Makeweight

It's Almost Here

2011-06-23T15:08:00.000-07:00

abstract

page 397

I know I haven't updated in a while. Life has been pretty busy lately. But I wanted to pop in and share an excerpt of the proofs for my Bagong Buwan (New Moon) film essay, forthcoming in the fall in positions: east asia cultures critique. To be perfectly honest, I feel kind of burned out from this piece since I have been working on it off-and-on for the better part of a decade now. (Yikes!) On the other hand, it will feel really great to get this thing out into the world, even if only a handful of people will ever read it.

Cheers.

The Grind

2011-04-13T01:21:00.000-07:00

It's already spring. Wow. Anyway, I almost can't believe it's been three months since I last blogged, but I was on the job market and actually got interviews. This entailed a lot of waiting on tenterhooks, which translated to radio silence for me as most of the time I was in my head or trying to forget about work. Sadly, I don't have good news to report. The market was terrible for almost everyone I know, including some really amazing scholar-academics, supply far exceeding demand and all that by-now unsurprising stuff.

It was incredibly difficult, being on the market. Like many others, I'm sure, I had to struggle against the feeling of being an impostor and a failure. (That I put that last sentence in past tense is part bravado, I think!) I'm just glad that the season is basically over. But I am still trying to finish this year, keeping my head down as much as possible except for a couple of recent conferences.

Speaking of which, the first was the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference in Riverside (see Jack Halberstam's write-up of this major event), and the second was the ACLA Conference in Vancouver. This was my first time at both of these conferences. While I was on a panel with friends (who are fabulously smart) at the CES, my experience in Vancouver was more to my taste, mostly because of the format of the ACLA seminars: a set group of people meet over the course of 3 days, 2 hours/day, and share their papers with one another. This allows for more sustained conversation among folks who have similar and/or related concerns. I found the conversations very interesting, if not exactly productive; the last meeting on Sunday morning, when I presented my paper, was compromised by half of my seminar going missing, even though I believe that the papers given that day were superb (excepting my own). I heard that at least one of the absent seminar members had to catch his flight, and perhaps it was the same for the others. Indeed, that's the only thing I would change about the conference: shift the conference from Friday-Sunday to Thursday-Saturday so that people can have three full days of meeting and save Sunday for their travel day.

Anyway, I opted not to submit this year to my favorite go-to conference, the Association for Asian American Studies Conference, because I decided that going to two big conferences in a season was enough. I am sad that I will miss seeing old friends as well as the chance to visit New Orleans, but I am relieved to have the time to work not just on my diss but also on copy-edits for my forthcoming article in positions as well as on the course that I am teaching this summer.

So I have a very full plate until the Fall. When the job market frenzy starts again. Oy.

Happy New Year

2011-01-09T05:27:00.000-08:00

Hey all, Masaganang Bagong Taon!

I got through my first MLA conference this past week. It is a huge beast, this conference. Business is spread out across multiple venues, a fact that requires lots of walking despite the expectation to wear dress shoes. Ow, my poor feet. On the other hand, I did see some very fashionable academics, which made my heart glad. I also saw several babies who had been brought to the conference -- it's L.A. in winter, which I suppose seems like a good place and time for a family vacation if you want to get out of the snow -- which made me glad as well.

It seemed impossible to meet anyone without making plans ahead of time. There didn't appear to be random mingling in the official conference hotel lobby, although I did manage to run into someone I hadn't seen in a while. I made plans to see friends and old acquaintances I hadn't seen in years. In the case of one particular individual, it had been over twelve years since our last meeting (!).

Anyway, I'm relieved the conference is done (for me). And that's all I'll say about the conference (for now).

So I have been reading some very interesting articles lately. I'll be working on my project very conscientiously in the next couple of weeks to get to the finish line in good time. I'm also proud of myself for taking extra time to work on better articulating the stakes of my project and its contribution to various fields. That will be necessary for my introductory chapter, which I'm eying to complete by the beginning of April.

Please Get The Frak Out Of My Office

2010-11-12T14:49:00.000-08:00

"Oh my god." This scene of an undergrad asking for a letter of rec was both hilarious and scary. It made me wonder if I was ever this naïve as an undergrad? (However, I was certainly not as arrogant, nor would I have basically ignored the professor's arguments.) Although neither a professor nor an undergrad, I definitely identified with the professor. Must be all the cynicism.

H/t to ladysquires, who also has a way more interesting reading than I do.

Writing Meter

2010-11-12T10:38:00.000-08:00

I have passed the worst of the deadline crunch (basically all of October through the first week of November), so I have been re-focused on the dissertation. Co-chair #1 confirmed that the last chapter I sent her needs a lot of work but made great suggestions on making it stronger. At least she didn't say, Scrap this and start all over! which I was afraid she might do. While revising that chapter, I have decided to continue with writing the next one.

I am adding a fun little image meter from Writertopia accounting for my progress on that new chapter. I've placed it at the bottom of the blog. I don't know how often I will be able to update it -- probably as often as I update this blog. But, yeah, I do feel rather like that angry little brown nut-looking dude (or does he look like something worse?), ~~literally hammering away at his computer~~ threatening his computer with a gun (dang, my eyes are terrible!). You can see that the meter was meant for those writing novels (most helpful for things like NaNoWriMo's goal of 50,000 words in one month), but I liked the cartoon anyway. It's a little harder to set a specific goal for a dissertation chapter, so I set it to a modest 10,000. I don't even know how to include revisions since that is where most of my writing goes. Well, we'll see what happens by the end of this month.

H/t to StyleyGeek for the progress meter link and the idea to use for the diss.

No More Getaway

2010-10-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

A little bit sad about this: I blocked access to my other blog, Getaway. Now that I am on the job market and everything, I'm thinking some of the stuff on that blog might be too personal to share in case search committees decide to look me up online. It's really too bad that Blogger doesn't allow you to make individual posts private or password-protected the way Wordpress and Xanga do. In any case, to my dear few readers here, email me if you'd like access to Getaway again.

Hahvahd Post

2010-10-05T01:56:00.000-07:00

I just saw a job posting that gave me the shivers: it's for a tenure-track assistant professorship at Harvard for an Asian American literature specialist. It's quite obvious that they are looking for a very advanced assistant professor; not only do they mention the word "advanced," but if you have even glanced through all the other job postings for assistant professors, you will notice some key differences in their application requirements: they expect the whole dissertation from their finalists by December OR a book-length publication (!), as well as up to 5 (yes, five) letters of rec. I have a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting this job, but I got the shivers because I do know quite a few Asian American literature specialists at the advanced assistant professor level who would definitely be kick-ass applicants for this job. I bet it is making the academic rounds among those friends as I write this. I am very curious and excited to find out who eventually gets the offer. From the JIL:

Harvard U
English, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138 http://www.harvard.edu

Assistant Professor of Contemporary and Asian American Literature [13492]
The English Department at Harvard University invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position in Contemporary American literature with a special interest in Asian American Literature.

The appointment, effective July 1, 2011, will be made at either the entry or at an advanced level, dependent upon experience and qualifications.

The successful applicant will have a strong doctoral record and should show promise of excellence in scholarship, along with a strong commitment to teaching in a variety of areas.

Finalists will be expected to submit in December the entire dissertation or as much of it as is completed (or, alternatively, a book-length publication). The successful candidate will teach four courses per year at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Send cover letter, CV, 1-2 page abstract of dissertation, 3-5 letters of recommendation, and article-length writing sample (25-30 pages, excluding footnotes), all postmarked no later than October 29, 2010, to "Contemporary and Asian American Literature Search Committee," c/o James Simpson, Chair, Department of English, Harvard University, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge MA 02138. Late applications will not be considered. Complete applications will be acknowledged by postcard once all materials have been received. Harvard is an Affirmative Action/Equal opportunity Employer. Applications from women and minorities are strongly encouraged.

Like Pulling Teeth: Chapter Draft Done

2010-08-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

Wordle cloud of Chapter 2

My god, I feel bludgeoned. What was that? I've never gone through a deadline like that before. I've complained here before about how it sucks to have a little kid while writing. Well, it still holds true. In fact, I think it was even worse this time. He might be sick, and he hasn't slept enough the past few days, and I don't think I've ever heard so much constant whiny crying in my life (except when I'm the one doing it, I suppose).

But okay, I admit, I can't blame the general dreadfulness of this recent writing experience all on my kid. It was just not much fun, even when I had the house all to myself in order to write. I'm ashamed of the overuse of a few words as indicated on the Wordle cloud above, a sure sign that I was not in the groove during the writing. I thought that everything I learned was interesting, but I couldn't make my brain go to that place. You know. That sweet, sweet place where all the words just come and you're not constantly using the terrible Word-program thesaurus. Maybe I just had too many distractions in my life. Maybe all of the digital stimulation is turning my brain into mush.

At least I have a draft now, a substantial one, to boot. At the moment, I'm not looking forward to making the additions (i.e., original work) that it needs; nevertheless, I have a draft. And I do believe I can have another one done in much less time than this one took me (um, yeah, almost a year. I suck at grad school).

Under The Gun

2010-08-17T01:22:00.000-07:00

I have a deadline looming to turn in material to my advisers; it's sometime next week. I had been working on a chapter since the beginning of July and making insufficient progress, in part because much of the extra time that I thought I would have when I put my toddler in preschool/daycare 3 days a week ended up getting spent thinking and worrying about the child and the childcare situation. In fact, we did end up switching him to a new daycare last week, which so far has been amazing -- (knock on wood) -- although he's only there 2 days a week instead of 3 because of scheduling conflicts.

But of course it wasn't completely the fault of sub-par childcare that I was suffering writer's block. I spent most of what time I did have just reading, reading, reading instead of writing and processing as well. I talked to a few friends who convinced me to stop working on the chapter and turn my attention to job application materials instead, since a job application deadline is also coming up. They were right. Once I decided to do that, I got a lot more done, and in fact it gave me a bit more perspective on the whole dissertation and thus the problem chapter (yes, sounds like "problem child").

I wish I had done this sooner! I stupidly assumed that putting together the job application would be a lot simpler than it is and so decided to put it off until after the chapter was finished. True, it's not as if I have to craft completely new material to write my job letter, especially since I have some excellent models from other folks, but it is still very much like putting together fellowship applications which, as I have written before, take a lot out of me. At least I have the material written down somewhere already; thank goodness I made the effort to apply for fellowships last year, because the text I wrote then is easily edited and thus lifesaving now.

The Decolonial Intellectual

2010-07-06T00:16:00.000-07:00

More from Shih. I must say, this short essay of hers has been pretty inspiring as I go about working on the chapter-that-will-not-behave. Perhaps there is a reason for that.

Knowing the embeddedness of [...] disciplines [such as literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology] in colonial ideology, the decolonial, postcolonial, or minority intellectual has two choices. One is to express endless anxiety over the racialization of thought through an infinite critique of the derivative nature of disciplines and their theories. For a time, several postcolonial scholars made this choice, and some of the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in postcolonial theory were arguably in this vein. Anthropology as the colonial discipline par excellence has for the past decades led a soul-searching critique of itself, with mixed results (Said, "Representing the Colonized"). Fanon would have called these "reactional" rather than "actional" measures (Black Skin [trans. Markmann] 222). The other choice is Fanon's: he appropriates and synthesizes disciplines, especially psychoanalysis, with great confidence and poise, as DuBois did with sociology. When scholars are so busy learning the disciplines that they have no time left to unlearn them, the confident use, revision, and extension of psychoanalysis by Fanon and sociology by DuBois offer inspiring lessons on how to race these disciplines and make them take race seriously.

Source: Shih, Shu-mei. "Comparative Racialization: An Introduction." PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1359-60.

Decolonization

2010-07-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

I know it's out of context but I loved this line:

Decolonization must therefore be a multidisciplinary, if not an interdisciplinary, project, since the beginning of racial thinking during the colonial turn marked the advent of disciplinarity in more than one sense of the word.

Source: Shih, Shu-mei. "Comparative Racialization: An Introduction." PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1352.

Strategy

2010-06-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

I recently got back from a trip to see members of my committee. I do this periodically so that they know I am still alive and planning to finish, although of course they heard from me in April when I found out about my dissertation fellowship. However, I wanted to thank them in person by giving them wine (both a red and a white) and also to have a conversation on strategy for the coming year.

What I like about my committee is that I receive different types of support from each of them. One of the main themes during the meetings was working while having children. The first one I saw was my outside member, who openly offers me advice on life. (It's a little embarrassing but I often end up crying a little -- not from hurt or anything, and not a lot of tears, thank goodness -- when I talk to her one-on-one.) She told me that 1) I shouldn't feel left behind even though it is taking me longer than some of my cohort and even the cohorts behind me to finish, and 2) I should consider my child as a credit when looking at my curriculum of life ("vitae") from a wider and longer perspective. She told me this from the position of someone who is retiring this year, who has had a long and fulfilling academic career, who has produced several books and many, many articles, and who has had two children to her credit -- and she took eight years to finish her Ph.D.! She and I also of course discussed the terrible academic market and my healthy attitude on the possibility of not entering academia. My takeaway was a sense of the bigger picture of where my priorities really lie.

Next was the co-chair from my department. From her, I got nitty-gritty tactics on where and how to apply, how to position myself in my letters, and a general sense of how to deal with the coming year in terms of job and postdoc applications while I finish writing the dissertation. I remarked almost off-handedly about how perhaps I should have waited until after tenure to have a child (that is, if I ever entered academia and got tenure), but she said very firmly that there seems to be no good time for women academics to have children, and that if one waits until after tenure, one may be 40 or nearing 40 and having children gets a lot iffier for women at that age. I must say that her perspective was surprising because I can't remember talking with her specifically about how having children affects women in academia. Besides the personal support and her reiteration of how pleased she was about my fellowship (apparently, of all that applied, I am the first of her students to get an AAUW award), the meeting was very helpful to me because of the step-by-step instructions on job letters, the reminder about formulating a cogent second project for postdoc applications, and the deadline she set for the end of summer. Yikes! But I'm on it.

Finally, my other co-chair and I had a long conversation about childcare and working-mother's guilt, specific job opportunities, and how to generally approach the upcoming year's challenges. I admitted that I had been feeling some guilt on putting Ben in preschool/daycare even though he is only 2. I know that, because of the truly dismal support for childcare in this country (especially when compared with other industrialized nations), many parents simply have to put their infants in daycare after 6 weeks. Moreover, at his age, Ben needs more than just me as a playmate and more regular contact with other kids besides what he gets at the play dates we schedule about every week or week and a half with local friends. Yet I still feel this guilt, inexplicable as it is, and my co-chair agreed that the guilt was something she faced as well but something that I simply needed to get over. Really. It is that simple. I felt both disappointed and elated to hear this. I think the disappointment came from the part of me that is afraid that once Ben is in daycare, I will have no excuse for failing to write and finish. I need to get over this fear, too. That was the main takeaway from this last meeting: I have no more excuses. I will finish this coming school year, whether or not it's in time for job applications starting in September. (We discussed that as well, the possibility that I might not be able to even selectively apply for jobs this fall but will have to wait until next cycle. Postdoc applications are a different story, however.)

On Teaching And Being A Collegial Academic

2010-06-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

I have been enjoying the posts from two academic blogs lately.

Natalia at Works Cited has recently written a great -- I mean, great -- series of posts on something most of us don't necessarily get a lot of guidance on as grad students: receiving feedback on your writing and giving feedback to others. One of the things I particularly like is the tone. The whole series has an advice column feel to it, but nothing like Dear Abby; it's more like a Chronicle for Higher Ed column but more specific and less stress-inducing. You get the sense that the pearls of wisdom she imparts are the contemplations of an intelligent and very perceptive mind. Honestly, if I had read her posts on how to respond to other people's writing years ago instead of just last month, I could have saved myself some *facepalm* moments that have had some ramifications to my budding academic career. There are six (relatively short) posts in all, so go through and read them as well as the other fascinating stuff she writes on.

Then there is ladysquires at Shitty First Drafts (great blog name!) who has been focusing on teaching in interesting, practical, and thoughtful ways. (The posts I just linked to have all three qualities, by the way, not just the one they're attached to.) She also writes a regular educational post on logical fallacies every Friday -- love them!

PLUS, both bloggers are feminists and critically aware of race. (I love this post on the recent Arizona craziness over immigration from ladysquires.) The world needs more of that.

Everybody's Working For The Weekend

2010-06-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

Just want to say that I love Google Scholar, especially when I am connected through a university proxy (or whatever you call it). I am now directing more of my attention to journal articles, although my monograph reading is FAR from over.

Btw, the chapter I am working on is kicking my butt. I need some inspiration on how to organize the hot mess that is my-brain-on-Chapter-2. I have set a strict deadline for myself from now until September, when application season will be in full swing.

The sound you just heard was my stomach dropping. Didn't feel too good.

Re-Energized

2010-05-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

Last week I attended a double-header talk on the topic of "Queer Temporalities" by Bliss Lim and Kara Keeling (part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series). Both presentations were really provocative and rich, topped off by a superb reading of both projects by the discussant, Grace Hong. Keeling spoke of Afro-futurism and the nature of speculation involved in speculative fiction versus that in capitalism, while Lim spoke of queer time and what she calls "camp time." (I also noted that both were very deft in their use of audio/visual media equipment, which is usually where a lot of talks that I have seen falter performance-wise. I suppose it makes sense since they are Film professors.)

It was the first academic thing I have done this year besides reading for my dissertation, and I was doubly excited because I was able to do it without the kid. It felt like old times -- especially since I went to the event with JFC, a good friend and former classmate from my M.A. cohort, and saw there another old friend as well as a favorite former professor of mine who was gracious as always.

While the talks only had an indirect bearing on the work I am doing, they still made the wheels start turning. Sometimes, just the heady intellectual atmosphere of these kinds of lectures can function as lubricant for my brain's rusty gears. The occasionally gorgeous ways in which a speaker puts words together into a thrilling thought can send me spinning into a different and productive mode of thinking. Moreover, the absence of my child allowed me to listen and process without having to multitask; multitasking apparently negatively impacts the quality of our performance, particularly for adults. The cherry-on-top was that I was given a couple of leads on possible texts to examine for my dissertation, which I very much appreciated.

I remember feeling very warm in the room during the talks, and JFC, having felt cold instead, suggested that my heightened excitement was causing hot flashes. Ha! But anyway, it has been a long time since I had regular access to a research campus, and I am very glad that my reaction to the talks was one of excitement and inspiration. In other words, I am glad that I still find some joy in academic culture, jaded as I have become in the process of dissertating and learning about the job market. Indeed, the excitement from the talk bled into heightened enthusiasm for my own reading (though Mary Niall Mitchell's book was already wonderful). I would attend more such events, but the rather major drawback is that it is very time-consuming given the amount of driving/travel time it takes for me to get to campus. Alas. But I have come back to my TBR pile with a renewed energy and sense of purpose.

Good News

2010-05-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

I have some exciting news to share academic-wise.

To preface, April was a pretty incredible month in general: it was my birthday month and the dh really outdid himself with the thoughtfulness of his gifts; and at the end of the month we had a really great, fun vacation road trip to visit a friend at the University of Wyoming and some family in Utah.

On top of that, however, and this is the news I want to share, I found out that I was awarded a dissertation fellowship by the AAUW for next school year. (!!!)

I was totally flabbergasted, especially after getting an outright rejection just a few days earlier from the other fellowship that I applied for. This earlier rejection had demoralized me so much that I was absolutely expecting another rejection from the AAUW. In fact, only the day before I was notified about the AAUW fellowship, I was telling a friend that I was seriously thinking of leaving academia after I finished my dissertation, and that I would need a HUGE sign before my feelings would swing back the other way. What a way to tempt fate, right? In part, I guess I was practicing what's called defensive pessimism, so that the impending rejection that I expected wouldn't faze me so much.

Well, fate did not call my bluff, and that huge sign came the next morning in the form of an e-mail notification (which first landed in my Junk box so I didn't even read it until mid-morning), and I was in shock. Of course, there was some drama there as well, since the e-mail didn't have my actual name in it, just a generic "Greetings!" And, being the insecure grad student that I am, I had to wait until the following week for the snail-mailed contract before I could really believe that the e-mail had been sent to the right e-mail address and that it wasn't the universe playing a cruel trick. Indeed, the universe dropped an amazing birthday gift on my lap instead.

Getting this fellowship is obviously a big deal to me since I can now afford to put my toddler in childcare at least part-time this fall and next spring while I write and FINISH the dissertation. But I am particularly happy about the award in a different way as well: I am proud to be chosen by an organization that prioritizes women's issues, and, having looked over some of the past winners' dissertation and postdoctoral project descriptions (at least of those in the humanities and social sciences), I see that the organization respects research on children as well. I also found out that my husband spent one very enjoyable summer as a child learning arts and crafts through a summer class organized by the AAUW chapter in his hometown. What a lovely connection! I am happy to be part of the organization's mission.

And now I'm really looking forward to drafting another chapter in the next couple of months.

Philippines Trip

2010-03-20T00:53:00.000-07:00

Last month, I visited the Philippines for two weeks. It was not a research trip; most of our days were spent with the large family on my mother's side. I basically piggy-backed on her vacation to see her own mother, my Lola, who turned 86 when we were there. Too, I brought my toddler with me, which made doing research difficult already.

I did, however, manage to visit the really great American Historical Collection at Ateneo de Manila University. Even though the collection is being prepared for a big move to a newer building, the librarians were fabulous about getting me what I needed. In fact, the librarian who helped me the most even found other items that I didn't know where there, and I left with a great sense of accomplishment in terms of dissertation research. What I was looking for will only make up a section of one chapter, but I consider it the capstone of the chapter and therefore necessary. If I had had more time to spend at the university, maybe four or five days instead of the one, I would have combed through their photographs collection. Perhaps I'll do that if I have the opportunity to revise the dissertation into a book, which is a big maybe right now.*

Another great pleasure during my visits to Ateneo and also the University of the Philippines (UP Diliman) came from meeting with several fantastic people who also happen to be amazing scholars. If you know Philippine film studies, then you know RT is the premier film scholar of the Philippines. If you know anything about Filipino American cultural/literary studies, then you've at least heard of OC and probably read many of his influential, formative articles in the field. (I consider him the godfather of Filipino American cultural studies since so many of the current Filipino Americanist professors across the country were taught by him.) CY is still a young faculty member at UP, but his work is amazing and I look forward to hearing more from him. They were so sweet about taking time out of their busy schedules to see me and meet my mom and my son.

Finally, I love the books that I was able to purchase at the university presses there. CY was especially great about helping me find relevant books for my project. I'm really looking forward to reading them and knocking them off of my huge TBR pile.

__________
* Let's just say that the implosion of the academic tenure-track during this terrible economic downturn -- I heard some people cried when the job listings for English professorships came out last fall -- has made me focus more seriously on figuring out my Plan B.

Conference: Re/Siting Asian American Studies

2010-01-25T23:52:00.000-08:00

Here is an upcoming conference on the East Coast that I wish I could attend (official website with more info):

Re/Siting Asian American Studies
connecting critical approaches in the field
A One-Day Conference at Rutgers
Friday, February 19, 2010
9 AM - 6 PM

PLENARY SPEAKERS & PANELS

CONNECTIVE & COMPARATIVE HISTORIES

MARTIN F. MANALANSAN IV
Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The House We Live In: The Crises of Race, Class, and Queer Habitations in the 21st Century

MOON-KIE JUNG
Sociology and American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Constituting the U.S. Empire-State and White Supremacy

VISUAL & PERFORMATIVE CULTURES

KAREN SHIMAKAWA
Performance Studies, New York University
Singing the Moving Map: Operatic Performance of Chinese/America

ANNA PEGLER-GORDON
American Studies, Michigan State University
Envisioning Chinese Americans During World War II

TRANS-REGIONAL ASIAN AMERICAS

LOK C. D. SIU
Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin
Hemispheric Asian America: Rethinking Migration, Sociality, and Racialization

SARITA ECHAVEZ SEE
English and American Culture, University of Michigan
Hair Lines: Filipino American Art and the Uses of Abstraction

RE/SITING ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES:
INSTITUTIONS WITH A GLOBAL REACH

EVELYN HU-DEHART
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University
Asian American Studies as Global Studies

JACK (JOHN KUO WEI) TCHEN
Asian / Pacific / American Institute, New York University
Critique, New Knowledges, and Organizing

Onward

2009-11-17T18:28:00.000-08:00

Thankfully, I made the deadlines for the fellowships I'm applying for; one of them still requires letters of rec and supporting documents, but I have time to take care of those since they are due early next year. I can breathe more easily now!

However, it is time to go back to the dissertation. Incidentally, yesterday I received feedback from my other co-chair on the first draft that I submitted about two months ago (she's been really busy organizing faculty over the University of California crisis), and it was really positive. She said that the chapter was well written and gave me the go-ahead to work on other chapters and save revisions for this chapter until after I have a complete draft of the dissertation. Neither of my co-chairs gives light praise, but this one in particular is known to sometimes give devastating critiques, so I must admit that I was thrilled to get positive comments.

Next up is Chapter 2, of which I have a partial draft already. I want to submit a complete draft by the end of January. Cross my fingers, especially since the holidays will surely prove an obstacle to getting work done. But it would be great to get the draft done then because I plan to take a three-week trip to the Philippines in February, where hopefully I will be able to do some research for another dissertation chapter.

In Which I Quote Myself Twice

2009-11-10T01:56:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year (and I mean early since it was January), I shared the news that one of my essays seemed to have been accepted for publication but that I wasn't completely sure. I wrote that I was delighted and surprised "to hear that I might be published with a stellar group of scholars. It is a testament, I think, to the subject matter of my paper, which I will share here when (if) I learn that a publication date and issue number have been set."

Well, just this past weekend, I heard from the editor of the special issue that the journal had given him a tentative publication date -- 2011, volume 19 of positions: east asia cultures critique. It's a bit far off, but I was happy to get the news since it came just in time for me to include it in my fellowship applications. (Speaking of which, I submitted the first application just this evening, with less than an hour to spare before the deadline. !!)

I suppose this means that I must now share what that essay is about. Actually, I was being a bit tricky during that last post, because I had already written about the essay on this blog in 2005: "I wrote a paper last year on Bagong Buwan and the repressed specter of national division in the film. I particularly discuss its problematic representation of the Muslim Filipinos as the ethnological 'other,' its tactical displacement of the violence against Moro women, and its refusal to deal with the nationalist, secessionist claims of the indigenous Moro Muslims in the southern Philippines." After revision, the essay still basically discusses all of that. Titled "Managing the 'Moro Problem': Fractured Nation/Narration in Bagong Buwan," it is a critique of the State-Christian biases of the Philippine film Bagong Buwan (English: New Moon), directed by Marilou Diaz-Abaya.

So if the paper gets published in 2011, it will have taken seven years from inception to publication since it was actually written in 2004. Granted, I didn't submit it for publication until 2006 and it was not originally intended to be placed with positions so it's not their fault -- but geez, academic publishing can be really slow.

The Ph.D. Problem

2009-11-06T00:33:00.000-08:00

I recently read "The Ph.D. Problem," an article on the imperiled humanities PhD system by professor and Pulitzer-Prize winner Louis Menand. I found it cogent and eye-opening, even though it is basically only a few short excerpts from his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas. Here are some excerpts of the excerpts, with special attention to my discipline. First, he lays out the problem:

English was one of the fields surveyed in the two studies of the Ph.D. It is useful to look at, in part because it is a large field where employment practices have a significance that goes beyond courses for English majors. What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about 25 years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable process. The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand.

Up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees (something that appears to be the case in doctoral education generally), and only about half of the rest end up with the jobs they entered graduate school to get—that is, tenured professorships. Over the three decades since the branch was grabbed, a kind of protective shell has grown up around this process, a culture of "realism," in which exogenous constraints are internalized, and the very conditions that make doctoral education problematic are turned into elements of that education. Students are told from the very start, almost from the minute they apply to graduate school, that they are effectively entering a lottery. This has to have an effect on professional self-conception.

Wow. I wish I had read this before I applied to graduate school. As an undergrad, I was told by my graduate student TAs that graduate school would be difficult and that not everyone would get a job at the end of a PhD program. But I don't remember being told the extent of the disparity between supply and demand.

