Long Interview on Occupy Wall Street With a Humorous Slant

Occupy Wall Street Interview - Professor Mark Naison ... - YouTube

5 days ago – Matt Sky Interviews Professor Mark D. Naison at Fordham University about the Occupy Wall Street movement, its future and global ...

OWS brings it home....

Here's a vivid story describing OWS's next move after its eviction from public spaces: occupying homes that have been foreclosed upon by banks and have been sitting vacant ever since.  My gut reaction is that it's very smart, in that it brings home the consequences of not only  the financial meltdown but also the decades-long upward redistribution of wealth that has been the consequence of many years of neoliberal policy. But it's also risky, in that the constant public visibility of a place like Zuccotti Park was a major source of the movement's success.  What do others think of this strategy?

Fabulous thesis presentations!

I'd like to interrupt the ongoing discussion of OWS just to rave about the American Studies thesis presentations that took place today. The creativity and hard work of the students was visible at every moment, and the large and lively audience of faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students provided a supportive and collaborative environment. Congratulations to the seniors of the class of 2012 for some remarkable research! Here are the thesis titles:

• Ariadne Blayde, “‘I Ran My Fingers Through Her Coal Black Hair To Cover Up My Sin’: Gender, Violence, and Redemption in Appalachian Murdered Girl Ballads”
• Melissa Brumer, “Sand, Sun, and Sex Tourism: What Really Happens During College Spring Break”
• Rebecca Gehman, “‘Fast Food for the Filipino Soul’: Consuming Transnational Identity at Jollibee in Queens”
• Rachel Jones, “Sistas in Sisterhood: Black Cultural Clubs in All Girls Private High Schools”
• Andrea Krok, “‘I Got It From My Mama’: Experiences of Language and Identity for Second-Generation Immigrant College Students at Fordham”
• Eve Krupitsky, “An Important Year: Competing Images of Womanhood in the Ladies’ Home Journal, 1919”
• Grace Loughney, “The New Media Deal: Obama, the Information Age, and the Shadow of FDR”
• Catherine McNamara, “The Cross Bronx Double Cross: The Effects of the Cross Bronx Expressway on Pediatric Asthma in the Bronx”
• Andrew O’Connell, “From Clayton Bigsby to Stuart Hall: Conceptions of Blackness and Authenticity in Chappelle’s Show”
• Jennifer Prevete, “‘Maybe It Was Too Much to Expect for Those Days’: The Changing Lifestyles of Barnard’s First Female Students”
• Kevin Price, “Jay-Z’s Coliseum: The Barclay’s Center, Professional Sports, and the Transformation of Brooklyn”
• Sarah J. Rogers, “Dramatizing Oppenheimer and Reagan: Theatricality and the Shaping of American Historical Memory”
• Lauren Sepanski, “Tending the Flowers, Cultivating Community: Gardening on New York City Public Housing Sites”
• Emily Tuttle, “‘Inspired By Our Feminist Foremothers’: Feminists for Life’s Appropriation of First-Wave Feminist Rhetoric and History”
• Gabriella Wilkins, “Fun, Fearless, and Feminist?: Gender and Sexuality in Cosmopolitan”

Occupy Wall Street Not Fading

Occupy Wall Street is, rather than fading, slowly embedding itself into the lives of working class and middle class New Yorkers. Consider the following- yesterday, OWS protesters occupied a foreclosed home inn the East New York Section of Brooklyn; tonight Occupy the Bronx and supporters around the city will be packing a meeitng of the 40 Precinct Community Council to protest the illegal arrest of... Occupy the Bronx members outside a community garden over the weekend; there are ongoing hunger strikes in front of Trinity Church to protest the church's refusal to let the movement Occupy a vacant lot owned by the Church on Canal Street; there is a 99 Percent Club, in full operation at Fordham with new clubs on the verge of forming at other area colleges. Couple that with CUNY tuition protests, movements to resist school clusings and charter school co-locations and you have a remarkable range of political activism around the city inspired by or supported by OWS.

Mark Naison
December 7, 2011

The Art of OWS

As if in answer to an earlier call for American studies scholars to look at the proliferation of images coming out of OWS,  here's a link to an op-ed piece by two American studies professors, Michele Elam and Jennifer DeVere Brody, in which they discuss  how we might start to talk about images like this one:

Organizing Principles for 99 Percent Clubs

99 Percent Clubs can be organized at your school, at your workplace, in your home, at your neighborhood community or senior  center or in your church, synagogue or mosque,  Here are four simple organizing principles for these clubs
1. To disseminate accurate information about the Occupy movements in the US and around the world.
2. To provide material support ( which may  in the form of food and clothing, legal assistance,  or pressure on elected officials) to the Occcupy movement in your own city and town
3. To organize around economic inequality issues and threats to freedom of expression where you live and/or where you work.
  4. To create networks among people who support the Occupy movement that enable them to mobilze support for demonstrations organized by that movement.
  The strength of these clubs is that they allow people a wide variety of situations , including those who are homebound or disabled, to participate in the Occupy movement.
Mark Naison and Ira Shor

A Crusade to Destroy a Conversation

The Occupy Wall Street People's Library prior to
the November 15th midnight raid.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg sent hundreds of police officers in the dead of night to Zuccotti Park to evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters as they slept peaceful in their tents. The sleepy protesters were ordered to leave immediately or face arrest. Many were, of course, arrested. Others gathered whatever possessions they could and left with what they could carry. Protesters who returned to gather more of their belongings were barred from re-entering the park.

