Ecopoetics Presentation

Here it is!

http://docs.google.com/a/utulsa.edu/leaf?id=0BzFvga99dQF8NmNjYmFjN2EtMzU0Mi00YjQ5LWJkZDUtMzA4YTNlNDY0ODIx&hl=en

Conservation vs. Human Life

Rarely does conservation come down to immediate life and death decisions. We talk about preserving the environment or saving endangered species as a far-off idea, something we should obviously do. It is sometimes slightly inconvenient to remember to bring along our reusable bags to Super Target, and a Prius may have cache on par with a Beemer in some circles, but as yet there is no convertible model. It became obvious during the ecocriticism unit that we are badly missing the point.

What happens when we privilege animal life equally (or above) human life? Here's the article from The New Yorker that I mentioned in class. I think it raises some relevant issues about the consequences of the ideas about privilege we discussed. Article HERE.

Maybe You'd Better Sit Down

The Characters:

Tyson: a pleasant, understated metrosexual in his 20’s.

Tyson’s MOM: the hyperliberal mother.

Lights up on a left-wing intellectual household. Maybe a couple raffia baskets from somebody’s Peace Corps year in Uganda; excellent feng shui. There is a couch and a mantel with a baby picture. Mom is doing something domestic, like dusting. Tyson enters.

Friday's class

Dear class, although I was not able to make it back to Tulsa in time for class, I admire you for sticking around and carrying on without me.  I regret missing Amelia's presentation and the ensuing discussion, as I'm sure she and everyone else had much edifying things to say.

I am proud, furthermore, that you all have taken ownership of this course and of your own learning.  You have helped each other navigate very difficult material, and class to me has felt from the beginning as if it were a conversation between a group of intellectually curious and open-minded people interested in similar things.

One of my ultimate goals for you coming out of this class is that you have the confidence and skills learn on your own.  Friday proves to me that you are ready for that goal, and I expect that each and every one of you will continue to teach yourselves and others for the rest of your lives.
 

Queercore

Awhile back, one of my friends showed me this pamphlet published by S.C.A.B, the Society for the Complete Annihilation of Breeders. I'll let you look for yourself:

http://36-c.blogspot.com/2008/12/scab-manifesto-1990.html?zx=21e968a8263c944

Of course, I was initially very shocked, and a little upset, although as that wore off I began to think that they couldn't possibly be serious.

I later came to the conclusion that they were, although not in the way I had first. Something weird happens when subaltern groups say outrageous things. They were serious about saying something, by using their unique position to reveal the bigotry of the radical discourses that we are used to hearing. In an ideal world, any anti-gay literature would seem as bizarre as this. However, I could also see how violence in any discourse is harmful. I'm surprised I've spent so much time trying to figure out one group in a tiny party called queercore, but I suppose that's what they wanted.

Post Colonialism

Today I had an interesting experience at my tutoring job at McLain High School in North Tulsa. I was assigned to monitor EOI tests with a few other volunteers from the community. McLain is a primarily black school, and its students are most often the lowest performers in the district. Anyway, today I was able to talk with 4 older members of the community, all black, and all who have grown up facing adversity because of the color of their skin. I couldn't help while I was sitting at a table with all of them, feeling a strong sense of guilt over the color of my own skin, and an inherent inability to relate to them. They discussed topics such as the Tulsa race riot, segregation and in turn the ill effects of integration, along with prominent civil rights leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. They talked about their inability to find a sense of identity without a real place to call home, much like we discussed in class. I was telling Amelia about this after I got back from the school, and we both agreed that there is this sense of guilt that we as white people have been instilled to feel for our race's injustices against black Americans, even if we ourselves haven't committed anything worth feeling guilty about. I enjoyed listening to them, and they really enlightened me to a lot of things, but I couldn't escape this feeling.

Ecocriticism

My first semester at TU, I took a 1063 class whose contents were all related to Nature. In the class we read many authors that were referenced in The Ecocriticism Reader, including Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Thoreau, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder and others. I had no idea at the time, (probably because my professor didn't articulate it) that ecocriticism was a literary theory. I really enjoyed that class because we explored all the ways in which nature affects society and culture. The underlying tone of the class was that every person is obligated (much like Levinas' Other as discussed in Who is my Neighbor?) to take care of their piece of the world as long as they live on it and in some ways abuse its resources. Anyway, I highly recommend these authors to everyone...maybe for a summer reading list?

