Konvolutes

If I wasn’t so overworked. . .

: Strange reading group, without extra reading requirements, for experimental ways of relating to text

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Dear overworked colleagues,

Starting next week, we will continue our now 2yo reading group with the aim of creating a space where reading itself is done differently. We are not trying to understand the authors, or to grasp their texts' meaning. We want to enter texts as simultaneously their readers and their authors, an exercise of extremely slow reading-writing whose point is to open spaces of doubt, vulnerability, and even failure, allowing texts to function beyond their analytical content claim, as calls to creation, as fissures of affect, as spheres of potency.

The outcome of last semester's experience with the reading group was very positive. It worked as a way of shaking off the academic tension we accumulate weekly, and to reconnect with the pleasure of reading – a pleasure we too often loose track of in a productivist/professionalizing environment.

The DotA reading group will meet

weekly every Monday

, from

1 to 3 pm

, in the Rhetoric Seminar room (

7415 Dwinelle

). We will have our first meeting next Monday, September 16th. We will start by reading

Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature

. And we will do it slowly.

All the readings will be done together

for

{or as if for}

the first time

. There is

no previous reading required

(in fact, we advise you not to read it beforehand). There is no need to come to all meetings either, that won't affect the overall purpose of the group; but please be mindful that we intend to create a cozy and regular reading space.

If you are interested in participating, need the pdfs, and/or want to know more about the reading group, please e-mail Pê at

[email protected]

I’ll never forget the first time I met Frances Fox Piven. I had just arrived to Chicago for the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association to moderate a roundtable discussion. I got to the conference room 5 minutes early and to my surprise, there was sitting Frances Fox Piven at my table with a friend of hers. At a conference where even the regular sessions are often poorly attended, the roundtables are sort of like poster sessions - it’s not uncommon that there are more presenters than participants. But she was there to hear a handful of papers being discussed on housing justice.  The three of us dove right into discussion, and it quickly moved from research to organizing and political tactics. We skipped over the entire professional niceties to both of our delights. I’ll never forget she just asked some real blunt question about the tension between increasing housing codes, conditions, or quality vs. availability, accessibility, affordable housing, or quality of housing for the poor. Something I thought about the lots in my research on the legalization of homeless camps, but also with respect to some deplorable “permanent” “supportive” housing in San Francisco I’d been researching for my dissertation. The presenters arrived, other professors and students, likely all drawn to participating in a discussion with Frances. It was a great session. The highlight of that conference for me.

In 2016 I convinced our cohort of Berkeley Social Justice Fellows to invite her to be our keynote speaker. I couldn’t make her evening talk, I was participating in a protest I’d helped organize with the SF Coalition on Homelessness on the Embarcadero against Mayor Ed Lee’s intensified sweeps of encampments to “cleanse” the downtown for that year’s Superbowl festivities. But I made the lunch. What struck me most was her discussion of her personal experiences in the welfare rights movement, and her laser-focused questions about our analysis of the organizing activities each of us were involved in. This article captures this spirit.

- - - -

“Working on any political project is enormously fun,” she said. “You don’t have to win for it to be really terribly satisfying. You get good friends. You do the right thing. You test your courage.”

Years ago, she said she had no theories to offer. Her painting, she said, was “like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.”

A brilliant art educator, Dow had known and worked with Gauguin in France; he was also a friend of Ernest F. Fenollosa, the great Orientalist, through whom he had developed a profound appreciation of Chinese and Japanese painting. As O’Keeffe said after studying with Dow himself, “This man had one dominating idea: to fill a space in a beautiful way.” Bement taught according to Dow’s principles of design, which for O’Keeffe proved eventually to be a way out of the dead end of academic realism. Bement invited her to come back the following summer—and for the three summers after that—to teach with him at the University of Virginia, and at Bement’s urging she went to New York in 1914 to study with Dow. Until then, she had been earning her living as an art supervisor in the public schools of north Texas.

Dozens of the people Stieglitz knew and influenced have tried to write their impressions of him, but O’Keeffe feels that no one has come close to describing him accurately. “Stieglitz was a very contradictory person,” she said last fall. “For example, he would start out in the morning saying one thing, and by noon he would be saying the exact opposite, and then in the evening he would have changed his mind again. He thought aloud, you see. He could become very enthusiastic about someone’s work and then forget about it. But he said everything with such conviction that people always believed him. He had such power with words. Stieglitz used words in a unique, almost violent way, which nobody has ever been able to reproduce. It was appalling to me the way he could tear somebody to pieces—and that person would accept it because it was 

Stieglitz continued to spend his summers, as usual, at Lake George, but from 1929 on he did so without O’Keeffe. The separations were painful for both of them. O’Keeffe was torn between her obligation to Stieglitz and her obligation to her work. In the high, wild desert country of New Mexico, she felt very close to something that she had been trying to reach in painting. “Lake George is not really painting country,” she remarked last fall. “Out here, half your work is done for you.” Once, O’Keeffe suggested in a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan that she sometimes found it necessary to help Stieglitz by not getting in his way, and that this was why she came West in the summer. But the problem was obviously more complex. “The difficulty in getting out here was enormous, but I came,” she told me quietly.

