Strauss on "'Like' Culture" + Twombly RIP + Geosynchrony: Beck in Bryant Park

About a year and a half ago, I thought of saying goodbye to this blog. It wasn't the first time, though. I'd considered doing this even further back, perhaps after the first year and a half of blogging, which would have been around late 2006. At that time I was still receiving a trickle of comments and the occasional hate post (based, if I recall correctly, on my epithet for George W. Bush, the "warrantless wiretapper"), as well as a small bombardment of spam, but I'd begun to feel like I not only was running out of things to say, but that I was unable because of work and life demands to remain timely, that I was mainly writing them for myself and that perhaps that wasn't enough to keep my commitment to this site. This issues very well could still be the case, but I do know that people read or at least skim this blog from time to time, be it friends old and new, students and colleagues, people referenced on the site, or even, as I learned, perhaps in 2009, people writing dissertations who have cited J's Theater in their arguments, and even, I'm told, at their defenses. (I kid you readers not, and my scholarly colleague who politely told me of one such case was not amused!)  And though comments are rare, I have come to terms with the fact that I enjoy posting here, when I can, and that sometimes the posts resonate beyond this seeming echo chamber in which I cast them.

I say this as a prelude to commenting on Neil Strauss's recent Wall Street Journal article "The Insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture," which ravels one strand from Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (a book he doesn't mention) and similar works (M. Jodi Dean, Nicholas Carr, etc.) and builds an argument around it. The argument: the "like" feature, so prominent on Facebook and increasingly all over the web, is molding what we write and who we are online--and perhaps who we are and become. In order to curry "likes" and provoke "RTs" (retweets), we're performing and conforming, rather than just being ourselves.  (You can block it, of course, but that's not Strauss's point....)

I would not be the first one to point out that in virtual space as in any other who we are is always a performance, that we already are shaping ourselves in various ways wherever we are, based on various contexts, that there is no pure or ideal self that is not at some point affected by the performative and all it entails. In fact this lies at the heart of any number of contemporary fields of critical and scholarly inquiry. That isn't to say that I'm completely disagreeing with Strauss, for I do believe that--and he doesn't mention the economics of the net and web, but Lanier and many others do--he's right on a certain level, and I find the "like" aspect of Facebook one of the most maddening, but I also feel that he doesn't address the facdt that there're benefits if you can conform and commodify yourself in certain ways. Wittier, shorter posts go over better than drier, longer ones, but single-issue blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages probably attract more adherents than eclectic ones. The more personal you are, the more people will be interested, especially if there's a nice serving of (melo)drama tossed into the mix.  Sex goes over better than its absense. If you're criticizing an unpopular president (Bush) vs. one whose still fairly popular and whom people expect you to extol (Barack Obama)....

For Strauss it's both a social and psychological issue. People want and need community, they want and need affirmation and attention...and above all approval, so they--we--are increasingly tailoring ourselves to provoke and be able to cull those "likes," instead of writing or tweeting whatever we--or Strauss and others--think to be "our true selves." Again, I'm not so sure about this "true selves" bit, though. But I get his point. C and I were even joking about this "like" mania a while ago, even using the term as a form of punctuation on the phone, to uproarious laughter. (It's been replaced with, among other things, "Yeezy taught me," but that's another matter.)  Strauss mentions Google's new entry for its ++ service, those +1s that I, as someone publishing the blog via Google, now see at the bottom of these posts.  As I wrote in my review of Lanier's book, he urges people to create in ways that cannot be subsumed within or reduced to forms meriting a simple (and simplistic) "like," which Strauss echoes, saying:

So let's rise up against the tyranny of the "like" button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what's important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you're reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don't waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

He even goes so far as to urge no comments on his post and certainly no "likes," though his employer, tracking page traffic, surely wants some. So I've violated his challenge, and will say that I "liked" his article. But believe me, I didn't click that button on his page nor comment.

(((

Cy Twombly (1928-2011) is no longer with us, I learned this evening from the New York Times. He had been suffering from cancer for the last several years, and passed away in Rome, where he has lived for most of each year since 1957. He is a major figure in the narrative of 20th century American and global art, but not without lingering controversy.  His paintings grabbed me from the first time I saw them, their seeming artlessness suggesting the very inverse, depths that it would take many hours of looking to parse, their almost throwaway charm marking another kind of beauty, or possibility of the beautiful, particularly in the moment and aftermath of sensory engagement.  I wrote in response to a friend's email about his death, referring to without mentioning the specific passages in the obituary:

Quite a loss. I like his attitude about his work, too. Also that he he was able to live long enough to see it come back into fashion and then to be recognized as central to the narrative of the art of his and our time. Of course it helps to have some wherewithal and connections, to be able to make your work, and to have critical champions, peers and those who don't know you from Eve. And to be able to plug into existing belief systems that people cherish, so that you don't have to continually explain what you're doing, unless you have champions who're willing to keep up with you all the way through. So many don't. But the work speaks for itself. The later pieces are gorgeous, so full of life, so redolent of what art can do in speaking to and creating life and reality, while also aware of Thanatos.  I also of course like that he was queer, as primly and Victorianly as the NY Times stated it. Lastly, it's kind of resonant for me that I just snapped photos of his sculptures when my friend Jerry W and I went to MoMa last week, primarily to see the Francis Alÿs show. That was so slick; Twombly felt like a gift from another world. RIP.

Here are those photos of his sculptures; I was permitted to photograph them but not Alÿs's work (not that that stopped me):

Legend for the Twombly sculptures

In foreground, "Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python)," New York, 1954

Foreground, "Untitled," Lexington, Virginia, 2005

Left to right: "Untitled," Rome, 1984-85; "Untitled," Rome, 1976; and "Untitled," New York, 1955.

