Closing the Open Ends

Posted on January 30, 2006 by Timothy Burke

I was struck this morning by a poster put up by a student group encouraging students to come to a discussion about social class. The poster quotes a typified person saying that class isn’t very important (I’m paraphrasing here) and follows by suggesting that anyone who thinks this can get educated by coming to the meeting.

That’s a generally typical rhetorical strategy for trying to appeal to people for political or social discussions and meetings on a college campus or elsewhere, across a broad political spectrum. “Think that there’s no genocide in the world? Come learn the truth!”, or “Want to know the truth about liberal propaganda? Come hear our speaker!”.

There’s a kind of perverse logic embedded within the appeal, though. The audience allegedly addressed by the poster or notice is never actually the audience who responds to the information, or rarely so. If you were already dubious about the analytic or political significance of social class in contemporary American life, or otherwise thought it was an uninteresting or unimportant issue, you’d hardly be likely to come to a meeting where it’s an apparent axiom that you’re completely wrong. Unless, perhaps, you were an unusually ornery or confrontational person who enjoyed disrupting the meetings of people whom you oppose.

So who usually is informed by such a poster and then comes to a meeting advertised as such, besides the people who are convening it? Those who agree with the implied premise of the notice but didn’t know about the group, those who have a pre-existing political commitment to the cause described in their own group and want to work out how to relate to the new group, and those who are anxious to signify their willingness to subscribe to the political beliefs implied in the notice and learn more about how to make good on that willingness.

Maybe a few of the latter will be surprised or dismayed by what they see, and drift away. Maybe a few of the already-committed will conclude that the new effort is chasing its own tail in some respect and turn away, or maybe a few politically committed attendees will decide that the new group is more organized and exciting than their existing commitments and jump ship.

In any event, such an appeal is about building constituencies, not exploring a problem. That’s where the (very typical) rhetorical gesture towards conversation or discussion or exploration, towards opening up a shared problem, is at the least misfounded, at the worst cynically performed. A group that assembles to ask, “Is social class really an issue?” with the intent of exploration has to start with as serious an acceptance of the probability that the answer will be “no” as it will be “yes”.

There’s nothing wrong with forming political groups along the lines of existing political commitments, of trying to get roughly like-minded people together for a common effort. I don’t like it when I see such efforts clouded by appeals for dialogue, conversation, exploration, however. On this campus and many others, I think those appeals are meant with great, in fact painful sincerity, which is a saving grace. But even so, it’s a terrible habit to get into, especially for students with liberal or left commitments, because it represents everyone with whom one disagrees as unenlightened, uninformed, as heathens yet-to-be converted to the true faith, not as people with worked-out convictions or even just some kind of substantive habitus which happens to diverge significantly from the premises of the group that’s trying to get together.

That’s the kind of bad habit that I think activists left and right have on a larger scale outside of campuses, leading to a kind of McEnroe-style incredulity when the inevitable encounter with serious dissent occurs, a bug-eyed cry of “You canNOT be serious”, as if it’s impossible that anyone could have a different view. The rhetorical hook of a poster becomes the philosophical presumption of a movement: that there is the cause, and then there are those who have yet to encounter the cause, nothing more.

Now if some of those posters are actually serious about the desire for exploration, something different is required, something much harder. If you can’t actually get someone with a principled position different than your own to sit down and talk openly with you (that’s obviously the best option), you almost have to assign members of your own group or circle of peers to represent those arguments in good faith. That takes a lot of work and a flexibility of mind. If everything is going right in a liberal arts curriculum, that’s part of what we should be teaching when we teach writing and speaking in our classrooms: how to know and represent the strongest arguments against one’s own position. Some days, I think we do a fair job of that. Other days, I worry and fret that we’re barely doing it at all.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 16 Comments

The Shape of the Gordian Knot: Synthetic Worlds

Posted on January 18, 2006 by Timothy Burke

I’m going to take a tour over the next month or so of some specific instances of the intractable dilemmas facing academics at the moment, challenges to which I see no ready or straightforward solution. All of these problems, as I see them, confound some of the conventional defenses of academic institutions, but also are poorly addressed or even aggravated by many of the conventional, especially political or partisan, critiques of the academy.

Scott McLemee has a nice column this week in which he talks about how blogging or online writing among academics may be creating new and unexpected communities among scholars, conversations that cut across or even ignore specialization and disciplinarity without any of the creaky, elaborate institutionally deliberate mechanisms sometimes used to encourage similarly collaborative efforts. The more formal the effort to encourage interdisciplinarity, the more that it is easily suborned to the institutional dynamics that it seeks to escape. Sooner or later, the pressure to formalize, standardize, and control such projects becomes irresistable.

The serendipity of communication and discussion between online writers not only casually, informally connects academics with different intellectual traditions and methodologies, but bridges gaps between academic and non-academic thinkers that otherwise can seem almost impossible to navigate otherwise. Try as a matter of deliberate policy to get academics and non-academics together, and you’ll get something about as spontaneous, relaxed and productive as a row of 13-year old boys at the high school dance trying to screw up their courage to ask someone to dance with them.

In contrast, there are all sorts of examples of academics and non-academics conversing busily, productively, creatively to be found at various weblogs, but the most powerful example I encounter in my working life isn’t so much at or through a single weblog as it is around an entire field of research.

Formal study of what the economist Edward Castronova has called “synthetic worlds”, what others have called virtual worlds or massively-multiplayer games, is something that I fell into largely by accident. I’ve been an interested consumer of online worlds (both game-oriented and otherwise) and some of their pre-online precursors, for my entire life. I felt comfortable identifying myself as more than a consumer, as an intellectual concerned with inquiry in this area, partly because I developed a secondary expertise in popular culture after arriving at Swarthmore and wrote about children’s television, but also partly because of a growing interest in networks, emergent systems, and complexity theory that came from other experiences.

I’ve been increasingly enthralled by both academics and non-academics working on this general topic not just because of the subject matter, but because on many occasions, I can see the outlines of a completely different sort of practice of intellectual life that is strongly distinguished from the kind of scholarly communities and relations that I see in the overall discipline of history or in the field of African studies. Work on synthetic worlds is often largely agnostic about disciplines, about the formalities of academic professionalism, about the hierarchies that often mar scholarly life. This is not to say that it is undisciplined or careless. The remarkable thing for me is that you can get ethnographers, economists, political scientists, legal scholars, literary critics, business experts, technologists and many others in a room with each other and have incredibly productive conversations where each contribution is shaped by a rigorous methodology, and yet have relatively little gatekeeping.

