During the AAA conference last week, I spent a ton of time in the Book Exhibit. But I wasn't just checking out the newest anthro-titles, which can be its own small joy, especially when friends and mentors have new offerings to share. I was actually walking the exhibit with students, trying to introduce several current dissertation writers (and a few newly minted PhDs) to editors at academic presses. I don't know many editors, but one or two introductions are better than none.
Every introduction won't turn into a publishing match-made-in-heaven, but it is important to grease the wheel for students as they attempt to clear that important hurdle. Indeed, it is an advisor's job.
When I was writing my dissertation, my advisor told me to "write a book," which is something I also ask of my current students. I realize that that isn't an uncontroversial position, and it is far from self-evident what the call to "write a book" even means. When you haven't even successfully written a dissertation yet (let alone a publishable manuscript), the suggestion can feel like replacing one opacity with another.
One of the things it means, I think, is to write with readers in mind, to make your claims with attention to the dramas, tensions, and storylines that will keep audiences oriented and invested. It need not mean sacrificing rigor for readability. It just asks for a little attention to storytelling (along with argumentation).
After I had defended my dissertation, my advisor made it her job to introduce me to several university press editors. In fact, she spent a lot of time helping me to think through my pitch, boiling my arguments down to their most interesting (and publishable) permutations.
My advisor made a point of saying that graduate students aren't "islands" isolated in some academic sea all by themselves. As most academics know, if the process works the way it is supposed to work, a dissertation advisor takes on a career-long role. And one part of the job description entails de-mystifying academia's backstage, helping students as they (i) prepare for "the market," (ii) negotiate job offers, (iii) deal with the challenges of post-doctoral life (committees, new colleagues, more demands, etc.), and (iv) publish their research.
In terms of the publishing maze, things are changing quite a bit. There used to be a time when it was roundly frowned upon to submit manuscripts to several academic publishers at once. That is increasingly becoming less true. Indeed, the only bit of leverage that a junior faculty member might have these days (vis-a-vis potential publishers) is the threat of going with another press that is equally invested (and also pressuring reviewers for reader reports). Again, this isn't uncontroversial, but there is a lot to recommend such multiple submissions, as long as you are up front with editors about it. For one, if an editor is really interested, he or she might promise to expedite the review process (pushing readers even more adamantly) to avoid competition. Indeed, I only submitted my first manuscript to one publisher, but only if they promised to expedite the process (not leaving one waiting around for months and months without word).
The other benefit of multiple submissions is the fact that you get more critical feedback. If Publisher 1 sends it to three anonymous reviewers and Publisher 2 sends it to three more, you can feel much more confident about the coverage your material is getting. There is less likelihood that you have missed a key critique.
Academic journals still routinely disqualify articles that have been submitted to several places at once. Book publishers are becoming more amenable to that idea, even if they aren't all happy with it. At the end of the day, a good relationship with an academic press is about a good relationship with an editor. So, whatever you do, make sure you are up front, honest, and straightforward. Editors will tell you where they stand, what they will stand for, and you all can both make informed decisions about how to proceed from there.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Why publish "Obama's mama's book" at all?
Why publish “Obama’s mama’s book” at all?
That’s probably one of the most dismissive and derogatory ways of phrasing a question that at least a few anthropologists are asking at this year’s AAA conference, and in just such disparaging terms. I know that some of my colleagues won’t agree, but I can’t help but think about such a query (even in its less choleric/unflattering registers) as a somewhat non-anthropological way of framing the issue.
Duke University Press officially launched S. Ann Dunham’s Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia yesterday, which included a noontime press conference where the only question posed actually pivoted on a differently pitched version of the same theme music: Is Duke University Press only publishing this book because it was written by the President’s mother?
I received a similar e-query over the summer from a colleague, a sociologist, responding to my post about what other anthropologists had been describing, optimistically, as President Obama’s potentially anthropological sensibilities (as a function of being an “anthropologist’s son”). The sociologist started with an excerpt from my posting and then succinctly offered his rejoinder.
I wrote the following, which he cited:
Anthropologists often get lampooned and dismissed by other social scientists (and by those outside of the academy) for their (our) assumed epistemological and presentational excesses: opaque jargon, solipsistic navel gawking, the politicization of research, and on and on. But even though she didn’t raise Obama for the entirety of his childhood, his mother seems to have imparted in him a degree of thoughtfulness and genuine appreciation for cultural differences (as partially manifested in his campaign’s inclusively “multiracial” ground game) that I want to embrace as the best of what the discipline of anthropology can share with the rest of the academy and beyond.
