Sometime Maybe...

I am that bad postcolonial...

2011-10-13T02:16:00.000-07:00

I have decided that Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' is one of the most widely mis-characterised, mis-interpreted and mis-used texts out there. I constantly find myself getting into debates with folks about the productivity of this piece; and the more I argue, the more entrenched I feel in my position.

I've been writing bits and pieces of my take on this text - primarily as a response to an argument I had with one particular academic. I won't post that here just yet. But, I'm been writing a conference paper in which I allude to this debate, so I'll post an excerpt from that here.

Take it as you will...

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This is an experiment.

My experiment begins with an image – a naked image (Rancière 2007, 22) – sheer presence, without signification (23).

Then the story – most have heard it before. December 3rd, 1984. The populus of Bhopal is gassed with 27 tons of methyl isocyanate from Union Carbide’s pesticide factory. ‘It felt like somebody had filled our bodies up with red chillies, our eyes tears coming out, noses were watering, we had froth in our mouths’ (Champa Devi Shukla). Within 24 hours, this city-turned-gas-chamber claims over two thousand lives, devastates over 150,000 bodies, thousands of which were – which are – yet to be born. The next morning, a father buries – covers over with rubble – his child. ‘Unable to bear the thought of never seeing her again’, we are told, ‘he brushed away the dirt for one last look’.

The image, naked, a seething presence. Forced to signify… what? The gas leak? The dangers of industrial expansionism? The horrors of postcolonial capitalism?

What is this image? Must I show you… again? And to what end… still?

The spectacle of violence. The violence of the spectacle.

Do we need another moment of ‘show and tell’, another witness, to testify to the truth of brown sentience. ‘Does this not’, asks Hartman, ‘reinforce the “thingly” quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort to establish the humanity of the enslaved?’ (1997, 19).

Yes.

And yet, what is the slave, the child covered over with rubble – what are they but things? ‘The refusal of repetition that reproduces what it refuses’ (Moten 2003, 5). No, behold the thing.

Close your eyes. See it. [No seriously, close your eyes.]

See the body of the child. Drained of life and color. Its mouth slightly parted. Perhaps from the last gasp for air. Or from frothing. See its unblinkingly eyes; white spots where there were once, perhaps, seeing eyes. See its torso. Is that broken flesh, broken bone or broken stone?

Ok. Open.

A good race and postcolonial scholar might call foul on this performance. Seize pain – not “mine” – and offer it to you, allow you to make it yours. Use brown brokenness – or broken brownness – to let you – us – feel… what? In the most general of terms, human? The image, from naked to ostensive – ‘Presence [opening] out into the presentation of presence’ (Rancière 2003, 23).

But I am a bad postcolonial scholar. It is already too late. I learned to speak long ago, just as you already know how to see. You are no stranger to brown brokenness – or broken brownness; you heard me speak it before you saw me. I – know no other language.

What about a name, the scholar might persist. The child – can it only represent? Does it not have a name?

Does it matter? I am that bad postcolonial who insists the subaltern cannot speak.

Here lies a buried thing. Do not be put off by my insistence on its ‘thingness’. For in our shared performance of its death – in that shared moment when we were moved to… Compassion? Empathy? Titillation? – we were confronted by our own subjectivity; our own impotent subjectivity.

Here, then, lies a thing with agency – agency, what Karen Barad describes as ‘the iterative reconfigurings of topological manifolds of spacetime-matter relations’ (2007, 178). A thing that defies its own thingness, but protests any easy emancipation into subjecthood.

....

Fuck it all...

2011-08-28T03:49:00.000-07:00

imma start blogging again.

1 year, 5 months and 19 days later, I still don't have Michelle Obama arms. Far from it, really. le sigh. But life has dealt some pretty serious cards and working (with) them has been quite a struggle. Beautiful, perhaps, but still a struggle. So, a cease-and-desist was issued on blogging, partially circumstantial but mainly self-imposed. I never really quit writing. In fact, I've been writing a lot - "for myself", to myself, with others, to others... just not here. But 1 year, 5 months and 19 days later, I say fuck it all, imma start blogging again.

What about? Who knows?! Who cares?!

Check in later...

Michelle-Obama-Arms

2010-03-13T08:17:00.000-08:00

I am now ABD. In academic parlance, that means "All But Dissertation" - i.e. I have been disciplined and thereby proven my worth for doing research and writing a dissertation. In other words, I am now a Ph.D. candidate. About a year ago I realized that ABD is in fact an official qualification, higher than an M.A. So that, I am the letters B.A., M.A., ABD, can now legitimately be attached to my name. For years I thought this whole ABD thing was just another hoop that we had to jump through - but I guess it actually counts for something. And so, technically, I could walk away from this thing and still teach (albeit as a lecturer not professor... whatever). But, after over a year of stressing over my prospectus and thinking I-have-no-idea-what-I'm doing, I-don't-have-the-smarts-to-do-this, I'm-never-going-to-pull-this-off... I finally know what I'm doing and can't wait to get started on it! And better still, my committee loves it too... which is, in itself, so worth all the pain.

Since I've haven't been posting much lately, and I'm still trying to physically and mentally recuperate, I thought a good way to start-up again might be to post the oral presentation I made before my committee. It gives a good idea of my project, without getting into the varied intricacies of it.

Since one's prospectus is never filed, there is never an official acknowledgments page that goes with it. So, I'm going to acknowledge some folks here. First obviously my advisor. You can never get away with crap with her - she demands the best of you. And if you don't deliver, she WILL let you know. But everyone that works with her knows this. With me, though, I demanded so much patience from her. Just yesterday, we were having a conversation about how I have higher expectations of, and am therefore the most mean to and demanding of, those I am close to. I said my parents and my partner (at any given time) experience this the most - and she added, "and your advisor." Damn... maybe I put her through stuff that I wasn't even aware of. She yelled at me once... pretty fiercely. And I was hurt and mad... but she got my out of a funk that had me stuck in a writing slump (yes, I know that rhymes...)... and most importantly, she didn't drop me as she well could have. For that and everything else, I love her!

And then, of course, there's my parents, my ex, and the person in my department I got close(r) to this year... they let me cry, they let me vent, they gave me ideas, they said it was ok if I wanted to come back/go back home but it would be better if I kept fighting... and for that and everything else, I love them too!!

So, what does any of this have to do with the title of this post? I love... I want... and now that I'm ABD, I can work towards more important things, like developing Michelle-Obama-Arms.

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Good afternoon everyone and happy International Women’s Day. I’d like to thank you for being present here today and especially for taking the time of read my work, despite all that this campus has been put through in the past few weeks. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Denise for being uncommonly patient with me as I worked through my prospectus and for not dropping me as quickly and as long ago as she rightfully could have. Thank you...

So, about my project. To state it concisely, and as should be evident in my prospectus, my project is about the erotics of violence. The path that brought me to this has been somewhat circuitous. If I had to trace back to its origins, I’d identify three moments through which my project emerged. The first was when I was introduced to Hortense Spiller’s Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. Here, the phrase “before body there is flesh” compelled me for the first time to seriously reflect on the possible differences between body and flesh. As I was doing so, a few weeks later, I had the opportunity to listen to Prof. Sherene Razack’s talk at an Ethnic Studies departmental colloquium where she spoke of how, in thinking about the deaths of aboriginal peoples in Canada, she was haunted by a boot-print found on the body of an Aboriginal man who was found dead a few hours after a police arrest. Her talk was built around the possible significance of this boot-print in the context of colonial violence. As I contemplated how these two moments might fit together – i.e. my reading of Spillers as well as Prof. Razack’s talk – I found myself constantly returning to Bartholomew’s image from Bhopal, rethinking its significance through the ideas posed by Spillers and Razack, and wondering too about what this image might have to offer to their work.

Thus put together, I began to recognize that what was driving my ideas was an interest in the productivity of the body in enactments of violence. That is, I wondered about the significance of the fact that the body is a predominant site for enactments of violence. And also I was interested in what might be revealed by focusing on the techniques through which violence in enacted upon the body. As I delved into my sites of interest then – i.e. Partition, Nandigram and Bhopal – I noticed that while postcolonial studies does in fact read the body as a crucial site of political formation, it is almost always signified through the ideas of culture and nation. And moreover, while the body is viewed as always gendered, it is primarily the female body that appears to be addressed – this is an effect, I believe, of the ways in which the figure of the woman is instituted in the realm of the cultural.

Reading postcolonial studies texts along side the work of scholars such as Allen Feldman and Elaine Scarry, I began to think about how one might write a postcolonial studies project that attempts to avoid a reification of power in the “edifices of domination” and contemplates, instead, the fictiveness of formal narrative that authorize it. Hence the assertion in my proposal that what I am interested in focusing on is the act of violence. And if Nietzsche is correct, and I presently concur, that “there is no “being” behind the doing, acting, … the doing is everything,” then, how might we think about subjects of violence as not already constituted but as produced in the act? And furthermore, how might we address them prior to, or in the initiating moment of the act?

This is the question that ultimately drives my project. Returning to my sites of interest, it does concern me that in cases of violence lives get written into, and sometimes out of, existence through certain privileged signifiers. And while I recognize the imperative and the productivity of these endeavors to illustrate the ways in which political formations are imbued with power and how that power circulates through and across various bodies and populations, I do wonder whether this can be written of in ways that reflect the larger violences that found their very existence. That is, I wonder how we might write violence so as to make it reflect the ontoepistemological contexts through which subjects are instituted and which mark their always already subjugated existences?

From this perspective, it is my belief that the lives that am I concerned with in my project are those that signify an imminent excess; that is, these existences are seen to exceed what is proper and useful in modern subjectivity – or, in other words, they exceed what is comprehended by the ethical order. It is for this reason that I see George Bataille’s formulation of the Human as offering something analytically valuable.

For Bataille, the Human is a descriptor that circumscribes both humanity and animality. Or, in other words, the Human is constituted through both, the negation of, and an always imminent transgression into, animality. The Human Other then, is that whose existence is always already described as excess. In Bataille’s work, this position is marked by the racial and sexual subaltern. In the context of my work however, subalterity is determined not through the usual colonial and racial constructs, but I re-describe it through the new Color Line as described by Sylvia Wynter, as that which separates the “developed” from the “underdeveloped.” This reframing enables me to complicate Bataille’s work so as to make his formulation of the Human and its Other productive for post-colonial contexts.

There are two more crucial steps which help lay-out my project. Here too, I follow Bataille’s guidance. For Bataille, the being that emerges through the negation of all excess, that is by holding all excess in ban, is SERVILE MAN. The accursed domain, then, describes all that lies in excess of SERVILE MAN. The act wherein the ban is negated, servility is transgressed and existence expands into the realm of the accursed – Bataille refers to as the erotic. Yet, he also argues that such an act is propelled by the horror and desire engendered by the object of the act. Indeed, it is acts such as these that he describes as violence produced by “a fleeting movement of animal excitation.”

I therefore propose that since racial and sexual subalterns always already signify an imminent return to animality, to excess, that their bodies are signifiers of the erotic. And it is this erotic signification that provokes both an (ethical) revulsion and a (human) attraction. This may be said to constitute the scene of engulfment, where engulfment represents the dread that the object-of-violence-in-waiting might envelop, or devour, the agent-of-the-act-in-waiting. Extending Bataille’s argument then, I propose that, in this scene of engulfment, violence produced as an effect of the erotic refers to both the transgressive act as well as to the object of violence itself. In fact, it is my contention that the object and the act mutually constitute each other as erotic. Thus, my proposal is based on the idea that representations of violence, in attempting to bring order to disorder, or to make known the unknowable, isolate the erotics of violence. Yet, violence always already bares traces of it.

In my prospectus, I provided a brief overview of the work of scholars such as Scarry, Feldman and Michael Taussig in order to demonstrate how attention to the body can reveal the illusions of power as produced through spectacles of violence, and also to contemplate the possibilities of heeding the erotic as embedded within their texts. But to follow the erotic, per Bataille’s work, requires, in my opinion, the generation of separate ontological descriptors that address the moments of humanity and animality. I therefore introduce for my project the framework of body and flesh, where body is the ontological descriptor of SERVILE MAN and flesh describes existence corresponding to the accursed domain. The erotic, I suggest, traffics in these two moments of body and flesh.

That is, the erotic is constituted when SERVILE MAN transgresses the primordial negation and surrenders to the desire of, or returns to, the organic excess, his filth, the biological material associated with animality. But furthermore, to re-iterate, violence as a function of the erotic refers not only to the transgressive act, but also an incitement to violence by the erotic object. Thus, in the context of my work, the raced and gendered thing, onto which the erotic is imputed, is always already ontologized as flesh. Consequently, as noted in my prospectus, I contend that violence as an effect of the erotic is that whereby the body, in surrendering to the desire for flesh, becomes flesh.

To clarify, further, consider Sylvia Wynter’s work on “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being…,” where she suggests that the “coloniality of power” has, over time, established Man and his Other, through descriptors such as rational/irrational, selected/dysselected, developed/underdeveloped and thus deserving/undeserving. My distinction between body and flesh poses a similar ontological distinction. Except, however, this distinction while acknowledging the difference instituted between contemporary Man and his Others, also insists on its volatility. That is, body provides an account of a certain form, or moment, of developed existence – one associated with humanity – and flesh describes otherness, or more precisely, existence that exceeds what can be comprehended by body. Yet, existence described as flesh can only be negated, not annihilated. Indeed the form of existence captured by flesh is always already imminent in that captured by body. What can be annihilated then is the actual life that becomes associated with flesh. And ultimately it is this life that is of primary concern to my project.

To recap: my project asks, how might we write an account of violence that heeds the ontoepistemological context through which postcolonial subjects are instituted? In an attempt to answer this question, I suggest that we focus on the act of violence, through which the agent and the object emerge as subjects of violence. Here, I pose racial and sexual subalterns as signifiers of erotic excess, so that their bodies incite violence as erotic transgression. And in order to apply this proposed logic to my sites of interest – i.e. Partition, Nandigram and Bhopal – I suggest a methodological framework that uses body and flesh to describe the two ontological moments of humanity and animality, respectively.

I’d like to conclude as I did in my prospectus by asserting that my work intends to provide neither a generalized nor a universalized account of violence. On the contrary, it hopes to determine how violence might be engaged in its very singularity, so that the bodies and lives that violence is done to are retained as such, and not swept away, effaced, by grandiose narratives that reify power for themselves and the edifices from which they emerge.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Banjamin writes: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” I do not pretend to be this historian. Yet, my work is driven by these words… “even the dead… .” My dissertation hopes therefore to be a crawl towards their spirit.

Thank you.

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Fuckin' Crazy

2010-02-28T06:53:00.000-08:00

Things are fuckin' crazy. I'm in middle of writing my qualifying exams, but my heart and mind are elsewhere. And since my body cannot be where my heart and mind reside, it refuses to give me comfort.

No time to write here; not even sure I have the words to capture all that's happening - on campus and in my head. So, instead, read: Stop the Racism, Sexism and Homophobia at UCSD and UCSD Coalition for Educational Justice.

Will leave you with a couple of videos:

Ruck the Feegents: March 4th

2010-02-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

Need a quick yet productive break from writing. So, here are some fliers I made for the March 4th Day of Action against budget cuts to social services, especially education. Feel free to print and distribute. More to come soon...
(P.S. Just to be clear... I did not design the images on the front of the fliers. UCSD undergrads are responsible for that amazing work. Don't want to take credit for something I didn't do... :)

Happy 2010

2010-01-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's the new year and all that jazz. I have much to look forward to this year... the first of which should occur within the next couple of months. I'm not going to use the "Q" word... I don't want to give it a real existence and hence any real power over me... but it is finally going to happen. I might not be posting much until then, so I thought I'd post a few cartoons that capture my current state of existence.

Ok. Must get back to work.

No wait, one more...

Peace.

P.S. For more wonderful insights into the life of the species known as "the grad student," visit www.phdcomics.com

Race, Space and the Body

2009-12-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

Oh joy! The quarter is finally, almost over. That means some me-time for doing my own writing. And it also means looking forward to teaching a new class, new students next year. (Damn... it's "next year" already.)

This quarter ended on a pretty high-note for me because I got to "teach" my first class ever - i.e. I got the opportunity to guest lecture in the class I T.A. for - Intro to Asian American Studies. I think it went pretty well, but the reason it feels so good is: 1) because I finally got to talk about stuff I really care about; 2) although prepping was a little stressful, it was a lot of fun and I got to be a little creative with it; 3) I was professor-for-a-day - i.e. I felt like I was finally on my way (a bit of an exaggerated response, perhaps... but still.)

In any case, here's my lecture from yesterday. I've learnt that the best way for me to prep, at least for now, is to write out much of how I would "speak it." I rarely ever refer to my notes when I'm actually teaching, but I think the fact that I've written stuff out really helps. It's like performing your lecture in your mind. It is a little time consuming sometimes and I probably won't be able to do it once I start teaching for real, but, for now, it works well for me.

Warning: The stuff in here is not theoretically sophisticated. It might in fact even be a bit reductive. But, given that it was a lecture for undergrads, for whom almost all of this was completely new, simplification (over-simplification even) seemed necessary.

Oh, and also... it's choppy.

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Race, Space and the Body
Intro to As Am
Dec. 1, 2009

Combine my own research interests with the texts. My own research interest, or obsession, deals with understanding how ideas of “body” and “flesh” play a crucial role in the production of violence. The texts deal primarily with 2 ideas – interpellation and queer critique. So in trying to bring these two sets of interests/ideas together, I am going to center the ideas of “space” and “body” in this lecture. And my primary aim will be to understand how “space” and the “body” are socially produced.

Get to that in a sec. But first, I’d like to note something about the nature of this lecture. I will be discussing two cases that involve a form of sexual violence. I recognize that these issues are often very hard and overwhelming to talk about. I recognize this and will be very cautious about how I talk about it... I don’t want anyone to feel unsafe or uncomfortable. But if you do feel so, it is completely fine if you feel like you need to leave. Or you can come talk to anyone of us about it.

I Lecture Overview
Aim:
To understand space and body as social productions.
- “space” and the “body” are both not just given, do not have an a priori existence but are in fact socially produced.
- that they emerge from within various discursive practices and social relations.
- race, gender, sex, sexuality, and class both, produce and get produced by, space and the body.

Content:
- Space as socially produced: Indigeneity and the case of Pamela George
- Body as socially produced: Queerness and the case of Angie Zapata
- The critical possibilities of queer critique: Puar
- The productivity of space and the body in the politics of interpellation: Chong

II The Case of Pamela George
Show video:

Who is Pamela George?:
Pamela George is a young Canadian Aboriginal woman. In April 1995, Pamela George is found dead in an isolated spot on the outskirts of the city of Regina. Pamela George is from the Sakimay reserve which is also just outside of Regina. But the area where she is found dead is called the Stroll and it is known as a place where people from Regina often engage in sex with Aboriginal women working as prostitutes.

In investigating the death of Pamela George, the police had 2 options, 2 different kinds of spaces to investigate. The first was the Sikmay reserve and the other the city of Regina, which is inhabited primarily by middle- to upper-middle class folks – professionals and students, because the city hosts a university.

For the first three weeks, the police chose to question people on the reserve – family and friends of George’s but each time they came up empty handed. But they persevered in this direction, interviewing people on the reserve and “street people.”

Finally, 3 weeks later the police decide to follow-up on a tip from another Aboriginal woman. This woman had seen George get into a car with 2 young university athletes who she recognized because they had try to solicit her before they picked up George.

The police finally pick up these students, the students acknowledge their involvement with Pamela George, admit that they beat her, but deny that they murdered her. And so the case goes to trial.

These two young men are white, upper middle-class students at the University of Regina. They were both found guilty not of murder, but of manslaughter and sentenced to 6.5 years in prison. But both were released early.

Ok. So these are the bare minimum details of the case.

Q: What does this case tell us about how space is socially produced?
To answer this question, let’s consider the following:
- How is Pamela George marked? What are the social markers through which I described her to you? Aboriginal, woman, prostitute
- What about the defendants? White, middle-class, students
- Next, what are the spaces that they belong to?
George: the reserve (space of indigeneity); the Stroll (space of prostitution)
Defendants: middle class homes; the university

Q: What common understandings or images constitute indigenous communities?
alcohol and drug abuse, poverty/unemployment, domestic violence, high rates of incarceration.
Prostitution is similarly marked.

Q: But what about the defendants? How are they marked?
stable, morally upright, privileged, bright futures, etc.

That is, none of the deviancy or degeneracy associated with indigenous peoples or prostitutes, and the spaces that they inhabit, ever gets associated with the defendants.

And we see this very clearly in who the police chose to interview and who they didn’t really consider.

So for, example, the police found prints from an expensive brand of boots near Pamela George’s body – the kind of boots that neither people on the reserve or “street people” could afford. So, why then did it take them 3 weeks to even consider that somebody from beyond the reserve or the Stroll could be involved?

Here is the testimony of the one of officers involved in that investigation:

Slide: (get someone to read)
Q: Who do you usually suspect when you get a murder?
A: Well- ...
Q: Let me give you a better example. If it’s a woman who’s killed and there is [sic] boyfriends, husbands, are those people often the suspects?
A: Yes.
Q: And that’s simply because of the reality because oftentimes there is violence in relationships?
A: That’s right.
Q: And do you often suspect associates?
A: Yes.
Q: And if a person happens to live a life on the street, involved in that type of world, you might suspect other associates in that area?
A: That’s right?
Q: Did you suspect anybody who was attending the University of Regina when you first got the case?
A: No.
Q: And why not?
A: Nobody had ever come forward or there was never anything to point to anybody there.
Q: And why would you suspect somebody far removed from Pamela George’s life, I take it?
A: Right.
Q: And did you get much, make much headway in this case pursuing the leads where the suspects were street people, people involved in a sort of a lifestyle different, maybe,
than most of us have?

Q: So what do we notice here?
Pamela George’s world is defined as “that type of world,” different, as “far removed” from normalcy, from the worlds that “most of us have” or inhabit.

In these phrasings we see a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that certain spaces, like the reserve and the Stroll, and the bodies that regularly inhabit these spaces, are always marked by violence and degeneracy. So that there is nothing “out of the ordinary” when violence, dispossession or death happen within these spaces.

In fact, before the jury goes off into deliberations, the judge instructs the jury that, while making their decision, the jury should take into account the woman killed was a prostitute. What the judge does here is reinforces the idea that Pamela George’s death is not exceptional because such consequences “come with the job.” Here, George becomes fixed as no more than a prostitute and hence becomes normalization as a subject of violence.

But what about the perpetrators?

In the course of the legal proceedings, we learn that:
1. immediately prior to their meeting with Pamela George, the two defendants had been out drinking and that a day or so after, they had gone off with family and friends on luxury vacations.

2. We also find that they had confided in a couple of friends, and also to one of their mothers, about what had happened.
- They admitted to picking up and beating up an “Indian hooker”.
- One of them reportedly said to a friend, “She deserved it. She was an Indian.” – it is unclear whether that refers to the beating or to the death.

But, in any case, during the legal proceedings, all of this information is explained by the defendants’ lawyer as “the boys did pretty darn stupid things.”

And since they never meant to kill Pamela George, the fact that they beat her up does not reflect violent behavior, but mere drunkness gotten out of hand. The “boys” are afterall from respectable families, with bright futures ahead of them.

Also, the acts that they committed were done in spaces already marked by violence and degeneracy, and to which they do not belong, they were only “visiting,” which they can walk in and out of. So, the mere fact that they entered this place of violence and degeneracy does not reflect on them – it is just another “darn stupid thing” that they did. They entered this space as a cheap thrill. They do not belong to the space and so their actions do not reflect upon them, but rather upon the violence of the space itself.

The actual degeneracy is associated with Pamela George agreeing to get into the car with them and drive to the Stroll. The “boys” were just having fun and things got a little out of hand.

In her analysis of the case, Sherene Razack writes:
Slide: “[Not] only did George remain the “hooker” but [the two defendants] remained the boys who ”did pretty darn stupid things’; their respective spaces, the places of white respectability and the Stroll simply stood in opposition to each other, dehistoricized and decontextualized. If Pamela George was a victim of violence, it was simply because she was of the Stroll/ reserve, Aboriginal, and engaging in prostitution. No one could then be really held accountable for her death.”

So, Pamela George’s death was seen as her own doing. Her death was always imminent because she was an aboriginal woman who lives on a reserve and she sometimes worked as a prostitute on the Stroll.

So far so good? Questions?

Q: What if Pamela George had been white?
Her inhabiting the space racializes her.
That is, race = space.
Race and space are socially produced in similar contexts and similar ways, so that spaces get marked by the bodies that regularly inhabit them but also bodies get marked by the spaces they regularly or normally inhabit.

Q: What if Pamela George had not been a prostitute? i.e. Why does race, or more
precisely, indigeniety matter, here? Why is the fact that Pamela George is aboriginal matter?

-Indigenous Lands/Bodies are naturalized objects of violence
Slide: 1885, Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap:
We were once factious, fierce and wild,
In peaceful arts unreconciled.
Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
From buffalo meat and settlers’ veins.
Through summer’s dust and heat content,
From moon to moon unwashed we went.
But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
Of light across our darkened way
And now we’re civil, kind and good
And keep the laws as people should.
We wear our linen, lawn and lace
As well as folks with paler face
And now I take, where’er we go
This cake of IVORY SOAP to show
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see.

Indigenous women, from the time of contact have been seen as natural and necessary objects of sexual violence. The bodies of indigenous women, like the lands they occupied, were seen as wild, untamed, and dirty. The land supposedly bore no marker of civilization, and the bodies that inhabited these lands similarly had no bodily integrity or morality. So, like their lands which were spaces of violence, their bodies were also natural sites for violence. There was no ethical crisis or crisis of conscience where sexual violence against or the death of indigenous women were concerned.

So, as Razack states, when it comes to indigenous women: “No one could really held accountable for her death.” It was almost her natural state of being.

- Fantasy of Revenge:
What might the defendant have been referring to when he said of Pamela George, “She deserved it. She was Indian.”

Slide: 1982 video game: Custer’s Revenge.

“You are General Custer. Your dander’s up, your pistol’s wavin’. You’ve hog-tied a ravishing Indian maiden and have a chance to rewrite history and even up an old score. ... . If you’re to get revenge you’ll have to rise to the challenge, dodge a tribe of flying arrows and protect your flanks against some downright mean and prickly cactus. But if you can stand pat and last past the the strings and arrows – You can stand last. Remember? Revenge is sweet.”

One website lists this game as #3 out of 10 of the most “manly” games.

This fantasy of revenge is a reproduction of the fantasy, and the imperative, of taming the wild Indian. So again, indigenous women are normalized as objects of sexual violence.

- “Stolen generations”
“Stolen Sisters” is a play on the stolen generations. What is the stolen generations?

Refers specifically to the case of indigenous children in Australia being forcibly removed from the families and being made wards of the state. Special homes, boarding schools, churches became sites for a process of forced assimilation, where children were taught that their cultures were degenerate and backwards; they were given new names, prevented from speaking their languages. In Australia, this was official government policy from 1909 to 1969. But unofficially, it began long before and ended a little after.

Also, not limited to Australia. Also U.S. and Canada.

But the main reason was that indigenous people were biologically inferior, diseased, and socially inferior, violent and would therefore not last as a people for much longer, so children had to be “adopted” and taught new ways of survival. The other was cultural genocide, where the culture was so detrimental to human existence and progress, that it needed to be destroyed. Assimilations through forced removal from the spaces of degeneracy.

So back to the Pamela George case, do you think that the police or the lawyers or even the defendants and their supporters, deliberately thought about these ideas of indigenous women as natural sites of sexual violence, or a sites for the exaction of revenge or cultural genocide, when they were deliberating the case?

Probably not, unless they were social or historical critics. So then why does this history matter?

Because the knowledge that produces this history, and that is in turn produced by these historical events or ideas, sticks to the bodies and spaces concerned and becomes embedded in popular understandings.

Think about the Kang article for instance and how she implicates laws, education, religion and other ideological apparatuses of the state in disseminating knowledge as information or truth among the general population, so that this knowledge and the power it represents becomes banal, un-noteworthy, a given and hence these ideas remain relatively unquestioned or uncontested.

