Recently in race & ethnicity Category

Dear Hegemony, please tell me who I am.  Please tell me how to see myself. 

We've just been reading Wide Sargasso Sea in class, so my mind's on how a dominant voice--backed by money and the power of the metropole--can erase and madden someone else's truth.

And how generous Hegemony is with its answers!  Here are just two that scratched their fingernails across my brain this week. 

David Denby, reviewing Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer in the March 8, 2010 New Yorker, refers in passing--admiringly--to Olivia Williams "one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier."  Just in passing, mind you.  It's not his focus; it's an aside.

But pause.  Let that sink in.  So . . . the majority of actresses, then, seem more stupid and ugly as they get angrier?   Do women in general, David Denby?  (Is it any wonder that so many women have trouble expressing anger directly?)  Is that true of male actors, of men? 

On to #2.  Nathaniel Rich, who turns all of 30 tomorrow, is perhaps surprisingly young to be the senior editor of fiction at The Paris Review, but then, he's had unusual opportunities.  His father is Frank Rich, who writes for the New York Times; his brother Simon writes humor for the New Yorker.  He grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Yale.  He worked at the New York Review of Books straight out of college. 

Hegemony.  Money.  The metropole.

Why does this matter to you, writers?  Well, at the Paris Review, a most desirable publication venue for any writer, Nathaniel Rich serves as the decider, the gatekeeper.  His taste determines what gets into the journal's pages.

So I found it rather fascinating to stumble across this window into his desires.  It appeared in Canteen Magazine this January in what Rich's own website describes as "an autobiographical nonfiction piece."  Its title, "Over Ernest," suggests that it's looking back at youthful folly; that the author's early infatuation with Hemingway is now outgrown.  Still, its opening paragraph is fascinating:

There was a time—not as long ago as I’d like to believe—when I imagined all novelists as Ernest Hemingways, hero-adventurers who shot tigers, fought in wars, seduced wild-eyed women, gambled their life savings at high-stakes poker, won duels, lost duels, and wrote frantic bursts of prose while standing upright in their rented rooms in Havana or Saigon or Beirut. I didn’t fully understand the standing-upright part, but I had read that Hemingway worked this way. At first I figured it had something to do with the immense ferocity of the act; surely he was too wired with genius to sit down at a desk. The more I thought about it, though, it occurred to me that the reason Hemingway wrote standing up was to allow a woman (his muse, no doubt) to more easily “inspire” him while he was in the midst of his demanding labor. This image—of the great writer madly scribbling masterpieces while being fellated by a native woman—haunted me. If this was the writing life, who wouldn’t want to be a writer? . . . I had just turned 21 years old.

While being fellated by a native woman. 

Gentle readers, we recently read and discussed in class an excerpt from Madwoman in the Attic, that groundbreaking work of feminist criticism from the 1970s.  The students were shocked by the wildly sexist things that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers said about the blood-congested male drive they saw as essential to writing works of literary genius. 

How backward, we all said. 

Yet here we go again, in 2010.  (Hey, it's working for Avatar.)

Okay, so Nathaniel Rich was young and oversexed when he fantasized about Hemingway.  Okay, so surely the essay will later take his younger self to task--I couldn't tell, because Canteen only excerpts the first page.  (Invited to read more--by subscribing, at $10 an issue--gee, I declined.)  Okay, so it was 9 whole years ago.

But not as long ago as I'd like to believe.

My beautiful, funny, and generous friend Lorraine López, about whom you've read on here before (multiple times), has just been catapulted into the national limelight!  Her latest book, Homicide Survivors Picnic, a collection of short fiction, has been named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.   The other finalists are Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead, and Lorrie Moore.   (Thanks to Tayari's blog for the heads-up.)

Always modest, Lorraine says she's still stunned and ecstatic.  It's going to be a whirlwind until March 23, when the winner is announced.  Wow!

