race

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives

gwen — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

As a feminist concerned with social justice, in the past year or so I’ve become convinced that dismantling the prison-industrial complex should be a top priority amongst feminists.

This anthology, Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex, edited by Stephen John Hartnett, argues as much, stressing that this very goal “should be at the head of a new human rights agenda for the twenty-first century.” In making this argument, the anthology is comprised of two sections of essays: “Diagnosing the Crisis” and “Practical Solutions, Visionary Alternatives.” The anthology further incorporates artwork and poetry by those who know the dehumanization and injustice of the system firsthand – those incarcerated – in an attempt to “remind readers that the prison-industrial complex does not house monsters but humans.”

The first section addresses how the United States of America has become a “punishing democracy.” That is, a democracy that spends more on prisons than on public education and spends more on punishment than on rehabilitation. In “Diagnosing the Crisis,” the authors note how we became a country with countless prisons and a swelling prison population. Several authors cite the “war on drugs” as a historical policy shift, one which paved the way for zero-tolerance policies which heavily affect – and actually target – communities comprised of poor and working class people of color.

Other essays in this section address how the defunding of public education and social programs works to benefit the prison-industrial complex. I especially appreciated Rose Braz’s and Myesha Williams’ essay “Diagnosing the Schools-to-Prisons Pipeline: Maximum Security, Minimum Learning,” which clarifies how the term high school “dropout” is misleading. They suggest replacing it with “pushout” – a term that more accurately conveys how the current public education system (due to issues of defunding and racism) betrays students of color from at-risk communities and practically ensures their entry into the criminal justice system.

The second half of Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex offers hope and ideas for change through activism and the arts. Essays underscore the need for educational opportunities in prisons, as university professors take it upon themselves to offer college-level courses, GED preparation courses, and college entry exam courses to inmates. Several essays also demonstrate the empowering effects of offering creative workshops and classes to inmates.

These essays detail the hard work, tribulations, and results of providing playwriting workshops in prisons as well as enlisting inmates to stage Shakespearean plays. Such activism provides opportunities for inmates to reclaim their humanity and their voices, as well as provides communities a glimpse into the prison-industrial complex and the people caught up in the system.

The inmates’ artwork and poetry are powerful additions to this anthology. As with any academic text related to social justice, there is the possibility of elevating so-called experts’ thoughts and voices on an issue while simultaneously silencing or absenting the voices of the very people affected the most. Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex seeks to create a balance between the two, in which voices of those both inside and outside the system work in tandem to convey a greater realization of what is happening in our schools, in our communities, and in our prisons.

Ultimately, the conversation surrounding dismantling the prison-industrial complex needs to be happening outside the walls of academia. This is an issue that relates to racism, classism, immigration reform, youth, budget spending, the militarization of our police forces, racist and inaccurate media coverage, the privatization of prisons, physical as well as sexual violence within our prisons, and the disenfranchisement of entire communities across the country – just to name a few. Feminists should be taking an active role in this fight. Abolishing the prison-industrial complex should be routinely discussed and debated on feminist blogs and in feminist publications alongside our efforts to end sexual violence and our fight for reproductive rights.

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex provides a framework for this discussion as well as steps to dismantle the system. We should all heed the authors’ warnings and advice and work together to reimagine a new democracy.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, April 27th 2011

Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions

annette — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Kimberly N. Ruffin

University of Georgia Press

African American literary contribution to the national conception of nature, in all of its symbolic ambiguity and historical twists and turns, is a subject that has been little studied. In fact, African American writers have contributed profoundly to our popular understanding of nature and to our ecological concern. Kimberly Ruffin’s book must confront the notion that modern ecological movements have been the exclusive province of privileged white people—that African American people have had little to do with the natural world as writers or advocates. To challenge this assumption, she redefines nature and ecological thought as it has applied to the experience of African American people throughout American history, as articulated by artists both well known and obscure.

This transformation in our understanding begins with a recent anecdote concerning the “Jena Six” incident in Louisiana in 2006. When high school students sought shade under what had been designated “the white tree,” they were subsequently threatened with nooses hanging from it. A tree is, indeed, a source of comfort, a sign of natural beauty with practical value. But it is also—sorry, Joyce Kilmer—emblematic of lynching and a history of terror aimed at African American people. The author points out that rather than preserving the tree as a “troubled relic,” school officials cut it down, presumably in an effort to prevent further trouble and to erase this living monument to racial injustice.

If many African Americans have felt estranged from mainstream environmentalism, Ruffin argues, it is because people themselves—“the most precious of natural resources”—seem to have been excluded from the discourse. The author cites Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement as a model for a new way of thinking about environmentalism, a “human-sensitive” activism that advocates simultaneously for people and the land. She argues that people of African descent have had both the burden and the blessing of being themselves seen as natural; whereas too often people of European descent have viewed themselves as radically separate from nature, a realm to be tamed and controlled or, later, to be visited for leisure.

Another critical point that she makes is that pre-twentieth-century Americans knew nature through work. The connection to the land was forged through labor, with both the body and the landscape part of the same “bioregion.” Similarly, nature has been inextricably involved in human efforts to achieve social justice and to escape from enslavement. She demonstrates that environmental degradation has disproportionately harmed the disenfranchised, but a detailed knowledge of the environment was instrumental, for example, in helping enslaved people establish routes to freedom. African American writing also reveals the extent to which the natural world provided sources of healing—the “wild-growing medicines” that are so much a part of cultural tradition and folklore.