In foreground, "By the Ionian Sea," Naples, 1988.

(((

A concept that enthralls that I haven't read a lot about but I'm sure someone is exploring or has already exhaustively looked at is geosynchrony*, which is the name I give (geo = space, place + syn = together + chronos = time) to being in the same place and space and time as someone else, sometimes over long periods, but seeing the same people all the time, perhaps never coming into contact with them or only doing so once or twice. In Care Crosses the River (translated by Paul Fleming; Stanford University Press, 2010), I believe, Hans Blumenberg recounts one of my favorite stories evoking this concept, noting that although Marcel Proust and James Joyce lived in Paris at the same time for a number of years, they reportedly only once encountered each other directly, when in May 1922 they shared a cab, with Sydney and Violet Schiff, after a dinner to honor a Stravinsky-Diaghilev Ballet Russe performance. (Can you imagine Proust and Joyce together in a cab?)  Blumenberg recounts, much like the one I link to above, what occurred, which is to say, Proust, who had not arrived to the dinner until 2 or 3 chattered on, while an inebriated and smoking Joyce was silent, and the cab ride was over before you could say either À la recherche du temps perdu or Finnegans Wake.

I was thinking of this on a much more banal level, though, as I was reviewing some recent photos: one, from last week, was taken on June 29, 2011, in Bryant Park, as I was leaving the New York Public Library and people waiting to see that evenings film were clustering around the lawn to stake out their spots and set up their blankets and personal effects.  Now it turns out that on that evening, if I am reading the news reports correctly, a certain Glenn Beck attended the movie screening and encountered some resistance to his presence there. A young woman, Lindsay Piscitell, accidentally, in her account, knocked over a glass of white wine onto his blanket and apologized profusely, before and after a few people in the crowd expressed their disapproval of him, that was it. In his typical bombastic TV account, he was razzled repeatedly by "hateful people", and the young woman, whom he excoriated as "lost" and "arrogant," spilled wine on his wife. Who knows what really happened, though I'm inclined to take the young woman's account more seriously than Mr. Testeria, but, that said, I was thinking, somewhere, maybe, in that gaggle I photoed edging the grass stands the Beck, his wife and their bodyguard, and had I chosen for the first time ever to stay in the park and catch one of these free films, I very well might have been witness to this event as unfolded, as I can spot people around corners and through doors (even if I cannot remember names to save my life anymore), and could have recounted to any and all who would listen, echoing Ted Hughes' simple Birthday Letters statement, "I was there, I saw it." I do think I would have had enough maturity not even to need to suppress a banal heckle--or gentle chiding--at the very sight (and site) of this man, though, especially given his advocacy of so much that's wrong with this society, and his hatred of the very concept of the commons and public spaces like Bryant Park, which he, his wife and his bodyguard were able to enjoy like anyone else who'd gotten there on time and found a spot, as opposed to the privatized, corporatized spaces he shills for on his programs. But I would certainly have taken his photograph, and posted it here.

The countdown to seating in Bryant Park on movie night, 6.29.11

Glenn Ligon @ the Whitney Museum

Mirror, (2002), Coal
dust, print ink,
glue, gesso,
and graphite
on canvas
82 5/8x55 1/8 in.
Collection of Mellody
© Glenn Ligon

Last Friday, I traipsed over to the Whitney Museum to view Glenn Ligon: America, the first mid-career retrospective of Ligon (1960-), an artist who is perhaps best known for his wall-sized, oil and coal dust text paintings from the 1990s through today. (I must note immediately that his beautiful painting "Black Like Me #3 (Study)," from 1992, graces my first book, Annotations.)  The Whitney rightly devotes a floor to Ligon's oeuvre, which consists not only of the paintings but of drawings, prints, photography, and multimedia installations, including sculptures, which together suggest a coherent approach, across forms, that define the possibilities, and perhaps strike the limits, of what identitarian art might do. I use the term "identitarian" with advisement, since I think that Ligon's work exceeds being so easily categorized, but seeing this art, all of it of considerable technical mastery and distinction, a good deal of it even more beautiful when viewed up close (especially the oil text paintings!), brought me back to the core of what the earliest of these works suggest: Ligon's investigations into questions of identity, racial, sexual, social, political, cultural--his own and those of people around him, in America and outside our shores.

What the works also evoked for me, almost in the sense of setting forth a world, of calling into existence the moment of their creation and first appearance, the fraught period of the 1980s and 1990s, when identity-based art surged to the forefront of public consciousness and discussion, just as other genres, such neo-Expressionism and the second waves of minimalism, conceptual and performance art were waning, and I could feel myself reliving some of the debates I witnessed, that I participated in; I could feel the polemics in favor of (which I passionately was and still am) and against this work, which was and, I would argue continues to be important, especially given how crucial it is in reminding of the broader political, economic and social turmoils of that period. The era of the Reagan, Bush I and early Clinton presidencies has been reduced to a caricature these days (Saint Reagan! The greatest president ever! blah blah blah; George H. W. Bush has virtually disappeared; the relentless attacks against Clinton and his centrist policies, even before he was elected, now almost completely forgotten in the public discourse even as they mirror what Michael Dukakis, and later Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama have endured), but the brutality and ugliness of that period, the period of the AIDS pandemic's emergence, of the anti-affirmative action and anti-abortion fanaticism, of white racial retrenchment and the rise of the militia movement, of the anti-Japanese and anti-immigrant testeria, of supply-side economic's intellectual triumph and practical failure, of the lust for warmongering and the buildup of the military-industrial and security states, of the ramped-up deindustrialization of the country, of the rise of the crack epidemic, of the cultural wars in and outside the academy, etc., all of these forming the foundations for our current moment and yet phantasmal in our mass media, also all form the backdrops to Ligon's art.

