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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind John L. Jackson Jr.

July 3, 2009

Catching up on "Friday Flicks"

I’ve been woefully undisciplined about my promise to talk film on Fridays. (Apologies to the one or two readers who might really have remotely cared.)

With my recent (and mercifully short) foray into fiction, the just-announced news of my promotion to Full Professor, and Michael Jackson’s very public and unexpected death, my head has been in many other places lately. And my body hasn’t been in a movie theater or checking out any DVDs, not even on computer. But I do want to be better about my Friday Film segment for the rest of the Summer, at least for my own enjoyment and sanity.

Since I’ve missed an installment, I thought I’d briefly mention (and recommend) three films this week. The first is a few years old and can be purchased on DVD. The second has just been completed and was recently aired (I think) on PBS. And the third is still in movie theaters.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump the Sun, by Kristy Andersen, is a playful and poetic examination of this eccentric Harlem Renaissance anthropologist from the “autonomous all-black town of Eatonville, Florida.” Hurston is one of my heroes, and I would constantly channel her flamboyant angularity while conducting dissertation fieldwork just to build up enough courage to start conversations with strangers on the streets of Harlem or Brooklyn, New York. It worked wonders for me as a shy ethnographer.

This careful film takes us from Eatonville to Harlem and back, chronicling Hurston’s mentorship by Franz Boas, her sometimes oddly self-effacing relationship to benefactors, her public fall-out with Langston Hughes, and even the accusations of pedophilia that clouded the last few years of her life. Some of the best parts of the film have to be the “folk footage” Hurston shot herself. Amazing stuff. Raw and unapologetically committed. The film helps to explain why it is so important that Hurston was rediscovered (by critics and a popular audience) many years after dying in relative obscurity.

Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, by Llewellyn M. Smith, is a slick and sophisticated examination of Melville Herskovits, another Boas-trained anthropologist. Herskovits is probably most famous for his debates with the likes of E. Franklin Frazier about the cultural links between New World and Old World portions of the African Diaspora. Frazier imagined the Middle Passage as a rupture-producing shut door between African cultural practices and behavioral patters found in African American communities. Herskovits tried to demonstrate cultural ties/similarities dampened but not completed shorn by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses, among others, argues that forms of Afrocentrism are fundamentally indebted to Herskovitsian claims. But it wasn’t just a one-way transmission. Historian Vincent Brown, one of the films producers and talking heads, describes Herskovits as “the Elvis of African American studies.” He might have gotten more credit for work that other African Americans were already doing, gaining from their insights while mainstreaming the entire endeavor (for the benefit, ostensibly, of all researchers interested in such topics.) With Michael Jackson’s death still shrouded in mystery and his eccentric life being replayed on TV all the time, the angularity of (and accusations against) Hurston and Brown’s invocation of Elvis seem particularly apt nodes of discussion right about now.

The third film, Away We Go, by Sam Mendes, is a fictional examination of thirtysomething love in a rather bizarre American landscape. The movie, co-written by Dave Eggers and Vindela Vida, stars Maya Rudolph (of Saturday Night Live) and John Krasinski (of The Office) as an unmarried couple (Verona and Burt) expecting their first baby and trying to re-calibrate their collective life as a consequence. They visit nutty friends and relatives all across the country in search of parental role-models and some actual assistance in baby prep. They find none of that. Instead, they come to slowly realize (maybe) that they are already far ahead of all the folks they thought had them beat in terms of functional familial relationships. By the end of the story, you don’t even see it coming, but Burt and Verona end up inspiring you to think about love, family and community just a little bit differently. Enjoy the weekend.

Comment

July 2, 2009

What Men Should Learn From Michelle


(Photo by, um, Flickr user Barack Obama)


“When Men Should Learn from Michelle”
by Khadijah White

She’s the perfect woman, right? Tall, good-looking, well-educated, stylish and endlessly devoted to her family. Michelle Obama is The Cosby Show’s Clair Huxtable personified.