Ruffin revisits the contributions of George Washington Carver, whose intense scrutiny of the natural world led to a unified view of science and religion, a balance between practical knowledge of the natural world and human spirituality. This balance is displayed in the myths written into the African American ecoliterary traditions about food and medicine and many different aspects of life, and they still are made manifest in community urban gardens, for example. The ultimate aim is an environmentalism that fully incorporates social justice as its aim, a natural world that includes humanity.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 17th 2011

Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America

mandy — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Sara Dubow

Oxford University Press

Sara Dubow navigates the complexities of an impassioned and divisive issue in Ourselves Unborn. She takes a calculated historical look at how Americans have interpreted the fetus and pregnancy throughout ever-shifting political realities. Her thesis: Americans have cast their social and cultural anxieties onto the fetus, which often results in abortion-related policies that serve ulterior motives.

Dubow explains that, for centuries, Americans’ insecurities about racial, social, and economic issues were projected onto the bodies of pregnant women. In the nineteenth century, for example, when White Americans were consumed with taking over western territories, abortion politics became paramount. Women were urged to reproduce in order to populate the expanding country, and the fetus became not a private symbol of a growing family, but a social symbol of a growing nation. Racial tensions about the decreasing fertility rate among White Protestant women were played out on the fetus, and women’s role as mothers became even more of a national imperative.

I’m glad the author points out that these biased sentiments are not linked to one historical moment; instead, she writes that this theme resonates in recent Islamophobic statements about the need for Christian women to increase their fertility rates to match those of Muslim women.

Dubow explains the many ways in which otherwise inexplicable phenomena were projected onto the fetus. Unsure about the scientific and medical aspects of human development, social ills were found to be rooted in pregnancy. Dubow shares information about how social problems from drunkenness to criminality were traced back to mothers’ emotional states during pregnancy. The mother was always the culprit.

Stretching into the twentieth century, Ourselves Unborn is punctuated by cases where pregnant women were considered medically incompetent. These cases highlight how the medical and legal professions painted pregnancy as a mysterious state where the fetus takes precedent and a woman becomes simply a vessel for new life. Dubow describes how the “fetal pain” and “abortion trauma” mantras of the 1980s played into this narrative.

Dubow ends her discussion with the 2007 Gonzalez v. Carhart case, a 5-4 decision that upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act without an exception for the health of the woman. The decision portrays Dubow's points with stark clarity, as Justice Kennedy supports his decision is by claiming the Court is protecting women from a decision they would later regret. Readers can understand that Kennedy is not concerned with the unborn, but with the proper place of women in society. That proper place, as dictated by centuries of policy, is a child-bearer.

Using Dubow’s lens, today’s abortion controversies relate to larger questions about the interplay of race and gender in American politics. This can be seen in the GOP’s recent attacks on Planned Parenthood and state laws that curtail abortion rights. Dubow’s theories illustrate how these and similar anti-abortion efforts stem more from policymakers' discomfort with women’s agency in making their own medical choices rather than from a sincere desire to protect fetuses.

Written by: Andrea Gittleman, April 7th 2011

The Magic Children: Racial Identity at the End of the Age of Race

farhana — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Roger Echo-Hawk

Left Coast Press

“I used to think that I was Indian. The world was filled with magic children, living in America under the spell of race. But one day I learned that racial identity was just something to imagine about myself, and I devoted several years of careful thought on the matter. Then shortly, before that century turned into this one, before the old millennium became a young one, I decided to give it up.” —Roger Echo-Hawk, The Magic Children

So begins Roger Echo-Hawk’s exploration of the deconstruction of race in his personal account of identity, ultimately ending with his abandonment of the concept of race. He examines the fact that race has been scientifically discredited by biologists, geneticists, and anthropologists yet society continues to allow the idea of race to thrive. Echo-Hawk emphasizes that race is an inherently dehumanizing concept therefore; racial identity must be rejected in order to embrace a larger acceptance of humanity. “Race tells us a lie—a lie that defaces the true nature of humanity,” Echo-Hawk notes. The concept of race is oversimplified in order to categorize people (or divide) without considering the complex uniqueness of heritage.

Echo-Hawk’s journey into his past and an exploration of his mixed heritage of being White, Indian, and Mexican shapes The Magic Children. These terms reflect on his life once early childhood teaches him a lesson that follows him throughout the course of his adulthood: that he is viewed differently because of his “race” (essentially, the color of his skin). Roger Echo-Hawk questions terms like Mexican (as it reflects national citizenship and not race) as well as Hispanic (as it implies ethnicity and culture but not race). His separation of racial identity is not as complex as the ideology of race as Echo-Hawk carries us through his lifetime in an array of short stories that leads the reader to an understanding of how race has affected his life. These interweaving stories include young Echo-Hawk as a schoolboy, throughout his hippie and college years and later on his reflection on life changing moments. As a student who has participated in programs that assists minority students with funding, Echo-Hawk’s analysis of being an “Indian” in Boulder, Colorado was personally profound to me as it depicted the way in which the education system continues to utilize race negatively. For instance, the rejection of race can have severe repercussions. Hypothetically, a minority student who abandons the idea of “race” and does not fit the standards for funding based on under-representation in a certain field faces the risk of being excluded from assistance that may be vital to their future successes.

