"Thinking through Collapse" @ NYU

Earlier this week Chris S. emailed notice of this year's Neil Postman Graduate Conference, which New York University's Department of Media, Culture and Communication, in the Steinhardt Graduate School of Education. This year's theme and title was "Thinking through Collapse."  Since it was free and since I'm around, I decided to attend and did.

Prof. Benson, Grad students Richard, Garrett, Selimovic

Named in honor of the department's distinguished, eponymous former and late media studies professor and cultural critic (1931-2003; he taught at NYU from 1952 until 2002, and I had the pleasure of meeting him), this year's conference proceeded from the following premise, which I quote from the conference website:

In the past year we have been confronted with many sites of present and impending collapse: the collapse of oppressive regimes in the Arab world, a global economy pushed to its limits, our own political system in paralysis, the teetering of the fourth estate, continuing environmental collapse and so on. In each of these sites, visions of apocalypse exist alongside those of renewal, inviting the imagination of new forms of organization and sustainability. In the academy, they are prompting new interdisciplinary assessments of the conditions – historical, social, political, economic, cultural, technological – that have brought us to these limits, and are forcing the question: where might we go from here?

There were several talks, panels, and a roundtable, and I stayed for most of the afternoon, the highlights of which for me were a talk by graduate student Claire Richard entitled "Politics of Fiction in Antoine Volodine's Work," which was part of the "Europe in Crisis" panel, and the keynote talk by philosopher, critic, and New School professor Simon Critchley, "Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit," which was quite profound despite--or rather, in keeping with--its title.

Simon Critchley giving his talk

Richard's paper explored the writings of the pseudonymous Volodine (b. circa 1949-1950), award-winning author of more than 40 books, written as well under the names Elli Kronauer, Manuela Draeger, and Lutz Bassman, and a translator of numerous works from contemporary Russian literature. (Only two of these texts have been translated into English: 1994's Le nom des singes, as Naming the Jungle [1996], and 1999's Prix du Livre Inter winner Des anges mineurs, as Minor Angels [2000].)

Richard began by discussing how fiction might not just be political, but in its thinking through form constitute a form of politics, and went on to show how Volodine's work bore this dictum out. She began by noting its frequent inclusion of scenes set in camps and prisons, or during or after wars of various sorts. She then noted some key elements of the texts which represented Volodine's narrative method: an avowal of post-collapse worlds without revolution as a recourse not as terminal but as sites of possibility; collaging of multiple languages, linguistic registers and genres, its use of plot and character repetitions and elisions, multiple aporias, all as challenges to unified understandings of history or temporality; the inclusion, in condensed form of the entirety of 20th century European history; and the employment of memory, imagination and poetry as ways of opposing "the end." He has even coined his own name for his approach, "post-exotisme," or post-exoticism, which he wrote about in a book Le Post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). Hearing her account of Volodine made me want to read him, and I shall.

Simon Critchley's talk was the afternoon's highlight. Would that all talks of depth be so clear, concise and, for a philosopher and theoretician, relatively jargon-free, or explanatory in terms of the terms when needed.  Drawing his title from the placard statement the Occupy Wall Street protester pictured on the conference's poster was carrying around at one point, Critchley launched into a compelling discussion of how power, the ability to get things done, and politics, the means to get things done, had become decoupled, leading to the widespread "vague, diffuse sense of fear" people throughout the West and many other parts of the world now feel, and which had profoundly delegitimated the "nation state" as the location, however imperfect, as the unity of these two major categorical concepts. In so doing this separation has also profoundly undermined the political regime through which we believe power to be based in and lie with (the) people: democracy.  Instead, as anyone looking at the European crisis or our own confounding political scene realizes, power is often supranational, and under the control of global capital and finance, information, military-industrial complexes, trafficking of various kinds, and so on. Critchley noted that we still think of and act as if power is "local," but, as the situation in Greece demonstrates so aptly, sovereignty lies elsewhere. Thus the major casualty: the (nation-)state.

I won't recap Critchley's entire talk, which including a great deal of humor, musings about ancient philosophy and Greek democracy, a one-sentence summing up of the history of philosophy's key issue, and so much more, but instead jump to the conclusion, in which he contrasted "representation" with "association," using this as a way to think through the significance of the latter in relation to the Occupy movements' combination of old forms of democratic engagement, such as "assembly, consensus and autonomy" with newer technologies, from digital recording and photography to social media. He was clear about the necessity of education for "politics," and noted how the Occupiers, though criticized for having "no demands" and achieving little--ha!--were actually quite well prepared, and though in some ways autochthonous, also drew from a deep well of resistant political organization and assembly, both within US history and outside. (I thought immediately of the Highlander Folk School and its important, often forgotten role in the Civil Rights movements of the mid-20th century.)

Critchley, a self-described Gramscian, stated that politics is about "articulation" and the "formation of fronts," and pushed towards the question of an "articulation" between political representation in the conventional sense and the Occupy assemblies, though he was careful not to place too much emphasis on the former, having been a former Labour activist in the 1980s and 1990s, only to witness the triumph of the neoliberal, neoconservative British Prime Minister Tony Blair.  Politics requires, Critchley said, a demand flowing from a feeling or need for something; and a location, a "terrain where that politics is to be articulated."  Association, which he called the key signifier, and present in the work of Rousseau and the later Marx, might be the generator of such a politics rather than representation, though without a location "we're doomed to the abstraction of protest." But locations, spaces, places, often are unanticipated, as Zuccotti Park proved last year. When Wall Street itself was closed off, the park became the locus of association, and as he pointed out, when people know the location or sense it, their (our) association means something.

