Posts Tagged race
Speculative Life
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 10, 2012
I’m excited to announce the publication of a new Social Text Periscope online dossier, edited by Jayna Brown and I, on Speculative Life.
Here’s part of our description of the theme and its relevance, from our introduction:
In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a neo-imperialism organized around the capture of abstract futures and the subjugation of transnational labor forces. Financial speculators gamble with everyone’s lives, and our times would seem to foreclose on any future at all for many.
But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining. And, as Ernst Bloch said, it may be in our imaginative worlds that we catch glimpses of utopian possibility beyond our present paradigm. At a moment when so many have been struggling to enact alternatives to the depressing world produced by Wall Street’s speculative failures, we need to practice imagining now more than ever.
And here are the wonderful, provocative essays.
Introduction: Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
A Wilder Sort of Empiricism: Madness, Visions and Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown
Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman Ability and Ableism in the work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monáe, by Moya Bailey
Larissa Lai’s “New Cultural Politics of Intimacy”: Animal. Asian. Cyborg. by Tamara Ho
Speculating Queerer Worlds by Alexis Lothian
Socialist Irrealism: an interview with China Miéville, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
Race For Life, by Alex Weheliye
So Say We All, by Tavia Nyong’o
The Water Keeps Flowing, by Elizabeth Turgeon
Disappearing Natives: Notes for Future SF&F Stories, by Andrea Hairston
I’m developing a strong love and appreciation for the kind of accessible yet incisive intellectual work we can do in just-over-blog-length, carefully edited and thoughtfully presented crossover scholarly publications like these. I encourage you to read them, teach them, pass them on.
#transformDH and transformativity
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 9, 2012
At MLA, Jentery Sayers gave a paper that cited the TransformDH Tumblr, which I previously linked at my post on digital praxis as theory––which Jentery also cited in his MLA talk. (I’m honored.) I was travelling at the time and only caught up on Twitter, but it seems that some controversy has ensued in this post by Roger Whitson,
Does DH Really Need to be Transformed?. The short version of his post is that the digital humanities don’t need to be transformed, as #transformDH is demanding; they are already marvelously welcoming and collaborative.
I certainly don’t deny his experience. But, to me at least, it feels tangential to what #transformDH has actually been setting out to do.
The Tumblr linked above was started, not after MLA, but after our American Studies Association roundtable titled “Transformative Mediations? Queer and Ethnic Studies and the Politics of the Digital.” Since then, the six of us who were on the panel have been gathering other collaborators to think about these concerns, organizing under the hashtag #transformDH. At the ASA panel, we agonized over our hashtag. #criticalintersectionalqueerandethnicstudiesDH is, to say the least, a bit too long; but #queerDH erases race. #criticalDH implies that most DH is not critical, which seems a bit unfair to a discipline so rooted in textual analysis. We settled on #transformDH because it seemed memorable and provocative, and because it linked to the title of our panel.
I think the title “Transformative Mediations” was mine originally, though it’s difficult to remember who wrote what in our collaboratively created panel description. The phrase comes from my situatedness at the intersection of critical media studies and queer studies; I am interested in how our various engagements with media can be transformative, shaping identities and communities and politics and worlds. (I’m also interested in the production and consumption of transformative works of media, art, and fiction, and I liked the terminological resonance.) ‘The politics of the digital’ has tended to be a more important idea to me than ‘the digital humanities,’ but as I’ve spent more time with my HASTAC and #transformDH collaborators, I’ve come to believe there is a place in DH for the kind of critical work of simultaneous production and critique that I am interested in making.
As the phrase #transformDH proliferated, it began to be seen more as an imperative than as a description of present creations and future possibilities. It has become a site for critique of what Natalia Cecire has acutely diagnosed, in her Defense of Transforming DH, as the endemic liberalism of DH: the common, though far from ubiquitous, presumption that racialized and gendered experiences in and out of the academy won’t affect people’s experiences in the big welcoming tent. I agree with Natalia: I think such antagonisms have their uses. Though I am unsettled that the presence of queer and ethnic studies theories and critiques has become an interpretive claim that she makes about #transformDH; from where I’m standing, that has always been the central, crucial point.
I’m also happy to say that I’ve had many great experiences, at MLA and other conferences, since I started talking with the DH community and stopped assuming that my orientation toward critical cultural studies would exclude me from participation. I think that most of the #transformDH group have felt similarly welcomed. I think that most of us also felt that the majority of DH projects did not speak to our areas of queer, feminist, critical race studies, cultural studies (within which we study a wide range of literature, theory, media and culture between us). We started #transformDH to think about how those interests might intersect with DH–how, most importantly, they might already be intersecting. We were not, I think, trying to take away from the good experiences others have had in the DH community: just to add to them, in the specific ways that mattered to us, transformatively.
