My name is not Nathan

This dizzy life of mine/keeps hanging me up all the time/this dizzy life/is just a hanging tree…

-Counting Crows (great new CD out today—check it out)

I’ve been thinking about writing this entry for a while and worried that it might offend a few people, but given my stellar track record of late… let’s just say I don’t mind if it offends anyone now (that ship–sailed :)). But to be at least a little subtle, I’m just going to hint to the piece of scholarship I am responding to instead of stating the exact name.

At any rate, during my MA, I took a fantastic class on research methodology with one of my thesis committee members. One of the pieces we read early in the semester was a study by a pair of doctors who watched as their students became integrated into “professional” discourse.  Part of this article’s data—and the analysis of this data—was the slow tracking of one student’s frustration as he essentially lost his voice to become an academic.

At the time, I raged a little in class, and I suggested that perhaps this wasn’t the most healthy thing. Alas, this was the beginning of a full year of discussion in that program of “professionalization.” I whole time we talked about these things, I tried to balance my sense of what was being said and what I see out in the world.

This strikes me as one of the many places where our field has a bit of an identity crisis. I say “a bit,” because I do NOT feel the pressure from my current institution to become a tie wearing, jacket-with-the-elbow-patches, jargon spouting academic (I know this pressure does exist in some places, and I think it’s sad).

But let’s look at this for a second, from a logical perspective. We tell our first-year students to find their voice, to write in interesting and unique ways.

We praise the idea of being creative and innovative.

Then the suggestion is that we should beat a PhD student into being a sort of “disciplined” academic?

Someone actually implied on this blog, in a response, the same sort of mentality. FWIW, I don’t think there’s any specific behavior that defines PhDness or professionalism. I will always teach in shorts in the summer (unless I end up someplace where it’s not miserably muggy in the summer). I will always make pop culture jokes. I will always be who I am.

This is not to say I don’t think there is “a” professionalism. I show proper respect to other academics, I am careful about how I interact within the professional network, and my work does what my work needs to do.

I would argue, though, that the idea that there is some universal “professional” behavior, that we could/should shape every PhD student into a specific product, is ridiculous. I look at my heroes in our field, and they don’t all look and act the same. They don’t speak the same or write the same. They don’t even get along in some cases.

To claim we should all be the same is the very definition of hegemony. And that’s bad, right?

Words matter

I’m hearing what you say/but I just can’t make a sound…

-One Republic

I had one of those “wow, these people don’t like me” moments today. In my teleconference class (which is already in and of itself strange—being in front of a projected screen with most of the class on it). We were discussing indigenous politics, specifically a book called The Politics of Indigeneity by Roger Makka and Augie Fleras. The book looks at indigenous political movements in Canada and New Zealand. It’s interesting reading, but this one quote that another student pulled out for us to scrutinize bugged me on some level.

Here’s the quote, from page 32:

Immigrants differ [from the indigenous] in other ways. They have ‘voluntarily’ left their homeland, have opted to abide by the rules of their adopted country, and do not bring a government or legal apparatus that they can assert.

Now within the context of the argument the authors are making about Canada and New Zealand this seems like a legitimate statement, but the student who raised the question, and several others, made moves to equate this to America.

I said “I don’t think an American would ever write this definition of immigrant,” and the room—on TV—went silent. So I elaborated, pointing out that perhaps the most profound immigrant experience stamped into American history is slavery (which invalidates the first two criteria above) and the most currently discussed version of “immigrant” is the “border jumping” Mexican (which many American policy makers claim violate the second criteria above, and who some might argue through the way American law works DO have some measure of the final criteria).

A little more silence.

So I went on to point out, as I have several times in this course, that I am not an expert on Canadian policy or Canadian history, and that it was possible that in that construction (I didn’t get to New Zealand, but the same is true), such a reductive definition might work.

Then someone loudly asks, into the silence, “how can you claim an American wouldn’t write this?” then kept going. This class makes me totally uncomfortable because the only way to be heard is to yell over someone else (which is not my style), so I pointed out that if this were an American author, I would instantly press him or her about slavery (it would, at the very least, require a footnote if this quote were to survive more than a single reading as a rhetoric text). And I reiterated that I didn’t feel Americans could construct immigrant in that way. The person who asked the question then spoke for about ten minutes, moving in a constant line away from the question and into something else.