I was very glad that he cited the Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin as part of this; I think about how the rage and frustration about the aftermath of this young man's murder has been building, but with the rally and march beginning in Union Square, one of the key historic sites in American history for public protest and the articulation of various kinds of politics, the protest had a national and symbolic location that the media could not ignore, though they tried to minimize it, as with the Occupy Wall Street and other protests, and as marches in Florida, Philadelphia, and elsewhere are demonstrating, it is compelling the speech and action of those with power, the President, the Justice Department, authorities in Florida, and so on.

I'll conclude by noting that this was the first conference I've ever attended wherein a question and answer session arose out of democratic consensus on how it might be structured. We had the choice of breakout groups or the General Assembly method of stacking comments, and we chose the latter. People spoke, someone kept a tally of who commented, preference went to those without permanent faculty positions, students, university staff, non-academics; and then Critchley responded to the comments in graceful fashion, without antagonism and taking into account the concerns of all who offered thoughts or questions. He urged that those on the left assume the temporality of the long durée as opposed to immediate results (as, I thought to myself, the right have done my entire lifetime) and accept a "refusal of the future," while still fighting for concrete changes in the here and now. He noted that we also should not ever underestimate the "presence of bodies in space," bodies together, in locales like Zuccotti Park or, as I could attest, marching down Michigan Avenue to protest Proposition 8, or through Washington, DC back in 1990s, and so on.

Though we often and rightly think of politics as a mediat(iz)ed spectacle, we should not forget the "excitement of bodies in space," the "pleasure of performing as bodies together." Again, I could point to the power of this just yesterday. He also talked about the paradox of visibility, and how some activists were seeking, in the face of steadily waxing surveillance and panopticism (he didn't use this word, but I immediately thought of it), to secede from visibility while still engaging in association, to achieve even partial modes of anonymity, an increasingly difficult prospect today. He ended with a point that Mohandas Gandhi or Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have made many times over: "Acting peacefully, in concert, anything is possible."

Yvonne Garrett (l), talking about Irish artistic responses to the collapse

As so often when I hear a brilliant talk or reading or have an enlightening conversation, I left the conference--which included a final roundtable discussion with several of the graduate students, very energized--somewhat dazzled, unable to stop thinking about the possibilities before us. As always too, I wished that these sorts of conversations, especially in such a clear and compelling form as Critchley engaged in his, were available to the widest array of people out there, people outside academe, though events all over the world have made clear that these ideas are circulating in varying forms. I also wish that there were more people of color in particular at this event, though I took into account how the program possibly developed, which is to say, who is in the graduate pipeline at NYU or similar institutions. Still, I wish a far more diverse group of people were having such conversations inside academe as well as outside it. That is an ongoing struggle as I can attest from my own experiences and those of many I know.

Those criticisms noted, we have seen more than enough "Collapse": of politics and political structures; of global capitalism; of our ability to challenge or arrest supranational agents; of our psyches, of language and nature (think ecocide) themselves. Yet we are not without power, or possibility, and we must not surrender them. Even if we lose the fight, we still possess them, in multiple forms, modes, ways, especially when we come and are together, and we must never forget that.

California's New Poet Laureate + Poem: Juan Felipe Herrera

Congratulations to California's new Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera (1948-). This week Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed the long-time social and arts activist and professor at the University of California, Riverside, where he holds the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair in the Department of Creative Writing. Herrera has published 28 books of poetry, fiction, and children's literature, and received the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection Half the World in Light, just one of the many honors he has earned over the years. Herrera is the first  Latino poet ever to hold this post, and he described it this way to the undergraduate newspaper UCR Today: "This award is for all the young writers who want to put kindness inside every word throughout the state, because kindness is the heart of creativity."

Rivera is the son of campesinos who worked San Joaquín and Salinas Valleys in California, and this upbringing provided the material for much of his early poetry, which he began publishing after attending UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop. As I noted when I wrote about and featured a poem of his during National Poetry Month last year, his work covers a broad range of styles and forms, sometimes melding Spanish and English, though it is often colloquial in tone, frequently tinged with humor, and always attentive to the resonances of everyday life and people, sometimes effortlessly bringing profound cultural and spiritual dimensions to the fore. It is in this regard quintessentially American, and nourishes a rich tradition of such poetry going back centuries.

The poem I chose last year, which fascinates me, "El ángel de la guarda" (The Guardian Angel), uses one of the oldest rhetorical devices, anaphora, or repetition of initial words or phrases, to build towards a powerful conclusion. In honor of his new post, I think it's about time to feature another poem by him, which I have borrowed directly from the blog of the very fine poet Barbara Jane Reyes. (Do read her take on Herrera too.) This poem is about poems and poetry themselves, though it is, like all his work, about life.

Congratulations to Juan Felipe Herrera, and enjoy!

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT A POEM BRINGS

for Charles Fishman

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.

Copyright © 2008 Juan Felipe Herrera, from Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008. All rights reserved.

Photos: Blossoms

I never tire of the many signs of spring. In Chicago before I left, the weather had already shifted to summer-mode. (It might be much milder now that I'm away. Summer is my favorite season, but I love spring's heralds and harbingers.) In New Jersey and New York, however, it does still feel like (a slightly warmer) March. I've even gotten to experience one of my favorite weather events, fog, which unfurled itself over everything like a gauzy coverlet all the way down to the Hudson. As I've traipsed hither and thither, I've been snapping photographs of flowers in bloom. Here are a few. I'm no Ansel Adams, but I think these images should convey some sense of the beautiful that nature makes available to us if we look.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 
 

Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin

Tonight in Union Square, in New York City, Daniel Maree, a supporter of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African American teenager who was murdered three weeks ago in cold blood by self-appointed neighborhood "watch captain" George Zimmerman, in Sanford, Florida, with apparent impunity, organized the Million Hoodie March, beginning at 6 pm, followed by a march through the nearby streets of Manhattan to the United Nations Building. Seeking justice for Martin and his family, and the prosecution of Zimmerman, who has not been charged with any crime despite a growing body of evidence, including aural witnesses, 911-call recordings, what sounds like a racial epithet uttered before Zimmerman pursued Martin, and Zimmerman's own history of violence, paranoia and overreaction, the rally and march also coincided with the United Nations' International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. After an evening appointment, I headed over to Union Square, where the march had already begun.

