Category: education

of course, life is education and education is life. and education is high on the agenda of the Student Worker Coalition for Justice and even more so among the Brown Berets. but being here at UCSC, i thought i’d make a thread of classes, seminars, colloquia… i decide to write about in these pages. although i must include the Challenging White Supremacy workshop, for my first 6 months here it was definately my the most intense educational experience. but then why not the Brown Berets… ay, you see, seperating education off from life doesn’t hold…

theories of slavery

getting into a UCSC class gets even more tough. Theories of Slavery by Angela Davis. maximum 15 students, of course there’s a waiting list and many people just show up in the desperate hope that there still might be a way to get in. i contacted Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness while i was back in europe, but the same story: since i’m not a student i can’t enroll nor even get on the waiting list. my emails were rather, well, insisting, and i had been telling myself, and friends, that i would take that class. (yesterday evening leta made me do the will-power thing: i will get into angela davis’ class…). but today’s situation was so awkward that i let go.

first an elaborate introduction to the structure and content of class, with all the tangible tension and eagerness of everyone wanting to be participating in what was presented to us. then the moment in which everyone introduced themselves… explaining why and how they really really really needed to be in this class. ay, i can’t do this… finally the moment of truth. angela carefully checked the list with 15 enrolled students. one free space and she got another student, who also wasn’t present, out (she should be writing up her phd these days, not taking classes.) two people from the waitinglist get in. two students from the Humboldt university in Berlin, who stressed that they had been unable to enroll through the normal procedure, got an impossible offer. this is what i propose, we make one extra space in the class, and the two of you decide among yourselves which one takes up the space. they looked at each other in terror… a number of people announced that they would be auditing the class, but angela responded that she had agreed to that before knowing that the class was so full, and that she would have to reconsider.

and that was that, the class was finished and full, as everybody knew all too well it would be. immediately a whole bunch of students queued up to speak with angela. i had put myself in the queue but with every second passing by i thought no, no, no, i can’t do this. i hear the german girls insisting that they can’t make that choice. angela responds that she has to submit the final list with names after this class, and if they can’t give her a name she’ll have to give the open space to someone else. almost angry, the woman just before me tells angela that the old agreement that she could audit the class was the only reason that she stayed in santa cruz after her graduation just before the summer. okay, so you can audit. note that we’re already at 17, with a long line still waiting. hardly disguised desperation on angela’s face. then there’s another thing i can’t help noticing. most of the students who got themselves enrolled, in the days following the announcement of the class in june, are white, and many of those in line are students of color. there clearly is an issue with who is fully and early enrolled (one needs a valid student number in order to officially enrol or even get on the waitinglist) and whose trajectory through these institutions is less evident and more fragile. in the end there’s a small group, all students of color, who insist that they really need the class and who will meet during the official class (but in another room) and do the same readings, and every other week angela will do a tutor session with them after class.

when it’s my turn to sit down with her, i just say “i’m sorry. this is awkward.” i look at her and smile. she nods, “yes, this is awkward.” “i would have wanted to audit the class, that’s what i would still want, but i see the situation. it’s okay.” her turn to smile. “you know what, just come next week. i think it’s okay.”

her presence is impressive. and there’s something about seeing her in action here at UCSC, after that other lousy-actor-Cali-governor (Ronald Reagan) made a public point out of it that Angela Davis would never teach at a public university in California again. and i’m eager to do the trajectory of this course. it’s aim is to look at slavery from the perspective of the failure of its abolition. the course is organized along six sections: (1) Paradoxes of Abolition and Legacies of Slavery; (2) Memory. Representations, Reparations; (3) Gender, Sexuality, Domination, Resistance: Feminist Approaches; (4) Slave Systems/Slave Lives: Classic Texts; (5) Political Economy of Atlantic Slavery: Anti-imperialist approaches; (6) Slavery and the Contemporary Era: Trafficking in Persons and Mass Imprisonment. i hope to be writing more about the classes in these pages, but listen, for next week we have to read the 700 pages of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, and it’s not getting better in the following weeks…

spanish – la comida

a bit nervous and excited when i get up this morning. the spanish exam on monday was quite broad: almost thirty pages of exercises, reading and listening comprehension, small pieces of writing, and i know that my weird knowledge of spanish doesn’t sit well with a more standard divisions of levels. no problems in comprehension and after a weekend of studying verbs the verb grammar exercises must have been flawless, but then there were entire pieces i had to leave blank. (and yes, i admit, i simply switched to italian when i didn’t know the spanish words.) after class alvaro calls some people to come to his office and discuss problems with the test. he doesn’t call me, so i go to him – can i stay? i had counted the people taking the test on monday, and we were just above the prescribed maximum of 24 students. he nods, no problem. ooooh, my first full UCSC class…

