academic

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

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

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

Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

mandy — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Parama Roy

Duke University Press

The introduction to Alimentary Tracts begins with a Salman Rushdie quote about peppercorns and includes the phrase “symbolic anthropophagy.” Similarly to the first two sentences, the remainder of the book would continue to intrigue and baffle me.

Alimentary Tracts consists of four long chapters entitled “Disgust: Food, Filth, and Anglo-Indian Flesh in 1857”; “Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity”; “Dearth: Figures of Famine”; and “Appetite: Spices Redux,” and one short final chapter, “Remains: A Coda.” The style of writing is admittedly dense, like an over-rich chocolate cake. And at times the meaning seems to be lost in the thickness of the form.

More simply, overall, Roy questions what is eaten, and what or who is involved in the process of cooking, sharing, and ingesting. She provides an analytical investigation of the “gastropolitics and gastropoetics.” Alimentary Tracts essentially asks how aspects of food politics (such as famine) impact identity and history in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Roy argues that “who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are fundamental to colonial and postcolonial making – and unmaking.”

In discussing famine, Roy brings attention to questions of equity and access. In the first chapter Roy provides greater context to Gandhi’s famous protest of the salt tax in India. She also looks at the issue of pollution for high-class Hindu males in food as interlinked to concepts of sex. And, in subsequent chapters, she discusses Mahasweta Devi’s coverage of famine in her short stories and novels.

In chapter two, she discusses Gandhi’s experiments with truth, eating, and abstinence. Humans today have certainly come a long way in acceptance of organic, local, vegan cuisines when compared to when Gandhi first went to England. At that time, open defiance of Hindu traditions were seen as civilized; eating meat and drinking alcohol was just one aspect of the norm.

I found the chapter focusing on appetite to smoothly flow the best. Roy traces the evolution of the term curry, an invention of Anglo-Indians in India, rather than an appropriate description of the various styles of cooking and spices that go into Indian food. Incorporating analysis of cookbooks and Indian writers, she weaves together what seems initially to be a strange combination of concepts.

Its easy to imagine excerpts of this text in a reader on South Asian studies, food politics, literary criticism or cultural criticism; it is nothing close to a cookbook and isn’t meant for light reading. In her introduction, Roy states that the alimentary tracts of colonial and postcolonial India contain lessons for students of literary, feminist, cultural, and area studies. Though the text can be painfully difficult to wade through, that is because it contains much substance.

Written by: Lakshmi Eassey, April 1st 2011

Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen

beth — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Kathleen Rowe Karlyn

University of Texas Press

Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen by Kathleen Rowe Karlyn is a fascinating look into the movies and television I watched as a kid. As a woman in my mid-twenties, I can safely say that my age group, for the most part, was the target audience when the films and television shows mentioned in the book were being produced. Or, at least, one of the target audiences. Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers is a companion volume to Unruly Women, published in 1995 by the same author. (I have not read Unruly Women, so some of my thoughts about Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers may have responses in the earlier work.)

According to the back cover and introduction, Karlyn’s purpose in writing this companion volume is to “ask whether today’s seemingly materialistic and apolitical girls, inspired by such real and fictional characters as the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have turned their backs on the feminism of their mothers or are redefining unruliness for a new age.” The book is more than 250 pages long, plus twenty pages of endnotes, eighteen pages for the Works Cited, and an index for ease in looking up specific information. It’s clear in reading that Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers is an academic work, but the author thankfully did a good job of keeping my attention with her writing style, relevance of the subjects, and accompanying photographs.

The book is split into an introduction, an afterward, and eight chapters which comprise the bulk of her argument. The first few chapters delve into the worlds of Clueless, Titanic, American Beauty, the Scream trilogy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mean Girls, and The Devil Wears Prada. It really helps to have seen the aforementioned movies (and the others Karlyn discusses later) or some of the series in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For example, I could really engage in the parts about Titanic, American Beauty, Buffy, and The Devil Wears Prada because I’d seen those multiple times, remembered details, and could grapple with Karlyn’s assertions about each piece. (She says American Beauty has a strong incest motif, and since I’d seen the movie multiple times I was able to disagree at first and then maybe see where she was coming from.) But for the others I mentioned—especially the Scream trilogy, which I’ve never seen—it was much harder to understand what she was even talking about; I had to take her at her word that one character did something and then another did something else, etc. It wouldn’t be unthinkable, I suppose, to sit down and watch (at least some of) the pieces mentioned in Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers to have a basic understanding of the author’s starting point, but until I have time to do that, I can’t fully engage with some of the text. I suspect other readers will have similar issues.