He responded: I agree with John L. Jackson! (But would you go as far as to publish her unpublished dissertation as Duke is doing?)
Why not publish it?
I can understand some of the skepticism behind the sociologist's question. If it wasn’t published before Barack Obama became President Obama, it probably isn’t worthy of publication. It probably isn’t very good. So, why pander to the depravities of the market?
Deborah Thomas and I had a different thought. We were gearing up for last year’s AAA conference, and we heard that Dunham’s colleagues at the University of Hawaii (including Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper) were already in the process of trying to get the dissertation published. The research was based on fieldwork in Kajar, a blacksmithing village in Indonesia, and we thought that it might be interesting to have a panel on the work (and the book) at this year’s AAA meeting.
Deborah called up the folks at Hawaii, and she found out that they’d been working to get this dissertation turned into a book for quite a long time, almost since Dunham’s death. Deb also discovered that although a few publishers had shown interest, they were dragging their feet. So, we started to read through bits of the dissertation. It is super long (in the general vicinity of 1,000 pages), and we didn’t get through all of it. But it seemed like an intriguing mix of old-school ethnographic holism and a relatively newfangled analysis of a rural Indonesian industry that Dunham characterized as "surviving," despite some anthropological predictions of its inevitable demise. She also placed her study (an “ethnography of microfinance” before microfinance was cool) within robustly historical, analytical, regulatory, and cultural contexts, which accounted for her manuscript’s daunting length.
If anyone was going to consider publishing the manuscript, it would have to be edited substantially, cut by more than half. That’s when we went to Ken Wissoker at Duke. We asked him to look at the manuscript, to talk to Dunham’s colleagues at Hawaii, and to consider publishing the work. And we wanted him to do all of that quickly enough so that it might be out and available in time for this year’s conference.
Duke was interested in publishing the book because it was written by President Obama’s mother. That is also why Deb and I were interested in it. We had even thought that President Obama might be willing to attend this year's conference and talk about his mother’s ethnographic research and its impact (if any) on his own politico-cultural outlook. He didn’t take us up on that invitation, but Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, graciously agreed to talk about her mother’s anthropological exploits.
But this idea that Dunham’s publication should be marked with a scarlet letter because its relevance is inflected by the fame and significance of her progeny seems strange to me.
Don’t all publishers weigh the merits of the books they produce with recourse to the potential audiences they might entice, especially university publishers increasingly being asked (by central administrations) to pay their own way? It was published because she is our President’s mother. And because that means that more readers might be interested in reading it. And because it is a bold critique of a certain Geertzian spin on the region. And because the stars aligned in just such a way that a stalled publication process got re-energized by some outside interlopers. And because it is a very solid manuscript.
The implicit presumption that that latter fact alone (or something close to it) ostensibly explains why more “legitimate” manuscripts are published by academic presses seems like an unproductive and disingenuous fiction to me, a scholarly fairy tale of Santa Clausian proportions.
This book should have been published before Obama moved into the White House. If Dunham hadn’t died prematurely, maybe it would have been. To dismiss it out of hand because it is being published now, so long after she completed the dissertation, as a function of its situated-ness at the trickster-haunted crossroads where scholarship meets “politics” (in many senses of that latter term) is, I think, a tough position to hold. Without such “from the ashes” reclamations (political and intellectual in the selfsame instant), Zora Neale Hurston, for one, wouldn’t be on any anthropological syllabi either.
That’s probably one of the most dismissive and derogatory ways of phrasing a question that at least a few anthropologists are asking at this year’s AAA conference, and in just such disparaging terms. I know that some of my colleagues won’t agree, but I can’t help but think about such a query (even in its less choleric/unflattering registers) as a somewhat non-anthropological way of framing the issue.
Duke University Press officially launched S. Ann Dunham’s Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia yesterday, which included a noontime press conference where the only question posed actually pivoted on a differently pitched version of the same theme music: Is Duke University Press only publishing this book because it was written by the President’s mother?
I received a similar e-query over the summer from a colleague, a sociologist, responding to my post about what other anthropologists had been describing, optimistically, as President Obama’s potentially anthropological sensibilities (as a function of being an “anthropologist’s son”). The sociologist started with an excerpt from my posting and then succinctly offered his rejoinder.