Regarding the issue of representing latinidad, Lorraine says that she "intended to produce stories for [the colllection] that would shift the focus from the performance of ethnicity that essentializes cultural experience. . . ."  The L.A. Times includes a lengthy passage from a lovely 2-page interview, which you can access in full at BkMk's webpage for the book:

Q: Your collection has many Latino characters, and they all interact with characters from other backgrounds. Did you intend this bicultural or multicultural dimension of the book from the start, and do you think Latino writers face any special challenges in writing about Latino characters and culture for today’s varied literary audiences?

Lopez: This is a complicated question, and I thank you for asking it. For me, I did not set out to do more than explore characters beyond their cultural definition. As mentioned, I wanted to avoid that performance of identity that essentializes cultural experience. I am not interested in providing the usual themes, characters, and props that many associate with Latino literature. These do not characterize my experience as a Latina, so why should I artificially simulate such things to validate stereotypic notions? I can think of no reason to do this, except to gratify expectations of others....

I am not out to give anyone (including myself) what he or she might be expecting. In speaking to other Latino writers, I find that we similarly resist gratifying expectations that our characters perform in culturally expected ways, say, rolling tortillas, bopping around the barrio, or gathering wisdom from a sweet abuela. More and more, Latino literature is evolving away from such stereotypes, and becoming more interesting and challenging in the process.

Lorraine's also co-editing a new collection, The Other Latino, that addresses this very issue--the expected performance of Latina/o ethnicity--from multiple perspectives.  It's due out next year from University of Arizona Press. 

In the meantime, lift a glass to Lorraine! 

Dear and gentle readers, we (here in Lincoln) will soon be graced by a visit from the lovely and amazing poet Camille Dungy, author of two books and editor of two more.  Mark your calendar, Star City Sceners: 

Thursday, February 4
3:30-5:00 p.m.
"Editing Black Nature"
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall, UNL

and later that evening,

7:00 p.m.--Camille's inaugural reading from her brand-new collection, Suck on the Marrow
Bailey Library, Andrews Hall, UNL.

Her edited anthology Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, is especially exciting for anyone who's noticed that nature-writing anthologies tend to be not only green but white.  (Seriously.  Scan your collections' TOCs now.)  At the 3:30 presentation, she'll talk about the process of gathering the poems and shepherding the book through the editing process at University of Georgia Press. 

At 7:00 p.m., she'll read from her own work--particularly her new book Suck on the Marrow, a collection rooted in 19th-century history, which Natasha Trethewey calls "[p]lainspoken and unflinching," marked by "restraint and wry wit."  She'll then be happy to chat and sign books, which will be available for purchase after the reading.

I first heard Camille read in 2004 at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.  She was a Bread Loaf Scholar, and of course all the Scholars are solid, but when Camille began to read, the air in the Little Theater hushed.  Folks didn't even cough.  The poems--and her riveting delivery--were knockout.  I can't wait to hear her read from her new book.  (And I can't believe she's gotten 4 books into print since then!  Makes me feel laaazy.)

It's going to be an honor and a pleasure to have her here.  And readers, I happen to know happy news:  she's pregnant!  So there'll be no wining with our dining, but we do intend to have fun.

On the home front, James and I are now cosily ensconced in our new place--which feels, after two and a half years in a smaller apartment, practically palatial.  Its sweeping vistas of 1082 square feet and its blank white walls seem all Dr. Zhivagoesque to me--you know, those wide snowy plains with the tiny troika gliding along?

Now, as I've mentioned, the floors are bare, unfinished concrete, so it has roughly the ambience of a parking garage, and the appliances are from the 1970s.  (The refrigerator shelves proudly proclaim "Spacemaker Door," as if it's a radical new invention, and the scary microwave has more knobs and dials than a cockpit.)   Since we haven't been able to paint yet, the plaster from the refinished (popcorn-be-gone) ceiling sifts down in a fine white dust, coating everything.

But it's home, and it's ours, and we're happy.

Many thanks to Sandra and Cindy for their recent notes of encouragement and congratulations; to Ingrid and Douglas for the bread and salt, which is an old German custom of housewarming; and to Susan and Linck for the wine.  We hope to be having some of y'all over soon.

