Celebrate!

Pan Morigan and I have been on the road since January, 2011 promoting my novel, Redwood and Wildfire, and her album, Wild Blue. We've met great people everywhere. The 99% are working hard. We are appreciating all the Good News!

We enjoyed going to vote on Tuesday and electing a progressive Mayor in Northampton. We were thrilled to hear that voters elected a 22-year-old, progressive, gay mayor in Holyoke, MA, rejected personhood at inception, and re-elected mayors (highly) supportive of the arts in Philadelphia, Houston, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Charlotte, Baltimore, Carmel, IN, and Charleston, SC.

The Senate voted down the resolution that would have shuttered the open Internet.

The U.S. State Department will delay making a final decision on the tar sands Keystone XL pipeline pending a new environmental review.

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Respect for Marriage Act.

Wow!

In a guest Blog, I shout out praises to Aqueduct and Aqueductistas at The Rejectionist. I end that Blog with: Here’s to the 99% writing the future.

"Black Feminism Holds Us Up" (ASA 2011)

The fifth in a series of reports from the American Studies Association.

“The Roots and Routes of Black Feminist Criticism.”

Located in a smaller room, this panel was more densely packed, with all kinds of people of all generations, Angela Davis among ‘em: easily over eighty auditors in that tiny space, and that was just at the start of the panel. It was very much the kind of panel that would excite the WisCon people I know and connect with their interests. I was sad to see that I was the only white male in the audience for the whole event

Be aware that my attention to my notebook during the q & a, in a room where the crowd limited visibility, might have led to a couple of errors as to who said what. Also, all the scholars and audience members used first names during the q & a, but I tried writing it up that way and it looked as if I was being overfamiliar, so I redid it.

Moderator Leigh Raiford explained that we see black feminist criticism growing out of art and activism in the 1970s, then challenging various disciplines in the 1980s and 90s, confronting and transforming their assumptions. Each of the panelists was given a Key Word to discuss. Raiford was inspired to do this roundtable by the great black feminist panel at last year’s ASA and by the announcement of Ann duCille’s retirement. So we have three generations of scholars on the panel from all kinds of places, eras, and disciplines.

Koritha Mitchell was given the Key Word tradition. The dictionary definitions of the word remind us that the act of labeling something a “tradition” requires claiming a historical pattern and gestures toward the future. Mitchell traces her roots to the 2001 Claudia Tate symposium, for which she trekked from UMCP to Princeton. She still remembers the awe and excitement that ensued when Claudia Tate, accompanied by an oxygen machine, entered the room. She remembers Hazel Carby insisting that her generation of scholars must share with the next generation the truth of what they went through. She remembers the critical demeanor that Ann duCille calls for, and that is exemplified by Farah Jasmine Griffin’s “That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May Know Their Names,” and the experience of being in the same room with all her favorite scholars: she began piecing elements of their strategies together, creating a “composite mentor” to avoid overburdening any one of them, and working to promote community in person while using publication to mentor from afar.

Mitchell does recuperative work on activist community, showing that Ida B. Wells was far from a lone crusader, and revealing that women, who were denied authority in the NAACP, spoke out by writing many anti-lynching plays. Inspired by Farah Jasmine Griffin’s account of all the scholars influenced by Hortense Spillers, Mitchell builds on the work of earlier scholars. She has an essay coming up in American Quarterly on Baldwin’s performance theory, “Reconstituting the Dead in Blues for Mister Charlie.” Inspired by the “Black Women in the Ivory Tower” conference (ten talks from which are available on youtube), she has published an essay on the forces that sometimes make a retreat necessary. In these, in her piece on Toni Morrison, in her blog work, she uses the personal politically and hopes that others can find support in that. To the extent that she focuses on self, it’s about acknowledging her place in the tradition.
Ann duCille wants to consider one of the ruts, or sticking-points, in the world of black feminist criticism. It is not hard to track black feminists’ successes in the academy: there have been peaks and valleys between Barbara Smith’s germinal article and today, and at this point we’re well removed from the heady days of the 1990s. Still, the academy looks very different today than it did a generation ago. But duCille is haunted by the possibility that the change is largely, well, academic. The dominant mass media models of black women are still the same four; people still broadcast and write about “nappy-headed hos” and “Obama’s Babymamma.” Has black feminist criticism done better by historical and fictional people than it has by living people?