The Need for New Historicism

A couple of weeks ago I was flipping through the Tulsa World when I came across an article with an intriguing title--"Politicians, pundits aim to rewrite history" (I couldn't get any sort of link to this to work, but you can find the article on the newspaper's website if you like). This article depicts some present ways in which politicians of the right are attempting (as the title says) to rewrite history, particularly in ways that would be unflattering to liberalism and thus, presumably, to the current regime (I do not mean to offend any who may be a part of the right, as there are many conservatives who are not fond of what is going on as well. I also don't mean to spark some sort of political debate.). Examples of changes they would like to be made are depicting Jamestown as a failed example of socialism. This ignores the fact that Jamestown was "a capitalist venture funded by the Virginia Company of London."
This seems to me to be one of the problems that New Historicism establishes itself as being counter to--the effect of biases on the writing of history. I do not think that it can be denied that these revisions are intended as means of bolstering the views of the Republican party; as Alan Brinkley (a historian at Columbia University) puts it in the article, "History in the popular world is always a political football. The right is unusually mobilized at the moment."

Why the Closet Will Never Go Away

In the end, I have to agree with Sedgewick; I don't think the closet is escapable. I think that the Netherlands and Iceland, two of the most tolerant countries on the planet, really demonstrates this fact. In both of these countries, many of the problems associated with homosexuality in less tolerant countries (drug use, STDs, mental illness) remain. Granted, they're lessened, but they still exist.

Of course, when you establish the closet as inescapable, the obvious follow up question is: why? And I think there are several reasons.

First of all, even in a country where parents would be as happy with a gay child as with a straight one, the assumption will be that you are heterosexual. The vast majority of people in the world are, unfortunately, heterosexual. And even if you believe the works of Kinsey on the subject, most people are going to end up being mostly heterosexual. It's insescapable.

It goes back to the whole "biological underpinning" that we discussed in the feminism unit. There are biological reasons for homosexuality. There have been all sorts of studies linking male homosexuality with population pressures and surplus males. When you're dealing with something that blurs the line between culture and biology, you run into these sorts of questions.

A second reason I don't think the closet will ever go away, which may seem rather tangetial, is that history is not progressive. We all assume that homosexuality will be more accepted in the future, but this isn't necessarily the case. Classical Greece was less homophobic than Hellenistic Greece which was less homophobic than modern Greece. The Age of Decadence precedes the Victorian Era. The Roaring Twenties was thirty years before the Square Fifties. And so on. History can change in ways that no one would have predicted.

Of course, as Professor Jenkins rightly pointed out, this does preclude the role of activism. It also precludes the role of the individual in dealing with this sort of thing. There are things people can do that can "fight the closet." Coming out the closet is one. Respecting alternative sexualities is another. We might not be able to see a culture where the closet is destroyed, but we can see one where the closet doors are thinner.

MC Solaar and PostCo

Hopefully people will find this interesting, as we talked about rap the other day.

MC Solaar was born in Senegal (a French colony) and moved to France when he was very young. I thought of his work as we talked about hip hop and rap spreading over the world. We talked about postcolonial situations within the country of the colonized, not so much when the colonized ends up in the colonizer's country, which is what is happening today in France. Although we don't normally think of France as a country where there are racial tensions, they definitely exist within France today. You might remember the student riots a few years ago in Paris.

Anyway, here is the video. I can't figure out the embedding, so I hope you don't mind a little copy-paste action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n8kGW16RYs&a=2s8YkAZUYWU&playnext_from=ML


It includes imagery of both the old, faded idea of the American West, as well as the exploitation of American cultures to other countries. Does the America act as a colonizer of cultures, even when they don't have a physical presence in other countries? The song also ask questions about the situation of minorities in France, the violence they encounter, ect. Don't worry, the video has subtitles. :)