A Round Up of Recent Blog Posts and News Articles of Note

Over the past week of so, I’ve encountered a number of blog essays and online news articles that I’ve found interesting. I thought I’d share them with anyone who might be interested.

Reginald Shepherd’s Blog

Reginald Shepherd’s Blog is important to me for several reasons. Reginald is my partner, so I’m inclined to like it, but any personal bias aside, it’s an impressive blog dealing with poetry, poetics, and art and society. One thing making Reginald Shepherd’s Blog different from many is that he writes long, substantive essays. (I’m not knocking the short and often diaristic blog posts on many blogs – just saying this one’s different.) His blog is different from most in that he frequently posts revisions of earlier posts, treating posts as serious pieces of writing and revising to reflect his own developing thought on a topic.

Over the past week, he has posted three such substantive revisions that are well worth taking a look at:

“On Difficulty in Poetry” explores the issue of what makes some poetry (or other art) seem “difficult.” What’s useful about Shepherd’s approach is that he recognizes that there are different sources of difficulty and explores them as distinct phenomena. This essay, in its earlier form was an inspiration for my own writing. My blog essay, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” was written largely as an application of Shepherd’s ideas to ethnography.

“What is Progressive Art? A Revision” discusses the progress or development of art, utilizing in part the work of Neo-Hegelian philosopher of art Arthur C. Danto. As above, this essay in its earlier form was inspirational for me, with my blog essays “Free Jazz and the end of the history of jazz” and “The end of the history of music” written partly in response to this essay.

Finally, “Revised Thoughts on the Long Poem” offers a thoughtful reflection on the issue of form and importance, specifically here the relation between the long poem as a form and “major poetry.”

Nicolette Bethel’s Blog

I’m also quite fond of Nicolette Bethel’s Blog. Like Reginald Shepherd’s Blog, this blog consistently offers substantive and interesting commentary.

In the past week, two essays, “On Images of Savages, Part One” and “On Images of Savages, Part Two,” continue an ongoing exploration on this blog of the importance of race in the Bahamas specifically and in general. These two posts explore the important contradiction in Enlightenment thinking associated with the invention of “The Savage,” that just as Europeans and Euro-Americans began to think seriously about equality and freedom, they invented the notion of the inherently inferior savage to rationalize the continued brutal exploitation of some, most egregiously in the form of slavery in the Americas.

Culture Matters

Another blog I like is “Culture Matters,” a group blog by faculty and students at the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. One thing I like about this blog is the frequent support faculty show for their students’ ideas and work. A recent post briefly describes and links to an online article by a student there, Khatab Sabir, “A United Iraq: An Impossible Dream.” An important part of Sabir’s argument is that Iraq cannot work as an united nation because it does not work as an “imagined community.” It is not that there are not “imagined communities” at play, but rather that they (plural) are specifically constructed as disunited, standing strongly in the way of any united Iraq.

Someone to Believe In

I’d like to draw people’s attention to a new blog: “Solipsistic Effluvia.” This blog is written by a promising, young scholar whom I had the pleasure of working with while he was a student at the University of West Florida. (For now, he’s posting the blog anonymously, so I won’t name him.) The first entry, “Return to Faith,” laments the fact that in contrast to the 1960s, when there were politicians and other important public figures who not only were important but whom people could have faith in as “good people,” there seem now to be no such public figures.

David Shumway’s article “Where have all the rock stars gone?,” published online by The Chronicle of Higher Education, asks a similar question of music celebrities. Shumway points out that in the 1960s and 70s, musicians like James Brown or Bob Dylan were important public figures who were respected and taken seriously as people who mattered, even by people who weren’t necessarily fans of the particular musician. I don’t personally see that this sort of public figure has disappeared to the extent Shumway implies. Bono immediately comes to mind. Shumway does address Bono: “Bono, whose political advocacy in the courts of real-world power has expanded his reach, may have been the last rock star to capture the imagination of a broad spectrum of the public. But even this case reveals a change. Bono's advocacy does not seem to be of a piece with his role in U2, the way, say, John Lennon's antiwar activism seemed to be a natural continuation of his role in the Beatles.” I don’t really see where Bono’s different here – U2 is a band that’s been a politically engaged band since its early work, e.g. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Pride (In the Name of Love).” But it’s an interesting article nonetheless, especially for the commentary on the importance of niche marketing in today’s music industry, in sharp contrast to music marketing of previous decades.

