I’ve been stressing the way that we need to see writing as work, focusing as much on the time you spend doing it or the amount of it as opposed to just the quality of it or the degree of “inspiration” you might feel. But even seeing writing as “work” can be an overly simplified way of seeing it, since what is also important is the way we understand what this work entails.
Here’s a great memorial of Prince from a former publicist, where the singer challenges him about what’s his job?”:
“Prince’s Former Publicist: Everything I Needed to Know I learned From Prince”
And here’s a video to “Let’s Work” from the Controversy album
On p. 77 of We Gon’ Be Alright, Jeff Chang mentions Parliament’s Chocolate City, George Clinton’s ode to Washington DC, a city that was becoming increasing black, as opposed to the “vanilla suburbs” he mentions in the lyrics. Clinton was celebrating a city that he saw revitalized through the new shifting demographics. Rather than seeing “white flight” as something that hollowed out DC’s artistic life, he imagines it as a place where a new kind of art would flourish.
You can watch it here:
“To each his reach
And if I don't cop, it ain't mine to have
But I'll be reachin' for ya
Cause I love ya, CC
Right on”
We talked a little about the #OscarsSoWhite section in Jeff Chang’s book and the importance of representation. (This was in the chapter “The Odds: On Cultural Equity). Chang here is discussing another kind of activism, what he calls twitter activism and how it can be effective in bringing attention to matters but also, even in its brevity, of revealing the complexity of issues that might seem simple on the surface. Even if protest deepens the conversation or clarifies the language or just simply connects people, then it has value.
How ultimately effective the hashtag campaign was in terms of actually changing behavior in the larger institutions can be debated. I mentioned in class that the Academy had recently introduced rules that were geared towards increasing diversity in the nominating process. Here’s an article from The New York Times about these changes. They seem like little more than a white-flesh-toned band-aid to be honest. But how do we we gauge change?
We’ll talk and write more about “cultural capital” and “cultural equity.” Have any of you watched Lovecraft Country?
In recent days, the story of Jessica Krug has rocked the academic and activist worlds. Krug is an Associate Professor of History at George Washington University (at least for the moment), where she specializes in African and Carribean histories. For years, she passed herself off as a woman of color, variously as African or Latina. The other day she posted a “confession” that she was really a white woman from Kansas who has been faking it all these years and even saying she should be “cancelled”. I won’t post to her confession, since the consensus seems to be that the only reason she offered it is that she was about to be revealed by others in her department who became suspicious and did some digging.
I will post a couple of responses from people that can give you a sense of what she did and what it means to the communities of color that she claimed to be speaking and writing for. It seems worse in many ways than the Rachel Dolezal scandal from a few years back, or maybe just more brazen.
This piece by LD Burnett from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History is quite good, as are the numerous accounts from people who actually knew her or engaged with her online.
Krug’s duplicity was at the expense not just of Black or Latino/a voices, but at the expense of the platforms and jobs and book contracts and grants that she took from them by trading on her “identity” and vehemently maintaining it. Reading through all the accounts (and twitter here is a great source for much of this) it’s hard not to see what she did as a kind of violence,.
This week, we’re starting Jeff Chang’s book We Gon’ Be Alright and he can help us navigate some pretty tricky conversations around race and identity, help that we all need in different ways no doubt. But even as we are writing about and “reclaiming” our own identities (as I say on the syllabus), it’s worth noting that identities are not something we pull out of thin air.
Professor of Anthropology David Graeber passed away unexpectedly this past Wednesday. If you don’t know the name, you should. He was active in the Occupy movement (which sometimes seems a lifetime ago) and wrote about “debt” and what he called “bullshit jobs.”
Here’s his obituary from the NYT and a series of testimonials from The New York Review of Books.
The art in the NYRB column is by Molly Crabapple, another important artist/activist/writer, whom you should also know
I’m in the middle of writing a review of 4 recent books on Prince for a popular music and culture journal. this even as I’m trying to get back into the academic grind by completing an article on a Swiss travel writer that I started like 3 years ago…. The books are all really good, each in their own way. I’m still trying to nail down a theme, figure out my critical lens etc. but mostly am just having fun with this stuff.
One of the authors mentions a book that I’d heard about but never read, Sign ‘O’ The Times by Michaelangelo Matos. It was written in 2004, so is outside the scope of my roundup. Reading the book is the closest I’ve yet come to recapturing the experience of what listening to that album was like. He has some good takes on the 60s nostalgia that permeated the 80s, and it’s in that context that he “reads” SoTT. But he just writes so damn well.
Went to the Living Inside Sanctuary Artist Talk with Cinthya Santos Briones the other night at the Green-Wood cemetery. Briones discussed her photographs of undocumented people living in sanctuary and their families and the difficult decisions made in choosing to represent these people in the first place.
Sarah Gozalo from New Sanctuary Coalition led things off. She talked about last year's suitcase solidarity march, where people were asked to imagine what they would pack in the single suitcase of a loved one that ICE allows deportees. (For example, I would have to imagine what I would pack for Johanna or Lucy -- one suitcase). Sarah was particularly defiant in recounting this action, in light of the recent reports that ICE has been monitoring NSC's actions and accompaniments much more closely than anyone was aware (as well as other immigrant rights groups).
Briones talked about the situations that these people were living in, the different kinds of support that different communities were providing, and how the concept of "sanctuary" (despite how nice the word sounds) is often a reality and situation that is traumatic. Not just for the person but for the family members and the community.
She mentioned that in addition to the talk there was an installation in Sunset Park, between 34th and 36th streets on 4th ave. So after I picked up Lucy from school yesterday, we stopped by to look at it. Here are some photos I took (with my supercool camera). It's kind of a an unprepossessing display, the photos don't really stand out unless you decide to focus on them. The sidewalk isn't ideal for viewing, lot of traffic going by etc. But you should go see it anyway if you can and post your own pictures.
The question of representation is a difficult one and needs to be part of any conversation about these matters. The question comes up in Francisco Cantu's book that I mentioned recently (The Line Becomes a River) and in Valeria Luiselli's incredible new novel The Lost Children Archive. I can't recommend this latter book strongly enough. (Bay Ridge’s own Juan Carlos Ruiz even makes a brief cameo.) (I also recommend Rebecca Schreiber's academic study Undocumented Everyday.)
