Angry Asian Potato

Bamboozled, Mandela, and the Dialectics of Racism-Capitalism. class notes

2.7.05

AMST394-11 Freedom Movements. Class notes, Feb 7

music played: Mbongan Nugema.

how to find articles on Safundi, which spans a broader spectrum of research done on sa www.safundi.com/members/login.asp . rachleff )the dept?) purchased a semester-long access for the whole class. username: school, pass: here

will announced first diversity weekend meeting. thursday 9pm, cc215

african american studies conference. rachleff: don’t need to go to all of them, but that would be nice. write something creative and tie it together with the class materials.

Bamboozled

Will: issues of working middle class and racial representation
Peter: agreed, but the two issues not related causally.
Zach: capitalism creates racial caegories by need (black athletes)
ref: Augusto Bael (theater of the oppressed)
church (ft Spike lee)
is the movie a self-criticism?
basketball
born black in SA is being political
Alex F: careful in process of reclamation

creation of representation
appropriation -> make money
how to connect material culture
know to resist

eric la black minstrelsy-> post industrialization
white working class, use of slavery as a reference point
“at least I’m not a slave”
strong denial — (needs) –> reinforcement of perfoming the other
30’s Dubios wrote a bio of John Brown

20th C Baudeville & Broadway, black people playing minstrelsy
Chapelle Show
Lily L: hegemony: marginalize people’s participation, compromise peronsal for greater goals

Zach: even in the black communities it is a tbaoo to go into “culture” fields
Alex Rubinstein: structures of white supremacy alienate communties
Alex F: (disagrees) families follow capital regardless
Tennis Guy
AFLO: but the colored/white divide in “artists”?
E. hist.
mau mau

Rachel: david wolpes & spike lee
Alessandra: Mandela on oppressive systems cannot be reformed, nikey commercials
women not part of movements

Peter: watch 4 girls, susan rose park
AFLO: Delacroix assisted the process of PAC criticizing the ANC
Will: p.20, Mau Mau reactionary masculinity women burning passes

wolpe -> single women in towns
Eugene Debs: sick Salvatore with Debs Hopes to go back what people react

E. Hutchinson: Mandela is in prison, black consciousness -> young people come to him

Rachel: Mandela’s position as a listener, heoized, did the PAC leave out of will or were they expelled from the movements?

Alex Rubinstein: 1 million dollar corruption case, ANC is sinking

Peter: last week we agreed capitalism has a role in white supremacy, has anyone challenged that?

Camilo paris: b link,

Patrick Bond is a white american who came to south africa for a citizenship

Alex Rubinstein: W-A-R? Move your stretch
journalist’s account in SA
different exp
need for violent protest
how the black leadership was constructed intot the white government (homelands)
use capital to alienate people

Rachel: skilled/unskilled divide out of question in south africa

P: in the 70’s two big issues: racism and vietnam. one group said those were “mistakes”

issue: to understand the “mistakes” as integral part of the U.S. society

P: what do we mean by “liberal”? approach to capitalism/racism
Jared: National Liberation as a paradox
Nicole: alternate systems. masculinity as part of a package
Roladn McKay: Frederickson, Herrenvolk Democracy

Alyssa: p.121 dialectical materialism, but Mandela doesn’t take on that anymore further in his actions

WIll Clarke: National liberation, communist party black belt
nation of islam in the ’30s.

