Once in a red moon

December 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

News flash: Saturday Night Live might be funny and <gasp!> socially relevant again! I, like most people, haven’t been bothered to watch SNL for many, many moons (More on moons at bottom). However, last week featured arguably–and I don’t want to argue over this now–the show’s first real bit of cutting social commentary in decades:

…the aforementioned cutting bit from the sketch being this line from Bill Hader playing chief WikiLeakian Julian Assange: “I give you private information on corporations for free and I’m a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.”

The Information Age is going through an awkward but inevitable shift, we are told. The release of government cables on Wikipedia, the threat of extradition and conviction brought by those governments on Assange’s head, and the hacker assault on the corporations (Amazon, MasterCard, PayPal, etc.) withdrawing services from Wikipedia amount a world cyber-war. Assange and Zuckerberg, A and Z, polar opposites in ideology, but two characters tied by the common feature of their fame and fortune: the peddling of private and confidential information.

Embedded in the language of ‘awkwardness’ and ‘inevitability’ is that our society will adjust to the changes and embark peacefully into a new world of greater transparency and less privacy. As John Heilemann remarks, “The question about the new transparency isn’t how to thwart it—because we can’t. The question is how we live with it.”

Notwithstanding the technological teleology of this sort of talk, it is interesting how rarely the gobs of attention from the commentariat attracted by Facebook and WikiLeaks manage to consider the immense effect of the state on the future production, circulation, and consumption of digital information.

The FCC new ruling on ‘net neutrality,’ a 3-2 vote that meant that service providers can’t block or restrict bandwidth for content they discriminate, effectively leaves the door open to future corporate control over the Internet. The stakes are poorly understood and poorly reported to the public, yet I would agree with SNL-alum-turned-Senator Al Franken and others that it constitutes the most critical First Amendment issue of our time.

Most of the talk about information technology today concerns how gizmos, search engines, social networking, and the like are changing our habits of thought, ways of relating to others, of understanding ourselves. Net neutrality is a matter that indicates that there is a flip side to this dynamic: that the Internet is a reflection of us, as well, and more precisely a reflection of growing inequalities. The corporate vision of the web is of “a fast Internet for the rich and a slow Internet for the poor,” writes Dan Lyons.

Most distressing, of course, is that the stakes of this debate do not reach the public in any kind of clear and sustained way precisely because the media are dominated by the very corporations who stand to battle over billions in profits. (I wonder how many Americans know that the airwaves, all those frequencies over which radio, TV, cell phone calls, and wifi travel, are publicly owned and licensed by the government.) Tough for SNL writers to slip that one into a sketch, I reckon.

Happy Solstice and lunar eclipse, everyone.

Filed Under: Internet, Politics

For Sure

December 16, 2010 By 7 Comments

Almost exactly one week ago, on December 7th, the New York City writer “Sure” was killed in action in Afghanistan.  He was 24 years old.  If you haven’t heard of him (I hadn’t either), that’s likely because Sure was a writer in the graffiti and street-art sense.  Those in the know—those who, unlike most of us, notice and study the illustrious, often encrypted markings that riddle the city’s everyday surfaces—unanimously regarded Sure as a master in the art of sticker-based handstyle, a true expert whose lettering was precise, ornate, varied, and idiosyncratic.  Like other name taggers, he and his writing partner Faust would order 1,500-count boxes of name tags (the standard kind with colored borders), inscribe each one freehand with some calligraphic version of their names, then stealthily paste them on newspaper boxes and other conspicuous spots throughout New York City.  Photographs of their writing, along with an interview, were recently included in Martha Cooper’s book Name Tagging, published just this past Summer (by Mark Batty Books, at whose website the interview can be found).

