Dog Days Classics III: Said Said What? Orientalism and the Other

Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978  

Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism is without a doubt a massively influential work that grad students and others sometimes use far too carelessly. Along with later works such as 1993’s Culture and Imperialism, Said established a critical insight into how Western works, fictional and historical, created a discourse about the East that conflated it with femininity, emotionality, and sensuality that left Eastern culture submissive to the masculine, scientific, and rational West. The book exploded the idea of an objective history and raised questions about the efficacy of Western histories of the East. After all, the West’s imposition of the above traits on Eastern culture in many ways said far more about the West than it did the East.
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Orientalism was an important book for my own development. Though I read it at age 20 for an undergraduate course, it raised all kinds of red flags. I had never really considered the power of discourse or the problematic foundations upon which Western historians wrote histories of the East. Maybe even worse, as an American Catholic school educated student (twelve years of Popery if you will), the idea of Israel as a problematic state never ever really came up. Though Orientalism never discusses Israel, my classmates did. Needless to say, it forced me to reconsider the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis. In a strange way, I grew to understand the nuanced and tragic relationship between them far better than I ever could have without Said. If I remember correctly, we read Orientalism in tandem with Martin Bernal's controversial Black Athena, so one can understand what kind of effect this might have on a middle class kid from the South Suburbs of Chicago. Thankfully, I never viewed history the same again.

Yet, as with Foucault, Said’s conclusions can be carried to far. After all, discourse matters, it can shape actions and policies, but it is not the be all end all. Also like Foucault, sometimes Said's followers seem to carry his conclusions too far or position him in ways he himself opposed. Said certainly had his doubts about the kind of work he inspired. Even with all its flaws, Said loved Western literature. The late Tony’s Judt’s essay on Said engages this thorny issue:

Edward Said was the idolized hero of a generation of cultural relativists in universities from Berkeley to Bombay, for whom ‘orientalism’ underwrote everything from career building exercises in ‘postcolonial’ obscurantism (‘writing the other’) to denunciations of Western culture in academic curriculum. But Said himself had no time for such nonsense. Radical antifoundationalism, the notion that everything is just a linguistic effect, struck him as shallow and ‘facile’: Human rights, as he observed on more than one occasion, ‘are not cultural or grammatical things, and when violated they are as real as anything we can encounter. (Tony Judt, "Edward Said: The Rootless Cosmopolitan," in Reappraisals, 164)

Yes, critics unfairly labeled Said, the “Professor of Terror,” but even those who questioned Orientalism’s conclusions, like Judt, or writer/literary critic, Edmund White repeatedly commented on the decency of the man. White, whose negative review of Orientalism offended Said, acknowledged that though it took years to “repair the damage . . . I very much wanted to because upon reflection I came to admire him so much.” (City Boy, 16) Moreover, even if some took his conclusions too far, there is no doubt that subaltern studies and efforts to uncover the place of the “other” and other liminal peoples have greatly expanded our knowledge of the past and present.
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Nor was Said any kind of real nationalist (“I have no patience with the position that ‘we’ should only or mainly be concerned with what is ‘ours’.” (Judt, 166)). He viewed the solution to Palestine, not as a two state solution but rather as the transformation of Israel and Palestine into a secular nation shared by both peoples. As a “rootless cosmopolitan,” he surely felt the sting of Palestinian humiliation and suffering and he rightly saw the sham of the Oslo Peace process (for both sides, though admittedly Said would probably focus more on the Palestinian cause). For all Said’s contributions to postcolonial studies, he viewed nationalism, even when resistant toward imperial power, warily. Efforts to rightly resist imperialism sometimes hinged on an essentializing nationalism that too often morphed into nativism, negating politics and history. In his 1993 work Culture and Imperialism, Said warned “to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself.”(228) Like Arjun Appadurai, Said raised concerns about the role of media in reifying and inscribing negative images about Asia and the Middle East while also marginalizing the experiences of such peoples by only giving historical context when geopolitical conflict erupts.

