Knight at the End of the Day
by Mahir Ali
ZNet
SIR Salman Rushdie – it has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? A faintly ridiculous ring, much like Sir Mick Jagger or Sir Ian Botham, and not a million miles removed from Lord Ahmed or Baroness Uddin. The British honours system is an absurd and undemocratic anachronism that ought to have been abolished decades ago, yet it seems many people in Britain and across the lands once colonized in the name of the crown still covet the silly titles and the right they thereby gain to embellish their names with initials that invoke a non-existent entity: the British empire.
Month: June 2007
Poetry from Guantanamo
Inmates at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, used pebbles to scratch messages into the foam cups they got with their meals. When the guards weren’t looking, they passed the cups from cell to cell. It was a crude but effective way of communicating.
The prisoners weren’t passing along escape plans or information about future terrorist attacks. They were sending one another poems.
For years, the U.S. military refused to declassify the poems, arguing that inmates could use the works to pass coded messages to other militants outside. But the military relaxed the ban recently and cleared 22 poems by 17 prisoners for public release.
An 84-page anthology titled “Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak” will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press, giving readers an unusual glimpse into the emotional lives of the largely nameless and faceless prisoners there.
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Richard Wright and Native Son
Professor gears up for 100th birthday of ‘Native Son’ author
By Sarah Bryan Miller
Author Richard Wright (1908-1960) is coming up on his centenary next year. That means that Jerry Ward’s work is moving into high gear.
Wright, born in Natchez, Miss., was best known for his novel “Native Son” and autobiography “Black Boy.” He did most of his important work from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, devoting much of his time to writing haiku toward the end. He died of a heart attack in his adopted city, Paris. His carefully wrought sentences are often long and dense by today’s standards, but his voice was striking in his time.
Dr. Jerry W. Ward Jr. is a professor of English and African World Studies at Dillard University in New Orleans. Born in Washington, he lived in Mississippi from age 6; before going to Dillard, he taught at Tugaloo College in Jackson, Miss., for 32 years.
At the moment, Ward is awash in Wright centennial projects, including monthly discussions in Natchez, and coediting the Richard Wright Encyclopedia for Greenwood Press.
“I hope it will be out before the end of 2008,” he says. He’s also coediting “The Cambridge History of African American Literature,” due in 2009. “But I’m really immersed between now and 2008,” he says. “Wright seems to have total control of my energies.”
Q: Have you seen a lot of changes in students’ knowledge and appreciation of African-American literature?
A: Yes, I have. When I first started teaching in 1970, the students were very anxious to have courses on black literature. This was the whole period of the civil rights movement, which dovetailed with the black arts movement. Students were very excited and wanted these courses.
Now, there’s still interest, but the passion for it is not there. They complain that some of the work is very hard (to read). They’d rather read street literature, urban literature — I call them “romances.”
Q: Is it as hard as getting people to read Henry James?
A: Not Henry James. (When) people read him, they get kind of prune-faced. Maybe Norman Mailer, he’s not as hard, but we have to know all this background.
Q: In his heyday, Wright was controversial, in part, because of his outspoken communism. How is he viewed today?
A: The communism is no longer a real problem, anymore than the threat of communism is a problem anymore.
Q: Is Wright seen as a major American author or as a major African-American author?
A: When you’re dealing with literature, I think he’s really seen in both camps. But it’s under the rubric of African-American literature that he gets the most attention.
Back in the 1960s, Irving Howell said that “Native Son” was so important that when it was published, America was changed forever. This is really hyperbole, but that’s the kind of impact the novel had.
In 1938, he published a collection of stories, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” which won him a Guggenheim Fellowship. That was followed by the great success of “Native Son,” which created a national reputation. In 1940, when you consider where America was in racial terms, to have a black author with a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, to have a black author sell as well as he did, well, that was quite a phenomenon.
Q: What else did he do that was significant?
A: In 1941, he combined his very poetic text with (government) photos, “12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States.” And in 1953, he published “The Outsider.” It’s a very powerful but difficult novel, because it is a novel of ideas.
You have to deal with existentialism, Wright’s critique of communism and fascism, the concept of the Superman from Nietzsche and Wright’s long-standing interest in Freudian psychology. It’s an interesting story, but with long passages of philosophy.
Q: It sounds like Ayn Rand.
A: It’s a little juicier than Ayn Rand.
Q: Rand’s pretty juicy in places.
A: Well, there’s lots of murder.
