Book Reviews in Drunken Boat + The Chronicle Attack on Black Studies Grad Students

I often forget to post little things I've done or have been up to, but: the online (and print) journal Drunken Boat has published my review of two delightful books, Jorge Carrera Andrade's Micrograms (Wave Books, 2011), and Rosmarie Waldrop's Driven to Abstraction (New Directions, 2010). The reviews editor, poet Shira Dentz,  also asked last fall for five books I'm reading, so I imagine that'll post at some point soon. I'll just add that that I had no idea how important Carrera Andrade was to the history of 20th century Latin American letters, but it turns out he's a big deal, and Micrograms, translated by Alejandro Acosta and Joshua Beckman, is a superb introduction to his work.

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For a variety of reasons, not least because I am an affiliate faculty member of Northwestern University's extraordinary African American Studies Department and feel so close to its faculty and students I almost could not compose a calm response, I have held back on commenting on the vicious, ignorant, racist attack, in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the dissertations of brilliant graduate students Ruth Hays, Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor, and LaTasha Levy. Nevertheless a number of friends contacted me and pressed me to respond. As is widely known now, the attack followed a glowing piece, "Black Studies: Swaggering Into the Future," by Stacy Patton, which coincided with a conference, "A Beautiful Struggle: Transforming Black Studies in Shifting Political Landscapes--A Summit of Doctoral Programs," held at Northwestern on April 12-14, 2012, sponsored by Northwestern's African American Studies Department in conjunction with the Northwestern Graduate School. The packed conference brought together faculty, students and staff from the small number of American universities that offer Ph.D.-level studies in African American and African/Africana/Black Studies.

The conference was superlative, and brought people from all over the US. As my former dean, the distinguished sociologist Aldon Morris, told me with elation filling his smile, the Chronicle had positively written up  and even used the word "swagger" to describe African American Studies, underling what many across academe acknowledged, that it was now a mature and vibrant field. It is. Then came the hatchet job, NOT on faculty members--that would not be unexpected--but on vulnerable GRADUATE STUDENTS, and not only did the hack show utter disdain for the entire field, but she mocked these students' work without ever reading a single page of their dissertations, of any papers they'd written, of anything by them. She not only knew nothing about them or their work, but made clear that she didn't care to.

Many people have responded with eloquence to this attack, not least among them these students, who are so smart and impressive I cannot but praise them. But one thing I also noticed that was a few people who supported these students and Black Studies chose, in response, to pick other fields to ridicule. A prominent black blogger and pundit whose work I greatly admire decided to start signifying on Twitter about medieval studies. I responded to him, but I had earlier responded to friends who, in a private email, questioned whether there weren't works in other fields that could not be denounced as obscure, and so forth. In response I wrote the following, which I have adapted slightly to remove the names of the people I was responding to, but I think it expresses my thoughts about both the racist hack, and the larger game she was engaging in, which I wish people would try to keep in mind. It's not just about Black Studies, or these wonderful graduate students, who to this lazy, hateful hack were ready targets.

My note:

Yes to everything you, ___, and you, ___, and everyone who has spoken on behalf of Ruth, Keeanga-Yahmatta and LaTasha, and Black Studies (and Ethnic and Women's and Gender and Queer Studies), have said. This is a battle both inside and outside academe, it's ongoing and we're hardly post-ANYTHING, racism and white supremacy rear their heads daily, and people like Naomi Schaefer Riley, in their gross ignorance, do speak for many, but we can never let them have the last word.

One of the things we should always consider is the larger political economy in which such hateful rhetoric emerges, how it aims to shape the public and private discourse, how its insidiousness feeds into long-standing and continuing discourses that then erupt as political agendas and platforms, and public policies, that are always incredibly and disparately harmful to people of color, especially Black people; to women; to sexual and religious minorities and dissidents; to working-class and poor people; and so forth.

For every Naomi Schaefer Riley spewing this crap, there are hundreds of people working very hard to enact the empty beliefs and values, if they can be called that, behind what she's saying. And these enactors work in multiple ways, often in seemingly benign ones. So we should stand with these three brilliant graduate students and with everyone working in Black Studies and similar fields, but we should also not lose sight of the larger picture, which is that we are still in a pitched battle, and it's not about to end anytime soon, no matter how much many people want to hoodwink or lull us into thinking it will.

As colleagues across the country will attest, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, at all levels, but especially at public institutions, are under attack. Attacking graduate students in African American Studies was a no-brainer for this person, and the Chronicle knew exactly what they were doing (yes, the journal fired the hack and its editor issued an the apology for the hack's journalistic malfeasance) in allowing her to hack away. But we should all always keep in mind that similar attacks have been launched against ethnic studies in general and in specific (cf. the ban on Latino/a Studies in Arizona), on women's studies, on gender studies, on LBGBQ/queer studies (think of all the snark about queer studies papers at past MLA conferences, etc.), but alsothe most traditional fields in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the arts.

