MLA 2014: Notes and Comments

I was at MLA from the beginning all the way to the end – somehow I managed to draw a panel in the second session of the entire conference on Thursday, and a second panel at the very end of the conference. So I was in Chicago for a full four days.

It was on the whole a good conference for me -- I got to see a number of old friends, eat interesting food, and connect in person with a few people I've only met online. I had a great 'power' lunch with my copanelists where we worked through our issues with the recent "post-secular" turn, and revived my involvement with an anthology project where I had earlier withdrawn my name. I even went to a party...

Just a quick disclaimer about the notes below... I generally try not to give away too much about what panelists were saying in their papers so as not to "jump the gun" on their ideas if and when they are going to be published. My notes below are intended to give readers a quick thumbnail indicating what people were talking about, and maybe a brief comment from me in connection. 

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1914 in 2014: Body of War. #s28

The research on this panel was very solid and the papers were well-researched and interesting. Stuff I wanted to investigate more: H.G. Wells’ World War I novel “Mr. Britling Sees it Through” (1916); Mary Borden, “The Forbidden Zone (1929) – an experimental nurse’s narrative. Another panelist was working on another nurse’s narrative, Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates (available on Gutenberg). The third panelist, David Lubin, was an art historian from Wake Forest University, working on images of plastic surgery. He mentioned Dr. Harold Gillies, the famous plastic surgeon ("the father of plastic surgery") who performed thousands of plastic surgery operations on wounded soldiers during and after the war. Soon afterwards, plastic surgery for cosmetic improvement took off -- especially in the U.S.

One line that stood out to me from Borden: “There are no men here so why should I be a woman?” The panelist (Sarah Cole) was doing some really interesting work with gender in Borden's narrative.

This was also the first time I’d seen Wilfred Owen’s poem “Disabled.”

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day,
Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. 

About this time Town used to swing so gay
When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,
— In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,
All of them touch him like some queer disease.

Beautiful poem -- not sure how I'd missed it earlier, since I've taught Wilfred Owen numerous times over the years.

Panels at #MLA14 on my radar

I took a few minutes to look at the MLA program for this weekend's conference. The following is as much a bookmark for me to follow as it is a possible guide for other conference-goers.

First, I am presiding over this one:

76. The Manifesto Revisited

http://mla14.org/76
Thursday, 1:45–3:00 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago

Program arranged by the Division on Nonfiction Prose Studies, Excluding Biography and Autobiography. Presiding: Amardeep Singh, Lehigh Univ.

1. "'Mind It Doesn't Bite You': D. H. Lawrence's Obloquy against Psychoanalysis," Tamara Beauchamp, Univ. of California, Irvine

2. "History Repeats as Tragedy: The Algerian Crisis as a 'New' Dreyfus Affair," Roderick Cooke, Haverford Coll.

3. "What We Talk about When We Talk about the Hijab: Alain Badiou's Manifesto on the Headscarf Ban in France," Nagihan Haliloglu, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Univ.

4. "The Premediated Manifesto: On the US Reception of The Coming Insurrection," Daniel Burns, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

I co-organized this with Roderick Cooke of Haverford. I think there are some very interesting papers here; hopefully we will have a good crowd.

Reagan and Apartheid -- a Few Reflections

When Nelson Mandela's death was announced earlier this week, I had just a few minutes at my computer before my kids needed to be fed their dinner.

I tried to think of something that reflected my own experience with the South African freedom struggle, and this is what I posted on Facebook:

The South African freedom struggle, which reached a climactic phase my freshman year in high school, introduced me to the idea that the United States could act on the wrong side of history -- that this country, led by supporters of Apartheid like Ronald Reagan, was not quite the noble bastion of real democracy our school textbooks told us it was. It was a difficult but necessary education. RIP Mandela.

A Facebook friend -- we'll just call him "BK" -- soon wrote in with a "correction":

I'm usually the least likely person to defend Ronald Reagan, but this is just wrong. His policy toward South Africa and the ANC was all about anti-communism. That was a hideous failure in judgment and morality, but it doesn't make him a "supporter of Apartheid."

This started a long thread that I won't recapitulate here. Some unpleasant things were said; some people ended up getting unfriended. Enough said.

(In fact, it seems like this debate is not just happening on my particular Facebook feed; it's happening in the media more broadly as well. This conservative site, for instance, is clearly taking note of all of the "liberal" commentators taking jabs at Reagan in the wake of Mandela's death.)

I did think it might be appropriate to do two things that are difficult to do on Facebook: 1) expand out the personal / biographical component of what I wrote, and 2) have a somewhat more nuanced and annotated discussion of Reagan's South Africa policy.

