Food Innovations 1: Raw Fish

I like to eat. I really, really like to eat, and I also like to cook, and admittedly, I can be a bit of a snob about it. So, recently I’ve been thinking that maybe I should blog about food. Why not? If I can apply theory to literature, movies, politics, and philanthropy, why not also food? I was inspired to do this while I was making lunch yesterday when I experienced the dilemma of eating raw fish that I had bought from a supermarket. 

Before I go on with my story, I have to tell you that even before I lived in Japan I was one of those people who loves raw fish — sushi, ceviche, whatever.  From Korea to Denmark to Mexico, so many cultures have specialty dishes of raw (or almost raw) fish, and I’ve never been disappointed. (Raw beef too, but that’s another story.) So, in my fridge I had a steak of wild tuna that I had just purchased from the supermarket the night before. If I had bought this from a Japanese grocery story, I would feel entirely safe eating it raw with just a little soy sauce and wasabi to season it, but I couldn’t help feel a little nervous since this was from one of those oversized American supermarkets. I wasn’t worried about the quality of the fish, as I know that all deep-sea fish such as tuna is frozen right there on the boat immediately after it’s caught, but I was worried about the quality controls at American supermarkets. 

It was a dilemma. On the one hand, I really love raw tuna and think that cooking it simply ruins the flavor. On the other hand, I didn’t want to get a disease. What to do?

tuna sashimi

My solution was to pour some rice vinegar onto a plate and lay the tuna over it, wait a couple of minutes, and then turn the tuna over so all sides had touched the vinegar. This is basically the principle behind the Latin American dish ceviche as well as the Japanese sasazushi, a kind of sushi invented specifically for regions distant from the ocean. Essentially, the vinegar “cooks” or preserves the fish, and so yesterday I imagined it would kill the germs too. To complement the fish, I also cooked some rice, boiled some edamame, and made a green salad with mixed greens, carrots, and tomatoes. My Japanese-style recipe for salad dressing is simple: rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, black pepper, and sansho (a Japanese spice that has a bit of a lemony flavor and is available at almost all Asian markets), and tastes much better than the sugary crap I’ve seen masquerading as “Asian dressing” in many restaurants and cafeterias. The whole lunch took me just 25 minutes to prepare, and it was delicious.

So, that was my culinary innovation. Please don’t sue me if you try this at home and get sick from contaminated fish.  But here of course is the irony. For the sake of this blog, I decided today to look up the chances that I might have done something really stupid yesterday and found this helpful NY Times article. It turns out the only real danger in eating raw fish is from a parasite called anisakis, which would have been killed when the tuna was frozen on the deep-sea fishing vessel (in contrast to fresh-water and coastal fishes such as salmon, which I would never eat raw except from a real sushi chef.) So, no worries there. But do I trust the supermarket for keeping the fish clean? As you can see from this website here, people are worried about the standards governing where the fish comes from (especially when it’s farmed, fresh-water fish), not the standards governing what happens to it once it gets to the supermarket. Maybe I have nothing to worry about and didn’t need to add the vinegar at all!!! Perhaps my clever innovation based on my desires and fears was all for nothing (though it was tasty, so I’m happy anyway.) Interestingly, the NY Times article notes that although many people in America are worried about getting sick from raw fish, nobody in Japan is, and, all things considered, hardly anyone in any country ever does.

So, what’s the upshot here? Besides observing that our eating habits are in many ways irrational, no matter how scientific we think we are being, what does any of this have to do with theory? Well, one of the famous structuralist anthropologists Claude Levi-Strauss once wrote a book called The Raw and the Cooked. There he argues that in spite of the fact that the human stomach can digest just about anything, human beings feel the need to “socialize” their food. One of the basic ways human beings do this — Levi-Strauss observed across the many cultures he analyzed – is through categories of raw, cooked, and rotten. His basic point is that cooking is just like a language, and like all languages has an unconscious structure to it. The basic unconscious structure is our relationship to nature and culture, and our often irrational feelings about food seems to traverse this nature/culture binary.

There seems to be an interesting paradox. One might think that the more cooked (or more socialized) the better, but Levi-Strauss notes that the foods most socially connected to prestige or high status are the foods that are either raw or even partly rotten (e.g., sushi and blue cheese.) And if one looks at the price of these foods, one will notice the same thing. Raw and rotten foods are often more expensive. This suggests that our culinary language is more complex than simple binaries such as good/bad,  raw/cooked, nature/culture, or inside/outside. Our cultural attitudes are coordinated complexly along more than just one axis of intepretation.

So, what is the moral here?… There is no moral, silly. Just some good eatin’.

Avatar and Postcolonial Theory

Probably no other movie will be watched by as many people this year or win quite so many awards as Avatar. If you haven’t seen it yet, you just might be the only one. And this makes me happy since I’m teaching postcolonial literature this semester, and Avatar provides a rather easy way for me to explain my subject to my students. The movie is basically about an indigenous, local culture being destroyed by greedy business interests that use high-tech military force in order to gain access to a valuable natural resource. Does the plot sound familiar? Although the movie is a science fiction story set in the future (year 2154) and the “native” Na’vi people on the planet Pandora have blue skin, the allegories to the history of colonization should be somewhat obvious to anyone who’s ever read a history book — Europe’s greed-driven conquest and exploitation of Native Americans, Asians, and Africans. In addition, critic Roger Ebert suggests the movie can easily be read as an allegory for contmporary politics because of the strong anti-war, anti-colonialism, and pro-environmentalist messages.

