.

Whither Anglicanism?

2008-06-29T16:39:00.003-05:00

From this just-posted article on the Times website:

Anglican conservatives, frustrated by the continuing stalemate over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, declared on Sunday that they would defy the church’s historic lines of authority and create a new power bloc within the church led by a council of predominantly African archbishops.

The announcement came at the close of an unprecedented week-long meeting of Anglican conservatives in Jerusalem, who contend that they represent a majority of the 77 million members of the Anglican Communion.

They depicted their efforts as the culmination of an anti-colonial struggle against the church’s seat of power in Great Britain, whose missionaries first brought Anglican Christianity to the developing world.

The conservatives say many of the descendants of those Anglican missionaries in Britain and North America are now following what they call a “false gospel” that allows a malleable, liberal interpretation of Scripture.

The article suggests that the liberal response is that this is the same-old, same-old. Perhaps it is. But I find it a fascinating manipulation of third-world nationalism, a liberating ethos, to support a movement that is all about restriction.

Standardizing labels

2008-06-29T16:28:00.003-05:00

I hope that I'm not the only who thinks that our blog is getting better and better everyday. In honor of this awesome blog (of interest not only to ourselves but also to others), I'd suggest that we standardize our labels more so that they are easier to look up - for example: history, politics, religion, art & literature, entertainment, etc. This is truly becoming a journal!

The Disadvantages of Elite Education

2008-06-29T14:58:00.002-05:00

Apologies for the flurry of posts. This is what happens when you don't have internet 24-7. You've got to save it all up on your hard drive and send it out to cyberspace all in one go.

But I wanted to flag this article by Yale prof William Deresciewicz about the disadvantages of elite education. Nothing particularly new here, but it's a well-thought out piece on the ways in which elite education entrenches class divisions and actually forecloses possibilities for those within its ranks. It's nice to see an article about this in the American Scholar, of all places. I may have something to say in a bit about the disadvantages of an elite law education. We'll see.

Code Switching and Authenticity

2008-06-29T14:45:00.002-05:00

A good ninety-nine percent of the time - and more, perhaps, as my older relatives pass out of my life - I speak unaccented American English. Nevermind that I don't differentiate pin and pen, Aaron and Erin, Ben and bin, when people guess, they say perhaps I'm from Vermont, and they never, ever, say Texas.

But then there's that one percent, when I'm speaking to my grandparents, or my cousins in Georgia, or when African American speech flips a switch in my head and suddenly I find myself responding with a Southern "yes, ma'am." Linguists, I believe, call this code switching. It's not a particularly remarkable phenomenon, but it comes with pretty good shock value. It's always fun to see the look on a northeasterner's face when they hear you talk to your Southern grandpa for the first time.

But here's the thing. I've never really had a southern accent or even a Texas accent. I do remember training myself not to say y'all sometime in high school, but it's not as though I grew up with a drawl that I learned to conceal when I went north for college.

So, when I call the elderly sister of a prison I'm working with down here in Alabama, and I automatically drop into the slow, syrupy intonations of my mother's family, what am I doing? I'm not faking it, exactly, and it's not as though I make a decision that this person ought to be addressed in a southern accent. But it's not entirely unconscious either. In my mind, the word "drop" describes what I do, I just let my voice fall into a different register, one that's higher and sweeter and lazier of pronunciation. When it comes as a response to someone else's accent, it's more automatic. But when I initiate the code switch myself, there's clearly been some sort of assessment - that my client's sister will be more receptive to a gentle southern accent, say, or that the librarian at the Alabama archives might just be suspicious of Yankees.

I find my code switching is more pronounced on the phone, perhaps because all of our vocal manners are. My fellow interns poke fun at the way I pull out my accent, and they make me feel as though there's something suspicious and inauthentic about my code switching. As though I were trading on my southern heritage, which, of course, I am. Unaccented English sticks out in Montgomery; it labels you as a foreigner and possibly a Yank, and it's nice to be able to change registers and blend in. Just as it's nice not have to ask what hush puppies are or who Jefferson Davis is.

Still, it bothers me that I can't determine what I'm entitled to call mine. That sugary accent that somehow I inherited but never fully possessed - is that mine? And the cultural trappings I know so well, but never participated in? Do we still get to own the things we disavow?

The Blessed Sameness of Barnes & Noble

2008-06-29T14:26:00.002-05:00

I've been living in Montgomery, Alabama, for just about a month now. Montgomery's quite a nice little Southern city. There's the AA minor league baseball team - the Montgomery Biscuits (yes, really, the Biscuits) - and the Shakespeare festival I haven't been to yet and a few pockets of sophistication nestled in among the meat-and-threes and the Confederate memorials and the shocking display on George Wallace in the state archives.

Still, aside from my two-year stint in Moscow, this is the first time in my life I've lived in a city where you can't have the New York Times delivered to your doorstep. After a month, the novelty of returning to the world of grits, bibles, and flying roaches was beginning to wear off. This week was hot, the Alabama criminal justice system is depressing, and federalism was getting me down. I needed a shot of cosmopolitanism. So I went to Barnes & Noble.

Oh, I know I'm supposed to lament the advent of stores like Barnes & Noble. Displacing the local bookstore, bulldozing regional variation, imposing that nowhereland retail chain sameness in town after American town. You're all good liberals; you know the rant.

But here's the secret. Today, I love Barnes & Noble. Today, that sameness - that reliable green lettering, those wooden shelves so predictably stocked - is no less than a blessing. Is like central air on a muggy afternoon. Is restorative. Is comforting. Is the sameness not of blight, but of cosmopolitan promise. And is definitely the only place in Montgomery that sells vegetarian cookbooks.

I bought: Moosewood Restaurant Simple Suppers: Fresh Ideas for the Weeknight Table; The Ten Year Nap, a new novel by Meg Wolitzer I discovered while browsing the Atlantic Monthly in the periodical aisle; 2007 Best American Short Stories, edited, somewhat alarmingly, by Stephen King; and the collected poems of Philip Larken. It was a beautiful splurge. I feel renewed and ready to do battle with habeas corpus law (and Alabama roaches) once again.

Collective Guilt?

2008-06-25T12:48:00.005-05:00

I want to reflect on the honest and revealing documentary *Traces of the Trade* by Katrina Browne et al, which was shown last night on Chicago PBS. But before I go into this film, which follows members of an old, privileged white American family of New England stock as they explore their ancestral complicity in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, I would like to cite Hannah Arendt in 1968 on the question of collective responsibility:

"There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them. But there is no such thing as being or feeling guilty for things that happened without oneself actively participating in them. This is an important point, worth making loudly and clearly at a moment when so many good white liberals confess to guilt feelings with respect to the Negro question. I do not know how many precedents there are in history for such misplaced feelings, but I do know that in postwar Germany, where similar problems arose with respect to what had been done by the Hitler regime to Jews, the cry 'We are all guilty' that at first hearing sounded so very noble and tempting has actually only served to exculpate to a considerable degree those who actually were guilty. Where all are guilty, nobody is. Guilt, unlike responsibility, always singles out; it is strictly personal. It refers to an act, not to intentions or potentialities. It is only in a metaphorical sense that we can say we guilty for the sins of our fathers or our people or mankind, in short, for deeds we have not done, although the course of events may well make us pay for them. And since sentiments of guilt, mens rea or bad conscience, the awareness of wrong doing, play such an important role in our legal and moral judgment, it may be wise to refrain from such metaphorical statements which, when taken literally, can only lead into a phony sentimentality in which all real issues are obscured."

Keeping in mind Arendt's unsentimental suspicion of the notion of collective guilt (which we know is motivated by her fiercely impersonal sense of justice), I wonder what it was that made it existentially important to this young woman Katrina Browne to come to terms with her ancestors, the DeWolfs, the most prominent and wealthiest slave traders in the United States. Browne's desire to confront her ancestor's complicity in a morally degrading enterprise led her to gather her own relatives, essentially privileged white Episcopalians, to trace the history of the slave trade together. They go as far as traveling to Ghana and Cuba to interview scholars of the history of slave trade, to visit sites of the slave market and plantations. Meanwhile, everything goes to make apparent that this journey was ultimately about confronting what it means to be not only white but in the white American elite. This becomes pointed when the whites in question felt - many for the first time in their lives - unwanted and snubbed when participating in a festival in Ghana, making them viscerally feel their race.