This is not to say that the field is free of really strong conflicts. I’ve written in the past about the conflict between what’s called “ludology” and “narratology”, which I think sort of translates to a rematch of Levi-Straussian structuralism with a poststructuralist hermeneutics, though there’s more involved than that. (Loosely speaking, the ludologists tend to think that games, including synthetic worlds, should be known in terms of their formal or structural properties; narratologists in terms of the communicative and expressive content and meanings embedded within those worlds.) People with different disciplines can talk past one another or get snotty about their own preferred methodologies. At a recent conference, a lot of us took the opportunity to aggressively bash a presentation that was premised on evolutionary psychology. The academics sometimes despair that the practicioners ignore them and the practicioners roll their eyes at the relative uselessness of what the academics have to say. Existing conflicts do not magically vanish, just because you’re working on synthetic worlds, games, online discourse, what have you. No kumbayas need apply.

However, the sense of community I get is still dramatically different. The transaction costs involved in having a new conversation, finding a new insight, adopting new methodological tools, getting involved in a productive collaboration are so much lower than in history or African studies. I’m involved now in a large and growing group of scholars and practicioners who are playing in one of the major existing online games together. That’s just plain fun, obviously, and not everything scholars do could be like that, much as I might like to walk into a department meeting in plate armor and with a sword. But I also feel we’ve had some serious, substantive discussions in between bashing virtual elves on the head, some of which have spun out into shared public spaces for thinking like Terra Nova. What makes those discussions productive is not just that they’re happening in a fun space: it is part of the intellectual architecture of interest in the topic.

Why I bring this up in the context of academia’s ongoing problems is that I feel a constant sense of melancholy about the likely unsustainability of this intellectual moment. Academic work on games, virtual worlds, cyberculture and the like is under constant, increasing pressure for standardization and institutionalization, and that pressure comes from all sides and is often coming from people with perfectly good, even laudable intentions.

On one hand, it’s coming from people who are perfectly right to be concerned about justifying scholarly attention to such topics with a wider public. That’s not just about trying to pick up legitimacy in the eyes of public officials who finance higher education, but about a wider cultural and social credibility. Edward Castronova’s new book Synthetic Worlds is a really great, thorough, intellectually rigorous overview of the topic and of evolving research concerns within it, but what kind of treatment does he get from the New York Times Book Review? They assign some pseudo-doyen of the literati ancien regime to trot out by-the-numbers snobbery about the brave new world of online popular culture, much as the high-culture tastemakers of a previous generation used to hold forth about the evils of television. The reviewer is the kind of person who read a newsmagazine article about The Sims five years ago and thinks that’s the alpha and omega of the story.

It’s hard to have to recapitulate a legitimating claim for yourself every time you tell people what you do, to explain soberly why comic books or synthetic worlds or television matter or are worth studying. So we try to institutionalize that explanation in our own universities and in the wider culture, and that involves standardization of all sorts.

Me, I think it’s enough to say that anything millions of people do is important, and anything that makes billions of dollars off the activities of those millions of people is doubly so. There are a great many other reasons to care about synthetic worlds, about their potential as mirrors of or experimental versions of human society, as vehicles for expression and art, and as a new form of sociality that has real-world economic and cultural impact. I’m glad to offer those reasons if asked, but I readily concede it would be nice to have those reasons precede me, be available as a form of widely distributed common sense.

Even more, however, the pressure for standardization comes from within academic life. I can afford to be dismissive of that pressure, insensate to it. I have tenure. Even more than having tenure, I even have a “legitimate” scholarly field that dominates my writing and teaching. Nothing in my own future career depends on my interest in synthetic-worlds, save my own personal satisfaction. That’s not true for some of those scholars who are eagerly pushing for the creation of “game studies” as a discipline, for specialized journals that publish work in “game studies”, for a body of canonical theory in “game studies”, and so on. Their futures may depend absolutely on their success in those efforts. It’s not true for scholars being trained in disciplines like literary criticism, anthropology, economics or legal studies. They can’t afford methodological and disciplinary eclecticism, or gaining credibility among the community of people interested in synthetic worlds at the cost of building reputation capital in their own disciplines.

I felt this incredible sense of despair the other night when one of the members of our growing group of online scholars playing together talked over the game’s chat channel about his dissertation. It’s an amazing dissertation: I’m really impressed with his discussions of it, of the kinds of research he’s doing, about the ways in which its implications thread together psychology, cultural criticism, aesthetics and sociology, and about the potential uses of the research both for understanding what virtual worlds are and what they might yet become, the abstract and practical senses of his work. But he worried, in the context of his graduate program of study, in a conventional humanities discipline, about his “lack of theory”, about the need to have a kind of authenticated body of canonically disciplinary theory mentioned prominently in what he was writing.

I despaired because I can’t imagine anything less necessary or meaningful to the kind of work he’s actually doing, to the value of his inquiry, than name-dropping a bunch of the usual crit-theory suspects. I despaired because there is no way in hell that I would tell him not to do that. If I were his advisor, I’d insist that he do it.

That’s the face of the Gordian knot, in this case. To be responsible to the futures of people committing to new projects, new ways of communicating and disseminating knowledge, new areas of study, we have to domesticate them, regulate them, restrict them to the forms and rituals of academic life. To do anything else is malpractice, a blithe kind of irresponsibility. Take your own risks, but don’t impose them on others. That’s not what a good teacher does. The only alternative is to create institutional programs that value such work on its own terms, and to do that means creating all the mechanisms of disciplinarity and standardization all over again. You can’t propose, in almost all colleges and universities, a Department of Cool Stuff, something equivalent to the animating spirit behind XeroxPARC or similar centers of private research and development. You’ve got to describe for others what constitutes “real” study of synthetic worlds (or any other novel topic), pin it down, restrict it. Which is a solution as bad as the ill it seeks to cure, most of the time.

There’s a lot of talk in Philadelphia (and elsewhere) about Franklin this week. That spirit of generative amateurism, exploratory practical knowledge, and so on. That’s the dream that still lies somewhere deep in the DNA of scholarly life and which fights its way to the surface now and again. I have no idea how to make it more than a brief gasp of freedom in between episodes of stricture, how to change the spirit and culture of inquiry in subtle but pervasive ways. There are few real villains arrayed against that shift, much as it would be convenient to think otherwise. Mostly it is responsible people behaving responsibly, or busy, productive people whose own arrangements work well enough for them, well enough that they don’t really see any need for sustained change.

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Games and Gaming | 7 Comments

Book Notes: Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees

Posted on January 13, 2006 by Timothy Burke

Of all the odd things I’ve heard in recent years, one of the oddest would be that there are objections in principle to the research paradigm that Franco Moretti describes in Graphs, Maps, Trees. It really doesn’t matter what your interest in cultural or literary analysis is: what Moretti proposes is useful grist for your mill. There is no requirement to purchase the entire methodological inventory he makes available, or to throw overboard close reading or aesthetic appreciation or focus on a small and rarified set of texts. Frankly, when academics propose that we only do what they’re doing and stop doing everything else, I tend to ignore such propositions in the same way that I ignore commercial hyperbole while deciding what things I want to buy. I enjoy my iPod: I’m not required to think that it has changed my life or should lead me to chuck my stereo out the window. Whatever you think literary analysis and cultural history are, quantifying the subject of their domains is a very good thing. Indeed, it is a kind of knowledge long inferred and rarely acquired, and though its acquisition unsettles some assumptions made in the inferred known, it equally clarifies and strengthens many other claims–or least puts new and productive burdens on them.