Besides supply-and-demand issues, there is the problem of prolonged time-to-degree. OK, for those who won't bother to click on the link above, I am going to quote in its entirety the section that I found most interesting, in which Menand offers some surprising suggestions on what specific changes could transform the system for the better. (I'll interject my own thoughts in parentheses.)

It may be that the increased time-to-degree, combined with the weakening job market for liberal arts Ph.D.s, is what is responsible for squeezing the profession into a single ideological box. It takes three years to become a lawyer. It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach college students for a living. Tightening up the oversight on student progress might reduce the time-to-degree by a little, but as long as the requirements remain, as long as students in most fields have general exams, field (or oral) exams, and monograph-length dissertations, it is not easy to see how the reduction will be significant. What is clear is that students who spend eight or nine years in graduate school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available. The argument that they need the training to be qualified to teach undergraduates is belied by the fact that they are already teaching undergraduates. Undergraduate teaching is part of doctoral education; at many institutions, graduate students begin teaching classes the year they arrive. And the idea that the doctoral thesis is a rigorous requirement is belied by the quality of most doctoral theses. If every graduate student were required to publish a single peer-reviewed article instead of writing a thesis, the net result would probably be a plus for scholarship.

(If the latter were the case, I know many colleagues who could have had their PhDs much earlier than they did. Even I could have my PhD by now!)

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s.

(For more on the super-exploitation of student labor, see Marc Bousquet's posts at The Valve, like this most recent one. Important perspective.)

But the main reason for academics to be concerned about the time it takes to get a degree has to do with the barrier this represents to admission to the profession. The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes.

And the obstacles at the other end of the process, the anxieties over placement and tenure, do not encourage iconoclasm either. The academic profession in some areas is not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself. If it were easier and cheaper to get in and out of the doctoral motel, the disciplines would have a chance to get oxygenated by people who are much less invested in their paradigms. And the gap between inside and outside academia, which is partly created by the self-sorting, increases the hostility of the non-academic world toward what goes on in university departments, especially in the humanities. The hostility makes some disciplines less attractive to college students, and the cycle continues.

The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of entrants) or harder to get through (reducing the number of graduates). But this has not worked. Possibly the story has a different moral, which is that there should be a lot more Ph.D.s, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction—and also if it had to deal with students who were not so neurotically invested in the academic intellectual status quo. If Ph.D. programs were determinate in length—if getting a Ph.D. were like getting a law degree—then graduate education might acquire additional focus and efficiency. It might also attract more of the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having.

(The first response I had when reading this last paragraph was simply: WOW! -- I know, not very sophisticated. -- I would like to see the consequences of making it easier to get PhDs. One assumes that it would entail more than the work currently required for a master's degree in a humanities field. Yet while I like the idea of more PhDs enriching the non-academic world, couldn't those students who "yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program," simply decide to get a master's degree anyway? Also, the comparison of the humanities PhD with the MD and the JD is a little bit off, since the demand for doctors and lawyers is still higher than that for humanities professors. I'm not sure if I am misreading Menand here.)

It is unlikely that the opinions of the professoriate will ever be a true reflection of the opinions of the public; and, in any case, that would be in itself an unworthy goal. Fostering a greater diversity of views within the professoriate is a worthy goal, however. The evidence suggests that American higher education is going in the opposite direction. Professors tend increasingly to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected. The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it.

Word.

Something I would have liked to see from Menand's reading of the existing data is an analysis of how all of this breaks down for women and minorities. I have the sense that his call for more "diversity" in the professoriate (and the graduate student population) is at least in part about racial diversity. But what are the specific data? I also wonder how the time-to-degree data is affected by the experiences of female graduate students, who from my admittedly limited anecdotal knowledge are the ones more likely to have "stop-time" -- withdraw for a few years before finishing -- because of the demands of childcare.

Overall, a very interesting article, even if it deals with depressing issues for me.

Lecture: The Child As Self And Nation

2009-10-21T23:47:00.000-07:00

I really wish I could go to this lecture!!! It looks like it will be amazing and may have significant bearing on my dissertation. (And once again, UIUC is hosting a great Fil/Am studies event.)

The Child as Self and Nation: Stories of Dependence in Early Twentieth-Century American Juvenile Travel Literature and the American Indian Day School Movement

Kimberly Alidio

Wednesday, November 18, 2009
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Asian American Cultural Center Lounge
1210 W. Nevada Street, Urbana, IL

Tis The Season

2009-10-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

It is fellowship season again. I was so relieved last year when I decided not to apply to anything, mostly because the process just takes so much out of me and, to be honest, I hate to bother my committee about anything. I kind of regret it this year since I feel a little bit at loose ends. But now that the end (my PhD) seems a lot nearer than it did just this past summer before I finished the first draft of a dissertation chapter, I actually feel compelled to go through the application process. For one thing, I saw my committee chairs recently and they knew and seemed to approve of my decision to apply (and thus they know to expect to write some letters). For another, since I have made some headway into the dissertation, I feel more confident about my dissertation plan and my work's significance in various fields.

Yet...well, applications are still difficult for me. Like I wrote a couple of years ago, writing about my work for one of these fellowships makes me feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. Maybe it is because I feel really invested in a lot of this work, and I hate the feeling that a rejection is a rejection of me as a person, kind of the way some students feel that getting anything less than an A is a personal judgment call on the part of the teacher. I simply have to get over this, I know. Unfortunately, I don't think I developed enough of a thick skin while I was in grad school, especially since I did relatively well in the classes I took during my first two years. Perhaps moving away after coursework was more like running away, even though I don't regret the move; I am -- we are -- so much happier living and working here. (I do miss going to school regularly, however, and I wish I could teach at least one more class before getting my degree. Oh well.)

Anyway, I am venting just a little here so that I can get it out of the way before I go back to work on my research statement and plan. If I don't come back for a while, happy Autumn to you, my dear few readers!

Assistant Professorship in Asian American Studies

2009-09-24T00:08:00.000-07:00

Just got this job announcement today:

Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
California State University, Northridge
Asian American Studies Department, Northridge, CA 91330-8251
Salary: $51,024-$62,000 (subject to budgetary approval)

PhD in Ethnic Studies, American Studies, English, or closely related fields, with an emphasis or a demonstrated interest in Asian American and Pacific Islander Literatures and Cultural Studies. Tenure Track. Degree expected prior to August 17, 2010. Desirable secondary interest may include media studies, composition theory, creative writing, performance studies, popular culture and postcolonial theory. Evidence of teaching and research excellence, an understanding of Asian American Studies as a disciplinary field and a commitment to providing service to the Asian American community required. CSUN is a Learning Centered University with a diverse student population drawn largely from the Los Angeles area.

Send letter of application, C.V., at least three letters of recommendation, evidence of teaching effectiveness, publications or recent writing sample, and representative syllabi of Asian American Studies courses taught or in planning to Asian American Studies, CSUN, Northridge, CA 91330-8251. CSUN is an EO/AA, Title IX, Section 504 Employer. Primary consideration given to applications postmarked by December 14, 2009. Review full announcement on our website: http://www.csun.edu/aas/.

Alas! The timing is all wrong for me, but I do wonder if the position will get budgetary approval in the end. The university systems in California seem to be imploding right now...?

First Chapter Draft Done

2009-09-11T02:46:00.001-07:00

Wordle cloud of my Chapter 3

I sent off the very first draft of a dissertation chapter to the co-chairs yesterday. Although I went past my original deadline by over three weeks, I am really proud of myself. The first draft ever of the dissertation! (And yes, I started on the third chapter rather than the first.) It is also the first real paper I have written since the prospectus two years ago, and the first since giving birth. So it was really quite an accomplishment for me.

Basically, full-time childcare (mothering, to be specific) is a major obstacle to academic writing and researching. While trying to get this chapter together, I was dealing with a toddler who absolutely did not want me to type anything into my laptop while he was awake and would, for the past few nights, completely wake up in the middle of the night while I was writing and insist on staying awake for several hours so that he could play with me, or rather have me play with him. As you might have guessed, I had to do the bulk of my work -- both reading and writing -- in the wee night hours, which meant that I was completely exhausted during the daytime as, of course, I had to get up and take care of the child. No sleeping in and recovering after pulling an all-nighter. After a couple of weeks of this, my brain simply was not running on all cylinders when I needed to write. I definitely had to take nights off from writing despite the deadline. But as the dh said, at least I made progress every time I was at the computer, even if I could only write a net of one or two pages a night. (Can you imagine? Sometimes I really miss my college days. I once wrote 20 pages in one night!)

Now, while I am really proud of myself for actually getting a draft out there -- one that is 40 pages, no less, one of the longest papers I have written -- I have to emphasize that it is a draft and needs some rather severe revisions. Because the texts I am working on are not widely read, I got bogged down on plot summary and did not make up for it with really good analysis. In fact, because it seems as if I am still feeling my way around the dissertation (this is only the first chapter I've written, after all), I do not yet have the confidence to make bold claims about the work. I also decided to refrain from citing a lot of social and critical theory to help make any such bold claims because of that uncertainty about where the dissertation is ultimately going. (You would think that making bold claims would help, but what I really mean is that I need to finish much more of the research first.) For that reason, and because I also decided not to integrate another primary text that I had originally planned on using, the chapter is about fifteen meaty (by which I mean my own words, without heavy quotes from the primary texts or other sources) pages less than it could/would have been. If I had had more time, maybe I could have worked on these two particular aspects, but I was already three weeks behind as it was.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to share some of what I was working on through the Wordle above. I have to focus on the victories, right, else I will never get this dissertation done!

(I got the idea to make this Wordle of my chapter from Natalia.)

CFP: Red Feather: An International Journal of Children's Media Culture

2009-08-27T22:35:00.000-07:00

CFP: Call for submissions to the premier issue of Red Feather: An International Journal of Children's Media Culture. The first issue will be published February 1, 2010.

Red Feather facilitates an international dialogue among scholars and professionals through vigorous discussion of the intersections between the child image and the conception of childhood, children's material culture, children and politics, the child body, and any other conceptions of the child within local, national, and global contexts. The journal invites critical and/or theoretical examination of the child image to further our understanding of the consumption, circulation, and representation of the child throughout the world's visual mediums. Some sample topics include, but are certainly not limited to: studies of images of children of color; child as commodity; images of children in Africa, Asia, Middle East, South America, etc.; political uses of the child image; children in film; children in advertising; visual adaptations of children's literary works; child welfare images; children and war; or any other critical examination of the child image in a variety of visual mediums.

Red Feather is published twice a year, in February and September, and adheres to the MLA citation system. Authors may submit articles in other citations systems, with the understanding that conversion to MLA is a condition of acceptance.

Interested contributors please submit the paper, an abstract, a current CV, and a brief biography as attachments in Word to debbieo@okstate.edu

Deadline for submissions for the premier issue is December 15th 2009.

A Status Update

2009-07-03T22:31:00.001-07:00

It has been so long since I last blogged anything that I feel funny in this space again. Like a lot of people, I gradually began to spend most of my online time on Facebook, because I can keep in touch with friends more easily there. Blogging is definitely a different animal, as not only do I have nearly unlimited word allowance for my "status updates," as it were, but also this is a space where I feel the need to practice the craft of writing, which I have admittedly neglected for quite some time now.

As for my status update: after reading my last few posts, I realized that I left my audience hanging on several things. Let me go in reverse chronological order. First, if you want to know what's been going on with my friend who has the abusive adviser, read the comments on the last post.

Second, the essay that I needed to revise for publication will soon be in the process of typesetting and, later, copyediting. It seems that the journal is definitely going to publish the special issue, but no word yet on issue number and date. Right now, the aggregate manuscript is going through another round of revisions before typesetting because the whole thing is about eighty pages too long; some of the contributors did not heed the journal editors' request for a specific number of pages and have been asked to edit down their papers once again. Thankfully, I don't have to go through another revision, which would have severely cut into my dissertation-writing schedule. (I already have too many things going on this month family-wise, so producing another revision for this essay would have been nearly disastrous.)

Third, I did indeed present in Hawai'i last April for the Association for Asian American Studies, and I had a wonderful time. I took my child and partner, and we had a few days in Maui with other family before going to Honolulu for the conference. The baby was a big hit with friends who had never met him and also with strangers (some of whom are now friends). It was quite funny because there was a point when I realized that "networking" had become easy: with the baby, I was welcome everywhere, and many people would simply come up to us. Moreover, people were very solicitous when I took him to the conference areas, and it gave me a good feeling about the conference in general, that the people who attended it welcomed and openly acknowledged the role of families in many academics' lives.

Fourth was a complete and utter surprise: I actually won that best graduate student paper award at the Rocky Mountain MLA conference that I mentioned here. I was one of three winners this year. I was floored when I got the packet in the mail, especially since it arrived on April Fool's Day! I exclaimed and laughed so loudly that the baby freaked out a little. It really was a very lovely surprise.

Despite all this good news, I know that I am not as productive as most of my peers, as I witness colleagues finishing their dissertations or receiving well-earned jobs and postdocs. I am reminded of the holding pattern that I am in and the precariousness of my situation with regard to my chosen career. The case of one young colleague doing research in another country in the first year of graduate school provokes thoughts of "if only I had done things differently back then..." and "what if life hadn't blindsided me," etc. But at the same time, I am really enjoying my time as a full-time babysitter to my son, who is 16 months old today and who has recently started walking, dancing while standing (it is hilarious), and babbling like he is having full conversations with us. Every newly-cut tooth is a cause for celebration. Every morning I wake up with kisses and hugs from an adorable toddler. I honestly would not trade this time in his life for a tenure-track job that would force me to put him in daycare.

I have finally found a few other young mothers here who face similar choices regarding career and childcare, and it has been a relief to know that I am literally not alone in this and that I can ask others nearby for advice and help. A couple of these women have recently offered to babysit for a few hours a week to help me with my writing, which was so humbling. I don't know if I can bring myself to take advantage, but I was just so grateful for what their offer symbolized, which was their support of what I am trying to do with my life. I am feeling quite optimistic at the moment. I hope this feeling will carry me through to finish the chapter draft that is due in a month and a half.

A Story

2009-02-08T02:59:00.000-08:00

Last evening, I had a long chat with a good friend from my program. She regularly calls me whenever she's facing a big decision regarding her academic career and future. Last night, it was about the possibility of not finishing her dissertation and just leaving with a master's degree. Of course, she is not the first person in our program to do this; others have left even without the master's. But she has already written so much of her dissertation and has been very focused on what she wants to write. She has had to deal with an abusive chair for the past couple of years, and even though she has been incredibly disciplined about writing, the chair now wants her to start from scratch despite having signed off on the dissertation proposal a year and a half ago and having read and basically approved drafts of at least one chapter. (Moreover, the chair takes far too long to return comments on drafts; my friend had to wait half a year for comments on one draft!)

Like most of us grad students, my friend cannot afford to stay in school indefinitely, yet her chair seems oblivious, insensitive, to this fact. At this point in her career, my friend has decided that she may not want, in any case, to run the rat race to get a tenure-track job in some much less hospitable region; she has particular needs that must be accommodated properly, and where she lives now is the best place in the country for those needs. If she cannot resolve this problem with her chair by, say, switching to a different one, she thinks she should look for a full-time job locally and wash her hands of academe.

Our talk made me sad and angry. She and I always joked that we would ride the other's coattails to academic stardom. After all, my friend was able to get a very famous gender studies/queer studies professor on her committee. And her prospectus meeting went forward, with the document signed at the end of it. It seemed all she needed to do after that was write steadily, and she is fulfilling her end of the bargain, so to speak. (A devil's bargain, perhaps.) Now it is unclear if she will even finish with the degree she originally wanted, let alone get a job as a professor, because of one person who is acting irrationally and abusing their power.

I confess that, while I am much more sanguine about my chairs, I can't help but feel anxious that I may not end up with a PhD, either, if one of them suddenly decides that my project needs to be scrapped. I doubt this would happen, or that it would happen so abruptly, but one never knows. And my friend has to be so careful about not offending her chair as she attempts to resolve this impasse. Rather like a beaten child who must then come back and say sorry. Sometimes graduate school really sucks.

Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages

2009-02-07T04:13:00.001-08:00

I've been reading Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages, and it is really great. I haven't read an academic book in a while, and this one made me feel like I was really, truly learning something. It made me question my assumptions by showing different sides to the issues of terrorism, U.S. exceptionalism, patriotism, race, gender, heteronormativity, and homonormativity. How refreshing after the last political season of un-nuanced arguments about these very things. Even lefties generally don't get it. (Huffington Post writers and Jon Stewart, I'm looking at you. And yeah, that's where I get my news, lol.) Puar's arguments seem very new and, really, very logical. Instead of finding mere oppositions, differences, and/or contradictions among the various indexes above, she instead argues that we look for "proximity" and "complicity." Her analysis of frameworks/discourses about terrorism vis-à-vis sexuality really blew my mind, or opened my eyes, whatever you like. And it made me think about what is at stake in movements like gay marriage and who benefits the most, and to personally reflect on a minor movement in Asian America and other communities of color to make our voices and opinions heard by showing how much buying power we have (i.e., via boycotts). What does boycotting mean for minoritized subjects? What kind of position(s) do we fall into when we range ourselves like this against the market and against the state? What is the trap of (neo)liberal subjecthood? . . . Anyway, I am reading the book to help with revising my essay (see previous post). These last few questions don't have much to do with what I'm writing, at least, not directly, but the revision is starting to shape up in my head. I'll need to ask family members to babysit for a few sessions, and then I hope to get this revision done on time.

Report

2009-01-25T00:50:00.000-08:00

It is probably no surprise that I've been silent here for so long, especially since I only want to post when I have some real news to report. The baby will turn one year old in a little over a month. He is beautiful, delightful, a revelation. But he is also a handful. I haven't been able to truly work since before he was born.

(As an aside, I also haven't had a full night's sleep in over a year, but I've gotten over it. Mostly. I hold on to the knowledge that it will happen again someday, a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Ah!)

Nonetheless, I have done some work. In October I presented at my first conference since giving birth. It was at the Rocky Mountain MLA in Reno, which I mentioned in my last post (from all the way back in May, wow). I had fun, although Reno itself and the hotel holding the conference were not that pleasant. But my panel turned out to be truly excellent and cohered in a way that none of us expected. I even drew a nomination for best graduate student paper, about which I am not holding my breath; I saw other presentations by graduate students and mine was certainly not the best!

What was nice about that conference was that I was able to dive into part of my dissertation work in a productive way, and now I get to present the material once again at another conference, this time in Hawai'i in April. I will probably report back again then. In the meantime, it needs to be revised further, even though it is already presentation-ready. Since the paper is the jumping-off point for one of my chapters, I also want to expand it so that I will have something more substantial to show my advisers in a few months.

Finally, I had some exciting news last week: I learned that one of my essays was accepted for a special issue of a refereed journal. The caveat: while I have heard from the editor at the journal itself, I am still unsure if the collection will be published; it might still be in the review process. But in any case, I was really excited, and not a little surprised, to hear that I might be published with a stellar group of scholars. It is a testament, I think, to the subject matter of my paper, which I will share here when (if) I learn that a publication date and issue number have been set. It has been about two and half years since I first submitted this paper for this particular collection, and almost twice that long since I first wrote it (five years? Yes, crazy, I know!). Our editor/collector has been incredibly patient and persistent with the publishers and the publications process, which has been more complicated than expected. To be honest, I wasn't sure if my piece would be included given the fact that I could not revise it properly when it was submitted for this particular journal. (At that time, two years ago, our heater had broken down in the middle of winter, my new kitten was dying, and an uncle in the Philippines had just been murdered. So, yeah, the revision process was an utter failure.)

After getting the feedback from two anonymous readers and a good friend, I am looking forward to properly revising the paper. And one last thing: I know some established academics have strong feelings against graduate students publishing their work while in graduate school. But given the attenuation of my graduate career, the fact that I am still in the early stage of the dissertation when I should already be finishing up this semester, and the uncertainty of my future as an academic, I feel a little better knowing that I might have another publication. It makes me feel like my time at this PhD has not been for naught even though most of the past year has been spent on childcare and self-care. I don't believe that I should feel guilty about putting my career on hold for this precious time in my baby's life, but I do, anyway.

Moreover, when I do finally go out on the job market -- which by all that I've heard is ugly and depressing and getting worse given this economic climate -- I don't want my application to be ignored. My job requirements are so specific that I need every edge I can get in order to land a good job in the location that will be best for my family. I felt convinced when I first entered my PhD program that I was doing it with my eyes wide open; then, I didn't mind the possibility that I might have to move to a different state for my job. I also planned to be on the fast track, given that I already had a master's degree. Oh, she was so, so naive, that old self! As the saying goes, if only I had known then what I know now.... Life blindsided me my first year in the PhD, and it has been doing it ever since. The last five or six years of my life have turned me around and sideways and every other which way. No one expects such big life-changing events to occur practically one right after the other. To tell the truth, I'm not sure I've adequately processed the last half-decade of my life. Yet here I am, still chugging along, still going after a PhD when a GED might have more than sufficed. If this article is actually published, it will, strangely enough, feel like I am moving towards more stability in my life. That means a lot (especially to someone with my personality).

Tidbits

2008-05-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

I have been consumed with childcare for the past two and a half months and generally cooped up in the house. It has been particularly hard to get all of the e-mail announcements about exciting lectures, symposia, and conferences and not be able to go since I cannot yet leave my child with someone else for more than a couple of hours (attending those events would require at least two hours of driving already). However, I am excited about presenting at a conference this coming October; it came as a surprise because I did not apply for it. I am substituting for someone else who had to pull out early, but I am not ashamed! In fact, I jumped at the opportunity when I was asked, in part because of the venue (Northern California in the fall will be beautiful). But the other reasons are even better: I will be presenting with good people; the subject matter ("ethnic studies") was broad enough for me to slip right in with my own work that I will not have to tweak; I now have something to look forward to that is related to my dissertation; and I will be able to bring my partner and child so that we can have a little family vacation. This also seems like a good way to ease back into academic mode, or rather to learn how to balance my personal and professional worlds, now that my personal life has become more demanding. Aside from the inconveniences of traveling, I cannot think of a downside to this venture.

I have also been able to sneak in reading while the baby eats and sleeps. At first I could only read fiction in my favorite subgenres, and I consumed a couple of stacks of such novels during his first month and a half of life. But lately I have had enough brain power left for more challenging reading. I am currently perusing this edited collection of Filipino American critique; like a gourmande, I am taking it in slowly, word for word, and enjoying each demonstration of intellectual prowess in my field of specialty. I had only read a couple of essays in it before, when I supposedly had more time for academic reading, but it really is a gem. Kudos to the editors who were able to draw the work of such a distinguished group of Filipino Americanists. I am happy to say that there are many more whose work I would also have included if I had my way, but I hope that this collection is only the start.

Conference: Philippine Palimpsests

2008-02-15T15:24:00.001-08:00

I salivated when I first saw the flier for this, but I won't be able to make it, of course. (By the way, the Asian American Studies Program at UIUC, where I worked for 9 months, incidentally, seems to be taking off like crazy. They have a few more exciting conferences like this coming up.)

Philippine Palimpsests: Filipino Studies in the 21st Century
March 7-8, 2008
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Conference Website:
http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/PhilippinePalimpsests/index.html

E-mail: aasp@uiuc.edu

It is no secret that Philippine, Filipino diasporic, and Filipino American studies have burgeoned with the arrival of Filipino and Filipina scholars into academia. While it might be too early to claim that we have reached "critical mass," given the welcome addition of tenured professors, new junior faculty, and emerging doctoral students into the ranks, we can no longer discount the large numbers of Filipino studies scholars who have graced various conferences, including the Association of Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, and various by-discipline symposia. Needless to say, there is a tremendous potential for scholarly production, intellectual growth, and networking among scholars that remains untapped.

It is thus with a view towards providing a venue for such exchanges that we at the University of Illinois have organized a conference called "Philippine Palimpsests: Filipino Studies in the 21st Century," scheduled for March 7-8, 2008 at the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This conference will bring together around 28 prominent and emerging U.S.-based Filipino American scholars to exchange ideas and create a strong network of support and scholarly contact. According to the OED, the term "palimpsest" connotes "a parchment or other surface on which writing has been applied over earlier writing which has been erased" and "something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form." Indeed, we seek to assess the state of Filipino studies and anticipate its rhizomatous extensions into the 21st century but, as the word palimpsest implies, with a profound awareness of the "hybridity," "heterogeneity" and "multiplicity" of our Philippine pasts, as well as a non-essentialist acknowledgment of the indelible traces of capital, empire, and labor upon our present.

Assistant Professorship For Filipino Americanists

2008-02-15T15:18:00.001-08:00

This would be my dream job if it were in California and if the start-date was for 2010.

Assistant Professor, Position 82125, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawaii at Manoa, full time, 9-month tenure-track position in Ethnic Studies Department to begin January 1 or August 1, 2009. Duties: Teach undergraduate courses from a transnational perspective on Filipino diasporic communities in Hawaii and the US; the intersections of ethnicity, race, class and gender; and process of migration. Advise and mentor undergraduate students; seek extramural funding; participate actively and provide professional service to the department, university and the community, particularly with the Filipino community in Hawaii. The successful applicant should maintain an active program of research and scholarly publication that integrates innovative theoretical analyses with applied research. Minimum qualifications: Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies or related interdisciplinary studies, humanities or social sciences field at the time of the appointments. Demonstrated ability to teach and conduct research on Filipino diaspora/transnational communities in Hawaii and/or the U.S.; evidence of excellence in research, teaching, and community service; and commitment to innovative educational strategies and to working with students with diverse backgrounds and experiences. Desired qualifications: Evidence of research and university-level teaching about the Filipino American experience; ability to teach courses on immigration, transnational communities, and/or ethnic/race relations, Philippine political economy and US-Philippine relations; previous experience in interdisciplinary teaching and collaboration between programs such as ethnic studies and other social sciences or the humanities; evidence of outreach activities to minority communities; ability to contribute to the College of Social Sciences Public Policy Center; a record of peer-reviewed publications. Salary commensurate with experience. To apply: Submit cover letter indicating how you satisfy the minimum and desirable qualifications, a curriculum vitae, and three letters of references, to Ibrahim G. Aoude, Chair, Departments of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, George Hall 301, 2560 Campus Road, Honolulu, HI 96822. Closing Date: Continuous with screening of first applications on August 15, 2008. EEO/AA Employer.

Happy New Year

2008-01-22T18:11:00.000-08:00

I hope you are having a productive 2008 so far.

As for me, it has been an unusual week academically. I was approached by two scholars I had never met -- one of whom found me through this blog, as a matter of fact(!) -- to be part of a panel and a seminar for different conferences later this year, but unfortunately I had to decline both although they sounded very interesting. Because of my baby's imminent arrival, I cannot make any promises about my schedule especially in the first half of the year. In fact, I expect that I will not be able to travel very far from home until late August or September.

In general, the first three weeks of 2008 have been very busy for me at home, so writing and processing have had to be set aside for a while. Besides the routine preparations for the baby, the hard drive on my Mac laptop started to die, which threw me into a tizzy for a couple of those weeks as I tried to make sure that my data was salvageable. I had my prospectus/dissertation backed up, but not all of the academic pdf articles I have downloaded over the years or schoolwork from my PhD program. Plus, it would have pained me to lose my photos and music. The idea of losing it all again (another hard drive died on me three and a half years ago) pained me. But I was able to access and back up all of my data at an Apple Store, and then get the hard drive replaced under the extended warranty I had fortunately bought with the computer. Even better, I finally got the latch on my laptop fixed for free, also under warranty. So that is that.

Coming up next: I have an essay review for a journal due in a couple of days (I am a "reader" for this journal), and the essay is actually very interesting; I expect to recommend it for publication but with revisions. Then I would like to finish my memo for the prospectus meeting before the end of the month, but because of the setback caused by the laptop problems, I will not hold myself to this deadline.

Prospectus Meeting

2007-12-21T23:31:00.000-08:00

I figured I would update now before the end of the year got away from me.

