"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.

"Have you ever wished you were queer?" (ASA 2011)

“Transforming Liberalism: African-American Fiction of the Postwar Period.”

(Third in a series of reports from the American Studies Association)

John Charles observed that for a long time, African American writers found a sticking point in such terms as The Negro Writer and Negro Literature: such terms were seen to intensify black writers’ cultural marginality and individual anxiety, and they chafed against the labels, especially after Native Son, fearing that white desire for The Negro Novel demanded reproducing tales of Negro subjection. Hurston in “What White Publishers Won’t Print” noted that the two acceptable images of The Negro were the banjo-picking darkie and the grumbling sharecropper; like Baldwin, she saw the obligation to protest as another form of imposition, leaving us “bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization,” to quote his Foucauldian insight on regulatory fictions and “sympathetic discipline.” Hence black authors such as Yerby, Motley, Petry, Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, and several others produced the novel of white life as a form of resistance. Except for Giovanni’s Room, these novels have tended to be ignored by critics. Hughes dismissed them as representing an “urge to whiteness”; Asante called them “decapitated texts.”

Charles pointed out how these authors revitalize the discourse of sympathy previously denied black authors and shift readers’ gaze from black suffering to white domestic crisis. They show how the ideals that underwrite white identity are damaging without reproducing black abjection; they assert black agency over shared themes of sympathy and privacy. Petry’s Country Place depicts a white resort town turned upside-down by a hurricane and invades white private lives, a significant thing, since in The Street blacks experience publicity as a violation and in A Country Place authorial privacy is protected, and the sole black character is spared degradation. The novel shows a white son suffering the deleterious effects of Mother Domination, as his mother, a suffering sick old woman, gradually realized that others have interiority and spends her last days imagining how other people feel. Her will enacts an impulse toward social justice by leaving her estate to the servants, all POC; the son, defending the will against the aghast in-laws, becomes capable of asserting himself after his mother’s death but elects not to perpetuate the tradition of white male domination: he relinquishes the property and with it the possessive investment in whiteness.

David in Giovanni’s Room goes in the other direction, choosing social death to perpetuate a hegemonic idea of white American manhood. And Yerby’s hero in The Foxes of Harrow recants white supremacy in favor of liberal nationalism, all the while perpetuating spectacular Yerbyan misogyny. It’s an intensely ambivalent novel, depicting a longing for the comfort of white supremacy while resenting its effects. In general, the white life novels resist the discursive figurations of white liberal racial discourse by allowing black authors to become the subject, rather than the object, of sympathy.

Mollie Godfrey began with Baldwin’s critique of the protest novel’s message that “black is a terrible color in which to be born.” Irving Howe’s piece elevating Wright over Ellison and Baldwin described the controversy as a debate by and about men: it’s a debate about how to have male agency under emasculating conditions. Ann Petry found a way out in the prospect of productive gender relations, especially in The Narrows.

The critique of objectification in protest literature goes back to the Harlem Renaissance; the debate continues through Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” and through Baldwin’s and Ellison’s critiques of Wright and Myrdal, arguing that the frameworks of liberalism, of sociology, and of Marxism were inadequate to do black American life justice. Wright dismissed Harlem Renaissance artists as sissies: it’s telling that he chided himself for having written a book that bankers’ daughters — not bankers themselves — would cry over. In Wright, agency becomes masculinity. In Baldwin too, there’s a slippage in the rhetoric from discussion of humanity to discussion of manhood. Baldwin sees Wright and Stowe as unjust because they emasculate. Ellison, Baldwin, and Wright are not in a conflict over agency but one about varying attempts to express black agency, not a fight about social determinism. And Petry addressed the problem in “The Novel as Social Criticism” and in The Narrows, which addresses the political responsibilities of the artist. But Howe ignored Petry [I wonder why!].

In The Narrows the Communist photographer flattens the historical and interpersonal complexities, figuring not Baldwin’s argument that protest art dehumanizes people, exactly, but that it humanizes certain people at the expense of others. The newspaper coverage of the interracial affair in the novel is fought as a battle between racist propaganda and sexist propaganda. All of these characters are complicit in each other’s oppression, as Linc says in the novel: “Me, executioner; you, executioner . . . Executioners all, hung from the sour apple tree.” He recognizes the similarities in each execution. Everyone seeks the agency that comes from taking someone else’s agency away. But Abby’s attempt to save Camillo, having recognized their similarities, shows the possibility, even in Linc, of identifying across race and class, and by extension also across gender.

The press in The Narrows reinforces stereotypes in the manner Baldwin decried protest art for doing, but the novel shows that racial and gender stereotypes are placeholders, not reflecting reality and not capable of containing people. The novel is not just about contrasts but about connections. Linc, whose position as a covert writer says something about the novel’s message concerning artists, remarks “When all candles be out, all cats be gray.” The Narrows is capable of advocating agency without advocating the dehumanization of others.