The job of the intellectual is to study, think, write, teach, and provide people with tools. What kind of president might George W. Bush have been if he’d gone to UCSC and studied with Angela Davis? Two of duCille’s students have already built a thriving school for girls and a community health center in Kabira, Kenya. Many scholars do hardcore active duty on the front lines and the mean streets. But what about the real world effects of our scholarship and teaching? We struggle with such questions as, not only does discourse matter, but do I matter? And we have to address them, lest black feminist criticism risks a point where the personal is only political. Black scholars today don’t have time to talk to each other: if Nellie McKay had no time to pee, of course there’s no time to talk about the personal issues that Carol Hamisch raised in “The Personal Is Political”: we don’t bring up the most intimate matters that relate to our needs.

The media and the academy have taken to approaching duCille as an authority on marriage, but her approach to the subject is purely academic. She’s so fiercely single that to her for decades, “a date” has only been a small fruit. If someone were to write her biography, it’d be called A None’s Story. She cracks wise, but as others have observed, if she were to talk seriously about this issue, it’d be dismissed as “private.” Looking at the new book Is Marriage for White People? and at the high rate of celibacy among college-educated black women, one sees that it’s no laughing matter; but humor can be a good approach — it’s silence that’s deadly. And the alarming rate at which we are analyzing in the academy, so often alone, is not about being married or single: it’s the peril of being alone in the lion’s den without the proper armor. We must realize, like the consciousness-raising groups of forty years ago, that isolation and aloneness are collective concerns. We may need the company of each other’s conversation to survive whole. The importance of language to this community lies in having a critical vocabulary to save us from our own silences.

Aliyyah Inaya Abdur-Rahman was given the Key Word motherhood. Hinton Als in The Women reproduces a newspaper article on the rape of a toddler, noticing coded references to the race of the family in which it occurred — the markers Als thinks indicate blackness. Als’s depiction of black familial ruins focuses on the mother’s mute bewilderment, expressing the muteness of “Negress” identity. With “she has rejected language,” he presents the mother as the quintessential black woman. It is her silence, according to Als, that makes her a symbol of black identity. The place of violence and familial ruin in black American life is emphasized by recent images of black women in the news: the woman who was arrested for enrolling her kid in a better school district; the outraged mothers who defended the men accused of the Cleveland, Texas rape; the woman who drove her van into the Hudson; the woman convicted in her child’s jaywalking death — all these inadequate mothers in the news show that publicity doesn’t have the redeeming power Harriet Jacobs hoped it would.

Abdur-Rahman became a mother between college and grad school in a truly horrible short marriage. Then she decided that only by Doing Something Grand could she redeem her situation. But she discovered the boundaries of what any person can do alone. Motherhood is an enriching but a limited identity — all of these horrific narratives attribute to black women a mute insufficiency as mothers. In a time when social good is no longer the province of the state but is left up to the private, black feminism holds us up, gives us the language we need, is as relevant an optic as it has been in the past 120 years: it helps us correct the narrative on behalf of the most vulnerable.

Regine Michelle Jean-Charles’s life was changed as a student when Farah Jasmine Griffin bought her a copy of Words of Fire. She wants to show us an excerpt from Congo: Une Cause Commune about the antirape movement in the Congo, which has extended through Europe. ON 17 October 2010 thousands of women in the DRC came out to protest mass rapes, with such slogans as SAY NO TO SEXUAL TERRORISM, demanding international attention and outcry, effecting a global feminist practice and strategically deploying such signs as “terrorism”, “freedom”, and “human rights” to indict the omissions in the War on Terror. The movement displays the shortcoming of U.S.-generated discourse, wherein even a slogan such as “women’s rights are human rights” can vitiate black bodies: this movement evoked the agency and subjectivity of black bodies, with an invocation of freedom that revised Nkrumah’s “total liberation.” Even when the armed conflict is over, the gender violence of peacetime must also come to an end. We see new types of African protest narrative in which women deploy traditional protest methods and recognized political language to reassert agency and challenge victim imagery as well as the victim/survivor binary. They have found numerous ways of resisting.