Q: Is the study of African-American literature becoming mainstream?
A: No, it’s becoming deeper, (reflecting) much of what’s happening. The whole cultural phenomenon of hip-hop, and how pervasive that has been — it has to do with fashion. It has to do with choices of behavior that almost seem to be from the Jazz Age: the misbehavior of the rich crowd. It’s part of some kind of cultural globalization.
When you begin to talk about African-American literature and culture, you begin to engage the whole notion of the African diaspora. What are the relations between people from the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States — how are they interacting? They’re not looking back to Africa. And they’re not looking at being absorbed.
The People vs King Coal
Coal the Hard Truth
Written almost 90 years apart, a pair of muckraking books neatly frames the messy debate over the consequences of the `dirty rock’ – and its stubbornly prominent role in our future
Christine Sismondo
The Ontario government recently announced it would not be installing “scrubbers” in the province’s coal-fired power plants, technology that could reduce toxic smog-causing emissions by 60 per cent.
And why not? Because coal plants are supposedly not long for Ontario, their demise in this province promised for 2014 just last week by Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Still, some wonder if reports of their impending death are exaggerated, since the funeral was once set for this year (a promise the current government campaigned on), then initially extended to 2009.
As a shortcut to making cheap electricity, we got seriously hooked on the dirty rock more than a hundred years ago and we’re still trying to wean ourselves off. Although we tend to think of coal as a thing of the past, with a few outmoded plants still lingering around as anachronisms, in fact we burn more coal than ever before.
All signs point to still more coal consumption, with coal now being billed, particularly in the United States, as a homegrown alternative to expensive foreign oil.
Coal has always had its hidden, ugly side. From the very beginning, while we were delighting in the novelty of electric appliances at world’s fairs and the convenience of nighttime lighting, coal was responsible for human misery.
About 100,000 people died in American coal mines in the 20th century, and “black lung” is thought to be responsible for an estimated 200,000 more American deaths over that span. That has been merely one of the hidden costs of keeping the lights on.
Novelist Upton Sinclair investigated the rock’s dark underbelly in his muckraking book King Coal in 1917. The book (currently in print but pictured below in an early edition) is fiction but based on a 1913-14 coal miners’ strike. Despite harsh realities of fighting powerful King Coal, Sinclair remained hopeful. He felt the injustices of men being cheated out of their full pay, and worked to the bone in life-threatening conditions, could be overcome through solidarity. In most of Sinclair’s books, there is only one real hero, socialism as he understood it, and in the end it always prevailed….
Fast forward to the present, where lately the dirty little rock has been examined by New York Times Magazine writer Jeff Goodell, in Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.
In Goodell’s story, the modern “King Coal” is the real-life Don Blankenship, president, CEO and chair of Massey Energy, a U.S. company with 19 mining facilities in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. Blankenship’s a small-town-poor-kid-made-good who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and is, incidentally, a descendent of those McCoys who kept feuding with the Hatfields.
At times, Blankenship tries to do good work; for instance, he gives out toys to children in Madison, W. Va., location of one of the company’s operations. In the real-life tale Maria Gunnoe plays the “David” role. She’s a vocal resident who has been campaigning against the environmental fallout from Massey’s operations.
By Goodell’s account,Gunnoe’s activism made her unpopular in some quarters – in suspicious incidents her car’s brake lines were slashed and the family dog found dead.
The devastation Gunnoe describes to Goodell is a result of the ways mining has changed (improved to some, much worse to others) over the years. For instance, in an effort to minimize the expense and danger involved in going into underground pits, it’s become common to simply cut the top off the mountain and lift the coal out (“mountain top removal,” in mine-speak).
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Establishment Willful Ignorance
Jeff Greenfield of CBS News writes in relation to Michael Moore’s new expose film, Sicko:
“…beyond the debate that seems to surround every Moore film -—honest advocacy or distorted propaganda? — lies a different question: can a cultural event such as a movie actually affect political events?
“In the past, plenty of books have—from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” that helped fan abolitionist sentiment before the Civil War, to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” a century ago that led to federal food regulation, to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” that spawned the environmental movement.
“Even a movie, like 1979’s The China Syndrome” helped trigger increased opposition to nuclear power.
“But there are plenty of counter-examples: 1983’s “The Right Stuff” did nothing for the Presidential campaign of ex-astronaut John Glenn; Howard Stern’s endorsement of John Kerry didn’t keep Bush from winning a landslide among young white men—Stern’s core group. Moore himself acknowledges that his last film, 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” was viewed mostly by people who didn’t like Bush in the first place.”