So if another prostitute is murdered or another indigenous women is disappeared or another deportee dies in a detention center the media or government or law enforcement doesn’t go into a tizzy about it. It might be “sad,” but not “shocking.” It is almost understandable.

Violence against these bodies or in these spaces doesn’t represent any crisis in the social fabric, because it is implicitly understood as “normal,” “commonplace.”

So, does this idea of race=space make sense?

Questions?

III The case of Angie Zapata

Who is Angie Zapata?
Angie Zapata is a young woman from CO. In 2008, she met a man over a networking site and they had been dating for a few days during which they once had consensual oral sex. One morning, while this person was alone in Angie’s apartment, he became suspicious about Angie’s sex because of some pics he saw lying around. He confronts Angie when she comes back, grabs her crotch and confirms that she is a transgender woman. At which point, he “snaps” and hits her over the head with a fire extinguisher and makes to leave. But as he is leaving, he sees Angie coming to consciousness, and trying to get up, so he strikes her again, killing her.

During the legal proceedings that happened in April of this year, the defense lawyer explained, that when his client found that Angie was trans, he snapped.

“Allen snapped. Allen flew into an uncontrollable rage. And when it was over and Allen realized what had happened, he ran out of the apartment."

Moreover, during his questioning by the police, the defendant refers to Angie as “it.” His defense attorneys on the other hand refuse to call her Angie, and always refer to her by her birth name, Justin.

What is happening here? How does this case tell us something about the body and queerness?

Queerness as monstrosity
Q: What is a monster?
- improper being, both physically and mentally.
- Signified through deformed body, sexual excess, moral deficiency, threat to normalcy, madness.

In popular culture, monsters are often produced as queer – not as in gay, per se, but as something that exceeds the limits of the normal and threatens its stability. So, queer theorists, for instance, critique the figures of Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula to show how these are queer bodies.

I won’t go over those analyses here, but let’s watch instead a clip from another cult classic.

Video: Interview with a Vampire

“I am flesh and blood, but I am not human.”
Feminized bodies
Parasitic
Sexual excess

In the case of Angie Zapata, we see a flip. If the monstrous body of the vampire is queer, in this case we see Angie’s markedly queer body as monstrous. It is more than what it seems. It is deviant. And so, something that is so scary, so repulsive that it must be destroyed. Here Angie’s body is queer par excellance. It is not merely the other, it is not merely different, but is not human, it is incomprehensible as human, it is in fact an “it.”

So the violence it elicits, is again, almost understandable. It may be wrong, but it isn’t shocking that such a murder or death could happen. There is again no ethical crisis.

Angie’s body says something about her mind, her morality as well. The fact that the defense attorney keeps referring to her as Justin is to highlight the “queerness” of Angie’s mind. Until recently, and in many cases even in the present, LGBTQ identities are seen as markers of mental illness. People were institutionalized if there were seen as queer in any way. The whole ex-gay movement is premised on the idea of psychological weakness or illness.

So when the lawyer names Angie not as Angie, but as Justin, he is positioning him self as somebody who has the mental health and ability to see Angie as who she really is – i.e. a man, Justin – while reinscribing Angie as mentally unable to recognize her true self.

So here we see the body as a site of social contestation. There is a battle over meaning, over self-determination – what is normal, what isn’t. But there is also a negotiation of proper social relations that happens over Angie’s body. That is, is violence against queer bodies truly violence or is it condonable, understandable, unexceptional because her body, like the body of the indigenous woman, has no integrity, it is non-human anyway.

IV Minarets
What happens when race and space and queerness and body and monstrosity, all of
these ideas collide? What do you get?

You get this...

Q: Recognize this image?
Have you heard about the ban on minarets that was passed a few days ago in Switzerland? There was a vote on whether to ban the construction of any new minarets in the country and the people actually voted yes on the ban.

This image was one of those that was used to garner support of the ban.

So what do we see here?
- Minarets as missiles (or perhaps missiles as minarets)
- Muslim woman in hijab become a fearful terrorist figure.
So here, the lines between a recognizably muslim space and a recognizable weapon of mass destruction get blurred. So that the minaret or the mosque becomes marked as that which produces violence. Which appears to make perfect sense given that in popular imagings terrorists are all mosque-grown. They are recruited in mosques, plot in mosques, etc. So the overlay between minaret and missile creates no form of cognitive crisis – it simply seems to replay or confirm fact.

What about the hijab being transformed in a terrorist figure?
To understand this, one must first recognize that the social production of the body includes not just the organic – i.e. the skin, the hair, the nails, etc. – but also the inorganic – the clothes, the shoes, the headgear. All these also make up the body.

In an earlier chapter in Puar’s book, she refers to the body as produced through the machining together of the organic and the inorganic.

So the hijab is a central marker of the muslim body. And its blurring with the image of a terrorist again appears to create no cognitive crisis because the muslim body is a terrorist body. So, the overlay of the hijab-wearing figure and the terrorist figure merely appears to confirm what is already known.

Ok. So this image very clearly shows both: 1. how race becomes spatialized and embodies; but also how 2. Space and the body get racialized.

But where does queerness fit into all this?

V Queer Critique: Puar
And this is where we finally turn to Puar.

1. not an identity = not merely LGBTQ
not an anti-identity = merely anti-heterosexual, or hetero-normative

2. recall queer = monstrous
here, queerness, as the monster, is that which exceeds comprehension, challenges and exceeds the limits of normalcy.
The queer, like the monster, has little if any claim to a legitimate social existence.
So from this hegemonic perspective terrorists are queer. They become, as Puar refers to them, “terrorist-monster-fag.”

3. but is all that queer means is bad or evil, then were is the possibility for resistance? That is, can the queer figure ever be a figure of resistance?

4. This is why Puar brings in the idea of “queerness as assemblage.” But what is an assemblage?
To put it very, extremely simply, it is the coming together of various organic and inorganic particles, and various social and political forces, to produce a certain figure or a certain existence.

5. Slide: To explain this, Puar uses this image:

Q: What do we see here, at first glance. Shout it out!
We see an image that is a play on the terrorist body.

6. But how do we recognize this figure as a play on the terrorist figure?
- there is first the organic? i.e. the body – the skin, the hair, and its various markers, especially of race and sex.
- then there is the inorganic? The clothes, the headgear, the guns, the bombs, the ammunition the terrorist may carry.
- even further there are the political and social conditions within which the terrorist is read – so that might be the war on terror, or the spate of suicide bombings.

All of this – the organic, the inorganic, the social, the political – all this comes together to constitute “the terrorist.” The terrorist body as assemblage.

7. But it is only through this assemblage, this coming together of various particles and forces, that the terrorist is seen as “terrorist-monster-fag.”

And in fact, Puar argues, that is how all queerness – queer bodies, queer spaces – get produced. That is, queerness, if thought of as a critical social production, is always an assemblage.

8. So, only by viewing queerness as an assemblage, does “queer” become more than merely bad or monstrous, because, as assemblage, queerness actually highlights how dominant or hegemonic ideas and formations are complicit in its production.

Infact, queer as assemblage demonstrates how dominant ideologies are dependent upon queerness to produce their own “normalcy.”

This is the possibility of queer critique – that by occupying the position of queer, you can actually critique and resist the production of hegemony.

9. One more thing about assemblage. Puar says that to look at “queerness as assemblage” is more production than looking at “queerness” through intersectionality. Why?

Because Xn institutionalizes it queerness. The only way that Xn can recognize queerness is by recognizing it, and disciplining it, as an identity or an anti-identity.

e.g. from an Xn perspective, gay marriage is important because, through it, queerness gets included, becomes legitimate, within the social. Queerness becomes an object that can be regulated and controlled by law.

But if you look at “queerness as assemblage” then you will recognize that everytime there is something that gets included, new “particles” and new forces become visible, that remain excluded from the social, from law.

Right? Because for law to function, there is always an inside and an outside; always something that must be included and excluded. Critical queer analysis says that everything that is created as outside, as excluded from the law, is queer.

But you can see that only if you see queer as assemblage. Because for every particle and every force, that gets normalized, there is always a whole bunch of others that remain queer, that remain “abnormal.”

To go back to Puar’s image then, if at one point Sikhs (as Asians) were considered queer say because of their bodily traits – their long hair and brown skin, their religious beliefs – the carrying of the kirpan and wearing of the turban, and their hyper sexuality, then with their inclusion into nationhood and citizenship they become perhaps partly normalized.

But in the context of suicide bombing and the war on terror, the turban institutes queerness because of the easy comparison with the turban Osama bin Laden wears. Or that the kirpan that Sikhs carry becomes the imagined as a bomb carried by suicide bombers.

So, the figure of the Sikh male, remains queer. It’s just that the particles and forces that define his as queer change over time and space.

Make sense?

So, again, reading queerness as assemblage allows for a recognition of, and resistance to, the hegemonic ideas and imagines that produce queerness in the first place.

So what does any of this have to do with the idea of interpellation?

VI Interpellation
Slide: Interpellation is a term developed most prominently by Louis Althusser and can be defined as a mechanism whereby the human subject is constituted by already existing social structures.

What does this mean?
Do you see that in all the sites I have mentioned so far, whether Pamela George, Angie Zapata, the image of the minarets, or the figure of the terrorist, we acknowledged the caterogires the constitute these sites – e.g. indigeneity, transgendered-ness, islam, etc. – and we also acknowledged, either vocally or tacitly, the underlying ideas or principles that produced mark these categories.

In short, we looked at each of these sites through a particular lens or even multiple lens of knowledge and meaning.

This is what is called the gaze.
Slide: Gaze can be defined as “the way the viewer views its object, which defined most
often by dominant formations of power/knowledge.”

The idea of interpellation is that the person which is being viewed recognizes themselves in that gaze. That is, when you look at me, depending upon the social context, the social space, the social relation, I recognize myself not as me, but as who you most probably see me as. That is I become interpellated as a subject in your gaze.

Example. Less than 24 hours after the shooting at Fort Hood, I was traveling by plane, and seated next to me was a family that was visible marked as Muslim. The woman was wearing a hijab, the man a skull cap, and they were speaking with their son and amongst themselves in what I am presuming was Arabic.

When I saw them, the first thought that came to my mind was, I wonder if they are feeling hyper-visible today. That is, I wondered whether in the context of the Fort Hood shooting –which was carried out by a Muslim – and in the continuing context of the war on terrorism, and the racism and xenophobia that accompanies it all, and given that they were marked so clear by clothing and language as muslim, I wondered if they felt like they were being viewed as dangerous, violent, with terrorist potential, etc. That is I wondered how they were being interpellated.

So, interpellation is I become a subject based on how I see myself reflected in your gaze.

Chang writes that interpellation represents not just a moment where you become subjected by the gaze of another – so it is not only a moment of oppression; but more importantly, how you respond to that moment of interpellation can has possibilities for resistance.

So in the case of this family I was flying with, if they were in fact interpellated as dangerous, then the fact that they didn’t get rid of the hijab and the skull cap, and they continued to speak in Arabic in public, could potentially signify an act of resistance. Because, in that act they refuse the gaze that casts them dangerous, as terrorist. They may recognize themselves in that gaze – that doesn’t change, that moment of interpellation still exists – but it is what comes after that marks resistance. Do they try to assimilate? Become less visible physical by discarding their dress? Speak only English? Or do they refuse to do all this and continue to live based on their own self-
definition rather than become subjected by the moment of interpellation.

Make sense?

So the reason, I wanted to center the body and space in this lecture, is because both these formations are crucial to both, the constitution of the gaze and the interpellation of a subject.

One last question? Is race here biological? [Refer to Wyatt]

VII Conclusion:
- human existence as socially produced
- produces possibility for resistance/counter-hegemonic practice
- Ethnic Studies as liberatory (not revolutionary) project

When my life becomes fodder for your conversation...

2009-11-21T12:52:00.005-08:00

Before I went home this summer, I mentioned here that I had had some realizations about what "friendship" means and, more specifically, what it doesn't. I had intended to write some about it but, for many reasons, never got around to it. Yet, it was a subject that I mulled over constantly and I made quite a few decisions in its wake. So far, those decisions have worked out pretty well for me... and I'm glad I stuck to them, despite the fact they are not "easy" or "convenient" ones.

But the burn that precipitated my decision to change directions still lingers. As much as I try to distance myself from it, it keeps reminding me of its presence. Perhaps, though, this is a good thing because it prevents me from being lulled into a false sense of security, and it reminds me of what I truly value in my life.

It has been a really long time since I have been cut by the fickleness of friendship. Ever since arriving in the States, it seems, I have had friendships that have withstood all kinds of hurt and pain and strife, and until recently, I had assumed that all friendships work out the same way. I had forgotten though how much trust goes into developing a friendship... a trust that can never be just established, but takes time and work and, yes, tests. And of course, to trust someone does not imply never being betrayed by them. In fact, the more you trust, it seems, the easier it is to feel betrayed. (Or perhaps that's just me?) Yet, looking back at my friendships that "work" I have come to realize that when there is genuine trust it withstands all forms of hurt and conflict and rejection and betrayal. Because, ultimately, what you trust is the other's deep, unwavering love/support/concern for you.

Most of the people that I consider my close friends, I don't speak with more than once or twice a year, sometimes less (unless they're in the same city). But this isn't weird or off-putting for us because we recognize that our busy lives, our very present conditions of living, don't necessarily allow for it. And we understand that the lack of communication doesn't mean we've disappeared from each other's lives, but that we are still very present in them. Then, when we do talk, it's like nothing has ever changed... that connection, that chemistry, that makes us friends is always there. And when we need someone to talk to, no matter how long it's been since we've spoken, it is comfortable to pick up the phone, or send an e-mail, saying I need you in my life right now. And we can still share the most intimate, difficult details of our lives without the fear of being judged or rebuked.

Friends are those that can make you the angriest, and hurt you the most (and vice versa) - but they are those that, even through your tears and fears, you know you will always have in your life. Even if you have to let them go in every way other than in your memories, you always want them, will them, to be a part of you.

Such friendships are never easy to come by. They can never just happen, be replicated. And, most importantly, the burdens they are capable of bearing can never be borne by other kinds of friendships. Indeed, in the case of the latter, one's life becomes not something that is held in trust, but rather becomes the fodder for "conversation." This was a lesson I learned, maybe re-learned, recently.

Gossiping, I understand, is fun. It is a predominant form of social interaction; it is a way of connecting, perhaps; maybe it helps in keeping conversations going. Oftentimes, it is a necessary means of venting. I'm no saint... I engage in gossip, especially of the latter kind. But the reason gossip is, well, gossip, is because it is superficial. It isn't intended to do the entity being gossiped about any good; it isn't a deep analysis of that entity, of its situations, etc. It is, simply, talk. And, as far as I am concerned, when one's life becomes the subject of another's talk, there is a deep breach of trust. And especially when such talk seems to forget, deliberately or otherwise, the difficulties, the complexity, of issues communicated in confidence - forgets the internal conflict, the messiness of it all - so that a multifaceted issue, with no easy right or wrong, gets reduced to dinner table conversation, it is quite easy to be feel utterly betrayed. And to feel little guilt in walking away.

When I think of my closest friendships - I think of three in particularly. These three probably know every detail of my life... all the significant ones at least. The first is one of sisters - it is probably one of the few relationships I have in which I am not the dominant one. (Yes, I admit it.) We are so very different in so many ways, yet we've been the best of friends since we met about nine years ago. She's probably the only one who can rebuke me, use harsh words against me, but get away with it without my putting up a fight. The other... I can't describe. She pushed my buttons because she loved me, I encouraged it and gave it back, because I loved her. The last year or so of her life, we barely spoke, and when we did, we'd end up fighting. We said terribly hurtful things to each other, but we could never deny that we loved each other. She drove me insane, but I let her, because I knew who she was and she knew who I was. It took a special kind of trust, and a lot of work and heartache - but it was worth it. And I'd do it all over again. The third is my ex. Our relationship was complicated as hell, painful and hurtful as hell, and it ended because of betrayal. But it was a friendship. The only way we survived our relationship, and our break-up, was because it was a friendship. Because we understand each others deep flaws and failings - but also recognize each others strength and beauty - we can keep re-learning to be friends. Despite a certain kind of breach of trust, that deeper aspect of it that I refered to above still exists.

To the unknowing eye, the last two friendships might seem abusive. And, like all others, they were... from the perspective of all parties concerned. There is no single guilty party; no singular victim. These relationships don't fit into neat boxes. When judged from the outside, they are necessarily dysfunctional, pathological. But I would pick these over and over again because they have each given me, and continue to give me, something this is not easily replicated, not easily reproduced. And whatever form these relationships survive in, they will always be a huge part of me.

See, certain folks understand that. So that when I communicate my pain and anger and frustration about these relationships, I know I am safe - and I know my relationships are safe too. With others, apparently, this is not so much the case. Forgive me, then, if I must walk away.

Cutting Class Against Class Cutting

2009-11-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

I referred, in my previous post, to the budget crisis facing the UC system. Starting today, until Nov. 20th, there is a system-wide strike action to protest the measures proposed by the Board of Regents - which include fee hikes, job cuts, fewer classes - the usual, predictable stuff that follows calls for budget cuts.

I generally teach sections on Thursday, but naturally I will be canceling them for tomorrow. But I wanted to impress upon my students why this strike represents not a waste of their education (in terms of time and money) but rather is central to it. That it is, in fact, a much better, more productive use of their time and money than a corporatized educational system would ever want them to have. So I drafted a "statement" (it's more an analysis) of the strike in terms of some of the ideas we've been discussing in class. Hopefully, it'll get them to see theory in practice, in real time! I'm posting that statement below.

There is, however, one thing that I left out of the statement but have been wanting to write about for a while now. I returned from Oberlin a couple of weeks ago and, as usual, it got me thinking about the direction of the school in terms of student, staff and faculty demographics, the presence of critical social justice programs, academic and otherwise, and the general ways in which the institution represents itself - and how all this is balanced against financial/budgetary concerns. My visit, in conjunction with all that's happening at the UCs, made me think about a letter I wrote to the Oberlin College student newspaper, when I was a Senior.

I'm not going to re-produce that letter here because it is probably not contextually appropriate to post outside of the institutional arena. However, in brief, the letter was a critique of how certain kinds of education and intellectual praxis got valued, were deemed as productive and hence worthy of institutional recognition, while others became marginalized as "not a real major" or got reduced to extracurrical activities. Of course, this isn't a new phenomenon, nor is it any way limited to Oberlin. In fact, Oberlin probably does a better job in supporting and recognizing social justice and intellectual praxis more than other institutions. (Now that I have some distance from the institution, I can say that. No, I'm not going soft...) Of course, that doesn't imply that Oberlin's getting it all right. The institution can undoubtedly be doing much more and much better, and it is just as vulnerable an institution as any other to the dangers of corporatized education (where institutions self-consciously produce themselves in the image of capitalism).

I have begun to joke often about how, in a capitalist system, I am an inefficient, unproductive worker. But the truth is: this is in fact true and it's not very funny. As an inefficient, unproductive worker, my labor is expendable. And this is true not because of the nature of my labor (i.e. research/teaching) but because of what academic formation my labor is attached to - i.e. humaities/social science. Were I an academic in an engineering or medical or law program, I'd be a "good worker." The point I'm trying to make, quite simply, is that as the plot of the global financial crisis thickens, critical intellectual work is going to more and more devalued so that programs like Ethnic Studies will no longer be "financially viable." We will either completely disappear, or be "absorbed" into other programs. (Institutions generally articulate this as "looking for creative ways to collaborate with other departments across campus." I've heard this statement once too often.)

I'm not exactly sure where I was going with this other than to say the UC strike and others nationwide are just the start. I think we have a big fight on our hands against numerous entrenched interests - one that I am both apprehensive about and very excited for. Perhaps the revolution is really coming! 2012?!

*************************************************

The UC Strike as an Educational Moment

The UC Board of Regents is meeting at UCLA from Nov. 18-20th to vote on the following issues pertaining to system-wide budget cuts:

o An additional 32% fee increase over the next two semesters.
Should this fee increase go through, the cost of a UC education will have increased three-fold since 2000.

o Laying-off an additional 2000 workers.
These cuts are likely to predominantly affect service and support staff at the UCs.

o Continuing with furloughs, cutting classes and critical student services.
This implies paying more for fewer/limited services – fewer classes, larger class size, limited library hours, limited access to student support services, etc.

In response to these potential changes, there is a call for a system-wide strike and for a mass protest – involving teach-ins, and sit-ins/sleep-ins – from Nov. 18-20th at UCLA, where the Regents are conducting their meetings.

Tomorrow’s sections have been canceled as a response to this call.

Canceling class does not represent a de-valuation of education, or a waste of the time and money being invested by you and your families towards gaining an education. Nor is it an opportunity to “slack-off.”

Rather, this strike/protest is a crucial site of education – of knowledge acquisition, production and practice. For, if we think critically about this event, we will clearly see how the discourses and practices of subjugation, exclusion, discrimination and resistance that we have been investigating in class with respect to immigration, citizenship and nationality are reproduced here in the context of education.

Thus, this event is in fact an integral part of the education that your time and money are being invested in.

The following are some of my thoughts about the educational and political significance of this event, and hence the need to respond to the call for a strike:

Access to Education:
o From the perspective of this class, thinking about the protest in the context of access to education is imperative because it raises issues of systemic exclusions and discrimination with respect to race, class, gender and sexuality.

o More than just a catch-phrase: One seldom hears college or university administrators argue that access to education must be limited, regulated and controlled. Indeed, everyone touts the imperative of “access to education.” Yet, policy changes made by educational institutions, especially higher ed institutions, almost always make education generally less accessible with a few token examples, perhaps, of how the marginalized and disenfranchised continue to be recruited and supported within their hallowed halls. Financial and budgetary concerns almost always trump issues of access and support, rendering “access to education” no more than a mere catch-phrase.

o Systemic discrimination: This is an example of systemic or institutionalized discrimination (i.e. de fact, not de jure, discrimination). For there is rarely ever any evidence that an effort is being made to balance budgetary imperatives with the imperative of education as a public, not private, good. That is, education becomes more deeply entrenched in systems (primarily capitalism) that are founded on exclusions and exploitations of the many by a few, and merely gets “re-designed” in order to be made more inclusionary and multicultural, without actually questioning the deep-rooted violences and exclusions that produce the system itself.
• Think about how conquest, slavery, indentured labor, (neo-)colonialism, imperialism, militarism, globalization, etc. have all been deployed to support the capitalist economies of the U.S. and Europe at the cost of indigenous and Third World lives. Think about the questions we’ve been discussing in class – Who can own property and who is property? Whose labor is wanted and whose lives are expendable? Whose lives does this “labor not lives” trope serve? If inclusion and multiculturalism are supposed to transform the evils of discrimination and exclusion, why do sweatshops, slave labor, indentured labor etc. still constitute the majority of domestic and global labor formations?
• The transformation from “old capitalism” to “new” or liberal capitalism does not represent systemic transformation. It only represents a transformation of the discursive practices and images propagated by the system.
• This is true of education systems as well.

o Rhetoric of Elitism: Too often we hear higher education and intellectualism being derided as “elitist.” This is an example of how discourse gets used to sustain systemic discrimination. So, for example, think about the contradictions between the rhetoric of education as elite, and anti affirmative action rhetoric. If higher ed is, in fact, elitist, and thus of little use to “real Americans” or “American values,” why is there so much opposition of affirmative action practices in education? In the context of these discourses, who is seen as the truly worth and deserving subject of education?

For all these (and many other) reasons, access to education is always a crucial issue (a site for consciousness-raising and resistance) regardless of whether budgetary or other similar concerns are in play.

Labor not lives:
o As mentioned above, 2000 jobs are likely to be cut system-wide, presumably affecting service and support staff the most. Oftentimes, the workers most affected by such cuts are low-wage workers, immigrants and people of color.

o Lay-offs are an excellent example of how these bodies are needed only for labor, but their lives (the quality, the possibility of leading an economically and socially stable and secure life) are expendable. When times are good, more labor is hired to serve our interests. When times are bad, labor is cut, once again to serve our interests. (“Our” here includes the people who benefit most from the institution, financially and intellectually – i.e. students, faculty, administrators, etc. It also refers to a more general “our” – i.e. those that have a stake in maintaining the institutional and larger societal status quo.)

o Yet, not only do these constituencies regularly support and join student strikes, globally, that aim to resist and transform systems of subjugation and violence, but often times their own activism is the inspiration for student movements. Think for instance about the TWLF and the various solidarities that the movement built and benefited from. Or the AsAm Movement, in general.

o Access to education and economic security are not in fact distinct issues. In fact, they mutually constitute each other. Not only do they both affect the same communities, but the exclusions and subjugations they produce are dependent on each other and are crucial to serving capitalist desires. Think about the vicious cycle – lack of educational access leads to de facto employment discrimination leads to economic insecurity leads to…?

Productivity of a Strike:
o When deciding whether to participate in a strike we are often compelled to make various economic calculations, weigh costs against benefits, etc. We wonder: Will I lose my job? How much will I lose in wages? Or, as a student one may wonder, why am I being denied an education when the strike is about access to education?

o Yet, to strike is to recognize that the capitalist system (or in this case, corporatized education) counts on the fact that, for all these reasons, one will not strike. This is precisely how systems of subjugation are intended to work – they count on a paralysis of action brought about by immediate needs versus the possibilities for future, long-term gains.

o This is why strikes are so productive, because they reveal the weakness of the system itself, and bring its founding ideologies into crisis.

o To strike, then, is productive not because it brings about a complete over-haul or dismantling of the system, but rather because it, metaphorically, puts a mirror up to the system to reveal its weakness and cracks, and disallows the system from reproducing its violence without hindrance.

These are some of my personal reasons for canceling class and joining the strike tomorrow.

As students of UCSD – as a constituency that has a stake in what the UC system values and how it functions – but also as Ethnic Studies students who engage in the intellectual-political project of the this field, you are highly encouraged to participate in this strike in whatever ways you deem appropriate.

Social justice projects like Ethnic Studies owe their emergence to, and should remain accountable to, working class people, immigrants, and people of color. This is a possibility represented by joining the strike.

This should begin, however, with educating yourself about the various constituencies involved in the strike, the various debates surrounding it, etc. Here are some web-sites to help you get this going:

http://ucstrike.com/

http://savingucsd.ning.com/

http://www.afscme3299.org/

Dear Disgruntled Academic...

2009-10-26T23:38:00.001-07:00

I started T.A.ing in my very first Ethnic Studies class a few weeks ago. In my introductory lecture, I tried to lay out for my students what the Ethnic Studies project is, and what its intellectual and political imperatives are. As I was winding up, my "take-home point" to them was about the keeping in mind the connections between theory and practice, and not falling prey to the idea that there is always already a rift between the two. Given that the project of Ethnic Studies emerged from radical, grassroots student movements, oftentimes theory is looked upon with great disdain within the field because it is presumed to signify the losing of one's roots, an act of "selling-out." I have a serious problems with articulations of such a split because it completely elides the intellectual underpinnings of the movement for Ethnic Studies, and it also presumes that grassroots work/activism is something distinct from, or other than, intellectual work. I didn't want my students to somehow come away with that idea, so I made it a point to emphasize that the rift between the two would exist only if they wanted it to; that is, it exists only in the moment of choice. And over the past few weeks, I have used the course readings to keep coming back to this point, so that they don't think I'm being an apologist for academia, or just pulling stuff out of my arse... but they actually see the connections manifest in the work assigned them.

The sad and frustrating thing though is that numerous academics themselves buy into this rhetoric about the split between theory and practice. It irritates the life out of me when I hear academics piss on intellectual work because it has no "real life implications." My response to these is, just because you don't see the connections doesn't mean they don't exist! The inability to note how intellectual work, theory even, impacts the everyday, and vice versa, signifies either a weakness of one's mental abilities (ok, I'm being a bitch), or a simple laziness. The dismissal of intellectual work doesn't make one somehow more radical; it makes them less capable of recognizing and confronting the socio-symbolic violences that pervade our world. It means that one has little understanding of how the world and human existence is constituted. The structures that we find ourselves confined within, subject to, aren't just a given - they are the effects of intellectual work. If you want to transform them, you've got to understand them in all their complexity... or else, you've lost the battle and the war.

