About Aaron
A graduate student in real life at UC Berkeley, Aaron is a graduate student in virtual life at zunguzungu.
Email Address: aaronbady@berkeley.edu
Posts by Aaron
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Dubois at 90
In the opening paragraphs of W.E.B. Dubois’ last autobiography, written in “the Last Decade of its First Century,” DuBois tells an ostensibly simple story. For almost a decade, he says, “I had been refused a passport by my government,” which used the bureaucratically opaque excuse that “it was not considered to be ‘to the best interests of the United States’ that I go abroad.” The US’s interests and his have diverged, it seems, and as a result he has been deprived of that most basic of civic identities, the right to be interpellated as American while abroad. Since the government had suspected--correctly!--that he would criticize the United States for its “attitude toward American Negroes” if released, he had become--as he dramatically analogizes--a convict. An unrepentant old committer of dissent, he is an almost certain recidivist, and his hope of parole, it would seem, is dim.
But through an unexpected twist of fate, he tells us, he managed to acquire a passport and depart his country, “like a released prisoner.” The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had not yet given the State department the right to do what they had done, so before the President was engineer a bill to zip up the loophole, DuBois jumps ship and is gone, traveling to Europe, the Soviet Union, and China. Like a criminal accidentally paroled, he savors every drop of what he no doubt expects will be his last trip abroad. And then, he says, simply, “I came home.”
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Friday, June 20, 2008
Blocking Out The Wire
One of the things that makes The Wire what it is, I think, is that it combines an incredible level of detail in portraying the local with a radical disinclination to address the larger context in which the “local” is located. This, of course, would hardly be a criticism if the show’s accomplishment in one kind of realism didn’t draw attention to its failings in another; after all, can you name a television show that does a better job in displaying the functioning of international capitalism than The Wire? In any case, “better” and “worse” are precisely not the right way to adjudicate this question. Instead, I would suggest that The Wire can’t see anything outside of Baltimore for the very simple reason that it carefully (and strategically) avoids looking.
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Monday, June 02, 2008
“What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”
A reviewer for the Chicago Tribune made that comparison, and it feels apt, whatever one takes the difference between “recording” and “implication” to signify. Caldwell and Faulkner do seem to be doing something strikingly similar, even if they go about it quite differently. While novels like Sanctuary are as close as Faulkner comes to producing “the South” as the lurid object of the reader’s voyeuristic gaze, the calculated way that Caldwell produces voyeuristic fantasy after fantasy would seem to take this to a whole other level. Peer through the hole in the fence, for example, at a typical sex scene in God’s Little Acre:
Continue reading "“What William Faulkner implies, Erskine Caldwell records”"“Take me, Will—I can’t wait,” she said.
“You and me both,” said he.
Will got on his hands and knees and raised Darling Jill’s head until he could draw her hair from under her. He lowered her pillow, and her long brown hair hung over the bed and almost touched the floor. He looked down and saw that she had raised herself until she was almost touching him.
He awoke to hear Darling Jill screaming in his ear. He did not know how long she had been screaming. He had been oblivious to everything in the complete joy of the moment.
He raised his head wide after a while and looked into her face. She opened her eyes wide and smiled at him.
“That was wonderful, Will,” she whispered. “Do it to me again.”
He tried to free himself and arise, but she would not let him move. He knew she was waiting for him to answer her.
“Will, do it to me again.”
“Damn it Darling Jill, I can’t right now.”
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
You Know Who I Blame? The System!: The Wire, Barack Obama, and Omar for President
Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation opens with the figure of John F. Kennedy being nominated to run for president and invoking the “New Frontier” as his vision for the country. As Slotkin observes, it might seem odd for a candidate so heavily identified with the Eastern seaboard to invoke the Wild West, but then, of course, this is exactly why Kennedy did it: by tapping into what Slotkin calls “a vein of latent ideological power,” Kennedy managed to be “intelligible to the widest possible audience--to Brooklyn and Cambridge as well as Abilene and Los Angeles,” by employing a set of symbols that were also an “appropriate language for explaining and justifying political power.” In Slotkin’s words, “The ‘frontier’ was for them a complexly resonant symbol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales--each a model of successful and morally justifying action on the stage of historical conflict.”
