Interactive Map: Do We Have "Developing States"?

I encountered something very interesting today while browsing the GOOD site, and as a result, I have been spending quite some time this afternoon playing around with this map feature. I thought many of you might be interested in it, since it seems very relevant to a lot of what we do in American Studies:

http://measureofamerica.org/maps/

It is a map of the United States which rates each state on the Human Development Index (which usually designates developed and developing nations). It is put together by the American Human Development Project of the Social Science Research Council, and compiles data from the past three years separately. The Human Development Index (HDI) takes into account factors like life expectancy, educational attainment, political participation, and median income.

While it is a little strange (and potentially problematic) to designate "developing states" since our standards of living are so vastly different from global standards, it is so interesting to compare the experiences of people living in different geographic regions within the nation.

For instance, I started out by looking at the human development statistics for all people in my home state:

What I found even more fascinating, though, is the capability of the program to recalculate HDI for specific gender and racial groups, and the map's color scheme looks a little different when it represents the measures as calculated for such groups. For instance, here is the map when it represents women (the highest HDI for women is in Washington, DC!) The darker the color of the state, the higher the index.

The information can also be organized by race, or by gender within race. You can also build charts based on certain demographics that interest you (for instance, life expectancy, rate of diabetes and other health indicators, or political participation based on age bracket,) based on what you hope to discover about each state, zip code, or congressional district.

Perhaps I'm a little behind the times in noticing such a useful tool, but I thought I'd pass it along just in case. I could post many more examples, but instead, if I may revisit our Keywords essay for just a moment, sometimes technology is pretty amazing.

Thursday at the ASA conference

The most interesting panel I attended yesterday was a plenary session on the conference theme, “Crisis, Chains, and Change.” As with any panel on such a broad theme, the papers were very different from one another, but the three I heard were all fascinating and illuminating.

In the first, Vijay Prashad (who has spoken at Fordham twice in the past few years, and may be known to Fordham American Studies students as the author of the Keywords essay on “Orientalism”) gave a witty and learned lecture that managed to tell a history of American capitalism—and various forms of resistance to it—over the course of more than a century. That he could do so in less than twenty minutes, and make his audience laugh multiple times, is a testament to what a great speaker Prashad is.

Then Christopher Newfield (also known to Fordham American Studies students as the author of the Keywords essay on “Corporation”) spoke. Newfield has been the great writer over the past several years on the history and present predicament of the American public university system, which was once the envy of the world and is now being de-funded and, basically, privatized. (None of the most prestigious state universities now get the majority of their funding from public sources). His blog, “Remaking the University,” is a must-read for anyone who cares about education in the United States, especially the ongoing evisceration of the University of California, which was once the best system in the country and is now losing its prestigious faculty by the dozen. Newfield’s talk showed—with more charts and graphs than one usually sees at an American Studies conference—how all the ideas we have about the way universities are funded are myths. The one that struck home for me was his demonstration that, contrary to our usual understanding that the sciences and engineering bring in grant money that subsidizes the humanities and social sciences—in fact, if you take into account the immense indirect costs of supporting the sciences, the low salaries of faculty in those latter areas, and the large numbers of tuition-paying students we teach, we are subsidizing the sciences.

The third speaker was Klee Benally, a Dine' (Navajo) artist and activist, who told amazing and disturbing stories about, for instance, how a ski resort is trying to expand in a way that would descrate a mountaintop that is at least as sacred to his people (and several other Indian nations) as any cathedral, synagogue, or mosque would be to adherents to other religions, and would cause enormous environmental damage by pumping thousands of gallons of water every day many miles up to a mountaintop for snowmaking. (As he said, "a ski resort in a desert doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?). He also made very vivid how the ongoing militarization of the US/Mexico border—something we’ve touched upon in this year’s “Approaches to American Studies” class—is affecting the indigenous groups who have lived for centuries on both sides of the border that was artificially drawn right through their land. By his account, these peoples are now living under virtual military occupation, and the U.S. government is doing things like building the new border “wall” right through their cemeteries and sacred spaces. The immigration debate tends to ignore the existence of indigenous peoples, as if there were only “Mexicans” and “Americans;” even the activists who came to Arizona to protest SB 1070 tended, Benally said, to ignore the input of Indians who had been working against the militarization of the border for years.

This was just one panel (and I had to leave before the fourth speaker spoke). It’s amazing the variety of things one can learn about at an interdisciplinary conference like this one.

Reevaluating Rubber Rooms

(Rubber Rooms: where New York City's teachers go when they “misbehave.” A sort of “paid detention.”)


Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of watching the performance of a play written by one of our fellow American Studies majors, Ariadne Blayde. A double major in playwriting, Blayde was inspired to write her play “The Rubber Room” after reading an intriguing New Yorker article which exposed the inner-workings of New York City’s “Temporary Re-Assignment Centers” for public school teachers.



(Satirical cartoon on New York Rubber Rooms)

"Rubber Rooms", which were thankfully shut down in September, were places where “At a cost of more than $30 million a year, teachers and 90 other school employees sit for weeks, months or even years in the centers - reading newspapers, playing games or napping - while waiting for their cases to wind through the disciplinary system.” The scene described is the product of an unsatisfying compromise between the Teachers Union and the Department of Education. The Teachers Union wants to protect teachers and their jobs, while the Department of Education has an obligation to protect school children and keep accused teachers out of the classroom. Violations worthy for accusation range anywhere from “incompetence to sexual misconduct.” The absurd (yet real) situation possessed what Blayde calls great “dramatic potential” for a play.

“The Rubber Room”, which premiered in the White Box Theatre at Fordham Lincoln Center, is a witty and insightful play that delves into the personal stories of five teachers held inside a New York City "rubber room." Ariadne wanted to attribute a human aspect to the "rubber room" debates, and thus focused on the perspective of the teachers who suffer the consequences, she explains, “Some are innocent and some deserve to be there, it’s about people and their stories.” As each teacher’s story unfolds, one can see that that there is no easy solution to this predicament, if there is even a solution at all.

The New York City public school system is the largest school system in the nation and thus inevitably prone to complexities and complications. Eight-year leader of this system, Joel Klein was quoted in the New Yorker as saying “You can never appreciate how irrational the system is until you’ve lived with it” But Klien won’t have to “appreciate” the system any more, seeing as of about a week ago Mayor Bloomberg appointed magazine mogul Cathie Black to replace him.



(Sensationalized cover of The Daily News, reporting Black's appointment)

But many are questioning “Huh?” to Bloomberg’s decision, as some point out that Black has no technical credentials for the job, let alone shown any outward desire to work in education. However, the choice should come as no surprise, since Klein himself also had a seemingly ‘unsuited’ resume for a job in education (he was the assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice and chairman at Bertelsmann, a massive media corporation.) Bloomberg’s reasoning for appointing business honchos is that their management savvy is just what’s needed in the school system. Which in that case, Black seems a good fit: while spearheading Hearst (publishers of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Good Housekeeping), ad pages increased 12%, a percentage that “outpaced” the currently stagnant magazine industry. Whether Black can equally salvage New York City public schools is yet to be seen.

So what needs to change? Blayde says “We need a better way of evaluating students and teachers, not all students are the same. More importantly, we need to protect children’s welfare.”

Hopefully, with the dismantling of "rubber rooms" and a new chancellor in place, we can see some more of Blayde’s advice being put into action.

2010 American Studies Association Annual Meeting

I flew from New York City last night to San Antonio, Texas, which is the site of this year's annual meeting of the American Studies Association. I'm not going to try to blog about everything that happens here--as you can see if you take a look at the program, it's an incredibly rich event, with a dozen different panels on different topics taking place at any given time--but I am going to try to post at least a couple of times about especially interesting talks, plenary sessions, and meetings.

Right now there's not much to say, since I got here late last night and haven't even had breakfast yet! But to give you a sense of what some of the panels will be about: Each year the conference has a theme. This year's is "Crisis, Chains, and Change: American Studies for the 21st Century." Something like half the panels at the conference deal explicitly with something related to the theme; the others are on any topic relevant to the study of American culture. The theme is determined by the conference planning committee, and is usually related to the work of the year's ASA President, who this year is New York's own Ruth Wilson Gilmore (she's recently moved from USC to CUNY), author of the award-winning book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (which I taught in Fordham's "Major Developments in American Culture" class a few years ago). She'll be giving a plenary lecture on the topic of the conference theme tomorrow night.

So, here is the conference call for papers, which describes this year's theme in some detail (I'm especially fond of the first sentence of the first full paragraph):

The theme for the 2010 ASA Annual Meeting, to be held in San Antonio, Texas, is "Crisis, Chains, and Change: American Studies for the 21st Century."

Ever since 20 January 2009, the US has had one African American man serving a term in the White House and more than a million serving terms in the Big House. US prisons and jails hold more than two million prisoners, mostly of color, virtually all modestly educated women and men in the prime of their lives. In the midst of multiple global crises - war, finance capital, economies, climate change, hunger - it has come to this. What is it that this is? Change, surely. But what changed?