First, my own story:

I started high school in 1988. It was a new start -- I had just transferred from a public junior high school in Potomac, MD to an elite private school inside DC, the Sidwell Friends School. Before Sidwell, I had spent most of my childhood in a relatively protected suburban world, with little exposure to politics. Because of repeated trips to India (especially in those anxious and difficult years after 1984), I probably knew a little more than some 14 year old suburban peers that the world of Nintendo, black felt Guns n' Roses posters, and Redskins' paraphernalia was not the only world out there. But in truth I tended to bracket off my Indian experiences from what I considered proper teen stuff (some Indian experiences: the anxious nights waiting to hear news from family members during the riots; the vehement fights over Khalistanism at the Maryland Gurdwara; and in India itself, the police checkpoints, the sense of fear, bribing corrupt policemen on the train...). I didn't then have the tools to realize that this India stuff was important, because at junior high in the suburbs at least the only thing you had to know pretty much was that Led Zeppelin is awesome and Milli Vanilli sucks.

"The First Four" -- Women Faculty in the Lehigh English Department

One of my students was involved with the making of a documentary about the first women faculty in the English department. I had a chance to see the film a few weeks ago at a public screening, and it's terrific -- probably of interest to anyone interested in gender issues in academia. Happily, permissions have been ensured to allow the film to be posted online (on Vimeo). An embedded link to the film is below.

A bit of background. At its inception in 1865, Lehigh University was an all-male college mainly focused on engineering. The university was founded by Asa Packer, a railroad tycoon, and over the years the university had connections to the steel and auto industries as well (major buildings on campus are the "Iacocca Building" and "Packard Lab" -- named after James Packard, who founded the eponymous car company). Colleges of Business, Arts and Sciences, and Education were later added; today they are highly ranked and well-funded.

The university moved to include women as students in 1971 (see "40 Years of Women at Lehigh"). As part of that change, the university also began to attempt to diversify its faculty (which was, not unlike other American academic institutions of that era, universally white and male). A large number of the first women faculty hired by Lehigh in those first years (1972-3) were in the English department.

Three of the first four women faculty were still part of the department when I joined the faculty in 2001. Rosemary Mundhenk, Elizabeth Fifer, and Barbara Traister are friends and have been mentor-figures to me. (Another faculty member hired in this period who also played a mentoring role for me, Jan Fergus, joined the department a bit later.) I consider myself lucky to have started my career as a professor in a department with a strong cohort of senior colleagues who were women. That said, as you'll see from the documentary, things were not easy for these women in the early years.

Finally, I'm quite proud of my student, Laura Casale (@lauralehigh on Twitter), who is one of the four students involved in putting this documentary together. Well done!

The English department's intro to the film is here:
https://english.cas2.lehigh.edu/

And the film itself:

THE FIRST FOUR from Lehigh IMRC on Vimeo.

"He couldn't provide any descriptions about his assailants, and it seemed to me that in some way, he didn't want to remember them."

As many readers have probably already seen, a Columbia University professor named Prabhjot Singh was attacked by a large group of men on bicycles a couple of days ago in New York City (at the edge of Central Park -- 110th Street and Lenox Ave.). The incident is being investigated as a hate crime. You can read Simran Jeet Singh's account of the incident at the Huffington Post here. There is also a video interview with Prabhjot Singh at NBC New York here (including brief footage of his broken jaw).

A friend who is a journalist wrote me asking for a brief comment. Here's the statement I sent him. 

I don't know Prabhjot Singh personally, though we have many mutual friends and this incident has been saddening and disturbing for many of us.

Most Sikhs in the U.S. know that they are potentially subject to verbal abuse and hostility at virtually any time, though especially in large crowds. We also know that supposedly cosmopolitan cities like New York and San Francisco are actually not any better or worse than small towns when it comes to encountering mean-spirited people and thug-like behavior. What is admittedly a surprise is when that kind of name-calling turns into something else, as seems to be what happened here.

As always, with incidents of Muslim-bashing / Sikh-bashing, it seems important not to dwell on the fact that Sikhs are not Muslims. For one thing, the attackers may not care that much one way or the other. But more importantly, one doesn't want to sanction hateful speech or violence against any vulnerable group based on "correct" identification.

The attackers here appear to be young men in a large crowd thinking they own the city. A lone Sikh with a turban and beard presents a very visible possible target, especially in a relatively quiet place like the edge of Central Park at night. I can't help but suspect that the person they chose to target could just as easily have been a gay person (rightly or wrongly identified), or a woman.

I was especially struck by the following sentence in a post by Prabhjot's friend Simran Jeet Singh, which was published yesterday in the Huffington Post. Simran Jeet wrote, "He couldn't provide any descriptions about his assailants, and it seemed to me that in some way, he didn't want to remember them." This rings true to me. With many crimes of this sort (does it make sense to call it casual racist violence?), it seems the attackers may not know or care that much about the identities of their victims. But it goes both ways: for those of us who may be targeted in such attacks, the particular motivation that drove the attack is, from our perspective, much less important than our overwhelming desire just to be able to walk down the street safely -- and go about our business.

A Post-9/11 Essay Fragment: "'War on the Rag-Heads': Learning the Meaning of Racism..."