The urge to integrate one’s journey with Echo-Hawk’s is inevitable. His understanding, acceptance and the freedom that he has found with embracing the non existence of a racial identity is almost ideal. Echo-Hawk encourages the reader to step outside of one identity and explore not just the various complex identities that reside in all of us but also the identities that are assigned to us by outsiders. The Magic Children is a journey of recognizing those differences as an external factor and uniting to demobilize race by denying it the power to construct our social realities. Everyone’s journey is different, the process of being under the “spell” of race is complex but the ability to free oneself from the confines of a label that segregates humanity is in itself the magic that will help us all move beyond racial identity.

Written by: Aneesa A. Baboolal, March 28th 2011

How Cancer Crossed the Color Line

annette — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 05:00:00 +0000

By Keith Wailoo

Oxford University Press

Cancer—a disease signifying White civilization? A disease of the domesticated female? An indifferent, “democratic disease”? Or, a targeted attack on specific racial and ethnic communities? These varying assertions and many more have populated America’s cancer discourse over the last century, fading in and out as the dominant way to comprehend the disease’s victimization.

Perhaps easier now than ever to agree that cancer (in all its types) indiscriminately permeates all racial, gender, ethnic, religious (etc.) groups, Keith Wailoo, a professor of history and director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, shows us how this was not always believed to be the case. How Cancer Crossed the Color Line traces the trajectory of cancer in America, from awareness, to prevention and treatment, drawing a critical link between medical advancements and socio-political shifts in gender and race understanding.

Beginning with early discussions from 1910-1930s, Wailoo notes the “birth of a dichotomy in American cancer awareness—[with] the emergence of a disparity between how experts, organizations, and communities worried about cancer awareness in white [women] as an individualized inner psychological issue, and how they worried over blacks as a demographic type, paying little attention to inner sensibilities.” This dichotomy is only the beginning, however. Drawing on a myriad of primary sources, from medical findings, popular culture, individual stories, and political advocacy, Wailoo makes a case for just how entrenched and beholden cancer rhetoric is (and has been) to dynamic shifts in our cultural understanding of race and gender.

Roughly moving decade to decade, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line charts the impact that historical events like World War II and the Civil Rights Movement, as well as social shifts like acknowledging ethnic diversity and socioeconomic disparities, have had on cancer awareness. Scrutinizing race and gender’s varying impact on dictating medical research, analysis of findings, and diffusion into the public sphere, Wailoo posits that although cancer is an indiscriminate disease, it has never really existed in a vacuum, as it has always been studied and interpreted by people, unavoidably beholden to a certain set of values and beliefs.

Although not necessarily a light read, Wailoo does an excellent job of conveying a dense amount of information in a comprehensible way, for academics and non-academics alike. And for those of you who may be a bit more academic, the text is meticulously cited, providing a wealth of primary source material in the endnotes for continued investigation.

Bottom line, I love this book. I admit, I am a nerd who really appreciates all efforts that seek to debunk the notion that race, gender, sexuality, and such do not play fundamental roles in dictating how we have come to understand aspects of our modern lives that we too often believe to be “beyond” identity and group differences—like medicine, science, and even technology. Despite seeming to be infallible sources of truth, each of these areas are unavoidably saturated with and influenced by our sociocultural beliefs and discriminations.

Keith Wailoo’s How Cancer Crossed the Color Line is an enlightening read, suggesting that even if accounting for “other” paradigms may make for a far more murky understanding of the already enigmatic cancer (in this case), only in the murkiness can actual progress be made moving forward. Most certainly there is still a "war on cancer" to be fought, but as Wailoo impressively highlights, it is as critical, if not more so, to continually scrutinize not just how we are fighting but also for whom.

Written by: Alison Veith, February 4th 2011

Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry

mandy — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Siobhan Brooks

SUNY Press

Racial inequality in the workforce seems sadly obvious, but something I had never before thought of was racial inequality in sex work. Logically, it makes sense that this brand of inequity would carry through to the sex industry, but it feels wrong somehow that anyone would be vying for a better position in sex work. As a feminist, empowerment in sex work has always fascinated me. Although the typical debates of this issue play a very limited role in Unequal Desires, the book creates the space for a new conversation about sex work and race.

Unequal Desires highlights race’s role in stripping—specifically, the stripper’s erotic capital. (Erotic capital is the value given to a body based on socially and culturally crafted visions of ideal beauty that are accepted by the majority of people in a given society.) Adapted from Brooks’ dissertation, her book reads like an ethnographic study. Her interpretation of interviewees quotes are very limited and the majority of the book contains her uncontaminated observations. The purity of her research gives it enormous academic credibility in my eyes, but may become tiresome reading for someone outside of academia.

What I found most interesting was Brooks’ choice of interviewing strip club staff as her primary source, and not dancers. This appeared to coalesce in the process of her research, as the dancers were less accessible at the three clubs at which she conducted her study: two straight clubs in New York City and one lesbian club in San Francisco. Hearing directly from bouncers, waiters, custodians, club managers, and a few dancers was incredible. It is nearly impossible to hear these voices unfiltered through media and academic sources, so Brooks’ fieldwork is invaluable in that sense; however, her choice to maintain an academic frame in her publication may limit the scope of individuals these voices reach.