Adam Jernigan remarked that scholars who identify with the sensibilities of Baldwin’s essays frequently distance themselves from his fiction. Gates accuses Baldwin’s fiction of the “Manichean simplicity” that Baldwin found in Stowe and avers that Baldwin was himself afraid that his own criticisms applied to him. Howe offered a similar critique in “Black Boys and Native Sons” and accused Baldwin of promoting Cold War Liberal values. On the right, Albert Murray and others, contrarily, accept Baldwin’s take on the Protest Novel but accuse his fiction of shrillness, while, back on the left, Morris Dickstein and his ilk call Baldwin’s fiction to soft, wishful, and accommodating. Jernigan is not going to defend Baldwin but to discuss how both camps make a sacrificial object of Baldwin’s fiction in the face of Baldwin’s own fidelity to fiction and belief that fiction was what had the capacity to improve race relations.

Isn’t there, Jernigan asks, a certain countersentimentalism to be found in Baldwin, of the sort that Gates denied was there? Baldwin’s aesthetic is, after all, informed by his critique of liberalism, of tolerance, of white liberal views of the black liberatory-integrationist impulse, on the grounds that the liberal view didn’t recognize a) How much whites would have to change and b) How much black life was and had always been central to American society. Baldwin saw how the sanctity of self and home had been expanded in the sentimental novel’s pity and compassion for vulnerable others. He does not post an autonomous or liberal subject; he argued that our own liberation came through, not love, but through the eternal heterogeneity of the self.

In Another Country, the nonsanctity of the self would be taken as the default condition of the human subject. In enacting the risks that go with making oneself available to another, the novel goes directly from the inconclusive scene in which Rufus accuses Leona of adultery to a scene with a very different tenor, moving from the metapragmatic frames of performative force of Rufus and Leona’s interactions to the restrained and focused account of Rufus and Vivaldo’s encounter. In contrast with the earlier confrontation, Baldwin frames the men’s dialogue with speech verbs that have minimum pragmatic value and keeps the account of physical movement small and terse, denying us the cues that tell us what they’re up to and leaving a lot of work to the reader. This scene, then, refutes Gates’s claim that Baldwin always tells and doesn’t show; in fact, Baldwin is able to reopen the question of how characters might feel in the present. These features are what underlay Podhoretz’s defense of the novel and its “banality,” or its “moral” neutrality and manifest Baldwin’s attempt at an aesthetic that could move us beyond the sentimental/moral culture. He is aware that the moral heat Americans bring to such issues is deleterious and hopes he could help to usher in another country, one less preoccupied with guilt and sin.

Tom Perrin, who is currently working on a project about the middlebrow in Hemingway, Eliot, and Highsmith, asks whether the end of The Street is a cry of despair or a call to action. The 1940s was the era of the Social Problem Novel, a novel trying to do progressive politics and wondering under what conditions such a politics might be possible. The middlebrow social novel was criticized from the left and the right: books such as Strange Fruit, Gentlemen’s Agreement, The Harder They Fall, and, later, To Kill a Mockingbird were, to use Sedgwick’s formulation, kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic. Sianne Ngai has written of the novel’s preoccupation with its powerlessness and its consequent ability to theorize powerlessness. To the authors of the “problem novel,” the central problem was not material inequality but prejudice: hence, while the right complains of such a book that it is “a sermon, not a story,” the left complains of its liberalism.

Petry called The Street a problem novel. It’s unapologetically aimed at mainstream readers, it has a swift-moving plot with an emphasis on realism, and, like other middlebrow literature, it is very self-conscious about language and storytelling. Lutie has not been an aspiring writer, so her question at the end, “What possible good has it done to teach people like me to write?” is Petry’s own: presumably, the novel itself is her answer. For decades, The Street has been seen as a naturalistic and futilitarian story; its fans have praised it as an Aristotelian tragedy, a genre which purges spectators of disquiet rather than moving them to action. But more recent critics see in it a critique of determinism. Petry had political aspirations for the novel, believing that all good art is propaganda. Nonetheless, The Street contains a lot about the powerlessness of books and a general tendency toward pessimism about change and agency. Petry’s relationship with the socialist press and the left in general was ambivalent: perhaps the fatalism is part of the novel’s point. But Macklin saw The Street as a Gothic novel calling for government intervention against real urban horrors. Petry’s use of violence, most intensely in Lutie’s vision of all her enemies, individual and institutional, as she commits the murder, juxtaposes the emotional power of the scene over and over with Petry’s theory of society: fiction gives such theories emotional force as it responds to the world with propaganda.

Lawrence Jackson gave a sixteen-minute response/series of questions to the panelists, in the middle of which I had to step out and hit the Men’s Room. When I left, he was saying that The Street was the most heavily didactic of the 1940s protest novels; when I returned, he was saying “Just like Franzen, Chester Himes, Milton Klonsky, and the rest of them.”