What is striking in this documentary for me is the extent to which the whites want to be loved and forgiven by those whom they believe to have oppressed. This is far from being a universal phenomenon since the Baba Chinese, for example, to whom I partially belong, do not seem particularly eager to be loved by the indigenous Javanese, at whose cost they had been able to prosper under the Dutch colonial regime, and toward whom they maintain till this day an unapologetic sense of superiority. (In fact, while most educated Europeans today feel embarrassed about colonialism, the Baba Chinese who have integrated and inter-married seamlessly into the Dutch society have yet to internalized this aspect of the European historical consciousness broadly speaking.)

It is probably obvious to us all that the notion of collective guilt is a particularly white phenomenon, be it on the part of post-war Germans (regarding the European Jews) or the white Americans (regarding the descendants of the African slaves). Equally obvious is the fact that the urgency to have a clear moral conscience regarding the wrongs of the world is a distinctly Hebraic-Christian heritage. At the same time, I would hesitate before seeing the sentiments and behavior of Katrina Browne and her folks as simply "Christian."

At one point during their journey, having been trapped in a tourist package modeled after "the life of the slaves" on the vestiges of a sugarcane plantation in Cuba, one of the family members breaks down. The gray-haired woman explodes in anger and frustration, saying, "Damn it, I need more communication among us about this experience, we have gone on this trip, and yet we are still being our Protestant selves, each to our own..." I think it was the most important moment of truth in this documentary. The woman is right to point out that the sense of the privacy of the individual soul is Protestant, and I would go further by pointing out that the entire journey, which was haunted by the wish to have the sins of the ancestors expiated by the victims, is distinctly Protestant. In other words, what is distinctive about this case of collective guilt is that those who saw themselves as "guilty" perceive the agents of forgiveness to be those whom they perceive as victims.

I do not question Katrina Browne when she says at one point in the film that the whites ought to ask for forgiveness, but I completely disagree with her and her family's conception of the blacks as the sole agents of forgiveness. In fact, I found mildly distasteful the moment when the family turned to their only African-American companion, Juanita Brown, in order to solicit approval from her, as if she alone could "forgive" the whites on behalf of all the black Americans that have ever lived. Brown is consequently put into the embarrassing role of consoling the historical oppressors, as it were, coerced emotionally to generate the absurdly sentimental and meaningless phrase: “To me, you are just a good person now…”

The absurdity of this situation, I think, can be avoided if we try to think beyond the Protestant mentality that seems to have entrenched Katrina Browne and her folks. This is completely thinkable especially because these folks belong to the American Episcopal church, which contains both Catholic and Protestant elements. We know that Catholic tradition valorizes confession of sins in a way that the Protestant churches do not, and it is crucial that it is to a priest that one confesses and not to those we have sinned against. In the Anglican and Episcopalian liturgy, one confesses to a “Most merciful God” that “we have sinned against thee/in thought, word, and deed,/by what we have done,/and by what we have left undone.” That is to say, it might be a trespass against our neighbors, but it is a sin against God. From this we can conclude that only God – namely a third, impersonal presence, a divine justice that goes beyond the human – can “have mercy/upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins.” The priest can perform this act of forgiveness in his office, but not as a person, whence the obligatory phrase, “Please pray for me, a sinner also” at the end of confession.

There is perhaps nothing that reveals the reason for this triangular situation “wrongdoer-wronged-God” than the kind of trespasses that we deal with in Traces of the Trade, namely, a wrongness whose magnitude is so that it that cannot be absolved simply by an apology. An apology on an institutional level (by the church, by a government) serves to make public a responsibility toward certain disenfranchised groups, but it cannot expiate the offenses of the wrongdoers. The danger of the Protestant mentality is its overemphasis on the individual conscience, which, in this instance, clearly reveals its impotence and helplessness when dealing with a moral transgression not against one person, one family, one country, but a whole class of people and their descendants over generations. I suspect that this is the reason for which Katrina Browne, to her credit, returns to the Episcopal church not only to have a public – which, in Arendtian terms, means visible, exposed, and therefore political – space in which she can seek recognition for white responsibility, but also as the an authentic institution in white American culture that can represent an impersonal, supra-human justice, to whom human beings caught in a historical tragedy can, without the risk of sentimentality, ask to “have mercy on us.”

Plasticity, or, is the Medium the Message?

2008-06-17T10:18:00.002-05:00

This article from the Atlantic asks how Google and the Internet are actively rewiring the way humans process information. It is definitely worth reading, and I apologize for the irony of posting it to a blog.

Is there some kind of Internet backlash afoot? This week NPR is devoting stories to the problems caused by email, last week a consortium of computer and software companies formed to discuss the same issue, and I've heard and read about declaring "email bankruptcy" a lot recently. David Brooks' writes today on Tiger Woods' mental discipline, and how this makes him such an unusual figure in today's world of incessant distractions, largely produced by media.

Do you feel that technology is altering your abilities to think?

There is a difference between knowing and thinking. Google might give us greater knowledge, but might it inhibit the processing of knowledge, the thinking part of the equation?

I've decided to ban laptops from my classes next year . . . even if the students protest. As Jeremy recently pointed out, it's better to discuss the issue at hand all the way through rather than to derail the conversation to allow someone to look up a disease, a medication, or whatever, on Wikipedia.

Happy Birthday Vertigo!

2008-06-11T18:16:00.005-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interesting article about Alfred Hitchcock's film, Vertigo. It's written by David Sterritt, a film critic and professor at Columbia. Vertigo was released to mixed (if not downright negative) reviews in 1958, but the film eventually became a critical darling. I saw it first in college, and my previous Hitchcock experiences had involved his television show (now available on NBC's website), and North By Northwest, which is more of a jaunty romp, a parody of a Hitchcock film, than classic Hitchcock.

Sterritt comments that the reviewers thought the movie was too farfetched; I remember thinking that this was a part of its allure. It was so odd: a detective story turned into a ghost story turned into a movie about obsession and deceit. I think Vertigo, and particularly the choice to cast James Stewart in the role of stalker/obsessor, resonates with David Lynch's Twin Peaks (also available for online streaming!). Something isn't quite right, and whatever that element is (the acting, the writing, the cinematography), it makes the movie feel slightly off kilter. This serves the purpose of making the viewer very much aware of the artifice, as might be the case in an avant-garde film, but since Hitchcock is a storyteller director, we are also immersed in the suspenseful plot. A delicate balance that few can pull off with any success.

I liked David Sterritt's final thoughts, and I excerpt them here:

To my mind, three aspects of Vertigo stand out above all others. One is its ingenuity in probing the nature of cinema itself. As perceptive critics have observed, Scottie is a surrogate for Hitchcock, transforming Judy into the fantasy character of his dreams. When her makeover into Madeleine is almost complete and Scottie sends her out to fix one final detail, he's like a movie director ordering a retake so the shot will be precisely as he envisioned it. Hitchcock's implicit commentary on his profession isn't very flattering, moreover. Scottie is a control freak just like him, bending every contingency to the demands of his own will.

Related to this is the film's exploration of how looking and seeing collude with fantasy and desire to shape our conceptions of the world. Scottie spends much of the film gazing at the woman who enthralls him, yet he remains pathetically ignorant of everything about her until a chance revelation makes his reveries come crashing down. Movies appeal directly to our sense of sight, so Hitchcock was going boldly against the grain by taking such a relentlessly ironic view of vision's role in shaping — and misshaping — human experience.

Most remarkable of all is this suspense picture's radical approach to suspense. Scottie ends the first scene dangling from a drainpipe high above the streets, and he begins the second scene in his friend Midge's comfortable apartment. How did he get from the drainpipe to the easy chair? We never find out, which means that, metaphorically, Scottie is in suspense throughout the rest of the story — suspended between Madeleine and Judy, desire and despair, reality and fantasy, living and dying. In the final shot, he's again gazing down at a lifeless body: the corpse of Judy, now unveiled as the duplicitous lover who caught him in a web of murder and deceit.

