Gikandi, Preface: armored men and quarantines

[image of James Drummond, 2rd Duke of Perth, from National Gallery of Scotland and Wikipedia; cf. also, Gikandi, x-xii]

I believe this image is as good a place to start as any in this densely argued book.  In his Preface, Gikandi describes an early moment of fascination in the National Gallery of Scotland, where he saw this portrait of the Jacobite James Drummond by Sir John Baptiste de Medina.  As he looked on this painting, with its conscious, almost theatrical projection of power, Gikandi began to wonder:

Why would Drummond, a symbol of the Catholic insurrection against the Protestant establishment, seek to inscribe an enslaved boy in his family portrait? What aura did this figure, undoubtedly the quintessential sign of blackness in bondage, add to the symbolism of white power?  What libidinal desires did the black slave represent? What was the relation of this blackness, confined to the margin of the modern world picture and placed in a state of subjection, to the man of power with his hand on his hip? And how were we to read this diminished, yet not unattractive, blackness in relation to the center embodied by the wig and armor?   And where was one to draw the line between the gesture of incorporation and dissociation? (xi-xii)

In some sense, I think it’s not too difficult to understand the relations here in the Drummond portrait as part of the theatrics of power, the way in which the “diminished, yet not unattractive, blackness” of the gazing, enslaved boy (signified by the collar around his neck) provides a readily comprehensible image of his, and by extension, our subjection to the armored, bewigged man at the painting’s center.  In this respect, the pairing seems at least comparable to our now familiar cultural repertoire of  assymetrical cross-cultural pairings like Crusoe/Friday, Huck/Jim, Lone Ranger/Tonto, Kirk/Spock, etc. etc.

In other words, de Medina’s pairing seems designed to demonstrate that the conquest has already occurred, and now a more subtle form of subjection has begun.  This is part of what I see at stake in these scenes of “incorporation and dissociation,” emblematized by Drummond’s helmet or Crusoe’s musket:

In some sense, as I’ve said in the comments, this story of subjection and hegemony has been hiding in plain view for some time, and I don’t think it has gone unnoticed in cultural criticism.  What Gikandi adds to this scenario of a visible “incorporation and dissociation” of the enslaved Other is a notion of the black as a source of libidinal energy for civilization and Modernity, one that requires regular maintenance, or “quarantining,” to be contained and yet productively nurtured:

What surprised me in the end, however, was the discovery that the world of the enslaved was not simply the submerged and concealed counterpoint of modern civilization; rather, what made the body of the slave repellant–its ugliness and dirt–was also what provided the sensations and the guilty pleasures of modern life (xii).

With this move into the “sensations and the guilty pleasures of modern life,” Gikandi has taken us into the peculiarly modern aesthetics of disavowal, what we thoughtlessly enjoy but cannot admit to having any contact with.  The libidinal pull of slavery and its  products is what takes us out of the purity and transcendence of Enlightenment aesthetics, and brings us into contact with something far more unsettling, the infrastructures of commercial modernity.  Drummond’s hand rests lightly upon his helmet, and Crusoe balances his musket on his shoulder, while these two figures set the terms for the “incorporation” of their black counterparts.

DM

collaborative reading of simon gikandi’s slavery and the culture of taste, may 13th-19th at the long 18th

OK, I’m calling the Gikandi collaborative reading for next May 13th-19th.  Who’s in?

When I initially floated this proposal, a number of people responded on and off the blog.

Could I now get volunteers to commit to responding to a single chapter? You’ll see the Table of Contents below. I would like each chapter to be covered, but otherwise multiple respondents to a single chapter are fine.  I am also including a link to the Amazon listing.

If you are still interested in participating, either as a post-writer or respondent, please let me know as soon as you can.  Feel free to forward this to any colleagues or students you feel might be interested in participating. Just hit Reply, and let me know which of the chapters you’d like to tackle:

Ch. 1: Overture, 5/13: DELUCIA; MAZELLA
Ch. 2: Intersections, 5/14: CODR; BURNARD
Ch. 3: Unspeakable Events, 5/15: DYKE; WOOD
Ch. 4: Close Encounters, 5/16: MOWRY; COUCHMAN
Ch. 5: Popping Sorrow, 5/17: KUGLER
Ch. 6: The ontology of Play, 5/18: GOTTLIEB; HARDY
Coda, 5/19: MAZELLA

If you are too busy to do a formal post, but want to listen and respond to others, that would be fine, too.