Okay, so I'm getting to this late, but I do have to wonder about these lines from Obama's Afghanistan speech on Tuesday night.  This part comes toward the end, when he's talking about the moral authority of the U.S.:

For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for — and what we continue to fight for — is a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.

Sitting there listening and watching, I was like, "Nuh-uh.  He did not just say that."  Because of course, "[o]ur union was founded" precisely by means of the successful attempt "to occupy other nations."  That's exactly what happened.  The founders of the United States did indeed "claim another nation's resources"--and not just the resources of the first nations of the North American continent but also the human resources of multiple African nations.  They claimed these resources--land, materials, and human labor--by means of lethal force and the imposition of tremendous suffering. 

Yes, "our union was founded in resistance to oppression"--for some.  Not for all.  For some, it was founded precisely upon oppression, to the point of genocide.

And really, to say "we have not sought world domination"--does that square with every epoch of American foreign policy as you remember it?  If our government and/or populace has ever wanted to be the single superpower in terms of military and economic might, doesn't that count as "domination"? 

Come on, Barack.  I'm all on board with the restoration of the United States' moral position in the world via the re-abolition of torture and so on, but let's not erase or distort our national past for the exigencies of the moment.  Your speeches matter.  Don't pretty stuff up.

Congratulations to path-breaking French Senegalese writer Marie NDiaye!  She has just won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious literary award in France, for her novel Trois femmes puissantes ("Three Powerful Women," Gallimard, 2009), becoming the first black woman ever to do so in the 106-year history of the prize.  (Wondering why it took so long?  Go here to speculate.)

Though the monetary award is only a token 10 euros, the prize brings tremendous international attention and prestige to the book and the author. 

While I don't think you can yet get Trois femmes puissantes in English, the attention from the Goncourt should soon correct that.  In the meantime, you can get NDiaye's novel Rosie Carpe from the University of Nebraska Press--the amazing little press that calls 'em first (as with Müller & Le Clezio on the Nobel).

Thanks to Cheryl Strayed for the heads-up!

 

Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years!  Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus!  Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!

Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry.  I have been going through it.  But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.

Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross.  Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years. 

What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning.  Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty.  At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie.  They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.

Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths.  We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film.  Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.

When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire.   I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with.  Livingston didn't say.

Wow!  I really needed this:

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.

Prestige + money?  Even more disastrous.  Read essayist and programmer Paul Graham's whole piece--about doing the work you actually love and not getting sidetracked along the way--here. 

Graham also has a very smart new piece on why meetings suck so profoundly for creative workers (like writers), while manager-types seem to love them.  Amen.  Go here to read it.  Then send the link to your chair/boss/supervisor.

In happy news, the lovely Meri Nana-ama Danquah's new edited collection, The Black Body (Seven Stories), is now available for pre-order.  Andres Solomon writes:

This singularly brave book recounts with poignancy, wit, and fierce passion the ways that Americans, black and white, have come to understand the black body. These are exquisite stories of what it is to see, and love, and to be seen, and be loved. They make an utterly compelling collection.

Good luck, Meri!  And congratulations!

Just a super-short, super-quick post to say that I loved Sergio Troncoso's recent blog entry, "Why I Write Simply," and think you should read it, too.

The yammering about whether Sonia Sotomayor will judge "differently" because of her ethnicity and gender grinds on.  (The line that's riling folks, which you've probably read or heard a dozen times now, comes from a speech she gave 8 years ago:  “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”  Critics object that the rule of law, not personal experience, is what should guide a judge's decision in any given case.)

This interesting addition to the discussion, "Debate on Whether Female Justices Decide Differently Arises Anew," appeared in yesterday's New York Times.

The piece focuses on a Supreme Court case regarding a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched by school authorities for OTC painkillers.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found the search objectionable; her colleagues (all 8 of whom are male, remember) weren't troubled. 

Leaving aside the specific issue of strip-searching a kid for ibuprofen, I want to look at the assumptions embedded in the way this story is being described in language, as in this line: "But the idea that women may inherently view the law differently on occasion is something that troubles even several female judges who believe it may be so" (emphasis definitely mine). 