Said provided game changing contributions to numerous fields. Foucault and Said's collective influence created its own discourse, that as acknowledged, could be problematic in its own right but also established a new lexicon and way of thinking regarding history, sociology, anthropology, and other traditional disciplines. Newer fields like immigration and postcolonial studies depend mightily on many of the foundational tenets Said provided. However, as with anything in the world of academia and elsewhere, theories can be extended too far. Of course, once again, it can be argued that Said noted this flaw himself. According to Judt, nothing frustrated Said more than modern literary scholars' overattention to theory at the expense of close textual reading. (Judt, 164)

Critics have argued Said obscured the contributions Orientalists made in regard to building knowledge about the East and that he pointedly focused too much on French and English writers at the expense of other European interlopers. Others claim that Orientalists served as advocates for political causes of various Middle Eastern peoples. Perhaps they have a point, but it remains difficult to ignore the clear social constructions that continue to emerge regarding representations of the East. Inane examples like the musical, Miss Saigon, popular in the 1990s and re-staged this summer in Philadelphia, appear laughably guilty of the sins of Orientalism. The “mysterious, inscrutable Vietnamese” (one could argue when you don't speak the language anywhere people will be mysterious) and the overly sensualized peasant girl turned prostitute Kim provide two clear examples. If Said got some things wrong, he got many more right. For this writer, the book opened up whole new vistas that 12 years of dutiful but dogmatic Catholic Church education failed to do.

Ryan Reft

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before: Tea Parties, Filibusters, and More in the 1970s

 

Historians like almost nothing better than to find precedents in the past for supposedly new things.  "X is nothing new" is a formulation that is likely to be heard in a graduate seminar, an AHA panel, or anytime anyone makes the mistake of suggesting something is genuinely novel.  (This is partly why history dissertations almost always end up going further into the past than their authors originally intend.)  It is an annoying professional tic, but there is a degree of truth to Solomon's old axiom that "there is no new thing under the sun."  Even dismissing the newness of things, it seems, is as old as the hills.

Recently I flipped through some primary sources I had collected about piracy in the 1970s, and one news clipping after another seemed eerily familiar.  All came from North Carolina newspapers such as the Raleigh News and Observer, Greensboro Daily News, and Charlotte Post, and most were published in 1978.  The prevalence of tape piracy, of course, is important for my own project, which aims to show how people wrestled with questions of copying culture long before Napster and Limewire came along.  But there are many other similarities.  For instance, Republicans have lately tried to tar President Barack Obama with the brush of Jimmy Carter's failed presidency, comparing today's economic doldrums to the crisis of the 1970s; whether that charge sticks or not, there is an undeniable correlation between today's news and the topics and themes discussed in these newspapers (taxes, unemployment, an angry middle class) that should worry any current officeholder.  Indeed, the similarities go much deeper than a mere recession.  Here are a few that you are bound to recognize:

The Age Old Agony of the Academic Job Market

As early as 1971, people began to worry that there were more people with doctorates flooding the market than there were academic jobs for them to fill.  Looks like academia has been waiting for the boomers to retire ever since they first started on the job.

Women of the Tea Party

Not long after Sarah Palin first "killed her a bar when she was only 3," American women began to rise up against the tyrannical hand of the IRS.  Their leader was Vivien Kellems of New Haven, Connecticut; at the age of 74, the AP referred to her as "Miss Kellems" but reminded readers that she was "still a lady."  One newspaper called her a "self-liberated woman," but Kellems disdained feminists for "invading" bars and "men's restaurants" when they should really "be concentrating on electing women to public office and shooting for a woman president."  The IRS sued Kellems for unpaid taxes the previous year, and she vowed to lead a "national Boston Tea Party" against the unequal taxation of single people like herself.

Kellems was a wealthy industrialist, an individualist, and a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.  Her case symbolizes the tangled politics of resistance in the early 1970s, when the emerging "tax revolt" was not yet an entirely conservative affair and rhetoric invoking the Boston Tea Party could be employed by an independent businesswoman in her 70s to fight for what she saw as equal treatment under the law.  (Sociologist Isaac Martin has explored how the early tax revolt shared both liberal and conservative support in his book The Permanent Tax Revolt, and we have previously written about early uses of Tea Party language here.)

The Filibuster Thwarts Progressive Agenda
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Long-time civil rights leader Bayard Rustin writes in this piece for the Post, the newspaper of Charlotte's African American community, about how a conservative minority was able to stymie progressive policies by invoking the filibuster, despite the fact that Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.  Sound familiar?