I was not wearing a hoodie, but like so many who were present, like millions of people walking or driving around this country, I have been viewed with suspicion, including by the police, more than a few times in my 40+ years, no matter what I have had on, including a suit, in every city, town and suburb in which I have lived, from Saint Louis to Boston to Charlottesville to Chicago. I strongly support not only the demand for justice for Trayvon Martin and his family, but the related points Maree and others are making about racial profiling, presumption of guilt, a horrifically flawed justice system, and the lack of value placed on too many lives in this country.  It was clear from the immense, vocal energized crowd that quite a few others feel the same way. Many of those participating were young people perhaps not much older than Martin, but many were my age or older, and have witnessed such travesties of justice their entire lives. I don't know what the recent moves by the US Department of Justice concerning this case will have, but if this and similar marches push the Florida authorities to conduct a fuller investigation of the events leading up to and the moment and aftermath of Martin's death, and of Zimmerman's history, then they will be invaluable. We cannot bring Trayvon Martin back, but if we can prevent similar deaths, then every such action will be that much more worthwhile.

Here are a few photos (my apologies for their blurriness, but I snapped them with my iPhone and I have never been known for manual dexterity); I will post several videos I also recorded. If you haven't already done so and can, please sign the petition at Change.org, demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman. Maree would like for 1 million to sign it; so far 800,000 people have done so.

Approaching the Million Hoodie March for Trayvon Martin

A young man being interviewed about the rally as marchers pass by

On 14th St. in Manhattan

Photographer seeking a good angle on the march

"WE ARE ALL Trayvon Martin"

Marching westwards on 14th Street

The marchers on 6th Avenue

Along the march route

On 6th Avenue

Marchers stopped by a police bike cordon (the old Limelight at left)

Heading north (Empire State Bldg. visible at center)

Marchers shadowed by the police

Quarter's Over + Neuroaesthetics, Part 1: Eric Kandel

At 3 pm today, all grades had to be in, and mine were, so I officially have concluded the winter quarter! And what did winter quarter comprise, in addition to committee work: three fully enrolled (or two-and-one-half) courses, two with undergraduate (introductory and advanced theory and practice) fiction writers, the other with undergraduate (and graduate) literature and theory students; three honors theses (one I was advising, which was recommended for departmental honors!--congratulations, Steve!); one MFA thesis (that I advised, and which is now approved!--congratulations, Libby!); supervising, with colleagues in the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, a group of of excellent undergraduate poetry students who were working with high school poetry students; and guiding three brilliant undergraduate researchers whose summer projects I hope get funded. In ten weeks. I almost cannot believe that the quarter is now over, but this is spring break week, so I'll be trying to read a little for pleasure, watch not too much TV, get out and about, and prepare for the quarter that rolls in next Monday and other great things to come, about which I'll say more soon. I also am going to try to blog a bit more, so I hope I can manage a few more posts than 1-2 per week. We'll see.

***

Several times over the past few years I've blogged about neuroscience and literature, and so two recent articles I came across snared my attention. In this post, I'll talk about the first, Alexander Kafka's Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Eric Kandel's Visions," used a review of a new book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House), by Kandel, the Nobel Laureate brain scientist and Columbia University professor, to discuss his contributions the burgeoning field of "neuroaesthetics," or the disciplinary nexus where brain and cognitive sciences and aesthetics, or theories of art, intersect. Kafka's piece opens with a snippet of Kandel's study--and let me state for the record that I do not agree with Kandel's essentializing view of women's affect, as expressed in this initial excerpt--to introduce the neuroscientist's attempt to read an image by the fin de siècle, Vienna Secessionist plastic artist Gustav Klimt, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1901, oil on canvas, Austrian Gallery Belvedere, above right), via certain formal and expressive features that connect to the "neurochemical cognitive circuitry" of you, the viewer. What do I mean? Quoth Kandel:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

Kandel's reading is full of speculation, but Kafka goes on to point out that cognitive scientists like Kandel, who began his career as a clinical psychologist before shifting into research on the vertebrate brain of the snail Aplysia, work for which he received his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, have increasingly been looking at the connections between aesthetics and the brain, through experimental testing methods like brain imaging and cognitive tests, in some key ways underpinning what artists have always known and argued--art matters, works in certain ways, and should not be taken or dismissed lightly, as it still too often is.

Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, oil on canvas, Neue Galerie)

Kandel is not the first brain scientist to write on what is becoming known as neuroaesthetics, but, Kafka says, he did set forth a research agenda of sorts in his 2006 memoir, In Search of Memory (W. W. Norton & Co.), asking, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?" His pursuit of answers to these questions over the last decade has resulted in his new study, which addresses these questions in relation to the work of three major Viennese Expressionist visual artists, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. (How covenient it must have been for his research to have the Neue Galerie so close!) Klimt's ornately patterned, carefully composed and exquisitely colored canvases, which I admit I find transfixing, serve as the means for Kandel to talk about a constellation of issues, from the historical to the discursive to the formal. Among Kandel's foci are the influence the anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl and similar figures from the Vienese and Central European world of this epoch had on all these artists, the circulation of ideas put into play by figures in the circle around Sigmund Freud, and the rich background of contemporary research on perception.  Importantly, Kandel also, Kafka says, makes a case for a negative-capability approach to scientific "reductionism," arguing that it does not diminish the power or beauty of the artworks to identify the neural foundations of how artworks work in and on our brains, but enriches our understanding of them.  Yet he is not attempting to collapse art and science into each other; according to the article, he cites the late biologist and author Stephen Jay Gould's desire for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."

Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest/Beech Forest
(1903, oil on canvas, Private Collection.)

Thus a newly developing field: neuroaesthetics, which is about a decade and half old, though its origins lie in the work of figures like Freud who, Kandel notes, did recognize a deep relationship between perception and affect but who not have the benefit of advanced experimental techniques we now do. Yet with those new techniques and findings, one of the points that Kandel, and peers like Semir Zeki of University College London appear to be making, is that scholarship in the arts should incorporate more of this material, a suggestion that may raise hackles among some humanities and arts scholars, as well as brain scientists, who find the search for neural correlates to aesthetic--affective, social and other kinds of experiences--to be problematic. In The Age of Insight, Kandel neurology and brain science in relation to visual art alone, but Zeki says that there is a "faculty of beauty" in the brain not dependent upon the "modality" through which its trasmitted, but which can be activated by a music, visuality, or both, as well as by other sources (including language, as I've written about before, and will continue in part 2 of this post) too. Ultimately, though, the implications go beyond aesthetics, towards a deeper understanding about human experience. We may not yet have an answer for the question What is art for? but we increasingly know, at levels artists have intuited but which scientists can now answer with ever greater clarity, at least with regard to our perceptions and emotions, How does art work?

Update: an unsurprising skeptic, the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton, on "The Brain Drain" (i.e., as the tagline says, "Neurosciences wants to be the answer to everything. It isn't"), in The Spectator.

Sláinte + Bayard Rustin Letters Published

Like the President and First Lady of the United States, I have Irish ancestors, so in honor of Saint Patrick's Day, let me say: Sláinte!

Bayard Rustin & Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Today is also marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Bayard Rustin (1912-1987), the civil rights and peace activist, author, and queer pioneer.

This month, in conjunction with this centennial, City Lights Bookstore is publishing I Must Be Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters: Bayard Rustin, edited by Michael G. Long, foreword by Julian Bond (2012). (You can download a pdf copy of a Q&A with Michael Long here.)

Today on City Lights Bookstore's relatively new blog, there is an Issuu document version of Rustin's response to a request by the late black queer author, journalist and activist Joseph Beam (1954-1988), to contribute to an anthology that would later become the one of the groundbreaking books of black LGBTQ literature, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (Boston: Alyson Press, 1986). 

Since Issuu allows easy embedding, I'm posting it here. Rustin explains why he will not be contributing, noting that he was not in the vanguard of fighting for gay rights (yet he was at the same time out to leaders of the Civil Rights movement, like Rev. Dr. King, Jr., and others) and that although he fully supported equal rights for homosexuals, he considered "orientation" to be a "private matter."

The City Lights blog features a number of Rustin's letters (in Issuu format), as well as other marvelous material (including a post on Audre Lorde and another on Cherríe Moraga, for women's history month), so please do pay it a visit, and if you can, get or ask your library to order this new Rustin text.

Open publication - Free publishing

Remarkable Trove Found in Chicago: Richard T. Greener

Richard Theodore Greener, A.B. 1870, Harvard College,
LL.B. 1876, University of South Carolina
(courtesy of Harvard University Library)

It was, at least from the outside, just another abandoned house on the South Side of Chicago, at 75th and Sangamon.  According to Kim Janssen's article in the Chicago Sun-Times, squatters, drug addicts, and stray animals had reduced it mostly to a shell, its front door flapping open like a tribute to desolation. Rufus McDonald, one of the workers hired to raze the house, made a remarkable discovery in its attic. There he found a steamer trunk full of papers, including what appeared to be--and was--a Harvard College diploma from 1870. While this would not be unheard of--Chicago has long had among its residents graduates of Harvard, and the neighborhood, Englewood, was once part of the very vibrant southern part of the post-fire 19th and early 20th century metropolis. McDonald went through the papers and noticed other documents that caught his eye: a law licence from South Carolina; a photograph of a man who appeared to be mixed-race or black; and an 1853 or 1854 book entitled Autographs for Freedom, a publication of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.

Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922)
University of South Carolina

McDonald had the presence of mind to collect all the papers and put them in a brown paper bag, despite being told by his crew to trash them, and took them to book expert on the northside of Chicago. The expert reviewed the documents and let McDonald know about his find: they had originally belonged to Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922), the first African-American graduate of Harvard College (and the second black person to have been admitted to the college).  Not only that, but Greener was a major intellectual and public figure of his day, despite the constraints racism imposed upon him. He became the first, and the for decades the only, black professor (of philosophy) at the University of South Carolina, during the brief window Reconstruction provided (1873-1877), and was admitted to the bar in that state in 1876; he became a dean of Howard University's School of Law in 1879; he helped to elect several Republican presidents and successfully pushed that party to condemn lynching; he was served in the foreign service in Russia in 1898, and later in China.

Richard T. Greener
(courtesy Harvard University Library)

Who was this extraordinary person, Theodore Greener, almost completely unknown by anyone today, though he is, I must note, not infrequently invoked by Harvard? Historian Michael Mounter wrote his doctoral thesis on Greener and has uncovered a good deal about his life. He was born the grandson of a slave in Philadelphia, and his father was a mariner; his uncle, in whose orbit he spent a great deal of time, was a prosperous barber and politically active in the civic affairs of that city.  When he was 10 the family moved to Boston, where he was barred from attending the public schools because of his race, so his mother enrolled him in a private school, from which he later had to withdraw when his father never returned from the Gold Rush in California. He began working as a porter at the age of 14, and it was two Boston businessmen, George Herbert Palmer and Augustus Batchelder, who funded Greener's education at Oberlin College's preparatory school from 1862-1864 (during the US Civil War, no less), and then at Phillips Academy from 1864-65, before Batchelder arranged for his admission, as an experimental, to the college, where he was an academic standout.