Leave aside for the moment the particular kinds of modellings and configurations of his data that Moretti describes, and just stick with the numbers alone. Even in a single national literature, it used to be hard to make any clear statements about the total number of books published in a given year or across a long series of years, and of those books, what proportion were works commonly known, analyzed, or regarded as defining a “literature”. Now Moretti is not really so unusual or isolated as he might appear in taking an interest in such quantification, as Matt Greenfield has already noted at the Valve. There are many subfields of cultural history and literary analysis that have taken an interest in similar quantification and mapping, in fact, the study of genres has long been shaped by an interest in cycles of publication of the kind Moretti describes.

The numbers alone, as Moretti observes, immediately falsify or complicate a series of conventional ways of understanding cultural or literary change over time. When we speak of a particular novel’s influence, or about how literature changed in response to a particular work, we’re making claims that ought to involve a total topography of published cultural work. Until recently, that would not have been the case. If it turns out that that the lineal descendents of a novel regarded as influential are no more than half a percent of all work published over a ten-year period, this puts pressure on what we mean by “influential”. It is not that we are now forbidden to make the claim, but it constrains and specifies what we can potentially mean by such a claim. It’s just that what Moretti does helps us to realize that often in making such claims, we’ve put too much trust in the representations and attributions of authors and readers, which are just as produced and fantastical as any publically uttered memories, just as Goffmanesque in their performance as any other presentation of self. It is not that we are forbidden either to speak of that novel’s quality or desirability, of what we (and past readers) might have found enticing, inspiring, productive, mysterious in such a work. Moretti doesn’t quantify the production of meaning, and even if he wanted to, he could not.

Enough on the simple virtues of Moretti’s project. Of course cultural historians and literary critics need numbers, all of us, and godspeed to the counting and graphing. I’d love to see someone do something similar with major historical archives: count all the documents, all of them, and graph for me their types and forms. Historians live in their archives, but we don’t really know them half as well as we ought to. We accept the categories that the archive offers us, and read along the pathways laid down. In researching consumerism and material culture in colonial Zimbabwe, I had to read horizontally across an archive for a topic that the archive itself did not recognize as lying within its confines, and the sense I got of what the archive contained was thereby complicated very much from what I’d thought it to be. Quantification could only help that understanding further.

What could enhance Moretti’s work further? What do I see as genuine problems and gaps in the models he offers?

First, a warning: that counting publications only scratches the surface of the totality of cultural production in any given post-Gutenberg moment. This is an issue that Raphael Samuelwrote about for years with regard to historians and their archives: that what lands in archives, is recorded as documentary evidence, is just a small and sometimes highly unrepresentative selection of the totality of potential grist for the historian’s mill in a given era. Moretti may be counting formal publication and finding that what is commonly taken to represent “national literature” is not typical or representative, but beyond that lies an even larger domain composed of the ephemeral, the unpreserved, the unrecorded. In the age of electronic communication, we should be especially wise to this problem. Even with the Web being archived, much of what has been written within it and read avidly is likely to be lost in the longer-term: asynchronous discussions, epistolary literatures passing through email, and so on.

There will come a point at which a project of quantifying cultural production in any given historical moment will only be able to gesture at a vast Oort cloud of unknown writings, performances, and texts, seeing the gravitational effects of some unseeable and lost Planet X tugging at the knowable and quantified. This especially strikes me as an Africanist: we now have some lovely examples of “market literature” in Nigeria available in published form, but beyond those examples, I very much doubt we will ever be able to represent the numbers or varieties of such texts published. If we confine our understanding of what was typical or normal within a cultural form to what we can find in archives, in libraries, in catalogs, in records of publication, we’ll ultimately have a deformed conception of the totality. Beyond everything counted there is always another mountain of the uncountable. Historians of slavery turned over every stone and record to count the total numbers of Africans taken across the Atlantic, and even then, had to make some educated guesses, which still fuels (sometimes quite intense) debate among specialists in that field. But once some numbers were in hand, those historians realized that making any statements about their meaning depended on another set of numbers, namely, how many people there were in West and Equatorial Africa at any given moment in any given society, of what the fertility rates were in those places, of the numbers of men and women, and so on. All numbers which, frankly, are never going to be tallied through anything besides serious guesswork.

The second thing that occurs to me on reading Moretti is that we know quantifying publication and quantifying discrete elements (tropes, places, and so on) within publications doesn’t tell us half so much as we might think about the quantification of readership and circulation. Again, maybe it’s because I’m an Africanist that I’m especially wary in this regard. You can count up the numbers of newspapers published in a decade in southern Africa, including ones presumptively aimed at African audiences. You would be making a big mistake to assume that such numbers tell you how many people were reading or consuming those newspapers. We know from historical and ethnographic work that the literate often read or reinterpreted newspapers for the illiterate, and that a single copy of a publication was often passed around many readers. Texts travel through readerships in ways that numbers do not describe very well. Here I’d look to Isabel Hofmeyr’s fantastic book on the transnational history of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for some insight, for a tracing of how a single work can traverse readerships in ways not precisely correlated with its appearance in libraries, archives, or even within texts that invoke, allude or cite Bunyan. There ought to be a sociology and social history of audience and reading that might complement Moretti’s work, but my intuitive suspicion is that it would also very much complicate the claims he would like to make. I also think that the sociology of authorship and publication would be a useful complement to Moretti: to know who knows whom, who reads whom, and to which outlets and forms of publication they relate strikes me as retaining its importance.

The most important concern I have about Moretti is that I think he has the same problem that the Annalistes and world-systems analysts have had with modernity: a difficulty explaining rupture, breach, or novelty. Novelty here in multiple sense: as Elif Batuman observes, the novel-form is what gets marked off in Moretti as something not explained. In world-systems history, this problem has lately been exaggerated to extremes by some of the founding practitioners in the field, as in Andre Gunder Frank’s argument late in his life that the contemporary world-system is part of a continuous five-thousand year old history, that modernity or the rise of the West is a temporary or epiphenomenal speed bump in a well-worn road, not anything genuinely new. The problem with a divergent tree of literary or cultural history is that it has a hard time explaining the appearance of genuinely new forms or genres: it is forced always to insist on a fundamental continuity. The best that the world-systems historians could do, if they didn’t want to follow Frank’s argument that modernity or the rise of the West was an illusion, was to either insist on materialist explanations of rupture (new technologies, new means of production) or to offer shopworn dialectics.