What use is focusing on this scene of global black feminist praxis? Guy-Sheftall calls movements against sexual violence Black Feminism 101. There’s been a transnational feel to black feminism for a long time: we move from Anna Julia Cooper’s Voice from the South to a voice from the Global South. And we see black feminism as a precursor to a lot of things. Thinking that way requires inviting international activists into the archive: these activities have been coursing through our criticism since it first began.

Farah Jasmine Griffin has learned so much from reading the papers for this panel. The Key Word she was assigned is imagination. Black feminists dared to imagine the world anew. In its early forms, black feminism was a Freedom Dream. The selections in The Black Woman (1970) reveal that it is not a unitary identity and shows ways to name different identities, as does Valerie Smith’s Not Just Race, Not Just Gender and all the work done by Crenshaw’s “intersectionality”: all see black feminism as a strategy of reading. We claim identities to resist the forces that oppress us even while challenging ahistorical and essentialist views of identity, as in Griffin’s own reclamation projects. The speakers have called attention to the presence of violence: how do we theorize and map that? Abdur-Rahman on motherhood reveals black feminism as a view that allows us to correct asymmetries, resisting stereotypes and uses of black mothers and address the legacies of Richard Wright, Ann Petry, the dozens, the mocha mama image — the language of the people. Jean-Charles writes about a new African Freedom Dream, synthesizing her intellectual and political concerns. Mitchell on tradition manifests a vibrant living tradition. Her pilgrimage to Princeton recalls to Griffin her own long-ago drive in a borrowed car with Saadiya Hartman to Princeton after Cornel West had promised to introduce them to Toni Morrison. We learn of Mitchell’s sense of community and of duCille’s of isolation, also duCille’s calling for space-clearing, time-making, community-building.

A question from the audience observed that in the Nafissatou Diallo/Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, the mother issue was overlooked. Her having lied in Guinea was not understood as protecting her children. How could a global feminist perspective have helped? How could our recognition of the pathological black mother issue have helped? Jean-Charles is very gratified to see black feminist scholars talk to each other about this. She was disappointed by the organizing here around the Diallo/DSK case, but it unleashed a lot of organizing in France, among Caribbean/African women. The global narrative we were given turned on clichés: she fled the Primitive Land and only in the U.S. could she seek justice for her cause. We have to be able to think about how global black feminism can address the class and the globality here. A black feminist optic wasn’t articulated. Abdur-Rahman said it was a story that could not be easily scripted in terms of the dominant narratives. (Devastation or Uplift) that are available to us.

Erica Edwards of UC-Riverside remarked that black feminism has given us a language to readdress the category of “woman”: how can we use it to theorize beyond gender normativities. Griffin sees that as having been a problem from the very beginning, with the contested issue of Remaking Womanhood. One of the unspoken fights with Barbara Smith is that she was naming black lesbian women as the center. The remaking should have been enabling, but it hasn’t been. duCille asked, How do you talk about marriage from a feminist perspective? How do you even talk about marriage without recentering the male? Griffin said the Diallo/DSK case shows the continuing primacy of the discourse of respectability in our culture. Mitchell says that to create a space for others to speak is part of a person’s responsibility. Abdur-Rahman is so invested in moving away from a normative category, she cannot take black feminism’s “content” as a given, or take it as her own.

