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This, and That

April 3, 2009 in Dissertating, Narcissism, Politics, Reading by Craig | No comments

I’m pretending I’m an art student today, hanging out in the very pretty but comfortable offices over at Steinhardt, doing work and drinking tea.  When I imagine an alternate life at an imaginary university in Europe somewhere, my imaginary office looks a lot like the one I’m in right now — stacks of magazines, slide trays and house plants jockeying for space with the Macs. Not a Dell in sight. An email from TSM’s California Comp Lit informant reminded me that the bleeding of work into life I wrote about last week can also be a bleeding of life into work. So I’m letting myself enjoy that I get to spend my days reading, writing and chatting with smart and interesting people. That’s not so bad, right?

Earlier, was browsing the latest copy of Left Turn magazine, a new issue on “Igniting the Kindred: Visions of Queer Radicalism.” As the letter from the editors says, the articles prompt thoughts on the history of multi-racial, multi-issue queer politics, and what that history offers for thinking through social movements for queer/trans liberation today.  Dean and I are excited and honored to have a little review in it we wrote of Milk, or really some thoughts on Milk in the era of Obama and Prop 8.

Win Some, Lose Some

February 26, 2009 in Blogging Blogging, Reading by Craig | 13 comments

In bad news, I got called a moralistic, over-wrought navel-gazer. In good news, blog stats are up and visits have quadrupled in the past few days. I’ll take it! Welcome new readers, hope you remembered to bring your bongs.

I decided not to weigh in over there since I felt trying to defend myself or challenge interpretations of what I’d written wouldn’t add anything productive to a conversation that was about much more than my post, and which was moving along fine without me. I do want to add something about what was seen as an overly-dramatic use of the word “trauma.” I don’t have a problem being called dramatic. (I am, after all, a gay, and we take pride in our dramatics, even if, on occassion, as Danny Noriega would say, “Some people weren’t liking it.”) But I did want to say that in my use of that word, I’m drawing from a body of literature that might be of interest — in addition to Cho’s work, I’m thinking of David Eng and David Kazanjian’s Loss, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and E. Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture.  Some of these and other recent works on race and trauma draw from psychoanalytic theorists Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, and their notion of “transgenerational haunting,” as well as sociologist Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.

And, in related news, the mayor of Los Alamitos, a small city in Orange County, CA, sent an email postcard to a colleague that featured the White House lawn as a field of watermelons, with the note “No Easter Egg hunt this year.” When the recipient, an African American woman who volunteers with the city, objected, the Mayor explained he was unaware of any racialized content in the image. He stated, “Bottom line is, we laugh at things and I didn’t see this in the same light that she did. I’m sorry. It wasn’t sent to offend her personally – or anyone – from the standpoint of the African-American race.”

Ghost Stories

February 24, 2009 in Blogging Blogging, Politics, Reading by Craig | 4 comments

I haven’t quite been able to wrap my head around the conversation about racism over at scatterplot. One thought I’ve had is that the pain inflicted by the cartoon under question, the pain of viewing the cartoon for people who know that monkey means them, has gone largely unacknowledged by those who question the racist content of the image. Thinking about that pain and how to attempt an account that can approach it, I thought of the work of Grace Cho (a graduate of my program and now a CUNY professor). Cho’s beautiful and brilliant Haunting the Korean Diaspora contributes to a body of literature that addresses the affective experiences and costs of racialized subordination, and the press of history that accompanies present-day experiences of oppression. Cho writes that “an unspeakable trauma does not die out with the person who first experienced it. Rather, it takes on a life of its own, emerging from the spaces where secrets are concealed.” Cho is dealing with the history of the “forgotten war” of the U.S. against Korea, and in mentioning it here, I don’t mean of course to locate racism against African Americans in our past. Rather, I mean to pause and remember the force of the accumulated and collective traumas of racism, and to think about what sort of failure it is for sociology to refuse a consideration of that force, and to what new traumas that failure contributes.

Just Perfect

February 19, 2009 in Reading by Craig | No comments

1962

In my search for classic texts in sociology, I wound up uncovering the Pelican Project. Put together by things magazine, the project is a collection of beautiful covers from Pelican press, including the above. The covers are organized by decade, and then year. Why can’t books still look like this?

Reading List?

February 17, 2009 in Reading by Craig | 6 comments

Our favorite local university librarian who lunches has requested a list of “classic/core” texts in sociology. I assembled the list below — additions anyone? I’m also compiling a secret subterfuge list of books that should but probably never will be as widely taught. The doors are wide open on that one for suggestions as well.

Marx, Capital, vol 1
Marx-Engels Reader
Weber, Protestant Ethic & Spirit of Capitalism
Durkheim, Suicide
Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents
The Sociology of Georg Simmel
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Hobsbawn, Age of Revolution
Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory
Mills, The Power Elite
Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Habermas, The Public Sphere
Parsons, The Structure of Social Action
Goffman, Asylum
Willis, Learning to Labour
Collins, Black Feminist Thought
Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology
Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society
Bourdieu, Distinction