No coincidence that the more progressive works mentioned here were more effective at fomenting change than the more establishment oriented ones — thus keeping in line with the known poll results of the American populace: they tend to be more progressive, humane than the those who have adopted the ideology of the dominant establishment. And so what if some progressive works have little or no effect. Some do. As with many efforts at catalyzing change, the necessary way to proceed is by trial and error.
Greenfield continues: “More important, Americans—unlike Europeans and Canadians—simply have a different relationship with government. Even though Medicare is a highly popular program, people do not go to government doctors or government hospitals; they have a near-visceral resistance to the idea. (Years ago, I heard a voter say, “I sure hope they don’t ruin Medicare by turning it over to the government.”)”
This is simply false. The anecdote is no doubt accurate but polls show that a majority of Americans have long preferred a government run free universal health care system like Canada’s system. And why not? It’s free to users, less costly to run overall, and more effective. For people who want private care, let them pay for their own.
Greenfield adds: “Moore himself says that there’s a “pioneer” mentality, an “everyone for himself” individualism, that runs deep in our history. As a man of the Left, he wants to see that changed to a “we’re-all-in-this-together” philosophy. But for most Americans, however angry they are at the cost, inefficiency and –at times — the heartlessness of our system, embracing the idea of a government run system will be a hard pill to swallow.”
Again, false, according to years of polling data. Of course the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and their tag alongs favor the current grossly bloated, inefficient, and deadly current system, replete with wasteful layers of corporate management. And why wouldn’t they? They’re making a killing.
Not McSweeney’s
Lee Siegel reviewing Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What:
“Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people’s stories the way we need other people’s oil.”
There are other, far better tendencies in US fiction than what Siegel pans here, including the work of Andre Vltchek and Ron Jacobs at Mainstay Press. Of course, Mainstay novels are of the sort the publishing establishment is loathe to market in the hostile social atmosphere, of which Siegel is symptomatic, and which may account for his not mentioning (as vital viable contrast) such work in his review.
The Oiliad by Caroline Arnold
A New Iliad: The Fixation of Dubya or The Wrath of the American People?
by Caroline Arnold
“I sing the Wrath of Achilles” … proclaims the opening verse of the Iliad.Scholars generally agree that the Iliad originated in orally generated and transmitted stories, scenes and characters during the 500 years after the Trojan War (c. 1250 BC) until the “blind poet” Homer, (who some believe was a woman) wrote them down around 650 BC.
Though many think the Iliad is about the Greeks’ war on Troy – battles, maneuvers, wife-stealing, the Trojan Horse – it isn’t. It’s about the Wrath of Achilles: “… that fatal wrath which, in fulfillment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans [Greeks] so much suffering and sent the souls of many noble men to Hades ….”
Achilles spent most of the Trojan War sitting in his tent sulking over a slave-girl Agamemnon stole. Eventually, after his friend Patroclus was killed by Hector, Achilles got really mad, went after Hector, and with the intervention of the gods, killed him.
Yet what strikes most modern readers is the formulaic language: “the fair Helen,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” “Hector of the shining helm,” “the horse-taming Trojans”, “the well-greaved Achaeans.” Such repetitive epithets and stock phrases are apparently what made it possible for epic tales to be remembered and reconstructed improvisationally by generations of singers/performers in pre-literate oral societies.
Some 30-odd centuries after the fall of Troy we seem to be in a new age of orality I see it in letters- to-editors, blogs and on-line comments where common oral phrases are spelled in ways that change meaning: “tow the line,” “feint of heart,” “waived a handful of documents,” “take the reigns,” “in cynic with” (for: toe the line, faint of heart, waved documents, take the reins, in synch with)
Where’s the sense, the meaning, the reality? in the sound of the words or in the spelling? And where are facts or truth when we are swamped with sloppy orthography, or the oral bravado of thousands of blind bards – PR people, newscasters, pundits, preachers, patriots, protestors and politicians who repeat the sound bites and urban legends they think portray reality?
Three thousand years – a hundred human generations – have passed since the Trojan War. Human population worldwide has grown from perhaps 50 million in 1000 BC to over 6 billion today. Human communication has gone from ephemeral oral/aural exchanges to semi-permanent visual modes of writing and printing; it has spread into broadcasting, computing, Internet, and cellphones, and been largely taken over by a corporatized “mainstream media” and professional spin-doctors.
