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houseofmysojourn · 6 years

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A Woman with Advanced Degrees in Bible - Looking for a Call, Part I

This is Part I of three posts where I’m trying to figure out who I am in the world, and how to make my life useful to God’s work. In Part I, I will deal with the church side of my difficulty, in Part II I will deal with the academy side, and in Part III I will circle back to church again, because in the end I’m convinced that the church is always where it begins and ends. This conviction is part of my problem, though I pray to God that in the end it will prove to be part of my solution too.

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Right now, I find myself just wanting to be called. I'm realizing that I want to serve the church, now more than ever, but I'm not confident that I really matter there or that my gifts are significant. And a lot of this, I know, is due to my gender. When I listen deeply to the church, the highest call I hear on my life is to get married and raise babies. The fact that this has not happened yet is painful and at times confusing. There doesn't seem to be a category for the many women like myself, and there doesn't usually seem to be any type of a call except to wait and hope for the best. This is because single folks are often not being challenged to serve in ways that are meaningful. We are being treated more like consumers than like members, and it may be that what single people need most is to be a member and to have purpose. And that means being called to serve.

When anyone in the church is treated like a consumer, church becomes one of many options on the vast smorgasbord of weekly activities that may or may not seem to fit with my identity, my preferences, my feelings, and what I think is most important in life. We treat people like consumers when we treat our services like...well...services. Like going to the salon or to the movies, church offers me a service which I sit and receive in a highly transactional manner. It would be unthinkable to challenge me to get up and serve. It would be like the hairdresser asking me to sweep up the floor. In many churches, to challenge one another to service in the church or in the church’s mission to the community is seen as almost as much of a faux pas. And I'm sorry to say that I'm not convinced that many of the church's leaders care, so long as the pews are warmed, the offering plates are filled, and the feeling of "successful ministry" is maintained. Some of them may even think that this how to maintain it! I almost wonder if they’re afraid that people who serve for free will put them out of the job.

And so we so often do not challenge people, especially single people, to live in to any sort of family or membership role. People can come and go without ever feeling that their presence is necessary, and in some cases, without feeling that it is wanted either. For single people, this is especially poignant, and the messages that the church promotes about family and relationships do little to help.

By contrast, in a family, every person ought to know that they have a purpose and that they are needed and wanted. In a family, it is not uncommon for one person to ask another to help with the sweeping. In a healthy family, those -- like children -- who would seem the least useful are showered with the highest degree of praise and assurance that they are wanted and necessary anyway. In a healthy family, each person has intrinsic worth simply for being who they are; and yet, in a healthy family, everyone who is able should also know that they have a purpose and that their work matters to the life of the family. While everyone has intrinsic worth whether they are useful or not, in a family there is the freedom to ask for help and to challenge members to step up. Fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters get joy out of serving one another. It is wonderful to cook a meal and to know that you have meaningfully blessed your family. It is wonderful to clean and to know that you are helping to make a home for your family. And to be asked, "Can you make those cookies again? They were amazing!" is not a burden, but a delight and a compliment.

Everyone, especially in our society, is seeking purpose. For husbands, wives, and parents, some level of that purpose is still given and this is the route for finding purpose which perhaps seems easiest and safest for the church to push (this is partly because we seem to think that sexuality is more easily contained in a family, and because we seem to think that true and healthy abstinence is only possible for a few spiritual elites -- but this is another topic for another time). It is our culture's way of seeking fidelity and intimacy when social individualism rules. But for single people, especially in the church, the idea of purpose is often nebulous and far off. We start to feel that if we are free to go anywhere, to choose any church that suits us, to choose any career path we like, then we might as well go nowhere and choose nothing. If I am free to sit in a pew week after week, and come and go as I please, then why show up beyond any potential consumerist pleasure? If I am not being, in some way, "called" to meaning and purpose then why bother? If it's just another transaction among the hundreds I make every year, why should I care? I can probably hear better music and get a deeper sense of camaraderie elsewhere.

Oh we want so desperately to be needed! We want to know that our life matters, and that it matters to people, people who can be blessed by our presence and who will miss something in our absence.

The too-often-hidden truth is that this is always the case, that in God's eyes we are all full of meaning and intrinsic worth, and all endowed with the capacity to bless others by our lives. If this were not so, then it would not be so painful to see that truth so often obscured, and sometimes even outright denied, by the church. We seem to think that the church is not a family in itself, but rather a kind of scaffolding to real families, and the implication is that single people don't have real families. Families need churches just like they need schools and movie theaters and hair salons. But who needs single people? Who is calling us, challenging us to service, letting us know that we are missed?

For some, it is the random guy they keep seeing at the coffee shop, who keeps asking for a number and keeps saying by his attention, "You are wanted here." For others, it is a high-paced career in which they can succeed, in which their supervisors affirm their talent and in which they are told they are worth something, with the almost undeniable proof given in cold hard cash. For others still, it is fashion or music or art or any number of other identity-markers, ways of getting others to nod approvingly and say "you belong."

There are millions of ways to seek and get worth and purpose, and there are even more ways to distract ourselves from the fear that we don't have it. For some, it is the actors on the screen, playing out the kinds of fantasies that overwhelm the senses and make the question of worth irrelevant, at least for a moment. For others, it is the drugs and the drug culture. For others still, it is Netflix, or food, or drink, or going out. For most of us, it is many of these things calling us all at once, offering significance, or as a next-best option, distraction from the fear of insignificance.

And of course, it is almost all false. In most of these cases, when we give in, we are contributing to the very system of consumer thought and action that leaves us feeling so insignificant, with thousands of options, limitless "freedom," and no real call to say we’re worth something.

This is the first and, up until recently, the most significant pain of my life in the church. The church does not usually offer the alternative family of the Kingdom in a way that is clear and revelatory to single people. This is especially true for single women.

In my case, in addition to dozens of other smaller (though no less devastating) calls in advertising and society, it is the academy which calls, and it has such a pleasant-sounding voice! It is classy, it is almost universally revered, it offers a future of money, and esteem, and maybe even a sort of fame. It can feel clean and pure, and noble, and good, and can be affirmed by almost everybody.

Even folks at church will cheer for me if I answer this call. They'll cheer for a representative of "true Christianity" (whatever it is they mean by that) in the hallowed halls of higher learning. They'll cheer because they think I prove to the world that Christians can be intellectual too. But I have no interest in proving any of those damn things.

For two years, my time at Duke has really made me doubt my capabilities in almost all areas of my life (it has a way of doing that to everybody). This has been part of what’s made the place so hard; but then, over the past couple of weeks, I have heard the following “calls”:

"You certainly have talent for it. If you want to discuss doctoral work over the summer, please give me a call.”

"Of course you can write a dissertation! You have clear, insightful thought and are a good writer. It never even occurred to me that you would doubt it!"

"You could do almost anything -- you just have to figure out what you want."

"I don't think you'll lack for jobs."

"I think your perspective is one that needs to be heard."

Up until this last week, I really wasn’t sure. And certainly it is gratifying when some of the country's most well-known theologians and scholars give that kind of praise. They are, collectively, saying, "Come be one of us!" At this point, they are inviting me to become one of their colleagues. They believe in me, they are telling me that I'm wanted and that I have a purpose. In some ways, it's what I came to Duke to hear (wish I could've heard it sooner, like at any point in the last two doubtful years...but I digress.)

And yet, it is a call as insidious as it is attractive, and that is the greatest and most difficult lesson I have learned here. Just because I can does not at all mean that I should. It is insidious because it offers a lot in the way of worldly wealth and honor, and because this means it's deceptive power is incredibly strong, almost unbreakable. To break through it at all is to pass a camel through the eye of a needle. More on this in Part II.

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collegeessayonline626-blog · 4 years

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universityofwisconsinessay626 · 4 years

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drannafrost · 7 years

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Wiser, Dumber: One Year On

This month marks one year since my PhD dissertation defense. To celebrate, I discuss what, if any, I would change about my dissertation and continue extrapolating its message to the greater world at hand.

When I get asked what my dissertation is about, most likely I say something about it being a twofold endeavor: on one hand, it is an ethnographic study about lyme sufferers, and the other, I am questioning what lyme disease is at all. Both are crucial to knowing lyme. That I may be the only qualitative lyme disease researcher in the world* says everything we need to know about how much we really do not know about patients. Further, “lyme disease” is really an umbrella for multiple infections and manifestations. When we talk about lyme in the United States, to name just one country, the Northeast manifestation of lyme is most likely different than the Southeast manifestation, which is most likely different than the Northwest manifestation. This has to do with research in the past six years that has discovered multiple vectors (not just Ixodes scapularis) carrying various infections (not just Borrelia burgdorferi). Given that 330,000 Americans contract lyme disease each year – six-and-a-half times more than HIV – this should indicate that lyme is something the scientific community has yet to grasp.

My three-minute** elevator speech is all true, but one of the most difficult parts about my dissertation to get across is the inherent, non-binary relationship between knowledge and being. Traditional scientific method says we can know an object from the outside looking in. For instance, we can determine a chair is a chair because...wait for it...it is a chair, and it was always a chair!

However, quantum physics says, Uhh, who decided it was a chair? Properties are not “out there” waiting to be discovered by humans. As evidence, Bell’s Theorem showed in experiments that (a) no hidden or inherent properties exist, and (b) action taken at one location can affect objects in another location, which is a phenomenon known as nonlocality.

Moreover, matter and meaning come alive thanks to the properties of objects having a “superposition,” which is an ontologically indeterminate state of properties. In other words, properties are unconsciously known to the human. In that vein, my hero, Karen Barad, PhD, a feminist physicist at UC-Santa Cruz, proposed the necessary inclusion of materiality and discourse, which debunks the idea that humans arbitrarily determine the properties of an object.

“[T]he specific nature of the material arrangement of the apparatus is responsible for the specifics of the enactment of the cut,” Barad said (p. 264).

The “cut” Barad was referring to is the “agential cut,” which is comprised of the material arrangements that provide the possibilities for humans and nonhumans to make decisions. To “cut” does not mean to separate, but rather to understand what holds something together without sacrificing the difference.

Furthermore, making an agential cut is located within a process that Barad called agential separability, which are acts comprised of both differentiating and entangling. Schrödinger (as in “Schrödinger’s cat”) once explained:

“When two systems of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each with a representative of its own. . . . By the interaction the two representatives [or qwiffs] have become entangled. To disentangle them we must gather further information . . . although we know as much as anybody could possibly know about all that happened.” (p. 189)

Objects are not separate entities with independent, self-contained existences. While differentiation is to disjoin, entanglement is to premise relationship on obligation. As such, objects necessarily relate to observers or apparatuses, and vice versa.

So what does this all mean to me in practice today?

I would write my dissertation differently. One year on, I’m now in my first ever committed relationship. Timespacematter is different now! While I am no longer sick, I do understand what many of my research participants were talking about and experiencing in their own relationships. I now know that relationships are already difficult between two relatively healthy-crazy people, and they are infinitely more complex when one of those healthy-crazy people is sick without any end in sight.

Though lyme patients are still absent from the national conversation about policy and knowledge, I did something to change that. Along with a team of patients and caretakers, I organized the NW Lyme Patient Workshop, which put the power into the individual’s hands to create an ease toward pathways to knowledge and understanding about lyme disease. The March 2017 event was successful, and there is discussion about doing it again. Presentation recordings are now up on the site.

One’s meaning of the disease is powerful. I get far too many questions and see far too many articles about preventing lyme disease. If only you just wear bug spray. If only you pull your socks up over your pants. If only you avoided nature. Rhetoric like this is borne from the binary scientific method I mentioned earlier. It completely misses the relationship and the “intra-action,” as Barad puts it, between human, animal, and nature inside time and space.

In addition, the rhetoric also sidesteps the real problem of when people contract lyme disease and, therefore, what they can do to reduce the effects of it. Here, I am referring to health. Though patients may not be able to control the existence of an infection(s) in their body, individuals do have the power to mitigate its effects. Nutrition, movement, sleep, delimiting stress, and cultivating healthy relationships are keys to getting this disease under control.