alvaro makes me laugh a lot. he plays much of the time, and i’m not entirely sure if the kids (these undergrads really look so young) get it. all UCSC spanish classes use the same (incredibly expensive) books, in which the language is embedded within a latin american hispanic cultural background. but alvaro just skips over the cultural references and brings in his own photocopies. the conversation topic today was la comida, food, and instead of using the textbook which teaches us about the cuisine of Venezuela, alvaro gives us a text (La Dieta MediterrÃ¡nea) that starts off like this: “Cuando se estudiaron las costumbres alimenticias de los paÃses mediterrÃ¡neos, descubrieron que en general los habitantes de estas zonas tenÃan un bajo nivel de colesterol, comparados con los consumidores anglosajones, centroeuropeos o norteamericanos.” i mean, i do see the point of criticizing north american food habits. but he’s so obviously playing the european and the mediterranean with the students, and enjoying it a lot. and i enjoy the whole spectacle.

spanish II

Physical Science building. my first real class at UCSC. the room filled with undergrad students, many of them freshmen. i’m excited.

the teacher turns out to be a man of my heart. (does one say that in english?) he speaks no word of english in class, and his announcement that he speaks very little and bad english in general, reveals itself to be true when he reads the names of students (but he is playing, imagine for instance how non-english you can pronounce “jennifer”) and when he is dealing with students after the class (here the misunderstandings get a bit worrying, like when he is trying to say to a student that she must “wait” and she keeps understanding “why” and repeats him her reasons over and over again…). but more than that, he starts with a mini-lecture on the importance of grammar. my hero of the day. in the states and here at UCSC, he says, when you learn a language quieren hablar hablar hablar. be able to speak as soon as possible and have conversations. but you don’t manage to speak a language well because you don’t learn grammar. and you don’t manage well with grammar because you don’t know english grammar. there is nothing particularly difficult about spanish grammar, but it is grammar. so it’s difficult because you’re learning about grammar for the first time, while you’re learning a new language. but there is no escape, you must know about grammar. (and all of this in spanish)

i instinctively love the guy.

i was expecting and kind of looking forward to learn spanish in one of its latin american forms, as in most of the classes here, but guess what, alvaro is from madrid. don’t worry, you’ll get used to my accent, he told the students.

it’s not sure yet that i can stay in the class. there seems to be a real problem with non-students taking classes when they are full, and this one is. but alvaro is helpful, advises to stick around for at least another week or two, and by then students always drop out. meanwhile monday there’s another examen de nivel. i’ll be studying spanish grammar all weekend…

brown berets

before the meeting sandino wants to flyer for the march on sunday, protesting the migra raids, and october 7 event, the 13th annual peace and unity march. we enter some taquerÃas on the Watsonville plaza and put posters up. the Brown Berets meet in a backroom just off the plaza.

the room is filled with objects, posters and symbols of chicano power, black power and revolutionary movements in Latin America. once more the Che poster, familiar from sharon’s place in san francisco, which i’ve come to appreciate so much: At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love. the meeting is well structured, but full of humour and animo, in a combination that is starting to feel distinct (particular to a certain kind of US style leftwing groups) and familiar (the Chavez student coop, the Student Worker Coalition for Justice). although i must say i was happy that the meeting wasn’t as structured as in the other groups. it was a bit more fluid and warm.

many young people, i was reminded that the Brown Berets indeed remains, among many other things, a youth movement. (giulia, un mouvement de jeunesse! je retourne aux sources, pour apprendre comment les renouveller, pour quand on commence notre mouvement de jeunesse…). a meeting ground of students (high school and college) and youngsters with a past in the gangs, and these are overlapping categories. which do, on first sight, seem to be gendered: many of the students are (beautiful and intelligent) women, many of those with a gang past (and i have a vague, no doubt possibly mistaken, sense that i can distinguish, not so much on the basis of postures and looks, but in the way they are addressed by others) are young men. a third constituency: farmers and agricultural laborers. they are not there in actual presence, but by proxy, through some of the students and organizations working on issues of local agriculture, the Farmers Market…

coming out of violence, dealing with violence all the time. the woman who is keeping track of the killings announces that since last week, when they made the poster for the 13th annual peace and unity march – a poster on which they put all the names of people who died – she counted four more deaths. all homeless kids and people this time, one of them killed by other homeless people. she also tells the group that the stories of those killed are running through her head at night and preventing her from sleeping.