Writing in a Universal Language

2008-06-04T15:20:00.003-05:00

Joyce's post on the problems with artistic margins and the benefits of artistic universals reminded me of a recent article about the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe in the New Yorker: "After Empire" by Ruth Franklin. An excerpt:

By deploying stock English phrases in unfamiliar ways, Achebe expresses his characters’ estrangement from that language. The phrases that Ezeulu uses—“be my eyes,” “bring home my share”—have no exact equivalents in Achebe’s “translation.” And how great the gap between “my spirit tells me” and “I have a hunch”! In the same essay, Achebe writes that carrying the full weight of African experience requires “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” Or, as he later put it, “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”

Achebe’s views on English were not yet widely accepted. At a conference on African literature held in Uganda in 1962, attended by emerging figures such as the Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka and the Kenyan novelist James Ngugi, the writers tried and failed to define “African literature,” unable to decide whether it should be characterized by the nationalities of the writers or by its subject matter. Afterward, the critic Obi Wali published an article claiming that African literature had come to a “dead end,” which could be reopened only when “these writers and their western midwives accept the fact that true African literature must be written in African languages.” Ngugi came to agree: he wrote four novels in English, but in the nineteen-seventies he adopted his Gikuyu name of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and vowed to write only in Gikuyu, his native language, viewing English as a means of “spiritual subjugation.”

At the conference, Achebe read the manuscript of Ngugi’s first novel, “Weep Not, Child,” which he recommended to Heinemann for publication. The publisher soon asked him to sign on as general editor of its African Writers Series, a post he held, without pay, for ten years. Among the writers whose novels were published during his tenure were Flora Nwapa, John Munonye, and Ayi Kwei Armah—all of whom became important figures in the emerging African literature. Heinemann’s Alan Hill later said that the “fantastic sales” of Achebe’s books had supported the series. But the appeal of English was not purely commercial. A great novel, Achebe later argued, “alters the situation in the world.” Igbo, Gikuyu, or Fante could not claim a global influence; English could.

Avant-Garde, Marginalization, and the Stories of the World

2008-06-04T04:22:00.015-05:00

I just returned exhausted from a conference in Gent, Belgium, which was dedicated to avant-garde and modernism studies. This year, the topic of the conference is "Europa! Europa?" and aimed to interrogate the meaning of "Europe" within the avant-garde movements. From my point of view, the question nearly needs no discussion: the avant-garde has always been about a critique of European/western civilization, and that Dada disregarded nationalities, Surrealism disregarded skin color. The avant-garde, as I say over and over again to others, was the moment when blacks, whites and others united against colonialism, bourgeois arrogance, and spiritual alienation under industrial capitalism. It was the last time in the western world where art and poetry could and did provide a sense of grandeur and nourished the courage for protest for a generation of men and women living under very dark times. Some members of the avant-garde made political mistakes, some perished in the wars, some in the concentration camps, some did themselves in. Those who survived, however, could testify to the fact that this artistic and intellectual elite did dismantle and renew language and symbolic forms in the west in such a way that they allow us to articulate our affective lives intelligently in modernity. Love and friendship, work and imagination, made all this possible.

Part of my exhaustion and sense of disappointment, therefore, results from the fact that this grandeur, this love for the world (as opposed to the love for "Europe") that is in my mind central to the avant-garde was barely brought out during the conference. Instead, it became the opportunity for scholars who work on the so-called minor cultures and languages (Hungarian, Bulgarian, Slovenia, etc) to re-claim their fair share of the pie - the pie being "modernism and avant-garde studies." One after another, I heard accounts by otherwise competent and committed scholars about a forgotten Lithuanian avant-garde figure, about the marginalization of Polish Cubism in the history of modern art, so on and so forth.

I sat through these conference papers patiently, though I was much perplexed. If I were to articulate my perplexity in the form of a question, it would be the following: If the minor cultures are now given microphones so that they, too, get to tell their previously marginalized stories, why is it that their stories all sound the same, since they all assume the position of marginalization itself as the main crux? In other words, what on the surface promises to open up a history to a field of heterogeneities (the opening up of the history of modernism to "alternative" stories) ends up reinforcing homogeneity, namely, the uniformly marginal status of the cultures of Central and Eastern Europe. The differences between the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Poles and the Bulgarians cede into the background as the "larger picture" surfaces: the large picture of "marginalized avant-gardes" and thereby marginalized peoples.

It was not until a panel of American scholars came on to talk about Czech, Hungarian and Slovenian contemporary art that I realized where the problem seems to be located. All three of the presentations by American speakers focused on artistic practices whose goal is to engage with the propaganda of the Soviet era or life under totalitarianism. The art forms were therefore discussed exclusively in relation to their content: how a Slovenian collective reproduces totalitarian rhetoric and techniques as parody; how Czech video artists produced a propaganda satirizing recent jouissance of consumerism in contrast to material depravity under communism; how examples of Hungarian installation art "failed" because they are supported by the right-wing government; so on and so forth. I found myself less concerned with the intellectual rigor of the presentations than with what seems to me a glaring truth: the west, namely that part of the world that did not experience totalitarianism during the 20th century and developed into the late-capitalist economies of today, continues to see the countries of the former Soviet bloc in terms of their experience under communism. In short, what is most important about the Russians, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Slovenians and so forth from the point of view of the west is their humiliating and humiliated experience under Stalinism. What would these hip, young American intellectuals think, if I were to tell them that that Eastern Europe for me and my childhood friends in Taiwan meant Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Dvorak and Bartok? Could they understand that we, at the age of 10 or 11, read War and Peace tirelessly not because it was Russian and exotic, but because it was a great epic that swept our youthful souls away, for the sake of which "Twuo-Er-Si-Tai" (how we translate "Tolstoy" phonetically into Chinese mandarin) was to remain our teenage idol?

I was deeply affected by this experience at the Ghent conference precisely because it is not an issue that touches the central and Eastern Europeans alone. Gale recently posted a conversation about race in the United States, where the same scenario is reproduced. To a great extent, the whites and the blacks essentially work together unconsciously to reinforce the notion that the most important component in black American identity is the humiliating experience of slavery and segregation. So long as those on the "guilty" side continue to apologize neurotically for institutional racism, colonialism, global capitalism over and over in order to save their own souls, the "victims" will remain victims in body and spirit. Conversely, so long as the "victims" continue to reinforce the fact that they had been marginalized, forgotten and oppressed, the "guilty" ones shall more and more fetishize the victims and "their stories," which, as Gale implies, can only be stories of not so much suffering but of humiliation and perversion. There will be a kind of endless jouissance of collective sadomasochism: the "master" gets off on being flagellated by the "slave," meanwhile, he remains the master and the slave remains the slave. Admittedly, it is difficult recognize suffering and simultaneously resist the temptation to reduce the people to their predicament. I myself have made the same slip over and over again, and recently I had to be reminded by my friend Ronen that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are reducible to their condition under the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are the means, then, to resist our compulsive bad conscience (Nietzsche, after all, must be credited for recognizing it as a form of post-Christian mediocrity)?

While I was listening to these American scholars on art about Soviet life, a vivid episode during my undergraduate career suddenly came to me. I went out of curiosity to an enormous conference in the Ryan auditorium, put together by scholars from the department of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern in collaboration with all the most important poets in central and eastern Europe. My motivation for going was not very profound: I was taking a modern poetry seminar with the Russian poet Ilya Kutik, and I liked Klebnikov and Mayakovsky. The poets at the conference included many Russians and Poles, but many Balkan poets also participated - most importantly, however, the entire auditorium was packed with the Slavic communities in Chicago-land. It was the first time in my life to see poetry playing such a central role in the lives of the common people, people who did not necessarily consider themselves intellectuals. When the poets began to recite, I began to understand why. The poets often recited long poems by heart; they barely looked at their papers. Never have I seen such rich yet natural idioms performed with such energy: at times, they whistled, sighed, shouted. I don't know any Slavic language, but all of the sublime fury of Mayakovsky seems to have made sense to me in one moment. As an American, I also had the impression of being re-taught Walt Whitman, whose free verse I did not understand until I understood it through the eyes of the central and eastern European avant-gardes. Even more moving was the overwhelming response of the audience - people clapped, laughed, cried - at the sight of which I said to myself that the Slavic peoples, who often intimidate me with their dry directness and mystify me with what seems to me an infinite capacity for suffering, are have poetry in their fibers, making it all the more unacceptable that such deeply creative and spiritual communities should have had to suffer the "moral extermination" of Stalinism.