I am sick too of those that valorize the 60s as if they represent a pure moment of political activism, untainted by intellectualism and "theory-heads." That form of idealization, in my opinion, does a deep disservice to the intellectual investments of those involved. It over-simplifies what was a complex, contentious moment of the political and intellectual re-writing of the U.S. Academics seriously need to re-think their mythologization of the 60s. This is especially true right now, in the context of the crises facing higher ed institutions, specifically the UC system.

I have heard folks complain that the acts of protest at the UCs are just an instance of the privileged acting out against pay-cuts and furloughs. First off, this is an oversimplification of the what's going on. The crisis also involves massive tuition hikes, larger classes, job loss among staff, etc. So the budgetary decisions in play have a more far-reaching effect than some seem to recognize - especially with regards working class and of color communities, as well as academic programs, like Ethnic Studies, that are, in fact, their heirs. Moreover, the conditions that have produced this crisis, and the effects they are bound to engender, closely mirror those in play in the 60s. Had students and activists in the 60s refused to walk-out, protest, and strike because they were intellectually and politically paralyzed by the fact their lot was better than those dying in wars in Asia, perhaps today we wouldn't have the language, the tools and the legacies that enable us to do the kind of anti-violence work that is actually possible today.

I am not trying, here, to deny that we are privileged to be in academia. I agree that as academics it is our responsibility to be aware of and continue to critique the conditions that make this privilege possible. But that doesn't mean we should piss that privilege away by merely complaining about how bad it is. We need to learn to use that privilege productively instead! That is crucial to the work of an academic!! We have an extraordinary opportunity to enable some form a social impact... we either use it, or get out of the way because there's many more deserving folks waiting to for a spot like ours.

Also, the next time someone talks to me about privilege with their Prada bag in sight... Internalize your critiques please!!

I am myself pretty disgrutled and cranky with academic right now. And in trying to rein in my frustration, rage too perhaps, this post may have turned out a little awkward. But, a couple of years, I wrote something similar for a student of color newspaper at Oberlin. I am pasting this here because I think it articulates a little better my displeasure with cranky academics.

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As I write this, I have just returned from a protest at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges at the University of California, San Diego. Marshall College, established in 1970 through a student movement initiated by fierce and radical scholar-activists such as Angela Davis and Herbert Marcus, was created specifically as a space for the intellectual and political growth of working class students and students of color. Central to the College’s academic requirements is the Dimensions of Culture (DOC) Program, an “interdisciplinary sequence that has Diversity, Justice, and Imagination as its main themes. In this course, which includes intensive instruction in university-level writing, first-year students study American social issues and gain an awareness of American cultural perspectives” (http://marshall.ucsd.edu/prospective/index.shtml).

Over the past few years the DOC curriculum, has been substantially “watered down,” which is evident, for example, in the replacement of the study of critical race theory with that of “downward assimilation” theory, a concept that argues that if new immigrant groups intend to successfully “Americanize” or assimilate, they must “avoid” interaction or integration with certain ethnic groups. Such spectacularly problematic, ignorant (and may I add, “pin-headed”) curricular changes were made in response to complaints from some “concerned” parents regarding the “indoctrination” of their children. Further, a college that was founded with a radical mission to serve underrepresented and disenfranchised students, now serves numerous (over-)represented and (over-)privileged students who chose to attend Marshall College because of its proximity to the beach and its wonderful residence halls.

In response to the growing critiques made by students and Teaching Assistants to the changing curriculum, the College recently fired 2 T.A.s for their political activism around the issue, defending its curricular changes and the firings through the rhetoric of “academic freedom.” The day’s protest, then, was to challenge these bogus claims of “academic freedom” and to demand the restoration of the critical, progressive mission that the College was founded upon.

I begin with this story because the on-going events at Thurgood Marshall resonate with my own memories of Oberlin, and will probably resonate with numerous other Obies, past and present. This is not to say that the events and circumstances at Thurgood Marshall are identical to those at Oberlin, or vice-versa. Instead, it is a comment on the non-uniqueness, un-exceptional-ness and non-isolation of the regressive changes occurring in various “social spaces” across the United States. Too often at Oberlin, we complain about the “Oberlin bubble.” But over the years I have come to realize that, while Oberlin may be spatially and socio-economically distant from the “real world,” it is in no way immune from, unaccountable for, or non-complicitous in the changes occurring “outside.” In fact, the “Oberlin bubble” is a microcosmic reflection of the “real world” – that space that we, so often, are tempted to valorize. As one of the speakers at the protest mentioned, what does it mean when an academic institution tells us that race and indigeneity and gender and class and nation are “controversial,” or worse still, “do not matter,” when each day people continue to die while crossing the border, and indigenous communities continue to encounter the violation of their environments and cultures, and immigrant communities of color continue to be subject to slave labor?

While academic institutions may not contribute directly to these unjust and inhumane circumstances, are they not perversely complicit – in line with the militarized nation-state and the corporatized global economy – in eliding the all-pervasive violence that communities continue to encounter across the various local and global spaces? I am not attempting to suggest here that academic institutions are as violent as, say, multinational corporations; rather, the point I am trying to make is that H/history, as living past and multiple futures, does not stop at the boundaries of Oberlin College, Ohio. The “Oberlin bubble” is part of the limitless, fluid and intersecting “bubbles” that constitute H/history. That is why it matters who Oberlin serves and what it teaches; whose voices are respected and whose dismissed; what is spoken and what remains mired in ghostly silences; what Oberlin values and what it proactively strives for. And more importantly, that is why the tireless and relentless social justice work of students, staff, faculty and alums at Oberlin, is crucial – it is not isolated action, restricted within the time and space of Oberlin, and it is definitely not any less “real” than that which occurs “outside.”

Yes, those of us in academic institutions are substantially more privileged and generally enjoy a greater level of security and comfort, at least within the space of academia; and while it is crucial to be critically aware of this privilege, to get bogged down by “privilege guilt” can be paralyzing and unproductive. Over the past few months, as a graduate student at UCSD, I have come to realize that non-complicit action is impossible – mired though we may be in the rhetoric of individualism, we are all intimately and violently linked to each other though oppressive systems and structures. Therefore, what is crucial to social justice activism is how we chose to insert and position ourselves, and our work, within such always-already complicitous frameworks.

I apologize for turning what was meant to be a “reflection piece” into a political spiel. However, I chose to write this because it is, in fact, what I have learnt through my time Oberlin. I owe Oberlin my life. While this statement may be somewhat of an exaggeration, it is not totally off the mark. I am where I am and I envision my future as I do because of Oberlin – because of my relationship with students, faculty, staff and alumni who were committed to social justice. It was at Oberlin that I came to consciousness, and learnt to be socially aware and active; it was also at Oberlin that I learnt to be angry, hurt, cynical and suspicious. But working through the pain and disappointments of Oberlin has been crucial to my ability to develop, what I perceive to be, a broader and more productive view of social justice work.

Oberlin is special, a friend (and also an Oberlin alum) recently said to me, while we were reminiscing about our time there. Yes, I responded, but it takes a lot of distance to recognize that. Oberlin has an uncanny ability to burn people out, but I hope that after some wounds have healed (even partially), we can “come back” to Oberlin to support those who come after us, and who continue to struggle for an Oberlin reflective of the revolutionary changes we envision for a global society.

A Little Bit of Me

2009-10-13T22:52:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to post on here for a while, but transitioning from vacation mode to work mode has kept me more than a little busy. This evening, though, I found myself in a slightly introspective mood. It's the effect of all those planets out there... all the trines and conjunctions and retrogrades and going directs. In any case, so instead of writing my prospectus or reading for section, I decided to do the "writing as self-therapy" thing, which I guess evolved into this blog post.

So, here's a little bit of me. Be nice.

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I am full of contradictions and, although it can get hard sometimes, I’m happy that way.

I’m never sure what one “needs” to know about me. And my limited knowledge of psychoanalysis inhibits my ability to profile myself.

Yes, I do tend to overthink things sometimes. And someday, I’d like to know Lacan inside out.

Which makes sense, given that I’m an academic – at heart, mind and professionally. Although, technically, I’m still a student... People back home still think I’m studying to be an engineer (which I was, over 10 years ago, till I saw the light), or that I work at the U.N. (where I interned for just one summer, 5 years ago). It’s funny how perceptions stick. But that might have something to do with the fact that I travel home once every 2-3 years. Flying to India is expensive…

I am an “almost math major,” which means that if I had one more class, I would in fact be a math major. But I decided that enjoying the last semester of my senior year was more important than having a major I wasn’t planning on using. Not that my “real” major, i.e. politics, is that useful either. A politics professor once told me that I think like a mathematician... which is partially true, I now realize, because I can design fantastically “logical” lesson plans, grading rubrics and essay-writing guidelines for my students. Not that I really believe in logic, or rationality, or truth. I think I’d rather be Nietzsche’s mad-man; but I’m not that “evolved.”

I love teaching. I think of it as a process of rocking the students’ world… mentally and emotionally. Academics are personal trainers of the mind. That’s why we’re so cool… and also potentially so dangerous. Though I’m never sure why academics are cast as the leftist plague. Has anyone looked at a college course catalogue or syllabus recently? I could count the instances of leftiness on my two hands. Besides, I’m proud to be a leftist (which, in my head, is different from being a liberal, which I am not. I could give you a spiel on that…)

I am obsessed with violence – not enacting it or the spectacle of it… I can’t actually even watch violent movies. But I am obsessed with understanding it, theorizing it. Say something to me, and I’ll show you the violence that underlies it… kinda. But that explains why, in another lifetime (my engineering one), I was obsessed with nuclear chemistry and quantum mechanics. The thought of it still makes me tingle.

I believe in karma, and astrology, and spirituality (even religion, to some extent)… all the things that a secular, “rational,” lefty is not supposed to believe in. But like I said, I think rationality is full of it… It all comes down to energy, and I believe in energy a hundred per cent. All those Enlightenment folks had it wrong… they were just terrified about their bodies (go Bataille!) and deflected those fears by focusing on the mind. But, of course, we’re still terrified by our bodies… we just sanitize them through beauty and glamour, and viola, the body becomes manageable, sexy even.

Some of the folks I know back home are taken aback by the fact that almost all my friends her are people of color and/or queer. I wonder why. I mean I wonder why the thin its weird. I mean, it's not like I hand out a questionnaire before I make friends, but I really being around people who don't think it should be my life's work to teach them about oppression. Those that I do do that for, I call students. And I get paid for it.

I sometimes fear what would happen if my friends from the States and those from back home were ever in a room together. I wonder in what ways they might be able to relate to each other... besides alcohol. I think any attempted “intermingling” might ensue in hilarity, or could turn out to be painfully embarrassing for me. But Saturn returns to my sign in 15 days. Which means, I get to start over… and find a way to integrate these two distinct circles that signify my two distinct lives.

I don’t do favorites. Because every time I propose a favorite, somebody around me is a bigger fan and more knowledgeable, and I end up looking like a phony. I was once obsessed with Jake Gyllenhaal. I did the whole web-stalking thing, reading fan sites… I stopped just short of posting on one of those sites or sending him fan mail. That lasted about a month… perhaps less. Also, I once mentioned to my co-workers that I “loved Rob Thomas.” They thought I meant really, like a true fan. A picture of him graced my office walls for an entire year, courtesy them.

I think Eddie Izzard is a genius. He's one of the smartest and most socially conscious comedians/actors out there. I own all of his routines on CD or DVD, and I saw him live last year in L.A. Also, I enjoy British humor better than the American stuff. But that might just be me being a good post-/colonial subject. :)

I don’t like poetry. I think it’s pretty and powerful and all that, but I can’t get into. Give me lyrical prose though, anyday. Gibran. Coelho. I do like spoken word though.

I think spicy food is the best cure for a cold. I went all the way to India and didn’t get myself any pickle. Now I have to wait till next month when I get paid.

I am pro-life and pro-choice. I support gay marriage but am anti-marriage in general and for all. I am Zoroastrian but I can’t get behind all the associated pedantic, formalist shtuff. I think Indians need to re-read Fanon. And if they haven’t read him yet, read him for the first of many times.

I have this weird desire to train for a marathon. Weird because, well, I have no idea where it came from. And also because, ahem, it’s me. Let’s see if it sticks. Hopefully. But I can weight-train like a dude… albeit not a super strong one. Just gimme time.

I love the sound of the 12.30 AM Amtrack in the distance, passing between Old Town and Downtown.

I need to drink more water and consume more protein.

I like eggs.

Today I Cried

2009-09-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

I'll be leaving home again pretty soon. I'm not really sure how I feel about it... I feel like I just got here, and I've had a pretty good time. But I do have stuff to look forward to back in the States. Then again, I hate goodbyes.

In any case, the next couple of weeks are going to be pretty hectic. I'll be at the Critical Legal Conference at the University of Leicester the weekend of the 11th. And then, when I'm back in San Diego the following weekend, it'll be all about getting back in the swing of things. So, in short, I'm no certain how often I'm actually going to be able to write in the next month or so.

I recently recovered data from my old hard-disk and found some stuff I'd written a few years ago. Here's one of those pieces. I wrote it the day after George W. won re-election in 2004. It's kinda sappy perhaps... apologies. But a good reminder of how shitty that time was.

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Today I cried; I’m not sure why, but I did. I couldn’t move; I kept staring at my computer screen; I don’t know why. Sometimes it seemed like I was forcing myself to cry, so I’d stop; but then I’d cry all over again.

Today, the campus seemed dead; maybe it was just my imagination, but it seemed dead. I think I saw other people cry; maybe they just had a cold, but I think I saw them cry too.

Today, I cried in public; I’m still not sure why I was crying, but I was. Each time someone asked how I was doing, I’d say fine and my eyes would well up.

Today is Nov. 3, 2004. I cried; I know others cried too. I’m not sure why, but it may be because

Today was a victory for indifference and ignorance; for insensitivity and arrogance; for fear and hate; for lies and deceit; for white supremacy and global supremacy; for corporations over people; for religion over faith; for ideology over ideas.

Today I cried. I’m not sure why, but it may be because

Today I felt anger, hurt, frustration, disbelief, rage, pain, hopelessness, shock, fury, fear, hate.

Today I cried because today I felt less human, less humane.

Today I cried; I know others cried too.

Today I cried and I think I know why.

Today I cry.

New Rule: No Shame in Being the Sorry Party

2009-08-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Bill Maher
posted Aug. 21, 2009
www.huffingtonpost.com

New Rule: If Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and Sarah Palin all think America has never done anything wrong, we must be doing something wrong. Look at them: an empty suit, an empty heart and an empty head. It looks like the news team on Good Morning Hell. And what they've been competing about lately is who would not apologize the most. America is infallible, and apologies are horrible things that must never, ever be given. Except by me when I make a joke about the Pope. "We're perfect -- deal with it," is their new handshake. But I say, what's wrong with America occasionally saying, "I'm sorry"? Because these are the three sorriest white people I've ever seen.

If in your eyes America can do no wrong, you should really look into Lasik surgery. There's the rational, mature assessment of our country: that it's a great nation -- especially if you like fried foods -- but it also has its faults. And then there's the Republican view: that it's perfect and pure in every way and it's always right all the time, just like Leviticus and Ronald Reagan.

If the founders were alive today, Republicans would be giving them shit because the Preamble to the Constitution says, "In order to form a more perfect union? Hello, it's already perfect! Why are you suggesting American apologetics, Ben Franklin?"

One of the things that makes Republicans furious about our current president is their idea that Obama is always apologizing for America's biggest mistakes. Unlike President Bush. Who was one of America's biggest mistakes.

In his first week as president, Obama did an interview with Arab TV in which he said, "We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect." Thought crime! And then he went to Cairo and violated one of those absolute eternal rules the Right Wing is always making up out of thin air: "The president must never apologize on foreign soil. Lest our allies begin to doubt that we're assholes. "

But what did Obama actually say to make Karl Rove's head explode and the popcorn fly out? Cover your children's ears: When he was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, he said he did, the same way "the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism." Yes, our so-called president actually said people in other countries might like their countries better. I was so shocked I nearly dropped the Bible I was using to help me masturbate into my gun.

In her farewell speech -- if only -- Sarah Palin kept telling us "how she's wired." Now I'm not a doctor, or an electrician -- but this is faulty wiring, this worldview that, in her words, "we should never apologize for our country." Really? Never? Not for slavery? Or Japanese internment camps, or if we tortured the wrong guy at Guantanamo? The Indians? Nothing, Sarah? "The Real Housewives of Atlanta"? Shouldn't John McCain apologize for... you?

When did intractability become a virtue? Mitt Romney's new book is called No Apology: The Case For American Greatness. You can find it at Borders, in the "Suck-Up" section. It's such a perfect title, combining paranoia with arrogance: "No one has yet asked me to apologize but, if someone ever does, fuck them."

Conservatives think apologizing is a sign of weakness. It's what liberal pussies do, when they're not busy driving electric cars and feeling empathy. When in fact it's the weak and the scared who are too insecure to apologize. Apologies are actually a sign of strength. That's why six-year-olds hate them.

In Rwanda, after a genocide that killed a million people, they set up special courts where people stood up and said, "Hey, sorry I macheted your entire family. My bad." And believe it or not, in most cases, that was enough. That's the power of an apology. A recent study reveals that doctors who are willing to apologize to patients for their mistakes are sued for malpractice about half as much as doctors who aren't willing to apologize.

Apologies can do great things, and they can enable great things. And if you still don't believe me, I have three words for you: make-up sex.

Of the Two Largest Democracies

2009-08-12T23:15:00.000-07:00

When the Congress Party won the national elections earlier this year, I felt a sense of pride for my nation. India has a multi-party parliamentary system. However, national politics in this country is dominated by the Congress (a more centrist, secular party) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (or the BJP - a right-wing, hindu nationalist party). Given that this year's elections followed close on the heels of the attacks in Bombay, I was terrified that the BJP would be voted back into power. Terrorism invokes, in response, the worst kinds of racism, communalism, xenophobia, nativism - the kinds of anxieties that right-wing nationalist groups feed off. And so, going off my experience with the U.S. response to 9/11, I was pretty convinced that the BJP would win... happily I was proven wrong.

National trends not withstanding, state politics, especially in Maharashtra - which is where I live and therefore what I'm most familiar with - seem to be becoming increasingly nationalist. Until a short time ago, the party in power was the Shiv Sena, a hindu/marathi nationalist party. And while the Congress is currently in power at the state level here, the Shiv Sena is still very powerful. As is its more recent, and apparently its more violent, off-shoot, the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (or the Maharashtra Renaissance Army). Most recently, the MNS was responsible for large-scale violence against taxi-drivers in the state, many, if not most, of whom are of North Indian descent.

This post though is not about Indian political parties. It is actually about the violent rhetoric and acts surrounding health care reform. For there is a strong connection between how parties like the BJP, the Shiv Sena, the MNS, etc function here, and the tenor of right-wing politics in the States, eve if the contexts and constituencies are not easily interchangable.

I recently read the an article by Cenk Uygur that captures this connection really well. The piece, although not particularly insightful in the context of those who get critical race politics, is still well worth a read. I've "redacted" though parts that I think are unnecessary because of the false and gratuitous yet inevitable glorification of U.S. democracy. Blah!

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The Last Gasp of the Angry White Man
Cenk Uygur
August 10, 2009

What we're seeing in these angry town halls these days is the last gasp of the angry white man. He's not quite sure what he's angry about, but he knows he's angry. It's not the world he used to know. He gets the disquieting feeling that he doesn't rule the roost anymore. And it's driving him crazy.

One of the chants at the town hall events was, "No national health care!" Okay, mission accomplished. No one has proposed such a thing. So, I guess they can go home now, befuddled at what they were yelling about.

The reality is that what they have been manipulated into arguing against is a public option that would give them more choices, not less in health insurance. It wouldn't nationalize health insurance at all, let alone any part of the rest of the health care industry.

But this isn't about health insurance. It isn't even about health care. You think those people are really this animated about having less health care options and making sure it costs more for them and their family? No, this is visceral for them. And it has nothing to do with their perceived choices on health care. This is about the sinking feeling in their stomach that they are losing power in this country -- losing control. That the reins of power are slipping out of their hands and they don't know what to do about it, except yell, really loud.

One guy famously shouted, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Everyone is understandably amused by this. But there is a larger point here. They don't care about the logic of the issue at hand. I'm not convinced they even care what the issue is. These are the same people that were yelling at the Palin rallies. They were screaming just as loud then, and it was different issues, or no issues at all. Just name calling and fear. Pure, unadulterated fear.

At a recent Tampa town hall people were yelling at the top of their lungs, "Hear Our Voice." Ironically, that's all we could hear. No one could hear the congresswoman there. Or any arguments that were being made or any issues debated. All they could hear was the loud, angry voices demanding to be heard.

And who is stoking these fires? Encouraging and egging on these screams, this anger, this fear? Conservative talk hosts all across the country (and, of course, special interest groups funded by the health care industry who are relishing using these poor schleps as fodder for their effort to kill health care reform). They're telling them the proper response is anger. Don't wait your turn. Don't listen to the congressman. Shout. Be heard. Be angry. Obama is taking this country away from you.

The woman who now famously stood up in a Delaware town hall and demanded that her congressman recognize the illegitimacy of Barack Obama's birth certificate, said something telling in her rant. She said, "I want my country back!"

Indeed. Where did it go? Of course, the country is still right here. It's the "my" part that's missing. She doesn't want this country back. She wants her country back.

I want everyone to be heard, too. I hated it when the Bush handlers would keep out dissenting voices from their town halls. If conservatives are frustrated with some of the policy initiatives of the Obama administration, I think it's an appropriately democratic reaction to show up at town halls and ask questions. In fact, if they did it in a way that asked their representatives interesting and tough questions, I'd be proud of them.

Some of them are holding up constitutions. They finally got them out of the drawer where they were collecting mothballs as the Bush administration ran roughshod over that sacred text. They didn't seem to demand loyalty to that document as the Bush team eviscerated the Fourth Amendment.

But bygones be bygones, if they want to hold Obama responsible for his signing statements for example, great. You can argue he is impinging against Article I of the Constitution just as Bush did.

Do you think that's the argument the town hall screamers are making? Come on, can anyone really discern an argument? Could they point to one clause that they think Obama has violated? My guess is if challenged they would scream out the Second Amendment. Except Obama has not only not done anything to impose gun control, he has gone out of his way to rein in his Attorney General to make sure he also does nothing about it. It isn't about the Second Amendment. It isn't about the Constitution. It's about the anger.

It's a self-justifying anger. The angrier they get the more they feel the imperative to get angry. What is it? What's really eating away at them? I don't think it's a conscious racial thing for them. It's more a feeling of their way of life slipping away from them.

Think about it. If you worked at the local shop and in the old days you could get your son hired there, things were pretty good. Now, they tell you that they have to give the job to someone else's son. Someone that doesn't look like you, someone that you've never met or ever talked to. There's been a lot of generations of that now.

You think those guys are going to inquire into the history of racial prejudice in this country and why it might make sense to increase diversity in a workplace when some groups have been excluded entirely? No, all they know is that their son couldn't get the same job that their dads got for them. They want their country back.

Of course, this has been building up for quite awhile. But now they have lost their political power. Now the epitome of what they were fighting against is their new leader. His first hire for the Supreme Court is a Hispanic woman, who they hear is racist against white men and was only picked because of her race and gender.

And when the president is talking about a confrontation between a white man (a cop trying to do his job) and a black man (another one that got to be a professor, though God knows if he earned it), he immediately chooses the side of the black man -- without even knowing the facts. Man, they're angry. This is the guy they were warned about.

Whether their perception is true is not relevant. It's the intensity of the perception that is relevant. And on top of all this, they feel the whole system is rigged against the average guy (and they're right about this one).

The bankers get all the money. The government spends a ton of cash, but they feel like it never comes to them. It feels like the guys at the top are the ones who always make out like bandits (the fact that their anger against this is being used by those same guys for their own interests is of tremendous irony).

But then add on top of that, their team lost. They don't feel like the president is "one of them." Maybe that's not even malicious, or at least consciously malicious. But that's how they feel. The world is changing around them and every time they turn on the radio or television (which, of course, is glued to Fox News), they are being told they're right to be angry. And that their anger should be directed primarily at one man: Barack Obama.

That's where the trouble comes in. It's starting to feel like a third world country around here. In developing countries there are organized mobs. There are disruptions of political gatherings. There are angry crowds and talk of gathering weapons. Talk of revolutions (one man in South Carolina told Rep. Inglis that "there is not a day that goes by ... that I don't hear talk of revolution in our country.").

We're America. We're supposed to be better than this.

We're supposed to resolve our differences peaceably and civilly. We're supposed to listen to one another. We're supposed to have the best democracy in the world. As it stands, we're one burning tire away from Haiti. We have to dial this thing back down.

Of course, the problem isn't the progressives here. Their side won. The moderates and independents aren't necessarily boiling over with anger. No, in this case, it's the right-wing. And there's the problem. Because there does not seem to be anyone on that side who is capable or inclined to bring down the volume of the conversation. If anything, their response is more shouting, more disruptions, more rancor and more accumulation of weapons. As one local Republican nominee in Virginia put it, "We have the chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box." So, what happens when they keep losing at the ballot box?

~~It's beginning to smell a lot like banana republic around here. And there is no answer.~~ If you try to suggest that they bring it down a notch, they scream censorship and warn their audience that their rights are about to be taken away from them. And so is their country. If you say it might not be such a good idea to have all of these weapons in the hands of all these angry men, they scream about the Second Amendment and tell their audience to hold on to their guns even tighter. And many have held on so tight that some of them even pulled the trigger.

How many more will? When does this stoking of anger and fear stop? And who would stop it? I really don't know. Here's one more thing I don't know. What happens if it doesn't?

Special 5

2009-08-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not generally a huge fan of commercials. But there's something really special about these Airtel Special 5 ads. Maybe I'm just growing old, or super mushy, or both.

Coming Out

2009-07-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

Being home over the past few weeks has reminded me just how strong, and potentially dangerous, emotional memories can be. I've always know that I have pretty a strong emotional memory, but being home has put it in overdrive. Unfortunately, a substantial proportion of these are not happy, pleasant memories, but unresolved negative ones, those that I can often hide from in the States. What in the States gets manifest as occasional nightmares, here take on the form of waking panic attacks.

Last night I was hanging out with one my closest friends here - we've known each other since I really don't when, but atleast for almost all our lives - and we started talking about intimate relations from our past. Listening to her talk about her most serious relationship, made me think of my own long, not serious, relationship with someone back home. Incidentally, the person she was dating then was also my "first boyfriend" - although while mine lasted less than 2 months, and I was 13 then, her's was her first adult relationship and lasted almost 3 years.

Unfortunately, for most of the duration of their relationship, I was in the States. I am not particularly good about keeping in touch with folks back home while I’m in the States. (As another friend recently complained to me, how is it that we can talk through the night while you’re here but once you’re gone, I hear 5 words from you once in 6 months? What to do though, I’m like dat only.) So, I just heard snippets from my parents a few times about what was going on with them, and I hung out with them a couple of times while I was back home for a couple of weeks in August 2004. From what I could gather then, the guy wasn't particularly ok with my friend hanging out or communicating with me. When I returned home for the summer a couple of years later, they had just recently been through a bad break-up. Consequently, we had never really spoken much about their relationship while it was still on, or in the immediate aftermath.

When we spoke yesterday, though, she was a bit more open and forthcoming about her experience in that relationship. And that made me re-live aspects of my own long relationship back home. Comparing our experiences, our reactions to them, and where we are each now in relation to them, made me wonder, what does it mean, what does it take to come out, openly, publicly, as a survivor of violence and abuse. I generally do not use the word survivor in reference to myself… and I think that that in itself has a lot to do with how I see myself, how much I have, or have not, come to terms with being, someone who has experienced, lived through an abusive relationship.