Untitled (I Am a
Man (1960)
Oil and enamel
on canvas,
40x25 in.
Collection of
the artist.
© Glenn Ligon

Walking through each room, I felt something akin to the beating wings of Benjamin's angelus novus, but a black, queer, cosmopolitan, left-leaning, and indefatigable one, against my cheek: the now-time (Jetztzeit) of that earlier era, the era of my 20s, the period of Slackers, of Public Enemy, of Eleanor Bumpers and Tawana Brawley, of Do the Right Thing, of ACT-UP and Queer Nation, of the last glimmers of Gay Liberation, of Essex Hemphill and Marlon Riggs, of Audre Lorde still alive speaking out against Jesse Helms, etc., was there with me even as I was firmly in our present moment, with its host of grave concerns.  What I also began to feel, as I reached Ligon's pieces invoking the runaway slave posters, was that a great deal of this art was perhaps, in some ways, too much of its time; universal yes, and yet perhaps too anchored in that earlier moment whose issues are still with us, but in different ways. The retrospective, to put it another way, felt insistently historical, indexing not only Ligon's history, but the country's, the society's, my own. It felt--dated perhaps is too strong a word, but while the formal power of the work struck me as transcendant, especially the oil text pieces, a good deal of the other aspects of the work felt as if it reflected a moment that had passed, but also, as if it were in some ways trapped, as if in amber, in that moment.  In a sense, this underpins some of the past criticism of this work, and of similar art of this or earlier periods, which I must admit upsets me, in part because I worry that in viewing the art in this life I may be undercutting Ligon's achievement, that I am falling into the trap of arguing that art probing identity, particularly the identifications and intersectionalities so central to Ligon's work, cannot transcend its moment, cannot resonate beyond the particular contexts in which it was created; but another way of looking at it might be to say that some of Ligon's work does and will continue to do this, but some of it does and will not. Perhaps, as an artist I greatly respect suggested to me a few weeks later when we discussed the exhibit, what might benefit some of these pieces down the road would be for them to be exhibited with other works of this era, thus providing an even richer immersion in a conversation whose urgency we forget at our peril.

Notes on the Margins
of the Black Book
(1991-93), (detail)
91 offset prints
11 1/2x11 1/2 in.
(framed) 78 text
pages, 5 1/4x7 1/4
each (framed)
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum;
gift of the
Bohen Foundation
© Glenn Ligon

I do want to call attention to one part of the exhibit that particularly took me back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and somewhat shook me up.  That was Ligon's Notes on the Margins of the Black Book (1991-1993), his response to Robert Mapplethorpe's highly controversial 1988 volume The Black Book, which preceded Mapplethorpe's even more charged 1989 exhibit Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Ligon's exhibit essayed and assayed the responses, from a range of viewers, some famous scholars and critics like Stuart Hall to figures depicted in the portraits themselves to Mapplethorpe himself, figuratively and physically breaking down the book, image by image, page by page, to critique and open up ways of seeing, reading, understanding, and interpreting--which is to say, experiencing--Mapplethorpe's, and by extension, this society's, views of black men, the black male body, the black body, blackness itself. Ligon's interpretive practice here was and remains quite remarkable; it suggested in its richness some of the subsequent revisionings of Mapplethorpe's work by Kobena Mercer and others, while also demonstrating another powerful, effective and moving method of critique. (It would do us all a bit of good never to forget that art, and not just academic criticism, has this capacity, and when it does so effectively it can reach a great deal more people.) I recalled my own reading of The Black Book, my own youthful critiques and conflicts, at the power being accorded Mapplethorpe, at what I read as objectification, at my own insistent attraction to the images, at my desire for someone black, someone of color, to attempt something of this sort and the frustration I knew I would feel as it went ignored by the wider culture in ways that Mapplethorpe's art never would, and so on. Ligon in fact captures all these feelings and many more--some were his own, reflected in the range of commentary, the juxtapositions of image and text, the sheer panorama of visuality that both magnetized--and magnetizes still--as it overwhelms.  This was one aspect of the exhibit that reminded me of why Ligon is such an important artist, and why I hope he continues to make art, especially work that engages the themes and tropes of our times.

One thing I found surprising was that the exhibit did not include--or perhaps I missed them!--Ligon's playful photographic and digital projects from the mid-to-late 1990s, such as Feast of Scraps (1994-98), in which he juxtaposed family photographs with vintage gay pornography, many of the images featuring black men. One outgrowth or extension of this work appeared in his online Dia Center for the Arts project "Annotations" (no reference whatsoever to my book), which is available here (click on "Annotations"). This work struck me as opening out into really interesting possibilities in terms of the emerging queer studies and discourses on and around family, geneologies, filiations and affiliations, and so on, and its use of digital media also marked what I took to be new directions on Ligon's work. But as I said, I did not see this in the Whitney show, and perhaps missed it. If not, I hope that in a future show and in his work to come Ligon resumes it, especially because it was in conversation with some of the exciting work that Thomas Allen Harris has been undertaking around black families and geneologies but also prefigured the mainstream gay shift towards discussions of marriage, family, homonormativities (which Ligon was queering in very interesting ways), and LGBT relationships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  All in all, I highly recommend seeing the exhibit, and look forward to seeing another retrospective of his work several decades down the road.

Outside the Whitney Museum, Glenn Ligon's exhibit, signaled by the neon Negro Sunshine in the window.

Regina Shavers RIP

Katina Parker of GLAAD wrote to say that Regina Shavers (at left, Union Square Awards), the founder of the only organization in the country geared specifically to older LGBT people of color, had passed away. Parker adds that "during her lifetime [Shavers] worked as a union organizer, helped establish Pride at Work and was former Assistant Director of the NYC Department of Health's HIV Training Institute," and that she was a student of Audre Lorde's. The circle is unbroken. Ms. Shavers leaves many friends, admirers, and mentees, as well as her wife, Rev. Janyce Jackson, who is a pastor of the Liberation in Truth Unity Fellowship Church (Newark, New Jersey). A remarkable person, by any measure, whose vision helped to address a pressing need that will only grow in years to come. Thank you, Regina Shavers.

