“Said’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is counterproductive. It may have swelled the ranks of subaltern studies programs and provided grist for numerous postcolonial studies Ph.D. theses, but that doesn’t make his argument correct. In the end, bad books are just bad books, and when they are canonized for instrumental reasons, the result is a coarsening of thought and an ever-widening and unhealthy divide between the academy and mainstream culture.” In his review of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, Salon‘s Gary Kamiya rails against the canonical status of Edward Said’s Orientalism. “Said’s radically skeptical position…was so abstract and chameleonic that it was impossible to disprove it, since it constantly dissolved (and hid behind) a multitude of deconstructive readings.” At the risk of seeming relentlessly pre-mo, I also tend to get irritated with arguments that rely on the immutability and inescapability of an all-powerful, trans-historical discourse. But at least, unlike too many of his advocates, Said’s work is relatively clear and readable. When it comes to a lot of post-colonial writing, I wonder: Is it that the subaltern cannot speak, or that nobody can hear him/her over all the jargon-riddled shouting?
Category: Ivory Tower
No Cred for Indy.
“The committee concurred that Dr. Jones does seem to possess a nearly superhuman breadth of linguistic knowledge and an uncanny familiarity with the history and material culture of the occult. However, his understanding and practice of archaeology gave the committee the greatest cause for alarm.” One sad note amid all the excellent election news: Despite the best efforts of Dean Marcus Brody, Indiana Jones has been denied tenure at Marshall College. (By way of The Late Adopter.)
Hofstadter’s Political Tradition.
“Like the late John Kenneth Galbraith, Hofstadter has been faulted for leaving behind no coherent ‘school’ of history, no set of disciples. But for a man who once said to Foner, ‘I’m not a teacher, I’m a writer,’ to have tutored such a splendid variety of historians shows that he imbued his students with something more precious than the ability to write history his way. He taught them to write history their way.” On the eve of a new biography of the hallowed Columbia prof, Slate‘s David Greenberg ruminates on Richard Hofstadter.
Bullies / Bully!
In case you missed it, last week Comedy Central’s fake news went academic: By way of The Naked Tree and various other sources, The Daily Show‘s inimitable Rob Corddry delved into racismism (racism against racists) with Columbia’s own Manning Marable and Eric Foner. And, soon thereafter, that Apostle of Truthiness, Stephen Colbert, sat down with Harvard’s resident throwback, Harvey Mansfield, to discuss the manly virtues. Harvey, go make me a sandwich.
Used to be my homies.
“While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as ‘preventive war,’ ‘benevolent hegemony,’ and ‘regime change.’ Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. ‘Opposition to utopian social engineering,’ Fukuyama writes ‘…is the most enduring thread running through the movement.’ Yet neoconservatives today are bogged down in an attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged, and deeply alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray — and lead the country — so far off course?“
Um, well, maybe ’cause a lot of ’em read Fukuyama’s The End of History back in the day? Jacob Weisberg reviews Francis Fukuyama’s new book, America at the Crossroads, and, while it’s good to see principled conservatives take this administration’s egregiously inept Iraq policy to task, it’s also hard to believe that the neocons didn’t share Fukuyama’s earlier contention going in that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was both an historical inevitability and in full flourish. Fukuyama can play the aggrieved realist now, but that’s definitely not how he made a name for himself.
Summers’ lease hath had all too long a date.
With another no-confidence vote on the way, Larry Summers announces his resignation as president of Harvard, effective at the end of the school year. Between running Cornel out of town and arguing women can’t do science, Summers long ago lost any truck with me. He was an embarrassment to the University, and it’s past time for him to go.
10,000 Chains of Harvard.
“‘I do think Harvard Square, unless something drastic is done, is dying.'” With the imminent closing of yet another landmark, the Brattle Theater (The Tasty, the original Coop, and the Bow & Arrow had all disappeared within a year of my graduation (1997), and recently Wordsworth Books and Briggs & Briggs have joined them), the AP takes a moment to lament the commercialization of Harvard Square.
Eliminate the Babylonians…for credit!
Via Cliopatria, Inside Higher Ed looks at increased use of Civilization III in college history courses. Um, yes, I’ve been playing Civ 4 in almost all of my spare moments of late solely for pedagogical purposes. Seriously, notwithstanding my own inveterate Civ addiction, I can’t see how the game would be in any way useful in teaching history, and particularly at the college level. And if you’re going to use games for elementary, middle, or even high school courses, I think you’d do better with a game grounded in specific history, such as old-timey classics The Oregon Trail or Seven Cities of Gold.
Googlarians unite.
“What’s going on? Google has become the new ground zero for the ‘other’ culture war. Not the one between Ralph Reed and Timothy Leary, but the war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; California’s cultural civil war. At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control.” University of Virginia Law professor Tim Wu surveys the controversy over Google Print, and makes a cautious plea for writers and academics to get behind the project.
New Deal, Raw Deal.
“It was during the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were adopted. But with them came something else that was quite destructive for the nation: what I have called ‘affirmative action for whites.’ During Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of African Americans or treated them differently from others.” With Katrina as a newspeg, Columbia’s own Ira Katznelson previews his new book on New Deal racial exclusion in the Washington Post.