Are we better off? The Greeks and Trojans had a pantheon of gods just barely nobler than the imaginations that produced them, and a body of oral, malleable myths to explain the world. We have imagined one great God who speaks directly, but orally, to selected prophets, (and latterly, presidents) and we justify our unimaginably destructive ideologies and technologies with oral, malleable myths.
“Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is recited as the all-purpose justification of a cruel war. Cindy Sheehan is labeled an “Attention whore;” anti-war protestors are called “whiny, anti-US morons,” or “idiot liberals.” “All options are on the table for Iran” means “we can nuke Iran if we want to,” and “support the troops” means giving Bush our money to pay Haliburton and Blackwater. Or does it mean “Bring the troops home now”?
I have been writing these columns for almost 10 years. I like to play with words and meanings, and explore ways to understand the natural world and our human place in it. I like to think I have done this in service to a less violent, more humane world.
I confess I’m running out of steam. The sheer quantity of information needed to understand what is going on in the world has become unmanageably large; the amount of noise in the system drowns out all sense. Even with good google-skills and a fast computer I can’t keep up with issues like corporate crime, drug smuggling, health care, global economics and a myriad of other things that matter. Among other things, I suspect it is not a good idea to tell pension funds what they can’t invest in, but how do I know?
Worse: it’s getting too hard to offer hope to people. The illusions we have created out of sound bites and formulaic phrases are taking us all to hell. The Middle East is aflame with civil wars, the U.S. President is hated world-wide, global warming and proliferating nuclear weapons threaten all of us.
We the people aren’t in control of our own government any more – nor of our our lives. We’re trying to stop the use of torture and illegal detentions, to end a cruel war, or turn back the march of global warming, and it’s not working.
We’re mostly contributing to the construction of an epic we might as well call Oiliad (”I sing the Fixation of Dubya, that fatal fixation which, in fulfillment of the will of God, brought [the world] so much suffering and sent the souls of many noble ones to Hell ….”)
We need an epic about “The Wrath of the American People” against the abuses of the Bush administration. Regrettably, six years of protests, speeches, op-ed essays, online blogs, and MoveOn.org haven’t accomplished much.
And we need an epic that glorifies the worth and dignity of every human being and ends the use of deadly weapons, nuclear bombs, torture, and war.
The Niceness Racket — Review by Lee Siegel
The Niceness Racket
A Review by Lee Siegel
As I was trying to make sense of Dave Eggers’s strange new book [What Is the What], I came across a piece of writing that captured the general cultural atmosphere in which Eggers’s book took shape. Not long ago, in the course of reviewing Martin Amis’s novel House of Meetings, most of which takes place in a Soviet gulag, Joan Acocella bestowed on readers of The New Yorker this illumination: “Amis, like Primo Levi, his great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization, is able to calculate degrees of anguish.”
Amis’s great predecessor in prison-camp memorialization! If you had the sublime luck to be sitting in your dentist’s waiting room when you read that, you could have tried faking a sudden painful abscess and begging the nurse to infuse you with a triple dose of Demerol. That way, you might have lost consciousness before Acocella’s sentence became stored in your memory cells. Her remark was shockingly and multivalently out of kilter. “Predecessor” implies a position and function kindred to those of the eventual “successor,” and Amis is planets away from both Levi’s experience and his evocative power. Auschwitz was not a “prison camp,” it was a death camp. Levi’s testimony cannot adequately be described with the bland “memorialization”. And real writers, imaginative writers, writers such as Levi, do not “calculate” anything, let alone incalculable anguish.
You couldn’t blame Amis for Acocella’s insentience, but you couldn’t blame Acocella for banging her head against Amis’s novel until she apparently lost consciousness. The generation of people who survived the Holocaust and Stalin’s vast network of camps is disappearing, but the number of novels about modern genocide has increased, and most of them are written by people who have no firsthand experience of their subject on which to draw. This presents a curious problem. Bearing witness, even in fictionalizing form, to extreme historical events that you have experienced is one thing. It is quite a different thing to try to recreate extreme historical events that you have not experienced, and then to try to imagine what it would be like to think and feel your way through them. This is hardly an illegitimate endeavor — the imagination has an obligation to wrestle with even the most unimaginable experiences; but it is an intensely demanding endeavor, with moral and aesthetic pitfalls all around.