Richard T. Greener

Several of Harvard's other schools had already admitted and graduated black students: Harvard Medical School in 1850 had admitted three students, including author and anti-slavery activist Martin Delany, before rescinding the offers after pressure from white students; in 1869 Harvard Law School graduated its first African American, George Lewis Ruffin, who in 1883 became Massachusetts' first black judge; and that same year, Harvard Dental School graduated a black student, Robert Tanner Freeman. (The following year, George Franklin Grant would graduated with a dental degree, before going on to invent the golf tee.)

McDonald holding a copy of Greener's
diploma from the University of South Carolina
(Cheryl Corley/NPR)

Indeed, a tiny number of African Americans had previously received undergraduate and graduate from institutions ranging from Oberlin College to Brown University to Middlebury College, during a period when the majority of black people were forbidden, sometimes at penalty of death, from learning to read or write, and the majority were enslaved. After Greener's graduation, Harvard would admit a few more African Americans to its various schools through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, though they remained a tiny but often publicly noteworthy minority until the 1970s. Among the most famous 19th century graduates after Greener include W. E. B. DuBois (AB 1890, AM 1891, PhD 1895, becoming the first African American earn a doctorate in the United States); his classmate Clement G. Morgan (AB 1890, LLB 1893, the first person to hold both degrees from Harvard, and the first black Senior Class Orator); and the anti-racist and peace activist William Monroe Trotter (AB 1895, AM 1896).

McDonald holding one of the photographs
he found, of Richard T. Greener
(Cheryl Corley/NPR)

But back to McDonald: He not only refused any money from the appraiser for the documents, but went back to the Englewood residence to fetch the trunk. It, like the house, was already gone. He retains the rights to the documents, and is considering where they might go. Interested parties include Harvard itself; the Sun-Times report quotes Harvard professor and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for many years head of its African and African American Studies Department, as having expressed interest, though he has told McDonald not to expect a mint in return. Other possible places the papers might go would include the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection at Howard University; the Library of Congress; or other notable research collections around the country. Perhaps someone will donate the papers to the forthcoming Museum of African American History in Washington. Whatever the case, it is likely a private collector will snap them up and donate them to one of these institutions. They will be invaluable for historians, scholars, writers, and others interested in Greener and the era.

Belle da Costa Greene
(Library Portraits)

One final note: Greener's family life, as the Sun-Times mentions, was a sad one. He had two families, in fact, one with his wife Genevieve Ida Fleet, the scion of a notable black Washington family, producing six children, and, after he headed to Russia, he established a common-law family with a Japanese woman, Mishi Kawashima, with whom he had three children. One of his daughters from his first marriage, Belle da Costa Greene, would go on to considerable fame on her own, as the biographer Heidi Ardizzone recounts in her enthralling book, An Illuminated Presence: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (W. W. Norton, 2007). Greene, having dropped the "r" from her last name and changed her middle name from "Marian" to the Mediterranean-sounding "da Costa," not only "passed" as a white person in turn of the century New York, becoming a society cynosure and a love interest, for a long period, of the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, but also, astonishingly, the person whom financier J. P. Morgan chose to organize his library and subsequently the first Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. The article notes that Greene ordered all her papers burned before her death in 1950, but the discovery of her father's papers could shed light not only on his life and times, but on her, her mother, and her siblings. Ardizzone points out that she might have visited her father in Chicago in 1913, though it is unlikely that she let many people in on her familial link, even though or especially because her boss and her father both served together on the committee to build Grant's Tomb in New York!

Bella da Costa Greene
(Morgan Library, Photo: Clarence White)

Although Greener did live with cousins in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago from 1909 until his death in 1922, there is no known connection to the house in Englewood. The districts sit not that far apart, however, one might imagine that someone in the Greener family could have moved to Englewood at some point, as that has been a predominantly black neighborhood of Chicago since the 1920s. In fact, it would be fascinating, I think, for some enterprising journalists, scholars and creative writers to trace out some of the connections among black Chicagoans radiating outwards from Greener and his relatives. I have noted to friends that you never know whom you might come across here or in other major cities. Once, a few years back when I went with my cousin to meet an elderly woman who had a little gallery in her beautiful South Side house and was selling some of my cousin's paintings, I noted what appeared to be some very fine art. It turned out that she and her husband were longtime major collectors of all kinds of art, most of it by African Americans, some of whom, like Charles Sebree, had been close friends of hers. (I will always also recall a beautiful sculpture by the Russian artist Archipenko.) But most remarkable to me was my discovery, when wandering in her living room, of a photo of a man whose face I immediately recognized, having grown up hearing about him and having even written a poem, many years before, that called his name forth. The man, it turned out, was her grandfather. And, it also turned out, he was the first black US Senator, seated during Reconstruction, from none other than Mississippi: Hiram Rhodes Revels. She seemed stunned that I knew who he was; I was stunned that I was standing there talking to one of his direct descendants. I imagine there are people who might know the story of Greener's trunk, and his family, if they talk to the right people and look in the right places, here in Chicago. And there are more such troves, and histories, and stories, our histories and stories, out there, waiting to be discovered, and told.

Keorapetse Kgositsile, Spring Tour 2012

It's exam week, which for me is final revised short story-and-final essay week, which means (lots of and) yet more reading, so little to no blogging. This quarter has left me particularly bleary-eyed, but by next Monday the grades will be in and it will be a wrap. The following quarter begins a week later!

In lieu of one of countless things I would like to blog about, I am going to do something I haven't in a while, which is to post information about an upcoming event, or rather, a series of events, involving a living legend, the great South African and Black Arts poet Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938-), who has begun a spring tour of the United States.  Not only is Kgositsile one of the major poets of his country and of contemporary African literature, but during the 1960s and part of the 1970s was actively involved in the creation of the Black Art literary, cultural and political movement, and as such represents and embodies a link between the political and cultural liberation movements of Africa and the US and the Americas.  The famous proto-rap group, The Last Poets, took their name from one of his poems; others who acclaimed his work included established figures like Gwendolyn Brooks, and peers like Amiri Baraka.