I am happy to report that my prospectus meeting last Friday went well. It lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes, and there were a lot of productive questions, criticism, and back-and-forth discussions among the professors (who, thankfully, all like each other). I was a little stymied in the beginning by a request to summarize or re-cap my project, but I sidestepped it and jumped into my little half-prepared presentation on the questions I wanted the committee to address about my proposal; insofar as the point of the summary suggestion was for the committee to hear my take on the project, my presentation and list of concerns accomplished the same thing. Then each professor went around the room giving their comments, with discussion at certain points when others jumped in. I was unsure how much I needed to respond to each question/issue, but it was a relatively relaxed atmosphere -- unlike my qualifying exams last year, which were a true oral defense. Overall, I felt that all four of the professors on my committee were behind me and the project. One professor observed that one of the things she liked about the project was the feeling of being taken on a journey, with no sense of what we will find at the end of it. I appreciated her comment a lot, as that is precisely how I think of scholarship and its purposes (in contrast to the outsourcing type of scholarship, via Professor Zero).

In the next month, I will be writing my "memo" of the meeting, which needs to be more than just a summary: I will need to craft my responses to the issues brought up during the meeting, especially regarding the project's quite ambitious political and methodological scope. Basically, I must make the research more manageable and not consider it my magnum opus; I was in fact encouraged to think of it in terms of two "books." "You can save it for the second book." That is something I have to really think about, as I am not certain how easy it will be for me to disaggregate or de-link one or two factors from the others. (Perhaps this is why I am not in the sciences. Ha!)

In other news, I wanted to share the good news about one of the Filipino Americanist tenure denial cases that I mentioned here last month: a negative tenure decision from earlier this year was overturned unanimously by the new tenure and promotion committee, so the professor was awarded tenure after a review of the last process. I am thrilled about this. The professor, who recently published a beautifully-written and well-received book, had already been unanimously supported by her/his department the first time around, so my disappointment at hearing about the tenure denial over the summer was due in part to a dread about the gatekeeping employed against people of color in academia. I feel that this new decision is in the vanguard against the artificial inflation of expectations for professors of color who are up for tenure.

P.S. I have added my del.icio.us links to the sidebar.

Back From The Workshop

2007-12-04T23:35:00.000-08:00

I am recovering from the dissertation workshop over the weekend (Thursday night to Sunday afternoon). It was basically as long as a conference, and it felt like half a semester's worth of seminars packed into a few days. I got back to my house Sunday night and I still feel fried after a couple of days back home.

About the workshop, it was for graduate students engaged in the "tangled strands" of race, gender, and/or sexuality. The other students' projects were really exciting, and I am happy to report that I did not feel like the "poor relation" as I expected. In fact, there was no poor relation to be found there. The professor-interlocutors told us at the end that we were the most cohesive and generous group of students that they had had in the six (or so) years of the program. Not only did our projects speak to one another's, but we, the students, also engaged with each other extensively during the discussion of each project. I was awed by how a couple of people seemed to be "on" most of the time, and how brilliant they were. It is a skill I have yet to hone, this ability to remain on one's toes during intellectual discussions despite, for instance, the need to jump from one discipline to another and back again or even simple weariness from a long day. My contributions were more hit-or-miss, but I do hope that at least a few of my comments were helpful or at least directed the conversation in productive ways.

Interestingly, I found that at certain points comedic relief was more than welcome. After all, we were stuck together for 72 hours all told, and it seemed necessary to be able to laugh together as well. But I have had seminars where little jokes have consistently fallen flat, partly because of the professor's repressive personality and partly because of the students' arrogance. It did not consciously register while I was preparing for the workshop that I was afraid of this type of atmosphere, but thankfully this atmosphere did not materialize. Most of us went to that table nervous and uncertain about ourselves, but none of us tried to overcompensate by being arrogant and disdainful of others' attempts at levity. Moreover, we were not being graded (not officially, anyway!) for our projects or our performance as budding scholars, so there was even less reason to act out. It was nice.

Other highlights: I did not get flak about my pregnancy, although I may have seemed preoccupied with it because so many people kept asking me questions about it! Part of my worries about the workshop had to do with sharing a room with other people while dealing with the embarrassments of pregnancy, but that also turned out fine, and I liked my roommates a lot. We went to a guest ranch in Sonoma that specializes in retreats, so the area was quite beautiful. And it was in some ways a relief to be so out of touch with the rest of the world for a while. While I could have used more lighting in the cabin, thicker walls, a full-size tub in the bathroom, etc., the food, served buffet-style, was excellent. I mean, excellent. I felt spoiled and slightly guilty at every meal, as if I were spending $50 at a restaurant for myself. And the few sips of red wine that I had were also lovely (we were in wine country, so no surprise there). It was also neat to discover that many in the group were cat-lovers; given my homesickness, it was nice to be able to talk about our cats, and a couple of the professors even shared photos of their feline companions (that was kind of hilarious, actually, as one of the photos was of a couple of sibling cats on their 5th birthdays, wearing party hats -- ahahahaha! I'm sure they just loved being made to wear those things). Finally, I was glad to get to meet other students in my department (English) doing work on race, gender, and sexuality who are also very kind people; I had never met them before because they are in earlier cohorts and because I basically stayed away from my department after my first year and so preempted any opportunities to run into them randomly.

I came away from the workshop with much food for thought about my project. Mine was one of the few in the early stages, so most of the others went to the event hoping for practical suggestions on how to organize their chapters as well as for some inspiration to write the next chapter or section (and to finish). I have only a prospectus and part of one chapter, and I definitely expect my proposed chapters to change during the researching and writing, so I was mostly interested in concepts/larger implications of the work. The workshop was helpful for both sets of students, though I believe some of us got more out of it than others, which makes sense. At this point in my dissertation, I got as much as I could have expected to get out of the workshop -- essentially a more nuanced way of thinking about the "big picture" I want to offer with my dissertation as well as tips on some of the issues that I will need to flesh out in my introduction -- and I hope that I am now more prepared for my prospectus meeting in a week and a half.

Done

2007-11-28T01:27:00.000-08:00

Just checking in.

I am done with all of my immediate deadlines, including fellowship applications and preparation for this workshop. I am told the letters of support have been sent as well. Although a bit sleep-deprived, I feel so much better now than I did this time 24 hours ago. Who knew that writing a short, six-page mock-introduction to an anthology could be so difficult? Mind you, I did not even do it well; I waited too long for "inspiration" to strike and then had to pull an all-nighter to churn something, anything, out. But at least it is finished. Now I just have to worry about tying up loose ends at home, getting ready for travel, and psyching myself up for three days of non-stop academic engagement. Unfortunately, none of those appeal to me very much right now. Must sleep.

Applications

2007-11-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

I submitted the first fellowship application yesterday, a full day before the deadline. I felt elated about being done but spent the rest of day putzing around, doing crossword puzzles, sudoku, and a little Scrabble online. I wanted to do more reading for the dissertation but found that I simply did not feel like it. I get tired easily these days, more intellectually than physically or mentally (hence the lack of posts on what I have been reading). Moreover, today is Friday, which means I get another free pass. I am psyching myself up for the next few days, during which I must deal with more deadlines before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Speaking of fellowships and applications, my policy is to stop thinking about them after they have been sent out into the world. Que sera, sera, and all that. This has worked for me very well in the past as I did not waste hours worrying about what I could no longer change and what I could not control, i.e., what selection committees were looking for. At the same time, I have not applied for anything in a long time, and I am feeling a certain anxiety that I think has to do as much with future job prospects as with the more immediate question of how to support myself in graduate school next year. Will my dissertation have any resonance or relevance in the academe? While I stand by my project and my ideas, will they be enough to land me a job (let alone a "good" one) in the career I have chosen for myself? Will I even end up with a decent dissertation? These are the thoughts that run through my mind while producing these applications. Talking up one's project sometimes feels like taking a leap of faith.

Time To Breathe

2007-11-06T01:07:00.001-08:00

The first draft of fellowship applications was sent out last week to my reference letter-writers. The first application is due in a week and a half, which gives me a little time to breathe before I need to polish. I do need to get back to reading for the dissertation, however.

In tenure matters, I heard some good and bad news the past couple of days regarding two Filipino Americanist professors at other universities. Neither case has been finalized, but I am feeling a little deflated at the moment. I respect both academics and hope for the best. In the one case, denial of tenure has been overturned and the tenure process reopened, which I think is promising given that the professor now has a book contract, but it is unfortunate that tenure was not granted by the arbitrator. In the other case, the denial of tenure was not unexpected -- not because of the quality of the professor's work, but because of what I have heard of the institutional environment there (which was the reason I did not apply to this professor's university for my PhD). This follows upon another tenure denial earlier this year regarding another Filipino Americanist whose work I like; I have not heard what is happening with that. Sigh.

Workshop

2007-10-26T23:09:00.000-07:00

I found out earlier today that I have been accepted into a three-day dissertation workshop with 10 other dissertating students and five professors who will be our professional interlocutors. I am excited and scared at the same time. It will be three days of intense academic engagement, much more intense than, say, conferences, where I can sit back and melt into the audience; or even seminars where participation is expected, because these last at most three or four hours. We are, moreover, expected to read and synthesize all of the 11 proposals into 5-6 pages, written as if we were editing an anthology. This extra work is a bit of a surprise, but I am looking forward to the challenge and to reading all of the other proposals. Having a deadline like this is galvanizing. Also, I know at least one of the other students and have met two others (all English majors -- there are strangely a lot of us for such a small workshop), and I am looking forward to meeting the professors I haven't met already. It is my hope that getting feedback from these professors and students in a workshop setting will make up somewhat for my distance from the university and thus my inability to take or sit in on classes and lectures.

But I do have a couple of misgivings with no upsides. For one, I am afraid of embarrassing myself if I have to room with another person, basically a stranger, for a whole weekend because, well, to be frank, pregnancy makes it more difficult for me to control my body. Also, for the sake of full disclosure, I will admit that I used to work for one of the research centers sponsoring the workshop and that I was also a reader for the director of this particular research center, who is one of the five faculty interlocutors. Since I use this blog as a platform to be honest about my insecurities, among other things, I will say that I have the suspicion that I was chosen partly for the above reasons; if this is indeed true and my proposal is not on a par with the others', then I am afraid of -- how shall I put it? -- getting slammed during the workshop. I have the backing of the professors on my committee who say that my proposal is good to go, and I believe them; at the same time, this suspicion niggles at me, especially since the professors on my committee and the professors at the workshop may have totally different expectations. And I do not know how to prepare for the possibility of being the "poor relation" in the group, except maybe to avoid it by declining the invitation.

That said, I am almost positive that I will go. My misgivings and suspicions may be nothing more than products of my usual tendency to downplay or denigrate myself, a tendency for which people have (kindly) scolded me before. This invitation is an honor and a great opportunity to hone my project; and, I suppose, if the workshoppers find it severely lacking, then at least it will be a good thing to know that.

CFP: Asian Pacific American Studies Graduate Conference

2007-10-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

Call for Paper or Panel Proposals

Creating a Community of Scholarship on Asian Pacific American Issues: A Graduate Student Conference

University of California, Berkeley

April 4-5, 2008

A National Conference

Current scholarship on Asian Pacific American issues is expanding beyond traditional disciplinary and regional boundaries, signaling a movement toward establishing new paradigms of understanding aspects of APA experiences. This conference highlights emerging scholarship of graduate students examining issues pertaining to the Asian Pacific American community as they partake in shaping the future of the field. What new projects or research questions are emerging? What are new communities of study, modes of analysis, pedagogies, and possibilities for collaboration and comparative research? We hope that interested graduate students will use this conference to become familiar with each other's research themes and methodologies and come to challenge traditional notions of research in Asian Pacific American scholarship.

We believe this conference will be an excellent way to build a community of scholars because graduate students working in the field of Asian Pacific American studies are most often scattered in different departments at every university. This conference will provide a space for interdisciplinary and intercollegiate exchanges through the presentation and discussion of cutting-edge projects in the field. Following University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 2006 and University of Illinois Chicago in 2007, this conference marks the third year of organizing efforts specifically in support of graduate student-centered scholarship and research in Asian Pacific American studies.

We welcome paper or panel proposals that advance the knowledge of Asian Pacific American experiences by graduate students at any stage of their research and in any discipline. The proposal should include an assessment of where this scholarship fits within the current literature of the chosen field and how the work contributes to and/or expands the knowledge of APA experiences.

Submission Deadline: November 15, 2007

Email: communitiesofscholars@gmail.com

Paper submissions should include (1) contact information (including university, year in school, address, telephone number, fax number, and e-mail address); (2) a 300-word abstract summarizing the paper's argument and assessing its relation to the field; and (3) a one or two page curriculum vitae and a brief biography for each presenter.

Panel proposals should include (1) a cover sheet with contact information for the chair and each panelist (including university, year in school, address, telephone number, fax number, and e-mail address); (2) a one-page rationale explaining the relevance of the panel to the theme of the conference; (3) a 300-word abstract for each proposed paper, summarizing the paper's argument and relation to the field; and (4) a one or two page curriculum vitae and a brief biography for each presenter.

Submission guidelines:
* Please submit individual paper proposals or full panel proposals via e-mail attachment by November 15, 2007 to communitiesofscholars@gmail.com with the subject line, "Conference Submission." Please also direct any questions to that email address.
* Attachments should be in Word, pdf, or rtf formats.
* Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all required information in one attached document).

Notification of acceptance or rejection of all submissions will be by made by December 15, 2007.

Limited support for graduate student travel to attend the conference may be available.

For more information, contact communitiesofscholars@gmail.com

Sponsored by the Critical Filipino/a Studies Working Group, the Asian Cultural Studies Working Group, the Graduate Asian Pacific Islander Collective, and the Asian Pacific American Studies Working Group at the University of California, Berkeley; and University of California, Davis Asian American Studies Graduate Student Group.
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Libe Stuff

2007-10-16T22:08:00.000-07:00

It is all work. I am working.

I went to the library today and borrowed books on Southeast Asia and gender, on the Ilongots, of José Rizal's letters. I will return for more on Friday. I am feeling pretty happy about these texts. I already went through them once today (to make sure they were worth lugging home -- I can no longer carry heavy weights these days), but I am looking forward to deeper study soon.

The downside today: I had to pay $5 for a recalled book that was overdue a mere ONE day. I did not even find out that it had been recalled until the day that it was due. Usually I am notified by e-mail. Damn.

Guilt

2007-10-16T00:27:00.000-07:00

Now that committee issues seem to be resolved, I have re-set my mind towards working on fellowship applications. I have applied for fellowships before, but for some reason I have been feeling slightly guilty about it since it isn't, strictly, working on the dissertation itself. But I should be applying for money to finish my dissertation if I need it, right? Come to think of it, I feel guilty about not being able to read my dissertation material faster. I feel guilty about asking my advisers to do stuff for me (like write letters and give me feedback even though that's part of the relationship). I feel guilty if I have to do errands for home. I feel guilty about relaxing in front of the TV or a non-dissertation book. I even feel guilty about being pregnant and having so many doctor's appointments, even though I know I shouldn't; a friend thoughtfully sent me a couple of Chronicle of Higher Education articles about pregnancy during graduate school, and these reaffirmed my right not to be judged and not to have my commitment to my career questioned because I am having a child. So why all this guilt?

Thinking about all this rationally, I know I need to climb out of this mire (it's probably some displaced former-Catholic angst, anyway). But maybe I'm just in a particular mood. Or maybe it has something to do with the culture of academe. Or the feeling that, as a woman of color, I need to keep pushing myself to work harder and faster than everyone else because, otherwise, they'll believe that I got to where I am because of affirmative action; or, as an Asian American, that I got here because I was assumed to be smarter than I really am.... Yeah, I really need to stop that. These thoughts do me no good.

In other news, I sent off an application to get into a two-day dissertation workshop. It would be great if I got accepted, but it won't be a huge disappointment if I don't. Also, I am entering into a long-distance dissertation critiquing/writing partnership with someone I met over the blogs. That sounds a little funny, but I respect her writing and her work, and I am looking forward to this. Which reminds me: I should get off this blog and do some critiquing-partner work. (Ah, this is the good kind of guilt, the kind that sparks a tinder under my butt to get going.)

Another Committee Update

2007-10-08T23:25:00.000-07:00

I thought that all was hunky-dory with my committee. I was pretty happy with the way it turned out, with four faculty members who get along and who all do interesting, relevant work that I respect and admire. But I guess sometimes I misinterpret situations, which is frustrating in any sphere of one's life, personal or professional. I have always been an independent worker, and living so far away from my university, I guess I assumed that certain things were OK when they weren't, not really. I hope it is all resolved now, but I am worried about my ability to correctly judge situations especially in academic settings where so many things are perceived in unexpected ways. Although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this; I'm talking about people who think for a living, after all.

Committee Update

2007-10-03T02:31:00.000-07:00

I just got an e-mail from the professor with whom I have been trying to curry favor, and I believe my committee will soon be complete. At least I hope so. In any case, the e-mail provided some relief from the feeling of dis-ease I have had since completing and sending off the second draft of the proposal last Friday. I.e., the draft was good, even enjoyable to read. I had been muttering to myself for the past few days about how my heart felt like throwing up; it was/is not really nausea at all, of course. I expect that most graduate students, and perhaps most academics in general, understand this feeling. In any case, I shall know for certain about committee issues in the next couple of days.

P.S. I forgot to add in my last post that the professors of color who have left/are leaving my department were all tenured faculty. Which makes it all even worse. I do not know what future incoming graduate students who desire to be mentored by faculty of color will do now. The faculty of color who remain already have immense workloads and face demands from a large number of current graduate students, including me.

{ADD} Yes, indeed, as I found out later today, I now have all my committee members. I was also able to set the prospectus meeting for mid-December (on the ONLY day that all four of them could make it. Egads -- I can't believe how difficult it was to find just that one day). Now, on to fellowship applications.

2nd Prospectus Draft

2007-09-28T23:58:00.000-07:00

I finished the second draft of my prospectus earlier today and sent it off to the co-chairs and to one professor I am "wooing" to be on my committee. I am not quite sure why I don't feel more relieved about getting it done. No, wait, actually, I do know why. It was quite a substantial revision, but my diction was terrible and I feel as if I am still waiting to find better sources to use as examples. Being pregnant, I have been fuzzy-headed for months now; I can still think relatively clearly when I am focusing, as was the case with the revision, but I haven't been able to get back into a groove where the words that I need just come to me. My memory is also shot. For example, twice in the last two weeks I have come up short on my share of the dinner bill while out with friends. For some reason, both times, I assumed that I had a $20 bill instead of a $10 bill. The difference in my share was only a couple of dollars each time, and thank goodness for easygoing friends, but I would never have done that before (I've always been finicky about exact change).

By the way, speaking of dis-ease, I was just thinking how messed up things might be in my department. This is already common knowledge, or at least it is relatively easy to find out, but in the last two years, at least four professors of color have left or are in the process of leaving for other universities. Given how many professors of color were in my department to begin with, that is quite an exodus, and in such a short time. It's pretty disheartening. I may have mentioned it here before, but it's part of the reason why I am still trying to get one last member for my dissertation committee at this late date. I guess I took classes with the wrong professors, or rather, I didn't start relationships with enough professors before moving away. Sigh.

Where Has The Summer Gone?

2007-09-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

Good question. It is not that nothing happened here; it is that too many things did, things that did not necessarily have to do with my dissertation work but that definitely cut into my academic work time.

I will summarize: since June 29, I found out that I was pregnant (I am now about 4 months along); I had to deal with nausea and fatigue and various health problems associated with a suppressed immune system induced by pregnancy; we got a new kitten; we got ringworm (a fungal skin infection, not a real worm) from said kitten; and I taught a six-week course called "Asian American Women" at UCLA. I have spent the last week at my university trying to move along my dissertation committee and prospectus, which I should have been doing a month ago when classes began here but could not because I was still teaching classes at home.

(Yes, I am writing this while away from home. Incidentally, in the week that I have been away, the weather flipped from summer to fall, so that basically I missed the changing of the seasons in my home. That gives me a pang of regret.)

In any case, my trip here has been relatively successful academic-wise. I acquired one new committee member whose name holds some sway in Asian American circles, and I hope to acquire another committee member who was incredibly nice and knowledgeable during our first meeting last Tuesday. I also let my co-chairs know that I am still alive and working, despite being pregnant, about which they have both been supportive. They are both actually quite good over e-mail, but I hoped that seeing me in the flesh would impress upon them the urgency of my case. I.e., I would like to get all the bureaucratic, logistical things done before I give birth next semester.

Back

2007-06-29T23:22:00.000-07:00

I'm back from almost a full month away from this blog. Don't make the mistake of thinking that my absence was due to my working hard on the dissertation or class prep. I have a friend who says that June for her is usually a throwaway month in terms of productivity. I think it must be the same for me, partly because it's summertime. Instead of working I spent my June taking care of homestuff and having reunions with family and friends, including several family members and friends whom I see only once every year or year-and-a-half. One of those friends was the first guest ever to spend the night in our house, and it's good to know that our hosting skills are survivable.

Anyway, after re-reading my previous post, I realized that I spoke too soon. Not too long after mildly bemoaning the fact that I don't get much feedback on my work (see #8), I received very generous comments from a friend; I had shared my prospectus draft with her because she had let me read her brilliant, tried-and-true prospectus when I was looking for good examples of prospectuses from a literature department. Her feedback was wholly unexpected as she had been dealing with heavy deadlines to complete the first full draft of her own dissertation (which she succeeded in doing).

I also wanted to note here that I've been appreciating looking at the old stuff in the libes when I've had the occasional chance to do so. In contemporary Filipino American circles, both academic and non, there is a sense, a strong impression, of Filipino invisibility in the U.S., and given this, I experience a thrill at the evidence of a preoccupation with Filipinos in the American popular cultural imaginary, even if such evidence was produced in the first half of the 20th century. But because I can't get inexpensive copies of my own of these texts (photocopying hundreds of pages is not cost-effective), I have to really work to be selective of the things that I type out when I take my notes. And sometimes I'm not too successful at selectivity because who knows what I will eventually need during the writing phase? One of the unexpected results of this is that I sprained my right index finger last month (it's fine now, after a hiatus from intensive typing). I don't want carpal tunnel syndrome from the dissertation. Ay de mí.

Writing Meme

2007-05-31T04:33:00.000-07:00

To follow up on the previous post, I am doing the academic writing meme from Professor Zero's blog. I currently find myself in need of self-reflection; this is one way in which that need manifests itself.

1. Do you outline?
Yes, but only very generally at the very beginning and then in more detail as I am actually writing. {Add} Actually, the dissertation prospectus I am working on is basically a detailed outline of my project, much more detailed than my outlines for individual essays. But there is still, perforce, much vagueness in the chapter descriptions since I don't know for sure what I am/will be arguing by the end of the writing. All I truly know is that I have certain questions, and in the process of writing I will be unpacking the assumptions behind and implications of those questions.

2. Do you write straight through a book, or do you sometimes tackle the chapters out of order?
I have never written a book but have produced a master's thesis and am currently dissertating: I wrote the master's thesis out of order, or, rather, I wrote the chapters without any real idea of their order until the very end; as for the dissertation plan, I am already planning to write chapters out of order.

3. Do you know how a book is going to end when you start it?
No. Not at all. I'm thinking about the dissertation as well as the thesis, but this goes for essays, as well. I have a general idea of the direction I'm going, but I don't really know if it will make sense at the end of the road, so I try to be very flexible. It's a bit scary, but I think it's the most appropriate method of writing for me since writing, for me, is a bit like a journey. The uncertainty is the price I pay for theoretical work, I suppose.

4. Where do you write?
I write mostly at my desk, once I've been able to clear it off. (I do most of my reading at the kitchen table, on couches, or on my bed.) I can't write in cafes or other public places. I need almost perfect quiet and a way to read aloud what I've written without fear of people thinking I'm crazy!

5. What do you do when you get writer's block?
I putz around, read my "fun" guilty-pleasure books, spend more time with family, or try to reflect on my writing process by completing memes like this. ;-) But when I'm under the gun, I re-read my sources and my notes and/or cast about for new sources to help jump-start my writing process which, after all, is about synthesis and inspired thinking. And when I'm under pressure, I do force myself to brainstorm (i.e., write in almost random fashion) for a few minutes at a time, or even produce idea bubble trees; sometimes that provides the catalyst.

6. What size increments do you write in (either in terms of wordcount, or as a percentage of the book as a whole)?
I am talking about essays here, since I have never completed a book: because of deadlines that run only a few weeks at most, I tend to spend the bulk of the time before the deadline doing my research and reading, and then spend about two weeks writing while still finishing up the research. This means that I write when I get inspired, and sometimes I can draft 15 to 20 pages in a night (though I must emphasize DRAFT) but I am thankful for 5 good pages a night. This isn't what I plan to do for the dissertation, however; I expect to draft at least 5-10 good, relatively revised, footnoted pages a week once I start on a chapter, which I hope won't run more than 40-50 pages each.

7. How many different drafts did you write for your last project?
My last real project was an essay I submitted for an anthology which I subsequently asked to withdraw since I couldn't (had no time, no energy to) do the revisions the editor and I wanted, and I didn't want to have something so poorly written/conceived floating out there. The project before that was an article published in a journal, based on a couple of chapters from my thesis; like a lot of people I revise constantly, so I don't know the number of real drafts I produce during a project. But I remember that I had to draft a whole new essay based on those two chapters against my will. The editor expressed interest in the original abstract, which was based on one chapter, but encouraged me to do a comparative essay because of the relative glut of critical works on the one book on which I based the original chapter. I revised this new essay as much as I could by myself then submitted it for publication; the readers' notes came back with the suggestion to accept with revision, and I revised as per the readers' really excellent comments, after which the paper was basically done (though I have to say I didn't think the new essay was as interesting or well-conceived as the original). A more recent project, though not an article or book, was my prospectus draft, which I didn't show to anyone else before submitting to my co-chairs, who I felt should be my first readers -- or at least I thought I should try them out as first readers to see how it worked out. It turned out quite nicely, actually, but of course I didn't turn in a totally sloppy draft; since I revise as I go along, I was able to give them my first completed draft, which took between 10-12 days, I can't really remember.

8. Do you let anyone read your book while you're working on it, or do you wait until you've completed a draft before letting someone else see it?
No, I am actually very shy when it comes to sharing my work, despite my willingness to read and comment copiously on other people's work. I just haven't found a good critiquing partner, since most people seem too busy to read my stuff and sometimes the feedback I get is too shallow because the reader isn't in my field(s). My best feedback has come from professors whose classes I've taken and usually for whom I wrote the papers. I only beg colleagues to read my stuff when I am desperate (like when I am under a deadline and need a new eye). For instance, I went through the process of applying to graduate school basically without other people reading my stuff; I was sorry the one time I let my boss (who was in my field) read my personal statement because his comments were so superficial.

9. What do you do to celebrate when you finish a draft?
When I finished my prospectus, I read my fun books, watched TV and movies, and ate out with the dh. The fact that my birthday had just past added to the festive feeling.

10. One project at a time, or multiple projects at once?
One prioritized project, with others waiting in the wings. I have several ideas I am still considering but for which I have done absolutely no research.

11. Do your books grow or shrink in revision?
My essays usually grow, actually. Huh. Never thought about it before.

12. Do you have any writing or critique partners?
Alas, no. I would prefer a critique partner over a writing partner: I have tried writing/reading with other people and found myself unable to do much work. As I wrote in #4 above, I need to be alone, in a very quiet place, when I write. Critiquing, on the other hand, I can do either face-to-face or over e-mail.

13. Do you prefer drafting or revising?
It depends on the project; it depends on which process (drafting or revising) produces the most euphoria that comes from inspired writing and thinking.

14. What are your favorite writing books?
I don't think I have any, or I can't think of any at the moment.

15. Morning writer, evening writer, or doesn't matter?
Evening/night, for sure. If I am writing in the morning, it usually means that I have been up all night writing.

16. How do you handle reviews?
I haven't had to deal with them yet, although anonymous reader reviews during the peer-review process can be really daunting. I still haven't completely read through the last one.