I am not saying recovery is easy or follows a linear path. In fact, it is most precise to say that lyme disease treatment and recovery is complex. To call it complicated would assume there are just a lot of steps in a straight path. Not so!

Indeed, lyme disease recovery is actually many little decisions made in moments:

The moment to get up out of bed.

The moment to take a shower.

The moment to take a walk.

The moment to turn around for home.

The moment to eat food that heals.

The moment to say “no” to that toxic person.

The moment to laugh.

The moment to fuck what should be and do whatever it takes to get well, even if it puts you in debt.

Because without your health, what do you have?

The participants in my study who are on their way to optimal health are the ones who choose happiness at least 80% of the time. They have realized they have more control than they realize; the control they give to lyme disease is on them. Though the disease may bring limitations for the rest of their lives, they have decided how they want to make meaning of their disease. As my favorite philosopher, George Herbert Mead, says, individuals will act towards that which has meaning for them.

Hence, the patients who are getting healthier, relatively speaking, figure out what is meaningful and then act on it.

Finally, this is not just about lyme. Lyme disease is just one example of many diseases and ambiguous events and circumstances in which we all live every day. How we navigate unknowingness is what interests me, and I look forward to writing about this more. Until then, be well!

-Anna

*I’ve checked with my fellow researchers in the U.S. and Canada.

**OK, 30 minutes.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 120-154). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Reprinted from Signs, 28(3), pp. 801-831, 2003, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago)

Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240-268. doi:10.3366/E1754850010000813 (pdf)

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, & society. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Schrödinger, E. (1935). Discussions of probability relations between separated systems. Cambridge Philosophical Society Proceedings, 31, 555.

Wolf, F. A. (1981). Taking the quantum leap: The new physics for non-scientists. New York: Harper & Row.

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micaramel · 4 years

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Artists: Akinbode Akinbiyi, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, andcompany&Co., Anna Dasović, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Theo Eshetu, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Lungiswa Gqunta, Olivier Guesselé-Garai, Patricia Kaersenhout, Kitso Lynn Lelliott, Antje Majewski, Claudia Martínez Garay, Adjani Okpu-Egbe, RESOLVE Collective, Konrad Wolf

Venue: Kunstverein Braunschweig

Exhibition Title: THE FACULTY OF SENSING Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo

Date: April 21 – August 2, 2020

Curated By: Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig

Press Release:

With THE FACULTY OF SENSING – Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo, Kunstverein Braunschweig has worked in close cooperation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung to develop a project in honor of Anton Wilhelm Amo, an outstanding philosopher of the 18th century. On the basis of Amo’s writings and their reception, highly topical issues of referentiality, erasure, and canonization will be discussed.

In a 2013 essay The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours for the New York Times’ philosophy page The Stone, Justin E. H. Smith wonders how and why philosophers like Immanuel Kant or David Hume could afford to be so explicitly racist, at a period when a contemporary of theirs Anton Wilhelm Amo was excelling as a philosopher. The explanation for this can be found in processes of erasure in relation to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called ‘Silencing the Past’.

Anton Wilhelm Amo (* around 1700 — † after 1753) is considered to be the first Black academic and philosopher in Germany. His work was largely pushed to the margins and rendered obscure. Amo studied philosophy and law in Halle and positioned himself with his dissertations on the mind-body problem (1734) at the University of Wittenberg and Treatise on the Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately (1738) as an early thinker of the Enlightenment.

Anton Wilhelm Amo was abducted from the territory of present-day Ghana as an infant, enslaved, and taken via Amsterdam to Wolfenbüttel at the court of Duke Anton Ulrich. It was here that he began his academic career.

As part of the extensive research and exhibition project, 16 international artists and groups were invited to respond to the philosophical thought of Anton Wilhelm Amo in largely newly produced works. Curatorially, the project develops around questions of Amo’s understanding of the thing-in-itself, the discourse of body and soul, the legal status and recognition of Black people in the 18th century and the present time, transcendental homelessness, the politics of naming, and the narrative and history of the Enlightenment.

Via questions on the environment Anton Wilhelm Amo grew up in and spaces that we still share with him today, Akinbode Akinbiyi embarked on a journey through the region to conduct a photographic search for vestigial remains.

Adama Delphine Fawundu shares this interest in trans-historical connections, working with water as the connecting element that flows through a spatial installation composed of photographs, videos, and an artists’ book. Following Anton Wilhelm Amo’s theory that it is only the living organic body that can feel and that the soul cannot, Kitso Lynn Lelliott has created a videographic portrait of environments from Amo’s life journey in Ghana and Germany. A second chapter tackles the shortcomings of re-enacting from a position of absence. Starting with targeted interrogations that flank the exhibition’s spatial course, Anna Dasović focuses on the empty spaces and deliberate omissions that have shaped Amo’s biography and perception of his work, questioning thereby the prevailing criteria of canonization.

In another form, RESOLVE Collective too have tackled the aporias, gaps, and contradictions that shaped Amo’s life, philosophical oeuvre, and reception of his work. The resulting project Programming Im/Passivity (2020) attempts to translate Amo’s theoretical positions into sensory and artistic processes, with the observers becoming involved as active participants in a workshop-library environment. A newly developed performance by Bernard Akoi-Jackson runs throughout the exhibition in several stages, with visitors again being invited to relate personally to Amo’s work (postponed).

With a room plan made of barbed tape and treated fabrics, Benisiya Ndawoni II (2020) by Lungiswa Gqunta addresses structural violence, migration, and the forced movement of Black people. Questions of exclusion and everyday discrimination are likewise the starting point for the Olivier Guesselé-Garais poem Their Eyes Were Watching Cop, (2015/2020), here reinterpreted in the form of an installation. Claudia Martínez Garay assembles drawings, prints, and paintings into a visual narrative that links back to heritage, displacement, and racism while also referring back to one-sided definitions of modernity and the problematic relationship of Black and Brown bodies to (cultural) institutions. These are issues that have also motivated Patricia Kaersenhout in her artistic and activist practice for many years. As part of the exhibition, Kaersenhout is showing the series While we were Kings and Queens (2020), in which she examines the trauma of a colonial oppression that stands in flagrant contradiction to the proclaimed ideals of the Enlightenment.

In his multimedia installation Decolonizing Knowledge (2020), Adjani Okpu-Egbe bridges the gap between Amo’s work, person, and a proposed alternative canon developed in collaboration with renowned thinkers, academics, and artists.

Direct connections to Anton Wilhelm Amo’s philosophical writings are also found in new works from Antje Majewski and Theo Eshetu. Majewski’s Die Apatheia der menschlichen Seele (2020) takes individual imaginations of the soul and translates them into painting via Amo’s ideas; Amo himself is able to “speak” via quotations in a video work by Eshetu. That Anton Wilhelm Amo’s history is a special but by no means an isolated case is made clear in the 2009 cyanotype series Good Morning Prussia series by Jean-Ulrick Désert, which recalls the fate of one of Amo’s contemporaries.

On the initiative of architect Konrad Wolf, Kunstverein Braunschweig will itself become the Anton Wilhelm Amo Center (2020) for the duration of the FACULTY OF SENSING – Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo exhibition, reflecting during this time on processes of strategic renaming over the course of accompanying workshops with Braunschweig Postkolonial and Tahir Della (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e.V.).

And finally, the performance collective andcompany&Co. will on April 25 show a collaboration created in cooperation with Staatstheater Braunschweig and streamed live on the Staatstheater’s website. Black Bismarck revisited (again) takes the Africa Conference as a starting point for tracing the consequences of colonialism.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive public program of performances, artist talks, workshops, and discussions, which will partly take place online due to current circumstances.

A publication will be produced alongside the exhibition THE FACULTY OF SENSING – Thinking With, Through, and by Anton Wilhelm Amo, linking theoretical and artistic contributions to the exhibition and the symposium.

Artists: Akinbode Akinbiyi (born 1946 in Oxford, UK), Bernard Akoi-Jackson (born 1979 in Accra, GHA), andcompany&Co. (founded 2003 in Frankfurt am Main, GER), Anna Dasović (born 1982 in Amsterdam, NLD), Jean-Ulrick Désert (Port-au-Prince, HTI), Theo Eshetu (born 1958 in London, UK), Adama Delphine Fawundu (born 1971 in New York, USA), Lungiswa Gqunta (born 1990 in Port Elizabeth, ZAF), Olivier Guesselé-Garai (born 1976 in Paris, FRA), Patricia Kaersenhout (born 1966 in Den Helder, NLD), Kitso Lynn Lelliott (born 1984 in Molepolole, BWA), Antje Majewski (born 1968 in Marl, GER), Claudia Martínez Garay (born 1983 in Ayacucho, PER) Adjani Okpu-Egbe (born 1979 in Kumba, CMR), RESOLVE Collective (founded 2016 in London, UK), Konrad Wolf (born 1985 in Neubrandenburg, GER)

Link: Group Show at Kunstverein Braunschweig

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3eA9yww

#micaramel

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blackkudos · 4 years

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Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah ( AP-ee-ah; born 8 May 1954) is aBritish-Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, before moving to New York University (NYU) in 2014. He currently holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU's School of Law.

Personal life and education

Appiah was born in London, England, to Peggy Cripps, an English art historian and writer, and Joe Appiah, a lawyer, diplomat, and politician from the Asante region, once part of the British Gold Coast colony but now part of Ghana. For two years (1970–72) Joe Appiah was the leader of a new opposition party that was made by the country's three opposing parties. Simultaneously he was the president of the Ghana Bar Association. Between 1977 and 1978, he was Ghana's representative at the United Nations. He died in an Accra hospital in 1990.

Anthony Appiah was raised in Kumasi, Ghana, and educated at Bryanston School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned his BA (First Class) and PhD degree in philosophy. He has three sisters: Isobel, Adwoa and Abena. As a child, he spent a good deal of time in England, staying with his grandmother Dame Isobel Cripps, widow of the English statesman Sir Stafford Cripps.

Appiah's mother's family has a long political tradition: Sir Stafford was a nephew of Beatrice Webb and was Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer (1947–50) under Clement Attlee; his father, Charles Cripps, was Labour Leader of the House of Lords (1929–31) as Lord Parmoor in Ramsay MacDonald's government; Parmoor had been a Conservative MP before defecting to Labour.

Through his grandmother Isobel Cripps, Appiah is a descendant of John Winthrop and the New England Winthrop family of Boston Brahmins as one of his ancestors, Robert Winthrop, was a Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War and migrated to England, becoming a distinguished Vice Admiral in the British Navy. Through Isobel, he is also descended from the British pharmacist James Crossley Eno.

Through Professor Appiah's father, a Nana of the Ashanti people, he is a direct descendant of Osei Tutu, the warrior emperor of pre-colonial Ghana, whose reigning successor, the Asantehene, is a distant relative of the Appiah family. Also among his African ancestors is the Ashanti nobleman Nana Akroma-Ampim I of Nyaduom, a warrior whose name the Professor now bears.

He lives with his husband, Henry Finder, in an apartment in Manhattan, and a home in Pennington, New Jersey with a small sheep farm. Appiah has written about what it was like growing up gay in Ghana.

His nephew is the actor Adetomiwa Edun.

Career

Appiah taught philosophy and African-American studies at the University of Ghana, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities from 1981 to 1988. He was, until recently, a Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values) and was serving as the Bacon-Kilkenny Professor of Law at Fordham University in the fall of 2008. Appiah also served on the board of PEN American Center and was on a panel of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award. He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the US, Germany, Ghana and South Africa, and Paris. Until the fall of 2009, he served as a trustee of Ashesi University College in Accra, Ghana. Currently, he is the professor of philosophy and law at NYU.

His Cambridge dissertation explored the foundations of probabilistic semantics. In 1992, Appiah published In My Father's House, which won the Herskovitz Prize for African Studies in English. Among his later books are Colour Conscious (with Amy Gutmann), The Ethics of Identity (2005), and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). He has been a close collaborator with Henry Louis Gates Jr., with whom he edited Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. Appiah was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

In 2008, Appiah published Experiments in Ethics, in which he reviews the relevance of empirical research to ethical theory. In the same year, he was recognised for his contributions to racial, ethnic, and religious relations when Brandeis University awarded him the first Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize.