I’ve always been a captivated admirer, but I know nothing, really, about this complex world of graffiti, much less about the particular art of handstyle lettering.  Last week, though, a brief but surprisingly reverent evening-news piece reporting Sure’s death and discussing his art prompted me to do a little research and ultimately to compose this post.  As a profound non-expert, I don’t have illuminating analyses to offer; instead, I want simply to direct attention to something that seems worth knowing and thinking about, a person whose life and art might otherwise be missed.  The few stray thoughts that do accompany the facts here, therefore, I present merely as evidence of my own freshly stirred interests and sympathies, in hopes of stirring the same things in whoever reads this.

What I find most compelling and exciting about this mode of art is the way it stands as a sort of sharp, nearly antithetical rebuttal to dominant modes of contemporary image-making (including much “fine art”); these tend to rely on mass production, elaborate processes, spectacle, and digital sheen, and they often operate with a view to achieving calculated responses in viewer-consumers.  Name tagging, in stark contrast, is almost a monastic art, requiring rigorous control, long hours of sequestered labor, a vocational devotion to repetition, and, implicitly, an uncompromising pursuit of perfection.  But if the ethos of name tagging centers on rigor, like a nucleus, there is also an ethos of play and wit surrounding that center, a cloud of whizzing electrons, as it were.  In the end, both of these complementary aspects of handstyle ethos, thus also aspects of any given tag’s design, stem from the basic counter-cultural commitment to making every image by hand and on a very small scale.  Artists like Sure predominantly confine themselves, over and over, to a tiny white frame—a mere handful of square inches—and a monochrome means of marking it.   This repetition and constraint, and the fact that each name tag is hand-written, breed almost infinite variation: ever-evolving shifts or nuances in spacing, size, proportions, flourishes, style, or even in the form of the writer’s name itself (in the interview, Sure lists the following as some of his name-variations—“SURER, SUREY, SEREISM, SURESTER, EL SURE, SUREIST, SURESY, SUREOC”).  Here is a mesh of several SURE & FAUST tags, showing the way each discrete rendition of a name gets playfully, carefully tweaked:

…

As language, name tagging adheres to a fringe of the semiological spectrum.  What we speak of as “writing” in a communication-intensive course is markedly different from what a graffiti artist means by the same word.  And yet, precisely because it straddles language and visual art (creating tense, thrilling, knife-edge balancing acts between pure form and legibility), there is so much to say or write about name tagging, whether one is considering a specific tag or the significance of the practice at large.  Each kind of writing can reciprocally prompt and enhance the other.  Notice, for instance, how eloquent and scrupulous Sure’s language is when he describes his and Faust’s chief influence:

“We’re both big fans of TWIST. I first saw a TWIST tag around 2000. I don’t think anybody uses a chisel tip better than he does. The ideas that he uses have influenced us. We feel that he has great technique in his letters and the way he combines them. His letters are all individually very strong and he uses the letters that precede and follow to fill each one’s negative space. His middle letters are regimented, real solid, and go up and down so well. He kicks out the “R” which complements the loop of the “T” and has a lot of form. He has ridiculously good flow.”

Sure here makes evident the vital fusion of rigor and style that characterizes the expert writer.  He first takes care to praise Twist’s technique—the solidity, balance, and “regimentation” of his lettering—but the higher, summarizing word of praise pertains to a je-ne-sais-quois that transcends mere technique, the net aesthetic effect of a particular hand’s signature movements—good flow.

Here’s a recently posted video of Sure writing, a chance to observe his flow in action (and also a chance to hear him talk more about the art of handstyle):

…

One final thought that comes to mind, another compelling way name tagging renounces prevailing cultural logics, is just the sheer anti-artifactual liberality of the whole endeavor, its complete eschewal of buying and selling and the exchange value of the made object.  In this case, after all, one is consigning one’s art to an utterly banal and ephemeral medium, paper stickers, and then sowing those artworks wildly out into public space (gratis!), where they will inevitably be lost—to weather, to a scraper of some kind, or to the cycle of replacing old newspaper boxes and ATM shields with new ones.

