October 6, 2001, 4:40 p.m.
listening: The Ex, Dizzy Spells CD;
Supersnazz, live at the Port
Lite
1.
N. spotted me as I entered the building and
called out, "Mimi! Don't even bother going up there! It's packed and no
one can get in!"
I did, but it took me twenty minutes
to squeeze my way into the room where a symposium on 911 had
drawn a crowd of hundreds, with others turned away at the sight of the
bottleneck in the hallway. I missed Kiren Chaundry's talk on "American
Foreign Policy and the Bitrth of the Taliban" but arrived in time for
Minoo Moallem's discussion of "Islamic Fundamentalism and its Modern
Aspects." My first glimpse into the room I saw audience members standing
in tight clumps, and turning my head, others sitting on the floor behind
the panelists and under the projection screen. L. made a small space for
me on a table shoved into the back corner, and we perched there
like two scrawny Vietnamese birds with our notebooks and pens,
scrit-scratching away.
2.
While public service messages and politicians'
statements urge "good citizens" to recognize Arab and Muslim neighbors
as "fellow Americans," the seemingly daily proposals for new
legislation, new policies to "fight terrorism" from Attorney General
Ashcroft and Co. are the real "hate crimes." Both Margaret Russell
and Jennifer Terry noted that this discourse --of individual
restraint matched by governmental excess-- configures the role of the
state as an avenger, meting out punishment and regulating liberties
on behalf of its populace.
3.
The symposium was organized by the Women's
Studies Department and sponsored by the Center of South Asian Studies
and the Departments of South and Southeast Asian Studies and Near
Eastern Studies. I love that all the speakers were women academics,
and that unlike the majority of women speakers I've seen and heard at
antiwar events in the last few weeks, they did not idealize "womanhood"
as a source of compassion or peace, invoke the figure of the Muslim
woman as always already a victim, or make appeals on behalf of "the
children of the world." Instead they discussed the politics of
representation, colonial tropes of "rescuing brown women from brown
men," and the domestication of the Western woman as wife and mother in
the U.S. national imaginary.
4.
I would also note the politics of the figure of
the "innocent child," either as the bright and shining future of the
nation, the nascent citizen-victim to be protected by the mighty arms of
the state, or the unintentionally "wise" commentator whose innocence
is the source of that wisdom ("out of the mouths of babes"). This
is so problematic in albeit fascinating ways, and not the least because
in the months before 911 the national public discourse was obsessed with
the "hidden monster," the child gone terribly wrong, the juvenile
offender, the school shooter, the "out of control" teenager.
1:58 p.m.
Discussing blasphemous band names in the aftermath of the attacks, T.
and C. throw out "Bin Laden and the Boxcutters," "The Infinite Justice League," and
"Dirty Tricks."