Nonetheless, the movies and characters with which I was familiar provided me with plenty of brain fodder. There’s an entire chapter on Reese Witherspoon’s ability to “walk the line” between feminine and feminist in her film portrayals, and in real life, a chapter about teen melodrama that focuses on My So-Called Life and Thirteen, and a chapter about girls and women of color in film. I’m not sure how I feel about having only one chapter about girls and women of color; I don’t know if Karlyn could only work with the movies she had and most of them just leave out people of color (i.e., the entertainment industry is racist) or if she picked and chose the films that fit her thesis and the ones that most easily fit didn’t include people of color in important roles, or some combination thereof. (I suspect it’s the third option.) That said, someone could write an entire book about just girls and women of color on screen, so I’m not sure how I’d have written it differently in this book.

Overall, I’d say that Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers is a great reference text; it has a lot of relevant, useful information for Third Wave feminists (and parents of said), and it may open up someone’s eyes when they ascribe to feminist beliefs that begin with, “I’m not a feminist, but…”

Written by: Viannah Duncan, March 29th 2011

Mother Knows Best: Talking Back to the “Experts”

gwen — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Laura Camille Tuley, Jessica Nathanson

Demeter Press

Given the sassy title and equally feisty cartoon woman on the cover of this book, I expected a bold, yet playful critique of so-called mothering “experts.” Much to my disappointment, what I encountered within was a collection of essays and research papers that were heavy in academic terminology and short on the fun. This is not a book for the lighthearted reader, but rather for those who seek a more scholarly perspective on issues such as the bodily experience of being pregnant, breastfeeding and its associated politics, and how a “good” mother is defined.

The women who contributed to this book share backgrounds in higher education. Many are professors and hold PhDs and other advanced degrees or positions of relative power and prestige. Taking this into account, it makes sense that their writing is at times overly cerebral in its deconstruction of motherhood. One would have to already be knowledgeable about the mainstream critiques in order to delve into this world of advanced analysis.

Some of the authors’ arguments were not new to me, such as that of breastfeeding. The mainstream media has a history of covering breastfeed-ins as well as studies about the benefits of breast milk. The buck usually stops here, and this is where the in-depth discussions come into use. The authors accurately deconstruct breastfeeding as it relates to the idealized image of a mother and the societal expectations that we are all inevitably caught up in. Breastfeed-ins are great and all, but to have the opportunity to engage in this type of activism also suggests a level of privilege. What about working mothers? What about otherwise marginalized women who have more at risk?

Then there is the whole question of how breastfeeding intersects with feminism. On one hand, women are held to impossible standards of motherhood in which the mother never blows up or grows frustrated and fosters a healthy sense of self in her children, quite possibly at the risk of losing her own self in the process. On the other hand, women have worked tirelessly to achieve even a semblance of equality in the workplace and are taught that they should aspire to anything and everything that they dream for themselves. Both of these paths involve a lot of input from outside sources, or the so-called “experts.” These experts tell women how they should feel, how they should birth their children, and how they should raise their children, yet tend to ignore or disregard the ultimate authorities on the subject—the mothers themselves.

At the core of this book, the authors propose that women can be experts of their own pregnancies and mothering experiences. There are many conflicting and compelling lines of reason behind many of the practices supported by experts, but ultimately the mother’s individual circumstances should be considered. Each woman must be her own mothering expert because, after all, she will be the one living it.

Written by: Shana Mattson, February 23rd 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

Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship

farhana — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Nathalie Lebon, Elizabeth Maier

Rutgers University Press

One of the aims of the groundbreaking work Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean is the diffusion of the ideas of these mostly Latin-American scholars to a larger audience, thus the original 2006 Spanish-language volume’s translation and subsequent adaptation and expansion into English.