Class Warfare on the Right

Class warfare, as conservatives never tire of reminding us, is unAmerican when practiced by the Left, but it is just dandy when the Mama Grizzlies want to wield their pitchforks and assault rifles against pointy-headed cultural elites.  Kevin Phillips helped usher in the political ascendancy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the late 1960s with his book The Emerging Republican Majority, but he was honest enough to admit the utility of class resentment for conservatives in this column.  "Analysts who suggest that the politics of class conflict must necessarily come from the socialist Left could be missing a new and intriguing trend," Phillips noted, described a "middle-income, class-conscious politics."  He cited the work of sociologists Richard Coleman and Lee Rainwater, who argued that "as US citizens can no longer take economic growth for granted, not only will belief in social mobility erode but also many people will begin to fear an absolute loss in social and economic status.  Voters will then embrace class politics as a tool of keeping one's self and one's group afloat."  Phillips's words seem especially prescient when he observes, writing in 1978, that "if the United States drifts into economic turmoil and eroding prosperity, then a politics of anti-elite resentment could conceivably be a powerful one.  The next three or four years should tell the tale."  

Tell the tale, they did.  Carter was out and Reagan was in two years later.  With today's meandering economic policy and chronically high unemployment, what are the odds that the resentment behind the current Tea Party movement will grow stronger in the years to come?  Its supporters may direct their anger at both the lazy, parasitic poor and the sybaritic elite, as Reagan so successfully did with his rhetoric of "welfare queens" and "limousine liberals." They may rail against government handouts and corruption even as they cling to whatever scraps of prosperity they have left.  (Hence the seeming paradox of opposing government spending and socialism while shouting "Hands off my Medicare!")  Let's hope this is not the outcome.

Austerity Is Always the Answer

This op-ed by Joseph Califano, a former close aide to LBJ and then-Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under Carter, does not give much cause for comfort.  The Democratic policymaker looks wistfully back at the 1960s as a time when liberals could wield the growing prosperity of American society to pursue ambitious initiatives to benefit children, the elderly and the poor.  The late 1970s, he suggested, were a time of limits, and liberals had to confine themselves to showing a skeptical public that government could actually be efficient and do its job well.  The fundamental premise of government services seemed to be under attack, and Califano's answer was one we have been hearing a lot about lately -- cutting spending in the name of efficiency and austerity.  Reading through the Secretary's proposals, one gets the sense that liberals had run out of ideas and had no real solutions to address the country's economic crisis.  One also gets the impression that the Obama Administration has given up on trying to pass any initiatives to fix the economy and hopes to just ride it out through the next election.  We saw how well that worked for Carter.

Best Days Behind Us?

Of course, not everyone gets unknowingly swept along in the currents of history, whether in the 1970s or today.  The following cartoon appeared, ironically enough, right next to Califano's op-ed.  In it, the Lumpits weigh in on the misguided nostalgia of American culture in the era of American Graffiti and the Fonz.

 

Before we come down with a bad case of nostalgia and flip on That 70's Show, we might do well to look at the history and learn from another era of filibusters, tea parties, and too many PhDs.  We might just manage to avoid repeating some of the mistakes of the past.

Alex Sayf Cummings

Over 140 Educators, Students, and Allies Sign Letter Opposing HB 87

A coalition of students, staff, faculty members and alumni of Georgia’s colleges and universities have signed a letter to Governor Nathan Deal, urging him to veto HB 87, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011.

The letter, which circulated online from Monday through Wednesday this week, lays out moral and practical arguments against the anti-immigration measure. The signers suggest that the bill unfairly targets immigrants and could lead to racial profiling of Georgia residents who are suspected of being undocumented migrants based on their physical appearance. The letter questions the constitutionality of the bill, and warns that it will cost the state business and revenue if organizations respect a planned boycott and choose not to hold conferences and other events in Georgia.

Teachers and Students in Georgia Speak Out Against HB 87

In recent months, legislators in Georgia have aspired to imitate their peers in Arizona by passing a bill that allows state and local authorities to police the immigration status of state residents.  These measures have raised serious concerns about the possibility of racial profiling and the power of state governments to regulate immigration, which has traditionally been a function of the federal government.   The current anti-immigrant agenda among conservatives portends a worrying trend toward the politics of scapegoating in the United States, as immigrants are held to blame for problems such as budget deficits, unemployment, healthcare costs and so forth.  