In evolutionary terms, Moretti is something of a gradualist; my impulse is to throw up the cultural equivalent of punctuated equilibria in reply, to insist that some genres and forms do not descend gracefully from predicates but emerge abruptly, catastrophically, like Aphrodite stepping from the waves. The evolutionary metaphor is a powerful one, but you want to take in even more of it than Moretti does. For one, it’s fine to talk about the death of forms and genres, about how divergence fuels convergence that fuels more divergence. You can’t have a metaphor that invokes evolution or speciation without death, or at least the removal of specialized forms. But it begs the question (and Moretti knows that it does) of what the fitness landscape is for cultural forms.

Emerge in fact is the operative verb here: I think Moretti’s trees in particular could benefit enormously from reference to the body of work subsumed under the heading of “emergence” or “complexity theory”. Because there is an answer within that body of work to Moretti’s question: what explains the divergence of literary forms. It’s not an especially comforting answer, perhaps, for either Moretti or some of his critics, because it may eschew some deep underlying explanatory principle for why some genres, tropes, modes of literary representation produce an explosion of divergent forms and why others die. In an emergent system, the place within the topology of the system where complex structures appear may be effectively random. If we take Moretti’s example of Sherlock Holmes, it might be that an evolutionary tree of British fiction in the last half of the 19th Century would help us to understand why the environment was friendly to “detective fiction”, what the conditions of the cultural soil were like for the growing of a new tree. But as for how Doyle’s stories set the conventions of a genre and others die, are forgotten, wither, some of that might be simply termed “dumb luck”, that the precise location as which crystallization of a genre occurs in a moment where many nascent forms of the genre are present is about the accidents of readership, of circulation, of publication, of imitation, that there is no deeper explanation that needs to cite how Doyle’s particular formulation of the genre more precisely satisfied or represented the desires of a reading public, or how his ability as a writer was more precisely distinguished from any other. I’m echoing Gould’s Wonderful Life here very consciously. This is a rebuke of traditional literary theory, historicist literary theory and even Moretti all at once: all of them assume that there is a rational way to explain cultural reproduction which relates the successful, generative or meaningful text to some underlying condition of its being: an ideological or discursive fit to its environment, a skillful or superior authorial creation of an aesthetic, or some undiscovered underlying “law” of cycles and divergences. Here maybe Moretti needs to go the next step rather than running back for the materialist security blanket as he does in closing the book.

The accidental and the emergent are also, however, where we might reopen the door to agency, creativity and the will of the author and reader again. Because another thing that appears in literary and cultural history is the unpredictable generativity of authors and readers who reach from a high branch far back down the tree to create some new possibility of representation, who take what was a junk gene in DNA of culture and from it express some meaning or representation that was deemed impossible the day before. Sometimes such authors are just Carlo Ginzberg’s Menocchio, envisioning private cultural worlds that die or are forgotten; sometimes they are better situated, differently located, or even, dare we say it, more imaginative or skillful in how they excavate the literary past in order to produce new possibility. Just as I would in the end say that modernity is an emergent and in some ways accidental social structure which in turn creates the possibility for individual agency that then generates still other emergent forms through will, choice or deliberate selection, I think you can reconcile the agency of authors and readers with Moretti’s graphs, maps and trees, but it does take coloring outside his lines to do so.

Posted in Academia, Books | Comments Off on Book Notes: Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees

Coughing Break

Posted on January 12, 2006 by Timothy Burke

I was very sorry this weekend to miss the AHA panel on history blogging, and all the more so because to my considerable surprise my own blog was singled out for some recognition. I’m really touched and all the more embarassed that I couldn’t muster the energy to stay past a lovely breakfast and meet many of the authors whose words I’ve so enjoyed reading. It turns out that I’ve got a nasty case of bronchitis, which makes this the second winter in a row that an ordinary cold has deepened into something much worse. Doesn’t make me feel real positive about my likely fate if an avian flu pandemic really does spread: it’s clear that my aging body is developing a genuine vulnerability.

The award was a pick-me up for which I’m grateful. Last week, I started composing an entry for this blog about what I’ve learned (abstractly, shorn of specific local details) about academic planning this semester, only to find when I was finished that I’d more or less repeated an older entry. So perhaps I haven’t learned anything, just confirmed pre-existing principles (or biases). There are quite a few days as a blogger and an academic where I feel that way recently: that I, and perhaps more than myself, are trapped in recurrent, irresolvable debates and conflicts, that the academy is at the edge of its limitations, at a moment of arteriosclerosis, but also that its critics are swinging familiar, well-honed, and largely instrumental and political axes at the university as an institution.

I’ve been reading a bit again in the intellectual history of Romanticism and the Enlightenment in preparation for my History of the Future class, and sometimes those discussions feel not past but prologue. Not even that, but eternal, damnable return, our collective sentence to playing out the same tableaux again and again.

I sometimes wonder what’s left for me to say, especially to long-suffering readers who’ve heard it all before from me. I don’t want to jump on every new story about academic life. I don’t want to be the hot-button commentator who is there with a ready smirk or an easily formed polemic. But I also don’t want to be the nag and scold who tells everyone how to behave correctly, and I know that’s the real danger for me, the bad habit that descends from my legitimate concerns.

I still think that there’s a productive balance that scholars can strike in the public sphere in which we undertake the work of de-familiarization and exploration, trying to get people off of fixed principles, of prior assumptions, of easy generalizations. For that to work, we have to be wary of our own idee fixes, our lazy assumptions, our own unexamined axioms. We have to be curious, mobile, persuadable, crossing not just the boundaries we self-congratulatorily mark out as transgressive achievements, but the unfamiliar disciplinary and discursive boundaries that we would never think otherwise to cross. Our ethnographies and histories and textual criticisms have to be directed at unfamiliar and unaccustomed subjects with the same presumptive humility and interest that we showily perform when we go to the usual suspects. Academics are both too hard and not nearly hard enough on themselves: demanding where they should be generous, forgiving where we should always try harder. We worry too much about the obscure and not enough about the general, about our responsibilities to our disciplines but not to our institutions or our possible (and often unfound) publics.

I think I’m just tired and sick and have a case of the winter blahs because this all seems at times to be harder than it should be. I’ve been trying to reason out why I’ve been such a passive-aggressive asshole in helping out a friend and associate of mine with a project outside of Swarthmore that he and I conceived of together (if he reads this, he’ll know which project I’m talking about). Originally I was missing his emails because of a spam filter, now I’m reading them and just delaying getting my ass in gear to help out. Part of it is that the project is a bit snake-bit in terms of bad luck with the schedule, but much of it is also that it’s been difficult to make headway on the issues which most interest me. My friend gets where I’m coming from, but most of the other people in the history of the project’s development don’t. It’s not (I think) that they oppose what I’m arguing for, it’s more that it’s irrelevant and orthagonal to the way they see some of the same issues. Sorry for the abstractions here, but one of the paradoxes of blogging under one’s own name is that one sometimes has to responsibly pseudonymize and abstract some real-world situations, particularly because I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with the folks who have a different sensibility to mine. Their interests are valid, intelligent, skilled, and often challenging: I wouldn’t want to be seen to be rubbishing anyone by voicing frustration.

