Interracial Marriage, Chasing the Empty Balloon

I’m guessing that everyone who reads this blog is aware of two news stories from yesterday: the one that dominated the television networks for hours and hours about the boy who turned out not to be in the balloon floating 7000 above the earth, and the other that dominated the alternative internet sites about the judge in Louisiana whose policy it is to deny interracial couples a marriage license. My guess is that most would see these two stories as opposites — one the kind of hyped bizarre-ness common on Fox News, the other the serious, social issue addressed by the progressive Hungtington Post. But are they really so different? 

This morning, NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show’s criticism of the balloon-boy episode was predictable — the oft-repeated criticism that networks devote hours and hours of air time and labor to this absurd story and ignore all the important news such as in-depth analysis of the American economy or the on-going crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I’ve written about this standard lament about journalism before [here]. Of course, nobody would be saying this if it turned out that the boy actually were in the balloon and died. It’s only the emptiness of the balloon that symbolizes the emptiness (and “hot air”) of the stories that the media tends to chase and the consuming public tends to eagerly follow. And who can blame the networks since their ratings went up as all of America together chased this empty balloon? Hipper-than-thou indie-rockers everywhere must be penning lyrics about it as I write this.

In contrast, the websites about the racist judge all express almost unanimous outrage that something like this could still be happening in 21st century America. One can imagine someone saying that this is the kind of important news that the TV networks should be covering instead of the balloon boy. And one can also imagine Northerners muttering under their breath the standard stereotypes about the racist South – a stereotype that my fellow blogger Dr. J has worked hard [here] to complicate and dispell. After all, in support of Dr. J, it’s clear from the Associated Press report that Louisianans themselves are just as outraged at this judge as other people in the country. And where was the national outrage when swastikas appeared in the dormitories of St. Cloud State U. in Minnesota or the lives of black student leaders were verbally threatened at Penn State?

The issue of race and racism in American continues to be important, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Being in an interracial relationship myself, this is something I care about. But the media does not really cover race – even when it pretends to cover it. Instead, it chases empty balloons, easy appeals to the mass public by presenting the judge whose extreme racism we can all define ourselves against. What I want to point out here is that the Associated Press never mentions what legal precedent the judge might be applying to this case. In the judge’s own mind, his policy is not only reasonable but also supported by the local black community. And we probably ought to assume that the judge — being a judge – had some legal principle in mind. Based on the judge’s answers to the journalist’s inquiry, my guess is that he is applying the “best interest of the child” rule that guides all no-fault divorce cases, and I will speak more about that in a moment.

In my opinion, the journalist should have mentioned what legal standard was being applied here, but doing so would have forced us to think about the legal system at large rather than just the racism of the individual judge. It always surprises me when journalists fail to do their homework, though I suppose it shouldn’t. I remember being interviewed once, and I discovered that the journalist only wanted a one-sentence statement of how I felt about the issue. I told the journalist that if he just looked at this publicly available website he could find all the documents and evidence he needed to expose the truth about the situation he was covering. He said he wasn’t interested in that, just in my feeling. He was obviously a young journalist, just a year out of college, so I pressed him why, and he said that’s what he learned in journalism school — to find the human angle…. the empty balloon.

Back to the “best interest of the child” rule. Although the judge is clearly applying that rule innappropriately, it is a rule that (when appropriately applied) might seem perfectly reasonable to everyone. In the case of divorce, the judge has to decide which parent the child should be with, and so the judge generally decides what’s in the best interest of the child. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? But, as Jane Juffer discusses in great detail in chapter five of her book Single Mother: The Emergence of a Domestic Intellectual (2006), feminist lawyers have for years challenged the rationality of this rule by demonstrating how “best-interest” is a culturally constructed notion that tends to be merged with notions of what’s normal. In other words, judges everywhere have tended to use this rule to discriminate against ambitious women, women in interracial relationships, homosexuals, and even women who choose to live in cooperative arrangements rather than in the “normal” nuclear arrangement with the white picket fence and dog in the back yard. The belief that guides this rule is that “normal” is better for the child, and lawyers can easily find simplistic sociological and psychological studies to back them up. In such studies, other sociologists and legal scholars have discerned an inherent bias — that the very standard of “normalcy” is the stumbling block for parents and couples, not anything unnatural about their alternative choices. More methodologically rigorous sociological and psychological studies present a more complex picture and suggest alternatives to a narrowly defined normalcy. We should be thinking critically about how to change our society and live better lives, not just thinking pragmatically about how to follow the given cultural codes, which remain racist as well as nuclear and individualistic. And while the judge appeals to his “black friends” who he claims agree with his policy, we should have the courage to (1) challenge his black friends for buying into a racist culture and (2) recognize the diversity of voices and successful lifestyles within any local community. Such standards of normalcy usually reign (hegemonically) wherever we are, especially within the liberal, academic community that imagines itself to be more open but in reality is not.

My point here is that the story about the racist judge and the balloon boy are both empty balloons that trigger emotions and may even address an important issue but ultimately allow us to avoid dealing honestly with our own anxieties and with the systemic injustices within our society.

Lone Star / No Country for Old Men

I just showed Lone Star, written and directed by John Sayles, to my English class. I remember when I first watched it in the movie theater in 1996, back when I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler detective novels. Back then, two things about the movie really struck me. First, what a cool idea it is to use the noir detective genre to explore the history of race relations. After watching the movie, I began to read African-American detective novelists Walter Mosley and Barbara Neely, who also do this really well. Second, that Elizabeth Peña is one of the sexiest actresses of all time. (Hey now — I know this is a theory-teacher blog, but I’m just saying what I was thinking as a young guy thirteen years ago.)