Using stripping as a window makes racial discrimination in the workplace a new issue. Even among jobs that many find undesirable, racism persists and reminds the world that we are not in a “post-racial” state; in fact, it is quite the opposite.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, January 22nd 2011

The Way It Is

mandy — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Donalda Reid

Second Story Press

Donalda Reid is gutsy to take on heavy racial undertones in her first novel They Way It Is. The story is historical fiction; although, aside from the creation of the main characters, this young adult book is more history than fiction.

Ellen Manery is quietly outspoken and smart. Your typical bookworm with big city ideas, Ellen is considered to be a radical in the small, Canadian town her parents forced her to move to. You have to feel sorry for Ellen, who is more comfortable with books than people, and starts her senior year at a new school where students and teachers alike believe she is way too ambitious for a girl.

All of this starts to change when we meet Tony Paul, a schoolmate of Ellen's who is seemingly as subdued as she is. As the friendship grows between this Shuswap Indian and former city girl, the reader starts to see the racial equality struggles of Canadians take shape. They Way It Is isn't just another book about racial discrimination. Donalda Reid makes it relatable; she doesn't just point out facts, she makes the reader live them.

The biggest lesson in The Way It Is is that while race gets in the way of many things, we don't have to let it. People create the dividing lines between people of different races and ethnicities. And if harmony and acceptance are employed, racism will no longer be justified as simply the way it is.

Written by: Nina Lopez-Ortiz, January 19th 2011

Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur

alicia — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Ron Christie

St Martin's Press

Before I begin reviewing Ron Christie’s Acting White: The Curious History of a Racial Slur I want to acknowledge my identity politics as they are crucial in my take on this book. First off I will never know what it’s like to be accused of acting white because I am white. Moreover, I am an anti-racist feminist who believes that institutional racism and structural inequalities exist and are held in place by those in power.

Understanding one’s subjectivity is crucial when reading Acting White, given that Christie, a Republican from an affluent family, interweaves his personal reflections into the book alongside a historical analysis of the slur. Furthermore, Christie’s impetus for writing the book stems from his own experiences as an outcast within Black communities and his need to unpack his own perceived marginalization. He opens Acting White with one such example, an anecdote involving Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California who reportedly chastised Christie, then serving as a junior legislative assistant to Craig T. James, a Republican from Florida, for selling out his race and being “nothing but an Uncle Tom!”

Christie traces the implications of the slur of acting white back to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, arguing that a link exists between black men denigrated as Uncle Toms and the notion of acting white. He examines the ideological conflicts between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois as well as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and the election of Barack Obama through the lens of what it means when Black men are accused of acting white or betraying their race. It’s important to note that Christie fails to discuss how being seen as acting white affects women of color and LGBTQ people of color—for what it’s worth, two groups who are also generally absent from or marginalized within the Republican Party and platform.

Overall, Christie blames Black communities for their own socioeconomic marginalization, asserting that Blacks underperform academically because they are afraid to be viewed as acting white—never mind issues of a lack of resources for teachers and/or underfunding within the public school system. In Christie’s opinion, if this racial slur could be dismantled then young working-class Black men and women would feel free to excel in school and would be able to pull themselves up out of their impoverished communities. Acting White makes it sound that simple as Christie repeatedly touts the importance of education, dressing well, and speaking well.

What hinders this goal, according to Christie, is a myriad of factors including Black leaders (he is particularly vocal about his dislike for Jesse Jackson) who point out institutional racism, which he argues sets up African Americans as victims with no agency or self empowerment. Christie also finds fault with legislation such as affirmative action arguing that these policies taint the achievements of African Americans whose hard work and dedication will be viewed with skepticism by racist whites.

Christie even goes as far as to castigate parents who give their children “black-sounding” names, as studies have shown that employers are less likely to hire applicants who do not have white mainstream names on their applications. Rather than calling for an overhaul of the racist system that ignores discrimination, Christie asks why such parents would set their children up for failure in the first place.

Ultimately, Christie preaches respectability in which Black youth (preferably those given white mainstream names) need to ditch hip-hop, dress nice, abandon slang, and hit the books without a fear of being called out for acting white. However, I cannot accept Christie’s arguments that sheer will and determination (alongside a certain dress code) separate the haves from the have-nots. As Melissa Harris Lacewell noted in her keynote address at the 2010 Facing Race Conference, referring to when Henry Louis Gates Jr. (whom Christie admires) was arrested for breaking and entering his own home, “your respectability will not save you when the issue is structural inequality.”

In the end, Acting White should be viewed more as a memoir and less as a treaty on the racial slur given that Christie’s subjectivity and politics color every word on the page—from which historical figures he discusses (why Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois but not Ida B. Wells?) to the rugged individualism he touts as the solution.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, January 10th 2011

Written on the Body of The Erasable Woman

mandy — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Interview with Shaunga Tagore

When did you start writing poetry?

At a very young age—probably when I started writing with chalk on my bathroom door or adding my own two cents to my parents’ biology textbooks they tell me I always furiously flipped through. I experienced a lot of racism, (hetero)sexism, and different kinds of regulation at a young age too, and I think what that did was make me really quiet and closed up in a lot of ways. But expressing myself creatively was something I did to become myself again—whether that be through writing, acting, music, or just telling stories about how I imagined my life to be, instead of the scary, oppressive ways I often experienced it.

Who has influenced your writing?

