class

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

Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City

brittany — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Julian Brash

University of Georgia Press

Julian Brash’s Bloomberg’s New York is an anthropological study of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration’s implementation of a particular type of neoliberal urban governance (the “Bloomberg Way”) since taking office in 2002, “branding and marketing the city as a luxury good,” an agenda aimed not only at “advancing the economic elite’s class interests” but in shaping the culture and geography of the city of New York by prioritizing this demographic. A thoughtful and rigorous analysis of class, urban development, and neoliberal governance in the context of New York City during the Bloomberg years, Bloomberg’s New York is a thought-provoking read primarily aimed at scholars of urban studies.

Brash’s work interestingly contextualizes the politics of governance in New York City in its “post-fiscal crisis era” but also shows how this paved the way for an individual like Michael Bloomberg (the “CEO as Mayor”) to take on the mayoralty of the Big Apple. The most interesting section of Brash’s work is the more theoretical chunk of this book, which employs an analysis of Bloomberg’s governance style—the Bloomberg Way—of running New York City “like a business,” viewing residents as “clients” and branding the city itself as a product to be marketed to a select demographic. The penultimate section of Brash’s study is a close look at the Bloomberg administration’s promotion of the Hudson Yards plan, contextualized by elite driven redevelopment drives in New York. Brash also illuminates with extensive ethnographic evidence the deeply contested public debates that surrounded the city’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics, highlighting differing perceptions of New Yorkers of what this meant for New York, and pointing the reader to the ruptures that this debate revealed in economic, political, cultural, and other differences between New Yorkers which have long characterized the fabric of this city.

Brash’s meticulous uncovering of the mechanics of class interests underpinning the shaping of the cultural, economic and political space of global cities is in the context of New York, but certainly poses important questions applicable to both urban scholarship of other cities and in furthering our understanding of class as a unit of analysis. For example, Brash calls for a more rigorous interrogation of the interests of the “transnational capitalist class” (or “TCC”)—shorthand for the owners of globalized means of production—and how these interests have a physical and cultural impact on the local spaces in which these classes are formed, live and work. His injunction not to “abstract” elite class interests from the physical spaces they inhabit comes as an important reminder in a time where their transnational mobility (enabled by the travel and technology that global capital allows) can easily allows us to forget the increasingly bigger and more powerful role that private enterprise and business interests have on the physical shaping and growth of cities today.

From a feminist perspective, it is important to note that Brash uses class as his primary unit of analysis but declares at the outset that his understanding of the term extends beyond its use as the individual’s relation to the means of production and that class is mediated by a range of other factors such as race, gender, and sexuality. While he acknowledges how class relationships may be displaced by other identities (such as gender), his own analysis is not necessarily engaged in these debates for the purposes of his book.

Written by: Kaavya Asoka, April 8th 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

Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in the Megacity

mandy — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Bharati Chaturvedi

Penguin India

New Delhi is a city that has undergone many incarnations in its lifespan. Just a century after the British built the city to be the capital of the crown jewel that was India, Delhi is racing towards becoming a world-class city. Published on the eve of the city’s hosting the October 2010 Commonwealth Games, which was supposed to serve as Delhi’s coming out party in the twenty-first century, the collection of essays in Finding Delhi explores what happens to the lives of its twenty million inhabitants as the city is re-engineered and re-imagined for the new millennium.

What happens to people who are driven out from the urban city centers, the places where they ply their trade, to live on the outskirts of town? What happens when public spaces are increasingly replaced with private malls and coffee shops, spaces that are no longer free to everyone? Who has the right to public spaces? Is it just the middle and upper classes, or do all inhabitants of a city possess this right?

Environmentalist and Delhi-based writer Bharati Chaturvedi attempts to answer such questions. The co-founder of Chintan, an NGO that works to increase environmental justice and reduce ecological footprints, Chaturvedi makes Finding Delhi unique by not assembling the usual cast of urban planners and educated intellectuals to discuss the city’s metamorphosis; she brings us the voices of fourteen full- and part-time residents, ranging from environmental activists to “urban-sector” workers, street vendors and other entrepreneurs who have contributed to Delhi’s vibrant formal and informal economy for centuries and risk being erased from the glittering new city streets and urban edifices that are being planned for New Delhi. Each chapter reflects the unique voice and opinion of these diverse individuals.