I use the phrase "coming out" quite deliberately. Because, as I understand it, the process of coming out involves developing the strength, the confidence, the sense of security... whatever one chooses to call it... to acknowledge one's own experience with, or existence as, something which is perceived as undesirable, unacceptable. When I say that coming out as a survivor of abuse or violence is a difficult, emotionally taxing process, I am not making an ground-breaking statements. But I guess the reason yesterday's conversation affected me a great deal is because it somehow brought to a head what I had been gradually realizing over my time home - that I have not truly resolved my experiences in an abusive relationship, that they still haunt me in extremely problematic and dangerous ways, and that in so many ways, every time I'm back home, I'm reminded very starkly of those experiences, although it's been almost 10 years since that relationship.

What brought all this home yesterday was when I asked my friend if she had ever witnessed my ex being violent towards me. Her response was incredibly hesitant, as if she'd rather not acknowledge that she had - not because of any sense of accountability that I might lay on her, but in order to spare me feelings of embarassment, and perhaps even shame. In order to spare me perhaps, the same feeling of discomfort that she appeared to be feeling in talking to me about her own relationship.

Thankfully, within the context of the States, I am more willing to, and more comfortable in, coming out. But the same is not true with folks back home. And yet it seems to me that it is with and among friends back home that this conversation is so essential. Although I have no actual "proof," just from the point of view of hear-say and, if I might be so bold as to add culture, the problem of abuse in intimate partner relationships seems to be a problem among folks of my generation in my community. And this is precisely a signifier of the intense heteronormativity that is privileged among us. With "boys" and "men" super invested in being "male," in protecting "their women" as their property, as they do their imported bikes and cars. I am not suggesting, obviously, that this is true across the board. But I feel safe in saying that is, as anywhere else, undoubtedly a problem.

And what is more problematic in this context is that the issue of domestic violence and abuse is, as far as I am aware, not really spoken of, even among a community that is supposed to be relatively "modern" and "progressive," like mine. It wasn't until I came to the States that I came to recognize that what I had lived through was not normal, and that there was a term for it - domestic, or intimate partner, abuse. The more I began to read, and think, and talk about it, the more angry and frustrated I became with my high school teachers who were more invested in protecting us "girls" - I went to an "all-girls" school - from "boys" by preventing us from talking to and interacting with them - I was reprimanded a few times for "talking to boys while in school uniform," and warned to think about "the school's reputation." They might have been able to "protect" us much better if they had engaged us in conversations about taking care of ourselves in relationships, in recognizing abuse, in encouraging us to talk to parents, friends, mentors about the nature of our relationships, in emphasizing to us that abuse is not normal, is not normalizable, regardless of which communities one belongs to, or which circles we socialize in.

If we can have sex-ed classes, which we did have some weird form of, I'm sure it requires no stretch of the imagination to include instruction on what a healthy relationship should look like. I know that I could have definitely benefited from that... and I know at least a few of my friends back home could have too.

I know that my teenage relationship has definitely haunted my adult ones too. I have not yet stopped having unpleasant dreams about my teenage ex, and I have most certainly projected my fears, anxieities with reference to him onto those who came later. I think much of my inability to excorcise this ghost is related to an uncertainity about what I went through and whether it was really significant. For instance, does the fact that I was between 13-17/18 when I had this experience make it more or less significant? Ironically (or is it?), while it is here, at home, that I have the most discomfort in dealing with what transpired, what the conversation yesterday made me realize, or reminded me, is that is was definitely real, made more so by the fact that little has changed over time, or as teenagers have grown into adults.

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From domesticviolence.in
published 4.17.09

In India there is a crime against women in every three minutes, one rape every twenty nine minutes and one recorded case of dowry death in every seventy seven minutes. Cases of cruelty meted out by husbands and in laws are seen in every nine minutes. Patriarchal terrorism where one partner uses economic and social power to maintain control over another human is very common in India and other Asian countries due to the subservient status of women.

The world statistics of domestic violence translates into 960,000 reported incidences of violence, against current or former partners every year. Three million women are abused every year by their husbands or boy friends. Around one out of three women in the world has been coerced into sex, beaten or otherwise abused by their boy friends. Women are seen to be more vulnerable to intimate partner violence then men world over.

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D.V. & Other Resources for Women in India

India Together
Narika
Sakshi

"Curry Bashing"

2009-07-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

Since I've been back home, I've been hearing a lot about violence against Indian students in Australia. Last year, there were a few incidents of the murder of desi students in the States that I'd read about. No doubt, the incidence of violence against desis, as with all immigrants of color, and pople of color, in general, is higher than reported and known. However, the official statistics out of Australia are pretty appalling. Per a Time Magazine article, Spate of Attacks Leave Indian Students on Edge in Australia, "1,083 cases of robbery and assault were reported against Indians in 2007-08, and that the attacks increased to 1,447 over the same period last year, with many of the attacks directed against students.

In the case of the U.S. attacks I read about, I was a little wary of accusations that they were racially motivated because the attacks were allegedly committed by black men and I figured that a certain degree of racism was manifesting itself in how the attacks (i.e. the attackers themselves) were being positioned. In the case of the attacks in Australia though, it seems a quite unlikely that at least a significant number of the crimes were not racially motived. If it is true that a large number of the attacks are on students, and given that, as of 2009, there are only about 90,000, the occurence of violence against desi students is not insignificant. Admittedly, in comparison to the total population of Indian descent in Australia, the numbers don't seem quite that horrendous. (I don't have very good data on the demographics of Australia. But if one takes into consideration the 2006 census numbers which has the self-identified population of Indian descent at 243,722 plus 12,300 immigrants per year in 2007-2008 & 2008-2009 plus in 2009 there are 90,000 Indian students in Australia, that rounds off to about 360,000. Obviously, there's a lot of over- and under-counting... but this is just a very rough estimate.)

Yet given that Indian students took to the streets this past May and June, in Melbourne and Sydney, at least, after a particularly heinous attack implies that these attacks are pretty pervasive.

Moreover, soon after the protest, a delegation of police and government officials visited various Indian cities to deliver "safety assurances" to the families of current and prospective students; which was followed by a visit from the Immigration Minister, Chris Evans. His visit was to aimed at reassuring "parents and authorities that the country is not racist and remains a safe place to study."

To quote Evans himself, "There's been a lot of concern inside India and I think there's been some fairly hysterical reporting of what's occurred. ... So part of what I intend to do on this visit is to try and reassure Indians that we're a safe place to study, that we're a multicultural society and we don't have racist attitudes to people." Further, "I wouldn't say there is no racism in Australia. Of course, there is, but majority of the incidents don't have any racial basis..."

I am not exactly sure where Mr. Evans gets his assured-ness from, given especially that there is actually a term for going out to attack Indians - curry bashing.

Mr. Evans' lack of understanding (or at least his apparent lack of understanding) about the situation is apparent here:
Evans said police were working on the problem but educating Indian students about safety in Australia could also help. "We've had a number of students attacked in areas at say four o'clock in the morning where quite frankly most people would stay clear of," he said.

Evans is either unaware of, indifferent to, eliding, or too dumb to make the connection between this issue of violence and another issue that is creating an embarrasement for his country - that of education scams. The reporting that I've heard and read about this issue details how students are lured into both, high-tuition programs that fail to provide the training promised, as well as illegal schemes wherein they are promised eduction and migration documentation on the downlow. In the former situation especially, students are forced to take-up lowing paying jobs to keep themselves going while they complete their long-drawn out training and degrees. Most often, they work as cab drivers and attendants at grocery stores and gas stations. I doubt that in many cases these students have an option of not traveling at odd, "dangerous" hours of the day. Thus Evans' statement is a fantastic cop-out, one of the caliber of some of the rabid comments about the attacks, prevalent on YouTube and various blogs/discussion boards.

The first type of comment on these sites is one that simply and neatly says "fuck off to where you came from, you dirty, stinking, lazy, ignorant fuck!" No surprises there really. They are the Brian Kilmeades of society. In a certain way, though, these comments as just as bad as the more enlightened responses they elicit, where somebody comes back with a "shaddup, you son of a convict." For the ignorance of the former type fits with their overall racist ignorance - no point in asking them, "umm... where exactly do you think you came from?" They're the ones who believe that, never mind the carnage and enslavement of the indigenous, the white man is responsible for the creation of the nation, it's material and discursive edifices, it's modern civilization. Just ask Pat Buchanan...

The problem, though, lies with the latter group of folks who appear to have some historical knowledge, but not enough. Who are unable, or unwillingly, to recognize that the racism apparent among some Australians is tied not to their convict history, but their patently and violently racist foundations.

The second type of comment suggests the Indians should quit complaining about racism because they are the most racist peoples of all. Here references are made to the popularity of Fair and Lovely cream, and the fact that darker-skinned peoples face much prejudice. Agreed, skin color is an immensely problematic issue in India, and I too am irked by the incessant commercials for fairness creams. But that is not racism, that is prejudice based on skin color which, though undoubtedly violent, is only one signifier of racism. I'd refer here to an earlier post where I elaborated on the meaning of racial violence. Here is a relevant excerpt from that post:

Racial violence is a mode of power exercised – most often by a state, but often by other organized, militarized groups – in order to control, subjugate or exterminate a people due to the idea that the latter always already pose a threat to the civilization of the former. Thus, racial violence always follows the logic of self-defense and self-preservation against the always already threatening other.
Racial logic functions so that an entire people are made to signify deviance, irrationality, violence, etc. – in short, everything that runs counter to the presumed ideals of modernity, and the interests of “civilization” and “humanity.”
... Racial violence is not about “race” as is commonly understood – i.e. black, white, native, asian, latino, arab or whatever new racial groups the state decides to create – but about the process of racialization. Of casting an entire people as a deviant, threatening other. ... [It is about] how power operates in the production and execution of subjugation, violence, and death.

In terms of defining racism, I would amend and add that when specific peoples become targeted as individual signifiers of the deviance or threat referred to above, and are singled out for violence, by individuals or institutionalized and other groups, as representatives of the larger racialized group, that act of targeting, of singling out, is racist in nature. Undoubtedly skin color and other phenotypical characteristics play a significant role in the enactment of racism, but I am not convinced that prejudice based on skin color is necessarily racist.

Besides, explain to me again how does racism here make racism there ok?

The third type of comment argues that these students are there not really for an education, but as means to migrate, to take precious Australian jobs, and that they are signifiers of the failure of the Indian economy, indeed of the failure of independent India. The rhetoric here is almost identical to that used in debates about "illegal" immigration in the U.S. Once again, the debate is willfully ignorant of the economic contributions made by the skilled and unskilled, "legal" and "illegal" immigrant workforce... it is all about the theft of jobs and the drain on resources. Never mind the overall damage done to Third World economies by the First World. (Admittedly, an argument that is truer in the case of U.S.-Mexico relations, and not so much in the case of Australia-India relations. But still...) Moreover, the Indian students who pay $40,000 in tuition, and work as cab drivers while they are trained to become professionals, provide way more economic benefit to the "Australian nation" than they get in return.

I'm never sure why people think that the life of an undocumented migrant or an un/underpaid student is something that they aspire to. Even if they do use some resources meant for the documented, over-paid and well-fed, does that really change the quality of life of the latter group. My frustration here is the same that I feel when some people argue that you must not "encourage" those who beg for money on the streets of Bombay, because it is their "profession." Even if it is, I'm sure it's not something they do as a choice, but rather because of a lack of it. The few rupees one gives a beggar, professional or not, are more substantially more likely to benefit them than the disadvantage that the loss of those rupees are going to cause you. It's all about diminishing marginal utility... the one good thing economics teaches us, but we choose to forget.

And finally, what frustrated me the most was a comment by the Consul-General (I think) of India in Australia who in an interview stated that what one needed to focus on, in terms of curbing the violence and exploitation, is the social nature of the students coming to Australia. Most of these students come from rural areas and thus, according to her, are "not sophisticated in urban ways." Really? The problem is not the parochial and violent mentality of the attackers, but the "backward," unsophisticated nature of the victim-/survivers? Talk about a blame-the-victim mentality! I just heard a snippet from the interview, and maybe she clarifies herself at some other point during it, but, as is, her comment is pretty shameful.

Thinking American Exceptionalism in India

2009-07-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

Almost तन वीक थई गया. There's a hundred thoughts/ideas floating through my head. Much that I could write about, पन एतली patience ने ताकत नथी. पन आजे कई थयू, that sort of brought together much of what I've been thinking/observing during my while back home.

हूँ जोर्थी आवीच, तोर्थी मोरू computer नथी चाली र्हेइयू. So आजे finally I could go pick it up. Incidentally, it's still under warranty until September, which wouldn't have meant much had there not been authorized Apple dealers and servicers around. Almost आखू नवू computer free मा मली गयू. Yay for globalization and free-markets?! Damn.

In any case, on my way back home, we drove past Arthur Road Jail today. The Jail is Bombay's largest, and "houses" many members of Bombay's various gangs. The Jail is located right in the city, off a very busy road (as if any road in the city isn't busy). As a kid, I used to recognize the Jail by the smell of what I thought was कोपरा पाक. Following the 1992 Bombay riots, Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt has been in and out of Arthur Road Jail for his alleged involvement in the riots.

As we drove past today, one side of the street had been blocked off to allow for the numerous T.V. cameras covering the trial of Ajmal Amir Kasab, the only surviving member of the group of 10 who attacked Bombay on November 26, 2008. (He is also only one of two attackers to be caught on camera during the course of the attacks.) He has been in the news the past few days because he confessed, and plead guilty, to various acts of violence committed during the attacks. Apparently, this confession caught most by surprise, especially since he had thus far plead not guilty to the various charge brought him. It wasn't until today though that I realized, at least consciously, that Kasab was being held right here, in the heart of the city.

Which made me think about the absurd हल्ला-गुल्ला being created in the U.S. over the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to the mainland. Just one more way in which U.S. exceptionalism comes into play. The idea that the security of Americans is so precious, so sacred, that they cannot even share the same landmass as a hodge-podge of "evildoers." I am willing to bet that security at the several maximum-security prisons in the U.S. is way better than that at Arthur Road. And that the U.S. has the resources and the "expertise" to imprison the several thousand detainees at Guantanamo. The difference though is that the U.S. has "options." If enough people say "not in my backyard," so long as they're not black and brown folks, the U.S. can borrow, lease, buy, annex some one else's backyard. And it's not like any precious, sacred lives will be at stake elsewhere!

In any case, if anything, it is the lives of those imprisoned that are perhaps truly in danger. As in the case of Kasab, the high security provided him is not to prevent him from escaping, but to protect him from getting killed by prison gangs. And in the case of most of detainees - those who aren't particularly high profile opertives, their flight risk is in fact minimal. Even if they are members of, or trained by, various militant groups, most of them are expendable resources. I doubt anyone's going to be trying to break them out of prison, or provide them the means/ability to escape, any time soon.

Most of the recruits are targeted because they already exist in desperate, highly vulnerable conditions. They are mere tools deployed for the execution of a larger mission, a mission who's gains they (i.e. the recruits) are very unlikely to experience themselves. Once their task is done, dead or alive, I doubt that the "system" really gives a damn about them. Just one of the many ways in which militant groups function like the military. (oooh heresy!)

Talking about the military and American exceptionalism, Hillary Clinton was in town this past weekend. She did the usual stuff... meet with corporate big shots (she asked specifically that women be part of the group... how we have advanced!), pledged to help India in its fight against terrorism, pledge co-operation in implimenting the Indio-US Nuclear deal, met with membres of SEWA (an NGO for "poor, self-employed women workers") and sat for a televised interview with Aamir Khan, who is the ambassador of the Teach India program... the latter two events I am not making light of, they are significant and worthwhile.

Here are a couple clips from the interview. More available on Youtube.

(I knew there was a reason I am an Aamir Khan fan!!)

The reason I mention Clinton's visit is not because I have much to say about it, at least beyond my person reaction to it. I have to admit that being here during her visit felt a little weird. Ever since I've been back home, I've been struggling a lot with how disconnected my two worlds, my two lives, are. I've felt this for a few years now, but each time I visit, the disconnect feels more intense, more disconcerting. The first week back I realized that anytime I spoke about "my life," "what I'd been upto," it was like I was talking about someone else. None of things that were so important, so central to my existence, in the States, felt real anymore - not intellectually or emotionally. Those who have experienced this would know how emotionally raw and drained you feel when trying to find someway to connect your existence, to translate one world in terms of another when the means, the symbols that allow for translation really do not exist. I think that is why I am always so eager for my friends from the States to visit me here, and vice-versa... for they'd be my means of translantion, my connection. My first week here, each time I came back from a visit with friends, I'd burst into tears. That degree of emotional turmoil has now dissapated... although the disconnect still very much exists, is very palpable... but I'm settled more comfortably into my life here.

So, in any case, given that Clinton signifies my life over there, the idea of her being present over here, was a little jarring.

That said, it was funny the ways in which traffic jams were suddenly spoken of - where's Clinton supposed to be at this hour? Ah, no wonder we're stuck... although we're 20 miles away from wherever she may be. It reminded me of her visit to India in 1998, or 1999, with Bill and Chelsea Clinton. All the roads along which they were to ply were re-tarred... something they couldn't do for Hillary's recent visit since she gave us Mumbaikers such sort notice. For shame!

Back then, I was in my first year of engineering school. I recall my friends and I wondering whether our private tuitions for mechanics would be canceled because the Clintons' were to arrive that evening. I remember joking that if they were, we should line the streets, waving our little paper Indian flags. (Un)fortunately, we still had our class... but I like mechanics, it is still one of the things I miss from my past-life, so no complaints. And finally, I remember a huge deal being made about them dining at a restaurant called Cafe Royale. It really isn't that fancy a place... but, if I recall correctly, it was a friend-of-a-friend kind of deal, for which a part of the city had to come to temporary standstill.

वाह रे वाह! Bombay, at a standstill for Americans...

Burma II

2009-07-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

Here's the second installment of articles on Burma. The novel, Saving Fish from Drowning, that I refered to in my previous post, is set "among" a small group of the Karen people who reside in the jungles, hiding from the junta who accuse them of being/harboring insurrectionists. The novel appears to mirror pretty exactly the situation of the Karen as represented in recent news articles. Below are a couple of articles/reports about the issue, including the implications of the Karen as refugees and stateless peoples.

The last piece, provocatively titled "Burma's Gaza," is about the conflict surrounding the status of the Rohingya, a Muslims ethnic minority in Burma.

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Over 500 villagers forced into jungles in eastern Burma
by Solomon Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Mizzima

(Photo: Getty Images)

New Delhi (mizzima) - Over 500 villagers from eastern Burma’s Karen state have fled their homes and are hiding in the jungles as military offensives by the joint Burmese Army and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a break-away Karen ethnic armed group, increases, a new report said.

The Free Burma Rangers (FBR), a group helping Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in its latest report on Friday said, at least 500 villagers from Mone Township of Nyaunglebin District in Karen State have fled their homes and three men have died while hiding in the jungle.

“The 500 villagers, who were now in hiding, have not been able to carry enough food and are facing shortages,” said the FB report.

Tha Do Moe, a member of the FBR told Mizzima on Monday that the military operation by the Burmese Army and the DKBA has not stopped in the region causing the number of IDPs hiding in the jungles to go up.

“The military campaign has never stopped. It is either a big or a small offensive. So there are increasing numbers of IDPs,” said Tha Do Moe.

He said it is impossible for the IDPs to return to their homes because, “If they [Burmese soldiers] catch them, they will be killed. So they are still hiding in the forest.”

He said, villagers who live in the regions under the control of the Burmese Army and DKBA, though they escape being killed, are faced with several rights abuses including forced labour and are used as porters. Most of their time is spent on working for the troops.

“They have marked conflict zones, and if they see anyone they are free to kill on sight. They often fire mortars into the forest where they suspect the IDPs to be hiding,” he added.

While the conflicts have caused villagers to continue fleeing, he said the fighting has got worse and more villagers are fleeing to the jungle than between 2005-2006 as the Burma’s ruling junta increases military operations in the area.

The FBR in its report said with the onset of monsoon, the IDPs are facing food shortage and are in need of proper medical care, especially the children, as the rainfall continues in the forest.

Iris, coordinator of the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People (CIDKP) said “The most important thing for the IDPs at the moment is medicines and food supplies.”

She said the Thai authorities have been negotiating with humanitarian groups including the International Organization for Migrants (IOM) over the future of more than 2000 Karen refugees, who have fled in June following fresh clashes between the Karen National Union’s armed wing the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and the joint force of the Burmese Army and DKBA.

At a recent meeting held at the KNU’s 5th Brigade, the group decided that the KLNA in Mutraw District of Karen state would retaliate to the ongoing military offensives by the Burmese troops and its ally.

The KNU, which has waged over 60 years of armed struggle for self-determination, said it has decided to defend its people after reviewing that the junta “has no plans to end such attacks anytime soon.”

“The combined KNLA 5th Brigade and civilian leadership declared that it is prepared to defend the integrity and interests of Karen people at all costs, including militarily,” the KNU said in a press release on Monday.

Earlier, the KNU lost control over its 7th Brigade to the advancing Burmese Army and DKBA forces. They were forced to retreat into the jungle and can only launch guerrilla attacks. (Photo above: Dai Kurokawa)

Mutraw District’s Chairperson Saw Tender called on all Karen people to join hands with them in their fight against the enemy’s offensive.

“We hope that our people will understand our determination to fight against the SPDC’s destructive plans and that they will join hands with us in the fight against such evil,” he said, referring to the junta by its official name – State Peace and Development Council.

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Calling the Shots
By ALEX ELLGEE
JULY, 2009
The Irrawaddy - VOLUME 17 NO.4

Photo: Larry Jagan/The Irrawaddy

For Karen refugees, the decision to stay or flee through the jungle to avoid clashing armies rests on the shoulders of their village leaders.

MAE SOT, Thailand — Intense fighting along Burma’s border with Thailand forced more than 4,000 Karen villagers to flee their homes and livelihood for the safety of refugee camps in Thailand in May and June.

The decision to flee rested with the village leaders—and it wasn’t an easy one.

“We are so sad to have left our village” said the leader of Ponyacho village, resting from his journey in a Thai monastery in Mae Salit. “But we had to leave. Now the fighting is more dangerous than ever.”

He recalled that as he was struggling with the decision to abandon their village, the sound of mortar and machine gun fire echoed through the mountains, which have acted as a last line of defense for the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) for more than 60 years.

Hearing the nearby gunfire, he quickly made up his mind.

The village leader ordered people to pack up what they could carry and to leave immediately. Many of the village men had been conscripted as porters in earlier armed clashes, and they were unwilling to risk capture again.

“If we stayed, we would have been forced to be porters,” said a villager who had previously carried the bed of a Burmese commander through the jungle. “The Burmese commanders want to live like kings, and they want us to live like animals.”

Villagers also feared the Burmese forces would need extra soldiers on the front line, and they would eventually be forced to participate in the fighting.

“How can the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) expect me to fight for the Burmese army and kill my Karen brothers?” asked one angry villager.

In the past, villagers conscripted by the Burmese army have been used as human mine sweepers—forced to walk in front of Burmese soldiers to set off any potential land mines.

“One Burmese soldier used me as a human shield,” said one villager. “As we advanced toward Karen soldiers, he hid behind me and held his gun over my shoulder. If anyone had fired at him, I would have surely died.”

Many of the fleeing villagers had been working hard on their farms and were waiting to enjoy their harvests. “We had been waiting for the mangoes to be ripe for eating” said the leader. “We’ve had to leave it all behind.”

Many of the Karen population retain their animist beliefs despite decades of Christian missionary work. As animists, every mountain, tree and river around a village has a name and spiritual presence.

“They have worshiped the spirits all their lives for protection” explained a Karen Youth Organization worker. “Outside of their village area, they wouldn’t know the spirits as well and for people who believe that spirits can kill, this can be terrifying.”

Some villagers hiked through the jungle for three days, traveling slowly to avoid detonating land mines planted by both sides of the conflict.

“Even if we don’t detonate a mine we are still faced with the risk of catching malaria or being bitten by a snake,” said the village leader. “When you travel with women and young babies, the decision to leave is not an easy one.”

When they finally arrived at the Moei River, the refugees crossed over on boats belonging to the KNLA’s 7th Brigade into the Thai village of Mae Salit. On arrival, they spread out, locating and staying with Karen families who had settled in the area in previous years.

They arrived in torn and ragged clothing. The Karen Women’s Organization (KWO) told the recent arrivals to congregate at a local monastery, where they were given new clothes supplied by a foreign donor and interviewed by members of various Karen organizations.

“There are so many mothers with young babies here,” said Blooming Night, joint secretary of the KWO.

“It’s not right that they should suffer in this way.”

For the children, this latest offensive will have long lasting affects on their lives. The school year had just started and all teaching material was left behind in the schools.

School children actually came under attack in Pa-an District, forcing 89 students and seven teachers to flee through the jungle. In the rush, they had no time to contact their parents. They travelled through the jungle, eventually arriving at Safe Haven Orphanage where nine children were diagnosed with malaria which they contracted on the journey. None of the children have received information about their parents’ whereabouts, or whether they are even alive.

“It’s very tragic. Most of the children’s parents have probably been taken as porters,” said Tasanee, the director of Safe Haven Orphanage, who goes by one name.

Tasanee’s mother established the orphanage in 1994 to look after children in the area who had been orphaned. Located near the Moei River, the orphanage is still close to the fighting and the sound of mortar fire often interrupts the children’s English lessons.

“When the mortars begin, the children stop singing,” said a volunteer English teacher. “They just sit there glazed over and silently terrified. They know what the noises are, and they know what they mean. Sometimes they come and hug us but mostly they just retreat within themselves. It’s like they’re shell shocked.”

The mortar fire worsened on June 10 when four rounds landed in Mae Salit, only meters from the monastery where the villagers had received aid. One round landed near Mae Salit Luang School.

Many villagers were concerned the fighting would spill over onto Thai soil. The Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) reported that a DKBA officer had sent a villager from the Ler Per Her area as a messenger to contact the recently arrived refugees. The messenger said the DKBA demanded 3,000 baht (US $100) per village to reimburse it for the cost of hiring porters to carry supplies during their offensive.

In response to the security concerns, Thai authorities have strengthened several checkpoints entering Mae Salit, and army jeeps with armed soldiers patrol the main road.

Observers say the recent clashes are designed to allow the DKBA to secure its new role as a border guard force under the Burmese army, and the KHRG reported that DKBA officials are already referring to themselves as the Border Guard Force.

If the DKBA and Burmese army succeed in their mission to eliminate the KNLA from the border area, many Karen villagers will be displaced and the survivors will be forced into refugee camps where they will be restricted for a long period of time.

Fully aware of the present dangers, the Karen villagers still managed to laugh and smile as they sat around the grounds of the Thai monastery.

“Our villagers feel lost and confused, but we are just happy to be away from the Burmese army—nothing can be as bad as living in a village under their control,” said the village leader.
“If I didn’t make the right decision, all our brothers and sisters would have perished in the village,” he said.

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Burma’s Gaza?
By MIN KHET MAUNG
MAR — APR, 2009
The Irrawaddy - VOLUME 17 NO.2

Citizenship and land rights are hot issues in Arakan State

MAUNGDAW, Arakan State—In a simple house on the edge of this small town near Burma’s border with Bangladesh, a Rohingya resident carefully adjusted his cheap Chinese-made radio. Six other Rohingyas also huddled around the radio, straining to hear its crackling broadcast.

“Here we go,” said 52-year-old Ahmed triumphantly. “It’s VOA reporting on what the international community is saying about the Rohingya issue. Listen carefully.”

Ahmed said he and his friends tune in nightly to Western broadcasts in the hope of hearing news about efforts by the international community and humanitarian agencies to pressure Burma’s military government to improve their living conditions.

In a teashop near Ahmed’s home, a small group of ethnic Rakhine people discussed the same issue—but from a different viewpoint. They were united in opposing any move to grant citizenship to the Rohingya people of Arakan State.

One man in his late thirties claimed the state and its majority Buddhist population would fall under the influence of Muslim Rohingyas if they became Burmese citizens. “They [Rohingyas] are like a virus,” he said.

Another man, in his early fifties, agreed. “Let’s hope the government doesn’t pay attention to international pressure,” he said. “The Rohingya are not among the 150 ethnic groups of Myanmar [Burma].”

His claim, supported by most Rakhine people and reflected in regime policy, is disputed by many scholars and historians, who trace the arrival of the Rohingyas in the Arakan region back to the eighth century.