Blogging helps a bit with this problem, because I feel that most of the people reading this blog do understand most of the way I’m approaching long-standing problems and challenges within academic life. It is much easier in many ways to deal with open opposition than it is to feel as if one is a Martian. I’m still glad for this blog and for the people who read it and appreciate it: one Martian to many, perhaps.

Posted in Academia, Blogging | 6 Comments

History of the Future, Spring 2006

Posted on January 11, 2006 by Timothy Burke

Week 1 January 16/18

The Construction of Time

Overview of course
Lecture: Time and the Future in Human Societies
Film clips

Week 2 January 23/25

Millennialism and Eschatology in Medieval Europe

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium
The Book of Revelation (read the introductory commentary and then skim the Book of Revelation itself)
Ralph Glaber, “On the First Millennium”
Bernard McGinn, “Who Was Joachim of Fiore?”

Week 3 Jan 30/Feb.1

City on the Hill, Revolution, Enlightenment: Making New Futures

Francis Bacon, “New Atlantis”, in Claeys, ed.,Utopia Reader
Condorcet, “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind”, in Claeys, ed., Utopia Reader
Steven Kreis, “The Vision of Human Progress”
John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”
Matthew Shaw, “Reactions to the French Republican Calendar”, French History, 15:1, 2001.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Giambattista Vico (read section 3, “The New Science”)

Week 4 Feb. 6/8

Chasing Utopia: Romantics and Revolutionaries in the 19th Century

Fourier, Marx, Bellamy, Owen in Claeys, ed., The Utopia Reader
William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment”

First paper due at the beginning of class

Week 5 Feb. 13/15

Looking Ahead From the Fin d’Siecle

Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon
Lady Henry Somerset, “The Position of Woman in the Twentieth Century”, in Varty, ed., Eve’s Century
John Elfreth Watkins, “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”, in Varty, ed., Eve’s Century
Tokutomi Soho, Shorai no Nihon (The Future Japan)
The World’s Columbian Exhibition, 1893
“The Eiffel Tower Stirs Debate and Controversy”
In-Class viewing: A Trip to the Moon

Week 6 Feb. 20/22

The High Modernist Future I

Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning, pp. 5-106, 159-248, 298-301
The Iconography of Hope: the 1939-40 World’s Fair
F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”
Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised
In-class viewing: “Flash Gordon”
Scheduled film: “Things to Come”

Week 7 Feb. 27/March 1

The High Modernist Future II

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
James Scott, Seeing Like A State, selections
Scheduled film: “Metropolis”

Week 8 March 13/15

Go Into Plastics: Postwar Futures and Their Discontents

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”
Hugo Gernsback’s Forecast, 1951
Retrofuture
Motorola Advertisements
Yesterland (look at the material about Disney’s Tomorrowland)
Paul Wilborn, “Tomorrowland”
Comics: Adam Strange, Tommy Tomorrow, Space Cabby
In-class viewing: “Design for Dreaming”, “The Jetsons”, “Star Trek”, “Walt Disney Treasures: Tomorrowland”
Scheduled film: “Sleeper”

Week 9 March 20/22

Futures For Sale: The Hubris of Expertise in an Age of Prediction

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
Daniel Bell, Towards the Year 2000
Scheduled film: “Clockwork Orange”
Scavenger hunt assignment due

Week 10 March 27/29

Futures For Sale II

Daniel Bell, Towards the Year 2000
Short excerpts from miscellaneous futurist works in Professor Burke’s collection
Short excerpts from Tom Swift novels
In-class viewing: “Barbarella”, “Logan’s Run”, “Zardoz”
Scheduled film: “Soylent Green”
Text analysis paper due

Week 11 April 3/5

Postmodern Revisitations and Revisions

Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan
Scott McCloud, “Zot: Hearts and Minds”
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
In-class viewing: “Futurama”, “Demolition Man”
Scheduled film: “Blade Runner”

Week 12 April 10/12

Apocalyptics Now

Tim LaHaye, Left Behind
Jason Boylett, Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse
Bill Joy, “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us”
Chris Gorak, “Right At Your Door” (if we can find a way to see it)
Scheduled film: “The Road Warrior”

Week 13 April 17/19

The Singularity and Other Contemporary Futures

John Brockman, The Next Fifty Years
Vernor Vinge, “What Is The Singularity?”
The Extropy Institute
In-class viewing: “Batman Beyond”
Scheduled film: “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”

Week 14 April 24/26

Who Needs the Future?
Emergence, Complexity, Prediction
Beyond Expertise: Futures Markets and Other New Auguries

Final research paper due May 11th

Posted in Popular Culture | 15 Comments

Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade, Spring 2006

Posted on January 10, 2006 by Timothy Burke

History 8a
Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade
Spring 2006
Professor Burke
Swarthmore College

This course is a survey of a broad era in African history, from around 1200 AD to 1850 or so, concentrating on the 17th and 18th Centuries. The class is designed for students seeking an introduction to the discipline of history, for students seeking knowledge about the history of West African societies, or for students with an interest in the Atlantic slave trade and its legacies in both Africa and the Americas.

We will have two primary (and often intertwined) areas of interest in the course. The first is a comparative understanding of West African societies in the era before formal European rule and the second is to study the origins and impact of the slave trade on those societies. In pursuit of these questions, we will be forced to ask, “What is slavery? How is it defined?”

The class is built around a mixture of lecture and discussion. The lectures will not restate material from a textbook, but instead will be used to introduce and review background material in order to facilitate discussion of the readings. Attendance is an important part of your final grade, both for its own sake and because you will be tested on material introduced only through the lectures. The readings are concentrated in the middle third of the course, and you will need to devote more time to completing them well during that time, as they will be key to the discussions we will have then.

In addition to attendance and participation in discussion, grades will be based on two short (4-6 page) papers and a final exam. Reading assignments should be completed by the class session where they are listed in the syllabus.

January 16 Overview of course requirements and structure.
Using Electronic Reserve and JSTOR.
Introduction to themes of course.