Here's the bio Parker sent:

Regina Shavers founded the GRIOT Circle, "an intergenerational and culturally diverse community-based social service organization responsive to the realities of older lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, two-spirit and transgender people (LGBTST) of all colors."

Regina Shavers had a long history of community involvement and activism.

As co-chair of District Council 37 she advocates for workers‚ rights, and serves on the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Lesbian and Gay Rights Advisory Board. She played an active role in
the Campaign for and Inclusive Family Policy, the citywide coalition that negotiated with Mayor David N. Dinkins to obtain Domestic Partner benefits for New York City employees.

She also helped to found Pride At Work, a constituency group of the AFL-CIO that focuses on the rights and unionization of LGBT workers.

Regina was also the former Assistant Director of the NYC Department of Health‚s HIV Training Institute. Here, she created and implemented curricula for HIV prevention and treatment, including curricula specifically tailored towards older populations. Regina continued with her HIV/AIDS facilitation as a member of the New York Association on HIV Over Fifty (NYAHOF).

In 1995, Regina co-founded GRIOT Circle to combat the lack of community that she had observed amongst LGBT Elders, particularly those of color. She assumed the role of Executive Director of GRIOT in 2000.

Regina Shavers founded the GRIOT Circle as "an intergenerational and culturally diverse community-based social service organization responsive to the realities of older lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, two-spirit and transgender people (LGBTST) of all colors." The goal of GRIOT Circle is to maintain a safe space for elders, provide emotional support and quality programming which affirms age, gender, racial, spiritual and ethnic origins for the over 50 LGBTST community in Brooklyn. GRIOT Circle provides educational and informational forums, referrals to social service providers, health and fitness programs, spiritual wellness, computer training, a friendly visitors program and social outreach. Volunteer members make reassurance telephone calls and visits to homebound, sick or hospitalized persons.

Congrats to Tisa & Renee + Johnson Slammed + Shakespeare's Cognitive Art + LGBTT Conf. in Brazil

Since I can barely read computer screens these days or type more than one sentence without a major spelling--which becomes a grammatical--error, I almost thought about using images like the one above, somewhat like what I used in an online piece eons ago. But I'd probably mix those up too. I'm too trifling to get my act together to film it properly, but if I could, I'd film the hibernation I hope to engage in in a little more than a week's time.

***

Congratulations are in order to two friends, Tisa Bryant, and Renee Gladman, who have just published new books. Tisa's book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, headed up by none other than Renee (=fierce)), is a daring hybrid work incorporating literary and film criticism, autobiography, and fiction that opens up an array of reading possibilities and pleasures, and you even get to converse with Othello, Julie Christie, Afro-English-women, and Caribbean and California Negroes, to name just a few.

Renee's new volume, Newcomer Can't Swim (Kelsey Street Press--and yes, her title, like Tisa's, is signifying!), is listed as poetry by Small Press Distribution but like Tisa's text, though in a different way, it deliciously breaks genre wide open and reconstitutes it. I'll be nourishing my neurons with these two texts, and I hope--know!--you'll check them out too.

***

After having read Denis Johnson's stories in Jesus' Son many times with delight, I decided to start teaching some of them, and for the last few years have been using "Emergency," a horrifyingly compelling tale, in my intro class. It never fails to spark amusement, awe, conversation, and imitation, though the students' personal knowledge one of the story's central elements, mind-altering drugs, is thankfully much more greatly reduced--at least based on what they tell me and what their responses indicate--than would have been the case with students of my generation. I have not read the prolific Johnson's plays, poetry collections, novellas or novels, however, since Fiskadoro, which would have been, well, back when I was the age of my students (yes, that long ago), but I keep saying I'm going to read at least one of his novels published since then, and I recently thought that I'd start with the most recent, Tree of Life, which has received rave reviews and this years's National Book Award.

But there's someone out there who thinks rather differently about Johnson's new novel, and s/he's not mincing words, the one-and-only, which is to say, notorious, R. B. Myers, in this month's Atlantic. You have to read the stunningly waspish "A Bright Shining Lie" to get the full dose, but here's a sting:

Not being religious myself, I do not feel personally insulted by any of this, and lest other tempers flare, let me make clear that free-thinking Skip, the man who wants the truth to wet him, cuts the silliest figure of all. Besides, most of Johnson’s prosethe metaphor of the jungle as screaming mosque, for exampleis too imprecise and empty even to give offense. One closes the book only with a renewed sense of the decline of American literary standards. It would be foolish to demand another Tolstoy, but shouldn’t we expect someone writing about the Vietnam War to have more sense and eloquence than the politicians who prosecuted it?

Those two qualities are linked. There can be no deep thought without the proper use of words, as our current president never fails to demonstrate. This is why it is dangerous to hold up bad English as good and why Philip Roth should know better than to announce that Johnson writes “prose of amazing power and stylishness.” There are people who will take that seriously. Less worrying, because so obviously lunatic, is Jonathan Franzen’s blurb: “The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s.” Really? Then God help Jonathan Franzen.

Ouch!

Anyone else want to weigh in on Johnson's new tome? Or least offer a counterweight to Myers's sledgehammer?

