proposal and its lack

i have to write a dissertation proposal

how do i fill up this space?

or, better yet, how do i start to narrate a place
for myself.

this liminal threshold
this in-between-ness is quite stultifying

not that i have a writer's block or that i am unable to write...
because i can

i feel like an intellectual fraud
i notice my peers writing and moving toward something and that
their ideas are fresh
innovative

i'm stuck...not that i am without my ideas
but that my ideas really suck
and that my writing really
is a convoluted mess
and that this unfortunate circumstance
is quite lonely

writing is lonely business

and the more i try to fill up
this lack with a narrative
i create more lack
i try to grasp at any kind of border
to solidify or at least close up
the "place" i am trying to create
but the borders are outside of my reach

like some kind of mirage on a hot road
i see it from afar but the closer i get
to it the more it fades
and is gone
leaving me more room
to write with words that, to me,
lack any kind of substance

frustration....or the absurdness of humanity

so i finally watched the documentary on derrida

and it is extremely frustrating to watch...not because of the

philosopher or the concept of deconstruction

but the absolutely stupid questions that people

(the "documenter" included) asked him

i must say derrida himself was composed, graceful, and patient

most of the answers he provided to these questions

spoke to their own impossibility

derrida, throughout this documentary, stated that he...himself...as

an articulated and inarticulated self, is skeptical of narrative acts

especially narrative acts of auto/biographical frames...

one constantly speaks about oneself but only in an always already limited way

because there is always something being withheld

always something suppressed or abjected

but we take these narratives anyway and hold them up as something

"authentic" and universal when, in fact, they are nothing more than specters

or phantoms...therefore, we are disjointed in our "being"

we reject the Other while also embracing it

we look and we touch and we remember

but what if we attempted to look at ourselves with the eyes

of the Other?

what would we see then ?

subjectivity, as derrida stated throughout, is an inescapable violence

many times rhetorical

often times physical

most times both

it's rather disheartening...to dispel or unravel the violent knots of being...

of i-ness...

and the utter masculinity that all of this is framed within

i also was extremely interested and saddened by a talk that he

gave in south africa regarding the "who" and the "what" in regards

to the concepts of "forgiveness" and "reconciliation,"

the role of love, and the conflicting terms of negotiation

that inevitably announce themselves in this type of analysis

i say interested because i see relevance and

saddened for the same reason...

but above all

my favorite moment in the film was also, ironically, the most absurd

an interviewer actually asked derrida if he was familiar with the u.s. sitcom

seinfeld...when he replied "no" she gave him a short introduction

to "what" it was via an anecdote then

she made a connection between this show and a process of deconstruction by the

insinuation that this show illuminates a deconstructive process...

i loved his answer:

"deconstruction can never be a sitcom"

loves it...

but i'm a drafter

"we write to taste life twice."
--anais nin

i was hanging out with my friend M yesterday and
like most grad school nerds we were talking about
academics...more specifically writing.

i have a very strange relationship with the process of writing
i love it
i hate it
i use it as an object to gauge my own self worth,
to determine the exact dimensions or specifications
of who i am as a writer
i realize that this is unwise
but i still do it nonetheless

in any event, back to my conversation with M
i was telling her about one of the comments
that i received (anonymously) from a reader
who, incidentally, passed me on the answer to the question...
anyway,
this reader basically scolded me for articulating my
ideas in "tortured" prose.
i must admit that this hurt my feelings
and i was pretty vocal about it

i'm not above criticism...and i,
more than anyone else,
realize that my writing can indeed be 'torturous' to read
because it is torturous to write
but i think that's the point

going over this comment and my adverse reaction to it with M
she looked at me and said:
"YOU'RE a drafter"
i thought about it and i sighed out an agreement
i am a drafter
writing is never, ever finished for me

my project and, consequently, my writing is and always will be
a draft
i write against language
i write against grammar
i write against the active
in an actively passive way...the paradox is torturous
but, for me, most necessary