As well as his academic work, Appiah has also published several works of fiction. His first novel, Avenging Angel, set at the University of Cambridge, involved a murder among the Cambridge Apostles; Sir Patrick Scott is the detective in the novel. Appiah's second and third novels are Nobody Likes Letitia and Another Death in Venice.

Appiah has been nominated for, or received, several honours. He was the 2009 finalist in the arts and humanities for the Eugene R. Gannon Award for the Continued Pursuit of Human Advancement. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its list of top global thinkers. On 13 February 2012, Appiah was awarded the National Humanities Medal at a ceremony at the White House.

Appiah currently chairs the jury for the Berggruen Prize, and serves on the Berggruen Institute's Philosophy & Culture Center's Academic Board.

Ideas

Appiah argues that the formative denotation of culture is ultimately preceded by the efficacy of intellectual interchange. From this position, his views on the efficacy of organisations such as UNICEF and Oxfam are notable for their duality: on the one hand he seems to appreciate the immediate action these organisations provide while on the other hand he points out the long-term futility of such intervention. His focus is, instead, on the long-term political and economic development of nations according to the Western capitalist/ democratic model, an approach that relies on continued growth in the "marketplace" that is the capital-driven modern world.

However, when capitalism is introduced and it does not "take off" as in the Western world, the livelihood of the peoples involved is at stake. Thus, the ethical questions involved are certainly complex, yet the general impression in Appiah's "Kindness to Strangers" is one which implies that it is not up to "us" to save the poor and starving, but up to their own governments. Nation-states must assume responsibility for their citizens, and a cosmopolitan's role is to appeal to "our own" government to ensure that these nation-states respect, provide for, and protect their citizens.

If they will not, "we" are obliged to change their minds; if they cannot, "we" are obliged to provide assistance, but only our "fair share," that is, not at the expense of our own comfort, or the comfort of those "nearest and dearest" to us.

Appiah's early philosophical work dealt with probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning, but his more recent books have tackled philosophical problems of race and racism, identity, and moral theory. His current work tackles three major areas: 1. the philosophical foundations of liberalism; 2. the questioning of methods in arriving at knowledge about values; and 3. the connections between theory and practice in moral life, all of which concepts can also be found in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

On postmodern culture Appiah writes, "Postmodern culture is the culture in which all postmodernisms operate, sometimes in synergy, sometimes in competition; and because contemporary culture is, in a certain sense to which I shall return, transnational, postmodern culture is global – though that emphatically does not mean that it is the culture of every person in the world."

Cosmopolitanism

Appiah has been influenced by the cosmopolitanist philosophical tradition, which stretches from German philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel through W. E. B. Du Bois and others. In his article "Education for Global Citizenship", Appiah outlines his conception of cosmopolitanism. He therein defines cosmopolitanism as "universality plus difference". Building from this definition, he asserts that the first takes precedence over the latter, that is: different cultures are respected "not because cultures matter in themselves, but because people matter, and culture matters to people." But Appiah first defined it as its problems but ultimately determines that practising a citizenship of the world and conversation is not only helpful in a post-9/11 world. Therefore, according to Appiah's take on this ideology, cultural differences are to be respected in so far as they are not harmful to people and in no way conflict with our universal concern for every human's life and well-being.

In his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), Appiah introduces two ideas that "intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism" (Emerging, 69). The first is the idea that we have obligations to others that are bigger than just sharing citizenship. The second idea is that we should never take for granted the value of life and become informed of the practices and beliefs of others. Kwame Appiah frequents university campuses to speak to students. One request he makes is, "See one movie with subtitles a month.".

Criticism of Afrocentric world view

Appiah has been a critic of contemporary theories of Afrocentrism. In his 1997 essay "Europe Upside Down: Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism," he argues that current Afrocentricism is striking for "how thoroughly at home it is in the frameworks of nineteenth century European thought," particularly as a mirror image to Eurocentric constructions of race and a preoccupation with the ancient world. Appiah also finds an irony in the conception that if the source of the West lies in ancient Egypt via Greece, then "its legacy of ethnocentrism is presumably one of our moral liabilities."

Temple University African American Studies scholar and activist Molefi Asante, has characterised Appiah's work as "anti-African."

In popular culture

In 2007, Appiah was a contributing scholar in the PBS-broadcast documentary Prince Among Slaves produced by Unity Productions Foundation.

In 2007 he also appeared in the TV documentary series Racism: A History as an on-screen contributor.

Appiah appeared alongside a number of contemporary philosophers in Astra Taylor's 2008 film Examined Life, discussing his views on cosmopolitanism.

In 2009, he was an on-screen contributor to the movie Herskovits: At the Heart of Blackness.

In 2015, he became one of three contributors to the New York Times Magazine column "The Ethicist", before assuming sole authorship of the column later that year.

He delivered the BBC's Reith Lectures in late 2016 on the theme of Mistaken Identities.

In late 2016, he contended that Western Civilization did not exist, and argued that many uniquely Western attributes and values were instead universal.

In 2018, Appiah appeared in the episode "Can We Live Forever?" of the documentary series Explained.

Awards and honours

Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for In My Father's House, April 1993

Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association for In My Father's House, December 1993

1993 Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association "for the best work published in English on Africa", for In My Father's House, December 1993

Annual Book Award, 1996, North American Society for Social Philosophy, "for the book making the most significant contribution to social philosophy" for Color Conscious, May 1997

Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association, "for the best scholarly work in political science which explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism" for Color Conscious, July 1997

Outstanding Book on the subject of human rights in North America, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America, for Color Conscious, 10 December 1997

Honorable Mention, Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights for The Ethics of Identity, 9 December 2005

Editors' Choice New York Times Book Review, The Ethics of Identity, 26 June 2005.

Amazon.com Best Books of 2005, Top 10 Editors' Picks: Nonfiction, The Ethics of Identity, December 2005

Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations, Cosmopolitanism, May 2007

Finalist for Estoril Global Ethics Book Prize, for Cosmopolitanism (2009)

A Times Literary Supplement's Book of the Year 2010 for The Honor Code

One of New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2010 for The Honor Code

New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award 2011 for The Honor Code

Global Thought Leaders Index 2015, No. 95, The World Post

In August 2016, he was invested with a chieftaincy of the Ashanti people of Nyaduom, his family's ancestral chiefdom in Ghana.

In 2017 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

In June 2017 he was named by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as one of its 2017 "Great Immigrants"

Bibliography

Books

Assertion and Conditionals. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy Series. Cambridge Cambridgeshire New York: Cambridge University Press. 1985. ISBN 9780521304115.

For Truth in Semantics. Philosophical Theory Series. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell. 1986. ISBN 9780631145967.

Necessary Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. 1989. ISBN 9780136113287.

In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. London / New York: Methuen / Oxford University Press. 1992. ISBN 9780195068511.

With Gutmann, Amy (1996). Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691026619.

With Appiah, Peggy; Agyeman-Duah, Ivor (2007) [2002]. Bu me bɛ: Proverbs of the Akans (2nd ed.). Oxfordshire, UK: Ayebia Clarke. ISBN 9780955507922.

Kosmopolitischer Patriotismus (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 2001. ISBN 9783518122303.

With Gates Jr., Henry Louis, ed. (2003). Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience: the concise desk reference. Philadelphia: Running Press. ISBN 9780762416424.

Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. ISBN 9780195134582.

The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2005. ISBN 9780691130286. Archived from the original on 18 October 2006. Retrieved 11 January 2006.

Translated as

La Ética de la identidad

(in Spanish). Buenos Aires, Madrid: Katz Editores. 2007. ISBN 9788493543242.

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2006. ISBN 9780141027814.

Translated as

Cosmopolitismo: la ética en un mundo de extraños

(in Spanish). Buenos Aires, Madrid: Katz Editores. 2007. ISBN 9788496859081.

The Politics of Culture, the Politics of Identity. Toronto, Canada: ICC at the Royal Ontario Museum. 2008. ISBN 9780888544643.

Experiments in Ethics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2008. ISBN 9780674034570.

Translated as

Experimentos de ética

(in Spanish). Buenos Aires, Madrid: Katz Editores. 2010. ISBN 9788492946112.

Mi cosmopolitismo (in Spanish). Buenos Aires, Madrid: Katz Editores. 2008. ISBN 9788496859371. (En coedición con el Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona.)

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: W. W. Norton. 2010. ISBN 9780393071627.

Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780674419346.

Kapai, Puja, ed. (2015). A Decent Respect: Honor in the Life of People and of Nations, Hochelaga Lectures 2015. Faculty of Law: University of Hong Kong. Original lecture.

As If: Idealization and Ideals. Based on The 2013 Paul Carus Lectures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Profile Books, 2018 ISBN 978-1781259238

Novels

Avenging Angel. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1991. ISBN 9780312058173.

Nobody Likes Letitia. London: Constable. 1994. ISBN 9780094733008.

Another Death in Venice. London: Constable. 1995. ISBN 9780094744301.

Book chapters

Appiah, Anthony (1984), "Strictures on structures: the prospects for a structuralist poetics of African fiction", in Gates, Jr., Henry Louis (ed.), Black literature and literary theory, New York: Methuen, pp. 127–150, ISBN 9780415903349.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Anthony (1985), "Soyinka and the philosophy of culture", in Bodunrin, P.O. (ed.), Philosophy in Africa: trends and perspectives, Ile-Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife Press, pp. 250–263, ISBN 9789781360725.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Anthony (1987), "A long way from home: Richard Wright in the Gold Coast", in Bloom, Harold (ed.), Richard Wright, Modern Critical views Series, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, pp. 173–190, ISBN 9780877546399.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Anthony (1990), "Race", in Lentricchia, Frank; McLaughlin, Tom (eds.), Critical terms for literary study, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 274–287, ISBN 9780226472027.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Anthony (1990), "Racisms", in Goldberg, David (ed.), Anatomy of racism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–17, ISBN 9780816618040.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Anthony (1991), "Tolerable falsehoods: agency and the interests of theory", in Johnson, Barbara; Arac, Jonathan (eds.), Consequences of theory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 63–90, ISBN 9780801840456.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Anthony (1992), "Inventing an African practice in philosophy: epistemological issues", in Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves (ed.), The surreptitious speech: Présence Africaine and the politics of otherness, 1947–1987, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 227–237, ISBN 9780226545073.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1992), "Introduction", in Achebe, Chinua (ed.), Things fall apart, Everyman's Library Series, No. 135, New York: Knopf Distributed by Random House, pp. ix–xvii, ISBN 9780679446231.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Anthony (1992), "African identities", in Amselle, Jean-Loup; Appiah, Anthony; Bagayogo, Shaka; Chrétien, Jean-Pierre; Dakhlia, Jocelyne; Gellner, Ernest; LaRue, Richard; Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves; Topolski, Jerzy (eds.), Constructions identitaires: questionnements théoriques et études de cas, Québec: CÉLAT, Université Laval, ISBN 9782920576445.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link) Fernande Saint-Martin sous la direction de Bogumil Jewsiewicki et Jocelyn Létourneau, Actes du Célat No. 6, Mai 1992.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony; Mudimbe, V. Y. (1993), "The impact of African studies on philosophy", in Bates, Robert H.; Mudimbe, V. Y.; O'Barr, Jean (eds.), Africa and the disciplines: the contributions of research in Africa to the social sciences and humanities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 113–138, ISBN 9780226039015.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, K. Anthony (1994), "Identity, authenticity, survival: multicultural societies and social reproduction", in Taylor, Charles; Gutmann, Amy (eds.), Multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 149–164, ISBN 9780691037790.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1995), "Philosophy and necessary questions", in Kwame, Safro (ed.), Readings in African philosophy: an Akan collection, Lanham: University Press of America, pp. 1–22, ISBN 9780819199119.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, K. Anthony (1996), "Race, culture, identity: misunderstood connections", in Peterson, Grethe B. (ed.), The Tanner lectures on human values XVII, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, pp. 51–136, ISBN 9780585197708.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link) Pdf.

