#george lipsitz

today i ran into this list of books just removed from the Nimitz library. the majority of the texts on race, racism and identity are ones i taught, read or included in my work.

we don't really have a name for this kind of grief, do we? teacher grief, scholar grief, archival grief just don't do it justice when you're watching your colleagues and your field get devoured. it's not even really anticipatory at this point either. this is the part where the once slow train speeds past you.

and there's this anger that comes from seeing how vulnerable people are when they're denied access to things that could have helped. it's bitter like a stomach ache from too much coffee, and it claws back at you when you think you're well beyond its grasp.

Cultural Appropriation: Motoko Kusanagi is White?

In a recent article from the New Republic, Ryu Spaeth makes the case that it is fine to cast Scarlett Johansson, a white female, as Motoko Kusanagi, a robot detective in future Tokyo. I think the problem with this article is that it doesn’t recognize the link between cultural appropriation and power relations. It is true that the distinction between cultural cross-pollination and cultural…

“Living with contradictions is difficult, and, especially for intellectuals and artists employed in academic institutions, the inability to speak honestly and openly about contradictory consciousness can lead to a destructive desire for ‘pure’ political positions, to militant posturing and internecine battles with one another that ultimately have more to do with individual subjectivities and self-images than with disciplined collective struggle for resources and power.”

George Lipsitz, on Paul Simon’s Graceland and David Byrne’s Rei Momo (and their lack of self-conscious understanding of the unequal power relations informing their collaborations on these recordings)

I am still trying to get my mind around the fact that the concept of cultural appropriation, whereby the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture is inherently a negative, oppressive act, was developed by a third generation Jewish immigrant from the Bronx named George Lipsitz (no h) who has made his career as a professor of African-American Studies at UC Santa…