while i disagree with the violent word of "torture" and
the various acts that it signifies i do realize that
my writing is a struggle
with knots
i untie them while at the same time making new ones
i look at the knots that i have made and i begin to untie
them and in this process creating newer ones
and so it goes

i am a drafter
an un-tier and maker of knots simply because
i hate the regulatory "nature" of language
with its power and its violent oppression
i will always write against it
because my life and who i am is reflected within the very
prose that issues forth from my clouded mind

i am a drafter therefore
my life and who i am is a draft and i
will continue to write
and rewrite my ideas and my life

at times, my stances will be cogent even if only in an instant...
at others
not so much (at least for the reader)
but ultimately i must be true (in a postmodern sense of 'true') to the conflict
that brews inside of me and work it out the best
way that i know how
which is writing
which is reading
which is interpreting and
ultimately unapologetic

it's funny, this same reviewer rattled off a litany
of scholars that i should read...(about 8)
6 of them i have read and
hindsight causes me to chuckle
because when i reflect on this list
i have very specific reasons for NOT using
these suggested writers
and i chuckle even more when i think
that if i ever attempted to copy or emulate the ways in which
they write or, more specifically, how they work out their ideas
within their writing i would never have
been accepted to grad school and certainly would never have
passed three comprehensive exam questions

from now on
i will be unapologetic with my writing
it has to be honest (if only temporarily)
and it has to be
re-written

i am a drafter
i would not want or have it any other way

note to self

pat yourself on the back

for passing your comprehensive exams

(but only for about 5 minutes)

then start writing your proposal

and freaking out over a dissertation.

is "fag hag" empowering? and the "colonizing" mother

i presented a paper at the children's literature association's international conference this month and (like most conferences that i go to and present at) i either love what i hear or hate it...a binary i know but i very rarely find gray areas at these events.

for the record i am not specializing in children's literature...my ethos to this field is through english studies via rhetoric...i am transdiscipinary which means that i feel a certain amount of responsibility to verse myself (if only incidentally) to the major intersections of critical discourse where text and culture intersect.

with this said i listened to two papers that were absolutely horrible if not disturbing. one paper was given on a panel that i was chairing. the panel was devoted to issues of colonization and (to some extent) the future of postcolonial studies.

one of the papers (given by a recently graduated "master's" student) analyzed the relationship between illustrations in a picture book and the words on the page. although i am all for cross pollinating concepts in order to parse through dense theoretical connections i sat there wondering what any of this had to do with colonization? i mean, i was making connections in my mind but as far as listening to the direction of this person's paper i was coming up short in constructing some kind of intellectual relevance. then she started talking about colonization.

the picture book being analyzed is entitled _the water tower_. essentially it is about two white boys who are around 9 to 10 years of age. the speaker then proceeded to talk about how these two boys were colonized by their mothers. or more accurately, how one boy was colonized because he had a mother and the other wasn't because his mother was absent. i suppose in her theoretical context fathers are unable to or just don't 'colonize' their spawn? i was dumbfounded. what did the speaker mean by colonization? acts of discipline imposed from one body onto another? althusserian interpellation? i am not persuaded. in fact this is what happens when students (and i am still a student) are given carte blanche to any half baked idea and consequently thinking that they are being "original" or "subversive". this student's mentor (a supposedly "big name" in this field) was there as well...and i kept on thinking to myself that this "mentor" approved this garbage and that she should know better.

the paper was not only terrible, it was dangerous. this paper is dangerous indeed because it downplayed the very real material presence of colonization (and its after-effects). colonization is local but it is also cultural...it deals with hegemony and the violence of the hegemonic struggle in a very "real" sense. it is traumatic and violent and it reifies this trauma on bodies and cultures mimetically (even after this said colonization or the colonizing agent has extracted itself from the cultural landscape). the power of discipline from a mother (or parent) to a child is many things. for instance, it creates subjectivity...it proves itself problematic insofar as insuring the proliferation of white male heteronormative power (in western society) is kept in place. many, many theorists have written about this power dynamic (adrienne rich or jessica benjamin, for instance) but in no way does this process even mimic a colonizing process. if anything this student's analysis downplays colonization...giving it license to hide itself in an irresponsible analysis.