Obviously, it would have been naive of me to simply reiterate the Romantic doctrine that art and poetry constitute the space of universality, as if there were no linguistic differences, differences in religious traditions and symbolic forms that separate one community from another. Nevertheless, insofar as poetry allows a language to become vehicles of people's emotions and experiences, it can be said to be the bridge between the individual's own sufferings and a world of open-ness. Art therefore transforms the particular into the universal, allowing the story of Hungarians, for example, to be simultaneously the story of the rest of us. It seems to me that the stories of particular peoples must be told in such a way that they become part of the stories of the world. Only then can we be genuinely prepared to listen to the "stories" of others without hearing the story that we actually want to hear, namely the story about ourselves. Then, one day, we might hope that the number of western scholars with a morbid fascination for Maoist China or Stalinist Russia would gradually diminish, and that we can all read Crime and Punishment and listen to Bartok together as the stories and songs about the world and of the world.

Talking about Race

2008-05-29T07:26:00.003-05:00

In Thursday's New York Times, there is an article about gentrification in Northeast Portland. The article discusses a recent initiative called the Restorative Listening Project that brings together blacks and whites (of the upper-middle class progressive variety), and the neighborhood's displaced black people and those long-time residents who are facing higher rent because of the recent development in the neighborhood share their stories. The white people attending the hearings (and there are some *amazing* quotations) love this; most of the black people find it useless. Talking about how their rent has gone up is not dealing with their problem, although it apparently salves the consciences of many of the whites who have participated.

One woman says the following: “That’s been our history,” Norma Trimble, who is Native American, said during the question-and-answer session this month. “They take all you’ve got. They take your land. Now they want your stories.”

But, as a recent study (by a Northwestern researcher) has shown, white people are so afraid of being considered racist in their daily lives, they most often choose to avoid people who aren't white.

I think the juxtaposition of these two stories exemplifies the fundamental problem with how we talk about race in America - a problem that Obama addressed in a new way in his speech on race. Clearly the Portland project has good intentions, but it's so ineffectual (read the article to see why) that it could also be published in The Onion.

At my book club meeting last night, I encountered something related to all of this, spoken by upper-middle class women. First, the "my black friend told me . . ." defense. After describing how emancipation disrupted the black family because it changed the steady social order of slavery, the book club woman suggests that while slavery was bad, emancipation did more harm. And then she proceeded to draw the conclusion that the difficult situation of a 1940s black woman in the South on emancipation.

I jumped in - umm, you're actually completely wrong. Black people reunited with family members after the Civil War . . . and your statement ignores the 50 years of institutionalized and legal racism encoded by Jim Crow laws, and the fact that persistent white racism is the real problem, not emancipation. She responds to me with the familiar line: well, this is what my "black friend" told me. Is this a defense of her statement? A statement implying that me, a white girl, can't know the truth, even if this subject happens to be exactly what I have spent the past six years of my life studying?

This incident followed a discussion with a Clinton supporter about how women are the most oppressed "race" in the country. Where is an American historian even to begin?

Conversations are good. I think that more Americans - white and black - need to have them. But I don't think Portland's plan is the answer, and I think that if anything, Portland's project fosters the sort of situation that leads to white people feeling like they do in the Northwestern research project.

We need something different from the model where black people talk about suffering and white people sympathize and grow. (See The Bridge Called My Back). The national conversation on race that Obama has called for needs to be more than well-off white people consuming black people's stories and then feeling better about themselves.

Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

2008-05-26T08:50:00.006-05:00

This is Ann's and my book club book for May: The Member of the Wedding by southern (sort of) author Carson McCullers. A couple of thoughts on the subject . . .

The Member of the Wedding was originally a play, and it takes place mostly in the hot August kitchen of twelve-year-old Frankie Addams. Because it began as a play, the stream-of-consciousness style is verbalized in lackadaisical conversations between Frankie, her nerdy/angelic younger cousin, John Henry, and her black cook/housekeeper Berenice. It is first and foremost a coming-of-age tale, set in a very quiet southern town amid surrounding chaos - the upheavals of the Second World War and, more immediately, the marriage of Frankie's older brother, a soldier who has been away from home for some time.

Frankie's thoughts and ideas epitomize adolescent angst. She feels trapped inside her house, her town, her identity as a twelve-year-old named Frankie Addams, yet escaping this narrow existence is terrifying. Also, her best friend has moved away, and the older girls at school exclude her from their club. She no longer wants to enjoy John Henry's childish games, yet she is too young to partake in the adult rituals of marriage, and the wonderful and exotic grown-up life she imagines her brother and his fiancee will have. Most readers can remember these thoughts and feelings, and the more creative set probably wrote them down in long journal entries (is this what the kids are blogging about now?). [A topic for another post; read the first comment to this piece, it encapsulates my view.]

As I read, I thought about coming-of-age novels, and how most of these stories narrated by children are written for adults. Children are outsiders who are inside, social critics who are forgiven for their antagonistic attitudes, liminal figures in their social worlds and liminal in the sense that they approach the threshold of adulthood. The rites of passage associated with coming of age are archetypal, of course; but I also think angsty teenagers are also permitted to express existential thoughts that would be irritating in the mouths of adult characters whom we expect to have "moved on" from such egoism. So, for writers who want to explore questions of conscience and consciousness, who want to interrogate the set of beliefs and acceptable practices of our rational world, the adolescent is the perfect narrator. We have Frankie Addams in this story, we have Holden Caulfield, Scout Finch, Kipling's Kim, Dickens's Pip, and many more - who am I missing? Are Victorians using children differently than modernists or contemporary authors (who use children to capture a certain preciousness, I think)? What is your favorite coming-of-age story?

1968

2008-05-24T09:37:00.005-05:00

In the United States and in France (as Joyce can certainly testify!), 1968 is getting attention. I wonder if there was such a display in 1998, for the thirtieth anniversary, or in 1988, for the twentieth. I doubt it. Actually, I remember D-Day being the most discussed historical event of the 1990s, a fiftieth anniversary, and falling at a time when baby boomers started to lose their parents, the Greatest Generation.

I think that the combined presidential election year and the Iraq War make this anniversary, the fortieth, more resonant. Although we don't have to scratch very far below the surface to deflate these comparisons. The Democrats are all anti-war, unlike the pro-war Humphrey who divided the Democratic Party; McCain is hardly a Richard Nixon. We have none of the urban riots of 1967-68, in fact we have just the opposite - gentrification.

I suspect, as has been suggested, that the fact that the media is largely dominated by baby boomers drives the discussion of 1968: see this French editorial in the Times.

Indeed, NPR has a whole website devoted to their stories on "The Echoes of 1968" (including Robert Siegel's interesting memories of being a student-reporter at Columbia). I like that they have a broader swath of history represented in their stories. Another NPR story covers a group that wants to "recreate '68" at this summer's Democratic Convention.

What do you think? Was 1968 truly transformational? Or more transformational than any other important election year? Does the current remembrance reflect boomer nostalgia or something else in the air?

Pandas!!!

2008-05-21T10:34:00.001-05:00

Alright. If this whole academic career thing fizzles, I'm moving to China to play with pandas. Seriously. This is possibly the cutest internet video ever.

Look at it right now.

