This looks fascinating to me…and has some examples of “code meshing” in scholarly writing….

Katina Rogers’  is giving a talk as part of a pedagogy series at Hunter on 12/2 at noon. You can sign up using this link:
https://acert.hunter.cuny.edu/events/calendar/putting-the-humanities-phd-to-work-thriving-in-and-beyond-the-classroom/ [acert.hunter.cuny.edu]

Greetings Utopists and fellow travelers,

Instead of our annual conference, and with much less organization, the Society for Utopian Studies is planning a series of virtual roundtables this fall. We’re kicking off the first one with a discussion of Tom Moylan’s new book, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (Bloomsbury 2020). Stay tuned for announcements of additional events. 

The first roundtable will be Friday, 13 November 2020, at 11:30 a.m. CST, a time we chose to maximize the possibility of attendance across international time zones.  This URL should show you the event in YOUR time zone: https://tinyurl.com/y5jnbj5m.

Here is a link to the registration page for this free event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roundtable-discussion-on-tom-moylans-becoming-utopian-tickets-127726012943.

We certainly hope, too, that you’ll consider becoming a member of the Society for Utopian Studies if you are not already, and plan on attending our annual conference, in Austin, TX on 10-14 November 2021. Here’s a link to membership information: https://utopian-studies.org/membership/.

Hi all,

I wanted to share this guide created by Donna Davey, one of the Mina Rees librarians. She offers strategies for conducting archival research while physical collections are closed or difficult to access. Donna has included extensive links to digitized collections that may be of use to researchers in your programs. 

All best,
Emily

— 

Emily Drabinski

Interim Chief Librarian

Mina Rees Library

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Online office:  https://connectcuny.webex.com/meet/emily.drabinski33

Apologies for this late blog post! Zoe, thank you for putting together these fantastic readings for your workshop. I was firstly struck by the somatic in all of these readings, from Patricia Williams’ search “for the shape of force and lost hands,” in Chapter 1 of Avery Gordan (6), to bodies gazing at reproduced images of other bodies in Eng (86). The surface of a body can present and disclose secrets but also haunt us with fragile, unknown pasts. 

I was particularly struck, on a personal note, by Ahmed’s description of his grandmother’s hands, and their rings, as a kind of archive of memories (9).  I loved this quote: “The body was the first archive I learned to read” (9). I used to ask my Grandfather about his ring all the time when I was little, before he passed away. He grew up on the island of Malta, and the ring was imprinted with the Maltese crest. It was passed down through the generations – a physical piece of history that tied him to his childhood home when he moved to London at 17. Asking about the ring invariably led to countless stories about various uncles, aunts and second cousins in Malta, and a window into this lives that were somehow connected to my own. (Or a story about the time he accidentally fused the ring to his hand when attempting to do some electrical work. For a brief, painful few hours, the ring was literally fused to his finger!) Reading his body, was also reading my family history, a past, distant “world that would never be mine” that simultaneously came to life in his re-telling (9). This makes me reflect on how reading the body, as an archive, impacts our sense of time. How does reading the body both collapse and reinforce temporality? Our space between things? Secrets? Ghosts? Other bodies? 

I was also struck by the quotation from Ahmed which Stefanie highlights: ”This archive made me silent for ethical reasons – it did not belong to me. I had no right to tell their secrets, as they were not my secrets. The scar was not on my body.” This makes me think of some of the reading I’ve been doing for my Feminism and Globalization class with Sonali Perera. We’ve been talking a lot about who gets to tell a story, and how. I’m struck by how Saidya Hartman imaginatively gives voice to where the archive gapes in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, while remaining very aware of her own positionality throughout the work. In terms of your question on the ethical obligation we have in work that approaches ghostliness, spectrality and silence, perhaps this is a good model of how to do this kind of work thoughtfully and responsibly. 

Looking forward to discussing more shortly! 

This week’s class readings aligns with my interest in the re-articulation and re-narrating of stories and histories that have either not been depicted in its entirety, are false or have been completely ignored. Gordon and Ahmed both elaborate on the idea of representation in storytelling. Ahmed tells their story of how they learned to interpret archives. Many histories of people have been politicized and written in frameworks to limit the possibilities of their lives. There is usually some form of interpreting history involved in telling the stories of marginalized people. Re-articulation and re-narration calls for a creative lens; in which authors are forced to ask questions before being aware if the answer even exists.

 Silence, then, is not the opposite of speech but, indeed, its very condition of possibility, the precondition of knowing and of meaning (Eng 86). In their own way, each author argues that lost or untold histories signifies a truth that has been untold. Silence is an identifying marker for the subject that needs to be explored, Gordon writes, “The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course” (8).  In the essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Hortense J. Spillers analyzes historic racial truths which problematize presenting categories as a universal commonality amongst individuals. She uncovers the missing and/or false histories of the disfiguration of Black bodies. Spillers goes on to argue that the current Black family structure is an effect of the ungendering of enslaved female bodies. The essay illustrates re-articulation and re-narration at play. Spillers retells a history that has been articulated through the gaze of white supremacy. Saidiya Hartman also puts a spin on history in the text Wayward Lives. She uses photos and stories from archives to give a fictionalized voice to Black women during the early twentieth century. The lives of the wayward women were lost- or haunted- by their inability to conform to the ideals of Black respectability. Hartman’s text is considered a biography as she brings light to these haunted lives… Who has the power to re-narrate stories? 