17. How do you handle rejection?
With as much avoidance as possible. Publishing is not yet crucial to my career, so I try to treat rejection with as much sangfroid as possible; dwelling on it will only depress and stall me.

18. Do you prefer to work on writing by yourself? Or do you prefer collaborating?
I have never collaborated on an essay outside of classes, and I must say I did not enjoy these collaborations unless we were appointed specific tasks that we could call our own.

19. Able to work on airplanes?
No, I prefer to read non-academic texts on planes because they keep me awake better.

20. Have you ever abandoned a book or an article that you had finished? When? Why?
I abandoned the article I mentioned in #7. I simply could not continue it, in part because it wasn't for certain that the anthology it was part of would be published nor that my contribution to the anthology would even make the publisher's cut if the project got picked up. But the most important reason was that it wasn't related to my dissertation, which I had to start prioritizing at this point. And I was getting tired of doing presentations and writing on stuff that wasn't going to be in the dissertation.

21. What writing advice do you really believe in?
Writing is a craft, and one needs to write constantly to improve one's writing. But I have to say, my few moments of brilliant writing and thinking have come from inspiration, and thus I have learned to trust my gut instinct as much as possible when I write.

On Organization

2007-05-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

Professor Zero, who seems to know very well what she's doing, shares her approach to academic writing in a meme. I personally like the index cards idea (#20):

I keep next to me a pile of index cards, on which I jot down a) the ideas and phrases this that come to me, do not fit in with my writing that day, but do fit elsewhere in the project, and b) the ideas and phrases that come to me and do not fit in with this project, but may be useful for something else.

I put the cards with the first group of ideas and phrases in the set of file folders I have set up, of notes towards other portions of this project.

I put the second group of cards in a box.* When I get stuck, I draw a card out of the box at random, for inspiration. When the project is finished, I use this box as seed material for other projects.

* This "box" turns out to be another blog.

As the artifacts of my own research start to pile up, I am realizing more and more that I need a better mode of organization. In fact, today, I considered going to the local big-box bookstore to buy a new journal/notebook since I have earmarked my current working notebook strictly for notes on books and articles. I have been writing the random ideas that invariably come up in older notebooks and on post-its that may get lost in the burgeoning shuffle of my workspace. I think that starting a separate file folder of "IDEAS" and using index cards would be much more organizationally smart than jotting down random ideas in different places. Or, for the notes that may have direct bearing on the dissertation later on, I can designate a whole new notebook for that purpose. Yes, I think I will. A new blog may be helpful as well -- perhaps I will follow Professor Kiita (of Chasing the Red Balloon)'s example of starting a tumbleblog -- though I must think more on this plan as I already have several blogs and webpages to maintain.

More Professor Blogs

2007-05-20T23:23:00.000-07:00

As I have started to move into the final years of my PhD program, I have become more and more fascinated by the professorial trials, travails, and triumphs that possibly await me. I've been enjoying these particular blogs, by queer* professors of color**:

chasing the red balloon
Professor Zero
Slaves of Academe

Excellent writing all around, too.

* By "queer" I don't refer to the person's sexual orientation but to her sexual and gender politics.

** Even "of color" is a provisional term, especially in the case of Professor Zero, who has had some very interesting experiences about the curious fluidity of racial boundaries.

A Manly Man

2007-05-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

{cross-posted at Getaway}

During bibliographic research, I came across the citation for a 10-minute silent film from 1911 that I now really want to see. I am just waiting for more free time to do the research and possibly to get a hold of it. The film, directed by Thomas Ince, stars Mary Pickford as -- wait for it -- a native Filipina maiden! Whoa! The film was originally titled A Manly Man but was reissued under a new title, His Gratitude, in 1914. (Why, I haven't found out, though one could probably make an educated guess from the descriptions below.)

Here is the description of the film from the WorldCat bibliographic database (which incidentally listed the film by its 1914 reissue title His Gratitude):

An American civil engineer sent to the Philippines on behalf of the U.S. government, comes down with the fever, and is nursed back to health by Lola, a beautiful Filipino girl, whom he later marries, and with whom he has children. When his former sweetheart in America comes to find him, he realizes he cannot abandon Lola. Filmed on location in Cuba.

Here is the more helpful description from someone who actually saw the film, user "wmorrow59" at IMDB:

I happened to see this one-reel drama in a public program of shorts and features featuring Mary Pickford, all made between 1911 and 1917. The first thing that struck me about A MANLY MAN, which was one of the earliest movies shown, is how primitive it looked alongside the other films, even ones made just a couple of years later. Mary's performance is comparatively restrained, but some of the other actors offer embarrassing displays of the sort of eye-popping, arm-waving histrionics that give silent film acting a bad name. Once we adjust to their over-emphatic style, however, it becomes clear as the plot unfolds that the story is an expression of the blatant racism prevalent when the film was produced.

A MANLY MAN (reissued under the title "His Gratitude" in 1914) tells the tale of a young American fellow with an attractive blonde fiancée and a seemingly bright future. This man and his brother are sent to Luzon in a remote corner of the Philippines on a surveying expedition related to an unspecified engineering project. But the setting might have just as well have been Honduras, a Pueblo village, or the Ivory Coast of Africa; the filmmakers made no attempt to recreate anything resembling the real Luzon or to depict anything resembling genuine indigenous culture. All that was required for the purposes of their story was a primitive community populated with simple, brown-skinned "natives" in exotic garb. And it is here that our surveyor hero encounters an attractive peasant girl played by none other than Our Mary, who wears a shiny black wig and "brownface" makeup on her face and arms. The man immediately begins flirting and Mary (whose character name wasn't specified in the print I saw) is of course flattered and responds happily. In reality, I believe, a girl in her situation would find the pale-skinned man repulsive-looking and consider his overtures an insult, but even as early as 1911 the native girls of film-makers' fantasies are delighted by the attentions of white interlopers, as they would be in so many later Hollywood movies.

In any case, the surveyor's intentions towards his native sweetie are probably not all that honorable, at least initially, for after all he has a respectable blonde fiancée waiting for him back in the States, but the point becomes moot for he contracts a terrible fever and almost dies. Mary nurses him through the illness and saves his life. And then, calling upon the services of a missionary stationed nearby who is the only other European in the vicinity (the surveyor's brother having returned to America), our hero nobly marries the girl. A title card informs us that he does so fully aware that he is "sacrificing his future." During the ceremony he looks miserable, like a man doing something shameful, but we are given to understand that this expression of his gratitude is courageous in a self-sacrificing way, seeing as how the guy can never take her back home to, you know, meet anyone respectable. And sure enough, the surveyor stops dressing like a regular American and 'goes native' instead, and settles in with the locals. His brother and fiancée, meanwhile, have received an erroneous report that their loved one is dead, but when they learn otherwise and come back to retrieve him they take one look at his "wife" and shrink away in horror and disgust. But our hero stands by his woman and stays behind, thus demonstrating what a loyal and self-sacrificing person he is. He's a manly man indeed.

That's the attitude expressed in this little drama, and it may come as something of a shock to modern day viewers who aren't familiar with the popular culture of this period. This sort of casually assumed White American Supremacy was the order of the day, and general audiences of the time would have shared the film-makers' assumption that, once our hero has married this native woman, he can never return to proper society however admirable his motives: he's sullied himself. And no doubt many viewers sympathized with the reaction of the surveyor's brother and ex-fiancée who in the final scene regard him as an Untouchable.

A MANLY MAN is interesting for socio-historical reasons but it's not exactly a pleasant thing to watch. Mary Pickford fans may be interested to find her in such an unusual role, and it's a relief to note that she does not overplay or embarrass herself in this uncomfortable and unlikely setting. Getting back to the Pickford festival I attended, it was even more of a relief to leave this film behind and turn to Mary's more characteristic works.

How refreshingly reverse-Miss Saigon! Anyone else think it's cool that it's the white man who is "self-sacrificing" here rather than the native woman? Though of course one ought to take issue with the notion of "sacrifice" to be found in too many narratives of interracial relations.

When I came across the citation on WorldCat, I became a bit discouraged because it looked as if no library owned it. But doing just a little extra digging on the internet (i.e., Googling), I found out that UCLA's Film and Television Archive actually has one of the rare copies, though it's sadly not an "access print." A scholar doing work on Mary Pickford film holdings at the Library of Congress got to do 10 weeks of research documenting the Mary Pickford films that UCLA had acquired as of 1997, and here is what she writes in her online project report:

A tinted nitrate print of a rare short called "A Manly Man" (1911) is my most important discovery at UCLA. The film was made during the actress's brief career at the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP) in 1911. Only eleven of thirty-two Pickford's titles from this period are known to survive. UCLA's unique IMP short was reissued by Universal and under the title"His Gratitude." I identified the original release title, "A Manly Man," by comparing the story told through the intertitles with the synopses of Pickford IMP titles found in trade magazines. In this short film, she portrays a woman who cares for (and eventually marries) a white man who becomes ill while working in the Philipines.

The actress played a number of non-caucausian roles (mostly Native Americans or Mexicans) during her years with the Biograph Company. During her feature career Pickford chose to play characters from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, including British, European (French, Italian, Irish, Dutch) and Asian (Japanese and Indian). At IMP, she played Spanish or Cuban characters in three productions. But Lola, her character in a "A Manly Man," is a Filipino woman of Spanish descent, as evidenced by her Spanish name. In addition, her Filipino lover is named Petro, and the Motion Picture World review of the movie refers to her as "a latin type." Unlike her other Cuban/Spanish roles ("Artful Kate" and "In Old Madrid," both at IMP), Lola is from an Eastern culture and is extremely poor. The Motion Picture World reviewer refers to her as a "semi-savage," and from a hand inspection of the nitrate print, Pickford's portrayal resembles her work in Native American roles at Biograph. It is also reminiscent of what we know of her character in the lost feature "Hearts Adrift" (1914) and her Inuit role in "Little Pal" (1915).

Like many Pickford characters, Lola is a heroine, rescuing her white husband from a knife attack by wrestling the weapon from her old lover. And when the caucausian fiancee of Lola's husband arrives in the Philipines the man does not abandon Lola, but happily stays with her. "A Manly Man" is an important film. It is one of the few examples of Pickford's work at IMP and continues her presence in racially diverse parts after leaving Biograph. And because it is similar to a number of her roles at the Biograph Company and in features, study of "A Manly Man" is vital to anyone researching Pickford's career. Unfortunately, UCLA does not have an access print (as of early 2005), so further research is impossible at this time.

I am not sure if Schmidt is correct in saying that Lola is of Spanish descent (and I am not sure if Schmidt meant that Lola is Spanish from both sides or a mestiza) since many Filipinos had Spanish names after about four hundred years of Spanish colonization. I also don't know what the writer/director was thinking, but as the IMDB commenter noted, Pickford wore "brownface" makeup, suggesting that Lola is a "native."

This may not be vital to my dissertation, but my curiosity, in any case, has been whetted.

Prospectus Draft Update 2

2007-05-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I presumed that I would get feedback from Co-chair #2 (my departmental adviser) in mid-summer at the earliest, so I was surprised to get her comments late on Sunday via e-mail. I am glad of this format because I don't get the visual impact/trauma of a mass of red-lined pages (though she usually uses pencil). Actually, however, I didn't get the feared and expected "devastating" questions that would undermine the rationale of the project (hmm, although perhaps I am not taking the feedback seriously enough?). Instead, her feedback really engaged with my ideas, the questions and comments taking their cue from the text of the prospectus.

Basically, she said that my project was promising (that word again, sweet), but that she'd like to see me push my ideas further. She also pointed out a tiny (tiny to me, but maybe not so tiny to her) logical misstep in one of my paragraphs which made my OCD self glad that not too many others have read this version of the prospectus. Both of these comments, the general and the specific, make me feel like she has my back. In particular, I have come to like hearing comments from advisers about pushing myself further; my first adviser in undergrad was like this with all of her advisees and with herself as well, talking about constantly "broadening our conceptual horizons" and improving our writing. Given my own teaching experience, I understand intimately the time, patience, and care it takes to read and comment on student papers; so when comments from my advisers seem to go line-by-line, I feel supported, and when they're smart comments, I feel the net below me is even stronger. For instance, I especially appreciated Co-chair #2's comments that called into question the originality of certain elements of my proposed interventions. Because, you know, I haven't read everything related to the project yet, and it's good to know that I won't be heedlessly duplicating a project that's already been done sufficiently well.

Also, she seemed quite unfazed by 1) the format of the document itself, which suggests that the format I finally settled on --

thesis paragraph
Rationale, Theoretical Problems, Questions
Critical Contexts
Proposed Structure and Chapters

-- works for her; and 2) the cultural-studies inter/multidisciplinarity of the project, which is good because this is coming from a tenured professor in my department, English.

Update

2007-05-11T02:42:00.000-07:00

I went to Northern California a couple of weeks ago to visit my university at least once this term. I was able to talk to one of my co-chairs about the prospectus draft as well as meet with a couple of other Philippine/Filipino American studies professors to talk about my dissertation ideas. Despite the lack of comments from the other co-chair (who will probably get back to me sometime in the summer with what a friend calls "devastating questions"), I came away from those conversations feeling inspired and on the right track. The overarching feedback that I got from the first co-chair was that the project right now is a little too large, but promising. That was nice to hear (I knew I was being ambitious, but better that than having too small a concept, imo). I left the Bay Area thinking that I would jump immediately into drafting the third or fourth chapter, since, in order to pare down the project, I need to learn from practice what my limits are and will be. I figured I could edit the prospectus after that.

In the week since I've been back, however, I haven't done much to those ends. I went to the library again to pick up another shelf of books on interlibrary loan, so that's something; I have found some truly amazing stuff that would most likely fit in the first, most historical chapter. But I am feeling listless again, after having expended so much energy to produce that first draft and then travel to the Bay Area to 'talk shop' with more people in one week than I met with or even saw during the previous six months. I've been ensconced here in my house, where everything moves much more slowly, at the pace I set for myself. (Is it any wonder that I've gained almost ten pounds in a little over a year, since leaving the Bay Area to live down here?) Ah well. Perhaps the absence of comments from Co-chair #2 is preying on my mind more than I thought it was.

For those interested, here is the current breakdown of the chapters. The breakdown might change dramatically in the next couple of months, though, and the chapter titles will almost certainly be edited (they've already undergone transformation several times as my units of argument and primary texts have changed):

Introduction

Part I: Colonial States of Dependency

Ch. 1: Historical Tropes of the Child: Civilization, Education, and Comparative Racialization

Ch. 2: The Racial Contexts of Filipino Representation in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century America

Part II: The (Sexualized) Child Talks Back

Ch. 3: Mourning a Lost Innocence: Sexual Precocity and Sex Trafficking

Ch. 4: Queer Boys and the Homoerotics of Empire

Conclusion (or Ch. 5): Toward a Critical Theory of the Child

. . .

You know, it's funny: looking at this breakdown makes the project seem more real to me, as if my having decided on a particular structure makes it more doable somehow. I am actually excited about the dissertation, despite my current listlessness.

The issue I have started to worry about is whether or not the roving (roaming?) interdisciplinarity of the project will be acceptable to my English department. Co-chair #1, at the beginning of our conversation, asked me in what department(s) I envisioned myself as faculty. "And so it begins" was my first thought; I had been counseled for years not to think about the job market until it was time, but apparently writing the prospectus is that time. Anyway, I responded to her query: Asian American Studies/Ethnic Studies, maybe American Studies, and English -- in that order -- and the English department must be very open to cultural studies folks. (I should note that I have never taught a literature course, not even as a teaching assistant, so any future teaching experiences in the field might shift English from last place. Or it might not. Then again, some of my favorite cultural studies scholars are in English departments, like Laura Kang, Rachel Lee, and Anne McClintock. And some of the exciting, up-and-coming Philippine/Filipino American studies folks are English or Comparative Lit professors as well.)

Co-chair #1 said that she felt the project would also appeal to Women's Studies, which makes a good deal of sense since much of the critical theory I will be harnessing for the project borrows a lot from feminist scholarship. But I told her that I don't see myself as having enough background in Women's Studies; despite having been a reader/grader for two Women's Studies courses in my graduate career so far, I don't have a truly firm grasp of the traditional (First and Second Wave) feminist theory that is required for Women's Studies majors. My project would perhaps find some fit in later Waves which are being defined right now by work on how gender and sexuality intersect with technology, race, disability, and, of course, discourses of the child, among other things. On the other hand, Women's Studies departments are also interdisciplinary -- a trait that is apparently very attractive to me -- and I wouldn't need to be a traditional feminist to be a faculty member in one such department, I'd think; I can just bulk up on my traditional feminist theory like I did with my orals fields. Moreover, the lecture course I am teaching this summer for the alma mater is titled "Asian American Women." That should count for something. Hmm...

EVENT April 27: Imperial Masculinities With Allan Isaac And Victor Bascara

2007-04-26T06:23:00.001-07:00

{Repost}

Imperial Reconstitutions of Masculinity:
A Critical Dialogue on Filipina/o American Studies

Allan Punzalan Isaac
"American Tropics: Boy Scouts in the Philippines (1911) or, Confederates Rebels in the Tropics"

and

Victor Bascara
"Repatriate This: Dilemmas of Defying the Repatriation Act"

Friday, April 27
1:30-3:00p
Barbara Christian Room (Barrows 554)

Allan Punzalan Isaac is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University. He teaches 20th century American Literature specializing in Asian American Literature and Culture. His teaching and research interests include ethnic American literature and culture, US Empire Studies, Law and Literature, and Critical Race Studies. He was Visiting Fulbright Professor at DeLaSalle University in Manila, Philippines in 2003-2004. His book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (2006) is part of the Critical American Studies Series with University of Minnesota Press. His next book project is entitled Asian Racialization and Double Negation.

Victor Bascara is associate professor of Asian American Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. At Madison he was faculty leader of a multi-year Mellon Humanities Workshop called "Empire in Transition," a community of scholars that brought together researchers examining the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialisms, primarily in the Philippines but also in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Asia/Pacific region. He is the author of Model Minority Imperialism, published in 2006 by the University of Minnesota Press. In 2006-7, while on leave from Madison, he has been a visiting faculty member in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA.

Organized by:
Critical Filipina/o Studies Working Group

With support from:
Asian American Studies, Beatrice Bain Research Group, Center for Race and Gender, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, Gender and Women’s Studies Department, English Department, Ethnic Studies Department, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities

For more info, please contact: Ethel Regis at ethelregis@berkeley.edu

Prospectus Draft...Complete

2007-04-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

Woo-hoo!

It is a whopping 6904 words and 25 pages (not including the works cited section). I cheated a bit and included a lot of quotation especially in the chapter descriptions, but since I was only going to write 12-15 pages initially, an extra ten pages of mostly blockquotes can't hurt, right? At least, not on a first draft. One of those extra pages even has an image thrown in as a bonus! Besides, my co-chairs don't necessarily know what the heck I'm talking about and they might be interested in so-and-so's actual words. I had lots of good quotes.

Anyway, I've got to shower and catch some sleep. I'm all woozy. Hm, I'm kind of hungry, too. Maybe I'll eat first.

Prospectus Update 3

2007-04-23T06:56:00.001-07:00

Not done with the first draft yet, despite my goal of last Friday. My critical faculties were barely functioning last week for various reasons, not the least of which was the shooting tragedy at Virginia Tech. Last week, I also got a teaching job for the summer at my alma mater, for a staple course called "Asian American Women." It will be my first lecture course, and I have almost four months to polish up the syllabus and produce the course reader and other materials. In between thinking about the news and the dissertation, I was (am) excited about it. Then it was my birthday over the weekend, so the prospectus was delayed even further.

But I promised one of my dissertation co-chairs that I would turn in my first draft tomorrow. I have about five more pages to go, which means it will be five more pages than I expected to submit this first time. And although what's written down needs a lot of editing, at the very least I now have the project divided into relatively interesting units/chapters that should provoke some discussion and debate with the co-chairs/advisers.

I cannot wait until this is over.

EVENT April 27: Imperial Masculinities With Allan Isaac And Victor Bascara

2007-04-20T11:47:00.000-07:00

Imperial Reconstitutions of Masculinity:
A Critical Dialogue on Filipina/o American Studies

Allan Punzalan Isaac
"American Tropics: Boy Scouts in the Philippines (1911) or, Confederates Rebels in the Tropics"

and

Victor Bascara
"Repatriate This: Dilemmas of Defying the Repatriation Act"

Friday, April 27
1:30-3:00p
Barbara Christian Room (Barrows 554)

Allan Punzalan Isaac is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University. He teaches 20th century American Literature specializing in Asian American Literature and Culture. His teaching and research interests include ethnic American literature and culture, US Empire Studies, Law and Literature, and Critical Race Studies. He was Visiting Fulbright Professor at DeLaSalle University in Manila, Philippines in 2003-2004. His book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (2006) is part of the Critical American Studies Series with University of Minnesota Press. His next book project is entitled Asian Racialization and Double Negation.

Victor Bascara is associate professor of Asian American Studies and English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. At Madison he was faculty leader of a multi-year Mellon Humanities Workshop called "Empire in Transition," a community of scholars that brought together researchers examining the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialisms, primarily in the Philippines but also in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Asia/Pacific region. He is the author of Model Minority Imperialism, published in 2006 by the University of Minnesota Press. In 2006-7, while on leave from Madison, he has been a visiting faculty member in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA.

Organized by:
Critical Filipina/o Studies Working Group

With support from:
Asian American Studies, Beatrice Bain Research Group, Center for Race and Gender, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, Gender and Women’s Studies Department, English Department, Ethnic Studies Department, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities

For more info, please contact: Ethel Regis at ethelregis@berkeley.edu

Prospectus Update 2

2007-04-14T05:04:00.000-07:00

The first draft is a third of the way done. I want to finish this by the end of next week. I am a little surprised by how much of my research on pedophilia in the news has made its way into the draft so far. Glad to know I haven't been wasting my time.

Prospectus Update

2007-04-12T00:02:00.000-07:00

Not that I've been able to actually write much since my "breakthrough" three weeks ago, but I've been doing archival research since then, looking for pertinent books on various databases as well as reviewing texts and notes to make sure of my path. Even better, this past Tuesday, I was able to run the idea for the historical component by one of my former advisers, himself a Philippine historian, whose opinions and feedback I still seek as much as I did when he was officially on my committee. And not only did he understand what I was trying to do, and the different tensions that the project is faced with, but he liked it, more than I expected he would. I could tell that he was struck by the idea of doing a cultural history of the child in the (neo)colonial Philippines, which no one has ever thought to do. But that is actually a HUGE project to save for another day, several years down the road, and what I'm doing for my dissertation now is a little more modest than that. It's a start, though, and my notes are already piling up. He himself saw the project of the child as a study of the process of minoritization, which hadn't been my perspective at all. As I've mentioned here before, I already have in mind a kind of telos, since what led me to the project was my desire to understand the tropes of sexually agentive and sexually victimized children in contemporary Filipino American literature. But his take on the project was helpful because I was able to step back and see a different way in which the project could contribute to cultural and political knowledge.

So I guess all I have to do is keep going. And finish a first draft. The former adviser urged me to hurry up and finish my Ph.D., since, as he pointed out in his smart-alecky way, I was getting old. (I should say here that the kind of dry, teasing camaraderie that he and I enjoy is akin to what I share with my siblings.) He was right; I've known him now for over eight years, and I thought the same thing before stepping into his office. God I'm getting old.

CFP: (Un)Making Queer Worlds

2007-03-31T20:27:00.000-07:00

(Un)Making Queer Worlds: Transformations in Asia-Pacific Queer Cultures
Roundtable Workshop for Postgraduate* and Early Career Researchers

June 22-23, 2007
Graduate Centre, University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia

Call for Papers

Proposal deadline: April 27 2007

Since 2000, intellectual interest in Asia-Pacific queer cultures has surged. This surge responds partly to the new visibility of non-normative sexual and gendered subjectivities in the Asia-Pacific and its multiple diasporas. Along with the new thinking around Asian/Pacific sexualities and genders come various contestations: in particular, the fine distinction between understanding A/P sexual cultures as part of an emerging ‘queer globality’, and the tendency to subsume them under a developmental model that places the ‘West’ as the vanguard of, or bad example for, the ‘rest’. Collaborations between queer studies, post-colonial studies, and post-structuralist critiques have shed light on the contemporaneity and historicity of each local queer culture in the Asia-Pacific. But although such effort to carefully describe geographical or local queer particularities is invaluable, locality does not subsist in an insular manner, but is always relational. ‘Glocal’ queer theory marries the specificity of locality with the context of globality. Additionally, the economic processes of globalisation have been accompanied by--indeed, in some cases actively promoted--mass migration, warm body exports and brain drains, particularly from the Asia-Pacific regions, that have temporarily and permanently dislocated individuals and families from their homelands. In such instances the ability to locate ‘local sexualities’ is brought to the fore just as it proposes new difficulties for the analysis of sexuality along national, regional lines, particularly in Australia. And if sexualities and genders are ‘glocal’, then so is capital. Understanding the nexus between glocal capital and sexual subjectivities through their localised and diasporic trajectories is, at bottom, about the political stakes of queer survival in a neoliberal world.

(Un)Making Queer Worlds tackles these important questions directly by bringing together scholars for a two-day roundtable workshop at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The workshop is particularly interested in proposals from postgraduates and Early Career Researchers (ECRs).

Confirmed speakers: Associate Professor Peter A. Jackson will deliver a keynote address on Friday June 22. Dr Jackson is the Deputy Convenor and Senior Fellow, Division of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is the author and editor of numerous publications on genders and sexualities in Thailand and elsewhere, including Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand (Haworth Press, New York, 1999) and Multicultural Queer: Australian Narratives (Haworth Press, New York, 1999).
______________________________________________

Submission of abstracts

What we’re looking for:

We seek participants investigating how various Asia-Pacific constituents are (un)making trajectories of queer world and globality. We encourage papers that employ interdisciplinary approaches. We hope that (Un)making Queer Worlds will contribute to the ongoing elucidation of constantly evolving Asia-Pacific queer cultures and their global articulations.

Workshop format:

Featured participants will be asked to circulate their papers a week in advance of the workshop. Participants will be allocated a one-hour session to present a paper (20-30 minutes) and engage in discussion. As this is a postgraduate and ECR event, registration is free of charge.

Please submit abstracts of 450-500 words to unmaking-worlds@unimelb.edu.au by April 27 2007. Keep in mind that papers presented will be circulated before the workshop. Circulated papers should be no more than 6000 words in length.

Important dates:

Proposals due: 27 April 2007
Speakers confirmed: Monday May 7
Deadline for papers to be submitted: Monday June 4
Papers circulated: Monday June 11
Workshop: Fri/Sat June 22-23

For more info, to register or to submit a paper proposal, email

unmaking-worlds@unimelb.edu.au

(Un)Making Queer Worlds is a project jointly initiated by the Cultural Studies Program, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, and the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. We acknowledge the support of the Cultural Research Network of the ARC and the School of Graduate Studies, University of Melbourne.

* Just in case you didn't know, "postgraduate" translates into American English as graduate student.

Breakthrough

2007-03-22T14:14:00.000-07:00

...I hope.

I'm happy to report that the prospectus is chugging along now. After whining last week I actually cracked open several books in the TBR pile and started reading. It helped that I went back to the space where I've become programmed to do intense amounts of reading -- no, not the intuitive choice of my office desk, which always seems to need cleaning off, but the kitchen table. I read whole books in one sitting at this table with its uncomfortable uncushioned chairs while studying for oral exams last year. We lived in a much smaller place then, our apartment, and when we moved to the house I decided that the kitchen table would be used strictly as a kitchen table since I would have space in the office. But, yeah, apparently that resolution is out the window. And I'm not going to question the feng shui of this arrangement.