That was 1996, but last year, as a teacher, I was reminded of Lone Star because the Cohen brothers’ movie No Country for Old Men won so many Academy Awards then. And here’s why I can’t help but make the connection between the two movies, and why I can’t help but think Lone Star is the movie that most clearly demonstrates what a load of crap No Country is. Both movies are about the Texas-Mexico border. Both movies can be categorized as noir. (Noir is usually defined as hardboiled and morally ambiguous crime fiction.) Both movies feature a supernaturally evil villain. Both movies were nominated for a lot of awards. 

But those similarities make the differences all the more striking. Lone Star actually developes white, black, and Hispanic characters in some depth, whereas in No Country, the Hispanic characters hardly speak at all, which is kind of messed up considering that its main character Llewelyn Moss spends some time across the Mexican border. In other words, in No Country, Hispanic characters are more symbolic than real, and the movie is somewhat racist in the way that, symbolically, their presence in the story is always associated with drugs, violence, and the moral degredation of society. In contrast, as one of my students pointed out in class a couple days ago, Lone Star actually has black and Hispanic poeple in it, who talk and think like real people and whose lives are cross-culturally entangled the way real peoples’ lives are — in other words, they aren’t some assinine Hollywood stereotype or a plot device or shorthand symbol for violence. You can tell Sayles put a lot of thought into his movie  (as you can see his interview about it [here].) To put it another way, we come away from watching Lone Star with a better understanding of the Texas-Mexico border than we came in with, but we come away from No Country with a worse understanding than we came in with.

Second, Lone Star features many conversations among characters of different backgrounds (not just cultural backgrounds, but also professional backgrounds) and uses the cinematic form of the noir detective story to bring their inter-connectedness to the surface. In contrast, the only lengthy conversations we see in No Country are either between a couple of old, white sheriffs moaning about the good old days or between the psychopathic killer and his victims. While the noir structure of Lone Star encourages us to develop a more complex ethical vision, the noir structure of No Country merely excites and titilates us. Now, against my argument, I suppose someone might point out that the absurdity of No Country — along with its unresolved, troubling ending – deconstructs our nostalgic sense of law and order, and I would grant that that’s true… but so what?

Finally, the evil villain in Lone Star is the white sheriff who stands in as a symbolic figure for the systemic violence of racism and who must be overthrown by a collaboration among black, white, and Hispanic characters, but the evil villain in No Country is an unbelievably omniscient psychopath who stands in as a symbolic figure for the arbitrary randomness and senselessness of criminal violence. Curiously, this villain’s ethnicity is vague — all we know is that he is somehow foreign, a foreigness which is used by the Cohen brothers to augment his evilness. It is curious that a character who is meant to symbolize the monstrosity of pure evil has to be not just somehow foreign, but indeterminately foreign.

In my view, John Sayles is one of the most ethical writer-directors of all time, and many actresses and actors have said they love acting in his movies because they feel like they are performing real characters. Especially women have noted that his female characters actually have some depth and aren’t just a projection of a male writer/director’s fantasy about, desire for, or fear of women. This is especially true in his beautiful movie, Casa de los Babys. To be fair to the Cohen brothers, most of the time, I think they also do a wonderful job in their movies, just not in this one. 

But here of course is the kicker. While Lone Star was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, it didn’t win. In contrast, No Country was the Cohen brothers’s most successful film of their careers, nominated for eight Academy awards with four wins, including best screenplay even though the movie was merely adapted from the novel. (And if you’ve read the novel, which I have, you’ll see that the Cohen brothers didn’t do much with the story. Their cinematography was excellent, for sure, but best screenplay?) In other words, the Academy Awards was stupid and unethical in 2008 just as it was in 2009 for giving all the awards to Slumdog Millionaire. (About that movie, see my blog post [here], and also go to your local Barnes & Nobel or Borders bookstore and get the current issue (#78) of CineAction, which features a terrific analysis of Slumdog… as well as, I’m not too modest to mention, my own essay about James Bond, which was originally conceived in this very blog!) However, in spite of the lameness of the Academy Awards, I won’t despair because all of the critial and scholarly essays that continue to be published about Lone Star assures me that it will endur as a classic, while No Country will fade as a cinematic novelty.

Jessye Norman, The Roots, and Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama

Jessye Norman

After we read a couple of Langston Hughes’s poems in class last week, one of my students told me about this project to musically perform Hughes’s book Ask Your Mama, and it looked pretty cool, so I thought I’d post it up on my blog and say a few words. Hughes always meant this poem to be performed with music and even provided musical directions, but he died before it could happen. This year, opera singer Jessye Norman teamed up with composer Laura Karpman to do it. Among many others, they invited members from the hip hop group The Roots, whose artistry is well-known for pushing hip hop to higher aesthetic, musical, and intellectual levels. This website here that my student e-mailed me includes some of the recordings along with several interviews — one with Roots’s drummer Questlove — that you can listen to. And here’s a promotional video:

Questlove of The Roots

As Questlove points out, this project reminds us of something that hip hop has always foregrounded — the fact that literature, music, pop culture, political activism, and community are not so distinct as we often imagine them. Especially in the literature classroom, students seem to expect literature to be a purely textual and serious thing, no matter how much I try to insert music, pop culture, politics, and community, and — most importantly — laughter into the curriculum (as I did [here] in my blog on the hip hop canon last fall, as well is in my many blogs on pop music [here] and on performative poetry [here].)