John Charles replied to whatever Jackson had said in my absence, that the white life novels help us appreciate how keenly aware black writers were of the racial structure of the liberal public sphere. White writers were unaware of how their whiteness was structuring their access to the debate. The idea of black domestic pathology was used to dismiss black authors as voices that could speak of something other than their own abjection: hence black authors showed they could say other things to and about whites than “stop hurting me.” Yerby was assigned the greatest amount of indexical significance, and held up as proof of the progress of The Race, because he could talk about the Old South just like white folks.

Godfrey has been struggling with how to address the ways in which Baldwin’s fiction is more complicated on gender than Ellison’s. Baldwin’s essays seem to be more masculinist than Go Tell It on the Mountain. Another Country, which came out simultaneously with the Howe/Ellison debate, is all about the process of identification, and there’s more skepticism than in The Narrows about interracial identification. Lawrence Jackson sees Vivaldo as having failed Rufus. Ida demands that Rufus take on some of the consequences of history.

Adam Jernigan: “I agree with everything that’s been said.” Vivaldo fails Rufus, Baldwin presents Vivaldo’s relationship with Ida as contradictory. Another Country is very interested in critiquing white liberalism: Vivaldo is great at projecting the troublesome aspects of himself onto black life; ultimately it’s from blues singers that he learns acceptance of the body. It’s unclear whether Ida opens herself to Vivaldo, as she remains completely opaque to readers.

Petry is also ambivalent about domesticity: in her author bio for Tituba of Salem Village, she wrote, “Ann Petry lives in a little white house with a little white picket fence in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.” Perrin sees middlebrow fiction constructing itself at midcentury via an anxiety of influence vis-à-vis Modernism: it disavows Modernism while itself writing self-consciously about language and metadiscourse. Petry’s relationship with the American Negro Theatre involved something like the middlebrowing of Brecht, importing Leftist ideas about shock without going full Verfremdungs.

Eric Sundquist has analyzed how antiracist novels crossed over into the mainstream, through commentators talking about antiracism and anti-Semitism in the same breath, as in Diana Trilling’s review of Strange Fruit for The Nation, which invoked Laura Z. Hobson, or the myth that Du Bois had reviewed Petry. A question from the audience about the paperback revolution cited Dwight MacDonald’s anxieties over the loss of distinction and remarked that what you lose in cultural capital, while what you gain is a disruption of hierarchy. Baldwin’s anxiety about Another Country’s being published by a paperback book company is well-documented. Perrin pointed out that you couldn’t order specific mass market paperbacks: you called Bantam and ordered in bulk, and you put whatever they sent you on your racks. The history of protest fiction, he noted, is very much the history of the middlebrow.

The World Fantasy Award

Nnedi Okorafor and Karen Joy Fowler are among the winners of this year's World Fantasy Awards. Yay!! Congratulations Nnedi and Karen! And congratulations, also, to Alisa Krasnostein, the publisher of Twelfth Planet Press in Australia, for her Special Award Presentation.

Here's the full slate of winners:

Novel: Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death
Novella: Elizabeth Hand, "The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" (Stories: All-New Tales)
Short Story: Joyce Carol Oates, "Fossil-Figures" (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me" (Penguin), edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith
Collection: "What I Didn't See and Other Stories" by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award-Professional: Marc Gascoigne, for Angry Robot
Special Award-Non-professional: Alisa Krasnostein, for Twelfth Planet Press

Jeff VanderMeer reports here, for Omnivoracious.

How could I possibly take this personally???

"A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star." So begins Glen Duncan's New York Times review of Colson Whitehead's Zone One.

Until I read that sentence, I'd thought myself immune to the vitriol that warriors in the stultified Genre War routinely fling at one another. But this opening struck me like a shower of acid in the face. And now I'm a little surprised at myself, for actually having taken it personally-- and surprised that my surprise isn't enough to make me go on reading the rest of the review.

Eleven Pages of Anxiety (ASA 2011)

Panel: “Black Psychoanalysis in the 1950s”

Panel Chair Gwen Bergner explained that scholars have used African American literature and theory to revise psychoanalysis as much as the reverse. Black writers have actively engaged with psychoanalytic thought throughout its history, and in keeping with the conference’s themes, we are going to discuss imagination, transformation, and reparation in black uses of psychoanalysis. Bergner is proud to have been a reviewer for the book manuscripts of all three panelists. She credited Dorothy Stringer with having assembled the panel. Badia Sahar Ahad began by citing the historical objectification of the black female body, which has been seen as a locus of “primitive sexuality” and of what’s a pathological subjectivity by mainstream standards. One medium through which African American women challenged the idea that they were sexually loose and morally bankrupt was the Mental Hygiene movement. Working-class women were attracted to normative ideals in this time, when there were few spaces left for black women to inhabit deviant desires. The periodical literature, study of which was inaugurated by Frances Smith Foster in her work on the importance of popular media, manifests the discourse of the everyday in such genres as the advice column, where psychoanalytic ideas got filtered to the public. Popular media’s banal engagements of these ideas prescribed ways for African American women to be both proper feminine and desiring sexual subjects.