Governor Nathan Deal has indicated that he will sign HB 87, but many constituencies, ranging from business groups in agriculture and tourism to human rights organizations, have questioned the wisdom of the legislation.   Several educators in Atlanta have drawn up the following statement, which we hope will contribute to the chorus of opposition to HB 87 (you can find a link to sign the petition below):


Members of the Georgia Academic Community Call for Governor Nathan Deal to Veto HB 87


We, the undersigned, would like to express our opposition to HB 87, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011, which was passed by the Georgia House of Representatives on April 20, 2011. We are faculty, staff and students in Georgia’s colleges and universities, and we urge Governor Nathan Deal to veto this legislation. The bill promotes racial profiling, transgresses the authority of the federal government to regulate immigration, wastes badly needed state funds, and damages the reputation and economy of the state. It is a political gimmick designed to satisfy those who would blame immigrants for all the state’s problems, not a practical solution for the economic and social challenges we face in these difficult times.

For years, Georgia’s economy has taken advantage of low-wage workers in a wide variety of fields, from agriculture to construction to services. With little ability to lobby for better conditions, undocumented workers in particular have been exploited by employers who profited from their vulnerability. We recognize that this situation poses real problems for communities across our state and the nation, and we look to the federal government to pass comprehensive immigration reform that will address the status of the estimated eleven million undocumented individuals in the country. Placing the burden of reform on the workers themselves, though, will do little to change the demand for cheap labor and wrongly penalizes people whose only crime is to work hard to improve the lives of their families. Above all, we reject the punitive spirit and misguided intent of this bill.

The most disquieting part of HB 87, like the controversial Arizona law on which it was modeled, is the prospect that Georgians will be singled out for police scrutiny because they “seem” like they might be undocumented immigrants. Although the bill only permits police to investigate a person’s immigration status when he or she is already suspected of committing another offense, it is not hard to imagine how authorities could use any number of pretexts to demand proof of citizenship from those deemed to be suspicious. The offense could be as minor as loitering or running a stop sign. The likelihood that people will be scrutinized based on their physical appearance remains inescapable, creating a situation in which some can expect to be asked for their “papers” while others go freely about their business. We are troubled by the bill’s potential to deprive Georgians of equal protection under the law, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution; we also question the constitutionality of a state government interfering in the regulation of immigration, which, like foreign policy, is a responsibility of the federal government. The state government will likely be forced to spend a great deal of time and resources defending a measure that is sure to face concerted opposition in the courts.

As faculty, staff and students of Georgia’s colleges and universities, we have already seen the harmful potential of such anti-immigrant policies. This bill provides extra money to local authorities to investigate residents’ immigration status and detain those who cannot prove their right to be here, even as the state has enacted year after year of cuts to education and other vital services. It follows in the same counterproductive steps as the recent decision by the Board of Regents of the state university system to exclude undocumented immigrants – many of whom came here through no fault of their own as children, and only want to study and contribute to our society. Such policies are not merely unfair but self-defeating. They deprive the universities of tuition dollars, and they consign a whole group of young people to a permanent caste of lower status, unable to obtain an education and condemned to work for low wages in the shadows of the economy. Their undeveloped talents represent both a practical loss and a moral failure that the state of Georgia can ill afford.

If signed into law, the bill will hurt Georgia’s economy in numerous other ways. Businesses are less likely to invest in a state that is perceived as having a hostile attitude toward diversity, and many organizations will choose not to hold their conferences and other meetings here, depriving the state and countless businesses of revenue and stunting economic recovery. (The Atlanta Convention Visitors Bureau and the Georgia Farm Bureau have already voiced serious concerns about the law’s potential to drive visitors, investors, and workers away from our state.) The US Human Rights Network, based in Atlanta, has announced that it will move its December conference outside of the state if the bill becomes law, and it is working with other groups to enforce a boycott of Georgia to protest the measure. While we regret the impact a boycott will have on the state, we feel obligated to support these efforts. The costs of this law must be felt for its injustice to be understood. We pledge to lobby organizations of which we are members not to hold conferences or other events in the state, and we will support protests of companies and organizations that choose to hold meetings here in defiance of the boycott.

In conclusion, we ask Governor Deal to consider what is in the best interests of our communities, our economy, and the fair treatment of all Georgians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, national origin or immigration status. We urge the Governor in the strongest possible terms to veto this bill and save our state the needless cost that this unjust and unwise legislation will incur.

