Revolutionizing American Studies

The Revolutionizing American Studies seminar was delighted to hear from Eric Lott, Professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia, on March 22nd. The following are some thoughts on the readings he provided for our discussion.

Professor Lott’s article, National Treasure, Global Value, and American Literary Studies considers the blockbuster 2004 film in order to think through critical histories and developments within American Studies. His call to “think carefully—politically—about the literary relationship of nation to globe” provides a generative inversion of much humanities training, in which a literary lens is applied to structures understood as fundamentally, and remotely, political. As an “impacted nexus of literary desire,” the National Treasure franchise explicitly charts the literariness of the nation’s symbolic and material position in and to the world; the trailer for National Treasure 2 visualizes this investment by spanning a three-dimensional atlas while zooming in and through the densely transposed script of a diary said to reveal “a conspiracy that crosses the globe.” Our chances for recovering productive, cross-global connectivity are thus foregrounded as textual, embedded in script, while the politics of the nation-state are seen to have long foreclosed possibilities of universal democratic alliance. The article suggests that it is especially important to think politically about these literary “input channels, kinship networks, and routes of transit,” to borrow from Wai Chee Dimock, so that the processes of textual decoding don’t become a kind of foundationalism, the Declaration (and the Bible) wielded to serve positivist ends and amounting to a national historical amnesia. As Lott’s analysis of the movie demonstrates, the desire for global alliance is ambivalent to begin with, hesitating, as it were, “between the tenses” of recto/verso, nation/globe, self and other, calling to mind the ambivalence of cross-racial desire and disavowal underpinning minstrelsy as proposed by Lott’s Love and Theft. Lott’s innovative handling of National Treasure prompts us to question the film’s hesitant investments, including those of Ben – who describes himself not as a treasure hunter but as a treasure protector – and of a post-9/11 U.S. – whose fantasy of seamlessly exporting democracy looks in practice much more like the razed National Library of Iraq. In pointing out how this ambivalence is indicative of the global economic and human rights crises we now face, Lott leads us to the troubling question of whether the material conditions of global cultural-capital accumulation and imperial dominance are in fact dependent on the literary fiction of a well meaning “treasure protector” to redistribute wealth “to the people.”

Considering the dialectic of “front” and “back” uses of the Declaration invoked by National Treasure, we might say that Back Door Man: Howlin’ Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow offers a definitively recto brand of embodiment, that is, a sensitive inquiry into the self as formulated on the back of a precise intersection of social, cultural, and state production (and not its inverse, which here might look like the determination of a group or individual based on the “anodyne clutches of blues buffs and the normalizations of conventional musicology”). The article is an extremely useful demonstration of how the formal structures and aesthetic qualities of a single expressive moment can open a whole social world and affectively disseminate — via the swaying bodies of listeners in, say, an everyday public space — the revolutionary potential for invention and change. Thinking politically, Lott details the ways in which a midcentury postindustrial urban crisis produced new ways of “ignoring black selfhood, of denying the legitimacy of black claims to existence.” If the state’s constitution of blackness is that of non-beingness in the world understood through the categories of race, gender, and sexuality, the unsettling “weirdness” of Back Door Man asserts the visceral, full-bodied presence of African American being in Jim Crow space albeit of a necessarily queered temporality and form. The reclamation of back door invisibility, where one gains the vantage of seeing and being what white men “don’t know” nonetheless bespeaks a national paralysis wherein the inability to know communally inhibits movement past the ambivalent and hesitant forms of cross-racial alliance. Some things we might consider are the possibilities for engendering backdoorness without the compulsive returns and backward glances of a traumatized Jim Crow soundscape; how we might re-imagine, as this song prompts us to do and especially in light of the Occupy Wall Street movement, social relations and institutions without a purported center to which we must return.

-Jenny LeRoy

…who has been so vital to our efforts in pulling together the RevAmStudies initiative…on the forthcoming DEBATES IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES!

Debates in the Digital Humanities brings together leading figures in the field to explore its theories, methods, and practices and to clarify its multiple possibilities and tensions. Together, the essays—which will be published later as an ongoing, open-access website—suggest that the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to contribute to the revival of the humanities and academic life.

Is there such a thing as ‘digital’ humanities? From statistical crunches of texts to new forms of online collaboration and peer review, it’s clear something is happening. This book is an excellent primer on the arguments over just how much is changing—and how much more ought to—in the way scholars study the humanities.