I explained that I couldn’t work all day and then be with people in the evening—it just wasn’t possible—but I said that if I had a day when I wasn’t working I would call her up and come over.

“I think Dove came to abstraction quite naturally,” O’Keeffe says, reflectively. “It was his way of thinking. Kandinsky was very showy about it, but Dove had an earthy, simple quality that led directly to abstraction. His things are very special. I always wish I’d bought more of them. And all the people Dove influenced, who are better known now than he is! The Museum of Modern Art never gave him a really important show—I don’t know why. Dove used to paint a lot of small pictures, little landscapes, that didn’t look particularly distinguished at first, but in them he would get the feel of a particular place so completely that you’d know you’d been there.”

O’Keeffe has often said that she does not much like pictures. When she travels, as she has done extensively since Stieglitz’s death, she spends little time in museums or galleries. The heights of Machu Picchu, the Lipizzaner horses of the Spanish Riding School, in Vienna, the ruins of Angkor Wat—these are the sort of thing she goes to see, and she is never disappointed. “But I mentally destroy the pictures I look at,” she said, with an amused smile. “I’m very critical. I don’t seem to have the kind of pleasure I know a lot of other people have in pictures. That’s why I was so surprised when I went to the Prado in 1953—because everything there was so exciting to me. Maybe the fact that the pictures had not been cleaned had something to do with it.

Of course, my favorite is Chinese painting. I’d still say it’s the best that’s been done.”

“The truth is I’ve been very lucky. Stieglitz was the most interesting center of energy in the art world just when I was trying to find my way. To have him get interested in me was a very good thing. My going to Texas was lucky, and, of course, my finding this place. And then, somehow, what I painted happened to fit into the emotional life of my time—does that sound right to you? Often I’ve had the feeling that I could have been a much better painter and had far less recognition. It’s just that what I do seems to move people today, in a way that I don’t understand at all. Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, How ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realize that to someone else it may not seem ordinary.”

This movie. Wow. A revolutionary viewing, and it came out 30 years ago. Why haven’t I seen more documentaries that bring such expression and poetry to today’s injustice? 

Went with Elly to see this at the Roxy in the Mission on the anniversary of its premier there. Elly talked about when Marlon Riggs was head of the Berkeley Journalism department. We both thought how different it must have been back then - Berkeley, Journalism, and the education of journalists. Moving remembrances by some who were in the film, including Marlon’s longtime partner who reminisced on his act of applying and winning funding from the National Endowment of the Arts and Humanities and the culture wars it sparked (and his intention to do just that).

Sunday, Feb. 17. 2019 @ PFA w/ Elly

Powerful film with a lingering impression.

Chinese master Jia Zhangke (The World) won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes for this startling — and startlingly violent — modern wuxia tale of four outcasts on the margins of a rapidly changing China, who channel their underclass rage into a bloody and murderous rampage.

a genre-bending film that has roots in traditional tea-house storytelling. In A Touch of Sin (which was awarded Best Screenplay this year at Cannes), he confronts China's extreme social changes with a daring aesthetic, drawing inspiration from real-life events to compose a visually arresting, emotionally disturbing fresco of the underprivileged. 

NASSER’S REPUBLIC, THE MAKING OF MODERN EGYPT 

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable. Sunday, 2.3.19

On the way to the airport in Minneapolis our driver told us about the largest mass hanging occurring in Minnesota. Had never heard of it - President Abraham Lincoln ordered 38 Dakota Warriors to be hung. It was the largest mass execution in U.S. history,

https://www.facebook.com/kimberle.crenshaw/posts/10156138000853851

So...I’ve seen BlackPanther twice now and I’m sure I will see it yet again. So many delights are there, I think I can see something new to appreciate each time. Still, I’m struggling with so many feelings that I need to think out loud about them. I trust we’re ready to have some real talk without having our own civil war cause I really want to know how other folks are thinking about some of the film’s contradictions.

First, I have to say what a treat it was to be part of a joyful screening with the amazing students, faculty and staff at Penn State. It was the perfect end to a phenomenal day. It couldn’t have been a better opportunity to give myself over to the fantasy than to do so surrounded by so much excitement and yearning. The desire was palpable, expressed not only in the decked out gear, but in the collective response to the spectacular beauty of our images on film. I haven’t been this enthralled with the loving representation of black bodies since Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. The sheer joy of drinking it all in made me realize just how thirsty I was for such visual treats. I savored every last drop, the fierce warrior sistas, the humor, the geniuses, Black love, all the things we just don’t get to see. Joy. I can imagine now what it must be like to be part of a group that can expect to see a celebrated view of themselves in 99% of what gets produced. Now that we’ve got a taste, we will surely demand more. I hope.