***

On a related note, since I mentioned Shakespeare the other day, I have to post a link to this short piece by Philip Davis, editor of the Reader (?) magazine. He surmised that Shakespeare's verbal artistry might have cognitive effects, and decided to test things out with several brain researchers. His specific experiment examined the effects of what linguists call "functional shifts" or "word-class conversions," which is to say, those moments when Shakespeare substitutes one part of speech for another, with minimal change to the sentence's shape or syntactic arrangement. He cites three examples: in King Lear, "He childed as I fathered" (nouns shifted to verbs); in Troilus and Cressida, "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" (noun converted to adjective); Othello, "To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!"' (noun "lip" to verb; adjective "wanton" to noun). And the result was...well, I'll let you read it, but it's pretty fascinating. One interesting aspect of the piece is that although Davis is an editor and a teacher, he doesn't mention "rhetoric" once in the piece, though the particular effect he's describing is called "anthimeria" and is a form of the rhetorical device of "enallage." Please correct me, Shakespeare readers and scholars, if I'm incorrect, but anthimeria appears frequently in the later plays, which leads me to believe that once the Bard latched onto this wonderful device, like so many others (one of my favorites, which I started noticing in a few of Elizabeth Alexander's poems a few years ago, is epizeuxis) he wasn't going to let it go given its ability to...well, you'll have to read the article! But it appears in other authors, and especially in great frequency in e. e. cummings's poems, where he elevates it to a central aesthetic principal. Think of his famous poem, "anyone lived in a pretty how town," for example. (Does anyone teach cummings any more?) I'm curious to see what other research projects using Shakespeare or other authors Davis undertakes, and what the results are. Meanwhile, start paging your Macbeth...

***

Recently the Noctuaristocrat Reggie H. (who convinced me to start reading Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, which I can't put down), forwarded an article about Bahia, Brazil's "Black Rome," becoming a key travel destination for African-American tourists interested in that state's strong and enduring African cultural retentions (shaped, of course, by their development in Brazil over centuries). (João deS. forwarded the same article later that day, so thank you.) Authenticity, baby. I've written a bit on here about this topic, and the post led me to check out Brazzil.com, which had another interesting article, on Brazil's first nationwide LGBT conference, which will take place in May 2008 and be sponsored by the Brazilian government, a Latin American first. (Actually, it'll be conference on Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transvestites and Transgenders.)

Brazil's Socialist president, Lula, is firmly supporting it, and has decreed that it will be held

under the auspices of the Special Secretary of Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic, with the objectives of 1. proposing the directives for the implementation of public policies and the national plan for promoting the citizenship and human rights of gays, bisexuals, transvestites and transsexuals - GLBT, and 2. evaluate and propose strategies to strengthen the program Brazil Without Homophobia.

How refreshing, and what a stark contrast with US politicians, including many of the supposedly "progressive" presidential candidates, who for the most part still can't help but speak out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to LGBT issues. So consider attending it along with a visit to Bahia; I had to check another site to find out that it's taking place in the post-urban capital Brasília, a city I've never visited, though I hope C and I get to see it one of these days soon.

DR Impressions

A while ago I wrote that I'd post some thoughts on visiting the DR, and after reading Steven Fullwood's post on his trip to Puerto Plata and thinking again about Mendi Lewis Obadike's and Keith Obadike's The Sour Thunder, which deals in part with her stay in Santiago, I decided I'd put a few down. I don't intend them to be comprehensive, but these were some of the things that came immediately to mind as I thought about our various trips to DR:

Being in the DR produces an interesting cognitive state for me because, on the one hand, it is one of the few places in the world that I've visited outside certain places in the US (like Washington, DC, or Detroit, or Atlanta) where the majority of people share my complexion, are built like me, are mostly of African descent (Bahia and Rio are the others), and this puts me very much at ease, and sparks a feeling of recognition that I have not felt traveling other places, meaning I can utterly be myself and relax; and yet, because of the language and cultural differences, because I am so obviously not from there and know it and know the people there know it, I also feel like a visitor and an outsider. In terms of clothing, body size, how I move through the street, even facial physiognomy and grooming, most Dominicans now automatically assume I'm American; on our first few trips, people looked at my dreadlocks and would say "jamaicano" or call out Bob Marley's name (I get "Ras" and "Rastafari" all the time in New York and Chicago), to the extent that one man, like a mina bird, would scream out "No woman no cry" every time he saw me; but in the Colonial Zone, where we've stayed a few times now, the people I encounter increasingly assume the default of "American," and in some cases are still surprised when they hear me speaking Spanish (however slow and non-idiomatic it is). We've seen only a few Dominicans with dreadlocks--there was a Dominican-American on our plane once sporting them, I met a budding Rastafarian in Boca Chica, and spotted a few locked folks circulating around the Conde, so my hair above makes me stand out. On the other hand, in other places, like Santo Domingo's Gazcue neighborhood, I had people address me directly in Spanish without hesitation, and my assumption was that these Dominicans figured that perhaps I was a longterm non-Dominican resident, a local who'd taken up Rastafarianism, or a native who'd lived in the US or elsewhere in the Caribbean and adopted a non-Dominican style of self-presentation. Or maybe it didn't even go that deeply--but I did wonder. What are the markers for methods of identification, and identifying difference? What do they look for, what do I look for?