P: Mandela’s operating from a minority status. Pan-African nationalism

Will: inside/outside the system. quote: within the system is the hierarchies of competition
same situation in the u.s. capitalism

malaysia
too much crime, too much work ethic
adanise, chinese

(are stus less dev?)
both movements from challenging capitalism
are they engaging capitalism?
inefficacy
oft overlooked
shana, economic and social agency
sam great to move “up” sustains capitalism
safety/ scarcity
self-sufficiency
eti lewis “home sphere” (church)
Julia: Tarzan Ujama, 1950-60s

no cognitive diffence between “reform” and “revolution”
Sophie: Mandela’s otrobro not solely as reflection -> intended to soothe allies
compassionate to oppressor (prison guard)
R1 jaito: runs the workshop

PR: tip

def what is a liberal via park?
cart transcripts -> only where to talk + nachie
Nkrumah, Lumumba,
Condi says I think we have to…

2.7.05

Condi says: “I think we have to view, at this point, the government of Venezuela as a negative force in the region” foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146472,00.html

LatinoPundit wonders: “I can’t decide.” latinopundit.com/latino/archives/002146.html

I think: The Man is trying to gather Star Wars fandom support!
Hegemon Rosenberg Letter Parody

hegemon, need blind

2.4.05

February 4, 2005

To all members of the Macalester Community, I’m writing to inform you of some changes that you may have already noticed within our community. Through my tenure as president here, I have attempted to present myself as a straight talker, I hope that this letter will be understood as an example of my ongoing commitment to open dialogue and civic discourse.

You are all probably aware of some changes we’ve had to make in the college’s admissions policies in order to preserve Macalester’s financial stability in these trying economic times. Unfortunately, the end of need-blind admissions is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Effective immediately, Spring 2005 classes are being postponed indefinitely due to diversion of funds to (what we hoped would be) more lucrative endeavors. In the interest of full disclosure, I’d like to offer the community several examples of where, upon abandoning what was an already shaky commitment to liberal ideals in higher education, we’ve found it appropriate to place our funds:
My salary: According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the total compensation received by my predecessor was $363,117. I can only imagine I earn more than this, given basic cost-of-living increases; I will disclose this salary pending computation by Danny Kaplan. I’m just an English major; I can’t count that high.
My house, which was purchased for me at an untold cost by the college last summer. You’ve probably seen it, sitting on the comer of Summit and Fry, though I imagine few have you have actually been in it – in the cutthroat environment of college fundraising, only the highrollers get that privilege. In fact, it’s a college policy that the only non-millionaires allowed in the house are the caterers and other house servants, who frankly could never make enough money to compensate for the abuse heaped upon them by my wife Carol. In any event, the house was fully renovated in the past year (the roof alone cost over $200,000), and includes a large yard and a three-car garage, which gives me space for storage, accommodating my family’s unused belongings nicely around our luxury SUVs. According to David “Wheaton, one of the benefits of the house, besides the fact that it is enormous, is that it “provides more flexibility for housing a president’s family.” Trust me – my wife and I have needs you can’t even begin to understand.

Those large blow-up dolls outside my inaugural party last spnng. I can’t explain their purpose either, except to say that they are the marker of a high-class institution. You may notice that size seems to be a common thread in my tenure at this institution – big salary, big house, big phallic symbols outside the Campus Center – but I assure you I am not in anyway overcompensating for personal insecurities. In conclusion, I apologize for any financial missteps that may have been taken by me or any other such overcompensated (that is, overpaid) college administrator. To assuage your concerns, let me assure you that Danny Kaplan is designing a plan to get the college running again; our target time for this is Fall 2005. Once classes restart, you may notice some subtle changes in classroom demographics and, commensurate with this, classroom dynamics. Increasingly, Macalester is being populated by the kinds of pnvate- school East Coast children of wealth (such as myself) who are your least favorite classroom co-constituents, dominating discussion to the detriment of others in the room not of similarly privileged backgrounds. By the time classes start again, these students will be the only ones talking, because they’ll comprise the bulk of the class more than they already do. The important distinction will be that not only do they think they own the world, they now have full institutional support behind them. As a college, Macalester has made a strong statement in favor of the entrenchment of class privilege. They have been emboldened; you have been silenced.

Lastly, my administration is in the planning stages for a new fundraising organization we intend to call the Rosenburglars; the purpose of this committee will be to raise money that will go straight into my own bank account. Once I have a sufficient amount, I intend to try to use it to buy back my soul.

