| — | Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence |
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I often see many South Asian Americans on social media platforms attempt (often uncritically) to claim forms of victimhood. This quote (though specifically related to the most extreme forms of marginality) speaks well to the frustrations I feel when I see people casually throw around terms like “exoticism,” “orientalism,” “appropriation,” and “neocolonialism” without thinking about their own participation in those processes. |
Professor Caitlin Zaloom assigned a class to do an ethnographic study of Occupy Wall Street. One student, Sara Ackerman—who objected to being “forced,” in her words, to interview “criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people, and of course, the few competent, mentally stable people”—did not like this. She seems to have complained several times, eventually attempting to confront NYU President John Sexton at Bobst Library; and when he (according to Ackerman) sent her to the “Mental Health exchange,” she let fly with the early-morning “open letter.”
After sending several emails through the listserv for NYU’s department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Ackerman began making slanderous threats to reveal misconduct and ethics violations among the various professors and administrators involved in the growing “scandal.”
Though the focus of the initial email is ostensibly the Occupy Wall Street assignment, there’s a lot more going on: at one point, Ackerman complains that a guest lecturer refused to call on her despite her hand being raised for a minute and 15 seconds (“a long time to keep one’s arm raised”); at another, she claims to have placed an op-ed at one of four “reputable papers” (the Washington Post, The New York Times, the New York Observer and the Wall Street Journal) where she has “close family friends” in employment, ready to be published on Thursday. (I asked Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers if she was aware of this; “we don’t do op-eds,” she told me.)
It is truly saddening to see these types of libelous attacks on the professional careers of members of the NYU academic community. I also find it appalling that Ackerman conflates her refusal to engage with the course material with an issue of academic freedom. This type of encounter is disturbingly indicative of a mentality where undergraduate students see their university education as a service that comes with various entitlements. I can only hope that this controversy brings to light the way that the term “academic freedom” is often co-opted in the name of the degradation of higher education.
I saw Asuncion last night, a play written by Jesse Eisenberg, who also plays the lead. The play follows Edgar, an aspiring journalist and academic who crashes in the apartment of his former Black Studies TA (played by The Hangover’s Justin Bartha). When his new Filipino sister-in-law comes to stay in the apartment for a few days, Edgar sees an opportunity to save her, since he assumes that she’s coming from some sordid background of sex slavery.
The play is extremely funny in its skewering of well-meaning, condescending liberal attitudes and pseudoacademic superiority. Eisenberg is great at depicting the academic humblebrag and the tendency to use scholarly awareness of racism and stereotyping to justify racism and stereotyping. After Edgar asks Ascuncion what she thinks of Pol Pot (since he spent some time in Cambodia), she responds that she’s from The Philippines, to which he replies “I know and I hate how people lump everything that’s not America together, but…”
Vulture’s lukewarm review makes sense, as the play does have a tendency to beat certain aspects of Edgar’s character over the audience’s head, but I didn’t think that was overly distracting from how entertaining the play was overall. The message isn’t subtle or new, but Eisenberg definitely makes it fun to watch. The play’s run has been extended, so if you’re in NYC, try and see it!
Thanks to a tip from WalkOutOfHerMind, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora has jumped to the top of my reading list.
Duke University Press’s description of the book:
Terrifying Muslims highlights how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced, constructed, and represented in the context of American empire and the recent global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic research that compares Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States before and after 9/11, Junaid Rana combines cultural and material analyses to chronicle the worldviews of Pakistani labor migrants as they become part of a larger global racial system. At the same time, he explains how these migrants’ mobility and opportunities are limited by colonial, postcolonial, and new imperial structures of control and domination. He argues that the contemporary South Asian labor diaspora builds on and replicates the global racial system consolidated during the period of colonial indenture. Rana maintains that a negative moral judgment attaches to migrants who enter the global labor pool through the informal economy. This taint of the illicit intensifies the post-9/11 Islamophobia that collapses varied religions, nationalities, and ethnicities into the threatening racial figure of “the Muslim.” It is in this context that the racialized Muslim is controlled by a process that beckons workers to enter the global economy, and stipulates when, where, and how laborers can migrate. The demonization of Muslim migrants in times of crisis, such as the War on Terror, is then used to justify arbitrary policing, deportation, and criminalization.
I’m sure this will be of huge interest to anyone who wants to learn more about the racial politics of Islamophobia, race, diaspora, and the War on Terror.
Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, edited by Siddharth Varadarajan, is an extremely thorough collection of essays exploring the various dimensions of the Gujarat riots. The book features diverse discussions of the violence itself, as well as the conditions in Gujarat and the Diaspora that informed the riots. I highly recommend this collection for anybody who is researching communal violence or Hindu fundamentalism.
| — | Svetlana Boym, “On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes” in Intimacy, a collection edited by Lauren Berlant. |
Desis in the House by Sunaina Marr Maira and published in 2002. Get your copy.
Such an amazing book. Certain parts of Maira’s study were alarmingly applicable to people I know.
| — | Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (via bollywoodsuperstar) |
| — | Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” |
The Hindu recently featured a very interesting interview with Gayatri Spivak, one of the most influential academics in the United States. The interview featured some interesting insight into Spivak’s personal growth as a scholar. I also enjoyed some of Spivak’s self-deprecating humor about her career and scholarship:
I see myself as a classroom teacher rather than anything. I write these books because I can’t not write. You know, it’s that kind of a obsession. I have read an awful lot of very excellent books to think that my books will really make the grade in the long run but they are written with great seriousness and sincerity. But I don’t write well either. Many people have said this in print – that I don’t write well and I am sorry about that… I try my best. My language has become much simpler but not, therefore, easier to understand.