The magazine Tan Confessions, established late in 1950, worked to contain a space for black female sexuality. In its pages, black women were active participants in the culture of therapy. The expression of interiority and intimacy in general for black people has been fraught, and the contradictions therein are evident in Tan Confessions. The magazine contained homemaking coverage alongside steamy expositions of illicit, bizarre, and absurd adventures and alternative sexualities, enacting a quasi-religious impulse to confess. The advice column often employs the language of psychoanalysis, using terms like “inferiority complex” or, worse, “superiority complex,” a problem that damaged black women’s capacity to submit to their husbands. And the magazine was full of stories of transgressive desire.

The term “mental hygiene” was originated in 1898 to name the art of preserving the mind against deleterious influences, through discipline of the intellect and government of the passions. But Tan Confessions shows an ambivalent relationship to the mode of mental hygiene. The magazine, as its readers’ responses emphasizes, makes accessible some alternative narratives previously rendered invisible. Readers sent letters condemning the magazine for having printed “Strange Love,” a tale of a married woman’s affair with a Lesbian. The story gushes with praise for its Lesbian character’s beauty and depicts the natural growth of same-sex desire: the heroine regrets having committed adultery, but the gay sexual attraction is never disavowed. Other stories manifest important women’s issues such as discontent with domestic life and sexuality.

The stories are written to educate women on how to address domestic and sexual dilemmas. In “Do Good Husbands Make Unhappy Wives?” the heroine learns not to be a domineering wife, as psychological texts teach her to come to terms with her “superiority complex.” Her story speaks to the production of therapeutic cultures. The confession periodical appears as a communal vehicle for self-help, wherein shape an engagement with mental hygiene outside the usual institutions of psychoanalysis. The black female subject is presented as an architect of therapeutic communities, fostering intraracial dialogue about black issues. But the punishment for deviance is psychosis. The stories frame sexual and social lives in mid-century psychoanalytic terms, but black women are trying to create subjectivities that ultimately run counter to mental hygienic and psychoanalytic norms

Dorothy Stringer is studying Richard Wright’s post-exilic work. Citing Wright’s vow after Uncle Tom’s Children to write a book so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears, she noted that psychology is the whole theme of “How Bigger Was Born” and that Wright is indebted to Freud’s “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” as well as his own barely-manageable affective flux, evident in his remark about an “act of concentration, of trying to hold within one’s center of attention all of that bewildering array of facts which science, politics, experience, memory, and imagination were urging upon me. And then, while writing, a new and thrilling relationship would spring up under the drive of emotion, coalescing and telescoping alien facts into a known and felt truth."

Wright was very very widely read in psychoanalysis (but not in Lacan). Inventing and controlling and transmitting affect is what writing is for him: it’s how he integrates an analytics of race as bodily reality. Affect, we know from Laplanche and Pontalis, is a diagnostic object which, like physical pain, can’t be repressed. And it lacks a necessary relation to language.Wright was uninterested in mapping sociocultural dynamics. How psychological necessities affect and change the political world. He sought to describe a racialized history of affect. What holds his post-1947 work, and especially the works of his very prolific time after 1951, together? The connection between affect and modernity: what he called “psychological reactions.” He attributed oppression to specific affects, as in his “Never have so few hated and feared so many.”

Savage Holiday was not reviewed at all in the U.S. It lacks any of Wright’s usual topics. In this text, racism shapes subjectivity in the absence of people of color. The “savage” seems initially to be just a figure of speech; but when Erskine Fowler thinks of a “savage,” he has Gothic feelings that are manifested in violent acts. The “primitive” is not primarily used to describe a racist fantasy of another but Fowler himself. Fowler is an insurance executive, in a sense experiencing the disordered affect of the professional-managerial class that Wylie, Mills, Riesman, and others addressed in 1950s discourse. But Wright refuses to consider whiteness therein as neutral or self-constituting. Passages such as “He stripped off his pajamas and loomed naked, his chest covered with a matting of black hair, his genitals all but obscured by a dark forest, his legs rendered spiderlike by their hirsute coating. Nude, Erskine looked anything but pious or Christian” compare Fowler to various grotesque racist fantasy-figures. The filmic and pulp clichés that are central to Wright’s work are generally ignored by Mills and other social commentators. In Native Son, movie monsters and the like are a commentary on Du Boisian double consciousness; in Savage Holiday the reformist critique is absent: the conflict is one of affect versus discourse, primitive versus civilized — and ultimately, Fowler has to turn himself in, because the discourse cannot see him as a criminal.