Reflections on HASTAC2011, politics, institutions
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on December 6, 2011
I’ve just come back from the 2011 HASTAC Conference. And if this blog leads you to think that I’ve been to an astonishing number of conferences recently, you’d be right. It’s a sign both of my having an open schedule this semester, since I have a final year fellowship, of my dissertation being in good enough shape for a projected March defense that I can raise my head and look around, and of my having begun to reach a point in my career where people invite me to speak or to be on panels (could it be time to make a tab on this site for travel plans and speaking engagements?). I was invited to HASTAC to tweet and blog, however: a marker of the organization’s focus on online connection and of the conference’s theme of digital scholarly communication. And so, in the spirit of open sharing that prevailed, I’d like to share some of my thoughts––even though they are still provisional, not fully formed.
When I first joined HASTAC, I wasn’t too sure what it was for, even after the excellent Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces online panel; attending the conference made me realize just how central the network’s intellectual community has become since I started to take a much more active part in it. Cathy Davidson has written a great summary of HASTAC’s history, if you’d like some larger context.
The conference was a real culmination of the excitement I’ve felt at being part of HASTAC in the past year. It felt so great to be surrounded by other scholarly geeks: to be sharing ideas on twitter and scarcely be able to tell who was following the conference in person and who was elsewhere. Karen Petruska did a great job of liveblogging the keynotes, which are also available to watch online. Fiona Barnett links her blogs and many others at her roundup post here.
I tweeted fervently from the conference––as I tend to do––and made a couple of liveblogs. One was from the opening workshop on “alternative academic” careers. I wasn’t wholly the expected audience for that, since I am a candidate on the non-’alternative’ academic job market and quite passionately in love with my life of research and teaching and writing––but I also think it’s incredibly important not to get tracked into a single path, to keep our options open. One of the advantages of living in a different culture than the one you were raised to is always having slightly more open eyes; the idea that a PhD opens only the door to a life lived in academia and closes all others is, in my experience, much more widely believed here in the US than the UK.
I learned a lot from the workshop, but felt that something was missing from its tone of purely professional advice. I tweeted it:
The missing piece in this conversation for me is the content of intellectual work; the excess to academe as industry.
In other words: what if people choose to pursue scholarly work not because they think it’s a good living, but because they are seeking a way to pursue an intellectual project they believe matters––and not just to themselves? I know I’ve linked to it many times, but Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The University and the Undercommons never stops being relevant. Critical content, radical content, is an excess in the university that we hope will slip the bounds of its commodified form.
#alt-ac in the workshop was largely about how to use your skills to become part of the machinery that shapes the university’s logistics and frames for delivering knowledge; there are plenty of creative and radical ways to do that work, but they didn’t come up a great deal. I don’t talk too much about subverting the neoliberal academy in my job market workshop either; but (largely because my job market workshop is led by one of its major critics) it comes up. As Micha Cárdenas said in her post #occupyHASTAC, the ailing tenure track job market is just one minor symptom of neoliberal education and shouldn’t be considered alone. If we think about #alt-ac in these terms, it seems to me, we ought to include not just the technological and organizational jobs in the structure of the university but also the category of the public intellectual, and how to do intellectual work that matters on the borders of the academic industrial complex or outside it.
In fact, the rest of the conference offered plenty of scope for thinking about public and politicized intellectual work in the context of the digital humanities. I am beginning to develop a sense that #transformDH is growing into a critical mass. I had so many conversations with scholars who’ve felt frustrated about the relative absence of discussions of race and other forms of critical structural analysis within the digital humanities, and met people who had felt––as I used to––that ‘digital humanities’ simply didn’t apply to them, until they realized they weren’t the only ones who felt that surely there must be a place within that big tent for critical cultural analysis in and of various digital forms, for work whose stakes are infinitely higher than tenure and promotion, for the possibilities of changing the ways we think about education and knowledge production altogether.
The second panel I liveblogged, From the Center: Facilitating Feminist Digital Theory and Praxis in a Digital Environment with Margaret Rhee, Isela Gonzalez and Alysse Gray, was exemplary of what that could be. They were talking about work they had done with the San Francisco-based Forensic AIDS Project and the Center for Digital Storytelling, working with incarcerated women in San Francisco; they screened some of the stories the women had created and they were moving, powerful, complex works. My blog is rough, but I want to share some fragments from Margaret’s talk that resonated powerfully for me, when she spoke about working simultaneously in the academy and outsde it.
Praxis, pedagogy, technology: meanings can be transformed. Utilizing your degree to bring resources back outside academy is one of the most fulfilling experiences you can have.
Approach the work humbly. There is much you cannot learn from a textbook; seeing and experiencing are very different from reading.
The academy fosters individuality, Collaboration is hard, but you can learn to support social change, Collaboration teaches us to imagine otherwise. Being reflexive and mindful is key.
The heart of this work is counterintuitive to the logics and rewards of the academy.
This is a very different perspective from the one suggested by the #alt-ac workshop, but it’s what we’ve been trying to emphasize with #transformDH; it’s the work that queer and ethnic and feminist and marxist-materialist studies can and must bring to the emergent ubiquity of the digital, and it ought to transform us and those we encounter.
I didn’t have the laptop battery to liveblog it, but there was another talk that also inspired me as an example of #transformDH in action. This was Maria Cotana’s Chicana por mi Raza archive of Chicana feminist documents; I tweeted the talk from my phone and gathered the tweets on Storify; the embed won’t work and I’m too tired to troubleshoot, so I’ve pasted them––in all their ephemeral glory––below. Some more information is here.