First and foremost, my family: my parents and sister created an environment for me where creativity was valued and encouraged. Now still, there are so many ways I am creatively inspired by the lives and perspectives of my friends and family, even in ordinary moments. I’m also lucky to be a part of Asian Arts Freedom School, a creative arts and radical Asian history and politics group, where the conversations and stories continually influence and push my own writing.

As for famous people, some who come to mind are Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Shyam Selvadurai, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Smarasinha, Himani Bannerji, and Andrea Smith.

The Erasable Woman is your Master's thesis project; why did you choose to write it in poetry?

I was sick of writing like an academic. (Laughs.) My topic was exploring colonial violence against racialized queer women, as well as how broad systems of oppression or histories can manifest intimately on women’s bodies, and in personal relationships. I find that poetry can express this intimacy in ways academic writing cannot. A lot of people in academia would not consider poetry a legitimate way to express theory or politics, but poetry is theory, it is knowledge, and it is political. I was really lucky to have a supervising committee who understood and supported this kind of project (Enakshi Dua and Priscila Uppal).

Why the title The Erasable Woman?

The Erasable Woman is a title of one of my poems, and I feel it fits the entire collection. A major theme that runs through my manuscript is erasure…being forgotten, lost, ignored, invisible, expendable, and disposable. At the same time, it asserts a physical, spiritual, sexual, emotional, and undeniable presence in the midst of being and feeling erased. That’s one of the ways I tried to express the complexity of what it means to experience oppression and survive/resist it at the same time.

Erasure is such a key and powerful way that violence is allowed to continue. [It] speaks to the ways in which racism and other oppressions in feminist movements is ignored, and the well-being of women of colour is not considered. Also, the value of challenging sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in a lot of anti-racist or queer initiatives is often marginalized and not given enough importance. So many things in this world are structured through erasure: mainstream education denies the violence of colonial conquest on this land by largely painting it as a benign, peaceful process; national media doesn’t pay enough attention to the ways in which violence impacts marginalized bodies or communities; survivors in/of abusive relationships are silenced and shut down when they try and fight/talk back; queer or unconventional love/desire is constantly trivialized and demonized; expressing or feeling certain kinds of emotions is minimized. I wanted to explore these topics in my own way.

How do your identities influence your work?

I can’t separate myself from my social position, or my mashup of identities, and I can’t separate myself from my writing, so it all becomes intertwined. In this particular work, it was important for me to center the voice of a queer woman of colour, because it’s not a perspective that’s often given attention—in literature, feminism, anti-racism, or queer politics.

How did you came to the decision to use images in your collection?

I always start with a feeling or idea I need to express (sometimes desperately), and I follow my intuition, as well as work with my skill set, to give shape and form to that feeling or idea the best and most honest way I can figure out how. For example, at one point I wanted to create something that expressed how the bodies of women of colour are judged and marked by oppression just by living in the world. So, one of the pieces that appears in my collection (called "bodysnatchers") contains a series of photos with oppressive words actually written on the body. It just made the most sense.

The Erasable Woman is currently not available to the public. Can you tell us what your plans are for this wonderful collection of poetry?

The Erasable Woman is still a work in progress that I am currently fine-tuning, and I hope to get it published in the near future. I’m really excited about how it’s shaping up and have been doing readings at various events. I now have a website, which is new and still under construction, where people can read some of my work and check out other things I’m up to.

Read the full interview at Black Coffee Poet

Written by: Janet Romero-Leiva, December 29th 2010

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

payal — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Christina Sharpe

Duke University Press

Christina Sharpe’s work Monstrous Intimacies is concerned with reading how the Euro-American and African-American post-slavery subjects are constructed. An academic text, and at times quite dense with analysis, this work will be of interest mostly to academics working in the fields of critical race theory, post-colonial theory, or literary and cultural theory. Through compelling and intricate readings of visual and written texts, Sharpe is concerned with unpacking the intersection between violence, sex, and subjectivity in post-slavery subjects. Sharpe’s work is a poignant reflection on historical time and convincingly deals with the ways that the horrors of the past continue to structure the present. In this, Sharpe turns away from ‘freedom’ to consider the “unfreedom in freedom”—or in other words, the way that the “desire to be free requires one to be witness to, participant in, and be silent about scenes of subjection that we rewrite as freedom.”

In the first chapter, Sharpe considers Gayl Jones’ neo-slave narrative Corregidora as a text that deals with the demands of generational witnessing to the horrors of slavery. She considers how the scenes of rape and impregnation at the hands of the slave owner Corregidora become a means of survival for the Corregidora women—the continuation of their family ensures witnesses to their trauma. Sharpe reads this as one way in which the ‘space of enslavement post-enslavement’ is reproduced.

In the second chapter, Sharpe turns to consider Saartjie Baartman or the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ a Khoisan woman who was exhibited around Britain and France in the 19th Century as a sexual oddity, and then dissected upon her death. Sharpe contests that the pleas for the return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa itself continue to objectify Baartman, as she is “once again overwritten with multiple histories and used in the service of a number of national and political agendas that involve not the emergence of history but its repression.” Thus, Sharpe examines how what is ostensibly an act to ‘right’ history, is in fact intimately connected to the monstrous treatment of Baartman under colonialism.