However, it seems contradictory to the spirit of the project to start reviewing it without mentioning the authors here. Besides excellent introductory essays by the editors listed above, this tome includes articles by the following Latin American and Caribbean academics who, for the most part, have been conscientiously translated from the original language: Myriam Merlet, Graciela di Marco, Norma Mogrovejo, Montserrat Sagot, María Luisa Tarrés, and Morena Herrera. The volume also includes interviews done by Graciela di Marco, and articles by scholars such as Karen Kampwirth, Ana Lorena Carrillo, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Kia Lily Caldwell, Mercedes Prieto, Andrea Pequeño, Clorinda Cominao, Alejandra Flores, Gina Maldonado, Cathy A. Rakowski, Gioconda Espina, Fiona MacAulay, Marysa Navarro, María Consuelo Mejía, Virginia Vargas, Marta Núñez Sarmiento, Helen Safa, Alice Colón, and Sara Poggio.

The foreword by Sonia E. Alvarez sums up succinctly why this book is so important to those of us studying questions of gender and activism in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to her reading, it is “brimming with compelling conceptual innovations, fresh empirical insights, and provocative political analysis, setting new parameters for future studies of feminist and other social movements in politics” in the region. There is no denying her expert judgment. However, the fact that this study provides a voice for the women listed above is what brings the innovative aspect, since many of these women have now been working in their respective countries for years in their own languages. Instead of all the “old regulars” working in the field in what the editors refer to as the Global North, this volume allows for an “inside look” into some (an infinite part, unfortunately) of the research that is ongoing in this region, at the same time as it allows for contrasting and/or other voices to come fill its pages. This achievement must be celebrated. Thus, for example, Graciela di Marco provides a voice for founding members of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Nora Cortiñas and Estela Carlotto, more than thirty years into their continued battle.

Although some countries’ movements are still not included in this type of volume (Bolivia, Panama, and Honduras come to mind), the attempt made to be as inclusive as possible is one which is on the right track with making visible research on gender-based issues, especially with regard to race, religion, sexual preferences and social classes. However, there is no way to ignore the magnitude of providing a space to the women’s indigenous groups from Ecuador (for example), given that they have only had the right to vote in their own countries for less than forty years. And, significantly, this is what this volume is about- taking a larger look at women’s activism in the region and appreciating the scope of what has advanced in the past years for the very diverse women’s movement, given the ebb and flow of the political, social and economic circumstances in the world.

Regrettably, the situation has actually gone backwards in some countries such as Nicaragua where the women’s movement has suffered significant losses in the past years, as Kampwirth argues in her chapter, especially with the still controversial therapeutic abortion debate which has been ongoing in the country. While some countries have moved from what were seemingly viable feminist movements towards what Kampwirth deems as “antifeminism” or backlash movements, some are only experiencing nascent incursions into this activist domain (what Lebon fittingly calls “activism with unexpected actors”) and still reject the “feminist” label.

Among the twenty excellent chapters, of particular note in the volume, given last January’s earthquake and more recent cholera outbreak in Haiti, is Myriam Merlet’s article on women’s citizenship in that country. It provides a remarkable glimpse into the leaps and bounds that were being made by women leading up to this disaster and, perhaps, provides some inherent insight into how some of the country’s problems could eventually be resolved from within.

Written by: Sophie M. Lavoie, January 11th 2011

Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England

jenna — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Susan Frye

University of Pennsylvania Press

Pens and Needles takes a new approach to the study of how women expressed themselves in Early Modern England (roughly 1500-1700). It has long been assumed that the gender roles we know today have been consistent over time. Pens, writing, communication, are the realm of men; needles, sewing, the home, are the realm of women.

Frye disagrees; she gives extensive examples of women writing in the Early Modern era, from poetry to household accounts. There are examples from old books defining a ‘virtuous wife’ as a woman who is educated enough to run her household well. A good wife is, in fact, “a vigilant businesswoman” who “considreth lande, and bieth it, and wyth the fruite of her handes she planteth a vineyard.” (Frye quoting The Common Book of Prayer and Proverbs)

Women of this era have left behind ample evidence that text—prose, poems, names—were ever a part of their daily lives, particularly their textiles. It is no coincidence, she asserts, that so many samplers, appliqués and tapestries incorporate letters and wording in their designs. Many a pillow case is inscribed with a verse or family motto in Latin.

Further still, Frye insists that these sewn objects were a way for women to communicate. These items were used as decoration within the home, allowing women to define their spaces. In the lower classes, an excellent ‘household store’ of good embroidery, well-made clothes, or decorations added to the family’s wealth and prestige.