education to overcome violence. learning about history and legacies of resistance as a way to liberation. the room where the meeting takes place is called “the classroom”. apart from a sense of on-going education throughout all activities, it’s a separate point on the agenda. every week somebody prepares a talk. this week mario speaks about what he learned from living in El Salvador this summer.

these kids are from the states, from california, as i am reminded on several occassions. my surprise reflects problematic presumptions about connections with countries one’s family (used to) come(s) from. like i had expected the meeting to be at least partly in spanish, but english, infused with spanish words and expressions (Â¡sÃ, se puede!), was clearly the language of communication. it seems, i find out, that some of them don’t know spanish very well. or like mario’s story of going to El Salvador. his father lives there, was part of the resistance. yet mario organized his stay through a US organization. at some point it started to feel strange, he comments, to be working with white north americans in the country of his father. but before leaving this had seemed an obvious way to go there.
and more: throughout his presentation he insisted very much on the need for north americans to learn from a widely politicised culture such as the El Salvadorian one, a bit in the line of the conversation i had earlier with sandino. but then mario pointed to a terrain where he felt that “they” could learn from “us”: through all the violence in that society, starting in the times of Christopher “fucking” Columbus, as the guy is called in this classroom, their souls and spirituality were broken, and maybe some of the people from here could go back there and share spirituality. ay, i couldn’t help thinking, more californian nerve-wrecking spirituality, as an export product this time… but i shouldn’t let traumatic encounters with cali spirituality ruin this, it still remains to be discovered what kind of spirituality the Brown Berets seek to embody.

and of course these young people are californian, it’s my problematic surprise which should be questioned. complex and fractured threads of belonging in which the power of your actual physical location cannot be minimalized, even (or especially?…) if you’re invested in other belongings and build up a worldview to which other locations are central. [it reminds me of the story one of the students at the women’s studies summer school in madrid, when the planes crashed in the towers. she was mexican and had been brought up with a very critical anti-imperialist stance towards the US. then she got an opportunity to do a masters degree in NYC, a chance of a million which she didn’t want to waste. in 2001 she must have been based in NYC for about two years. the contrast between her own emotional reaction to 9/11 and the politicized reactions (“this is a respons to US hegemony”) of her family and friends back home, and how upsetting that difference was to her. after two years, which is nothing…]

and how different complex and fractured threads of belonging sometimes translate in harsh political realities. in the car sandino was shaking his head in disappointment while saying that, stupidly enough, there is quite some antagonism between the established latino communities and the newer immigrants from Latin America. as much as the Brown Berets talk about “our communities”, they are working with the knowledge that community is a political project in construction, that it’s about bonds and culture in the making.

clases de espaÃ±ol

in the previous months i failed to find the spanish classes i was looking for – somewhere in town, as part of some nice project or organization. and the experience of the summer classes organized by the city was awful enough not to try city language courses again. so now i’m checking out what might have been the obvious: the language program on campus.

“high impact” as they put it, with three classes a week. and in principle for students only, but staff can negotiate to get in. after having settled that with the language center, a question remained: to get in which class. (ay, this is where i get all nervous and sweaty when thinking back of the city course and sitting through a full hour of learning the spanish alphabet…) the point is, i’ll be pretty unhappy if i have to start with a total beginners class. but it’s perfectly true that i have as good a no spanish grammar, and when i try to speak italian comes out. i explain the situation in full details to the language center people but they don’t really take the time to consider the story. instead, they give me an access code to the on-line placement test. i take a deep breath (ay, if i had known i could have minimally prepared myself…) and take a chance: i go for the intermediate level test, not the beginners one. the weird structure of my basic knowledge of spanish becomes visible: no mistakes at all in reading and listening comprehension, but one mistake after the other in the grammar part.

the test takes me automatically back to level one. oh shit. then it seems that for some reason (well… the grammar questions about verbs concerned the present tense, while in the second level test they were about various past tenses. hereby confirmed that inventing grammar is more easy in the present than in the past) i pass the test without problems. declared fit to start classes in level two, this friday, three days a week, during lunch break, on campus, for free. me siento muy afortunada.

community tv

“Our tv-stars just came in,” mihui said on the phone as we crossed her in the hall way. Our housemates definately shared the excitement. What a concidence, our local television performance. Tom, the father of Giulia’s housemate Ailin, invited us for what was a wonderful dinner in the good company of some other guests – like Neil, the italiophile who should have been treating his gourmet belly with good italian food and wine and his cultural interests with conversations about Italian cinema and music somewhere in trattoria in Roma but instead was melancholically lost in Santa Cruz (and a palm tree shirt), admittingly not a very good place for a classisist.