Thanks, DM

Proposal for a Race and Empire Caucus at ASECS

[I just saw this announcement on the Eighteenth-Century Questions group at Facebook, and thought it would be a good idea to cross-post at the Long 18th.  Take a look, and if you're interested or have further questions, please reply to Suvir Kaul or Ashley Cohen at kaul@english.upenn.edu or AshleyCo@sas.upenn.edu.  Thanks, DM]

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In an attempt to make ASECS a more conducive and productive environment for scholarly exchange on the issues of race and empire, we are proposing to establish a Race and Empire caucus. ASECS procedures require us to collect a requisite number of signatures. Please consider our proposal (below) and reply to kaul@english.upenn.edu or AshleyCo@sas.upenn.edu with your name and departmental affiliation if you would like to sign. We would be much obliged if you would forward this e-mail to like-minded friends, colleagues, and students.

We have also organized a Race and Empire roundtable in Cleveland in support of our efforts and would be delighted to see you all there.

Best,

Ashley Cohen and Suvir Kaul

The rise of European sea-borne trade and colonialism is the central geopolitical fact of eighteenth-century history. It is thus impossible to understand the domestic social formations and cultures of eighteenth-century Europe in isolation from a global framework that acknowledges and takes into account the histories of European exploration, commerce, conquest, colonialism, and slavery in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and the Americas. These simple propositions form the basis for our present proposal to found an ASECS caucus dedicated to the constitutively linked issues of Race and Empire. We feel that the systematic study of these issues has been significantly underrepresented at ASECS’s annual conference in years past, even as occasional panels on such issues gather large audiences. A Race and Empire Caucus will ensure that ASECS consistently provides a forum for discussing and developing innovative critical approaches to eighteenth century histories and legacies of imperialism and slavery, as well as to the strategies of racialization that were central to both of these institutions. It is our hope that a Race and Empire Caucus will promote intellectual solidarity, create community, and foster collaboration, transforming ASECS’s annual meeting into a venue that consistently offers vibrant and vigorous discussions of these issues.

one definition of a “public good”: not just unprofitable, but impossible to profit from . . .

Robert W. McChesney’s Salon piece nails the higher education/journalism analogy, and reveals something that all our talk about “business models” fails to acknowledge:

There is probably no better evidence that journalism is a public good than the fact that none of America’s financial geniuses can figure out how to make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When manag­ers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative public service, not a business. Corporatized schools throw underachieving, hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard stu­dents with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the main impediment to “success.” No one has ever made profits doing qual­ity education—for-profit education companies seize public funds and make their money by not teaching. In digital news, the same dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to the same conclusion. (h/t Brad DeLong):

This is the extraction economy argument all over again, in which private companies make money by seizing public funds and not performing the now-privatized public serve (e.g., education, public parks, museums, etc.) . It’s a quieter, more plausible-sounding way of denying people the public services they once expected and received, while funneling money towards one’s friends and donors.

In the case of journalism, it has resulted, as McChesney observes, in a relentless attrition of the paid labor force of journalism that once provided the content, even while the quality of the now outsourced product declines to the point where no one would want to spend money on it. The internet’s effect has been to whittle away at the business model that once sustained newspapers (car dealerships and department stores once paid for local news), without leaving anything that could plausibly take their place. We might make a similar observation about all the “disruptive” models of education we’ve been hearing about lately.  How, exactly, does giving away content on the internet lead to the financial health of the institution giving its content away?  Who does end up paying for something that’s supposedly “free”?

It’s also worth noting how much the new online journalism, like the new higher education “business models” rely on massive amounts of “volunteer” labor from underemployed or aspiring laborers, who offer them free content in the hope of “exposure” rather than pay.  (And even if this kind of writing is conceived, like graduate education, as a form of apprenticeship rather than de facto pauperization of the profession, it still suggests the long-term unsustainability of the model).  I’ll leave the last word to writer/editor Teresa Nelson Hayden, who commented in this way on the value of the writing done “for free” in the public sphere:

“The role of journalism in a democracy is a public trust. It is much abused. It is a scandal. Writers aren’t expensive, but they aren’t free. If Atlantic isn’t paying them, someone else is. By not paying its writers, the Atlantic has thrown itself open to manipulation, astroturfing, and other disinformation. The principle you learn in Cinema 101 is that movies don’t film themselves. There’s always someone behind the camera. The same goes for journalism. We thought we knew what it was: this publication hires these writers. Now we know other agendas and relationships were in play, and we don’t know what they were. So yes, we feel betrayed.”