In the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, her projects became gifts full of meaning to both allies and enemies. Through specific examples, Frye demonstrates how Mary wove her identity into everything she created, emphasizing her noble heritage and royal aspirations. Symbolism is rife in Mary’s work, especially when creating gifts for Elizabeth I, her cousin and captor. Frye contrasts Mary with Elizabeth, who was prone to more intellectual projects. Elizabeth began easing her way into Henry VIII’s court through books she translated and bound herself. These gifts to her father established a reputation for intelligence as well as skill and taste, paving the way for her ascension.

Even now, we’re too quick to dismiss ‘arts and crafts’ as less notable than writing. Sewing is utilitarian, but it is also artful, and a means of expression. When we scoff at them we are falling in line with the sentiments of men who never fully appreciated the labor and creativity that goes into each item. Contemporary women more prone to letters should listen to Frye’s arguments, and grant more respect to their ‘traditional’ peers.

Pens and Needles is an academic text, and its style is better suited to researchers and college classrooms. The language (such as ‘textuality’, a tricky idea to wrap one’s mind around) is not meant for the casual reader. Frye assumes that her reader is already familiar with the era discussed and her area of study.

That said, the book is a real gift for researchers and academics. Frye is meticulous with her citations, resulting in a hefty appendix made up of Notes, Bibliography, and Acknowledgments. The chapters are few, but each is broken down clearly, helping one identify each smaller section.

I would very much have liked to read nonfiction in a more easily digested style, something that would allow me—someone who is interested but has no formal background in the subject—to orient myself and read for the pleasure of learning something new. Instead, I battled to get through it, as I’m sure many students will as well.

Regardless of readability, Pens and Needles is thorough, detailed and well-researched. For all that Frye has cited all her sources, I have no doubt that she will become a source on many other bibliographies.

Written by: Richenda Gould, December 17th 2010

Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities

annette — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

SUNY Press

I learned a lot about Black Greek-letter organizations while reading Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities, specifically about the title sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA). The author, Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, does a good job of laying out the socio-political arena in which the members lived, from the importance of stepping to the brown paper bag (skin hue) test to the members’ activism in the public sphere.

Disciplining Women is split into five chapters and includes copious endnotes for the dedicated reader. Whaley introduces us to Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs) generally in the first chapter by referencing the recent movie Stomp the Yard and Spike Lee’s School Daze. She notes, however, that neither film is historically complex and both are about men’s organizations, not women’s, which creates kind of a vacancy in popular imagination about the specifics and importance of Black sororities. The first chapter is a stepping point from BGLOs by and large to AKA in particular.

The second chapter focuses on placing AKA and, by extension, other BGLOs into a historical context by connecting the sorority to other culturally significant events: everything from anti-lynching activism at the turn of the last century to1990s AIDS activism and all the way up to the present. Whaley duly notes AKA’s members’ good deeds but also mentions with caution that the sorority’s “politics of respectability and reform ventures” may actually have hurt (and continue to hurt) Black Americans as a whole. One step forward, two steps back, it seems.

The third chapter was the most interesting and informative to me because it covered stepping, something I’ve been interested in since I learned about it in college. (My school had no historically Black sororities or fraternities, but the Black Student Union often hosted groups from other schools, many of which included step performers.) Whaley briefly analyzes stepping by centering it in the step performances of the African diaspora and then centers on how stepping has evolved on college campuses and how young women reproduce and recreate gender, sexual identity, and ethnic loyalties through public ritual. Though other publications have covered stepping more thoroughly, Disciplining Women expands upon Black women’s contributions to discussions of femininity and sexuality.

In the fourth chapter, from which the title of the book is taken, Whaley tackles the minefield that is hazing in a BGLO (or any Greek-letter organization). The primary AKA case study about unofficial pledge activities that resulted in a criminal trial in Kent, Ohio, provided a dark, complicated look into sorority initiation rites.

In the last chapter, AKA sisters and alumnae comment on the future of BGLOs and raise three main points of concern: “class, gender, and racial struggle; regrets and mistakes pertaining to pledging and hazing; and maintaining hope through action in the Black public sphere.” Including the voices of women in AKA proved to be an important point for Whaley; she lets the reader draw his or her own conclusions by setting historical narrative and present-day socio-political and cultural discussion side by side for review.

