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.
Postcolonial/Global literature and film, Modernism, African American literature, and the Digital Humanities.
Wrap Up from Spring Teaching: "Writing for the Internet"
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.
Fall Teaching: Global Cities
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
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
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"
On Teaching Blogging in a College Classroom (a Response to Gawker)
So then, it's a new academic program straight outta Duke University: "Write(H)ers," which will, according to the Duke Chronicle, "create a community of feminist-oriented writers," by, you know, teaching women how to blog. Specifically—direct quote—"The 23 members of the program will participate in personal blogging." This new program is officially sponsored by the Women's Center at Duke University, a school with a tuition of $43,623 per year.
As strong supporters of feminist-oriented writers and bloggers, let us be very clear: this is a total fucking scam. (Source)
Whenever you want to make something unconventional at an elite university sound ridiculous, all you have to do is bring up the tuition. Sex week at Yale? They pay $45,000 a year for that? Just about anything college students might do at any such expensive institution could be made to sound ridiculous with that sticker price. Invoking tuition is, in short, an easy rhetorical move (a bit cheap).
Once you get past the tuition shock, the reason Nolan gives for claiming that the new "Write(H)ers" program is a scam? You can also learn how to write online for free -- just by doing it:
The finest bloggers, meaning the finest writers who happen to write primarily online, got good, like every other writer, by reading, and writing. These things—particularly the writing part—can be accomplished for free, without ever paying a penny to Duke or any other university, and without filling out an application form to an academic program. I hear Tumblr.com works well. Contributing "three blog posts over the course of the semester" is not going to help you. Sorry.
It so happens that this spring I am teaching a course called "Writing for the Internet." It is a writing course, and blogging is a major component of what I have been asking my students to do. The platform are using is Tumblr. It actually does work well. You can see what my students are blogging by starting here. We've used Tumblr's Dashboard / social media design to create a "blog circle" -- where everyone in the course follows everyone else.
I do not know enough about the Duke program to defend it directly, though the Duke Chronicle article cited by Gawker does help a little. For one thing, any university education in the humanities is as at least partially about socializing in future professional networks. And an important part of "Write(H)ers" seems to be oriented to just that. The program has several influential feminist bloggers visiting the campus, and students in the program will be interacting with them. The Duke Chronicle has a helpful quote from a participant named Sara Van Name along those lines:
“This program was a dream come true for me because I read a lot of feminist blogs and several of the women who write these blogs now have the opportunity to come to Duke and explain to this new community how to follow in their footsteps,” Van Name said.Gawker asks whether it's worth their tuition dollars for students to get access to people like Jill Filipovic (of Feministe) or Rebecca Traister (of Salon) by enrolling in this program; I tend to think the answer would have to be yes for those students, especially if down the line they might want to think about writing for Salon, Feministe, Jezebel, etc.
The other question, which of course this snarky post on Gawker won't bother with, really boils down to whether there's any value in teaching writing in a college classroom to begin with. Over the years many successful authors, especially creative writers, have at times made arguments to the effect of: "there's no point teaching writing in a college classroom, you just have to get out there and do it." (Here's a recent one by Anis Shivani.) But for every commercially-successful novelist that has said something along those lines, there are 20 published and well-reviewed literary novelists who make far better salaries teaching in various university MFA programs than they ever would by selling books alone. I would tend to expect that they believe that what they do when they teach writing has value--that writing can, in fact, be taught. (Though perhaps it's right to acknowledge that not everything about good writing can be taught.)
Could you learn to write well entirely on your own? Yes, surely, if you were very motivated. But teaching can also be part of it: there is value added in working with students to help them learn the mechanics of effective sentences, as well as effective and interesting arguments. They could probably learn some of these skills by going out there and trying to blog "for real," but is Hamilton Nolan really going to argue that it hurts them to have help? Didn't he have his own modes of help as he learned his own chops at Gawker -- for instance from editors at Gawker itself? Professors in writing workshops often approach their task as exactly that: a first editor. In any case, that's the role I have tried to assume for myself this spring, in "Writing for the Internet."
[Update: a friend pointed out to me an additional point, which I had neglected to mention, that the Women's Center at Duke is not an academic program, and that this is not a part of any course curriculum -- it's extra-curricular. ]
The Killing of Sunando Sen Was Not a "Hate Crime"
One thing the subway pushing is not is a hate crime. It is true that Ms. Menendez said some hateful things about Muslims after being picked up by police, but I would argue that because she is so evidently disturbed, her statement is immaterial.