This is an essay I started writing shortly after 9/11, a time when I was in shock -- and as preoccupied with suddenly being branded as "the enemy" as I was with the massive tragedy that had transpired just 90 minutes away in New York City. I think I wrote this with the idea that it might be published somewhere as an Op-Ed or something, though in the end I didn't do anything with it. 

In the archives of my computer, this file is dated 9/18/2001. I returned to some similar themes a year ago, in the blog post I wrote after the shooting at the Sikh Gurdwara in Wisconsin by a right-wing extremist. 

One word that I used that today I'm not sure of is the word "backlash." It wasn't really a "backlash" that many of us experienced that fall; more of a kind of ethno-cultural realignment and displacement from a position of complacency and relative privilege. Until that fall I felt that at heart I was really an American, despite my connections to the Indian subcontinent and my visible religious difference. After that fall, I came to feel that perhaps I didn't really know anymore what "American" might mean. 

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“War on the Rag-Heads”:

Learning the Meaning of Racism in the Midst of a Backlash

9/18/2001

Many in the Sikh community in the U.S. are amazed at the kind of hostility they have been encountering in the wake of last week’s world trade center attacks. Some of the attacks have been extreme – one Sikh man in Arizona, for instance, has been killed by a “patriot,” while many others have been assaulted, verbally and physically, around the country. Mosques Gurdwaras and Mandirs have been vandalized, firebombed, even rammed, in one instance, by a mad motorist. Whether or not we have been harassed in such a manner, nearly everyone who looks different (even vaguely Arab) has felt the glare of a newly virulent hostility. Sikhs in particular are gawked at openly on the streets where we have lived for years, as if we just appeared there yesterday; kids torture us in schools, where we are present inevitably as micro-minorities of one or two individuals in masses of thousands; on the highways we are confronted by a juggernaut of obscene gestures; and we are skewered on American talk-radio by callers and even, at times, by the hosts of the shows. As a particularly egregious example of the latter, Howard Stern has suggested that America “declare war on the rag-heads.”


Sikhs have been doing their best to respond to the hostility in a constructive manner, though some of the things people have been saying have been problematic. Sikh leaders protest that "Sikhs are not Arabs, we are not even Muslims"; the attacks, they claim, are “misdirected,” as if attacks against innocent Arab-Americans would somehow be appropriate. Sikh and Hindu leaders seem outraged by the obvious ignorance of the attackers, and the highly vague definition of the Americans who are now being singled out. Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister of India, even went so far as to call George W. Bush to ask for help in protecting the Sikh American community. For their part, Sikh community leaders around the country are working overtime to try and get media coverage for the incidents of racially-motivated murder, assault, and racial profiling that have been occurring, along with elementary descriptions of the Sikh religion and the meaning of the Sikh turban. One hopes these educational efforts may make some difference in the long run, especially if they develop a wider base and more systematic implementation. Sikh educational efforts also, one feels, ought to be deployed in direct cooperation with Muslim groups that want to accomplish the same kinds of things.

On N+1's "World Lite"

I'm teaching a graduate class called "Global Cities" this fall, and when I was casting about for a text to use for the first 75 minute session it occurred to me that the recent essay by the editors of N+1, "World Lite," should be it.

I just got out of that session and it seemed like it worked: my students seemed engaged and interested in the arguments. Most had not heard of many of the authors the editors mention. The exercise gave me a chance to do quick spiels on Mario Vargas Llosa, Ngugi, Benedict Anderson, and a few others. So before we go any further I should credit the N+1 editors for writing something provocative and stimulating.

At Tehelka, Pooja Rajaram and Michael Griffith posted a spirited and intelligent critique. The editors have responded to that critique with some clarifications of their main intention and argument.

I'm not going to take issue with the central claim the N+1 Editors are making in "World Lite"; in any case, I feel pretty sure that the editors have defined their terms loosely enough that my main criticisms could be easily parried. As I understand it, their primary interest is in criticizing the "Global Lit" marketplace, and positing instead an "internationalist" literature that preserves (or revives) some of the confrontational energy and edginess of an earlier generation of postcolonial authors from the 1970s and 80s ("angry Rushdie," "angry Gordimer," and early Ngugi are favored; later Rushdie, "Wizard of the Crow" Ngugi, the abstractions of Coetzee, Murakami, Pamuk, and many others are not).

Wrap Up from Spring Teaching: "Writing for the Internet"

Writing for the Internet: A Wrap Up from Spring 2013

Earlier I had mentioned I would be debuting a new course called "Writing for the Internet" this spring. Below are my reflections on the course as it actually transpired. I will certainly try and do the course again soon, though I might alter it or refine certain parts of it in some ways, and would welcome feedback from readers as to how to do this.

It's hardly revolutionary to use blogs or blogging in writing courses. I myself had used blogs in courses before, but generally as a secondary feature in courses where conventional papers constituted the bulk of the grade. Students in those courses generally didn’t care too much about the course blog: it didn’t really reach outside readers, and the students saw it as a chore, not so different from logging into Blackboard/CourseSite to write a response paper.