And though I’m sure certain prized tags get passed around and carefully saved, their sticker-backing firmly intact, it seems clear that a name tagger’s ultimate reputation as an artist rides not on a selection of stand-out pieces but on the composite, spectral sum of all the traces of his or her hand that exist (or once existed) out in the world.

Most of all, I think this is what moves me so strongly about Sure’s (and his comrades’) approach to name-tagging: the way it exploits to the fullest extent the deep pleasure and significance of writing itself, writing at its most elemental and personal: the signature.  Here, the act of rendering one’s identifying mark is salvaged from the wreckage of rote, unvarying, bureaucratically mandated, dotted-line signatures.  Here, the signature is liberated and  forceful: elegant, intimate, elusive, and arresting, each rendition an emphatic name badge in an ever-growing and manifold insignia.  Such signatures bespeak a particular presence in the world, an evocation made especially poignant in a tragic case like Sure’s.  His handstyle—in each instance and as a composite whole—seems to say I, a person named Sure, exist.  I was once at this exact place where you found the mark I crafted.  The lines and loops and flourishes and versions of my signature are varied and shifting, but you will always recognize my writing just as you would recognize my face.  I scripted these intricate lines so you might see and enjoy them.  I passed by this spot, now I greet you from elsewhere.  Fare well.

(Sure: rest in peace.)

Filed Under: Art

Jumbo vs Small Class and students who sit and listen or click

December 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Listening Post: installation culled from real-time internet chat rooms, by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin

It has been hard not to take the announcement that many level two classes at Baruch will become jumbo-sized next year—increasing from 24 to 50 or 100 students—as a rejection of my work and values, as well as my colleagues’. The more experience I have, both as a student, teacher, and consultant, the more I see a need for what I’ve come to think of as “communicative reciprocity”—listening or reading and acknowledging the uniqueness of a student’s work, the back-and-forth that fosters authority based on critique and reflection.

I’m not saying lecture and jumbo classes might not be effective, even best, in some situations. Many professors have brought great talent, knowledge, creativity, and hard work to covering a large amount of information succinctly, coherently, and vividly. And of course, this is all contingent, you can have a demagogue in a small class. (A student told me she didn’t want to turn in a paper to her teacher that stated an opinion that disagreed with his.) But it seems nearly impossible in a class of 100 or even 50 to have the kind communicative reciprocity that recognizes a student’s developing opinion as valuable, responds with respect and consideration, and encourages more bravery, exploration, and complexity.

Often when I help students with drafts of essays, their first impulse is to mimic the teacher’s opinion and way of speaking, or to paraphrase research they’ve found online. I ask students to tell me their opinion, and then ask them to support it. When I tell them to write down what they’ve said, or when I write it down as they speak and hand it to them as a sketch for their rough drafts, students often seem surprised. To them, their own thoughts don’t seem appropriate in a class assignment.

One professor who teaches a communication intensive Theater 1041 class asks her students  to write a theater manifesto. I met with one of this professor’s students to work on her paper, and as she developed her opinions into ideas about what she thinks theater should and could be in terms of political and cultural relevance, she told me: “This is a whole different way of thinking. I never do this.” Here is a student telling me she’d never before been asked to reflect upon and develop her own observations and ideas in college before this assignment. So it isn’t a stretch to suggest it possible that a student could get a BA at Baruch without ever being asked to develop, support, and explain her opinions—about culture, politics, economics, and ethics.

In a class of 100, or 50, how will teachers foster this kind of reflection? How will teachers read and make significant comments on student writing, and get to know each student well enough to meet them where they are, in order to support and challenge them? Without a significant amount of practice in communicative reciprocity, I think that we set students up to be receivers of opinion as well as information. In the communication intensive classes we support at the Schwartz Institute, we work to help students develop and present their own perspectives in response to an assignment. And we try to support professors’ efforts to include more student writing and presentations in their classes. It’s fine that in many other classes students show their knowledge through more multiple choice and short-answer responses. But Baruch lauds itself for the diversity of its student population, and what does diversity matter if in most of their work the same answer is right for every student? What is the value of diversity if we don’t recognize the importance of developing an inclusive, reflective, authoritative political voice of one’s own?