So, at this kitchen table last night, I had a breakthrough that pretty dramatically expanded the project, but in a way that felt inevitable once the figurative lightbulb went on over my head. I am grateful for that feeling. It's like I'm going with gut instinct, and I like trusting my gut instinct when it decides to show up. Sort of like a muse, or unerring "female intuition." I was reading Claudia Castañeda's Figurations, and it reminded me of what I'd found useful in the wonderful texts that I read for my third-field exam last year and that I had forgotten about when it came time to square myself towards the prospectus; they were unfortunate casualties of my post-orals mind-numbing euphoria. Then I went back through all of my school-related notebooks for my notes on the dissertation and on meetings with professors and colleagues during which we'd talked about my project; and what did I find? Well, the notes were scattered all over the place and only partial, but apparently I have been seriously working on the dissertation ideas much longer than I remembered, and I shouldn't go over the same ground twice. Also, now, in this expanded version of the project, I will be able to do the historical/archival work that I was itching to do but that I couldn't figure out how to incorporate. So: yay!

The books I'm talking about? Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2002); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (1995); and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995) and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002). (I know I've mentioned before at least the last three texts in relation to the prospectus/dissertation, but I meant that I forgot to go back to what I'd written in my notes and in the marginalia of the books.)

(Smelly Books, if you're reading this, thanks for the Castañeda citation!)

Standstill, Or, Loser

2007-03-17T03:45:00.000-07:00

Encouraged to share by the Foreign Student's recent post on feeling like a loser, I'll disclose here that I myself have been wallowing in a bit of self-pity lately.

I am suffering a serious bout of writer's block (scholar's block?) regarding my prospectus, which makes me utterly undesirous of reading anything to do with the dissertation. I believe the mental block is due, in part and so ironically, to the fact that this project is incredibly important to me; I am afraid that I will produce a proposal that makes the project seem only a dim shadow of this large, potentially very significant thing that is in my head; I am loath to sit down and make that dim shadow real by writing it.

I borrowed a shelf of books from the library a couple of weeks ago, and, add that to what's already on the TBR list, I now have a rather intimidating pile of books in the office that need to be opened and at least skimmed. If I were in a different mood I would actually be excited by the prospect of going through them. But I don't even want to skim. A part of me thinks that if I leave the books there and maybe watch it grow as I compulsively borrow from the library or buy the books I believe I need, the project will seem important forever.

Right?

*sigh* I know, I know, I need to snap out of it. If this were a paper for a class, I doubt I would be dragging my feet like this. Perhaps I need a solid deadline and the threat of a grade?? Ugh. How can I be thinking of having a career in academia? I'm such a loser! (And not in a coolly cynical and ironic way like that Beck song.) Have sympathy for me!

A Comfort Woman's Story

2007-03-07T21:36:00.000-08:00

{cross-posted at The Last Vehicle and Getaway}

In the news, Japanese Prime Minister Abe's recent denial of the Japanese military's role in sexually enslaving young women (some as young as 10) during World War II has infuriated the survivors and their supporters. Such a statement, despite the findings of historians and the witness statements of survivors from different parts of East and Southeast Asia who came out with their stories independently of one another, is callous and delusional.

Here's the problem: While Abe doesn't deny that women were "recruited" to serve the military sexually, he claims that there was no "'coercion, like the authorities breaking into houses and kidnapping' women. He said that private dealers had coerced the women, adding that the House resolution [for Japan to admit its role in coercing these women] was 'not based on objective facts' and he would not apologize even if it were passed." But just yesterday I read a Filipina's narration of her experiences as a "comfort woman" for Japanese soldiers in the Philippines, and I can say that Abe must be doing some logical contortions of his own in how he defines "objective facts," or ignoring some significant eyewitness testimonies on the subject. In other words, he's simply full of shit.

According to Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military, published in 1999, Maria Rosa Henson was not coerced into sexual slavery by "private dealers" or any such thing during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines in World War II; she was directly kidnapped by Japanese checkpoint sentries who noticed her because she was young and pretty. She was only 15 at the time. But that wasn't the first time she'd been raped. The year before she was forced into sexual slavery, at 14 years old, she had been raped by Japanese soldiers when they came upon her in the road, not once but at two different times. She notes this repeated violation and the loss of her virginity with some agony, especially since the loss of her virginity -- which no one knew about but her mother and her two uncles, who witnessed but could do nothing about the rape on pain of death -- made her believe that she couldn't accept any of her various suitors. Being herself a product of rape, she seems to have believed for a while that being raped was her fate. She also notes that she hadn't even started menstruating by the time she was kidnapped and taken into captivity by Japanese soldiers, and she was confused when she had a miscarriage during her captivity because she had never had a period.

She was abused so badly before her rescue by Filipino rebels that she was in a coma for months, and when she woke up she could barely walk or talk, some probable damage to her brain having occurred when a Japanese officer slammed her head against a wall. For the rest of her life she had speech problems, would drool uncontrollably at times, and could no longer write because of a palsy in her hand. Such lasting physical problems are not uncommon in the stories told by other comfort women. And the shame of it made Henson keep the story of her captivity a secret for 50 years, until 1992 when there was a radio announcement in the Philippines calling for former comfort women to tell their stories. Only her mother knew what she had been through; she wouldn't even tell her husband or children, and her children only found out when she decided to respond to the radio announcement. After working for acknowledgement and reparations from the Japanese government for five years, she died on August 18, 1997, a few months shy of her 70th birthday. Many more of these comfort women have since died.

It is so, so sad. And for someone like Abe to refuse the Japanese military and government's accountability in the hell that Henson and 100,000 other women like her were put through, to continue to play a devious waiting game for the claimants to die, just pours more salt on the wound. I was horrified when reading Henson's narrative, and I can't imagine the pain that the remaining survivors are going through at this denial of their claims and this latest setback in their campaign for reparations. It is enraging.

The Sexualization Of Girls (U.S.)

2007-02-24T23:17:00.000-08:00

{cross-posted at The Last Vehicle and Getaway}

Via BBC News (2/20/07), I found out about this new report released by the American Psychological Association on the "harmful" sexualization of young girls in/through the media. The report is basically a summary of "the best psychological theory, research, and clinical experience addressing the sexualization of girls via media and other cultural messages, including the prevalence of these messages and their impact on girls, and include attention to the role and impact of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status" (1) (though there isn't much at all on socioeconomic differences).

It made me wonder how to conduct my research on pedophilia and child characters in Filipino American novels while negotiating the morass of moral judgment that seems to accompany any thought on children's sexuality. The way I imagine it, I am not doing any sort of sociological study of children's sexual activities or desires. My project doesn't study media that target children, either, the way that the APA report does. Rather, I am studying the way children's sexuality is centrally framed in several Filipino American novels and what such child characters are doing in works largely, if not wholly, directed towards mature audiences with more knowledge of world history (I would think).

Yet, you know, given that I use the word pedophilia in my work, I can also imagine getting questions about how my project relates to stuff like the APA report and the Catholic pedophile priest scandals while, say, presenting my work at a conference or even, if I'm lucky, at a job talk somewhere. So below are some excerpts from the report (the full Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls [pdf], not the summary) that interested me.

But before that, here are my early criticisms of the report (the bad stuff): it grossly generalizes the psychology, cognitive faculties and development, and sexual and physical development of girls and women, even while it declines to estimate age ranges for "girlhood" or "childhood"; given that it uses data on media representation of boys and men merely for comparison, the neglect of boys' sexuality and agency not only reinforces the long-standing policing of female sexuality but may also obfuscate any detrimental effects of the mediatization of children's sexuality on boys; it makes problematic assumptions or doesn't define certain terms very well ("healthy sexuality," "age-appropriate"); it skirts the notion of consent; it makes unsubstantiated projections about the possible effects of media sexualization of young females, such as an increase in child prostitution and pedophilia. On this latter, while I am willing to see possible links between these issues, the lack of studies on such links makes me leery of such statements in official reports by a large institutional body that clearly has some intellectual/medical authority and international impact. (Foucault would probably hate this report.) As for the positive criticisms: it brings together a huge array of studies on the subject and makes me want to see something similar for boys despite the problems with this report on girls (sorry for being on a two-gendered system here); it hopefully opens up discussion on the subject of children's sexuality, desires, and agency.

Excerpts from the full report:

Definition of "sexualization":

There are several components to sexualization, and these set it apart from healthy sexuality. Healthy sexuality is an important component of both physical and mental health, fosters intimacy, bonding, and shared pleasure, and involves mutual respect between consenting partners (Satcher, 2001; Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States [SIECUS], 2004). In contrast, sexualization occurs when
a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics;
a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy;
a person is sexually objectified--that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; and/or
sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person.
All four conditions need not be present; any one is an indication of sexualization. Much of the evidence that we evaluate in this report is specific to the third condition--sexual objectification.The fourth condition (the inappropriate imposition of sexuality) is especially relevant to children. Anyone (girls, boys, men, women) can be sexualized. But when children are imbued with adult sexuality, it is often imposed upon them rather than chosen by them. Self-motivated sexual exploration, on the other hand, is not sexualization by our definition, nor is age-appropriate exposure to information about sexuality.

We view the sexualization of girls as occurring along a continuum, with sexualized evaluation (e.g., looking at someone in a sexual way) at the less extreme end, and sexual exploitation, such as trafficking or abuse, at the more extreme end.We offer several examples of the sexualization of girls to clarify our definition:
Imagine a 5-year-old girl walking through a mall wearing a short T-shirt that says “Flirt.”
Consider the instructions given in magazines to preadolescent girls on how to look sexy and get a boyfriend by losing 10 pounds and straightening their hair.
Envision a soccer team of adolescent girls whose sex appeal is emphasized by their coach or a local journalist to attract fans.
Think of print advertisements that portray women as little girls, with pigtails and ruffles, in adult sexual poses.
These examples illustrate different aspects of our definition of sexualization. In the first example, we are concerned with the imbuing of adult sexuality upon a child. In the second, we are reminded that a specific and virtually unattainable physical appearance constitutes sexiness for women and girls in our society. In the third, we see that sexuality is valued over other more relevant characteristics, such as the girls’ athletic abilities. In addition, the girls are being sexually objectified. In the fourth example, the adult models are sexually objectified and the distinction between adults and children is blurred, thus sexualizing girlhood.

Sexualization may be especially problematic when it happens to youth. Developing a sense of oneself as a sexual being is an important task of adolescence (Adelson, 1980; Arnett, 2000; W. A. Collins & Sroufe, 1999), but sexualization may make this task more difficult. Indeed, Tolman (2002) argued that in the current environment, teen girls are encouraged to look sexy, yet they know little about what it means to be sexual, to have sexual desires, and to make rational and responsible decisions about pleasure and risk within intimate relationships that acknowledge their own desires.Younger girls imbued with adult sexuality may seem sexually appealing, and this may suggest their sexual availability and status as appropriate sexual objects. Concomitantly, women are often considered sexy only when they appear young, thus blurring the line between who is and is not sexually mature (Cook & Kaiser, 2004). (2-3)

Unfortunately, they don't specify the age ranges that constitute "childhood," "girls," "youth," etc. Instead, they have this caveat in a footnote: "Age ranges for childhood, preadolescence, and adolescence vary across the research summarized in this report.Where relevant, age ranges reported reflect definitions from individual studies. Tween, though not a scientific term, is used by advertisers and marketers, and the report discusses the tween population in that context" (4fn2).

On sexual precocity, abuse effects, and agency:

In addition to making sexualizing choices regarding clothing, hair, and makeup, girls and teens sometimes “act out” in sexually precocious ways. Given the highly sexualized cultural milieu in which most girls are immersed, these behaviors may simply be the result of modeling. It is important to note, however, that sexualized behavior in children (e.g., compulsive sex play, persistent and sometimes public self-stimulation, inappropriate sexual overtures to others) is one of the common sequelae of childhood sexual abuse (Friedrich et al., 2001; Kendall-Tackett,Williams, & Finkelhor, 1993; Letourneau, Schoenwald, & Sheidow, 2004). In this case, girls are sexualizing themselves through their behavior (i.e., they are presenting themselves as sexual objects for others to use and/or they are engaging in age-inappropriate sexual behavior). It would be inaccurate, though, to state that girls are freely choosing these behaviors. Rather, the mental functions and cognitive processes necessary for healthy sexual decision-making have likely been damaged through the experience of sexual abuse victimization (Zurbriggen & Freyd, 2004), leading to precocious or inappropriate sexual behavior.

These data support the contention that girls sometimes participate in and contribute to their own sexualization. However, the surrounding cultural milieu (and, for some girls, their experiences of childhood sexual abuse victimization) have encouraged and facilitated this process. Thus, girls’ choices are not fully independent of cultural or past interpersonal influences. In addition, it is important to remember that girls are fully capable of agency and resistance in this area. (18-19)

You'll notice that this doesn't say very much about "agency" and in fact seems to withhold agency from girls in some ways. At the same time, the comparison with the sexualized behavior of child sexual abuse survivors (which is well documented) might have some merit.

Their very, very brief note on consent:

Another area of slippage concerns consent. Children are not legally able to give consent to sexual activity with an adult.When girls are dressed to resemble adult women, however, adults may project adult motives as well as an adult level of responsibility and agency on girls. Images of precocious sexuality in girls may serve to normalize abusive practices such as child abuse, child prostitution, and the sexual trafficking of children. (35)

Conjecture on possible effect on pedophilia:

One particularly pernicious effect of the constant exposure to sexualized images of girls is that individuals and society may be “trained” to perceive and label sexualized girls as “seductive.” Studies have shown that adult men often misperceive friendliness in adult women as sexual interest (Abbey, 1982, 1987). Images of young girls who are made to look like adult women may evoke similar responses. (35)

One note on class difference:

Expensive beauty products and treatments are unlikely to be affordable for low-income girls. Self-sexualization may serve, then, to widen the gulf many lower-income girls undoubtedly feel between themselves and those with the financial means to look “sexy” and thus be socially popular. (24)

Racial/cultural difference:

Perhaps the most insidious consequence of self-objectification is that it fragments consciousness. Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities. One study demonstrated this fragmenting quite vividly (Fredrickson et al., 1998). While alone in a dressing room, college students were asked to try on and evaluate either a swimsuit or a sweater. While they waited for 10 minutes wearing the garment, they completed a math test. The results revealed that young women in swimsuits performed significantly worse on the math problems than did those wearing sweaters. No differences were found for young men. In other words, thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity. Recent research has shown that this impairment occurs among African American, Latina, and Asian American young women (Hebl, King, & Lin, 2004) and extends beyond mathematics to other cognitive domains including logical reasoning and spatial skills (Gapinski, Brownell, & LaFrance, 2003).

The implications are stunning and suggest that sexualization may contribute to girls’ dropping out of higher level mathematics in high school.[...] (22)

Resistance to racism helps:

Several research studies have explored how girls of color are particularly effective in resisting mainstream notions of female sexuality, femininity, and beauty. Central to much of this research are feminist theories developed by and for women of color.[...]

Black women often reject Eurocentric ideals of beauty as culturally irrelevant and often feel better about their bodies than do White women (Duke, 2000; Milkie, 1999; Nichter, 2000). A study of nine 7th-grade Latinas revealed that although teachers perceived Puerto Rican girls in sexualized ways (e.g., as “hypersexual”) and as uninterested in education, the girls often resisted these labels and stereotypes (Rolón-Dow, 2004). For example, the girls resisted the notion that liking boys or dressing sexy was incompatible with being a good student.They did not tolerate sexual harassment, reporting it to school officials or resorting to punching boys themselves when it occurred. Similarly, Faulkner (2003) interviewed 30 Latina teens and women (18–36 years of age) and found that many rejected cultural imperatives for motherhood and virginity, were angry at sexism, the lack of sexuality information, and being labeled, and insisted on their right to be both religious and sexually active. (41)

More Blogs, With An Announcement

2007-02-15T22:56:00.000-08:00

I already introduced Notes from the Last Vehicle to the blogroll last week, but I'd like to announce that I am now a contributor to this collective blog "for postgrads originally from Manila who are now globally (and academically) dispersed across various disciplining disciplines." I am originally from Manila, but I don't think they meant a 1.5-generation Filipino American who grew up in Los Angeles by that description. Yet Bobby kindly invited me to join them, perhaps in the belief that I could add some "pop" to the rather intimidatingly brilliant theoretical, thought-provoking posts over there. I've met my share of scarily smart grad students, and these guys are probably more of the same except they're really nice and collegial (check out Bobby and Unpack/Maita's comments to my last post), AND some of them are Harry Potter and Heroes fanboys and fangirls! (Watch me while I lower the level of discourse, though I hope they won't mind.)

Anyway, a few more blog links to note:

Foreign Student
beyond the sunrise
brain droppings

Research Update: Some Lists

2007-02-09T23:15:00.000-08:00

I've been spending my workdays rather desultorily gathering research materials for the prospectus/dissertation. I've borrowed a lot of books on child sexual abuse, youth prostitution, and sex tourism and been disturbed by what I've read so far. Many of these texts are made up of case studies that are framed by religious or human rights advocacy rhetoric. Others are psychological studies of survivors and perpetrators, backed by statistical analyses.

I've already decided that, while this type of information is important and advocacy against child abuse is an important part of my life, this isn't where my dissertation is going. I have a different set of questions and a different path to take. My primary texts consist of Filipino and Filipino American novels that feature sexually victimized children as agentive figures. One of the questions I ask is why use children in these novels? As someone who has studied Philippine and Filipino American history for many years, I instinctively turn to the colonial past, but gut instinct tells me that an embattled globalized present is significant, too. In this project, I am trying to parse how pedophilia and incest are used in these texts as analytics or critical lenses. I know it has something to do with "the family romance" and the particular problematics of colonial desire, but I am still a little lost about how precisely to frame and order the dissertation, what my units of argument will be. To that end, I've acquired several books of critical theory and philosophy (with many more waiting to be plucked from a wish list) that address some of the questions I'm interested in, hopefully in ways that will be helpful to my project. Here are some of them:

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America
James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting
Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead
Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

And here are other texts that already deeply inform my understanding of the project:

Linda Alcoff, "Dangerous Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Pedophilia"
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
Gillian Harkins, “Legal Fantasies: Regulating the Real in U.S. Incest Narratives" (diss.)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest
Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things; and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
Neferti X. Tadiar, Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order
Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage

We'll see if I can put together a decent prospectus from all of this.

New Blog Links

2007-02-08T17:00:00.000-08:00

Because I've been a spaz lately (with a weird energy that I didn't want to inject into the ether of the blogs) I've been remiss about announcing several blogs that I stealthily linked to anyway. Here they are, blogs with smart and sharp cultural analysis, and blogs that follow more inward journeys:

love it or lait?
Bahala Na | Que Sera Sera | Come What May
Notes from the Last Vehicle
animae tarot

Prospectus Advice

2007-01-23T23:54:00.000-08:00

Here is some of the helpful advice I've received on composing a prospectus, paraphrased/quoted from several grad student friends at different schools:

Every committee is different, so work with your committee, or at least your dissertation chair, closely.

It's OK to be "unconventional," i.e., no chapter breakdowns, no bibliography -- as long as the committee is fine with it.

Things will change during the actual crafting of the dissertation, so you don't need to worry about being totally committed to what you write in the prospectus.

It is meant to be a description of your intentions, so you need just enough theoretical work to "describe, in detail, the general problems you're addressing, the disciplinary fields in which these problems arise, the theoretical work you'll be doing to 'fix' these problems, and a few, in somewhat simplified but direct and precise language, of the propositions and theories you'll be advancing."

"Try to strike a fine balance between the general and the specific, the descriptive and the theoretically dense."

Don't use a lot of jargon if you can help it.

When writing the prospectus, remember that you will be producing a document that you should be able to revise and pare down when applying for important things like dissertation fellowships and postdoctoral fellowships.

It's Official

2007-01-10T15:47:00.001-08:00

After a couple of nail-bitingly gnarly goose chases, including the strange disappearance of hand-delivered documents from the appropriate administrative office, I found out just now that...drumroll please...I am officially advanced to candidacy in my PhD program. Now I can get some business cards.

*whoops* and *snorts*

(I'm really glad about it, though. Really.)

New Year

2007-01-10T02:20:00.000-08:00

Hello again, and happy new year!

It's been very quiet around here, I think understandably. I missed most of November and all of December 2006; after passing my orals, I very firmly put my academic reading on the shelf and concentrated on settling into my new home (I don't think I've announced here that I bought a house in mid-October last year) as well as on having a great holiday season. Well, I did the second and am well on my way to accomplishing the first.

So. Now I suppose the time has come to return to the academic grind (and I hope it will feel better than it sounds). My New Year's resolutions here are 1) to produce a prospectus by mid-year and 2) subsequently to start drafting dissertation chapters so that I'll know how much more research will need to be done. I've seen a couple of prospectuses on projects in a totally different field than my own, but I can already tell that the prospectus is going to entail a lot more reading and synthesizing in the months ahead. One thing that worries me now is that I'll need to make a serious decision about which critical theories I'm going to follow in my analyses and why. I don't know how people can produce something like this in a semester, but I suppose I must simply make a choice and stick to it during the defense, and then when the actual dissertation writing starts I can change my mind about the particulars of the project.

However, before I begin the prospectus, for the remainder of this week I will be editing down and re-tooling a 40-page paper for submission. Nothing will probably come from it, but it's good practice (and when the reader's notes are truly helpful, it's totally worth it) and since I'll only be spending a few days on editing, it won't be a huge loss to get a rejection. It's not even relevant to the dissertation, which is where I really need to start focusing all my intellectual energies. I am not one of those academic dynamos who can, in one year, produce several articles for publication, teach a couple of classes, give brilliant talks at conferences, and publish short stories or poetry, all the while completing their dissertation or book. Unfortunately. (Can you tell I'm feeling inadequate at the moment? Most of the exuberance of passing my oral exams seems to have faded.)

Well, onward.

I Passed!

2006-11-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

My orals, that is. Yesterday. I feel great. I'm super relieved. It was incredibly stressful, but my examiners were all great. Really. And it feels good that I didn't let my advisers down, especially since they'll be working with me for the dissertation.

Which reminds me, now that orals are over, this here blog will now be devoted to my general academic interests but also to my dissertation research. I hope to be blogging more regularly, although I think my mind needs a two-month break for the holiday season.

Cheers!

Study Update: Faulkner

2006-09-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

After many stops and starts over the past week or so, I finally finished William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). I consider this a major coup in my reading progress, as I, like so many others, have a very difficult time reading Faulkner's stream-of-conscious narrative technique, with the constant paranthetical interruptions that can go on for pages and even chapters, and his intermittent way of giving crucial details so that you're stuck in a 300-page mystery that is frustrating because the intermittence is due to how the story is told rather than to a detective following random clues.

But I have to say, I'm actually starting to like Faulkner, after having read four of his novels now (As I Lay Dying, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, and now Absalom, Absalom!). Yes, you read that here first. Don't get me wrong: I still find really disturbing in Absalom the evacuation of black folks' subjectivity (his most sympathetic black characters basically look white and don't quite understand what makes them different -- again, the problem of making the mixed-race/miscegenated figure a sympathetic one in a way that relies on rather than exploding the Manichean binaries between white/black and good/bad) as well as the way women are described and portrayed (often as dried-up spinsters, angry and hateful ghost-like figures, or self-centered nitwits). And my god some of the language is truly offensive ("black gargoyle," "rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity," "band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men") because sometimes you don't know whether to chalk it up to the author or to his racist and misogynistic Southern characters. But I think it's a good idea here to perceive an important distance between the author and her/his characters, not least because there are several layers to the storytelling. There's a sense that these kinds of descriptions are demanded by the way the narrators, say Mr. Compson, understand the mindset and reasoning of the historical figures he's telling his son Quentin about. But of course he and Quentin are also culpable inheritors of this Southern mindset, which is why the novel ends with Quentin trying fiercely to convince himself that he doesn't hate the South when clearly he's torn about that fact that it forms a large part of his cultural inheritance.

Ultimately, the novel critiques the moral contortions and evasions of the people of the South that led to the Civil War. Thomas Sutpen, 'poor white trash' from the mountains, is formatively affected by the class and caste differences between himself and the rich white planter elite, made clear by his feelings of inferiority to the black house slave who the little boy Sutpen understands is a proxy for the white master yet at the same time is still black and therefore such feelings of inferiority seem unnatural to him. This moment leads to his furious desire to escape such a social position by making money quick (thus he goes to Haiti where he marries the daughter of a rich white sugar planter) and subsequently to create the largest and richest slave plantation and dynasty around. The failure of his "design" is caught up not only in his earlier morally-bankrupt decision to repudiate his first wife and son because they are "corrupted" with a small amount of black blood but also in the fate of the South during the Civil War. The crux of the trouble, what precipitates the central drama of murder/fratricide in this novel, is that, for these 19th-century Southerners, miscegenation is worse than even incest. You can't make a greater critique than that, it seems, where incest, used as the yardstick for mortal sin, is considered a lesser evil than officially acknowledging a black person as part of your family. The latter is cause for killing Charles while willful incest is not.

The novel has many other layers, some of which require contextualization with The Sound and the Fury, for instance, how Quentin deals with this story of forestalled brother/sister incest (both brothers, Henry not just Charles). Quentin in Absalom gets stuck on the issue of what constitutes "love" in relation to kin and unkin blood, and you can't really understand the significance of this unless you've read about his relationship with his own sister Caddy in Sound. Anyway, I have more thoughts about the issues I already brought up -- genealogy and race, the nature of love, Southern womanhood, incest, and class -- but I've got to keep reading.

{Add} Recently went through, as part of my secondary readings, Carolyn Porter's Seeing and Being (1981), and I must say that her reading of Michael Rogin's theorization of paternalism in the service of American capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries -- with the attendant infantilization of both Native Americans and Africans -- made Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! SO much clearer to me! Very salutary. It was helpful to read her descriptions of the powerful myth of the Old South as a genteel, aristocratic plantation society even as she attempted to show that Faulkner was actually puncturing such myths by positing that a figure like Sutpen, entrepreneur extraordinaire, was very much a product of a South that was as capitalist as the North. In the process, she claims that Faulkner should be considered an American writer and not so specifically a regional/Southern writer; he was writing about American history and culture using what he knew best -- the South where he grew up (Mississippi) -- and it is totally misguided to believe that slavery did not benefit anyone but those in the southern part of the country, that southern plantation owners as well as yeoman farmers were not capitalist entrepreneurs, or that the freedom of white Americans did not depend on the unfreedom of black folks from the very beginning of the nation.

Exam Update

2006-08-26T23:29:00.000-07:00

I spent the last work week doing school business in the Bay Area, and it was overall very successful. Besides getting to hang out with friends I haven't seen in a long time, I was able to meet up with most of my exam committee members and received really useful advice from all of them. I do believe that the test will be challenging, but the profs seem generally confident that I will come out of it all right. After talking with them, it seems that I'll have few problems with thematic connections; I just need to polish up my language so that I can talk more easily about the (literary) texts with regard to their forms as well as their themes. And that means some heavy reading of secondary criticism. My plan, then, is to finish all my lists in the next two or three weeks while doing some intensive secondary reading, and in the two or so remaining weeks leading up to the exam date, I'll probably literally map out the thematic connections and prepare some close readings of certain texts and write out at least one important point about each and every text on my lists. I'm sure I won't be able to follow these prescriptions fully, but I need to do as much as possible. I am very ready to be done with this hoop.

Autobiography Of A Face

2006-08-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

Adding another fantastic new find to the blogroll, Autobiography of a Face. Well, she found me first, and I'm glad she did -- smart and thought-provoking cultural analysis is the norm over there.

Study Update: Kolodny

2006-08-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

Annette Kolodny's literary study of the metaphor of "land-as-woman" in American history and culture, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975), seems pretty naive in suggesting that we can change the world for the better through changing our language; it's rather strange for an English PhD not to consider euphemism, irony, unintended linguistic effects, etc., but she probably means changing our metaphors so that land is not equated with women and the feminine. Her trajectory, however, is a critique of environmental abuse instead of also being a critique of a society (as embodied culturally in its language and literature) that victimizes women and portrays the feminine in such schizophrenic ways. In fact, her critique of environmental abuse depends on a sympathetic reading of the land that is actually based on a sympathy for victimized women. So, Kolodny shouldn't be aligned with the language-focused French feminists like Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, whose writing is associated with écriture féminine, although Kolodny's work does show how patriarchy works in literary representation.