However, on the other hand, other critics have attacked the film for repeating colonial fantasy narratives such as the classic tales of of Pocahontas and Last of the Mohicans, not to mention more recent movies Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and even another sci-fi movie, Dune. Just like in all these other colonial fantasy narratives, the protagonist of Avatar is a white male who is sent to subdue a far-away people, then comes to identify with those people after he falls in love with one of them, and eventually somehow assumes a leadership role in their doomed struggle against imperialism. So common is this narrative that one critic asks, “when will white people stop making movies like Avatar?” He claims such movies are basically symptomatic of white guilt about the history of atrocities against black, brown, red, and yellow peoples and attempt to symbolically redeme the audience. And for sure, almost all of these stories contain a redemption allegory in which the white male finds redemption for his past  by coming to a new Eden-like land and identifying with the victims there. Another critic dislikes the white character’s ability to literally become an incarnation (or avatar) of the other cultural identity, and he compares Avatar to earlier “black-face” narratives in which white characters not only “go native” but become even more adept at the native skills than the actual natives (like Tarzan or Natty Bumpo.)

Probably the most balanced and interesting response to the movie is this blog post by the Native American scholar and writer Daniel Heath Justice. Although he admits to how effective the movie was at evoking an emotional response in him, he also argues that the plot line of good guys vs. bad guys is too simplistic. In his view, the movie’s director James Cameron missed an opportunity to enable the American audience to really understand colonialism. Real colonizers are not cartoonishly evil people but often nice people who, because of their social position, do bad things. He worries that such a romantic good vs. evil story allows the audience to feel overly self-satisfied when they emotionally side with the good guys without really questioning how everyone is morally complicit with colonialism — even the “good guys.” In sum, the question that all these critics raise is why the white male hero is there in the first place? Why not just focus on the Na’vi characters and their struggle against the sinister forces of commercial empire? What is the difference between how the movie represents colonialism and how real colonization and oppression happens? And most importantly, why does the white male character become the leader of the “colored” (blue/red) people in their own struggle? 

Hence, interestingly, we have two very contradictory readings of this movie. One reads it as an anti-colonialist story, and the other reads it as a colonialist story. And importantly the cultural identity of the reader is not the determining factor in how one reads it. Daniel Heath Justice observed that responses among the Native American community were very mixed, some liking the movie, some hating it, most somewhere in between; and as one can see from this little note in the right-wing National Review, some conservatives have claimed that the movie is anti-American because it inserts phrases from George Bush’s speeches about terror and preemptive strike into the mouths of the villains, but other conservative critics have praised it for its libertarian values. A few of my Oromo friends read the movie’s anti-colonialism and its reverence for a tree as an allegory for their own sturggle against Abyssinian imperialism in Ethiopia and the Oromo reverence for the Odaa tree, which is a symbol for their liberation movement. But other Oromo really can’t stand the fact that the Na’vi have to be saved by a white guy.

The diverse reactions to the movie, I think, indicate why postcolonial theory can be difficult, and hence there is quite a lot more that could be said about this movie than I have time to write about here. But there are a couple of points I’d like to make that I haven’t seen made yet, especially in regards to postcolonial theory. First, although it’s easy to compare the movie to films like Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves, there are important differences, and I think critics ought to pay attention to the differences as well as to the similarities. As the theorist Homi Bhabha observes, postcolonial writing and art often mimic colonial forms — just as a lot of colonial writing  and art were borrowing from indigenous forms and ideas – but mimic them with a difference that moves the narrative and the reader’s response in other directions.  In Avatar, for instance, the most obvious difference is that the Na’vi win. Also, while in the Pocahontas story the Indian betrays her people by falling in love with John Smith, Avatar’s story is actually the opposite.

We might also consider too the essay ”Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Spivak. Her answer to that question is no, the most marginalized peoples can’t represent themselves. One of the strongest criticisms of Avatar is why the whole story is narrated from the white male character’s point of view. In this way the movie is similar to Dances with Wolves. The alternative to this scenario would seem to be to have the movie narrated from the point of view of one of the Na’vi — perhaps Neytiri’s character. But for Spivak, this would not be satisfactory either for several reasons. First, does Neytiri speak for all the Na’vi or just some of them? Second, along those lines, wouldn’t the movie then have to begin acknowledging the forms of oppression and disparity that existed within the Na’vi culture? After all, feminist and Marxist critics have reminded the upper-class, male postcolonial writers that things were not all roses before the colonizers came. Third, how would Neytiri or any of the Na’vi be able to speak about the colonial system unless she had spent some time within it or had some position of authority that would give her access to all that knowledge. Fourth, any articulation would really be a translation. Fifth, few of us really understand our identities – we are, in other words, when all things are considered, strangers to ourselves.

Perhaps a more avant-garde film could explore the multiple points of view and theoretical problems of representation, but such a film would miss the romantic inspiration of Avatar’s plot; such romantic plots require a simple identification between audience and character, and good romantic plots aim to inspire and morally reform the members of the audience by means of that identification.

We might also consider Edward Said’s discussion of discourse in his classic book Orientalism and how the discourses of anthropology, biology, and other sciences all operated to give the colonizer expert knowledge of the exploited other and encouraged the colonizer to exagerrate the differences between himself and the other in ways that were dehumanizing, racist, and simply inaccurate. One of the things I appreciate about Avatar is that it included the ambivalent role of the scientist in the colonial project. Although the scientist is sympathetic to the Na’vi and even takes their side, it is precisely her knowledge and science that is used by the greedy bad guys and gives them the tools for how to win against the Na’vi.

But although the movie explores the problematic position of science, here the movie seems to repeat a lot of the biases of such colonial scientific discourse. Such discourse represented (and still represents) indigenous people as nature people, incapable of progress or development. Such representations were always used by the colonizer as the rationale for why it was OK (in the name of progress) to subdue them. Interestingly, Native Americans and environmentalists have turned that “nature people” image to their own advantage and used it as a tool for critiquing the environmentally destructive practices of capitalist imperialism. Although there are many debates about this among indigenous communities, many Native Americans have gladly identified with that image. In effect some Native American and postcolonial theorists have exploited the incoherence of colonialist ideologies and discourses that value pristine nature and human liberty but destroy them anyway.