In her introduction Chaturvedi discusses how in the not-so-distant past it became fashionable to characterize what she terms “work on the greens” as being detached from the reality of the poor, but, as she aptly points out, the greening of the environment is also of importance to the working poor: “Lamenting the loss of tree cover in Delhi, an itinerant vendor remarked during a meandering conversation, ‘I miss all the trees now. I used to enjoy looking at the leaves and my mind used to become fresh even in the heat of summer.’” Chaturvedi notes that the idea of a green city came up over and over again in numerous conversations she had with residents who are considered the working poor of Delhi.

In the chapter “Remaindered Things and Remaindered Lives,” contributor Vinay Gidwani asks the reader to consider what happens to their discarded gym shoes and introduces us to Mundka, a township on the edge of West Delhi that Gidwani dubs a “site of reincarnation not just for Delhi’s detritus, but the entire world.” Gidwani describes a recycling industry that operates in an almost subterranean fashion, including the 150,000 to 200,000 ragpickers who make a living sorting and selling recyclables that are found in Delhi’s garbage. He points out that Delhi produces 7,500 tons of garbage daily. A large amount of this is recycled by the ragpickers, who are very poor and work in hazardous conditions.

Because Delhi’s focus is on the formal-sector economy, city officials view these workers as unskilled and not contributing to the retail economy, but Gidwani contends that the informal sector workers provide an array of services that enable formal sector workers to continue their privileged lifestyle—from vegetable vendors to cycle cart pullers who deliver appliances, or grocers who deliver bulk orders to households. He contends that Delhi today is inhabited by two “eco-classes.” He notes, “On the one side, a way of life that churns out growing quantities of waste; on the other, lives that live off this commodity detritus.” Gidwani asks the reader to consider what a different city Delhi would look like if the ruling elite actually learned to recognize and value the important contributions that these marginalized people and places make to their daily lives.

In “Women Reimagining the City,” Kalpana Viswanath discusses the harassment and violence that women encounter on a daily basis in the city; she writes that “being a woman in Delhi is often an intimidating, frightening, worrisome and, at the least, uncomfortable experience.” She points out that although Western cities were historically viewed as male spaces (hence the term streetwalker to describe women who walked the streets alone at night), developing urban areas also provided female friendly spaces in the form of department stores, tea rooms, and promenades. Viswanath notes that class plays a significant role in a woman’s experience in Delhi.

Delhi does not fare well when it comes to gender equity indicators; only seven percent of the Delhi police force are women, and according to recent crime data, Delhi accounts for thirty percent of reported rapes in India’s largest cities. Taking public transportation in the city exposes women to potential harassment and abuse, and Viswanath indicates that no women are immune to gender-based violence by highlighting the highly publicized murders of young women of privilege. She closes by writing, “The big challenge will be to transform people’s attitudes towards women as citizens with equal rights.”

I found Finding Delhi to be one of the most thought provoking books I’ve read in a long time. Some books have a profound effect on how one thinks about their world and this is one of those books. The topics and issues discussed are not unique to Delhi; cities across the globe are increasingly having to balance the need for economic and industrial growth without losing the sense of humanity and culture that gives a city its soul. It is a delicate balancing act and one that can benefit from each person playing an active role in re-imagining their cities and interconnected destinies.

Written by: Gita Tewari, January 15th 2011

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945

caitlin — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Mark Driscoll

Duke University Press

Mark Driscoll, an associate professor of Japanese and International Studies at the University of North Carolina, here presents a very thorough reassessment of Japanese imperialism of Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Driscoll focuses his attention on the fringes of the colonized Asian peoples, writing about the Chinese coolies, Korean farmers, Japanese pimps and trafficked women of various Asian nationalities that moved Japan's empire along and provided the behind-the-scenes energy that created such an empire. Japan's rise to a capitalist power—and its expansion of its empire—is identified by Driscoll as happening in three distinct phases, each marked by exploitation of people, land, life, and labor: biopolitics, neuropolitics, and necropolitics.