What are two feminists from europe were doing here, our table guests wanted to know, and what kind of research work were we up to. “You should invite these girls to your talkshow, Tom.” It turns out that Tom hosts a talkshow Voices on Santa Cruz community TV every Thursday. And what’s more, the first Thursday after this sweet dinner Tom didn’t have any guests for his show yet.

Religion and sex work. Piece of cake to bring them together: shisms within european feminism. The day before the show we meet up with Tom at Lulu Carpenter’s (Pacific Ave, near the Clocktower) to talk a bit more focused, although i’m not sure if that was what we were actually doing. i start off by saying stuff that makes me think “what the hell am i talking about”, afterwards giulia tells me that she was thinking the same thing. This was after Tom proposed us the title “world feminism” for the show – gosh no, it’s not because we’re not from here that we’d be able to represent the world… Let’s keep it european, that’s already impossible enough. But Tom wanted to bring in a third guest, he’d contacted a feminist from Mexico and a feminist from Lebanon and the Susie Bright. With every possible third guest we saw how the show would take a very different direction, so in any case it would be a surprise…

The community TV operates from a building on Pacific Ave (near the beach) with a shop front with three TV screens tuned in on their three channels. When some months ago marÃa and i stood for some minutes to watch, we were immediately invited to come in and join the audience in the studio. We arrive shortly before the show and find out that the third guest is a woman from the community TV crew, who is presented as a feminist single working mum. Just before we get on the studio stage Tom mentions something about how Claire can bring the issues back to women’s daily life… ay, the dreaded division of labour between who represents theory/politics and who “real life”…

Tom first has a conversation with Claire and this kind of sets the tone of the things we want to react or come back to. How is it to be a single mum in this country? If you really want it, if you are determined, you can do it. It’s tough, there are plenty of inequalities, but in the end it’s in your hands and if you fight for it you’ll make it. Did you get help? Claire takes pride in saying no, she did it without help. Nothing from the “other party”. Nothing from the goverment. Then she nuances that she did have a goverment job at some time, so if that counts as help… (Hell no, that doesn’t count. A job, trading your work force for money, since when would that be social welfare… okay, i know it’s all mixed up, but at least i want to be upset about it!). Tom had to probe further – help from friends maybe? Yes, other single mums, but Claire wraps up her story that basically she did it alone. What is it with this pride in independence and investment in the image of the one who stands alone, who fights alone, who got no help? When obviously she had community around her… Then there’s a strange disjuncture between how she talks about this wild west “at home” and the lack of opportunities “in other places”. In telling the story of her success as a single mum, she incorporates a visit to a village in Portugal where her father is from and ponders over how “back there” she obviously wouldn’t have had opportunities like a decent education and so on. Her story about women’s opportunities effectively fell apart in two pieces: full opportunities here and the absence of opportunities for women outside of this country.

I insisted that there is something very wrong with the idea that this is a land of opportunities, that what characterizes this country is not the fact that people have more opportunities here than in the rest of the world. What characterizes this country is the fact that people are being fed – in the media, in school,… – with this story of opportunities, that they believe they have so many opportunities, when it’s a lie, when (tax) money goes into war instead of education, child care,…

In the end there was not much space to talk about “european feminism” (there was not enough of a context to have a conversation about that) nor our work (although Giulia did manage to talk about sex work, complicating the choice in the pro-prostitution argument in a way which wasn’t really picked up by Tom or Claire.)