furthermore, this student talked about the image of the water tower itself within the narrative structure of the book. she surmised that the water tower was/is a matriarchal (and colonizing) figure in the story. how so? well this student says that the boys went swimming in the water tower. the water tower was round (womb-like) and it contained water. my brain almost exploded. what about the shape of the water tower? is it not in some way a phallus? the fact that this womb was housed inside a phallus was absent from this critique therefore actively ignoring at least 50 years of feminist scholarship that addresses this very issue. what kind of work does this ignorance or short-sightedness do? could it be that the figure of the mother as womb is created within phallogocentrism? this student's problematic paper displaced the point of critique from the oppressive dominance of white male heteronormativity onto the body of the woman as mother using a non sequitor of colonization.

also, another alarming aspect to this student's talk was her use of "marriage". she constantly reiterated a marriage between the image and the text; marriage between oppression and the body. yet again, i am reminded of how very pervasive white male heteronormative dominance can be in that it manipulates and hence reifies itself under a rubric of a critique that supposedly does the opposite. meaning, her paper was not a critique but an excurses based upon a very well hidden apology from the dominated to the status quo.

the second paper that i had the "privilege" to listen to was given by a new master’s student. if not for the fact that i had to read my paper right after her, i would have left the room. she proposed through her paper that the term "fag hag" is empowering. she used an adolescent text to make her point. in this text a young woman finds out her boyfriend is gay (through, i am assuming, his disclosure). they break up. this break up does not lead to animosity but rather to friendship...this young woman becomes in this text a "fag hag." the reader of this paper then tries to say that this is empowering...that fag hag is not what it used to be but it is something different. she also used several examples from pop culture to illustrate her point (seinfeld, will and grace, and sex and the city, etc.). i kept on thinking to myself (while biting my tongue and trying to keep blood from shooting out of my nose): really....Really.....REALLY???????? not once did she theorize the term. not once did she rely on any of the critical feminist and queer theory scholarship that challenges this term. furthermore, she didn't even historicize the label as a pejorative.

i am all for reclaiming a name...i do this with 'queer.' but unlike this reader i try to always question the terms and the work that 'queer' does. queer in my lexical and theoretical usage is grounded in strangeness...it functions on ontological, phenomenological, and ultimately epistemological registers. queer looks at race, gender, ability, sex, and class in terms (and not despite) of normativity (in a juridical foucauldian sense). however, i must never forget what this word still can do. i must always remember that it functions for many as and only a pejorative. it still does work that i critique against. this word is still rhetorically VIOLENT. i must never forget this. the same goes with "fag hag."

never once was the question raised by this student...can "fag" ever be empowering? what about "hag"? both have very long histories. both have been critiqued together and separately through countless pages of scholarship. i am not persuaded that these terms can ever be empowering...maybe i'm wrong but unlike queer this term was created solely for very specific reasons. it is a raced term...it is gender specific and points to a solid demographic (self identified straight white women who hang around white gay men). "fag" in this sense is being used as a label by white gay men to lay claim to the "hag" or, more specifically, the body of the straight, white woman. therefore, "fag" is a term of empowerment and melancholy for white gay men over white straight women. it is a move that signifies not only a claim to bodies but a claim to power. so my question is who is being empowered by this term? how is the term "hag" functioning? is it empowering? for whom?

during the q & a time i tried to bring these questions to the fore. i attempted to get people discussing the inherently misogynistic work this term is still "doing" within culture...is will and grace subversive...what about sex and the city? what specific images are being attached to the term? how is this term working? no one wanted to talk about race or class or gender in this way. they just wanted to sit around and talk about how "fag hag" is empowering. this, like the previous paper, is dangerous. the term is still used as a pejorative...unnuanced and under theorized by the people who want to claim it as an excuse for doing "cutting edge" work.