#hastac2011 laptop battery gone, tweeting from phone. Maria Cotera talking about Chicana por mi Raza project in process. cc @anneperez!
#hastac2011 Cotera’s mother Marthe P Cotera was Chicana activist; helped her digitize 70s histories of intersectional critique #transformDH
#hastac2011 Cotera collaborating with feminist filmmaker also daughter of activist. Creating online project w wiki for public collaboration
#hastac2011 I love the combination of activism, archive, pedagogy, personal in Cotera’s project #transformDH
#hastac2011 Cotera material lost bc not recognized by archivists. Democratizing the archive; open access vital for communities of color
#hastac2011 Cotera: goal is to reunify what was once a vibrant counterpublic; connecting regional narratives
#hastac2011 Cotera showing a scanned to do list from young woman involved in campaign: making histories of labor visible
#hastac2011 Cotera showing queer women of color anthology 2 years before Bridge Called My Back
#hastac2011 Cotera pedagogy: taking undergrad students on research trips, they meet agents in the histories they are learning
#hastac2011 2 of Cotera’s students got tattoos of images from archive material. Histories marking bodies, political commitments reactivated
It’s worth remarking that neither of these projects are well represented online; no shiny and easy-to-find websites. From The Center, run by overworked and underpaid activists, is working on getting their materials online, and I think Chicana por mi Raza is in the process of doing so –– but it does make me think that one common factor among #transformDH projects is that they are not easy to fund.
The last HASTAC keynote was from Chairman Jim Leach of the National Endowment for the Humanities and, like Micha, I was fairly taken aback by his discussion of the humanities as a “civilizing project” that would spread from a “new digital class” based in the US out to the rest of the world. Comments on twitter and to Micha’s post suggest that this unabashedly imperial notion of civilization is what we must accept if we want to be funded for our digital projects, and discussions I had informally at the conference reminded me that anything that seems overtly ‘political’ will (after so many years of the culture wars) be unlikely to appeal to US government bodies.
The hallmark of both the projects I described above is that they are absolutely *not* “civilizing projects.” They are committed to creating knowledge without creating hierarchies: to teaching as something that changes the teacher as well as the student, to the possibility that digital tools can let people in the worst situations narrate their lives and engage differently with the world by doing so; to not losing sight of radical, revolutionary activities from the past just because the transformations they produced were not large enough for them to be written into official history. They work with technology to create knowledge from below.
I don’t know enough about either project to really discuss them in depth, nor do I want to presume that they will never receive government funding. Anything is possible, after all. But I do think they offer us a possible throughline to consider the implications of #transformDH at an institutional level, and some reminders that we must continually look out for the ways our institutional locations get under our skin.
Mixed metaphors, marked bodies, and the question of “theory”
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on November 4, 2011
A ferment of planning is afoot in what I find it difficult not to think of as digital humanities fandom. After Natalia Cecire’s great blog post a couple of weeks ago, “When DH was in Vogue, or, THATCamp Theory” her joking proposal for a THATCamp (THAT=The Humanities And Technology; Camp=unconference) Theory has been taken up. She blogs about it in American Nerds go to THATCamp and there is now a planning Google Doc.
THATCamp Theory is a fascinating idea, and I am excited to be involved with it. I do have a difficult time imagining how it will look, but I think that connecting the ethic of making that is central to the digital humanities with a self-consciousness about the way everything is structured and its cultural politics can only be good.
However, I am unsettled by some of the ways that the term “theory” is trafficking in the conversations that Natalia’s post sparked. Ted Underwood critiques the idea of an intransitive theory; Jean Bauer asks “who are you calling untheoretical?”; Roger Whitson summarizes some of the conversations in “THATCamp Theory Bunnies”. I feel a little awkward about it, but I’m moved to make this post because of what those ones don’t mention. There are, I think, two sets (at least) of conversations intersecting here, and I’m not sure we’re hearing each other.
Genealogies of conversations don’t always matter much, of course; but Natalia’s inspirational THATCamp Theory post came, indirectly (um, via my blog) out of Micha Cardenas’s provocative “Digital Humanities: Hot Sellable Commodity or Place of Counter-Hegemonic Critique?”, in response to the Los Angeles Queer Studies conference, particularly the panel that Micha and I did there with Margaret Rhee and Amanda Phillips. It continued in person and on twitter around several panels at ASA, where the digital humanities were put into conversation with critical race studies, ethnic studies, queer critique, and feminism in a conversation we dubbed #TransformDH.
We weren’t using theory intransitively; we were talking about queer, trans, butch, femme, critical race, women of color, Asian American, Puerto Rican theory (with a slightly different group of scholars in the room, those adjectives would have changed). We were talking about marked bodies, systemic social hierarchies, and transformations in a very specific and material sense, not some vague revolutionary concept that can be written off with an image of graduate students sitting around talking about Foucault. We were talking about theory as making, about making objects that critique, that *are* critique, that are transformative reimaginings of the world. Micha’s art is a pretty fantastic example of this. Several of us who have been talking #transformDH, including me, are interested in where and how theory of this kind gets made outside the academy: what conversations and artforms and databases and archives do the work of a transformative digital humanities but don’t have the institutional status to be named as such.