I wrote the following, which he cited:
Anthropologists often get lampooned and dismissed by other social scientists (and by those outside of the academy) for their (our) assumed epistemological and presentational excesses: opaque jargon, solipsistic navel gawking, the politicization of research, and on and on. But even though she didn’t raise Obama for the entirety of his childhood, his mother seems to have imparted in him a degree of thoughtfulness and genuine appreciation for cultural differences (as partially manifested in his campaign’s inclusively “multiracial” ground game) that I want to embrace as the best of what the discipline of anthropology can share with the rest of the academy and beyond.
He responded: I agree with John L. Jackson! (But would you go as far as to publish her unpublished dissertation as Duke is doing?)
Why not publish it?
I can understand some of the skepticism behind the sociologist's question. If it wasn’t published before Barack Obama became President Obama, it probably isn’t worthy of publication. It probably isn’t very good. So, why pander to the depravities of the market?
Deborah Thomas and I had a different thought. We were gearing up for last year’s AAA conference, and we heard that Dunham’s colleagues at the University of Hawaii (including Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper) were already in the process of trying to get the dissertation published. The research was based on fieldwork in Kajar, a blacksmithing village in Indonesia, and we thought that it might be interesting to have a panel on the work (and the book) at this year’s AAA meeting.
Deborah called up the folks at Hawaii, and she found out that they’d been working to get this dissertation turned into a book for quite a long time, almost since Dunham’s death. Deb also discovered that although a few publishers had shown interest, they were dragging their feet. So, we started to read through bits of the dissertation. It is super long (in the general vicinity of 1,000 pages), and we didn’t get through all of it. But it seemed like an intriguing mix of old-school ethnographic holism and a relatively newfangled analysis of a rural Indonesian industry that Dunham characterized as "surviving," despite some anthropological predictions of its inevitable demise. She also placed her study (an “ethnography of microfinance” before microfinance was cool) within robustly historical, analytical, regulatory, and cultural contexts, which accounted for her manuscript’s daunting length.
If anyone was going to consider publishing the manuscript, it would have to be edited substantially, cut by more than half. That’s when we went to Ken Wissoker at Duke. We asked him to look at the manuscript, to talk to Dunham’s colleagues at Hawaii, and to consider publishing the work. And we wanted him to do all of that quickly enough so that it might be out and available in time for this year’s conference.
Duke was interested in publishing the book because it was written by President Obama’s mother. That is also why Deb and I were interested in it. We had even thought that President Obama might be willing to attend this year's conference and talk about his mother’s ethnographic research and its impact (if any) on his own politico-cultural outlook. He didn’t take us up on that invitation, but Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, graciously agreed to talk about her mother’s anthropological exploits.
But this idea that Dunham’s publication should be marked with a scarlet letter because its relevance is inflected by the fame and significance of her progeny seems strange to me.
Don’t all publishers weigh the merits of the books they produce with recourse to the potential audiences they might entice, especially university publishers increasingly being asked (by central administrations) to pay their own way? It was published because she is our President’s mother. And because that means that more readers might be interested in reading it. And because it is a bold critique of a certain Geertzian spin on the region. And because the stars aligned in just such a way that a stalled publication process got re-energized by some outside interlopers. And because it is a very solid manuscript.
The implicit presumption that that latter fact alone (or something close to it) ostensibly explains why more “legitimate” manuscripts are published by academic presses seems like an unproductive and disingenuous fiction to me, a scholarly fairy tale of Santa Clausian proportions.
This book should have been published before Obama moved into the White House. If Dunham hadn’t died prematurely, maybe it would have been. To dismiss it out of hand because it is being published now, so long after she completed the dissertation, as a function of its situated-ness at the trickster-haunted crossroads where scholarship meets “politics” (in many senses of that latter term) is, I think, a tough position to hold. Without such “from the ashes” reclamations (political and intellectual in the selfsame instant), Zora Neale Hurston, for one, wouldn’t be on any anthropological syllabi either.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Day One at the AAAs
The anthropologists are finally here!
Philadelphia's Downtown Marriott is housing the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, which started last night, and The Chronicle of Higher Education has already run a story on one of Wednesday night's panels.
