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July 28, 2001, 9.a.m.-ish
Overheard on the radio, we stop to listen in disgust as the Bush administration official explains the President's refusal to attend the UN Conference on Racism: "We all feel badly about slavery, we all feel badly about colonialism, but the question is, who should apologize to whom?"
July 27, 2001, 11:50 a.m.
A brilliant, biting spoof by Bianca.
July 26, 2001, 11:45 p.m.
Yesterday I spent a pleasant afternoon chatting with Judith Halberstam in a Rockridge cafe about queer punk, skateboarding, drag kings, publishing, and queer youth service organizations. She gave me advice and I gave her dirt, and vice versa. I had my suspicions confirmed about a certain queer scholar's work ("The chapter I saw made no historical sense!") and she marveled at my fanzine archive ("I have five plastic bins at home," I said modestly). After a short half hour in the anthropology library, I went home and took a Vicodin for my splitting headache, and later two more Tyenol, before curling up in a sleeping bag on the living room floor and watching a full three hours of Star Trek Voyager on my accumulated painkillers.
It was an uneven day.
(Today however, Chandra presented with me a one-inch button reading, "Postcolonial theory makes me wet," and we spent two hours dishing in the crowded aisles of Dark Carnival bookstore. Good times, good times!)
July 23, 2001, 10:36 p.m.
reading: The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh "Diaspora," Brian Axel; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, Sara Ahmed
listening: The Ex, Cyndi Lauper, Detriot CobrasWhen the cops beat antiwar demonstrators in Chicago 1968, the slogan went up, "The whole world is watching," which was somewhat deflated when polls indicated that a majority of viewers thought the cops were doing the right thing. On the other hand in Czechoslovakia in 1989, when the cops beat student demonstrators, student organizers fanned out to factories and towns around the country, showing video of the brutality and winning crucial support from working people.
What determines the difference? Can we even know? It seems to me that we need to examine this question if we want to get serious about contesting for, yes, ideological hegemony...
--JOHN BURKE, e-mail message
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In between news reports on Genoa, Kyoto, et cetera, I've been working constantly on too many projects (as usual): I've begun my ode to The Legend of Billie Jean (and which will be duly dedicated to Wendy, who alone shares the love as intensely); I've started to take serious notes for my dissertation prospectus; and I've been researching three other partial papers to finish for academic publication and editing another. (Not to mention editing Paperson's ocassionally atrocious grammar for his Complete Idiot's Guide to Asian American History !)
In the midst of all this I wonder how to answer John, because between Genoa and the classroom I'm made cynical and bitter. Not (at first) necessarily about what I do, or what others do as activists and/or teachers, but about those investments in power we think, we hope, we might dislodge somehow; and then yes, I begin to think about accepted approaches to pedagogy or "action" that feel bad to me. Like the circulation of images of violence or hunger or torture, or a language of humanitarianism that transforms populations of refugees into faceless "masses," or depoliticizes the conditions of conflict or war in the appeal. And I don't know how to reach the political science student in D's classroom with his calm assessments ("The West has nothing to gain from our altruism, and yet we're rejected over and over. Why should we continue?") if all the standard approaches have no effect -- when sentimentalized photographs of wailing children or cowering women have no effect on him, how can I begin to discuss the invisible workings of power, the management of discourses and bodies, with this person?
It's not despair, but I do feel grim.
On a completely different note, I've rediscovered a cache of my "school marm" dresses and plaid pants in the bedroom closet, which makes me think that perhaps I should actually change my clothes. Really, sooner or later the dirt does show on black like a weird, oily veneer.
July 18, 2001, 12:45 a.m.
Teaching does not permit or perform anger, but real life, meaning, grievances, and injustices are daily brought into the room where I teach, a real relation of violence obtains in the room itself. I am a real person angry at having to prove to real people grown accustomed to racism, that it has a history, political economy, culture, a daily existential dimension. Skeptical, brutal, shame-faced questions dart out at me; a white woman defends the killing of a Black young man, herself a part-time member of the police force, her husband implicated in the killing. I hear her, I see the stony faces of the Black students in the class, the uncomfortable body motions of some white students, I hear a few hisses. My body feels tense and hot, I want to shout at her, just plain scream -"you fucking racist idiot," "you killer" - but I cannot. The theatre of teaching, its script, does not permit me to do that. If I have to say it, I have to say it pedagogically; exact a teaching moments out of it. I must build up a body of opinions and explanations here, which will challenge and crush her racism. Carefully, cunningly, smoothly I create with comments and statements and debates an ambush for her racism. I begin to summon up previous police killings, the work of the police in general...on and on. I am teaching. The point is coming across, the meaning of racism is becoming evident and wider; but in the meanwhile there is me, there is she. My anger seeking the release of name-calling, a slap across the face, not this mediated rage. Of course I disassociate. My work and I part company. I am aware of doing violence to myself by choosing this pedagogical path.
-- HIMANI BANNERJI, "Re: Turning the Gaze" in Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism
Once in a while --hardly all the time-- teaching feels like this. I think I am more optimistic about teaching than Bannerji, though it might be my inexperience talking. Teaching has taught me patience, which I didn't have in large quantities before (and which was reserved for kittens and children under seven exclusively), and an ability to choose my battles (and which previously I never exercised). Bannerji seems to pathologize the distance she is forced to maintain from the teaching moment; I am grateful for it.
(And if it seems I'm bitter from the last year, it's more because the lecturer provided such a terrible pedagogical example. And because I tend to write here when I'm annoyed, or frustrated, or bored, rather than when I'm aglow with joy.)
Lar asked me if I really approach teaching as an act of "crushing" (Bannerji's words) a student. No, I don't. I put to Bannerji quote here because I'd been thinking about it, and the pedagogical act. Because I'd been reading several books on pedagogy, looking for some way to theorize my own fledging approach, and the Bannerji quote reminded me so much of how I used to feel being a "race girl" in punk rock. But looking at it again, it is not how I feel --or approach my students-- as a teacher. I like teaching. It is exhausting, frustrating work, but I enjoy it immensely (maybe perversely).
And besides, where else but in the classroom do I have a captive audience for my monologues (i.e., "lectures") about talk shows, pop stars, and the bloody history of gynecology? (Um, this is a joke.)
More thoughts on this later; I have to run to the airport but I wanted to clarify.