Your devoted President,
Brian Brian Rosenberg
notes, seminar. anthro in a nutshell

2.3.05

handout:
http://wiki.adelantemac.org/Anthropology_in_a_Nutshell

british don’t like “culture” -> colonial mission, maintaining
french -> things inside the head, rationalism

foucault, levi strats -> like comets! they come and go
LTAM new anthro, no impact

school training is system-adaptive,
thoughts extensions

notes on the handout:
culture -> cultivate
ethnography=cultural anthro
ethnology=comparative cross-cultural study of human cultures
fight against racism: culture over race, public sphere
aurora levins morales

2.3.05

aurora levins morales talk, 12:00pm

sense of history -> resistance

destruction of memory -> subjugation (makes oppressedness seem like a natural aspect of the peoples lives)

self as an counterexample “adwomenster (sp)”
Nelson Myers 1898, spanish war, great plains, arabian peninsula, immigrants

Puerto Rico, intermediaries, the work of women, produce ginger, used for the working class (ginger bread) in Shakespeare’s England

tiva arriving out of africa -> geographical/racial?

Railroad women
labor movement, struggles as anyone else

antiwar activist
67 left PR
denied tenure in UPR
76 Berkeley CA
RE: Freedom Movements Technology

2.2.05

EDIT: good reference en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software

blah, I got tired of writing this. kind of pointless, anyway, now that the blog is up there. it’s just another semester of classes.
(more…)
film notes, bamboozled

2.2.05

is Delacroix playing the west indian?
misrep people?

why is his room (the white boss) full of “negro” stuff?
“variety skit show”

boss at the middle, evaluators to the side, the performer in the middle
is he wearing the arab stuff on purpose?
urgency/diff
anth380 sexual networks in jefferson school article

2.1.05

Medical Anthropology class,

this is the coverage on the study of high school romantic and sexual networks that I mentioned today in class. This is the link to the paper:

Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks
Peter S. Bearman, Columbia University
James Moody, Ohio State University
Katherine Stovel, University of Washington
www.sociology.ohio-state.edu/jwm/chains.pdf

Ohio State University has a press release summarizing the findings:

RESEARCHERS MAP THE SEXUAL NETWORK OF AN ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL
researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chains.htm

as I explained in class, the paper studies sexual behavior of jefferson high school students and how they form a network of sorts, that sprawls fairly uniformly compared to adult sexual behavior. They do so via a number of confidential surveys conducted in 1995. Researchers concluded that

unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community. (Grabmeier citing Moody’s conclusion, in the press release above)

I saw this paper mentioned in zamzzi.com, a south corean blog loosely linked to an online sex toys/supplies store maintained by the same person. The posting, in turn, was referring to a news article in NaverNews [네이버뉴스] and originally developed by Chosun.com [조선일보].

This is how it was intially portrayed in the south corean press:

Caption: Sexual Relationship Strucutre of Jefferson High Students. Blue=male students, Red=female students. “2건” stands for “2 cases”. “63쌍” stands for “63 couples”.
Source: 윤희영, chosun.com 25/01/05. 288명이 性관계로 연결: 미국고교생 실태 표본조사 832명중 126명만 ‘1대1’
[Heeyung, Yoon. 288 people were sexualy networked: only 126 out of 832 high school students were in a “1 on 1 relationship” in a U.S. high school students sample research.]
article: www.chosun.com/international/news/200501/200501250338.html
same artice: news.naver.com/news/read.php?mode=LSD&office_id=023&article_id=0000109820

It is of interest how this chart was initially pictured in the paper:

From the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 100, No. 1. “Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks,” Bearman PS, Moody J, Stovel K.

south corean blog entry commenting on the story: zzamzi.com/tt/index.php?pl=195
another blog entry: Roland Piquepaille. The Sexual Network of a High School primidi.com/2005/01/27.html