Especially important to the public’s obsession with Michelle Obama is her relationship with husband Barack. Between the couple’s affectionate photos on the cover of various magazines and the love story that warmed our hearts on the campaign trail, it’s hard to avoid getting wrapped up in the bigger-than-life fantasy of idealized black coupledom that the Obama union seems to represent. But while people are falling all over themselves to tell black women how to land a man like Barack, I rarely hear anyone talk about what Michelle had to give up to be with a man like Barack. What would make her eventually tell her highly coveted husband, “You only think of yourself… I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone”? For all the single men looking for their own Michelle, the answer to that question might help reduce any of their Barack-sized expectations.

Michelle was working for a law firm in Chicago when her future partner arrived as a summer intern. Barack often talks about how hard it was to get Michelle out on a first date. No surprise there. She was a young, black female lawyer in a corporate firm, and a colleague that she had been assigned to mentor was pursuing her as a romantic interest. But we know how that story ends. At some point, Michelle accompanied Barack to a community organization meeting and quickly fell in love.

Soon after they started dating, Barack went into a superior’s office and announced he was going — and taking Michelle with him. Despite the pay cut, her move to work in the public sector would be extremely helpful in establishing important political networks for Barack’s career. His continued influence upon her professional life became clear when Michelle subsequently applied for a position in the mayor’s office. Before accepting the offer, she had to get her fiance’s approval and set up a face-to-face meeting for Barack and her prospective employer. With his consent, Michelle began her new post.

Once Malia and Sasha arrived on the scene, the Obama marriage was in a tense state. By this point in time, Barack was a State Senator and spent three days a week away from home much of the year. Michelle was both the primary breadwinner and caretaker in the Obama family. She was exhausted, and angry and resentful towards her career-driven husband who, in return, thought of her as “cold and ungrateful.” It was Michelle who dressed, fed, bathed, chauffeured, and read to Sasha and Malia every morning and night, even while serving as an extremely successful director of a nationally recognized community service group during the hours in between. Somehow, she had become both a married woman and a single parent at the same time. “What I notice about men, all men,” Michelle would later tell a reporter, “is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first….And for women, me is fourth, and that’s not healthy.”

On inauguration night, Michelle dressed up like a Princess and danced with her husband to Beyonce’s melodic rendition of “At Last” at the inaugural ball. And, in a way, Michelle had become a fairytale princess in a manner that mirrors the most paternalistic aspects of Disney’s tradition. She had met a man, left her job, moved into his castle, transformed herself into a beauty icon and began an unpaid gig as a White House debutante and spouse premier.

“Michelle and Barack” may be an ideal in some ways, but let’s be truthful about what sacrifices she has (and he hasn’t) made along the way.

White is a Ph.D. student and Fontaine Scholar in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, she worked as an Associate Producer at NOW on PBS.

Comment [3]

June 30, 2009

Michael Jackson's Media Coverage: Racist?

I’m still trying to wake myself up from the groggy haze of Michael Jackson’s unexpected death — the coverage of which has become a global “media event” like none we’ve ever seen before. Not even Princess Di or JFK created this kind of immediate and mass-mediated mushroom clouding of fetishized televisual and cyber obsessions. That’s mostly because the media apparatus wasn’t nearly advanced enough to inundate us the way it can now: MJ updates through tweets and text messages and Internet pop-ups all day and night long. And then there are the 24-hour news cycles, the magazine covers, and the newspaper headlines. The saturation is surreal and science fictiony.

I’m one of the people who caught BET’s attempt to pay tribute to the “King of Pop” this weekend on its annual awards show. And maybe my expectations were pathetically low to start, but I wasn’t nearly as mortified by the broadcast as some detractors. One joke making the rounds this week (courtesy, I think, of Spelman College’s Jelani Cobb) has Obama being stripped of the presidency as a function of BET’s “embarrassing” program. They only had a couple of days to pull off their tribute, and I didn’t think the presentational schizophrenia (between their homages to MJ and the typically “ghetto” shenanigans of such BET fare) was all that surprising. Actually, one of the best parts of the night was the pre-planned tribute to the O’Jays, but that’s because they had time to really prepare the segment. However, I digress.