Disciplining Women does not work well as an introduction to Black Greek-letter organizations and seems more easily approached as a case study of one such organization, Alpha Kappa Alpha, so long as the reader already has some background knowledge of Black fraternities and sororities, stepping, and/or hazing on college campuses. The reading is verbose and intense; more than once I had to reread a sentence to understand what it really meant. Essentially, it’s an academic text rather than a popular history or easy-to-read guide. Any one of the chapters could have been exponentially expanded and, when I was able to follow the author, I often wanted it to; the discussion, when I understood it, was all too brief for my taste. Disciplining Women provides a lot of great information, but make sure you’re prepared to focus and engage in the reading without interruptions or distractions.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, December 5th 2010

Imagining Black Womanhood: The Negotiation of Power and Identity Within the Girls Empowerment Project

beth — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Stephanie D. Sears

SUNY Press

Imagining Black Womanhood by Stephanie D. Sears is a sociological account of the experiences of young African-American girls within the Girls Empowerment Project (GEP), an “Afri-centric, womanist, single-sex, after-school program” in Sun Valley, the largest housing development in Bay City, California. Set against the backdrop of a “nation’s collective anxieties” regarding Black women and girls, Imagining Black Womanhood is a well-researched and thoughtful interrogation of race, gender, and class and how the experiences of young Black girls struggling to resist stereotypes within and outside the GEP project speak to broader questions of power, privilege, and politics. Despite the (ironically) unimaginative title, Imagining Black Womanhood is a commendable effort by Sears to question, with equal academic rigor, discourses of empowerment, as well as oppression, in addition to showing how the biases that inform many of the stereotypes that these girls must struggle against come from across the political spectrum and across racial lines.

Sears sets the historical stage well, by tracing images of poor Black women and girls as “welfare queens” to the Reagan administration’s dismantling of the welfare state and its promotion of “trickle-down” economics, with its explicit finger-pointing at the “impoverished African-American female” as an undeserving recipient of benefits. By laying bare the racial and gender stereotypes that underlie these and other predominant images (such as “teen mothers”) of young Black women in the public imagination, Sears demonstrates how discourses from both Black and dominant communities have attempted to control the sexuality of young Black women—and have shaped the context for the growth of projects such as GEP.

Against this background, Sears describes how despite its aim to “empower” and enable Black girls to counter racial and gender stereotypes, GEP inadvertently reproduced many of these discourses in both its structure as an organization as well as its method of work. GEP’s explicit aim, when it initially conducted an assessment of problems such as teen pregnancy and poverty among Black girls, was to “challenge and change…unequal power relations and resource distribution”—that is, the structural issues underpinning Black girls’ social status in Sun Valley. However, despite this goal, GEP’s more pragmatic choice to try and effect change in areas where they could have most impact, meant that they ended up addressing the symptoms of discrimination rather than challenging the structures of power responsible for them. In doing so, GEP fell back on middle class cultural values and notions of “respectability,” attempting to erase what they viewed as the cultural markers of the “ghetto underclass”—such as the hypersexualization and objectification of young Black women—but with them, also the sense of self-hood and lived experiences of the young girls of GEP.

The above is illustrated most interestingly in the section entitled “Dance Lessons,” in which Sears shows how the struggle over sexuality, power, and identity between GEP and the young girls who attend it, is enacted through the “embodied politics” of dance. Prompted by the Afro-centric ideology of GEP, GEP staff’s attempts to encourage the girls to perform African dances (this bearing, in their eyes, the respectable currency of tradition) is countered by the girls’ desire to “express who they are” through contemporary hip-hop numbers. Sears stages the generational and class confrontation between the GEP staff and the girls through their conflicting perceptions of “appropriate” displays of sexuality, respectability, and respect, thereby asking the question that lies at the heart of Imagining Black Womanhood—what does “empowerment” mean, and to whom? How are notions of empowerment intertwined with class and cultural values? And what happens when processes of empowerment attempt to reconstitute the identity of she who is seen to be a “recipient” rather than an equal participant in this process? Sears’ book is a dense but rewarding read, not just for academics but for anyone interested in confronting these questions.

Written by: Kaavya Asoka, November 19th 2010

Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse

gwen — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Pegeen Reichert Powell, Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

SUNY Press

While the field of mothering studies is approximately thirty years old, there’s no question that the experience of motherhood and the accompanying discourse and silence that surround it has existed for far longer. In this academic anthology, Stitt and Powell cast a wide net into this interdisciplinary field, bringing back articles that speak to everything from the “mommyblogging” revolution to single mothers’ groups and how they operate on university campuses. It is a bit broad for a text that comes in under 315 pages, but then again, it seems that attempting to narrow this field of study would be counterintuitive. The message of mothering studies scholars is clear: each mother’s experience deserves exploration.