People who defend the use of the hate crime label for this tragic death argue 1) that it matters from the point of view of potential victims of other hate crimes: we have to watch out in case someone else does the same thing. They also argue 2) that her particular fixation on Muslims (and Hindus) comes out of a climate of racial and religious intimidation. She may be mentally ill, but anti-Muslim sentiments are so readily available that there was, in effect, a "ready made" group for her to hate.
Let us deal with point (1) first. To me, what's clear from this killing is that the issue should be the way the U.S. handles severely mental ill people in general. There is no evidence that Ms. Menendez had a history of racial or religious animus (and as anyone who has ever followed a case related to hate crimes surely knows, this matters). Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that she was a violent and severely disturbed person, and she might well have targeted anybody at all; her targeting of Mr. Sen might well have been arbitrary. It's also probably worth mentioning at this point that her comments were actually pretty incoherent: was she targeting Mr. Sen because she thought he was a Muslim? Why then did she later say she hated both Hindus and Muslims? This is a very unusual pairing to pick as targets. (While one can easily imagine hatred of either religious group individually, it's unusual to have both without the additional presence of generalized xenophobia. And yet in her statement to police, Menendez didn't mention anything about immigrants, dark-skinned immigrants, etc.)
Along those lines, here are a few paragraphs from the New York Times article dealing with Ms. Menendez's mental history:
There were ample warnings over the years concerning Ms. Menendez.
In 2003, according to the police, she attacked another stranger, Daniel Conlisk, a retired firefighter, as he took out his garbage in Queens.
“I was covered with blood,” Mr. Conlisk recalled on Sunday. “She was screaming the whole time.”
Just two months earlier, Ms. Menendez was accused of hitting and scratching another man in Queens. She was also arrested on cocaine possession charges the same year.
Since then, according to friends and people familiar with her record, she has been cared for at mental health facilities in Manhattan and Queens as her problems worsened.
Between 2005 and February this year, the police responded five times to calls from relatives reporting difficulties in dealing with Ms. Menendez, reportedly stemming from her failure to take certain medication, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly about her medical history. In one of these instances, in 2010, she threw a radio at one of the responding officers, the official said.
“She has been in and out of institutions,” another law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Within the past year, she was discharged from Bellevue, according to a person with knowledge of her medical history. (link)Note the random nature of her targets, particularly the guy (who I'm presuming is Caucasian) who was violently attacked while just taking out his trash.
People more experienced with this subject than I am have also pointed in this direction following other attacks by mentally ill people where a "hate" dimension was involved. In June, 2011, Eugene O'Donnell of the John Jay College of Law, published the following comments in the New York Times:
It is impossible to ignore the mental health dimension in the Holocaust Museum attack and an earlier assault at the Federal Reserve headquarters by James von Brunn. There may also be serious mental health issues with Scott Roeder, the killer of Dr. Tiller.
There is a gaping hole in our mental health infrastructure which will not be easy to fill, but needs urgent examination and action. Far too many potentially dangerous people are left to fend for themselves. Even when there are concerned family members or friends in their lives, these guardians are often worn out from trying to help, or do not know where to get dependable care.
We continue to leap at the chance to declare actions criminal despite the fact that attacks like this museum shooting are rooted in an extremely irrational and bizarre world view, and are thus outside the scope of traditional criminal notions of “punishment” and “correction.” And of course, even where the criminal justice system is utilized, extended post-release mental health supervision needs to explored, in some cases for the whole life of the ex-convict. (link)In short, what Sunando Sen's death reminds us is that we need to be focused on the American mental health system, particularly the metrics and regulations governing how potentially violent individuals can be involuntarily committed to mental health institutions. (This was also apparently an issue in the truly horrible shootings in Newtown Connecticut a few weeks ago.) This is not a matter of simple criminality because people this disturbed are not committing "crimes" based on rational motives -- which are the basis of any theory of criminal law. As Professor O'Donnell points out here, the concepts of "punishment" and "correction" are also inapplicable in such cases.
Attempts to label the killing of Sunando Sen a hate crime imbue a sense of rationality and motive to Ms. Menendez that does not exist, if her prior history is any indication. The labeling of Sunando Sen's death as a hate crime also weakens and cheapens the real problem of violence motivated by hatred of religious and racial minorities. It gives the appearance that community advocates may be overplaying their hand, which, just a few months after the ghastly shooting at the Gurdwara in Oak Creek Wisconsin, they surely do not need to do.