I really want to just flag the growing furor over the media’s coverage of MJ’s life and death. Many people have been calling it blatantly racist. The YouTubed FOX News clip above lays out the general parameters of this discussion, including a debate on the merits of the accusation. What do folks think of the claim?

Off to a McNair Scholars workshop. I’ll check back in later.

Comment [28]

June 25, 2009

'Alphebet Houses: The Brownest Eye'



Newcomers were told without solicitation: That’s where they found his brother, Craig Rey, you know. Right back there under that same diagonal dumpster behind Happy, before Happy was even Happy, what seemed like forever ago, when it was still the far-left corner of an awningless, signless Russian-American social club (Razborka-Razborka!) that splashed its heavily accented contents onto an otherwise deserted strip mall’s parking lot every Friday and Saturday night.

They found Tyrone’s brother’s dead body right back there, Alphebeters would remind one another, often with a fleshy neck-twist tacked to the back of the phrase, for emphasis. Or one of those sharp, hum-like grunts residents let out sometimes, especially when actual words felt too exacting and precise for the ambiguities of other people’s pain.

That’s the same grunt neighbors offered up when they described what Teetee’s pitbull did to Mrs. Harrison’s granddaughter behind Building 8 a couple of years back, what a shame. The very grunt, sometimes cut up into three different-sized phonetic chunks (uumm, um, uuuum!) that got passed around liberally after folks found Ms. Rita Millon’s living room furniture, church clothes, and everything else she owned spilled out against the concrete sidewalk space in front of Building 9, the sheriff and his marshals dragging her and fourteen-year-old Keisha from their one-bedroom apartment inside. Umm, um, uum. That exact grunt punctuated people’s tales about Tyrone, about that dumpster, and about the cobble-stoned alleyway behind Happy Liquors. And nobody thought it was just a coincidence that whatever it was that happened to little, skinny Tyrone happened way back there, behind that dumpster where nothing ever really happened, except that one time, a year before, when Tyrone’s brother’s dead body had been left there to soak up rainwater all night.

Mr. Jenkins, God rest his soul, who used to live in Building 4, didn’t wonder upon it until the next morning, during one of those 5 a.m. walks he used to take, before the streets got too dangerous. Someone else called 911 from the corner pay phone and the crowd stayed right there long after the ambulance came to siren the body away.

Craig was probably the most strikingly attractive individual many residents in the Alphebet Houses would ever see — at least face-to-face. Tall since forever, though not nearly as lanky as his younger brother, Craig’s appearance must have been engineered from the start, designed to hold itself together with surgical foresight — a nose that thought purposefully about its relationship to the lips below before taking a single breath; cheeks with dimples so deep and sharp they must have come together at a point somewhere above his tongue. But it was those eyes! That’s what people loved.

Women twice Craig’s age always felt compelled to comment on them — a brown several shades lighter than his maple skin, with irises and pupils easily discerned, nothing like Tyrone’s, those two dark spheres of blackness surrounded by a lighter black that Tyrone himself could only barely distinguish, and then only by kneeling atop the bathroom sink with his nose scrunched up against the medicine cabinet mirror. No, Craig’s eyes were really brown, not “brack,” which is what Craig took to calling Tyrone’s after happening upon one of his little brother’s nose-flattening, bathroom sink balancing-acts.

Tyrone’s brack was several crayon-boxes away from Craig’s brown — or better yet, his browns, since Craig’s right eye was an even lighter shade of brown than the left, and by more than just a tint or two, with this last idiosyncrasy only adding to the deceased older brother’s exotic allure.