During the next few years the planet-wide struggle over remedy for crisis, and the attendant reconfiguration of social orders, will doubtless become deeper and broader in a range of sites and scales. In the midst of crisis what can American Studies do - as an association of scholars, and as both an intellectual and annual meeting-place for questions and methods that cut across disciplines, institutions, places, and material and conceptual boundaries? We know how to find things out. What do we know now?

While traditionally historians claim change as their specialty, in fact we all study change all the time. Specialists in narrative, culture, production, reproduction, ecology, political economy, and geopolitics encounter in their objects of analysis change, including what does not change.

The program invites participants to conceive of their work as the analysis of commodity and other chains in their fullest complexity - consumables, durables, FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) products, armaments, ideologies, aesthetic forms, narrative structure, analytical methods, life-ways, labor, people, migrations, rights, scale, space, garbage, carbons, deities, rules, group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, justice. A chain is a process no less than a restraint, and every process is full of events - some repetitive and dreary, others exciting, all dynamic - which create along the way people, places, and things.

The program, thus, invites continued consideration of topics central to American Studies - indigeneity, gender, race, sexuality, laws and status, dispossession, documentation, wage and custom, boom and bust, primitive accumulation, love for and loathing of risk, and stretching or shrinking: states, glaciers, empires, horizons. We will be interested in projects that engage broadly with the ways ordinary people create power-- understood as the capacity to compel or help others do things they would not do on their own. Some examples are: alternative household formations, resistance to rent and mortgage evictions, workplace activism, communities that challenge polluting industries, informal economies, economic delinking, sitting in, sitting down, tossing shoes, sabotage, quilombos, queering politics, buying in, walking out, redefining sexuality and sovereignty, underground armies, implacable pacifism, territorial imperatives, total war.

The goal is to identify in our various projects, among other things, specific dialectics of homogenization and differentiation, persuasion and action, space and place, structure and agency, metaphor and materiality, expression and explanation, crisis and whole ways of life. Why? So that we might ask how our understandings of "there" or "then" inform the distinct yet densely interconnected geographies of the present.

Scholars of all specialties, methods, places, and periods are urged to submit paper and panel proposals. Taking our cue from the ground, the meetings will be an opportunity to hear from a variety of trans-border activists working around immigration, the wall, femicides, maquiladoras, and other aspects of the US-Mexico border?s political ecology.

We anticipate special focus on convergences and divergences in the Americas, in Islam in the Americas and beyond, and in the Atlantic or Pacific worlds, and hope as well to highlight comparative methods. Meeting plenary sessions will be designed for discussion and debate on the socio-spatial, cultural, political, educational, and economic dimensions of crisis, chains, and change in the spasmodic context of neo-liberalism's death-throes. What comes next is anybody's guess, but we should be working on life after the "n" word now not later.

Learning About Globalization from Mozambique: A Keyword Reconsidered

It doesn't happen very often, but the developing world, where I live, came up in my American Studies reading the other day. "Neoliberal policies" imposed by "international banking and financial institutions," this scholar warned, threatened developing countries. Land, previously used for subsistence agriculture was being handed over to large-scale agriculture for export crops. "Millions of people…[have been left] without their traditional means of livelihood." I admire this scholar's work greatly, so I hope she will forgive me if I use her words to quarrel more broadly with the field. In many ways her declaration reiterated a highly conventional critique in American Studies of neoliberal globalization--or of the spread of global markets with limited regulation of the flow of labor, capital, and goods.

However much I sympathize with this critique of globalization, these statements gave me pause. I spent early October in rural Mozambique, traveling across the country from the Indian Ocean up to Lake Niassa on the Malawi border. I visited villages reliant on subsistence agriculture. And I passed signs of corporate tobacco and tree farms.

Subsistence agriculture should not be romanticized. Too often scholars sketch out a story of land displacement, export agriculture, and foreign demands for open markets that have lurking within them an idealization of traditional ways of living. In all honesty, I find myself angered by such simplified schema. They seem to imply that we should just let poor people continue living on subsistence agriculture, as if they are happy with back-breaking manual labor on poor soils, remoteness of education and health facilities, and lack of access to cash to buy commodities like mattresses, pots and pans, and other consumer goods.