Ethnologists say the Rohingya—far from being a homeless migrant people—are a distinct ethnic group derived from a bewildering ancestral mix of Arabs, Moors, Persians, Turks, Mughals, Pathans, Bengalis, Chakmas, Rakhine, Dutch and Portuguese.

For centuries, Muslim Rohingyas and the Buddhist Rakhine people of the Arakan region lived in harmony. They enjoyed the same rights, guaranteed by the 1947 constitution and the 1948 Citizenship Acts.

Rohingyas were able to participate fully in post-colonial political life. They could vote and stand for public office in local and national elections, and they were granted Burmese passports and complete freedom of employment.

The 1962 military coup that brought Ne Win to power ended all that. Anti-Rohingya sentiments were allowed to fester. Race riots disrupted life in Arakan State.

“The Rakhine-Rohingya relationship was poisoned by the military junta,” said one moderate Rakhine historian in Maungdaw.

Denied protection by the Ne Win government and the current military regime, Rohingyas have been mercilessly exploited by many Rakhines, who are accused of treating the Muslim minority as a cheap workforce. The fiction that these dark-skinned people were illegal Bengali immigrants has been allowed to spread without much contradiction.

Discrimination against the Rohingya now permeates all levels of society in Arakan State, from local government departments to community life.

“The military government is systematically encouraging ‘divide and rule’ in our state,” said the Rakhine historian. “It can then exploit the instability it causes in order to rein in the people.”

Observers say the policy has inevitably fuelled racial tensions, leading to clashes between Rakhine residents and resentful Rohingyas.

Fear is said to reign not only in Rakhine towns and villages but also areas with Rohingya majorities—including Maungdaw Township, where more than 90 percent of the 493,000 inhabitants are Rohingya.

One other township in Arakan State has a large Rohingya majority—Buthidaung, where more than 80 percent of the 279,000 inhabitants are Rohingya. (Photo: Min Khet Maung/The Irrawaddy)

Building on Rakhine prejudice and exploiting social tensions, the current military regime has progressively tightened restrictions on the Rohingya, denying them not only citizenship but also the most basic rights.

Freedom to travel is severely curtailed, and permission has to be sought from local immigration departments for journeys even within Arakan State. Permits are issued for a maximum of 14 days.

The travel restrictions make life difficult for the Rohingya on many levels, including education. The university in Sittwe, the capital of Arakan State, has no faculties for medicine or engineering, meaning that young people wanting to study those subjects must enroll at universities in Rangoon. But that option is denied Rohingya students, who have difficulty enough trying to cope with the discriminatory practices and bureaucracy of Sittwe University.

Some restrictions are patently racist—one, for instance, requires Rohingya couples to sign an agreement that they will have no more than three children when seeking official approval to marry.

Many Rohingyas hope the general election planned for 2010 could bring about a relaxation of restrictions or even an end to them.

For one young Rohingya, who graduated from university two years ago, citizenship is the most important right he would like to see restored. “If democracy is restored, then we must be given the chance to ask for citizenship,” he said.

Yet the Rakhine historian warned that social tensions could increase if the Rohingya are granted citizenship and land ownership rights.

“If the government does not solve the problem wisely,” he said, “ this could be a hot spot of the future—another Gaza.”

Talk Dirty to Me!

2009-07-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

I was roped into watching Transformers 2 today (and how!). It really wasn't a movie I was interested in watching. It isn't that I didn't enjoy it, in a "yeah well, whatever" kind of way, but it didn't really surprise me... it was all pretty predictable stuff. (Also predictably, my mum and a friend's mum slept through much of it.)

One of the first thoughts I had watching it was: this is the military's wet-dream... not to mention a lot of other kinds of wet-dreams. But the whole sleek, benign, "deceptive" machines turning into killing machines? Oh yea! That's military sexy. And Optimus Prime = "Army of One" fantasy, perhaps? And so I was reminded of an article I was introduced to years ago, when I was interning with a nuclear non-proliferation feminist NGO in NYC, called Reaching Critical Will. Or maybe it was something I read for my "War, Weapons and Arms Control" class at Oberlin.

The piece by Kathleen Sullivan is called Sexualizing Technology and is a feminist analysis of the language used by the military, specifically with reference to nuclear weapons. I'm pasting the article below... it really is worth a read. The highlighted parts are the ones I was specifically thinking of during the movie. It's actually kind of funny... on a theoretical level, not when it gets manifest in reality. But really, is there anything a penis can't destroy?

And also, would an analysis of race in the movie be too obvious? I really don't have the energy (and the interest, perhaps) in doing it... but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. I'm thinking specifically of Leo, Mikaela (setting aside the stuff about racial ambiguity, I have to say, I did like her plump, pouty lips), and the poor Jordanian air force dudes... it doesn't take much for brown folks to die in movies, does it? Or in reality too, actually...

Oh, and did they really say "President Obama" in the movie?! Is that ok? Legal even?

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Sexualising Technology, or how we’ve come to love the bomb

In Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) the Nazi scientist who understands the creation of an atomic weapon and the military men who deploy it have learnt how to transmute their fear into a sexual desire for the bomb. Kubrick’s apocalyptic film noir portrays the men of science and the military as sexually turned on by a nuclear attack. The erect warheads and the cascading mushroom clouds are perceived to signify male penetration and ejaculation. But the fetishization of nuclear weapons is not only the stuff of fiction. The connection between sex and atomic science has a very long history. The use of sexually explicit, often violent language to describe the scientific method long proceeded the development of nuclear bombs. When Francis Bacon, the seventeenth century philosopher who is widely recognised as the father of modern science, described the "interrogation" of a female nature as that which must be "bound into service", "put in constraint" and made a "slave", he was laying the ground work for a sexualized lexicon that continues to characterise the language of so-called defense intellectuals and much of modern science and technology.

Indian scientist and social activist, Vandana Shiva maintains that “[the development of] modern science was a consciously gendered, patriarchal activity. As nature came to be seen more like a woman to be raped, gender too was recreated. Science as a male venture, based on the subjugation of female nature and female sex provided support for the polarisation of gender” (1989: 17). Thus, modern science has cemented a dualistic rationality that still persists and continues to be effectively used as a tool for controlling and repressing the autonomy of women.

The language developed by nuclear defense intellectuals is a sexualized lexicon which degrades the female/nature half of the male/culture binary. There are several examples of the sexualizing of nuclear technology, where on the one hand, nuclear bombs are represented as the virile son of ‘hard’ science, and on the other, nuclear power is the sexy love-child of technocratic culture. With regards to nuclear-philia, perhaps the most bizarre example of the perceived feminine sexiness of nuclear bombs has to be the Bikini bathing suit.

In 1946, the beginning of an era which lauded the presence of the ‘blonde bombshell’, the French designer, Louis Reard, named his two-piece bathingsuit the Bikini (Ruthven 1993: 63). The famous, and at the time shocking, swimming costume was named after the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, which the US government commandeered from its inhabitants. Bikini was the site of early atmospheric nuclear tests including the hydrogen bomb test, code named ‘Bravo’. Bravo was the largest nuclear bomb ever exploded by the US. It literally vaporized three of the twenty-three islands in the atoll system and spread radioactive debris across nearly 50,000 square miles. Ken Ruthven, an Australian cultural theorist, highlights the sexualizing of nuclear technology when he asks, "who knows what gang-bang fantasies lurk subliminally in the subtitle of W. C. Anderson’s book on those Marshall Islands tests: ‘12,000 Men and One Bikini’?" (1993: 63). Today, Bikini is still heavily contaminated with radiation. And yet many people may never recognize the connection between nuclear technology and seductive swimwear.

Thirty years after bikini bathing suits hit the fashion industry, an advertisement for nuclear energy by the Crouse Group of companies featured an illustration of a young, white woman in a see-through night gown. Next to her is the question in bold lettering, "Why is a beautiful woman like a nuclear power plant?" The answer, in small print, is given as follows. “In order to remain beautiful she must take good care of herself. . . . She schedules her rest regularly. . . . When she is not feeling well she sees her doctor. . . she never lets herself get out of shape. . . She is as trim now as she was ten years ago. . . . In other words, she is a perfect example of preventative maintenance.” (Nuclear News Buyers Guide, February 1976, quoted in Caputi 1988: 507).

Here, the nuclear industry accomplishes two tasks simultaneously. The advertisement attempts to placate public fears by implying that there is no reason to worry because the experts are in control and they will take care of the community dependent on nuclear power. It also serves to reinforce male-defined gender roles for women. The woman, like a nuclear reactor, must be perfectly maintained by male-defined science. Her ‘preventative maintenance’requires that she be slim, white and beautiful; and that she waits around all day in her see-through negligee, willing to be ‘fixed’at any moment. In this way, nuclear power is rendered ‘sexy’. It will, like this woman, give the public what it wants because it only exists to serve. The sexualizing of nuclear technology — testing grounds represented as provocative bathing suits and nuclear reactors represented as alluring women — serves to reassure the public regarding issues of safety and to keep women in their rightful, unreconstructed place. After all, who could be afraid of a sexy bomb and a pretty, white reactor? The question remains: how can women empower themselves to break out of the male-defined gender-trap, when even weapons of mass destruction are used to remind them of their place in male-defined culture?

Specific to the sexualization of nuclear technology read in its manufactured connection to the female gender, is the work of Carol Cohn. Cohn’s (1987) case study of US defense intellectuals has brought a critical spotlight to bear on the sexualizing of the language of nuclear technology and its resulting imagery. Cohn describes the work of a defense intellectual as “[formulating] what they call ‘rational’systems for dealing with the problems created by nuclear weapons: how to manage the arms race; how to deter the use of nuclear weapons; how to fight a nuclear war if deterrence fails[.] In short, they create the theory that informs and legitimates American nuclear strategic practice” (Cohn 1987: 688).

Cohn spent a year as a participant observer "immersed in the world of defense intellectuals" in order to pursue her persistent question: how could these men (and they were exclusively men save the administrative staff) think this way? (1987: 688). After learning to speak and understand their ‘specialized language’, which she refers to as ‘techno-strategic speak’, Cohn found that her own ‘rationalizations’ were changing. "Soon, I could no longer cling to the comfort of studying an external and objectified ‘them’. I had to confront a new question: How can I think this way? How can any of us?” (1987: 688). There are two central aspects of Cohn’s research. Firstly, that images of sex and death dominate the rationalization of defense-intellectual-speak; and secondly, that inherent to the technology being sexualized is the glorification of male procreation and reproduction. Illustrated here is a modern Baconian notion of male pregnancy and birth; that is, men giving birth to nuclear bombs.

Cohn was surprised at the overt nature of the sexual innuendo in the description of nuclear bombs that she found among defense strategists. In her research she notes that, “American military dependence on nuclear weapons was explained as ‘irresistible, because you get more bang for the buck.’ Another lecturer solemnly and scientifically announced ‘to disarm is to get rid of all your stuff.’ (This may, in turn, explain why they see serious talk of nuclear disarmament as perfectly resistible, not to mention foolish. If disarmament is emasculation, how could any real man even consider it?) A professor’s explanation of why the MX missile is to be placed in the silos of the newest Minuteman missiles, instead of replacing the older, less accurate ones, was ‘because they’re in the nicest hole — you’re not going to take the nicest missile and put it in a crummy hole.’ Other lectures were filled with discussion of vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration, and the comparative advantages of protracted/versus spasm attacks — or what one military adviser to the National Security Council has called ‘releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.’ There was serious concern about the need to harden our missiles and the need to ‘face it, the Russians are a little harder than we are.’”(1987: 693).

Cohn was furthermore privy to strange, ritualistic (and again, overtly sexual) gestures towards nuclear bombs such as, "patting the missile". In touching actual nuclear weapons, or weapons systems, the men of the nuclear fraternity seem to derive some sort of sexual pleasure. Their sycophantic gesticulation of missile patting summoned great excitement among the defense intellectuals. One claimed that "the only real reason for deploying Cruise and Pershing II missiles in western Europe was ‘so that our allies can pat them’" (1987:695). Having heard that Cohn was in the near vicinity of a B-1 bomber, one of her colleagues "enviously" said to her "I hear you got to pat a B-1" (1987: 695). Thus, defense intellectuals will discuss, with ‘breathless eagerness’, their exciting adventures in patting missiles, yet they will only refer to human death as ‘collateral damage’. These defense strategists appear to love sexualizing their weapons, their technology, their ‘thrust to weight ratios’, but they appear equally unwilling to articulate the outcome of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. They are interested in their creations but they altogether skip the human and earth-scale details that their creations will bring.

Along with the fetishization of nuclear technology, the development of nuclear weapons is rife with metaphors about birth. The first atomic bomb constructed at Los Alamos was called “Oppenheimer’s baby” (1987: 700).

“The hydrogen bomb was called ‘Teller’s baby’(1987: 700). Later, Teller would send a telegram to Los Alamos from Enewetak to signal the successful test of another hydrogen bomb. The telegram read: ‘It’s a boy’(1987: 701). After witnessing the Trinity Test, Laurence wrote that [t]he big boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash — the first cry of a new-born world. . . . They clapped their hands as they leaped from the ground — earthbound man symbolising the birth of a new force” (1946: 10).

Through their visions of male technological procreation, the men of the Manhattan Project as well as today’s defense intellectuals hark back to the beginnings of modern science. Like Francis Bacon and Victor Frankenstein, the practice of the masculine-birth of technology is fathered in science. Caputi states that Shelley “conceived the exemplary monster of technological myth to be purely fathered (from dead flesh) and utterly unmothered” (1988: 511). Cohn points to the outcome of male-birth in science. “The nuclear scientists gave birth to male progeny with the ultimate power of violent domination over female nature” (1987: 701).

Beyond violence against ‘female nature’, there seems to be a normative acceptance of violence in US society, that archetypal nuclear nation, which appears to condone the iconography of atomic symbols. The mushroom cloud, symbolizing a nuclear explosion, has won its place among major cultural icons (Caputi 1993). The words: ‘atomic’, ‘nuke’, ‘mutants’, ‘meltdown’ and ‘ballistic’ show up in an array of cultural contexts (Chaloupka 1992). The predominance of nuclear imagery in US popular culture reveals a general acceptance of it. It is as if people from the US live under the rule of a nuclear mythology. Mushroom clouds, radiation signs, phallic caricature bombs, and other symbols of pending nuclear doom have been elevated to a cult status (Hilgartner 1982, Weart 1988). As the glamorized reversals of their true nature, these symbols are perceived as ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’, and as such, ‘nukes’and ‘mutants’ have won their place in culture.

Kathleen Sullivan

References cited:
Caputi, Jane. (1988) ‘Seeing Elephants: The Myths of Pallotechnology’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3: 487-521.
Caputi, Jane. (1993) Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth. Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company.
Chaloupka, William. (1992) Knowing Nukes: The Politics and Culture of the Atom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cohn, Carol. (1987) ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 4: 687-718.
Hilgartner, Stephen et al. (1982) Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology in America. New York: Penguin Books.
Ruthven, Ken. (1993) Nuclear Criticism. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Shiva, Vandana. (1989) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books.
Weart, Spencer R. (1988) Nuclear Fear: A History of Images. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

क्या बात है!

2009-07-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Some days ago, I discovered this: blogger allows me to type in हिन्दी (Hindi), ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada), മലയാളം (Malayalam), தமிழ் (Tamil) and తెలుగు (Telugu)! (No, I do not speak any of the languages listed other than Hindi. But turns out, this is an issue of transliteration.) Too bad though there is no Gujrati.

I grew up speaking English and Gujrati - so I can think pretty easily in both, which, theoretically, would make it pretty easy for me to actually type an entire post in Gujrati. Unfortunately, though, I can't actually read or write too well in Gujrati. Which, in this case, wouldn't have been much of a problem because like I said, blogger uses a system of transliteration.

Hindi and Marathi I'd be great at - learnt them in school for over 6 years - so reading and writing are not a problem, per se. But I don't really speak them unless required, so the actual formulation of thoughts and sentences is a little challenging. Compromise? Type a post in Gujrati with Hindi script. गुजराती। See? That's the word "gujrati" written in Hindi. Really, that's the equivalent of posting in Gujrati in roman script. But visually its much "cooler."

I do intend to the use the Hindi in a शुद्ध way though. Initially, I'd thought of just transcribing Hindi songs. But given the transliteration, that really wasn't much of a challenge - it would've just been a matter of copying and pasting. So, next best thing - translation.

I tried that with so many different songs, but given my rustiness with the language, I had to start with something really easy. Even so, I'm sure my high school Hindi teachers would be appalled by my efforts। :)

यूं कैन गेट ईट इफ यूं रिली वांट - जिमी क्लिफ्फ़
(You Can Get it if You Really Want - Jimmy Cliff)

कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
लेकिन कोशिश की ज़रूरत है
कोशिश करना भूलना नहीं
तो कामयाबी ज़रूर मिलेगी।

मेरा वादा है, सुनो!

इन्किलाब न होतें हैं एक पल में
(The actual lyrics here are: Rome was not built in a day. I'm pretty sure a literal translation would sound pretty absurd. So I changed it to: Revolutions don't happen in a flicker/in an instant.)
तुम्हारे विरुद्ध खूब लडेंगे
लेकिन जितना भारी होगा ये सामना
उससे मीठी होगी तुम्हारी जीत।

कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
लेकिन कोशिश की ज़रूरत है
कोशिश करना भूलना नहीं
तो कामयाबी ज़रूर मिलेगी।

दुःख-पीडन सेहेने पडेंगे
लेकिन जीतो या हरो तुम्हे तुम्हारी मिलेगी
अपने लक्ष्य को दिल-दिमाग से कायम करो
सीमा कितनी दूर न होई, कामयाब तुम होगे।

कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
कामयाबी उसकी जो सच्चे दिल से चाहे
लेकिन कोशिश की ज़रूरत है
कोशिश करना भूलना नहीं
तो कामयाबी ज़रूर मिलेगी।

Burma I

2009-07-14T03:08:00.000-07:00

I am currently reading a novel by Amy Tan, titled Saving Fish from Drowning, which narrates the (")adventures(") of a group of American tourists in Burma. This post is not about the book, although it is a very enjoyable read - you can listen to an NPR interview with Tan here. No, this post, and the next one, is a collection of pieces on Burma. Everyone that writes of Burma, or Myanmar, refers to it as "little-known," "mysterious," etc. While these references do have obvious Orientalist (under)tones, there is a political dimension/significance to them. I therefore started doing a bit of research on Burma, to make it less "little-known" for myself. There is, of course, lots of information out there if you wish to find it. Perhaps not as much as about "open," "democratic" states, but still enough, at least for the lay person.

This post is a collection of a few articles/reports about the implications of Burma's political status/conditions, in general. The next one will probably be about issues of ethnicity, displacement/migration, and statelessness. Although, obviously, the issues addressed in the two posts are not mutually exclusive.

Note: The picture above is from the Voices for Burma website. This website has some good information on the debate about boycotting tourism to Burma, and the possibilities for responsible, informed tourism.

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Burma VJ

There is a documentary, recently released, title Burma VJ, which "celebrates the courage of the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a group of exiled Burmese journalists who secretly film the abuse of peoples in Burma. The film recounts the efforts of a small group of independent video journalists (VJs) who risked their safety, freedom and lives to record popular protests and the military government’s brutal response."

Below is a short trailer for the film, followed by a synopsis. Also, here is an interview with one of the filmmakers. For those interested in the States, here is a list of upcoming screenings:
19-Jul – Santa Fe, NM – CCA
24-Jul – Cleveland, OH – Cleveland Museum of Art
31-Jul – Washington, DC – Landmark E-Street
07-Aug – Salt Lake City, UT – Tower
28-Aug – Seattle, WA – NW Film Forum

Synopsis
Going beyond the occasional news clip from Burma, the acclaimed filmmaker, Anders Østergaard, brings us close to the video journalists who deliver the footage. Though risking torture and life in jail, courageous young citizens of Burma live the essence of journalism as they insist on keeping up the flow of news from their closed country. Armed with small handycams the Burma VJs stop at nothing to make their reportages from the streets of Rangoon. Their material is smuggled out of the country and broadcast back into Burma via satellite and offered as free usage for international media. The whole world has witnessed single event clips made by the VJs, but for the very first time, their individual images have been carefully put together and at once, they tell a much bigger story. The film offers a unique insight into high-risk journalism and dissidence in a police state, while at the same time providing a thorough documentation of the historical and dramatic days of September 2007, when the Buddhist monks started marching.

"Joshua”, age 27, is one of the young video journalists, who works undercover to counter the propaganda of the military regime. Joshua is suddenly thrown into the role as tactical leader of his group of reporters, when the monks lead a massive but peaceful uprising against the military regime. After decades of oblivion - Burma returns to the world stage, but at the same time foreign TV crews are banned from entering the country, so it is left to Joshua and his crew to document the events and establish a lifeline to the surrounding world. It is their footage that keeps the revolution alive on TV screens all over.

Amidst marching monks, brutal police agents, and shooting military the reporters embark on their dangerous mission, working around the clock to keep the world informed of events inside the closed country. Their compulsive instinct to shoot what they witness, rather than any deliberate heroism, turns their lives into that of freedom fighters.

The regime quickly understands the power of the camera and the reporters are constantly chased by government intelligence agents who look at the ”media saboteurs” as the biggest prey they can get.

During the turbulent days of September, Joshua finds himself on an emotional rollercoaster between hope and despair, as he frantically tries to keep track of his reporters in the streets while the great uprising unfolds and comes to its tragic end.

With Joshua as the psychological lens, the Burmese condition is made tangible to a global audience so we can understand it, feel it, and smell it.

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Burma: Where journalism is a living hell
Tita C. Valderama (Philippine Center For Investigative Journalism - The Manila Times)

It is Southeast Asia’s largest country in terms of land area, yet there is reason why Burma is unfamiliar to many people, even within the region.For one, it has been isolated for the last few decades as a result of both Burmese and international actions. For another, press freedom is unknown in Burma, meaning accurate and up-to-date information is hard to find—and report—even within the country itself.In fact, this was largely why many people in Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta were caught by surprise when a Category-3 cyclone (codename: Nargis) rampaged through their communities for about 10 hours last year.

The disaster that struck on May 2, 2008, claimed at least 140,000 lives and left 2.3 million homeless.

Burma’s 47-year military government had known about the cyclone several days before, but had failed to warn its citizens. At the height of the cyclone, few people outside of the affected areas had any inkling about the unfolding tragedy, with local television channels showing dancing and other entertainment programs. It was only hours later that the government-run television stations ran a brief news item about a storm that hit Rangoon, the former national capital.

Phillipines, Marcos-era: Filipinos born after the 1980s have no experience of being under what it was like to have a government that controlled and manipulated what its citizens read and heard. But even those who do not know what martial law is or who Ferdinand Marcos was should only look toward Myanmar to see what it is like to have no freedom of the press and little access to information.

Indeed, the Burmese have taken to relying on outside news sources just so they could keep up with what is happening in their country, even though doing so can be costly, and in more ways than one.

Among their favorites are radio broadcasts by the BBC, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia, all of which have Burmese-language programs. Since 2005, the Democratic Voice of Burma, based in Norway, has also been beaming television signals via satellite into Burma.

Over the weekend, the intrepid BBC made sure that the world would not forget Nargis and the ruling junta; it ran a series of reports on Burma, including a most daring documentary on how Burmese folk endure hunger, land mines, and military reprisal in villages sympathetic to the Karen guerrillas.

Owning a satellite dish, however, would mean forking over serious money as subscription—as much as one million kyats (Burma’s currency), or the equivalent of $1,000, in a country where the annual per capita income is said to be $280. One Rangoon-based journalist in an interview in Bangkok said: “The regime does not ban them . . . just made it impossible for the people to afford.”

Small market: Burma does have local journalists in both print and broadcast. In major cities across the country, stores and stalls have stacks of daily, weekly, and monthly publications. But there seems to be few, if any, buyers of these.

That may be because everyone knows each piece that appears in any local publication or broadcast has to be vetted by a strict censors board. Some magazines have even come out with entire pages blacked out while others have been forced to cancel certain issues altogether because the censors deemed the content too sensitive. In Myanmar, “sensitive” usually means anything that seems contrary to any official line or policy.

As a result, news coverage in that country is generally devoid of political developments, except for ribbon-cutting ceremonies and official government activities and announcements.Burma has about 400 newspapers, journals, and magazines at the moment, most of them based in Rangoon, the former national capital. Five of the publications are state-owned, including the omnipresent New Light of Myanmar, a tabloid-sized daily.

The rest, which are privately owned, face political and financial struggles every single day. But most of them know how important their work is to the people of Burma. That’s why, says one Burmese journalist, “we try to get around all the rules for our readers.”

That, of course, is easier said than done, especially when journalists are constantly in the crosshairs of the military junta. Said Zin Linn, information director of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB)-East Office, in Bangkok: “They think journalists are key enemies of the military junta, [next to] the dissident politicians . . . so they [are] always catching the journalists.”

In early February 2008, for example, authorities arrested Thet Zin and Sein Win Maung, chief editor and manager respectively of the Rangoon-based weekly Myanmar Nation. Their publication’s offices were also searched.

Exiled media: According to Mizzima News, which is run by exiled Burmese journalists in Delhi, India, the two were later charged of violating section 17/20 of the Printers and Publishers Registration Act because they were in possession of a report by UN Special Rapporteur Paulo Sergio Pinheiro on the human-rights situation in Burma, as well as the book Unbreakable Union by ethnic Shan author U Shwe Ohn and video discs of the 2007 Saffron Revolution.

Other laws that have been thrown at journalists and even bloggers to keep them in check are the Emergency Provision Act, which has a section that criminalizes the spreading of “false news,” and the Penal Code, specifically section 505(b) regarding “Crimes Against Public Tranquility.”

Publications that have refused to run propaganda are closed down, and journalists are harassed and intimidated at every turn. Some have even been detained and arrested simply for covering opposition figures or demonstrations against the junta.

Yet, Burma’s journalists have remained undaunted. Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist who has been banned by the junta from visiting Burma since 1989 because of his unflattering reports about its administration, said that his Burmese colleagues have simply learned the “skillful art of writing in a crazy way,” such as through literary pieces and cartoons that carry political messages.

Aung Zaw, a Burmese journalist now based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, agrees. “Cartoons or comic strips are very popular and attractive,” he said. “Some can be very clever and get away with it.”Many, however, do get caught. Last November, poet Saw Wei was sentenced to two years in prison for “inducing crime against public tranquility” by way of a poem published in a local weekly. Reports said the first letters of the Burmese-language poem’s lines spelled out “Power Crazy Snr. Gen. Than Shwe.” Than Shwe is the chief of the military junta.

Too many issues: Besides the generals, there is a surfeit of other subjects to be scrutinized in Burma, courtesy of the way the military has run the country since 1962. For instance, households experience chronic power shortages, leaving much of the country in almost permanent blackout, but the junta’s new capital in isolated Naypyidaw gleams with 24-hour electricity. For some reason, too, women workers have become staple sights in road projects while children as young as seven toil away in tea stalls, many with only food as their wage. Burma has also long been known as an AIDS hot spot.

But a straightforward report on any of these or something similar is bound to land one behind bars. Tired of dodging authorities, many Burmese journalists have elected to report on their country from far away.

There are more than 100 Burmese journalists now working in exile, mostly in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They fled Myanmar after a crackdown following the 8888 Revolution (a student-led uprising that culminated on August 8, 1988) against the military junta. “I myself am a persona non grata,” said Aung Zaw, who is editor in chief of the popular Irrawaddy magazine. “I cannot go back to Burma. I am forced to live in Thailand. From outside, we tell the story as much as we [can].”

Aung Zaw said he was jailed for a week in 1988, while his younger brother spent eight years in detention for participating in student demonstrations against the junta. Irrawaddy magazine comes out in print, but is also online. It has become one of the most visited news websites on Burma and Southeast Asia. At the height of the Saffron Revolution, it had 20 million hits in a month, a phenomenal jump from its regular average of 80,000 hits per month.

Short on funds, staff: Aung Saw said most of the Burmese media in exile are understaffed and underfunded. Yet while their apparent staying power is admirable, what is really remarkable about them is their army of sources within Burma itself.