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Cross-language Lit
Cross-posted from The Valve:
The vital concerns of literature (by which I mean reading and writing) have relatively little to do with the language the reading and writing is carried out in. In other words, the vast majority of the vital elements of novels, of poetry (more arguably), of drama, of essays, of scholarship are very largely beyond the originating language. Specific language issues are an important but very specific specialty within the vast domain of the concerns of literature. (Is this even controversial? Did the English language force George Eliot to write Middlemarch and not say Crime and Punishment, or for that matter, within her own language, Wuthering Heights? Of course not. Did the English language cause the flow and feel and sentence structure, etc, in Middlemarch to be at least somewhat different from War and Peace? Of course, but these are relatively marginal elements compared to the nature of the novels as a whole.)
Apart from the humanities, we can consider science and science literature, scientific literature: language is only an obstacle to be overcome by translation or multilingualism both in conducting research and in teaching (again, apart from some very specific linguistic concerns).
Of course the humanities are _somewhat_ different, especially in considering aesthetic issues, but even in this, language differences account for only a fraction of aesthetic issues. And aesthetic issues make up only part of the elements and focus of literature.
Language differences should not be allowed to limit the access that writers and readers – not to mention students – have to literature, and I think the department(s) should be reorganized to ensure this as much as possible, especially since in an ever more globally integrated age (which, incidentally, is not what the corporate-state establishment means by “globalization”), people can benefit from and otherwise need insight into and from the world over – across geographic and language differences both, and more.
And of course the departmental evolution away from both geographic/national and language insularity is going on, not least in scholarly World Lit courses and other broad international offerings. This trend is obvious in many MFA programs (where aesthetic and comprehensive concerns are often primary), as MFA faculty teach literary works from all over the world, translated from all sorts of languages, and no one necessarily thinks twice about it, except I suppose often about how exciting or intriguing such diversity is. It makes no sense to say these are “English” (&/or American) Department courses, or even “English Language” Department courses when many of the novels have been translated into English (or are even read in the original non-English language, as at the University of Texas El Paso (and elsewhere) which offers a bilingual MFA degree).
Fundamentally question the national basis of “English” (& American) Departments (a very good thing to do, in my opinion) and you’re left with quite possibly no justification for a large “English” Department. On the other hand, easily justifiable at large Department size is a wholesale “Global Literature Department,” or simply “Literature Department” that would include literature written everywhere in any language (translated, typically).
The Future of Departments of English/Literature
Cross-posted from The Valve:
In general, many social and individual trends are toward trans-nationalism (i.e., globalization, globalism, global integration) of all sorts. Again, we see this perhaps most strikingly and hopefully in the activity and related activity of the World Social Forum. Meanwhile Europe has integrated in the European Union and continues to do so, as Victor Hugo called for as a member of the French Legislative Assembly over a century ahead of time. South America is making huge strides in continental integration and toward possibly a South American Union. Meanwhile, the United States (officially) is increasingly isolated in its frequent unilateral and intransigent role in the United Nations – not to mention internally, and in the continent, the hemisphere, and elsewhere.
Corporate power, state power – corporate state power remains the dominant force(s) shaping much of the conditions of life in the world. The huge undemocratic features of this rule of force are the greatest threat to liberty, well being, and by now even species survival. The democratic rights that have been won by popular struggles and that have been forced upon corporate-state power are the greatest protectors of liberty and well-being and the greatest hope for their desperately needed expansion. Literature functions sometimes to protect, enable, and advance the corporate-state status quo, which is largely anti-democratic (anti-democracy) rule, and literature sometimes functions to protect, enable, and advance enlightenment ideals and human rights, as some scholars have shown. Literature has a great responsibility to the latter, which should be cultivated, pursued, as it has been to some extraordinarily insufficient degree. Call it the liberation tradition of literature.
Edward Said writes in Culture and Imperialism that “the focus in the destabilizing and investigative attitudes of those whose work actively opposes states and borders is on how a work of art, for instance, begins _as_ a work, begins _from_ a political, social, cultural situation, begins _to do_ certain things and not others….”
“Contamination is the wrong word to use here, but some notion of literature and indeed all culture as hybrid…and encumbered, or entangled and overlapping with what used to be regarded as extraneous elements—this strikes me as _the_ essential idea for the revolutionary realities today, in which the contests of the secular world so provocatively inform the texts we both read and write” (317).
“I keep coming back—simplistically and idealistically—to the notion of opposing and alleviating coercive domination, transforming the present by trying rationally and analytically to lift some of its burdens, situating the works of various literatures with reference to one another and to their historical modes of being. What I am saying is that in the configurations and by virtue of the transfigurations taking place around us, readers and writers are now in fact secular intellectuals with the archival, expressive, elaborative, and moral responsibilities of that role” (319).