January 18 Lecture: West Africa: the material and cultural environment

January 20 Lecture: Overview of West African history to 1100 AD
Reading: George Brooks, Landlords and Strangers, pp. 7-48

January 23 Lecture: Societies of the Upper Niger River up to the time of Sunjata
The Sunjata epic, background
Mande nyamakala and the griot

January 25 Discussion: The Sunjata epic
Reading: Bamba Suso et al, Sunjata

January 27 Discussion: Historical sources for precolonial West Africa
Reading: Bamba Suso et al, Sunjata
Reading: Ibn Battuta selection

Jan. 30 Showing of “Keita: The Heritage of the Griot”

Feb. 1 Lecture: Mansa Musa to the Songhay Empire

Feb. 3 Discussion: The rise and fall of empires. What is an empire, anyway?
Reading: John Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire

FIRST PAPER DUE

Feb. 6 Lecture: West African trading networks
Reading: George Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa

Feb. 8 Lecture/Discussion: Kinship
Reading, Sandra Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast, pp. 20-32

Feb. 10 Lecture: The great pivot–Trans-Saharan to Atlantic

Feb. 13 Lecture: Africans in the Atlantic world
Reading: Randy Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar

Feb. 15 Discussion: Africans in the Atlantic world
Reading: Randy Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar

Feb. 17 Discussion: What is slavery?
Reading: Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery

Feb. 20 Lecture/discussion: What was slavery in precolonial Africa?
Reading: Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery

Feb. 22 Discussion: Warfare, slavery and kin networks in West Africa
Reading: Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery

Feb. 24 Discussion: Why did the Atlantic slave trade happen?

Feb. 27 Discussion: The numbers game
David Eltis, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom

March 1 Discussion: Debating the consequences

March 3 No class

SPRING BREAK

March 13 Discussion: The mingled worlds of the slave trade
Reading: Robert Harms, The Diligent

March 15 Discussion: Morality in the era of the slave trade
Reading: Robert Harms, The Diligent

March 17 Discussion: The West African world in the 18th Century
Reading: George Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa

March 20 Discussion: The problem of sources for the 18th & 19th Century
Reading: *Oladauh Equiano, selection from Africa Remembered
Reading: *Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
Reading: Robin Law, “An Alternative Text to King Agaja of Dahomey’s Letter to King George I”, History in Africa. (JSTOR)

March 22 Discussion: The problem of sources for the 18th & 19th Century
Reading: Anne Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade

March 24 Lecture: Arochukwu and the Igbo

March 27 Lecture: Oyo

March 29 Lecture: Dahomey

SECOND PAPER DUE

March 31 Lecture: Asante

April 3 Lecture: Benin

April 5 Film: “Ceddo”

April 7 Film: “Ceddo”

April 10 Discussion: “Ceddo” and the problem of evaluative argument

April 12 Lecture: Islamic revival in Senegambia and the Niger Valley

April 14 Discussion: The Yaa Tradition of Ogoni
Reading, Sonpie Kpone-Tonwe, “Leadership Training in Precolonial Nigeria”, International Journal of African Historical Studies. (JSTOR)

April 17 Discussion: Yoruba proverbs
Reading: James Bode Agbaje, “Proverbs: A Strategy For Resolving Conflict in Yoruba Society”, Journalof Africa Cultural Studies. (JSTOR)

April 19 Discussion: Kwame Boakye and late precolonial Asante
Reading: T.C. McCaskie, “The Consuming Passions of Kwame Boakye”, Journal of African Cultural Studies. (JSTOR)

April 21 Lecture/Discussion: Architecture and space
In-class presentation: James Morris and Suzanne Blier, Butabu: Adobe Architecture of West Africa

April 24 Lecture: The “era of legitimate commerce” and the end of the slave trade

April 26 Discussion: The problem of teaching precolonial Africa
Reading: Donald Wright, “What Do You Mean There Were No Tribes In Africa?”, History in Africa. (JSTOR)

April 28 Discussion: One more pass on the era of the slave trade and the problem of assigning responsibility.

FINAL EXAM

Posted in Academia, Africa | 2 Comments

Rome vs. Oyo

Posted on January 2, 2006 by Timothy Burke

I’m really enjoying HBO’s series Rome. I gather BBC viewers have had a less detailed, more sex-focused version of the series to watch, which is a pity for them. What I’m enjoying in particular about the show is the meticulousness of its attention to Roman material culture combined, far more unusually, with some thoughtful attempts to capture the mentalite of Roman society, particularly through the viewpoint characters of Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus. The addition of those characters is also one of the smarter storytelling strategies I’ve seen in a historical film: when it’s nothing but “real” people and “real” events, history tends to drag cinematic or televisual work down like a lead balloon, leaving a writer and director nowhere to go but towards tarting up history or coldly respectable costume-drama accuracy. (Though I gather some classicists have noted a “real” Pullo and Vorenus are mentioned in Caesar’s Gallic histories…)

The series has helped me to more clearly articulate an argument in one chapter of the manuscript I’m working on, where I try to discuss how 19th Century Shona political theories and practices form part of the “deep grammar” of postcolonial political struggle in Zimbabwe. Part of the argument I’m making is a criticism of common attempts in the 1970s and 1980s by historians to redeem precolonial African polities from colonial misrepresentations, to legitimate precolonial African political systems as sophisticated and “civilized”. Often such attempts went further, arguing not only against clearly racist dismissals of precolonial political structures, but attempting to turn the evaluative claims of colonial observers on their head, to characterize precolonial African political systems as constitutional, democratic, freer or in some respect more humane and tolerant than 19th and early 20th Century European regimes.

You can’t quarrel with the first part of that effort. It doesn’t matter which precolonial African society we’re talking about: it can be taken as a given that its political systems were in their own way sophisticated and complex, even if we’re talking about small groups of hunter-gatherers. Even if you want to reserve the term “civilization” for societies whose political and social systems rise above a minimal level of size, scale and complexity, there were plenty of precolonial African political systems that were “civilizations” in this sense.

Even the second part of that counterthrust by historians has some legitimacy to it, in that there were African political systems which I think could reasonably be called democratic or implicitly “constitutional”, in British sense of an evolving set of precedents and constraints on the power of the polity. The problem in my view arises when that became the gold standard for attacking colonial misrepresentations, when a historian felt obligated to find something preferable or laudable in any given precolonial African polity, something that makes the colonized morally superior to the colonizer.

A lot of that thinking has died down, and some kinds of historical scholarship about precolonial societies and political systems never indulged in it in the first place, such as the Marxist-inflected “modes of production” scholarship about many precolonial African societies. That work did leave a legacy, however, in that most precolonial specialists in African history (a less and less common specialization in recent years) tend to avoid or soften any kind of evaluative commentary about precolonial political life, and to stress disjunctures between the present and the past rather than connections and continuities. At the least, most precolonial African political systems end up morally and ethically comparable in most historical scholarship. If there is a moral dimension to the analysis, it tends to be the default position that the violent destruction or disruption of precolonial African political structures by colonial conquest was an evil simply because it denied Africans self-determination or sovereignity and because it reduced the diversity or plurality of political models and discourses available to humanity in service to the monoculture of modernity. In that view, all precolonial African political systems are morally equivalent: whatever they were, it is wrong that they were destroyed.