Appiah, K. Anthony (1997), "African-American philosophy?", in Pittman, John (ed.), African-American perspectives and philosophical traditions, New York: Routledge, pp. 11–34, ISBN 9780415916400.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1997), "Europe upside down: fallacies of the new Afrocentrism", in Grinker, Roy Richard; Steiner, Christopher B. (eds.), Perspectives on Africa: a reader in culture, history, and representation, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, pp. 728–731, ISBN 9781557866868.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1997), "Is the 'post-' in 'postcolonial' the 'post-' in 'postmodern'?", in McClintock, Anne; Mufti, Aamir; Shohat, Ella (eds.), Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives, Minnesota, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 420–444, ISBN 9780816626496.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1996), "Identity: political not cultural", in Garber, Marjorie; Walkowitz, Rebecca L.; Franklin, Paul B. (eds.), Field work: sites in literary and cultural studies, New York: Routledge, pp. 34–40, ISBN 9780415914550.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1999), "Yambo Ouolouguem and the meaning of postcoloniality", in Wise, Christopher (ed.), Yambo Ouologuem: postcolonial writer, Islamic militant, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 55–63, ISBN 9780894108617.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2000), "Aufklärung und dialogue der kulturen", in Krull, Wilhelm (ed.), Zukunftsstreit (in German), Weilerwist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, pp. 305–328, ISBN 9783934730175.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, K. Anthony (2001), "Grounding human rights", in Gutmann, Amy (ed.), Michael Ignatieff: Human rights as politics and idolatry, The University Center for Human Values Series, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 101–116, ISBN 9780691114743.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, K. Anthony (2001), "Stereotypes and the shaping of identity", in Post, Robert C. (ed.), Prejudicial appearances: the logic of American antidiscrimination law, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 55–71, ISBN 9780822327134.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2002), "The State and the shaping of identity", in Peterson, Grethe B. (ed.), The Tanner lectures on human values XXIII, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, pp. 235–297, ISBN 9780874807189 Pdf.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2009), "Sen's identities", in Kanbur, Ravi; Basu, Kaushik (eds.), Arguments for a better world: essays in honor of Amartya Sen | Volume I: Ethics, welfare, and measurement, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 475–488, ISBN 9780199239115.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Journal articles

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (Winter 1981). "Structuralist criticism and African fiction: an analytic critique". Black American Literature Forum. 15 (4): 165–174. doi:10.2307/2904328. JSTOR 2904328.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (October 1984). "An argument against anti-realist semantics". Mind. 93 (372): 559–565. doi:10.1093/mind/XCIII.372.559. JSTOR 2254262.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (November 1984). "Generalising the probabilistic semantics of conditionals". Journal of Philosophical Logic. 13 (4): 351–372. doi:10.1007/BF00247710. JSTOR 30226312.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (1 July 1985). "Verificationism and the manifestations of meaning". Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume. 59 (1): 17–31. doi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/59.1.17.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Autumn 1985). "The uncompleted argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race". Critical Inquiry. 12 (1): 21–37. doi:10.1086/448319. JSTOR 1343460.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (April 1986). "The importance of triviality". The Philosophical Review. 95 (2): 209–231. doi:10.2307/2185590. JSTOR 2185590.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Spring 1986). "Review: Deconstruction and the philosophy of language Reviewed Work: The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy by Christopher Norris". Diacritics. 16 (1): 48–64. doi:10.2307/464650. JSTOR 464650.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Spring–Summer 1986). "Review: Are we ethnic? The theory and practice of American pluralism. Reviewed work: Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture by Werner Sollors". Black American Literature Forum. 20 (1–2): 209–224. doi:10.2307/2904561. JSTOR 2904561.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Winter–Spring 1987). "Racism and moral pollution". The Philosophical Forum. 18 (2–3): 185–202. doi:10.1111/(ISSN)1467-9191.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Spring 1988). "Out of Africa: topologies of nativism". Yale Journal of Criticism. 2 (1): 153–178.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Autumn 1990). "Alexander Crummell and the invention of Africa". The Massachusetts Review. 31 (3): 385–406. JSTOR 25090195.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link) Publisher's website.

— (October 1990). "But would that still be me?" Notes on gender, "race," ethnicity, as sources of "identity". The Journal of Philosophy. 87 (10): 493–499. doi:10.5840/jphil1990871026. JSTOR 2026866.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Spring 1993). "African-American Philosophy?". The Philosophical Forum. 24 (1–3): 1–24. doi:10.1111/(ISSN)1467-9191.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (Spring 1998). "Race, pluralism, and Afrocentricity". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. 19 (19): 116–118. doi:10.2307/2998938. JSTOR 2998938.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (2004). "Comprendre les réparations: une réflexion préliminaire" [Understanding reparation: a preliminary reflection]. Cahiers d'Études Africaines (in French and English). 44 (173–174): 25–40. doi:10.4000/etudesafricaines.4518. JSTOR 4393367.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (April 2008). "Chapter 6: Education for global citizenship". Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. 107 (1): 83–99. doi:10.1111/j.1744-7984.2008.00133.x.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

— (21 September 2010). "Convincing other cultures to change". Big Think. Archived from the original on 12 December 2013.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)

—"The Key to All Mythologies" (review of Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss: A Biography, translated from the French by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff, Polity, 2019, 744 pp.; and Maurice Godelier, Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought, translated from the French by Nora Scott, Verso, 2019, 540 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 2 (13 February 2020), pp. 18–20. Appiah concludes his review (p. 20): "Lévi-Strauss... was... an inspired interpreter, a brilliant reader.... When the landmarks of science succeed in advancing their subject, they need no longer be consulted: physicists don't study Newton; chemists don't pore over Lavoisier.... If some part of Lévi-Strauss's scholarly oeuvre survives, it will be because his scientific aspirations have not."

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noisyharmonyeagle-blog · 6 years

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feelingdrafty · 6 years

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Guest Post from V.P. Hughes, author of A Thousand Points of Truth

Title: A Thousand Points of Truth

Author: V.P. Hughes

Publisher: XLibrisUS

Genre: History

Format: Ebook

My interest in Colonel John Singleton Mosby began in 1950 However it wasn t until 2002 that it led to extensive research on the subject centered upon newspaper reports on the man begun during the Civil War and continued throughout and even after his life And while I rejected Virgil Carrington Jones s observation on Mosby contained in the preface of this work I did not contemplate writing this book until an even more disparaging observation came to my attention during my research The comment was contained in an article in the Ponchatoula Times of May 26 1963 as part of a six article series written by Bernard Vincent McMahon entitled The Gray Ghost of the Confederacy Mr McMahon in turn based his comment upon General Omar Bradley s judgment of what might have been the postwar life of General George Patton Now substitute Mosby for General Patton in the book A General s Life by Omar Bradley I believe it was better for General Patton Mosby and his professional reputation that he died when he did He would have gone into retirement hungering for the old limelight beyond doubt indiscreetly sounding off on any subject anytime any place In time he would have become a boring parody of himself a decrepit bitter pitiful figure unwittingly debasing the legend emphasis mine McMahon however only proffered in his writings the widely accepted view of John Mosby held by many if not most However like General Ulysses S Grant I have come to know Colonel Mosby rather more intimately through the testimony of countless witnesses over a span of 150 years and I believe that it is time for those who deeply respect John Mosby the soldier to now also respect John Mosby the man A century ago the book of John Singleton Mosby s life closed It is my hope that this book will validate the claim he made during that life that he would be vindicated by time V P Hughes,

The History and Humanity of Col. John Singleton Mosby in Newsprint

I can say with confidence that this book is unique. Although there are innumerable books, essays, articles and dissertations about Colonel John Singleton Mosby, none presents his life through the lens of the press from 1862 through 1916, the year of Mosby’s death. To illustrate the depth of the resources used, almost 600 newspapers and over 7500 articles were available and only size limited what eventually was included. Yet even with severe editing, the work is almost 800 pages long, thus assuring the reader that a great deal of new and fascinating information has been brought to the fore! The articles are supported by a thought-provoking narrative interpreting Mosby’s life referable to the major historical events of the times as manifested through press coverage.

Yet this is not just a recitation of facts and press revelations, however interesting. Rather, the main thrust of the work is to correct past assumptions regarding Mosby’s life and especially those negative traits constantly reiterated in biographies and other works. As Mosby buffs know, such criticisms comprise denigration of his military value during the Civil War, his supposed post-war political “apostasy” and his character, especially in his old age. In all of these issues, this contemporary evidence counters the “accepted interpretation” of John Mosby as both a soldier and a man.

For many years, V. P. Hughes has been drawn to certain historical figures whom she researched at great length and in considerable depth regarding not only the person of interest but the period in which that individual lived and his influence upon it. Over the years, she has studied such heroes as Sir William Marshal (1147-1219), Sir Harry (Hotspur) Percy (1364-1403), Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), Sir William Wallace (1270-1305), Francis Marion (1732-1795) and the legendary figures William Tell and Robin Hood. The last three were of especial interest because they, with their few followers, engaged the most powerful armies of the time-and prevailed. Of course, John Singleton Mosby was another such champion-a man who defeated his adversaries with cunning and courage rather than brute military force. Yet Mosby became an even greater curiosity when during her research the author discovered that he had died twenty-five years to the day and hour of her own birth-May 30th, 9 a.m, 1916 and 1941 respectively. Although acknowledged as a mere coincidence, however curious, Mosby’s unique style of warfare and his astonishing success under the circumstances extant, made him of especial interest. Early on, her knowledge of the man centered around the Civil War, but then, copious written works as well as the opinions of past and present day Mosby sages brought to light his post-war life in a manner that seemingly disparaged and negated all the glories that had gone before. Finding this both troubling and unacceptable, when the opportunity arose to refute these calumnies and slanders, the author felt obligated to undertake what is, in essence, a posthumous defense of the man. It is hoped that this unique work will achieve the goal of undoing a great injustice and restoring to a noble American hero the respect and admiration he so richly deserves.

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houseofmysojourn · 6 years

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Part II - The Academy: Issues of Class and Kingdom

For as difficult as it may be to find a calling in church, it may be equally difficult -- if not impossible -- for me to find it in the academy. Certainly, it is impossible to find it in the academy apart from the church. But as much as the church creates difficulties for a single woman with advanced degrees in Bible like myself, the academy is also tough. At the end of the day, it is not my world. I fear that it is not a world that I can ever fully belong to, and if I'm being honest, I fear it's not one I want to belong to either.

I have learned some unexpected things at Duke. I thought I would find a lot of people like myself, people who had the same interests and the same types of intelligences. I honestly thought that there would be a type of belonging I could enjoy in the academy that I could not enjoy elsewhere.

Yet, this has been far from the case. Someone asked me recently if I felt alienated at Duke. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that it is not so much a feeling that I have been alienated as that I am simply an alien. I think there are many reasons for this, reasons that I have only recently begun to fully grasp.

For one, I have learned that the academy is full of people from certain social classes, certain higher social classes. I did not grow up poor by any means; but, I think it is safe to say that my parents did, and I grew up around a lot of poor people, with a lot of what you might call "poor people perspectives". Because I grew up with security for my daily needs, this is not a perspective that I was aware I had. I was not aware that I would be one of the only people from my social class at Duke. I wasn't even aware that I had a social class. But there are significant differences between the way that I think and live in the world, and the way the average Duke person does. The Duke world is hardly intelligible to me sometimes, and it is not intelligible at all to the folks I grew up with.

Likewise, while people here at Duke think they know a lot about the world, there are aspects of life where I grew up that they could never comprehend. (A wonderful example is the absolute shock and horror of my classmates and professors after the election of Donald Trump. I was equally shocked at their collective shock!) There are a lot of things taken for granted here that I cannot imagine taking for granted, and that even my friends in undergrad would never have taken for granted. Some of these things are infuriating, some of them have been deeply hurtful, and some of them just make me feel lonely.