So what I want to do is back up for a moment and unpack this.  The word differently implies--necessitates--the existence of a norm to differ from.  Such a norm indeed exists, and it is the norm of "law."  But this "law," which has been written and revised over hundreds of years, is a construction made by individuals and groups of people, working together, imperfectly, over time.  This construction has been authored (almost entirely exclusively, until the late 20th century) by only one identity group:  white males (and you might nuance that to say mostly "economically privileged white males," though some worked their way up, etc.). 

Thus, this form of writing, this body of codes, necessarily bears the marks of that group's experiences, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world.  It cannot avoid doing so.

But today, these particularities are neutralized in the common imagination and in the media because, hey, it's "law."  It's been authenticated by the highest political authorities available.  (But again, these authenticating authorities have been white males.)

Only if you believe that the norm--the law--is magically right, which suggests a lack of historical awareness (Plessy v. Ferguson, anyone?), or if, hmm, you benefit from the way the norm is constructed, will the idea of things being done "differently" keep you up at night.

If history had been different--if women, say, had authored the statutes that governed what is legal and illegal--then reporters might be commenting on how gender-biased were these responses of two male judges, whose perspectives stem directly from the personal experience of being socialized as boys:

Justice Steven G. Breyer was one of several on the court who suggested during oral argument that he was untroubled by the search. Justice Breyer said that when he was that age, boys stripped down to their underwear in the locker room and “people did stick things in my underwear,” a comment that produced hearty laughter from Justice Thomas.

But the influence of personal experience of masculine socialization--and how it might make a male judge deem some things unimportant--goes unremarked by reporters.  Even the metaphors chosen by male judges, as in the "comments by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas . . . that judges should be like neutral baseball umpires," are inflected by gendered experience.  (Don't Title IX me.  Thomas [b. 1948] and Roberts [b. 1955] were out of school before that little gem, which passed in '72, took effect.) 

But again, no reporters are pointing that out.

Women know (and may have lived) the statistics:  approximately 1 in 8 of us are raped as adults (by men; let's name it), and approximately 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 of us are sexually molested in childhood (primarily by men--by a vast margin).  Most of us have been monitoring our dress, physical behaviors, and spatial freedom since childhood in order to mitigate the possibilities of such assaults.  We carry our keys (and maybe pepper spray) in our hands and check the backseat of our locked cars when we walk out of the grocery store at night.   Again, in the interests of naming the unspoken, this is due to the prevalence of attacks by men. 

This is our daily, lived experience.   These are the micropractices that shape our consciousnesses.

We also know intimately the various confusions of menarche, adolescence, and the attentions--welcome and otherwise--that our maturing bodies bring.  We are thus far more likely to question the needfulness of an adolescent girl's being "made to stretch out her bra and underpants" so that school officials can inspect what's within.  (For ibuprofen, remember.  We're not talking heroin or explosives here.)  Our experience inflects our understanding of what such a strip-search would feel like.  We can empathize with the girl in a way that male judges' personal experience apparently prevents them from doing.

Sexual inequality before the law isn't ancient history.  In graduate school in Texas in the mid-1990s, when I was sexually harassed by a man masturbating on the street, I was able to obtain his vehicle's license plate number, which I gave to the police.  Because I had filed a report, my name and address were available to anyone  (including the harasser) for a nominal paperwork fee.  His name and address, however--though the police knew them, based on his license--were not made available to me.  That was the law.  The police drove by his place of business to give him a warning; they didn't want to go to his house, because he was married, they said, and they didn't want to stir up trouble with his wife.  A warning, to my knowledge, is all he ever got. 

He knew I had complained, and he could learn, if he desired, exactly where to find me.  There was nothing I could do to prevent that, no way of protecting my name and address.

Who wrote those laws?  Who enforced them?  Who benefits?

So yes, women view the law (when it speaks to gendered concerns) "differently"--differently from men, for whose advantage the laws have long been written.  Likewise, men also view the law differently--differently from women.   Alas, women haven't historically held sufficient power to make their views of the world into "law," so the norm from which male views differ is a muted or even silenced view. 