I asked myself, in the car on the ride home, if this intervention into class was worth it. I had a presentation in this course a few weeks ago, and instead of considering my questions/engaging with them, one of the remote site students (perhaps the same one—their faces are blurry on our screen) spent too much time being outraged about my question than discussing it.

I wrote on my notes, for the two students on my site to see, “I’m pretty sure they don’t like me,” and shrugged it off. 🙂

But I do think the point I made was important, because the text we were discussing today was (even if the prof wasn’t so sure) political science. And if we’re talking about a polisci definition of “immigrant” that one might want to utilize as an American, that definition simply will not work. America has the beloved “melting pot” (which also came up in class, ironically as some sort of support for the quote, which perhaps I’m parsing wrong—if you think so, comment). Immigrants founded this place, and in reality, it would be easy enough to make an indigenous/immigrant binary. The African slaves who later became African Americans were immigrants, if we use the term the way polisci has for generations (they weren’t JUST immigrants, obviously, and it sort of glosses over one of the true horrors of American history, but they were people relocated from one nation to another).

a Portrait of the Blogger as a not-so-young-Rhetor

Nail in my hand/from my creator/you  gave me life/now show me how to live…-Audioslave, almost always misquoted 

Today I want to get semi-deep and reflective. I’ve been thinking about something and resisting saying it to much of anyone because I’m afraid of how it might be received, but I’m quickly finding that in my field, at this level, it’s the time to say things without worrying so much about how people receive it. To comment back to someone who responded to one of my posts, I guess I just don’t “know better.” 🙂

I’ve been trying to decide lately what sort of rhetorician I am (will be). People keep saying that as a first-year PhD I probably shouldn’t know. I should be experimenting and digging into things and becoming instead of claiming I have become. My response to that is this: I am what I am.

I don’t talk much about my past. The truth is it’s not a story I think anyone really needs to dwell on, but if one wanted to write my biography, it’d read a lot like the story of the kid from a bad neighborhood with an absent father and a working single mother who learned he was good at basketball and rose up. Only when I learned I was good at basketball, I learned I was good at basketball… for a six-foot-tall slowish guy. I’m good with words, so I’m told, and I pick at the right things when I do research (so I’m told). Because of that, and a lot of work, and a lot of help from people along the way, I’ve made my attempt at rising up. But people should make no mistake; when I identify myself as a mixed-blood Cherokee poor kid from Indiana, the product of two broken families and a broken city, that is not an identity I take lightly or wear as some sort of plumage. That is who I am.

In much the same way, I think I know what sort of rhetorician I am. I have found over the course of the last year that elements of what I do upset many in the field (there’s some evidence of that here on this blog, and there are seeds for much more). I am generally unapologetic on that point; I never mean to insult someone personally, but no one says “with all due respect” before mocking the things I value, so if my criticism of some idea any of you hold dear feels bad, that’s academia for you. 🙂 I find it interesting, though, that all of the “legends” or “celebrities” I’ve met in the field find my ideas either interesting, “fascinating,” “exciting,” or tolerable. It’s people who are just a bit ahead of me—or people who are doing the same sort of research in ways I would characterize as sloppy or incomplete—who seem to take such issue with me. People have presented to me theories for this breakdown in who is angry with me, but I’m not going to speculate.

Here’s where I “live” as a rhetorician:

 

1.   I think it’s important to investigate popular culture, specifically video games, television/film, and comic books. I do not, however, see a particular use in creating academic versions of these technologies (though I enjoy researching those products and respect the people who create them).
 

 

2.   I think there is a great deal that academia in general is missing about digital technology and fans of popular culture because so many researchers stand at the outside and lean over/peer in instead of diving in. There’s too much privilege still being granted to “high” culture in a world where America, at the very least, ditched high culture for “git er done” a long time ago.

 

3.   I want to help to expand the smallish field of Native American rhetoric, but I think it’s useless to try to generalize it too much (beyond building frameworks). There is no singular Native American rhetoric.

 

4.   I’m mixed-blood, so furthermore I want a mixed-rhetoric.

 

5.   I think the use of theory just for the sake of packing it in is pointless and anyone who does it should be ashamed. The same is true of jargon. Rhetoric doesn’t need to be hard to read to be “smart.”       

 

6.   I think we need to dig beyond “the tradition” (western rhetoric) to find the actual “tools” that constitute rhetoric so that we can use them to look at new things instead of constantly going back to Aristotle as if he’s the origin point.