—
Clive Thompson, columnist for Wired and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine

http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/debates-in-the-digital-humanities

Dear Everyone:

On Friday, 2 December, we will discuss chapters from Professor Jodi Melamed’s forthcoming book, REPRESENT AND DESTROY: RATIONALIZING VIOLENCE IN THE NEW RACIAL CAPITALISM (from 12:30-2, in 8201) in the Graduate Center.  Professor Melamed has generously provided us with pdfs of uncorrected page proofs for the purposes of our seminar — please see the Center for Humanities site for a copy of the readings, or email either of us.  At the seminar, and at the public lecture at 4pm that afternoon, a limited number of copies of her book will be available to attendees — we have the privilege of seeing the book first!

In light of current events — and we do mean *current* — the kinds of issues Professor Melamed takes up in her work takes on highlighted urgency.  Her public talk, Ghosting Human Capital: Neoracial Logics in Neoliberal Times, will take place at 4 in 4406 in the Graduate Center, and is cosponsored by the PhD Program in English and the American Studies Certificate Program.  The description of it is as follows:  “Between the old and the new racial capitalism, the era of white supremacy and that of a formally antiracist liberal modernity, the trick of racialization has remained the same: racial procedures constitute human value and valuelessness differentially in accord with reigning geopolitics and economic orders. These procedures do this even as they appear “merely” to sort human beings into rationally inevitable categories of difference.  Jodi Melamed (English and Africana Studies, Marquette University) will examine the post-World War II history of dominant antiracisms as generative forces for global capitalist development, focusing especially on our neoliberal era, whose hallmark is an aggressive recursivity between procedures of race and hyper-speculative capitalism, which speedily and flexibly fixes extreme differentials of value to forms of humanity in any given instance.”

We look forward to seeing many of you for these events.

Looking head, our final session of the semester, 9 December, will be a space dedicated to thinking through such matters as the relationship of (police) power and the university; historicizing contemporary events; and what it means to be a scholar-teacher in this context.  This, we’re imagining as an open forum, without prior reading, as an occasion for anyone who might want to talk about these kinds of issues to be able to do so.  In some respects, it returns us to pick up the ideas that inaugurated the RevAmStudies initiative last spring, organized around Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag.  We’ll meet in our usual space — 8201.01 — at our usual time — 12:30-2.

As always, looking forward to being in conversation with you all, and best wishes to you as the holiday season gets under way.

Best,
Kandice & Duncan

Dear All: In solidarity with the student strikes planned for Thursday, 17 November, Professor Anne McClintock’s lecture has been rescheduled to NOON on Friday, 18 November in Room 6496 — please help spread the word, and hope to see you Friday! Paranoid Empire: Perpetual War and the Twilight of US Power

Friday, November 18, 12pm, Room 6496

Professor Anne McClintock will be exploring what kind of overt U.S. empire emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, engaging notions such as paranoia and perpetual war, torture and the crisis of violence and the visible, imperial déjà vu and the empire of drones in the twilight of U.S. imperial power. McClintock will be exploring the concept of imperial deja vu through the unquiet dead of Hiroshima as the first “ground zero,” and the ubiquitous invocation of “Indian Country” in the “War on Terror.”

co-sponsored by the President’s Office, the American Studies Certificate Program
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FREE and open to the public. All events take place at The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave btwn 34th & 35th. The building and the venues are fully accessible. For more information please visit http://centerforthehumanities.org/ or call 212.817.2005 or e-mail ch@gc.cuny.edu

[This was written as an introduction to Revolutionizing American Studies' Priscialla Wald seminar. For the seminar, participants arrived having read her essay "Blood and Stories: How Genomics is Rewriting Race, Medicine, and Human History.]

It is my honor and pleasure to introduce Professor Wald to this seminar. I’d like to thank Duncan and Kandice for the opportunity to make these brief remarks, and also thank President Kelly for giving myself and so many here the chance to hear Professor Wald’s provocative tone-setting presidential address at the ASA conference two weeks ago. In that speech Professor Wald addressed many of the themes she raises in the article we read for this seminar, including the relationship between biopiracy, racism, and narrative, through a reading of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It appears we are at a moment ripe for re-opening inquiries into the intersections between social, cultural, and scientific categorizations of human bodies, and what kinds of labor bodies can do. It should suffice to say that future scholarship will develop these themes because of the leading example of Professor Wald’s courageous, thoughtful, and piercing insights.