But what is salutarily suggestive about this study of the American pastoral tradition is the possibility, based on my own extrapolation, that a specifically American cultural desire for literal (rather than figurative) pastoral abundance could have been a cause of American expansionism and American empire. To this end, she looks at the letters and what amounted to ad campaigns of European explorers and settlers in America; Philip Freneau and Hector St. John Crevecoeur in the 18th century; John James Audubon, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Gilmore Simms in the 19th century; and, much more briefly, in the 20th century period, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and the movement to save People's Park in Berkeley, California, from the University of California's intention to build on the land. It seems to me that the gendered "pastoral longings both to return to and to master the beautiful and bountiful femininity of the new continent" (139) might also be found in other 20th-century works like Frank Norris's Octopus (1901), Willa Cather's novels, and even Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926).

I think, however, that her work ultimately forecloses any consideration of American empire. The poverty of her reading of the presence (or absence) of Indians and their communities in the texts under consideration has to do with this. She herself seems to enact the same epistemic violence of metaphorizing Indians merely as the embodiment of nature or as nature's children -- in other words, the land-as-woman metaphor is also joined by the land-as-Indian (especially the Indian woman) metaphor. And conquest is understood in a very narrow fashion in her study, as being only of the land and not of Native peoples. The fact that her endpoint in the present-day is the environmental crisis thus seems a little too circumscribed. What about social crises of gender and, yes, race that her study more than suggests in its insistence that "what we label as historical and economic processes are, at least in part, the external projections of internal patterns--be they called psychology or myth" (136-137)?

On this point, her psychological reading of the texts also suffers from under-theorization. Her argument that the incest taboo is the engine that spurs the tensions or "tragic contradictions" in each writer's case is not all that convincing. Basically, the argument is that the land is depicted as either a nubile virgin or a mother, and the first seems to invite more violence than the second. However, because there is a blurring of the two symbols of virgin and mother, when there is any hint of "rape" of the virgin land (through agricultural and technological development, urbanization, industrialization, etc.), it also shades into incestuous rape of the mother. She furthermore argues that the writers she studies were all, oftentimes unconsciously, trying to get around this problem of incest in their works. The argument is intriguing, but the argumentation seems to fall short because it doesn't problematize cultural assumptions about the incest taboo, the inherent victim-status of women, etc. But the book is interesting.

MDrew's Blog

2006-08-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

With his kind permission, I'm adding MDrew's Blog to the blogroll. He's another stellar former student of mine, soon to embark on his grad student career. Some excellent stuff on the new blog already.

Study Update: Larsen

2006-08-10T23:52:00.000-07:00

Just a few words on Nella Larsen's novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), that I meant to post last week but never got around to. It's not much, just some impressions that would make most sense to those who've read them already:

Passing was really disturbing to me, partly because of the husband-cheating-on-wife plotline. What's brilliant about Larsen is that she purposely sets us up for that feeling of a woman who is trying to do her best for her children, being betrayed by her husband and her best friend, yet in a twisted way being circumscribed by race loyalty. So we have sympathy also for Clare Kendry (the best friend), who has had such an unhappy life and decided to pass, and Brian Redfield (the husband), who has wanted to leave the United States for another country like Brazil because of the virulent racism in the U.S. Yet I was totally with Irene Redfield all the way, mostly because she's being cheated on while she's trying to do what's best for her family given her own deep-seated desire for stability and security -- a motivation that is also a result of American racism against black communities. Plus it's her perspective that is being followed most closely in the novel, which is written in the third-person-limited pov. The novel is intense and psychologically real in a way that moves me. But at the same time, I wondered at the manipulation of my feeling, and if some people wouldn't be more likely to sympathize with Clare and Brian and believe that Irene is too manipulative, disingenuous, selfish, cruel, or whatever in wanting to secure the stability of her family at all costs.

According to the introduction in my edition by Charles R. Larson, which I read after finishing Passing, "The story has frequently been misconstrued as Clare Kendry's tragedy, since she is the character who has crossed over the color line, concealed her racial origins, and whose past is eventually discovered by her bigoted white husband." Indeed, in her foreword in the same edition, Marita Golden doesn't even mention Irene but talks only about Clare along with Helga, the unambiguous heroine of Quicksand. However, Charles Larson goes on to say, "Yet the central story--for all of the realities of Clare's unhappy life--is what happens to her childhood friend, Irene." It was a relief to read that, as I am almost unnaturally sensitive about whose point of view I end up sympathizing with when I read this stuff.

I think Quicksand is also excellent in grappling with similar issues -- not the philosophical and material problems of passing, but with other problems attendant in a racist society, like the often-unfulfilled desires to belong, to have security, and never feeling quite satisfied. I think in some ways, Passing took the story from Anne Grey's side rather than Helga Crane's (the main character in Quicksand), although of course there are differences. But you know, Anne could correspond with Irene, Helga with Clare, and Dr. Anderson with Brian Redfield, who is also a doctor, by the way (though a medical doctor rather than a PhD like Anderson). Quicksand also features a comparative view of race in another country, in Denmark, of all places, where Larsen visited her mother's relatives when she was a teenager (Quicksand seems to have been at least semi-autobiographical). Helga seems to feel more comfortable in her skin in Denmark because her difference, while not ignored, is not disparaged and in fact she likes the attention of being seen as attractively exotic rather than repugnantly alien. Yet in Denmark she is struck by the audience reaction to a black minstrel show, and she realizes that this exotic view of her is just the other side of the coin, rather than something totally different from the way blacks are treated in the U.S. Larsen brilliantly depicts Helga's pained ambivalence and the ambiguity of it all:

Helga Crane was not amused. Instead she was filled with a fierce hatred for the cavorting Negroes on the stage. She felt shamed, betrayed, as if these pale pink and white people among whom she had lived had suddenly been invited to look upon something in her which she had hidden away and wanted to forget. And she was shocked at the avidity with which Olsen [Axel Olsen, her suitor] beside her drank it in.

But later, when she was alone, it became quite clear to her that all along they had divined its presence, had known that in her was something, some characteristic, different from any that they themselves possessed. Else why had they decked her out as they had? Why subtly indicated that she was different? And they hadn't despised it. No, they had admired it, rated it as a precious thing, a thing to be enhanced, preserved. Why? She, Helga Crane, didn't admire it. She suspected that no Negroes, no Americans, did. Else why their constant slavish imitation of traits not their own? Why their constant begging to be considered as exact copies of other people? Even the enlightened, the intelligent ones demanded nothing more. (Ch. 15)

Makeweight Word Cloud

2006-08-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

A "word cloud" of this blog from SnapShirts.com (via L. Ho Show). It's interesting. Try it out.

ABB, INTER-FACE, Morofilm

2006-08-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

Adding three more super-interesting bloggers to the blogroll:

AngryBlackBitch
INTER-FACE
Morofilm

Money

2006-08-01T06:48:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928):

She hated to admit that money was the most serious difficulty. Knowing full well that it was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the unalterable truth that it could influence her actions, block her desires. A sordid necessity to be grappled with.

The issue of money and how to make a living in a capitalist society looks like one of the major themes in many of the early 20th-century novels I've read: House of Mirth, The Jungle, Sister Carrie, My Ántonia, The Professor's House, and now Quicksand. The majority of the texts I just mentioned also focus largely on women and their limited choices in such a society. It does, of course, come back to the symptoms of modernity during this time period.

Yet, as we know, the problem has continued beyond the 1920s and 30s; like Larsen's heroine, Helga Crane, I myself feel this problem of money quite keenly. It's a problem that has in fact gotten worse in this country, as the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen and the unfortunate are pushed to unbearable margins. What Quicksand does differently from the other abovementioned novels is to talk about this problem at its intersection with race as well as gender, which makes it, I think, somehow more relevant to how people understand class conflict today because of the civil rights movements that occurred in the intervening years.

Studying Update: Cather, Crane, Roméro

2006-07-30T00:48:00.000-07:00

For orals reading so far this week, I completed a Willa Cather novel and selected works by five poets, Hart Crane, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, and e.e. cummings. I also read Lora Roméro's 1991 (rpt. 2003) essay, "Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism," which was serendipitously relevant to the Cather and Crane.

Now, I may or may not be able to post write-ups on all of these texts. I'm starting to feel things coming down to the wire, and although the processing necessary to write these posts will I hope be very useful for my qualifying exams, bringing my notes into coherent form consumes a lot of my time and energy. I think most people who take these exams read like crazy first (while taking notes) and wait to do such processing until the end, when they can make broader connections among the hundreds of texts they've read. Just wanted to put you on notice, because I feel bad that my posting here has been getting more and more sporadic. I do like posting this stuff, and feeling that I've done some real work (well, "real" to me), but I must be more careful of managing my time.

Anyway, here at least are some of my thoughts on Cather, and a little bit on Crane, with help from Lora Roméro.

Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)

Set in a Mid-Western town next to Lake Michigan in the 1920s, the novel is divided into three parts, "The Family," "Tom Outland's Story," and "The Professor," each part shorter than the last. So Book One, "The Family," makes up over half of the novel and sets up what's currently happening in the family life of 52-year-old professor of European history, Godfrey St. Peter. Having won the Oxford Prize for his 8-volume work of history, Spanish Adventurers in North America, he's had a new house built for him and his wife, Lillian, because it seems the thing to do, especially with an ambitious wife and after so many years living in an inconvenient rented house. They have two daughters now married, Rosamond married to Louie Marsellus, a businessman and former electrical engineer; and Kathleen married to Scott McGregor, an aspiring poet and writer of a syndicated feel-good prose-poem column. There is tension between these two couples, delicately negotiated by Lillian, who nevertheless is closer to Rosamond than her younger daughter. The McGregors, as well as other members of the community, are jealous of the Marselluses' newfound wealth, which is due to the commercial application of a patented invention willed to Rosamond by her former fiancé, Tom Outland, who died fighting during the War (World War I). The money and Louie's generous, flashy influence have changed Rosamond so that she now has airs and seems to lord it over the other women in the town, including her own sister Kathleen. There is also a particular resentment against Louie because it doesn't seem right that an outsider, a stranger, should come in and benefit from Tom Outland's invention. But the sense of his strangeness, his foreignness, has something to with the fact that he's Jewish.

The book, in my estimation, seems to ruminate on two particular issues regarding society: the first is the nature of social relationships in relation to money (which is why I think it's important that there is a Jewish character in the novel), and the second is the nature of aging and life-phases. (I'm sure there are better ways to phrase this but I haven't figured it out yet.)
1. It seems that the Notorious B.I.G. was right to say, "Mo Money Mo Problems." That is basically what this novel is saying in regards to money. It seriously reconfigures social relationships as well as people's personalities. Here, more money makes Rosamond a snob and makes Kathleen jealous and envious whereas before she idolized and always supported her older sister's triumphs. When Rosamond suggests to her father, Godfrey, that she and Louie settle a generous annuity on him because of his close relationship to Tom Outland (who was Godfrey's student and probably best friend), he tells her,
  "[...] there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can't explain just how I feel about it, but it would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else. And that would be a great loss to me. I'm purely selfish in refusing your offer; my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar language [i.e., money]."
  
  His daughter looked perplexed and a little resentful.
  
  "Sometimes," she murmured, "I think you feel I oughtn't to have taken it, either."
  
  "You had no choice. For you it was settled by his own hand. Your bond with him was social, and it follows the laws of society, and they are based on property. Mine wasn't, and there was no material clause in it. [...]" (Chapter 4 in Book One, "The Family," 50)
  Thus, even though Tom is dead, the professor does not want to change the relationship he has with his memories of Tom. The fact that he calls money the "vulgar language" reveals a contempt for society, given that money/property is the basis of society, according to Godfrey. He also disaggregates friendship from social bonds, as if true friendship between two people incurs no obligation on either part. (Extraordinary, and idealistic. Or perhaps the use of "vulgar" here is just matter-of-fact rather than judgmental?)
  
  But note how his speech in some ways does reprimand Rosamond's benefitting monetarily from Tom's invention; of course, as Godfrey suggests, she might have been rich anyway had Tom lived and figured out the commercial application of his invention himself. But the fact that she chose to marry someone else who could take advantage of the invention and in the process appropriate the memory of Tom as if he had been a good and generous friend -- or an "older brother," as Louie once says, thereby bringing him into an imagined "social" relation that can be based on property -- makes Rosamond seem mercenary to the reader. Her father's relationship to Tom seems purer than hers used to be. (Of course, Godfrey ends up liking Louie anyway, because Louie is quite generous and resilient.)
2. In Book Three, "The Professor," Godfrey realizes what's been making him withdraw from his family and the rest of society: his old personality, from before he went through puberty and became a "lover" (which necessitated social and sexual relations with another person, thereby creating a family and the need to make a living according to the rule of his society), has come back into his life and taken over again. This personality of the preteen boy has a deep affinity with Tom, who had such wonderful adventures and died before he could change into a "lover" and become married and have to deal with society.
  [...] the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy [his young self], little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all of the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. (Chapter 2 in Book Three, "The Professor," 240)
  
  the complexion of a man's life was largely determined by how well or ill his original self and his nature as modified by sex rubbed on together. (242)
  These realizations, however, are aided by comparison with the Other, in this case Indians, who figure largely in the previous section, Book Two, "Tom Outland's Story."
  The Kansas boy who had come back to [Godfrey] St. Peter this summer was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water. Wherever the sun sunned and rain rained and snow snowed, wherever life sprouted and decayed, places were alike to him. He was not nearly so cultivated as Tom's old cliff-dwellers must have been -- and yet he was terribly wise. [...] He was earth, and would return to earth. (241)
  Despite the slight distance between his "primitive" self and the long-dead cliff-dwellers, the nostalgia for a more simple way of life, which is brought on by comparison with them, is still a powerful engine for his "self-knowledge." In that ancient civilization, there was no complicated relationship to property and money.
  
  To me, these realizations are more about his deepest desires than self-revelation (though of course such desires do reveal something of himself). I think about the fact that his primitive self, who is "only interested in earth and woods and water," doesn't worry about violence at all, and what may have caused the cliff-dwellers to die out. In a sense, he evacuates that part of Tom's story -- the violence -- from his own understanding of himself.
  
  That's where Lora Roméro comes in.

The Indian question: Cather, Crane, and Roméro

But first, let's talk about Crane. I don't know why I decided to read Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930) right after Cather's The Professor's House, but it ended up being justified because they both prominently featured long-dead Indians, as in Native Americans who only exist in their works as corpses or vague ghosts from the past or metaphorically embodying the land. And I'm kind of glad I read them one right after the other because it made me really think of what the Native body (disembodied, really) is doing in the texts.

The racialism is of course a product of the authors' time, so they didn't have discourses of color-blindness or political correctness to worry about, but it's still valid to interrogate their use of the Other here, especially since it might illuminate something about the anxiety over property and complicated social relationships in Cather's case. In The Professor's House, property refers to two different types of relationships: 1) a social relationship based on money and 2) a less tangible, less describable relationship that marks the professor's friendship for Tom as well as Tom's feeling of being the spiritual offspring of the ancient cliff-dwellers. In Book Two, Tom is devastated to find out that his best friend and fellow excavator, Rodney Blake, has sold all of the Indian artifacts and mummified corpses for a small fortune, $4,000 (which in 2005 would have been worth from between $37,000-$44,000), to a German curiosity-collector who takes what have become fungible "relics" to Germany. When Tom tries to explain the problem to Rodney, he says,
"But I never thought of selling them, because they weren't mine to sell -- nor yours! They belonged to this country, to the State, and to all the people. They belonged to boys like you and me, that have no other ancestors to inherit from. [Both Tom and Rodney are orphans.] You've gone and sold them to a country that's got plenty of relics of its own. You've gone and sold your country's secrets. (Chapter 6 in Book Two, "Tom Outland's Story," 219)
Later in the argument, the two have this exchange:
[Tom says, "...] did you ever think I was digging those things up for what I could sell them for?"

Rodney explained that he knew [Tom] cared about the things, and was proud of them, but he'd always supposed [Tom] meant to "realize" on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. "Everything does," he added.

"If that nice young Frenchman I met had come down here with me, and offered me four million instead of four thousand, I'd have refused him. There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its people were concerned. They were something that had been preserved through the ages by a miracle, and handed on to you and me, two poor cow-punchers, rough and ignorant, but I thought we were men enough to keep a trust. I'd as soon have sold my own grandmother as Mother Eve [one of the mummies] -- I'd have sold any living woman first." (220-221)
This last quote opens up a whole can of worms, frankly, which I'm not going to touch. But what I wanted to note was that Tom evinces a proprietariness here in relation to the cliff-dwellers that is about a national feeling, which is equated in some ways with the lofty feeling of friendship that Godfrey feels towards Tom. The money relationship ruins such feelings, and indeed this argument between Tom and Rodney -- over their conceptions of their national heritage and money -- ends their friendship.

This mixture of national feeling and proprietary feeling in relation to Indians is also very present in Crane's long poem, which is basically a national narrative celebrating America à la Walt Whitman (whom Crane invokes specifically in section IV, "Cape Hatteras"), though with a Modernist form and sensibility. A large part of the poem imagines Pocahontas as the mother of America (see section II, "Powhatan's Daughter"), and the land is her body: "our native clay / Whose depth of red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas" (section IV, "Cape Hatteras," 85). Notice the use of "red" and the "clay" here, which are stereotypically associated with Natives.

This use of Natives/Indians in Cather or Crane isn't hateful, but it's all about the national Self as delineated through temporal distance from the Other as a person who also lives within the same geographical bounds. Through his/her imagined demise, the Other is transmogrified into earth or spirit. In effect, Indians are dead and gone. In Cather, the preservation of these bones is more important to Tom Outland than the welfare of living Indians. Crane, meanwhile, doesn't feature living Indians either but focuses on the legend of Pocahontas. So the result is that Indians here function as an Other that delineates the individual American.

Lora Roméro argues that in the American antebellum period (early 19th century), novels like James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) imagined the Indians as a vanishing people basically in order to metaphysically clear the frontier for civilized men who are trying to escape the strictures of the maternally-ruled Victorian household. This is ironic because it is paternal rule that has circumscribed women to the domestic sphere, yet the rules and regulations of such a sphere also affect men as well. According to Roméro's reading of the novel and other historical material contemporaneous with the novel, Cooper suggests that men desire to escape the "discipline" of the household that affects the mind and to instead live by the rule of "punishment" or the rule of force that affects only the body and is therefore more simple and honest. This latter Roméro calls "the myth of simple brute force in antebellum discourse," which "generates what Renato Rosaldo calls 'imperialist nostalgia'" (57).

In Mohicans, the Natives are represented as living by this rule of force, which is nostalgically understood to have been superannuated or succeeded by the rule of domesticity in society. The problem, though, as Roméro argues, is that the novel, through the "elegiac mode" (or an "imperialist nostalgia"), "performs the historical sleight-of-hand crucial to the topos of the aboriginal: it represents the disappearance of the native as not just natural but as having already happened" (45). And indeed, we witness the "precipitous" deaths of most of the Natives in the novel.

While in Cooper's novel, "the racial other [is] an earlier and now irretrievably lost version of the self" (50), in Cather's novel, the "primitive" returns to Godfrey as the "Kansas boy" version of himself. Yet there seems to be something similar happening in Cather's novel, in which the native body, definitely depicted as already gone, is a representation of Godfrey's desire to escape the society he has become tired of, to the point where he doesn't care if he lives or dies.

I'm not so clear about how the trope of the "vanishing Americans" is relevant to Crane's long poem, partly because I didn't read it as closely as I did Cather's novel, but I think that the poem speaks to the general displacement of racial others that occurs in the history of American letters and in the project of American exceptionalism in historiography, a displacement that Roméro, Amy Kaplan (see "Romancing the Empire" and her introduction to Cultures of United States Imperialism), and other literary scholars attentive to race, minority cultures, border studies, and transnationalism have been studying.

BlackProf.com, Reappropriate

2006-07-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

Adding BlackProf.com and Reappropriate to the blogroll.

More Thoughts On Pedophilia

2006-07-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

(cross-posted at getaway)

Dutch will allow paedophile group
A Dutch court has turned down a request to ban a political party with a paedophile agenda.

Dutch court rules pedophiles can form political party

###

Jessica Lunsford (9 yo) rape and slaying case

Football players gang-raped girl, 11, police say

Soldiers charged in Iraq rape-murder

###
Go ahead and read through the articles above. I'll wait...

The first case is indicative of an increasingly visible movement in the West to categorize pedophilia as an alternative sexual orientation like homosexuality that deserves equal representation in the law and government, even as the solicitation of minors over the internet has become increasingly publicly criminalized (cf. Dateline NBC's weekly segment on catching adults in the act of soliciting minors online and the MySpace controversy, among other things). The rest of the cases are about violent crimes against children, forced sexual contact and murder.

The pedophile movement does not advocate rape and murder, but the issue of consent under the law is a key issue in both the criminal cases and the sexual movement: 1) rape in general is about the lack of consent and forced sex, and 2) because children are not considered lawfully able to give informed consent, sex with children is automatically rape, i.e., statutory rape, which is a very complicated issue because of the arbitrariness of setting age limits. The pedophile political party in the Netherlands, for instance, seeks to lower the legal age of consent to 12. Meanwhile, Canada recently decided to raise the age of consent.

It is of course more than a legal issue: in the eyes of society, the rape -- forced contact, not statutory rape -- of children, especially preteens, is deemed more heinous than is the rape of adult women. Thus the U.S. official reports of the Iraq rape-murder case (the Reuters article cited above) claimed falsely that the raped female was 20, no longer a teenager, while the Iraqi officials said that she was only 14 years old according to her birth certificate. One wonders, if the pedophile movement manages to convince society to lower the age of consent, would child rapes -- forced contact -- be considered less heinous? And would the incidence of child rapes actually go down because pedophiles would be able to have consensual sex with children?

This brings up the question of pathology. Rapists are definitely pathological in my book, but I'm not sure if pedophilia -- attraction to young people -- is in itself pathological: I don't believe all pedophiles are rapists. But the criminalization of "consensual" adult-child sex as statutory rape, not to mention the emergence of the Amber Alert and the increasing focus in the media of child abductions and sexual abuse, has probably led to the immediate identification between pedophilia and child rape. And the whole issue of what constitutes "informed consent" is a sticky one, especially in the case of children who still have several years left of physical and mental if not emotional development. A 12-year-old child consenting to have sex with or marry a 40-year-old adult? What would you think, given the 12-year-old children you know and the 12-year-old you used to be? When I was 12, I had absolutely no sexual interest in adults; I was even grossed out when my "boyfriend" in 6th grade (poor Martin) tried to hold my hand. I ran into the girls' bathroom and wouldn't come out. Needless to say, the "relationship" lasted only two weeks. I think I would have had a meltdown if an adult had tried to have sex with me at 12. But this is only my experience, and I had girlfriends at 12 who were definitely having sex with their sometimes older boyfriends, though not adult men. (A couple of them ended up being teenage moms because, of course, being considered kids, no one taught them to use birth control.)

Anyway, I'm getting the willies just writing about this, but it's important to think and talk about it because pedophile communities are self-electing to become more visible as a "civil rights" group. The issues are already very complicated when you survey the law and social acceptance. But then, as I'll be looking at, international politics and uneven power relations due to imperialism and colonialism force the discussion to consider histories of racialization, feminization, and infantilization of specific groups of people when talking about children of color in the U.S. and in other countries, making a clear understanding of the situation even more difficult. Interpreting the Iraq rape-murder case for instance must allow for these considerations.

"Ferdinand's First Lady"

2006-07-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

This is not a study update. I was just shocked to find that there were about 200 hits to this blog on Saturday and some today, referred by Google specifically to my post on Imelda Marcos and Cory Aquino. The search terms: ferdinand's first lady. The hits came from different parts of the U.S. and Canada, but I can't imagine why this search has become so popular (well, relatively popular) recently. Was the phrase on some televised game show or something?

P.S. I'll post a study update hopefully this week. I've been busy with editing an essay and with family.

Study Update: Pound, H.D.

2006-07-07T15:45:00.000-07:00

Ezra Pound, Personae (1909); "Portrait d'une Femme" (1912); "In a Station of the Metro" (1913); "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" (1915)

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Sea Garden (1916)

Pound's Personae was a surprise because of the medieval sensibility, in terms of diction, rhythm, syntax, and even subject matter. It seems affected. Sorry. This was his first volume of poetry that got critical acclaim, that made the literati in Europe consider him a poet to watch out for. I don't believe that this volume would be considered Modernist. In the later poems I read -- "Portrait d'une Femme" from Ripostes, "Station of the Metro" from Poems of Lustra, and "The River-Merchant's Wife" from Cathay, all considered Modernist -- his tone, syntax, and address become simplified, pared down, and more conversational. The latter two are influenced by East Asian literature, "Station" by Japanese haiku and "River-Merchant" by Chinese war poetry.

H.D.'s Sea Garden was an exquisite read. I read it out loud (it's not that long) because the lines really invite it. Its imagism (of which Pound was key in the critical elaboration) I think would lend itself to an artsy film with disjointed scenes, stream-of-consciousness images, something like that. There is a lot of sound, color, movement, a lot of barrenness, dead crackly leaves, but also the wind-tossed ocean, completely un-manicured nature. It is intense and focused, full of dual oppositions, and while not quite unhappy, it isn't happy either. The images seem removed from history, and the speaker, from both history and (paradoxically, because of the images' full engagement of the senses) physical embodiment, which was H.D.'s purpose. However, I can't help but think of H.D.'s desire to escape the confines of Victorian injunctions on women while reading some of the poems. She deals with this desire in almost painstakingly muted fashion, as in the first poem of the collection, in which a battered sea rose is compared favorably to a lush garden rose:

Sea Rose

Rose, harsh rose
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem --
you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?

###
And here is the last poem of H.D.'s volume, simply because it resonated with me. And one also wonders about its relation to the rough sea- and forestscapes of the rest of the poems in the collection....

Cities

Can we believe -- by an effort
comfort our hearts:
it is not waste all this,
not placed here in disgust,
street after street,
each patterned alike,
no grace to lighten
a single house of the hundred
crowded into one garden-space.

Crowded -- can we believe,
not in utter disgust,
in ironical play --
but the maker of cities grew faint
with the beauty of temple
and space before temple,
arch upon perfect arch,
of pillars and corridors that led out
to strange court-yards and porches
where sun-light stamped
hyacinth-shadows
black on the pavement.

That the maker of cities grew faint
with the splendour of palaces,
paused while the incense-flowers
from the incense-trees
dropped on the marble-walk,
thought anew, fashioned this --
street after street alike.

For alas,
he had crowded the city so full
that men could not grasp beauty,
beauty was over them,
through them, about them,
no crevice unpacked with the honey,
rare, measureless.

So he built a new city,
ah can we believe, not ironically
but for new splendour
constructed new people
to lift through slow growth
to a beauty unrivalled yet --
and created new cells,
hideous first, hideous now --
spread larve across them,
not honey but seething life.

And in these dark cells,
packed street after street,
souls live, hideous yet --
O disfigured, defaced,
with no trace of the beauty
men once held so light.

Can we think a few old cells
were left -- we are left --
grains of honey,
old dust of stray pollen
dull on our torn wings,
we are left to recall the old streets?

Is our task the less sweet
that the larve still sleep in their cells?
Or crawl out to attack our frail strength:
You are useless. We live.
We await great events.
We are spread through this earth.
We protect our strong race.
You are useless.
Your cell takes the place
of our young future strength.

Though they sleep or wake to torment
and wish to displace our old cells --
thin rare gold --
that their larve grow fat --
is our task the less sweet?

Though we wander about,
find no honey of flowers in this waste,
is our task the less sweet --
who recall the old splendour,
await the new beauty of cities?

The city is peopled
with spirits, not ghosts, O my love:

Though they crowded between
and usurped the kiss of my mouth
their breath was your gift,
their beauty, your life.

"Spirits, not ghosts"...what is the difference for the speaker -- and who is the speaker of this italicized section? Is the poem a dialogue? What a gorgeously nostalgic poem.