The vital work that humanities scholars and social scientists do, alongside that of artists of all kinds, is vital for the production of human knowledge and the survival of human societies. There are many out there who have little desire for this vital work to continue; they know that the more ignorant most people are, the great the power they, the powerful, can wield.  The hack who penned that Chronicle attack is on the payroll of these folks; we shouldn't ever forget that, or the danger that they pose. It's not about to disappear anytime soon.

Quotes: Rosmarie Waldrop

"If the writer is nobody the translator is nobody twice over and, if also lacking a publisher, approaches the cube of nothingness." (p. 5)

"I tend to think the fragment is our way of apprehending not just the infinite, but anything at all. Our inclusive views are all mosaics. The shards catch light on the cut, the edges give off sparks." (pp. 18-19)

"The pages of the book are doors.... The soul is a moment of light.... Distance is light." (p. 26)

"voir, c'est la traversée des miroirs." (Seeing is crossing through mirrors) (p. 26, my translation)

--From Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

This Week, Pt.2: Int'l Writers + Waldrops + Anti-War Rally Downtown

Friday morning I flew back to Chicago, in order to participate in the university's International Writers Day, a series of events coordinated and hosted by the Center for Writing Arts and Center director Reg Gibbons. He and Assistant Director Stacy Oliver got things going that morning when they brought the six visiting writers, Nirwan Dewanto (from Indonesia), Hamdy El Gazzar (from Egypt), Ksenia Golubovich (from Russia), Lawrence Pun (from Hong Kong), Aziz Nazmi Shakir-Tash (from Bulgaria), and Lindsay Simpson (from Australia), to meet with poet Robyn Schiff's advanced sequence creative nonfiction class, and my advanced fiction class. All of the writers are currently residence at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, and were in town for events at the university and in Chicago, at the Chopin Theater. After introducting themselves and their work, they conducted a discussion with our students, who had read their work and came prepared with sharp questions about their backgrounds, their work in genres, the role of politics, and related topics.

Golubovich's responses really struck me. She spoke about being a writer from different countries, a writer living in and on borders; an ethnic Yugoslavian whose family had fled Tito after World War II, she was born in the Soviet Union and lived now in a different country, and had a British stepfather who, from her 15th year, expected her to speak and be smartly amusing in English. (Her English was excellent, but then all five of the non-native Anglophone writers were fluent.) Her work, she said, faced the "idea of the border," and one of her challenges was the question: "how do you make yourself whole?" She continued by noting her and other writers of her generation's work redeeming language from its abuse by the state, and suggested that in writing there's always politics, and if not, "it's bad writing." In response to a subsequent question, she spoke about how she and another writer had engaged in the task of translating one of Bruce Chatwin's travel works, heavily influenced by one of Russia's greatest poets, Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda, back into Russian, and how this "double process" (Russian-->English-->Russian) created a new Russian, something--and language and idiom--that had not existed before. In effect, it changed and enriched her Russian. She pointed out that the Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye in the 1960s had been fundamental for a generation of writers; the idiom it created influenced these authors as much as and perhaps more than any native Russian works or culture.

I also was taken with Aziz Shakir-Tash's statements about being of Turkish ancestry in Bulgaria. Though Turks were once the majority there, during the Ottoman Empire, after the First World War and Bulgaria's independence, Turks became a minority and it was in this context that Shakir-Tash grew up. As it is, he not only writes in Bulgarian and Turkish, choosing the latter in part because of the much larger pool of readers (70 million+ vs. 8 million), but also English (and he read some droll micropoems later that day) and Arabic, for which he was one of a few translators in his country. He felt that in light of the historical closeness of Bulgarians and Turks, who in a nationalist fervor that is well known across the globe, now hate each other, literature might serve as a bridge by revealing their shared history and experiences, and above all, humanity. "If they know each other they won't fear each other." If only this were true, though I admired his conviction (and hold it, against reality, unfortunately, myself).

After the class concluded, we headed to lunch, and were joined by the most of the rest of our creative writing faculty. It was great to break bread with the visitors, and I had an opportunity to chat a little with Golubovich, primarily about music; Pun, discussing films, particularly those of Wong Kar-Wai (though I confessed to him that Tsai Ming-Liang was perhaps even more of a favorite); and El Gazzar, who gave a colleague and me the names of some of Egypt's best younger fiction writers. I had to run to an afternoon class, my introductory fiction course, so I headed there and after we conducted a scheduled story workshop, we headed to the writers' reading and question and answer session, some of which I photographed below. Though I was exhausted by the end of the event, I also felt tremendous energized, and only wish that it were possible to have more of these sorts of events taking place all the time, particularly with creative people who were so open.


Pun reading his short story "What Exactly Did I Lose?"