 

7.   We need to blend more; hybridity and remix aren’t just buzzwords. These are things that create new understanding. We won’t re-create Aristotle’s wheel, but we’ll shy away from riding in Judith Butler’s car? Why?

 

8.   We need, as a field, to start saying “oh, I don’t know,” when we don’t know. Since I study things that people don’t know in many cases, I hear all manner of hedging and attempting to characterize things incorrectly. I won’t tell you Sassure is wrong if you don’t claim that the gamer community I’m studying isn’t a community, m’kay? Note: I don’t know if Sassure is wrong; I don’t know him well enough to make that judgment. It’s an example. 🙂

 

9.   Sometimes ambition kills. We’d all be better served by smaller, well-crafted studies than attempts to totalize by doing over-blown, super-crazy research projects. Don’t try to talk about anything “in America” or “In this century” or “on the World Wide Web.” We tell our first-year students to focus. Why don’t we? 

 

10.                  We have to embrace the sad possibility that we’re wrong about a few things. I see so many scholars who won’t entertain ideas that challenge existing structures. I also see people who think it’s “weak” to change their position. No one is going to sick the Swiftboat Vets for Truth on any of us. We need to, as a field, start saying “whoa, I totally got that wrong” when we totally get that wrong.

 

11.                 The “paper” is dying. It might not ever vanish entirely, but we’re quickly learning that all the things we ask for in a paper can be created virtually allowing for interesting new affordances (sound, video, image, more control over text shape and where the eye goes, color, etc.) and less dead trees. I know that many people want to burn me at the stake when I say that the traditional double spaced, Times New Roman essay isn’t long for our world (at least as a mainstream genre), but it’s important, as Cindy Selfe says, to pay attention. The newest generations communicate in such ways that email is becoming too formalized and restrictive for them. The way they perceive communication is changing, and pinning them to a sheet of paper for our sake would be akin to stunting their growth. The concepts behind writing an academic paper will live on to evolve, but the paper itself… I don’t think it’ll last.

 

12.                 We are going to fail at understanding communication and rhetorical practices in 2008 and beyond if we resist entering new digital/technological spaces. IDK, my BFF Jill might not be positive what is happening, but IIABD (it is a big deal). Much like we need to consider underlife in our classrooms, we need to consider “underculture” in our academic world. There are people  reading and writing as much as a lit grad student without ever touching a sheet of paper. If we miss that, we neglect the nature of reading and writing.

 

13.                 There is no “literacy.” It’s “literacies,” and they’re interdependent and recursive. We have to understand that or we’re just boxing people in.

 

14.                 To understand how certain people in this world of ours think, we have to collapse “space” and “place.” Sometimes geographical location becomes entirely secondary to an imagined/virtual space.

 

15.                 The same buzzwords that impress people can make one look foolish. If you claim, for example, that you’re a “digital rhetorician,” you better know what that means. If you don’t, you insult yourself and you insult me (as a digital rhetorician). And if you write a book called “Digital Writing in France,” it better not be based on five case studies of people who send email from cybercafés in Paris. I know it’s a rhetorical choice sometimes to overblow (I do it here), but some things shouldn’t be fodder for that.

 So that’s me. It’s too blunt to be part of a professional document, like my teaching philosophy (contrary to what some might think, I DO understand the field and how to behave within it), but that’s what I’m about. I don’t see this changing dramatically as my education progresses. I’ve been around 31 years, and I’ve seen a great deal. I’ve had to survive, and I’ve had to fight and claw. I’m fairly set in my academic ways, just as I’m fairly set in my personal politics and my spirituality. I will flex and bend, as we all have to in order to survive, but this is who I am. I ended up here, where I am right now, because I feel this way about things.

If this place, and the process of finally being ushered into the field, takes these major points from me, I don’t think I did it right. I’m rough around the edges, to be sure, but I didn’t come here to be smoothed. I came here to get sharp.  