To sign the letter, follow this link:

http://tiny.cc/7zhd8

Asian Ballers, Trailer Trash and Sissy Rap: The Best of SASA

The following are among the most thought-provoking papers from last week's Southern American Studies Association conference at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Stanley Thangaraj, "Competing Masculinities: Sport and Ethnic Minorities in Atlanta,” Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University


In this intriguing paper, Stanley Thangaraj adds to the growing literature on the importance of leisure space in providing a means for urban and national membership. Focusing on the role of Asian only basketball leagues in and around Atlanta, Georgia, Thangaraj explores the importance of sport in creating alternative masculinities, forging community formation, and providing a means to citizenship for South Asian American men. Pushing back against tropes of perpetual foreignness ascribed to South Asian American born citizens since the Banned Zone immigration Act of 1917, the Thind ruling in 1923 and the resurgence of anti-South Asian racism in the post 9/11 period, basketball leagues provide a site for community formation. Linking Sihks, Pakistanis, and Indians of numerous regions, the Asian Ballers League enabled these groups to express a form of “American” masculinity that negates traditional asexuality and passiveness conflated with South Asian Americans, while participating in a uniquely American activity. Thangaraj accounts for class differences arising from those born after the 1965 Immigration Act and those arriving in the wake of the 1980 Family Reunification Act, with newer South Asian Americans suffering a notable lack of social and economic capital in comparison with their 1965 antecedents. Though such leagues craft a sort of pan-ethnic identity, Thangaraj notes that such developments were not without their pitfalls as Blacks remain outside the traditional purview of such leagues and often racialized when present within them. Thangaraj’s research offers an intricate and fascinating investigation into how South Asian Americans see themselves, their relationship to each other, and their ties to other ethnic groups, notably Latinos and Blacks. A post doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Thangaraj can be contacted at Stanley.i.thangaraj@vanderbilt.edu.

 

Matt Miller, “Millennium Sissy: The Gay Male Rappers of New Orleans," Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University


Though segments of the rap community have long been accused of homophobia and misogyny, new developments in the New Orleans rap scene suggest a means to transcend such problematic constructs. Focusing on the “sissy" rappers' appropriation of New Orleans “Bounce,” Matt Miller cleverly illustrates the openly gay and transgressive nature of new regional rap icons like Katey Red and Big Freedia. Adopting a “Butch Queen” rather than “Drag Queen” persona, Katey Red and others exude pride in their sexuality, dismissing men who engage in similar homosexual acts but deny them publicly. Blunt, joyous, and sexual, sissy rappers embrace the supra localism of New Orleans bounce, celebrating local housing projects, block parties, and other Big Easy idiosyncrasies. Careful not to overplay the freedom such individuals enjoy, Miller points out that in many cases the deeply based place-based identities of these rappers and bounce itself, has enabled them in many ways to transcend homophobia so ingrained in American culture. Moreover, as Miller suggests, they remain perfectly situated to appeal to wider audiences of white middle class audiences, notably “hipsters” and bohemians looking to challenge traditional domesticities and gender roles. Finally, consisting of primarily working class black men, sissy rappers illustrate the powerful influence of grassroots cultural movements that build support through block parties, local clubs, and community events to change broader perceptions. Miller’s work reminds us that agency can start from the most unlikely places and from the most discriminated against groups to create something new, viable, and potentially revolutionary. 


See a clip from Miller's documentary about the bounce music scene, Ya Heard Me, here.

Eve Errickson, "The Mobile Home Park: A One Time Design Revolution Reconsidered as Vernacular Architecture and Artifact of Legal Inconvenience," National Trust for Historic Preservation, Washington DC


Eve Errickson traces the mobile home’s origins as a form of luxury travel to its designation as a low-income shelter for marginalized populations in this insightful presentation. Though adopted from upper class ideas of transportation, the post-war housing crisis led to predictions that the mobile home served as a partial solution to future housing problems. Affordable, mobile, and simple, many believed pre-fabricated mobile homes served as a model for planners and municipalities. Yet, plagued by lack of regulation and often flimsy design models, mobile homes spiked in popularity several times from the 1950s to the 1970s to the 1990s even as their value and social capital continued to decline. Still, they remain a consistent presence among southern communities. Errickson noted that future investigations into why these forms of shelter have been labeled the purview of white trash need to be excavated, as mobile home dwellers remain one of the few social groups that people find acceptable to denigrate publicly. 

Ryan Reft

Pentecostal Captain America and the Racialized Geographies of Muslim Hip Hop in a Toothless Fictive Milieu

The Southern American Studies Association will bring its conference to Georgia State University in Atlanta this week. Scholars will travel from France and Kansas, California and Germany to present at the meeting, although a preponderance of the participants hail from institutions in southeastern states such as Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Operating under the capacious tent of American Studies, the conference includes contributions from scholars of history, literature, music, popular culture, and sociology, among other disciplines.