"A Critical History of the Darkness in El Dorado Controversy" was organized around Alice Dreger's scathing critique of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, which was equally scathing in its criticism of how Napoleon A. Chagnon (author of, amongst other things, Yanomamo: A Fierce People) and geneticist James Neel conducted their research in the region. According to Tierney, they actually exacerbated a measles problem, failed to acquire true "informed consent" for research, and even (in Chagnon's case) allegedly fomented violent conflicts among community members. I remember the AAA meetings in 2000, 2001, and 2002 when the book's accusations first surfaced.
Conducting research for a book that she is currently writing, Dreger revisited Tierney's assertions. Not only does she claim that Tierney's work was sloppy and inaccurate (his accusations mostly flat wrong), but she also criticizes the AAA for throwing Chagnon and Neel under the bus in its 2002 report about the matter. I missed the session, but I'm sure that I'll hear anthropologists talking about it for the rest of the week.
I missed that particular panel because I was teaching my grad class yesterday afternoon (goxewu will appreciate that). And then I stayed on Penn's campus for two AAA-affiliated events.
Penn's Anthropology Department joined forces with two AAA journals (Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Transforming Anthropology) to throw an opening-night reception in the Penn Museum's Chinese Rotunda. 90-feet high, it is one of the largest unsupported masonry domes in the entire country. One of the most amazingly breathtaking interiors that any college campus can boast, it was a spectacular setting for the fete.
I left that reception early enough to attend an intimate performance of Pouring Tea, a one-man show by ethnographer E. Patrick Johnson (also, like Dreger, from Northwestern University). The performance took place at Penn's LGBT Center in The Carriage House. Vocalist Joya Jones and poets Nina Harris and Joshua Bennett (of HBO's Def Poetry fame) sanctified the space with three blistering performances. Then Johnson spent the next 40 minutes performing excerpts from interviews he conducted for his most recent book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay men of the South. He has played much larger venues with this show (and is currently preparing a more expansive stage version for a May opening in Chicago), but this tiny, cozy space was a perfect way start to a week that will be chock full of ethnographically inflected conversations. As Johnson himself described the event in his post-performance Q&A session, "it felt like I was bringing you all back with me into those small and intimate living rooms where I conducted the interviews."
Philadelphia's Downtown Marriott is housing the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, which started last night, and The Chronicle of Higher Education has already run a story on one of Wednesday night's panels.
"A Critical History of the Darkness in El Dorado Controversy" was organized around Alice Dreger's scathing critique of Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, which was equally scathing in its criticism of how Napoleon A. Chagnon (author of, amongst other things, Yanomamo: A Fierce People) and geneticist James Neel conducted their research in the region. According to Tierney, they actually exacerbated a measles problem, failed to acquire true "informed consent" for research, and even (in Chagnon's case) allegedly fomented violent conflicts among community members. I remember the AAA meetings in 2000, 2001, and 2002 when the book's accusations first surfaced.
Conducting research for a book that she is currently writing, Dreger revisited Tierney's assertions. Not only does she claim that Tierney's work was sloppy and inaccurate (his accusations mostly flat wrong), but she also criticizes the AAA for throwing Chagnon and Neel under the bus in its 2002 report about the matter. I missed the session, but I'm sure that I'll hear anthropologists talking about it for the rest of the week.
I missed that particular panel because I was teaching my grad class yesterday afternoon (goxewu will appreciate that). And then I stayed on Penn's campus for two AAA-affiliated events.
Penn's Anthropology Department joined forces with two AAA journals (Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Transforming Anthropology) to throw an opening-night reception in the Penn Museum's Chinese Rotunda. 90-feet high, it is one of the largest unsupported masonry domes in the entire country. One of the most amazingly breathtaking interiors that any college campus can boast, it was a spectacular setting for the fete.
I left that reception early enough to attend an intimate performance of Pouring Tea, a one-man show by ethnographer E. Patrick Johnson (also, like Dreger, from Northwestern University). The performance took place at Penn's LGBT Center in The Carriage House. Vocalist Joya Jones and poets Nina Harris and Joshua Bennett (of HBO's Def Poetry fame) sanctified the space with three blistering performances. Then Johnson spent the next 40 minutes performing excerpts from interviews he conducted for his most recent book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay men of the South. He has played much larger venues with this show (and is currently preparing a more expansive stage version for a May opening in Chicago), but this tiny, cozy space was a perfect way start to a week that will be chock full of ethnographically inflected conversations. As Johnson himself described the event in his post-performance Q&A session, "it felt like I was bringing you all back with me into those small and intimate living rooms where I conducted the interviews."