But somewhere along the way the splendor sucked me in like a narcotic and had me accepting things that made my heart ache upon reflection. What else can possibly explain my shushing my internal whispering to stay in the zone? I had to put it out of my head that Black pilots were actually going to be killed rather than intercepted (where’s technology there?), that a civil war between Black families was unfolding over aiding other Black people, and that the CIA’s shooting down of vessels carrying technology into the fight against an anti-black world order was hailed as a heroic moment in the film. And we are not talking about a stand-in for the CIA, not a metaphor for the world’s big brother, but a full on embodiment of it. All day I turned it over in my gut. Like remembering a drunken night thru a hangover haze, I kept wondering how I’d come to dance on the table for the CIA? The ones that helped destroy the dream of African liberation, that had a hand in the assassination of Lumumba, staged a coup against Nkrumah, tipped off the arrest that imprisoned Mandela, installed the vicious, nation-destroying Mobutu? Why not throw in the FBI and COINTELPRO as kindly white characters? Was this meant to be ironic? What meaning do we assign the fact that the possibility of a real life Wakanda in the resource-rich Congo and Ghana, and the promise of a Pan African quest for collective self-determination were precisely the threats that the CIA worked to suppress? The consequences of Meddling and proxy wars continue to this day, with millions of lives lost. Whether intentional or not, the West’s justification for neutralizing these threats was resurrected and written all over the character of Killmonger, updated of course with the urban swag of the rabid Black American whose tragic abandonment could only be resolved by being put down. Black power has always been framed by its critics as dangerous, irrational, bloodthirsty revenge. Today’s identity extremists were yesterday’s Panthers and Pan Africanists. How did that libelous trope come to be the central tension in this celebration of Black superheroes?

Perhaps the most amazing feat of the film was to split these legacies of self-determination and self-defense into murderous warring factions with no possibility for reconciliation. Fratricide is the only acceptable option? What’s left for the lost Americans is piecemeal urban development and STEM, while the menu of possibilities for the UN ensures stability through shared technology rather than redistribution. No wonder the CIA gazes on the final scene with pride. Mission accomplished.

I guess the conundrum for me is coming to terms with how it is that in a fantasy world where anything is possible it was not possible to paint from outside the neo-colonial gaze. And yes, it’s Disney, and it’s capitalism and it’s entertainment but is the price to be paid for big budget representation of black bodies the vilification of black liberation politics?

And can we set aside “it’s just a movie?” That horse has already left the barn.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/how-black-panther-liberalizes-black-resistance-for-white-comfort

But at its core, Black Panther contains a fundamentally reactionary understanding of black liberation that blatantly advocates bourgeois respectability over revolution, sterilizes the history of real-life anti-colonial struggles in Africa and elsewhere, and allows white folks such as myself to feel extremely comfortable watching it — which, given Marvel’s sole purpose, is almost certainly the bottom line.

Audiences have flocked to see it: the movie has made over $427 million so far. Many brilliant pieces have identified its clever undermining of racist tropes about Africa, prioritizing of powerful female characters, and groundbreaking impact of seeing an uncolonized African nation completely in control of its own resources and technologically advanced future.

But at its core, Black Panther contains a fundamentally reactionary understanding of black liberation that blatantly advocates bourgeois respectability over revolution, sterilizes the history of real-life anti-colonial struggles in Africa and elsewhere, and allows white folks such as myself to feel extremely comfortable watching it — which, given Marvel’s sole purpose, is almost certainly the bottom line.

As writer Leslie Lee III recently put it on Twitter: “Black Panther is a deeply evil film. It dangles the idea of global black liberation in front of you, paints that as villainous, then ends in an orgy of the freest black people to ever walk the earth slaughtering each other to protect whites. That shit turned my stomach.”

Killmonger’s motivations are thus extremely unclear. Is he a reactionary black nationalist seeking to establish a new vanguardist rule over subjects? Or does his burning of all the critical herb which bestows superhuman powers upon Wakanda’s king represent a desire to do away with monarchical traditions and allow for true black self-determination? Such questions aren’t ever resolved, as he ultimately only ever plays foil for T’Challa to develop into a true leader. But Killmonger’s final words — offered in response to being healed and serving as the only to acknowledge the history of slavery — hint at his fears that it would be T’Challa who would would maintain hierarchy: “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ‘cause they knew death was better than bondage.”

That set the stage perfectly for the final act: There Is No Alternative to Liberalism.

Black Panther is an absolute triumph when it comes to representations of black people and cultures. The psychological and communal power of seeing such images will never be understood by white folks.

Unfortunately, the film also positions itself as a politically radical film, something that could only be true if we willfully ignore the histories of actual black liberation struggles around the world and accept the premise that late-stage capitalism underpinned by austerity, hierarchy and philanthropy is the best we can do. It’s a deep shame.