When I look at the discussions now about theory and DH, I keep asking myself: where did we go? Where did our politics and our specificity go? Do we need, as Jentery Sayers suggested on Twitter yesterday, a different term? Radical critique, social justice, or––following Alan Liu––cultural criticism? That does make some sense.
But, as the title of this blog makes fairly clear, I’m attached to “theory” and to the possibility that it can be democratized. I want all these forms of critical making and the analysis that accompanies it to be part of the “theory” conversation, if there’s a “theory” conversation to be had. And I don’t want their specificities to be dismissed as irrelevant identity politics either, because they aren’t. They’re the heart of things, the center from which our digital work radiates. And these concerns are not exclusive to the digital. These are, as Natalia Cecire pointed out in the THATCamp Theory google doc yesterday, also questions that scholars of art and performance––even literature and film, I would argue, especially in the zones where scholarship and practice overlap, which are especially common in queer and ethnic studies––constantly confront.
Part of the conversation about how we make theory has to be a conversation about which forms of theory-rich making are recognized and institutionally supported and which are not; about whether there are clear cut lines between digital humanities scholarship, digital media art, and digital media everyday practice, other than the question of where the funding comes from. I think this question is closely connected to the issues of labor Miriam Posner has brought up: there are unstated hierarchies of labor in who does the work of making versus who conceptualizes or “theorizes” a project, just as there are in what counts as a “project” deserving of labor other than basic conceptualization. Marta S. Rivera Monclova’s struggles in making the necessary theory for her planned project on multilingual Puerto Rican poetry visible––how what she’s talking about isn’t ‘just’ translation––may be a case that connects the two.
The comments, made by many different people, about the effect of one’s experience of “theory” or “Theory” and one’s graduate-school training in academic knowledge production and knowledge-sharing, are crucial here. Theory can, as the rather delightful Twitter conversation linked by Roger Whitson demonstrates, be held like a weapon or like a bunny; it can lurk under the surface of everything or be something we constantly look for but never find, like the Loch Ness Monster. My conception of theory, which comes both from a graduate school experience in which theory was rarely weaponized and from a range of nonacademic locations, is probably somewhere in between: an awkwardly handcrafted pet monster, perhaps, but more efficient and dangerous than it looks. Nessie’s got teeth.
No future––for who? (post 1 of 2 on Durham’s No Future conference)
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on April 9, 2011
Shortly after the Critical Ethnic Studies conference on Settler Colonialism and the Future of Genocide (liveblogs of which are in the posts preceding this one), I headed across the Atlantic for the No Future Conference at the University of Durham in the UK, part of a year-long series the Institute for Advanced Studies is organizing there on futures.
I had a wonderful time and heard many fascinating papers at both conferences, but looking back on them together, what I notice most is how rare it was for the two sets of conversations––no future and future of genocide, two phrases that have the potential to mean more or less the same thing––to overlap.
My experience felt very structured by the old and new world surroundings. I’m originally from Scotland, but five years in California have accustomed me to freeways, wide open spaces, and a certain newness to even buildings that grandly proclaim their history; to an often visibly manufactured landscape that the CESA conference reminded me to see as a product of settler colonialism and its histories of genocide. The No Future Conference was my first visit to the University of Durham, which is a kind of small, ancient university I’ve never attended. The wood-panelled debating chamber decorated with heraldic shields in the shadow of 900-year-old Durham Cathedral couldn’t have been more different from UC Riverside’s division between a campus gym and recently constructed student center.
And the questions about absent futures asked in Durham were often directly connected to the long history of British knowledge production our location (a stone’s throw from the tomb of the Venerable Bede) made tangible. The apocalyptic as a religious category was often addressed, something I was keen to hear about as it’s an area whose relationship to my own work I’m trying to figure out. Papers from Karen Edwards and Christopher Rowland on apocalypse in Milton and Blake served as reminders of the political ferment, the revolutionary hopes and resistant dreams that bubble up from the canon it’s easy to dismiss as dry, the landscape smoothed into ‘heritage’ by generations of well-heeled undergraduates and overawed tourists.
Highlights of the conference for me included Melanie Adley’s paper “There is a Future in Dying: Female Fragility and Passive Defiance,” about fin de siecle German melodramatic suicide fiction as antisocial feminist queer futurity; John Troyer on the cultural construction of death and unevenly distributed technological efforts to change its future; organizer Alastair Renfrew’s discussion of Lenin as a utopian cultural figure (particularly the allusion to “Lenin in a Jimmy hat”) followed by Sean Grattan’s reading of hipster liberalism in the light of this statue in Seattle; and Lucy Sargisson and Lisa Garforth’s explorations of possible futures for environmental politics through fiction. Internet was patchy in the old buildings (one more old world/new world element) and I missed the immediate archive that tweeting and/or liveblogging makes possible; I make far better notes when I am aware they will have an audience, it turns out.
