Anne's Discussion Notes

*starting with the ideal of the cosmopolitan canopy:
is this what you want to create?!?
a “neutral” setting of “civility”?
a place to “collect evidence” that can reinforce stereotypes?
“they feel a sense of community….and then they move on”
“doing their own folk ethnography”
(breaks down on public transportation, particularly around black men)
“exposed to an unknown other….growing social sophistication”?

interrogating this ideal?
cf. Iris Marion Young, "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference," in Feminism/Postmodernism, Ed. Linda Nicholson.

“racism, ethnic chauvinism, and class devaluation...grow from a desire for community…from the desire to understand others as they understand themselves, and from the desire to be understood, as I understand myself. Practically speaking, such mutual understanding can be approximated only within a homogenous group that defines itself by common attributes….
The striving for mutual identification and shared understanding…has led to denying or suppressing differences….A more acceptable politics would acknowledge that members of an organization do not understand one another as they understand themselves and would accept this distance without closing it into exclusion…
The ideal of immediate presence of subjects to one another…is a metaphysical illusion….
radical politics must begin from the existence of modern urban life….the temporal and spatial differentiation that mark the physical environment of the city produce an experience of aesthetic inexhaustibility….Dwelling in the city means always having a sense of beyond…I can never grasp the city as a whole….City life is the “being-together” of strangers….openness to unassimilatable otherness….

cf. also Doris Sommer. "Advertencia/Warning" and "No Secrets for Rigoberta." Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ix-xv, 115-137 /exchange/system/files/private/Sommer.pdf
"So simple a lesson and so fundamental: it is to acknowledge modestly that difference exists...this defends us from harboring any illusions of complete or stable knowledge"

" inhospitality…merits a pause long enough to learn new expectations."

“Empathy is hardly an ethical feeling...readers' projections of intimacy...disregard the text's...performance of keeping us at a politically safe distance....”

"Why is so much attention being called to our insufficiency as readers? Does it mean that the knowledge is impossible or that it is forbidden? Is she saying that we are incapable of knowing, or that we ought not to know?"

Is she "withholding her secrets because we are empirically different and would understand them only imperfectly; or must we not know them for ethical reasons, because our knowledge would lead to power over her community?"

“our access is limited...but sentimental readers miss the point... prefer the illusion of immediacy...."

"Secrets can cordon off curious and controling readers...Secrecy is a safeguard to freedom."

second keynote is the “mantrafesto”à
Alex Juhasz’s  counter-impulse (not to question, but) to "manifest."

Unlike questions, which (presumably) "keep things open,"
the Italian word manifesto is derived from the
Latin manifestum, meaning clear or conspicuous (= "making manifest").

In her "mantrafesto," Alex melds "manifesto" with "mantra":
a chanted/sung incantation/prayer;
a repeated word, formula, phrase, often a truism ("less is more").

what elements of this practice do you want to incorporate?

another possible reading is Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights

also what about Monsoon Bissell’s performance/workshop as a resource?
(in Identity Matters file…)