Personal Lifestyle Versus Religion

2008-05-15T16:59:00.006-05:00

That Buddhism is the most popular religion among educated, affluent and cultivated elite of the modern west is probably obvious to many. It is on the list of "stuff white people like" in the satirical blog, in the form of a tiny Buddha statue on the armoire in a bedroom with "Pottery Barn"-like furniture. Today, it is in the New York Times today, in the "Home & Garden" section - in the form of a bohemian couple living an alternative life-style in the desert of Arizona. Only, to what extent it is "Buddhist," I am not sure. Their supposedly austere tent is furnished like a tourist magazine photograph from Tibet or Nepal, and their speech pattern makes it clear that, no matter how learned they might be, what they believe and practice is essentially no different from any new-age non-philosophy that one can purchase off the shelf.

What makes this form of self-made spirituality so attractive to certain populations in the west, I suppose, is the apparent absence of a figure of authority. Even the word "discipline" that is being used rings like the kind of discipline that we associate with athletic training or diet: it is demanding, but it is good for you. In other words, it is not a kind of discipline that we impose on ourselves for the sake of others, for the love of some higher good. It is a discipline that "purifies your mind" - with emphasis on "you." For this reason, the story of this couple is appropriately placed in the "Home & Garden" section, implying the truth that this is about a personal lifestyle and is far from being an authentic religion.

What makes monotheistic religions unfashionable among the Western educated elite, I presume, is the fact that they implicate a partial submission of the individual to an institution. (Why it is any worse than submitting oneself to institutions such as the university, the company, the nation-state, I cannot quite figure out. My Episcopalian or Anglican parishes have never obliged me to attend office on Sundays, whereas there are days that one cannot miss at the university or work.) But for religious persons, I suspect that it is precisely the recognition of the limitations of the individual that is the most rewarding aspect of their practice. By this, I do not simply mean the limitations of the individual before an almighty, absolute God. On the more quotidian level, the daily mediation of one's values, beliefs and practices through intercourse with other human beings is a powerful antidote against self-delusion.

The presence of a community and competent spiritual leaders prevents religious people from making up their own gods, in other words. More than once, I shared my own "theology" with friends, only to find out at the end of a long conversation that my ideas were incoherent (at best) or debased (at worst). Left to my own devices, I would be in a situation where I can make up whatever idea I have of God for my own benefits, safeguarding the criticisms of others with the deluded dogma that "spirituality is a personal thing." The truth is that in an authentic and functional religion, the "I" always needs to be checked against the values of the collective, or, even better, a small affective community based on friendship. Is there anything more precious than the presence of human beings whom we trust enough to ask, "Do you think that I might be mad?" All the more precious are those who will respond with honesty and intelligence.

That said, since religions are human institutions, they are susceptible to all human weaknesses. Corruption is standard in any institution, and I have often recognized in certain Roman Catholic bishops in Europe the same crooked faces of Zen-Buddhist charlatans in Taiwan (all with names like Star-Cloud Master or Child of Moonlight) who molest female worshipers habitually. And when a population suffers systemically, we can only expect that the religious institution that it upholds will also suffer and go mad: this is the case with radical Islam today. For any religious person, who must to some extent take responsibility of his or her religious institution, perhaps nothing is more painful than watching a rich religious tradition degrade itself due to contemporary circumstances. At that point, one has the choice to stay or leave, and either decision will affect the person's understanding of his or her identity.

Many religious people have chosen to stay in imperfect traditional religious institutions - some harder to defend than others - instead of going away to the desert to make up their own Buddhist lifestyle. Some of these religious people are less educated than others; some can defend themselves with more conceptual clarity; some, admittedly, become incoherent or mediocre when pushed to articulate their faith. But I wonder if all of them do not share one thing: They all implicitly recognize or understand religion as a form of institution that, when made to function as a rich symbolic space in which metaphysics and ethics join to dance, might end up saving human beings from their own follies and miseries.

To defend a religious institution and to partake in it is like speaking a language. Just as I do not refuse to speak German for the reason that it has been tainted by Amtsprache of the Third Reich, I do not reject the Christian tradition for the reason that it has been co-opted by the Roman Empire and been misused numerous times as pretext for political and military violence. The same as German language remains valuable to me because it is the language of German philosophy, aesthetics and poetry, the same I continue to defend Christianity, not only because it is the most feminine and pagan of monotheisms, but above all because it is the religion whose essence is the Sermon on the Mount, the loving and merciful God, and the faith in the imperfect perfectability of every man and woman.

Myanmar

2008-05-11T09:16:00.004-05:00

I have nothing terribly interesting or original to say about the recent catastrophe in Myanmar, the frightening death toll of 28,000 as a result of the typhoon, and the hysteric efforts of the Burmese government to prevent international rescue and aid to make contact with its suffering people. An opinion piece on the New York Times voices a temptation to "invade" Myanmar in order to save the victims. While my conservative side says that there is no way we can import democracy by a military invasion, and that a form of authority imposed by a foreign power will not receive the populist support that is the point of democracy, how can we understand the kind of isolationism of these repressive regimes, whose reaction under crisis can only be compared to a dysfunctional family who would rather see to its own ruins than open itself to the aid of social workers?

I am not for "invasion" (I doubt that it is the right word to use here), but I wonder if there is not something to be said about external mediation. We do not occupy the earth alone, and when we suffer, we need to be able to ask others for help. After all, Germany's acceptance of the Marshall Plan is a sign of the reconciliation of the western European nation-states, isn't it? To be able to accept help from others is a form of humility and the beginning of peace-making with the outside world. The parents in the Indian reservations in Canada have been known to call upon Canadian social workers to take away their children before they all get drugged on gasoline fumes, which is a gesture of grace in an abysmal situation. The current behavior of the Burmese government, however, can only be seen as heart-chilling. It is only to be expected that a government that has no love for its own people would hate not only its neighbors but the entire world.

Knives from the Sea and the Problem of "Fish-Goat"

2008-05-07T07:50:00.006-05:00

Spring time has finally arrived in Paris, and the "couteaux" (knives) from the sea, a common treat that I associate with summers in Spain with my family, have begun to appear on the fish markets. Called "navajas" in Spanish (meaning razor blades), they are a species of shellfish whose taste I consider vastly superior to not only mussels but also many different kinds of clams.

These were purchased on rue Mouffetard this morning, and the fishmonger told me that they can be eaten raw, to my surprise. I went home and prepared them the Mediterranean way: heat up olive oil in a pan with a few pieces of garlic; when the garlic begins to dance, throw the "knives" into the pan and "stir-fry" until the slim "boxes" begin to open; remove from fire as soon as they lose their modesty and display their flesh. The rest is simple: parsley, lemon juice, and the delicious sauce produced in the pan, which should not be lost.

In Chinese, the character "鮮" (pronounced "xien") refers to a kind of taste that comes with extremely fresh and flavorful food, and it can be applied to both vegetables, fruits, seafood as well as meat. However, this two-part ideogram is essentially made up of the part “魚" (fish) and "羊" (goat, sheep), intriguingly bringing together two kinds of meat known for their distinct animal smell. Both are earthly delights that cannot be neutral: they are the coquettes in the world of food. The "couteaux" tasted exactly like this: tender, juicy, fragrant and moist like the summer wind of the Mediterranean. In fact, they do not even have to be salted, since they were evenly marinated during their short lifetime in that mysterious uterus from which all organic life comes: a bath of salt water, seasoned with alga.

God is good, one might say, yet the Buddhist monks knew exactly that this is the kind of taste that keeps the most well-intentioned from receiving enlightenment. Anything that tastes too "xien" provokes desire, and desire is always modeled on the carnal kind. In my very limited philosophical knowledge, only in ancient Greek philosophy and Christian theology is this negative view of desire modified - vis-à-vis the concept of love. Love is the desire of something for its own sake - a brilliant solution to a biological necessity that brings as much joy as it does suffering. Nevertheless, the great philosophy of the East understood the moral problem presented by tasty foods. In the austere form of Buddhist diet, not only meat and fish are to be avoided, garlic, onions and leeks are considered taboo - because they make food taste good, or "xien." I doubt the Christian monks thought differently: is not the holiest food simple bread, perhaps with a little of soup? Even the fun foods and beverages invented in the monasteries, such as biscuits and beers, tend to taste wholesome and pure like the earth. The mild intoxication that one experiences after having a few too many beers is still less dangerous than the kind of para-erotic "fish-goat" taste that one gets from shellfish, foie gras, and blood-based foods such as boudin noir (France) and morcilla (Spain and Portugal).