In spite of all this, it is the aspiration of so many in lower social classes to attain to this level, even as they are at the same time (often justly) suspicious of this world and what it promotes. A lot of my friends -- even friends far poorer and more marginalized than myself -- could have made it here if all it came down to was capacity. But they would never think to try. The possibility is not on their horizons.

Furthermore, I think there is something in many poor people which rightly discerns that they would not belong here, and that in order to belong here, they might have to change so much of who they are as to no longer be recognizable. And they are, in so many ways, right about that.

I've been caught up in it too. Without realizing what I was doing, I would help to make poor, ignorant, conservative, white America the butt of every joke, the background of every subtle jab, the gold standard of what not to be, the source of the world's ills, and what we as Christians must attempt to distance ourselves from as much as possible. In places like Duke Div there seems to always be this fear that if we claim Christianity, the world at large might think we are claiming those people -- and by "the world at large," I mostly mean the world of higher class, educated people. I mostly mean the academy. It has taken me two years to wake up to what this means.

So much of what happens here seems to be apologetics for the elites. We think we are in danger of being excised from the academy or thought poorly of because the name "Christian" might lump us in with so many undesirables. We must meet certain standards, standards for language and methods and style of writing, in order to prove that we belong here too, that we deserve our place -- from individual professors trying to get tenure, to PhD students defending dissertations, to master's students seeking affirmation for their dreams.

Poverty, ignorance, ignominy, and bigotry are viewed as contagions, and the way we sanitize and show our cleanliness to others is by publicly denouncing the people to whom these illnesses are believed to stick.

Now don't get me wrong: the folks I grew up with definitely think, in a certain way, that they are better than more educated people from higher classes. There is almost the sense, in some churches, that it is better for people not to pursue advanced education in Bible, even from more conservative institutions. But, I think the folks I grew up around also feel a certain amount of shame, failure, and disenfranchisement in the current social and political scene, and there is not a lick of that feeling here. Here, there is only success and the threat of losing it, of becoming like them. In certain ways, I'm convinced that both sides are right and both wrong. There are truths about each of these locations that can only be seen from a true outsider's perspective, and they are truths that the Evil One works to keep us from discovering. Because in discovering them, perhaps we would be reconciled, and in being reconciled, perhaps we would see where we stand before God.

When I came here, it was on the advice of my professors in undergrad. They thought I would flourish here, and that this was a place from which I could have a shot at getting a job in an ever more competitive field. I also think I honestly wanted to know what it was that my friends and family were so suspicious of. And, part of me actually hoped deep down that people here would, in light of their education, be more open and charitable to others than the folks I grew up with. I hoped I would have breathing room to be charitable that I didn't have in more fundamentalist spaces.

But there is a big difference between me and many of my classmates from evangelical backgrounds: I am not bitter against the people I grew up with. I am not bitter against my parents. I may disagree with them on a few things, but we agree far more than we disagree. There are plenty of people here who do not even know a Trump-voter or a "climate denier" personally, and for many it would be unthinkable to actually take them seriously and listen deeply to them; certainly, they would not allow themselves to be personally critiqued or challenged by them.

Here, there are as many unforgivable sins as in fundamentalism. There is a legalism as harsh and exacting as Puritanism. And this semester it suddenly dawned on me: there are actually some people here who would want some people in my family dead. In the perfect world of many at Duke, my family might not exist.

I type these words through tears, because as wrong as they may be, I love them. I love all of them.

But no matter how much I take from this place, when it comes to my family, I have no choice but to listen to them. I have no choice but to be challenged by them, critiqued, to hear their concerns and perspectives. And I've started to realize how right they are about a lot of things. They're just not in the position to express those critiques in a way that will make any sense to the people who need to hear them. And yeah, they don't wanna hear critiques on their end either.

I get it. There are times when the flip-flop between break and school has felt intolerable. There are times when I have just really not wanted to be asked if I drank the liberal kool-aid, or how I navigate my faith at a "secular" school like Duke Divinity. There are times when I haven't wanted to hear about how the world is going to hell because of liberals.

There are times when I haven't wanted to come back to school and hear people make fun of the simple, uneducated faith of old church ladies -- ladies who have been to hell and back again and who love others in radically Jesus-like ways, ladies who I am sure will gain crowns in heaven far out of our reach. There are times when I haven't wanted to sit through another tirade about how the church has contributed to systemic poverty from people who think they're really sacrificing for Jesus by taking a job where they'll only make a starting salary of 40k. There are times when I haven't wanted to hear about how the world is going to hell because of evangelicals.

Here, being a Christian seems to equal voting for Hillary. Back home, it seems to equal voting for Trump. But I'm starting to think it equals loving God and your neighbor, and that maybe we need to talk more about how to do that personally than about how to vote. I don't know what this so-called Christian madness is that thinks a vote is more important than a cup of cold water. Oh if only we could get back the time we spent watching the news and debating each other about the election, and give it back to God and our neighbors! If only we could cleanse our eyes and our hearts from their disease! If only we could return to the Lord our God, and He would have compassion on us.

I'm exhausted. I have seen how exhausting it is to seek after success, to care so damned much what people think. I have seen the utter vanity in riches and prestige. I have seen demonic things here. God has opened my eyes to some crazy stuff. And I think I have cracked just enough under all the pressure to let at least a little bit of the light in.

In the words of Kendrick Lamar, I have seen that love may get you killed, but that pride's gonna be the death of you, and you, and me, and you, and you, and you, and me. I have come out realizing that "in a perfect world. . .I'd take all the religions and put 'em all in one service, just to tell 'em we ain't shit, but He's been perfect, world."

The "perfect world" for many of the folks I grew up with, and the "perfect world" of the folks I've gone to school with do not agree. The visions that seem to dominate both of these spaces are fractured, damaged visions. I believe that both of them, in certain ways, approximate the Kingdom, but both of them also fall far short. And neither of them have room for undesirables. Neither of them have room for all of the children of God, for all of the ones for whom Christ died. The Kingdom, on the other hand, is so much greater than these visions. The Kingdom includes the reconciliation of all things. The Kingdom calls us to true, personal repentance, repentance that will cause us all to listen to the ways in which the other side is being used by God to show us our wrongs.

If I am an academic, I will not stop being an evangelical, and I will not stop being loyal to the village of people who raised me and made me who I am. I have no problem with being poor, with having just enough to get by. And I hope I have no problem with being despised and being spoken ill of. If I am an academic, I need to see how my work matters to the people I grew up with and to the church in general, as much as it matters to the world's elites. I want to satisfy the requirements of the Kingdom, not the academy, and certainly not the economy. But is that even possible? How does one preach a gospel that is despised, in a place so dominated by prestige? Can a path to career advancement also be a path to repentance, and if so, how?

Does my repentance involve me going on for doctoral work and living into "the dream"? Am I supposed to serve the church (as some of my friends have suggested) by being a light of some much-needed truth in academic circles? Or is this the suggestion everyone makes because it makes sense according to the world's standards? Because we think that Christians should seek worldly influence to make the gospel effective?

The gospel is found first in weakness, but the academy holds itself up as a bastion of meritocratic strength. And sometimes Christian higher ed is the worst.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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TO TURN THE PAGES of Spill is to watch the invisible become flesh from the language of humming, longing, living, and dying. Drawing from the deep aquifers of the work of Hortense Spillers, American literary critic and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s poetry is an overflow and offering of Black voice. It is a voice mostly for Black women that illuminates a world critically and lovingly restored with dimension and structure by the work of Hortense Spillers. Characterized by intermittent rhyming, a perspective that is at once fluid yet rooted in the language of the body and the usage of space and citations, Gumbs weaves narratives of hope, desperation, and knowing into one sharp longing. It is a “poetilitical praxis,” an unflinching look at what pain has wrought and what fruit might yet be born.

A queer Black troublemaker, a Black feminist love evangelist, and a prayer poet priestess, Alexis Pauline Gumbs holds a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Her scholarship spans the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University. Alexis is a public intellectual and essayist on topics from the abolition of marriage to the power of dreams to the genius of enslaved African ancestors.

Alexis is the visiting Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota. Her conversation about Spill can be found at Left of Black, and more about her work can be found at alexispauline.com. The second book in the series, M Archive: After the End of the World, comes out in a few weeks.

Alexis makes time for me right after a dentist appointment, so that’s where we begin.

JOY KMT: How are you?

ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS: Doing well. I didn’t engage in full-scale battle against the dentist and dental assistant, which I used to do when I was a kid. I guess meditation works. Because of how I don’t really get numb from anesthesia and how I am in the throes of grieving my father, I have been thinking a lot about Lucille Clifton’s poem “water sign woman.” I have a Cancer rising sign. She talks about the “feels everything woman.” That’s me. 

I am sorry to hear of your father’s passing. I have a moon in Pisces, so I understand the “feels everything woman.”

Yeah. I miss him so much. He was actually one of the first people to read Spill.

What was his reaction?

My dad was a big cheerleader for me, so of course he was like, “It’s groundbreaking, it’s stunning, it’s going to take the world by storm.” But that’s what he said about everything I did so …

It’s true, though.

My dad would say, “Just because I’m biased doesn’t mean I’m not right.”

How would you say general reactions have been to Spill?

The reactions have been really humbling. People have written beautiful letters and emails about how the work is impacting their healing, their relationships, their creativity, and their lives. And it’s been a wide range of people from other scholars and poets, people in my neighborhood, and dance classes. I wanted it to be a space for all my communities of accountability to be together, and it seems like it’s working.

Over and over again people have told me that the scenes are out of their own lives and the lives of the people they love. And when I share the book, I use it as an oracle. I ask people to think of a question and then a number and I read them a page and it seems like the book is able to speak to their lives and get all into their business. Long story short, a lot of people are looking at me like I’m a witch. And they aren’t really wrong.

I’m really struck by the tenderness with which you were able to render scenes, even when they were scenes of deep antipathy — “she loved the soft blue ocean of wishing he would die,” for instance. Why and how did you frame those very devastating scenes like you did?

The one thing that was present for me every moment of writing the book and that I hope is present in every moment of the book is love for Black women as Black women above everything, despite everything. So in a moment like that scene where this woman is trying to use all the gentleness and servility she has been taught to destroy, the person she sees as her oppressor, abuser, exploiter, love is still there. Her love for herself is there. Even if it can only be expressed in her desire to be free from the situation.

I think that no matter what we are going through, and even if we are not in a so-called “empowered” or “positive” space, mood, or situation, love is there. My study of Black women as a Black woman has taught me that. Love is always there. Always. Even when it seems completely impossible that it would be.

You start the book and each chapter with the definition and synonyms of spill — the title of your book. It seems both an homage to Spillers and a declaration of defiance. What is the container that you intend to overflow in this book?

Yes, I definitely think of this book as a celebration of the fact that Black women have not been contained, even though our blood has been spilled over and over again (including internal bleeding). I also think of the book as a libation to honor our ancestors and begin a ceremony that doesn’t end in the book. You have to use it every day. So I think the container has many names. Heteropatriarchal capitalism? Colonialism? The Western idea of the individual life?  In the next book (coming out in March!), I write about the Black Feminist Pragmatic Intergenerational Sphere, which is just of way of referencing what Audre Lorde said in “My Words Will Be There,” which is that who we are is beyond the limits (or container) of one lifetime. But most explicitly what I designed the book to defy was the oppressive interlocking set of narratives that entrap Black women every day.

What kind of ceremony do you see springing to life from this work?