A quote: "In a situation of oppression, there are no choices beyond didactic writing: either you are a tool of oppression or an instrument of liberation."

He has already begun his tour, with readings in Brooklyn, down at Virginia Tech (with Nikki Giovanni, I imagine), at today at the University of Oklahoma, but he will be traveling all over the country, so if you can, do go hear him read if you can.  Here's the itinerary (I cannot verify it, so please check with the institutions) that poet Tyehimba Jess forwarded to me:

March 15th (Thursday): University of California at Santa Cruz

March 16th (Friday): California College of the Arts in San Francisco, 6:00 pm

March 22nd (Thursday): Hammer Museum near UCLA, 7:00 pm

March 23rd (Friday): University of Texas at Austin

March 26th (Monday): Miami University in Ohio

March 28th (Wednesday): University of Vermont

March 29th (Thursday): U of Mass at Amherst (with Sonia Sanchez)

March 31st (Saturday): National Black Writers' Conference at Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn, 7:00 pm

April 2nd (Monday): Labyrinth Books in Princeton, 6:00 pm

April 3rd (Tuesday): George Washington University (mid-morning class); Library of Congress, 4:00 P.M.
(Gathering at the home of Dolen Perkins-Valdez)

April 4th (Wednesday): College of Staten Island, CUNY, 2:30-3:30

: The New School (6:30 p.m.)

April 5th: (Thursday): University of Pennsylvania

April 7th (Saturday): CSI in San Francisco (Lecture)

April 9th (Monday): Institute of American Indian Arts, Sante Fe

UPDATED: April 10th (Tuesday): University of Illinois at Chicago - UIC Daley Library: Poetry Reading: 4:00 pm; Poetry Workshop: 6:00 pm.

April 12th (Thursday): Vanderbilt, 7:00 pm

April 13th (Friday): NYU, 5:00 pm

April 16th (Monday): Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 4:30 pm

April 18th (Wednesday): Fairleigh Dickinson University

April 19th (Thursday): Fairleigh Dickinson University
April 20th (Friday): CUNY Graduate Center

[Waiting to Confirm--April 21st (Saturday): Kalamazoo, Michigan]

April 23rd (Monday): Northwestern University

April 24th: (Tuesday): City of Asylum, Pittsburgh with Oliver Lake

April 26th (Thursday): Gaines Center

April 30th (Monday): Brown, 4:00 pm—arrive on Sunday the 29th and return to NYC on Tuesday, May 1st, with Chinua Achebe

Poems: Édouard Glissant

Two poems by the late and truly great author, intellectual and critic Édouard Glissant (1928-2011, at right, from fabula.org), from the collection Black Salt, Betsy Wing, translator, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, a translation of his collection Le sel noir, Le sang rivé, Boises (1983).

Cold Weather Fever

Ashes canebrakes oh your days
By eternity are foresaken
And like fancy dress our lies
Are tears mirrored into life

Shallow mirror and high tower
Death-water no ocean can confine
Beyond the digging hoe the plow
The fever and the furrowed clay

Weep that my space may bind
Space more complete upon you
Than any ocean makes an exile

My fevers furrow canebrake dead
And ash again for all such lies
More than eternity are clay.

Cities

On the wool of sound some object of silence one so immense.
The issue is love, its turning towards solicitous shop windows.
Who stops who gazes? Here thought arranges the display of rags, and charm lingers on and on.
There, giant cats scratch the earth, the steel of silence and faith with no object.

Copyright © Édouard Glissant, from Black Salt, Betsy Wing, translator, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Copyright © Translation by Betsy Wing. All rights reserved.

Whom Does Economic Austerity Benefit?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy
and German Chancellor Angela Merkel
(Philippe Wojazer, AFP/Getty Images)

Why do so many European leaders, both within the Eurozone and outside it keep pushing economic austerity despite its apparent failures historically (under Hoover, FDR in 1937, Latin America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, etc.), and, as a host of current economic indicators show, in real time, in Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Latvia, and now even France and Germany? Why is so hard for the political opposition in the United Kingdom to make an argument for the failure of that country's coalition government's policies, which have proved a disaster, stalling economic growth and creating social havoc? In fact, were the UK following an equally tight monetary policy, like the European Common Bank under Jean-Claude Trichet and now Mario Draghi, instead of the expansionary approach the Bank of England head Mervyn King has adopted, its jobless rate and slowdown might be as severe as Spain's, which tops out the European Community.  Even here in the USA, after the country experienced the most severe economic shock since the Great Global Depression of the 1930s and early 1940s, and in the face of an inadequate but still necessary stimulus bill and the Federal Reserve's successful monetary policies, the call for austerity, budget-cutting, and fiscal retraction remains strong. In fact, it is already underway at the state and local level, and may be one of the major causes of the slow and tenuous growth rate the country is now experiencing.

I'm aware that Naomi Klein and many others have written entire books about why economic and political leaders would and continue to push such policies; Klein's arguments concerning "disaster capitalism's" effects, via "shock doctrine" policies, praised but with caveats by the likes of Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Indian MP and former United Nations Under-Secretary Shashi Tharoor, are incredibly persuasive and resonate with critiques articulated by generations of people on the political Left as they do with many participating in the Occupy movement.  Moreover, as Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (2010), and the documentary film version of Klein's book, to give but three examples also illustrated, the "disaster capitalism complex" is just that, complex series of interlocking systems, institutions, discourses, attributable to no single person, firm (though Goldman Sachs's name would pop up in amost every account), conspiracy or aim, though the goal of funneling economic and political capital into the hands of a very few (the upper reaches of the 1%).