Driscoll's reading of biopolitics as it applies to Japanese imperialism and capitalism is the same as Michel Foucault's: faire vivir (improving life) and laisser mourir (letting die off). Biopolitics most often involves public health, disease prevention, maternity clinics, and hygiene campaigns. It directly ties in to the concept of laissez-faire capitalism, its aim being for some lives to be improved and for others to be left to fare for themselves. In neuropolitics, the exploited worker in the capitalist society has a life that no longer belongs to him but to the object into which he puts his life (often his job); therefore, he must try to buy back his own life in the form of “commodity substitutes.” (Think of Fight Club and its message of “the things you own end up owning you.”) Citizens in a neuropolitical state are “shocked into stupefaction,” and then tricked into buying a “second life” back from the capitalist regime in the form of consumable goods. Necropolitics, the third phase of Japan's capitalist imperial expansion, is defined as the state in which workers, forced laborers, and colonized persons are aware of the constant threat of omnipresent death, and perceive life as a constant struggle against this threat of death. The imperialistic powers over the colonized peoples subjugate their lives with the power of death.

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque is a highly fascinating book, though occasionally dry and academic. This is no fault of the writer or subject matter, but simply my own Western/Caucasian mind not having these lingual-neural pathways, but I had trouble keeping up with the many Asian names sprinkled liberally throughout the text. There is plenty in here to intrigue those with an interest in twentieth century world politics, Marxism, sex workers, the failures of capitalism, the deplorable treatment of women in war conditions, poverty, gender, race, political corruption, and the swift rise and fall of empires. Driscoll also covers pornography and drugs in Japan's colonization of Asia, and includes some grisly photographs from “erotic-grotesque” magazines, the idea of these being that the two concepts were not so different from one another.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, December 4th 2010

Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out the Best in America

jenna — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Alan Khazei

PublicAffairs Books

Alan Khazei is a heckuva guy. In 1988, he co-founded City Year, a privately funded domestic service organization that lead directly to the establishment of AmeriCorps. When AmeriCorps was threatened out of existence by budget cuts in 2003, Khazei spearheaded the drive to save it. Today he runs Be the Change, Inc., a group that “creates national public awareness campaigns to build momentum for citizen service as a practical solution to problems facing our communities and our country.” A better-intentioned guy would be hard to find.

Alan Khazei is also a politician. In 2009, he lost the Democratic primary for the Senate seat made vacant by the death of Khazei’s colleague and hero, Ted Kennedy. Everyone knows that the winner of that primary, Martha Coakley, lost in the general election to former Cosmo model Scott Brown. Had Coakley won by a clear margin, I doubt that Khazei’s Big Citizenship would exist. The book’s lines announce that Alan Khazei really loves his country; between them, the reader understands that Khazei plans to run for office again, with this sunny, confident book as part of his pitch.

Big Citizenship is ostensibly the tale of how Khazei cooked up the idea to send idealistic seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds into urban communities for a year of full-time service and what transpired afterwards. The book tells this story well, but it does little more than that: we’re not shown, in the creative nonfiction sense, what motivated Khazei. Guilt? Ego? Existential despair? All we’re told of Khazei’s early life is how dearly he loved his immigrant relatives, all of whom loved America so much that Khazei had no choice but to love it, too. We’re led to believe that City Year emerged from this overwhelming love of country (and love for the older Kennedy brothers, John and Robert).

Before you toss a used tea bag my way, let me assure you that I’m also fond of my homeland, including its ability to learn from its troubled history. Unfortunately, Khazei fails to unpack any of the root causes of persistent poverty and inequality, preferring instead to direct his considerable energy towards his many service organizations.

The birth of City Year smacks so much of Ivy League elitism (we, the Upper Class, shall help you, the Lower Class) that it’s easy to forget that Khazei, son of an Iranian immigrant, must have endured taunts of “Ayatollah Assa-holah” as a St. Paul’s prepster in 1979. But Khazei avoids introspection at every turn. His consistent emotional distance, perhaps born of his bruising Senate campaign, quells any desire in the reader to use Khazei’s methods to “bring out the best in America.”

Nitpicking the founder of a program that has done so much good for so many feels singularly shameful, but here it is: Big Citizenship is boring. Reading it is as much a chore as eating a plateful of steamed vegetables: good for you, yes, but in desperate need of salt. Were Khazei not planning a future campaign, I suspect he’d have shared a more complex portrait of City Year, including the inevitable ugliness and frustration, perhaps even acknowledging his own class privilege more deeply than expressing a vague desire to “give back.”