Monday, November 30, 2009
This Week: "On Location" at the AAAs
The American Anthropological Association is holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia this week, and I'll be there with bells on (maybe literally).
I realize that the last time I mentioned anything about academic conferences in one of my blog-posts, the critical responses came fast and furious.
One of the consistent commenters for that posting was someone named goxewu, who kept asking me if I had to cancel any of my classes so that I could trot off to these conferences. Even though I answered the query a few different times (and a few different ways), goxewu continued to push the point, even implying that I would probably have canceled my classes this semester if they were on Mondays and Fridays (instead of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays).
But goxewu's major gripe wasn't necessarily about those missed class sessions. One of goxewu's final comments makes the argument plain: "Prof. Jackson may have done academe an unintended service with his post on conference-going, which unintentionally shone a light on the academic equivalent of Congressional junkets (which are also about a third legit, a third of marginal use, and a third paid vacations)." But are only a third of all academic conferences really legit?
Back when I was in graduate school, we used to read the yearly journalistic stories (some called them "attacks") on the ostensibly bizarre themes found among offerings at academic conferences. And these stories were seemingly offered up with a similarly delegitimizing impulse at their core.
A Philadelphia Inquirer article on the 2004 Modern Language Association meetings started with the following line: "When a professor draws a parallel between Dumbo and Detective Monk, you just know you're at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association."
The annual news stories about the AAA meetings often playfully invoke the tone and register of traditional ethnographic monographs, as does this Chicago Sun-Times piece from 1991: "Adorning themselves with jackets of tweed or gaily colored beads, puffing on elaborately carved pipes, ears pierced and decorated with rings, members of a national tribe are holding their annual potlatch in Chicago this week. They number some 3,700 [closer to 5,000 will attend this year]. But once here, they will break into smaller groups."
In many ways, I am an advocate of the academic conference. And I don't think that these venues are a waste of time, or a scam--or that they will be quickly/easily scrapped for cyber conferences in the not-too-distant future (another theory offered up after my last post). But I do sometimes mildly grumble about the fact that I can't make all of the interesting ones that are relevant to my work. And new meetings seem to pop up every single day.
For instance, on Wednesday night, E. Patrick Johnson is performing his electrifying one-man show, Pouring Tea, an adaptation of his powerful new book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, based on an extensive oral history project. On Thursday night, the AAA will host a book launch and reception for Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama, who died in 1995, before she could publish her work. Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, will be present to offer remarks at the reception, which follows a panel about Dunham's work. And the exhibit "Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction, and Poverty in Urban America," opens on Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia (and runs through May 2010). The exhibit is based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Philippe Bourgois (my Penn colleague) and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg. They worked among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers in San Francisco. The exhibit is based on their new book, also called Righteous Dopefiend. (Another Righteous Dopefiend exhibit is being presented in conjunction with the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street. It is a multimedia installation that will run from December 3 through 31.)
I'll blog about these conference events--and others--all week.
I realize that the last time I mentioned anything about academic conferences in one of my blog-posts, the critical responses came fast and furious.
One of the consistent commenters for that posting was someone named goxewu, who kept asking me if I had to cancel any of my classes so that I could trot off to these conferences. Even though I answered the query a few different times (and a few different ways), goxewu continued to push the point, even implying that I would probably have canceled my classes this semester if they were on Mondays and Fridays (instead of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays).
But goxewu's major gripe wasn't necessarily about those missed class sessions. One of goxewu's final comments makes the argument plain: "Prof. Jackson may have done academe an unintended service with his post on conference-going, which unintentionally shone a light on the academic equivalent of Congressional junkets (which are also about a third legit, a third of marginal use, and a third paid vacations)." But are only a third of all academic conferences really legit?
Back when I was in graduate school, we used to read the yearly journalistic stories (some called them "attacks") on the ostensibly bizarre themes found among offerings at academic conferences. And these stories were seemingly offered up with a similarly delegitimizing impulse at their core.
A Philadelphia Inquirer article on the 2004 Modern Language Association meetings started with the following line: "When a professor draws a parallel between Dumbo and Detective Monk, you just know you're at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association."