Langston Hughes

But of course, the literary text’s intimate relationship with its performance and its cultural context is something I struggle with too. It’s not that easy to bring all this together in the sterile setting of the classroom. Moreover, text has the advantage of seeming solid, permanent, and immutable, in contrast to the fleeting nature of individual performances and timely articulations in specific political contexts.  The internet definitely helps return the text to its performative dimension or at least makes that performative dimension more accessible. I say “helps,” because I know we could have a long conversation about whether the internet successfully does return it home to its performative originality or whether the internet form somehow changes the performative text.

“Race,” Profiling, and Deference — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

As most readers of this blog have probably already heard, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — a professor at Harvard University and arguably the most famous living scholar of African American literature — was recently arrested for disorderly conduct right outside his own house. Gates is somebody whom I have in the past assigned to my students in theory and literature courses, but if you haven’t heard of him, then go ahead and look him up on wikipedia. And if you haven’t already heard what happened to him yesterday, well then here’s some links to various versions of the story: NY Times, Huffington Post, and the official police report.

A couple of things are obvious about this story, but their obviousness may prevent us from noticing what we really should be noticing. One, obviously Gates is correct that none of this would have happened to him if he were white. So, right off the bat we have to acknowledge that some kind of racial profiling was being enacted. Whether or not that was the police officer’s intention is certainly another story, you might say, since he was not actively “profiling” anybody according to any officially mandated procedure. But this other story about intention is of course precisely the story that we should be paying attention to — and we should be paying attention to it for several good reasons, perhaps least of which is that this is exactly the sort of story that Gates has dedicated his whole career to deconstructing.

The title of my blog is an allusion to the very well-known and influential book of essays by various big-name theorists that Gates put together called “Race,” Writing, and Difference, which investigates how the category of race was historically written into being — that is to say, culturally constructed. The important thing to notice here is not that the police officer was a racist, but that the police officer was merely doing his job, and that his job was to respond to the call of Gates’s neighbor, who was merely doing her duty as a concerned citizen. Am I excusing the police officer and the neighbor by suggesting they were just doing what they believed they were supposed to be doing? Not at all. Their behavior was racist to the core, but racist in a complex way. And it’s important to acknowledge this complexity lest we simply start bashing the police or the neighbor… or even Gates.

What isn’t always obvious about racism – but really ought to be – is that racism itself is not obvious. If it were obviously what it is, then it wouldn’t exist, right? Nobody would ever admit to being one of those, but there it is — whether one wants to admit it, it’s there… and we are… because the structures of racism have been so thoroughly “written” into our culture that it affects our everyday reality whether we notice it or not.

Two, the second thing that is obvious here is that Gates flipped out — understandably so. How would you react if a police officer were standing in your house not believing that you were you? And in flipping out, he berated the cop, and in berating the cop he failed to realize what he himself has analyzed so carefully in his scholarship — the complexity and depth of racism in America. In other words, he didn’t realize that it was his own neighbor who had set everything in motion, and instead he accused the cop of being racist.

Now, in my own recent experience, I’ve witnessed a white woman calling the cops on her neighbor who was also in front of his own house, but in this case, the cop who answered the call ignored the caller (as I blogged about a couple weeks ago here). Two differences between the Gates case and my case. First, I witnessed this in a racially diverse, working class neighborhood, not in a fancy-pantsy neighborhood like Cambridge where Gates lives. Second, the Hispanic man showed deference to the cop, and Gates didn’t. What this difference underscores is something about the nature of the housing market and of the exclusive nature of the neighborhood — something we really need to pay attention to when stuff like what happened to Gates happens (and it happens far too often, hence the common pun on DUI — DWB, or “driving while black.”)

And so, my point is that when we read about the po-po putting the cuffs on yet another innocent black man, in addition to reminding ourselves of the depressing statistic that the U.S. has a larger percentage of its population in jail than any other country in the world and that most of them are black, and in addition to reminding ourselves that minorities have culturally had to learn a kind of deference that Gates refused to perform yesterday precisely because he knows all too well that no white person would have had to perform it, we should also remind ourselves that banks and real estate agents have created a society that is more racially segregated now in 2009 than it was before the Civil Rights Act in 1964. And if you don’t believe that’s true, see this study here (or my previous blog post here) that suggests how racism might have exacerbated our recent housing market crisis. The point being, that the neighbor’s neighborly duty is structurally part of the deep nature of how neighborhoods are defined. Her racist action was probably not intended to be so, but rather was an effect of the structure of her neighborhood’s culture.

Three, what is perhaps less obvious is the structure of how one understands one’s role. In this case we have Gates hysterically asserting his authority as a Harvard professor and the cop hysterically asserting his authority as a cop. And then, most importantly perhaps, the role of the crowd outside. Would the cop have arrested Gates if it were not for the fact that a small crowd of people outside had begun to watch the scene unfold before them? If you read the officer’s own report, you will notice that it’s not until he feels the gaze of the crowd upon him that he decides to arrest Gates.

I don’t think we can underestimate two things here. First, we cannot underestimate the significant role of the Other (the crowd) that would force a decisive response from the cop (the arrest). Second, we cannot underestimate the fact that the cop might have unwittingly done exactly the opposite of what the crowd wanted him to do. This indicates some of the complexities of racism all the more, for if the cop at that moment of decision thought he was doing the right thing before the gaze of the crowd but was in fact misunderstanding what was expected, then the nature of “intention” — i.e., the story of intention that I suggested at the begining of this post is THE story we ought be paying attention to — is truly a complicated, contradictory, and beastly nature.

And so when we repeat the seemingly obvious and common-sensical truism that ”race” and “racism” are culturally constructed (a truism that has only become “common sense” within my own short lifetime), we ought to remind ourselves how complicated and strange is the cultural process by which that construction happens.

