ABlog

1. Saw a new film, "A Little Bit of So Much Truth/Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad," about the 2006 uprising in Oaxaca. Spending an hour and a half with images of poor people, teachers, indigenous citizens confronting armed police with moral suasion, women taking over a TV station to broadcast the real news...showed me the extent of my entrapment in the quagmire of North American self-consciousness. There are struggles in the world that do not involve Dick Cheney! Oil! Waterboarding! The Green Zone! See how much people can do with the barest, barest minimum of material resources when they are determined, when they determine to connect instead of allowing the dividers to divide. (Some of them walked from Oaxaca to Mexico City, relying on the solidarity of strangers to feed them along the way; proudly they demonstrated how they fashioned cushions for their sore, blistered feet from sanitary napkins.)

2. Heard Ann Stoler, anthropologist and historian, deliver a lecture in the New School's Gender Series: "Biosecurity and Bodily Exposures"--which means...this so-called War on Terror, this new imperial iteration, is deeply suffused with, enabled by gender hierarchies...but how? Weird feeling of the hauntedness of the setting: the Graduate Faculty's Wolff Conference Room, scene of other efforts over the years to bring some sense of relevance and engagement to the safe, sterile spaces of the academic Green Zone. Stoler inquired: why were the academics engaged in post-colonial studies so silent in the wake of 9/11? Why has the new discourse of Empire been almost completely dominated by the right wing, the Niall Fergusons, etc.? An excellent set of questions, to which I answer: in part, it's because the academy had already shown, in action, its true allegiance. Just to take the New School as an example: when the gender program that found a home at the Grad Faculty in the 1990's hired a visiting professor, Jacqueline Alexander, who forcefully posed trenchant questions about the Eurocentrism of the curriculum and the class/race stratifications of the institution--and who gathered around her students and other faculty disposed to press those issues--the institution responded reflexively, defensively: rejecting a proposal for curricular change, flatly refusing to rehire Alexander herself, and in short order terminating the gender studies program that had offered a platform for the challenge. The GF's Anthropology Department, which had been heavily invested in gender studies under the leadership of Rayna Rapp, also imploded around this time and had to be totally reconstructed. Part of that reconstruction involved the hiring of Ann Stoler, whose most recent work is an edited collection of essays called Haunted by Empire. Several years after Ann Stoler joined the Graduate Faculty, the university hired anthropologist Arjun Appadurai as its provost; he has since resigned from that position but continues his association with the New School. Appadurai has a good reputation as a progressive theorist of post-colonial change and globalization, but virtually his first act as New School Provost was to oppose the formation of a part-time faculty union. Is it barely possible-- could there be a connection between the silences of the post-colonial theorists in the wake of 9/11--the fact that most of them have had no practical challenge to pose to the new crimes of empire--and the stubborn, ugly resistance of a purportedly progressive academic institution to a reformist upsurge within its own walls?

3. A deafening buzz in my tiny back yard! Three short, dark-skinned men in work boots are wielding loud machines just beyond the fence, in the almost equally tiny back yard of my neighbor. What part of the trans-border empire do they hail from? I see them as "Mexican," but who knows. The neighbors whose yard they groom are almost certainly from the English speaking Caribbean. The yard workers are scooping brown leaves into plastic bags (forbidden under the current recycling law--we're supposed to brown bag them--but no doubt the men will take the bags of leaves away with them and dump them far from this part of Brooklyn's environmental regulations, thus sparing my neighbors the hassle of those brown bags). They make a horrible racket for twenty minutes and then are gone as suddenly as they came. "Nature" has been pummeled into a standard, acceptable shape.

In a neighboring yard, two weeks ago, a young man spent the better part of an afternoon chopping down with an ax a 50-foot tall ailanthus tree. The raw, four-foot-high stump still stands as a souvenir. I'd never seen a tree chopped down by hand before. I've seen chain saws wielded, but never realized what a struggle, a masscre, the real thing could be. Life resists. It is fragile, but resists.

4. A handsome student with stars in his eyes describes to me his hunger and thirst for knowledge. He speaks with appetite of a class he took: "The Age of Dostoevsky." And with that, I decide to revisit my once-favorite book, The Brothers Karamazov, which I fell in love with while living in American Bellevue, when I was a girl about the age of Lise, with her "lovely little face, a bit thin from illness" and a mischievous glint in her "big dark eyes with their long lashes," above useless legs whose paralysis caused her to be "wheeled about in a long, comfortable chair."

There it is in the stacks of Fogelman Library, a heft red hardcover. No Constance Garnett for me this time around. I want a modern translation. I will visit those crazy brothers in another country--anothing country of language and of my life. I'm now just about the age the author was when he started the manuscript, just a couple years off from his triumphal funeral, with its 30,000 mourners and the music of 15 choirs.

I enter the book. What country do I find?

The serfs have been freed--barely.

All this trouble over nothing but
sex
money
alcohol
and God!

(to be continued)