There is a legitimate question about whether the general cultural climate in the United States at present makes it easy for mentally deranged individuals to pick up on it and deploy anti-Islamic or anti-immigrant sentiments and use them as channels for violent and anti-social behavior (see point 2 above). However, if this is a cultural problem, it likely needs a cultural, rather than a legal, solution.
Americans might be justified in feeling a bit afraid riding the subway after events such as the killing of Sunando Sen. But South Asians in particular are mistaken if they feel this attack is directed at them. It really affects all Americans, and will continue to do so as long as the American mental health system remains broken.
Notes on MLA 2013
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.
Here were my own thoughts on seeing the above: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.
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
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 AttackPizza, 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.
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]
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).
Bal Thackeray: Not to be Mourned, Not to be Honoured
Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray has died. Some Indians will only remember him as a "great man" who founded and led a regional political party.
This is unfortunate, because he had the blood of more than a 1000 souls -- mostly Muslims -- on his hands. He should not be mourned, should not be honoured.
In particular, he played a key role in the riots of 1992-3 in Bombay. Here is a little bit describing his actions using evidence gathered by the government's Srikrishna Commission later:
The Srikrishna Report is clear just where the blame lies for the 1992-1993 riots. On the basis of the welter of evidence before him, the Judge concluded that "the communal passions of the Hindus were aroused to fever pitch by the inciting writings in (th e) print media, particularly Saamna and Navakal." "From 8th January 1993 at least," he concluded, "there is no doubt that the Shiv Sena and Shiv Sainiks took the lead in organising attacks on Muslims and their properties from the level of Shakha Pramukh to the Shiv Sena Pramukh Bal Thackeray who, like a veteran General, commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organised attacks against Muslims." He blamed "effete political leadership, vacillation for political reasons and conflicti ng orders issued to the Commissioner of Police" for the State's failure to contain the attacks on Mumbai's Muslims.
Justice Srikrishna's observations were based on the mass of evidence before him. Dozens of witnesses before the Commission identified Shiv Sainiks as those who attacked them. Reshma Umar Makki, who converted to Islam when she married Umar Makki, had to h ide her husband when a mob of Shiv Sena workers attacked her home on January 9, 1993. Two days later, another vigilante group broke into her home, and "abused her as to why she got married to a 'landya', and whether all Hindus were dead." "She identified the mob," the Report records, "as comprising inmates of Andhra Chawl, out of whom she clearly recognised Umesh, a Shiv Sainik living near Sundar Hotel. He and three to four other boys entered her house, placed a chopper on her head, and threatened her that, if she spoke up, she would be stripped, raped and killed."SOURCE: http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1716/17160110.htm
"The Gotham"
Click here to try it.
Beyond "We Take Care of Our Own": Hopes for Obama's Second Term
Though the Obama campaign's official Spotify playlist contained a number of other inspiring songs from diverse genres, including country, pop, hip hop, and R&B, it will be "We Take Care of Our Own" that will go down as the campaign song of 2012. (Sorry Chubb Rock!)
"We Take Care of Our Own," despite its powerful chorus, is somewhat of an unusual choice to be an uplifting anthem. Like that other great Springsteen anthem with a killer chorus ("Born in the U.S.A."), its patriotic language and tone is countered by a deep sense of tragedy and failure recounted in the verses of the song itself. Let's start with the second verse of the song:
From Chicago to New Orleans
From the muscle to the bone
From the shotgun shack to the Super Dome
There aint no help, the cavalry stayed home
There aint no one hearing the bugle blowin'
We take are of our own
Where ever this flag is flown
So when the chorus kicks in: "We take care of our own," there's a sense of irony. In fact, in 2005, under George Bush's FEMA, we actually didn't take care of our own at all. The chorus is therefore partly a rebuke for that failure, not just a clean statement of a compassionate ethos.
Now take the third verse:
Where're the eyes, the eyes with the will to seeFor me this is the most moving and interesting part of the song. The series of rhetorical questions starts out implying that a crucial part of the American dream has been neglected: as in, "Where are the eyes with the will to see?" But of course, there's just enough hope in the lines to forestall an utterly bleak posture, and as the verse progresses the questions start to become answers. Lines like "Where's the love that has not forsaken me" and "Where's the spirit to reign, reign over me" suggest that a constructive, transformative energy (the "spirit") keeps us from falling over the cliff. Where is the love? Where is the spirit? Why, it's here in this song. It's in Bruce Springsteen. (And the Obama campaign wants to say: it's here too, in our campaign, in our candidate.)