Filed Under: Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Education, Oral Communication, Pedagogy

Interpreting By Hand

December 13, 2010 By 2 Comments

Whether we subscribe to a specific learning style inventory or theory of multiple intelligences, almost any educator would admit that different students respond well to different kinds of lessons and assignments. Over a few semesters of teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), I’ve tried to accommodate FIT students’ overwhelmingly visual styles of learning (an intellectual orientation, I should add, that I don’t particularly share).

Recently, for a major assignment, I asked my students to create illustrations for either the novel City Crimes (1849) by George Thompson or the short story “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe. Then, I asked them to explain their artistic choices in a brief essay and present the illustrations to the class.

I felt a little apprehensive about devising such an assignment, because I feared we were sacrificing some course objectives (improving students’ critical reading and writing, for example) in favor of more richly reaching others (such as interpreting literary texts with innovation and creativity). But here’s what surprised me about my students’ responses to this assignment: the creative component actually improved students’ critical and analytical skills. Never before had the students referred so directly to different passages of the texts and offered such bold and risky interpretations of some themes.

Some students have been kind enough to give me permission to share their work on our blog. Here are a few:

Tara’s “Ragged Mountains”

It’s no surprise that Tara, an illustration major, excelled in this assignment; students gasped in astonishment as she unveiled her artwork. (More of Tara’s work can be seen on her website.)

Tara told the class she chose unrealistic colors for the scene above in order to reflect the effects of the morphine the protagonist, Bedloe, had just taken.

Tara explained that when Bedloe sees a hyena, rebelling Bengalis, and an Indian cityscape in the mountains of Virginia, it feels strange and disorienting, but also seems real to him. That’s why she made the figures detailed but distant from Bedloe (represented in silhouette because of his underdetermined character).

Olga’s City Crimes

After apologizing that she is decidedly not an illustration major—an apology that seemed beside the point, after seeing her masterful illustrations—Olga explained that she chose black and white in order to reflect the novel’s bifurcation between dark and light, good and evil; the color red represents “blood of course” (it is an extremely violent novel), as well as the vivid consequences of the characters’ actions.

Of the illustration below, she wrote, “By showing the two ghosts on both sides of her bed, I wanted to portray that she is being haunted by her demons. They eventually catch up to her and make her commit suicide out of fear of shame and capture.”

Rose’s City Crimes

Rose, the only student to use cut-and-paste collage on paper, explained, “I used newspaper for the tree because I thought from this point on, everything was ‘sudden news.’ It is supposed to represent all of the little secrets that grow.”

In the collage above, Rose used a piece of a New York City subway map to reflect the novel’s urban setting, and explained that “the characters in this picture are not facing each other because their love is a sin.”

So Hee’s “Ragged Mountains”

So Hee wanted to emphasize the protagonist’s “loss of free will,” and she found some ingenious ways to represent that graphically. In the illustration above, she explained, “he is under hypnotism by Dr. Templeton, so you can find Dr. Templeton watching over Bedloe on the top left corner, observing what’s happening to him.” She added, “As he descends to the city, he uncontrollably flows with the crowd to where they lead him, not being able to even think for himself.”

I was most excited to see the illustration assignment empowered some students to challenge my interpretations of the course texts. So Hee, for example, first reminded the class what I had taught them: that the story links British imperialism to American expansionism. But, she said, she saw it differently: “England’s occupation and imperialism in India correlate with Dr. Templeton’s authority over Mr. Bedloe’s body and mental state,” she wrote.

All in all, I am very pleased with this assignment. Next time around, though, I will make some changes. Now that I see how connected illustration can be with interpretation, I will make this a more structured and paced assignment with guided planning and drafting, the way I would with a writing assignment. In the future, I would also like to incorporate an illustration assignment like this one into a longer-term collaborative project, like an online illustrated edition of a text.