One of the issues that pops up in a hideous way on the message boards of a site like DR1 is race, and racism. (Sometimes the moderators will shut down threads if people start asking too many questions about race specifically.) While I've said that most of the Dominicans I came across in the DR were of obvious African ancestry, I did not say they were Black. According to various US definitions of Blackness, like the one-drop rule, the vast majority of Dominicans would be considered Black. (Most are as racially mixed, or more so, as most African-Americans, though here I think most people reject terms like "mulatto," which are historically problematic, even though other problematic terms like "biracial" have gained traction.) But without getting into a long disquisition about racial and ethnic formation in the US or DR--which would have to include the country's tumultuous history and relationship with colonial powers Spain and France; its tumultuous relationship with Hispaniola neighbor and sibling nation Haiti; the centuries of colonial and ruling class ideology, including the Spanish and criollo versions of white supremacy; Trujillo's slaughter of Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans; Joaquín Balaguer's notion of Hispanidad; and what I will call, for lack of a better term, Indianism, of a vogue for Indian roots as a way of displacing the African ones--I cannot say that many of the Dominicans would automatically call themselves "Black," per se. Which is to say, they might not use terms like "negro" or "moreno" about themselves. I've read that the term "Indio" is common...and yet, despite the Black-effacing accounts that I've found online and in the official tourist guide that was in my bedside table, and the obvious championing of everything Taíno, what I saw in terms of the people themselves, how the people carried themselves, what was evident in numerous cultural traits (the food, the music, religious practices, etc.), was the indelible African imprint. (This is borne out in the histories by Cambeira, Domínguez, Rout, Sagás and Inoa, and others.) Yet the issue of "Blackness" remains touchy, whether under the guise of the economic and social situation of "Black" Haitians as a foreign presence in DR, or Blackness as a term of self-representation and designation or cultural performance in its various aspects in DR. What was evident among some of the younger people we came across, who'd adopted hiphop and reggaetón styles that celebrated a version of increasingly globalized, commodified, performative Blackness, or with a group like the self-labeled Los Negros (who sing R&B-inflected ballads and were on TV while we were there), was that the issues of Blackness, race and racism were much more complex than they're often presented. (The various local TV programs didn't hesitate to show brown and dark-brown-skinned people regularly, though some of the commercials were as a whitewashed as in Spanish-language American TV; why?)

When we were traveling to Bayahibe on our way to Isla Saona, our tourguide, John-Paul (Jean-Paul?), without prompting, pointed out to our bus full of Europeans (there was another Black American family with us) that in San Pedro de Macorís, where "Sammy Sosa," "Alfonso Soriano," and numerous other famous major league baseball players were from, so many "Haitians" had immigrated there and had mixed with the English-speaking immigrants (some of the earliest ones to San Pedro came from the US, while later waves came from other Caribbean islands like Tortola), that the result was a predominantly "Black" population. He actually used the English word; I immediately thought to myself, so what do you consider yourself? (He could easily have been mistaken for a Black American.) I also wondered who this bit of information was for? Were Europeans usually curious about the Black population? Was he saying that Sosa and Soriano were "Black," but people from other places were not? Was he saying that they were also part Haitian-part West Indian, and what sort of racial-ethnic construction was he devising in terms of San Pedro de Macorís? Would Sammy Sosa consider himself "Black"? (Jacques Chirac, France's corrupt right-wing president, in his usual outrageous hauteur, recently commented that Haiti and DR should rejoin, since both consisted predominantly of Black and mixed people. Either he is more ignorant than anyone believed, or he knew that this comment was sure to set Dominicans off for years to come.)

Thinking of John-Paul's comments made me think of our very first trip, when we were racing around the Colonial Zone with another guide (his name escapes me). He made a point of showing us everything to do with Columbus, the Catedral Primada Basilica (the first RC cathedral in the Americas), Taíno symbol-covered tchotchkes, and so on. After a bit of this, I finally had to ask, "What about the African history?" or something to that effect. Whereupon he replied, "We're all Black here,"or something very close to this, and quickly went on to the next topic. When we happened upon a little gallery run by two Haitian men that was full of Haitian art, and I asked them to see a vèvè, which they kept hidden behind the canvases, the guide basically fled the room. That was a bit too much "Blackness" for him, I think. At any rate, race remains a complex issue, which did not come up at all--and on one level, why would it have? Would I be discussing race in Barbados? In Jamaica? In Aruba?--even as its centrality to DR's social relations was constantly on view. (I'll leave the question of Haiti and Haitians for another post.)

Without doubt, I think I've been treated as well (maybe better?) in the DR as in any other place I've other visited. But then, as I wrote in a prior post, I think, outside of the US, I've never encountered the blatant and constant racism I do just living every day in this, my native country. Never. Not in Canada, not in any European country (save one) I've visited, not in Mexico, not in Brazil. Whatever people have felt about Blacks--and racism is alive in well in all these countries, without a doubt--not once have I experienced what some friends have, perhaps in part because I'm usually identifiably American, identifiably a tourist, and a man (gender-related bias plays into racist attitudes). In fact, the only overtly racist incident I experienced occurred in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1990, when I was mistaken for an African (and there were hundreds--thousands?--of Africans milling about the main squares of that city), which was sort of a childhood fantasy of being a different kind of Black person (an African, no less!) playing out in the most negative way. That experience definitely was not what I think any of the teachers in African dancing or my Black drawing classes could have prepared me for. The DR is also the only place where men I've never met have called me "beautiful" (in English, not Spanish) to my face, on the street, no less, even if one was obviously a hustling scam artist and the other was lit up on pocket bottle of rum. The drunk actually repeated it, for emphasis, and didn't ask for money, either....

Spanish, which I'm glad I taught myself years ago, is utterly indispensible in the DR, especially for traveling around the capital city and to other points in the country if you don't have an English-speaking guide. Outside of the people at the hotel desk, the various Americans we know or met, and many of the Haitians I chatted with, most Dominicans we encountered spoke only minimal to no English. This was the case in Santo Domingo, in Samaná, in Boca Chica, in San Francisco de Macorís, in Bayahibe, pretty much everywhere we traveled. Occasionally some Dominicans made a point of speaking English, but that was rare (though if they'd lived in the US they were often fluent, and we met a few kids who were on vacation or adults who were back living in the DR after years in the US). I'm also glad that rather than learning Castilian (or as I was always told, "proper") Spanish, what I've managed to acquire is a garbled but useful Caribbean-Mexican idiom, which probably wouldn't be intelligible in Spain, but it works in DR and among Spanish-speakers in the US.