The future shape of the study of “English” – of literature written in English (and, why not?, translated into English) will likely and should be shaped by the ever growing international daily use of English, and by international artistic creation in English, and by the exporting of American art, especially perhaps popular songs and movies but also novels and other books in translation, and untranslated. Also by the importation of many works, typically translated but sometimes not in the case of Spanish especially, and other languages.
In other words, English language literature study must globalize because the English language is globalized and globalizing further, and because our human situation both social and individual has globalized and is doing so increasingly – not least “the full human condition” that literature best addresses, illumines.
I don’t know to what extent, if any, trans-Atlantic “English” study accounts for the other languages of non-English literatures that have always been found within the United States and Britain, but I suppose trans-Atlantic English study could serve in some ways as a micro-analogue for the rapidly expanding macro-reality that is global English language literature, art, and culture.
As for curriculum issues, it seems to me that one practical problem with badly needed reform (needed already decades and decades ago) is that much of the scholarly side of the conventional English department is actually a History department in disguise. The conventional English department is actually basically a niche History department, with of course national English language literature, it’s elements and milieu, as the object of historical focus. In my view, that needed but overly large aspect of English departments should be shrunk, so that something else in particular can grow – be shrunk humanely, respectfully, thoughtfully, by natural attrition if necessary, not forced resignations, or perhaps mainly by encouraging professors to themselves apply more of their historical expertise to the contemporaneous situation (which would also serve to excite students more about important distant historical aspects. Of course a department that pretends to encourage that and doesn’t make moves to structurally realign itself is kidding everyone involved, at best.) The conventional English department has a rather status quo structure at a time when a far more progressive function has never been more badly needed.
What should be “grown” within departments, it seems to me, is much that is badly neglected by English (and other) departments, as I’ve noted in passing and in some detail in my recent posts at this site – liberation literature, to put a handle on it, that goes well beyond what is typically studied, taught, and created. Otherwise, in my view, the vitality of English Departments will continue to be severely compromised, as has been the case, again, for many decades, in fact, always. There’s a reason MFA programs are booming and attract no small percentage of the brightest students. There’s an urgent contemporaneity and vital freedom available there. (Whether or not such opportunity is remotely taken advantage of is another question. MfA programs have their own serious, related, problems, in my view.) So there has been a huge MFA surge. I’ve always felt there could be and should be a similarly sizable scholarly/creative resurgence in the vein I’ve suggested, which is sort of mildly happening university-wide (even in face of backlash), but much more and at much greater degree could be done, needs to be done, ought to be done, in my view.
English language literature departments, literature and writing departments in general (and the other humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences, etc) should develop in congruence with the possibilities and the needs of people socially and individually, in specific locales and the world over. Ascertaining, keeping up with, and helping to create the possibilities, current realities, and needs are crucial and very much in line with what seems to me to be the too-often (often unwittingly, and often ideologically) neglected liberation tradition of literature—a “tradition” that is more of a tendency, not necessarily an overall or wholesale tendency, but one that crops up in bits and pieces here and there, and is integrally, closely, or in concept aligned with other libratory individual and social acts and movements, organizations and various other such tendencies too in other fields and realms of life.
Review of The Situation by Dorothy Woodend
Hollywood Has Joined in on the Exploitation of Iraq with New Film
by Dorothy Woodend
The other day my mother said she’d just read a great novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called Half of a Yellow Sun. The story, about Biafra’s struggle for independence from Nigeria, chronicles the life and death of one disparate group of people. “It was great because it was actually about something: death, war, survival,” said my mother. “But it didn’t make anyone pathetic.”
Her words echoed in my brain as I watched The Situation, a new film directed by Philip Haas, and written by former war correspondent Wendell Steavenson. The film takes place in current day Iraq (although it was primarily filmed in Morocco) and it makes everybody out to be pathetic. And while this is a major problem, it is not even the film’s greatest flaw.
In the film’s opening sequence, two young Iraqi boys are accosted by an American military patrol. It’s past curfew and instead of sending the boys on their way with a warning, the Americans throw them off a bridge. One of the kids swims to shore, but the other drowns. You might think the plot of the film would hang on this crime and its aftermath, but you’d be wrong. This is merely an aperitif, a little amuse-bouche as it were, for the pottage yet to come.
