In symbolic preparation for the start of another academic year, I ritualistically cleaned out one of the many file cabinets today, one of the several that I haven't opened in what seems like millennia. There are usually at least two or three pleasant surprises to be uncovered during such a process, and this time around I came across my old stash of Lingua Franca magazines. And I immediately had a dilemma. Do I throw them away or not?

The purported rationale for this annual late-summer exercise is just such purging. I'm a packrat, a trait I probably got from my mom, who tosses just about everything that comes across her kitchen table into a cardboard box (to be filed away and subsequently forgotten). Plus, I'm an ethnographer who considers just every bit of material culture ever manufactured potential "data" that might be deployable in some future attempt at cultural analysis, which means ...

So, the semester has finally started. It really has. And I've got a stack of half-written student recommendations (and more than one unfinished syllabus) to prove it. Classes don't begin at Penn until next week, and I have been trying to take a little break before the delicious storm that is the start of every new academic year pours down on my head.

I've also re-read many of the scathing comments to my last few Chronicle posts, trying to honestly consider their criticisms, including the idea that my Chronicle posts exemplify the kind of left-wing brainwashing that needs to be purged from the academy.

I don't see it, but I would also readily concede that that doesn't necessarily mean the criticisms are unfounded. Culture is powered by self-deluding blinders. It is a kind of second nature that usually only gets harder to recognize the more you try to spot it. Culture wouldn't be culture...

Promotion for Jay-Z's forthcoming hip-hop album has begun, and some of Talk TV's most hyperbolic infotainers have helped to build buzz by briefly responding to being mentioned (negatively) in one of his new songs.

In many ways, Limbaugh and O'Reilly didn't actually respond at all (as you can see from the YouTube clips above). They simply note the fact that this hip-hop celebrity has "dissed" them. But the revelation is seemingly offered up to their respective viewing audiences without any angst or indignance. They simply laugh it off, even feigning pride about the fact that such a mention proves their own success (Limbaugh's spin). O'Reilly just asks the audience to compare a clip from Jay-Z's music to the work of Otis Redding, the distance between those two musical figures being supposedly laughable in its self-evidence.

I'm...

Some readers want to interpret my previous "Obamaphobia" post as yet another "far Left" attempt to dismiss any and all criticism of Obama as racist. These are readers primed for an ideological fight. And it is a fight on their own terms, not the ones I offered up.

Part of the problem, I think, is that some self-deputized "culture warriors" want to drag everyone else into their fight club. There should be no place beyond the fray, above the partisan muck.

That's part of what happens when hyper-partisanship gets exported to everyday conversation and debate. Our "discussions" are poisoned from the very start. They entail little more than the same ridiculous discursive dance: I try to determine which side you're on, mine or theirs. If the latter, I pounce on everything you say with self-serving abandon and the least generous interpretation I can muster, even into the realm of the bizarre (...

I had just started reading an article by literary scholar Joyce Ann Joyce in a recent issue of the journal Callaloo when I came across her severe critique of my latest book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness.

Joyce is probably most famous in some academic circles for having been tapped to replace Molefi Asante as head of African American Studies at Temple University in the late 1990s. Asante wasn't pleased with that selection, and he made his displeasure very public. He even went so far as to claim that she would destroy his Afrocentric project/curriculum. Many scholars dismissed his attacks as sexist bigmanism, but having been subjected to so many vicious attacks during her stint at the helm, Joyce ended up stepping down a little ahead of schedule.

Anyway, that's just a too-short recap of the Joyce-Asante dispute. Here's the passage from her new...

"He's a socialist." "He's a communist." "He's anti-American." "Heck, he wasn't even born in the United States."

By most accounts, Obama has been taking a public pounding lately. His poll numbers are falling. His attempt to revamp our health care system appears decidedly stalled.

Of course, that very same health-care agenda has even been blitzed by angry protesters at town hall meetings all around the country, protesters accused (by those on the Left) of either being extremist zealots or disingenuous provocateurs/plants.

These same indignant protesters claim to read between the lines of Obama's public statements about health care, accusing him of trying to nationalize it. Or worse.

Over the last few days, there has even been talk (media-covered talk) about an Obama-led Democratic conspiracy to create "death panels" charged with determining which sick Americans will be given the...

Nobody talks about Baudrillard anymore, but this has been a summer replete with political absurdities of Baudrillardian proportions.

Budrillard is most famous for his use of the concept simulacra, the idea of a copy passing itself off as "the real McCoy" without anything original or genuine actually vouchsafing it. This was his post-Marxian and post-Freudian attempt to talk about the newfangled nature of late 20th century culture, especially as funneled through--and even concocted out of wholecloth--by mass mediation itself.

There was that delicious reference to his book, Simulacra and Simulation, in the first installment of the Matrix trilogy, but Baudrillard is often dismissed as too ridiculously hyperbolic to take seriously (for instance, his 1995 claim that "the Gulf War did not take place"). His critics describe him as even more theoretically vacuous than other fetishized,...

The folks I follow on Twitter (yeah, I’m still experimenting with that seemingly useless social networking tool) have been raging over the past day and a half about Skip Gates’s recent altercation with the Cambridge Police Department, an altercation that began in his own home, spilled out onto his front porch, and eventually landed the iconic Harvard professor in jail. Here’s how the Boston Globe tells the story.

Gina Barreca, one of my Brainstorm Blog colleagues, has already opened up the dialogue for us.

I’m hunkered down at home right now trying to finish a short “afterward” for the paperback edition of my most recent book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, but I just wanted to take a quick break to weigh-in on the entire affair.

At this point, I’m sure that most interested parties have gotten the details: the phoned-in tip about two Black men a...

I’ve been watching the Sotomayor confirmation hearings pretty faithfully since Monday, and one thing jumps out about the entire affair. Obama might get his nominee confirmed, but the Republicans soundly won the week anyway.

Conceding their relative powerlessness to stop the Sotomayor train from eventually reaching its final destination (the chambers of the Supreme Court), they turned the hearings into a very dramatic lesson on “the perils of reserve racism.” On the white man’s newest burden: being victim par excellence of a newfangled American racism.

Their sessions with the nominee were less about Sotomayor’s judicial record or her professional readiness for the highest court in the land and more of a public referendum on Affirmative Action and the logic of racial rhetoric today. And the Senators did a masterful job pummeling Affirmative Action at every single turn.

Not...

The ethnographic project has long been predicated on an ethnographer accessing the “primitive” others’ backstage region without necessarily divulging too much of his or her own backstage life—at least not in the same way or to the same extent. Clearly, the ethnographer is always managing a complicated cross-cultural dance in the field, and he may perform missteps that portray him in ways that he would have preferred to hide. In fact, he could very well have hidden some of his own backstage existence inside that proverbial field tent, the one traditionally pitched on the outskirts of some village community. But more than that, he eventually left for “home” with a kind of finality that kept such distant locales decidedly off limits, even for the most curious of local “informants.”

With new media technologies like the Web, it has become increasingly easy for ethnographers’ formerly...