DM

18th century blog round-up resumes: march edition

I haven’t done one of these round-up posts for a while, but it seems as if some interesting new blogs have been coming online (along with others I’ve followed for awhile), and I wanted to call your attention to them.   Here are some links:

• The 18th-century Common has had some good posts lately.  Jonathan Lamb has posted an essay about Hogarth’s blush and Maori tattoos; and Margaret Koehler discusses her new book, The Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century, in the Common’s ongoing collection about Cognitive Science and 18th century studies.
• The Early American History blog The Junto has a very useful omnibus posting called “This week in American History.”  This week’s post contains a link to the soon-to-be-indispensable UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, along with a great post (at the worthy journal of narrative and experimental history, The Appendix) about colonial-era drunkenness.
• At Persistent Enlightenment, James Schmidt asks “What, if anything, does Dialectic of Enlightenment have to do with the Enlightenment?“
• Ted Underwood makes a case for the use of DH methods to help us revisit and refine our categories and macro-narratives of literary history, using the (admittedly incomplete but still voluminous) digital archives now available to us. Takeaway line: “The blurriness of literary categories is exactly why it’s helpful to use computers for distant reading.”

These are just a few of the posts I’ve been reading and thinking about this week. If you’ve got your own thoughts about them, or more suggestions for this week’s round-up, please hit “comment.”

DM

asecs 2013: initiative for digital humanities, media, and culture workshop, wed. april 3rd

Laura Mandell, of 18thConnect, has asked me to post this announcement for all interested ASECS attendees:

The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) will be hosting a special workshop at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference (ASECS) to be held in Cleveland this Spring 2013.

Creating a Publishable, Digital Textual Edition

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013
8:30 am – 7:00 pm

For workshop agenda, click here.

To register, click here.

This workshop will be taught and sponsored by 18thConnect. For additional information, please contact Laura Mandell, mandell-at-tamu-dot-edu.

DM

welcome to the university of pret a manger

I think any academic who reads this TNR piece about “emotional labor” at the upscale English coffee/food chain, or the essay that inspired it in the London Review of Books, will recognize the similarity between the weird emotional demands of Pret’s workplace and those placed on faculty, staff, and especially TAs in US institutions of higher education.

Here is a sample of “Pret behaviours” listed on a now-yanked corporate webpage:

Among the 17 things they ‘Don’t Want to See’ is that someone is ‘moody or bad-tempered’, ‘annoys people’, ‘overcomplicates ideas’ or ‘is just here for the money’. The sorts of thing they ‘Do Want to See’ are that you can ‘work at pace’, ‘create a sense of fun’ and are ‘genuinely friendly’. The ‘Pret Perfect’ worker, a fully evolved species, ‘never gives up’, ‘goes out of their way to be helpful’ and ‘has presence’. After a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks sparkle, you’re sent home with a few quid.

This could be on an MLA advice column for potential job-seekers, and of course we really do like the idea of genuinely friendly people acting as our doctors, teachers, nurses, policemen, and so forth. And who wouldn’t want to have as a colleague someone who “goes out of their way to be helpful”?

What seems strange to me is the idea that people must be coerced into such “behaviours.” And, of course, I naively thought that one of the ways to create a pleasant environment for one’s customers is not to treat people like complete assholes. So yes, apart from the small group of people who actually get off on the flattering insincerity of upscale bootlicking, I think this approach to management is actually counterproductive for staff and quite unpleasant for customers.  But what do I know?  I may have been served by a succession of cowering baristas for most of my life without even knowing it.

As someone who spends a lot of time reminding faculty and various others not to treat their students like non-humans, I feel a little ambivalent about the way in which the “service mentality” creeps into higher education, whether as the “loving our work” phenomenon so aptly diagnosed by Marc Bousquet, or the strangely schizophrenic attitude of hyper-rich institutions like Harvard towards their highly privileged faculty and students.  The problem is that the “caring for students” in those places is either caught up in superexploitation, as in many if not most public institutions, or in the careful maintenance of a reputation for caring, as at many of richest private institutions.

The tip-off, as we saw in the Harvard cheating debacle that either was or wasn’t a cheating debacle, is that instead of trying to educate all parties (faculty, students, parents, etc.) about the appropriate forms of collaboration either for teaching or learning (remember, a significant contributing factor was the lack of appropriate coordination of TAs), the university simply lowered the boom and silenced everyone about the incident.