Filed Under: Pedagogy

Cozying up to big brother

December 7, 2010 By 1 Comment

Image credit: University of Pennsylvania Digital Library

The Wikileaks narrative continues to unfold, highlighting some of the major challenges humanity faces in the Age of Infinite Information.  The story entered the realm of academic freedom on November 30, when the Office of Career Services (OCS) at Columbia University issued an email to students at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), warning them against any online engagement with Julian Assange’s rogue media network.  The office was repeating the “suggestion” made by a SIPA alumni working at the U.S. State Department.  The email reads, in part:

The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.

After the email was picked up by several education-related blogs, who amplified the fear and outrage expressed by some SIPA students, SIPA’s Dean of Students, John Coatsworth, backtracked on the OCS recommendation, stating in another email:

Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences. The WikiLeaks documents are accessible to SIPA students (and everyone else) from a wide variety of respected sources, as are multiple means of discussion and debate both in and outside of the classroom.

Should the U.S. Department of State issue any guidelines relating to the WikiLeaks documents for prospective employees, SIPA will make them available immediately.

Regardless of how you feel about Wikileaks, the incident at Columbia should distress anyone concerned with academic freedom in the United States.  In the excellent essay collection The Cold War and the University:  Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, academics from a wide range of disciplines describe how the federal government’s Cold War ethos infected universities across the country, as the state attempted (often successfully) to enlist college professors and administrators as loyal agents of the larger Cold War project.  While most histories describe how the applied sciences and “area studies” (such as SIPA) disciplines were powerfully shaped by government and military funding and oversight, the social sciences and humanities were seriously impacted as well. As professor of English Richard Ohmann documents, virtually every discipline at the postwar university was bent to the larger goals of the United States government, then aggressively pursuing its anti-communist “containment” policy, a project that led to the Vietnam War and dozens of other proxy wars over the course of nearly sixty years.  Throughout this imperial project, Ohmann points out, university departments were compelled to assist the government in these efforts:

Anthropology [was] mobilized for knowledge and control of subaltern peoples, and sometimes recruited into secret counterinsurgency efforts; linguistics backed in its years of major development by the military and various arms of the foreign service (not always with the intended results); political science funded in some places (including the American Political Science Association itself) by the CIA and other cold war sources; free-market and “developmental” economics the same; and in these last two fields the seductions of prestige and influence, of direct and indirect participation in the making of national policy.  The list could go on through less vital symbioses between the Cold War state and psychology, foreign-language instruction, even history, with its abundance of prominent OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA] alums, and doubtless other fields.

Ohmann and others highlight a danger that continues to haunt the academic scene, as witnessed by Columbia’s admittedly clumsy attempt to put a lid on student discussion of Wikileaks.  The new question, it seems, is whether this type of repression is even possible, as technological developments continue to explode the possibilities of information storage, transmission, and consumption. According to documents released in the latest Wikileaks dump, the government of China certainly believes so, asserting that the internet and other forms of digital communication are “fundamentally controllable.”

It is unclear whether the U.S. government believes that the democratic impulses made possible by the free flow of digital information can be harnessed by the traditional forces of state repression that were mobilized to chilling effect during the Cold War. SIPA’s close relationship to the State Department undoubtedly influenced its uncritical parroting of the government’s propaganda. By exploiting its own students’ fears about future employment in order to assist the state’s efforts to blunt the impact of the Wikileaks story, Columbia revealed that, even in the digital age, instances of university-assisted repression will continue to have an impact within institutions that have, for reasons both material and ideological, internalized the foreign policy assumptions of the state.

Filed Under: Higher Education, Politics

“Vile Video” and Rhetorical Redux

December 6, 2010 By 2 Comments

Over the past few days my inbox, Twitter and Facebook feeds have been blowing up with news and commentary on the censorship of one of the works in the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian. The exhibition, which draws in large part on canonical works in the Smithsonian collection, is far from a reductive look at “gay” art: rather, it’s an extended historical examination on the ways in which artists have navigated a complex set of cultural codes that govern sexual expression, how those codes are deployed or circumvented to express desire, love, or loss, and how contemporary artists negotiate the politics and proscriptions of identity.

