"The oxygen and hydrogen will now have the honor of combining before Your Majesty."
- John Henry Pepper (creator of the illusory technique Pepper's Ghost) to Queen Victoria, quoted in Jim Steinmer's Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, also quoted in Clover as a cheesy metaphor for love.
It is astounding to me the number of ways in which my academic and nerdy artist lives have intermingled over the past year. I've written poems drawing upon Audre Lorde's theories of poetics, made a radio show in tribute to hooks, Said, Halberstam, and others, and, alas, as of November 30th, written the great Cultural Studies U.S. American novel. I use the word "great" loosely, as, so far as I know, I'm the only one to have written a cultural studies novel at this point, though I'd be pretty thrilled to be proved wrong.
I've always been pretty self-reflexive as a fiction writer, which is possibly the main reason why I never get any novels done save during National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) each November, when would-be novelists are encouraged by the Office of Letters and Light to write 50,000 words of a novel starting at November 1st at 12:00 a.m. and ending at 11:59 p.m. on November 30th. For the past four years, I have been successful in these attempts, writing A Shiver in the Distance (general fiction, 2007), Dedication (general fiction, 2008), The (Mostly) True Story of Ms. Bertha P. Collins, Grandmother, Showman, and Sometimes Usurper, as Told By the Terribly Unfortunate, Blister-Thumbed, Hortensia Higgory Hernandez, Volume 1 (children's fantasy, 2009), and, most recently, Clover (steampunk, 2010). All of these books were written while attending university, the first while an Asian Studies student at Seattle University, the second in the same program but as an exchange student at 上智大学 (Sophia University) in Tokyo, and the third and fourth while a cultural studies grad student.
This most recent session, I was even more self-reflexive (self-critical, panicky about undermining my own intentions, and harried) than the previous years, while simultaneously considering whether or not the novels written in the first two years of my Nanowrimo experience ought to be trashed. We do a lot of critiquing in cultural studies, but, in my eyes, no one is more harshly critiqued than the self.
Cultural Studies and Zombies
I've also been interested in linguistic questions, such as the idea of cultural studies as a non-discipline/anti-discipline. Recently, at a graduate research colloquium, a certain professor demonstrated an archive of multi/mixed media materials pulled together during a summer 2010 study abroad to South Africa, expressing displeasure at it often being referred to as a "scrapbook." Perhaps a better term might be "non-scrapbook"? In any case, I've been considering the linguistic understandings of non/anti-discipline in terms of the word "undead" to refer to zombies and the like, the reanimated dead as it were (and vampires, sometimes, but let's not get into polemics). What does it mean to be "undead"? Well, realistically the undead are dead, technically, as they have died in some form, but this death has far more implications than the conventional death. After all, this isn't an idle death, but one full of transformation and movement, as well as the continuous daming (not too be confused with "damning"--"siring" simply felt too patriarchal) or turning of the living.
What does this mean in terms of cultural studies? Well, in case you haven't followed my rather obtuse metaphor, cultural studies as a non-discipline works outside of traditional understandings of a discipline. Stuart Hall, a grandsire of cultural studies in a strictly Whedonian sense, explains:
Cultural studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. It was "centered" only in quotation marks, in a particular kind of way which I want to define in a moment. It had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention... Now, does it follow that cultural studies is not a policed disciplinary area? That it is whatever people do, if they choose to call or locate themselves within the project and practice of cultural studies? I am not happy with that formulation either. ("Cultural Studies..." 278, emphases mine)In Barnes and Noble, cultural studies as a "genre" seems to imply "something that just didn't really fit anywhere else" or anthropological investigations of subcultures (Fruits, a Japanese magazine on street fashion, was once found there). When I search the store for books needed for classes in the cultural studies program, however, I have found authors in various sections: bell hooks alone spanned Education (Teaching to Transgress), Memoir (Ain't I a Woman?), Cultural Studies (Teaching Community), African American Studies (Killing Rage), and Literary Studies (Feminist Theory from Margin to Center). While inconvenient, this spanning is demonstrative of the undisciplinary nature of cultural studies. Even when one of our number makes a "scrapbook" it is far more than a conventional scrapbook-- the text is not simply a memory book of random photographs, captions, dates, and aesthetics-- it also acts as a critique of the traditional scrapbook in itself. The photographs are driven by theoretical understandings of what a photograph can do and mean. A photojournalist in my program uses his photos to critique racism, and considers what race means in terms of photography. In a recent mapping assignment, dates were reconsidered in less quantitative terms, drawing instead upon significant news items, popular songs, and television shows of those particular times to create a greater understanding of the dates she discussed.