For me it is the opening part, the libation, of a three-part work. A triptych. This is the part that opens the way for ancestral honoring and healing. The second part, “M Archive: After the End of the World,” is about long visioning about what the material evidence will be of this apocalypse we are going through. And then the third part is actually what I am writing right now. It’s called “DUB: Finding Ceremony.” Which is another way of saying yes, this is an oracle. And what’s cool is that it still functions as an oracle for me, even though I’ve read it more than a hundred times.  And the other thing I love is that other people are using it as an oracle. A few weeks ago a healer was doing tarot readings paired with pages from Spill on Facebook. I was like, “Wow! Draw one for me!” And it was right on point! So the primary ceremony I think Spill calls for is for Black women, all of us by the way, cis and trans, to recognize ourselves, each other, our ancestors and what we’ve been through. And to recognize the love and life-making that has also been there the whole time and is still there. And the secondary ceremony is for everyone who doesn’t identify as a Black woman to also understand that their healing is bound up with ours too.

How would you describe Spill in terms of genre and intent?

I think of the pieces on each page as scenes. I think of the book as a whole as a poem (#epic) and I think of every scene as poetic. And I think of it as an index and an oracle and a meditation. My intention is for the technologies of Black women poets, fiction writers, hip-hop artists, priestesses, singers, mamas, fugitives, stylists, and literary theorists to converge in the same space. Sylvia Wynter says, “After humanism — the ceremony must be found,” and I wanted to find a ceremony where we could be together, and where I could be with the revolutionary work of Hortense Spillers and with everyone else I love at the same time. Finding ceremony is a poetic act. So it is poetry.

I think you’ve partially answered this, but as a multidisciplinary artist and Black feminist scholar, what was the impetus for this book at this point in your career and life?

Right, I thought about what my intellectual writing would look like. And I thought about the people whose work has impacted me the most. I thought about Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux, and Barbara Smith and how none of them wrote “novels,” even though the novel was the most marketable form of writing available to them. My dissertation is about the poetics of survival and mothering in the work of those four geniuses and I think about them at all time. I thought about other academic theorists I cite the most: Hortense Spillers, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Sylvia Wynter, and how, to date, none of them have published a traditional scholarly monograph. They have all these essays collected (or in the case of Wynter uncollected) that change everything.

And so with that in mind I decided that building on the work that I have done to create spaces for my communities of accountability to be with the Black feminist creative and movement writers that I love, I also wanted to have creative space to be with my communities in the worlds created by the Black feminist theorists I love. Also though, it wasn’t a decision like how capitalism and individualism and Western education teach us to think about decisions.

When I decided to do the daily writing process that resulted in Spill, I didn’t really have thoughts about who would publish it, or if it would be published at all. I just knew it was what I should do.  And I’m actually still doing it. First thing every single day. And I am as surprised as anyone by what it looks like. But what I’m not surprised about is that it is infused with love for Black women in every moment. Because that’s the one decision I keep making by continuing to be alive. To love Black women (myself included) with everything I have, every day. That’s what my life is.

At the end of Spill you seem to shift to a longer and broader timeline, moving from individual intimacies to a more collective oracular vehicle, sort of in the vein of Ayi Kwei Armah. Also, throughout the text, rhyme, space, and sound tend to shift the movement of the text at will. What was your decision-making process like behind the movement of the text or what guided the movement?

What a generous comparison! Yes, that’s true. The end of the book is more explicitly collective and intergenerational. The way the scenes appear in the book isn’t the order I wrote them in. It was a conscious decision I made when I was ordering the manuscript to move from the intimacy of the first scenes to the collectivity of the last scenes. And maybe because that’s how my day goes. I wake up very early in the morning to be with myself. And then my partner and I intentionally come together, and then it’s later in the day usually that I’m actually in community. And the way that rhyme and rhythm work in the text … to me it’s a poetics of fugitivity. The sound of being on the run, compelled, but sometimes being able to stop and be with people, stop and be with self, stop and reflect, but then you are on the run again.

Can you speak more to the poetics of fugitivity and fugitivity discourse?

Sure, so Harriet Tubman and Phillis Wheatley get explicit shout-outs in Spill. And they were both enslaved women who in completely different ways spilled out of and upset the container of gendered and racialized slavery.

Fugitivity for me, for us now living in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery,” means that we are still entrapped by the gendering and racializing traps that made slavery possible. But we exceed it. We stay in love with our own freedom. We make refuge for each other. How do we do it? With our movement, with our braveness, with our leaving, with our words, almost always with food involved. So the scenes in Spill are scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity because for me they all feature a desire to be free and the urgent impossible-to-ignore presence of the ongoing obstacles to our freedom. It’s making me think of my teacher, my cherished intellectual mother Farah Jasmine Griffin’s book on Billie Holiday, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery. Our navigation of freedom requires so much creativity, and the work of saying it while also hiding it. That’s a fugitive poetics.

I wanted to ask you personally, why did you include a thank you to me in the book?

Oh girl! Because you completely inspire me in general! But also specifically because when I was writing that scene after Spillers’s words “a question that we cannot politely ask,” I immediately thought of your work and the confrontational, epistemic liberating questioning you do in your poetry. And also your refusal to be limited by the “polite.” How you say, “they say we are strong but they really mean silent.” It’s exactly what I am talking about in Spill. Reading your work while I wrote Spill had a crucial impact on me and I had to acknowledge that.

Reading Spill was deeply nourishing for me. It took me back to my secret life. I think the unwavering radical love that you offer in this book helped peel back my shame. So thank you so much for the opportunity to read and the opportunity to explore with you.

Wow, I am so grateful for that. That’s the ceremony of Spill, I think, to give us space to acknowledge all of it.

How is the eclipse treating you?

The eclipse is amazing! We put candles all over the house and were drumming and dancing.

Yeah? My house is a mess, so I was playing Alice Coltrane and cleaning and went outside to watch the eclipse.

Super powerful and profound energy. Yeah, change is coming; you can feel it.

It’s a potent time to be talking. I appreciate you taking time out your day.

[Laughs.] I appreciate you. They’ll speak about it in legend — “On the day of the eclipse, the Nat Turner eclipse, Joy KMT and Alexis Pauline Gumbs spoke about the healing qualities of literature.”— When we’re really old, they’ll speak about it like this. [Laughs.]

What have you been thinking about Spill?

I just did this reading with an amazing poet named Cynthia Dewi Oka, and Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, who is an amazing poet, student of Audre Lorde, mother of Phife Dawg from A Tribe Called Quest and Afro-Trinidadian genius, author of many books of poetry, and another person, Raquel Salas Rivera. It was really interesting because a lot of the poems in Cheryl’s newest book of poems, Arrival, are thinking about her family and ritual, and a lot if it is in Trinidadian English, and Raquel’s poems are all in Spanish, and she translates some of them into English; Raquel is a Puerto Rican poet. So I was thinking about, “What is the vernacular of Spill?”

When Black women talk to me about feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I feel like you wrote this just for me,” what makes it feel that way to other people? What’s recognizable? I think some of the vernaculars of Spill have to do with food and cleaning and domestic rituals and domestic work, hair braiding and grooming. I think there’s a lot of tactile language. Language of touch.

I realize that I’m always thinking about Black women and I love Black women, and obviously I was engaging with a Black feminist theorist the whole time I was writing it. But I think what makes it effective, intimate, ritual space for me and for other Black women does have to do with familiar forms of care that are in the book. Even if it’s for a slaver, which it sometimes is, or if it’s considered to be surplus labor, that work that we do to keep other Black people alive, that is not sanctioned by the state.

You asked me, before the interview, about the relationship between Fred Moten’s work and mine. Well, Fred was on my dissertation committee. But before I even met Fred, Fred Moten’s work, In the Break in particular, had me thinking about how powerful Black maternity is. And how scary it is, you know, to everyone in the world who is threatened by that power. And yet, how revolutionary it is to honor it for what it is. That’s actually one of the things that I love about your work. What happens if we understand everything in the world, all of the systems of oppression that target and seek to harm Black women and Black mothers especially. What if we see all of that as proof of and as a response to the amazing power that is Black mothering and that is the Dark Feminine? What does it mean if we acknowledge that? I would say that that’s the primary connection between the work that I’m doing in Spill and the work Moten is doing there. And it’s not a coincidence that that would be the connection because they both come through Spillers.

That’s the thing about Spillers’s work, that has me coming back to it forever and ever and ever ever. It’s the basis for how he develops that theory of Black maternity, also.

Well, I know we jumped right back into the interview, but I wanted to ask you, how have you been?

I’ve been good. I know last time we talked, I had just come back from the dentist and was talking about my dad. I still think about him every day. I was just thinking this morning about the fact that my dad was an amazing friend to me. I never thought about that until literally this morning. About the fact that, “Ah, I was actually friends with this person.” And I feel really grateful for that. That was a really powerful definition of our relationship. And what if I never realized that? I feel like the reason it took me so long to realize that is patriarchy. My dad did not play the patriarchal role, but there is something about the Black longing for patriarchy that’s deep. It’s something that I think is super toxic, hateful, and ridiculous and illogical.

Hortense Spillers writes about this as well in her essay, “‘The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight’: In the Time of Daughters and the Fathers.” There’s no such thing. There’s no Black patriarchy, there’s not gon’ be no patriarchy, there’s really no such thing as fathers and daughters in relationship to what Black life has meant. The essay looks at a short story by Alice Walker and the strange incest story that the guy in Invisible Man tells. It talks about these stories as examples of how ownership, the way a father owns a daughter in patriarchy, is not Black relationality and is sick and disgusting to begin with. And that these stories basically offer how absurd that is but also how harmful the desire for that is. And as usual — this is what I love about Hortense Spillers so much — in conclusion, Black people are inventing a whole different type of life. Basically we’re doing a whole other thing that makes all these other things possible. At least for me, that’s the queerness with which I read Spillers’s work. It’s like okay, if there’s no such thing as Black fathers and daughters, then what are Black relationships built on? Black social life and Black community? If we know we cannot own anything, even our bodies and even our loved ones, then what is our relationality made of? It’s not made out of property, but we’ve been made into property.

What does she say relationships are made out of?

Let me go ahead and open the book. So I don’t misquote, but basically she talks about our relationships being built on choice, our relationships being built on shared ritual practice, our relationships being built on creativity, creativity that can’t be necessarily owned. So that’s a general paraphrasing. Of course the way she says it is going to be beautiful and incredible and impossible to paraphrase, but …

Would you say that interpretation of Spillers’s work is the foundation for how you approach Spill? And also, it’s funny that we started on this path of conversation, because one of my questions is: What do you see as the relationship between Black masculinity and Black femininity in Spill?

That’s a good question. And yeah, it’s very much framed by those questions. And you know, that essay is not an essay that I cite in Spill, but I got back into that essay — it has always been one of my favorite essays of hers — trying to process my grief around my father and not wanting my grieving process to be shaped by patriarchy. So I actually ended up writing some other scenes that are not in Spill, that have a similar process based on quotations from that essay, and some scenes that are based on Sylvia Wynter’s work, which is what the third book is.

Is that M or the next work?

It’s the next work, called Dub, Finding Ceremony. But this piece in feminist formations is me processing around my father and it cites this essay and it cites ethno and socio poetics, by Sylvia Wynter. I think it’s coming out soon because they just paid me for it today. I think it’s coming out today. Who knows? Sorry, I have you on speaker phone and I’m climbing my book shelves looking for this book.

It’s okay.

Yeah, but the relationship between masculinity and femininity, I mean I think one of the things I was present to, especially in the section, “what he was thinking” was just the violence of masculinity. A lot of the violence that the feminine figures in the book are fugitives from is masculinist energy, but it’s also the predictable result of the imposition of masculinity. I felt like those were scenes that made it visible in a particular way, and there is a scene in there where I’m very much thinking about Invisible Man, that scene where a young man is seeing his mother being disrespected over and over again by a paternal figure. The imposition of masculinity, especially in terms of Black social life, has been profoundly destructive. And Black femininity has been in fugitivity from that in a particular way. I think that might be one way that it shows up in Spill. But then, I think that there’s a lot of different possibilities. Some of the scenes around Black masculinity and femininity in conflict, I’m definitely drawing on Alice Walker’s work, I’m definitely drawing on Zora Neale Hurston’s work, I’m definitely drawing on — I think about Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I think about masculinity in Jamie’s life as something that comes through the scenes in Spill. I think about “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, and the ending of the book is definitely an offering in reverence to that story.