I will make a separate post about my own paper and the panel I was on. I want to close this general one by going back to Critical Ethnic Studies. Comparisons between two conferences so totally different in scope and scale can’t be taken all that far. But, especially in comparison to CESA, it was impossible not to notice that all of the 50 or so attendees at No Future, all that I met from the EU or US, seemed to be white. I don’t want to make an argument based on demographics, but it’s also true that very few of the papers I heard made any mention of the connections between race and futurity, and though the uneven distribution of futures within global capitalism was mentioned often, we heard little from the perspective of those populations whose access to futurity has been most foreclosed.
I would have loved to bring over some of the speakers from CESA to add the perspectives of Black and Native futures and presents; many presentations I heard at CESA would have fit verbatim into the “no future” theme. Perhaps speakers on these areas were among those who had to cancel due to budget constraints, symptoms of the present crisis in higher education’s economic future. But if there are going to be interdisciplinary conversations about futures of institutions, worlds, socialities, and what we mean when we agonize about their apparent absence, they will be incomplete if they do not take into consideration the racializing pasts and presents of what CESA called “the future of genocide.”
THATCamp and diversity in Digital Humanities
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 18, 2011
I’ve been meaning to post about THATCamp SoCal since I got back, but I’ve been busy with the new semester.
THATCamp is an unconference about technology and the humanities. It’s open to anyone working on or interested in that conjuncture, and the schedule is set and sessions organized on the fly by the attendees. It’s a well established conference in the digital humanities, and I was slightly nervous about attending. For a literature and cultural studies scholar I’m very technologically proficient, I consider digital media to be one of my research interests, and I’m working on using alternative digital forms to present my scholarship––but I know enough people who are coding, building, and in other ways shaping the landscape of new media and digital scholarship to know just how much I don’t know. I went knowing I would learn a lot, but unsure how much of the conversations would go over my head. I also didn’t know how many people would be interested in the conversations I wanted to have: about what the sometimes inflated rhetoric around digital humanities enables and obscures, and about the politics of access, participation, and institutionalization and how those relate to racialization, gender, economics, and other matters of social justice.
In the end, I didn’t attend as many of the Bootcamp sessions on the basics of code and tools as I had intended, mainly because I soon realized that even at an unconference all the panels you want to go to are liable to be taking place at the same time. I’m a little sad that I didn’t manage to leave Orange County with something approaching a working knowledge of CSS. But I did get to have the conversations I’d been yearning for.
For me, the highlight of THATCamp is probably the highlight of every conference session I have ever attended: the Diversity in Digital Humanities conversation proposed by Marta S. Rivera Monclova and Amanda Phillips. It felt as if everyone there––about 15 people, I think, but I may be misremembering––had been longing to talk about how spaces like THATCamp could be useful to so many more people who engage with the humanities and technology than currently attend: people outside the university or in underfunded parts of it, ethnic studies and queer studies and cultural studies scholars, schools, activist organizations, radical bloggers, artists, fans.
We exemplified the radical possibilities of technology within the session, creating a Google Doc that collaborators inside and outside the session could contribute to. Toward an Open Digital Humanities. We even came up with a Position Statement that everyone could sign.
In the Diversity session, we talked a lot about the statements around “if you don’t X, you aren’t a digital humanist” that had emanated from MLA’s twitter stream, where X is sometimes “build” and sometimes “code.” For many of us, those statements often felt exclusionary: why insist on boundaries based on the possession of a particular kind of knowledge? Why do only some activities count as properly digital or properly humanities? Some of us wondered why the feeling of exclusion stung when we were unsure of our investment in being “humanists” in the first place; wouldn’t it be better to be digital antihumanists? (A phrase I love and must attribute to Marta S. Rivera Monclova.)
Since THATCamp, I’ve been thinking about these questions off and on, aided by the various blog posts on the subject that have appeared since. I’ve found that there are two ways to look at it. Saying ‘you have to make something’ can encode the assumption that making digital things requires knowledge not everyone will be able to access, creating a possessive investment in coding ability and excluding those who have not been able, for whatever reason, to gain it. Or it can sound more like ‘you CAN make something,’ where the capacity to do digital scholarship is opened up by showing people that making things is easy, coding isn’t so hard, and the digital world looks different when you understand a little about how its pieces are put together. The second is the message I’ve been lucky enough to get from my interactions with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC and from professors like Tara McPherson and Alice Gambrell. I think that’s the intention that underlies many digital humanities scholars’ comments about the importance of building. But––as the HASTAC Critical Code Studies forum that has just begun will doubtless insist in many fascinating ways––the building blocks of digital worlds also include race, gender, capital, and every form of privilege.
I’m not saying anything in the least bit new here. But as Digital Humanities becomes an ever more widely recognized buzz term in academia and as it is reported to be the only field not endlessly losing out on funding and jobs, I think it is massively important that we keep having this conversation––that whatever institutional power accrues to this work doesn’t accrue only to the most privileged parts of it. I hope it can continue not only online but at other conferences, particularly queer and ethnic studies-focused ones. (The American Studies Association proposal deadline is soon…)
post-MLA link on DH and ethnic studies
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 10, 2011
While I was composing my last post, Anne Cong-Huyen posted a blog about Asian American studies and the digital humanities that I think is really important. It articulates a lot of the thoughts I’ve been vaguely having about the relationship between queer and gender studies (which of course overlap everywhere with ethnic and critical race studies).