Study Break

December 11, 2008 in Reading by Craig | 2 comments

In which I take a break from my usual grind to engage in some study. The arrival of a book I’d ordered months ago and forgotten about, White Logics, White Methods: Racism & Methodology, has sent me on a Google Scholar chase that thus far knows no limit. Especially occupying my mind: Tracking down Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s 1997 ASR article “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Interpretation” led me to a critique of the piece by Mara Loveman (December 1999 ASR), which then sent me to Bonilla-Silva’s reply (obvs, also December 1999). I’m trying to sort my head around a sense of how this argument in the sociology of race/ethnicity parallels (or perhaps underwrites?) a debate in political sociology of the welfare state about whether or not racialized disparities in social entitlements are a side-effect of something else (i.e. class subsumes race), or whether (and of course this is where my intellect/politics lean) we should understand the structure of the U.S. welfare state as itself a product of racialized social strucutrers, i.e., a “weak”* federal government and “states rights” as mechanisms developed to maintain racial apartheid or inequality. I don’t even know what I’m typing at this point…

*I think weak is the wrong word for the U.S. federal government. I understand this classifcation is meant to point to the lack or relative limits of universal programs in the U.S. But my diss research suggests that the federal government exercises quite strong authority over programs it does not directly administer, a power of delegating tasks that also produces pockets of power at subnational levels. Or something. What am I thinking? This is not way to lure back readers!

Your Lucky Day

June 18, 2008 in Reading by smalinky | 2 comments

Chris Caruso, whom I know through the Tech Fellow program of which we are both part, has put together an amazing web project. Chris coordinated a team of people to videotape the weekly lectures from David Harvey’s “Reading Marx’s Capital” course last fall. Now the 55 hours of tape are edited, and Chris is putting up one video lecture a week (podcasts coming soon). I took this course with Harvey a few years ago, and it was one of the highlights of my graduate student career. If you don’t know his work, he’s considered one of (the?) contemporary experts on Marx, and the course offers a close reading, chapter by chapter, of Volume One of Capital. He’s a great and patient lecturer, and he makes beautiful work of Marx’s methodology, which I think is as important as anything, as a tool for reading to understand. When I read Marx now, I hear the soothing sound of Harvey’s British lilt in my head. Now you can too — Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey.

Tuesdays With Mannies

June 11, 2008 in Dissertating, Jobs, Reading by smalinky | 6 comments

The temperature seems to have returned to something resembling a habitat suitable for human life, which I’m happy about, as I’m planning to be out and around on my bike later. Though first I need to fix a flat — the second in one week! Defying everything I know about having (and keeping) a bike in NYC, I leave my bike locked up downstairs in front of my building, and no trouble has ever come my way. But if I wind up with a third flat I’m going to begin to suspect sabotage. Yesterday, a long but fun day doing manny duty with Greg for the twins (by the end of the day we were all covered in popsicle juice; sharing a popsicle with a one-year old in 90something degree weather is not a neat affair.) I am no longer so tired after our Tuesday babysitting gig that I can’t do anything but get in bed with Pringles and my laptop tuned to Hulu, so I actually got some satisfying work done last night. A flurry of re-visiting some old favorite readings — Rajan’s Biocapital, Chow’s Protestant Ethnic, some pieces in Global Assemblages — plus some time with Aihwa Ong’s recent book on neoliberalism, which I’m finding quite helpful. Something I’m sorting out right now: the limits of ephochal readings of Foucault (such as “disciplinary society”) and some reasons we might want to concentrate instead on descriptions of technologies that (as Ong characterizes neoliberalism) can be deployed within any sort of political regime. This seems consonant with a Deleuzeun understanding of “diagrams” (abstract, mobile), despite some of the responsibility Deleuze bears for encouraging epochal readings (his “society of control.”) Meanwhile, the soc blogosphere is rife with advice these days for the would-be job candidate — Newsocprof, Scatterplot, Rethinking Markets — which I’m really appreciating. “Going on the market” seems sort of terrifying, but completing a set of discrete tasks feels do-able.

You Wish Your Bed Was Already Made

June 9, 2008 in Reading, Teaching by smalinky | 2 comments

I’m not totally ready for it to be Monday. I think I achieved a good balance this weekend between doing work and having fun, but does this every get easy? Does any academic ever hit an automatic stride in which you’ve figured out how to get enough work done, how to feel like you’ve gotten enough work done (not necessarily in a direct or obvious relationship with the first goal), and how to have time to unwind and just, you know, eat hot dogs outside while melting into a puddle or whatever? Between bike rides, barbecues, and housewarming parties this weekend, made good progress on the Foucault article, starting to sort out some coherent thoughts on the relationships between Foucault’s state racism and what Dean and I have been calling “racism racism.” Last night, reading Jeff Manza’s excellent review article on sociology of the New Deal, a great moment of clarification when he writes that a strict (or “strong” as they say in sociology) historical institutionalism comes to odds with what I’d call a critical race view insofar as the latter says that the institutions of U.S. government themselves get produced by structures of racism. This gels with what I’m trying to say through a biopolitical framework, and helped me understand my own resistance to some of the new institutionalism. But for now: I have to grade papers to turn back to the students tonight. On the upside, only half the students did the assignment, so I don’t have too much to grade. On the downside, only half the students did the assignment. Any thoughts on how to overcome overwhelming summer-inertia and motivate students?

339 days left…

May 12, 2008 in Blogging Blogging, Politics, Reading by smalinky | 1 comment

…until the next National Librarian’s Day (April 16, 2009), but if you need a fix of your favorite Local Librarian before then, I’ve got a couple of options for you:
(1) Emily has a piece in Radical Catologing, a new collection on the politics and possibilities of library practices, with articles addressing “the implications behind what materials get cataloged, who catalogs them, and how.” The book seems like it would be a good syllabus-companion to Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out: Classifications and Its Consequences. (2) And if that’s not enough (it’s not), please visit Emily’s amazing new blog: WIAFLAW.

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