We have looked through the program to single out some particularly intriguing panels. (The entire schedule can be viewed here.) The panels selected will hopefully provide a thumbnail sketch of the most interesting work going on in the multiple fields that make up American Studies, for both casual readers and possible attendees. Although any academic conference includes its share of comedy-gold paper titles -- a quick glance at the MLA’s most recent program serves up the likes of “Bootleg Paratextuality and Aesthetics: Decay and Distortion in the Borat DVD” and “The War of ‘Of’ and Other Polyvocal Syntaxes in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’” -- we hope to focus attention on some of the most provocative and promising papers in the conference, whether they focus on Elvis Presley or excrement or spottieottiedopalicious angels. The following is a taste of the freewheeling interests of those who study America and its culture today:

The World in 2011

As regular readers know, we at Tropics of Meta try in all things to be as much like The Economist as possible.  For this reason, we have consulted a distinguished panel of historians, political scientists, fishmongers and Daley machine hacks to weigh in on their expectations for the year 2011.  Their predictions range from likely events in academia and politics to music, fiction, and fast food -- and sometimes a combination of these fields.  So without further ado, we give you the shape of things to come:

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The writers of the defunct TV show Lost will admit they were just kidding and air a new sixth season.


Columbia University will outrage animal rights advocates and community activists by showering the site of its new West Harlem campus in a rain of tiny frog fetuses.

To deflect mounting criticism over its monetary policies, the Federal Reserve will plant a rumor on Politico that former chairman Paul Volcker was replaced by a lookalike actor some time in the early 2000s. The “Paul Volcker is dead” theory will become an unexpected viral phenomenon.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore will a conduct a drive-by shooting at Gordon Wood’s Providence residence. Spokespeople for the New Yorker will claim that condescending rhetoric played no role in the year’s increase of white-on-white violence.

You think you big time?

Teaching to the test will no longer confine itself to high school education but will apply to STDs as well.


Robot rights will become a major subject of political debate and ethical concern. Conservatives will complain that the Obama administration values robot life more than human life and warn that FEMA is building an army of clones to imprison Christians. John McCain will express skepticism about laws protecting “the health of the robot.” And in an unexpected reversal, Markos “Kos” Moulitsas will appear on the Sean Hannity show, insisting that “guns don’t kill people, robots with laser eyes kill people.”

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Secret genius

Failed South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Alvin Greene will be revealed to be the lead character in Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest mockumentary. Joaquin Phoenix will subsequently slide into a Brian Wilson-like spiral of depression. 

University of Wisconsin wunderkind Jeremi Suri will reveal that he has been leading a Montanaesque double life as Canadian pop sensation Avril Lavigne for the last ten years.

A dance craze that mixes elements of the Dougie and the John Wall will sweep Baghdad’s nightclubs, as well as some of its hottest spider-holes.

Surprisingly large influence on Grizzly Bear

Slayer’s South of Heaven will replace Pet Sounds as the new hipster soundtrack, leading to pentagrams constructed out of hand-crafted woodland creatures.


In order to make up for loss of state funding, the University of California system will begin charging students fees for hope.


Zoolander will emerge as the new foundational text on child labor and globalization.


Tron III will be as incomprehensible as Tron I and Tron II, but it will look great.


The Honda Fit will be the new Pinto.


Jury duty will be outsourced to South Asia.

Spoiler alert: the author was dead the whole time

Foucault’s unpublished novel Biographies Are for Losers will make The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo look like a self-published farce.


Sociologists utilizing the ideas of Habermas will create new theories regarding public space and elevators, proving that rapid vertical travel serves as modern day social mobility.


Eating Irish babies will become the new black.


During a press conference on the Obama administration's “new detention policy,” George W. Bush's Barack Obama costume will accidentally unzip while at the podium.

Olbermann smash

Keith Olbermann will die of a heart attack during an on-air “Special Comment” in which he expresses righteous indignation at Sarah Palin's seventh grade paper on reproductive rights.


John Lewis Gaddis will win the Socialist Workers Party’s Excellence in Truthful Reporting about the Boss Class award.

 
“I brake for insurance fraud” bumper stickers will become a national phenomenon.


Heroin chic and competitive eating will merge for a new sport: competitive rehab.

Alan Greenspan will be caught in the Library of Congress sexually molesting Atlas Shrugged.