One of Gordon’s major arguments is to reconstruct how we know and make knowledge (5). So often academic knowledge production focuses on telling stories of marginalized groups. However, sometimes those stories are not written with the intent to share them with the very group it explores. It has always baffled me why those most interested in understanding and changing the barbaric domination that characterizes our modernity often-not always-withhold from the very people they are most concerned with the right to complex personhood (Gordon 4). Scholarship written and produced from a performative lens seeking approval from academic peers further “haunts” the research subjects. Simply reducing a human’s existence to research subjectivity further alienates their personhood and agency. Gatekeeping writings and stories is a product of white supremacy- just as producing “historical” analysis on the lives of marginalized people without dutifully working to find their voice. Ahmed’s archival study also illustrates the fluidity of history. Gordon argues that history belongs to no one. Yet, there are museums across the world with historical artifacts stolen from people they belonged to. History does belong to people, but it is co-opted in favor of those with the desire to re-articulate a story. 

David Eng’s piece can be summed up in one word: prophetic. The dangers he expressed in his discussion of the political ramifications of how we mourned post 9-11 has come to pass through Trump’s election and time in office. He writes, “…in all the noise, the language of mourning is no less impoverished for it has become the language of an unyielding nationalism, one that brooks no internal dissent” (89). This lack of dissent is reflected in conservative, and Republican, politics. There are numerous instances that can be used to highlight this so I won’t go into them as they will detract from my response to Eng’s writing. However, to stay connected to Eng’s ideas, I think the rise of the Trump’s Republicans and Trumpism (I loathe this term) are symptomatic of poor uneducated White people (mostly men) mourning the loss of the political and social dominance they’ve experienced since this country’s conception.

Of course, I don’t mean that these White people have actual measurable and tangible control as individuals- they certainly did and do not. I mean that they have been able to put rich lawmakers into place who they thought would serve their best interests. They empowered people who would ensure that the systems of reality which perpetuated feelings of Whiteness as superior to all else would continue to have dominant footing in American culture and American life. I also do not mean to imply that all people who are white are perpetuators of Whiteness. Indeed, Whiteness can and does include people who are not white. Without my continuing down a rabbit hole of my own musings and philosophies on Whiteness, I think David Eng’s piece provides a fair summary of what I am trying to say in regards the hegemony of Whiteness and its relation to American identity:

“The rhetoric of the loss of ‘fathers and mothers,’ ‘sons and daughters,’ and ‘brothers and sisters’ attempts to trace a smooth alignment between nation-state and the nuclear family, the symbolics of blood relations and nationalist domesticity. This narrative of white heteronormativity leaves no public space, no public speech, for those liminal groups- gays and lesbians and undocumented migrant workers, for instance- who perished in the tragedies but whose degraded social status, hard to affirm in life, become impossible to acknowledge in death” (90).

One point which I could quite understand or grapple with is his argument on silence. For example, Eng writes “In this externalized mania of nationalism, the value of silence goes unheard, for silence exists in that moment before loss gains its symbolic meaning and tragedy is exploited for a politics of mourning” (92). I do not understand what value this silence has. The best I can come up with is that the silence is when we are all one people with a common history. The silence is when we are truly kin and countrymen. How did others receive this concept of silence?

I had a decidedly emotional reaction to today’s readings. Just yesterday, I visited my great uncle in his Long Island house since he is migrating to Florida on Wednesday as he does every winter (he is traveling with my aunt, this time, so she can make sure he is distancing safely). When I was a child, I would often stay at that house for days, for my parents (used to) travel for work for extended periods of time. My great aunt taught me to read (she was the first in the family to go to college—Brooklyn College, actually), and the creepy dolls in the guest bedrooms gave me extended bouts of insomnia. She would serve me scrambled eggs and Ritz crackers with peanut butter for breakfast. We would walk to Jones beach…

So now my dad and I visit my great uncle; my great aunt died last year after battling Alzheimers for almost a decade. She would not remember my name, but she would remember my dad and talk to him like she did when he was a child growing up in East New York. One Passover, we were using the secular Yiddish Haggadah I insist on in my parents’ home, and my great aunt, who could still read at the time, could still pronounce the Yiddish better than my German mother; her eyes even shone with recognition at the familiar story, retold every year of her life.

So we visit my great uncle and, as we leave the house on Long Island, my uncle, wearing his Korean war veteran cap, excited to introduce us to a Chinese Hot pot restaurant (he has always loved Chinese cuisine and used to meet my dad in Flushing for long family meals), we pass through the basement to go out through the garage since it is raining. The top floor of the house has remained miraculously clean, but this basement is piled high with nearly the entire livelihood of my Aunt Patty, my great uncle’s older daughter, who died of sudden aggressive brain cancer in 2018. Her culinary equipment and tennis rackets nestle among cardboard boxes of clothes and furnishings. As we walk by, my Aunt Sue, her sister, complains that every time she gathers things into bags and gives some away, the pile doesn’t even remotely shrink. She asks if I’d come by some time soon and gather anything I need for my Bushwick apartment.

So… not sure how or why this became me retelling an event from yesterday. I guess I was inspired by Eng, Asif, and Gordon on the topics of archives, memory, and ghosts, even if I don’t directly state those ideas here. I’ll give more analytical reactions to these texts in class today!