What is perhaps most unrealistic about the movie is the strategies of the colonizers. In the movie, the evil military commander just wants to blow up the Na’vi, and so all the Na’vi unite to fight back. But historically, empires usually used a divide-and-conquer strategy. Years before any formal conquest took place, merchant colonizers formed alliances with segments of the indigenous society and sowed the seeds of discord. Some of the indigenous actually benefitted (often temporarily) from these alliances. The political reality was never a simple binary of good and evil. After all, why would the Na’vi be such good warriors if they weren’t already fighting amongst themselves before the humans came? Hence, for postcolonial theorists, one of the most challenging problems was (and still is) how to unite people under the banner of a nation or form pan-national or pan-ethnic movements. For sure, Avatar simplifies this problem in a troubling way by allowing the white, male character to do the uniting after he tames the giant flying Toruk. But I don’t think we should so easily dismiss alliances between native and non-native cultures. The Trinidadian scholar C. L. R. James was very clear about the power of such alliances in his famous history of the Haitian revolution, as were Linebaugh and Rediker in their history of the revolutionary Atlantic. And theorists Negri and Hardt indicate that social movements today in the age of globalization are necessarily transnational and multiethnic. And for sure, most oppressed people know that they can’t defeat an empire by themselves and need allies, so it is a bit ridiculous for anyone to simply criticize Avatar for exploring the possibility of that cross-cultural alliance. At the end of the day, the movie does dramatize the important possibility of a colonizer learning, growing, and changing his mind. And according to this CNN article, it would seem that Avatar is, if anything, having a significant effect on people’s minds.

What Should I Do for Haiti, Addendum

Last Friday, I tried to give some advice for how best to donate money to Haiti. One of my points then was that we should talk and think before acting. The purpose of my addendum here is to continue that line of thinking and talking. Since last Friday, several people have e-mailed me some feedback and more has happened. First, several people e-mailed me confirmation that the organization Partners in Health is one of the most highly ranked charities worldwide for its integrity and efficiency. In other words, if you donate to them, the money actually goes to the right places. The very same evening that I wrote my post, Rachel Maddow [here] covered some of the same stuff that I did and interviewed Tracy Kidder about Partners in Health.

And similarly, on the same day, Naomi Klein on the public TV/radio program Democracy Now [here] also warned about the tendency of corporate-driven disaster relief efforts to re-engineer societies in sinister ways. So, basically, at the very moment I was citing her book The Shock Doctrine to make an argument about disaster relief in Haiti, she was herself on television saying the same thing (as I should have expected her to do.) But later this week (yesterday, here in the Huffington Post), she reported some good news that, because of public pressure, the IMF might be backing away from its tendency to use disasters to force countries to adopt neoliberal, market-fundamentalist economic policies. One example of such public pressure is The Nation article Klein mentions, and another is the ”No Shock Doctrine for Haiti” FaceBook group.

I haven’t yet seen anyone make the same point that I made about the philosopher Agamben, so perhaps I can at least claim some originality on that one.

On another note, on a list-serve for literature professors that I’m on, some are talking about donating money to Education International, a federation of teachers unions, which plans to support teachers and professors in Haiti. This seems to me to be a praiseworthy expression of global solidarity. I wonder if other international unions and professional associations have thought of such solidarity.

The support for Haiti has been astounding. Many corporations have donated quite a lot, as you can see here, and the cell-phone donating that I mentioned before has raised quite a lot of money, though it’s not always clear if the money is being used in the best way or if the effort is being coordinated as well as it should. It’s obviously a difficult situation, and I am quite ignorant about how it all works. On the one hand, I am impressed and pleased that people want to help. On the other hand, I am still worried that the American, corporate involvement in the relief effort has the potential to become a neo-colonial take-over of Haiti. But I say “potential” because I don’t think it has to be that way so long as the multinational corporations, U.S. government, the IMF, and American Red Cross don’t try to forcefully control the relief effort. (By the way, in my earlier post, I forgot to distinguish between the American Red Cross and the International Red Cross — the International is, in my opinion, the better organization.) I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater here, since these organizations do a lot of good work. But down the road, as the relief effort moves from the current state of emergency to the rebuilding stage, I think this is precisely why it might be good for university professors such as myself to support teachers in Haiti and likewise for international labor unions and professional associations to partner with their sibling Haitian civil society organizations. And the reason I think that is because such labor-orientated rebuilding will be necessary to counterbalance the corporate-orientated rebuilding we can expect to be the focus of the U.S. government, etc.

The Tragedy of Haiti’s Earthquake: What Should I Do?

One of the questions I’ve noticed a lot of people raising on FaceBook and various list-seves is where to donate money to help people in Haiti who have suffered so terribly from the recent earthquate. Oxfam… Red Cross… Doctors without Borders… Partners in Health… Madre… Haiti Action??? It’s a hard decision, and although the urgency of the situation seems to demand that one act quickly, I think it is also wise to pause and act thoughtfully. As the theorist Slavoj Zizek famously and cleverly remarked about the global financial crisis in the October 10, 2008 issue of the London Review of Books, “don’t just do something — talk!”

For instance, the new fad in the age of iPhones and Twitter is to donate money by cell phone, and this would seem to be fast, but apparently, cell phone donations have to go through one’s cell phone provider, and hence the money takes almost 90 days to get to its destination. For large organizations, such as the Red Cross, the timing of donations actually doesn’t matter that much, because of the way their annual budgets work. They use their financial reserves to respond immediately to disasters, and any donations given at the time might actually be put in savings in preparation for a future disaster or simply used to settle accounts at the end of the fiscal year. (This, of course, frustrates people who only want to donate to specific causes and want to know exactly what their money is going to.) So, for large organizations, while it is important for them to act quickly to address the problems on the ground as soon as possible, it is not so important that we the donors act quite so quickly. So, we have time to time to heed Zizek’s words and talk this out before acting.