And Tyrone had what was probably an unhealthy admiration for his big brother; something far more reverent and distant than two years between male siblings usually produce. They should have been battling about everything, agreeing on nothing, fighting almost every waking minute of every day—how brothers are supposed to show a backhanded kind of affection. Certainly, twenty-five months is a long time, especially in boychild years, but not nearly long enough to justify the wide-eyed awe Tyrone had for his older brother, an exaggerated esteem that only increased once Craig was gone, his silent body left behind Happy Liquors until a noisy ambulance came by to get it at sunrise.


(Brainstorm illustration adapted from a photo by Flickr user dandeluca)

Comment [4]

June 23, 2009

'Alphebet Houses: TyBones'



[For the folks who commented on my last post, scratching their heads and squinting their eyes with reasonable bewilderment, this is just me having a little bit of fun and taking some creative liberties with unused ethnographic fieldnotes. I’m running out of inspiration for this foray into fiction, so I probably won’t post too many more installments in this “Alphebet Houses” serial. Lucky for you all.]

All told, the first twelve years of Tyrone’s life, before that celestial visitation, were pretty standard as childhoods go, ignorable in their ordinariness. Little in Tyrone’s George Washington Elementary School days hinted at the faintest sliver of precocious exceptionalism. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about him.
He wasn’t a loner or an outcast. He got along fine with most kids, well enough to swap Atari videogame cartridges and to get his name hollered up four flights of steps on Saturday mornings to even out sides for two-hand-touch football games.

Tyrone drew no special attention to himself one way or another. Nobody really bothered him, but they just as often didn’t bother with him, either.

When it came to schoolwork, Tyrone was hardly a nerd, though he never got left back or had his parents called for bad behavior. During Washington Elementary’s sixth-grade graduation ceremony, he received only one certificate, “for Good attendance, five or less days absent,” Principal Johnson had announced into the feedback-whistling microphone. And Tyrone didn’t even have to walk up to the stage like the Perfect Attendance recipients did. He just stood in front of his wooden auditorium chair, identical to all the other chairs there, connected to every other seat in his row, the back of Tyrone’s legs forcing the spring-wound seat, against every bit of its mechanical inclination, down into its horizontal (seatedly) position while he listened to all the other names announced along with his own, the auditorium blatantly disobeying Principal Johnson’s request to “please remain silent until the final name is called,” an appeal that had to be shouted over that youthful assembly’s rowdy clamor. Students whooped and howled for every single name — and in decibels roughly proportional to each student’s overall level of recognized extracurricular coolness. Tyrone’s name didn’t come close to drawing the loudest response of the morning, but it was cheered with at least as much fanfare as half the others. And was in a completely different acoustic universe from the hiss-pockmarked silence elicited minutes before by the three Perfect Attendees forced to take the stage.

Of course, Tyrone did get teased, but no more than the playground average. He was lucky enough to have been born without too many of the more obvious physical quirks that kids in the neighborhood usually latched onto with their taunts. He had no buckteeth. No bulging eyes or coke-bottle glasses. He was spared a hump, a conspicuous limp, or massive fits of uncontrollable face-twitching. His butt and head roughly fit his frame, not too bulbous or pathetically miniscule for the rest of his lanky body.

And if anything, that was Tyrone’s most lampooned feature; he was shoestring thin, which was just a touch slimmer than many of his classmates would have allowed had they been consulted on the matter. So he got pinned with the nickname TyBones on the very first day of Ms. Reskin’s second-grade class and never, ever lost it, not even after the meat around those bones began to fill itself in two years later. Still, TyBones was tame as those kinds of things went, especially where Tyrone lived, in the Alphebet Houses behind George Washington Elementary School, a place where name-calling often got black-eye ugly.

But then, when Tyrone turned 12, everything changed. He got a message from God behind a broken-down dumpster. First, there was a golden light, fairly standard, some say, when it comes to these kinds of occurrences. Then he heard a voice (which Reverend Samuel, many years later, would famously describe as “both deep and hollow at the exact same time”). That light and that voice seeped out from amongst the discarded beer bottles and candy wrappers and emptied milk cartons and losing lottery ticket stubs and every other assorted piece of mildewed or rusted detritus abandoned inside that large metal container, the one that had had its two back legs missing for as long as anybody could remember, leaning itself neolithically against the burnt-brick façade of the liquor store’s back wall.