His circumstance is somewhere between Cabrini and Love Jones

John McCain's hip hop album I Thought I Told You I Ain't No Mother F***** Maverick will top the Billboard charts for 40 weeks straight. Hit singles will include "Build the Dang Fence," "My Friends (and F**** Homies)," "That Hoe Palin," and "No Gays Getting Married in McCeezy's Military."


With circulation dwindling and financial insolvency imminent, Time and Newsweek, two of America's most venerable news magazines, decide to merge. The new magazine will be called Vapid.

The increasing penury of Americans will lead McDonald's to create a new "quarter menu." Items will include McPorridge, McPaint Chips, and McKetchup Packet Soup. Subsequently, Larry Summers will attack McDondald's for its attempt to subvert the free market.


The Replacements’ old mantra “straight to the middle” will become the new motto of the United States.


Richard Hofstadter will come back from the dead.  Upon seeing the state of History, he will kill himself.


Francis Fukuyama will declare The End of Political Science, and with any luck, he'll be right.


Mahmoud Ahmadenijad will try to give Angela Merkel a backrub.


Chicagoans will finally eat vegetables.


"Wrong" will finally become a social construction.


David Brooks will stimulate a conversation about our national character by observing that “America is an argument it has with itself about love.”

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Diplomatic History: Bringing Sexy Back

Diplomatic history, the famous quip goes, is the record of what one clerk said to another clerk. Or so it was. In 1959 William Appleman Williams published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, igniting a ferocious debate about American empire. While at least a generation of diplomatic historians were busy arguing about Turner’s Frontier Thesis, the Open Door notes, and who’s most to blame for the Cold War, other historians were revolutionizing the way history was written by studying topics like gender, race, and ideology. Diplomatic history was at its peak of popularity during the most violent years of the Vietnam War, but soon after the conclusion of the war the subfield realized it had been left behind.

In 1980, Charles Maier decried the languishing state of diplomatic history, arguing that its published works revolved around tired one-dimensional arguments that paled in comparison to the serious work of other subfields. Not long after Maier aired his critique of the field, diplomatic historians began exploring the role of ideas and culture in U.S. foreign policy, perhaps most prominently in the publication of works such as Michael Hunt’s Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy and Emily Rosenberg’s Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945. Today, diplomatic historians have come to fully embrace the old “new” ways of examining history. Indeed, recent winners of one of SHAFR’s most prestigious book award have gone to titles such as The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, The United States, and The Philippines (Paul Kramer), Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Mary Renda), and Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of American-Japanese Relations (Joseph Henning).

While the embrace of new ways of writing history helped improve the profile of diplomatic historians within academia, diplomatic history has also benefited greatly from the latest fad of the ivory tower: transnationalism. As Thomas Zeiler notes in his state of the field essay of 2009, it is not uncommon to see diplomatic historians publish in specialized journals outside of their field or, equally as important, scholars from other fields publishing in journals like Diplomatic History. Quite conveniently, in Zeiler’s cheerful opinion, historians’ newfound interest in transnational trends complements diplomatic history’s relatively recent diversification of intellectual pursuits. “The field of diplomatic history has now entered the stream of cutting-edge scholarship, all while retaining the distinct characteristic of privileging the study of power in the international arena.”

Unfortunately, despite all the advances recently made in diplomatic history, it still suffers from a serious problem of relevancy. In June of last year, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times published an article examining the troubles of diplomatic history. Zeiler is cited in the article arguing that “The shift [to studying culture, discourse, race, gender, etc.] does not necessarily mean students aren’t learning the material, he noted, but rather that a new approach to teaching it has developed.” The numbers Cohen cites, however, challenge this assertion. Cohen notes that “Fewer traditional courses in the subject are taught, fewer articles are published in refereed journals, and graduate student training has changed”:

In 1975, for example, three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian; in 2005 fewer than half did. The number of departments with an economic historian fell to 31.7 percent from 54.7 percent. By contrast the biggest gains were in women’s history, which now has a representative in four out of five history departments.

How have some departments sliced up the pie? At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, out of the 45 history faculty members listed (many with overlapping interests), one includes diplomatic history as a specialty, one other lists American foreign policy; 13 name either gender, race or ethnicity. Of the 12 American-history professors at Brown University, the single specialist in United States empire also lists political and cultural history as areas of interest. The department’s professor of international studies focuses on victims of genocide.