i have said this before and i will say it again (even though it is problematic). anytime (white) straight people/scholars attempt to discuss the lesbian/gay/transgendered/transsexual bodies within culture and cultures through what they think is substantive critique they (9 times out of 10) fuck it up. thus "open minded" and/or liberal/progressive self identified straight (white) people are always reassuring their listeners through their words that they as normative bodies are still the unquestioned paradigm and thus, unintentionally, admitting that although normativity should be questioned it is only questioned insofar as their fear of implication allows them to go.

an old argument

at 1:45 today i was walking to the stevenson building

to teach my 2:00 class.

on my way to the classroom

i noticed an "evolution vs. creation" table set up by the stairs

and instantly i became tired.

i am sick of this argument for many reasons

not simply because of the religious vs. secular

fight but rather the more obvious notion of

who's doing the fighting and i can tell you that it is

almost always white guys on both sides of a fence

battling it out,

trying to establish policy which in turn will regulate our bodies

as intellectual vessels that are thought to be depraved and which,

consequently,

need to be filled

either by believing the earth is 10,000 years old or 10,000,000,000.

what does this "knowledge" (if it can ever be truly attained) "do"?

i offer up and experience that

invovles one of my visits with j...

who, by the way, is studying to be an episcopal priest so

the intersection between god(dess) and science

is extremely complex and existential...

in any event, we were listening to a very outspoken

scientist/atheist who was commenting on npr about the ever persistent

debate between

science and religion (creationism)

and he said something interesting....and i am greatly simplifying

his argument...it was much more nuanced…

"why" questions are not worth answering

only "how" questions deserve our time;

why questions are "typically" asked by, in this instance, christians

whereas "how" questions are much more rigorous and tend to be

asked by scientists...

this drives me crazy....here you have this white guy,

upper class, who teaches at oxford university and assumed

to be heterosexual or heteronormative in the very least

telling the audience that there is only one mode of inquiry

and that, since god does not exist, the other type of question

is not even worth considering...

typical (typically male i should say).

i am not falling on either side of the religion/atheist or evolution/creation binary

in this post...that would be a book...rather

i'm just saying that the argument as it stands is being framed

like any other argument where power and policy are working

on bodies within culture vis-a-vis a representation of

two white guys arguing for/over power,

to tell us all how to live, and

what questions to ask...

for instance, i think why questions are extremely important

i want to know

why are people still dieing from poverty and disease?

why is there no healthcare for everyone?

why is there discrimination?

these "why" questions are not worth considering because

they implicate...

pointing the finger at real issues

instead of focusing on "issues" that are speculative,

that do not implicate and only require a body to speak from a

comfortable armchair, wearing a smoking jacket, and clenching a pipe.

someone

surrounded by

access and privilege

trying to figure out how old the earth actually is

or if there is life after death…

the answers to which do not feed or

help anyone.

furthermore,

arguments such as evolution and creation

distract and, worse, are simply circuitous…

because these two concepts need each other to survive,

they create a wheel that rotates

but doesn’t go anywhere

an experiment in narrative because i am not a poet

ok, at illinois state there is a journal called euphemism that is entirely run by the undergraduate students within the english department. most, if not all, of these students are english majors who are concentrating their studies on the field of publishing. the faculty advisor for this journal is a brilliant writer and scholar who i will refer to as dr. h. well, i received an e-mail from dr. h. requesting that i "read" something for this event. apparently they would like to have more men reading in the program.

problem no. 1: i do not fancy myself a creative writer...although i have written some poetry and short stories...i don't think that i have ever shown them to anyone.

problem no 2: i have five minutes to read something. now, five minutes may not seem like a long time but you would be surprised by how slowly the minutes drag by when one is reading written work. over five years of writing conference papers has taught me this much.

problem no 3: the event is next thursday...

problem no 4: did i mention that i am not a creative writer? oh yeah, i guess i did.

at first, i had a couple of poems from other people that i was thinking about reading and then i thought i should at least try to create something of my own. i mean i am a compositionist, in part at least, and i can look at this event as an "assignment." i can look at it as something that i would ask my writing students to do. so i have been working on a piece of narrative. it isn't a poem and the best i could describe it as is a fragment, an observation. i see it as an object that is reflected in the broken pieces of a mirror....disconnected and yet symbiotic and somewhere "out there" beyond the reach of an instantaneous signification these narrative pieces will meld. writing is exhausting...creative writing even more so....i would never call myself a poet but i can call myself someone who tried. finally, any suggestions or helpful comments would be greatly, GREATLY appreciated. here it goes...