So yeah, I would say that the relationship between masculinity and femininity and the work in Spill is a relationship that is also — the masculinity and the femininity of the people in the book are fugitive from patriarchy. It’s also fugitive from binary. It really is trying to escape that. So part of what Spill is about is how sometimes you don’t escape something until it’s impossible to ignore how violent it is. And at the same time, whatever the revelation is within that violence is what is making it possible for something else to happen beyond that binary. Beyond what patriarchy has made masculinity and femininity. So you know I think about that in the way that Toni Cade Bambara talks about in “On the Issue of Roles,” which is definitely another influence on Spill. But I think actually the relationship between masculinity and femininity in Spill is as complicated as the relationship between the relationship between masculinity and femininity in Black women’s writing. As we know, at the very outset of what literary historiographers call Black women’s writing renaissance, when Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker and Toni Morrison had these widely deep texts that were centered on the experiences of Black women, that were probably the most widely acceptable that texts about Black women that had ever been, by Black women, immediately the pushback was around the portrayal of Black men. That it was unfair to show the forms of violence that Black women experience. It hasn’t stopped, as we know. That’s the archive that I am soaked in, that spilled out in Spill. And at the same time, like how June Jordan writes about Zora Neale Hurston’s work in contrast to Richard Wright’s work, saying whereas Black masculinist impulse in protest literature is like, “ F you white man!” and this is why we need to destroy this terrible racist society — which June Jordan definitely agreed with — but if you look at Zora Neale Hurston as your model for what Black literature is, you see the relationship between Black people invested in within the work of Black women. I wouldn’t make a gender binary around that either. But what she’s saying is if you look at Zora Neale Hurston as our model, that’s what we are going to have again and again. We’re going to see that the revelations, the complexity and the nuance is really in relationships between Black people, and what about that as an argument for the world that we want to create. Not only relationships between Black people and white people. So I would say Spill is that too, saying that there is something to be learned in the gendered relations of Black people that is key, core, really primary. And it’s learned. And if healed, would absolutely change everything. Who is considered family? What Spillers is saying is that, Black family is based on who preserved life and the calling for life. Who creates kinship? It’s not going to be based on patriarchal traceability and lineage. Because people have been sold away and are being dispersed over and over again and displaced. Revolutionary mothering is the way that I think about it. Who is participating in the preservation of life? That’s the vernacular of Spill. If you go back to what I said in the beginning, that’s what’s happening. Cooking is happening. Cleaning is happening. Hair is being done. You know, all of that is happening. People are being warmed.

I’m such a baby trying to get into this Spillers. But I appreciate the challenge of her work.

It is complicated, what Spillers is saying, and it’s almost impossible to say. Given the language and structures and thought that we have all been trained into, how deeply her work unsettles those it’s almost impossible for her to say what she’s saying. And at the same time, it’s really simple but it only requires the small thing of forgetting everything you know. For me, that’s the poetic imperative. Every poet is saying things that’re unsettling and making possible ceremonies for something to be said, that couldn’t be said otherwise.

I wanna talk about craft with you a little bit. What, in your writing, signaled to you the evocation of ceremony? What are the components of language that create ceremony?

The first scene in Spill, the person tried every possible ceremony they knew about and it’s still as bad as it looks. They had candle, they had the food in the corners, all of it. The ceremonies that had been known up till then were not sufficient to the reality and in a certain way had to either be what offered that clarity or be left behind. And similarly, making the greens, that ceremony changes. The way that person makes the greens changes throughout that scene. There’s something important about that, that the ceremony that they started with and the ceremony that’s available is asking for something else to be created. So how does that happen? Writing can be like a wormhole, a nonlinear path to a space from where one started. That’s the fugitive technology.

For me, the repetition of rhyme is the fugitivity. The arrival at the urgency that’s asking for your own revelation. Fugitivity for me is like, okay, so we have this flight and we’re compelled and propelled and the momentum of the pieces of Spill is evoking that through the rhythm. What does that embodied experience give and demand? It demands ceremony in a particular way. Fugitivity demands many ceremonies. One of the things I talk about in the beginning note is, “we have to create the space now we gotta leave.” The rhythm shapes that movement.

The other thing I would say is listening. The major skill that I had to develop to be present for this work was to listen. Hearing different people read them, I can tell that it is what I heard when I hear people read the scenes at performances. That’s important because the words are there or the punctuation that we have access to, and you know I’m doing weird stuff with punctuation, it’s not a given that it would sound like what I heard when somebody brings their own voice to it, but I still hear the rhythm that I heard. It means that rhythm holds the possibility for that ceremony. The shifts in the rhythm signify the shifts in the ceremony. I think that’s how it shows up in the language. That’s the language that gets you to get into the rhythm that makes this possible.

It’s not to say that the language is a signifier or that you could substitute any word as long as it had the syllables, I’m not saying that at all, what the language references is also important, domestically ceremonial and creating and providing intimacy and access in really important ways. The actual content of the language is what has my neighbor be able to be like, “Oh, this makes me think about my mom and my aunt.” But at the same time there is something rhythmically happening, and it was transformative for me to be able to experience those rhythms in the process of making this work.

You said you were listening. What were you listening to?

I needed to hear the phrase. I had written down the phrases [from Spillers’s work] and I would open up the notebook that had the phrases outside of their context, and I would work with the one my eyes fell on. Then I would cross it out after I worked with it. I was distilling it in that way because I had to look at the phrase and not then go, well here’s what she meant by that. Here’s what I think about it. I had to not let my brain fill the space. I had to leave a space and listen to where the phrase took me. Who is this? What is the scene? Where? As I was hearing it and writing it and seeing it, the rhythms were very different. Sometimes there was a breathlessness at the end of writing it. Sometimes I would reread it and be like woo! Sometimes the experience was like um-hm. Sometimes it was a feeling of being transported and traveling back into my actual life. Who has the actual expertise to tell this actual story is who I had to listen to, and understand that I’m in relationship to who that is through my intimacy with Black women’s writing, and that legacy of listening. Listening to storytellers and also listening beyond, listening to the silence of a room, that those writers have been doing. And realizing that it was all there. Like if I had been a lot more quiet a lot earlier in life I would have heard this before. And it was these phrases of Hortense Spillers that could get me to have the level of stillness and listening to hear whatever it was. It was the technology for it.

I wanted to ask you about your next work, M. I got the sense from the description that it seems to build on Sylvia Wynter’s discourse on humanism. Can you talk a bit about M and the connection between Spill and M?

First of all, Sylvia Wynter is always there. I first heard about Sylvia Wynter from Brent Edwards. I went to this summer thing at Dartmouth and I had this one conversation with Brent Edwards who was a speaker. He mentioned ethno and socio poetics by Sylvia Wynter — and this is the deep generosity of Black scholars without which I could not participate in intellectual life in the way that I do — he mailed me a photocopy of this essay. That was very important because it was only published in the journal of this conference in 1979, so it wasn’t very accessible. The context of this essay is that the conference seemed like it was for anthropologists who were interested in poetics, like do certain poetics come from certain ethnicities, preserving indigenous language and poetics but in a super colonialist way, so I don’t even know why they invited Sylvia Wynter to this conference unless there was some subversive person that wanted them there. In this essay, Sylvia Wynter breaks down the entire invention of what you think a human is. She’s like, let me go through the medieval times, the sense of God, Robinson Crusoe, and basically she’s breaking down all of Western civilization to say that there is no ethnopoetics, there is no ethno — there is no us, because what you all have done is to create a them and then said that hat them has no language. So this entire project that you think you’re doing, you can’t. You’re not. But, there’s such a thing as Black poetry, and there’s such a thing as Indigenous poetry. It’s not along the lines of ethnicity that you are thinking about. It is the possibility of being able what is impossible to say. For me, that was a very important moment in my life because I was like, “That is what we’re doing!” Yes. Yes. It is the impossible daily work. Black artists and Indigenous artists in particular, we’re using these languages that are literally what makes it impossible to say what we gotta say, do what we gotta do, be with each other, be here. From then on I was like I have to read everything by Sylvia Wynter. She’s saying, none of this stuff is natural, none of this stuff is permanent, so we can think of some other stuff and do it and the sooner the better because this particular train of thought is destroying everything. So back to the question. M, the citations from that work come from M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing, so it’s a similar process that I did for Spill but a completely different set of essays that took me to totally different places and post-apocalyptic futures. One of the things about this future is that the perspective is from someone who is archiving the material evidence of the end of humans. But that does not mean that there are no beings, or no beings related to those of us who are the current humans or not humans based on anti-Blackness. But it does mean that that category has expired. And it may actually mean that we all die. There are multiple possibilities in the text, but it does imagine what is after the human, and Sylvia Wynter says that after the human the ceremony must be found. So what are the material components of that post-human ceremony? What are the memories, what are the practices, what are the rituals that constitute that? And how would someone describe it who could see it as history? And definitely, there’s nothing that I’ve written before I read Sylvia Wynter and definitely after I read Sylvia Wynter that’s not in conversation with Sylvia Wynter. Not a tweet. Everything is in conversation with Sylvia Wynter in some way.

So, final question: What’s your recollection of how we met?

From my perspective, it was like the hugest gift that you came to DC from Pittsburgh and were like, “Hello, I heard you were doing oracle readings, I’m here to open the oracle.” The way I got to DC, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival had a special thing they were doing about Black adornment called “The Will to Adorn,” inspired by how Zora Neale Hurston talks about Black adornment. They asked me to come, and I don’t know what they thought I was going to do but what I knew there was to do was to create this wearable oracle created on a daily basis out of Black feminist texts. I remember what was going on in your life but I don’t remember what your question was. I remember you talking about Oshun and the cinnamon and cleaning the new space you were in and the artist grant you had just gotten. I’m just really inspired by you and your life, and how you understand everything to be a part of your creative practice, like the ants and how you dealt with the ants by putting cinnamon down. And you know I’ve never stopped reading your work and I’ve never not been blown away by the brilliance, the honesty, and the rituals that you create in your community. I just feel like we have the same religion.

Yes, I feel similarly. I feel like much of my work is in conversation with your work. Did anybody ever tell you that talking to you is like talking to a nourishing whirlwind?

[Laughs.] No, but I like that though. I should put that in my bio. I like that! I identify with that. I know it’s a lot. I know I’m all over the place, but I’m glad it’s nourishing. I’m glad it’s clear that it is all love. That’s all it can be.

Joy KMT is a healer, poet, and ritual artist. She is the founder of the Tabernacle of Immaculate Perception.

The post We Stay In Love with Our Freedom: A Conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2DZxLug

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sky-designs · 6 years

Video

youtube

Slavoj Žižek: The great challenge of The Left (2016)

European Graduate School Video

Public open lecture for the students of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School EGS, Saas-Fee/Switzerland and Valetta/Malta. 2016.

Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a Slovenian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Aside from these appointments, Žižek tirelessly gives lectures around the globe and is often described as “the Elvis of cultural theory”. Although, more seriously, as British critical theorist Terry Eagleton confers, Žižek is the “most formidably brilliant” theorist to have emerged from Europe in decades. Many, in fact, now consider Žižek to be “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.”

He grew up in in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which at the time was part of the former Yugoslavia. The regime’s more permissive, albeit “pernicious,” policies allowed for Žižek’s exposure to Western theory and culture, in particular film, English detective novels, German Idealism, French structuralism, and Jacques Lacan. Studying at the University of Ljubljana, he completed his master’s degree in philosophy in 1975 with a thesis on French structuralism and his Doctoral degree in philosophy in 1981 with a dissertation on German Idealism. He then went to Paris, along with Mladen Dolar, to study Lacan under Jacques Alain-Miller (Lacan’s son-in-law and disciple). During this time in Paris, from 1981–85, Žižek completed another dissertation on the work of Hegel, Marx, and Kripke through a Lacanian lens. After his return to Slovenia, he became more politically active writing for , a weekly newspaper, co-founding the Slovenian Liberal Demorcratic Party, and running for one of four seats that comprised the collective Slovenian presidency (Žižek came in fifth).