I enjoyed eating the knives of the sea this afternoon, but I soon will need the psychic-physiological tranquility that only rice, potatoes and vegetables can bring. The Lord put an infinite number of tempting fruits on this planet (the French call seafood "fruits de mer" with good reasons), and fruits always put us in debt to the world for the reason that we pick them and consume them without too much labor. Hence the Original Sin in Hebraic-Christianity is conceptualized in terms of picking a forbidden fruit in the garden of the Lord. Other things, however, remind us of the necessity of our labor, of our obligation to give ourselves to the world whose existence precedes ours. These things are cereal-based and usually taste plain, heavy and sometimes even dry: in short, they taste like quotidian life in its simplicity and dignity. Rice, couscous, pasta, bread, tofu - these things give us back our existence as earthly and mortal beings, who have better mind our own business on earth before plunging into the oceanic Eden to plunder the edible pearls sown by the pagan gods.

Chinese are protesting!

2008-05-05T16:57:00.001-05:00

It turns out, some Chinese people DON'T like this new brand of government-sponsored capitalism.

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

2008-05-05T08:46:00.004-05:00

The other day I realized that this blog serves the same purpose as my high school newspaper - the Oracle. And so this is an entry belonging in the "Arts and Entertainment" section.

Darkmans is an odd page-turner. The plot elements and characters (a stolen envelope containing mysterious and centuries-old documents from the British Library, a secretive podiatrist and her many connected clients, a crooked contractor, a mentally ill or visionary German, and a precocious and possibly possessed little boy) at times seem like the novel is another iteration of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum or The Crying of Lot 49. History runs into the present in murky ways, in characters dreams and waking lives. A number of characters, few of them resembling any stock figures, are brought together for a few days in the Chunnel town of Ashford on England's southeast coast. A father and son, a married couple with a small son, a skinny and loud teenager, a Kurdish immigrant.

Darkmans' power, though, is in its uniqueness. The font is sans serif (jarring at first). The writing melds working-class youth slang with poised English prose. The historical motif of a medieval court jester popping up in characters' dreams and waking lives bears no connection with the more popular Knights Templar, Masons, or various other secret societies linked to immortality that tend to appear in books of this genre. The jester laughs, but he's also deadly, and his presence looms darkly over the novel's often comical plot.

Without going into too much detail, I think another reason for Darkmans' novelty comes with Barker's refusal to adopt the popular models of the fantastical/literary novel. The autistic child, for example, as the narrator or visionary: The Curious Incident of the Dog at Nighttime and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are two recent examples. Precocity is also experiencing a literary comeback; I read recently that J.D. Salinger's Glass family has been replicated all over the place. (Everyone's a wise child!) In Darkmans, none of Barker's characters are precocious knowers, not even the boy, Fleet, who is in some ways the center of the story. He builds an entire French village out of matchsticks on the dining room table, and occasionally tells stories and speaks in an Old English that hint at the historical presence haunting the novel. His voice is eerie and oracle-like, but almost none of the characters take him seriously. In fact, when his mother is advised to enroll him in a program for gifted children, she listens politely although it is fairly clear she has no intention to act on this advice. (Advice given by a man who encouraged his daughter in the same way, and then had to deal with the fact that his daughter moved to Sudan, converted to Islam, and married a warlord.)

For Barker, the mystery at the center of the novel remains obscure. It cannot be dismissed as a mentally disabled person's point of view, indeed, the presence of the past in all of the characters' lives show that this paranormal historical slippage is not confined to the diagnosed schizophrenic. Barker's characters motivations are only partially explained as the ending quickly answers one small puzzle, leaving the other strings hanging loose.

In its imaginative earnestness, the book reminded me of the less successful Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian in that the supernatural is neither rationally explained nor purely metaphorical. Adrian's book ends (spoiler!) with a fiery apocalypse, angels and all. I wonder if this is some kind of post-X-Files phenomenon - I think echoes can certainly be seen on other television shows - Lost leap to mind immediately. Neither science nor logic can explain the mysteries, nor can they been taken as a manifestation of a disturbed person's psyche. In X-Files terms, Scully's science or Mulder's childhood damage are both inadequate explanations for the strange things they witness. Written nearly a decade later, Darkmans doesn't even suggest that it might be one of these two options. It embraces the unnatural, concludes with a startling scene, and leaves the reader with a feeling of unsettledness to match the displacement felt by its characters.

The Death Penalty

2008-04-29T08:07:00.002-05:00

This in the New York Times is perplexing. Race clearly matters in the criminal justice system, but I was surprised at the way the problem gets hashed out - it's the victims race that matters more than the alleged murderer?

Most disturbing of all:

"Twenty-one years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that even solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty did not offend the Constitution. The vote was 5 to 4, and the case was McCleskey v. Kemp."

One NYU prof called it the new Dred Scott . . .

"An affaire of civilization, not biology"

2008-04-29T04:06:00.005-05:00

Since our blog was bound to hit the big race subject, I might as well take the opportunity to recall Aimé Césaire's position, which is that "négritude" or "nègre" had always been about culture and civilization instead of "race." Césaire was a black intellectual who was consistently appalled by biological arguments. Therefore, from the point of view of Martiniquan intellectuals of the 1930s, the Martiniquan bourgeoisie was essentially "white" - black skin, white masks, since they rejected indigenous culture, oppressed the under-privileged blacks, and worse of all, identified with the French bourgeoisie. At the same time, the "white" Surrealists were considered more "nègre" than the black bourgeoisie, because they condemned colonialism and believed in the value of the "l'âme primitive" or the "primitive soul," which translates into the valorization of poetic, imagistic form of thinking and a kind of spontaneous defiance against all forms of instrumental thinking. (After the sixth or seventh time of reading André Breton's homage to Césaire and Césaire's memory of Breton, I still cannot help being moved at the thought that when, once in a blue moon, a great white poet meets a great black poet and they recognize each other as great poets, all the skin colors of the world explode into a million stars.)

As a student of "primitivism" and the avant-garde, I almost want to say that the terms "primitive" and "soul" as understood by Césaire and his friends in the 1930s and 1940s do much to clarify our accursed discourse about race and skin color these days. Césaire was very explicit about the non-equivalence between "primitive" and "Africa," because primitive actually meant a certain phase in a civilization. For this reason, primitive Greece - as opposed to Hellenistic Greece - was more interesting to Césaire. Of course, this might sound like a very European/Caribbean discourse, but my homework in this domain has suggested that the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals did not think much differently. The "soul" of the black folk had to be valorized and articulated: this was the message of DuBois and someone whom I admire deeply, that is to say the philosopher Alain Locke. (Gale, can you add from the point of view of the Americanist?)

I was just reading Simone Weil's diatribe against the moral decadence of the Roman Empire and how (she argues) it corrupted the entire western civilization by co-opting Christianity, stamping out the "primitive" cultures of the Mediterranean as well as the Celtic lands, and left imperial vestiges to feed future totalitarian inspirations. Obviously, I am not qualified enough in the antiquities to dispute with her as to whether ancient Rome was truly the first Hitlerian regime that oppressed all peoples for the sake of grandeur and let innocent human blood flow for mere pleasure (the gladiators). However, the Christian in me has to recognize that there is something morally equivocal with empires (including China), and, historically, we cannot dispute the fact that fascism both in Italy and Germany dreamed of resuscitating the grandeur of the empire whose summit in the European part of the world was achieved by no other than ancient Rome. (By the way, Rome just went to the neo-fascists after 65 years of left-wing dominion. Reason to worry?)