How to Celebrate the 4th of July in Columbia Heights, D.C.

When I was a kid, growing up in one of those infamous Orange County, California suburbs, 4th of July meant BBQ in my backyard and fireworks in the front driveway, fireworks that we had bought in the next town over where they were legal. These fireworks were pitiful things — little tubes that spat out sparkly flame about two or three feet up into the air – but pitiful though they were, I was just eight years old and thought they were cool. Usually my friend’s family came over, and that was also cool. Such was the experience of the suburban child.

Since I’m all grown now and living my own life far away, my parents obviously don’t light fireworks in the front yard anymore; no more fake “oohs” and “ahhs” as they carefully monitor their children dancing about the yard with sparklers. Instead they watch the Boston and New York fireworks on TV accompanied always by the “1812 Overture” and the commentary of some idiot announcer. As for myself, a few times when I lived in cities or visited friends in cities, I would head over to watch those special city-run displays. If I was lucky, I was invited to a friend’s house whose house/apartment had a view of the city fireworks show, so that I could enjoy grilled meat and salty carbohydrates in the sanctity of a private home but still bear witness to the occasion and feel at one with the nation.

Please forgive my sarcastic tone. I know I was supposed to admire the artistry of the pyrotechnics, but usually I was just bored. Every display looked pretty much like every other display I’d ever seen, and something about it felt too controlled… too prophylactic, as if my role in the celebration of freedom had been transformed by an efficient, centralized bureaucratic state apparatus into the role of a entirely passive spectator. The message of such fireworks shows seemed to be that “independence” is to be watched, not re-enacted. My pyromaniac instincts could hardly be satisfied by mere watching.

In the Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods of Washington D.C., things are a bit different. This year, I’m spending all of July in these neighborhoods to enjoy some time with friends and use the city’s fabulous libraries. If you’re unfamiliar with D.C. or have only experienced its many monuments, museums, and government buildings as a tourist, then I probably have to explain my nation’s capitol city to you before I explain what was so excellent about its 4th of July. Away from the tourist attractions and government offices, D.C. is a fascinating mix of cultures. In a sense, D.C. is both the least American of American cities and the most American at the same time.  Ironically, the very thing that makes it feel different from the rest of America is also the thing that makes it the most iconically American — its international culture, its free-thinking and tolerant liberalism, its mixture of working-class and professional-class populations. For instance, the tiny neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant is exactly one third white, one third black, and one third Latino, and though certainly a lot of this mixture is due to past waves of migration and recent gentrification, I don’t think it is another example of the typically tragic gentrification story. In contrast to the version of gentrification narrated in this recent novel by the DC-raised/Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu, the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood association actively tries to follow the enlightenment principles of the social contract to make this uneasy mixture work for everyone.

So, how does one properly celebrate the 4th of July in Columbia Heights? Does one take the subway to the enormous National Mall and watch the fireworks burst over the Washington monument? No, of course not, unless you are a tourist. Rather, if you are a native (or wanna-be native), you grab a bottle of cheap champagne from the fridge, and shortly before the sun has set completely, crawl out of the window of the top story of your friend’s row house and up a make-shift ladder to the roof.  There you will inevitably discover other like-minded souls dancing without much sense of rhythm to Chicano hip hop on pirate radio. What could be more in the spirit of “independence” day than pirate radio or Chicano hip hop? Once it gets completely dark, then the magic begins — not a single display of fireworks like you find on TV, but a whole city-wide panorama of pyromania. You can look in any direction and see rockets bursting over the rooftops. Immediately below you, wherever you happen to be, a car will inevitably pull up with a trunkload of rockets and begin shooting them right over your heads, and inevitably one of the white 30-something professional-class neighbors will come outside, angrily shake a finger, and call the police on this somewhat brown-skinned man, not realizing that he, his wife, kids, and other relations are firing them from the steps of their own house and that the police will merely ask him not to double park his car next time. From the rooftop, you and your friends will of course cheer for your pyrotechnically skilled neighbor and hurl insults at the complaining hater.

I enjoyed this Independence Day more than I have enjoyed any in the past. Maybe it sounds a little sappy, but I felt like I was actively celebrating a human desire for freedom and not passively consenting to an empty and chauvenistic national pride.

Found in Tranference

There are two inspirations for this post. First, an acquaintance of mine circulated on one of those “online social networks“ a YouTube clip of this music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” by the band Camera Obscura, in which the boy and the girl dance through the shopping district of Shibuya in Tokyo for no sensible reason at all. Second, I’m going to be leading a three-week study-abroad trip in Japan this May, and since I don’t really have anything to blog about this week, I thought I’d blog about something that relates to my upcoming trip… even if the music video doesn’t really relate to my trip… or relate to anything at all.

Except maybe it does…. I’m going to try to say something immensely clever by the end of this post. What that will be, I don’t know yet. I hope you’re as excited and shaking with anticipation as I am about it. Anyway, here’s the music video, which my aforementioned acquaintance from the unnamed online social network claimed would be an “optical seducation.”

Oh, oh, so fun, so fun, indeed — a seductive frolic through color and 60’s kitsch. I’d never heard of the band Camera Obscura before, but because of the location in Shibuya, I was reminded of the movie, Lost in Translation. And if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you should. And if you don’t think you should, then it’s quite possible that you’ve got, um, you know… “issues.”

That movie came out in 2003, and the song about Lloyd came out in 2006, and so maybe the people in Camera Obscura saw the movie… but so what? Who cares that the synapses of my distrubed brain connected one thing with the other?

But here’s the thing — the thing of the two things. The two things are opposites. The music video is the reverse of the movie.