“We have a lot of sources inside the country,” Aung Zaw said. “We rely on the telephone, Internet, e-mail . . . talking to sources. Some of our sources have been with us for 10 years, but some of them we don’t meet or have met just recently.”

“We are not disconnected,” he said. “Ideas keep flowing inside and outside Burma.”This can only be an indication that while the Burmese themselves are left in the dark about much that is going on in their own land, many of them understand that the rest of the world needs to know as much as possible about Burma if they want to put a stop to the junta’s abuses. Thus, there are those who risking the ire of authorities and investing considerable sums just to get information out of the country.

Clearances required: After all, in Burma, to own a computer and other electronic devices capable of accessing outside information, one must first secure government clearance.

Too, Internet access is not only limited, but also has very prohibitive rates and highly controlled. A mobile phone’s Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card, meanwhile, costs $1,500 to $2,000 each.

One senior editor in Rangoon theorizes that it is the younger generation that has become very creative in communicating with the outside world. “We have no [open] access to Yahoo, Gmail, YouTube, and the like,” he said, “but everyone seems to be breaking the rules . . . they have secret access.”

Still, the information from Burma often comes in trickles. Or at least it seems that way to impatient editors at international news organizations. This has prompted some media companies to send their own reporters to Myanmar—itself a tricky operation, since Burmese embassies are quite strict with granting visa requests; anyone who identifies his or her occupation as “journalist” is turned down. Journalists who intend to make several visits to the country therefore tend to use aliases in their reports to avoid difficulty in securing visas for subsequent trips.

Deportation, death: Old Burmese hands, though, said that any foreign visitor to the country was likely to be the subject of surveillance by authorities, and advised caution in talking to the locals and discretion in taking photographs.

“You just have to be careful who you are with, just use your common sense,” said a foreign photojournalist who has been in and out of Burma for the last 15 years and is now working on a photo book on the military junta. “Just don’t draw attention to what you’re doing.

But the risks confronting members of the foreign media are obviously less compared to those faced by local journalists. According to one business magazine editor in Rangoon, the worst that could happen to a foreign journalist in Myanmar is deportation and seizure of photographs, discs, or printed materials about the country.

Then again, during one of the biggest of the monk-led rallies in 2007, Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai was shot and killed by a Burmese soldier. Nagai was working for APF Tsushin, a media company based in Tokyo.

It’s a situation that could test the resolve of anyone, but to the likes of Aung Zaw, it’s also one that highlights the role of media in society. “Without a free media,” he said, “a democratic society is incomplete.” What more for one under an autocratic regime.

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Burmese Detainees in Danger
Saw Yan Naing (The Irrawaddy)

The relocation of Burmese refugees in Malaysia could lead to worse human rights abuses as they would be isolated from outside world, rights advocacy groups in Malaysia said.

According to the rights groups, the Malaysia immigration authorities moved 598 Burmese refugees including women and children who were detained at Semenyih Immigration camp near Malaysia’s Kajang Township on Friday.

The move was likely due to the Malaysia authorities wanting to isolate the refugees from the outside world, while other sources said it was due to the riot between Burmese refugees and Malaysia camp authorities on July 1. The riot broke out after camp authorities beat 30 detainees who were refusing to board a truck that was to take them to another camp. Eight Burmese detainees were wounded in the riot.

Aung Naing Thu, general secretary of the Malaysia-based rights advocacy group known as the Burma Youth of Nationalists Association said, “Now the Burmese refugees have been relocated to other places, they will be isolated, and the authorities will be able to do whatever the want, even torture them.” Forty-eight out of more then 600 Burmese refugees who were detained in Semenyih detention camp were released on Monday, but 598 of them remained. Many of the remaining refugees are undocumented, said rights groups.

The released detainees said there had been many human rights abuses while they were in the camp. Months-old children and women and pregnant women were the most vulnerable, as the meals distributed in the detention camp lack nutrition, they said. Thant Zin, a Burmese refugee who was released on Monday, said that only ten sick people are allowed to receive medical treatment per week.

“Many people who feel sick in the camp go without medical treatment. They are not allowed to see doctors,” said Thant Zin. “The drinking water and the water used in the toilet come from the same source,” he added.

“If they find communication materials such as mobile phones, they brutally beat you,” said Thant Zin.Immigration authorities regularly beat the detained Burmese refugees during inspections. Last week, two Burmese detainees were seriously beaten when they went to the clinic to ask for medicine.

One detainee was beaten around the eyes till they filled with blood and he became unable to see. The other detainee suffered from cigarette burns on his body and was said to be in serious condition.A delegation from the United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees in Malaysia is now investigating the riot, according to Yante Ismail, a spokesperson for the UNHCR, in Kuala Lumpur.

There are 22 detention camps in Malaysia, some of which are located in isolated areas on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. Some refugees have spent years in the detention camps. About 500,000 Burmese migrants work in Malaysia, legally and illegally, according to the Kuala Lumpur-based Burma Workers’ Rights Protection Committee.

"India's Gay Day"

2009-07-12T02:31:00.000-07:00

My first day back in Bombay, as I groggily went about my home-coming rituals, I caught sight of a headline in the morning newspapaer, loudly proclaiming India's Gay Day. I balked at the headline, presuming that it had something to do with Pride celebrations across the country (only in the second year in India's history). Turns out, the article was actually a report on overturning of colonial era penal code that criminalized homosexuality, or as someone helpfully pointed out, the homosexual act. This of course is momentous, although the ruling came down from the Delhi HC, and within days of it, appeals have been made to the Supreme Court. Hopefully, things will go down well at that level too, but who knows. From what I hear though, the hearings at the SC are to be held on an expedited basis, which is probably a good thing.

In any case, for a couple of days thereafter, there were numerous celebratory articles in the dailies. Those in the color sections of the newspaper (such as the Bombay Times) were of course titled in bright pink. (I can't make up my mind if this pink-stuff plays into absurb stereotypes, or whether it's meant to signify some kind of reclamation. I'm leaning towards the former...) And the obligatory "interviews" with celebrities on their thoughts about the ruling - although, as far as I know, most of them were straight, pretty hetero. And of course, "good-natured" jokes about being gay. The one common thing that ran through all these pieces, was the constant reference to "the gays."

I was hoping to have read and researched this some more, so that I could write a more informed analysis. But my week thus far has been plagued by jet-lag and sickness and very low-energy. So, I figured I'll just post a few articles about this, because even if the reporting on it was less-than-satisfactory, the issue itself is pretty significant.

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RIGHTS-INDIA: India's Historic Gay Ruling
By Ranjita Biswas

KOLKATA, Jul 3 (IPS) - A day after the Delhi High Court's landmark judgment to overturn a colonial law that criminalised homosexuality, Indians expressed mixed reactions to the verdict.

After almost 150 years of introduction of Section 377, a law of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which describes same-sex relationships as an "unnatural offense", the Delhi High Court overturned the law on July 2, ruling that gay sex between consenting adults would no longer be unlawful.

"Homosexuals in the country now have the right to live like any other citizen and without being treated like criminals," Anjali Gopalan, the director of the Naz Foundation, a New Delhi-based gay rights nongovernmental organisation.

But she cautioned that the "judgment doesn’t mean that homosexuality is legal, but that adults in consensual homosexual relationship cannot be discriminated against."

Section 377 of IPC was introduced in India in 1860 during the British colonial period indicting homosexuality as "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" and thus punishable by law. In Britain, the Victorian law was scrapped in 1967, but its former colonies chose to cling to it. Since 1994, gay rights activists have consistently demanded that this law be changed, citing it as discriminatory and misused to harassed homosexuals.

But their demand had not been to completely abolish the Section, but only "read down" the law, given Section 377 is instrumental in prosecuting other crimes like pedophilia.

The high court in its ruling recommended those parts of the section 377 that deal with sexual offenses such as "non-consensual sodomy" be transferred to other sections of the IPC that deal with rape, like 375 and 376. The verdict clarified that Section 377 will be enforced for sex offenses involving minors.

Activists have long contended that Section 377 exacerbates the spread of HIV infection among the MSM (Men having Sex with Men) and transgender community.

"Oppressive laws such as Section 377 drive people underground making it much harder to reach them with HIV prevention, treatment and care services." said Michel Sidibé, the executive director of UNAIDS, a nongovernmental organisation.

However, the controversial ruling has become a hot potato in New Delhi’s corridors of power.

"There are several opinions on the matter," in the Indian government, Veerappa Moily, union law minister, told the Indian media on July 3.

The minister is opposed to repealing the law on moral grounds, citing that the country was not yet ready for it and advocated retaining it to avoid "far reaching consequences."

But India’s Health Ministry welcomes the decision to amend the law.

Last year, at the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, Anbumani Ramadoss, the Indian union minister for health and family welfare said, "Structural discrimination against those who are vulnerable to HIV such as sex workers and MSM must be removed if our prevention, care and treatment programs are to succeed. Section 377 must go."

But social groups are upbeat.

"Personally it’s a feeling of lightness, as if a huge burden has gone off my shoulders," said Pawan Dhall, the director of ‘Solidarity and Action Against the HIV Infection in India’, a Kolkata-based nongovernmental organisation. "It’s a sign that progressive India is a place for everyone, where people of different sexual orientations can live together."

But the battle for gay rights is hardly over, he cautions.

"The Delhi HC decision is the first hurdle we have crossed. It’s a big morale booster for us who work in this field," he said. "We’ve to be always careful so that we are not seen as breaking the law. Violence against the members of the community has also been common. We didn’t have any standing to fight our case. Now we have. It will also have a social impact."

The decision has not gone down well with religious conservatives who have long regarded gays and lesbians as ‘aberrations’.

As soon as the Delhi HC ruling was in the public domain, sections of Muslim religious leadership, Catholic Church and Hindu conservatives came out strongly against the decision.

Rev. Babu Joseph, a spokesman for the Catholic Bishops Conference of India said the decision was "disappointing" but clarified that though homosexuals should not be treated as criminals, "we cannot afford to endorse homosexual behaviour as normal and socially acceptable."

Even before the verdict came out, Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind's Maulana Mehmud Madani stated that "Homosexuality is Haram (prohibited) and an immoral act. It is unnatural. It is a punishable offence in Shariat. It is against the age old traditions and culture of India and of Islam."

Some Hindu religious leaders also condemned it calling it "against Indian culture."

"People who have resisted our stand saying it’s against ‘Indian culture’ ignore human rights," Dhall argued. "Besides, if culture means inclusiveness, being honest hard-working citizens of a country, is it [a] prerogative of only a certain section people?"

The ruling, according to Saeed, a gay rights activist from Pakistan, said the historic verdict should set a precedent for "the entire ex-British-colonized world still clinging to the absurd laws."

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Commentary posted on Sepia Mutiny by Amardeep on September 17, 2006

Section 377
The writer Vikram Seth, along with a group of activists, recently signed an open letter directed to the Government of India and the Delhi High Court, asking it to repeal Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This is the section that prohibits sexual relations between men as well as other “unnatural” acts. Amartya Sen has put out a follow-up open letter with dozens of prominent Indian intellectuals and celebrities signing on.

Human Rights Watch put out a report in 2002 criticizing the law because it weakens efforts to mobilize against AIDS. In the NYT Somini Sengupta mentions that the government’s own National AIDS Control Agency has stated that the law hampers AIDS prevention and treatment programs.

The key actor in all this a group called the Naz Foundation India Trust, which sued the government in 2004 to request the repeal of the law. The case was initially refused by the Delhi Court, but the Indian Supreme Court required the Delhi Court to examine the case on its merits. The next hearing is scheduled for October 4. The recent agitations seem to be oriented to influencing the outcome of these particular hearings.

For reference, here is the text of the 1861 law:
Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman, animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation- Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section. (link)

This is a very bad, outmoded law. It is, for one thing, euphemistic to the point of absurdity. Who exactly defines what is “against the order of nature”? I believe the earlier versions of the Penal Code didn’t include the “explanation,” so one obvious question is whether it includes, to be quite direct, everything but the heterosexual missionary position. (The term “sodomy” once included oral sex as well as masturbation; it is still only euphemistically defined as “any sex act that does not lead to procreation”.)

More generally, the law has many deleterious effects that its critics have explored. Let’s have a look at some of these arguments, as well as the government’s response to them so far.

Here are some quotes from a speech by Aditya Bondyopadhyay (of Naz Foundation) that makes many good points:

Very few cases on this law have actually reached the upper courts level in all this time, but the law continues to be a potent tool of oppression. It provides the impunity to a venal police to extort money, blackmail, indulge in violence, and extract other favors, including sexual favors, by dangling this law on homosexual males and hijras, a traditional social group of transvestites and transsexual persons. It impedes sexual health promotion activities like HIV/AIDS Interventions amongst same sex attracted males. It discourages reporting of male rape, and therefore encourages such rape, often by police. In sum, it disrupts the social existence of all same sex attracted persons, erodes their dignity and self respect, and reduces them to a sub-human level of existence.

Aditya Bondyopadhyay also quotes from the government’s initial response to the case:

After a few initial paragraphs of legal arguments, the government goes on to reveal its real face by saying in paragraph 9: “deletion of the said section can well open flood gates of delinquent behaviour and be misconstrued as providing unbridled licence for the same.

In Paragraph 31 of the reply the Government goes on to state: “law does not run separately from society. It only reflects the perception of the society. Public tolerance of different activities, changes and legal categories get influenced by those changes. The public notably in the United Kingdom and the United States of America have shown tolerance of a new sexual behavior or sexual preference but it is not the universally accepted behavior.

In paragraph 32 of the reply the government states: In fact, the purpose of this section 377 IPC is to provide a healthy environment in the society by criminalizing unnatural sexual activities against the order of nature.” And then goes on to add in Paragraph 33: “If this provision is taken out of the statute book, a public display of such affection would, at the most, attract charges of indecent exposure which carry a lesser jail sentence than the existing imprisonment for life or imprisonment of 10 years and fine. While the Government cannot police morality, in a civil society criminal law has to express and reflect public morality and concerns about harm to the society at large. If this is not observed, whatever little respect of law is left would disappear, as law would have lost its legitimacy”.(link)

This reasoning is flawed in any number of ways, one of which being the reference to “new sexual behavior or sexual preference.” The behavior is not “new,” or it wouldn’t have been outlawed in 1861; it is the recognition of it as a fundamental human right that is new. One could also argue that since the law isn’t often enforced, it already doesn’t have much legitimacy. And third, sexual acts between consenting adults in private pose no harm for anyone, whereas the existing law has been shown to cause harm to large numbers of people — including many people who are not gay (i.e., the large number of heterosexuals with HIV/AIDS in India).

The old argument that the majority of Indians would probably support this law doesn’t hold water either. The majority of Indians probably still support the practice of dowry, but no one would argue that that is a good reason to reinstitute it. Justices of the court, as non-elected officials, are in a unique position to do what is right rather than what is going to be popular.
Also, supporters of this law (along with supporters of the old anti-Sodomy laws in the U.S.) often claim that removing it would legalize pedophilia. That simply isn’t true; existing laws would continue to protect children from sexual predators.

Importantly, it’s not just lefties who are on board with this campaign; among the original signatories to Seth’s letter is Soli Sorabjee, the former attorney general and a BJP official, according to the New York Times.

One final thought: before Americans liberals get on their (our) high horse about the barbaric nature of these laws, we should keep in mind that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down the remaining anti-Sodomy laws in 12 American states, only came down in 2003. Then again, Section 377 applies to all Indian states equally. In my view, it is time to erase this relic of Victorian morality.

Original Title: Long Goodbyes and Hestitant Hellos... New Title: WTF??!?!?!!??!?!

2009-07-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

I am currently at the Atlanta airport, waiting for, and dreading, the 12 hour flight home to Bombay. To say this journey has been eventful is an understatement... although this is still not the worst travel experience I've had. I left San Diego last morning (i.e. Tuesday, June 30th). I was to fly through Philadelphia and Franfurt, onto Bombay. My flight in San Diego was delayed about 2.5 hours because of weather conditions in Philadelphia. hunh?! But they told us not to worry about our connections because flights out of Philly were bound to be delayed too. Of course, once I got to Philly at 9.30PM, my flight to Frankfurt was well on its way. Thankfully, though, I wasn't the only one in this predicament. Unfortunately, I was one of 100s in the same situation. By the time I got my re-routed ticket through Atlanta onto Bombay, it was 12.45 PM. Of course, all the compensation I received for my pain was a $15 meal voucher and a discounted hotel room, for $80 a night. What a discount!

Thankfully though I'd struck up a conversation with an older lady who was also headed to Frankfurt, and we decide to share the room. So that didn't work too that badly. The funny thing though is that the reason I decided to speak to her was because I read her as Indian. In fact, the first time I saw her on the flight over to Philly she reminded me of a diva desi scholar, like Spivak or someone.

I thought my pain had ended after a few hours of sleep and a hot shower, but when I got to Altanta, I was informed that my bags had not made it on the plane with me. In fact, as I write, they are still siting pretty in Philly! I don't really care about much in those bags except for all of my books in there. If for some reason my bags are misplaced, I'm not sure if I'll be find them too easily in India. The person at a baggage services had the gall to ask me to "stop sweating it." I'm really hoping they'll be waiting for me in Bombay.

Perhaps this isn't as bad as it appears, but it feels pretty hellish...

And it's all adding to my distate for travel, my exhaustion and my sensitivity. It's pretty weird... I've been on the verge of tears multiple times but none of it has to be with my travel. There's a couple of hundred really young people here who are in the military or appear to be headed to some sort of boot camp. I'm really not exgaggerating about the number. When I see young... I mean really young - I saw a couple of them who looked like they could be 12 - it really makes me feel frustrated, angry, sad... They were lounging around at the airport... waiting for god knows what, going god knows where... like they were at some sort of picnic. I really, really wanted to burst into tears. Talk about projecting anger and frustration...

And then, tears welled up in my eyes when a Delta agent at my gate bust into Hindi. I'm sure I can rationalize that, but I'm too tired to attempt to analyze my thoughts and emotions.

Now that that's out of me... Wow! It's been two months since I last posted here?! So much has happened in the interim... First, my advisor suggested that I wait until the Fall to qualify. I was somewhat attempting the impossible by trying to qualify in one quarter, but there were financial pressures. But those are now lifted which means I can breathe a little easy and think a little more, and write a little smarter. Plus, I can apply for some fellowships now, which would decrease my financial stress even more. And, I also found that I will, finally, be T.A.ing in Ethnic Studies next year. Yay! I was so worried that I'd graduate from the program without ever having taught a class in it.

Also, a little over a month ago, I moved to a new place - my own little studio. I've been here for about a month and I think I'm going to enjoy it. But for now, I am a little sad/sobered. The place that I moved out from was where my ex-partner and I lived together, and although he's been back home in Guam for a year now, it still feels like home. I think it's the first place I've lived in in the States that has actually felt like home. So it was very bitter-sweet to move out. It was the final marker that a beautiful and very important phase in my life had finally come to a close. And, as my horoscopes keep telling me, I'm in, or headed towards, a phase in my life characterized by major change - a phase that will define the next couple of decades of my life. Exciting? Perhaps... But I feel like my life is a case-study of Lacanian psychoanalysis - I can see/feel my symbolic networks crumbling, but until new ones are concretized, I'll be feeling very lost and adrift. Ah, uncertainty, the bane of my existence.

I spent this past month with my ex in fact. I'm not sure if that was "rationally" a good idea. I don't know if it just enabled some illusion that we were still together, or whether it was some naive attempt at deferring the inevitable. I know that some people in my life disapprove especially because of the dramatic, painful circumstances surrounding out split. I may write more about that later, especially because all this - not just the break-up, but people's varied reactions to my situation - has made me think a lot about love and friendship, all of its possibilities. For now though, all I know is that the time I spent with my ex felt like the right thing to do, and it felt good. We've had a long, good relationship - and sometimes long goodbyes are necessary. We had a lot to work through, to figure out, to come to terms with... and now we can move forward to perhaps, someday, be able to be close friends again. And I owe no one, or perhaps very few folks, any explanations

And finally, this summer will be spent at home. It's been three year since I was last back. So I'm excited, but a bit apprehensive. But the timing of this trip is perhaps opportune... I need to go back in order to move forward - refresh myself, regain my footing, gear up for whatever's about to be thrown at me next. Like the rest of my current life, this experience also signifies the ultimate embodiment of all my theoretical understandings of home. Over the past few years, going home has always been bitter-sweet. Each time, it's like learning a new language, and in many cases quite literally. I have to learn to be a different person - someone's child again, the "baby" niece, the grandchild. I left home when I was 19. I think for most of my family back home, that's how old I still am. And just as some people talk about lost childhood, my parents I think feel a sense of lost parenthood, one that they try to recover on my visits back. Honestly, though, I can't blame them. It's tough all around. But then what isn't, right?

I need to board soon. Soon one last comment about Michael Jackson. I did of course enjoy his music, a lot, but I wasn't a die-hard fan. Even so, his passing did affect me. I remember a few years ago my dad feeling a little down about the death of some celebrity... I can't even remember who. But I do recall wondering back then who's death might affect me similarly. And the first person who came to mind was Michael Jackson. So his passing marked my crossing of some kind of age/historical/experiential threshold. And that... well, that was moving.

So, to finish up the post, here are a couple of videos of my favorite MJ songs. And finally a song for the other one in my life. To you both, a sweet goodbye.

More to come from Bombay....

Life and Labor

2009-05-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

There's a little cafe in the housing complex where I currently live. In the final stages of thesis writing, I'd be here every morning and evening... it was the only way I could get some solid writing done. And then, as if they were just waiting for me to be done, the week after my thesis defense they decided to close down, temporarily.

Now that I'm in the throes of prospectus writing, they're back open! Oh the small wonders/miracles of life...

In any case, I decided to get out of the house early this morning and get to the cafe to start working. The 'problem' I'm encountering though, is that the person at the counter is playing really good music, and I'm super distracted by some of the stuff they're playing. So when something catches my attention, I end up going to YouTube to search it and add it to my playlist. Here's what I've got thus far:

India Arie - Long Goodbye

India Arie - Wings of Forgiveness

James Morrison - Please Don't Stop the Rain

Taylor Swift - Love Story, Instrumental (Don't hate!)

Some stuff is conducive to life, but not to labor... :)

Indigenous Studies Engages Ethnic Studies: Schedule

2009-04-29T01:35:00.000-07:00

This symposium is organized as an effort to move the field of Ethnic Studies beyond the usual emphasis on immigration, diaspora and slavery paradigms, and to incorporate the critical potential of Indigenous Studies as an integral part of our intellectual agenda. Just as the scholarship ‘about’ people of color does not describe our notion and practice of Ethnic Studies, scholarship ‘about’ indigenous people must reflect more than merely the violent history of the academy within indigenous communities. It must, in fact, engage the sophisticated indigenous theories, which have been circulating for many years, especially those that confront the ways in which colonial power still operates in nation-states. This symposium is an important step towards facilitating this integration.

Schedule

Friday, May 8, 2009
9.30 AM - 5.00 PM
UCSD Social Sciences Building
Room 107

9.30 AM: Breakfast

10.00 - 11.45 AM: Panel 1
Moderator: Ross Frank, Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

Noenoe Silva, Associate Professor of Hawaiian and Indigenous Politics, University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
The Study of Indigenous Politics at the University of Hawai'i.

Michelle Erai, University of California, Office of the President Post-doctoral Fellow
Gender: A site of engagement for Indigenous and Ethnic Studies?

Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
The Delicacies of doing Indigenous Studies within Ethnic Studies

Traci Brynne Voyles, Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
Queer Ecologies: the 'Navajo Problem' and Intimate Cartographies of the Navajo Nation, 1928-1943

11.45 AM - 12.45 PM: Lunch

1.00 - 2.45 PM: Panel 2
Moderator: Denise Ferreira da Silva, Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

Andrea Smith, Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside
White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism

Chris Finley, PhD Candidate in American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Conquest: A Love Story in the New World

Mark Harris, Senior Lecturer, School of Law, La Trobe University, Australia
Lost between memorialising and forgetting: a reflection upon the recent trend towards apologies made by modern settler States to Indigenous peoples

Lani Teves, PhD Candidate in American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
We're All Hawaiians Now: Kanaka Maoli Alterities and the 21st Century Ahupua'a

3.00 - 4.45 PM: Panel 3
Moderator: Adria Imada, Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

Audra Simpson, Assistant Professor in Anthropology, Columbia University
Indigenous Resistance and Etiologies of Consent: Mohawk Nationalism, "Proper Citizenship" and Settler Emergency

Ma Vang, Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
Statelessness and Citizenship in the Hmong Veterans' Naturalization Act of 1997

Maile Arvin, M.A./Ph.D. Student in Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
Sovereignty Will Not Be Funded: Indigenous Citizenship and the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement

*** Co-sponsored by: Department of Ethnic Studies, California Cultures in Comparative Perspectives, Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor, Office of the Dean of Social Sciences, Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor, Faculty Equity ***

Lady Sings the Blues

2009-04-20T17:48:00.000-07:00

I just turned in the first draft of my prospectus, so I have a bit of a breather until tomorrow when my work gets ripped into and I return to stress-ball state. In the meantime, I've been listening to music over YouTube and finally got my hands on some amazing music that I lost when my computer crashed a year or so ago.

One of the best things about going through a break up (not that going through one is particularly enjoyable in any way), is that, in your stronger moments, you can re-discover aspects of your pre-relationship life that got somewhat muted during the relationship. Of course, the trick is not to lose those parts of you, in the first place, (something I need to be more deliberate about the next time around). In any case, my moments of "re-discovery" have all circulated around music and books - music for memories, and books for inspiration. In the first week, I listened to the one swing album I own: Colin Jones and the Big Little Band. It got it my very semester at Oberlin, when I took swing classes. Besides the music itself, which is fun, it has a lot of sweet, untainted memories attached to it - the kinds of memories that come few and far between, but are essential for sustenance, in a break-up. I hadn't listened to that CD in forever, maybe not since my sophomore year, but listening to it again a few months ago gave me a sense of very simple happiness.

This morning though, as I was winding up the draft of my prospectus, I was browsing YouTube for music to play in the background. And I came to a playlist titled "Lady Sings the Blues." It has many of the songs from the album of the same name - one that I fell in love with the first time I heard it (I'm referring to the two volume compilation, not the Billie Holiday album). I don't remember how long ago that was, but the CD belonged to my uncle who I was visiting in London. I remember playing that CD every morning after he and my aunt left for work, just lounging around on their sofa, day-dreaming. I even downloaded it onto my laptop, but I lost all my music last year because of a harddrive crash).

I definitely hadn't forgotten about this CD... there are a handful of songs from it that have graced my YouTube playlist for a while now. But finding almost the entire set today was pretty amazing. Like I said, I've always really enjoyed the compilation, and so listening to it again brought back some really calming memories. I must've been going through some kind of intense period in my life back when I first heard the CD, because listening to the songs on it always makes me feel somehow stronger, more hopeful; it makes me believe in myself again, in who I am and what I am capable of... again, a feeling that is so crucial, but often so hard to come by, when going through a rough patch. But I guess, subconsciously, the songs remind me that I've encountered hard times before, and that I've survived them pretty ok.

Listening to the songs today, they really spoke to me, to so many of the feelings I am currently experiencing. It did make me wonder though why they had resonated with me so much before. Was I somehow already anticipating this moment then? Or is that, in some way, this moment is no different from others I've experienced, that it has just taken on a different form? And either way, I'm not sure what this says about me - is it that I am a cynic? Or a (tragic) romantic? Or that I subconsciously fantasize about personal difficulties because they help me realize my strength? I'm not really sure... but in any case, it was pretty fascinating. It might just be, too, that for me these songs conjure up the image, the feel, of it means to be a "woman" - a perfect combination of tenderness, ferocity, sensuality, wisdom, survival.

Here are some of my absolutely favorite songs from the compilations... admittedly not the "bluest." I really like pretty much all of them, so it's kind of hard picking just a few. But these are the songs that never go old, that I never tire of.

Julie London - Cry Me River (I remember loving this song as a child. I think my dad had it on LP, unless it's a totally made-up memory.)