Where're the hearts that run over with mercy
Where's the love that has not forsaken me
Where's the work that'll set my hands, my soul free
Where's the spirit to reign, reign over me
Where's the promise, from sea to shining sea
Where's the promise, from sea to shining sea
Wherever this flag is flown
So the chorus can be positive and constructive despite the evidence given in the verses of the song suggesting that there might not be much reason to hope that "We take care of our own" is a promise that anyone is actually interested in fulfilling. (And if you listen to the rest of the songs on Springsteen's "Wrecking Ball" or his earlier album "The Rising," there is plenty of bleakness to be found. See for instance, "Death to my hometown.")
One hopes that the sense of the vision of compassion in the United States encapsulated by "We Take Care of Our Own" turns out to be true in Barack Obama's second term. In the first four years of the Obama presidency, there were some signs that it was -- Health Care reform, the various efforts taken to rescue the economy from the brink of disaster -- but also a certain worrying coziness with regards to the Obama administration's alignment with corporate interests and the financial industry. (Will Obama's response to the recent "Superstorm Sandy" be appreciably better than George Bush's response to Katrina? I hope so, but time will tell.)
And I have a deeper frustration with "We Take Care of Our Own" that isn't just about the ideological question of whether the United States is a society that believes "we're all in this together" or "you're on your own" (to reprise one of Obama's standard talking points). As a person whose family originates in India, I can't help but wonder about the nearly seven billion people in the world who don't count as "our own." Do we, as the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, have any obligation to those who live, and sometimes struggle, under flags that are not the American flag?
I admire "We Take Care of Our Own" and the other recession-era anthems on Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball. And I remain a pretty passionate supporter of Barack Obama, while recognizing his limits and flaws. But when I hear the chorus of this song, part of me is always held back from fully embracing it by its grammar. The truth is, "we take care of our own" simply isn't enough for me.
I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 hoping that his international connections and background -- a father from Kenya, years spent living abroad in Indonesia -- might lead to a new kind of transnational understanding and a shifting away from the rhetoric of American exceptionalism in our foreign policy. But that hasn't happened (though admittedly, during this past campaign it would have been politically suicidal for Obama to make any noises in this direction). I believe the United States has an obligation to take care of its own, but I also firmly believe in the obligation of privileged countries to try and better the circumstances of people living in poorer countries.
Can we still get there? My hopes for the foreign policy agenda of the second Obama administration might entail: 1) rethinking the disastrous "no distance from Israel" policy that has led to a complete stalemate in progress towards a two-state solution (while the Palestinians continue to suffer under occupation); 2) rethinking the drone war and targeted assassinations in Pakistan and Afghanistan; 3) rethinking the approach to "American jobs" that means that jobs, growth, and development in other countries -- such as China and India -- is only registered a bad thing or a loss for Americans; and 4) a serious investment in working to combat global climate change.
Yesterday, a UC Irvine professor named Mark LeVine published a hard-hitting essay on Aljazeera.net arguing that in actuality Barack Obama doesn't really get the Bruce Springsteen whose message he exploits -- that he doesn't deserve the mantle of a populist or the embrace of the guy who wrote "The Ghost of Tom Joad."
I am more upbeat on Obama than Professor LeVine -- I do hope that President Obama, in his second term, might earn and fulfill the promise of compassion to American citizens that Bruce Springsteen represents. But I hope he'll go beyond the Boss as well: we take care of every one.
In the Times...
The New York Times' India Ink blog printed a revised version of the post this morning. And look for meon NPR's All Things Considered Tuesday August 7. [Update: here's the link w/ audio and a transcript of my comments.]
And now enough, I think, of being a pundit for me. If you'd like to support victims of the Oak Creek shooting, you can get information on how to do so here.
Beyond Recognition and Misrecognition: the Shooting at Oak Creek Gurdwara
2001-2002 happened to be my first year teaching at Lehigh. I was living alone in Bethlehem itself, close to the university, and believe me, I felt the intensity of that hostility, both while driving and of course on foot. But it wasn't just a small town issue; the sense of smouldering hostility was also something one felt on the streets of Philadelphia and, not surprisingly, New York. I heard a lot of ugly taunts and insults, and had a couple of encounters that might have been dangerous if I hadn't decided to walk away very quickly. I was kind of spooked, and like a lot of Sikhs that fall I put a bumper sticker on my car with a U.S. flag, announcing myself as a "Sikh American," crossed my fingers, and tried to stick to stay focused on teaching literature. That year I ate a lot of Drive-Thru fast food and missed the fun grad-school life I had left behind in cosmopolitan (really) North Carolina.