What? Is this the clever thing I promised?… Hold on.

The movie of course is about two characters — Bill Murray and Scarlet Johanson — who are “lost” even before they get to Japan, but who are even more lost in Japan where they don’t know the language or the culture. Obviously the whole “being lost” thing is a metaphor for how meaningless their lives had become before they even arrived on the scene. But they don’t realize their existential lostness until they encounter a literal lostness – similar to the TV show Lost.  (Except the literal lostness is actually the metaphorical vehical to explore their existential lostness.) Although the movie seems at first to be about their confrontation with the “other” foreign culture, we eventually realize that the real other is their own self.  I’ve written about the American fascination with Japanese otherness before [here]. Eventually Murray and Johanson become friends, come to like being in Japan… and find that their lives have meaning. In other words, they translate themselves. That is to say, it is their confrontation with otherness, with strangers, that allows them to reconcile themselves to their own internal otherness — to the fact that they had long before become strangers to themselves.

The music video “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken,” [lyrics]  would seem to be the total opposite. Instead of a confrontation with the other, the music video is fantasy escape into total otherness — the Shibuya skyline, the retro-60s clothing and furniture, the ecstacy, etc.  This is what Freud calls “transference” when you redirect your libidinal desires or feelings onto an idealized object. In this case, the idealized object is the metonymic symbolization of perfect happiness, and I’m using the word somewhat differently than Freud. For him, the object of transference was the doctor himself — the One who knows all,  the one who knows the secret cure. But the culture industry is in many ways a substitute doctor. And in the case of the music video, the singer longs to be the happy, skipping blond couple who seem to have some secret knowledge of the way to happiness. This is the solution to her identity, which is why she sings, ”I know you can stay a girl by holding a boy’s hand.” The knowledge of this secret happiness is key, especially since the singer clearly knows that she does not know it. And in a sense, she doesn’t want to BE them at all (because who would want to, really?); she just wants to know what they know. She is “ready to be heartbroken.”

This is the secret to happiness, she believes… a secret she wants but doesn’t really want… but of course the writers of the song don’t really believe that. They are playing the standard love narrative, which soons becomes uncanny and strange, when the couple skips past the allusion to Andy Warhol’s famously postmodern Brillo boxes and we discover how completely reproducable Lloyd is. Immediately after the Brillo/Lloyd boxes we enter a Hollywood cinemascape from a 50s musical. The “boy” is, like the Hollywood romantic musical, a fabrication — a substitute for another, a constructed thing that confers identity on the girl. There is no unique “him” that is needed. Any “him” will do.

So, on the one hand we have Lost in Translation, with its fearful confrontation with otherness that leads the characters out of their psychological feeling of void. And on the other hand, we have the music video, with its desire for otherness that reminds the singer (if not also us) that her life is not the idealized one — an other that seems to be not just difference, but the big Other. The big Other with a capital O (according to Lacan) is the symbolic order that demands the subject not necessarily conform to it, but — at least — relate to IT somehow, whatever IT is, which of course we don’t really know because we only know that by holding the boy’s hand,  the girl gets some kind of status conferred upon her.

So, I’m almost done, amost done trying to sound clever. So, here’s the thing: in a sense, the music video is the flip side of the movie. What does this dialectic between two opposites teach us? Search me, I’ve lost myself.

How to Write about Africa

I just re-read Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa” for the second time. It was published in the journal Granta in 2005. Since then, Wainaina has been profiled in the special issue of Vanity Fair magazine about Africa (edited by Bono!) two years ago and appeared as a guest on Krista Tippet’s show Speaking of Faith last December, where he shocked the poor, idealistic Tippet by pointing out that he’d often rather westerners do nothing to help Africa than all the stupid, misguided somethings that they do. He is almost as fearful of guilty white liberals as he is of avaricious neoliberals from London and militant neocons from Washington D.C. (and that’s saying something, because those mo-fo’s are scary-ass… you know what I’m saying?)

Anyway, Wainaina’s essay wonderfully exposes the way white westerners have represented Africa (or mis-represented… or in Lacanian terms, misrecognized, meconnaissance, because of their own psychological issues), and I’ve decided to use it in my class tomorrow (and wish I had used it in my class last week) on “representation.” So, I don’t have much to say in my blog today except “You got the link; now read it!!!”

And moreover, I now want to assert that every teacher of classes about race, history, African studies, Asian studies, Latin American studies, geography, international relations, peace studies, postcolonial literature, intercultural competency (whatever that is), etc., etc., should begin their classes with it… not only as a means of fostering a healthy skepticism among the students, but also and even more importantly to remind themselves not to be stupid teachers. (I often need this reminder myself.)

“Nigger” / “Nigga”: Tribe vs. Mos Def

What does hip hop have to teach us about deconstruction? Quite a lot, in my opinion.

Way back in 1993 (when I was a junior in college, gasp), Tribe Called Quest released their Midnight Maurader album, considered by some to be one of the top hip hop albums of all time. On it, the controversial hit “Sucka Nigga” [lyrics] observed that black youth had taken the racial slur “nigger” and transformed it into a “term of endearment… nigga.” (Is this at all similar to how Hester Prynne transforms the meaning of the scarlet “A” on her chest from adultery to able in The Scarlet Letter?) Tribe’s song provocatively raises many questions about the use and meaning of words, and as the song explains, the black community in the United States was (and still is) deeply conflicted over the use of the word “nigga” by black musicians and comedians.