Even the word "scrapbook" has a number of connotations, many negative and perhaps a bit stereotypical. Literally, we are referring to the archives we create as a "book of scraps," which feels a bit underrepresentative of the thought going into this professor's project as a whole. Yet there is also the connotation of womanhood and a woman's art similar to that of quilting, which may be positive yet, historically, has been underappreciated, as my cohort explains in her dissertation proposal:
Economic models all look at the same three categories: production, distribution, and consumption, but they leave out a critical fourth category, resource maintenance (Sampson, 2008). These crucial jobs include social reproduction, caring labor, domestic labor, community building, and care of the local environment. These activities are the crucial foundation of any economy, yet are ignored because they are feminine, or femin-ized work. If women did not perform these services, the entire economy would collapse, yet no one has made a development model that valorizes these activities. (Brown 1, emphasis in original)Methods (of Vampire Slayery)
One of the most liberating aspects of being in a cultural studies program is the methodological freedom. It doesn't even extend simply to what methods I can use for my own work, but to the texts of those we study/with whom we study as well.
(A Cultural Studies-y critique how Twilight romanticizes stalking, via a dialogue with Whedon's self-proclaimed feminist vampire dramedy, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.)
In particular, I had the pleasure of understanding research surrounding South Africa and the world cup from a variety of affiliated voices through a number of media types, including video, theoretical research article, autoethnographic article, newspaper article, unscrapbookery, and lecture. Two of the larger products of this research (these researches) was Krabill's book Starring Mandella & Cosby and the My World Cup project. Yet even within these methods, other media types are brought in, such as song, dance, and graffiti art. One of the pieces that most resonated with the research slipped into my recent novel, was the video "Waka Waka: The Official World Cup Anthem":
Waka Waka from Angelica Macklin on Vimeo.
What is so wonderful about this video to me is the way it addressed various viewpoints surrounding the song "Waka Waka." It is a joke within my CS cohort that our work is producing no answers, only more questions, which is certainly exemplified by the contradictory opinions on Shakira's primary involvement in the performance of the 2010 World Cup anthem. Yet, this video was produced in South Africa, so it would be interesting to include viewpoints within other countries as well, such as Shakira's native country of Colombia. For example, Shakira is an extremely important figure for many Latin@ Americans, because she is such a success in the U.S. while simultaneously producing songs in her native Spanish. The professor of my core CS course this quarter spoke similarly about the many perspectives surrounding Christopher Columbus, primary: 1) CC as the discoverer of the U.S. and a hero, 2) CC as a murderer of native peoples and whose crews mutinied on him twice, 3) CC's importance as 1 for Italian and Latin@ Americans as one of the few U.S. national heroes with whom they/we can relate.
Another speaker in this series spoke about her work with the Senegal-based non-profit Tostan, including the production/writing of a pamphlet on the organization and an academic article co-authored with the Tostan founder. Before this lecture, I had already shied away from non-auto ethnography due to an unfortunate reading of Snyder and Mitchell's chapter on "Compulsory Ferali-ization" in Cultural Locations of Disability. In this piece, the authors essentially argue against any type of disability studies in the academy, citing that people with disabilities (hereafter PWDs**) have been mistreated by the academy for long enough and that modern approaches to working with PWDs as research subjects are in no way superior to the sequestering and subsequent study of PWDs a hundred years ago (200). Since the last thing I want to do is "reproduc[e] aspects of an oppressive culture"(201), I switched my research so that I will no longer be interviewing with other people with chronic pain***, but instead drawing from my own experiences as one with chronic pain.