Dinah Washington - Call Me Irresponsible

Gladys Knight - Midnight Train to Georgia

Aretha Franklin - Today I Sing the Blues

Etta James - Sugar on the Floor (OK... this one's not the Etta James song on the album. But it's one of my top two favorite Etta James songs. She was such a revelation for me my sophomore year... so wonderfully amazing!)

Dorothy Moore - Misty Blue (I almost want to say this is my favorite song ever... I'm pretty sure it's on the CD too, although the playlist below doesn't indicate that. Whatever, it's beautiful!!! UPDATE: It's a shame that this video cuts the song off so abruptly. But I really like the video itself too... Anyway, full audio can be found here.)

And finally, just for fun: Diana Ross - Touch Me in the Morning

Here's the playlist from the compilation. I don't think this is the exact CD my uncle had... perhaps the UK version is slightly different? I don't know... or I could just be wrong.

Disc: 1 1. Key Largo - Sarah Vaughan
2. Solitude - Ella Fitzgerald
3. Embraceable You - Dianne Reeves
4. Don't Go to Strangers - Etta James
5. Call Me - Della Reese
6. I'm Just a Lucky So and So - Diana Krall
7. Call Me Irresponsible - Dinah Washington
8. Something Cool - June Christy
9. You Go to My Head - Keely Smith
10. Very Thought of You - Nancy Wilson
11. My Funny Valentine - Dinah Shore
12. It Had to Be You - Kay Starr
13. One for My Baby (And One More for the Road) - Rosemary Clooney
14. I'll Be Seeing You - Peggy Lee
Disc: 2 1. In A Sentimental Mood - Dianne Reeves
2. Here's That Rainy Day - Peggy Lee
3. Stormy Weather - Sarah Vaughan
4. In a Sentimental Mood - Dianne Reeves
5. They Can't Take That Away from Me - Diana Krall
6. Body and Soul - Etta James
7. Some Day My Prince Will Come - Cassandra Wilson
8. More Than This - Norah Jones
9. Thrill Is Gone - Patricia Barber
10. You're Changed - Nancy Wilson
11. Cry Me a River - Julie London
12. Don't Explain - June Christy
13. Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?) - Rosemary Clooney
14. I Wish You Love - Keely Smith
15. We'll Be Together Again - Lena Horne

Toba Tek Singh

2009-04-15T23:18:00.000-07:00

I'm working quite frantically on my prospectus. I need to finish a complete draft by Monday... and although I feel good about it, I have tons of thinking and writing to do. My advisor's not easy to please... but that is precisely why I appreciate her so much, because she really does demand good work. In any case, if I am to qualify this quarter (I'm still keeping my fingers crossed), that means very little blog posting. But, since I do want to keep this space somewhat alive, I'll be trying to post some stuff occasionally.

As I was contemplating a good starting point - a good hook, so to speak - for my prospectus, I went back to some of the Partition literature I'd looked at for my thesis. There are two fictional pieces that I am truly and completely moved by, and keep going back to over and over again. One of these is the film Khamosh Pani about which I posted some time ago. The other is a short story by Urdu author, Sa'adat Hasan Mato, titled Toba Tek Singh. This story is one of Manto's most popular, and indeed, it is one of the most popular pieces within Partition fiction. I am actually quite intrigued by Manto himself for many of his stories are quite stunning - he writes about the grotesque, the monstrous, in the most banal, unspectaculairzed, unsensationalized tone. I am thinking particularly of Thanda Ghosht (Cold Meat) and Khol Do (Open It, often also titled The Return), both Partition stories as well. Both of these stories provoked harsh reactions - the former was banned in Pakistan, and obscenity charges were brought against him with respect to the latter. Manto, however, was no stranger to such harsh reactions - he was publicly decried and hauled to court on obscenity charges on numerous occasions. Manto's stories, in fact, were often cast as 'pornographic.'

I won't go into the details of Manto's life here. There's a collection of essays about his life and works that I've read in part, but still need to do a closer reading of. There's also a pretty decent 'portrait' of Manto available here.

Anyway, coming back to Toba Tek Singh, this is a very different kind of story compared to the other two mentioned above. It is dark humor, yet poignant. I don't care much for the translation pasted below - or for any of the other translations available online. I like, instead, the translation by M. Asaduddin, but it is unavailable over the internet. So, the majority of the text pasted below is a translation by Richard McGill Murphy. However, the last few italicized paragraphs, which are the most beautiful and powerful, I've used M. Asaduddin's translation.

Hopefully, I'll be able to write more about this short story later.

*********************************************

Toba Tek Singh

Two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics in the same way that they had exchanged civilian prisoners. In other words, Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani madhouses would be handed over to India.

I can't say whether this decision made sense or not. In any event, a date for the lunatic exchange was fixed after high level conferences on both sides of the border. All the details were carefully worked out. On the Indian side, Muslim lunatics with relatives in India would be allowed to stay. The remainder would be sent to the frontier. Here in Pakistan nearly all the Hindus and Sikhs were gone, so the question of retaining non-Muslim lunatics did not arise. All the Hindu and Sikh lunatics would be sent to the frontier in police custody.

I don't know what happened over there. When news of the lunatic exchange reached the madhouse here in Lahore, however, it became an absorbing topic of discussion among the inmates. There was one Muslim lunatic who had read the newspaper Zamindar¹ every day for twelve years. One of his friends asked him: "Maulvi Sahib! What is Pakistan?" After careful thought he replied: "It's a place in India where they make razors."

Hearing this, his friend was content.

One Sikh lunatic asked another Sikh: "Sardar ji, why are they sending us to India? We don't even speak the language."

"I understand the Indian language," the other replied, smiling. "Indians are devilish people who strut around haughtily," he added.

While bathing, a Muslim lunatic shouted "Long live Pakistan!" with such vigor that he slipped on the floor and knocked himself out.

There were also some lunatics who weren't really crazy. Most of these inmates were murderers whose families had bribed the madhouse officials to have them committed in order to save them from the hangman's noose. These inmates understood something of why India had been divided, and they had heard of Pakistan. But they weren't all that well informed. The newspapers didn't tell them a great deal, and the illiterate guards who looked after them weren't much help either. All they knew was that there was a man named Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whom people called the Qaid-e-Azem. He had made a separate country for the Muslims, called Pakistan. They had no idea where it was, or what its boundaries might be. This is why all the lunatics who hadn't entirely lost their senses were perplexed as to whether they were in Pakistan or India. If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, then how was it that the place where they lived had until recently been known as India?

One lunatic got so involved in this India/Pakistan question that he became even crazier. One day he climbed a tree and sat on one of its branches for two hours, lecturing without pause on the complex issues of Partition. When the guards told him to come down, he climbed higher. When they tried to frighten him with threats, he replied: "I will live neither in India nor in Pakistan. I'll live in this tree right here!" With much difficulty, they eventually coaxed him down. When he reached the ground he wept and embraced his Hindu and Sikh friends, distraught at the idea that they would leave him and go to India.

One man held an M.S. degree and had been a radio engineer. He kept apart from the other inmates, and spent all his time walking silently up and down a particular footpath in the garden. After hearing about the exchange, however, he turned in his clothes and ran naked all over the grounds.

There was one fat Muslim lunatic from Chiniot who had been an enthusiastic Muslim League activist. He used to wash fifteen or sixteen times a day, but abandoned the habit overnight. His name was Mohammed Ali. One day he announced that he was the Qaid-e-Azem, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Seeing this, a Sikh lunatic declared himself to be Master Tara Singh. Blood would have flowed, except that both were reclassified as dangerous lunatics and confined to separate quarters.

There was also a young Hindu lawyer from Lahore who had gone mad over an unhappy love affair. He was distressed to hear that Amritsar was now in India, because his beloved was a Hindu girl from that city. Although she had rejected him, he had not forgotten her after losing his mind. For this reason he cursed the Muslim leaders who had split India into two parts, so that his beloved remained Indian while he became Pakistani.

When news of the exchange reached the madhouse, several lunatics tried to comfort the lawyer by telling him that he would be sent to India, where his beloved lived. But he didn't want to leave Lahore, fearing that his practice would not thrive in Amritsar.

In the European Ward there were two Anglo-Indian lunatics. They were very worried to hear that the English had left after granting independence to India. In hushed tones, they spent hours discussing how this would affect their situation in the madhouse. Would the European Ward remain, or would it disappear? Would they be served English breakfasts? What, would they be forced to eat poisonous bloody Indian chapattis instead of bread?

One Sikh had been an inmate for fifteen years. He spoke a strange language of his own, constantly repeating this nonsensical phrase: "Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyan o mung di daal of di lalteen."² He never slept. According to the guards, he hadn't slept a wink in fifteen years. Occasionally, however, he would rest by propping himself against a wall.

His feet and ankles had become swollen from standing all the time, but in spite of these physical problems he refused to lie down and rest. He would listen with great concentration whenever there was discussion of India, Pakistan and the forthcoming lunatic exchange. Asked for his opinion, he would reply with great seriousness: "Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana di mung di daal of di Pakistan gornament."³

Later he replaced "of di Pakistan gornament" with "of di Toba Tek Singh gornament." He also started asking the other inmates where Toba Tek Singh was, and to which country it belonged. But nobody knew whether it was in Pakistan or India. When they argued the question they only became more confused. After all, Sialkot had once been in India, but was apparently now in Pakistan. Who knew whether Lahore, which was now in Pakistan, might not go over to India tomorrow? Or whether all of India might become Pakistan? And was there any guarantee that both Pakistan and India would not one day vanish altogether?

This Sikh lunatic's hair was unkempt and thin. Because he washed so rarely, his hair and beard had matted together, giving him a frightening appearance. But he was a harmless fellow. In fifteen years, he had never fought with anyone.

The attendants knew only that he owned land in Toba Tek Singh district. Having been a prosperous landlord, he suddenly lost his mind. So his relatives bound him with heavy chains and sent him off to the madhouse.

His family used to visit him once a month. After making sure that he was in good health, they would go away again. These family visits continued for many years, but they stopped when the India/Pakistan troubles began.

This lunatic's name was Bashan Singh, but everyone called him Toba Tek Singh. Although he had very little sense of time, he seemed to know when his relatives were coming to visit. He would tell the officer in charge that his visit was impending. On the day itself he would wash his body thoroughly and comb and oil his hair. Then he would put on his best clothes and go to meet his relatives.

If they asked him any question he would either remain silent or say: "Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana di mung di daal of di laaltein."

Bashan Singh had a fifteen-year-old daughter who grew by a finger's height every month. He didn't recognize her when she came to visit him. As a small child, she used to cry whenever she saw her father. She continued to cry now that she was older.

When the Partition problems began, Bashan Singh started asking the other lunatics about Toba Tek Singh. Since he never got a satisfactory answer, his concern deepened day by day.

Then his relatives stopped visiting him. Formerly he could predict their arrival, but now it was as though the voice inside him had been silenced. He very much wanted to see those people, who spoke to him sympathetically and brought gifts of flowers, sweets and clothing. Surely they could tell him whether Toba Tek Singh was in Pakistan or India. After all, he was under the impression that they came from Toba Tek Singh, where his land was.

There was another lunatic in that madhouse who thought he was God. One day, Bashan Singh asked him whether Toba Tek Singh was in Pakistan or India. Guffawing, he replied: "Neither, because I haven't yet decided where to put it!"

Bashan Singh begged this "God" to resolve the status of Toba Tek Singh and thus end his perplexity. But "God" was far too busy to deal with this matter because of all the other orders that he had to give. One day Bashan Singh lost his temper and shouted: "Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana di mung di daal of wahay Guru ji wa Khalsa and wahay Guru ji ki fatah. Jo bolay so nahal sat akal!"

By this he might have meant: "You are the God of the Muslims. If you were a Sikh God then you would certainly help me."

A few days before the day of the exchange, one of Bashan Singh's Muslim friends came to visit from Toba Tek Singh. This man had never visited the madhouse before. Seeing him, Bashan Singh turned abruptly and started walking away. But the guard stopped him.

"He's come to visit you. It's your friend Fazluddin," the guard said.

Glancing at Fazluddin, Bashan Singh muttered a bit. Fazluddin advanced and took him by the elbow. "I've been planning to visit you for ages, but I haven't had the time until now," he said. "All your relatives have gone safely to India. I helped them as much as I could. Your daughter Rup Kur . . ."

Bashan Singh seemed to remember something. "Daughter Rup Kur," he said.

Fazluddin hesitated, and then replied: "Yes, she's . . . she's also fine. She left with them."

Bashan Singh said nothing. Fazluddin continued: "They asked me to make sure you were all right. Now I hear that you're going to India. Give my salaams to brother Balbir Singh and brother Wadhada Singh. And to sister Imrat Kur also . . . Tell brother Balbir Singh that I'm doing fine. One of the two brown cows that he left has calved. The other one calved also, but it died after six days. And . . . and say that if there's anything else I can do for them, I'm always ready. And I've brought you some sweets."

Bashan Singh handed the package over to the guard. "Where is Toba Tek Singh?" he asked.

Fazluddin was taken aback. "Toba Tek Singh? Where is it? It's where it's always been," he replied.

"In Pakistan or in India?" Bashan Singh persisted.

Fazluddin became flustered. "It's in India. No no, Pakistan."

Bashan Singh walked away, muttering: "Upar di gur gur di annexe di dhiyana di mung di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di dar fatay mun!"

Finally all the preparations for the exchange were complete. The lists of all the lunatics to be transferred were finalized, and the date for the exchange itself was fixed.

The weather was very cold. The Hindu and Sikh lunatics from the Lahore madhouse were loaded into trucks under police supervision. At the Wahga border post, the Pakistani and Indian officials met each other and completed the necessary formalities. Then the exchange began. It continued all through the night.

It was not easy to unload the lunatics and send them across the border. Some of them didn't even want to leave the trucks. Those who did get out were hard to control because they started wandering all over the place. When the guards tried to clothe those lunatics who were naked, they immediately ripped the garments off their bodies. Some cursed, some sang, and others fought. They were crying and talking, but nothing could be understood. The madwomen were creating an uproar of their own. And it was cold enough to make your teeth chatter.

Most of the lunatics were opposed to the exchange. They didn't understand why they should be uprooted and sent to some unknown place. Some, only half-mad, started shouting "Long live Pakistan!" Two or three brawls erupted between Sikh and Muslim lunatics who became enraged when they heard the slogans.

When Bashan Singh's turn came to be entered in the register, he spoke to the official in charge. "Where is Toba Tek Singh?" he asked. "Is it in Pakistan or India?"

The official laughed. "It's in Pakistan," he replied.

Hearing this, Bashan Singh leapt back and ran to where his remaining companions stood waiting. The Pakistani guards caught him and tried to bring him back to the crossing point, but he refused to go.

"Toba Tek Singh is here!" he cried. Then he started raving at top volume: "Upar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana mang di daal of di Toba Tek Singh and Pakistan!"

They tried their best to persuade him that Toba Tek Singh had already gone to Hindustan, or would be sent there immediately. But he was resolute. When they tried to move him forcibly to the other side, he stood on his swollen legs at a spot in the middle, in a posture that seemed to suggest that no power on earth could move him from there.

Because he was a harmless fellow, they did not use force anymore. He was allowed to stand right there, while the exchange proceedings continued.

Just before sunrise, a sky rending cry emerged from the gullet of Bishen Singh, who till then had stood still and unmoving. Several officials came running to the spot and found that the man who had stood still on his legs, day and night for fifteen years, was lying on his face. Over there, behind the barbed wires, was Hindustan. Over here, behind identical wires lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of land that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.

A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Freedom of Speech

2009-04-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Hooray for Juries
by Dave Lindorff
http://counterpunch.com/lindorff04032009.html

A group of 6 ordinary people in a Colorado courtroom saw through the McCarthyite political tactics of the University of Colorado officials and Colorado politicians who conducted a witch hunt against tenured professor and long-time Native American activist Ward Churchill, saying with remarkable clarity and sense that he never would have had his tenure revoked and been fired by the university had it not been for his unapologetic left-wing politics and writings.

It was an enormous victory for academic freedom and for the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech.

It is unclear at this point what the split was on the jury on the issue of damages, which ultimately resulted in a symbolic award of $1 dollar. There was a letter from the jury to the trial judge, Denver District Court Judge Larry J. Naves, during deliberations, asking whether they could replace one juror if they couldn’t get a unanimous agreement on the $1-dollar award, but when told that was not possible, they reached that decision unanimously.

A university spokesman, Ken McConnellogue, tried to argue that the low damage award was “some vindication” for the university’s action in firing Prof. Churchill. The Boulder school is now fighting Churchill’s effort to be reinstated in his job, where he had been chairman of the school’s ethnic studies department. McConnellogue claims that because it was a faculty committee that had been instrumental in his firing, an order by the court reinstating him to his position would “probably draw a sharp reaction.”

The idea that somehow a dispassionate group of faculty members at the university had reviewed Prof. Churchill’s scholarship and determined he had plagiarized and falsified his research is simply nonsense.

There may possibly have been a time when faculty committees reviewing tenure decisions were independent scholarly bodies unswayed by administrators—though given the history of blacklists and firings of tenured professors during the 1950s, I doubt it--but in any event those days, real or imagined, are long gone. Over the past several decades, the concept of academic self-governance has been fatally eroded at most universities. At many institutions, administrators routinely override hiring decisions reached by faculty committees, and all kinds of pressures are brought on individual faculty members to reach decisions that are desired by administrators.

Administrators at many schools have aggrandized the power to veto unpaid and sabbatical leaves, to assign heavier teaching loads, to over-rule tenure decisions, etc. In addition, administrators determine or have the final say on raises, which increasingly are based upon ill-defined and hard to challenge “merit” considerations. All of this makes faculty members on critical committees such as the one which was assigned to investigate Churchill’s scholarship, extremely vulnerable to administration pressure—the more so when powerful political figures like the state’s governor and members of the state legislature, who have made clear their desire to see Churchill sacked, are added to the mix.

The academic committee impaneled to investigate him claimed that Churchill had plagiarized articles, but in truth the works they referred to which Churchill had quoted in some of his work were things he had himself written earlier, either anonymously, or with other writers. He was, in other words, being accused of plagiarizing from himself.

As Tom Mayer, a professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado, wrote in a paper titled: “The Plagiarism Charges Against Ward Churchill,” the faculty committee accusations against Churchill were “largely discredited” by a number of respected independent scholars, and the committee’s own report was larded with “errors of omission and commission.” He writes that the faculty “Report of the Investigative Committee” itself “improperly converts legitimate scholarly controversies into indictments of the positions taken by Professor Churchill.” Mayer adds that the three specific cases of alleged plagiarism condemned by the faculty investigative committee, had appeared in writings that were never intended to be scholarly or to be used for his academic advancement, but rather were rather part of Churchill’s voluminous body of political writings. (Mayer goes on to say that even in those three cases, the accusations of plagiarism are “without compelling force.”) Moreover, all three examples, he notes, were over 14 years old, and the charges about them had been circulated by his critics for over a decade, with no one at the university taking any action “until he became a political pariah.”

The jury, as if often the case, saw through the political subterfuge to the root of the problem, which was that Churchill’s body of writing (much of which has been groundbreaking, such as his 1988 book “Agents of Repression”, co-authored with Jim Vander Wall, and his 1992 book “Fantasies of the Master Race”), which includes 14 books and 150 publications, would never have been subject to investigation, had it not been for the climate of political repression that followed the 9-11 attacks. His political difficulties arose in the wake of his publication in 2003 of a book-length essay on 9-11, titled “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality.” That essay argued that some of those who died in the Twin Towers, rather than simply innocent victims, had been “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.” Provocatively calling such people “Little Eichmanns,” Churchill had claimed that their financial machinations had led to death and suffering around the world, and thus to the attack on the US.

It was inflammatory language coming at a time when the American public was being inflamed by demagogues in Washington and a flood of media propaganda and jingoism, but it was also a correct assessment of the role of Wall Street financial firms, as has been made all the more apparent by the recent financial crisis. (In fact, had Churchill written the same thing today, and included American homeowners and workers in his list of the victims of those financial technocrats, the resulting level of public outrage might have been a good deal less—as witness the death threats reportedly being made these days against the recipients of AIG bonuses.)

In fact, it wasn’t publication of Churchill’s 9-11 tract that got him in trouble. It was the workings of the right—most notably former ‘60s fringe leftist-turned-right-wing agitator David Horowitz—who began dogging Churchill in 2005. Horowitz, whose own scholarship is a shameless Swiss cheese of errors and plagiarism, has been conducting a well-funded (courtesy of such right-wing outfits as the Olin Foundation) one-man campaign of smearing and “outing” academic leftists on American campuses, made Churchill a poster child for his absurd charge that universities have become dens of leftism.

It is now up to Judge Naves to decide whether to order the University of Colorado to reinstate Prof. Churchill.

He should do so, though it remains to be seen whether he will have the same political courage shown by those 12 jurors. If he does, he will order reinstatement.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

San Diego Silences JROTC guns

2009-04-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

The pieces below are almost two months old, but still, it is incredibly inspiring. Over the past couple of years, I've volunteered in San Diego with an organization called The Project on Youth and Non-military Opportunities (ProjectYANO), although for various reasons I haven't been that active the past few months. In any case, here's a bit about the organization from their About Us page:

Project YANO is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit community organization that provides young people with an alternative point of view about military enlistment. Many of our members are armed forces veterans who believe that high school students are getting a distorted picture of the military and war from recruiting ads and marketing. In particular, we are concerned that many low-income students and students of color are being diverted away from higher education and into the military, where they are found in disproportionate numbers.

In our base community of San Diego County, Project YANO sends veterans to youth groups and local schools to speak about the realities of military life and war so that young people will better understand what is behind the armed forces sales pitch. As an alternative, students are given nonmilitary options for local job training and college financial aid. Project YANO also urges youths to become community activists and consider pursuing careers in social change.

Our goal is to help young people see a different side to these issues so they will have a more balanced picture and be able to make educated decisions about their future. We encourage them to think critically, search for more information, and then make up their own minds.

Since its founding in 1984, Project YANO has sought to educate school officials about the need to give students a more balanced view on the military. We have also urged schools to make students and their families more aware of how to protect their privacy by using their right to opt out if student information is going to be released to military recruiters.

Project YANO’s direct outreach focuses on youths in San Diego County, but we also provide resources and advice to other groups across the country. Our Resource List describes tools that can be used to organize similar efforts in other communities.

Over the past year or so, YANO has been working with high school students in the city to oppose the installation of firing ranges by the JROTC on school campuses. Besides the obvious problematics of teaching students to fire weapons on school property (especially when San Diego City Schools have a zero-tolerance policy for weapons), the installation of firing ranges exemplies the increased militarization of not only schools, but of black and brown communities in general, so that money for education and employment is diverted away from constructive, productive learning and vocations, and into military activity. For more detailed analysis of this issue, read articles here, here and here.

In February, however, after months of resistance to and lobbying of the school board by students, parents and other concerned members of the community, the San Diego Unified School Board passed a resolution, by a 3-2 vote, to ban all marksmanship training in the district. Here's the text of the resolution:

Resolution in the Matter of Eliminating Marksmanship Training From San Diego Unified School District Schools

WHEREAS, the San Diego Unified School District has a zero-tolerance policy on weapons in schools and seeks, as one of its primary goals, to teach students to resolve conflicts without resorting to violence; and

WHEREAS, the District cannot risk sending a mixed message to students when some of their lives have been recently taken by gun violence;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that any existing school district property used for shooting ranges shall be immediately closed for that purpose and converted for other educational uses by the beginning of the next regular school year.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that marksmanship training, whether it is conducted oncampus or off-campus, and through textbooks or physical instruction, shall not be taught in connection with the San Diego Unified School District and shall be discontinued immediately.

The article below details this activism around, and consequences of, this vote. Below that is a poem written by Ernie McCray, a retired educator of 37 years, about the students that organized around this issue. Although we're supposedly living in a time of hope, cynicism abounds, even among those of us committed to social justice work and to communities of struggle. Within that context, then, the work of these high schools students is truly inspiring for they accomplished something presumed impossible - they went up against systems deeply entrenched in structures of inequality and violence - i.e. not only the educational system, but also that of the omnipresent, and apparently omnipotent, military.

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San Diego Silences JROTC Guns

February 10, 2009 (see photos below) - San Diego Unified, located in the middle of one of the largest military complexes in the world, took the uncharacteristic step of banning rifle training conducted under the military's high school JROTC program. Eleven schools with rifle ranges were affected in the nation's eighth largest urban district.

Before the board meeting began, speakers representing local high schools and colleges addressed an outside crowd of 200 students, parents, teachers and community supporters. Some high schools sent so many students that two charter buses, courtesy of the AFSC, were used for transportation. Anticipating a long evening before the school board would discuss the rifle training issue, the Association of Raza Educators provided tamales to help sustain the crowd.

It wasn't until four hours into the board meeting, at 9:00 PM, that the agenda item came up for discussion. The vote was preceded by testimony from about 15 pro- and con- speakers in front of a crowd that was largely in favor of terminating the weapons training program. One school board member said that in all of his many years on the board, this was the most impressive student effort he had ever seen. Even two board members who opposed the resolution expressed their admiration for the students' involvement. When the decision was made, the resolution, which immediately banned all marksmanship training in the district, passed by a vote of 3-2. The crowd then spilled out of the auditorium to hold a loud and joyous celebration.

This achievement was made possible by a collaboration of students and various community groups who first came together in 2007 as the Education Not Arms Coalition. One of their main concerns was the way schools were tracking students into military training (via JROTC) while denying them adequate class alternatives, especially ones needed to qualify for college. Students from African American and Latino families were being disproportionately affected.

To address the problem, the coalition adopted three initial goals--convince the school district to:

-stop placing students into military science (JROTC) classes without their informed consent.

-stop telling parents and students that the class will help them qualify for college, when it won't.

-ban weapons training and JROTC gun ranges in San Diego schools.

All three goals have now been achieved, the first two by a superintendent's directive, the third by school board action. Throughout the over one-year long campaign, high school students have played a central role in educating and mobilizing their peers, with support from a variety of community and college groups.

Audio of the entire Feb. 10 hearing and school board decision is posted on the SD Unified site: http://www.sandi.net/indices/board.htm. Video should be added soon.

For a video news report, visit: http://www.10news.com/video/18687674/index.html.

For more information: www.projectyano.org/educationnotarms/

About 150 students from a dozen schools, plus another 50 teachers, parents and other supporters, rally at school district headquarters before school board meeting.

As the board meeting begins, a JROTC color guard and students opposing JROTC rifle ranges stand face-to-face for the pledge of allegiance.

After waiting 4-1/2 hours for the school board to vote, cheering students celebrate their victory outside.

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Freedom Isn’t Free
(A Shout Out to Some Beautiful Freedom Fighters I know)
by Ernie McCray

You beautiful freedom fighters
came into my life
out of nowhere it seemed
like a cosmic prize,
a glorious surprise.
You’re all so young and dedicated
and so utterly refreshing and wise.
You’re a melody playing in my ears,
a vision of hope dancing before my eyes,
warming and soothing my soul,
giving energy to a belief I strive
to hold inside
that a better world
can be realized.

Please take pride
in how you have risen
out of a society
that gives voice to a philosophy
that “Freedom isn’t free,”
attributing such a philosophy
solely
due to the sacrifices
of our country’s
army GI’s,
and marines giving honor to semper fi,
and flyboys and girls patrolling the skies,
while swabbies keep their eyes
on the sea.
Keep your heads held high
knowing that you intuitively
understand that such decrees
ignore others of this country’s citizenry
who have struggled
when they shouldn’t have had to
JUST TO BE FREE.
Talking about:
Frederick D
and Booker T
and Harriet T
and Sojourner T
and H. Rap and Stokely
and the SNCC
and Schwermer, Goodman and Chaney
found in an earthen dam in Mississippi
and Thurgood and Rosa P
and Martin,
a disciple of Gandhi,
dreaming out loud
in Washington D.C.
and Cesar Chavez
and Dolores Huerta
bestowing dignity
on La Raza as a legacy
and Malcolm
and Medgar
and Gloria Steinem and Fannie Mae
and Al and Jesse
and Muhammad Ali
and Chicanos, like the Brown Berets
and Las Adelitas de Aztlan, bringing awareness
to a people’s culture and history.
And YOU, if you ask me,
because you have
followed in the footsteps
of these heroic personalities,
confronting ever so intelligently
and diplomatically
and insistently
and lovingly
some ugly practices
that were going down
in your schools,
scraping and crawling
against being militarized
against your will,
standing steadfastly
against your schools telling your folks lies
about JROTC,
shining a light
for all to see
on the glaring hypocrisy
of weapons training
where a Zero Tolerance Policy
was said to be.