Written by: Shannon Drury, November 9th 2010

Living in the End Times

barbara — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Slavoj Žižek

Verso

Reading Slavoj Žižek for the first time is not unlike being stuck on a bar stool next to a slightly inebriated, repentant MBA who just read a Karl Marx biography and thinks he has the world figured out. An aside about the deeper meaning of 3:10 to Yuma, a diatribe against Slovenia’s failure as a communist state, and praise of the five stages of grief seem like disconnected nonsense unless taken as a larger, comprehensive analysis of the failure of global capitalism. After a while, you’re either also drunk or so bewildered by the onslaught of information that you begin to see the reason behind this grizzled young man’s ramblings. Now just imagine that this is one of the most gifted living intellectuals.

Žižek—one of the world’s leading contemporary academic thinkers—is at once obscure and brilliant. In Living in the End Times, he pulls together themes from several smaller works and dozens of speeches and papers from the past several years to illuminate the apocalyptic zero-point for which the world is headed. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching—ecological crisis, explosive social divisions and exclusions, consequences of the biogenetic revolution, and systemic imbalances (struggles over raw materials, food, and water; as well as more abstract battles over issues like intellectual property)—and our textbook-diagnosed reactions show that the end is nigh.

Using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model, he categorizes our reactions to modern economic, social, and ecological crises as stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While many believe Kübler-Ross’ framework to be somewhat flawed, it does provide a handy way of determining one’s own stage of grieving the collapse of society. How else to make sense of our apathy in the face of the simultaneous rise of extreme religious fundamentalism, crumbling banking systems, and expansive, violent political repression? What other way to explain away the near-psychotic binaries in wealth and poverty in places like Kuwait and Dubai, oil-dependent towering desert empires built by thousands of slave-wage immigrants and ruled by a frighteningly wealthy upper class—and the ways with which we turn the other cheek?

If you believe the state of the global economy, social hierarchy, and legal affairs to be as dramatically desperate as Žižek, you’ll not be surprised that he beckons us to prepare for famine, plague, global warfare, and ultimate death. If you have little faith in humanity, you’ll find good company in the bright if troubled theorist. If you believe in our eventual recovery, you’ll also find nuggets of helpful wisdom between his dismal predictions.

You may not be able to keep up the apocalyptic philosopher, but you’d be better off for trying.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 23rd 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

Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir

mandy — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

By Sonya Huber

University of Nebraska Press

If you suspect that your experiences alone put the hell in healthcare, then Cover Me by Sonya Huber is the memoir for you. By the age of thirty-three, Huber had already endured eleven gaps in healthcare coverage, and had also been sent to collections for medical debt multiple times. She became an expert at scavenging for alternatives and at squeezing every drop of blood from the recalcitrant turnip that is the US healthcare system.

Cover Me is a moving portrait of how access to healthcare determines who is a “have” and who a “have not” and in Huber’s hands, the issues surrounding healthcare reform become clear and relatable. Improbably, given the toll the struggles exact, the author is also very funny, telling her stressful tale with an irrepressible sense of humor.

Huber began her adult employment journey as an idealistic labor activist and became a university professor. At one point, she held down three jobs at once, none of which offered healthcare benefits. The pressure to find affordable healthcare ballooned exponentially as Huber went from single working woman, to wedding a man who was also a healthcare "have not," to becoming a mother.

But even as a single woman, the challenge of good health was daunting. Diagnosed with a disabling panic disorder, Huber was forced to scrounge for low cost medical clinics and sliding scale arrangements, at one point even bartering office cleaning services for therapy. She was often left to rely on two of the universe’s most unstable forces: luck and the kindness of others. At times, sympathetic doctors offered free pharmaceutical samples and dentists forgave their fees. But there were consequences, many of which could be filed under “you get what you pay for,” or more accurately, “you get what you are able to pay for.”

As a wife and mother, Huber’s determination grew even grittier. Schlepping her infant son through the frozen Ohio tundra to register for WIC and Medicaid benefits, and expertly working the phones to correct inevitable and near catastrophic bureaucratic errors, Huber became a master of resourcefulness and tenacity. Even during a rare stretch when Huber had coverage through an HMO, she found it to be Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque, requiring the right "passwords" to gain entry. (The passwords being properly worded referrals and appeals, and an intimate familiarity with the policy’s fine print.) If it’s true that insurance companies spew gobbledygook and denials to weed out folks who lack perseverance, they never counted on someone like Huber.