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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Some Uneducated Speculations on the “The African Novel” in Tanzania
When I was in Arusha, Tanzania--doing other things--I greedily purchased the few African novels that were available for purchase. This meant frequenting bookstores that sold novels to two very distinct markets: novels for white people and novels for Tanzanian students. I feel safe in saying that the comparatively high level printing, binding, and prices of the former pretty much limited those books to tourist and expatriate buyers (or were certainly printed with that market in mind), while the very specific pedagogical function of the latter confined their relevance to a similarly particular sub-section of the Tanzanian population: young people still in school. In the first category, you had both canonical English literature--penguin editions of D.H. Lawrence and so forth--and literary supplements to the tourist industry, stuff like this, with books like Out of Africa and Green Hills of Africa straddling the gap. The second market was for novels used as textbooks, a mixed bag which I’ll look at in a moment. I was therefore an eccentric purchaser, poorly served by either marketing strategy: I was in search of an object, “the African novel,” which hardly exists as such in the local commercial consciousness.
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Sunday, April 20, 2008
African Novels and the Politics of Pedagogy
(This, for what it’s worth, is a continuation of what I was thinking through in this previous post)
It’s something of a cliché that literary writing in Africa is more political than we are accustomed to expect in the West, but truisms often become clichés precisely because they have something true about them. So after tabling the fraught issue of whether one can productively compare “Western” and “African” literary aesthetics in any meaningful sense, I’m interested in the fact that the form taken by such literary politics is so often--and so significantly--that of pedagogy.
For example, Chinua Achebe’s 1965 essay “The Novelist as Teacher” set the tone for decades of critical work to follow by arguing that:
Continue reading "African Novels and the Politics of Pedagogy"“the writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front…I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past--with all its imperfections--was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important, but so is education of the kind I have in mind.”
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Monday, April 07, 2008
Young Englishmen and Black Boys
That racism “infantilizes” people of color shouldn’t be news to anyone. Calling a black man a boy (or a black woman a girl) means something recognizably similar in contexts as different as almost any part of Africa or the Western hemisphere, and farther abroad than that. So when, in 1952, Dylan Thomas referred to the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard as written in “young English,” he was only playing an interesting variation on a well-worn theme. After all, while Tutuola made his reputation as a writer on the strength of that review, the idea of “young English” clearly defines a very particular kind of cultural hierarchy, infantilizing populations instead of particular adults.
But it’s at least worth taking seriously the fact that Thomas thought he was praising Tutuola’s “thronged, grisly and bewitching story” by calling it a “nightmare of indescribable adventures.” Tutuola’s writing blends basic ignorance of standard English with an equal measure of cavalier disinterest in it, and a desire to be “bewitched” could make that devil’s brew into a particular kind of virtue for a white book-buying public, the same way Paul Laurence Dunbar broke into print by imitating white dialect writers. And just as William Dean Howells introduced Dunbar to white writers by using his own authorial stature as contrast, so too does Dylan Thomas’ review distinguish such writing from the kind of literature a white writer like himself would produce. That Thomas’ Welsh-ness recedes into the background should underscore what calling The Palm Wine Drinkard a work of “young English” accomplishes: it makes a Welsh writer into a practitioner of “mature” English. As with Norman Rush, here, paradoxically, it is the things which the white writer can’t describe which make him white.
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Monday, March 31, 2008
Cowboy Realism and Cowboy Presidents
I’m very happy to have been invited to contribute to the Valve! So let me just say thanks to Scott and the rest of the regulars, and get on with it.
I think it’s safe to say that HBO’s Deadwood first got a lot of attention for its foul language. I still haven’t seen the dad-blamed show, consarn it. But the “cowboys who swear a lot” meme is interesting, independent of whatever other virtues the show may have. After all, it’s not like the idea of cowpunchers swearing is unexpected; HBO’s own narrative stressed that colorful language is just one more of the harsh truths from which our tender sensibilities have hitherto been shielded by protectors of public decency. “Old” Bonanza style cowboy shows were idealized and stylized, airbrushed, brushed down, and cleaned up, but Deadwood, they tell us, is a step forward for gritty realism, a cowboy show unafraid to show us how it really was.
Whether or not cowboys actually cursed, I haven’t the faintest interest or idea. But I do know this: the good folks at HBO who made Deadwood weren’t the first to make cowboy cursing into a literary trope, by a long shot. Owen Wister was both the most important early popularizer of the “cowboy” genre and he made the “unprintable” into a generic convention of the Western. Early on in The Virginian (1904), for example, one of the first things that Wister’s narrator notices about the novel’s eponymous hero is the way his friends curse him to his face while his enemies do so at their peril. For example, and famously, when the amiable Steve calls the Virginian a “son-of-a----” (with the unprintable represented by the hyphens), Wister’s narrator, an Easterner naïve to the ways of the West, is astonished by the lack of reaction, writing:
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