No, freedom isn’t free
but I have observed with the utmost respect
how you freedom fighters
have paid the price,
how you set out to get a job done,
and how you’ve held yourself erect,
from the day you started
until the day you WON,
refusing to be moved
“like a tree that’s planted by the water”
in an old civil rights anthem sung
at another time when the good guys won.

Oh, this old son-of-a-gun
will hold you beautiful freedom fighters
in a special place
in my heart until my day is done.

The Economy Explained

2009-03-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

I've been working slowly on a couple of posts. But it's Spring Break and I'm taking it easy (or I'm being lazy). With all that's in the news, enjoy this comic strip in the meantime.

What's Your "Whiteness" Score?

2009-03-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

OK. So as Ethnic Studies scholars we think a lot about 'whiteness' as a political practice and as a modality of power. And that's all well and fine, but there's a lighter side to all this too. How often do you observe someone's habits/lifestyle and go, "dude, that's super white!" Well, I do; often in fact I find myself surrounded by whiteness that is snicker-worthy. Actually, I tend to think of it more as middle-classness, but that's not particularly distinct from cultural whiteness anyway.

Anyway, so there's this book and website called Stuff White People Like that's apparently all the rage. It takes a look at the fun/funny/stereotypical side of whiteness. I was at a professor's place recently and we started talking about the book, and I decided I wanted to know what my whiteness score was. So I logged onto the website, and here's the stuff I thought was laughter-worthy. Make sure to read the descriptions; that's really what makes it all so funny.

Funny (In most cases you have to read the descriptions to get the humor)
2 Religions their parent's don't belong to
9 Making you feel bad about not going outside
16 Gifted Children

20 Being an Expert on YOUR Culture

21 Writer's Workshop
62 Knowing What's Best for Poor People
69 Mos Def
71 Being the only white person around
72 Study Abroad
75 Threatening to Move to Canada
80 The Idea of Soccer
87 Outdoor Performance Clothes
100 Bumper Stickers
102 Children's Games as Adults
105 Unpaid Internships
115 Frisbee Sports
116 Black Music that Black People Don't Listen to Anymore
117 Political Prisoners
118 Ugly Sweater Parties

Creepy (especially when people of color like them too. And by 'like,' I'm referring more to fetishization, which really is what it generally is anyway... a fetish)
58 Japan
11 Asian Girls (especially creepy)
I'm surprised there's no listing for Anime. hunh?!

My whiteness score (I've been as honest as I can) = 20/123 = 16.3%
(read the descriptions, if you will, but don't impute all that you read onto me. I have my own reasons, too.)

1 Coffee
5 Farmer's Markets
6 Organic Food
15 Yoga
19 Traveling
24 Wine (not in a pretentious way; $3-5 Trader Joe's stuff will do fine for me)
26 Manhattan (can't help it...)
29 80s Night
32 Vegan/Vegetarianism (been a vegetarian all my life)
35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report
36 Breakfast Places (come on now, who doesn't?!)
48 Whole Goods and Grocery Co-ops (yea, yea, I know...)
59 Natural Medicine
64 Recycling
81 Graduate School
82 Hating Corporations
90 Dinner Parties
94 Free Health Care
112 Hummus
115 Frisbee Sports (it's not like I play it all the time, but when I do I enjoy it, so I guess it goes here)

What's your score?

Rev-o-lu-tion Baby...

2009-03-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

I'm tired. It's been a long week... in a good way... but I'm ready for things to get back to their normal rhythm. But since I'm not ready to go to bed yet, I figured it's time for a post.

A few days ago I had the opportunity to attend a performance of "Fringes-Margins-Borders," a show that highlighted "six compelling autobiographical works that examine lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender contemporary life in California." The show was a mixture of modern dance and jazz pieces, spoken word and hiphop, monologues, etc. - the usual stuff you'd expect to see at a performance art show. One piece in particular, though, really caught my attention. It was titled something along the lines of "127 ways of being a man"... unfortunately, I gave my program to someone and never got it back, so I don't have the exact name of the piece or the artist, who went by the name Scott something. My apologies to the artist and the production. [UPDATE: I actually found the intro to the piece on YouTube. The piece is called: "Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps." The artist is Scott Turner Schofield. Too bad I can't find the actual stories he narrates.]

In any case, Scott is a trans man whose act entailed a narration of different stories associated with his multiple identity markers. Technically, he was to have had a 127 stories, of which he'd narrate a couple based on the combination of markers picked by audience members. A friend who'd seen the show before mentioned to me though that the stories he used in this performance were the same he narrated in previous shows, regardless of the markers chosen. Oh well... be that as it may, I was quite taken up by one of his stories.

I won't go into all the details of the story, but the gist of it was that Scott once worked as a babysitter for a family to whom he was out as trans, and whose son was also aware of the fact that although Scott "was once a girl, he was now a boy." Everything seemed cool until, one day, when Scott was babysitting the son and his friend, out of the blue the son announced to his friend "Scott used to be a girl, but now he's a boy!" Long story short, Scott was put on the spot and had to explain the complexities of sex, gender, and sexuality to a pair of four-year olds. As might be expected, some of the exchanges were pretty hilarious, others really poignant... I won't mess with Scott's piece by trying to reproduce the narration/exchange... but the point of the piece, as I understood it was: one, what it means to raise children from a critical, socially conscious perspective, and two, the serious limitations of language in attempting to raise kids thus. My experience of this piece was really bitter-sweet because it reflected so many of my own hopes and anxieties about raising children.

I would like to have kids someday. But when I think of having kids, what excites me most is the act of raising them in a politically conscious way. A few years ago I was babysitting my cousins, all of them 8 years old or younger, when I realized how subversive one could be just by hanging around with kids - by just saying a few things here and there that might nudge their socialization in one direction rather than others. And that made he realize how immense it would be to raise my own kids; to have perhaps a kid whose first word is 'social justice.' Well, that's two words, so maybe I'll settle for 'justice' or 'critical' or something like that. They'll have plenty of time to learn 'mum' or 'mommy' or whatever, if indeed they chose to call me that. The point though is I want to raise my kids to be socially conscious; to be little racial and sexual warriors; to be little decolonial, queer resisters. I want my male or female or otherwise-bodied kids to all wear pink tiaras if they so chose, or little black ties, or whatever. You get the point, I hope. In short, I want to attempt to have, each day, the kind of conversation Scott did with his kids that one evening.

Of course, every time I attempt to describe my ideas, I am confronted by the impossibility of articulating them 'otherwise.' Even in my effort to think 'otherwise' I am first forced to recognize the 'normative' before getting to the site of the (possibly) 'non-normative.' It's frustrating as hell, so that no matter what I think, or say, or do, there is always some problematic inherent in it. But that is the disciplinary power of language in general... to arrest thought, speech and action that attempts to be 'otherwise.' And yet, we must persevere.

And then, there is the mere act of reproduction which in itself, especially for a 'straight' 'woman' like me, entails participation in the heteronormative ideal. I was recently reading Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion, when I was reminded that no matter how subversively I raised any kids I might have, ultimately my actions would reaffirm the role of heterosexuality in the production of what I envisioned as my social ideal. Referring in particular to reproduction and the nation, Ahmed writes: "The object of love [ here, my kids?] is an 'offspring' of the fantasy of the national subject at stake in the ego ideal [me/my visions for a different social], confirming the role of heterosexuality in the reproduction of the national ideal [or in my case, my social ideal]" (137). Dammit! And yet, subversion's all I got.

When I sometimes express my ideas of child-raising to my family they not only think I'm crazy, they think my ideas are sadistic. Kids are cruel, they argue. Why would I want to raise my kids as anything other than 'normal' so that they could ragged on by others? Why would I force my ideals onto my kids and allow them to get hurt? But that's a frustratingly simplistic argument. I am not a sadist. Nor do I wish to live through my kids. But I do understand enough about psychoanalysis, and discourse theory, and theories of violence and power, and whatever else, to know that the social context within which we exist isn't just there, it is produced; and if change, revolution even, is to be enacted, new, or a different kind, of subjects must be formed. Raising kids within a socially critical/conscious context is enacting a form of decolonization, and whoever said that is pain-free?!

Besides, as Elizabeth Povinelli points out in Empire of Love, the issue at hand is, how do we raise kids who are capable of taking care of themselves "in the context of liberal corrosions?" Referring to Aboriginal communities in Australia she writes: "subjects who can live in and experiment with environments of numbing harm must be made, and grown out of the very environments that are poisoning them. The women and men I know constantly reflect on just this face, how to provide their children with theself-discipline necessary to survive the "hard facts" of poverty in the context of what they call "hard Aboriginal law" " (89-90). This logic may be applied to our everyday existence within the context of (neo)liberalism. Simply put, in the grand scheme of things there is no protecting kids from socio-personal pain, ugliness, disappointment, struggle. Might as well, then, raise them with the tools they'll need to confront, overcome, subvert, transform the pains of existence; to grasp the myriad moments of crisis and to deploy them as moments of micro-revolution.

This at least is what I dream of in the limited language available to me...

For, as Sara Ahmed writes in her elaborations on love and politics:
We must love the visions we have, if there is any point to having them. We must be invested in them, whilst open to ways in which they fail to be translated into objects that can secure our ground in the world. We need to be invested in the images of a different kind of world and act upon those investments in how we love our loves, and we live our lives, at the same time as we give ourselves up and over to the possibility that we might get it wrong, or that the world that we are in might change its shape. (141)

And so, I shall continue to love my vision of raising kids... until I know I've got it wrong or the world round me changes. And then, I shall re-imagine it all. But for now, besides what I attempted to describe above, I dream too of raising kids who don't fear hurt or pain, but who are strong enough to be weak. Who are strong enough to be haunted, and smart enough to face their own demons. Who realize that words matter, and that honesty requires strength and integrity. Who know that to love, and be loved, is a privilege and are not afraid of take up its immense responsibility.

I too have much yet to learn...

Bleak Times (?)

2009-03-11T23:33:00.000-07:00

Being in an Ethnic Studies department within an increasingly corporatized academic world requires one to always justify their existence. As recently as couple of weeks ago, a professor in the Anthropology Department at UCSD wrote a letter to the Dean of Social Sciences, protesting my department's stance on the Israeli war on Gaza (an issue I wrote about recently), and also suggesting that the existence of my department should be reconsidered since our work is founded upon recognizing race as a social category. Say what?! I still find such arrogant ignorance shocking... although really, I've encountered it so often I shouldn't be. But of course, such events are an excellent reminder of why we do the work we do.

In tough economic times, departments such as mine come under even great scrutiny. In fact, an article in the New York Times, titled "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth," suggested that "in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency" and that "[t]he essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”" A pretty bleak proposition for an Ethnic Studies scholar!!

The bleakness of our future became pretty palpable this afternoon at a department meeting in which we discussed issues ranging from student employment to faculty hires to job prospects for graduating students. But then, someone e-mailed me the article below, and it made my mind leap with joy. An excellent article... it's all worth reading, but I've highlighted short sections that I think get to the heart of comprehending why we (i.e. critical social theory scholars and the like) must exist.

**************************************************

Making Democracy Matter: Academic Labor in Dark Times

By HENRY A. GIROUX
March 11, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/giroux03112009.html

I do not believe that a student of human reality may be ethically neutral. The sole choice we face is one between loyalty to the humiliated and to beauty, and indifference to both. It is like any other choice a moral being confronts: between taking and refusing to take responsibility for one’s responsibility. -Zygmunt Bauman

In his sobering analysis of recent democratic decline, Sheldon Wolin has rightly argued that in a “genuinely democratic system, as opposed to a pseudo democratic one in which a ‘representative sample’ of the population is asked whether it ‘approves’ or ‘disapproves,’ citizens would be viewed as agents actively involved in the exercise of power and in contributing to the direction of policy.”2 There is a long tradition of critical intellectuals in American higher education extending from Thomas Jefferson to John Dewey, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn, who have all insisted that the university is one of the few spaces where the task of educating students to become critical agents and socially engaged citizens is not only crucial to the meaning of education but also an essential condition of academic labor and democracy itself. As a vast array of public spheres, including some of the nation’s major newspapers, either fall prey to corporate control or simply disappear, higher education becomes one of the few remaining sites where a society might question itself, where it might reflectively consider how lived realities measure against democratic practices and ideals. Universities thus provide the pedagogical conditions for existing and future generations both to defend democratic principles and to incorporate them into their own understanding of what it means to define themselves as engaged citizens and socially responsible adults.

Understanding higher education as a democratic public sphere means fully recognizing the purpose and meaning of education and the role of academic labor, which assumes among its basic goals promoting the well-being of students, a goal that far exceeds the oft-stated mandate of either preparing students for the workforce or engaging in a rigorous search for truth. While such objectives are not without merit, they narrow the focus of human agency, depoliticize education, and ignore the issue of civic responsibility, among other generally unacknowledged shortcomings. Defining education as a search for the truth and preparing students for the workforce says little about the role that academics might play in influencing the fate of future citizens and the state of democracy itself. Surely academics are required to speak a kind of truth, but as Stuart Hall points out, “maybe not truth with a capital T, but ... some kind of truth, the best truth they know or can discover [and] to speak that truth to power.”3 Implicit in Hall’s statement is an awareness that the priorities of big business and other powerful interests are not always, or even routinely, the priorities that shape intellectual commitment or pedagogical practice. To speak truth to power is not a temporary and unfortunate lapse into politics on the part of academics: it is central to opposing all those modes of ignorance, market-based or otherwise instrumental rationalities, and fundamentalist ideologies that make judgments difficult and democracy dysfunctional.

Amy Gutmann broadens the truth-seeking function of universities by insisting that “education is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency, the ability to struggle with ongoing relations of power, and is a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens. For Gutmann, what is unique about academics is the crucial role they play in linking education to democracy and recognizing pedagogy as an ethical and political practice tied to modes of authority in which the “democratic state recognizes the value of political education in predisposing [students] to accept those ways of life that are consistent with sharing the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society.”4 And higher education, if it is to take its democratic ideals seriously, must be recognized as more than an outpost of business culture simply there to do the bidding of corporate power.5 Democratic societies need educated citizens who are steeped in more than workplace skills and the formal competencies of textual analysis. And it is precisely this democratic project that affirms the critical function of education and academic labor, while refusing to narrow its goals and aspirations to instrumental or methodological considerations. This is what makes intellectual labor different from other provincial notions of teaching, largely restricted to teaching the canon or the conflicts, and other narrowly defined pedagogical commitments. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and possibilities that creates the conditions for those pedagogical approaches that ignore what it means to receive a critical education.6

The goals of higher education and the demands of academic labor must also include teaching students to be responsive to deepest conflicts of our times, learning how to identify anti-democratic forces in the wider society, and connecting knowledge, power, and critical modes of agency to the task of imagining a more just world and demonstrating a willingness to struggle for it. Academics have a moral and pedagogical responsibility to unsettle and oppose all orthodoxies, to make problematic the commonsense assumptions that often shape students’s lives and their understanding of the world, but also to energize them to come to terms with their own power as individual and social agents. Higher education, in this instance, as Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire, Stanley Aronowitz, and others have reminded us, cannot be removed from the hard realities of those political, economic, and social forces that both support it and consistently, though in diverse ways, attempt to shape its sense of mission and purpose.7 Politics is not alien to higher education but central to comprehending the institutional, economic, ideological, and social forces that give it meaning and direction. Politics also references the outgrowth of historical conflicts that mark higher education as an important site of struggle. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, politics illuminates the complex ideological and institutional conditions that enable universities to function as democratic public spheres. At the same time, it makes visible the fact that such conditions are the outcome of “fragile social achievements that open up the possibility of more equality and justice, and to sacrifice them is to step backwards, whether this step is masked by a deterministic analysis of the 'market' or a naked assertion of self-interest by the wealthy and powerful.”8 Politics is thus not the bane of either education or academic research but rather a primary register of their complex relation to matters of power, ideology, freedom, justice, and democracy. The real enemies of education are those modes of politicizing education in which matters of critical dialogue, judgment, debate, and engagement are disabled through allegiance to domains of ideological purity, certainty, dogma, and assured knowledge—a species of fundamentalist thinking and practice that is not limited to any one ideological position or disciplinary terrain.

Nurturing critical agency is part of a pedagogical process that must be self-reflective, empowering, and directive, but not propagandistic. When the distinction between a political and politicizing education is collapsed or lost, the role of academics is reduced to that of either corporate clerks, hermetic specialists, or jargon-ridden, clever apologists for established power who justify their unthreatening combativeness by gleefully claiming “to profess nothing.”9 The smug call for academics to profess nothing or to “save the world on their own time” is not an educational virtue but a form of surrender, a corrosive cynicism parading as a form of professionalism, an ethical refusal to educate students to question official dogma, to create the pedagogical conditions for them to become moral agents and critical citizens, and to provide them with the knowledge and skills to engage the tension between existing reality and the promise of democracy. The “save the world on your own time” creed aligns too closely with the neoliberal incantation that “there is no alternative” and in the end means complicity with the established order. In this discourse, education as a fundamental basis for engaged citizenship, like politics itself, becomes a temporary irritant to be quickly removed from the hallowed halls of academia. In this stillborn conception of academic labor, faculty and students are scrubbed clean of any illusions about connecting what they learn to a world “strewn with ruin, waste and human suffering.”10

Yet the commitments academics enact are distinctively political and civic, whether they deny or willingly embrace such roles. University educators cannot ignore politics, nor can they deny responsibility for acknowledging that the crisis of agency is at the center of the current crisis of democracy. At the very least, academics should be more responsible to and for a politics that raises serious questions about how students and educators negotiate the institutional, pedagogical, and social relations shaped by diverse ideologies and dynamics of power, especially as these relations mediate and inform competing visions regarding whose interests the university might serve, what role knowledge plays in furthering both excellence and equity, and how higher education defines and defends its own role in relation to its often stated, though hardly operational, allegiance to egalitarian and democratic impulses.

The view of higher education as a democratic public sphere committed to producing knowledge, skills, and social practices that enable young people to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, their moral imaginations, the public good, and the imperatives of a substantive democracy has been in a state of acute crisis for the last thirty years.11 Harnessed to the needs and demands of corporate and military interests, higher education has increasingly abandoned even the pretense of promoting democratic ideals. The needs of corporations and the warfare state now define the nature of research, the role of faculty, the structure of university governance, and the type of education offered to students.12 As federal and state funding for higher education is cut, universities are under more pressure to turn to corporate and military resources to keep them afloat. Such partnerships betray a more instrumental and mercenary assignment for higher education, a role that undermines the free flow of information, dialogue, and dissent. When faculty assume, in this context, their civic responsibility to educate students to think critically, act with conviction, learn how to make authority and power accountable, and connect what they learn in classrooms to important social issues in the larger society, they are often denounced for politicizing their classrooms and for violating professional codes of conduct, or, worse, labelled as unpatriotic.13 In some cases, the risk of connecting what they teach to the imperative to expand the capacities of students to be both critical and socially engaged may cost academics their jobs, especially when they make visible the workings of power, injustice, human misery, and the alterable nature of the social order—all too evident in the recent firings of Norman Finklestein and Ward Churchill.

Educators need to defend what they do as political, support the university as place to think, and create programs that nurture a culture of questioning. But there is even more at stake here. It needs to be recognized on a broad scale that the very way in which knowledge is selected, pedagogies are defined, social relations are organized, and futures are imagined is always political, though these processes do not have to be politicized in a vulgar or authoritarian way. Again, the conditions that make the university possible as a democratic public sphere are inescapably political and should be defended as such, but such a defense should take seriously the distinctive role that academics play not merely in preparing students for the world in which they work and live but also in enabling them to function as individual and social agents capable of critically understanding their own capacities and responsibilities in working to expand the promise of a democracy that is increasingly under assault.

The utterly privatized, if not reactionary, discourse through which academics with any sense of public commitment are now upbraided and told to save the world on their own time mimics both the logic of the market and the silencing forces of the corporate and warfare state.14 Within this discourse, there is a needless severing of the connection between the private and the public, theory and practice, learning and social change, and the university and the broader social contract, with its implied ethical and political foundations. Such a crude dismissal of academic responsibility is not merely theoretically hermetic and politically naive; it is also part of an ongoing attack on the crucial civic and pedagogically responsible role that both the university and academics have in a society that—until the current global financial collapse—had aligned itself with the production of violence, greed, self-interest, cut-throat competitiveness, and a market-driven world bereft of ethical considerations. In a society that remains troubling resistant to or incapable of questioning itself, one that celebrates the consumer over the citizen and willingly endorses the narrow values and interests of corporate power, the importance of the university as a place of critical learning, dialogue, and social justice advocacy becomes all the more imperative. Moreover, the distinctive role that faculty play in this ongoing pedagogical project of democratization and learning, along with support for the institutional conditions and relations of power that make it possible, must be defended as part of a broader discourse of excellence, equity, and democracy. As Wolin points out, “For its part, democracy is ultimately dependent on the quality and accessibility of public education, especially of public universities. Education per se is not a source of democratic legitimacy: it does not serve as a justification for political authority, yet it is essential to the practice of citizenship.”15

For education to be civic, critical, and democratic rather than privatized, militarized, and commodified, the work that academics do cannot be defended exclusively within the discourse of specialization, technological mastery, or a market-driven rationality concerned about profit margins. On the contrary, academic labor is distinctive by virtue of its commitment to modes of education that take seriously John Dewey’s notion that democracy is a “way of life” that must be constantly nurtured and defended, or as Richard Bernstein puts it:

Democracy, according to Dewey, does not consist exclusively of a set of institutions, formal voting procedures, or even legal guarantee of rights. These are important, but they require a culture of everyday democratic cooperative practices to give them life and meaning. Otherwise institutions and procedures are in danger of becoming hollow and meaningless. Democracy is "a way of life," an ethical ideal that demands active and constant attention. And if we fail to work at creating and re-creating democracy, there is no guarantee that it will survive. Democracy involves a reflective faith in the capacity of all human beings for intelligent judgment, deliberation, and action if the proper social, educational, and economic conditions are furnished.16

Democracy is not cheap and neither are the political, economic, and social conditions that make it possible. If academics believe that the university is a space for and about democracy, they need to profess more, not less, about eliminating the racial, economic, and political conditions that fill their ranks with adjuncts,17 remove faculty from exercising power in university governance, and work towards eliminating the economic conditions that prevent working-class and middle-class youth from getting a decent post-secondary education.

Both the responsibility that academics bear and the political nature of that responsibility are especially clear given the current unprecedented economic meltdown the country is now facing. As the financial crisis reaches historic proportions, free-market fundamentalism is losing both its claim to legitimacy and its pretense to democracy. Even a Newsweek cover declared recently that “We Are All Socialist Now.”18 Despite this apparent growing recognition that market fundamentalism has fostered a destructive alignment among the state, corporate capital, and transnational corporations, there is little understanding that such an alignment has been constructed and solidified through a neoliberal disciplinary apparatus and corporate pedagogy mostly produced in the halls of higher education and reinforced through the educational force of the larger media culture. The economic Darwinism of the last thirty years has done more than throw the financial and credit system into crisis; it has also waged an attack on all those social institutions that support critical modes of agency, reason, and meaningful dissent. And yet, the financial Katrina we are now experiencing is rarely seen as part of an educational crisis in which the institutions of public and higher education have been conscripted into a war on democratic values through the endless reproduction of neoliberal beliefs, social relations, identities, and modes of understanding that legitimate the institutional arrangements of a cut-throat capitalism that has spawned rapacious greed, grotesque levels of inequality, the devaluation of any viable notion of the public good, and far-reaching levels of human suffering. There seems to be an enormous disconnect between the economic conditions that led to the current financial meltdown and the current call to action of a generation of young people and adults who have been educated for the last several decades in the knowledge, values, and identities of a market-driven society. Clearly, this generation of young people and adults will not solve this crisis if they do not connect it to the assault on an educational system that has been reduced to a lowly adjunct of corporate interests and the bidding of the warfare state.

This disconnect becomes clear in a recent article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times in which she uncritically reports that in light of the current economic crisis the humanities are going to have a harder time defending themselves because they are often found inadequate to the task of educating students for future employment in the workforce.19 According to Cohen, the humanities in these tough economic times has to “to justify its existence,” by which she means it has to align itself more closely still with the needs of the economy—a view closer to training than educating.20 Rather then view the humanities, if not higher education in general, as one of the few public spheres left that can educate students to do more than reproduce a now widely condemned set of market-driven values, she wants universities to adopt them even more aggressively, in spite of broad public recognition that this mode of corporate-driven education has both undermined the economy and sabotaged any viable notion of critical agency and democracy. Oddly, Cohen argues that the free-market rationality that has undermined, if not ruined, so many basic institutions in American society need not be jettisoned by higher education but applied more stringently. Couple this argument with the news that many prominent newspapers are now failing and it becomes clear that the responsibility of faculty who inhabit the university can no longer downplay or “abandon the idea that life’s most important questions are an appropriate subject for the classroom.”21 Academics have a distinct and unique responsibility to make learning relevant not merely to the imperatives of a discipline, scholarly method, or research specialization but, more importantly, to the activation of knowledge, passion, values, and hope in the service of modes of agency that are crucial to sustaining a democracy in which higher education plays its rightful civic and critical pedagogical role. Renewing such a commitment, academics will more easily defend their role as public and engaged intellectuals, while also enabling higher education to live up to its promise as a valuable and valued democratic public sphere.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.

Notes.

1. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Malden: Polity Press, 2001), p. 47.

2. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 60.

3. Stuart Hall,“Epilogue: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” in Brian Meeks, Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall (Miami: Ian Rundle Publishers, 2007), pp. 289–290.

4. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 42.

5. Ian Angus, “Academic Freedom in the Corporate University,” ed. Mark Cote, Richard J. F. Day, and Greig de Peuter, Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 64–75.

6. This position is brilliantly articulated in Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

7. See also Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2004).

8. Craig Calhoun and Loïc Wacquant, “Social Science with Conscience: Remembering Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002),” Thesis Eleven 70 (August 2002), p. 10.

9. Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

10. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 50.

11. See, especially, Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

12. I take up the issue of the emerging of the academic-military-industrial complex in Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008).

13. See Henry A. Giroux, “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere,” in Edward J. Carvalho, ed., “Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University,” special issue of Work and Days 51–54 (2008–2009), pp. 45–72. This may be the best collection yet published on intellectual activism and academic freedom.

14. For Stanley Fish’s latest version of this position, see http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberalism-and-higher-education/

15. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 161.

16. Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Malden: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 25–26.

17. On the crucial issue of the erosion of tenure track jobs and the growing casualization of academic labor, see Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008). For a more pessimistic account, see Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

18. See the February 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek and the accompanying story, Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas, “We Are All Socialists Now,” Newsweek (February 7, 2009). Online at: http://www.newsweek.com/id/183663/output/print.

19. Patricia Cohen, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” New York Times (February 25, 2009), pp. C1, C7.

20. Cohen, p. C1.

21. Anthony Kronman, “Why Are We Here? Colleges Ignore Life's Biggest Questions, and We All Pay the Price,” Boston Globe (September 16, 2007).

Online at: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/16/why_are_we_here/.

Lewis Black at Oberlin

2009-03-10T00:07:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a wonderful, rejuvenating weekend trip to Oberlin. I have so much to think about, so much to say. But it's week 10 here at UCSD, which means I have much winding up to do. Besides, I am hooked to Octavia Butler's Fledgling, which I'm hoping to finish tonight.

So here are some fun clips from Oberlin, until I can write some more. Apparently, Lewis Black visited Oberlin after the 2000 election, did a little campus tour, visited with students, and of course, did a show. Too bad I wasn't a student there yet. My favorite line in all of this is: "So I asked everyone from around the country to tell me what school I should go to, and Oberlin College won." Oh yeah! Yes, I heart Oberlin, so get used to it...