In the village I visited, residents walk several hours a day to reach their fields, have a school in which the teachers have changed five times in the last two years, and have until recently had to walk three or four hours to the nearest health clinic. Infant mortality is high. Girls marry young--12 or 13. When asked when they had last eaten meat, villagers laughed and thought it was normally three or four or more months earlier. Land is cleared by burning, and in the days that I was there air quality would have warranted a high smog alert in any urban center in America.
All of this is not to say that large-scale export-oriented farming is the answer. Still, Mozambique, as one of the poorest countries in the world, with rich agricultural lands available for development (a population of twenty million occupies a country about twice the size of California, which itself has a population of thirty-three million), needs more large-scale, capital-intensive corporate agriculture, or it will remain poor. Agriculture is a potential strong suit for its economy. But large-scale corporate agriculture cannot be even close to the only answer for lifting rural Mozambicans out of poverty. Nor should it be expanded without good labor controls, fairer global markets (such as fewer trade barriers to the country's products), and efforts to reinvest reasonable proportions of the profits back in the country. But for the vast majority of rural Mozambicans, other strategies are also needed. Proposals I have seen that make sense to me stress building up small and medium-sized agricultural production--building on existing subsistence production. To do that, rural Mozambicans need "inputs"--better seeds, fertilizer, help with improving productivity, and access to credit to purchase those supplies. They need a vital trading network that collects their small outputs, and joins them with others, for larger, even foreign markets.

I reside right now in a peculiar interdisciplinary borderlands between American Studies and international development. I have learned from it, however, to shift in my seat suspiciously and to long for nuance when I hear indictments of neoliberal globalization.

Paranormal Activity

So, those of you who know me may know that I am a movie buff. My older brother graduated from Fordham in 2008 and since then the two of us have gone to the movies about once a week as a way to keep up with each other and keep our eyes on what is going on with our favorite visual medium.

Last year we went together to see a low budget movie that had become somewhat of a cult phenomenon, Paranormal Activity. This film was made in 2006 for a reported $11,000 and was wide released in 2009 earning $194 million, making it one of the most profitable films ever made.

The movie is presented as "found footage" that is, the movie asserts itself to be actual home footage of two people who experience a great deal of paranormal activity in their house as a result of a demonic possession. Most of the movie is night-vision home-camera style footage of a couple sleeping in their bed while paranormal activities occur around them, reaching climax in a demonic possession.

Both my brother and myself left the theater last year singing the praises of this low-budget horror movie which proved itself to be more intelligent and terrifying then most of its big budget competition.

When I saw a trailer for a sequel the other week on the TV, I knew this was an event we could not miss.

This movie does not disappoint, the suspense and fear of the first movie remain and the sequel has one of the most ingenious plots I have ever seen to both include and inform the action of the first movie.

This is a movie that could not exist at any other time in history. It relies not only on the technological ability of handheld cameras which can record large amounts of footage in high definition, but also on a culture which is not only accepting but desirous of filming its every actions for future viewing.

The movie plays on the Myspace and Facebook generation's obsession with recording and presenting itself in a digital medium for a potentially limitless audience through the internet. This movie would have failed in the 1980s, a period in which home movies were easily produced but difficult to present to mass audiences. The rise in digital media as well as social networking and sites like youtube both inform and provide the context for a movie in which families record their daily lives while extraordinary (or paranormal) events occur.

If you have not seen Paranormal Activity, see it first. If you have seen it, go now to the nearest theater showing Paranormal Activity 2, you will not regret it.

Blackface and the VMAs

Earlier this week MTV held its VMA (Video Music Awards) ceremony and there was a slight bit of controversy when Will.I.Am of Black Eyed Peas fame arrived to the show with his face painted black (I don't own the copyright of a photo so to avoid legal issues, click here to see one).

Immediately this was condemned as a "blackface" performance by the media and there was a small bit of outrage over it, accusing Will.I.Am of being a racist, or setting back the clock or race relations in the US, however, those making the accusations, I believe, are completely off base.

So yes, his face was painted black, and although his fashion sense may be suspect, this was clearly not an example of blackface. Blackface Minstrelsy, once one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the US and now regarded as ignorant and racist (rightfully so), requires much more than just a blackening of the face.

Blackface performers were whites who would blacken their faces using make-up and then perform highly stylized versions of black speech and culture for white audiences. Yes, their faces were blackened, yes, Will.i.am's face was blackened, no, they're not the same thing.

The blackening of his face does not make Will.I.Am's performance blackface because he was not intentionally performing highly stylized stereotypes of white perception of black culture for his audience. He was attempting some sort of futuristic look in which he was painted all black, the fashionistas can argue whether or not this was a wise choice, that's not my field.

If you want to be mad at Will.I.Am for something from these VMAs, your anger would be more appropriately focused at his tweet responding to accusations in which he says "I where" when in actuality he means "I wear," this, I believe, is the far grosser offense which was committed that night.

And now for a bit of unabashed self-promotion; Come see Amsterdam Abortion Survivor this Thursday, Friday or Sunday at the Soho Playhouse, I am the tech guy for this uproarious one man comedy show, and tickets are only $18!