Her third chapter on Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant serves her purposes particularly well and gives her space to continue to flesh out how practices of historical remembrance and display interact with everyday violences of black life. Finally, in perhaps her most engaging chapter, Sharpe looks at Kara Walker’s silhouette art work and its reception to continue to read how the violence of slavery manifests itself in post-slavery subjectivity—particularly concerned with how critics have been reluctant to read Walker’s invocation of whiteness in her work.

Sharpe’s book is an eloquent and at times challenging analysis of the construction of post-slavery subjects as subjects who are by no means ‘post’ but continue to be structured by the past that is not quite past.

Written by: Sam McBean, December 27th 2010

Tea & Justice

brittany — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Ermena Vinluan

Women Make Movies

If your political leanings are more in line with musical acts like NWA or MDC, then Ermena Vinluan’s fifty-five-minute exploration of race and gender issues in the context of the New York Police Department may seem... tame?

Tea & Justice is a documentary about Asian women police officers in the NYPD that skirts the uneasy boundaries between a full-blown narrative of empowerment of Asian women breaking cultural and gender stereotypes to become police officers, their negotiation of the politics of being racial and gender minorities in what has historically been perceived as a racist and sexist institution, and the inherently violent nature of policing. Sometimes provocative, but generally unremarkable both politically and artistically, the film is perhaps worth watching (once) for its almost accidental exposition of the gender and cultural politics at play.

The centerpiece of the film is the personal stories of three women, who share their experiences of discrimination and defiance as part of the two percent of NYPD officers who are Asian women. Their stories are interwoven with the public’s perceptions of Asian culture, women, and police officers. Officer Ormsby, for example, tells of how being compelled to serve tea to her male colleagues at a Japanese firm prompted her to find a new career. This is against the backdrop of interviews with New Yorkers, some of whom (predictably) feel that men make better officers, while others subscribe to the great equalizing power of the gun.

In an interesting history of the NYPD, Vinluan highlights how various social movements opened up space for women in policing; for example, the NYPD got rid of regulation high-heels, lip-stick, and smaller guns for female officers in the 1970s. Somewhat disingenuously, the director also traces images of women warriors in Asian mythology to support her claim that ‘being an Asian woman cop is not so odd after all’. While Asian culture is full of examples of remarkable women, I found it difficult to believe that most people would identify policewomen with being leaders or warriors, a contradiction amplified by the inclusion of interviews discussing racially charged incidents of police brutality in the United States, such as the beating of Rodney King.

In her haste to bridge the gap between images of subservient Japanese tea-servers and Vietnamese warrior princesses, Vinluan seems to have confused empowerment and oppression. This speaks to the broader issue of the film’s selective critique of the police along gender and racial dimensions, and failure to adequately question its inherently violent role in maintaining law and order.

Interesting interviews include one with Margaret Moore (Executive Director of the National Center for Women and Policing) who claims promoting diversity in gender and race is the only way to ensure fair treatment inside departments and in policing. Moore and others also argue that since most excessive force claims are made against male officers, recruiting more women—who are ‘naturally less aggressive’—is the solution. But by essentializing qualities to women like their ‘mothering’ instincts and tendencies towards less aggression, interviewees like Lieutenant Eric Adams (100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care) regurgitate classic stereotypes of women that Vinluan’s film is supposedly aiming to debunk. By failing to attribute their ‘natural’ credentials for making better officers to the historical subordination of women in care-giving and domestic roles—aren’t we back at square one?

Vinluan’s schoolteacher voice-overs and flat animation accompanied by platitudes like ‘she’s just a regular working mom!’ work against the film’s rare moments of subtlety, leading me to conclude that those parts that can be deemed thought-provoking are, in fact, inadvertent. Am I asking too much from Tea & Justice? Maybe. But given the eight film festival laurels adorning the DVD cover, I expected more.

Written by: Kaavya Asoka, October 25th 2010

Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign

mandy — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Johnnetta Betsch Cole

SUNY Press

Please read this book. If you were in any way inspired by the groundbreaking 2008 election of President Barack Obama, you will find an essay in Who Should be First? that speaks what's been on your mind, challenges your way of thinking, causes you to feel frustrated, or represents the many complex emotions you felt on that historic day.

Bravo to Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Johnnetta Betsch Cole for compiling this diverse and inspiring anthology. At first glance, I saw all the usual names (i.e., Valenti, Steinem, Walker) and warily assumed that this would be one more tribute to the same feminist pundits, as always. But you will find essays from many feminist points of view in this compilation, and a lot of them (thankfully!) point out that “women” and “people of color” are not mutually exclusive groups. The press often ignored women of color during this election, leaving us to think that everyone had the luxury to choose between race and gender allegiances.

I wish I had owned this book during the election, although of course that would have been impossible. The essays recall conflicted feelings I experienced when trying to decide between the two potential Democratic Presidential candidates. The authors explore the divisive, oft repeated claims of the time: that gender was a greater barrier to overcome than race, that young feminists were naive or stupid to vote for Obama, that Bill Clinton had been the first Black President and, therefore, Black voters should support Hillary, etc. The editors arranged the book book to highlight, rather than smooth over, these opposing views.

