Anne Dalke's blog

I thoroughly enjoyed our shared experience of Skype this morning.

I hope that someone can record what Parkway said to Bryn Mawr--I would love to savor those words!

Here is what Bryn Mawr said to Parkway:

Thank you for inviting us to see in new ways, and speak so frankly, about our own experience at Bryn Mawr.

Thank you for making us grateful for our campus and all the opportunities that Bryn Mawr College provides.

Thank you for calling us out on our inconsistency: a bunch of us wrote that college isn't necessary for success, but you pointed out that we are in college now; it was easy for us to say that college wasn't necessary... because we're in college.

Thank you for helping us recognize that the things we say are very much influenced by our life situations and where we are right now.

Thank you for forcing us to reevaluate our choices and goals.

Thank you for reminding us of the need for positive thinking.

Thank you for opening up different perspectives.

Thank you for reminding us that we can make our goals more concrete – we can make paths to follow.

Thank you for giving us renewed faith in the youth of this city.

Thank you for teaching us that it's ok to identify ourselves as what we aspire to be, to say "I am a writer" or "I am a basketball player."

Thank you for being our friends.

more @ /~adalke/ppppf11/Teach-In

still haven't heard back from kammy, but/and/so
here's the (interim) current plan for tomorrow night
(feel free to use less--but not more!-- time than been's allotted for your group)

7:10-7:30: review end of semester requirements, portfolio work, etc.

7:30-7:37--alice.in.wonderland

7:37-7:44--amophrast, Katie Randall

7:44-7:59--venn diagram, jmorgant, phenoms

7:59-8:14--aybala50, lgleysteen, leamirella, S. Yaeger

8:14-8:29--jfwright, essietee, kimk, lwacker, rachelr

8:29-8:44--snacks

8:44-9:14--someshine, AmyMay, charlie, chelseam, Gavi, sel209, shlomo

9:14--9:30--end of semester evals

looking forward to this!
anne

I had a bit of a revelation during our discussion of Little Bee on Tuesday, and since--in the midst of insight!--may not have been very clear about what I was suddenly seeing, I wanted to write it out here.

In 1899, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness. In the late 1950's, Chinua Achebe critiqued the novel as "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." He then created a new work of fiction, the novel Things Fall Apart, to give life and flesh to the sorts of figures Conrad had objectified in his novel. In 1979, the appearance of Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood called attention, in turn, to the peripheral role women had played in Achebe's novel. In this sequence a story was repeatedly re-worked-- first in criticism, then in fiction-- in order to bring into the foreground the sorts of characters whose lives had been neglected in earlier fiction. In each case, the attempt to fill one gap unexpectedly created another one.

Something quite similar happened with Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Like Achebe's essay, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 discussion of "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" made problematic the fictional use of people of color as representations of the tortured psyches of Europeans. Spivak's analysis helps explain the generation of Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Bertha Rochester takes center stage (in Bronte's novel, she had been confined to the attic as a madwoman, a figure of Jane Eyre's unexpressed rage).

In preparation for our final class/performances/"teach-in," you may want to explore the workshop material made available by Theater of the Oppressed and Theater of Witness.

By Friday morning, Dec. 2, please post (as comments here) a list of the group members you'll be working with (the brainstorming, so far, looks pretty fun!)

http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/cdd/announcement/view/89

Call for Papers: Volume 4 Critical Disability Discourse (CDD)

York University’s Critical Disability Studies Graduate Student Program launched an academic journal in November 2009. Critical Disability Discourse is a bilingual, interdisciplinary journal, publishing articles that focus on experiences of disability from a critical perspective. The journal considers articles from graduate scholars in a variety of academic fields, but undergraduate students, activists, and community members/organizers are also invited to contribute. Critical Disability Discourse's goals are to provide emerging scholars an opportunity to contribute to the expanding field of critical disability studies and to gain exposure for their work in the public sphere.

Possible topics can include but are not limited to the following:

• Critical theory and disability: feminism, post-modernism, postcolonial theory, transnational analysis, Marxism, etc.
• History of disability: Antiquity, Middle Ages, Victorian Age, Industrial Age, etc.
• Law and public policy, and disability
• Qualitative and quantitative research pertaining to disability
• Education and disability
• Culture: disability-related popular culture, television, videos, blogs, arts, literature and film analysis

Toward an Ethics of Cohabitation

Sharon Ullman's "devastating" introduction:
the claim that "academics don't live in the real world" is a false rhetorical strategy designed to restrain their power
Butler works in "the best part of the Jewish ethical tradition: to insist on the relation to the non-Jew"
intellectuals are under a political obligation
Butler rejected a "courage" prize in Berlin, saying, "I distance myself from racism"
from her Occupy speech: "If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible"
she demonstrates the direct relation between political action and analysis
learning and intellect are devalued in the public square, and cruelty is celebrated
there are those who are "rightly afraid" of thinkers, like Butler, who inspire activism:
she helps to repair the world

Butler: "it will change my thinking and my writing that I have been here"
an ethics that heeds the fragility of life" = we accompany one another
the last two lectures explored "bodies in alliance," with-and-against Hannah Arendt,
in an attempt to enact-and-exemplify alternative forms of living together
various forms of cohabitation are central to the most vexed problems of our time
start in register of ethics, w/ political implications
1) on global obligations, near and far:
what about our capacity to respond to suffering @ a distance?
what is our ethical obligation to those we never choose, in languages we don't understand?

Many of you, who wrote in your last set of web events about biological and sexual education, might be interested in this 11/16/11 NYTimes piece about teaching good sex @ a local Quaker high school.

From Secret Dread @ Penn State (NYTimes, 11/19/11):
"In a culture that increasingly accepts gay life, organized athletics, from middle school to the professional leagues, is the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment .... What lurks behind so many male athletes’ vociferous antipathy to homosexuality seems to be deep anxiety about masculinity, the very quality that aggressive team sports showcase .... Maybe it’s time for a new kind of sports hero....?"