The annual news stories about the AAA meetings often playfully invoke the tone and register of traditional ethnographic monographs, as does this Chicago Sun-Times piece from 1991: "Adorning themselves with jackets of tweed or gaily colored beads, puffing on elaborately carved pipes, ears pierced and decorated with rings, members of a national tribe are holding their annual potlatch in Chicago this week. They number some 3,700 [closer to 5,000 will attend this year]. But once here, they will break into smaller groups."
In many ways, I am an advocate of the academic conference. And I don't think that these venues are a waste of time, or a scam--or that they will be quickly/easily scrapped for cyber conferences in the not-too-distant future (another theory offered up after my last post). But I do sometimes mildly grumble about the fact that I can't make all of the interesting ones that are relevant to my work. And new meetings seem to pop up every single day.
For instance, on Wednesday night, E. Patrick Johnson is performing his electrifying one-man show, Pouring Tea, an adaptation of his powerful new book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, based on an extensive oral history project. On Thursday night, the AAA will host a book launch and reception for Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama, who died in 1995, before she could publish her work. Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, will be present to offer remarks at the reception, which follows a panel about Dunham's work. And the exhibit "Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction, and Poverty in Urban America," opens on Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia (and runs through May 2010). The exhibit is based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Philippe Bourgois (my Penn colleague) and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg. They worked among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers in San Francisco. The exhibit is based on their new book, also called Righteous Dopefiend. (Another Righteous Dopefiend exhibit is being presented in conjunction with the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street. It is a multimedia installation that will run from December 3 through 31.)
I'll blog about these conference events--and others--all week.
Friday, November 20, 2009
The End of an Oprah
Later on today, Oprah Winfrey is supposed to announce that she's closing up shop on her wildly influential daily show. The lights go out on that televisual institution in 2011, and that will be the end of a pop-cultural era.
Of course, Oprah didn't invent the genre (and she wasn't the first person to ratchet its stakes up to national prominence), but she has owned that format for much of the last two decades, using it as an amazingly powerful platform, one that has made her the most recognizable first-name celebrity on the planet.
Some credited her "book club" with almost single-handedly keeping America literate (and the publishing industry solvent), a not completely hyperbolic claim.
I probably watched about 10 to 15 episodes of the show a year, but they were some of the most riveting moments of network TV: Tom Cruise prancing around on that couch and attacking psychoanalysis; Dave Chappelle, just back from Africa, explaining why he left his own lucrative and highly successful television show; Whitney Houston admitting her bouts with drugs, alcohol and Bobby Brown; and, of course, who can forget the James Frey controversy, which was probably the beginning of the end of her book club's golden age.
Earlier this year, I watched her show with Jay-Z, and just this week, I DVR'd her Sarah Palin interview. The hour-long format makes her engagement with these folks feel so much more substantive than the five-minute packages that you get most places on TV. She has time to ask Palin all the questions you thought needed to be posed (about that infamous Katie Couric non-answer, about Levi Johnston's public attacks on her family, about her preparedness for the White House). They are all questions we've heard put to Palin before, but Oprah's space feels like a much more intimate place for the conversation.
Indeed, Winfrey's been criticized for just such would-be intimacy, especially as it informs her unprecedented crossover appeal. Is it really fair to call her a postmodern mammy-figure (as some detractors have)? That seems like a cheap shot, an overly dismissive critique that can be thrown around quite self-servingly.
Part of what makes her show so entertaining, especially when it features someone like Palin, is that she is always as famous as the person she's interviewing. Palin is one of the most sought-after guests right now, a star in national politics, and the closest thing Republicans have to an Obama-like figure. Even still, Palin seems to recognize (and defer to) the aura of Oprah. Everyone does!
Over the past few years, Oprah Winfrey has been all over the news for what she's been doing outside of her daily broadcast (that all-girls school in South Africa, her stumping for then-Senator Obama, etc.), and she plans to devote more time to her new network, which will provide her with 24 hours a day to fill, not just one.
Winfrey is also doing things like financing the new Lee Daniels film, Precious, which I have still yet to see. Ugh!
With all of these pots on the fire, Winfrey is probably betting on the fact that she'll be even more influential after they shutter the doors to her studio show. I wouldn't doubt it.
Of course, Oprah didn't invent the genre (and she wasn't the first person to ratchet its stakes up to national prominence), but she has owned that format for much of the last two decades, using it as an amazingly powerful platform, one that has made her the most recognizable first-name celebrity on the planet.