Joan Morgan is now an NYU grad student, in her second year in American Studies. She asked about using pop culture to give black women language to dissect and navigate things that reach us through that medium — such as the attempts to tell black women that they need to be fixed. Providing language to combat it is black feminist work. But she feels that work is not reaching vulnerable people. Jean-Charles finds that when you have conversations with people, it becomes easier than she imagined. But, Morgan asked, after we work one-on-one, where do we go? Griffin told Morgan, You have modeled that beautifully in your own work. Jean-Charles says she does thing it requires creative models, but then you end up seeing black kids marching through the streets of Chicago with t-shirts saying no means no and doing all kinds of activism.

Mitchell cautioned that what we’ve done to clear space doesn’t mean things are gonna radically change. What we’ve done doesn’t mean that the next generation won’t suffer and we won’t continue the lonely fight. Abdur-Rahman averred that there’s got to be a way to conceptualize the distinction between, say, individual difficult experiences without deferring automatically to issues of how we’re represented. Octavia Butler’s isolation ought to be discussed before we go on to talk about Nightline and the media presentation of black women. Discussing the battles we have to fight, an audience member named Randall said that lawyers take money. He remembers reading at fifteen or sixteen about the Joan Little case . . . and now, we’re dominated by the professionalization of the academy. So thanks for addressing the question of engagement, and thanks for facilitating discussion of black masculinity too.

"The Hikers that Rocks Crush" (ASA 2011)

Fourth in a series of reports from the American Studies Association.

“Affective Histories, Critical Transformations: A Roundtable Discussion."

I don’t often attend such highly philosophical panels as this one; I showed up as an admirer of McRuer’s and Luciano’s work. But it was an immensely popular panel, with over fifty auditors, a couple dozen of whom had to sit on the floor. Not quite what many readers of this blog would regard as “a roundtable discussion,” it consisted of the panelists reading papers shorter than most panels comprise, allowing for more discussion and responses in the q & a.

Jasbir Puar opened by raising the question of the role of affect in our fields. In the process that Patricia Clough has called the Affective Turn, what kinds of histories and genealogies are evolving? What are we eliding? Especially in the context of American Studies, what is affect? What are our objects of inquiry and analysis? People keep asking about Occupy Wall Street, “What is it going to do?” as if it weren’t already doing something. Following the tradition from Spinoza to Deleuze/Guattari, Puar finds that the affective turn contests the dominant terms of critical theory itself and reveals the limits of poststructuralism. The presumption of the subject as a formative space from which a politics emerges is also being questioned.

Karen Tongson began her talk with, “Thank you, Jasbir . . . I probably won’t address anything you’ve brought up.” Tongson wants to talk about acafandom. She was originally a Victorianist but finds her work veering toward music and considering what she has learned from Cole Porter. What would it mean to be true to you in our fashion? What counts as infidelity? How can we reimagine the style, scope, and fashion of infidelity? In our work, we tend to see fidelity as disciplinarity; in these times of scarcity, we tend to ask, how does a young scholar construct herself as true in order to be chosen? We receive mixed messages — be innovative, but be ready to impress a hiring committee half of which has no idea what “digital humanities” means. So to what extent do we hipsters harness our fidelity to new disciplinary formations as our capital? Consider Heather Love’s “Close, but Not Deep”: Tongson shares that fascination with surfaces, which involves tone and humor and the ways in which certain capricious encounters with musicality can offer a porous relation to fidelity.

Consider Theodor Reik on “The Haunting Melody.” Looking at the origins and motives of the disciplinary loyalties we start out with, we get pulled back to where we reside: we are held by a promise, a long-term commitment. Tongson’s love and fidelity were always exogamous and polyvalent. Her attachment to Kant and Derrida began with their invocations by Scritti Politti; so many of her loyalties have been informed by pop, and Keats and Yeats are on her side. In making sense of the affect that made this textual promiscuity possible, she started with Matthew Arnold and his idea of “the touchstone” — the lines of poetry we carry in our head as standards. These earworms always have to do with the vicissitudes of affective attachment. In the face of the edict to produce disciplinary coherence, we can’t only respond with interdisciplinarity and post-disciplinarity, nor, aware of the perils of these programs, can we disavow their viability. But in a fantastic reconciliation with the idea of disciplinary fidelity we can reimagine an enduring open relationship with our field. It is time for you now to go out to the places you will be from.