The book is divided into two parts: “Feminist Interventions in Public Discourse,” and “Feminist Interventions in Interpersonal Discourse.” That organizational style doesn’t help or hurt the book since it’s a well-curated set of articles, but it is interesting to think about the public and private spheres that mothering dually occupies. In a feminist collection like this, it is difficult to highlight certain articles over others, especially because readers know how intimate these experiences are. However, there are certain pieces in this anthology that truly do stand apart from the rest. “Cyborg Mothering” by Shelley Park offers a unique, maternal perspective on technology. This is a woman who once refused to own a cell phone because she didn’t want to be in constant contact with anyone. Upon her separation from her husband and as a result of their joint custody of their two daughters, that same woman now relies on that mobile device and various web tools to maintain a presence in her daughters’ lives when they spend time with her ex-husband. It’s fascinating to see technology in this light, as a tool that truly does keep the lines of communication open, rather than as a distraction or a way to connect with an old high school friend.

Lynn Kuechle offers her thoughts on the current lack of mothering scripts, and expresses her frustration as a master’s student in speech communication and a mother, which culminates in a series of monologues about mothering. When read against another article in this text, “Mommyblogging Is a Radical Act!: Weblog Communities and the Construction of Maternal Identity,” one begins to question what “lack of mothering scripts” Kuechle is referring to. According to Lisa Hammond, mommybloggers are rewriting scripts every day on the web. The issues like these that are raised by the mere combination of articles in this text are the most rewarding aspects of reading Mothers Who Deliver. The articles themselves promote introspection, but it is the act of reading them in the same space against seemingly disparate articles that fosters questioning and eventual understanding of just how personal and political a field like mothering studies can be.

Written by: Alyssa Vincent, November 13th 2010

The Rey Chow Reader

emily — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Edited by Paul Bowman

Columbia University Press

Not many theorists would re-imagine Jane Eyre as a Maoist. However, postcolonial thinker Rey Chow does and with great aplomb. Furthermore, it's not in the context of English literature in which Chow invokes the fictional heroine, but rather the issue of Orientalism in today's academia. According to Chow, the Maoist Jane Eyre is a romantic and a self-styled victim that is embodied in the non-native scholar of East Asian studies who bemoans the loss of cultural “authenticity” in an increasingly globalised world. Chow's deft and even fanciful portrayal of the latter-day Orientalist that demonstrates her creative ingenuity and unconventional analytical mind is evident throughout the collection of her essays, The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman.

These qualities are important in the primary themes tackled in her writings—sexuality, racism, and postcolonialism. In the post-Edward Said world, the Orientalism of yore is not only outmoded but a disgrace to the Western academic code of practice, but Chow is perceptive to detect the more subtle Orientalisms she finds still pervasive in the academy, particularly in East Asian studies in Western institutions. Not only are academics (and often highly respected icons; Julia Kristeva for one) safe from Chow's relentless critique of latter day Orientalism, the works and words of art house film-makers Zhang Yimou and Bernado Bertolucci also go under her microscopic scrutinising gaze.

She is also self-aware of her own position in the ivory tower that she turns this gaze towards herself in an essay about her early career in academia; scholars from the former colonial frontier during the dissolution of the British empire such as herself (Chow hails from Hong Kong) were seduced by the imagined prestige of English literature that rendered Chinese writing less superior and intellectually legitimate. Chow's essay on the postcolonial-ised scholar is a subdued call to arms for the reclamation of one's own scholarship and by effect, cultural identity, even if one cannot readily give up the tools fashioned by the master.

It becomes clear that Chow is also deeply political. 'Seeing is Destroying' charts the changes in the US discourse of war since the devastating bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to today's brutality of war made sophisticated. These historical observations are perhaps nothing new, however, her concept of the target has chilling resonance of the primordial hunt. As the target in the hunt for America's national Other, first Japan, then the USSR, and now the shadowy figure of the Muslim terrorist, it is reduced to an object on which the trigger is on perpetual threat mode. What links 'Seeing is Destroying' with most of Chow's essays is visuality and the continued technological advancements that make the act of seeing increasingly powerful and more instrumental in xenophobic and sexist control.