Some credited her "book club" with almost single-handedly keeping America literate (and the publishing industry solvent), a not completely hyperbolic claim.
I probably watched about 10 to 15 episodes of the show a year, but they were some of the most riveting moments of network TV: Tom Cruise prancing around on that couch and attacking psychoanalysis; Dave Chappelle, just back from Africa, explaining why he left his own lucrative and highly successful television show; Whitney Houston admitting her bouts with drugs, alcohol and Bobby Brown; and, of course, who can forget the James Frey controversy, which was probably the beginning of the end of her book club's golden age.
Earlier this year, I watched her show with Jay-Z, and just this week, I DVR'd her Sarah Palin interview. The hour-long format makes her engagement with these folks feel so much more substantive than the five-minute packages that you get most places on TV. She has time to ask Palin all the questions you thought needed to be posed (about that infamous Katie Couric non-answer, about Levi Johnston's public attacks on her family, about her preparedness for the White House). They are all questions we've heard put to Palin before, but Oprah's space feels like a much more intimate place for the conversation.
Indeed, Winfrey's been criticized for just such would-be intimacy, especially as it informs her unprecedented crossover appeal. Is it really fair to call her a postmodern mammy-figure (as some detractors have)? That seems like a cheap shot, an overly dismissive critique that can be thrown around quite self-servingly.
Part of what makes her show so entertaining, especially when it features someone like Palin, is that she is always as famous as the person she's interviewing. Palin is one of the most sought-after guests right now, a star in national politics, and the closest thing Republicans have to an Obama-like figure. Even still, Palin seems to recognize (and defer to) the aura of Oprah. Everyone does!
Over the past few years, Oprah Winfrey has been all over the news for what she's been doing outside of her daily broadcast (that all-girls school in South Africa, her stumping for then-Senator Obama, etc.), and she plans to devote more time to her new network, which will provide her with 24 hours a day to fill, not just one.
Winfrey is also doing things like financing the new Lee Daniels film, Precious, which I have still yet to see. Ugh!
With all of these pots on the fire, Winfrey is probably betting on the fact that she'll be even more influential after they shutter the doors to her studio show. I wouldn't doubt it.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Is Diversity a Dirty Word in the Academy?
Former United States Senator Rick Santorum penned an op-ed in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer that questions the military's commitment to "diversity." Santorum's "The Elephant in the Room: Diversity, but at What Cost?" argues that the Naval Academy's characterization of diversity as "highest personnel priority" is not just silly (as manifested in an attempt to diversify an all white and male color guard before a recent world series game) but also potentially "dangerous," especially if "the military's commitment to 'diversity' as job one prevented military officials and the Department of Defense from 'connecting the dots' when it came to the accused [Fort Hood] shooter."
Of course, academics hear a great deal about diversity, but is it becoming a dirty word in the academy, a potentially dangerous threat?
According to detractors, what's the problem with diversity?
Santorum likens it to "a politically correct incantation that forces otherwise reasonable people to say silly things," a critique many would extend to diversity claims within academica. (Indeed, it has been used to characterize the arguments made by many a brainstorm blogger, myself included.)
But what's wrong with diversity? The naysayers have many answers: that it discriminates against white males; that it rewards mediocrity/incompetence; that it perpetuates minority under-achievement; that it threatens the integrity of higher education; that it is undemocratic and unethical; that it runs counter to all of our loftiest ideals of equality. Diversity, they argue, is the euphemism of choice for quotas, which should be considered unfair and unconstitutional.
We know what the detractors think, but how do diversity proponents counter. Santorum lays out a version of diversity's defense in his piece, a version that seems pretty accurate to me (and woefully, as Santorum would agree, insufficient).
What's the defense of diversity, not just as an abstract principle, but as translatable into concrete decisions about, say, student admissions and faculty hiring?
Given the extent to which recent Supreme Court decisions have demonstrated growing judicial hostility towards race-inflected admission decisions/formulas (and with the increasing thematization/politicization of academia as ideologically Far-Left), are advocates conceding too much? Are they trying to have it both ways? That is, might academia be falling into a trap when it attempts to ostensibly cloak its programmatic commitments to diversity (one of the criticisms leveled at many current academic interventions)?