Tongson spoke very fast and managed to put many words into her time slot, even though she skipped a page of her prepared talk; so my note-taking hand was too tired to take especially thorough notes on Mel Chen. Chen’s book speaks to affect and to debates about the status of the human, the haunting connections that remain between language and matter, and the issue of posthuman humility. A statement such as “The hikers that rocks crush” violates a cross-linguistic norm of agency, of the conceptual order of things. What if nonhuman entities or marginalized humans enter into animacy? What about Critical Pet Theory? We see the animacy of toxins appear in the discourse: toxicity is figured as gendered, sexualized, racialized: in the Chinese Toy Panic, lead actually moves and travels over time: it is not passive. In artists’ heightened attention to objects, under what conditions and by whom are stones considered inanimate and where are they considered animate? What about the stereotype of the stone butch or the stone-faced foreigner?

The great Robert McRuer then gave a talk on his “Cripping Austerity” project. Perhaps “austerity” doesn’t need to be defined for this audience. The Puerta del Sol has been occupied since 15 May, the Hardest Hit March occurred in London on 11 May; we’ve seen images of the police beatings in Barcelona, of the student movement and hunger strikes in Santiago; npr reports that “austerity” was chosen as 2010’s Word of the Year. But “cripping” may need elaboration. An anti-identitarian disability identity may not account for the full non-normative range of agents here. Much of this was discussed at the October 2010 Prague conference on “Cripping Neoliberalism.” Robert wants to present four theses:

• Disability is an unexamined and undertheorized issue in the global austerity project. Neil Marcus’s “Disability is an Art” poster graced the Arnieville Sleep Out in Berkely in 2010.
• Disability simultaneously exists as a niche identity or market that’s potentially useful to our neoliberal masters.
• Disability has the potential to go the way of a globalized and commodified identity.
• The path that cripping takes is dependent on issues of affect.

Hence McRuer’s title, “The Crip’s Speech, or, Benefit-Scrounging Scum.” The global success of The King’s Speech and emergent discourses/uses of disability are not part of the usual “Overcoming Narrative”: it’s not just a “Good for you [Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, et al]!” story, but something much insidious and something more useful, in the sense that the Paralympics 2012 are useful, which is the reason they’re being boycotted by disability activists: London’s hosting of the Paralympics is being used to give the ruthless Cameron government compassion cred. We see an affective rallying around certain representations of disability, one that coexists with demonization of the UK’s equivalent of “welfare bums”: Labour equates “benefit fraud” with the crimes of the banksters who cause the crash. McRuer ended with an image by artist Celia Franklin and a shout-out to Sue Marsh’s Benefit-Scrounging Scum.

McRuer presented a similar paper at the "Composing Disability" conference two weeks later: Margaret Price and Ann Fox offered some very informative tweets on it.

Dana Marie Luciano noted that the preliminary questions for the panel had addressed the issue of proper and improper objects and what objects have been omitted that are important to the study of affect. She confessed a sense of imposture and wondered whether, despite multiple uses of “affect” in Arranging Grief, where it was used more or less synonymously with “emotion” and “feeling”, affect has really been present in her work. She’s considering affect as a site for the exploitation of the inhuman. Grief in modernity is a measure of what makes us human, so how do we respond to signs of inhumanity? Talking about rocks, of course, gives one a Simon and Garfunkel earworm, brings to mind the endurance of stone, Cohen on our fascination with Stonehenge and its mystery (while we’ve repurposed it to plastic expression), romance of the stone, Ozymandias, Thomas Cole’s painting of the Coliseum, and a bunch of associations from which Luciano surprisingly omitted Bob Dylan. The pedagogy of awe — stone’s durability bespeaks our precarity. The erotics of rock: Wilde’s tomb is covered with ineradicable lipstick stains from all the pilgrims who’ve kissed it, but it’s also castrated: someone stole the penis from Wilde’s monument. The accidental intimacy that occurs at Wilde’s grave resists imagining the nonhuman or inorganic as cold and chaste. Anthrodecenterism may well sponsor a powerful ethics: what would it mean to stone austerity? She ended with a Plain Dealer cartoon about Martin Luther King.