Huber’s Odyssean journey through the American healthcare system throws the institution's inequities and ironies into stark relief. She describes working for a nonprofit whose mission is to provide low income workers with health insurance; however, in a stunning revelation of either outrageous hypocrisy or business-as-usual in fund-strapped nonprofits, that same organization was unwilling to provide Huber with healthcare coverage. Meanwhile, Huber’s boss, who had stellar insurance through her prominent surgeon husband, could brandish her benefits card and blithely obtain top care. Reading this, you will be tempted to hurl the book against the nearest wall, but you won’t because you’ll be too riveted to let go.

Huber’s story will resonate with anyone who has ever battled a medical bureaucracy. That is, with everybody in America. Her refusal to say “uncle” will inspire, and along the way, readers may even pick up invaluable tips on navigating the labyrinthine depths of both public and private healthcare. There is also a twist at the end that makes university bureaucracy even scarier than its medical counterpart.

One question nagged me throughout Cover Me: where is Huber’s husband? He seemed to hang back and let Huber take the front lines, a story known to too many wives and mothers. But that question aside, and because Huber is such a deliciously skilled writer, Cover Me is the best kind of memoir; it is engaging, enraging, tragic and funny. Fortunately, laughter as medicine is one thing the insurance companies have not yet managed to deny.

Written by: T. Tamara Weinstein, September 15th 2010

Winter’s Bone

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 08:01:00 +0000

Directed by Debra Granik

Roadside Attractions

In my review of 2009’s Oscar-nominated film Precious I stated that it was incredibly difficult to objectively review the film because the realism that is presented is so detached from my own circumstances. After seeing Debra Granik’s gritty Winter’s Bone I find myself faced with a similar conundrum, although not to such an extreme.

For people living in the rural areas of the Ozark mountains a fulfilled life is not one of luxury. The goal for an individual is simply to survive rather than thrive in the harsh natural and social environment. The world presented in Granik’s dark thriller seems desolate and cold, but through the female protagonist it manages to glimmer with hope. Brilliantly filmed against the poetic landscapes of the Ozark mountains, Winter’s Bone is a glimpse into rural morality and the emergence of an unlikely hero.

Relative newcomer Jennifer Lawrence is a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination for her performance as Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old with a lot of responsibility. She is the chief caregiver of her two younger siblings, she lives with her nearly catatonic mother, and she only occasionally shows up for school. Her meth-dealing father has been arrested, posted the family’s house as bail, and vanished. If he does not show up at court, the family will lose their house and be thrown into a world where they have more enemies than friends.

The narrative is essentially straight forward, which allows Granik to lace the film with tension. Granik brilliantly proves that action does not equal tension and most scenes start and end on high notes with an anticipated release that never comes. At its heart, Winter’s Bone is a film noir with a missing person chase, a look into an underground crime world, and a feeling of constant danger. Lawrence successfully creates a new feminist hero that also harkens back to the great noir detectives of the 1940s.

In a low populated area like the rural Ozarks, the morality that is presented does not fit the mold that urban and suburban dwellers have become accustomed to. When a significant portion of the workforce consists of unskilled laborers, the job market is incredibly volatile. In one scene Ree sees her only two possible futures in two separate school rooms: join the army and escape or become a mother and join her miserable relatives.

Nobody appears content with their existence in Winter’s Bone except for the children who only appear in the film in brief segments where they can be seen jumping on a trampoline or playing in hay. The fact that the children get such joy out of such meager circumstances shows that Ree’s fight is worth it.

Cross-posted from Film Misery

Written by: Alex Carlson, July 7th 2010

Tea on the Axis of Evil

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Jean Marie Offenbacher

Reorient Films

After two years of providing security intelligence about the activities of Al Qaeda to the United States government in the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration publicly dubbed Syria a threat to democracy by including it in the so-called Axis of Evil. Knowing very little about the secular republic, filmmaker Jean Marie Offenbacher decided to spend a year in Damascus in order to offer a look at everyday citizens of Syria and combat stereotypical depictions put forth in the mainstream media.