I wanted to make online writing the center of this course, not a secondary feature. I also wanted to try and create an ecosystem where students would actually be interested in reading each other’s works and find it convenient and simple to do so. I also had hopes of connecting students with outside readers – so I was going to ask them to post on the open internet (of course, with the option to use a pseudonym). This mean we would need to move beyond firewalled courseware options.  

To help students feel that their writing was “live,” I decided to use Tumblr, a free social networking oriented blogging platform.  Admittedly, the Tumblr platform has some pretty substantial design limitations which would make it hard for me personally to commit to Tumblr as a primary platform for longer posts. Also, the broader stylistic norms on Tumblr emphasize a sense of immediacy and short comments rather than longer, more substantial writing. Successful Tumblr bloggers tend to be aggregators, image hunters, and meme generators rather than serious writers (which is not to diminish the value of skillful aggregation – but it’s a different skill from composing a convincing argument).

For the purposes of this class, however, we didn’t need to worry too much about those stylistic norms – since the goal was to create a closed Tumblr loop for the 19 students in the class and myself. This was fairly easy to do. (You can see my root blog for the course here: amardeeplehigh, with a blogroll consisting of student blogs on the right column.)

Fall Teaching: Global Cities

[This fall I will be teaching a new graduate course on postcolonial literature that I am calling "Global Cities." The following is the "short" course description.]


English 479: Global Cities (For Fall 2013)


This course will focus on literary and theoretical texts connected to London, New York, and Mumbai. It is also intended as an introduction of sorts to postcolonial literary studies, though one targeted to a particular set of themes: urbanization, immigrant narratives, and the idea of cultural hybridity. Many of the issues in the course will also be relevant to students interested in immigrant literature of the United States and multiculturalism in contemporary England.


We will begin by reviewing some of the classic literature of urbanization from the late Victorian period, and then move to consider the increasing diversity of these three urban spaces. A city like Mumbai, built by the British, is often seen as haunted by its colonial past, still visible in the Victorian architecture and English place names that dominate its landscape; analogously, there are signs and traces of the Empire scattered across both the map of contemporary London and the English literary canon. From the late Victorian Imperial metropolis we move to the first wave of post-colonial migration – where patterns of immigration to London and New York from the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Asia almost seemed to suggest a kind of reverse colonization (one thinks of the famous activists’ slogan: “We are Here because you were There”). The post-colonial rewriting of the Anglo-American metropolis has been be followed by a third wave of immigration, tentatively understood as tied to globalization, characterized by heightened mobility and the decline of fixed borders, constant connectivity enabled by the internet and mobile technology, and the creation of new transnational cultural formations.


Literary selections include Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Zadie Smith’s NW, Amitava Kumar’s Bombay-London-New York, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Nonfiction narratives by writers like Suketu Mehta, Sonia Faleiro, and Katherine Boos will also be discussed, along with selections from postcolonial theory and globalization theory.

Consequences Day: A Modest Proposal for the 19th of March

The U.S. has a number of important civic holidays: Veterans Day (equivalent to the British Armistice Day), Memorial Day, Labor Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and of course, Independence Day. In the past twelve years, a new de facto patriotic holiday has also emerged -- September 11 Day.

Some of these holidays tend to emphasize straightforward patriotism, while holidays like Labor Day and MLK Day tend to provoke internal reflection regarding the injustices in American history.

I think we need a new holiday (or perhaps an anti-holiday) in the spirit of MLK Day and Labor Day: a day to memorialize the tremendous folly, waste, and injustice of the second Iraq War, which began on March 19 2003 -- ten years ago to the day. For readers who have forgotten about this long burning corner of horror, Juan Cole has a helpful set of reminders, with a post called "What We Lost: the 10 Ways the Iraq War Harmed the U.S." I highly recommend it.

I would call my proposed day of remembrance (it is not quite right to call it a holiday) Consequences Day. Here is what I have in mind for Consequences Day:

1. We need a Consequences Day first and foremost because the United States started a war on spurious grounds, and against the advice of friends and allies, and now has to pay for it. We are still dealing with and paying for the Consequences. (And we are still seeing those Consequences in the headlines of the news -- if we choose to notice them. Fifty people were killed in bombings in Baghdad today.)

President George W. Bush and his team have never publicly addressed the consequences of their actions. Bush is now retired and apparently spends his time painting dogs. I do not think there is any mechanism for any of these people to ever come forward and acknowledge their failures and their mistakes; I wish there were. At the very least, I hope their retirement is troubled from time to time by reminders of what they did -- the questioning of the occasional disabled veteran, for example.

2. We need a Consequences Day because the U.S. invaded a country without any sort of plan for following up after the initial invasion component was completed. As Cole points out, and many others have stated, the U.S. did not have very deep knowledge of the country it took charge of in 2003, and indeed had actively excluded some of its most knowledgeable people from participating in the rebuilding of Iraq. Waste and mismanagement ensued, followed by a protracted and bloody insurgency (or Civil War) that left tens of thousands of Iraqis dead and hundreds of thousands permanently displaced.