Most organizations would prefer to devote money to minimize the effects of disasters before they happen by building good infrastructure rather than responding to the disasters after they happen. Thanks to one of my students who wrote a wonderful research paper about the psychology of philanthropy, I learned that relief organizations are painfully aware that preventative efforts do not raise much money compared to response efforts. They want to behave one way, but the psychology of their donors directs them another way. Hence, the history and circumstances of a particular location can leave certain populations especially vulnerable. I won’t dwell on Haiti’s long and complicated history here, but in yesterday’s NY Times [here], the Pulitzer-prize-winning author of Mountains beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder intelligently alerts us to why Haiti has been so vulnerable and which disaster relief organizations have been more helpful than others.

He makes a point that I’ve also heard made elsewhere — that organizations that are already on the ground in Haiti and have been for a long time will probably be able to do a better job than a foreign organization coming in. They already know the people there and their circumstances. One such organization is Partners in Health, which has been actively working with communities and governtal agencies in Haiti for a long time and has an excellent reputation.

That said, I must admit that I do not know much about disaster relief organizations or the ethics of aid. I hope anyone reading this blog will volunteer some information and insight. But I do know that aid doesn’t always do what it purports to do.

In fact, sometimes relief organizations don’t always act in the best interests of the local people. Many people criticized George W. Bush for not responding fast enough or strongly enough to the Katrina hurricane or the Asian tsunami,  but his lack of haste and effort was not the only problem. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine (published in 2007) has revealed that the U.S. government (both Democrats and Republicans) has used natural disasters and relief efforts as tools for re-engineering entire communities to make them more accessible to American venture capital and corporate interests. One might argue against Klein that such development projects and private investment are ultimately good for the people of that location, but often such projects benefit only the wealthy minority of that community. In any case, one hopes that aid and relief will be knowledgeable and considerate of all the stakeholders there. And considering that the United States’s historical relationship to Haiti has been one of hostility, invasion, and constant meddling that has undermined the Haitian people’s own political will, it is probably worth keeping our eyes open to whether the United States will now finally do the right thing by Haiti.

In light of these concerns, I appreciated that Barack Obama said [here] that he plans to “partner” with not just with the Haitian people but also with the Haitian government (since whenever politicians say they only will ”help” “the people” what they often really mean is a specific political faction that is friendly to their own interests.) The word “partner” is significant, for sure, and gives me some hope, but I am sceptical, as I always am.

So, what to do? I suspect I will donate to Partners in Health, but  before I do that, as Zizek says, first we should talk. And I would also add to Zizek’s recommendation, we should keep our eyes open. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues in his book State of Exception (published in Italian in 2003 and translated into English in 2005) and as Klein demonstrates in Shock Doctrine, emergencies have a way of blinding people to ethical action. The emergency situation might lead us to believe that a less ethical option is so expedient, necessary, and/or urgent that it can’t even be discussed.

Immaterial Bowl Games

I have to admit, I’ve never been a “fan” of sports. I’ve always liked playing sports quite a bit, and I like watching some sports (football, basketball, and tennis are my favorites), but even as a kid I never cared enough to keep track of a team’s performance, a star athlete’s digits, or whatever. However, recently I have to wonder whether even the die-hard sports fanatics are questioning the proliferation of college bowl games. EagleBank Bowl? Little Caesars Pizza Bowl? Sports commentators joke about “toilet bowls” — their term for bowl games whose significance is laughable. But whatever the debates among sports commentators about the pageantry of bowl games and how we decide the number one team of the year, all this seems less interesting to me than the names of the bowl games, the changing nature of sponsorship, and what this suggests to me about the changing nature of our economy. My hypothesis is that the rise of immaterial bowl games reflects the rise of immaterial labor — note the pun.

For example, this morning I just watched the Capital One Bowl, which used to be called the Florida Citrus Bowl. As everyone knows, Florida’s economy, because of its climate, is based largely on citrus fruits. And as everyone knows, Capital One is one of the largest credit card companies (a.k.a. “consumer lending”). What people may not know is that Capital One was created as recently as 1988, and in the short span of a decade became a powerful enough company to sponsor one of the premiere bowl games. So what? What’s the difference? Well, the difference is a shift from a bowl named after an agricultural crop to a bowl named after a credit card. And this shift seems symptomatic of a larger economic shift from an economy based on efficient commodity production to an economy based on services.

The earlier economy is what (almost a century ago) theorist Antonio Gramsci called a “Fordist” economy after the innovations of Ford Motors, and today our economy based on financial services is sometimes referred to as a “post-Fordist” economy. Building upon the concept of “post-Fordism,” theorists Negri and Hardt made a big splash in 2000 with their book Empire that argued (among other things) that there has been a shift from material to immaterial labor. This “shift” does not mean that the production of actual material things is no longer important. Of course it still is. Rather, it means that services such as credit, finance, health care, etc. have become the hegemonic form of production that dominates. Think back to the 19th century during the “industrial revolution” when economists claimed that industrial production — i.e., the factory — had become the most important form of production. At the time, however, when people were first noticing this change in the makeup of their world, factories represented a relatively small amount of the economy. Most of the economy was still rural farms. Analogously, today is the same deal. While the economy may still be about commodities (food, clothes, cars, toys, etc.), the form that is emerging as a dominant form is immaterial. For example, as most car companies are well aware, they don’t make much profit off the production of automobiles. The real profit is in their financial services, insurance, and other services.

And so, in college football, we don’t have a General Motors bowl, Ford bowl, or Toyota bowl. Rather, since 1999 (the year before Negri and Hardt’s book was published), we have a GMAC Bowl — GMAC basically being the bank that provides financial services for General Motors. And following this trend towards immaterial global capitalism, some of the most recent additions to college football include the EagleBank Bowl, Meineke Car Care Bowl, Humanitarian Bowl, and International Bowl. I’m surprised there isn’t a bowl named after a health insurance company. In the near future, will there be a bowl game named after an unregulated hedge fund?