(Image slightly altered from a photo by Flickr user venicephotog)

Comment [6]

'The Alphebet Houses'

God first whispered to Tyrone from a rickety old dumpster in the alleyway behind Happy Liquors.

The same night day, when the 12-year-old told his mother about what had happened, she would hear none of it.

“You mustn’t say things like that,” Denise yelled, staring into the blackness of his blinking eyes. “You can never, ever, say things like that, Tyrone. Do you hear me? You can’t say that kind of thing. People will start to talk bad about you.”

Their neighbors in the Alphebet Houses already considered this skinny kid from Building 16 a little off. That’s the word they used. Off. The psychological equivalent of a burned-out light bulb or a stovetop’s ice-cold back burner.

What Alphebeters liked about the word, what made it different from crazy or cuckoo or other more flamboyant choices, was that it seemed to leave space open for sanity’s future return, for the possibility that a sick mind could mend itself back to health.

Very few things are ever left off permanently. If something’s off now, it can still be flicked back on, maybe in an hour, maybe tomorrow, maybe at the beginning of next week when the landlord is scheduled to come by.

Off implies an on to come, or else something couldn’t be considered off, not really, only finished, or maybe even just dead.

But way back then, at around the time when Alphebeters first began to gossip about Tyrone’s alleged audience with the Almighty behind a local liquor store’s filthy rear end, there were still more than a few residents who thought that maybe the 12-year-old wasn’t all that off at all.

Long before Professor Nettlesome’s prize-winning monograph about his Life Among the Ty, before the unanticipated fame and untimely death that same book brought down on him, way before the stampede of court cases and magazine exposés, the rock-stars and their MTV-covered religious conversions, even before Samuel Diamond ever became “America’s #1 spiritual guru” (according to Fox News), there were at least a few people in this small Brooklyn neighborhood who thought Tyrone Greene Reynolds might really be on to something, though they could never have predicted what such a something would ultimately turn out to be.

Comment [18]

June 19, 2009

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

I’m stilling planning to get to my “Friday’s Flick” post later on today (probably a review of Kristy Anderson’s Zora Neal Hurston: Jump at the Sun, but I just wanted to send out a quick note this morning about Twitter.

I had lunch with Marc Lamont Hill yesterday. Hill, an anthropologist based at Columbia University’s Teachers College, did a very convincing job explaining the appeal of Twitter and its form of social community, a form predicated on pithy, punctuated (pseudo-intimate) interactions.

Hill is the kind of public intellectual who is always in demand. When he’s not lecturing at a college or high school somewhere, he’s giving as good as he gets on Cable TV, debating the likes of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly on the issue of the day. I put him in a category with John Hartigan, Mark Anthony Neal, Imani Perry, Eric Klinenberg, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell. These are some of the academics who masterfully juggle rigorous investments in public intellectualism with everyday commitments to academic teaching and scholarly research. They all do it differently, but they all do it well.

And given how busy these folks are, I am shocked that any of them have time for Twitter. But they do. At least four of the five of them have Twitter accounts that can be followed. How is that possible?

I have already blogged about being dumbfounded by the entire Twitter phenomenon, especially given how much I can’t even keep up with the new communicative technologies I already use. But Marc Hill swears by Twitter, so I checked out the Web site yesterday and started to consider taking the plunge. However, I just wanted to do a pre-Twitter test run first. So, after lunch yesterday, I tried to take note of the kinds of things I might conceivably Twitter. What I came up with is listed below.

As I feared, most of it seems completely banal and unimportant, which is part of Twitter’s point (see the video link above for a kind of anthropological argument in support of these seemingly insignificant communiqués). But I am still tempted to join up, even if just to inundate myself with other people’s Twitters, starting with the scholars I mentioned above.