Though the U.S. Embassy warned the director that Syrian folks would be too afraid to talk to her, Offenbacher found enough subjects to fill the hour-long film. She highlights the stories of a few Bedouin people, the family of a taxi driver, and a couple of impressively quintilingual teenage boys who sell rugs at a souq in Aleppo, but the film focuses on people most Americans will find quite palatable: liberal, middle-class, educated Syrians who speak English and whose lifestyles mimic those in the Western world. There are several students of literature, sociology, and journalism, as well as a fashion designer, an actress, a weaver, a painter, and a businesswoman. In an interview with New America Media, Offenbacher explains this choice by saying she chose people she believed Americans could identify with; unfortunately, tactic undercuts her claim of and desire for authenticity, as the film’s characters are hardly representative of the general population (Syria’s lower classes, political conservatives, and the religiously dogmatic are conspicuously absent from the interviews) and simply become a counter-stereotype themselves.

This bumble heightens the well-intended, if naïve, thesis of the film: Syrians are just like us! They dance to 50 Cent in pubs. They swoon over movie stars like Antonio Banderas. The women struggle with feeling beautiful, and with sexist double standards regarding female sexuality. They worry about how to balance the need for childcare with their demanding careers. They learn to reconcile their religious practices and beliefs with newly emerging desires. The version of Syria presented in Tea on the Axis of Evil is, indeed, very much like urban America, but just as one should not forget that urban America comprises more than latte-sipping, New York Times readers, it is equally necessary to understand that Syria is not America—nor should it be—and, in a film about countering false depictions, present the complex diversity of Syrians’ lived reality.

Originally published in Bitch Magazine

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, June 24th 2010

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Aífe Murray

University of New Hampshire Press

The popular image of Emily Dickinson is that of an almost ghostly woman in white, secluding herself in an upstairs bedroom alone, but Maid as Muse's innovative approach shows her frequently in the kitchen. There, she is found stirring puddings, baking her famous gingerbread, and living on familiar terms with the household help. She shared her dreams and gossiped with her favorite maid, the Irish-born Margaret Maher, who Dickinson referred to as her dear Maggie.

Murray uses a wide range of documents, including maps, advertisements, letters, photographs, and oral history interviews with descendants of the Dickinson's domestic staff to recreate the material and intellectual milieu in which the poet wrote her celebrated works. Murray demonstrates that the quantity and quality of Emily's writing output—in letters and poems—varies with the presence and absence of reliable servants in the household. Only when there are competent people to help with the heavy load of housework that a nineteenth-century homestead requires is Emily able to find the time, the energy, and, most significant, the concentration to write at her best.

Furthermore, Murray shows that the servants' vernacular speech—often quite different from the staid Yankee rhythms of the poet's family and neighbors—influenced Emily's compositions. The poet herself quotes sayings in her letters by the Irish immigrant Mrs. Mack, for example, and notes how differently her maids pronounce certain English words. Emily's famous slant rhymes and staccato lines of poetry also have startling parallels to the reported conversations and personal letters of her staff.

Murray traces the contributions of Black, American Indian, and British-born servants to the life and work of Emily Dickinson. She points out the places where Emily revealed the prejudices of her times, the classism and racism, yet she also acknowledges how Emily managed to rise above those prejudices and see poor people and other outcasts as sympathetic human beings. This is an enormously rich book, impossible to summarize briefly, well worth exploring, not only by the many fans of Emily Dickinson's poetry, but anyone interested in cultural history and the development of American society.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 21st 2010

Ilustrado

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Miguel Syjuco

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is the novel made for re-reading. There are continual twists and turns and questions about the nature of fiction writing that immediately attune one to the constructed nature of the textual landscape. Indeed, Ilustrado is a metafiction, as it involves a character by the name of Miguel, a writer living in New York who is researching the life of a Filipino expatriate writer named Crispin Salvador.

At the beginning of the novel, the readers discover that Crispin has died under mysterious circumstances. Miguel, having been acquainted with and impressed by Salvador’s work and life, goes about trying to find out what might have happened to Salvador, especially as he embarks on writing Salvador’s life story. The novel is written with this main storyline, but scattered throughout are excerpts from Salvador’s many creative writings, both fictional and nonfictional in scope. There are also various interviews and blog excerpts that continually provide more context and more complexity to Crispin Salvador.

