anti-racism

Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:19:00 +0000

Interwar Paris conjures up images of romance and renewal. From the ashes and rubble of the First World War, families reunite and rebuild under what seemed to be the end of the most dire of circumstances. Unfortunately, Colonial Metropolis fails to capture this magic, and yet it is an extremely thoughtful and methodical review of the local primary source material available, and would serve as a very strong academic referral source.

The author, Jennifer Anne Boittin, has a clear passion for the subject matter and conveys this well through her enthusiastic descriptions of the characters of the period who populated the anti-colonialism and feminist movements. The problem, for me, stems from the fact that we never feel the interaction between these players. These characters never seem to weave together into the larger story of feminist and anti-colonial activism, the tale that Boittin is seemed so hopeful to tell at the outset of the book.

Boittin lifts directly from the historical record to bring a multitude of characters from this period to life, but none so well as that as Josephine Baker. Pages and pages are dedicated to bringing her tantalizing and mischievous performances to life. Imagine the dedication and zeal of Marina Abramović crossed with the free wheeling sexual spirit of Isadora Duncan. Who wouldn’t want to be warped back to the front row for that show of an old theater in Paris?

With these high sensory moments scattered throughout, readers catch glimpses of the time gone by that was advertised to them, but even the best of these moments failed to sustain me from page to page. Clearly, Boittin’s integrity to the historical record speaks to her virtues as an academic; it just doesn’t make for a particularly interesting read.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, August 2nd 2010

The Promise of Happiness

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:03:00 +0000

By Sara Ahmed

Duke University Press

In the introduction to her new book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed asks readers a provocative question: “Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?” Ahmed takes on the elusive topic of happiness not to define it, but to look at how it works. Amazingly, this book does not get trapped in abstraction. Sara Ahmed approaches her critique of happiness with explicitly feminist, anti-racist, and queer analysis, always attentive to the historical moment in which she’s writing. She moves through what she calls an “archive of happiness,” comprised of novels, philosophical treatises, films, utopian proposals, and dystopian visions that all deal in some way with happiness.

In the first chapter, the author reads older European philosophical and psychological accounts of happiness, many of them concerned with the family as a site of happiness. This history of ideas sets the groundwork for the ways in which happiness is constructed in contemporary times. Ahmed introduces the figure of the “affect alien” as a person who challenges the happy family ideal. This figure takes shape in the next three chapters in the form of “feminist killjoys,” “unhappy queers,” and “melancholy migrants.”

These chapters demonstrate how happiness gets used as a form of social control. In looking at how feminists challenge the notion that people are naturally happiest in rigid gender roles, Ahmed writes, “The struggle over happiness forms the political horizon in which feminist claims are made.” Her reading of the classic novel The Well of Loneliness considers how an unhappy ending for a queer main character opens up a possibility for social critique that a “happy” one might not. In her reading of the film Bend It Like Beckham, Ahmed asks why certain kinds of rebellion (say, against one’s immigrant parents) get celebrated in mainstream film while other kinds (say, against British imperialism) don’t. She also recasts the age-old parental plea of “I just want you to be happy,” as a way in which a child is obligated to be happy in order to make the parent happy (a kind of debt).

In concluding chapters, Ahmed cleverly turns her gaze to the future by looking at the varied promises of happiness presented in speculative fiction. Dystopian visions, such as Ursula LeGuin’s short story “The People Who Walked Away from Omelas,” can show how insidiously the happiness of the majority might be used to justify cruelty toward the marginalized. Ahmed acknowledges that positioning happiness as a goal has disturbing implications. She suggests a new approach to living: “...if we no longer presume happiness is our telos, unhappiness would register as more than what gets in the way. When we are no longer sure of what gets in the way, then ‘the way’ itself becomes a question.” In her conclusion, Ahmed uses the word hap (itself so much more buoyant in sound than the heavy happiness) as a way to work through new ideas at the level of language.

Ahmed writes in her introduction, “To kill joy... is to open a life, to make room for possibility, for chance. My aim in this book is to make room.” I think Sara Ahmed succeeds in her project. Fresh in its premises and elegant in its follow-through, with plenty of incisive questions to move it along, The Promise of Happiness offers new lenses on an emotion rarely challenged. I suggest you make room for it on your shelf.

Written by: Vani Natarajan, July 7th 2010

Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Katherine Mellen Charron

University of North Carolina Press

When Septima Clark began teaching in 1919, she quickly learned that good education is very much like community organizing. Both start by identifying pressing needs, involve the affected in formulating solutions, and give them a stake in the final outcome. Freedom's Teacher tells Clark’s story, and while the writing is drily academic, the book is an important reminder that each of us can make a dent in the status quo.