Americans have been paying financially for the Consequences of this war, and will continue to pay for it for generations -- to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Iraqis, for their part, have had to pay for it by having a broken country (see more about that at another Juan Cole post: "What We Did to Iraq").

3. We need a Consequences Day because many political figures (especially in the U.S. Senate) and social institutions (the New York Times, along with a huge swath of the journalistic establishment outside the Times) who might have questioned the build-up to the war, including the very vague and questionable evidence that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, failed to ask the right questions or say "no" when they had the chance.

For the people who failed to say no, Consequences Day needs to be a time to think about how we handle decision-making and how we approach dissent. A number of Democrats in the Senate, for example, clearly made the calculation that voting against the war would be a political loser. The consequence ought to be that they are forced to see the error of their ways. Similarly, many important writers and journalists (two who stand out in my mind are Fareed Zakaria and Salman Rushdie) signed off on Bush's war; I want them to address the consequences of that support.

Surely, many people who supported the war did so because they were "freaked" by the seeming political paradigm-shift represented by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For them Consequences Day should be a reminder that tragedies can multiply themselves if we don't respond to them appropriately and dispassionately. Instead of remaining focused on solving security issues raised by 9/11, we created an entirely new tragedy which has cost more in American lives (4000 soldiers have been killed, and tens of thousands more have been rendered disabled) than were killed on 9/11.

Every American is crystal-clear on what happened on 9/11, but many, if not most, are pretty fuzzy about the fallout from the Iraq War. We need a Consequences Day to rectify that.

One writer who clearly has accepted the Consequences of supporting the Iraq War is Andrew Sullivan, for whom the war was such an epochal catastrophe that it has effectively reversed his political orientation. I am not clear why this hasn't also happened for others. Admittedly, some (one thinks of Tom Friedman) are just too callow and complacent to really even be aware of how their support for the Iraq War has damaged their credibility. (Clearly, between Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole, bloggers come off much better than institutionally supported journalists when it comes to accountability and the ability to see the truth in front of our noses.)

4. We need a Consequences Day to reflect on the many abuses of human rights conducted by American soldiers and intelligence agencies during this war, and the War on Terror more broadly. American soldiers treated prisoners unspeakably at Abu Ghraib, and the CIA widely used torture at facilities like Guantanamo (but not just Guantanamo). The rest of the world knows that now, so that too has consequences: any American efforts to compel other countries to check the use of torture against detainees will in effect be stillborn until there is some sort of accountability for this.

Consequences Day in, short, is intended as a day of reflection and self-criticism -- borrowing something from the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur (the day of "Atonement"). It would be a day for Americans to stop and take stock of and collectively grapple with the results of this large national failure. While some of it can be pinned on a few terrible public officials who engineered the catastrophe (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld), or to a larger number who assented and were complicit (Rice and Powell, but also John Kerry and Hillary Clinton), in truth the failures of the Iraq War also point to broader structural and social failures that apply in some ways to all of us. How can we do better as a society -- to try and ensure that something like this doesn't happen again?

Not the cheeriest of commemorations, to be sure. But unlike some other civic holidays, a day to focus on the Consequences of our mistakes might actually help us avoid repeating them.

Text for Lehigh Valley THATcamp

[Lehigh is hosting its first digital humanities conference -- a THATcamp -- Friday and Saturday. I am facilitating the session on "Academic Blogging" that will occur on Friday. Below are my notes for the session. These introductory notes are intended for an audience coming from very different levels of familiarity with blogging, social networking sites, or the digital humanities.]

Academic Blogging Workshop: Notes

For THATcamp Lehigh Valley, March 2013
Facilitated by Amardeep Singh (amsp@lehigh.edu)

Workshop Description

This is a non-technical session designed to introduce participants to the world of academic blogging. Time will be evenly divided between practical “how-to” questions and more general questions related to the pros and cons of academic blogging, and the role of blogging in the digital humanities. No particular experience in web programming or design is necessary, as blogging software has evolved to become ever more easy to use.

The first half of the session will address practical questions, such as: 1) What blogging platform might be right for you?; 2) How do you get your own domain name, and how should you arrange for your blog to be hosted? Does it cost money? 3) How to promote your writing using social media? Some time during this session will be spent demonstrating how to start a practice blog, so participants are encouraged to bring laptops or tablets to the session for this purpose.

The second half of the session will pertain to broader issues regarding the value of academic blogging, including 1) How can your further your “serious” research with a blog? 2) Does blogging ‘count’ as Digital Humanities work? 3) What are some different models for academic blogs and 4) What are the implications of academic blogging for hiring, tenure, and promotion in academia?