Biting Commentary – Literally

An interesting piece of trivia – men are 12 times more likely to be bitten by another person than women, at least in Ireland where the study reported on in “Men bitten more than women and alcohol is the culprit” at News-Medical.Net was conducted. I’m not sure why I find the article fascinating, but I do.

"More on Why Race Matters"

I'd like to direct attention to the June 1 post on Nicolette Bethel's Blog, "More on Why Race Matters" . As with the previous post on the same blog, "On Why Race Matters" (which I cited in my own post, "Talking About Race"), Bethel's discussion provides an insightful commentary on the contemporary Bahamas that also speaks to the issue of race in a variety of other American contexts.

Talking About Race

Nicolette Bethel has an interesting recent blog post: “On Why Race Matters” (Nicolette Bethel’s Blog, May 24). I’d like to quote one passage in particular:

“It’s time, I believe, for us to open our mouths and start talking to one another. Until we examine the things that shape our race relations — like slavery, emancipation, labour’s struggle, the fight for equality, and the massive influx of Haitian immigrants — we can never hope to build a united society. Although it’s no longer a matter of law or custom, there are still churches and clubs and parks and professions and schools that are avoided by whites or blacks. There is still very little opportunity for mingling, for getting to know the people beneath the skin. And we have to say so.”

Bethel’s words refer specifically to the Bahamas, but with one minor tweak, they speak to the contemporary U.S. context as well. Except for South Florida, Haitian immigration is not a hot button issue in the U.S., though immigration in general clearly is.

I do think that the U.S. (and most every other nation-state in the Americas) needs more dialogue on race and more interaction across racial and ethnic lines. However, for those interested in a society based on equality and where race doesn’t matter, we also need to talk differently about race.

In his History of Sexuality series, one of Michel Foucault’s important arguments was against what he called the “repressive hypothesis,” proponents of which argue that to be sexually liberated, we need to talk more about sexuality in order to eliminate sexual repression. Foucault pointed out that in western culture people talk endlessly about sexuality, but in ways that pretend to not talk about it, or which express distaste (a good example would be the countless news editorials from about ten years ago which professed to be tired of speaking of the Monica Lewinsky – Bill Clinton scandal and then proceeded to discuss it at length), and ultimately in ways that subject some, such as women (though Foucault doesn’t acknowledge that so much) and homosexuals.

Foucault’s point was that there’s little reason to hope that simply talking more about sex and sexuality would liberate anyone – at least not unless the content of the discourse also changed. In the U.S. and elsewhere, we face an analogous situation with regard to race. In the U.S., we talk quite a bit about race, but mainly in ways that don’t transform the basic premises of people’s discourse.

Recently, there’s been endless high profile discussion in the U.S. about immigration, especially undocumented/illegal immigration, and about Don Imus’ racist comments about the Rutgers’ women’s college basketball team. Most of the conversation consists of continuous (and usually simplistic) rehashing of a few basic themes, though. Immigrants are a threat to the American way of life vs. immigrants make the American way of life possible. Don Imus’ comments were racist vs. Don Imus has an inalienable right to free speech.

More of the same sort of discourse won’t change much. How to talk about race differently, though? I don’t have a blueprint, but I do know that we need to discourse differently on race if we’re to move toward a society where race actually matters less. I do have a couple suggestions:

1. More of the mingling that Bethel seems to be looking for would help – so long as it’s done with an open mind, lest it actually be counter-productive.

2. We can each individually try to talk about race differently. Counter arguments to racist propositions are important and necessary, but so are arguments that change the shape of the debate altogether.

To take again the immigration and Imus examples, discourse which simply presents the goals, motivations, aspirations, and experiences of immigrants could help make the discussion less about “aliens,” and perhaps at least ratchet down support for the most hate filled anti-immigrant screeds.

As for the Imus affair, most debate has seemed to miss the point to me. I’d suggest instead an argument that takes something like the following form: Obviously Imus has an inalienable right to free speech, including to say stupid, offensive things. Just as obviously, the corporation he worked for, as a private entity, has the same right, including to not be associated any longer with his speech, and other citizens have the same right to express disgust and anger at him. Now, why would he want to say what he did? What does the whole affair say about him or anyone else?

Again, I don’t claim to have a blueprint for how to go about engaging in a different sort of discourse on race, one that works more to open up dialogue and understanding and less to subject people (in Foucault's sense of discourse and subjection). I do know that when our public debate takes the form of people yelling the same things back and forth, more of the same isn’t going to change anything.

Maps as Political Representations

Nicolette Bethel's Blog has a fascinating entry about maps as political representations of reality:

http://nicobethel.net/blogworld/?p=275