While the country threatens to dissolve into a seething stew of civil war, insurgency and occupation, a beautiful blond journalist is falling in love with an Iraqi photographer. The real meat of the story is that of Anna Molyneux (Connie Nielsen), a Western reporter eager to carve a career out of the bleeding beast of a dying nation. Anna is hot on the trail of corruption and violence in Iraq; or perhaps, she’s simply hot. Men everywhere take one look at her blond, world-weary beauty and keel over. Quite literally. Her part-time boyfriend is an American intelligence officer named Dan Murphy (Damian Lewis) and the other man in her life is Zaid (Mido Hamada), a fellow photojournalist, and the most sensitive, new age Iraqi man ever conceived in the febrile mind of a screenwriter. It’s a Harlequin romance with a little grit thrown in.
Literature, Teaching, Ideology
Cross-posted from The Valve:
All courses are ideologically loaded. The status quo is always going to try to force courses to represent status quo ideology, all the while pretending and/or believing that this is not political indoctrination.
As Terry Eagleton notes in “Conclusion: Political Criticism” in Literary Theory: An Introduction: “Radical critics…have a set of social priorities with which most people at present tend to disagree. This is why they are commonly dismissed as ‘ideological’, because ideology’ is always a way of describing other people’s interests rather than our own.”
Beyond that, it seems to me that there are so many very effective (and needed) ways to teach progressive/humane knowledge that are not typically considered to be “advocacy pedagogy” by the status quo power structure (including every example I noted in my previous comments), ways that fall under the standard of academic freedom, that far, far more could be done along these lines than currently is being done, without potentially being confronted by any but the most extreme right wing zealots like Horowitz.
The third issue here, it seems to me, is what happens when teachers take advantage of such vital progressive/humane teaching possibilities, so that there is a greater cumulative libratory effect than currently, and/or what happens when certain teachers go beyond whatever the status quo powers accept on a case by case basis? Well, then you have real struggles for real power and real education and real action that should exist wherever illegitimate authority is imposed. That’s essential to progress.
Otherwise, if we don’t push the boundaries of what teaching and creation is appropriate, we get a culture that, well, we may contribute to some of what Edward Said describes in Culture and Imperialism —
“The modern history of literary study has been bound up with the development of cultural nationalism, whose aim was first to distinguish the national canon, then to maintain its eminence, authority, and aesthetic autonomy…. [There has been] an absolute requirement for the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between the [ostensibly] civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the [supposed] barbaric brutality of those who for some reason—perhaps defective genes—fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment, so well revealed by America’s Asian wars, for example.”
Now Middle East wars, etc. I see it strikingly in my area of creative focus: we wind up with a culture that fails to produce a flood of overt antiwar novels, and many other so-called partisan novels about other crucial issues.
If professors and students don’t take such stands, in teaching and learning (that they are perfectly entitled to take, if not under certain laws, or certain interpretations of certain laws), then everyone contributes to Nazifying the country and beyond, actively or by omission. Nobody knows what the “tipping point” is, or might be…nobody knows how many war debunking novels, for example, need to circulate in classrooms and without, be “taught” and read, how many plays like Lysistrata need to be put on, how many women need to stop sleeping with men, and/or how much else elsewhere needs to go on before students and others on campus, say, call a “college strike” that avalanches into labor strikes, and a general strike altogether that shuts the country down for a period of time that thus forces the end of the Iraq occupation, or cuts the military budget in half, or more, etc.
The problem is – not enough people resist the illegitimate, thus – slaughter. The problem is, too often, I think, we don’t see what we are doing and not. We’re conforming to the extraordinarily ideological status quo, habitually obedient, in thought, in action – which is the only way a country as otherwise free as the US could wind up with a government that carries out such crimes against humanity and other violations. What could be more truly educational in especially virtually any contemporary humanities or social science course, at least, than teaching in such a way that is ideologically and factually and aesthetically and socially and politically and educationally, etc, liberating? Again, this is what the status quo often calls simply, ideological, as Eagleton notes. It seems to me we have an obligation to resist, though we must each choose our own way. The same goes for soldiers in the military, and citizens in general. These are often hard choices, hard decisions (though sometimes not; sometimes we just have to recognize the real possibilities). We can think of options that are suggestive in various ways. But to give advice would seem almost worthless. It’s hard enough just to try to “advise” one’s own self. Each person has to make his or her own call, in face of problems real or perceived.