Melodrama in Milwaukee: a Review of "American Dervish"

[Cross-posted at The Aerogram]

When the topic of South Asian diaspora fiction came up on blogs like Sepia Mutiny (or now, happily, The Aerogram) the conversation would inevitably come around to Jhumpa Lahiri--though not always entirely happily. Many readers have complained over the years that Lahiri’s characters are too narrowly of a certain class and milieu – highly educated, upper-middle class Bengalis. Where, many readers wonder, is the second-gen novel that sounds more like ‘regular’ desi life?

Reading The Namesake years ago, I should say that I did not particularly share that frustration, since actually Gogol Ganguli’s experience at Yale resembled my own experience at Cornell in some uncanny ways. The one difference was really the Ganguli parents – Lahiri’s immigrant parents have a sort of stateliness and dignity that the Punjabi aunties and uncles I knew growing up in DC did not exactly have. In contrast to the characteristic quiet in Lahiri’s stories, my experience was most definitely loud: full of melodrama, over-the-top arguments and fantastic fights.

That sense of Punjabi shor-sharabba is something I immediately noticed and found gripping n Ayad Akhtar’s excellent debut novel, American Dervish. Fathers say crazy things after a night’s drinking, wives curse about their husbands’ affairs (“Another of his white prostitutes decided she was sick of his promises!”), and children playing video games in the living room hear it all.

Much of what I have written so far pertains to the Punjabi elements of this story. I should also address what is really the core theme of the novel – the boy protagonist’s troubled relationship to religion. Hayat Shah is about eleven years old when his mother’s best friend from Lahore, Mina Ali, comes to stay with him and his parents in the Milwaukee suburbs.

Hayat’s own father, a doctor, has turned against Islam in large part because he feels that so many of the observant Muslims in the Pakistani community in Milwaukee are hypocrites or fools. But the boy latches on to his new auntie – and she begins to introduce him to her unconventional brand of Islam, one suffused with elements of Sufism and Mysticism. Hayat’s auntie Mina Ali was divorced by a callous husband in Karachi, and decided to leave Pakistan to avoid having to lose her son to his custody – as, under Pakistani custody laws, she would have been obliged to do. Mina Ali is a curious and paradoxical character – a feminist and freethinker, she is also a devout and committed Muslim who resists the idea of ever marrying a non-Muslim despite her earlier bad experience in Pakistan.

Hayat begins to develop an intense pre-adolescent crush on his auntie, which leads him to do some rather unpleasant things to keep her American suitor, a friend and colleague of Hayat’s father, away from her. This forms the core of the novel’s plot, about which I won’t say too much here for fear of giving too much away. What I can say is that his feelings for his Auntie lead Hayat into a pretty intense period of religious study; his immersion in Islam starts as an attempt to please and get close to Mina, but over time it develops a life of its own.

One aspect of American Dervish I particularly appreciated was Akhtar’s willingness to “go there” with some serious community dirty laundry. In this case, the particular dirty laundry is the presence of a continuing strain of theological anti-Semitism amongst some Muslims. This is carefully and thoughtfully explored in the novel – it’s one of Akhtar’s central themes. I was also impressed by Akhtar’s willingness to tell hard truths about how religion can be used as a tool for hurting and suppressing free-spirited women in particular. American Dervish is often powerfully – though also subtly – feminist.

[To be clear, every South Asian religious community has its share of dirty laundry. Like Ayad Akhtar (and like his character Hayat in the novel), I grew up in the 1980s and 90s. For Sikhs recovering from the shock of 1984 that was a difficult time, and I overheard many bitter and angry conversations amongst men of my father’s age expressing anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu statements. So when Hayat hears his local Imam making some pretty nasty anti-Semitic comments in the Khutbah at the Masjid, it definitely resonated.]

In the end the young Hayat turns away from the brand of Islam practiced at the local Masjid, but Akhtar eschews the kind of harsh medicine advocated by activists like Irshad Manji. His rebuttal of intolerance within certain strands of Islamic practice is much more nuanced, grounded in the alternative Islamic discourses of the Sufis. Hayat’s solution to the quandaries over religion he faces do not involve rejecting the faith outright, but rather a subtler reorientation to faith that recognizes how deeply our love for the religious beliefs and values of the people we love might impact our own relationship to religion.

I should say that I “read” this novel as an audiobook, on my daily long commute to and from work. Part of my pleasure in listening came from its being read so incredibly skillfully – with none of the mispronounced Punjabi or Urdu words one sometimes encounters in audiobook versions of South Asian themed stories. It wasn’t until I reached the acknowledgments track at the very end of the last CD that I realized the audiobook was done by the author himself; Ayad Akhtar’s training as an actor and background as a playwright clearly informs his recorded performance of his novel – with emphasis on performance. (As a side note, Akhtar’s play Disgraced was recently performed at Lincoln Center and well-reviewed by the Times.) Many times I felt so drawn into his verbal portrayal of certain scenes that I decided to wait in my driveway or in the parking lot at the university just to hear how a particular crisis moment might end up playing out.