From my perspective, one of the missing dimensions to Bousquet’s argument about superexploitation, and one I’d love to see him take up at some point, is why he himself continues to do what he does, or why any of us in higher ed still continue to care about our work, our students, or the consequences of what we do for others.  I think there is some tacit notion of a non-exploitative professionalism buried deep in there, but it’s difficult to disentangle those feelings from what we already know about institutional life and its risks of exploitation.

So what allows us to continue to interact with people, even if we feel that we work within institutions that may not always have ours or our students’ best interests at heart?  To what extent can we maintain a decent relation with others under such circumstances?

DM

 

new blog alert: James W Schmidt’s Persistent Enlightenment

I recently discovered a new blog by James W Schmidt, whose anthology What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions I’ve always admired. It’s called Persistent Enlightenment, and it proposes to examine “the Enlightenment, considered both as an historical period and as an ongoing project.”

It’s only just started, but one of the first posts, about Diderot in contemporary American culture, and specifically in the NY Times, is an interesting exploration of why Diderot “ought” to have mattered to Americans from their founding forwards, but perhaps did not.  Significantly, the term “ought” is not Schmidt’s phrase, but Andrew Curran’s in his own NYTimes tribute to Diderot, and Schmidt explores the gap between is and ought in American intellectual history.

Having read Schmidt’s treatment of the intellectual history represented by the Times and its editorial choices, I wondered how large an influence Jacques Barzun might have had in the construction of a middle-brow Diderot and indeed Enlightenment in 20th century America, since it was probably his translations and introductions to Diderot that introduced me to the term Enlightenment many years ago. Thoughts?

DM

 

Robert Scholes’ Rise and Fall of English, take two

I finished Scholes’s Rise and Fall the other day, and when I was done I felt that it was a lucid attempt to grapple with the largest questions surrounding the future of English Studies, as these problems were perceived circa 1998. Some of these issues still seem apposite, like the relation between K-12 and higher ed teaching; some, like his meditations on theory in the classroom, less so.  However, I left it wishing, perhaps a little unreasonably, that it had been written a little more boldly.

One of the problems that I had with the book was that it seemed specifically addressed to an audience of tenured, historically-based literature specialists who seem a lot more marginal now than they did in 1998, without it having much to say to the once-marginalized groups (the rhetoric and composition specialists, the creative writers, the underemployed adjuncts or the ambivalent graduate students) who really do make our departments different than they were in the 80s or 90s.

Even if some of the problems and solutions struck me as dated, though, there are still lots of moments worth pausing over.  This is one of my favorites, from Chapter 5, “A Fortunate Fall,” which I offer to you for consideration:

The idea of academic research as a “contribution to knowledge,” the ideal of “original research,” requires an assumption of progress toward more adequate descriptions of reality. In the sciences, research receives its justification and its support–despite all the lip serve to “pure” knowledge–from the exploitable discoveries or patents to which it may lead.  In the humanities, research receives its justification–despite all the lip service to the advancement of learning–from its applicability to teaching.  In fact, I would say that all important research in the humanities is simply teaching by other means than the lecture or the seminar.  And conversely, published work in English studies that has no use in teaching or makes no contribution to learning is unimportant–trifling stuff.  When Chaucer said of his Oxford Clerk that he would gladly learn and gladly teach, he was implying that the two activities were connected by more than the repeated adverb (172).

I happen to think this is true, and I was happy to see a figure like Scholes saying this as directly as he does.  Having said that, it seems that all the growth areas in literary scholarship are occurring in fields developing a dimension of exploitable discovery in their research, either in the hopes of Digital Humanities scholars to digitize, assemble, and analyze unprecedented amounts of verbal materials from the past and present, or in the continued effort to assemble, collect, and analyze more and more literary and cultural productions in the present from groups previously underrepresented in our cultural record.

So here’s my question: do we need to recognize Scholes’s allusion to Chaucer to conduct such research? And how might this kind of research activity relate to curricula and teaching, if this is where the scholarship of the field is indeed moving?

DM

simon gikandi’s slavery and the culture of taste: a collaborative reading?

When I arrived at MLA, I learned that Gikandi’s book, Slavery and the Culture of Taste had just been awarded, along with Greenblatt’s The Swerve, the James Russell Lowell Prize. Would readers of the Long 18th be interested in arranging a collaborative reading of this book for this spring?  If I get enough responses, I’ll see if I can solicit Simon Gikandi to participate.  If you’re interested in participating, or better yet, organizing, hit the Comment button or contact me offline at dmazella at uh.edu.

DM

PS: It would be helpful if those responding would let me know the best time to schedule this week-long event.  Thanks.