Of course, some ideologies are appropriate, some aren’t. Simply holding an open argument or discussion advances certain ideological assumptions. That’s appropriate. Considering a question from all sides – that’s appropriate. Having one party dictate in a classroom what may be, say, drawn as evidence or not, or be brought up for consideration or not, is not appropriate.
It’s also entirely appropriate for a professor to advance, to argue a certain point of view, such as, say, the US is the world’s leading terrorist state, or God is a fiction that cannot be proved, or autobiographical novels are the greatest novels of all, in a class so long as the professor also allows for and helps to facilitate open discussion. That’s all ideological and all appropriate, since the norms of free exchange of ideas (again, also ideological) are observed. The professor should want to be challenged; that’s appropriate (also ideological). Disallowing open discussion on the basis of, say, some notion that the professor is more experienced and therefore knows better is ideological, sure, but again what isn’t? The fact that it’s ideological doesn’t/shouldn’t disqualify it, but the fact that it is not normatively appropriate should bar it. It violates norms of free and open inquiry that are vital to intellectual activity (at the least).
Yes, I too had professors who couldn’t get anywhere close to 2 + 2 = 4 when discussing on certain ideological grounds.
Of course when you are examining literature as a socially symbolic form you are teaching literature “in terms of ideas” in some way. It’s also entirely appropriate to discuss and think about any number of conceptual elements of the work or that are raised in the work. I’ve here been speaking a lot of thinking about the normative elements of literature—how valuable it is, in what ways, to whom…? Also conceptual elements of all variety.
Is it appropriate to offer a class full of hate literature (like Mein Kampf or the Turner Diaries) without subjecting it to normative and conceptual critique? Of course not. Is it appropriate to offer a class full of literature that tends to reinforce a complaisant status quo view of a society that is homicidal in many ways without subjecting it to normative and conceptual critique? Of course not. Even less so, because isn’t doing the latter even potentially more monstrous than the former? Everyone or virtually everyone knowingly rejects the obviously heinous as compared to not necessarily seeing anything wrong with, say, the also heinous but officially sanctioned, like the Iraq invasion, etc. Is it appropriate to offer a course full of, say, progressive novels without subjecting it to normative and conceptual critique? Of course not. It should all be questioned and discussed openly.
Some classes too are properly taught in a division of labor sort of way in that the focus may be almost entirely on some array of technical aspects of a work without going into any normative aspects or normative implications of the technical.
The thing is, it’s not unreasonable for professors to, well, _profess_ about the conceptual and/or otherwise technical and/or the normative. Haven’t you ever gone to a great talk where some author/artist/intellectual goes into great detail about his or her view of something – the world, politics, something technical, whatever? You can learn so much. Oftentimes you learn the most in the question and answer sessions that should immediately follow such talks. That is entirely appropriate in a regular classroom, so long as you encourage students to challenge your views and understandings and facilitate their ability to do so. It’s not the only way that teaching can be done, as I’ve discussed previously, but it’s one lively and appropriate way. And it works better for some teachers and students than the also effective but sometimes dry teacher-hides-his-own-conclusions approach. The one style can be problematically passionate and/or phony; the other can be problematically dry and/or phony as well.
I don’t pretend to deny that teaching has consequences. The teacher Socrates was killed by the “state” for that. And I don’t pretend to be entirely ignorant about what sort of teaching can lead to what sort of consequences. Ideas have consequences, art has consequences. The state knows it. We teachers should too, and we should use that knowledge responsibly. More responsibly than the state does, much of the time.
“Advocacy pedagogy” is a term I first heard at the Valve recently. I don’t know if it has some specific legal technical meaning in some context. But I’ve used it here to refer to teaching in such a way that teachers think is likely to be illuminating and consequently to have some other likely constructive individual and/or social or political (that is, public) effect, or any number of other effects. This, after all, is what university mission statements and expressed core values are all about: advancing the well being of individuals and the public, not least—intellectually and otherwise.
Somewhat like universities, and other public and private institutions, the military often doesn’t live up to its expressed ideals and values and missions either. If it did, none of the Generals and soldiers would have obeyed the President’s illegal and immoral command to invade Iraq. The analogy isn’t perfect, but some soldiers do stand up and stand against, as they ought, and it has been reported that lately even the Generals have been making it known they will only go so far. Teachers, students, people generally, have analogous obligations in their own various realms. We shouldn’t pretend or allow ourselves to be conned into believing that it is otherwise.
A Practical Policy 