The work in question is Fire in My Belly (1987) by David Wojnarowicz, a four-minute meditation on suffering, the silence and stigma surrounding AIDS, and historical symbols of death and redemption, set to an unsettling score by Diamanda Galas. Wojnarowicz, a now-iconic artist and activist in New York’s East Village scene of the 1980s, was 37 when he died of AIDS-related complications in the summer of 1992.

Recent articles in the Washington Post and New York Magazine outline the basics of the controversy. In short, after being on exhibition since October 30, the work came to the attention of Catholic League president William Donahue and two conservative House representatives, incoming majority speaker John Boehner, and Eric Cantor. The reps not only expressed offense at the video’s themes, but demanded that the entire exhibition be pulled and federal funding to the Smithsonian institution “reconsidered” by the House Appropriations Committee. Donahue repeatedly called the work “vile” and went so far as to classify the work as “hate speech” in a reactionary Q&A in the Washington Post.

Under a few hours of pressure, upper administration of the Smithsonian caved and pulled the video, without consulting either of the curators (national Portrait Gallery staff historian David C. Ward, and Jonathan Katz, who founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale and is now professor of visual studies at the University at Buffalo). Shortly afterward, NPG director Martin Sullivan issued a conciliatory press release apologizing for any unintended offense and noting that the video is no longer on view.

As an art historian and curator, as well as a thinking person, I can only see this whole situation as shocking and ludicrous. At a moment when the culture wars have been pretty forcefully reignited in the US, it’s not the conservative objection to what is now a widely-exhibited work by a well-known contemporary artist that’s surprising: rather, it’s that an art institution with only a nominal amount of government funding buckled so quickly under a series of purely rhetorical threats.

Although I’m not teaching this semester, I can’t help but see the situation as a perfect “teaching moment” across disciplines. The written and verbal statements from all parties involved leave a great deal to untangle, but also explicitly and implicitly reveal tactics of communication and language: some forceful, some measured, some (of course) cheap and abusive. There are many analytical problems to pose to students after providing them with examples of the various means of public discourse related to this incident: press releases by the institution, the curators, the representatives of the Wojnarowicz estate, political and educational organizations, and news outlets (one of which, the Washington Post, chose to give Donohue an outlet to publicize his views on the “vile video” on World Aids Day. Here are a few:

-How is language strategically used in each instance? (For example, the tactical use of the term “AIDS victim” by the museum and by those opposed to the video and exhibition, and the forceful rejection of that very same term by Wojnarowicz himself in his lifetime).

-What, exactly, is “hate speech?” How can we define it? How is it different from protected speech? Do claims of “hate speech” in the rhetoric provide such a definition, or leave it completely open?

-How does the rhetoric deployed here mirror that surrounding past controversies about public funding of the arts? How does it differ? (Wojnarowicz himself was no stranger to forceful and original public discourse: in the 1980s, in the wake of an uproar about a publicly funded about AIDS at downtown institution Artists Space, he appeared on a local talk show wearing a Reagan mask and delivering rapid-fire statistics to the audience).

Has anyone addressed this in the classroom already? Please comment!

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid...), 1990

Filed Under: Art, Education

“They don’t even expect to live. They only know barbarity.”

December 2, 2010 By 2 Comments

I thought I’d use this forum to share some reflections on a situation that has entered the international headlines in the last week. In Rio de Janeiro, where I conducted dissertation research between 2008 and 2010, a combined force made up of civil police, military police, SWAT teams, the national army, air force, and marines invaded and occupied the Complexo do Alemão (German Complex) and Vila Cruzeiro, sprawling informal settlements, or favelas, in the north zone, away from the iconic beaches and affluent neighborhoods that tourists generally associate with the city.