The other major narrative involves Miguel’s own life, one marked by the tragic and premature death of both his mother and father. Miguel and his many siblings are raised by his grandparents. Perhaps, not surprisingly, the novel takes us to the Philippines where Miguel is both haunted by the tensions that have disintegrated his family and looks to discovering more about his esteemed Crispin Salvador.

The title of Miguel’s novel, comes from the Filipino elite that traveled to Europe in the late nineteenth century in order to receive an education. In this regard, the “enlightened ones” speaks to the complicated ways in which the colonial subject could continue to be indoctrinated by the cultural capital devised out of the imperial enterprise. Nevertheless, the education that the ilustrados received also helped foment the revolutionary ideals espoused by those such as Jose Rizal. In this way, the novel is distinctly postcolonial in character inasmuch as it might be called Asian American.

Following Crispin’s life through the eyes of Miguel’s work and by other creative excerpts, the novel does track an impressive array of historical changes that have typified the Philippines in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crispin, having been raised in affluence, must come to terms with his class background and finds himself using writing as a venue to share his political sentiments. The hope for the venue of writing as a direct instigator of political activism is a vexed issue throughout the novel and we can see that Syjuco is tarrying with the complex ways in which representation, referent, and social protest collide. Miguel, too, comes from a clearly privileged background and all throughout the novel we see the ways in which class stratification details the Manila landscape that becomes a sort of “third” character.

Like the recently reviewed, A Thread of Sky, Syjuco excels at painting a picture of modern metropolitan Manila in all of its intricacies and these urbanscapes become the terrain upon which power and difference can be situated. As the plot moves directly into the homes and lives of individual characters, we see, for instance, the way in which the domestic workers are subordinated and often times flagrantly abused. In the clubscapes, individuals worry about the latest fashions and where to score a round of drugs. The profligacy of the Manila elite is meant to destabilize any deterministic trajectory of the country’s progressivism. In addition, the political ruling class is also portrayed as corrupt and ineffectual. In this general space of guarded pessimism, the novel begins to turn inward with a major shift in the conclusion that queries the entire nature of the narrative trajectory itself. It begs the question about the construction of the modern Filipino/American subject, and he or she has come to exist at hazy boundary between fantasy and reality.

Ilustrado is a consummately entertaining book, one that will have you immediately re-reading, spending more time on the many different threads that hold the book together.

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Written by: Stephen Hong Sohn, June 3rd 2010

Privilege: A Reader

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Michael Kimmel, Abby L. Ferber

Westview Press

A historian once said that the more one can know about something, the more you can control it. Michel Foucault was specifically talking about the control of psychiatric patients, prison inmates, and people's sex lives, but we can certainly extend his thoughts to a plethora of other examples. What Foucault did not say, however, was how exposing and learning about power and dominance can lead to their dismantling.

After more than two decades since his passing, the inheritors of Foucault's ideas make an appearance in a handsome new book that explores the invisible power of privilege; namely the privilege of being White, heterosexual, and middle class in America. Privilege: A Reader is a collection of essays compiled and edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, both scholarly experts in masculinities and ethnic studies respectively. The book takes on a welcoming and accessible feel with essays that come a personal place, many written from a first-person perspective by heavyweights like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Tim Wise.

Some, like Allan Bérubé's experience as a gay rights activist brings to light the complications of being White in anti-racist gay rights movement. Not being White, I found Bérubé's angst about pointing out the Whiteness of influential gay groups in the U.S. an eyeopener. For White people, it seems, it was convenient to remain racially invisible and to depend on the unspoken rules about keeping that Whiteness unchecked. Awkward silences, defensiveness, and hostility form the repertoire of White discomfort when the racial gaze is turned to Whiteness.

In Michael A. Messner's piece on "Becoming 100 Percent Straight," he raises questions that heterosexual people rarely ask: how do we know for sure we're straight? And what made us straight? Messner's question is interwoven in a study of his own sexuality that touches on his memories as a young man who was infatuated with a male classmate and friend. In repressing this infatuation, he belittles and rejects his friend—a process Messner calls the heterosexualisation of his masculinity.