This might explain Tony Judt’s morbidly humorous recount of his experience teaching European diplomatic history at an American university:

After some probing ... [the] students would start to confess that they were actually in a state of panic. To be sure, they could expatiate at length on theories of nationalism. They had mastered the disputes surrounding the nature of fascism or the gendered impact of industrialization. They knew how to "explain" history.... But they had not the foggiest notion what happened, when it happened, who did it, or why.

One might get the impression that diplomatic historians would have had the most to gain in academia from the events of September 11th and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but it seems the increased interest in world affairs has mainly benefited political science and area studies departments. It would be a bit crass to suggest that in seeking approval from the most “cutting-edge” scholars, diplomatic historians have become as irrelevant as they are. But perhaps there is something to this. In one way, Zeiler is right. There are few who would disagree with the notion that diplomatic history has vastly improved since it embraced new analytical methods. In this sense, diplomatic history is thriving. But why has it declined so much in terms of faculty positions and course offerings?

It cannot really be said that students have lost interest in world affairs. While a straightforward answer escapes me, I sense that despite all the flaws of the scholarship put out by the revisionists and their rivals, they did have the virtue of being understandable to curious students not already versed in highbrow academic debates and jargon. It is no coincidence that Niall Ferguson and John Lewis Gaddis are part of the chosen few diplomatic historians you’ll find at a Barnes & Noble: anyone vaguely familiar with history can pick up and understand their books. Though it is perhaps best that diplomatic historians get used to the fact that they will never be as popular as they were in the 1960s, it should be urged that more complexity be accompanied with a greater effort to remain accessible to people without graduate degrees in history.

William Mangoman Williams

The Econopocalyptic Job Market, Part I

If you or someone you know happens to be at any stage in the process of getting a PhD in the humanities -- English, History, Philosophy, and so forth -- you've probably heard that it is nearly impossible to find stable employment, even once the degree is in hand. Even with impressive publications in scholarly journals under one's belt. The number of jobs out there for a 20th Century US historian or a scholar of comparative Slavic literature is vanishingly small.

This strikes many people as odd. Their long-suffering grad student friends are smart folks. They went for a doctorate, which seems like a prestigious degree, at top schools like Penn, Berkeley, or Virginia. How is it that not a soul wants to hire them? The weird dynamics of the academic job market, where quite a few people work for a very long time with the knowledge that they will eventually compete for a tiny number of jobs, is difficult for anyone to understand, even those most familiar with it.

This problem has been attributed to a number of factors: 1. declining enrollments in majors like English and History over the last few decades; 2. the admission of "too many" people to grad school; 3. the creation of "too many" PhD programs at too many institutions (as every department seems to dream of having its own graduate program and every college aspires to attain "research university" status); 4. the ever-lengthening time it takes to complete a PhD; and 5. the shift toward a low-wage model that favors farming out teaching positions to teaching assistants and adjunct instructors instead of creating new tenure-track positions. English departments have plenty of Freshman Writing classes to fill, History departments have lots of US History surveys, and it's easier to pay an adjunct $2,000 with no benefits than to hire more tenured professors.

Many people have tried to weigh in on the problem, offering one solution after another to the crisis of "overproduction" of PhDs. Some are plausible, while others are outright laughable. In a New York Times op-ed a few years ago, a professor who had spent his life enjoying the privileges of tenure at an Ivy League institution suggested that the whole system that benefited him so richly should be scrapped. Tenure should be done away with, he said, and departments should be discarded in favor of temporary task forces in which PhD students would specialize in interdisciplinary themes like "Water." If life is hard for the average English lit PhD, how is the newly minted Doctor of Water going to fare on the market? Don't expect serious proposals from people who don't have a horse in this race.

In any case, this will be the first of a series of posts on the Academic Econopocalypse at Tropics of Meta. We will be linking to articles on the subject that are worthy of debate, and weighing in with a range of our own perspectives.

A great place to start would be Louis Menand's recent piece in Harvard magazine, in which the author offers some truly sobering statistics about PhD completion rates and the withering of the humanities. Menand makes the debatable argument that time-to-degree (the time it takes to finish classes, exams, and the dissertation) needs to be shortened; he suggests that this would bring a more diverse bench of candidates into graduate programs and lead to PhDs bringing their expertise into other fields of endeavor.

Is Menand's argument persuasive? What, if anything, can be done to change the unfair and capricious system known, always ominously, as The Job Market?

Louis Menand, "The PhD Problem: On the Professionalization of Faculty Life, Doctoral Training, and the Academy's Self Renewal"