Memories, dear Watson (conference)

I got nowhere but home to go/I got Ben Folds on my radio/right now…

-Counting Crows 

Recent events have me thinking back to the last Watson Conference at Louisville. There was a large panel consisting of three of my favorite scholars in one room (or at least three of the people I frequently cite—Dr. Gee might take issue with me claiming to be a fan of his given the ways I’ve addressed his work, though I respect him to no end): Cindy Selfe, James Paul Gee and Gunter Kress. Dr. Selfe presented her most recent research on audio-composition (which is fascinating; I hope a book is forthcoming). Dr. Gee presented on World of Warcraft and Okami (his WoW presentation prompted one of my papers this semester and a presentation I hope to give at the next Watson conference). Dr. Kress gave a fascinating lecture on time, sequence and duration in visual images vs. time, sequence and duration in a textual sentence. When the presentations ended, I was very much looking forward to the question and answer session.

Oops.

It seems the Q&A could have been subtitled “High School Teachers Claim Responsibility for the Movement and Traditionalists Hate Cindy and the Gs.” There were a few questions in the mix that were about the content (including one rather insistent man who claimed that things aren’t claimed to have happened in the order the words are presented in a sentence), but most of the “questions” were veiled attacks on the idea of composing with sound or image in a college classroom.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say about this other than to share that I was shocked then, and that having spent almost two more years in the field I’m not as shocked now but I still think it’s a shame. The field IS going toward technology. It doesn’t mean we’re abandoning writing (just as the move from oratory didn’t invalidate the Greeks and Romans), it simply means that the types of writing we do in this society are different.

Why fear it? It’s still composing.

Misunderstanding Ethos: Revenge of the Guy Who Knows X

Don’t call me a zero/I’m gonna be hero/like Phil Esposito/or the Kennedys…

-BNL

So my recent adventures with a number of people—not to name names—have brought me back to something I started discussing back in the first incarnation of the blog but tangled my feet up in not wanting to name names and sort of tripped over. I feel like maybe today is a good day to revisit it.

Is there something about having to write a lit review that makes some people in the academy think that if they can catalog that they know X,Y,Z suddenly their opinion and theorizing is superior? I consider it a broken attempt at establishing ethos, but apparently some people think it’s the best way to handle a discussion.

A point in case: discussing texts in a graduate seminar. Now I mean no disrespect to my peers. I’m really glad that some of the people I work with have read exhaustive amounts of specific scholars, but just as  I don’t think it’s useful for me to point out my exhaustive reading and research of Jay David Bolter before commenting on a Deb Brandt book, I don’t think it’s all that important that some people are in love with articulation theory.

We did a reading for material rhetorics this week on the Imperial Archive. One of the points it made over and over is that knowledge—in that archived form that never really, truly existed—was viewed as a fantastic power. It makes me wonder if that’s not what some people in the academy do. Maybe they create a theory-rich blanket to carry, Linus style, so that when they engage in conversation they have something that will protect them?

I wouldn’t mind this tendency, IF it didn’t seem to stifle conversation (and hence learning). But if I’m discussing something with a group of people, I want to know what they think of that thing. I don’t want to hear yet another interpretation of Latour (I can read Latour’s work) UNLESS it works in an interesting way to make new sense of what we’re discussing.

Now for those who don’t know me or my life at this point, please realize that what I’m saying is a direct response to people I am currently working around/with; I am by no means trying to cast judgment on those of you who have a favorite theorist that you carry around with you and dust off for important projects. I owe many of my ideas to the tools provided by people like Cindy Selfe, Carolyn Miller, Stuart Selber, Jim Porter, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Danielle DeVoss, Heidi McKee, Malea Powell and others.

But I don’t just randomly toss Dr. Selber’s triad of digital literacies on the table while we’re discussing Isocrates to deflect the fact that I’m not all that well versed in Isocratic scholarship. Instead I stay quiet until I see an entrance into the conversation. It’s not a performance piece, and I doubt anyone is keeping score.

Bonus: What’s With the Remix Disrespect?

Pack my car/and leave this town/who would notice that I’m not around?
-BNL 

So I’m sitting at Julie’s place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice:

So students who can only remix don’t get practice thinking critically about culture — and it’s certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

I hate to take up the position of the Jeopardy judge and simply say “bzzzzzz, wrong!” but… that’s just wrong.

And I don’t mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but… this is a case of looking in at something from the outside (I would assume, based on the admission later in the post that Jerz knows little about music) attempting to critique something without ever getting the insider’s perspective.

I would argue the exact opposite of the first portion of the quote (before the dash). But let’s also be realistic; if Jerz has encountered, or thinks he will encounter, a student who can only remix, he’s failed to keep track of public high schools in America. Every student who makes it through that system with any success—meaning 95% of our trad students—will know how to write a five paragraph essay. They will also try to do anything—including remix—in five paragraph form before they do anything else. And they will scream at us if we tell them five paragraph form is a thing of their past.