It struck me how several reactions to the coverage at naver.com (which caters to a young readership, mostly in their late 20’s) were expressing “disappointment” (huh?) at how far “sexually perverted” the U.S. society was from what they had imagined it to be. There was abundant attack on the existence of homosexuals and “cheap girls” as portrayed by the chart. In part, I think, this has to do with how the study was portrayed (the subtitle was emphasizing how “only” 13% of the population was in a single relationship) The more conservative chosun.com did not receive any readership reaction.

zamzzi.com’s article gave it a more positive spin, focusing on the fact that the research suggested a honest solution to the realities of high schools in the u.s. Readership reaction were on a similar tone as well.

anyway, I wanted to point out that the professor’s observation that “when you engage in sexual intercourse with a person, STD-wise this implies engaging in sexual intercourse with every single person that that person has had an intercourse with, and in turn with every person that those people have had an intercourse with, and so forth” was portrayed in a dramatically more graphic fashion with the blue dots/red dots chart. Ah, this has nothing to do with the elections (I think)
anth490 sample letter to prospective employer

2.1.05

Assignment: Write a one-page introduction of yourself to a specific, prospective employer or graduate school.

(more…)
movements, notes. capitalism

1.31.05
class notes. jan 31. freedom movements

fr nights, Golden town

Mapantsula
visual imagery
thrown out of the window
Themba
“John” speaking Afrikaans
english had subtitles (also aimed at non-english speaking native audience)
1976 Soweto’s school students boycott Afrikaans language

Afrikaans develops not to be understood by masters? but why don’t they speak it then?

violence / peaceful resolution

Duck
1. lower middle class
2. tails cat the N

Manning Marable: Race is the modality through which class is expressed.

Nothing but a man – filmmakers are white
violence: Tactially to attract (white) sympathy

every slave had to be zambo =//= need to be tamed?
Lily: nothing but a man “north” as a safe place
Pathe: Film noir detective, anti hero (Rosenberg?)
Priest
Social history -> women making “stuff” possible
movement history

(leola Johnson) extradiotigenic personality
on Abby Lincoln 1963

Jesse Goldman on Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson
freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/linking-racism-and-capitalism-robinson.html
-Theoretical background: racism & capitalism -> formation of europe
racism predates capitalism -> influences
immigratory movements in Africa care about work places of works
going to another place slavs as natural slaves
capitalism comes from a social order (racism)
capitalis is a process of “heteroginization”

Zach Cheema on Harold Wolpe
freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/harold-wolpe-capitalism-and-cheap.html
(P: racial and labor control in tension)
white domination
1. capitalist -less pay >>>> anti-capitalis (less efficiency)
2. af-am / blacks in SA
af-am considered inferior
sa considered equals
Wolpe is fixating in making Apartheid separate from segregation
strategies to create breaches among black/white workers

Jonathan Fredor
Cooper. black ideology
songs of Zion Tiembo
(P: Cooper doesn’t like Frederickson)
doesn’t walk much about U.S.
criticizes on mechanical comparison, too much white perspective (no black agency)
interested in how religions and ideology works

Shula Marks
freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/white-supremacy-review-shula-marks.html
-highest agers of white supremacy, John S.
marks is SA historian
doesn’t like comparative historical method
generalizing is bad
not enough info
George Frederickson had historical inaccuracies

Peter: comparative history is only done through a U.S. lens, and when you look at Safundi for example, more broad comparisons (brasil, etc) is done

I brought up racism and racialism from Anthony Appiah, and said Robinson is opposed to Frederickson.

group discussion
(what makes a slave) christians are enslaved too, white slaves
1900-1942
rights in he americas
colored in SA, frederickson p.133

Alessandra Williams on Manning Marable
freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/how-capitalism-underdeveloped-black.html
phenotype condition
black migration
common worldview was destroyed
white working class gave up
George Lukacs -> racism
whitenes -> took hold off of whiteness
(P: prof of Af-Am in Columbia)

Leonard Thompson -> good overview
freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/thompson-history-of-south-africa.html
- segregation of homelands
-blacks created their own economic world, niches
-ANC formation