I always enjoy coming across fellow Americans outside the country, but the DR is the only place I've been where many of them are Black--and lgbt/sgl. On our trips to Brazil, of course, we have come across a number of Black Americans; when we went to Bahia, I spotted poet and former teacher Sonia Sanchez and scholar and poet Rachel Harding while we were making our connection in the São Paulo airport, and later, through a bit a serendipity, ran into Sonia's son on the beach in Rio. On another visit, when traveling down to Rio we noticed a number of straight Black American men on our flight, and once there we met other Black Americans (male and female) who were recreating and taking in the cidade maravilhosa. But the DR is perhaps the only place I've been where most of the Americans we've met are Black, and a sizable number also happen to be lgbt/sgl as well. In Santo Domingo, Black gay Americans have actually begun to develop a business infrastructure; first and foremost there's Anthony Montgomery, who founded and runs the Monaga Corporation, a multiservice organization that includes an apartment suite and rentals, tours, and much more. We've also met David Lee, who runs the Sports Bar, a great casual nightspot, and Mario Sessions, a graphic designer and photographer who organizes DR events. In addition we've encountered a number of Black gay/sgl American tourists who, like friends of ours over the years, have visited and fallen in love with DR and its people.

I often wonder what it would be like to live in a foreign country for an extended period of time. When I was in college I knew a few people who could afford to take time off and go travel; most went to Europe or Asia (China, Japan), to do research and experience the cultures they were studying in person. Since then I've known a number of writers and artists who've done so, usually in Europe, though I know of several poets who've spent time in Bahia, and as is clear from her blog, Soucouyant was in South Africa for several months. When I worked at MIT, I used to prepare visa applications for foreign visitors, and got to know scholars from Israel, France, Italy, South Korea, and Brazil who were spending six months to a year in Boston. The longest I've ever lived away from what I'd consider my primary home (or homes) was during a writing residency in Saratoga Springs, which I think lasted two weeks or so (I had to get back for the purposes of work). C and I both have wondered what it would be like to live in DR, so maybe we'll have the opportunity to do so eventually. I realized that I could live there (as I could in other places we've visited), but that my perspective really would change if were there for an extended period as opposed to visiting as a tourist. Not have recourse to English, dealing with the electrical problems, the cultural and societal differences, including the legal system, and being cut off from the familiarity of US, among other things, would pose serious challenges.

The economic crisis and rising poverty in the DR become more evident every time we visit. I usually keep up with DR news via the DR1 site, and through my reading am a little familiar with the political situation in the country. In 2004, Dominicans re-elected as their president Leonel Fernández Reyna (Leonel), the New York-raised economist and leader of the PLD party, who had become president in 1996 by joining with PRD leader and former dictator Joaquín Balaguer to defeat RPD leader José Francisco Peña Gómez, the former mayor of Santo Domingo and a Dominican of Haitian ancestry whom Balaguer and others in the political ruling class were determined to keep out of office. During his first term, Fernández Reyna pursued neoliberal economic policies, including selling off the electrical grid and privatizing various aspects of the economy. His four years in office coincided with the US (and world) economic boom under moderate-conservative Democrat Bill Clinton, and the Dominican economy expanded. In 2000, Leonel couldn't run again because of Dominican constitutional provisions, and Hipólito Mejia, from Peña Gómez's party, was elected president. In four years the Dominican economy (like the US economy) tanked; a spectactular private bank collapse, which Mejía allegedly used $2 billion from the Dominican treasury to cover, only made the economic situation worse. Leonel has placed improving the Dominican economy and creating jobs at the forefront of his presidency (and it is remarkable, I have to say, to see the president of a country on television freely engaging in probing conversations with scholars, government officials and business leaders about contemporary societal issues is thrilling, yet talk only goes so far), but rising oil prices, limited natural resources, low prices for Dominican commodities, waxing inflation, a lack of investment capital, longstanding structural and infrastructure problems, a steadily increasing populace (both through natural growth and immigration from Haiti and other countries, like Cuba), international fiscal demands, and the worsening situation in neighboring Haiti, which continues to send thousands of people to DR in search of work, have made it extremely difficult for Leonel to pull off a quick turnaround. On top of this, the basic crisis in electrical service (there are daily blackouts, and three times within the last week the entire country has experienced a blackout) not only is disadvantaging DR's businesses in general, but especially one of the country's growing sectors, tourism, compared to many of its smaller Caribbean competitors. The desperation among many people was evident to me; in Santo Domingo, I noticed more street children, more adults begging and begging aggressively, and more intensity in the usual hustles we've encountered in the past. The physical state of some buildings in Santo Domingo's colonial zone seems to have worsened as well, though I also noted a lot of renovation, since DR remains a bargain investment option compared to other tourist-target countries. The release-valve option of coming to the US has become more difficult since 9/11; not only are US authorities shipping Dominicans back from nearby Puerto Rico, but it's harder for Dominicans to get visas to travel to the US.