From her most recent scholarship to her previous texts, such as Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and The Outbreak Narrative, Professor Wald has produced work that acts as a progressive model of American Studies. In Constituting Americans, Professor Wald examines the ways literary authors from Fredrick Douglass to Gertrude Stein contributed to the production of American identity, and did so in the context of evolving cultural and legal debates about citizenship, personhood, immigration, and national identity. In Contagious, Professor Wald gives us a cultural history of “contagion” as a concept, and parsed the way that anxious Americans imagined and circulated narratives of contamination and outbreak, whether that outbreak was microbial, viral, or even moral. In a move that gets us another step closer to our discussion today, Contagious also examines the ways that journalists, scientists, and literary authors tell stories about outbreaks – and in a larger sense, about America itself. In a society drenched in the proliferation of digital communication and surrounded by ever-louder discourses of public health, genetic innovation, and fears of global viral transmission, Professor Wald has constantly reminded us that we articulate these anxious concerns through narrative mediums that work on us in different ways. She reminds us that we foreground the ways that seemingly new anxieties about mutations, discoveries, and identity cannot be separated from the entangled political history of American bodies.

The essay we read together, “Blood and Stories: How Genomics is Rewriting Race, Medicine, and Human History” asks us to understand anew the aforementioned intersections between race, science, and narrative.  Her essay begins with Howard University’s decision to collect the DNA of African-Americans in 2003 for a genomic databank. They were motivated to ensure that black populations had access to the most up to date health care and biotechnology, but critics pointed uncomfortably to some  haunted historical and ethical issues: in Professor Wald’s articulation of this position, would racial classification of DNA risk “reanimating an inaccurate understanding of the biological basis for difference?” The tension in this question points to a divide between disciplinary models of understanding just what race is, how different disciplines imagine certain bodies, and how this imagination of bodies returns to us conversations about social justice.

As we consider this debate for ourselves, we should remember some of the tools that Professor Wald has given us. With Stuart Hall’s notion of articulation in mind, she is quick to remind us that we can discover racism not in the genomes but in the information produced by scientists about those genomes through conventions of representation. The rehearsal and distribution of these conventions through media become stories, and these stories become technologies that articulate ways of seeing and believing. Later, Wald notes the way that disagreements in the scientific literature about race and ethnicity highlight the ways that social and cultural inquiry are not valued equally in a hierarchy of knowledge. Moreover, science generally and genomic science in particular does not have a consistent articulation about what race is and where it comes from. It in part depends on what instruments and measurements are used to make it “visible” – with an implication being whether or not those instruments and measurements are in fact in part producing what they expect to find.  Perhaps we should also consider here how this might be a variation of Foucault’s repressive hypothesis.

(1) I was fascinated and properly disturbed to read about Professor Wald’s critique of the PBS program The Journey of Man, and how it acclaimed DNA as a ‘true’ narrative character. Professor Wald’s critique raises the specific issue of “unacknowledged power” and how scientists can biologize outcomes that could be changed if they started from different positions. This appears again with the program’s use of the word “globalization” as a force of nature while certain populations go “extinct.” I wonder how we could use that same idea to speak to our own work and previous discussions in this seminar, but also how we could use it to frame current budget debates here in New York. (Furthermore, it appears that Professor Wald’s critique of The Journey of Man could be leveled against Jared Diamond’s entire body of work.)

(2) On that note, Professor Wald’s work also turns us to the different cultural and political values that shape how stories are told about bodies, and what people can be actors in what scientific narratives about the stories of human identity. I’m thinking here of the organization of the Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism, and how we might begin to think through the conflicts over the different ways of thinking about the self, about the body, and about how the interiors of bodies become property.

3. We could also think about what narratives scientists use to justify programs like genomic databanks. In what seems quite relevant to Professor Wald’s previous books, it often seems science programs justify their narratives through stories meant to induce anxiety and shock: it’s about making black bodies healthy, we have to move quickly because populations are disappearing. It’s an urgency produced to further along that “unacknowledged power,” and never forces that power to stand still, or stop.

4. Finally, what would it look like to extend post-humanist conversations about biopiracy and the biopolitical management of populations to include non-human populations? It seems to me that the same issues of corporate investment and unacknowledged power extend to non-human bodies all the time – I’m thinking here of the industrial food system’s genetic manipulation of bovine, swine, and chicken genes, not to mention all the patented seeds (like soybeans) that Monsanto has invented and successfully placed into the food supply (without labeling). I think this matters, too, from a traditional humanist perspective, when we remember that labor in the industrial food system is overwhelming done by vulnerable immigrants and people of color. What could taking up this discussion about bioethics and biopolitics do for American studies? Could this be an entry point whereby we could expand the subjects at the center of our discussions, and reflect in new ways on the politics of how animal bodies labor in the absolute worst conditions of capitalist space?