Marable & Homeland LEadership

Lily on Phil Bonner
http://freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/bonner-delius-posel-shaping-of.html
Apartheid’s genesis in the 20th C
processes of social history
(district 6 was bulldozed after 1946)

peter: per books, demographic (b/w in sa/am)
smilarities

A. Randolph: WWII as a war on racism, going to DC asking for equal jobs
no jobs! poor jobs

SA there are jobs, no political power
structures & mandela/king
RE: Blantant misuse of a paper that I wrote

1.30.05

Err, I sent this to you via email, then I recalled I had a BLOG (uh…)

========

Andrew,
so, I try to comment on your

Blantant misuse of a paper that I wrote
andrewsw.com/news/index.php?p=913

and your comment spam detector thinks I am a spammer. I logged into your blog, with no luck. ):

================

First, my condolences.

I’ll vent a bit on something similar that happened recently in the south korean blogging circles regarding a web-based RSS feeding service (Daum RSSNet, rss.daum.net) that benchmarked bloglines.

Something very similar to what was happening to you was done by Daum, and people complained their names were not showing up in the website, etc etc. Do you know what some bloggers suggested in a counterargument?

1) That it was actually good for them because they were getting publicity (how?)
2) That following the copyleft tradition, every single blogger on earth should let their stuff flow freely across the internet.
3) That blogs were designed to be publicly open since they had features such as trackbacks and RSS feeding, and if people didn’t like them (if they didn’t want to be widely publized at the whims of corporations) that they should move over closed, ActiveX based, fucked up private community CMS platforms.

Bastards.
Yup, I just bitched about yellow peoples’ problems in front of a white guy. In english. Sue me.

Ok, I’m done bitching.

Now back to your case.

Credit: TechRepublic is being an ass, but doesn’t it look like the problem in the Michigan State U Boad of Trustees? I mean, Tech Republic saw it there, it was listed as authored by MSUBT, and so they gave credit. They
might not have found your version first. Didn’t they do all that was expected for fair use standards? It seems like MSUBT need to rectify whatever they did with your paper.

Login: that’s messed up. I’m not sure if that violates any existing law, though. Of course it violates common sense, but customary law doesn’t apply intranational, or?

Public domain: I just don’t get it that TechRepublic calls your paper a “white paper” and that “they are publicly available on the internet” for the sole fact that your paper is avaliable at YOUR website. There should be a
semantic difference between the POSSIBILITY of going public and the FACT of being public, the two of them being usually linked together, but not necessarily requiring each other.

So your papaer is factualy public, but that doesn’t necessarily imply you are giving it free rein (in particular, to be used for commercial or pseudocommercial purposes) in terms of distribution. Some people confuse the two. Some people, blatantly disregard the difference and question back, “what’s wrong with what I did?”
on squashed philosophers

1.29.05

So today at del.icio.us , this is a site that has been linked 670+ times:

Glyn Hughes’ Squashed Philosophers
The books which defined the way The West thinks now
Condensed and abridged to keep the substance, the style and the quotes, but ditching all that irritating verbiage
www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/

There’s nothing new in making condensed versions of the classics. What is different here is that these are neither the opinion of one person nor mere extracts. Instead, each has begun with a very wide analysis of quotations, citations and, especially, past examination papers (including UK A-Levels back to 1976), to establish which passages, which phrases, which lines, which words and which ideas, are generally considered the most important
www.btinternet.com/~glynhughes/squashed/about.htm

Three words:

Brave New World

ugh
it's not only minnesooootans who complain about weather!