Study Update: Bryant, Longfellow (QND)

2006-06-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

(QND = quick 'n' dirty summary)

William Cullen Bryant:

"Forest Hymn" (1821) - forest, flower as creation of God; nature as proper temple; "flower" - Life, Love, the "soul of this wide Universe"

"Thanatopsis" (1821) - listen to Nature's teachings; when you die you are lost to the human race but become part of the family of nature, the earth, and you will not be alone in this; the earth is the "great tomb of man"; live so that you go to your death like going to sleep rather than as a quarry-slave being prodded into the cave at night

"To a Waterfowl" (1821) - "certain flight" of the bird an analogy, a guide for poet's own journey from birth to death; its instinct is given/taught by the "Power" a.k.a. God; a guide to where it is necessary to go; "Lone wandering but not lost" because of God's guide

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

"A Psalm of Life" (1838) - "Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal"; life is about the soul, not the body; "Art is long, and Time is fleeting"; we should act because "We can make our lives sublime" and "leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time"

"The Slave's Dream" (1842) - the dying slave here used to be a king in his native land, a happy husband and father; in the dream, "The forests, with their myriad tongues, / Shouted of liberty"; his body is "A worn-out fetter, that the soul / Had broken and thrown away" upon his dying

"The Fire of Driftwood" (1849) - a conversation with a friend from whom he went his separate way; hailing the other but "no answers back again"; "splendor flashed and failed"

On E.A.P.

2006-06-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

First, I just want to give shout-outs to some people whose very kind words in the recent past are keeping me afloat as I study: Anita, Audrey, Bino, Carolina, csperez, JoAnna, Joanne, Liz, Lucy, Margaret, Mary, PJ, Roland, Ryan, Texter.

Thanks for checking in, mes amis.

###
For the past three days, I've been reading works by Edgar Allan Poe. I didn't know this before, but going back to Poe is like going back to the beginning of my literary critical career. What does this mean? Well, last night, as I was reading "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), it seemed so familiar that I looked at some old work from high school and realized that, yes, indeed, I must have read it in my junior-year English class because I discovered that I had written an imitation of it -- actually, more like an unintended parody, so it seems to me now -- but instead of talking about the composition of "The Raven" (which is what Poe did), I focused on another poem of his, "Ulalume."

I have to say, the assignment was an ingenious way to get young students to teach themselves a method of analyzing poetry -- attention to meter, rhyme, rhythm, diction, etc. -- so props to my English teacher, Mr. Malott, for that. But what he didn't manage to do was give us some context on Poe's writing; taken at face value, "The Philosophy of Composition" seems like the writing of someone extremely confident of his poetry. But the essay is actually quite tongue-in-cheek. Poe has written some amazing short stories, and many of his poems have wonderful atmospherics, but he wasn't considered a first-rate poet, and I think he knew it. So his remarks about his "originality" and success at mechanically, even mathematically producing his intended effects in the poem were at least half-ironic when, at 16 years old, I thought he was totally serious. And perhaps he was suggesting that the mechanical quality of it is one reason why he is not such a great poet. But, again, I didn't know this when I was 16, being new to the 19th-century American literary canon. So when I look at my (very close) imitation now, it really does read as a parody, making fun of a writer who seems far too full of himself.

Yet I can still see the seeds of my formal writing style in this early assignment, the syntax, the wording, and even some of the mechanical cadence. (My high school AP French courses were also very formative in terms of my lit crit writing, so that training is in this assignment, too, even if it's in English. Props to Madame Myron, my high school French teacher.) It's kind of weird to read the parody assignment now, in conjunction with the original, and think about how I write my formal papers. (Mr. Malott, by the way, praised it as a successful emulation of the original.) If you want to read the assignment, with some of my present-day comments bold and in brackets, scroll down.

Analysis of “Ulalume” by Edgar Allan Poe (the Second) [written January 1995, and please keep in mind that this was written by a 16-year-old! Oh, and ignore the typos, if you please]

The construction of a story is, in my mind, rather like a mathematical problem, a scrupulous formula to be followed upon commencement of writing---in other words, a plot must be developed to its dénouement before any part of the actual story itself may be put down on paper. My own works were put together this way, and I say “put together” neither figuratively nor idiomatically speaking, for, as every author knows (or ought to know, at least), and what every aspiring writer should understand, any piece of literary work is never---or perhaps I should say, almost never---composed in a fury of gushing intuition and inspiration, without the difficult and hard-won elaboration of thought, without the tortuous and crudely circuitous path of molding a story up to its intended climax. For my own part, I don’t believe that it would be at all an impropriety to describe the method by which I created my poem, “Ulalume.” [If you know the original at all, you'll notice that I used much of the same wording, for the "effect," of course. Er, right.]

In composing “Ulalume,” I first of all took into account the effect I wished to convey to my audience. Which effect or impression, out of all the ones which the heart, the mind, and the soul are most sensitive and vulnerable, do I choose? Now, upon selecting an original---originality is always of greatest import---and vivid effect, I next must decide through which medium it could be best brought about: by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or by both incident and tone being peculiar? Keeping this choice in mind, I went on to create the plot.

My first consideration then was length. If totality is not necessary to the intended effect, then an author may, by all means, go ahead and write it as long as he wants. However, if unity is of utmost importance---as it was in my case---then the work needs to be of short enough duration to be read in one sitting but long enough to produce the effect. Thus I decided on the number of one hundred, and set about to write a poem of about that many lines. “Ulalume” is, indeed, ninety-four lines. [This whole line-counting thing is probably one of the more ridiculous things Poe says, but it can be fascinating if you really are mathematically-minded: how many words/lines/sentences/pages does it take to produce sublime feeling in the reader? But, of course, not every reader is the same. And neither is every sublime feeling, I would think.]

Secondly, I endeavored to choose exactly what effect or impression to convey to the audience through the poem, and in this I must say that I essayed to render the work universally appreciable. Therefore, the province, or proper sphere of action, of the poem---it is, in fact, the only province of any poem---is Beauty, for when it is contemplated, not as a quality in itself but as the effect of the elevation of soul, then and only then can the most pure and elevating pleasure be found, and that elevation, that Beauty, is most easily and readily achieved in a poem.

Having established Beauty as my province, I was now concerned with the tone of the poem, and through which tone Beauty might be most exquisitely expressed---sadness, sadness being the most legitimate of all poetical tones, for it excites the soul to tears as does Beauty in its loftiest maturation. Or perhaps a better tone would be of intense loss and grief and insanity. These points being settled, it was quite easy then to combine the most prominent expressions of Beauty and sadness: the death of a beautiful woman. [OK, are you feeling the parodic effect yet, what with all of the italics?] A beautiful woman whose lover is mourning for her. Now, however, is where the story is embellished, for, as was stated earlier, I kept in mind the medium through which I would accomplish the effect. After much thought and consideration and perhaps a bit of my own fancy, I chose both the tone and incident as being peculiar in “Ulalume.” The lover who is conversing with Psyche, his own soul, and stumbles upon the tomb of his great lost love makes for a very mysterious and rather bizarre tale, for how could anyone grieving so terribly stumble accidentally upon the grave of the loved one for whom he is mourning? [I guess at this point I'm making a bit of fun of the actual poem itself, "Ulalume."] Even the personification of Psyche gives a strange and eerie feel to the composition.

The poem was now itself ready to be penned, but where to begin? My answer, of course, was to begin at the end, or, really, at the climax. Here, the lover and his Soul, his Soul who is gloomy and afraid of something she does no understand, are “stopped by the door of a tomb . . . the vault of [his] lost Ulalume.” Starting from such a vantage point provided me with the opportunity to better embroider the preceding events as might give the plot an air of causation or consequence by making all the points of the tone keep in accord and proportion to the elaboration of the intended effect.

How this tone, then, was to be itself established was the next question which arose. The locale was of course my very first consideration in this case: where would I have the lover conversing with his Soul? A second consideration was keeping the poem simple. Diction, the choice of words on the basis of their connotation, &c., was another very important factor, as well as the meter and rhythm of the poem itself. And last was poetical devices, which were greatly needed to produce the intended tone.

If I may be at liberty to do so here, I will explain the first two considerations at this time. Simplicity is very easy to explain: there is no need for more than a few characters. To add more than the lover and Psyche would be to merely clutter up the poem and lose the sense of unity, for too many characters would have to be counted for and remembered, thus perhaps confusing the reader’s state of mind. The locale was also very significant, for I needed to have the internal feelings of the bereaved lover manifest themselves outwardly in some way, and that was to create a landscape, strange and fantastic yet utterly possible, to match the imbalance of his mind and heart. He is, as was stated, preoccupiedly conversing with Psyche, his own Soul, but at his own peril, for there is a volcano in the background, as well as “scoriac rivers that roll---As the lavas that restlessly roll.”

This brings me now to diction, and the primary role it played in producing the tone. I chose a volcano to be representative of his heart because of the feelings of volatility and instability a volcano conveys. It could erupt any second and destroy everything in its path. For the moment, however, it is dormant, just as the lover is unaware of his surroundings or that this is the place where he himself buried his loved Ulalume exactly one year ago in October. Words such as “ashen and sober,” “withering and sere,” “ghoul-haunted,” “palsied,” “treacherous,” “senescent,” “strangely mistrust,” “gloom,” “tomb,” “vault,” “dread burden,” “demon,” “misty mid region,” and “dank tarn” are all scattered throughout the poem, giving it a dark, dry, and dismal atmosphere. It is foggy yet barren and old, representing age and time lost. In addition, I used words such as “cypress” and “scoriac,” which mean, respectively, the tree whose branches are used as a symbol of mourning and cinderlike lava. Moreover, allusions to Greek, Roman, and Semitic myths added to the tone and atmosphere of the poem. Astarte is a goddess of love, as opposed to the goddess of chastity Diana. It is Astarte’s crescent which warns the lover and his Soul about the tomb of Ulalume. This idea is further strengthened by the word “Sybillic,” which means of a female prophet. “Lethean,” a word deriving from the Greek Lethe, which is the river of forgetfulness and memory loss, gives the impression, when combined to form “point us to the path . . . to the Lethean peace of the skies,” that there is godly interference in the lover’s life. His case is very special because of this.

The meter and rhythm is largely anapestic trimeter with a few complements of iambic monometer. However, I came up with a bit of originality here and “cut” some of the feet in parts and place them at opposites ends of the line. For instance, “The skies | they were ash | en and sob | er.” In addition, in some places, as in the third stanza, “We not | ed not | the dim | lake of Aub | er” and “Remem | bered not | the dank | tarn of Aub | er,” I coupled an iambic trimeter with an anapestic monometer. This was intended to break up the rhythm slightly and emphasize the meanings of the lines themselves. Now the rhyme scheme was rather simple. For each stanza I used only two end rhyming sounds which alternated, more or less, in this order: ABBABABAB. The first five rhymes of each stanza were consistent, but the last four to eight varied in sequence. This was meant to give a slightly imbalanced feel when reading the poem.

Finally, let me discuss the various poetical devices I used in “Ulalume.” The first three I would like to elucidate are my use of plosives, long consonants, and long vowels. I did not use many plosives in the poem but there is one very prominent example of this poetical device: in the third stanza, “palsied.” This serves to emphasize the meaning of palsied, which is in a state of paralysis. Now long consonants and long vowels, if put together in the same word or next to each other, can create a very serious, grave, or mournful sound. There are many instances of this in the poem, such as “Auber,” “Weir,” “sober,” “sere,” “lonesome,” and “sighs,” to name a few. In fact, these devices are so important to the tone of the poem that I have made up the word “Auber” in order to keep the tone unbroken for lack of an appropriate word to fit into the rhyme scheme.

Nextly, alliteration and assonance, the former being the repetition of consonant sounds and the latter being the repetition of vowels, give the poem a musical effect and emphasize words to create the mood. Some examples of alliteration are “rivers that roll . . . restlessly roll” (r, stanza 2), “misty mid region” (m, stanza 1), “woodland of Weir” (w, stanza 1), “now as the night was senescent” (n, s, stanza 4), and “lair of the Lion / With love in her luminous eyes” (l, stanza 5). Several cases of assonance are “lonesome October” (o, stanza 1), “leaves . . . sere (ee, stanza 1, 9), and “misty mid region of Weir” (i, ee, stanza 1, 9). As is evident, these devices enhance the eerie, dark atmosphere of the poem.

Enfin are repetition and the refrain. In “Ulalume,” the refrain is a whole phrase, “ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,” which is repeated only three times throughout. I placed it in the first, introductory stanza and the last, dénouement stanza for an obvious reason: to cinch the poem in unity. I placed in the third stanza more to fit the story than anything else. Repetition, however, is a different case. Some of the words repeated were “leaves,” “sere,” “cypress,” “night,” “sighs,” “trailed in the dust,” “gloom,” and “Ulalume.” However, I also repeated certain sounds obscurely, such as “dim . . . mid” in the first and last stanzas, as well as “nebulous luster” in the fourth stanza. Repeating these words serve to embellish a little more their meaning, to intensify everything that leads to the climax, and to compound the finality of the dénouement. All things considered, it makes a definite contribution to the overall tone, and ultimately the effect, of the poem. [I totally don't do this much parsing of poems anymore, but I'm glad I used to know how to do it.]

More Blogs

2006-06-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

Adding a bunch that I've been following lately, found through exploring other peeps' blogrolls (esp. at Textual Life, Foodie Rants, and beautiful women and lanzones):

Study Update: Cather, Anderson

2006-06-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

Finally: some (brief) notes on Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson.

Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

focus on Eastern European immigrants and their eventual successes; problem of collision between traditional values and new practices

The story is in the form of a memoir by Jim Burden, who met an immigrant girl named Ántonia Shimerda when they were children new to Nebraska, Ántonia from Czechoslovakia and Jim from Virginia. The rest of the novel follows their growing up best friends, coming of age and losing touch. The novel depicts the plight of the new immigrant families who have come to Nebraska to start farms and whose daughters need to hire out in the town to help their families. These immigrant "hired girls," living away from the authority of their parents, become a focus of tension as their desire to stay out late, to dance, and flirt with the young men of the town butt up against traditional standards of behavior. Ántonia becomes one of these "hired girls," and Jim, inclined to defend her, is able to offer a sympathetic look at these young women.

The depiction of immigrants is both similar and very different from that in Sinclair's The Jungle. The Shimerdas, Ántonia's family, suffer quite a bit, and Ántonia's beloved father commits suicide because of his shame at his inability to take care of his family. The family, not surprisingly, suffer even greater hardships after this, and Mrs. Shimerda becomes an even more petty, bitter woman. Yet the Shimerdas gradually make things work, with Ántonia's vigorous help in the farm fields and then later with her salary in town. In some ways, I was reminded of immigrant stories of people of color, except that these pioneers are not legally denied possession of land, and they do eventually succeed in numbers and in a way that Asians and Latinos did/do not.

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

full of "defeated" and abject women; ambitious and ineffectual men; just chock-full of unhappy people who want something amazing and transcendent to change their lives

Because of the procession of different characters/personalities with weird quirks ("grotesque" figures, as Anderson calls them), it reminded me of West's The Day of the Locust (which was written 20 years later and with much, much more irony). Another similar aspect was a focus on hands. Homer Simpson in West's novel has really unruly hands that have a life and thoughts of their own separate from his will. In some ways, they seem to be expressive of his repressed feelings. In Anderson's collection of stories, Wing Biddlebaum, the sensitive character of the first chapter, "Hands," has extremely expressive hands that he usually tries to hide because they have gotten him in trouble in the past. When he was a schoolteacher, he would put his hands on the boys' shoulders and ruffle their hair because touching them was "a part of the schoolmaster's effort to carry a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream. And then the tragedy" ("Hands" [ch. 1]). Falsely accused of molesting a young student at the boys' school in the Pennsylvania town where he used to teach, he barely escaped a lynching, and the angry injunctions to "keep your hands to yourself" have rung in his head since. In fact, Wing Biddlebaum is an alias, as his real name is Adolph Myers.

One interesting quote in this chapter:
Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.
In this gendered language, where the men characters generally want to love and the women characters want to be loved, Anderson demonstrates a kind of universalism that keeps getting tripped up by this gendered difference -- "He wanted to love and to be loved by her, but he did not want at the moment to be confused by her womanhood" ("Sophistication [ch. 20]). Whether or not this is self-conscious on Anderson's part, I don't know; but he does seem to be saying that what the characters want is a real human connection that lets them break free from the strictures they feel in this little town, though the strictures aren't necessarily because it's a small town at all. It seems tied to something greater, a general state of humanity. Some quotes of what I mean:
In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker. [...] "I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them," he said. "I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places." ("Death" [ch. 19])

With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding. ("Sophistication" [ch. 20])

How might these two be related? Well, they're both "local color" narratives about the Midwest, i.e. they're texts that fall under literary regionalism. Each is also, in a sense, written from the perspective of someone who has left his small Midwest town and lived for a long time in a large city elsewhere. But while Winesburg seems to be nostalgic about traditional, small-town Midwestern lifestyle and values that are being encroached upon by the city, immigration, and the modernization of media and information systems as well as transportation (see the quote from the previous post), My Ántonia seems less sympathetic to these values, at least where young immigrant women are concerned. Jim Burden, the narrator of My Ántonia, does indeed express nostalgia for his past and the people he once knew, but not necessarily for the way of life in the farm or small town with his grandparents. As for Winesburg, I would venture that if there is single perspective that ties together all of the character sketches in the short story collection, this perspective seems to lament the lost capability of the small town to fully nourish and sustain the creative, imaginative inner lives of its residents; yet the city is no real answer, either, as the several characters who have lived for long periods in the city or who came from cities couldn't survive living there and needed to come (back) to Winesburg and wait out the rest of their lives.

An Excerpt: Winesburg, Ohio

2006-06-23T04:54:00.000-07:00

Long time no update. I'm battling a major bout of listlessness in the studying department (not to mention listlessness just generally), so I'm still in the middle of reading Sherwood Anderson's thus-far strange collection of linked stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). But I wanted to post this excerpt:

In the last fifty years [since the end of the Civil War] a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people. A revolution has in fact taken place. The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses, and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in the habits of thought of our people of MidAmerica. Books, badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, magazines circulate by millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in the village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone for ever. The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best city man of us all. ("Godliness" [ch. 6], Part I)

I don't know why historical statements like this always interest me more when they are in novels/stories than when they are in historiographies or other scholarly texts.

Further Notes

2006-06-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

I'm in layover hell right now* and I desperately need sleep. Had a 7 am flight from California and spent the five hours to New York trying to self-induce a coma, but my lingering cough (from my cold) prevented continuous sleep, as did the flight attendants who kept stopping for prolonged periods of time by our aisle shaking out and crinkling up their plastic trash bags and talking to each other. And then when we got off the plane, we found out that our layover had been extended because of poor weather conditions in Boston. So no rest at the hotel, no cocktails and dinner reception at my sister's uni.

Anyway, since I'm just waiting around, I figured I might as well blog...here are a few further notes on Wharton, Johnson, and West regarding my thoughts about some of their representations of race and gender:

Each of these texts features an abjected racialized group, or rather, these texts make abject particular racialized groups. For Wharton, it is the Jewish, whose stereotypical obsession with money contrasts with Lily Bart's own (because she doesn't want money for money's sake but for the lifestyle she can attain with lots of it) and therefore makes her Jewish suitor an extremely poor marriage prospect for the discerning upper crust. At the end of the novel, however, this suitor turns out to have sympathetic characteristics, partly because his outsider status helps him understand her downfall and expulsion from high society.

Johnson, in order to provide a negative contrast to African Americans, represents Indians (Native Americans) as more abject than blacks. In fact, through just a couple of contrastive comments, they become the ultimate abject figures in the world of his novel (see Ch. IV and V). Meanwhile, Cubans in the U.S. are seen as sort of racial and class brothers (it's definitely all about fraternalism in this novel), though they are in a less precarious position than African Americans. Finally, the narrator's relationship to his white millionaire benefactor is particularly and strangely intimate, not least because of the servant-master aspect that undergirds their friendship. For me, these representations of intimacy and fraternity are worth comparing and make this novel definitely worth writing (lit crit) about. [Addendum: I didn't even realize this, but Kristin Hoganson's book is helpful in understanding why Cubans would be particularly sympathetic, "fraternal" characters in a novel from this period -- there was a lot of pro-Cuban support and sentiment during the Spanish-American War, for which the jingoist rhetoric depicted Cuban men as chivalrous towards women, fraternal towards each other, and thereby worthy of joining the American/Western brotherhood of freedom and self-government. The Cuban liberation struggles were the reason that U.S. soldiers were in Cuba in the first place, and the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine there provided the catalyst for the Spanish-American War.]

Finally, West's abject is the Chinese, but in a rather offhandedly sympathetic way. What do I mean by this? There are references to the protagonist, Tod's character being as complicated as Chinese boxes, and then one of Tod's filthy rich friends has affected the habit of calling his Chinese servant "black rascal." Tod's disgust with the affectations of all of the Hollywood people he knows, despite his friendships with them, bespeaks a larger critique of this culture. There are no Chinese characters who actually speak, of course. Yet another abject figure in the novel is the figure of women (and one can argue that women, especially poor women, are also represented as the abject figures in Wharton's novel, though with more sympathy than in West's). This abject figure is predominantly represented by Faye Greener, whose artificiality effects an impenetrable wall for not-so-attractive-nice-guy Tod, which then makes him dream of shattering her through violent rape. Like I've said before, this novel was not the most pleasant thing to read. (And I wish I had something smarter to say about this, maybe a la McClintock.)

###
Just finished Hoganson, and I should have blogged about Whissel, Kaplan, and Hoganson together. Will do that soon. I also read Willa Cather's My Ántonia last week and should do write-up on that, but I'm thinking I'll wait until after I read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which was published the year after My Ántonia.

After that, I'll be starting the early 20th-century poetry, and I'm a little scared because it includes Modernist poetry, which ~~bugs the hell out of me~~ I've yet to learn how to appreciate. I need to take a leaf out of the rebel's blog, which has been doing an H.D. fest for a while. I did hear from other friends, however, that H.D. is a much better read than, say, Pound. Let's hope.

Also, for the non-literary texts, "strategic" reading has begun because 1) I shouldn't over-prepare when 2) I won't have enough time otherwise. But I'm currently in the process of excising, and I've already made what I think are reasonable excisions...yay.

* This was actually written Thursday afternoon; the layover ended up being even longer, and then there was a "traffic jam" while we were on the plane, and there was a long-ass line of planes waiting to take off. Sheesh. I didn't expect the early June weather to be so bad in the Northeast. Btw, saw my sister's graduation in Boston this morning and am now in NYC to see my other sister. I'll be back on the West Coast on Sunday night.

Study Update: McClintock, Whissel

2006-06-05T00:08:00.000-07:00

It's past time for another study update.

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995)

McClintock's text looks at the relationship between Victorian ideals of femininity and discourses of race and class that emerged during what she calls "imperialist capitalism" in late 19th-century Britain, and the legacy of this relationship for the colonized into the 20th century. For (my) convenience's sake, I've borrowed a useful summary that I found of some of McClintock's larger points by a professor who teaches the book:
- First, she suggests that the colonial discourse is not only the discourse of domination but also of anxiety.
- Second, at the end of the 19th century, scientific racism changed to what to McClintock calls commodity racism: what she means is that while previously the discourse of racism was mainly a scientific discourse, it then began to be expressed primarily through the display of commodities.
- Third, commodities representing the colonies invaded, during the Victorian period, the middle-class home, while at the same time the colonized world was, in the Victorian imagination, domesticated.
- Fourth, time was spatialized as a static, nonivolving [sic] image of progress on the familial model: the family Tree of Man.
The advent of soap as a global commodity throughout the British Empire; H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines; South African (white) Victorian feminist writer Olive Schreiner's oeuvre; the 1978 auto/biography/novel/oral history The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena written by Afrikaans writer Elsa Joubert as the conspicuous amanuensis of Poppie Nogena -- all of these provide the cultural and literary texts that McClintock reads with expertise and insight.

Moreover, following from Johannes Fabian's theory of the anthropological construction of race and temporality in Time and the Other (1983) and Foucault's insights in the 1975 Discipline and Punish, she outlines two helpful theoretical tropes that are discernible in imperial, racist, classist, and misogynistic discourses: "panoptical time" and "anachronistic space."
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, panoptical time came into its own. By panoptical time, I mean the image of global history consumed -- at a glance -- in a single spectacle from a point of privileged invisibility.... To meet the "scientific" standards set by the natural historians and empiricists of the eighteenth century, a visual paradigm was needed to display evolutionary progress as a measurable spectacle. The exemplary figure that emerged was the evolutionary family Tree of Man....

The tree image, however, was attended by a second, decisive image of the Family of Man.... In this family group, evolutionary progress is represented by a series of distinct anatomical types, organized as a linear image of progress. In this image, the eye follows the evolutionary types up the page, from the archaic to the modern, so that progress sseems to unfold naturally before the eye as a series of evolving marks on the body. Progress takes on the character of a spectace, under the form of the family. (37-38)
One of the many images McClintock reads is this one from Types of Mankind (1854) by the 19th-century "ethnologists" Josiah Clark Nott and George R. Glidden; it illustrates the "second, decisive image of the Family of Man" that she's talking about:

As for "anachronistic space":
At this point, another trope makes its appearance. It can be called the invention of anachronistic space, and it reached its full authority as an administrative and regulatory technology in the late Victorian era. Within this trope, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity.

According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. By extension, the return journey to Europe [from its various imperial holdings in the "periphery"] is seen as rehearsing the evolutionary logic of historical progress forward and upward to the apogee of the Enlightenment in the European metropolis [i.e., the "center"]. Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical [and cultural, racial, civilizational] difference across time. (40)

But what is particularly brilliant about her book, in my opinion, are her revision of Freud's and Lacan's theories of fetishism and her readings of the love affair and fetish games of the Victorian barrister, Arthur Munby, and his servant and wife Hannah Cullwick. McClintock salutarily decenters the male fear of castration (Freud) and by extension the phallus (Lacan) when she tries to understand the meaning of female fetishism (the existence and importance of which both Freud and Lacan assiduously minimized) in Hannah Cullwick's case. So McClintock does something similar to Diana Fuss (whose Identification Papers was published the same year as Imperial Leather) when she takes into account Freud's biography and personal papers (e.g., letters) in her revision of his theory on fetishism. In reading Freud's life, she brings back to focus what Freud 'disappeared' in his theory: the role of the working-class woman in the Victorian middle-class household. This laboring woman is the double of motherhood in these households -- the nursemaid or nanny who, unlike the mother, was paid for her domestic labor. Since the fetish (whether or not it has anything to do with the phallus) is the embodiment of unresolvable conflicts and contradictions, McClintock makes an argument about how certain forms of fetishism during this time period were an attempt to make sense of the contradiction of female labor in imperial capitalism.

What I especially love about McClintock's book is the way that it brings many of the important insights of feminist studies to bear on her readings of these cultural texts and their links to socio-historical events. (Unlike Donaldson, she doesn't belabor the 'ambiguous positioning' of the white colonial woman in colonial patriarchy, and she also doesn't disappear the colonized woman/woman of color in her readings.) I've already expressed my affinity for psychoanalytic readings that are attentive to social history (as in Daniel Kim's book), and McClintock does this very well. During our reading group, MF and I both agreed that this book is the way we would like to write (and think) if we could.

Kristen Whissel, "The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity and Edison's War Actualities" (2002)

This short but excellently-argued essay offers readings of several short films created during the Spanish-American War in 1898 -- the Edison Manufacturing Company's "War Extra" actualities -- films which argued the various "therapeutic benefits" (145) of American imperialism, particularly to U.S. "native white masculinity," the new anxieties over the reliability of large-scale modern technology and the various consequences of industrial capitalism, and the civil-war torn history of the country.
The image of the white male body harnessed to military technology became a signifier for a newly forged national-imperial identity based on an amalgamation of social Darwinism, the imperatives of industrial capitalism, the myth of the frontier, and the ideology of manifest destiny. The outbreak of war in 1898 saw a resurgence of claims to an Anglo-Saxon virility that had led the "English-speaking race" to conquer and civilize vast areas and populations around the world. At the same time, the image of an enervated male body, exhausted and effeminized by the demands of industrial capitalism and technological modernity, circulated throughout popular American culture. In turn, increased participation of the new woman in suffrage, reform, and anti-imperialist movements, and the increased presence of women and immigrants in the workplace and the spheres of commercialized leisure appeared to loosen native white masculinity's privileged grip on political legitimacy, cultural authority, and social control. (141-142)

Whissel further argues that the "idealization of native white masculinity depended on the production of a range of racialized male bodies that might be compared, contrasted, and ranked in relation to one another" (154, and cf. McClintock's Family of Man trope) as well as on a particular representation of (white) women -- "ladies" -- as helpless and reliant on their men for protection. These films, which depicted women (if at all) as spectators on the sidelines of the central action of virile, muscular white soldiers strenuously preparing for imperial battle, interpellated the female viewers into this particular subject position.