In a highly mediated conflict, which people could tune in to watch from live helicopter feeds, drug gangs mounted a fierce resistance to the state operation, with heavy gunfire, barricades, and the burning of 96 vehicles. At the end of the five-day siege, police reported 45 deaths and 197 arrests. Many residents who fled before the violence are only returning to their homes now.

Many people have asked me what to make of this so-called ‘war’ in Rio. I do not claim to be able to make any better sense of the situation than the many commentators and analysts currently publishing articles, blog posts, and tweets. For those unfamiliar with the history of armed drug syndicates in Rio, or who only have the film City of God as a referent, I offer some back-story and some prognoses:

The siege of Complexo do Alemão and Vila Cruzeiro was not a spontaneous event, but rather the punctuation of an ongoing campaign of ‘pacification’ through police operations underway for at least two years. Brazil will be hosting the 2014 World Cup, with Rio one of the cities staging matches, and Rio will also be the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics. The history of security long precedes the announcement of these events, but the strategy of pacification has changed and intensified recently.

The general tactic of military police forces used to be predicated on shock and surprise. This resulted in the deaths of many innocents. The justice system in Brazil all but guarantees police impunity. As Jon Lee Anderson reported in the New Yorker last year, curiously on the eve of the Olympic bid announcement:

According to officials, there were just under five thousand murders last year, half of them drug-gang-related. (The numbers don’t include such inci- dents as “rape resulting in death” or “riots resulting in death.”) Twenty-two police- men were murdered. Rio’s police, in turn, kill more people than police anywhere else in the world; in 2008, they acknowl- edged killing eleven hundred and eighty- eight people who were “resisting arrest,” or slightly more than three people a day. By comparison, American police killed three hundred and seventy-one people— classified as “justifiable homicides”—in the entire United States in the same period.

The new campaign involves a ‘softer’ approach: police announce in the media that they will be taking over X or Y favelas in a week’s time, giving drug traffickers a chance to flee. Until recently, this tactic has spared communities of much bloodshed and inaugurated a new program titled UPPs (Units of Pacification Police) who work like community policing inititatives to win, as it were, the hearts and minds of local residents while gas, electricity, water, sewage, internet and other services come in to regularize the infrastructure.

While many commented casually on the ‘craziness’ of the war-like scenes in Vila Cruzeiro and Complexo do Alemão last week, it was predictable. With every favela reclaimed through the UPPs, drug gangs have found it increasingly difficult to operate. Their livelihoods threatened, many took a stand last week (although it is likely that the most powerful of the trafficker hierarchy fled to allied strongholds). You can actually see them in this news clip:

Almost all of Rio’s nearly 1,000 favelas have been controlled for decades by one of several organized crime gangs, the history of which derives from the era of the military dictatorship. Two of the largest gangs, the Red Command and Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends), usually sworn enemies, have recently made a pact to join forces against the state. They have reportedly called this alliance, in open mockery of the government, UPP: Unidos Pelo Pô (United by the Powder, i.e. cocaine).

Several interesting themes and possibilities are emerging amid this conflict: one is how the joint military/humanitarian/capitalist project underway in Rio’s favelas mirrors efforts by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as by Brazil in Haiti, where the South American giant is the commanding peacekeeping force. It appears that Brazil is quickly becoming the world leader in the business of urban warfare, and this is becoming a central factor in its geopolitical strategy as an alternative empire in the hemisphere.

A second theme is the revanchist attitude perpetuated by the news media that depicts the conflict between the state and non-state armed actors as a transcendental struggle between good and evil. In Rio, suspects killed or arrested are almost never represented as such, as suspects. Rather, the language and iconography of newspaper headlines portrays individuals as not only already judged guilty but morally and ontologically other. Criminosos, marginais, vagabundos, bandidos are all terms freely attached to images such as this typical display of poor, young, often racialized and male favela dwellers made to pose in front of the substances that mark them as less than human, and certainly not deserving of civil or human rights.