All of this happened under the cloak of darkness, both literal and figurative. Press were barred from covering the police action. Public transportation to the site was halted as subway service to the nearby stations was suspended. People in neighboring buildings were also barred from leaving their lobbies as the raid unfolded. One cannot help but assume that the Mayor did not want any lingering images of this stealth attack, whether those images were captured by the press or by concerned citizens.

The morning after Mayor Bloomberg evicted the protesters, he held a press conference to defend his administration's actions. He concluded those remarks by saying that the protesters had already had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. "Now," he said, "they will have to occupy the park with the power of their arguments."

Mayor Bloomberg's position seems to suggest that ideas and arguments can somehow be crafted without the minds and bodies that generate them. Somehow, in the world that the mayor occupies, ideas spring fully-formed from the foreheads of men who never want for any corporeal need. Their bodies, so well-fed, and exercised, and groomed, and scented, so well-rested, and warm, and safe, fall into the background, allowing them the fantasy that their minds are somehow independent of their bodies and the vast labor that supports and sustains them. Nestled in the comfortable cocoon that is economic privilege, their bodies become the sites of various pleasures and perhaps the occasional discomforts of the diseases that medical science has yet to ameliorate. But seldom are their bodies the sites of desperation, hunger, pain, and need. Were it not for the utter insensibility that such privilege fosters, the mayor's remarks might seem not just disingenuous, but utterly cynical.

The notion that citizenship should only be the legal right of the propertied has its roots in this sort of fantasy about ideas: reason, it is argued, is only possible when one is free from the drudgery of laboring for a living. (See Hannah Arendt's analysis of these ideas.) The frustration, anger, and rage that emerge from economic inequality, and that animate mass movements, are deemed irrational. Protesters are characterized as crazy or criminal. Their status as citizens is impugned. They are cast as a mob, as unruly and unreasonable. Often they are described as malodorous, ill-kempt, and unclean.

That is one reason that the Occupy Wall Street People's Library was such a threat. The library, along with the non-violent civil disobedience of the movement, suggests that the occupation is guided by ideas and ideals. The image of a movement that had assembled a 4,500+ volume library in just two months was starkly at odds with the media fantasies of irrational, marauding hooligans or filthy, unkempt hippies. A 4,500+ volume library that was organized, cataloged and circulating, suggests that reason, reflection, and dialog are at the heart of the occupation. A collection that included volumes inscribed by renowned authors supporting the movement suggests an alarming level of cultural resonance. Beyond that, such a distinguished and significant collection might some day be archived for historians to consider as the story of the occupation is written. But instead of continuing to circulate amongst library users, instead of being preserved for the archives of the future, much of the occupation library was crushed in the trash compactors of twenty-eight Department of Sanitation trucks that carted away the property of the occupying protesters.

OWS librarian Stephen Boyer displays a damaged copy of
Philip Levine's What Work Is that the poet had inscribed for the library.

Yesterday I attended the press conference where the librarians of the People's Library displayed the books that they had recovered from the midnight raid. Of the 4,500+ books confiscated by the NYPD and the Department of Sanitation, only about 1,300 have been returned to the librarians. And of those, a third are damaged beyond repair.  Books destroyed ranged from copies of the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita to popular potboilers and children's books. Milton Friedman and Karl Marx shared shelf space (and the protection of waterproof plastic bins) under the trees at Zuccotti Park. No book was rejected because its ideology might be at odds with that of the occupation: Andrew Carnegie's The Empire of Business was not far from Mayor Bloomberg's own memoir Bloomberg on Bloomberg.

The mayor and his administration may have been aware that the destruction of a library represented a potential PR problem.  Perhaps that's why they released a photograph via Twitter the day of the raid, suggesting that the library had been well-cared for by its temporary custodians at the Department of Sanitation.

Images from yesterday's press conference suggest otherwise. 

At a time when budget cuts have shortened public library hours and bookstores are filing for bankruptcy protection, the image of a press conference table covered with crushed and moldy volumes was more than simply disturbing. The remnants of the sacked library were a sobering reminder that, as OWS librarian Danny Norton observed, "this is a crusade to destroy a conversation." 

On this Thanksgiving Day, at tables across the country — and in newspapers, and blogs, and twitterfeeds — I'm grateful that the conversations (and occupations) will surely continue unabated.