It's an old story, no? -- the knight in shining armor, come to rescue and protect the willing and helpless damsel in distress. These representations (strategically) elided the existence of so-called 'New Women' and "the forces of resistance to U.S. imperialism, such as American anti-imperialists who protested expansion [though Whissel doesn't explain that this group is made up of complex and contradictory interests, some of which were racist and xenophobic in the extreme] and the colonial subjects who resisted U.S. imperialism in the new colonies" (159).

Moreover, Whissel argues, these films "encourage[d] spectators to perceive U.S. imperialism as the opposite of Spain's brutal colonial regime, rather than a mere replacement of it" (158) via the representation of American white masculinity as contradistinct from the effeminacy and decadence of the "Old World" (154). As briefly mentioned earlier, this new 'Teddy Rooseveltian' masculinity was also seen as an antidote to the effeminacy and nervous afflictions produced by the demands of industrial capitalism (144). Whissel did a great job of unwinding the complicated knot of race and gender that emerged during the rise of U.S. overseas empire and arguing for the ways in which cultural forms like the war actuality attempted to (and succeeded in) naturalizing and making seem inevitable and "therapeutic" this new empire.

Barbara (Ehrenreich)'s Blog

2006-06-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

Adding Barbara (Ehrenreich)'s Blog. Such a great spokesperson for the working classes and women.

I Couldn't Let This Day Go By

2006-05-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

...without posting:

Makeweight is now exactly one year old. Happy anniversary.

Rereading my first post, "The Why And Wherefore", I realized that I didn't thank Jean for getting me into blogging in the first place. So: thanks, Jean. I also noticed that I've been doing here what I set out to do from the beginning. I haven't written as much as I thought I would because I had a late start reading seriously for my exams and am constantly distracted and blogging elsewhere, but it's good to know that I can follow through with my own projects, when there are no outside deadlines and no accountability to other people.

Back to reading like a dervish. I have another reading group tomorrow.

Study Update: Wharton, Sinclair, West, Johnson

2006-05-26T22:18:00.000-07:00

I read another barely-related batch of books. There are still connections, although I'm afraid some of these comments are going to be a little more impressionistic and random than usual. The more I read, the less important it seems to have a detailed grasp of each text. Plus, besides the beginnings of what feels like eye strain, stupefaction has set in. It's getting harder and harder to translate into my own words the worlds I've been plunged into in all of these books.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)

The plight of Lily Bart, Wharton's protagonist, reminded me of Carrie Meeber's plight in Sister Carrie because of the fact that the only way for the women in their world to have money is either to be born into to it or to marry into it. And even when born wealthy and/or married to wealth, women have little to do with how to maintain the funds, so that they are at the mercy of their fathers or husbands. But money wouldn't be such an important issue if neither Lily nor Carrie had expensive tastes, which is something that they can't seem to help.

There are major differences, of course. Lily is born into the upper crust of New York society and raised in luxury, but is impoverished when her father is ruined in business. She then becomes a "poor relation," although her extraordinary beauty keeps her marriageable for years. By the time the novel starts, she's in her late twenties and is starting to feel the pressure to marry and marry well. It seems, despite more than a few offers of marriage from rich men over the last ten years, she has managed to stay unmarried, unwilling to shackle herself to stupid, boring, or boorish men, even if they are wealthy. Her moral standards are high, and she doesn't want to feel like she's selling herself. She's not necessarily looking for love, however; she would rather have both the money and the option to be independent for as long as she likes, which is what is supposed to happen once her great-aunt dies and leaves her the inheritance. But there's no immediate expectation of that happening. Her life takes a turn for the worse, however, and she becomes a "victim of the civilization which produced her" (9) when a rich woman in her set becomes jealous of her relationship with Selden and spreads rumors about how she is a fortune huntress. These rumors prove her downfall as every action she takes in order to remain in the world she grew up in -- where casual high-stakes gambling is a part of every party and beautiful, expensive clothes are absolute necessities -- becomes filtered through these rumors, and her reputation, her primary asset, is torn to shreds by the end.

Yet through the character of Selden, her love interest, we see that Lily is critical of this upper-crust society life as well. Selden, to whom the doors of this high society are open despite his being only a middling lawyer, finds this type of life superficial and imprisoning. He likens it to a "great gilt cage" (59), and indeed it is so for Lily. She would marry Selden except that he could not support her as she would wish, since she is addicted to luxury and a life where "every material difficulty [is] soothed away" (243). Falling in love with Selden, however, intensifies her internal conflicts about this life and causes her to undermine her own strategies to marry a rich man, which would resolve her worries about the future and about the enormous debt she unknowingly incurred through her request to a married male friend to "speculate" on the Stock Exchange on her behalf (the man, Trenor, is sexually interested in her and believes that she is casually proposing sexual relations with him in exchange for pin money).

Money, and its primary influence over everything, is criticized in this novel. This criticism is accomplished through a character who is poor yet culturally and socially still part of the upper class. This distinction between social/cultural and material capital is examined here, and presented as more porous than one would think. Despite the exclusiveness of the upper crust, material wealth stands more than a good chance of breaking into that society. Moreover, the whole system is unfair to women, especially if they have no money, because, as we see in Lily's case, it is easy to strip women of their social capital (such as reputation of good breeding) if they do not have the material capital to buttress and even substitute for it if necessary.

Other comparisons could be made with Henry James's novels in terms of the particular class of people being dealt with, like Daisy Miller, but I have to finish my reading of James later for the specifics.

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

Whereas Norris tackled the Octopus of the railroad Trust, Sinclair offers a "tour" of most of the Trusts in the U.S. while focusing mostly on the meat-packing Trust. The other monopolies he critiques include steel works, transportation, harvesting, and even wheat and the railroad, briefly. He also critiques the political system of Chicago that feeds and renews graft and other forms of corruption, all of which supports the oligarchy of the packing industry: it's all really one big firm (i.e., a monopoly), but with the illusion of several firms competing with each other.

Sinclair's tone is overwrought and melodramatic, emphasizing the constant (and I mean constant) misfortunes of the protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his immigrant Lithuanian family. One by one, his family and friends fall to the predations of the meat-packing industry, and in cycles he gets cheated, gets jobs, loses jobs, goes to jail, becomes a hobo, becomes a criminal, and over again in different contexts -- all as a device to enable the reader to "tour" the different industries that make up American industrial capitalism, the political machinery that helps capitalists exploit the laboring classes, and the underworld of crime and poverty that are produced by this exploitation. His father dies, his wife dies (after being forced to prostitute herself to a boss), even his baby son dies because of the terrible living conditions, housing, and even adulterated food that further weaken the poor.

The Jungle seems more like a soap opera/melodrama that goes on and on circularly until finally we get to the last three or so chapters, when we realize that we've been forced to go through the constant anguish in order to be more receptive to the protagonist's conversion from an ideology of economic individualism and meritocracy to one of socialism. Even the narration in these chapters changes, and it seems more like a series of long speeches and debates about the merits of socialism than an accounting of Jurgis's life.

Some points the book makes: in these kinds of conditions, families cannot survive intact, women are forced to go into prostitution, children are forced to go to work too young and get socialized into brutal street life, the poor get poorer in the process of killing themselves and the rich get richer and more dissolute. There is also a critique of the luring of immigrants to the U.S. to be used as cheap labor whenever the current labor force starts to complain about their exploitation (ah, doesn't this sound familiar even today?). Oh, and of course, the corrupt business practices of the meat-packing industry make you want to stop eating meat for good (this is what the novel is most famous for I believe and led to the reformation of the packers). The novel is part of literary naturalism, with its determinism regarding the ultimate failure of a strong, hard-working, and good-hearted person in a "juggernautical" system like capitalism, but the strong advocacy of socialism at the end seems to offer a way out.

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912)

Published anonymously in 1912, this novel is not an autobiography at all but the first first-person novel in African American letters according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s introduction. Johnson, however, decided to publish anonymously in order to give the narrative a sort of "sociological" weight, i.e., the weight of "truth." It follows the life of a very pale-skinned African American man born of a mulatta mother and a rich white father in an illicit love affair in Georgia, but he grows up to be a gentleman in Connecticut. The protagonist is intelligent, muscially talented, and even vain about his good looks. His natural endowments lead him to succeed in school and to become a popular ragtime pianist in Bohemian New York, to escape from a gambling problem, to travel through Europe as a millionaire's companion, and to meet all classes of people in his search to learn more about the world and about black people's place in it. Under the psychological pressures of the brutality of racism, however, he ultimately decides to pass as white and become a settled businessman in New York, even marrying a white woman and having "white" children (which effectively keeps him publicly silent about his roots because he would do anything "to keep the 'brand' from being placed upon them" [Ch. XI]).

This plot furnishes a way for Johnson to give a "tour" of middle-class African American communities in the North and the South that most white Americans know little about because they only know about African Americans through their popular representations as criminals or minstrel characters. The narrator articulates three classes of African Americans:
1. the "desperate class" of blacks who absolutely hate whites and counter racism with violence; they are "creatures of conditions" and thus not naturally desperate, but they receive the most attention from whites and, though small in proportion to the rest of the African American population, are unfortunately made to represent the whole race
2. the servant class, which is in most contact, even intimate daily contact, with whites as their domestic helpers, nannies and wet nurses, etc.; there is the least friction between whites and this class of blacks
3. the class of "independent workmen and tradesmen" and the "well-to-do and educated" who are as far removed from whites as the first category because whites consider them to be "uppity" and deride them as performing "a sort of monkey-like imitation" of white people; but as the narrator shows, the "society" of this class is much more polished and exclusive than what whites believe
The narrator wants the world to judge African Americans by the best examples of the people, the way other nations are. That they are judged by their worst elements is a thing of tragedy and a sign of the perversity and illogic of racial prejudice. (In this sense, the novel reminds me of anti-colonial Philippine nationalist rhetoric around the same time period.)

Johnson's novel is clearly an attempt to showcase the progress that African Americans have made since emancipation and to celebrate the strengths of their accomplishments especially in music and artistry, even as he demonstrates that racial prejudice still continues to impede such progress. Johnson's metaphor for this is bottle-necking:
I looked out through other eyes, my thoughts were colored, my words dictated, my actions limited by one dominating, all-pervading idea which constantly increased in force and weight until I finally realized in it a great, tangible fact.

And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, nor even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man. It is wonderful to me that the race has progressed so broadly as it has, since most of its thought and all of its activity must run through the narrow neck of one funnel. (Ch. II)
He also riffs on DuBois's "double consciousness" with is own "dual personality" of the black man, in which he must understand himself and the world in two different ways, how he and his race see him and then how whites see him and his race.

Throughout the novel you can see that the narrator takes pride in the accomplishments of his race and idealistically decides to learn more about the folk music and cultures of the South so that he can write music that is true to his black roots yet considered elite/classical art. However, what propels him to abandon this plan to help glorify the race and to pass as white for the rest of his life is the ultimate symbol of racial hate: the lynching. The narrator is completely traumatized by witnessing the burning alive of a black man and decides immediately to leave the South for New York and "forsake" his race:
I argued that to forsake one's race to better one's condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one's country for the same purpose. I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would; that it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead. All the while, I understood that it was not discouragement, or fear, or search for a larger field of action and opportunity, that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. For certainly the law would restrain and punish the malicious burning alive of animals. (Ch. X)

This novel, with its focus on the African American middle class and the use of mulatto characters to dramatize the tragedy of racial hate, reminded me of Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892). A question, though. The fact that the narrator is light-skinned enough to pass into whiteness is necessary for the story in terms of the moral at the end -- the pressures of racial prejudice tragically propel him to abandon his race -- and so that the narration can come from the viewpoint of someone sort of on the margins to enter into the "freemasonry of the race" (Ch. 5) to learn about the various types of black communities in the Northeast and South. But is his being mixed with whiteness incidental or integral to black progress and its celebration in the novel? Or is it another tragedy of the mulatto (the novel ends pretty pessimistically)? Just wondering.

Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)

This one, I'm afraid, is too difficult to summarize. But the novel portrays the grotesquerie and artificiality that Hollywood attracts and produces (pun intended). The character whose perspective frames the novel is Tod Hackett, a scene painter and creative artist who works on movies during the day and dreams about creating his masterpiece which he calls The Burning of Los Angeles. He is in love with Faye Greener, a beautiful but vacuous, self-centered, and superficial wanna-be who can't act. Hollywood's grotesquerie is not just the sideshow characters, vaudevillians, and petty scam artists, but also the rich people who have made their money off of this huge industry, spend unbelievable sums of money on realistic rubber sculptures of dead horses to put at the bottom of their swimming pool for fun, and delight in all forms of immorality to relieve their boredom. All of the characters in the novel seem to be emotionally deficient in some way. Homer Simpson (I guess this is where Matt Groening got the name from!), for example, a Midwesterner who goes to California for his health, craves stability and can only dully engage with the world. Intense emotion oversets him completely, including sexual desire. His hands are the only things on him that are alive, and they have a life of their own, almost as if they enact what he represses in himself, and he must somehow physically control them if they start to do something independent of his will.

Homer is in love with Faye, too, and when her father dies, he takes her in and furnishes her with expensive clothes and a car so that she can more easily get into films. It looks like he's set her up as his mistress, but there is no sexual contact and she is merely taking advantage of his generosity. Even after she turns cruel, he still loves her and accepts her treatment of him. One night, a party goes terribly wrong. It features a disturbing cockfight scene that seems to be an allegory for several things, take your pick -- it's a fixed fight, one of the roosters is fixed so that there is a hairline crack on his beak, he's older and slower than the other rooster, and he is sent into the fighting ring anyway, basically to die. Several fights break out over Faye, who is the only woman in a company of six or seven men (and she seems to purposely stir things up), and she leaves Homer for good.

Anyway, after this Homer is a benumbed wreck and tries immediately to leave California, but Tod finds him aimlessly wandering around Hollywood and tries to help him. However, the novel ends with a scene of terrible violence, and Homer probably dies: a large gathering of fans, awaiting the stars at a movie premier, turns into a mob (the locusts of the novel's title?) when they see Homer attacking an evil little boy who threw a rock in his face and woke him up roaring from his stupor. This last scene, I believe, dramatizes that underneath the artificiality of everything lies a bubbling, seething mass of anger and desperation that takes one little trigger to send it into full boil. It's utter mayhem and Tod gets swept away from Homer and is almost trampled himself. He even has to save a woman from being stripped naked and mauled in the midst of the mob.

It was a short book and I was glad when it was over. What a lot of unsympathetic characters! This is the narcissistic, dissolute Hollywood that most people despise, and that colors their whole imagination of L.A. I haven't read anything like this before; other representations of L.A. around the same time, like Bulosan's American Is in the Heart (which admittedly doesn't focus on L.A. at all), refer to the manual laborers in the city, not the people somehow connected to the movie-making industry. I can only think of Hollywood films that focus (narcissistically?) on Hollywood itself that would be comparable. The recent film about Howard Hughes, The Aviator (2005), and various early Hollywood films show the sectors/sections of L.A. that Nathanael West does; West, by the way, was also a Hollywood screenwriter before writing this particular novel.

It's definitely not the L.A. that I grew up in, and not the people I've known, although Hollywood was always there. [Warning: going on a tangent] It reminded me of all the posers I saw congregating for the premiere of that Vaughn-Aniston film The Break-Up in Westwood last Monday, when PJ and I were forced to go around the barricades set up to prevent the 'little people' from getting too close to the stars. And I mean literally little, too. I can't remember ever seeing so many tall stick-like white men and women in one place. The women had masks of make-up on, and while many were undeniably good-looking, their interaction -- walking down the street and 'accidentally' running into acquaintances as if they hadn't expected to see and be seen -- was so fake, so like what you imagine after watching so many films with bad actors. Since I had started reading Locust by then, I was superimposing Faye Greener on all of them, men and women.

Blogs: Text, Clause, Process

2006-05-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

Adding several blogs I've been following lately. I've been appreciating the questions these bloggers raise and the various but engaging processes by which they flesh out their intellectual, poetic, and writerly concerns: Textual Life, rebel without a clause, disordered thought processes.

Back To Writing Manhood

2006-05-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

After more thought, I became a little troubled by this particular part of my reading of Kim's book in the previous post:

Kim's argument is that the "homophobic symbolism" in Chin's (and Chan, Inada, and Wong's) writings is actually integral to the strength of its antiracist rhetoric:
Where previous studies have done an effective job of "outing" the homophobia of cultural nationalism, they have not attended sufficiently to the figural complexity of its articulation, a complexity that must be understood to grasp how it is able to effectively mobilize the affective investments of its readers. (xxii)
But of course this is not an ahistorical value judgment in any way, as if to say that homophobia and antiracism will always go hand in hand. Rather, this is more a critique of 20th-century American society itself and the way that too many people are successfully swayed by this homophobic rhetoric. Because I didn't read the other half of Kim's book, I'm not sure if he ever makes this societal critique clear. But I find useful here the term that Susan Koshy introduced to me, "metacultural intelligibility," a term which historicizes seemingly ahistorical or universal cultural tropes that are prevalent in particular periods of time, like homophobia, for instance -- which, unfortunately, is still prevalent today, even though people should know better by now. Well, this is precisely why queer studies and feminist gender studies (especially at the intersections with race and ethnic studies) are so important.

In the above, I said that his is more a societal critique of homophobia, but actually, according to his theoretical insights stemming from Fanon, the binary of sexual difference "abets" the binary of black vs white racism, so that in a sense the homophobic symbolism becomes a "natural" reaction to racism -- at least in the case of white racism against blacks. So, in other words, racism and homophobia DO go hand and hand simply because of the nature of anti-black racism, if we follow Fanon's thinking.

But this begs the question, then: is Fanon's account of racism the only type of racism around? Or is this simply one of the most powerful and prevalent type among several types and therefore the one that black nationalists in the U.S. responded to most?

Kim would say no to the first question, I believe, though I'm not sure about the second. This is where the discontinuities between the racializing discourses about black and yellow manhood come in. As apparent from Kim's own account of white racism against Asians (specifically in his reading of the Fu Manchu stories and films in Chapter 3), the case of Asians -- at least in the British and U.S. contexts -- shows that the "binary" of sexual difference is no binary at all but a kind of continuum of femininity that may or may not be desirable. According to Kim's reading of Frank Chin's writing, one important difference structures the imposition of femininity on the Asian male body, in contrast to the black male body: it is that the imposed/imagined/projected femininity of the Asian man is not desired by the white man in the way that the imposed/imagined/projected femininity of the black man is desired by the white man:

In the end, what fuels Chin's outrage -- what leads him essentially to call the white man a "faggot" -- is not the presence of homosexual desire for the yellow man in "the white Christian's racial wetdream" but rather its absence. What throws the yellow man's lack of racialized manhood into relief is the white man's lack of a phobically charged sexual desire for him. Fanon's analyses of white racial fantasies lead him to conclude that for the white man the Negro is a penis -- that the black man signifies for the white man all the masculine plenitude he feels himself to lack; Ellison's analyses of white male racial psychology lead to similar conclusions. In contrast, what Chin sees in the popular texts that would seem to depict white male racial fantasy is not an analogous sexual desire for the yellow man but rather a relative indifference. Fu [Manchu] is apparently "not so much a threat as he is a frivolous offense to white manhood" because he does not signify for the white man a terrifying phallic manhood worthy of desire or emulation. (142)

So being feminine versus masculine isn't the whole picture. There are different kinds of femininity, at least two here (and these are both, in my understanding, dependent on Freud's notion of the fetish, but I won't go into it here): there's desirable but "phobically charged" femininity, one imposed because of the white man's desire for the black male; and undesirable femininity, one imposed because the Asian male is below the white male's notice, signifying more thoroughly his phallic lack because he's not even an object of desire. (By the way, is this what makes Frank Chin's writing seem so shrill, this outrage about not being 'fuckable' to the white man?)

Daniel Kim's Writing Manhood In Black And Yellow

2006-05-23T05:56:00.000-07:00

I met up with my Asian Americanist reading group at UCLA yesterday, where we talked about the Preface, Introduction, and Chapters 1 and 3 (which is about half) of Daniel Kim's Writing Manhood In Black And Yellow. The "verdict"? The four of us really, really liked what we read. It was a lot to read, and of course it gets tiring to read 40-page chapters (even the Intro was that long!), but it was a real pleasure to be convinced by such meticulous theoretical argumentation and excellent close readings. The methodological approach was part of the pleasure for me: Kim relies heavily on a psychoanalytic approach (a la Fanon, Fuss, and Freud -- the three F's!), but without losing a strong connection to the historical and the material. It's a kind of structuralism that I find convincing because of its attentiveness to the historical contexts in which the writers (Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin) were writing. And the focus on rhetorical figures, spatiality, and directionality -- in short, form -- as well as the argument about how these writers approached the literary and the aesthetic as political spaces satisfy the literary-minded ethnic studies critic in me.

What I thought was the book's particular strength regarding Asian American cultural criticism was its attempt to seriously and directly deal with the homophobic qualities of Frank Chin's writing -- "to understand how an antiracist cultural politics comes to articulate itself with instead of against homophobia" (xxii, my bold, italics in original) -- instead of dismissing him and his work because of them. The need for this particular intervention, he suggests, stems from the need to understand the strange "seductive allure" (xxii) that this "homophobic symbolism" (xxii) seems to have for the young college students he teaches despite his attempts to critique such rhetoric:

[T]he political ideal toward which our writing and teaching is directed [...] is to promote antiracist "interethnic identifications and alliances" that cut against the most narrow and essentialist forms of identity politics. But as many of us are aware, the forms of identity politics that were so crucial to the [ethnic studies] field's inception -- those associated with cultural nationalism -- can continue to take on a more than spectral presence in the minds of the students we teach and in the coalitions we try to encourage. (xix)

Having been a college student myself engaged in identity politics, I know what he's talking about.

Kim's argument is that the "homophobic symbolism" in Chin's (and Chan, Inada, and Wong's) writings is actually integral to the strength of its antiracist rhetoric:

Where previous studies have done an effective job of "outing" the homophobia of cultural nationalism, they have not attended sufficiently to the figural complexity of its articulation, a complexity that must be understood to grasp how it is able to effectively mobilize the affective investments of its readers. (xxii)

But of course this is not an ahistorical value judgment in any way, as if to say that homophobia and antiracism will always go hand in hand. Rather, this is more a critique of 20th-century American society itself and the way that too many people are successfully swayed by this homophobic rhetoric. Because I didn't read the other half of Kim's book, I'm not sure if he ever makes this societal critique clear. But I find useful here the term that Susan Koshy introduced to me, "metacultural intelligibility," a term which historicizes seemingly ahistorical or universal cultural tropes that are prevalent in particular periods of time, like homophobia, for instance -- which, unfortunately, is still prevalent today, even though people should know better by now. Well, this is precisely why queer studies and feminist gender studies (especially at the intersections with race and ethnic studies) are so important.

What I found particularly virtuosic in Kim's book was his reading and revision of some of Fanon's "axioms." He seemed very much influenced by Diana Fuss here, whose own readings of Freud and Fanon are exquisite (see Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Culture). Here is an example of an axiom one can glean from Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks:

"whites look at blacks in much the same way that men look at women" (4)

But given the text's gendered "unconscious" (it is a "deeply masculinist and homosocial text" [4]), Kim revises Fanon's axiom thus:

"that white men look at black men in much the same way that men look at women -- as bodies whose alterity is signaled by the wounds of castration they bear" (5)

So according to Fanon, the imposition of racial difference is always subtended by the imposition of sexual difference. Ah! Brilliant! But Kim's revision offers a better, more nuanced understanding of this relationship. This relationship is the impetus, then, for the rejection of homosexuality, which black nationalists like Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver see as the "perverse" motivation of white males' racism, along the lines of Fanon's "depiction of the white male racist as a 'repressed homosexual'" (14). After this theoretical articulation and his great readings of Baraka and Cleaver, the arguments in the following chapters on Ellison and Chin flow quite (if not perfectly) smoothly.

During the reading group discussion, JL noted something about the possible "unconscious" of Kim's own text, which is that, in its success in showing the many different forms of homosexual/homosocial/homophobic figurations along a continuum, it might rely too much on a naturalized binary between genders and sexes, i.e., feminine/masculine, male/female. I thought this was a great question, because it made us discuss more closely the rhetorical structures that Kim identifies. In particular, JL wondered whether this was Kim's "unconscious," or a result of the forms of homophobic rhetoric that he identifies in Ellison's and Chin's writings. We weren't sure at the time. See, one of the results of Kim's argument is that the race of any of the female characters in the writings becomes irrelevant; what is of primary or sole importance is their femininity, characterized as the penetrability of their bodies, from which the Asian American or African American man attempts to distance himself because otherwise it means submitting to the homosexual desire of the white man for the black man (which is the sign of the white male's perverse racism) and becoming homsexual himself. So we weren't sure if this was unconscious on Kim's part, a kind of uncritical adherence to certain of Chin's and Ellison's sensibilities. Or perhaps that it is exactly the point, that for Chin and Ellison the race of their other, the female (or, better, the feminine), is of little matter.

Some of us thought this might be Kim's blindspot, but I subsequently found a couple of short passages that, even out of context (which, by the way, is his discussion of Robert E. Park), suggest otherwise:

"[A] binarized mode of thinking drawn from the putatively natural presupposition of sexual difference abets the construction of a black/white conception of racial difference" (73).

"The binarizing impetus that is released when an account of racial identity is couched in the language of gender seems to colonize, as it were, any other categories of identity introduced into that account" (81).

Anyway, I'd like to finish the other half of the book when I have more time.

Sundry

2006-05-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

I'm still childish enough to do this.

I just counted the number of pages I read in the last two weeks, after (i.e., not including) Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. And the result? A whopping 1,965 pages. (This number is of course dependent on the particular editions that I have, and it doesn't include any endnotes, prefaces, afterwords, secondary criticism, and literary histories/biographies that I read during the same time period.) Anyway, I'm doing this to make myself feel better; given the current versions of my lists, I actually need to be reading at a faster pace in order to finish my lists, basically averaging a novel a day, yet I only managed to get through half of what I was hoping for (7 out of 14 -- well, 7.5 by Sunday night). I should have taken some American lit classes as an undergrad. I feel like I'm starting from scratch here. Oh well.

I must still, however, cut down my lists. They're far too sprawling right now, hence this anxiety over "plowing through" the texts. (By the way, many people have used this term, "plowing through," to refer to reading for orals, yet it reminds me of Frank Norris's sexualization and gendering of farm labor in The Octopus, vigorous, male-operated farm plows penetrating and seeding the earth's "womb," etc. Shudder.)

###
An item, for those of you out there interested in literary studies attentive to the politics of writing, African American and Asian American studies, analyses of masculinity in cultural nationalism, gender studies, and queer studies: for my reading group on Monday, I'm going to be reading three chapters of Daniel Kim's (professor of English and Ethnic Studies at Brown University) new book, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity. I've read the Preface already, and it is probably one of the best prefaces I've read; it makes a great case for the critic's intentions in writing the book and titillates with some of the premises/surmises to be found in the arguments later on. In particular: in Ralph Ellison's and Frank Chin's texts, he reads "homosexuality as a signifier" and aims to parse the "figural complexity of this homophobic symbolism" and to account for the "seductive allure that this symbolism possesses -- a symbolism that links antiracism with homophobia" (xxii).

People have been waiting a long time for this one to come out, actually. And I honestly believe it's the first of its kind in Asian American criticism and research. I'm expecting brilliant things already, which is probably unfair, so I'll try not to be too disappointed if it doesn't do what it sets out to do.