"Always in the long corridors of the psyche
doors are opening and doors are slamming shut"

Marge Piercy from "Song of the Fucked Duck"

doors: five narrative fragments

i

reading derrida on a friday evening i found myself hungry and restless.
i was caught up in a psychic paradox between my bodily desire to leave because of a hunger to fill up an emptiness and my longing to stay where i was...because of this same hunger.

i went out...the desire fueled by my physical hunger won...trumped, as it were, the excuses to stay put...to eat the words of the book that i was reading at that moment.

actually, both desires drew a compromise that involved take-out.

ii

waiting, waiting for my food i noticed a woman sitting in a darkened corner.
i know this woman, not by name but by recognition.
she walks.
she walks around town most of the time.
i have only ever seen her walking so it took me a while to place her in the restaurant because she was temporarily rooted,
stationary.
i heard her get up.
i heard her ask the server about time: she wanted to know what time darkness settles in.
i tried to answer the question in my mind...to myself and i didn't even know the answer. the server told her something...i think she said 8 but i'm not sure,
i was still calculating.

what time does it get dark?

iii

my food came up...handed over to me like a precious thing wrapped in styrofoam and plastic.
i paid.
i turned to leave and was faced with the unfamiliar-now-familiar woman standing next to me.
she followed me outside
our movements were cadenced yet displaced
like awkward choreography
she said she knew me.
she has seen me around town with other people.
i was placed, a stationary point on a map.
she wanted to know something so she asked me a question...a question that i could not answer for her...a question that required walking for its response...perhaps even walking in circles.
i stood, anchored upon the sidewalk in my own absence
shrugging my shoulders and smiling into a void
she thanked me for my time and inability to answer.
we whispered antiphonic goodbyes.
i went to my car, with very heavy feet and my plastic bag of food, cell phone, and cigs absurdly hanging off of my body--useless ornaments, swinging.
i stopped and turned as she kept walking the other way,
a vanishing point that expanded the muted territory between us.
i felt like saying something more than what my goodbye could offer her.
i wanted to tell her that i understood.
goodbye is easier though because this other understanding is beyond words...it only recognizes the grammar of movement.

iii

some say that this woman is a poet...a remarkable poet, a tragic poet.
i say that she is a walking poet.
others say that she has a psychiatric condition...i say that that assumption is relative...it depends on who is doing the diagnosing and it's usually a doctor that is sitting down, rooted in a place without movement
in some shadowed corner of some dingy restaurant, and who has no idea...no idea at all.

iv

i read the other day that dreams about houses are pictures of the psyche...i believe in that premise because i believe in basements.
i also believe in basements under basements as well.
imagine that you are dreaming….you are in a house that is webbed in the gauzy reassembled pieces of memory and nostalgia in which you find yourself walking.
vision invites you to drift downstairs through an open door that announces itself as a materialized binary marked by its two knobs.
you accept the invitation…you walk through and down into darkness.
you realize (through intuition and touch) that at some point these stairs stop or cease to exist in another, deeper room.
this room under the house is dark, a little cool and there are no windows.
most who get this far don't linger long enough to see the passageway that leads to still a deeper room, as vast as it is profound.
but some do...i did (or, rather, still do, I know it’s there) the walking poet did so as well
but even if the dreamer does get further than most and follows that corridor down to this other room...still, most don't see the door in this basement's basement.
it beckons anyway.
in a certain kind of silence, you can hear it...like the gentle static sound of snow falling. not only have i seen it, i have had my hand on the doorknob a couple of times, i have even turned it.
but unlike the woman who walks, something tells me, however, that once this door is opened and i cross over its threshold there is no coming back.
because the inside of that door has no knob.
i simply do not posses that courage.