About a year later everyone started to calm down and I put a lot of my feelings from that first year behind me. (And yes, I eventually took the bumper sticker off the car.)
Obviously, the Sikh community realized very quickly that fall that it wouldn't do to simply say, "Don't hate me, I'm not a Muslim." And by and large people have avoided that particular phrasing and rhetoric. The Sikh advocacy organizations that were organized shortly after 9/11, chief among them the Sikh Coalition, were very emphatic on the point that they were opposed to hate crimes directed against any group based on religious hostility.
Today as I've been keeping up with the community's reaction to the Gurdwara shootings in Wisconsin I've been seeing a lot of friends and family reminding everyone not to dwell on the shooter's likely "misrecognition" -- the sentiment that "we didn't do anything, we don't deserve this" is actually not one we should be giving voice to, even if it might be understandable after such a ghastly attack.
Many of my friends online are also suggesting we renew our efforts as a community to educate Americans about who we are. These are well-meaning and valuable efforts, and I myself will try and support them if I can.
But here's the thing: I don't know if the shooter would have acted any differently if he had really known the difference between the turbans that many Sikh men wear and a much smaller number of Muslim clerics wear -- or for that matter, the difference between Shias, Sunnis, and Sufis, or any number of specificities that might have added nuance to his hatred.
As I have experienced it, the turban that Sikh men wear is the embodiment of a kind of difference or otherness that can provoke some Americans to react quite viscerally. Yes, ignorance plays a part and probably amplifies that hostility. But I increasingly feel that visible marks of religious difference are lightning rods for this hostility in ways that don't depend on accurate recognition.
I am not sure why the reaction can be so visceral -- perhaps because wearing a turban is at once so intimate and personal and so public? Walking around waving, say, an Iranian flag probably wouldn't provoke quite the same reaction. A flag is abstract -- a turban, as something worn on the body, is much more concrete and it therefore poses a more palpable (more personal?) symbol for angry young men looking for someone to target. Whether or not that target was actually the "right one" was besides the point for the Oak Creek shooter.
Years ago I tried to make a point along these lines in a conference presentation; I also took it a step further and claimed that in effect the turbans that Sikh men wear mark them as different in ways that rhyme with the hostility that Muslim women wearing Hijab also often face. That comparison wasn't received terribly well, but I stand by it. It's not that what the Hijab means for Muslims has very much to do with what the Dastar means in Sikhism. It's that both have the potential to provoke a kind of visceral reaction by these marks of religious difference worn on the body. Sometimes that reaction is simply a sense of discomfort or confusion, easily allayed by a winning smile or a comment about the local sports team or the weather. Sometimes, however, that negative reaction runs deeper and can't be readily resolved. (And yes, I think Hasidic Jews, for instance, provoke similar kinds of visceral reactions. And while there is likely no "9/11" connection in the minds of anti-Semites, it's worth remembering that anti-Semitic hate crimes and synagogue vandalism continue to occur at a pretty steady clip. And isn't homophobic gay-bashing connected to something similar -- a sense of difference operating at an uncomfortably intimate [to the attacker] level?)
I want to be clear that I am in no way suggesting Sikhs not wear turbans to avoid hostility. But I also don't think we should fool ourselves that incidents of this nature will be completely addressed purely by "education," nor should we presume that the shooter suffered from "ignorance." If the shooter turns out to have been what it's currently thought he was (that is, some sort of white supremacist), all that mattered to him was that he hated difference -- and saw, in the Sikh Gurdwara at Oak Creek, a target for that hatred.
Indeed, I don't have any very constructive solution to offer today. I am, truthfully, at a loss right now as to how to understand this tragedy, or how I might explain it to my five-year old son (we haven't told him about it yet, and don't plan to). At times living in the United States seems like an amazing privilege; this year we were out waving our little American flags with the rest of the neighborhood for the Independence Day parade in the suburban Philadelphia town where we live.
But the level of violence that is regularly expressed here (and, seemingly tolerated, since nothing substantial is ever done to address it) also defies explanation. This -- naked gun violence -- is the nightmare that periodically creeps into, and overshadows, the American Dream. And I will try to let my son go on being a typical American kid who doesn't have to think about that.