Clark was a teacher’s teacher, a skilled motivator and a driven, hard-working, proponent of human equality and the power of the classroom to encourage and provoke social change. Her personal life was not easy—her husband died young and she was forced to send her son to live with his paternal grandparents—but her ability to shift gears and accept new opportunities, even in late middle age, is inspiring.

Born to working class parents, her first job was on Johns Island, a tiny underdeveloped farm community off the coast of South Carolina. Clark did not go to the island by choice. In fact, the position was the only placement she could find since her native city, Charleston, refused to hire African Americans to teach in the city’s segregated schools. Johns Island, populated by largely illiterate Black farmers, challenged the fledgling educator whose would-be students lived in such intense poverty that they had to work in the fields instead of attending classes.

But what to do? Clark understood that getting islanders to allow their children to study would be difficult so she began going door to door, speaking about the benefits of formal coursework. “At every turn, Charron writes, “success mandated creativity.” It also mandated that Clark get involved in people’s everyday lives, not only learning Gullah, but also helping them write letters, fill out forms, and determine crop prices and proper wages. What’s more, free evening literacy classes for adults—taught by Clark—gave residents the tools to expand their options. Decades later, Clark brought this experience to the civil rights movement, crafting adult literacy classes to activate and empower those who attended.

The few years Clark spent on Johns Island radicalized her, and Charron describes Clark’s increased agitation over the miserable conditions her students had to contend with, including a decrepit, unheated school building, inadequate supplies, and non-existent text books. Protests against racial disparities set her on a course that would last six-plus decades. Furthermore, her quest for justice prompted her to get involved in numerous civic and civil rights groups including the Highlander Folk School, the YWCA, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Citizenship Education Program [CEP].

Women formed the crux of the CEP, teaching unschooled southerners how to pass literacy tests so that they could vote and then discussing everything from racist laws to activist strategies for changing them. Clark was the force behind much of the CEP’s work, toiling behind the scenes but receiving few accolades for her intrepid work.

Unfazed, Clark never lost sight of the big picture, continually condemning government spending on war and the concomitant failure to provide adequate funds “to end joblessness, slum conditions, and to correct educational deprivation in the ghettos.” Similarly, she never lost her faith in movements for world betterment and her cautious optimism—which lasted until her death in 1987—was infectious.

Clark’s example reminds us that change is never linear or free of backlash. While she picked her battles, Clark knew the importance of nonviolent resistance. As she saw it, watching from the sidelines was never an option.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, January 25th 2010

Black Male Outsider: Teaching as a Pro-Feminist Man

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:16:00 +0000

By Gary L. Lemons

SUNY Press

In this compelling, readable volume that is part memoir, part classroom case study Dr. Gary L. Lemons employs the theme of moving from silence to voice, and what this means for anti-racist, feminist pedagogy. He eloquently writes about his experiences teaching and learning in majority white classrooms as a pro-feminist, African American man.

Filled with the citations from work that has inspired and supported his pedagogy—such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Marlon Riggs, and Patricia Hill Collins, as well as quotes from the many critical autobiographical writings Lemons assigned to his students—Black Male Outsider is a powerful memoir and teaching tool. He offers educators at all levels effective strategies they can adapt to their own classrooms to teach and learn across difference and is one of the most compelling books on this subject to come out in some time.

For thirteen years Lemons was a professor at a small, progressive, liberal arts college in New York City. His book highlights his classroom strategies to challenge students to confront the interrelated forces of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, often through teaching black, feminist literature. He also highlights how he worked to encourage students to come to a deeper understanding of the ways white supremacy has shaped American culture. To further illuminate his path to being a pro-feminist educator, Lemons also delves deeply into his own personal history of growing up in Arkansas and surviving domestic violence perpetrated by his father.

Lemons, whose doctorate is in English literature, is adept with language, and he plays with it throughout the book. Unfortunately, his many italics, parentheses, and quotation marks—while making a strong point about how institutionalized power inhabits the very language we speak—become a distraction from his otherwise clear prose. They threaten to become too cutesy for the depth with which he addresses his subjects.

Fortunately, Lemons and the students whose work he quotes provide powerful examples and testimony of the possibilities teaching across difference offers. He demonstrates how one can find strength in difference that resists a banal, depoliticized celebration of multiculturalism. He also powerfully makes the case that men can and must be feminist advocates and allies.

As Lemons writes in the conclusion, his book "promotes black feminist memoir-writing pedagogy that opposes all forms of domination, and it promotes the critical necessity of one’s movement from silence to voice about the effects of its dehumanization—personally and politically." Lemons bravery in confronting the violence social injustices wreak on society in his teaching and in his writing will serve his readers alike and equip them with knowledge a theoretical framework in which they can formulate their own ideas of how to heal from the wounds of white supremacy in their own lives.

Written by: Eleanor Whitney, April 10th 2009