Where am I going with this? I believe that the meaning of the terms "black" and "white" are (hopefully) changing in America so that they could again embody the moral connotations that they had in the 1930s. The most important thing about the humorous blog "Stuff White People Like" is that it reveals unmistakably that "white" is, as Césaire says, "une affaire de civilisation, pas de race." "White" does not mean having pale skin; instead, it refers to a certain bourgeois mediocrity. This mediocrity consists of materialist complacency, thirst for consumption, a false morality that consists ultimately of putting themselves above others ("pretty" social causes such as universal health care and global warming to be discussed over organic dinners), emotional stinginess, incapacity to understand spirituality other than what can give immediate pleasures (decor, massage, therapy). This kind of moral laziness is understood to be "white," in which case we can easily imagine persons of any skin color turning "white" simply by virtue of being alienated from the essential matters of human life: birth, old age, illness, death.

All this means that whether Obama is white or black is and has to be more complicated than how we used to judge white and black in my very multi-ethnic high school. (Asians who listened to "Offspring" were considered white, Indians who played basketball and listened to hip-hop were "black," and so forth.) We have to start asking the questions: What does it mean to be "white" in America? What does it mean to be "black" in America? As a relatively new American whose people happened to not have shared the history of slavery and colonialism, I consider it far from evident that all aspects of "white" culture are to be rejected, just as no one would dream (I hope) of denying the African-American heritage in this wonderful country called the United States of America. The Anglo/Germanic-American form of Christianity might be drab at times, but I am not sure that it does not contain elements capable of rivaling the grandeur of African-American hymnals (represented by the incomparable "Were You There?"). After all, can we imagine calling J.S. Bach's Kantatas "white"?

All in all, I believe that as Americans, we are in the extraordinary position of transcending white racism as well as black nationalism. If we cannot aspire for the kind of universality that Christianity has achieved (same doctrines, same creed, different tunes, different beats), let us at least dream of achieving a kind of "same nationality, different skin colors, different historical experiences" that the word "America"still rings for me.

Speaking of Race

2008-04-27T13:37:00.002-05:00

This Opus cartoon raises the best question no one is asking.

How about this guys? Do we still subscribe to the "one drop of blood" doctrine of what makes someone "Black"? Apparently we do.

Appearances

2008-04-24T14:03:00.002-05:00

Today's column by Matt Bai begs the same question I asked in my previous post about McCain and race. But with a different spin: are the Democrats misconstruing the electoral map? I wonder if the prolonged Democratic primary is going to ruin the candidates - not because of insults and attack ads, but because Clinton and Obama are trying to out-Democrat each other and consequently lose more centrist votes by the minute.

Yet, as Ann said the other day, I also wish that elections didn't turn on the "Reagan Democrat" vote. The US isn't going back to being an industrial powerhouse like it was in 1950 (John Edwards), so maybe we need to let go . . .

In Memory of Aimé Césaire

2008-04-23T04:17:00.005-05:00

A grand poet of color,
who makes tremble with anger
the hollow belly of the white moon.
Shoot, chutez, pale petite planets
from heaven. New stars are birthing
from the cries of ancient islands.

Joyce Cheng
23 April 2008
Paris, France

My first true posting on the blog

2008-04-22T17:24:00.003-05:00

This is my first posting to our still very infrequently visited blog, "A common fire." It is indeed a very peculiar form of publication, and I feel two opposing forces. On the one hand, I feel that all opinions I voice here should be fair, balanced, informed, "footnoted," so to speak, since it is open to the public (the meaning of publication). On the other hand, the facility with which this text can be instantaneously composed and posted makes it tempting to write without much hesitation or deliberation, as if I am just writing an e-mail.

What makes me participate for the first time in this blog phenomenon - which, I admit, I have long looked upon with some incomprehension mixed with tempered contempt - is the notion and experience of friendship. I like the idea that, two hundred years after romanticism and one hundred year after the first avant-gardes, there is a surviving ethos of the ideal community in a small circle of friends (as opposed to the utopian society). Since everyday, more people of our generation have more "friendsters" than friends, have more understanding of "hanging out" than of conversing, I find this blog-experiment very interesting, because it uses new technology for what is essentially an old and perhaps endangered practice: having conversations that have content, with people for whom the content is actually meaningful.

I suggested to Gale that "A common fire" as a name for the blog sounds suspiciously like the Christian Left. She said, "Well, that's sort of what we are." I like to emphasize the "sort of," because it seems to me the most determining element of these conversations.

Sharing a blog with a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, I feel like my contributions to these urgent matters of politics and society will be inadequately informed. My postings will probably be on the side of philosophy, culture and the arts - those things on which no life depends.

Making Bread

2008-04-21T17:53:00.002-05:00

A new bread recipe for all of you intrepid bakers.

Race and the GOP

2008-04-21T15:12:00.004-05:00

I know that I shouldn't think John McCain's current tour of Alabama is strange. I know I shouldn't.

The skeptic in me says that McCain is gearing up for a fight with Obama, and in his spare time before the general electioneering starts, he's collecting his "I'm not a racist" credentials since the GOP has such an awesome track record when it comes to campaigning against black and Latino Democrats. This is, after all, the same man who voted against making King's birthday a national holiday, and the man who asserted repeatedly that he was the true heir to Reagan, the foot-soldier in the Reagan revolution and all that. Remember Reagan? Remember the time he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to announce his candidacy in the same county where three civil-rights workers were brutally slain? And gave a speech about states' rights?

This new post-primary version of McCain echoes back to the man who was race-baited himself in the South Carolina primary in 2000, not the "foot soldier" of this past primary season. A shred of hope that McCain might douse the GOP's fondness for overt and covert racism?

At the very least, he is clearly setting a different tone - perhaps because McCain would be battling for centrist voters for support if Obama is to be the Democratic nominee. Maybe going on the civil-rights tour of Alabama is less about getting the black vote and more a PR opportunity to appeal to (white) centrist Democrats. All of which reminds me of polls at the beginning of primary season - when many people were deciding between McCain and Obama. If McCain wants their vote, he can't play with the usual GOP playbook.

Predictions about what a general election between McCain and Obama would look like?

Luck to Jeremy

2008-04-21T14:20:00.002-05:00

Good luck on your two-day ordeal of taking the Boards, Jeremy!

Eldorado

2008-04-19T20:03:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post since, with all of this talk about foster care and child abuse, I can't not bring up the mess in Eldorado, Texas. If you haven't been following the removal of over 400 children after a raid on a "ranch" (compound) owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), my favorite criminal justice blog, Grits for Breakfast, has a good round-up of coverage.

You'd think this would be a moot issue at this point, since the call that provoked the raid - allegedly made by a 16-year-old girl reporting abuse by her 49-year-old husband - has turned out to be a fake. But, yesterday, a Texas judge ruled that all 416 children will stay with the state, and their parents will have to submit to DNA testing, undergo psychiatric evaluations, and agree to some sort of safety plan before the State will considering returning the children.

ABC News reported earlier this week that CPS planned to argue that the ranch is one household, presumably so that the finding of one instance of abuse would allow the removal of all 416 children. I don't know whether that happened, but it seems likely given the speed with which the court ruled on the custody of so many children.

True, I don't like the idea of polygamy or the thought of 16-year-old girls marrying men who could be their fathers. And reports of the "lost boys" of FLDS are not too savory either. Still, it's far from clear to me, in my admittedly extremely limited knowledge, that the "best interests" of these children mandate wholesale removal and placement in a Child Protective Services system that doesn't have a great track record even when it's not scrambling to deal with the sudden influx of over 400 children.

Bears

2008-04-19T19:11:00.001-05:00

Laura sent this video of a new baby polar bear in Stuttgart.

The Frontal Cortex

2008-04-18T22:36:00.002-05:00

A brief post, to point you all to one of my new favorite blogs I've recently come upon. "The Frontal Cortex" by Jonah Lehrer (author of Proust was a Neuroscientist, which I have not yet read) tends to link neuroscience all sorts of things interesting and artistic and social and political. Here are two recent posts that I really wanted to share:

Neuroaesthetics and Post-structuralism - I had no idea such a thing exists, but it's so far outside my realm of expertise these days. Reductio ad absurdum? The question of how aesthetics works on the brain is interesting, but less so the question of how "neuroasthetics" makes art. Or is it?