Yet, this professor's talk on her work with Tostan and the ethical considerations of working with predominantly Black poor East Africans as a White U.S. American member of the academy was eye opening. One of the ways in which Western imperialism is addressed in the organization, as explained by Gillespie, is through a bottoms-up, community-led approach, wherein the people in the towns where the organization's programs are implemented are the leaders:
Tostan honors the local context of our participants. Our classes are held in local African languages, and we hire and train culturally competent and knowledgeable local staff. Classes are taught in a participatory manner and emphasize dialogue and consensus building, highly valued skills in African societies. Learners create songs, dances, plays, and poetry inspired from traditional culture to reinforce new knowledge. (Tostan website)In my own research, I am predominantly focusing on the creation of a poetry chapbook, a theoretical essay considering the self-other problem in relation to pain, and an autoethnographic paper on pain depictions inside and outside of medicine, drawing upon my poetry as one with chronic pain. Yet, I also work through blogging, have created a website, and consider my research through a variety of other methods. I hope to be less panicky at the prospect of ethnography in the future, however, because Gillespie's work has helped me to remember that, while no research can be perfectly ethical, particularly since "the good" is in itself subjective, researchers have come a long way, generally speaking, in self-reflectory and well-meaning research praxes. Furthermore, wide generalizations, such as those of Snyder and Mitchell, should be considered as problematic in themselves (which is academese for Snyder and Mitchell can go fuck themselves in an ultimately unsatisfying manner****).
Steampunk'd: How Cultural Studies Bogarted My Novel
Without further ado, I will dig into how cultural studies infiltrated Clover in November 2010. I will do it via a list, because numbers make me feel quantitative, even if it is merely an illusion.
Anyway, at risk of even more ostentatiously allowing my "geek flag" to fly, I will need to briefly sum up this year's novel. So, basically, steampunk is a science fiction sub-genre wherein one reimagines the Victorian era with futuristic advances, traditionally with inventions steam-powered (popular examples: The Time Machine, the new Sherlock Holmes, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). Of course, as all good ideas tend to do, this one went off in far less solidly-defined directions (a lot has been done with the U.S. American Civil War), before becoming an un-sub-genre of sorts.
So Clover essentially follows a plot based around the idea of a new sort of plague (ever so Star Trek-ian-ly referred to as "The Disease") hitting the world as a problematic whole in a more-or-less modern-ish era. As is the usual course of apocalyptic action, groups with money and/or power head up to the skies to escape the airborne disease. Our hero is a young boy who sneaked aboard one of these ships, and has had the cure hidden in his bloodstream.
Well, I never did claim to be Shikibu (if that was her name). In any case, this rather silly, and rather purposefully silly, novel considered a number of cultural studies concepts. Seriously. At least three, if you're to believe my fancy list. And here they are:
Formulating Silences- Trouillot speaks of how certain historical events are made to become invisibilized, particularly explaining formulas of erasure and banalization (96). In particular, Trouillot considers the virtually disappearance of the Haitian Revolution from U.S. (and other countries') history textbooks, and how this came to be. He talks about how the Haitian Revolution is often listed as simply an independence struggle that occurred by following the examples of the U.S. and France (banalization), and how nobody discussed the revolution in Haiti even at the time-- a strong, and fairly successful, attempt was made to hush up its existence as a whole (erasure).
One of the major historical events in Clover is the period when the airships took off, leaving everybody else behind to die. Well, it would be pretty difficult to invisibilize this event for the folks left on the ground, but I wanted to consider how the event would be portrayed for survivors on the airships. In any event, this process most unintentionally followed Trouillot's explanation in "An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event." Thus, if the abandoned earth is to be as Haiti, wherein the history of the separation is well understood, then the airship dwelling elite more or less ignore that the separation occurred. It is portrayed as one of many such unfortunate but necessary happenings; commonplace and, well, banal. Furthermore, the control of information makes it such that one cannot access non-Manifest Destiny-type understandings of this event.
In fact, the rhetoric also largely draws from a key scene in Doctor Strangelove when the eponymous Strangelove plans for how humankind is to outlive a nuclear holocaust. Although the scene is part of a comedic film, some of the elements as well as the tone are sadly realistic. In particular, the nostalgia meant to be associated with the dead-- a rhetorical device similarly attached to the lives of those lost in war (fighting the good fight and all that). Similarly, the way in which the power to survive is portrayed as a necessary burden rather reeks of the White Man's Burden.
Spaces Within Spaces- The idea of space was considered in far more depth this year than the previous novels. In particular, Neil Smith's "Contours of a Spacialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographic Scale" and scales of space most surreptitiously slipped into my thinking. Smith outlines the following spacial regions: body, home, community, urban, region, nation, and global (66).