In one essay, the author explained that she was voting for Hillary because gender was the greatest barrier to overcome. In the following essay, a different author explained that she was voting for Barack because race was the greatest barrier to overcome. The authors of all the essays express various thoughtful points of view, but I have not been able to stop mulling over Jane Caputi’s “Crisis of Representation: Hate Messages in Campaign 2008 Commercial Paraphernalia.” Originally published in the Denver University Law Review last year, it is a comprehensive, although by no means exhaustive, study of visual representations of the rampant sexism, racism, ageism, and ableism expressed during the campaign not only against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but also Michelle Obama, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. This essay actually made me feel nauseous. If you can stomach the hateful and disgusting images, it is a powerful reminder (in case you forgot) of the vivid hate speech both Democratic candidates had to battle.

“Sex Versus Race, Again,” by Tracy A. Thomas, is another well-researched piece that compares the 2008 election to the fight for women’s voting rights in the early twentieth century. Thomas shows that drawing a line in the sand didn’t work then and won’t work now. The either/or strategy leaves everyone at a loss.

Read Who Should be First? to remember the electric energy you felt two years ago. We all knew that the political world was changing, and after eight bleak years with a warmongering President, even the most cynical of us began to hope. With the November elections around the corner, and the threat of right-wing extremists garnering control of Congress, think back to a time where you were excited, enthralled, and inspired by politicians.

Cross-posted at Gender Across Borders

Written by: Colleen Hodgetts, October 24th 2010

Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007

mandy — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Suzanne Lacy

Duke University Press

A student of Judy Chicago and Allan Kaprow, Suzanne Lacy’s collection of essays about her performance art pieces showcases not only Lacy’s development as a powerhouse feminist artist of her time but also the changing landscape of political art throughout the past four decades. Following a thoughtful introduction by her friend Moira Roth, Leaving Art traces Lacy’s self-criticism, the intended meaning behind her pieces, and reflections about the effectiveness of her work, at times in journal form (e.g., “While I was working on this piece I figured out why it has been so hard for me to consider myself grown up”) and at times as she reflects about the meaning of art more broadly. As an introduction to Lacy’s work, or as an in-depth look at Lacy’s artistic process, the book will appeal both to those newly familiar with Lacy or with those who have long followed her career.

Cleverly titled, Lacy intends Leaving Art as a meditation on the various objects and stories she and her colleagues have left behind; still more, the title implies that their collective departure from the art world—through retirement or even death—looms imminently. Aside from considering what it means to leave art, the volume addresses a startling array of subjects: rape, violence, gender, race, speaking across identities, sexuality, power, injustice, challenging institutions, solitude, connection, friendship, speech acts, performance, and community. Lacy’s impact on feminist art reveals itself throughout the book not by loud proclamations of her importance, but via a layered portrait of how her work chipped away at the injustices she saw happening around her and to her.

During the early days of feminist consciousness raising, Lacy tackled such difficult topics as the role of prostitution in a feminist politics, the dismemberment of women’s bodies (metaphorically and literally), and the process of witnessing a rape narrative. She followed these pieces with sweeping tableau vivant performances where she drew together over 400 performers to converse and dialogue in public view along the shores of La Jolla, CA. Her later pieces, drawing together such disparate subjects as Buddhist philosophy and police brutality, engaged people in performance demonstrations where they confronted each other in order to challenge powerful social ills like racism and sexism. In each decade, Lacy reinvented herself as artist and social critic.

Pushing art as a mechanism for social change, she admitted in the 1990s to questioning “whether it was possible for artists to exert a substantial impact on communities…; whether civic institutions could be significantly recruited for social and aesthetic claims; and how to transform hundreds, even thousands of personal attitudes that might, in turn, be measured through policy outcomes.” Certainly, Lacy’s work responded to these questions by adamantly demanding that art (and artists) continually re-imagine themselves in relation to their political usefulness. In particular, Lacy’s work prioritizes the urgency of listening to marginalized voices just as it delves into content that lies beneath the surface of our lives. Lacy provokes us to consider what has become forcibly out of sight (e.g., stories of cancer, narratives of rape, privilege of Whiteness), and what we drive underground because of fear, shame, and the difficulty of seeing ourselves.

Written by: Breanne Fahs, October 24th 2010

Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference

annette — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Kamala Visweswaran

Duke University Press

In a book about race, class and cultural differences, the author argues that a global common culture focused on human rights may be emerging. Proving an excellent example of the gulf between academics and activists, research and experience, the book’s reader strains through reams of multi-syllable words, only to confront a mass of contradictions and confusions, statements unsupported by facts or logic, and conclusions that are unfair or just plain wrong.

The author analyzes race and caste and claims that we are reminded daily that we live in a post-racial world. That’s not the world I live in. The election of President Obama has increased, not decreased, expressions of racism. The author claims violence against women is invisible in the United States. It’s everywhere I look. She compares race, caste and class and questions whether race is biological, social, or even exists as science proves.

Her critique of what she calls feminist universalism focuses on refugee/asylum law. But she fails to acknowledge that in a patriarchal state no law, no matter how well written or intended, will remain untainted. She also fails to take into account the ever present tension for activist lawyers–making a political point or representing your client. The client always comes first.

While true that human rights standards are often not applied to the United States, especially under the criminal administration of George Bush, much has changed since that time. Two cases about family violence are at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Gonzales v. U.S. and Dombrowski v. U.S.) and four countries have now protected American women from the failures of the United States under the Hague Convention. Hillary Clinton recently announced that the U.S. will hold itself to the same standards it holds other countries in its annual Trafficking in Persons report. This is a major and important shift in policy.