In short, this is a very solid and thought-provoking debut novel and a definite contribution to the rather short list of really good novels about South Asian diaspora life. The audiobook version is so good that it might even be recommended above the text version of the novel.  

Notes on MLA 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has already put up some stories about MLA 2013, including this article covering the growing attention payed to "Alt Ac" (Alternative academia) career tracks, and this one focusing on the general theme for the conference, "Avenues of Access," which was explored by the MLA's President, Michael Berube in his address, as well as in numerous presidential forums interspersed throughout the conference that focused on facets of "Access" broadly construed. (The panels on that theme were on everything from "Open Access" journals, to questions of access and diversity in the Digital Humanities, to disability studies.)

I would recommend the above Chronicle links (not paywalled, I don't think) for anyone looking for a general sense of the MLA this year. (Update: or check out this link at Inside Higher Ed, on the MLA's Big [Digital] Tent.)

Below are my own particular notes on the panels that I ended up attending, starting with the one I organized. My goal in writing these notes is not to "opinionate" about the papers or evaluate them, but rather to simply give some thumbnail sketches, and maybe offer up a link or two for people interested in these topics who weren't able to attend. The notes and links are also, needless to say, for myself -- there's lots of "further reading" for me to do in the links and references below.

In general, I attended three "Digital Humanities" panels, two panels related to South Asian literature, one panel on modern Anglo-Irish literature, a panel on "Public Poetry," and a panel on Modern British Literature and the State. I also branched out a bit from my core interests and saw a panel on 19th century American literature ("Secularism's Technologies"), which featured both Michael Warner and Amy Hollywood -- two scholars I admire -- talking about secularism.

Click on "Read More" to read my notes on the panels I attended.

Debating "La Bayadere" a bit on Tumblr: Exoticism, Orientalism, etc.

I came upon this string of comments related to the above animated Gifs on Tumblr:

1/5. Why you should see “La Bayadere”

The drama: Love triangle story that ends in death

yroymustang:

warcrimenancydrew:

searchingforknowledge:

crackerhell:

inheritedloss:

i was extremely confused and for a minute i’m like

why would all these indian people have white makeup on

then i realized it was just white people

and now i has a sad

op means why you should NOT see this pos right?!!

where’s the section called “the racism”?

My first reaction was “Oh look, only white passing Indi… WAIT, THOSE ARE WHITE PEOPLE REPRESENTING MY CULTURE!”. White people representing my culture, I am not surprised, I’m merely mildly infuriated. 

Here were my own thoughts on seeing the above:

First, I respect the reaction, and believe me this bothers me a fair bit as well. 

But we can do more than simply label it "racism." Are we unhappy because these are white dancers performing Indian characters, or because of the whole context of this ballet -- including its original choreographer (the Russian Marius Patipa), as well as the modern choreographers and designers who have produced the Paris Opera Ballet's 2012 version (from which these Gifs are derived)?

This is a ballet called La Bayadere, first performed in 1877. It's part of a long tradition in European high art of using "exotic" Indian themes and settings with all white casts. (Another classic example is the opera Lakme.) It was produced as a reaction to a visit from real temple dancers to Russia in the 1870s. 

Such stories are usually based on actual Indian sources. While there are many elements of La Bayadere that are clearly historically inaccurate (a Rajah's daughter would never be involved in dancing publicly, as the character does in this ballet), it's not entirely out of the question that a story like this could be recuperated and rethought to make it more relevant and 'true' to real Indian culture. 

A future version, for example, might rework some of the original choreography using elements from classical Indian dance formats. And yes, use dancers of Indian origin. (Presumably one reason why they might not be casting any Indian dancers is that there may not be very many who are trained at this level in western ballet. If they change some of the choreography to include Indian classical dance, the complexion of the cast could look very different.)

In short, I'm not thrilled about what I'm seeing in the images above, but maybe this Gif series might be an opportunity to get educated, not just mad. 

Das Racist Splits up

So: Das Racist has split up.

I have mixed feelings about it. As an Indian American kid raised on hip hop in the 1980s and 90s, I was for a while quite taken by the promise of a rap group with two Indian-American members suddenly becoming famous (cover of Spin! K Mart commercials!), even if they were a generation younger than me. But I was also often frustrated with their choices and actual performances (i.e., the terrible performance on Conan), and in some ways I'm not really that surprised they've broken up.  Below I have some thoughts about what I really liked about Das Racist and also some of what I found frustrating.

* * *

I've been aware of Das Racist since Abhi blogged about them on Sepia Mutiny in 2009, though truth be told I didn't actually bother to click on the link and listen until Phillygrrl did her two-part interview (Part 1; Part 2) with Himanshu Suri that September.

I also saw the band perform exactly once, at the Roots Picnic in June 2010 (an event that was photographed and described a little [not by me] here). I meant to write something about my thoughts after that event but didn't. Briefly now: I thought the rise of a rap group with a strong Indian-American presence was kind of amazing, and I wanted to love them -- but the actual live performance was a little disappointing. By that point I had been enthusiastically listening to band's mixtape, "Shut Up, Dude," for a few weeks, and even knew some of the verses to songs like "Ek Shaneesh" by heart.