Is it enough to re-name programs that used to be explicitly marked as race-specific initiatives and still deploy them in service to similar goals, walking on egg-shells all the while? Are academics still fighting for a version of diversity with real institutional teeth? Or has that battle already been lost?
Of course, academics hear a great deal about diversity, but is it becoming a dirty word in the academy, a potentially dangerous threat?
According to detractors, what's the problem with diversity?
Santorum likens it to "a politically correct incantation that forces otherwise reasonable people to say silly things," a critique many would extend to diversity claims within academica. (Indeed, it has been used to characterize the arguments made by many a brainstorm blogger, myself included.)
But what's wrong with diversity? The naysayers have many answers: that it discriminates against white males; that it rewards mediocrity/incompetence; that it perpetuates minority under-achievement; that it threatens the integrity of higher education; that it is undemocratic and unethical; that it runs counter to all of our loftiest ideals of equality. Diversity, they argue, is the euphemism of choice for quotas, which should be considered unfair and unconstitutional.
We know what the detractors think, but how do diversity proponents counter. Santorum lays out a version of diversity's defense in his piece, a version that seems pretty accurate to me (and woefully, as Santorum would agree, insufficient).
What's the defense of diversity, not just as an abstract principle, but as translatable into concrete decisions about, say, student admissions and faculty hiring?
Given the extent to which recent Supreme Court decisions have demonstrated growing judicial hostility towards race-inflected admission decisions/formulas (and with the increasing thematization/politicization of academia as ideologically Far-Left), are advocates conceding too much? Are they trying to have it both ways? That is, might academia be falling into a trap when it attempts to ostensibly cloak its programmatic commitments to diversity (one of the criticisms leveled at many current academic interventions)?
Is it enough to re-name programs that used to be explicitly marked as race-specific initiatives and still deploy them in service to similar goals, walking on egg-shells all the while? Are academics still fighting for a version of diversity with real institutional teeth? Or has that battle already been lost?
Friday, November 13, 2009
Most of the reviews are in, and if it weren't for Wes Anderson's new animated film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Lee Daniels might have the most critically acclaimed motion picture of the year.
Precious, based on the novel Push, by the poet Sapphire, is finally going into wide national release today, but most critics have been gushing about this gritty little film for weeks.
Even before it had a distributor, I wrote about Daniels and the Sapphire book right here on my blog, especially after the film won prestigious awards at Sundance and Cannes, something close to the equivalent of Best Picture Prizes at both festivals.
I called my previous post "Sundancing with Controversy," because I thought that Daniels had chosen a very difficult book: the first-person story of a poor, sexually-abused (by her father), HIV-positive black teenage mother named Precious Jones who has to negotiate a cruel and unforgiving world. Daniels court's controversy in his films, so I wasn't surprised that he'd gone after this powerful (and disturbing) little book. Here's some of what I wrote about him back in January:
Lee Daniels is the unconventional filmmaker responsible for helping to create provocative and disturbing independent films such asMonster’s Ball (famous for Halle Berry’s controversial sex scene with Billy Bob Thornton) and The Woodsman (which boasts Kevin Bacon’s riveting and sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile). Shadowboxer, his 2005 directorial debut, was most cited for its incestuous interracial sex scenes (between Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Helen Mirren). But I own a copy of that movie simply to show people its bizarrely unexplained (and matter-of-fact) depictions of a suburban Philadelphia landscape seemingly awash in stray Zebras.
In all of his films, Daniels pushes the envelope. He usually rips and defaces it, too.
And just as I thought, even though most reviewers applaud his film as "unforgettable," "remarkable," and something that, according to Rolling Stone, will leave audiences "moved like no film in years," one or two critics have come down very hard on Precious. For example, Armond White's NYPress review has been making the rounds as the harshest version of this anti-Precious critique. "Not since The Birth of a Nation," White writes, "has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious." Quite a claim!
My colleague at Penn, Salamishah Tillet, has penned a very thoughtful reading of the film that places its generally positive critical reception in conversation with the venom that Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple received. Her essay puts the film's critical praise in a much more productive and robust cultural/political context. And it might help us to unpack some of White's hostility, too.
Has anyone out there seen the film? (It has been in NYC for at least a week.) If so, what's your verdict?
It just got to Philadelphia today. So, I'm planning to buy a ticket for the weekend. As you can guess, I'll give you all my two cents after I see it.
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