With every chapter I am reminded of the discomfort the topic of privilege raises and how important that it should remain unsettling. I learn that Black men and working class White people, as privileged groups, are highly contested categories in the face of institutional racism and poverty. And dishearteningly, I discover that the gateway to social mobility undermined by the unearned privilege of being accepted to Ivy League colleges by virtue of having parents who are alumni.

Kimmel and Ferber's book takes us on a journey of self-reflection, of deconstructing the power of invisibility, and asks us some difficult questions about our many roles in maintaining oppression. But it does not try leave us beset with racial or class guilt. Rather, it invites us to pursue, both on a theoretical and practical level, ways of recognising the overlapping nature of social privileges and overcoming differences in the name of solidarity against oppressions.

Though Privilege: A Reader could be a more comprehensive, far-reaching catalogue of dominance, both insidious and overt, if it had taken on board the narrative of privilege from other non-White experiences and interrogated what being able-bodied and cisgendered mean. The absence of trans, disabled, Asian, and Native American voices speaks, ironically, of Kimmel's and Ferber's privilege of omitting these important experiences that are key to dismantling the edifice of privilege.

I praise Privilege: A Reader nonetheless, for its courage to speak from a place that prefers to remain silent, for raising attention to a things that want to stay hidden, and its overall critique of life's many taken for granted experiences and “common sense.” I'm sure Foucault would be proud of that.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, May 8th 2010

MILK (5/1/2010)

admin — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

HERE Arts Center

New York, New York

Emily DeVoti’s provocative two-act play, MILK, opens in a spare farmhouse kitchen. It’s 1984. Ronald Reagan has just been elected US president and local newscasters seem to have nothing good to report. Meg (played by Jordan Baker), a former mathematician who loves precision and order, and her husband Ben (Jon Krupp), a former investigative reporter, are sitting at the table and talking, but it’s the kind of tense conversation that can quickly turn from controlled anger to fierce argument.

Things are bad, very bad. A drought has made dairy production virtually impossible, and land that’s been in Meg’s family for centuries is now on the cusp of foreclosure. On top of this, their college-aged daughter—who is never seen but is referenced at key moments in the play—wants to be an actress and their fourteen-year-old son Matt (Noah Robbins) wants material things his parents cannot possibly afford: name-brand sneakers, CDs, a bedside color TV, and stylish clothes, among them. Worse, there’s a city slicker on the prowl, and he’s made no bones about wanting to “help” Meg and Ben ease their financial woes. Ben thinks it’s good idea, "a gift from God"; Meg doesn’t.

Ben wins.

By the time businessman James (Peter Bradbury) and his teenaged daughter, Veronica (Anna Kull), arrive on the scene—in a private plane, no less—things have deteriorated even further. But James couldn't care less about the family’s personal difficulties. Instead, he’s turning his managerial acumen to improving the farm’s productivity. Although he knows nothing about cows, he hatches a plan that, on paper, will foster unprecedented growth and save the day: importing “wild, hairy, horned” bulls to impregnate the many heifers dotting the pastoral landscape.

As you have probably guessed, things don’t pan out as James—or Ben or a reluctant Meg—expect. While the second act of the play is far weaker than the first, the excellent cast, including Caroline Baeumler as Auroch, a talking bovine the Program Notes describe as “quite possibly the last living wild cow,” briefly explore a number of evocative themes including monetary pressures; urban versus rural lifestyles; marital fidelity; self-sacrifice; coming of age; and the festering ache that often accompanies keeping silent about things that matter.

In fact, by the time Veronica tearfully confides her father’s secrets to Matt, the pathos is so intense that James instantly morphs into someone less repugnant. In the end, while we may revile Matt politically, DeVoti renders him a multidimensional personality who is deserving of compassion.

There are no easy answers in MILK. Indeed, as the world changes, some customs and practices inevitably become obsolete and are replaced by newer rituals and activities. The key is figuring out which pieces of cultural and personal history to retain and which to let go.

At one point, Meg looks into a bucket of unpasteurized milk and declares that “the pure stuff, it corrupts so easily.” Maybe so. MILK asks its viewers to think about what’s negotiable and what isn’t. Regardless of what is ultimately decided, one thing is certain: after watching this well-executed play, urban audiences will think about cows in a whole new way.

Photo credit: Jim Baldassare

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, May 5th 2010