I’d be curious if someone has ever written a “cultural studies” history of the bowl game. What might that history look like? The first bowl game was the Rose Bowl begun way back in 1902 to celebrate East-West rivalry. This bowl was symptomatic of the rise of California as an economic power after the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Most of the other major bowl games emerged during the Great Depression or right after World War II — Orange Bowl (1935), Sugar Bowl (1935), Cotton Bowl (1937), Gator Bowl (1946), Citrus Bowl (1947). One might speculate about why bowl games were created during the devastation of the Great Depression and (ironically) the Dust Bowl. My guess is bread and circus for the poor and a nice patriotic stimulus to the economy. Obviously, the names of these bowls all suggest the warm climate in which they are located, since nobody wants to play a bowl game in the snow, and that’s why there aren’t bowl games reflecting the identities of northern climates (e.g., corn, wheat, and steel bowls), though it doesn’t explain why there isn’t a rice or indigo bowl. (South Carolina missed an opportunity there.) Significantly, for the point of my blog, the names of bowls generally tend to suggest the agricultural product associated with that climate.

By the 1960s, this was no longer the case. Certainly, the invention of television had something to do with the rising importance of bowl games, and so we have more TV-oriented names such as the Liberty Bowl (1959), Fiesta Bowl (1971), Holiday Bowl (1978), and Hall of Fame Bowl (1986).

If the 1960s was about television, the post-1990 era is about globalization, immaterial labor, and life-style branding, so we have the creation of the Chick-Fil-A Bowl (formerly the Peach Bowl), Champs Bowl (formerly the Tangerine Bowl),  Outback Bowl (formerly the Hall of Fame Bowl), PapaJohns.com Bowl, and Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl. Noticeably all of these are named after popular brands of food services rather than actual food. In addition to the food services bowls, credit card bowl, and the Meineke Car Care Bowl mentioned above, there is also the MAACO Bowl Las Vegas (another car services company) and the Insight Bowl (information technology services.) In other words, the shift is from things to services — what Negri and Hardt conceptualize as the shift to immaterial labor. In addition, I think we can see evidence of what Naomi Klein famously argued in her book No Logo (published in 2000), that the 1990s saw the rise of the “brand.” In other words, agreeing with Negri and Hardt’s thesis about immaterial labor, what Klein notices is the rise of branding and life-style management alongside the outsourcing of industrial production to third-world nations.

But so what? Is this a bad thing? That’s a question for another day, and I don’t know enough about the sports world, because as I mentioned earlier, I don’t really care about it. But as many sports commentators have lamented on ESPN (which I have to watch when I use the gym at my school), the changes in corporate sponsorship have created a cultural dynamic that is bad for players, bad for coaches, and bad for fans. In sum, from what I gather from listening intermittently to the ESPN sports commentators, it has made the game worse, not better. But how were bowl games sponsored before? Who was in control and who is in control now? I don’t know, which is why I really think somebody should write a theoretically and economically informed “Cultural History of the Bowl Game.”

Going Blind

One of the bummers about being a young, not-yet-tenured professor is that my reading is so circumscribed by my research projects, editorial work, service to my university, and teaching that I have little time to venture out into the rest of the wide literary world. If you’ve been reading my blog this past year, you’ll recall posts about Ethiopian history, the webzine Ogina, my faculty trip to Kenya, and reflections on teaching composition — all of which connect to my professional concerns. In some ways, academia is the intentional practice of tunnel vision, if you’ll excuse my metaphor. But this vacation, in addition to my research and preparation for next semester’s classes, I set aside a few books to read for pleasure: the novel Real World by Natsuo Kirino, the novel Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, the philosophy Multitude: between Innovation and Negation by Paolo Virno (which I promise to blog about soon), and the memoir Going Blind by Mara Faulkner, OSB. Today I’m going to blog briefly about Going Blind, which I just finished reading this morning during breakfast and which I think other readers of this blog might want to pick up before the winter vacation ends.

At first sight (again, please excuse my metaphors), Faulkner’s book is a memoir about her father and about her family’s silence regarding the gradual onset of blindness that they all saw happening to their father and that transformed their lives. The book begins, “Blindness was my father’s blind spot, and it became my family’s and mine, the word we didn’t dare say.” But as Faulkner says in interviews about her book [here, here, and here], it is more than just a memoir. Really, it’s a collection of essays — or meditations — on the concept of blindness, and each chapter is a thoroughly researched investigation into various topics such as the Great Famine in Ireland that brought her family to America, the policies of the U.S. government that devastated Native American communities around her home town in North Dakota, the nearby internment camp for Japanese and Germans during World War II, representations of blind people in the media, gender roles, the metaphor of blindness in Christian theology, and the nature of language itself.

The book is as wide-ranging as it is introspective, and Faulkner is as courageous in her questioning of the world as she is in her questioning of her self. As a result of her creative investigations, Faulkner notes how much her own understanding of blindness changed over the course of researching and writing it. In her final chapter she writes, “When I look back on my early notes for the book, I’m shocked at their narrowness and inaccuracy. For there, in all their shameful glory, are most of the patronizing and damaging misconceptions, stereotypes, and bad attitudes I’ve tried to dismantle in these chapters.” As I read her book, I felt like I was learning along with her, learning to dismantle and revise not only my own misconceptions about blindness but also how I see the world.

I wonder if her careful deconstruction of blindness might not illustrate some of theorist Paul De Man’s arguments in his book Blindness and Insight. There, De Man asserts that the insight of both literature and literary criticism depends in part upon its own tunnel vision and remains blind to the possibility of a literary text beyond the purview of its methodological orientation. Similar to Faulkner’s observation in the lines I quoted above about her own writing process, De Man notes that the final insight of a literary work in some ways seeks to negate (or dismantle) its own starting point, a starting point which may have been simply confusion and frustration. Like both Faulkner and De Man, I hope to instill in my students a constant questioning of all their assumptions and all conceptualizations of the world and of literature — noting the paradox that a concept can simultaneously lead both to insight and to blindness. I think one of the strengths of Going Blind is that, although it may dismantle its own starting point, it consciously and critically traces its own lines of inquiry so we as readers can see the many possible starting points and many possible destinations of the memoir.