Chow's tentacle-like approach to a diversity of disciplines that probes into every crevice of detail promises a thrilling experience and an inspiration to younger scholars of postcolonialism like myself. Perhaps the level of microscopic detail that Chow magnifies throughout her merciless analyses on Orientalism in film and her idiosyncrantic salad-bowl approach to theory may not appeal to everyone, but Chow has certainly created a fan in me.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, October 29th 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

Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire

priyanka — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Sukanya Banerjee

Duke University Press

It’s important to state here that Becoming Imperial Citizens is a work of research best suited for academic audiences. The upper-level vocabulary, combined with analysis, makes for quite a heavy reading.

Sukanya Banerjee’s work looks at the British Empire and citizenship with reference to Indians during, as the title notes, the late Victorian period. From documents covering Mahatma Ghandi’s early years in South Africa to Cornelia Sorabji (Oxford’s first female law student), Banerjee examines the complexities of Indian citizenship under imperial control.

The text provides many examples of how difficult it was for Indian citizens to actually be treated as such. The British system, while quite ideal on paper, did not treat its Indian subjects as citizens. Nevertheless, India proved to be more progressive than England itself when it came to achieving franchise. A good example is Dadabhai Naoroji, who utilized colonial language to appease Britain while advocating for India’s needs. For the good of England, he argued, her Indian subjects required the same rights and justice as her English-born.

To complicate matters, even when individuals like Surendranath Banerjea (one of the first Indians with the Indian Civil Service) complied with empirical expectations, they did not become citizens. Indians had to travel all the way to London, England to take the ICS exam, which greatly reduced Indian chances of admission—many Indians simply couldn’t afford the trip. When Banerjea made it into the ICS, a supposedly permanent position, he was overworked at first, and then expelled. He attempted to go to plan B, law, but his history with ICS ruined his chances. Ghandi, in his writings, also noted discrimination against Indians in South Africa, which was evident as soon as he arrived there.

Banerjee does not merely examine British-educated Indians; she presents their writings and documents to show that the Indian caste system was another obstacle to gaining real citizenship within the empire. Professional occupations in India were a privilege, for the elite. The exam for ICS, for example, was opened to those who did not have a university education but ‘crammer’ preparation. To keep up the lower class individuals who passed the ICS exam, candidates had to show mastery of such elite skills as horsemanship and ‘gentlemanly’ manners. In gaining a foothold for Indian traders in South Africa, Ghandi himself initially downplayed unskilled labourers, conforming to the stereotypes of the day.

While fighting for the right of real citizenship, the affluent people presented in Banerjee’s analysis were well aware of the intricate factors involved in imperial politics. They knew how to play the imperial game in order to make small, gradual gains towards the goal of realized citizenship for all Indian subjects.

Becoming Imperial Citizens is a great resource for anybody studying the British Colonial Regime’s legal, social, or political history. The struggle for equal status in daily living is not specific to India, but experienced by all former British colonies. When taking action against the government, it took inspirational actions to gradually tear down racial, class, and gender obstacles to citizenship for all.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, October 10th 2010

Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War

mandy — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Jodi Kim

University Of Minnesota Press

In Ends of Empire, Jodi Kim approaches the Cold War not as a period in United States history, but as an epistemology, a continued production of knowledge. How does the Cold War generate specific forms of knowledge about the world that reproduce the binary categories of nations as “good” and “evil”? The Cold War is now what Kim characterizes as a “protracted afterlife,” as its gendered and racialized logics and rhetorics are once again deployed in the War on Terror.

Ends of Empire is, therefore, a timely intervention. Kim traces how the rivalry between the US and the USSR was triangulated throughout Asia, and how this triangulation has been sustained through complex cultural formations that naturalize the values of imperialism.

Kim’s project draws heavily from Cultural Studies, as she looks into cultural production as sites of resistance. Since dominant historical accounts obscure the gendered and racialized logics of the Cold War as an epistemology, Kim turns instead towards Asian American cultural products. She skillfully turns her analytic eye on how such literary and cinematic texts make visible the mandated “forgettings,” and violent displacements that Cold War logic continues to unleash in Asia.

In Chapter Three, for example, Kim examines Ruth L. Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats. Jane, one of the novel’s main characters, is the adult daughter of a Japanese mother and an American father who served as an Army botanist during World War II. In her capacity as producer for a television show, Jane promotes the cooking and consumption of US meat to Japanese housewives. Jane is thus part of an enterprise to recruit Japanese housewives as enthusiastic consumers of US products, a contemporary form of imperialist gendered racial rehabilitation for a nation that was once seen as an enemy.