v

so i know the temptation.
i know what her walking means.
i know this woman and she is brave,
to walk between two worlds and yet refuse to distinguish a line between them.
to only be recognized by the vision and grammar of others who have either been at the door or who have themselves trampled through.
or the ones that stare, that refuse to understand what her movement means
by hiding behind their own carefully selected rubrics of denial that thinly disguise their own basements with their own doors quietly singing like static snow
perhaps her walking makes it better.
perhaps it eases the pain of the door with no knob
slamming shut.

--oaw

i have a new crush....

on a cultural geographer by the name of Yi-Fu Tuan. Thanks to Devon and Dr. Justice, I am now reading about cultural geography and the intersections that this concept shares with space, place, time, and narrative/narrativity. it is interesting for me to see the ways in which queerness is negotiated through shifting territories and the relationship that this theoretical position, in turn, discursively shares with temporality, space, place(ment), the role, or work, of boundaries, and the complex choreography that these concepts share not only with a process of bodily inscription but of embodiment. this all started with dr. kim's newberry library lecture series that i am taking this semester. in this seminar i am looking at the concepts of strange territories and monstrosity (read queer[ness]) and how they are constructed and (con)textualized within an anonymous anglo saxon text: the wonders of the east. not only is dr. kim letting me write about that text but i am analyzing it against (or with) the more contemporary novel lolita by nabokov. it seems like an over the top project for a short ten page paper but maybe i can get a good working outline going in hopes of a diss chapter....one can only hope (or pray).

gender outlaw is gender trouble

i had my gender in the humanities class read kate bornstein's gender outlaw this week and i'm kind of stumped. on one hand i really like this text because it is the first major text written by a transsexual person and she really does go into great detail about what transsexual and transgender issues really involve. i like this text because it assertively puts on the table issues of naming and the male/female binary...the emotional and psychological investments that we have in this binary and the consequences of transgressing the codes of identity that this said binary deploys. however, maybe it's too much of one thing....what i mean by this is that she really focuses on the transgender body as a site of queerness and silence in such a concerted way that other connections that could be made are not even addressed. i'm thinking here of issues involving race and socioeconomic positions. Bornstein is white and she was a male. she really does go into deep discussion over the problem of male privilege but does not identify its relationship to white male privilege. she discusses the implications and the issues of the ways in which the lesbian and gay communities oppresses transgendered/transsexual bodies but again intersections of race and socioeconomic positions are not really addressed. or if they are it is minimal. her discussion of male/female power relationship conflates this dynamic with class conflict....and i find this extremely un-nuanced and problematic. my class also had some trouble with this text as well. however, i must admit their criticisms were all very constructive and i didn't get closed-minded polemical garbage but i fear that my own trepidation regarding the text seeped into my teaching of the text and i am paranoid that my students went away with a somewhat skewed notion of what this text was really about (of course, can we ever determine what any text is ever about?). which is to say, i think that i might have been misread by my students. now nothing happened in class to give me this idea...i guess i'm just a little paranoid...which is something for me to look at a little bit more closely now that i think about it.

grade inflation?