After our first trip to DR, when we stayed in Boca Chica, what immediately struck me was how overt the heterosexual prostitution in that resort were; as we pulled up to our first hotel, a European man and Dominican woman were engaged in a financial transaction right in the driveway. Subsequent trips have impressed upon me that the sex trade in all its forms is thriving there (though less so, it seemed, in Samaná), in no small part because of the dire economic situation the majority of Dominicans are facing. While I support people's right to earn money in whatever ways they can, I find exploitation of any sort deeply disturbing. For many women and men in DR, as in Cuba, Brazil, Thailand, and other countries, the sex trade is one of the surest ways to earn money and put food on the table...and yet rationalizing this does dispel the sense that things would be better if people had more employment options. (In wealthy countries, prostitution exists, and might be an option of choice--but there is a difference between having options and having none.) Sorting out sex-for-pay and exploitation, however, is not so easy, which makes discussing it a fraught subject to discuss (and some people, like French author Michel Houellebecq, actually celebrate it as an option for the economically marginal and oppressed outside Europe, and for the sexually rejected among Europeans.) A separate but related issue involves the sexual exploitation of minors, which also deeply troubles me. Recently a friend noted that he would not want to travel to countries where sex tourism is so evident, and I had to remind him that he would be disqualifying most of the countries across the globe, especially outside Europe (where the sex trade flourishes even in some of the wealthiest societies on earth), but I added that prostitution and sex-for-sale exist the US as well. (One of Jersey City's prime prostitution strips, where poor female addicts congregate, was featured just a few years ago on the nationally syndicated Fox show Cops, while documentaries on prostitution in New York have also appeared more than once on TV in the last few years.) Of course that doesn't make exploitation anywhere any better, but I try to keep in mind that the issue is complex and not so easily reducible to moralistic pronouncements and slogans.

Just as I ventured to comment on race, I also will say a little about (homo)sexuality. A while ago I read an interesting article, via Monaga's site, on homosexuality in DR. One of the arguments in that piece was that DR was a conservative, macho, class-stratified society, and that while there was a nascent gay scene in Santo Domingo and a US-European style "gay" consciousness was developing there, historical traditions, the conservatism of the culture, the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, different views on sexuality and sexual commerce, and class and economic issues were all strongly shaping its developing, making it quite different than in some other Caribbean or Latin American countries. As in Haiti, and unlike in most Anglophone and some other Hispanophone countries, homosexual sex was never criminalized because of the adoption of the Napoleonic code (which decriminalized same-sexual relations in France at the turn of the 19th century). Lack of criminalization, however, doesn't mean acceptance, and I think it would be fair to say that overt displays of homosexuality and queer sexualty, at least as we might see in the US, would not be acceptable in most parts of DR, especially in rural areas. But acceptance is also a different issue from same-sexual practice. I've argued before on here that equating same-sexual practices with gay orientation, with "gay" self-identification, and with what you might call gay social performance, is problematic; some of the Dominican men I spoke with that I knew were MSMs reinforced this difference. Many had children, some were married to women. How applicable would Euro-Americans labels be for these men, even if they'd come into contact with the social constructs behind them? Maybe, maybe not. In Santo Domingo there were also men who appeared to be more openly gay, in their public performance. There appeared to be a social space open to them; since I don't live there I don't know, but I did wonder what everyday life was like for them. What about in smaller cities and the countryside? According to the article, things were different, and perhaps more difficult for middle-class gays. (And probably easier for wealthy and rich gays.) I was therefore interested in the social spaces created by the American entrepreneurs, and how this was shaping views of sexuality and self-identification, and social relations more broadly. In terms of the social norms, heteronormativity was, unsurprisingly, quite strong: people constantly were assuming that C. and I were seeking women. As the Black lgbt tourist stream grows, will people's perceptions of the tourists change? Unfortunately, I didn't meet any self-identified lesbians, though I imagine there is a lesbian scene, not only in Santo Domingo, but in other parts of the country as well.

Back in January 2003, I saw Andrea Robbins's and Max Becher's exhibit The Transportation of Place at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. One of Robbins's and Becher's foci was the "Americans of Samaná." As the press release described this aspect of the exhibit:

The series The Americans of Samaná (1998 – 2001) documents the descendants of freed African American slaves who traveled to the Dominican Republic in 1824 in a scheme initiated and financed by President Pierre Boyer of Haiti, with the cooperation of the American Colonization Society. Today about 8,000 descendants of the original group speak an American English from 1824 in a Spanish-speaking country and live in linguistic and religious isolation-the "Americanos" are protestant, while most other Dominicans are Catholic.

This wasn't the first time I'd heard about Samaná (which is where Napoleon's military landed in its final attempt to reconquer Haiti and which was nearly purchased by the US in the 19th century), though. Almost a decade ago, I worked with a Dominican guy, Frank C., whose family came from Samaná, and though he had a Spanish last name, he'd told me a similar story of the American links there. I also known of a scholar, José Vigo, who served as an intellectual mentor to a close friend, and who'd been studying the Americanos in Samaná before he died of AIDS in the late 1980s. In the city of Samaná and in the Samaná resort town of las Galeras, where we stayed during a previous visit, we actually looked for some of these Americanos, whom I imagined would, as the exhibit proclaimed, somehow stand out. On the bus trip back from the northern province, I asked a young White American Peace Corps worker if he'd come across any of the English speakers in the Samaná countryside (el campo), and he said he hadn't. Though we did meet some natives of Samaná and asked around, we had no luck in finding the Americanos; flipping through the Samaná phone directory, however, I did see a number of English names (Bell, Green, Lee, etc.), which provided some evidence that some of the Americanos (and subsequent waves of English-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean, known as cocolos) actually are there, somewhere. (Current Detroit Tigers pitcher Fernando Rodney is from there). I actually have been writing a story that involves this particular aspect of African-American and Dominican history. At some future point, I hope to return to Samaná and meet some of the Americanos in person. Perhaps Samaná College, once it's off the ground, may provide the means for doing so.

I'll end by saying that I probably have bought enough cigars to last me a year (since I rarely smoke them) and my favorite Dominican dish remains pulpa al ajillo (octopus in garlic). Sancocho dominicano (a kind of pot au feu), pollo dominicano, and all of the sopas de pescado (fish soup) are also high on my list. All dispelled whatever lingering desires I may have had for American cuisine--and in any case, fried chicken, spaghetti, pizza, and hamburguesas, sin y con queso, were available at many restaurants, had I wanted them. But I didn't....