This is where HBO’s Rome comes in. One of the things that the series has reminded me is that most of us have a crude evaluative understanding of Roman society and politics somewhere in our heads. We think we know what Rome was well enough to not just talk about what happened in classical Rome but to have an opinion about the virtues and vices of Rome’s political and social order. That opinion frequently rests on a sloppy, blurry or even grossly inaccurate received understanding of the history involved, and is typically voiced in terms of bad analogies to the present. But protests by classicists notwithstanding, at least none of us feel shy about having an opinion, bad or good, about what we imagine Rome to have been, and about particular events and personalities within its history. There are a handful of other historical examples where a similar lack of inhibition is exhibited in contemporary discourse: classical Greece; medieval Europe (often England or France); Renaissance Europe (primarily Italy and the Netherlands); the Reformation; colonial America; the French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution (often England’s); the antebellum US South; early 20th Century US; the US in the 1950s. In all these cases, historians often yelp in agony over the inaccuracies involved in popular or common evaluative claims, but mostly concede the legitimacy of evaluative claims, that it is ok to have opinions about the moral, ethical, personal desirability and attractiveness (or lack thereof) of those societies and political systems.

Not so precolonial African polities, and I think that’s one reason that interesting examples like the Oyo Empire, the Munhumutapa state, Buganda, the Empire of Mali, or Igbo towns can never cross a threshold of general familiarity with anyone who has a general interest in the past. Learning about those precolonial societies from the Africanist literature still largely has the feel of piety and obligation, of knowing details for details sake, or of overcoming ignorance that is articulated in the same terms that we talk about trying to eat a healthy breakfast. You can guilt people (Americans, Europeans or even contemporary Africans) into thinking they should know that history. They may come to know it rather dutifully. But save for a few points of purchase where evaluative claims flash into intense visibility, as in the debate about the meaning of slavery within precolonial African societies, none of those political systems and social orders ever become the food for analogy, for illustration, for putting meat and bones on some contemporary moral or ethical argument.

I think part of the reason for that is the reluctance of scholarly historians studying precolonial Africa to roll up their sleeves and make strongly felt or envisioned evaluative claims about the political and social systems they study, save for arguments that valorize or celebrate the contributions of those societies and regret their destruction. The field can’t push its content into some wider circulation or general knowledge until valorizing argument appear in equal measure with critical or hostile appraisals of some precolonial systems. In my case, I have no problem arguing strongly that precolonial 19th Century Shona political theory and practice was civilized, sophisticated, intricate, and deeply human, and repays study for that reason alone, but that it was also in many respects flawed and destructive, and that the legacy of those ideas and practices in contemporary Zimbabwe is at least one of the underlying reasons for postcolonial misrule. In the chapter, I am particularly focusing on the characteristic indirection and non-transparency of Shona political discourse and some consequential propositions about causality and conspiracy within political life. Part of making that argument meaningful in the present is claiming the structural connection between the past and the present, but it’s also being willing to say, “These political practices and structures, though deeply complex, were also wrong“.

That’s what almost all of us (Africans, Americans, Europeans, anybody and everybody) feel like we can say things about Rome and its history: you can admire or be appalled by the Republic, or the early Empire, or the Pax Romana, a partisan, enemy or bemused observer of political and social systems whose practicioners lie many centuries dead. That is possible partly because of written records, partly because of a long history of classicist knowledge, partly because of the legacy of Eurocentrism, but also because there are no gatekeepers who rush to stand in between such judgement and its historical substance, who try to forbid it, who burden every attempt to own or make use of that subject matter with some restorative project. Not so precolonial African history: at least, not yet.

Posted in Academia, Africa | 5 Comments

Theirs, Not Mine

Posted on December 29, 2005 by Timothy Burke

So I’ve been wrapped up in family life, grading and a persistent cold since about the 22nd. One thing I did have a chance to do is take my daughter down to Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Betsy Ross’ house and the Constitution Center this week: she expressed some interest in going.

I hadn’t been there since the major changes in security and the opening of new facilities. It used to be, most of the time, that you could just walk right up to Independence Hall and if it was open, walk right in. Sometimes when there were a lot of visitors you had to wait a bit, or the congestion was a bit off-putting. Now you have to go get free tickets and go through a very substantial security check, roughly equivalent to what’s required to get on a plane. I had to empty my pockets (including, at the specific request of the security official, my parking validation ticket) and remove my belt before going through a metal detector. Not my shoes, at least. The quickest time to get into Independence Hall was many hours after we arrived, so we settled for the Liberty Bell and headed off to see Betsy Ross.

The new exhibits are impressive: I especially liked what I saw of the Constitution Center. However, the whole experience made me feel melancholy. Usually when there is public talk about changes in the handling of security after 9/11, it turns into a hot-button discussion about the Bush Administration, with critics assuming that such measures are an over-reaction instrumentally intended to bolster the Administration’s political fortunes and Bush defenders arguing that such measures are absolutely necessary and implying that any critic must not care about the threat of terrorism.

Whatever I was feeling this week down in Philadelphia, it wasn’t easily found in that shouting match. It doesn’t seem to me that these kinds of changes have much to do with orders from the top. They’re more like a bottom-up institutional reaction to general signals. No institution wants to appear as if it’s uncaring or unconcerned about an issue that has received enormous public attention, whether it’s the threat of terrorism or multicultural inclusiveness. So most institutions, with very little specific political intent, try to do something to communicate their sincerity and responsiveness. That’s partly a genuine desire to make institutions meaningful to their publics and partly the kind of self-reproducing, self-interested behavior that bureaucracies habitually exhibit. To do nothing or be perceived to be doing nothing as a bureacrat, a middle-manager or representative of an institution is to invite elimination, to appear superfluous.

So high-rises add new security measures at entry to look as if they’re thinking about terrorism. Museums have new searches. Photography gets prohibited in various spaces. And Independence Hall gets removed from easy public access. I don’t think many of these measures actually accomplish much of anything. If you visit Independence Hall or the area around it, I think you’ll see fairly quickly that if someone was to approach the area on foot with explosives on their body or in with a vehicle full of explosives, they could still do considerable damage to the building and to the lives of visitors. Maybe the new precautions make it more difficult for someone of ill intent to do harm and that’s a good thing, I don’t know.

The way it makes the whole area feel is something to hold in balance against that change. Independence Hall has long been one of my favorite American sites of historical importance because it felt so much like our collective property, our patrimony. You could just walk in. It was there for us, of us. Now it feels like theirs: the government’s, the Park Service’s, someone else’s. A place operated by someone else, for someone else, guarded against the public rather than belonging to it. A place to which I have no rights, and from which derive no strength. I don’t attribute that change in feel to any political faction or leader, and don’t really hold anyone responsible for it. It’s also a very vague and emotional claim to lodge against the hard facts of public safety, assuming that in fact the site is safer than it was, something I’m not entirely convinced about. I wonder, however, what it is that we are preserving the building for, in this case.