The crisis in Savage Holiday is a Poesque, cosmic crisis. After the door closes behind Fowler, on that bad morning that leads to his crime, “A fine film of sweat broke out over the skin of his face. Again he grasped the doorknob and strained at it, hoping that his sheer passion for modesty would somehow twist those cold bolts of steel, but the door held and he knew that steel was steel and would not bend. There was no doubt about it; he was locked out, locked out naked in the hallway and at any second one of his neighbors’ doors would open and someone would walk out and find him . . . They’d scream, maybe, if they were women. Good God, what could he do? His face was wet with sweat now.

“He tensed as the faint sound of the elevator door opening downstairs came to him, echoing hollowly up the elevator shaft. Somebody was coming up! Maybe to this floor! He glared about in the sun-flooded hallway, searching for nooks and crannies in which to hide, clutching awkwardly his bundle of Sunday papers. His hairy body, as he glanced down at it, seemed huge and repulsive, like that of a giant; but, when he looked off, his body felt puny, shriveled, like that of a dwarf. And the hallway in which he stood was white, smooth, modern; it held no Gothic recesses, no Victorian curves, no Byzantine incrustations in, or behind which, he could hide.

The elevator was coming up . . . He felt that he was in the spell of a dream; he wanted to shake his head, blink his eyes and rid himself of this nightmare. But he remained hairy, nude, trembling in the morning sun. If that was Mrs. Brownell coming up, she might scream; she’d surely complain, maybe to the police . . . He felt dizzy and his vision blurred.” And it goes on like that for eleven pages of anxiety, the naked-in-public nightmare from which there’s no waking up.

Fowler’s unconscious complicity in his own exposure — he’s pretty clearly aware of the risk he takes stepping out of his door with that breeze blowing — is consistent with the failure of sexual repression. But Wright encourages skepticism of psychoanalysis. His epigraphs group the anthropological Freud, with his totems and fetishes, alongside other unreliable cosmologies. The quote from Job, on the other hand, gives the Bible a special place. The Bible is the working-class text par excellence (recall Wright’s grandmother’s attitude toward it) and constitutes all of Fowler’s library. Wright’s use of Job inverts and parodies the racial history of primitivism: the savage is actually Job, God’s good man. Ultimately, Wright is a very bad Freudian: he’s willing to use psychoanalytic texts in his unresolved bricolage, but there’s no Master Text in Savage Holiday or elsewhere, no key to What It Means. Just the use of distinct, granular units of affect.

Mikko Tuhkanen spoke of his admiration for Leo Bersani and introduced the topic of “James Baldwin and Fascination.” Evidently Bersani’s and Laplanche’s work on how the Enigmatic Signifier calls the subject into desire is relevant to a Baldwinian ethics of otherness. For Baldwin, Protest Novels fail in the task of Art — in dealing with the complexity to which he gives the Nietzschean name “reality.” Like Nietzsche, he insists on the ethical necessity of undoing and being undone. Protest Novels strengthen the categories whose violence they delineate. But accepting the terms of the argument cannot extricate us from the deadly, timeless (and Hegelian) battle of the master and the slave.

Randall Kenan has written on “the strange fascination” Uncle Tom’s Cabin held for the young Baldwin as an unethical relation. Kipling and Proust show us that fascination immobilizes. Lacan and the étade de miroir demonstrate the fascination of the Imaginary, the simultaneous identification with and alienation from one’s gestalt, the semblable. Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves discusses this murderous fascination with the Other and the subject’s libidinal attachment to the Other in a master/slave dialectic: we have also seen recent analyses of Wright in those terms. Go Tell It on the Mountain addresses immobilization in dialectical violence: Elizabeth’s doomed affair with Richard, her fascination with the white cop’s weapons. In what Baldwin calls the “rage in the blood,” the fascinated gaze gets caught by the sight of the Other’s violence and, as in Kipling and elsewhere, it is the fascinated party who gets devoured. For Baldwin, protest artists remain damagingly beholden to their Others, in the thesis/antithesis confrontation he calls “thrust and counterthrust.”

Baldwin narrates his departure from the U.S. as a breaking of the thrall of violent fascination. The mirror scene in “Notes of a Native Son” involves the breaking of the hold of the specular image, of the deadly allure of the Imaginary Other. But Baldwin retains a hunger to unearth racist fantasies — he is fascinated by the consciousness of Bull Connor — and in 1947 writes “the root of our trouble is between their legs.” Neither Baldwin nor psychoanalysis suggests what we may find beyond the dialectic. The dreaming narcissist, the nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus is trying to awake, are mesmerized states which Baldwin wants us to snap out of. In the diasporic imagination, Modernity often figures as a state of involvement with monstrosities. Vivaldo’s awakening is gained at the expense of Ida’s confinement. Baldwin’s breaking of the spell should constitute reality’s becoming: he prefigures the argument for narcissism in Bersani’s rereading of Laplanche.