i recently came across a syllabus by a phd student instructor who put a clause in his/her syllabus regarding "grade inflation". basically this person was telling her/his students that because there is a "problem" within the academy today regarding the easiness of getting an "a" in a course s/he will be grading the class "strictly", i.e. don't expect an "a" in this course. i find this disturbing because it seems as if these students are being punished because of a systemic problem within the academy that has nothing to do with them...a problem that i personally don't see as concrete or material but more or less self congratulatory on the behalf of the instructor for teaching a "tough" class...but that's just me. in no way am i saying that we should just give out "a"s to students just for showing up or for any other such reason that maybe considered "non rigorous" by current traditional standards but why is grade inflation these students' problem? why does this instructor feel the need to couch her/his terms in this manner in order to justify their own strict approach to grading and thus shoring up the already problematic issue of static abstractions?....just grade them...isn't that a power dynamic enough to deal with without adding to the ethos of an already existing position? it's hard enough getting the students to actually read and engage with the learning process. i find useless power plays regarding strict grading as somehow more academically rigorous than an "easy" class absurd. it also takes away from actual teaching (which may be the point). as you can tell i hate grading in general...it is a commodity that the students expect to get (because they have issues of entitlement which are extremely problematic) but it is also a commodity that instructor's tend to think that they can possess and distribute through insane power plays that surface in language that, in turn, attaches itself to academic performance and, inevitably, intelligence. i read such rhetoric as an instructor assuming the gatekeeper position not only in the classroom but also in the academy (a position that is also a static abstraction) and thus telling the students from the very beginning of the term that they actually are 1) assuming that they are getting an "a" (which many are not) and 2) because of that assumption or presumption they will not get the desired "a" because they're not serious students anyway and that they don't belong in the academy. i guess i'm more concerned with my students actually learning something rather than trying to figure out how they need to manipulate a power dynamic in which they will get an "a". it all becomes about getting SOMETHING from the instructor and this "SOMETHING" has nothing to do with learning at all but rather getting the first letter of the alphabet and its corresponding points tallied and printed on their transcript.

PS: don't even get me started on plagarism statements!

the best day so far in 2007

when i woke up on sunday morning and was contemplating my day over cigs, coffee, writing a blog post, and a yahoo crossword puzzle i had no idea my day would end the way that it did. after my morning rituals of procrastination i gathered up my various stuff and proceeded to the brand new coffee hound in downtown normal to study and read with stefanie. when i first walked in i saw dr. tolson and lauren reading and working. getting my coffee and setting my various bags and coats down i went over to where dr t. and lauren were sitting. it was at that point when dr. t. asked me if i was going to go hear angela davis' talk at iwu later on in the evening. it was as if i was struck over the head by a 2x4....what did she mean angela davis' talk? sure enough angela davis was in town....i did not even know...i felt my heart beating really fast and my palms immediately became sweaty. it was at this point lauren looks up at me and says that she not only has an extra ticket for the talk but also the ticked involved dinner as well...with angela davis...and she asked me if i wanted to go. i just looked at her for a couple of seconds and said "hmmmm...let me think about that YES" so two hours later i was sitting at a table between lauren and dr. t. looking directly at the gloriousness that is angela davis.
angela davis is the quintessential scholar for me...not only is she an icon for everything that i believe in but she is also history that walks and talks...a history that we are living and breathing...a history that is stunningly profound and yet is still alive and doing important work. for me angela davis demonstrates the important intersection between theory and practice. she is also a teacher...i am looking at a woman who influences todays innovative thinkers...chela sandoval and laura hun ye kang...i don't only look to her but i also look to her students.
her talk was phenomenal. she briefly talked about her reseach and intellectual investments in various critiques of the prison system in the united states but she spent a lot of time talking about the discursive formation of racism in united states culture. she spent time talking about meaning and language....what does "racial justice" mean...let's rhetorically analyze the construction of the emancipation proclamation and the 13th amendment...what are these documents actually saying and how have they inscribed themselves upon the consciousness of the culture in the united states. just how was (and is) the institution of slavery conceptualized....as the abolishment of compulsory labor? racism and xenophobia? or have we become blind to the work of racism through this language...how is race lived? where does racism discursively live and do its work? critiques on and the movement to rid the legal system of affirmative action as one way to illuminate the ways in which racism is still living today and doing its work was talked about by davis. the disappearance of affirmative action is no less a perpetuation of civil death...the work of affirmative action to empower subjugated communities has been superseded to focus on the individual and, indeed, propagate a civil death...to silence...to stop history...to make it conform to white male supremacy. it is all done with certainty...the discursive relationship between racism and certainty, davis reminded us, creates a logic that "ceases to announce itself" and that "hides in the grammar" that forms our very subjectivity negotiations between us (or our selves) and the world/culture.

i have three pages of notes...this was the best day of 2007 yet.