1.29.05

no somos los minnesotanos los únicos que reclamamos por el frío. es la misma cuestión en nueva york, florida, en los trece estados. y las expresiones son las mismas, igualitas. por cierto: cada uno de esos comentarios están bien humorosos

bigpinkcookie.com/2005/01/23/ill-just-stop

ah, encontré su blog referenciado por oneband.80port.net/wp porque según él cristina era quien terminó poniéndole el nombre a wordpress. hay un running joke en la wp dev forums que “wordpress” les encanta a las ladies. ¿será por ella?
the definitive problem in information distribution

1.29.05

the biggest problem (as in setting up various kinds of media for the SOLE PURPOSE of exposing promotional stuff received through email) facing ¡Adelante!, and other small organizations, is that they distribute OPEN information (events) in a CLOSED environment (emails) that are limited in their expository potential given they can ONLY propagate through a forwarded email.

aha.

we need set up a public email account.

like this groups.yahoo.com/group/adelantemac2
white supremacy, racism, racialism

1.29.05

in “White Supremacy: a comparative sutyd in american and south african history”, frederickson makes the distinction between white supremacy and racism.

first, racism is too ambiguous. second, racism is an essentialistic mode of thought that gives racial attributes to given populations. (frederickson characterizes them as “the fact that populations groups that can be distinguished by ancestr are likely to differn in culture, status, and power” (p.xii)

racists, then, make the claim that those are natural and bypass historical ciscumstances. white supremacists claim tha these differences favor whites.

frederickson introduces white supremacy as an alternative, attitudinal term to racism, while leaving racism to the realm of the epistemic.

the first reason is that in everyday discourse no one admits to being a racist anymore, because it has been conflated with a multitude of overlapping, and differing, meanings. it has been a blind spot for criticism. many administrators in south africa still admit to being white supremacists, however. alabama had a state motto praising the virtues of white supremacy.

second reason is that scholars can deal more purely with the study of white supremacists practices, without getting stuck at accusing and pointing out the moral wrongs of racism.

(so both reasons given by frederickson are of a methodological nature, not by some theoretical reason, such as the one given by appiah.)

kwame anthony appiah claims in “in my father’s house” that racialism is the mode of thought where racial differences exist. then racism, is the judgement involving the placement of blacks and other colored peoples in an inferior relationship to the white race. he argues this in ch.1, “the invention of africa”, p.13, while trying to make a case for Crummell. i think he also mentions DuBois as an example of racialist thought.

so frederickson seems to be borrowing on appiah’s theoretical framework of the epistemic aspect and activist (?) aspect of racism. but they differ in terminology

appiah -> concept -> frederickson -> public discourse
racialism -> epistemic division of races by attributes -> racism -> racism
racism -> black and other races are inferior -> white supremacy -> racism

now, rachleff briefly presented the idea of racial prejudice and racial discrimination as sub-branches of appiah’s “racism”, i don’t where he brought it from (his own?).
appiah -> rachleff -> notion -> frederickson -> public discourse
racism -> racial prejudice -> to claim some form of hierarchical racial order -> (no term) -> racism (reverse discrimination if the agent is not white)
racism -> racial discrimination -> to execute out racial prejudice, e.g. school segregation -> white supremacy -> racism (terrorist, if agent is not white)

now maybe racial discrimination and the rest of the concepts needs to be separated, because racial discrimination is a form of praxis, while the others are forms of cognition?

back to the book..
aphasic narrative in Spanglish

1.28.05

Independent Project Paper
January 28, 2005
Yongho Kim

In this paper I argue that the recently premiered film Spanglish, a documentary about the “integration” of a Mexican single mother into white U.S. society through the eyes of her daughter, represents a form of an essentialist reading of their social texts that can be analyzed using the notion of double consciousness.

Spanglish is the story of Flor, a single household mother, and Cristina, her daughter, who come to the U.S. via the migrant trail and get established in California. The story progresses as a narrative in the past tense from Cristina’s perspective as she writes her college admissions essay to Princeton. (The essay is read aloud in the admissions office by an employee)

The film starts off with an image of Mexico that self-consciously works around breaking the overused image of realismo mágico, a literary device in Latin American literature that emphasizes the supernatural in everyday life. The film shows some clear examples of such device (such as a big and long tear scene with Cristina), ridicules it, and the single family moves over the border to California.