So, knowing all of this, why would I ask "What is Economic Austerity For?" or, to put it another way, why do political leaders and their plutocratic backers and friends keep pushing economic austerity? Why do brilliant economists like Paul Krugman bemoan the depredations of austerity, as he regularly does, predicting its destructiveness and calling out its agents, but always with the query of why the people behind it are doing it? Surely he knows better. Why do online commentators resort to a form of near-Manicheanism when discussing austerity, labeling those behind it "evil,"or suggesting that they are sadists--and perhaps some are, who knows--rather than trying to divine who benefits from such policies? As I said, we know who benefits, but when I consider the public discourse about austerity, whether in the US or beyond our shores, particularly in the mainstream media, I note that no one begins to put the various strands together. So here's an attempt, using a simple list format, to note who benefits from such policies.

European Common Bank President Mario Draghi
(Macrobusiness.com.au)

This is what I see:

In the EUROZONE countries

1) for the creditor nations and the global banks, austerity coupled with bailouts of the creditors (but not the governments themselves through the purchase of sovereign debt) represents the chief alternate to default because because under a default the creditor nations could incur massive losses and the banks, both in terms of debt obligations and in terms of bond holdings, could lose everything. Thus creditors benefit by imposing austerity and dragging this out as long as possible, with feints, false promises, anything, because with each bailout the creditors are getting something, as opposed to nothing, which also benefits the private bond market, while the austerity policies place the sovereign entities in an even more weakened position;

2) for the sovereign governments in severe fiscal crisis with no monetary policy options, agreeing to austerity policies appears to be a good option in lieu of default because they fear the inability to borrow money at a reasonable cost, which is already happening, so their governments, whether run by people ostensibly on the left, right, or technocratically "centrist," go along with the creditors' program, though, as many have argued, in Greece's case, where the country to default, though it would cause a severe temporary shock, Greece would again have control its currency, devalue it to make itself radically more competitive, thus lowering its cost of living,  increasing exports, and making itself more attractive to tourists. It probably would not be able to borrow money anytime soon, however, so political and economic restructuring would have to occur, but that is already happening without any of the benefits of having its own currency.

MOREOVER:

3) the global banks and shadow banks, which caused the economic collapse, as well as private creditors, have placed bets on rising European debt and are benefitting as austerity drives these bets up;

AND, THE FOLLOWING APPLIES TO NON-EUROZONE ECONOMIES LIKE THE UK AND THE US:

4) austerity allows political policymakers, abetting global corporations, banks, and the very wealthy to drive down public sector wages, dismantle unions or force radical cuts in any agreements they've made, hack away large numbers of government employees and any agreements public sector unions have made, making it more difficult to reenact those agreements at a later date;

5) austerity allows political policymakers, abetting global corporations, banks, and the very wealthy to drive down private sector wages because of increased competition and wage and salary deflation; dismantle private sector unions or force radical cuts in any agreements they've made, and thus drive up corporate profits, which accrue to corporate executives and shareholders;

6) once these policymakers and actors have effected such cuts, they then can also reduce or eliminate direct government services, through privatization, benefiting private corporations and often wealthy individuals; reduce government subsidies for particular private services that benefit middle-class and poor people, unless these subsidized private services directly benefit political and economic patrons, or undermine direct government programs; and to the extent possible, they seek to destroy or severely undermine safety nets, turning them both into privatized systems that the banks and wealthy can then plunder on the one hand, and into social welfare programs that are politically weakened and eventually be eliminated on the other.  One major discursive effect of such an approach is to underline the narrative that "government" doesn't work and that the safety net comprises entitlements as opposed to benefits people pay into and support, and which benefit the entire society; the attack on government power reinforces these empowered government and private political and economic actors' capital and power;

7) with austerity in place, the decreased public sector costs and social services mean that federal, state and capital gains taxes on the wealthy can remain low or, if raised (as in the UK, for example) can be pegged to floating economic targets upon which they can be returned to lower levels; the wealthy, imagining they will need only minimal government support of any kind, can afford to pay for private services, including higher municipal taxes benefitting the places they live; or they imagine they can move to secure enclaves protected from social unrest;

8) with austerity policies in place, the increased economic stress makes private and public sector workers more fearful of joining unions, challenging management, of speaking out, of requesting raises, of striking (this has not stopped either Europeans or Americans from doing so, yet), or of aiding fellow workers and organizing;

9) with austerity policies in place, the increased economic stress breeds social, economic and thus emotional and psychological strife and makes it easier to pit those under stress against each other, and in the absence of a strong Left party or parties, or a class-based or group-based consciousness grounded in theories of resistance and opposition, including the historical trends (Marxism-Leninism, Socialism, Progressivism, etc.) it opens the way for right-leaning parties to come to the fore, to write into law and then justify through adjudication the new state of affairs;

10) austerity policies in place also advantage the wealthy in multiple other ways, not least in elminating competition in corporate terms, while increasing access to political, social and economic actors and systems; augments their buying power (cf. real estate, retail, etc.) as well as their social and political power; affords their children less competition in terms of education, social and political access, etc.;

11) and finally, with austerity policies in place and the social, political and economic transformations these create, it makes it considerably more difficult to enact policies to turn things around, in the absence of revolution or another economic collapse, both because of the increased concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few and because economically and psychologically stressed civic actors are less able if not less likely to participate, organize or challenge the increased power of the elites, allowing those possessing it to control whoever or whatever entities are "democratically" elected or, in the absence even of the figment of democracy, they can control through authoritarian means, thus extending social and economic inequality and the policymakers' power and control.