An audience member asked about the diagnosis offered by “Going to Meet the Man” and what Baldwin offers as the consequences of that revelation — the call to an awakening at the end. Mikko said that’s one of the more Wrightian of Baldwin’s texts, whose pessimism leaves no easy way to break the dialectic. But it also suggests that what Baldwin rejects is ego-psychology and not psychoanalysis itself. An auditor suggested that if there’s a Master Text in the post-exilic Wright it’s Enlightenment thought, and Stringer acknowledged that in Black Power, for example, he’s got whole chapters on how The West Is Superior. Q: Savage Holiday is a book that makes you do certain kinds of ham-fisted psychoanalytic readings. Stringer: And it makes you feel dirty.

An audience member suggested the message that white Westerners are afraid of the moral chaos that’s let loose by Enlightenment thinking and that the black American is better-equipped to deal with Enlightenment thought. Stringer objected, But there are so many references to High Romantic, fairytale, magical texts, jokes about Blake — the whole thing is psychotic. The obsessive method is more like a dialectic that’s become toxic than like a dialectic that’s achieved or achievable. The book that Wright wanted his post-exilic reputation to rest on was probably The Long Dream. Mikko suggested that, as we might infer from Max’s speech, Wright believes in the Light of Reason. And what interests Wright is that psychoanalysis is the undoing of Reason. Descartes and Husserl talk about reason as awakening, while Freud tells Wright that we’re not sure when we’re awake and we’re not sure what the awakening entails. The “I” of Black Power is designed as an untrustworthy narrator.

An audience member asked, What does your work with these writers lead you to think about the utility of psychoanalysis now? Stringer offered a forceful answer that made me wonder how people like her manage to speak so quickly and intelligently while people like me hesitate and stammer and couldn’t answer a question in a complete sentence even under threat of punishment. Something like, “Psychoanalysis has fallen into disrepute in the clinic and in the academy, but its ghosts are everywhere; and its scraps are everywhere: it’s come into bits and the bits have spread out; it’s now something that’s being dismembered and repurposed. So we’re at a point where concerns about its status and authority can be thrown out . . . I know that if I’m going to speak about desire in mid-century black literature, I’m going to use it, and I don’t care about its reputation in that context."

Ahad, as I was trying to take down Stringer’s forceful answer, replied to an audience question by talking of the Negro Projects in the Social Hygiene movement of the 1930s and of the fact that Wright and Ellison along with Wertham started a Mental Hygiene Clinic in Harlem in 1946 and we can read the Case Studies of the many women who went there to be cured of their homosexual desires: there are wonderful remarks therein, such as that of one woman who said, “Maybe my life is just revolutionary.” In founding Tan Confessions, John Johnson was very interested in the politics of black respectability. But many letters to the editor affirmed the deviant behaviors that were included in the magazine as cautionary tales. The behaviors described can become destigmatized through repetition and people seemed relieved by the existence of these stories. Johnson ultimately couldn't take it: he felt guilty having a confession magazine. After a couple of years, the magazine changed to Tan, and by the time it folded in 1955, it was a domesticity magazine.

Archaeology of the Sissy (ASA 2011)

American Studies Association, 20 October 2011. Harry Thomas's talk on a panel entitled "Violent Transformations: Imagining the Gendered Body."

Harry Thomas began his talk, “Amplifying the Paradox: Effeminacy in the Age of AIDS,” with a discussion of how the sissy has been alternately a figure of fascination and horror in our culture. The creation of the Boy Scouts was motivated by sissiphobia, as was the 2008 Lawrence King murder; on the other hand, Liberace was the most successful entertainer of the 1960s, and he’s had many effeminate superstar successors. Now, the term for hybrid bodies that both horrify and fascinate is, of course, “the grotesque.” And the paper will address both the threatening grotesque and the fascinating grotesque.

The sissy as threatening grotesque is featured in Randy Shilts’s nonfiction novel And the Band Played On, in the form of one Gatean Dugas, the alleged “AIDS Patient Zero” who, we are told, deliberately went about spreading HIV in various cities in the Seventies and early Eighties, about whom Shilts makes monstrous claims that invoke misogynist stereotypes. While Douglas Crimp and others have debunked the Dugas myth and discredited the very idea of an AIDS Patient Zero, celebration of Shilts persists. Shilts’s portrait of Dugas incorporates class and gender stereotypes, depicting a bitchy swell from the lower orders (even sissy memoirs are upward-mobility tales) with vindictive/emulative urges toward his betters and a monstrous vanity. In Shilts’s melodrama, Dugas is the victim of bullying whose suffering leads to a need for recognition. Shilts must continually emphasize Dugas’s effeminacy, lest his promiscuity look like a studly virtue. Although Shilts’s book is anti-homophobic, it tends toward the femmephobic and sex-negative. The confrontation outside the American Boy store between Dugas and a butch gay man who tells him to leave and stop infecting people suggests that healthy, all-American masculine gay men can restore the community.