There’s a lot to say about these traces. In the introductory chapter, Mara Faulkner draws upon theorist Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “infinity of traces history leaves on the psyche” so that for anyone writing a memoir “it is imperative at the outset to compile an inventory of history’s traces.” In other words, history affects us all whether we know it or not. For instance, Faulkner’s family was willfully blind to its own condition; the Irish were willfully silent about the realities of the Great Famine; and most Americans were (and still are) willfully ignorant about the effects of government policy on Native Americans. All of these events affect who we are today, and our repression of our memory of their reality produces what psychoanalytic theorists call symptoms. As Going Blind brilliantly shows, trauma can stay with us in unpredictable, unconscious ways.

Another literary theorist, Raymond Williams, has focused on something he calls “structures of feeling,” which — agreeing with Gramsci’s political theory — are organized not only by ideology but also by historical traces and habits of mind. The way we feel about the world might be partly determined by dominant (or hegemonic) ideologies and socio-economic structures, but only partly, as there are also residual structures and cultural forces in play (not to mention the fundamental indeterminacy of the human spirit.) For example, although today we live in a democratic nation, it is obvious that fantasies about hereditary monarchy still play a powerful role in how we as Americans feel about politics (e.g., the Kennedy and Bush dynasties, as well as the popularity of The Lord of the Rings and many King Arthur movies. The Star Wars movies are a perfect example of how monarchical and democratic feelings combine in nonsensical ways.) Monarchy remains a residual political form even if representative, republican democracy is the dominant one. In Mara Faulkner’s book, she discerns how the social habits that emerged among the Irish as a response to British imperialism over a century ago still affect how the members of her family respond to the mundane circumstances of everyday life today.

In some ways, Going Blind is as much a work of theoretically informed  “cultural studies” as it is a memoir, although an actual “theorist” is mentioned only once in the entire book (in the sentence about Gramsci’s traces that I quoted above.) I believe this book will have a lot to offer the emerging new scholarly field of “disability studies” and ought to be read alongside other works that blend the genre of memoir with the genres of essay and cultural studies such as Life as We Know It by Michael Bérubé about raising a child with Down’s syndrome. As a “theory teacher” I think Going Blind has a lot to offer the teaching of theory as well (as I’ve tried to indicate in this blog post.)

My only criticism of Going Blind is its lack of attention to public policy on blindness. While I don’t expect a single book to do everything, and Mara Faulkner references numerous other books on blindness, some of which do focus on policy issues, I did notice a disconnect. Its chapters on the Great Famine, Native Americans, German-Russians, and Japanese internment camps all rigorously analyze the often sinister role of government policy alongside the socially irresponsible “blindness” that allowed that policy to happen. But what about the government’s policy on blindness? This is absent, and it is important. For example, when I was a graduate student, I did some organizing for the graduate student labor union, and in doing this, I encountered another graduate student getting his Ph.D. in chemistry who was blind. He collaborated with the union because he felt the union could put pressure on the university to address the concerns of blind students — often meaning something as simple as putting Braille on things such as the on-campus ATM machine. I remember joining this student in solidarity by attending his “bowling for the blind” in which several blind graduate students and several sighted graduate students went bowling together, an event that was covered on the nightly news. While the book Going Blind deftly analyzes other policy issues and even more deftly deconstructs our misconceptions about blindness, it is curiously blind to the very specific, mundane, everyday realities for blind people that are created by the often “blind” policies of our democratically elected government. Democracy itself is essentially a practice of willful blindness (i.e., the decision of a majority party blinding itself to the vast multiplicity of perspectives of its many stakeholders such as labor unions and associations for the blind.) Going Blind is also “blind” to some of the practical ways (e.g., labor unions) that different kinds of people (e.g., blind and sighted, Indian and European) might form productive political alliances beyond identity, beyond personal relationships, and beyond an individual’s intuitions of transcendent justice.

But that said, the book provides its readers with all the conceptual tools for making those connections on their own.

On a completely different note, Going Blind was a timely read for me, because just a couple days ago I went to see Pedro Almodovar’s latest movie Broken Embraces, starring Penelope Cruz, and its main character just so happens to be a writer-director whose sudden blindness leads him to recreate himself, eventually see his past through someone else’s eyes, and “revise” one of his films. Also, the erotic opening scene of the movie (with him very stylishly seducing a young woman) immediately defies the usual stereotypes of middle-aged blind men. (A suggestion for readers of this blog: if you haven’t seen an Almodovar film before, I suggest watching his classic Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown before going to the theater to watch this new one.)

Volvo, Ford, Zhejiang Geely

Ten years ago, in 1999, one of the largest American car manufacturers, Ford Motors, bought one of the largest Swedish car manufacturers, Volvo. But things haven’t gone so well for Volvo since then… or for Ford… so now Ford, according to the newspapers [here and here],  is selling off Volvo to the Chinese company, Zhejiang Geely. And if you’re a globalization theory freak (like I am), then you’re thinking, “oooh, that’s globalization, wowee zowee.” And that darling globalization columnist/cheerleader for the NY Times Thomas Friedman is doing a little jig, singing, “See? See [here]? I told you so! I told you so! It’s a flat world after all.”

I got curious about the Geely Holding Group that owns the car manufacturer. According to the Wall Street Journal [here], they were created in 1986, are based in Hangzhou, and their publicist is the Brunswick Group, based in London. According to a NY Times blog [here], Geely means “lucky” in Chinese and has the backing of Chinese banks, as well as a lot of investment from the famous bank holding group Goldman Sachs, based in New York. Apparently, they’re selling quite a lot of nifty cars these days, and that is pretty dang nifty… apparently….

one of Zhejiang Geely's cars

But BUT BUT, according to its own website, the automobile company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and its company structure includes 17.9% ownership by the TOSCAfund, 58% by Proper Glory, and only 24.1% by shareholders. The TOSCAfund, according to its own website, most of which is inaccessible without a password, is a British company that mostly engages in “unregulated collective investment” (i.e., a hedge fund.)… …Oh, by the way, the villain of the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace (which I’ve blogged about [here] before) has his secret meeting at a performance of the opera La Tosca by Puccini… …As for the Proper Glory Holding Company, apparently based in the Virgin Islands, I haven’t been able to find much about it on the internet. Both TOSCA and Proper Glory seem to be somewhat inaccessible to the general public and lacking in transparency, as the Volvo union discovered [here]. The investment bank JP Morgan was involved in Proper Glory’s attaining a controlling stake in Geely according to Reuters [here]. I’m sure there’s more, but it’s hard to find out who these people really are.