Now every element of this list, and especially numbers 4-11, do really represent "shock doctrine" policies in action to varying degrees, which is to say, neoliberal capitalism in conjuction with laissez-faire and libertarian economics.  They also do suggest a conspiracy, if not linkable to one source then to particular ideologies, actors, institutions and systems. Again, whereas some might label this behavior evil, and others, like economist Duncan Black (Atrios) have on more than one occasion pondered whether the people with and in power are just stupid, it's clear that there are numerous benefits, at least to a very few, of austerity policies in the face of the sorts of economic downturns we're seeing nowadays.

Now, how can we get some of this information across to more people?  The Occupy movement, blogs and other online social media, and certainly many grassroots organizations and institutions, as well as some political parties across the globe, have begun to do so, but I do think that one of the best way to get such information across to people is via media that touch them affectively, as well as intellectually, that entertain while also educating and enlightening. How, without resorting to propaganda and eluding the censors, can we do this? That is the major challenge.

Last Day of Classes + The Fashions of Walter Van Beirondonck

Today was the last day of winter quarter classes.

Boardwork for the LGBTQ American lit class discussion on "trans"

Such is this year's calendar that reading week begins tomorrow, and exam week commences next Monday. I shall have many short stories to read, but I decided to follow a colleague's lead and allow students in the literature class to choose between a critical paper or a creative project, and thus I'm hoping for some very interesting submissions alongside the more conventional essays.

I almost cannot believe the classes are over; the writing class was three times a week for 50 minutes, so it felt like a running relay in which I was the only one holding the baton, while the literature class felt like a half-marathon in which I got a second wind after the third class, the advanced fiction writing class, ended halfway through the quarter. That would felt like the 100-yard/meter dash, if a jet-fuel pack were on my back.

I am still recovering from that class, and missing my wonderful students (who I do get to see, even enjoying the benefit of reading with one of them at the final winter quarter student faculty readings last Monday, before the Associated Writing Programs conference blew through town), and the combo, along with Chicago's slightly warmer but still chilly weather has made the past 10 weeks come to feel like 50.

Last night it even snowed, lightly, before the fine lace covering my windows and the roadway dissoved in the sunlight, though outside its grasp a gossamer pane of ice remained. My apartment's radiators crank frequently, but for whatever reason the rooms themselves stay chilly, or my bones are no longer holding the heat so well. At any rate I will have more time to chill: now, no classes, just theses (honors, MFAs, a dissertation to read), final stories and papers and projects, and I hope somewhere amidst all this that I can find time to compete a paper for a spring conference, and my own creative projects, as well as my capacity even for short form entries on this blog. I do miss it.

In lieu of something not even slighly coherent from me, and given that it's still the fashion season (now drawing to a close in Paris, after the spectacles in New York and Milan) and I have always loved watching fashion shows as a way of brightening my day (disidentification, you know), here are three videos of rather male fashion shows by a not very well known but very innovative queer designer and artist, Walter Van Beirondonck. Note that the second video starts automatically (it's an iframe-coded video, and I'm not sure how to turn that autoplay off in html), so turn off the sound or just click to stop if you don't want to watch it right away.  Enjoy!

UPDATE: In the comments section, Jenny (thank you!) links to this note from Racialicious on Van Beirondonck's racial fetishist thrust in many of his collections. I hadn't seen it before nor had I seen his Fall 2012 collection, which it particularly calls out, but I do agree with its ambivalent take on his work, and would suggest it could apply to any number of major designers, from Jean-Paul Gaultier to the disgraced John Galliano to Diane von Fürstenberg to many others who have sampled the "tribal," trafficked in self-proclaimed "exoticism," and engaged in Orientalism,  as a way of creating luxury commodities for the richest among us to consume. Just two years ago, in the Financial Times, reporter Marian Hume, in an article that began by talking about young fashion sensation Doru Olowu, quickly segued into how von Fürstenberg and other heavy hitters were "interested" in exploiting this cultural material as much as they could...

Brothers: Hand on Heart: Winter 2011/2012

Walter Van Beirendonck Winter 2011/2012 from Walter Van Beirendonck on Vimeo.

Billows: Cloud #9: Summer 2012

Bears: Wonde®: Summer 2010 (if you don't like seeing big hairy men in underwear, skip the end)


Walter Van Beirendonck Summer 2010 from Walter Van Beirendonck on Vimeo.

Happy Women's History Month

March 1, 2012 marks the beginning of Women's History Month, and just as I believe on a daily basis if we are talking about and exploring and writing history, thinking about our society and how it functions and might improve, we cannot but focus on the history and contributions of women, without whom none of us would be here, and without whom this world would fall apart immediately.  In my LGBTQ class, one of the first documents we looked at was "The Woman Identified Woman," by RADICALESBIANS, formerly the Gay Lavender Menace, one of several groups that splintered off from the Gay Liberation Front.

Released on May Day (May 1), 1970 (and eschewing the parodic tone of Valerie Solanas's 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto while sacrificing none of that or similar documents' political acuity) and distributed to attendees of the National Organization for Women-sponsored Second Annual Conference to Unite Women, and then published in Come Out!'s 4th issue, it is very much an artifact of its time and moment, down to its rhetoric, but like similar documents it set the stage for countless theoretical, biopolitical and political, cultural and aesthetic interventions to follow. As it did for me when I first came across it, the text resounded for many of my students, across genders, and become of the documents that they circled back to in our in-class discussions and in their response papers. Its insights are ones, however, that I think still don't pervade the public consciousness, despite the many decades of LGBT and later queer (and queered, and as E. Patrick Johnson and others coined, "quare") studies.

Here, in tribute, are two quotes, the opening paragraph, and the closing.

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society – perhaps then, but certainly later – cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society–the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyze what the rest of her society more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her “straight” (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society’s view of her – in which case she cannot accept herself – and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a tortuous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women – because we are all women.

And:

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that through struggling, an incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.

Copyright © RADICALESBIANS, 1970, 2011, from the Queer Rhetoric Project. All rights reserved.