But at the DR show I went to the sound levels were set so high that it was impossible to hear any actual lyrics. And Heems, Kool A.D., and Dapwell just seemed to be running around the stage like maniacs--not working at all to win over the crowd or draw in potential new fans. DR was followed that afternoon by a Black Thought side project (Money Making Jam Boys), and you could instantly see the difference between Das Racist's self-referential, semi-comic "rap in quotation marks" and the serious posture and delivery style of Black Thought and his peers. Black Thought seemed to care about what he was saying and wanted the audience to hear it and understand it; to my eye, that afternoon, Das Racist did not.

Of course, Das Racist has been, from the beginning, as much interested in commenting on rap music and hip hop culture as they have been in actively participating in it. Even the band's name refers to a famous  MTV meme from 2005 (the band was clearly ahead of the curve in naming themselves after a meme that involved a Gif!). Also, their debut track, "Pizza Hut/Taco Bell," was intended as a kind of clowning version of a rap song, and several of the band's songs on "Shut Up, Dude" seemed to "do" rap more referentially than literally. (The most compelling of these efforts is of course, "Fake Patois," which is beautifully explained and decoded via crowdsourced hypertext links at Rapgenius.)

Still, you can only get so far in rap -- a medium that prizes authenticity and the singularity of the voice (even if those values are present more in the breach than in the observance) -- while performing as a kind of postmodernist simulacrum of a rap group. Either you have to start being real and aim to have an actual career in the music industry, or the joke has to end.

I don't want to suggest that Das Racist didn't write some really amazing lyrics. On their recordings they seem to take their task quite seriously, writing witty and even, sometimes, brilliant verses.

Good vibes PMA
Yeah, believe that
Listening to Three Stacks, reading Gaya spivak
Listening to KMD and feeling weird about Naipaul
Fly or Style Warz, war-style Warsaw
Listening to jams with they pops about dem batty boys
Listening to  Cam while I'm reading Arundhati Roy
Yeah, yeah my pops drove a cab, homes,
Now I drop guap just to bop in the cab home
[Again, see Rapgenius for help decoding some of the obscure references here]

Seeing the references to Gayatri Spivak, V.S. Naipaul, and Arundhati Roy alongside Andre 3000, Cam'ron, and the notorious homophobia of dancehall reggae all in seven short, witty lines is pretty exhilarating. (Not to mention the element of personal biography: Himanshu's father did briefly drive a taxi when he first came to the U.S.)

In a way I am the perfect listener for this sort of song -- as a postcolonial theory scholar and old school hip hop fan, I'm exactly the kind of person who, in college and then graduate school, might have been culturally multitasking on precisely these terms. At some point, I'm pretty sure I've listened to Illmatic or Enter the Wu-Tang while also trying to figure out Homi Bhabha's frequently baffling Location of Culture or Spivak's even more baffling Critique of Postcolonial Reason (interestingly, both hip hop and postcolonial theory can involve readers & listeners hustling to get to the bottom of deeply obscure references).

Despite the exhilarating moments, in the end I often felt a little let down by Das Racist tracks, mainly because the political self-consciousness and desire for critique seemed to lose out to a broader enthusiasm for easier reference points: the banalities of middle-class American consumer culture, and of course the endless references to weed and booze. The booze in particular often troubles me (I'm agnostic on the weed), especially since so many accounts of Das Racist performances in recent years have described the trio as drunk on stage (Google "Das Racist drunk" to see what I mean). From Das Racist I wanted to hear more songs like "Ek Shaneesh" and "Fake Patois" and fewer that contained verses like this one:

Finna spark an L and have myself a Big Mac Attack
Known to rock the flyest shit and and eat the best pizza
Charge that shit to Mastercard, already owe Visa
Catch me drinking lean in Italy like I was Pisa
We could eat the flyest cage-aged cheese for sheez, ma
[Rapgenius]

Pizza, big macs, mastercard, visa, the leaning tower of Pisa... Oy, vey. Can we go back to talking about Arundhati Roy, Gary Soto, and Junot Diaz again? I was feeling that more.

To his credit, Himanshu has taken an approach on his solo mixtapes that seems a little more serious. There were the amazing Punjabi tracks on Nehru Jackets, for one thing (see especially "Chakklo," track 15).  But even more than that I was impressed by the searing condemnation of police brutality and corruption in "NYC Cops" (see Rap Genius again).

Himanshu's second mixtape, Wild Water Kingdom, wasn't quite as strong as Nehru Jackets overall, though I did think the track "Soup Boys," which samples the viral Indian pop hit, "Why this Kolaveri Di?" and nicely mixes the postmodernist randomness of Das Racist with elements of protest and critique (drone warfare, Islamaphobia, Hinduphobia... lyrics at Rapgenius).