Take, for example, the statement by state legislator Marcelo Freixo, which I made the title of this post: “They have guns in their hands and nothing in their brains. They have no ideology. They don’t even expect to live. They only know barbarity.”

Or as a captain of BOPE, the Special Operations Military Police Battalion, put it: “I believe the work of forgiving the traffickers falls to God; we only advance their meeting.”

This opinion is extremely popular with Brazil’s middle classes, who express a sense of being at siege by an anonymous mass of violent, depraved armed youth. What this obscures, of course, are the massive structural contradictions of an urban political economy in which the drug trade absorbs tens of thousands of otherwised unemployed young men and women.

A final note: My own work concerns the ways armed violence and its social consequences are experienced and represented, which is why it was fascinating to come across this Risk-style board game of Rio’s police vs. trafficker vs. militia conflict, called “War in Rio.”

Filed Under: Language, Politics Tagged With: , ,

Ciao! Bye! Do widzenia! Tschüss!

December 1, 2010 By 1 Comment

Image taken from http://www.propwishbook.org

Living in a bilingual family raises all kinds of communication issues: questions about what it means to be a native speaker of a language, how to associate each language with a different culture and how to hold your own as a non-native. Sure, in New York City it’s easy to find multilingual households, so it’s a wonderful environment to experience a multiplicity of cultures and languages.

But at home, a family setting is its own microcosm. Having come from a monolingual family I find it fascinating to wonder about just how to create an environment that would lead to a bilingual child. How does one navigate the challenges of introducing a child to a minority language and, no less important, to the minority culture, in a household dominated by the English language and by the ever present American culture.

Developmental psychologists and linguists generally agree that knowing a second language is a big advantage in a globalized world. More than that, bilingualism makes it possible to see the world in more complex ways and to better understand other cultures and countries. There are huge advantages to learning a second language early in life such as developing the cognitive firepower devoted to language acquisition, having improved attention span and it is definitely easier later to learn additional languages. Not so long ago, skeptics argued that bilingualism confuses kids or causes language delays.

When kids mixed languages and choose to speak in a funny concoction of two languages, they appeared to be confused, when in fact they were making sense of the world in which every object has two names ( and in some case a gender as well.) We now know that being bilingual has no down side.

Raising a bilingual child requires a major commitment from all family members but, in particular, from the speaker of the minority or non-native language in the household. It requires a special effort, particularly when it is difficult for a child to find speakers of the minority language or to find educational material in that language. There are also varying degrees of bilingualism: from understanding the language spoken to you by family members, to being able to speak it yourself, and finally to fluently read and communicate with near native fluency.

One of one of the most common methods of teaching bilingualism is known as “one language, one location method.” It works by designating areas of life, sometimes areas of the home, where a minority language will be exclusively spoken. For instance, while English is the dominant language in the school and with peers, the minority language will always be used at home or during weekends or perhaps only at dinnertime. This requires both parents to be able to speak that minority language. Another method, often considered easier and perhaps better at achieving quicker results is the “one person, one language” method, where a minority speaker in the house uses his or her language exclusively to speak to the child. Many families which are not fluent in a second or third language find ways to introduce a child to another language and culture by, for instance, sending him or her to a kindergarten where a foreign language is spoken or hiring a nanny who speaks a foreign language exclusively.

Even if one of the parents is fluent in a minority language and is devoted to helping a child become bilingual, competence in two languages and cultures is a difficult thing to achieve. The ability to devote appropriate time and resources to this task can be made more difficult by just how rare the minority language is, or how difficult it is to provide the child with meaningful interactions with the speakers of the second language. As kids grow into teenagers, new problems appear, from rebellion against a language that is not spoken by the child’s peers and may seem archaic or strange, to the child’s diminished interest in learning the second language.

Regardless of the challenges I think it is worthwhile raising a bilingual child. What is your method? Advice? Experience?

Filed Under: ESL, Language