In particular, the concept of body as space is deeply considered and perhaps plays a key role in the motivation for the creation of this piece. In particular the idea of the body as an inescapable space for one with chronic disease, and the body as tool in a Kantian sense are two of the key philosophies considered in this work. Throughout the novel, people with the Disease are continuously put into forms of quarantine, yet it might be argued that the diseased body is in itself the quarantined space, wherein one is made to become other. Yet the body of the story's protagonist is further the space of cure, and he is come to be treated much as Kant's second premise of the Categorical imperative teaches against: "conduct is 'right' if it treats others as ends in themselves and not as means to an end" (30).
Yet the prison of external space is also considered in relation to the idea of perspective, particularly drawing on Hejinian's metaphor of Kaspar Hauser:
He [Kasper] encounters the enigma of space. Daumer [his teacher] points to the tower at whose top is Kaspar’s room. But that’s impossible. When in the room, Kaspar sees it everywhere around him. When standing below the tower which is said to contain the room, he can turn his back and it is gone; Therefore the room is bigger than the tower. (n.p.)"The Resistance" or "The Resistances"?- One of the key concepts considered in my first quarter as a cultural studies grad student was that cultural studies as an un-discipline did not originate in a single location and does not have a single grandsire. While there may be one attributed university wherein cultural studies first developed (Birmingham) and a number of names most tightly associated with its origins (Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams), additional programs and people are further considered, including by Stuart Hall, existing outside of both the academy and the West.
Essentially, this thinking infiltrated my own less overtly cultural studies-y writing with regard to classic and contemporary sci fi alliances and resistances. For example, Star Trek has the United Federation of Planets, Star Wars has Rebel Alliance versus the Galactic Empire, and Firefly has the Alliance versus the Independent Faction. While a sometimes nefarious but also sometimes positively portrayed hedgemonic power is put in place, there generally is a simple singular rebel faction. This line of thinking was questioned in this novel through the existence of resistances on multiple fronts, often working actively against one another and with various motivations.
A singular in-power group versus a singular working-for-power group is thus problematized.
** Referring to people with disabilities as PWDs is probably very problematic. But, quite frankly, I find all terms referring to people with disabilities either offensive or annoying, and I am quite tired of typing out "people with disabilities" seventeen times a day, often in reference to myself. "Handy-capable" has the feel of "Freedom Fries," by the by.
*** You see what I mean? Getting that we don't want to be defined by our disabilities [insert Derrida quote here], I still get exhausted with all the wordplay involved.
**** Because, really, how is "go fuck yourself" an insult? In fact, I was once told this by an ex-lover, to which I may have replied, if I'd been more quick on my feet, "Well, I suppose that is the way it will go tonight, but I imagine it'll be far more satisfying than any fuckery done with the likes of you."
Works Cited
Brown, Debbie. "A Dissertation Research Proposal Overview." 2010. Unpublished. Print.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Video. 1964.
Gillespie, Diane, and Molly Melching. "The Transformative Power of Democracy and Human Rights in Nonformal Education: The Case of Tostan." Adult Education Quarterly XX.X (2010): 1-22. Print
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Threichler. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 277-294. Print.
---. "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power." Formations of Modernity. Oxford: Polity in Association with Open University, 1992. 276-295. Print.
Hejinian, Lyn. "Figuring Out."
Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Print.
Krabill, Ron. "Surfing Into Zulu." Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. 65-180. Print.
Krabill, Ron, Anjelica Macklin, and Georgia Roberts. "My World Cup." Lecture. University of Washington, Bothell. 7 Dec. 2010.
Martin Sandino, Amanda. Clover. 2010. Unpublished. Print.
---. Dedication. 2008. Unpublished. Print.
---. The (Mostly) True Story of Ms. Bertha P. Collins, Grandmother, Showman, and Sometimes Usurper, as Told By the Terribly Unfortunate, Blister-Thumbed, Hortensia Higgory Hernandez, Volume 1. 2009. Unpublished. Print.
---. Shiver in the Distance. 2007. Unpublished. Print.
"My World Cup: 2010." University of Washington. 7 Dec. 2010. 11 Dec. 2010. Web.
Smith, Neil. “Contours of a Spacialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographic Scale.” Social Text 33 (1992): 54-81. Print.
Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. "Conclusion: Compulsory Feral-ization." Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2006. 185-203. Print.
Tostan: Community-Led Development. Tostan. 2010. 9 Dec. 2010. Web.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. "An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event."Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Print.
1 comment:
Very nice done. here. good work!
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