Then, six years later in 1999, Mos Def released his highly acclaimed album, Black on Both Sides, which included an explicit and direct response to Tribe entitled “Mr. Nigga” [lyrics]. Mos Def’s song suggests that the original, racist meaning continues to subject black people to unfair prejudice. And furthermore, one might go so far as to say that the clownish antics of some hip hop artists and their lyrics may even be perpetuating it, despite whatever intentions or claims to the contrary they may assert.

So, against Tribe’s playful deconstruction of the word “nigga” that attempted to ”flip the script” on American racism, Mos Def presents a hard cautionary tale about how the meaning of the word continues to insist in the cultural practices of people not just in America but also around world. In a sense, Tribe seems to exemplify Derrida’s concept of “play,” and against Derrida, Mos Def seems to exemplify Lacan by reminding us of how the symbolic order continues to structure how we imagine ourselves in the world and how we experience the contradictions of reality (a contradictory experience that Lacan calls the Real, with a capital “R”.) Both songs, in my view, are doing deconstruction — contextualizing the cultural production and transformation of meaning and deconstructing the many binary oppositions invoked by the word “nigga.”

So, to put these songs in their historical context, back in the early 1990s, many people and organizations were concerned with “hate speech” — speech acts that give rise to violence and/or prejudicial action against minorities. The political debate concerned itself with two political rights, free speech and universal, personal integrity (since hate speech sometimes led to horrible acts of violence, called “hate crimes,” not to mention systemic discrimination.) Theorist Judith Butler eventually published Excitable Speech about this issue in 1997. Rather than engage directly in these legal debates, hip hop artists waged an artistic, performative battle against American racism.

In a sense, what we have now are two words. One word is the derogatory “nigger,” originally articulated by the “white man,” whose mouth, in Tribe’s splendidly poetic imagery, reminds us of the dome of a capital building — the very political structure that legitimated racism for so many years. The other word is “nigga” whose meaning is not so much positive as it is a historical reminder of the “adversity” that black Americans overcame as a community. In other words, as everyone knows, white people can not use this word (and any white person who does deserves to get his or her ass kicked) because they did not experience that adversity, but black people can because it reflects a commonly shared, historical identity.

Mos Def, however, reveals how the author of a text does not control its meaning (just as Roland Barthes showed in his famous essay, “Death of an Author“) because of how the signifier circulates in different social contexts. In fact, just as Michel Foucault argued in ”What is an Author?” so too does Mos Def seem to argue in “Mr. Nigga” — that authors and hip hop artists are products of legal and socio-economic systems. Hip hop has been appropriated by white suburban youth who (as Lacan suggests in his argument about how we construct our identity in relation to spectral others) enjoy the thrill of transgression by imitating gangsta rap culture and by pretentiously disavowing their own white privilege. And in a way, hip hop artists never had full control over their medium, having to respond to a marketplace dominated by white consumer culture and powerful corporations.

What artists, comedians, novelists, and hip hop artists have realized is that it’s not enough to simply demystify racism, because our culture and our language continues to reflect racist biases long after we as a nation realized that racism is a false ideology. And so, their project to deconstruct the language of American culture (which includes its racist language) is a project begun centuries ago, in the memoir of Olaudah Equiano and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, well before commedian Richard Pryor first made it a central issue in his stand-up routine back in the 1970s.

Why House? Economic Crisis and the Drive to Home Ownership

In his first speech to the Joint-Session of Congress [text and video],  President Barack Obama observed that one of the causes of our economic crisis was that, ”People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway.” The causes of our current economic crisis are complex, and I started to try to understand them last fall in my blog [here]. I can’t say that I succeeded, but I found lots of good sources and links… and all things considered, it seems to me that Obama’s explanation of what precipitated the crisis and his rationale for why we need strong credit markets — and therefore some kind of socially responsible stimulus bill — was generally consistent with what most economists have said.

But the politicians and economists often seem to be talking in circles, recognizing that spending beyond our means causes problems but then passing legislation that artificially props up a market system that enables and encourages the same problematic behaviors. In other words, it’s easy to observe that people are buying houses they can’t really afford, but what would motivate somebody to do that in the first place? Obviously, to explain all this is beyond what anyone would expect a president to talk about, and we should give credit to Obama for at least recognizing the problem and talking about it. But, if we understand that people are buying houses when they shouldn’t, why does the government then want to prop up this market? Shouldn’t we just let the market forces naturally correct?

One way of looking at it is that the market basically works just fine except for a few bad apples that ruin it for everyone, but I don’t think it’s useful to just blame individual greed or individual error since the phenomenon is so widespread. Clearly, there is something more systemic here, and I suggest that Lacanian psychoanalysis (which my class is studying right now, having just read “The Agencyof the Letter in the Unconscious Since Freud“) might offer us some useful insight into what both Obama and economists have noticed is an excessive “drive”  to own a home. 

While economists (and Obama in his speech) use the word “drive” simply to mean what drives the market, for Lacan the term Drive is a complex concept, and the important thing to realize about the Drive is that it’s not just instincts or repressed desires as pop psychology would have you believe, and neither is it just ideology or culture. So, what is it?

Before, I give the pat answer to that question, let’s acknowledge that there is something rather unnatural about the housing market, because it’s clear that people don’t just buy houses because they need a place to live. That would be the “natural” reason to own a home, but in our modern society today, when young adults are so mobile, it’s in many ways easier and more sensible to rent an apartment. It’s also a more efficient use of resources and space, if one cares about the environment. But “the house” seems to mean (or signify) a whole lot more than just a place to live. It also signifies that you’ve made it, that you have control of your life, that you have not just a house but also a “home” with all the lovely Norman-Rockwell-painting connotations of home… that you are now a responsible member of society.