After the show we went for pizza on Pacific Ave (near the Clock Tower). In exchange for an ad for the pizza joint at the end of the show, the entire staff (with guests and audience…) gets free pizza here every Thursday night. We talk about the show and why nobody called, why there were no questions from the audience. The people around us agree: there was no disagreement or conflict between us. This came as a surprise to us. Giulia insisted that we were telling a really different story then Claire’s. Our conversation partners looked puzzled and wanted us to explain. The emphasis on individual choice, responsibility and opportunity versus a perspective on structural inequalities and collective political strategies. They nodded and concluded that for Santa Cruz it was all part of the liberal left, there was no disagreement on issues, so it was all the same thing. Oh that really counts as an indication of the omni-presence of neo-liberal ideology…

The next day Susan, who watched part of the show, expressed her scepticism of the whole thing. Good that you guys did the show, but the whole thing shows how inadequate these progressive voices are… As we were talking more about the problem with the set-up and arguments, she looked at me and asked, “Did you actually use the word neo-liberal? I bet nobody in Santa Cruz understands that concept.” Yep, Giulia is right, we need to learn how to do these kind of performances…

spanish class

“Bienvenidos. The first and most important sentence that we will learn is: No tener miedo de decir algo incorrecto.” The most important sentence, no doubt, because it was kind of the only full sentence we learned, and a bit unnecessary because the students had no inhibition to speak at all (albeit in English.) The first session of the cheap Spanish summer courses which the City of Santa Cruz offers to its residents (including alien non-residents like me). If it was anywhere near representative for language education around here, no wonder the white crowd in Santa Cruz is not bi-lingual.

The first hour we did the alphabet. Yes, the alphabet. You might be under the impression that the English and Spanish language share the latin alphabet. Give and take a perk here and there, like most languages that rely on the latin alphabet. But here in Santa Cruz we did an hour of learning the Spanish Alphabet. (i mean, when learning Turkish, a language that did a good job in twisting and stretching the latin alphabet, it didn’t take us an hour in class to get through the alphabet.) A list of rather random words (a – abeja, b – bicicleta,…) which got ridiculous at some point (w – waffle, cause the teacher couldn’t come up with a spanish word, and y – yoyo.) But don’t get a wrong impression, it wasn’t only about the teacher. The classmates just didn’t stop asking questions about how to pronounce this or that letter precisely. As the questions went on and on (and on…), my thoughts turned nasty – listen you guys, you’re not anywhere near the correct pronounciation, so what about shutting up now and as we actually start to speak a little bit, there will be more opportunity to practice pronounciation. But i just shut up, and let the nasty thoughts grow. The teacher, however, seemed to love this kind of attention, and continued pointing out how this letter is pronounced differently when it is followed by that letter, and how this word is pronounced differently in Nicaragua, while in Columbia they pronounce it this way, and then let’s not even talk about Spain (but meanwhile she obviously was) because that’s a different story all together (“Castilian is different from Spanish”, as she put it), cause imagine, over there they pronounce this word like that. Classmates were busy taking notes. “Oh, how interesting, so how would they pronounce this word in Mexico then?” I had my pen ostentatiously on the paper in front of me, my arms folded into each other on my desk, and kept on thinking, when is my Spanish class going to begin?

At the very end of that hour, a bit by accident, we got into the tu-usted business. You know, like tu-vous with its own idiosyncracies. Not only in Spanish in general, but to countries in particular, so before we knew it, we were on our way for another session of endless nerve-wrecking questions… “So if i’m in Venezuela and i want to address a person who looks younger than me but this person is the boss, what will i use then?” Well English i guess, cause the way this class is shaping up there’s little chance that you’ll be able to address the person in Spanish by the end of this summer, don’t worry. Could we now please start our language class? But tu-usted was too much a goldmine for trivial pursuit to be settled so soon. And i swear, it was only after the third time that i heard someone (including the teacher) mention that this was “oh so interesting” and so unlike English where we only have “you” that i intervened. “Well actually, in old English there was a very similar distinction between “thou” and “you”, only the words got collapsed into “you”. Blank looks. For a split-second i thought to say, you know, like Shakespeare, like “shall can i compare thee to a summer’s day”, but “thee” as conjugated form of “thou” would raise the confusion to unbearable levels…

The class took place in the Spanish classroom at the Santa Cruz High School on Walnut Street. The classroom is decorated with all kinds of posters and objects from Spain and Latin America. In front, above the blackboard, a large notice to remind students of the use of learning a foreign language. “10 reasons to take a foreign language at Santa Cruz High School.” number 6 reads: “It leads to a better understanding and use of English.”