As the Digital Humanities becomes more institutionalized and recognized as a field, with many universities making cluster hires and building DH areas of their own, ethnic studies departments seem to be finding themselves in more precarious situations which has led to efforts to justify their existence and relevance. When ethnic studies programs elsewhere are being eliminated (I’m glaring in the general direction of Arizona right now) the anxiety I’ve noticed at UCSB in particular is not completely unfounded (but c’mon, “post-racial”? Really?!). How many grads have I spoken to who have expressed some regret that they didn’t jump on that digital band wagon earlier so they could be more marketable now?
It seems there’s a danger of the digital being marked as the future of the humanities, hopeful and shiny despite all the ways the rhetoric of internet utopias has been debunked, while the difficult and complex work of talking about racial materialities (including such issues as who makes our computers) gets left behind. I do know there are a lot of scholars working with digital media who are thinking about these things––Kara Keeling, Tara McPherson, Lisa Nakamura, Wendy Chun and so on and so on––but that angle doesn’t seem to be at the forefront of what people mean when they say “Digital Humanities.”
Anyway, it’s something to think about as I head, trepidatiously, to my first THATCamp tomorrow morning.
Digital Media and Learning
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on February 21, 2010
I spent the weekend in a state of gleeful intellectual overstimulation, at the Digital Media and Learning Conference at UC San Diego. The theme was ‘diversifying participation,’ and most of the presentations I attended focused intensely on the divisions, inequalities and conflicts that utopian or dystopian rhetorics about the digital future too often obscure.
I was part of a panel on fan video, which was slightly misrepresented in the program, as we had expected to feature some discussion of other kinds of participatory culture but ended up with five people (six including Francesca Coppa‘s Skype appearance) all steeped in the same fanvidding culture. It made for very complementary talks, but was perhaps a little opaque to outsiders. I dashed around frantically trying to make the recalcitrant technology speak to my computer and gave a short talk on how vidding can be a form of literacy that makes subjugated knowledge formations visible in mainstream media.
S. Craig Watkins’s keynote on black and Latino youth use of digital media was quite fascinating. Watkins talked about the different uses different social groups make of digital media, with particular reference to hip hop culture, and how poor and working class young people can be disadvantaged because the publicity of social networking profiles, twitter etc necessitates such complicated code switching. The news that young people of color spend more time online than young white people was greeted with much excitement on the twitter stream; I couldn’t help thinking that, rather than greater equality, this just marks a change the relationship between access and class. There are a fair few science fiction texts that feature an elite free from the surveillance and alienation of data connections through which working classes labor (two offhand examples: Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer and L. Timmel DuChamp’s five-novel Marq’ssan cycle).
As the conference went on, may aspects of my concerns were mirrored in others’ comments. They are also taken up in Kristina Busse’s non-attending response post to the conference where she argues that, given the current industrial dynamics of the academy, we have to recognize the material privilege that being able to attend large events requires, and make them digitally available to those who lack those resources. DML was free and open to those who could make it, but didn’t have the tech set up for remote viewing.
Despite my presence in the flesh I didn’t get to attend as many panels as I would have liked, partly because I had to leave early. Other highlights of the conference for me included discussions of race in online avatar representations from Lisa Nakamura and Beth Coleman among others, talking about how we need to think about much more than the visual coding of avatars and its relationship to RL images of race: among other things, structures of kinship and belonging and global labor politics should be part of that discussion. I especially appreciated Nakamura’s remarks about how great value is placed on subverting the rules of games when they are remade in forms like machinima, but when capitalist practices like gold farming break the rules they are only seen as cheating.
Most relevant to my own work was the panel on Queer You(th)Tube, with Jonathan Alexander, Elizabeth Losh, and Alex Juhasz. Alexander and Losh laid out the context of online queerness and demonstrated the generic markers of YouTube coming-out videos, talking about the ways queer communities form online and move offline, the support networks that emerge, and how some queers get left off the map. I found the sincerity, diffidence, bravado and anxiety of the queer teenagers’ vlogs quite moving, and it made me quite nostalgic for the message-board-enabled digital development of my own queer self-understanding.
Juhasz punctured that bubble with her provocative YouTube presentation, which took up the parodies made by straight kids of these earnest online comings-out and connected them to what she understands as a pervasive, conservative miasma of irony that permeates all our online discourse. Her critique of the lack of critical distance was very reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s 1980s analysis of postmodernism, but she emphasized one difference; as Juhasz’s recursive use of YouTube to make her attacks on YouTube underlines, her criticisms of irony are themselves ironic. The debate made me think about the multiple definitions of queer that I feel I am constantly trying to balance in my own work: community, sense of self, political identity, political anti-identity, disruption. Queer theory also offers many important interventions to the intense focus on ‘youth’ that tends to dominate discussions of digital pedagogy: learning is not exclusive to the young, and too often all people are assumed to share an overly normalizing life narrative. Similarly, queer and other radical pedagogies remind us that learning never flows only in one direction, from teacher to student.