Puar asked, Are we producing in this turn toward object-oriented ontology another form of the ontological realism that Karen Barad unfortunately advocates? Isn’t it risky to suggest that the truth is in the stone? Can queer temporality embrace terms like durability? Don’t terms like that reproduce a politics of reproduction or of fidelity? In response, Dana noted the perils of commodity fetishism and explained that an intimacy with the Earth has to take forms other than the desire for a quest for truth. And that we should watch out for inhumanization as fossilization, or as fascination with “primitives,” at a nexus of dehumanization.

Someone asked a question about petrifaction and uncanny monumentality. McRuer spoke of the materiality of the wheelchair, and the ways in which wheelchairs differently materialize disability. He contrasted the petrification of disability in a picture of Cameron exploiting disability with the use of wheelchairs by protestors in Santiago. A questioner took on the language of fidelity by asking, What about the infidel? Giving attention to the abjected within disciplinary spaces, and what happens when you talk about the things you’re not supposed to talk about in ways you’re not supposed to talk. The reply involved how we seek out experience of the objectness, the thingness of the body that are not abjecting. An auditor asked about lineages of affect theory and whether it isn’t possible to take us to queer and feminist readings of Marx on the fetish. A comment brought up Rey-Silva and how we can and should find ways to think about indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.

Someone asked, Aren’t we disavowing agency and historical materialism when we talk this way? Are we evading issues of the political? Chen said she doesn’t think toxicity can be reduced to a matter of human actions and that “affect” is doing more work than “causality.” She feels she’s doing the kind of bracketing that’s necessary to tell the story. Puar, known for her own critique of the notion of agency, said that affect asks us to rethink issues of temporality and scale. Luciano noted that Jane Bennett’s work on materiality sometimes retreats in causality/agency when you don’t want it to and that redoing sentimental-queer-vitalist genealogies can undo human mastery.

Tuhkannen asked about geology and whether the emergence of psychoanalysis was the geology of the unconscious, and does ontology have to be equated with truth? Luciano is interested in the relationship between enigma and truth. She cited Stephen Jay Gould’s retort to Freud, explaining that the decentering of the modern subject, a project which Freud claimed he was the culmination of, actually began with 18^th-century geology rather than Darwin. The issue of transformative accommodation in religion, which has been going on since that discovery if not earlier, came up. Puar remarked that her critique of Barad’s version of ontological realism was not a critique of the attachment to objects.

A questioner in the front row observed that the buildings under construction around Liberty Plaza are huge, while the plaza is tiny. But another thing is being built there: they’re rebuilding a relation between people and objects. McRuer noted that Bloomberg’s invocation of sit-lie laws had recently failed, but all around the country laws about how people can interact with stones and concrete are being used against protestors successfully. One audience member asked about the sexuality of the stone structures in India and the motion of stone. When we privilege deep time, what kinds of time are being left out? A panelist cited the great works of art coming out of the Haitian earthquake that are bypassing the sentimental and are very geological

Finally, an audience member asked about the stigma and blame being thrown at immigrants and how it resembles the discourse around British “scroungers.” Wittingly or not, the question was tailor-made for McRuer, who acknowledged that the issue was very close to his heart and that disability identity in the U.S. has been defined as an appeal to the state — it’s the Americans with Disabilities Act — and as such has made it impossible to identify certain bodies as disabled.

So what is a police state, anyway?