Jane’s observations about the lingering cancers and contaminations in Japan and in American towns that produced plutonium for the bombs, as well as her meditations on her father’s death from cancer, highlight the transnational links between Japanese and US victims of the war, who are all but ignored in dominant historical accounts. In Chapter Five, Kim’s reading of the PBS documentary Daughter from Danang shows how the continued inequalities in political and racial economies made it impossible for a US transracial adoptee to know the lives of her Vietnamese mother and family.

Kim provides a good example of how cultural critique could be employed to make visible various narratives that are suppressed in dominant accounts of history. Many of the narratives of loss, violence, and haunting that she teases out would be impossible to articulate outside literary or cinematic forms. Ends of Empire thus serves to illustrate how cultural production not only serves to give voice to suppressed histories. By refusing to conform to the logics of the Cold War, these works also serve important sites of resistance.

Kim ends her book with the hope that her efforts to trace links between former and current manifestations of US empire would contribute to “a broader interrogation of the intersecting genealogies that have produced our contemporary moment of neoliberal globalization, imperial mandate, and enduring gendered racial regimes of domination.” It is a welcome invitation, as social critique is particularly relevant when it is oriented towards imagining ways of life and organizing that are not built around the need to reproduce empire.

Written by: Tanglad, September 14th 2010

Violence Against Latina Immigrants: Citizenship, Inequality, and Community

admin — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:31:00 +0000

By Roberta Villalón

NYU Press

I generally do not start reviews with blanket statements, but I simply cannot say enough positive comments about this book. As a student of Gender & Sexuality studies, as well as community activism and Hispanic studies, I was greatly interested and inspired by this thoughtful, critical, theory-meets-activism approach to the difficult and devastating reality of violence against Latina immigrants.

The author, Roberta Villalón, is a professor of Sociology at St. John’s University in New York City, where she is active with both the Committee for Latin American and Caribbean studies and the Women and Gender Studies Program. According to her author biography, Villalón was inspired by the corrupt, and often deadly, political regime of her childhood in Argentina, and has since dedicated her professional career to studying the harms and realities of inequality on multiple levels from institutionalized corruption to domestic abuse. With her academic grounding in political science, international relations, and sociology, as well as her Latin American/Latina focus and affiliation with various immigrants and women’s rights organizations, Villalón brings a fresh, critical perspective to the discussions of resistance in social movements, particularly activist feminist grassroots discourse and efforts.

In Violence Against Latina Immigrants: Citizenship, Inequality, and Community, Villalón’s writing/research process was mainly based on her work on the ground as an activist researcher with a legal nonprofit organization that offers free services to individuals who have suffered from domestic abuse. The clients were typically female, undocumented immigrants, a population she notes as particularly vulnerable to violence: domestic, structural, cultural, and symbolic. In her book Violence Against Latina Immigrants, Villalón combines her observations and struggles with individual clients and their processes with the complicated bureaucracy of our national immigration system, with personal interviews with staff. Even though well intentioned, the staff and general organization were often limited by funding and legal restrictions. They were therefore, as Villalón claims, forced to work within and, unfortunately often perpetuated, the oppressive cycles and systems of structural inequality, specifically in their construction of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ clients. Although the organization started from a radical, revolutionary grassroots project, many of the employees seem to be jaded, and accepted the limitations, an unfortunate although (arguably) sometimes necessary common ideological shift for non-profits when the practical issues such as funding, staff, and helping people in the immediate present are realistically addressed.

Villalón notes these frustrating contradictions and dilemmas that further the cycle and reproduction of inequality, and calls for more advocacy, networking between community organizations and policy changes that would aid this particularly vulnerable population. She calls for people, especially those with the desire and power to change policy, to “focus on the ways in which (these women) experience exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence” in order to make the “invisible, visible," while also avoiding the equally oppressive victimization narrative that would further deny their agency.

Overall, the text proves to be a critical study into the complex intersection between immigration, citizenship and violence, particularly in regards to race, gender, heterosexuality, and nationality, and I would recommend to all interested in women’s, immigrant, Hispanic, or general sociopolitical studies.

Written by: Abigail Chance, August 6th 2010