When talking about Gender Based Violence (GBV), the author misses the fundamental analysis of GBV as about power and control. She says, “It is thus important to understand domestic violence as part of the structural violence wrought by liberalization and structural adjustment policies.” Domestic violence is no more caused by structural adjustment policies than it is caused by poverty or unemployment, alcoholism or anger. The fundamental cause, known for decades, is imbalance of power-also the backbone of structural adjustment policies. They both spring from the same well–abuse of power–the operating system of patriarchy.

Repeatedly the author fails to acknowledge the shoulders upon which she stands. She claims that feminists don’t understand that GBV is about state policy as much as about culture. On the contrary, the history of the battered women’s movement shows that it originally focused on the failure of state policy by suing the police for not enforcing the law, forcing prosecutors to charge abusers, and changing laws to hold the government accountable. T-shirt politics confirms how aware feminists are that domestic violence is intertwined with world peace—If you can’t have peace in the home, how can you have peace in the world?

Visweswaran wonders what it would mean to speak of a culture of violence against women in the United States and to understand domestic violence in the United States as a human rights issue. Advocates working in the battered women’s movement have spoken of it and understood it for decades.

The last chapter in Un/common Cultures contradicts earlier ones by showing that there is, in fact, a growing global human rights movement. But she fails to do her homework and thinks that university students urging divestment in countries that violate human rights is a new tactic. That was a common practice against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s. What’s new is technology that tells the world in minutes if a coup or revolution is occurring, so that actions can be supported from half a globe away. Her final conclusion seems a simple truism about social movements and left this reader wondering why she slogged through 225 pages for that.

Written by: Dianne Post, October 11th 2010

Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music

mandy — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By Eileen M. Hayes

University of Illinois Press

In her critical study of later twentieth century women’s music festivals, Eileen Hayes sets the tone and identifies her intended audience in a trenchant dedication, which really serves as an effective epigraph for her book:

_Some say feminism is dead. Others say black feminism stopped by but left in a hurry. A few claim that “women’s music” is dull; “Besides,” they say, “Bessie Smith is so last century.” Others don’t know any lesbians and would rather watch them on TV. It was chic to be lesbian—last year. They say you can’t be black, lesbian, and musical at the same time. Maybe you can be black, lesbian, and love music—but if so, you probably can’t dance, and if you can, you don’t care about social change.

Lots of folks say all these things. This book is not dedicated to them._

Songs in Black and Lavender is a book for those wanting a firsthand account of one of the most famous of these festivals, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (August 1995), which the author attended and for which she provides the “Diary of a Mad Black Woman Festigoer.” It is a book for those wanting to discover the music of Mary Watkins, the group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and the “Dreamgirls” who provided part of the raison d'être for the festivals. It is also for those studying the history of American feminism—and the women who lyricized the experience of radical separatist feminism in the later part of the twentieth century, and the complicated intersection of gender, race, class, and culture.

There is little treatment here of the well-known festival Lilith Fair, which has an inclusive admissions policy, but has been criticized for its lack of diversity. The festivals written about were deliberately exclusive, a feature that allowed for relatively sharp delineation of gendered and racial identity in the study. Famously, the Michigan Festival did not allow men and welcomed “women-born women of all ages and ethnicities”—the latter restriction a source of considerable protest. One of the products of this policy was an encouragement to freedom of expression and action and, as the author puts it, a “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” attitude. While the author celebrates this liberating experience, she maintains distance—as an ethnographic researcher and interviewer, as a woman of color at festivals attended mostly by white women—and later as a straight woman at festivals designedly for lesbians.

Most of the musicians featured in Songs in Black and Lavender are not well known, and many musicians, such as Nedra Johnson and Pamela Means, are represented online only by a couple of amateur video clips. Festival enthusiasts lament that early participants such as Melissa Etheridge, Michelle Shocked, and Tracy Chapman, who achieved mainstream stardom, “did not credit the community that gave them their start.” Another barrier to more widespread recognition of the artists associated with womyn’s music and the festival scene is an aesthetic that rejected the hype and glitz associated with popular music. As a result, the music—as well as the cultural experience of these festivals generally—has remained mostly outside of the public gaze.

Poignantly, the author describes how a flag that combined triangles of black and lavender resonated with some lesbian women of color more than the rainbow flag, a widely adopted symbol of the gay and lesbian nation. One of the author’s interviewees asked, “How come there is no black in the rainbow flag?” In terms of the unity of feminist activism, the old questions about class and racial awareness remain, and the Sweet Honey in the Rock song “Are We a Nation?” still has no clear answer.

Hayes makes a noteworthy semantic decision in the book by largely avoiding the term queer, which as she admits would have suggested commonality with the scholars and activists engaged in queer theory. She writes that the majority of women she interviewed for her study preferred the term lesbian and did not see the terms as interchangeable.

Songs in Black and Lavender asks powerful and often painful questions about the meaning of diversity, multiculturalism, and identity. The author chronicles a radically destabilized historical moment through the lens of these music festivals, one that is ignored in mainstream music history and is unreported in the “narratives of rich white feminists,” as the author puts it. Hayes’ study is provocative, but always respectful of its subject. She is positioned largely as an outsider at these exclusive events, giving her readers not a voyeuristic backstage pass but rather a kind of access to the power and meanings of these festivals that loomed large in the lives of the participants.

Written by: Rick Taylor, September 7th 2010