Last spring, at a convivial luncheon here in Seattle with several other science fiction writers, a disagreement arose about the term "police state." One of my colleagues took an authoritarian state in the Middle East as an example of a "real" police state and advanced the argument that because here in the US we don't feel fearful, in our day-to-day lives, of arbitrary violence from the police, it's absurd to say we live in a police state. When someone (perhaps me) brought up the fact that many people in the US do feel fearful in their day-to-day lives of such violence, she wasn't shaken from her position in the least: they are exceptions, she said, not the rule. As I recall, she said that "ordinary" people need to feel daily fearfulness. Since then, I've several times mused about just what a police state is, and also about whether it needs to touch everyone with fear. Long after the conversation was past it occurred to me that probably "Aryan" middle-class Germans were not touched with such fear under Hitler, or most Italians under fascism. Yet who would argue that Hitler and Mussolini presided over police states? 

The question arose freshly for me when reading the Guardian's article on the recent beating, jailing, and belated intensive-care hospitalization of Kayvan Sabehgi, an Iraqi-war vet (and small business owner) in Oakland-- off the site of the Occupy Oakland action. The question didn't arise so much for the pre-arrest part of the story (which can be written off with the bad-apples narrative that is so often trotted out to explain the arbitrary police violence that is endemic across the country) as the part that happened after Sabehgi's arrest. Though of course what happened before the arrest is bad enough:

On Wednesday night, police used teargas and non-lethal projectiles to drive back protesters following an attempt by the Occupy supporters to shut down the city of Oakland.

Sabehgi told the Guardian from hospital he was walking alone along 14th Street in central Oakland – away from the main area of clashes – when he was injured.

"There was a group of police in front of me," he told the Guardian from his hospital bed. "They told me to move, but I was like: 'Move to where?' There was nowhere to move.

"Then they lined up in front of me. I was talking to one of them, saying 'Why are you doing this?' when one moved forward and hit me in my arm and legs and back with his baton. Then three or four cops tackled me and arrested me."

Sabeghi, who left the army in 2007 and now part-owns a small bar-restaurant in El Cerrito, about 10 miles north of Oakland, said he was handcuffed and placed in a police van for three hours before being taken to jail. By the time he got there he was in "unbelievable pain".

It's the next part of Sabeghi's account that for me points to profoundly serious problems at the institutional level-- not just in the Oakland PD (which would be the rotten-apple narrative), since we know damned well that this instance reveals a set of assumptions and attitudes that are the standard throughout our entire law enforcement system, at every level, and that those small portions of the institution that don't hold those assumptions and attitudes are the exceptions rather than the rule. To continue with the Guardian's report:

He said: "My stomach was really hurting, and it got worse to the point where I couldn't stand up.

"I was on my hands and knees and crawled over the cell door to call for help."

A nurse was called and recommended Sabehgi take a suppository, but he said he "didn't want to take it".

He was allowed to "crawl" to another cell to use the toilet, but said it was clogged.

"I was vomiting and had diarrhoea," Sabehgi said. "I just lay there in pain for hours."

Sabehgi's bail was posted in the mid-afternoon, but he said he was unable to leave his cell because of the pain. The cell door was closed, and he remained on the floor until 6pm, when an ambulance was called.

He was taken to Highland hospital – the same hospital where Olsen was originally taken after being hit in the head by a projectile apparently fired by police.

Sabehgi was due to undergo surgery on Friday afternoon to repair his spleen, which would involve using a clot or patch to prevent internal bleeding.

I wonder, if Sabehgi had accepted the suppository, he would now have grounds for suing for medical malpractice. In any case, being forced to lie in a cell in a pool of vomit and liquid feces ought to be considered a level of police abuse that is unthinkable. In fact, of course, it's not at all unthinkable. This is where we are now, in 2011, in the US.  Sabehgi's experience holds up a mirror of our society. There's nothing unfamiliar about the ugly sight that greets us in that mirror.

We all know that such treatment of a convicted felon in any prison in the US would not raise so much as an eyebrow.  (And do please remember that no country in the world incarcerates as big a proportion of its population as the US does.) Even for those who think that such conditions for convicted felons are as it should be (regular readers of this blog and readers of my Marq'ssan Cycle know that I myself do not), the problem for our polis-- if we can actually, at this point, claim to have one-- is that once it becomes ordinary to treat convicted felons in such a way, it then becomes ordinary to treat any detainees in the same way, without distinction. At any given time quite a few detainees in the US are people who have not been convicted in a court of law-- and a growing number of detainees are people (and children) who have not been charged with crimes at all. (Whole classes of people now have no "right" to the due process of the law.)