Child Abuse - This sort of acts as a follow-up to my first post about foster care. I guess one of the fundamental problems of, well, everything regarding how our government cares for children is that there is no real follow-up. We intervene on the front end, but without any system to speak of to deal with the sequelae. What do you do with a child that doesn't know empathy, or can't express it? As I'm sure you can imagine, Martin and Kate from the vignettes are likely to end up disenfranchised and/or in prison because while we can remove abused children from their abusers, we have a lot of difficulty providing long-term mental health care they may need (or they will be excluded because they're not yet at a crisis point in need of immediate intervention) in order to remove the abuse from the child. And we know how we can prevent a lot of child abuse: intense wraparound services for families at risk from before birth for a the first few years of life, to help with material needs, job-finding, food, parenting skills.... but why would our government fund anything like that?

Jesusland.

2008-04-17T12:24:00.003-05:00

So, instead of emailing articles during my break between classes, I'm posting them all! This, by Matt Bai, who is always very perceptive, is interesting.

It resonates with the idea that is in the Times op/ed today - that it's Democrats and urbanites who care more about social issues than rural conservatives. In other words, being a pro-life Democrat can be more politically damaging than one might think.

Personally, this whole "bitter" and "clinging to guns and religion" business has made it difficult for me to write lectures this week. In explaining the rise of the New Right in the late '70s and early '80s, how do you NOT say that urban Catholics, blue-collar folk, and white southerners are turning right because they are bitter? It's more acceptable, I think, to talk about this during the 1950s Cold War. People were afraid and felt like they had little control over their destiny because it could all be erased with one bomb. In response, defending traditional gender roles and a certain social hierarchy becomes central to Americans' lives.

It seems a problem of social construction versus authenticity of belief. In other words, does using context to explain why certain beliefs wax and wane diminish the inherent validity of those beliefs? If you turn to faith because you've lost your job and feel like the Iraq War is a mess, does that make your faith less authentic? I don't think so. For example, I don't think of myself as a fickle Christian who uses church as an opiate, even if sometimes I'm more into church (usually because of external events) than at other times. Although I understand how some people might not interpret themselves in this way.

What if we switched it? Democrats cling to their pro-choice stance because they feel X. What do we put in for X?

China

2008-04-17T09:09:00.001-05:00

A Chinese student caught in the crossfire. Talk about nationalism and the internet . . . a dangerous combination. See the article here.

Life.

2008-04-16T14:14:00.003-05:00

My favorite headline du jour:

The New York Times website had a picture of the pope and President Bush in the center, with the caption, "Americans 'need your message that all life is sacred."

To the immediate left of the picture, the top headline reads "Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution" - "By 7 to 2, justices upheld Kentucky's method of putting criminals to death by lethal injection, clearing the way for other states to resume executions as well."

All life is sacred indeed.

Lawsuits and foster care

2008-04-15T21:05:00.002-05:00

Related to Jeremy's post (that I'm still thinking about, especially after having lectured on welfare reform and the Personal Responsibility Act today), I saw this article, scheduled to run in tomorrow's Times. It seems that foster care is so horribly awry in Oklahoma that a major lawsuit is underway on behalf of the system's children.

Aside from the use of lawsuits to remedy a clearly broken system (Laura?), it's also interesting to me the comment on who serves as social workers:

"Caseworkers, who are supposed to monitor foster homes regularly and connect children with services, often have more than 50 clients, compared with the 12 to 15 recommended by professional groups.

Because the work is stressful and the pay is low, starting at $26,000, turnover is high and many case workers are young and inexperienced."

Remember those people in college who want to "help people?" How prepared are they when they get thrown into these situations?

Vicious Cycles

2008-04-13T16:41:00.005-05:00

Gale encouraged me to post this piece from All Things Considered for your consideration. Warning: it's not a happy one. The narrator is a young woman who was essentially orphaned by domestic violence in childhood and who is now aging out of the foster care system. It touches on many themes I see in my work on a fairly regular basis, themes not unique to foster children: alienated adolescents seeking belonging and affection, the emotional logic of teen pregnancy, the effects of poor modeling of self-sufficiency, hopelessness. She is open and honest in a way that is both startling and refreshing, in the way that only adolescents with all their ego-centrism can be - the way that makes working with them so exasperating and rewarding. (For some reason, also, the occasional chirp of what I assume to be a smoke detector with a dying battery which is heard in part of the piece is one of the more affecting parts of it. And perhaps one of the most illustrative.)

We, all of us, are/were raised in an environment which lays out for us the path which we are to take. We mobilize our parents' capital, social and material, to forge this path for ourselves. This is the cycle of that mythical "American Dream" - that we will be better off than our parents. The assumption that underlies our system of government, our economy, our society as a whole, is that this cycle is intact. Even the welfare system, such as it is, assumes that both the impetus and the tools to become self-reliant, to "succeed in life," have been provided.

Unfortunately, for many of us (now speaking broadly), the cycle is broken and replaced by a new one. The cycle of generations of welfare ("victims of welfare," as Kanye West puts it), of people who eke by on whatever is provided by the government or nonprofits. The cycle of crime and incarceration in our minority communities. The cycle of children left emotionally wanting and starting their own families to fill that void. The cycle of undereducation and school segregation. These are broad strokes, of course, and many many people don't fit this description, but the theme is the lack of capital, in any or all senses of the word. Generations of people who, for whatever complex convergence of history, politics, and personal circumstance, were not provided with the same tools for "success." The consequences: violence, suffering. But don't we all start from the same starting line? Isn't one's failure to achieve solely one's own doing?

This is America. See what she has wrought, basing her domestic policy on the twin myths of a classless society and radical self-reliance.

Caveat: Remember that this piece was not solely recorded and produced (or even conceived) by she whose voice it depicts. That work was done by the NPR editors, who are likely not so different from us. Even the lack of editing (say, removal of the sound of a chirping smoke detector) is an editorial decision made by those whose voices you don't hear. The 'authenticity,' if such a thing exists, is therefore somewhat limited.

Sigh.

2008-04-12T15:51:00.003-05:00

I hate this, because you know that the Clintons would say the same thing about guns, Jesus and fear. It's things like this - the Clinton's bringing attention to one statement of Obama's - that make me wonder if the "Tanya Harding" strategy is actually in play. HRC in 2012?

An addendum:
And it gets worse.

Why are Democrats so excited to tell the Republicans exactly how they can defeat either of the nominees? Jeremy brought up the good point that Obama's comments reflect Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, in that they imply that religion is the opiate of the masses. It was recently pointed out to me that Frank's book is actually much more critical of the Democratic party than Democratic voters, and that the centrist turn of the Clintons and their Democratic Leadership Council is actually the target of his criticism.

Falling Down a Rabbit Hole

2008-04-12T10:21:00.005-05:00

Historian Tony Judt's article in this week's New York Review of Books is quite good. It's about the problem of historical memory at present, particularly relating to the twentieth century, and particularly relating to the United States.

He argues that while we remember certain groups through memorialization and museums, we lack a more generalized narrative of continuity to the twentieth century and the post-9/11 world.

Judt has an excellent analysis of the linguistic and historical problems of the terms "Islamofascism" and "terrorism," the problem of torture, and our practice of memorializing . . . he concludes:

"We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and 'exceptional' circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and 'terrorists,' between 'us' and 'them' —are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur 'never again.' So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?"

I also think that the point he makes that winners and losers alike, during war, suffer consequences. This is the reporting done by the assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya concerning Russian soldiers in Chechnya. This is what pushes Fanon to write that the colonizer is as psychologically disturbed as the colonized. Reading about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam this past week, my students sympathized enormously with the American soldiers put into the situation and told to "search and destroy." How our our current wars affecting us now?

2008-04-11T17:25:00.003-05:00

Check this out . . . an article on the "counter counterculture," also known as young conservatives, from the New York Times in 1995. Lots of familiar faces, in their raucous youth.

I might have to integrate this into my last day of class next week.

Origins

2008-04-11T08:36:00.002-05:00

This is a place to hold discussions with far-flung friends; rather than forwarding e-mails, rehashing conversations, we can have some of them here and engage in them together.