Posted in Domestic Life, Politics | 5 Comments

Precautionary Principles, The Local Version

Posted on December 28, 2005 by Timothy Burke

So among the things we got for my daughter for Christmas was the boardgame Zathura, based on the film and book of the same name. She and I saw the film earlier in December, and she really enjoyed it. The concept of a game turning into a reality from which one could only escape by playing the game to its conclusion both fascinates and disturbs her: she’s been asking me various questions about the film’s narrative to try and sort this out.

So perhaps I wasn’t thinking too clearly getting her the game. When she unwrapped it and saw what it was, she recoiled as if it were a poisonous snake. I said, “Maybe we could play it later”, she looked at me, wide-eyed. “No, no, NO!”

Later in the day, though, she brought me two of the pieces. “Maybe we could just look at the board?” she asked. I said, “Sure, let’s look at the rules and maybe we’ll see about playing.”

“Not TODAY,” she said. Why not? I asked. You don’t think the game is actually like the one in the movie, right? No, probably not, she conceded. So why not play with it today.

“Because it’s CHRISTMAS, I don’t want to take the chance that it will send us into space today. Some other day, maybe.”

Posted in Domestic Life | 5 Comments

The Consequences of Representation

Posted on December 21, 2005 by Timothy Burke

John Holbo was kind enough to pick up on my posting about tropes for my Image of Africa course this semester and add a new item, a really interesting one: the extent to which imaginative fictions feel comfortable inventing countries, cities, places in Africa (in fact, are actively uncomfortable using real countries and places). What’s really interesting about this is that many of the source fictions that we looked at this semester, like King Solomon’s Mines and Sanders of the River, blend real African geographies with fake ones. There are latter-day examples of that, Michael Crichton’s Congo, for example. But more often in recent popular culture, fictions and entertainments offer African places (Wakanda, for example) unmoored from any link to real geographies and places.

The Crooked Timber commenters point out that there are a host of European examples of this as well, and even fictional American cities (Metropolis and Gotham City, for starters). So it’s not just Africa, but there’s a particular vagueness and plasticity of the African examples, a blurriness. Metropolis and Gotham City invoke known versions of New York City, light and dark. The kinds of Boogaboogalands we see set in fictional Africas invoke nowhere in particular. They have a dictator here, a refugee camp there, insurgents, witch doctors, pleasant villagers under the sway of custom, perhaps some savage warriors with long Zulu-style shields, an avuncular chief (often, as a Crooked Timber contributor observed, sporting a monocle and claiming to have been educated at Eton).

I was really satisfied with the Image of Africa course this past semester. The students were great, we had good discussions, the mix of texts seemed to me to work. I felt less obligated to “coverage” than I had in the past, and stuck with what generated reactions. One of the most satisfying things to me, though, is that I thought we began to zero in on a more sophisticated way to think about what kinds of consequences representation has in the world, of the relationship between representation and action. The combination of identity politics and historicist cultural criticism, whether you dismissively call it “political correctness” or acknowledge its more sophisticated underpinnings, nevertheless left us with a generic, one-size-fits-all response to “bad” culture, certain in advance that we know why such culture is wrong or what work it does in the world.

However, though I was pushing the course away from that shoot-from-the-hip reaction, you don’t want to end up at the opposite pole, where representation is just a mirror of society, where it has no relationship to action or behavior. In the case of representations of Africa, particularly the representation John Holbo describes, you don’t have to look any further than a December 19th story in The Wall Street Journal (sorry, no online version of the article) about Bruce Wilkinson, an American preacher determined to create a huge village of orphans in Swaziland, through his “Dream for Africa” project, extending existing endeavors like the “Never-Ending Garden”.

I suppose generously you could say the impulse behind the project was at least genuinely humanitarian. At least some of the people who’ve given to the project or who believe in it are utterly sincere in their desire to help. The problem of AIDS-orphaned children is also very real in southern Africa, and heart-breaking. But the fantasies that got mustered in this particular humanitarian dream were roughly as grotesque and unreal as those of any 20th Century autocrat you care to name. Leaving aside any of the thinking behind the project, the mere design and scale of it was bad enough: a huge residential and commercial complex intended to house up to 10,000 orphans plus preachers and support personnel, funded through work by the orphans, a 99-year lease over two major game parks adjacent to the complex, and expected tourist revenues from Americans and others flying in to see the salvation of orphans one day and wild animals the next. The whiff of Ceausescu in that design (and Dickens, for that matter) is pretty unmistakeable to me. At the least it’s a high-modernist fantasy of centralization and control. Not to mention that any of us who study the history of development projects in Africa know exactly where this project was headed if it was given any further room to become reality, towards a kind of half-assed initial implementation that would round up the most vulnerable, marginal “orphans”, put them in some poorly thought out starter complex and probably end up abandoning them after five or ten years. That history goes way back, all the way to the 19th Century expedition of British missionaries who went up the Niger to demonstrate to the locals the virtues of free labor over slavery and ended up buying slaves in order to “free” them for work on a plantation. It comes way forward, with the ill-conceived Somalian intervention of the 1990s.

Always inappropriate to the circumstance, and always utterly unconcerned with the actual people involved. Here’s a case where I think precisely the imaginary geographies that John Holbo writes about are involved: Africa is the place where it’s ok to capaciously envision grand projects of various kinds with little concern for the specific humanity of specific African individuals or communities, where you treat them as generic, faceless objects to be saved, remade, to be waved about as totemic proof of your own goodness, not as people who may have histories, psychologies, aspirations, cultures, individual and collective complexities. And when such projects die their inevitable deaths, rather than looking hard at themselves, the grand dreamers always blame African intransigence and malfeasance. It’s not as if Swaziland’s government is normally a model of probity and responsible governance, but here’s one case where they did exactly the right thing by stringing along the donors for whatever they could get from them and cutting them off at the point where their project threatened to become just real enough to do actual harm.

It’s only Africa where it’s ok to envision doing something like creating a gigantic tourist complex for foreigners to come and being photographed with orphans one day and wild animals the next, leaving the orphans to be preached at and prodded in the days in between: nobody, except maybe a Hollywood celebrity or two, would dream of buying up existing communities or facilities in the United States for anything of this kind. This is one of those junctures where what is otherwise safely imaginary has a kind of surplus to it, spilling over the chalice of dreams into real lives and real places. I don’t think you deal with that spillage by attacking imagination, but maybe you could help prevent it with an increased supply of knowledge about the real-world.

Posted in Academia, Africa, Popular Culture | 8 Comments