Thanks to Twitter and HASTAC’s liveblogging, I was able to get a sense of the panels I missed on the last afternoon. It seems that the critical reflections crossing my mind were crossing many others’ too. As always, I am eager to see what may come of the questions raised about institutionalized vs unofficial knowledge production which are now being addressed in Busse’s blog comments.
SF and race part two
Posted by Alexis Lothian in fandom, race on January 22, 2009
My last post was about science fiction fandom’s Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom. Although there had been rather a lot of unfortunate remarks made, I felt justified in linking to the most interesting posts and describing the overall affair in more or less positive terms, as an occasion when important things about complex, difficult and painful topics were said, as well as predictable and unpleasant things.
Things have changed, and my previous post needs an addendum.
As seems to be the general process in these debates, the “unpleasant” has shifted to the unconscionable. Many links can be found on Micole’s posts to the Aqueduct Press blog, linked above; Rydra Wong also maintains an enormous archive of fannish race discussion if you want background. What it boils down to is that more respected sf writers and editors from the small subcultural pond have become involved; nasty accusations have flown (I would say “in both directions”; but the accusations flowing one way have been “orc,” “troll,” and “blogwhore,” and the accusation flowing the other has been “racist” more often as an adjective than a noun. I think that’s telling.) and it has become very, very ugly.
Elizabeth Bear has stepped back from what she now calls a circular firing squad, a phrase that seems to me to skirt close to “political correctness gone mad.” I had initially planned for this post to segue off into a discussion of friendship and what is implied in Bear’s closing declaration:
Do not confuse my politeness, my willingness to listen to criticism, or my acceptance of the need to sometimes take one for the team with moral cowardice, a susceptibility to bullying, or any plans to throw any of my friends under the bus whether I disagree with them or not.
It made me wonder about the politics of friendship; does disagreement work differently among the internet friends with whom we (and by “we” I suppose I mean anyone who engages in an active digital life that is more than an extension of their pre-existing physical one) often share far more of our internality than we do with the people we see every day? At what point does someone become the kind of friend who is effectively family, with whom no disagreement can be a deal-breaker? Is that a point that can be said to meaningfully exist? Is it throwing someone under a bus to call them on their actions when you believe them to be wrong and you think they are hurting others?
I suppose that last question makes my standpoint clear; her post assumes that there are two sides with equal status and at equal wrong here, and I don’t think that’s the case. Ciderpress made a concise, eloquent and stunning post that deserves to be read in its entirety, and that is responsible for this post being significantly more opinion than the analysis I had originally intended. It reminded me of what’s at stake in my ability to maintain a racialized, classed tone of intellectualizing detachment.
The discussion that Seeking Avalon’s Willow and [info]deepad started and many other PoC participated in and the points they made regarding cultural appropriation, different PoC experiences with life in general, the media and the effect that cultural appropriation has on our emotions, our narratives and our ideologies was derailed. Instead, the discussion became focused on accusations of reverse-racism, racism against white people!, classism, anti-intellectualism, jealousy and grandstanding etc and the arguments that followed.
In fact, the whole focus and point of the discussion devolved into several PoC having to defend themselves, their integrity and their character for having a non-dominant-white-mainstream opinion and for expressing it. It became, as these discussions do without fail, almost completely about white people’s feelings, white people’s actions, white people’s reactions and white people’s needs. Even a discussion about cultural appropriation, about us and our representation? The whole conversation is appropriated, our concerns are very much silenced and lost in the furore.
…
[I]n the intense and almost singular focus on clueless white people in this discussion and the often repeated statement that this was an opportunity to dialogue, that there is solace in the fact that it has been worth all the pain and difficulty, that they are somehow *glad*, the underlying assumption is that:• PoCs have emotional/intellectual catharsis after such discussions.
• PoC’s pain being part of an educational moment for clueless white people is worth it to PoCs because it’s worth it to white people.
• Anti-racism matters the same amount, in the same way to clueless white people, allies and PoC.
My own personal answer is, frankly no, I haven’t felt any kind of catharsis. I’m pretty sure that the sacrifice of my dignity and watching other PoC being denigrated without any remorse isn’t worth it so please stop talking for me and be more precise in your speech and own that you didn’t really think about whether my pain and humiliation is worth your enlightening moment. And I can’t walk away after a discussion and it’s not about having a choice (even a forced one) about writing or not writing characters that are in my head. When we talk about race, we are often talking about our lives, it’s deeply personal, it’s how we related to the world, to people, to media, to everything.
I try to avoid it, but I know I can do the flip utopian moment as well as any other white participant in conversations about race. But ‘at least we’re talking about it, people are learning’ is only valuable for the people who are doing the learning, not those off whose backs it occurs.