So, after about half an hour of a little digging with our trusty friend Google, this is what I found, and so, apparently, it’s pretty easy to go much deeper than the reporting of the Wall Street Journal, and it’s even easier to reveal something more complex than anything that that “flathead” idiot Friedman ever observed in his bestselling novel, uh… er… I mean, book.

Now what should we do with this information? It’s creepy and weird and hard to make sense of, but oughtn’t we be able to come up with a better, more persuasive theory of globalization than Friedman? Unfortunately, truth isn’t always the same as persuasion… but still….

Transnational Communities, Multi-Ethnic Literature, and the New Issue of Ogina

I’m happy to report that the fourth issue of Ogina: Oromo Arts in Diaspora has been released on the internet just in time for Christmas. The new issue almost instantly got some play on Gadaa.com [here] and [here]. It kinda rocks.

And as always, it reminds me of some theoretical questions. One of the things in this issue is a review of Dinaw Mengestu’s recent novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. I’ve taught this novel a few times in my classes, and as far as I know, the review in Ogina is the only one that says anything critical about it. Why is that? Why has no other magazine or newspaper criticized that novel?

It’s impossible to say for certain why. For one thing, it is a really well-written novel, which is why it has won awards, and consequently reviewers will tend to praise it. Mengestu has got some skills. For another, there are very few African immigrants publishing novels with the major publishing companies, and so, at this particular moment of literary history, reviewers want to nurture this talent, not squash it. But I think the real reason has to do with the critical perspective and the location of the reception. Since the novel was published by one the largest British-American publishing companies, most of the reviews likewise take place in the mainstream American and English media, so for them, this is an immigrant story — contributing to the diversity of these nations and supported institutionally by a variety of academic associations including MELUS and MESEA. From this perspective, Mengestu’s novel is superb, despite a few aspects of the plot that are a bit improbable (aspects that, as the Ogina editors point out in their review, the predominently middle-class readership might not notice.)

But Ogina has a different critical perspective than the mainstream media and academic institutions of the United States and Europe. Its perspective comes from a transnational politics — Oromos maintaining their affiliation with Oromos around the world and back home in Ethiopia (or, in Oromia as they might say.) Many of the contributors were born in the Oromia region. So, its review of a novel published by a major British-American publishing house (Penguin) appears alongside interviews of Oromo pop-musicians, artworks both traditional and contemporary, poetry in the Oromo language, and an essay about how art is a tool for political resistance. The difference between a review appearing in the NY Times and one appearing in an Oromo publication is pretty obvious. For a webzine like Ogina, art is not just about some multicultural identity politics; rather, as Demitu Argo’s essay about resistance intelligently discusses, it’s about struggle — a struggle that is sometimes violent.

There is quite a lot more to say about these different perspectives, and I have blogged about them elsewhere [here]. There is especially more to say about the question of violence. But I defer both of these questions to another time.

Africa in Copenhagen for Climate Change

As I’m sure all the readers of my blog are already well aware, the United Nations Climate Change Conference has been going on for the past week in Copenhagen. Interestingly, the representative of the African Union is the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi. A lot of people are critical of this choice because of Meles’s poor record on both human rights and the environment.

For instance, journalist Douglass McGill in his YouTube video: 

In addition, yesterday, the Oromo Studies Association sent an open letter to the UN conference detailing this record, including the destruction of Lake Koka and the burning of the Bale forest.

From the perspective of cultural theory (i.e., my blog), two things about all of this interest me. One is the choice of Meles to represent Africa rather than the leader of a country that is more stable and democratic (such as maybe Ghana, Senegal, Botswana, or Tanzania.) Wouldn’t it be preferable to choose a leader who has successfully tackled climate issues? Perhaps the choice of Meles was motivated by the location of the African Union headquarters in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa. But I want to assert that Ethiopia’s place as the “representative of Africa” has a longer literary history than the African Union’s political history, as scholars such as John Cullen Gruesser and Wilson Jeremiah Moses have carefully demonstrated. Consider Alice Walker’s joke in her novel, The Color Purple: “Everyone has such high hopes for what can be done in Africa. Over the pulpit is a saying: Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands to God. Think what it means that Ethiopia is Africa.” Her book reflects a long tradition within black churches in the United States, Caribbean, and West Africa — a tradition whose literary origin is the passage that Walker quotes from Psalms 68. Because of Ethiopia’s unique relationship to the Greek classics and the Christian Bible, and because it was the only African country never to be fully colonized by Europe (though it was colonized, just not fully), it has become the spiritual representative of pan-African aspirations. Ironically and paradoxically, it is precisely because of Ethiopia’s exceptional relationship to a European literary tradition that it gains its representative status on behalf of Africa.

The second interesting thing is the question of Africa’s voice in a process dominated by the United States and Europe. Many fear that Meles will sabatoge the conference by claiming that Africa’s voice is not being heard. For instance, recently he said [here], “If Copenhagen is going to be about an agreement that simply rides roughshod over Africa, then we will try to scuttle it, and I think we have reasonable assurance we can scuttle it if our concerns are not addressed.” Noticeably, Meles seeks support for his position from China and India, perhaps because these two countries have recently begun to invest in various economic projects in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa. On the one hand, I think Meles has a reasonable point that the major global institutions such as the UN, IMF, World Bank, and WTO have tended to force African nations to submit to agendas that serve the interests of the United States and Europe. I think this point should be taken seriously. But on the other hand, I suspect that Meles is using that point as an alibi, for if anything, his scuttling of the conference is perhaps encouraged by multinational corporations based in the U.S., Europe, China, and India who want to continue exploiting the resources and people of Africa with little environmental oversight.  In other words, in the name of African rights, Meles ultimately serves the interests of global corporations, and not actual Africans. This, I think, is the real question of Meles as a “representative.” If he comes from a country whose democratic institutions are totally corrupt and whose government is violently oppressive, then whom is he really representing?