As my comment kind of interrupted the fun, we moved on to the last part of the course: 40 minutes of introducing oneself in Spanish. The model phrase begins with “me llamo [name]” and since the teacher explained that this meant “my name is”, it took the class another round of confusion to figure out where the “is” figures in the sentence. Not a bad nor suprising question if you get no grammatical explanation, but there was no good answer. A total inability to provide the class with any kind of grammatical points of reference. Instead, the teacher repeated a number of times during those two hours that we didn’t have to be scared, we wouldn’t do much boring grammar. Boring grammar, says the Spanish teacher. I honestly don’t think i’ve ever had a language teacher teaching class that grammar was boring. That parts are difficult, and parts to be ignored for the moment being, yes. But boring? (on the contrary, i remember my Turkish teacher drooling over Turkish grammar, that is was the most beautiful and most logical in the world. and true enough, Turkish grammar is breath-taking, especially in the first levels of learning it, when you have to hold your breath before you speak and think of all the suffixes you need to add to the words…)

Once we got over the “me llamo” hurdle (without even mentioning the existence of reflexive verbs, simulating the students instead to learn “this expression” by heart), we sank, again a bit by accident i feel, into the deep waters of ser-estar. The preparation for the actual introduction included the teacher translating and writing words on the black board that students needed to present themselves: ama de casa, peinadora de perros, arquitecta, bibliotecaria, carpintero, maestro, etc. If you’re still following, the idea was, “me llamo [name] y yo soy [profession].” Then there’s a student who doesn’t want to do the profession thing and wants to say that he is happy. “Yo estoy feliz,” the teacher tells him. Not a chance that these things slip by in the class with neverending questions… so the rest of our time was consumed by whether “i am” is “yo soy” or “yo estoy”. Which would have been very fine, if the teacher was not so much into escaping grammar. When asked whether you could use both, she said yes. Total confusion, and as the students where trying out different combinations, she would correct them: “no, here you have to use estoy”. “Why?” “Cause it’s an expression, this is how you say it.” “But then why can’t you say…?” I was a bit on the edge of my nerves and as they went on and on (and on…), i couldn’t help intervening again. “There’s an indication for the difference: if it’s about a permanent quality, use “yo soy”, if it’s about a more temporary state of affairs, use “yo estoy” and then afterwards it gets a bit more complicated.” “How interesting,” and more sets of questions which at some point turn back to the teacher again: “Is this true?”. She nods, and goes on to dismiss the class, cause we’ve worked very hard today. (oh, i shouldn’t forget to mention that there was no homework.)

I left the classroom in a fury. This was the most miserable language class ever. And i have some experiences to compare with – i’ve taken, in chronological order, classes in french, classic greek, english, spanish, arabic, russian, italian and turkish. i’ve studied those languages in primary school (french), secundary school (greek, english), university language centers (spanish, russian), a university regular language degree course (russian), private language centers (russian, italian, turkish), and evening schools for popular education (russian, arabic). i’ve joined such classes in Belgium (french, greek, english, spanish, arabic, russian), the UK (arabic, russian), the Russian Federation (russian), the Netherlands (russian, italian), Italy (italian) and Turkey (turkish). Yet, i have never ever come across a language class that was so badly taught, and students so ill-equiped to learn a foreign language. (although now that i’m thinking about the student part, there were two elderly Brits, having lived in Cyprus for 5 years (!), who had the greatest difficulty in taking Turkish level one, to the point that the guy sighed, in exasperation (with a very british accent), “Wouldn’t it be so much easier if the Turks were to learn English?”).

Back home, after having told marÃa how i can’t continue with this class, i check the info i have from the City of Santa Cruz on their language courses. There’s no second level, this is the only course they offer each summer. My eye falls on the paper heading and in particular the Department of SC City which organizes the language courses: Parks and Recreation. Right…

multitudes?

Capitalism part II: a feminist analysis

“In the United States, both in and out of the academy, a new wind is blowing: the hopes of a revived Left with its focus on the terrors of global capitalism. U.S. militarization abroad and social cutbacks at home have united splintered opponents, offering prospects of a common voice. In the academy, the charisma of Hardt and Negri’s Empire has recharged Left scholarship. The revival of the Left is wonderful; one can feel the new energy. But it’s just a bit too familiar. Once again the faces of those who point toward a common future are white and male. And if they have learned anything in the last three decades about gender, race and national status, they aren’t showing it.”
(Anna Tsing – Subcontracting et.al.)

The Institute for Advanced Feminist Research has a session later this afternoon with Anna Tsing presenting her work-in-progress – a feminist retort to Left theories of capitalism in which gender, race, and national status are subsumed to pre-established common cause.

Commentaries by, among others, Gopal Balikrishnan, Chris Connery, Julie Guthman, Johanna Isaacson, Tamara Spira and Neferti Tadiar. Anna’s paper is inspiring and i’ll write up some impressions of the discussion later this evening!