Golubovich reading from a project that constituted a tribute, in part, to her British stepfather

Shakir-Tash and Golubovich listen as Dewanto (center) answers a question

El Gazzar, Simpson and Pun ponder a question after the reading

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Yesterday afternoon, I was still beat, but I got up and after spending time doing some cleaning and shopping, and also reading student work, I headed down to the grand Harold Washington Library (the main branch of the Chicago Public Library) to catch Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, exemplary poets, critics, translators, and publishers, as part of the Chicago Poetry Project's yearlong reading series dedicated to translation. And who better to launch such a series? They are extraordinary figures in the world of contemporary American literature, particularly experimental writing (talk about people deserving of MacArthur Foundation Fellowships!) and through their Burning Deck Press publishing house have published a wide array of US authors, from Walter Abish and Robert Coover to Marjorie Welish and Xue Di, while also bringing out numerous works in translation over the years. They're also two of the most welcoming people I've ever met, gentle, sage, full of knowledge lightly offered, encouraging, witty, and great storytellers. I can still recall vividly a story Rosmarie told, while I walk around with a few Keith's apothegms in my head as well. Like a number of writers I know, I think of their literary activism--which it is--as a model, and try not to miss them when they pass through. (I met Rosmarie and Keith during the year I taught in Providence, where they've lived for nearly 40 years, where Keith has trained generations of writers and artists at Brown University during that period, and where together they've run Burning Deck Press, one of the signature small presses, for decades.) Poet John Tipton (whom I sketched at his reading last fall) introduced them pithily, and then they read, Rosmarie first, then Keith. Below are a few photos, both of the reading and the library, which is one of my favorite spots in Chicago. (How often do you hear someone say that about a library?)


Rosmarie Waldrop, who started by reading some quotes by Edmond Jabès, whom she translated and knew well

Rosmarie Waldrop, holding up a copy of Curves to the Apple, published by New Directions in 2006; it brings together three of her most acclaimed volumes, The Reproduction of Profiles (1987), Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993), and Reluctant Gravities (1999)

Keith Waldrop, reading some of his translations of Baudelaire's poems from Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen

From the mezzanine level, looking at the main floor of the Harold Washington Main Branch of the Chicago Public Library

Descending the escalator at the library

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After I left Keith and Rosmarie's reading, I headed to the Fall Out Against the War Anti-War Rally, which was at Federal Plaza, just a few blocks away. It followed an early-afternoon staging and rally at Union Park, from which participants marched downtown. The Federal Plaza Rally was one of 11 regional marches and rallies; the others were in Boston, Jonesborough (Tennessee), Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle. One of the speakers noted that perhaps 30,000 people were present (the crowd was vast, and people with placards were visible on streets many blocks away), though I overheard a cop scoffing that the speaker had "smoked too much pot" and that the crowd was about 10,000, which was what the traditional media (both the local TV news and NPR) announced. (Maybe they read straight off the script that cop had seen.) The wall of cops was incredible; in addition to the Chicago Police Department contingents, there were traffic cops and what I guess were details from Cook County (the county containing Chicago, Evanston, and few other suburbs) and who knows where else. There were probably even federal and state entities there, for exactly what reason who knows. I doubt it was to protect the marchers and rally participants. I got to hear several of the speakers, and they spoke not only about the ongoing disaster in Iraq, but about the looming threat of a US military attack on Iran, which increasingly seems possible given the worsening rhetoric coming out of the White House and Congress. I kept thinking that despite thousands of people out there in Chicago and more than a hundred thousand at other rallies, and despite the widespread sentiment, quantified by polls, against continuing Iraqmire or attacking Iran, if the people in power are set on doing this, they will. They are unconstrained by the popular will and have been since they seized power in the 2000 election. I know this sounds cynical and defeatist, but I'm not sure what else to say, at least at this point. My faith that the leading Democratic presidential candidates, like the Democratic Congress, will do anything to stop this craziness, is at an ebb. Congress seems to keep falling all over itself to do George Walker Bush, Dick Bruce Cheney and the Military-Industrial Complex's bidding. Nevertheless, it was encouraging to see so many people, from all over the Midwest, and from all points on the political spectrum, converging to express their collective hope and determination to ensure that we follow a more peaceful road than the current belligerent one.


Chicago's famous Federal Plaza, the site of the rally, with the Alexander Calder "Flamingo" stabile sculpture, and buildings (Everett McKinley Dirksen Building; the John C. Kluczynski Building; and the Loop Post Office) designed by one of the greatest modernist architects, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The stage from a distance (the speakers were barely visible unless you got close, though you could hear them blocks away)

The stage, and some of the signs (note the Alfred E. Bush/George W. Newman) Impeach sign)

A "peace" standard bearer (and behind her, one of the many people carrying a Ron Paul sign)

Lots of buttons for sale

People milling about during the speeches

On my way back north, crossing the Chicago River

On my way back I encountered this lone protester highlighting another issue; take note!