Now, the polarities are reversed in Angels in America: the tough pro-American macho gay is Roy Cohn (and to some extent Joe, who is conspicuously absent from the community — “the liberal Edenic America” — that forms at the end of the play). Kushner’s femmes, far from being villainous, have special and sometimes superhuman abilities. Belize says of Roy Cohn, “A queen can forgive her vanquished foe” and is given the moral triumph of persuading Louis to say Kaddish for the villain: his compassion stands out in the Reagan-era U.S. And of course, Prior’s heroism takes place on an even grander scale. Kushner’s queens are heroes and prophets, the bandagers of wounds and the redeemers of the American Dream. Belize says to Roy Cohn, “I’m your negation.” So effeminate men in Angels in America are not fully-realized characters either. Must effeminate men be superhuman in order to be sympathetic? Thomas ended his talk with an illustrative quote from Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia:

I read in Herve Guilbert's book that Foucault died, not knowing exactly what had hit him. His lover found his handcuffs and whips and couches full of leftover manuscripts on such trifles as the history of socialism. Charles Ludlum was the most profound loss. America doesn't even know what she's missing . . . But what do we do with all the mediocrities who never created anything worth remembering and never would have even if they had lived to be eighty-five? It drives me crazy how quickly the great ones get canonized. Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss. Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living?

I was struck by how Thomas’s description of Dugas’s character resembled Tom Ripley and how Shilts’s invention of Dugas resembled the fictional character of “Michel Foucault” that James Miller presented in The Passion of Michel Foucault, and how both recalled earlier fantasies of effeminate purveyors of infection, such as Jews. Also I noted that Belize is a bit too much of a Magical Negro. In the Q&A, I asked for a genealogy of American sissiphobia — did it start around Teddy Roosevelt? Thomas was sympathetic to Michael Kimmel’s claim that we have to go back at least to Andrew Jackson’s reinvention of elite American Manhood. But the age of TR and the Boy Scouts was certainly a high water mark for these kinds of anxieties.

When less is more

Freud got some things right. As, for instance, here, when he's talking about Shakespeare's artful characterization (of Richard in Richard III):

It is, however, a subtle economy of art in the poet that he does not permit his hero to give open and complete expression to all his secret motives. By this means he obliges us to supplement them; he engages our intellectual activity, diverts it from critical reflection and keeps us firmly identified with his hero. A bungled in his place would give conscious expression to all that he wishes to reveal to us, and would then find himself confronted by our cool untrammeled intelligence, which would preclude any deepening of the illusion.

Fiona Lehn's The Last Letter

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the release of The Last Letter, a novella by Fiona Lehn, the latest volume in our Conversation Pieces series.  It's a fascinating tale. On Island SG7, one voracious parasite endangers a protected forest and a small community. But the biologist hired to bring the place into balance is already compromised—by a too-narrow view of her duties, and—increasingly—by a love she cannot ignore.

This is the love letter of Peta Sutton, who struggles to perceive the full complexities of her place in a foreign ecosystem and an extramarital relationship. As the island roils and the parasites seem to drag people's worst fears into being, Peta struggles to forge a peace at the heart of fears that threaten to consume everything.

Here's a taste:

Nearly 25 years ago, in the northwestern region of the New World, on Island SG7, in the month of May, I spoke with you for the first time. I had called a general meeting. Such meetings usually drew 200 people or less and so were held in the pub, where they comfortably adopted the tone of a family squabble. My meeting, however, took place in the school gymnasium at the northern tip of the island, to accommodate the nearly 2500 island inhabitants who attended. They sat in the bleachers that lined the sides of the room. You stood alone against the far wall by the exit and said nothing, watching the proceedings as if observation were your business. In the middle of the gym floor, I clung to the sides of the podium with sweaty palms, trying to emanate an authoritative calm.

“Thank you all for coming,” I said. “This community obviously cares about its forest system.”

“You're damned right we do!” A man's voice shot out from the crowd and echoed about the gym, followed by righteous voices of agreement.

“I've spent the past week in the forest, as you know,” I said, “and I want to share with you what I've learned.”

“We already know—the worms are taking over the entire island!”

More shouts of assent.

“If you would please refrain from commenting until I've finished,” I said, “We'll have time for everyone to share their views.” The crowd quietened. “The web worms and their webs are unsightly,” I said, “but they have done and will do no permanent damage to the forest. This Spring, the web worms will continue to develop through six phases, called instars—during which they will grow and molt, or, shed their skins—until late June when they coccoon. I will destroy any cocoons near ground level and trap moths in early July. In the months that follow, I will destroy all accessible egg masses. This process will significantly reduce the web worm population and give the forest a chance to renew itself. That is the first step to restoring balance to the island's forest system. As well, I will develop a long-term eco-balancing strategy. Until the forest regains balance, it may look strange to you, but I need you to be patient and let me do my job.”

