January 31, 2002, 10:54 a.m.
listening: The Langley School Music
Project CD, Slant 6, Soda Pop * Rip Off CD
reading: Nancy Farmer, The Ear, the Eye,
and the Arm; Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, ed.,
Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora
By the way, I produced all the illustrations on the site. Mark is the
one with the pierre mustache (fake: I drew it on him), looking like a scroundrel.
Shivering at the bus stop in front of my
building, I discovered the catalog for Berkeley's summer sessions nestled between the newsprint pages of the local weekly and
lo and behold! My class is listed for Session
D. (Previously, I'd not known which six-week period my class covered.) Below is the
very last-minute course proposal, which will change when I fine-tune the
syllabus.
bodies + machines: interrogating gender,
race, and technology in the digital age
This course will explore technology's
interaction with the concepts of gender and race, how the terms of
gender and race are embodied in technologies, and conversely, how
technologies shape our notions of gender, race, and other modes of
identification and subjecthood. This course will give students the
opportunity to critically assess these relations as they are produced in
areas such as entertainment and games, work, domesticity, identity, the
body, transnational capital and science fictions. At the human/machine
interface, a series of (imagined) transformations are mobilized for
different purposes, and to different effects. How do cybertechnologies
differentially enter into our personal, social and work lives? To what
extent are cybercultures an "alternative" space for the making and
unmaking of identities and meanings? Does cyberspace offer the
possibility of transcending the body? Which body? What are the
implications for notions of gender and race? What is cyberfeminism? What
is the political economy of cyberspace? How are writers and artists
rewriting or reproducing notions about the human and the post-human,
territoriality and temporality, the mind and the body in this
imaginary/imaginative landscape? What is a cyborg, and what does s/he
want, anyway?
6:45 p.m.
France Returning Remains of African
January 30, 2002
By
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PARIS (AP) -- It has been a long wait -- nearly 200 years -- but
Saartjie Baartman, once paraded about like a circus freak and then
gawked at in a French museum, is finally returning home. The skeleton
and bottled organs of the young woman of South Africa's indigenous
Khoikhoi people, who died in Paris in 1816, were displayed for years at
France's Musee de l'Homme, then shoved onto a back shelf and forgotten.
Now, France is moving to send the remains home to restore Baartman's
honor, and its own, after years of requests by South Africa. The Senate
voted unanimously on Tuesday to accede to South African requests to
bring Saartjie Baartman home. Backed by the government, the bill is
expected to be passed soon in the lower house.
A victim, in life as in death, of what one minister called
"colonialism, sexism and racism,'' Baartman was known pejoratively as
the "Hottentot Venus," a reference to her well-endowed sexual organs
and to the term once used in South Africa to refer to indigenous people.
Born in 1789, Baartman, a slave, was taken to London in 1810 by a
British Marine surgeon and exhibited "in humiliating and scandalous
conditions,'' according to Research Minister Roger-Gerard
Schwartzenberg.
It got worse in Paris, where she was an attraction between 1814 and
1815, at one point displayed by an animal trainer. She also was
exhibited before "sages and painters,'' Schwartzenberg told the Senate
in a brief account of Baartman's life. One of them, Georges Cuvier,
described as a founder of comparative anatomy in France, noted movements
"that had something brusque and capricious about them that recalled
those of monkeys.'' It was Cuvier who made a plaster cast of Baartman's
body, dissected her and conserved her organs, including sexual organs,
in bottles of formaldehyde.
"They wanted to pass her off as a monster, but where was the
monstrosity?'' the bill's author, Senator Nicolas About, said during the
Senate hearing.
Baartman's remains were displayed at the Musee de l'Homme until 1976.
They might have been forgotten had it not been for South Africa. Since
the end of apartheid, South Africa has expressed a fierce desire to get
its native daughter back. President Nelson Mandela brought up the
subject in 1994 during an official visit by French President Francois
Mitterrand. The request was renewed two years later, and again in
2000.