As George Bush even argued in a somewhat famous speech in 2004, “We are creating an ownership society.” That speech is well-known enough to have an entire wikipedia entry dedicated to it [here], and our favorite journalist Naomi Klein has critiqued it [here]. Bush’s argument is that our economy would be stronger, and citizens would be more invested in our nation’s future, if they owned a home. Now, this is the interesting thing here, that in a sense home ownership is not just about home ownership, but is also a metaphor for something else. In other words, to put it in Lacanian terms, the home is a metaphorical compensation for what is lacking in our core being. Just as romantic lovers will say to each other, “you complete me,” so too in the postmodern ideology of home ownership, we can say of the home that it completes us, that it gives us citizenship. (Incidentally, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, ownership of land was a prerequisite for the right to vote. This perhaps made sense in a society that was largely agricultural and that lacked the technological means for tracking its citizens such as the modern identification card and census. But, if the home ever had some kind of real relationship to citizenship in the past, today the home as an expression of citizenship is purely metaphorical.) And so, one part of the Lacanian drive is how it works metaphorically.

But this is just one part of the drive. It also works metonymically, and this is why the Drive is not just a mystical ideology or false consciousness, but something very, very real. What the government did at this moment in 2004 was actually encourage a housing bubble, and it did so with all sorts of artificial incentives such as tax breaks, special loan programs for first-time home buyers, lax regulation of hedge funds and other investment firms, etc. In other words, what made the home valuable was not its value as a place to live or even its real market value, but a speculative future value. Even first-time home buyers who really didn’t have enough money saved could still buy the home because they believed they could count on its value going up. And, likewise, the bank who lent them the money believed they could count on its value going up, so it was willing to take risks with the loan.

You may think I’m just being paranoid, but back then there was a real push for the housing market, and many of my friends, who never considered buying a home before, suddenly bought them in 2004 and 2005 — and what was striking about these particular friends of mine buying a home is that they were all graduate students who were earning very little money and knew they would have to sell their house and move in just a few years. But it was hard to resist the housing-market buzz; one felt foolish for not taking advantage of it, except that it was being pushed so hard by the President and media hype that we all should have been at least a bit skeptical.

The upshot of all this is that people bought homes because of an artificially stimulated housing market. They assumed that the value would increase, and so it was worth making a risky investment. And this is a metonymical relationship, because as Lacan argues, the meaning of a signifier is not just in what it represents — its “signified” (which, in this case, is simply a place where one lives.) It’s also its relation to other signifiers. And here is why it is a mistake to think that Lacan’s analysis of language and dreams is not about real stuff… to think that it is not materialist. To the contrary, it is materialist because these signifiers (which, in this case, is the market value of the home) are the symbolic relations through which people and things relate, i.e., the social relations between things and material relations between people, as Karl Marx put it in his famous chapter on the commodity fetish. And more importantly, they produce real world effects. This is why Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek observed in a recent, and already freqeuntly cited, op-ed for The London Review of Books [here] that even left-leaning Democrats and socialists had to support the bail-out of the finance sector because of the extent to which the lives of working-class people were entangled in it.

The problem, of course, is what Lacan reminds us all along (and which economists and banks should have known from their own Econ 101 textbooks), that the market can’t just go up and up… and up. Or, as Lacan put it, the metonymic chain of desire is a displacement of a fundamental “lack.” We know that ultimately there is something missing from the equation, and that we are building castles partly out of air. Or, as my favorite Lacanian theorist, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, put it, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Admittedly, I’m being a little simplistic here, but this is part of how Drive works in our society. It’s not just natural instinct, and it’s not just ideology or culture. It’s more complex than that.

I could stop my analysis there, but since I began this blog post with Obama’s observation that there was something excessive about the drive to own a home, I want to speculate a bit further about the nature of what seems to me to be a pathological excess. Following the theoretical model of Lacan and Žižek, I suggest that the drive to own a house is a psychological symptom… but a symptom of what?

There is something, after all, a little bit creepy about the irrational desire to own a nice house with a picket fence and all of that lovely loveliness at a moment when global warming has been discovered to be a real threat. Houses in America have been getting bigger and bigger (obscenely large, just like SUVs), as Americans have moved from the cities to the suburbs and now to the exurbs. Indeed, the recent creation of the exurb seems to suggest a changing American geography just as the creation of the suburb in the 1950s did. And as such, these houses not only require more and more energy for heat but also create a society completely dependent on the gas-guzzling automobile. Not only do these houses and cars consume more than the world’s fair share of oil, they also take up land that could be used for farming or just left for forest. Ironically, it is often the nature-and-animal-loving individuals who push suburban life outward in their quest for that authentic, natural feeling, and in the process disrupt the very ecosystems they want to protect.

It should be pretty obvious that cooperative living arrangements are more efficient and increasingly necessary. No amount of technological innovation such as hybrid cars or ethanol is going to solve what is essentially a cultural problem — and not a scientific one. Unfortunately, these kinds of reasonable, cultural solutions are not encouraged by government investment like technological solutions are, nor do they receive the kind of artificial incentives that home-buyers receive. In fact, there are even laws on the books in some places that discourage cooperative and alternative living arrangements.

But there is more to the issue than that. When one looks at the history of the American suburb, one can easily discern two basic causes. First, Ford’s development of the affordable automobile, the Model T, in 1908,  and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that committed the government to an automobile-based infrastructure. But another spur to the growth of suburbs was the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision two years earlier in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act in 1964. As soon as the government began to force schools to integrate, the nation experienced something popularly known as white flight. As a result, according to census data, the United States is more racially segregated now than it was in 1954, despite years of civil rights legislation and the election of a black president.