I hope all of my patient readers notice that the first thing that I discussed is the relationship between literary representation and political representation (Ethiopia’s symbolic status on the world stage) and the second thing I discussed is the relationship between political representation and global economics. Hence, the theoretical question that guides my inquiry is the relationship among literature, governance, and business.

The Ideology of Hollywood Remakes

For the spring semester of 2011, I’ve been asked to teach an introductory undergraduate class on film, and what I’m imagining is teaching the class by looking at various remakes. My idea is that the students can learn to critique film by discerning the subtle (or not-so-subtle) differences between two versions of the same story. So, if anyone has any suggestions for movies I might use, please let me know.

For instance, Hairspray originally was a witty, satirical, transgressive movie directed by John Waters in 1988. Then it was made into a Broadway musical in 2002, and then into a new movie in 2007. What struck me when I watched both the 1988 and the 2007 movies back-to-back is that the original, independently-made movie was satirical and the big-budget, Hollywood re-make was sentimental. The changes in the story were often very slight — just a sentence or two deleted here, a scene added there, a different choreography for some of the dances and songs – but the effect of these slight changes in tone and content was that the original was transgressive, smart, and interesting while the remake was conservative, confused, and boring. Something similar could be said about the new version of Shaft starring Samuel Jackson that came out in 2000 compared to the original Shaft that came out in 1971. The original is smart; the remake is stupid.

One might ask, “Are remakes always worse? Are they always conservative versions of earlier progressive or transgressive stories?” It would seem so, because I can’t think of an exception . . . except for the Cohen brother’s movie version of No Country for Old Men, which is more witty and less racist than the novel it’s based upon. Perhaps what’s more interesting than remakes are homages or new films that deconstruct old genres. For instance, Quentin Terantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) is a wonderful homage to the career of Pam Grier and her early 1970s films Coffee, Foxy Brown, and Sheba, Baby. I’m glad he didn’t simply remake an old film but instead created an entirely new film with more mature characters. Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1968) is a brilliant deconstruction of the classic western that quotes entire scenes from earlier films but does so in a way that reverses their meaning (or, “flips the script.”)

Recently, I just taught the movie Real Women Have Curves (2002) alongside the play of the same title by Josefina Lopez that it’s based upon. The difference between the two is striking and indicates the power of Hollywood’s conservative ideology. The play is set in a maquiladora in East Los Angeles in 1987 immediately following President Ronald Reagan’s new immigration reforms that incited racist violence against Latinos. The characters are the women who work there, including the owner (Estella), her mother (Carmen), and her younger sister (Ana) as well as Pancha and Rosali. Estella is clearly being exploited by the powerful company for whom she makes expenses dresses and is afraid to confront the company for fear that it will retaliate by getting her deported. Ana is hoping to go to college the next year. At the beginning of the play, Ana’s progressive feminism and sense of sexual independence conflicts with the conservative sensibilities of the older women, but by the end of the play, they all learn from each other and come together in solidarity. They decide to pool their resources and start their own business in the manner that has become very fashionable these days after Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace prize for his highly successful work on microfinance. (Note that artists such as Josefina Lopez and progressive activists were imagining such microfinance projects many years before the mainstream community of economists and Pope Benedict XVI finally appreciated Yunus’s work.)

The movie, on the other hand, focuses almost entirely on the character of Ana, her frustration at working in the “sweatshop,” and her desire to go to Columbia University in New York. Cut entirely from the movie are the political issue of undocumented workers and the solidarity of the women. Added to the movie are Ana’s romance with a wealthy white boy from Beverly Hills, the efforts of her teacher to help her get into college, and the doting love of her father and grandfather. Noticeably, while in the play, all of the women come together in solidarity, in the movie Ana’s relationship to all the women (including her mother) is outright hostile. Instead, Ana is repeatedly helped by the men in her life who give her money, appreciate her appearance even though she is a little plump, and call her their “gold” (suggesting a creepy equivalence between her person and money.) While the play carefully explores different versions of feminism (liberal feminism, working-class feminism, and ethnic feminism), the movie is ideologically patriarchal – sneakily slipping its paternalistic changes and additions into a formerly feminist plot.

In addition, while the play celebrates community, the movie champions the ideology of individualism. The final scene of the play is the women creating their new factory together. In contrast, in the movie, the women all disperse, and the final scene is Ana leaving her family behind for bright lights of New York City.

Certainly, Hollywood’s decisions to change the story so much are in part due to its desire to appeal to a broad, movie-going teenage audience. As one of my students suggested quite correctly, the average teenager in America would probably relate more to Ana’s alienation from her family, her dating for the first time, and her going to college than he or she could relate to solidarity among factory workers. But, in my view, this is precisely how ideology works. Why wouldn’t a movie about a community of workers be more fun to watch than a movie about teen angst? For example, as Jonathan Kim says in this YouTube restrospect on the 1979 movie Norma Rae, why hasn’t there been a pro-union movie for the past twenty or thirty years?

Norma Rae won awards, as have movies such as Erin Brocovitch and North Country, so apparently people did (and still do) find this kind of story interesting. Personally, I find movies about resistance to oppression much more interesting than movies about embittered teens. Might we ask (as the movie Josie and the Pussycats does) whether young teens today have been brainwashed by a conservative Hollywood establishment about what they should enjoy? Might we ask whether the choices to change this film were not just about ticket sales (since it’s very likely that the movie would have made more money in the long term if it had tackled the tough questions), but were instead ideological?