Once Flor starts working in California, she realizes that the pay is never enough, and decides to start working for a white family as a nanny. Pay is great, and the white family is full of little middle class problems – unmotivated children, weight-complexed daughter, combative husband-wife relationships – that Flor helps solve with her “Mexican wisdom”, a remix of age old European desires regarding the good old customs that can probably be traced back to Rousseau’s noble savage.

It could be argued that Spanglish is just a comedy film, and that none of the stereotypes herein presented intend to represent the reality of white middle class family crises nor Latina nannys. The response is twofold: first, the director already presents us with well known truisms from White America towards Latin America, which is magical realism, and crosses it out after playing with it a while, as if saying: “this is what you have been hearing all along – now let me tell you what the real thing is like”. Second, the film takes on a documentary quality insofar as it takes the voice of Cristina, the daughter, looking back at the past.

The second essentialist reading of social realities in the U.S. is through the main theme of Spanglish, which deals with the affectionate relationship between Flor and John, the white family’s father (whether this was a deep friendship or a love affair has been purposefully hidden from the public). The main point made regarding love in the film is that white women talk too much. Naturally, for the dialectical relationship to occur, brown women ought not to talk. And so it happens. Flor cannot talk, because she cannot speak English.

The director, James L. Brooks, portrays the scene with tact, but what remains in the center is that what awakens a sense of longing and/or loving in John towards Flor is the fact that she is quiet and yet gets the job done (i.e. making children happy, “discussing” house problems with monosyllables and gestures, housecleaning). Although there is a crucial moment in the middle where Flor recourses to Cristina as her interpreter to settle down some misunderstandings between her and John, the occasion is an eventful scene focused around the viewer’s pleasure of seeing two women ramble in Spanish (and English)

The point might be to suggest that relationships can develop without language, and the brown woman in her quality of undocumented immigrant might be simply a device for that rhetoric. It is of noting, however, that even giving this definition (that things go smooth when problems are not talked about) is given by the enligsh speaker, John, the master signifier, who claims that “we [John and Flor] have been communicating so well through silence all this time” in the movie itself. Thus, the film gives its viewers the sense that what Mexican immigrant women want is for the English speaking male, to speak for them, and tells them that former misconceptions such as magical realism were wrong.

Finally, the entire narrative of the film takes place in Princeton’s admissions office, where at the end of the essay, after telling how Flor was fired from her nanny work by John’s wife after she found out about the relationship and Cristina was unwilling to let go the white privileges of going to a private school, Cristina decided her primary identity was being the daughter of her mother, a Mexican single household immigrant mother, but in front of white admissions office workers, in order to get herself accepted in another stronghold of whitedom in academia. Thus identity formation is used to please and reaffirm white expectations of how minorities should perform or self-identify in the United States.

(some references, I ended up never using for lack of sleep)
Reference
Dávila, Arlene
2001 Latinos, Inc: the Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press
Dibango, Manu
1994 “The Shortest Way Through”: Strategic Anti-essentialism in Popular Music. In Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. Pp. 51-66 New York: Verso
DuBois, W.E.B
1994 The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Fiske, John
2004 Understanding Popular Culture. New York: Routledge
Lipsitz, George
2001 The Lion and the Spider: Mapping Sexuality, Space, and Politics in Miami Music. In American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Pp 139-67
Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota's Political Terrain

1.27.05

Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota’s Political Terrain
Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Internship Paper
January 27, 2004
Yongho Kim

The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride of 2003 was a national movement aimed at claiming immigrants’ rights in the legislative branches of the United States. It gathered a critical mass of religious, labor, progressive and other political organizations and individuals to actively demonstrate and lobby in the Congress and the streets of New York City, and strategically located towns positioned along the path from the twelve departure cities to Washington, a move that intentionally followed the path laid by the freedom rides from the civil rights era.

The Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (MN IWFR), planned by the two organizers who took a leading role during the national ride, Mariano Espinosa and Quito Ziegler, came together as a state-wide initiative that consisted of thirty immigrant riders and allies riding a bus that connected various key cities for voter mobilization and immigration law reform. Riders made connections with local organizers, contributed to voter registration efforts, and lobbied with representatives to have them support pro-immigrant legislation, symbolically marketed through AgJobs and the DREAM Act.

In this paper, leaving the effectiveness of the movement aside (as the process is still ongoing), I argue that pro-immigrant efforts such as the MN IWFR injected a dose of instability and self-doubt in Minnesota’s political arena prior to and after various Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives, and the U.S. presidential, elections.
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anth490 negoatiating the course

1.27.05
Assignment: Bring in a list of at least 5 topics or skills you would like covered in the course.
- spotting statistical exaggerations and issues of overinterpretation
as a student who had at most two weeks of training doing linear regressions, I want to learn the basics of faulty statistical analyses.
- macro phenomenoms
as anthropologists mainly trained to study the observable, how do we deal with the big stuff? is there a big stuff? when can we say that the NYT is “wrong” in this and that?
- simplifying anthro
when people ask me what anthropology is, I usually give them the british social functionalist definition, because it sounds most “social scientific”. what could be a non biased explanation of what anthropology is for nonanthros?
- is there a way to deal with workplace stress that doesn’t sound like another bourgeios urban advice?
- i’ll improvise #5
how to browse this site

1.27.05

this site can be browsed in different languages. to do so, click any of the languages under “por categorías”, and onc you are in that language, you may use the « and » buttons to navigate through.

본 사이트는 여러 언어를 고를수 있습니다. 일단 “por categorías” 하단에 나오는 언어중 하나를 고르신 후 « 와 » 버튼을 이용해서 옮겨다니시면 됩니다.

quick references is mostly some links for myself.

streaming links is a live feed of sites I link as I read them or mark stuff to read in the future (or to browse back, if they have useful information)

there is a guestbook under “contacts”
a decommodification agenda by capturing state power?

1.26.05

so after reading Patrick Bond’s Strategies for Social Justice Movements from Southern Africa to the United States fpif.org/papers/0501movements_body.html

Bond is thinking about circular state measures that eventually weaken local communities, and talks about fundamental change that doesn’t rely on state power, when he writes:

…South Africa’s independent left fully understands the need to transcend national-scale capitalism. One step along the way is the strategy of decommodification.

The South African decommodification agenda is based on interlocking, overlapping campaigns to turn basic needs into genuine human rights including: free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS, at least 50 liters of free water and 1 kilowatt hour of free electricity for each individual every day, extensive land reform(…..)

so I think, if Rachleff is sending out something, there’s gotta be something new in there. The “measures”, as I reade them, of decommodifying services into basic human rights seems to require state intervention, and as he describes local movements in environmental justice, I thought he would provide some sort of theoretical framework to understand these processes. But then., the conclusion comes back with a reliance on state-administered reform:

The latter [change that advances a nonreformist agenda] would include, for example, social policies stressing more generous and universal state services, controls on capital flows and imports/exports, and inward- oriented industrialization strategies allowing democratic control of finance and production in order to meet social needs.
……
We must capture state power through elections in which a democratic political party amasses community/worker/peasant support by generalizing the sorts of struggles discussed above, eventually contending with those elites who remain locked into neocolonial power relationships.

so I have never taken a polisci course, and so I have always trouble figuring out the influences of macrogroups, hierarchies, and unequal relationships. In other words, when dealing with historic processes, I always started with the little practices and observable phenomenom. am I missing something in Bond’s analysis of how to materialize a “nonreformist agenda”? at least when put into words, doesn’t it look like another developmental rhetoric?

—-

also: what was this NEPAD business? Because the new president of Kenya about a year ago had made some strong statements about NEPAD that made the party of the outgoing president rave. It’s been a while since the news went out, thoguh

Bamboozled