I think we can safely extrapolate from this to issues of race & ethnicity and economic class, to which Sotomayor can speak from experience, as well as sexual orientation and religion.  Only when all people's standpoints are represented in the halls of power will justice be real.  Only then can we afford to let it be blind.  In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes open, and so should the media.

Will Sonia Sotomayor judge differently?  Probably, when it's relevant.  And it's a difference we need.
 

I'm so psyched about Justice Sonia Sotomayor, her fantastic record, and her excellent chances of being confirmed.  As Jeffrey Toobin observed on last night's Daily Show, there have been 110 justices on the Supreme Court during the U.S.'s history, and 106 of them have been white men.  It's about time.  Sorry about the squeals she's provoking from the right, but folks rarely relinquish unearned privilege gracefully.  Why the right is trying to scare people off the word empathy, though--and why Dems are capitulating--is beyond me.  I wonder what George Lakoff would say.  Progressives currently have power and the will of the people behind them.  It's our turn to shape the discourse, and leaders should take the wheel in that regard. 

Ain't I a princess?  Disney's drawing fire for The Princess and The Frog, an animated film due out this December that features Disney's first black princess, Tiana.  Oprah consulted, and parents are happy, but critics voice concern that the prince is not black enough (or not black at all) and that the princess spends a good chunk of the movie as a frog herself (in a divergence from the original). 

I was wondering why, instead of reshaping a classic European tale (the film retells the Grimms' fairy tale but sets it in 1920s New Orleans), Disney didn't just look to either African or African American narratives.  If I wanted to create a tale that highlighted a black princess/heroine, I'd start by looking at some culturally indigenous stories.  Just a thought. 

If you get a chance to see Examined Life, a documentary of public intellectuals gabbing and moving, go.  It's more accessible than you might think, given the status of some of the subjects as high-powered theorists, and it's often humorous (intentionally or otherwise).  My favorites were Avital Ronnell, who talks about anxiety and ethics (pointing out the way that Bush was notoriously un-anxious about the death penalty in Texas and various crimes against humanity since), and applied ethicist Peter Singer, who questions our moral responsibilities to one another vis-à-vis the issue of conspicuous consumption in front of Fifth Avenue's windows full of designer goods.  (Singer's remarks actually helped me think through a chapter I'm revising, so that was an unexpected plus.)

Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the filmmaker's sister show up in the film, too, as does Judith Butler, who is much sexier than I'd guessed from her prose.  (Of course, a doorstop is sexier than I'd guess from Judith Butler's prose.)  Sharp hair, Judith.

Thinking about the Other is all over the documentary, so empathy, though not called that by the philosophers, was a theme.  How do we design and implement a just society when people have such different capacities and values?  How do we imagine our way across vast differences into another person's perspective? 

Many thanks to Sonam, Amalia, Julia, and Jon for going with me and talking about it afterward, and to Sonam for dreaming up the outing in the first place.

Today's Grey's first day on the job at a bookstore in Austin, where he's spending the summer, so my mom-heart is all wondering about how it's going for him.  Good luck, Grey!

With the end of classes, I'm getting just a ton of revision done.  A character completely surprised me last night; I love it when that happens. 

I'm so grateful to be a teacher and thus to have summers off.  For three months a year, I get to live and work like a real artist, to dwell in the imagined, constructed worlds of creative projects.  It's such a gift. 

I think it's a gift back to our students, too, though.  If we didn't have this concentrated, different sense of focus on our work, we wouldn't be able to do our work as well, and then we wouldn't have sufficient experiential knowledge when we teach.  In fact, I wish university administrators really comprehended artists' processes better and would structure more "studio" time (time for jello-mind, time to write for hours on end) into the school year, so we could stay juiced up all year long, instead of sticking us onto committee after committee.  I have a few scholarly friends who genuinely like committee and administrative work, and more power to 'em.  I wish they could do it all.  I'd like to just teach and write, teach and write, and then, for the summers, just write.

Hey, a girl can dream.