The islanders, a mix of superstitious island-borns and educated, retired imports from the mainland cities, were accustomed to autonomy and immediacy. They wanted predators shipped in, they wanted bug bombs and pesticides. I reminded them that their overuse of pesticides over the past decade was one of the things that had gotten them into this mess in the first place, killing off beneficial insects and losing their web worm predators in the process.

“Then spray the worms,” someone shouted. “If the other organisms or creatures are gone, then we have nothing to lose anymore. Spray everything!”

“Spray them with what?” I said. “After completing my preliminary tests, I can tell you that the web worms have developed a resistance to insecticides, viruses, and funghi. Even the parasites they host have no significant effect upon them. You have bred some very resilient web worms here. So we must control them another way. But this will take more than a season, so again I ask for your patience—”

“We've waited long enough already. Those worms have devoured half the forest.”

“What will they eat when they run out of trees?”

“Us?”

“Our homes?”

***

Fiona Lehn is a new voice in feminist science fiction, and it's my pleasure to do what I can to make her better known in our field. Her only publication to date is a novella in The Writers of the Future series. Fiona grew up in Stockton California and took a BA in Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz but now lives as a Canadian citizen in Vancouver, British Columbia. Besides writing fiction, Fiona is also a musician. From 1993 to 2006, she co-produced several CDs of her original songs and performed across the U.S. Of particular interest for this blog's habituees is that from 2007 to 2011, she served on the editorial collective of Room, Canada's oldest feminist literary magazine.

You can purchase The Last Letter here.

Reading for a Friday

Today is Ursula Le Le Guin's birthday. Happy birthday, Ursula!

---It's therefore fitting that today's first link is to a description by Ryan Britt of a panel discussion, at the Center for Fiction, on the influence Ursula K. Le Guin has had on the sf/f field. The panel was moderated by David Hartwell and included N.k. Jemison, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Kushner, and John Wray. I was particularly interested to read...

In terms of her influence on the panel’s writing specifically, N.K Jemisin noted that Le Guin made a big impact on rediscovering her love of short stories. Jemisin cited “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a major revelation as the story caused so much “pain, because it’s intended to be a painful story.” Jemisin previously felt she didn’t need nor understand the medium of short fiction, but after some prodding from peers and reading the short fiction of Le Guin, she thinks totally differently.

...because it reminded me of how important Le Guin's short ficton was for me in the 1980s and how for a long while I firmly believed her short fiction superior to her novels. Eventually I decided, perhaps because the generally shared assumption that novels matter more than short fiction began to insidiously erode my conviction that the best short fiction is as powerful and affecting as the best novels, that perhaps I might be wrong. (Not that I'm not used to being alone in my critical judgments...)

---This is a bit old in internet terms, but in case you missed it: Vandana Singh's most recent column for Strange Horizons continues with the second part of her series on "Science, Emotions, and Culture."

Spread/Art Culture has a photo essay by Kisa Lala, "Visions of a Treeless World," that ranges from the Vikings' slash and burn razing of forests to Easter Island to current day Manhattan, offering striking art work along the way.

--In her essay The Balm of Sisterly Consolation: Thoughts on Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, Abigail Nussbaum wrestles with Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho and finds the young Jane Austen reacting against the labeling problem women writers face now as well as then. Nussbaum notes:

It's a question that crops up again and again, whenever art by, for, or about women is discussed. You see it whenever chick-lit--the term, the publishing category, and the question of who gets classed into it--is discussed, and especially when an author of literary fiction--usually a female one--comments disparagingly on it. These discussions, if they acknowledge that chick-lit is rooted in some deeply problematic assumptions (and that it is equally problematic that women writing about the domestic, such as Austen herself, are assumed to be writing chick-lit, or at least less worthy work than male writers who write about it), will usually fail to admit that the perception of chick-lit as frivolous and shallow is rooted in misogyny, and vice versa. During the discussion of the dwindling ranks of women writing SF, there were several surprisingly negative responses from female bloggers, which were partially explained by their argument that women haven't been driven out of SF but have left it for fantasy and paranormal romance, and that the prioritization of SF is just the flipside of the tendency to discount these genres. But all is not well even within those fields: witness, on the one hand, Stina Leicht complaining about the expectation that a female fantasy writer must be writing paranormal romance, and on the other hand, M.K. Hobson's creation of a moniker for a female-oriented subset of steampunk which she dubs "bustlepunk." And then there's the fact that what is meant by literature for women is often literature for white, middle class, heterosexual, cisnormal women, as discussed in the comments to Kyra Smith's review of a romance novel at Ferretbrain.

---Over at the Nation, Ari Berman weighs in with How the Austerity Class Rules Washington:

In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.

The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Berman names some names and takes notes of the deep pockets backing "these very serious people."

---A New Scientist article by Andy Coghln and Debora MacKenzie reports that

An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The image the article provides of interlocking ownerships is awesome. 1318 corporations make up the "core," but a "super-entity" of 147 owned 40% of the total wealth in the network.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Fascinating stuff. The study is to be published in PloS One.