If any Brainstorm readers are already tweeting, can you let me know what kind of stuff you send out? Who do you follow and why? Or let me know if joining Twitter is more like making a pact with the cyber-devil?

Thursday, 6/18
2:30 p.m.
At the bookstore, thumbing through a new ethnography of a summer basketball league in Philadelphia, Black Men Can’t Shoot. To buy or not to buy?

3:50 p.m.
Just read MHL’s critical CNN.com review of Tavis Smiley’s documentary, The Stand. How did I not even know the movie existed? I’m not that far out of the loop, am I?

8:10 p.m.
Finally watched the comedian Artie Lange’s controversial guest spot on HBO’s Joe Buck Live. I can see why EVERYBODY is talking about the Monday night performance. Surreally hilarious.

11:22 p.m.
Had to watch the Lange’s profanity-strewn segment again. Just found out that The Howard Stern Show’s Lange has supposedly been blacklisted from HBO sports.

Friday, 6/19
1:06 a.m.
I’m really enjoying the opening segment of Kristy Andersen’s documentary about Zora Neale Hurston.

7:13 a.m.
Going through other people’s Brainstorm blogs. I really enjoy reading these things. Particulary appreciate Gina’s post Teaching and Tenure and Sara’s discussion of pre-tenure motherhood. As usual, readers’ comments run the gamut.

9 a.m.
About to blog on my current Twitter preoccupation. Marc Hill has me rethinking my aversion.

Comment [9]

June 17, 2009

Seeing Harlem

The New York Historical Society is highlighting the powerful Harlem photographs of Camilo José Vergara in an exhibit, Harlem: 1970-2009, scheduled to be up through mid-July.

As someone who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Harlem since the mid-1990s, I have had one of the many front row seats to the massive changes that just recently transformed this section of northern Manhattan.

In the 1980s, many experts were still labeling Harlem “gentrification-proof,” so symbolically linked to African-American cultural difference that wealthier whites would never feel comfortable moving into the area, at least not in any significant numbers. The 1990s and 2000s have already proved that prediction absolutely wrong.

Vergara, a MacArthur “genius” and native Chilean who has been documenting urban life for decades, moved to NYC in 1970 and started photographing the city as soon as he arrived. This ongoing work has periodically congealed into several award-winning books of his photos. The themes of those books include many different aspects of urban life, focusing, in turn, on urban cemeteries, the re-ethnicization of American inner cities, the everydayness of religious experience, and the iconography of New York City’s subway system.

He spoke at MIT last month, and MIT has a link to it online as part of that school’s OpenCourseWare program, making it accessible via YouTube. I’ve provided the video above. It is a relatively long program (about an hour and a half), but it really provides a detailed (even inspiring) look at Vegara’s approach to urban photography.

Comment

June 16, 2009

Steele's Critique of Obama/Sotomayor

I read two very short books while I was in Kingston, Jamaica, earlier this month. One, a tattered copy of St. Clair Drake’s The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (1977), I bought at a vending table set up for the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in New Kingston. I am trying to finalize a syllabus for a grad seminar in the fall, and I was planning to check a copy out of the library later on this summer.

The second book, Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (2007), I brought with me from home. I’m trying to write an afterward for the paperback 2010 edition of my recent book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (2008), and it seems pretty clear that I have to address Obama’s election as a watershed moment in American history, one with clear implications for that book’s basic claims. So, I have been galloping through recent book-length commentaries on Obama (including Gwen Ifill’s The Breakthrough, Richard Wolffe’s The Renegade, and Chuck Todd’s How Obama Won) just to make sure that I’m not simply repeating what everyone else is saying about his victory and its implications for the future or racial and electoral politics in the United States.

Soon after I got back to Philadelphia last week, Steele penned an op-ed on the Sotomayor nomination that is a summary of his book’s basic argument. Steele thinks that Obama is “bound” by the myopic and misplaced mathematics of race, a math of one-drop-rules and too-easy invocations of would-be racial impurity-by-addition (“black” plus “white” equals inauthentically “bi-racial”).