My last post about this debate-turned-debacle was linked from a metafilter post, in the comments to which LiveJournal is described as a zone of cat-picture-loving teenage drama queens. I moderated a panel at least year’s WisCon that asked whether internet drama could change the world, and for it to have a chance at that lofty goal, it has to be more than groups of friends at loggerheads over subjects whose content is irrelevant. And, in fact, it is; for better and for worse. I think Ciderpress’s post gives some sense of why the threaded, community-oriented discussion sphere that LJ is matters, why internet drama matters, even though the answer is not ‘great, a few more white people learned what racism is!’ Because the scope and the meaning and the reach of these discussions is not by any means limited to LJ or to the internet. Because it’s not a case of there being so many other ‘real’ problems in the world, but of this being one location where the structural inequalities of the real world (which does, after all, include the internet) play out.
Maybe the more people who can confront the fact that there aren’t easy answers–who can realise that the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation white writers complained about so vociferously is in fact a fundamental fact about the hierarchical and unequal structures and ideologies through which we experience the world, the better. Although that value certainly doesn’t outweigh what ought to be the exceedingly basic importance of, you know, not hurting people, and perhaps I am engaging in naive and privileged utopianism by even bringing it up, it might force some to recognize the wider problems to which their individual discomforts and lashings-out contribute.
Feminist sf, alterity and representation
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 15, 2009
I am on a top 100 Gender Studies blogs list, inexplicably. And rather excitingly, although I was slightly sad that the geek aspect didn’t seem to be relevant to the maker of the list. Then again, at least she didn’t think it was a tech blog. But if that doesn’t drive me to update, I don’t know what could.
Handily, I even have something to update about. There is currently a fierce debate afoot in the feminist science fiction blogosphere about cultural appropriation, colonialism and the representation of people of color in science fiction. It began with some rather boring complaints from white male writers about how all those nasty politically correct people are taking away their goshdarned right to say whatever they please about anyone without worrying about race or gender (I gather; there is a more nuanced reading of that, I’m sure, but I confess I didn’t read them in much detail, preferring the rest of the posts linked here).
Then Elizabeth Bear* made a post giving tips on how to write the “Other”; “Other” defined as a person very different from oneself, and the summation being to remember that people are people even when there experiences are different. Several people pointed out in comments that there is more at stake than innocent difference when it comes to othered narratives; Deepa D. wrote a stunning, moving response, I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, which talks about (among other things including capitalism, taverns and Enid Blyton) how the ‘treat everyone like people’ argument is flawed when full, novelistic personhood has already been predefined in colonizing terms. She Who Has Hope has also posted some eloquent responses.
Avalon’s Willow wrote an open letter discussing the racial tropes Bear used in her novel Blood and Iron and how they made it impossible for her to read the book. Bear wrote a very gracious response, as did Sarah Monette; Monette’s post provoked a great deal of discussion about the legitimate way to read a text, and whether discarding it for the painful issues it touched upon is a ‘valid’ reading. Those were some moments when I felt a little embarrassed to be a literary scholar, especially because I think my reading of the novel in question would probably have leant heavily toward the critique of imperialism the author discusses as her intention rather than the reproduction of stereotypes Willow found in it.
Critique and reproduction often sit uncomfortably close; I can think of several episodes of Doctor Who that offer similar, probably less complex, examples. I’ve often been driven to question my own comfortable critical interpretations that privilege clever commentary over unpleasant imagery by reading antiracist fan discussions of how popular culture and sf texts reproduce racist tropes and stereotypes while claiming to challenge or critique them, and I’m grateful for the education. I’ve also often been driven to question my uncomfortable emotional and political interpretations that privilege unpleasant imagery over critical commentary by reading critical texts and having intellectual discussions in both academia and fandom; sometimes I’m grateful for that education, and sometimes I’m (to put it politely) not. It will be interesting to see which interpretation I pick up when I get around to obtaining a copy of Bear’s book
I am currently writing my PhD field exams, so I am going to cut short these ruminations and play World of Warcraft for the restorative hour or so I have been engaging in during this process, before I go to bed early in order to get up at the sparrow’s fart and write. (I am not a WoW geek by any stretch of the imagination. I like to be low level, not get involved, kill things and look at the pretty graphics. I find it very relaxing, mainly because there is very little chance of my ever studying it.)
Just one word of warning: All of the above-linked posts are thoughtful, well written, and expressed with grace and clarity even when they are filled with anger. The comments are not so (well, some commenters are all of these things, but many are not). Be prepared for foolishness, and don’t go reading them all unless you enjoy car crashes. However, many of the impassioned posts are responses primarily to the comments, so you probably do want to read enough to get a fair impression. Also, there are lots more posts linked from these and others I haven’t yet seen myself; lots of people are weighing in.
(This post contains many of the mutant parentheses I excise from the essays I am writing for exams. Sorry about that. I am sure my committee will thank you for taking some of the convolution off their hands.)
*I have read one book by Elizabeth Bear, Carnival. I thought it was a well-written, nicely queer and engaging update on feminist science fiction concerns, and much appreciated the nod to Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s under-read opus. Which I was privileged enough to read an original edition of at the British Library this summer; I thought of its degraded cheap paper as I cited it in my field exam essay on early twentieth century utopianisms.