Žižek rose to prominence in 1989 following his first book published in English, . Since then he has written countless books, in fact, perhaps the only thing more numerous than the talks he tirelessly gives across the globe are the books on which those interviews stand. For the last twenty-five years Žižek has been writing predominantly in English, and to a far lesser extent in his native Slovenian, for obvious reasons. His books of the last decades include: (1991), (1993), (1997), (1999), (2006), (2001), (1996), (1992), (1991), (2015), (2003), (2002), (2010), (1994), (2002), (2009), (2009), (2007), (2012), (2007), (2001), (2008), (2000), and (2012). Along with these and many other books, he has also co-authored a number of books with Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Eric Santner, John Millbank, Ernesto Laclau, Boris Gunjević, and Agon Hamza, among others. Further, he is the editor of a number of consequential series, including Wo Es War by Verso, SIC by Duke University Press, and Short Circuits by MIT Press.

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econobitch · 7 years

Link

RISE OF THE ADJUNCTS. I accept the Truman Capote Award in this spirit of justice. I would be remiss, therefore, if I did not address another injustice tarnishing the literary critical profession. I am, so far as I can tell, the first adjunct faculty member to receive this award. To be sure, I have one of the best non-ladder positions available. My paychecks cover my bills. I have health insurance. I can work full time. I know by the end of June if my appointment is renewed for the fall. And yet I am one of over one million non-tenure-track instructors working on a temporary or contingent basis and whose position offers no possibility of tenure. To be contingent means not to know if you’ll be teaching next semester or if your class will be canceled days before it starts. Most adjuncts receive less than three weeks’ notice of an appointment. They rarely receive benefits and have virtually no say in university governance. Yet to talk about adjuncts is to talk about the centerpiece of higher education. Tenured faculty represent only 17 percent of college instructors. Part-time adjuncts are now the majority of the professoriate and its fastest-growing segment. From 1975 to 2011, the number of part-time adjuncts quadrupled. And the so-called part-time designation is misleading because most of them are piecing together teaching jobs at multiple institutions simultaneously. A 2014 congressional report suggests that 89 percent of adjuncts work at more than one institution; 13 percent work at four or more. The need for several appointments becomes obvious when we realize how little any one of them pays. In 2013, The Chronicle began collecting data on salary and benefits from adjuncts across the country. An English-department adjunct at Berkeley, for example, received $6,500 to teach a full-semester course. It’s easy to lose sight of all the people struggling beneath the data points. $7,000 at Duke. $6,000 at Columbia. $5,950 at the University of Iowa. These are the high numbers. According to the 2014 congressional report, adjuncts’ median pay per course is $2,700. An annual report by the American Association of University Professors indicated that last year "the average part-time faculty member earned $16,718" from a single employer. Other studies have similar findings. Thirty-one percent of part-time faculty members live near or below the poverty line. Twenty-five percent receive public assistance, like Medicaid or food stamps. One English-department adjunct who responded to the survey said that she sold her plasma on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pay for her daughter’s day care. Another woman stated that she taught four classes a year for less than $10,000. She wrote, "I am currently pregnant with my first child. … I will receive NO time off for the birth or recovery. It is necessary I continue until the end of the semester in May in order to get paid, something I drastically need. The only recourse I have is to revert to an online classroom […] and do work while in the hospital and upon my return home." Sixty-one percent of adjunct faculty are women. You have asked me to speak to you today about literary criticism, and so we might note that the conditions ravaging our profession are also ravaging our work. The privilege of tenure used to confer academic freedom through job security. By now, decades of adjunctification have made the professoriate fearful, insular, and conformist. According to the AAUP, adjunct faculty are about half as likely to undertake risky research projects, and the timidity moves up the ladder. "Professionalization" means retrofitting your research so that it accommodates the critical fads that will make you marginally more employable. It means cutting and adding chapters so that feathers remain unruffled. Junior faculty play it safe — conceptually, politically, and formally — because they write for job and tenure committees rather than for readers. Publications serve careers before they serve culture. Illustration by Pierre Fortin for The Chronicle Review If my book deserves recognition, then we must also recognize that no young scholar with any sense would be foolish enough to write it. Graduate students must tailor their research projects to a fickle job market, and a book like mine simply doesn’t fit. Few academic presses publish narrative literary history, and what’s worse is that my book is a microhistory — it chronicles the publication of just one novel. The job market’s clearest demand is that a candidate must demonstrate breadth in research, especially if he or she works in a traditional field. This year, for example, there are only eight tenure-track jobs seeking a scholar of British modernism. And yet even this tally is too generous, because all eight of those departments are looking for someone whose expertise covers two or more centuries of British literature. The message is clear: Stick to the old dissertation formula — six chapters about six authors. The most foolish mistake is addressing an audience beyond the academy. Publishing with Penguin or Random House should be a wonderful opportunity for a young scholar. Yet for most hiring committees, a trade book is merely one that did not undergo peer review. It’s extracurricular. My book exists because I was willing to give up a tenure-track job to write it. We cannot blame this professional anemia on scarce funding. The largest adjunct-faculty increases have taken place during periods of economic growth, and high university endowments do not diminish adjunctification. Harvard has steadily increased its adjunct faculty over the past four decades, and its endowment is $35.7 billion. This is larger than the GDP of a majority of the world’s countries. The truth is that teaching is a diminishing priority in universities. Years of AAUP reports indicate that budgets for instruction are proportionally shrinking. Universities now devote less than one-third of their expenditures to instruction. Meanwhile, administrative positions have increased at more than 10 times the rate of tenured faculty positions. Sports and amenities are much more fun. Last year the University of New Hampshire made news when one of its librarians, Robert Morin, who had saved almost 50 years of paychecks, left $4 million to the university upon his death. UNH spent $1 million of the librarian’s gift on a 30-by-50-foot high-definition scoreboard for the new, $25-million football stadium. The university defended its decision by stating that the donation had been used for "our highest priorities and emerging opportunities." Adjuncts in the English department there reportedly receive $3,000 per class. They already knew they weren’t a high priority. And why should they be? Amid competing budgetary pressures, classroom instruction is the easiest expense to cut. And part-time employees aren’t just cheap; they also provide curricular flexibility. Unpredictable course enrollments encourage administrators to find faculty who can be hired and fired just as unpredictably. Adjuncts help departments offer an ever-changing menu of courses. But the problem goes deeper than administration as well. It’s systemic. The key feature of adjunctification is a form of labor-market polarization. The desirability of elite faculty positions doesn’t just correlate with worsening adjunct conditions; it helps create the worsening conditions. The prospect of intellectual freedom, job security, and a life devoted to literature, combined with the urge to recoup a doctoral degree’s investment of time, gives young scholars a strong incentive to continue pursuing tenure-track jobs while selling their plasma on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This incentive generates a labor surplus that depresses wages. Yet academia is uniquely culpable. Unlike the typical labor surplus created by demographic shifts or technological changes, the humanities almost unilaterally controls its own labor market. New faculty come from a pool of candidates that the academy itself creates, and that pool is overflowing. According to the most recent MLA jobs report, there were only 361 assistant professor tenure-track job openings in all fields of English literature in 2014-15. The number of Ph.D. recipients in English that year was 1,183. Many rejected candidates return to the job market year after year and compound the surplus. It gets worse. From 2008 to 2014, tenure-track English-department jobs declined 43 percent. This year there are, by my count, only 173 entry-level tenure-track job openings — fewer than half of the opportunities just two years ago. If history is any guide, there will be about nine times as many new Ph.D.s this year as there are jobs. One might think that the years-long plunge in employment would compel doctoral programs to reduce their numbers of candidates, but the opposite is happening. From the Great Recession to 2014, U.S. universities awarded 10 percent more English Ph.D.s. In the humanities as a whole, doctorates are up 12 percent. Why? Why are professional humanists so indifferent to these people? Why do our nation’s English departments consistently accept several times as many graduate students as their bespoke job market can sustain? English departments are the only employers demanding the credentials that English doctoral programs produce. So why do we invite young scholars to spend an average of nearly 10 years grading papers, teaching classes, writing dissertations, and training for jobs that don’t actually exist? English departments do this because graduate students are the most important element of the academy’s polarized labor market. They confer departmental prestige. They justify the continuation of tenure lines, and they guarantee a labor surplus that provides the cheap, flexible labor that universities want. The abysmal conditions of adjuncts are not the inevitable byproducts of an economy with limited space for literature. They are intentional. Universities rely upon a revolving door of new Ph.D.s who work temporarily for unsustainable wages before giving up and being replaced by next year’s surplus doctorates. Adjuncts now do most university teaching and grading at a fraction of the price, so that the ladder faculty have the time and resources to write. We take the love that young people have for literature and use it to support the research of a tiny elite. All of this is to say that the profession of literary criticism depends upon exploitation. Even this formulation is too soothingly vague, so let us be more direct: If you are a tenured (or tenure-track) faculty member teaching in a humanities department with Ph.D. candidates, you are both the instrument and the direct beneficiary of exploitation. Your roles as teacher, adviser, and committee member generate, cultivate, and exploit young people’s devotion to literature. This is the great shame of our profession. We tell our students to study literature because it will make them better human beings, that in our classrooms they will learn empathy and wisdom, thoughtfulness and understanding. And yet the institutions supporting literary criticism are callous and morally incoherent. No one, of course, signed up for this. You wanted to teach Milton and Toni Morrison. You wanted to change the way we understand novels and plays. You agree that the current state of affairs is awful. You have written all about the patriarchy and racism and poverty and the subaltern. You call administrators "neoliberals," and that feels good. You have little job-market chats with incoming grad students. It makes you sad the way local decisions ripple out across the wide surface of a culture, how literary intentions end up serving unforeseen interests, how people may grow rich or suffer, how what was an expression of freedom now becomes a trap, how what was virtuous now becomes immoral. I sometimes wonder when the ripples widened out beyond what I had imagined. Recently, I sat next to two professors at the plenary session of a graduate-student conference. The students had been presenting their research all weekend, and now they were listening to us. "What is your advice?" a student asked. "Get your hands dirty," one of the professors said. "Throw yourself into your work. Don’t be afraid." He is a good person. He is an important scholar and an inspiring teacher. He immigrated to the United States decades ago and threw himself into his love for literature. He worked his way up, as we say, published several books, received tenure, won fellowships and awards, and now, in 2016, he was offering advice about bravery to graduate students surviving on $10,000 a year. This is the carefully dressed underclass of his department, the people who, when he wasn’t looking — because he didn’t go to yesterday’s luncheon — furtively filled their tote bags with leftover fruit and potato chips. How did we become like this? What does the narrative historicism of this profession look like? It looks like the bright 21-year-old peeking into office hours seeking advice about grad school and your wanting to help. It looks like the papers stacked on the wobbly cafe table of the adjunct who doesn’t have an office. It looks like the miles ticking away on her shabby car’s odometer. It looks like the hiring-committee member who, by the time you’ve given your job talk, still has not bothered to read your application’s cover letter. It is coming to terms with the appalling fact that you have spent the better part of the last decade applying for a seat at this table, trying to convince committees in hotel suites that you would be a more effective member of this particular team. It is the painful recognition that it never fully outraged you until the jobs didn’t work out. It is the grad student about to make her first foray into the job market who nods in agreement about all of this in a crowded restaurant on a cold night in Madison, Wisconsin, and who replies over her tepid coffee that she will have a better chance of changing the system from within. It is suddenly seeing yourself 10 years ago. It is remembering how powerful the word "system" made us grad students feel, how it tricked us into imagining locations and targets, pillars we could smash, wires we could cut. It is arriving at the proper sense of wonder at the atmosphere we once called "the system." It is being told over the phone that you have won an award and finally getting that metaphor ("the system"), finally grasping, after all these years, that change is more cunning than we were prepared for, that change is as gentle as the snow falling faintly onto the surface of the lake outside while we wait for the server to bring the bill. You have asked me to speak to you today about literary criticism. This is what literary criticism feels like.

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