According to Steele, Obama is bound in two ways. First, he is forced to play the conciliatory role of “bargainer” in contradistinction to the more hard-lined racial “challengers” (the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons) who use “white guilt” as their political weaponry. This means that he has to come off as postracial, as not hostile or bitter toward whites, an optimistic racial politics that doesn’t necessarily stand him in good stead with the more cynical/skeptical strands of African-Americans thinking on race. In other words, the very traits that make him palatable to many liberal white voters potentially estranges him from black ones. His electoral coalition is split right down the middle.

Steele also argues that Obama is bound by his own misplaced attempt to actually embrace a gentler (more open-minded) form of racial politics (as opposed to eschewing it altogether and declaring its complete bankruptcy), which Steele would prefer, even as Obama gives lip-service to the idea of his own postraciality. And Steele blasted Obama’s nomination of Sotomayor this past week for just that very reason.

“The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics,” Steele writes. “It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the ‘new,’ we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.”

University of Maryland Law Professor Sherrilyn A. Ifill just wrote a response to the Steele op-ed that dismisses his critique as so much more “stale, tired and now proven-wrong theories” of black neoconservatism.

Obama won the election, and Ifill thinks it weird that Steele would have the audacity to say anything other than that he was flat-wrong on that prediction. Of course, Steele was not just implying an electoral defeat for Obama. The other point was that Obama couldn’t win (even if he actually won the election) because of America’s racial logic and his unwillingness to denounce it.

I’m off to a morning meeting, but I just wanted to make sure that folks were up to speed on this before I had a second (hopefully) to write a more substantive response to this dispute.

Comment [7]

June 12, 2009

Friday's Flicks: Jamaica for Sale

I am attempting to institute a new feature on my blog this summer, a film review segment on Fridays. And anything is fair game: contemporary Hollywood fare, new independent features, online shorts, documentaries. Everything. For the most part, I’ll try to highlight films that I think Brainstorm readers may not already know, but I might also put my own spin on the much-hyped movie of the moment. Wherever the spirit moves me.

This week, I want to mention a documentary, Jamaica for Sale, produced by Esther Figueroa and Diana McCaula, two activists and media makers based in Jamaica. The film screened last week as part of the 2009 Caribbean Studies Association conference in Kingston, Jamaica. (I was down there both for the conference and as part of an ethnographic film shoot of my own.)

A low-budget feature-length documentary shot in mini-DV, Jamaica for Sale takes a critical look at the impact of tourism, Jamaica’s most lucrative industry, on that island’s social, economic and environmental well-being. In the spirit of another relatively recent filmic critique of tourism in Jamaica, Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt, the movie depicts the country’s all-eggs-in-one-basket dependence on tourism as a kind of Faustian pact, a self-defeating commitment to the inevitabilities of globalization, and on terms that are hardly beneficial to the island and its inhabitants.

The film juxtaposes the luxuries of high-end tourism with the everyday exploitation of Jamaican workers, some of whom are asked to spend more than eight hours a day constructing hotels for about $1 an hour in U.S. currency. (The depreciation of Jamaican currency over the decades is another vital part of this tragic storyline.)

This documentary about the oft-hidden downsides of globalization and “unsustainable development” attempts to deconstruct the tourism-based imagery of Jamaica as sandy beaches and smiling natives (see the Youtubed commercial above), replacing it with a bifurcated landscape of elite, privatized, and cosmopolitan leisure propped up by the grinding details of local poverty, a poverty exploited by employment policies of big businesses with transnational interests and by large and small governmental complicities that exacerbate such material deprivation.

The film allows some of the workers to speak for themselves (in a few of its most riveting scenes), and it asks experts to help audience members to make sense of the historical context that laid the foundation for the Caribbean’s current predicament.

Some of this stuff you’ve probably heard or seen before, but a good deal of this narrative (and the specific cases chosen by these filmmakers) will be completely new to a lot of viewers.

Comment [3]

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