And then, of course, there is a perhaps more obvious point: in city after city, the response of civil authorities to dissent is to wield violence and detention against the dissenters. This, too, is routine. But ask yourself this: what does it mean that the response to any visible dissent (as opposed to that of the polite letters to the politicians who couldn't care less what their "constituents" since what really matters is pleasing the people who hold the purse strings [aka "the 1%]), dissent that might actually mean something, is repression by any and all means available? Can we speak honestly of "democracy" that cannot accommodate (much less respect) dissent?

I won't even go into the level of surveillance we live with in the US. Or the fact that the US intelligence establishment is bigger and more far-reaching than any of its people at the top even knows.  Or the fact that the US Supreme Court has in effect ruled that the US is a plutocracy in which political speech is to be treated as a commodity.

Perhaps the US is as not as terrible a police state as certain Middle-Eastern autocracies are, but surely we can agree that there can be degrees of being a police state, and that sadly, so sadly, we are if not there already, heading there fast.

Sentence of the day

Enright observes that we have become more cynical about legendary, overapposite last words, which may well have been invented or embellished by a ghostwriter, though, as he says, it is still nice to think that Andrew Bradford, an eighteenth-century Philadelphian newspaper publisher, did cry on his deathbed, "Oh Lord, forgive the errata!"--- Hermoine Lee, Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography

The Latest E-books from Aqueduct Press

I'm excited to announce Aqueduct Press is releasing a new batch of e-books. Our latest offerings are Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal, It Walks in Beauty: Selected Prose of Chandler Davis, ed. Josh Lukin, Gwyneth Jones's Imagination/Space, and both of my fiction collections-- Love's Body, Dancing in Time and Never At Home. They're available now on Aqueduct's site, and will be available soon from other venues selling our books.


The complete list of e-books now available--forty-three titles, so far!-- can be found on Aqueduct's site here (where they can be purchased) as well as on the page listed in the sidebar on this blog.

2011 Gulliver Travel Grant

SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES GULLIVER TRAVEL GRANT WINNER

SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION
PO Box 1693
Dubuque, IA 52004-1693

info@speculativeliterature.org - http://www.speculativeliterature.org/

For Immediate Release: Nov 1, 2011

The Speculative Literature Foundation is delighted to announce that
Ibi Zoboi is the winner of the 2011 Gulliver Travel Grant.

Zoboi will use the $800 grant to travel to Haiti and the Dominican
Republic to research her YA dystopian novel set in both countries. She
was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and had always loved the magical
aspects of the Haitian literary tradition. She has been published in
Crossed Genres, Haiti Noir, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, among
others.

The Travel Grant judges said of Zoboi's entry, "The sample story was
provocative and haunting, and stayed with us for weeks after reading
it. This, combined with the knowledgeable treatment of the subject and
the compelling project idea, made it a clear winner."

Also shortlisted were: Tiffani Angus, Lillian Cohen-Moore, Hunter
Liguore, Kirsty Logan, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Sandra McDonald, Kate
Milford, Trina Phillips, and Hilary Smith, for their unique and
thought-provoking submissions, which made the selection of the
eventual winner a difficult but enjoyable process.

----------------

PR Contact: Corie Ralston press@speculativeliterature.org

The Speculative Literature Foundation is a volunteer-run, non-profit
organization dedicated to promoting the interests of readers, writers,
editors and publishers in the speculative literature community.

"Speculative literature" is a catch-all term meant to inclusively span
the breadth of fantastic literature, encompassing literature ranging
from hard and soft science fiction to epic fantasy to ghost stories to
folk and fairy tales to slipstream to magical realism to modern
mythmaking -- any literature containing a fabulist or speculative
element.