Now, we can return to the metaphorical aspect of the drive to own a home. As Lacan says, the metaphor (or condensation, to use Freud’s term) is a cultural symptom, and it is symptomatic of our relation to so-called others — others who are psychically, socially, and politically constructed as others… as others supposedly different from ourselves. For theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau, who use Lacan to analyze political relations, such metaphors might be symptoms of social antagonism. In this case, the metaphor of the home, with all its connotations of citizenship, responsibility, and safety, is a symptom of America’s racist history. After all, if I asked you to picture in your mind the perfectly safe, idyllic community full of educated citizens, what would you imagine? And then if I asked you to picture the opposite of that, what would you imagine? And would not race factor into those images, despite all your noble, politically correct intentions?

Hence, though it would be quite a leap of logic to claim that our current environmental problems were entirely caused by a deep, unconscious racism, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to argue that the Drive for home ownership and idyllic suburban life is a symptom of that racism. I would argue that it is. Moreover, this is a racism that still exists but which Americans repress, not wanting to believe it’s still a factor.  But, it exists powerfully in the housing market, as shown by a recent study about how racial discrimination in the lending practices of many banks exacerbated our current housing-market crisis. Liberals eat their organic food, go camping, vote for Obama, and wring their hands about the environment… but they also buy into the racist, environmentally destructive logic of the ever-expanding, suburban and exurban housing market.

Reading Slumdog Millionaire

The movie Slumdog Millionaire has already won numerous awards including Golden Globe’s best picture and best director, and it has been nominated for ten Academy awards. The movie is essentially a fairy-tale rags-to-riches story about Jamal and Latika, a poor boy and girl in Mumbai, India who are finally able to be together after he beats all odds to win the “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” show. The narrative trick of the movie is that he tells the story of his life to a police officer, who suspects him of cheating, in order to demonstrate how he knew the answers to the triva questions. Each question corresponds to a significant moment in his life. Hence, in the process of telling a story of an alternative to poverty, the movie also suggests an alternative epistemology — or way of knowing the world — that romantically evokes the fundamental equality of all humankind. Even a poor, ignorant “slumdog” can know things. What I think is stylistically interesting is how the movie in many ways resembles the kind of fairy-tale plot typical of the “Bollywood” Indian films (alluded to in the final scene), but it is shot in the hyperrealistic style now popular in London and Hollwyood cinema.

Though the movie has been almost unanimously praised by American and European reviewers, it has provoked angry protests in the country it purports to be about. NPR radio recently asked how people in India would receive a movie set in India, starring Indians, but made by an Irishman from England, Danny Boyle. Some of the Indians interviewed are glad that Indian cinema is finally receiving the attention it deserves, others are angry that western media always repeats stereotypes of Indian poverty, and still others assert that poverty is an issue that ought to be addressed in India as well as in the West. (No comparison is made to Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited, which came out the year before and is also set in India, but perhaps this is because Anderson’s movie has nothing “Indian” in it, and is so self-consciously absurd that it might as well have been set in any exotically foreign space – Brazil, Congo, Mars, whatever.)

The question NPR raises in turn raises some important questions about the relation between readers and a text — a relation that I have blogged about earlier here in a post about a Japanese comedy skit that was more popular outside of Japan than inside it, and also here in a post about the politics of rock and roll. Explicit in NPR’s question is the issue of representation, and how a single representation may mean different things to different people depending on the context, as the theorist Stanley Fish argues. Implicit in its question is the historical relation of power and how power can be exercized through media representations, as Michel Foucault suggests. India was once a colony of England and is now still greatly affected and perhaps even partially controlled (in a neocolonial way) by British and U.S. corporate agendas. In other words, to put it oversimply, it’s clearly not the same thing when an Indian movie represents poverty in India and when India’s former colonizer represents poverty in India, and the reason it’s not the same is precisely because of the disparity in power between the Anglo-American film industry and the various audiences. This disparity in power is not necessarily a problem for all movies made by a Brit about its former colony, but Slumdog Millionaire practically ignores this centuries-old relation. In it, we see how Mumbai has changed over the course of Jamal’s life presumably because of globalization – and we see that this change creates both wealth and poverty – but the movie in no way tries to understand why or how . . . or even what is going on.

However, none of this really explains why Americans and Europeans love this movie so much, why some in India hate it, and why some reviewers can so blatantly contradict themselves by claiming simultaneously that the movie is a fairy-tale and that it truly represents life in India without even noticing that they are contradicting themselves. How can it be both a fairy-tale fantasy and a realistic portrait of India at the same time? And for me, this contradiction is a far more interesting question than the question NPR raises about the different reactions in India. Instead of focusing on how they-over-there appreciate the movie, why doesn’t NPR follow Slate.com’s example here and analyze how we-over-here do?

To answer this question about the obvious contradictions manifest in how it has been appreciated, I suggest that the reason why the movie is so successful and so troubling at the same time is its style — its synthesis of gritty, hyperrealism with romantic fantasy. The result is an uncanny eroticization of poverty (as an article in The Guardian points out here) that is likely to be offensive to some precisely because they suspect that it is romantic and titilating to others.

So, returning to the question of the relation between readers and text — a relation we call interpretation — I want to emphasize that it would be wrong to claim that Indians see the movie one way and Americans another because of differences in Indian and American culture. This is clearly false, since people everywhere have read the movie in so many different ways, and this is not what Stanley Fish meant by “interpretive communities.” Rather, what is meant is the reading of the film is partially determined by the context of the act of reading, not the life or background of the reader.  What is involved in this particular act of reading is, of course, an intuition about what the movie means not only to oneself but also to others — an intuition informed not by singular cultural identities but by a history of political relations.