But beyond that, REMIX is a cultural rhetoric. I’ve taught classes with a number of texts (leading to research assignments, a practice I think first year college composition needs to abandon). With “classic” novels (The Grapes of Wrath, for example), students were less likely to engage with culture than with poetry (I taught a collection of Dickinson poems, a set of “minority author” poems consisting of Silko, Baraka, Hughes, etc., a book of Dylan Thomas), and were less willing to engage culture with the poetry than they were with film or comic books.

Then I started teaching using remix and the concept of comedy to shape how my students approached issues. If you show a classroom “Black Bush” by Dave Chapelle, and you discuss what it means to lampoon and remix a political situation in that way, the students will engage our culture on a profound level.

If you ask them to make their own remixes, you end up with things like the video below. Now I know some scholars would cringe at the idea that this reflects sophisticated thought, but let’s think for a moment about what a student would have to do to create this:

1.   Watch the Brokeback Mountain trailer carefully
2.   Scrape the music for use
3.    Find enough footage from the Star Wars films to create replacement shots
4.   Frame, edit, chop, screw, and remix

And while this is, on one level, very funny, there’s a sophisticated cultural critique that I think many traditional educators miss. The person who created this video has made a rather profound statement about our cultural understanding of same sex relationships by porting the issue from our expectations to something our culture holds sacred in a different way.

I realize there’s a terrible fear of plagiarism, and as someone who spent four years teaching—and three prior to that as a TA/writing tutor—at an open admissions college, I know it’s an issue we have to literally drill students about. This is not an excuse to avoid remix, though. That’s a strawman built by people who don’t want to embrace the changes digital media, web 2.0, and a whole generation of children raised on the internet bring to the table.

Quintilian, the sage of Rome, advised that we teach our students by having them copy the oratory (and writing, I suppose) of those who were highly successful.

Shall I charge him with encouraging plagiarism now, or does someone else want to get right on that?

Or should we maybe consider the highly valuable skills students of writing can learn from doing things that aren’t just standard researched essays, knowing that they aren’t idiots. They WILL understand that they still have to cite research. Give students a little credit. We all started in first year comp.

Marxism: no can has

Everybody here/comes from somewhere/that they would just as soon forget/and disguise…

-REM

Okay, so the first step of doing this “right” is actually writing an entry every day. And I’m down with that.

 Today’s entry is going to be my attempt to drive a friend and fellow PhD student insane: I’m going to point out why I think Marxism isn’t such a wonderful thing for the study of rhetoric.

Now before I get too deep into this, I will willingly concede that almost all of us use the term “hegemony” now, and there are a number of Marxist based ideas that spread across the discipline. That, however, makes sense in a second way: Marxism is a commentary on capitalism, and other commentaries on capitalism, had they arisen independent of Marxism, would almost assuredly have noticed some of these same concepts.

And other than “he was wrong, since the revolution should have happened by now,” I like Marx, as a thinker. His work with Engels is essential to understanding political thought in the West. I think some of the things Marx said are a touch on the obvious side (but again, I’m the guy who almost got punched in a lit class because I said Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” was only respected so much because he was the first person to be vague and poetic at the same time in a published venue, so I do on occasion blurt things out that people don’t like). It was clear long before Marx said it that the masses were “duped” by the few (just as Machiavelli pointed out in his reflections on power and fear).

The economic additions that Marx makes are a fascinating step, but again, it’s not as if the earth moved and the skies parted because Marx put into text “human workers are capital.” Slave traders knew that for years and years and years.

But at the same time, I have deep respect for Marx as a thinker. Here’s my problem with him: you have to be worried about the West, and about Western thought, for his ideas to take on primacy.

I had this discussion with someone when talking about Native American baskets at one point last week. This person—bless his heart—was trying to read the pre-colonial production of baskets by a tribe through a Marxist lens. And it was troubling him.

So I pointed out “Marxism is about capitalism, and these basket makers weren’t capitalist.” It froze him up.

It shouldn’t freeze anyone up to think that systems exist that aren’t Marxist.

Marx was responding to capitalism specifically. He wasn’t responding to everything that ever existed or ever happened. Why do we only remember Kairos half the time? Would that be Kai? Ros?

And the fact that Marxism has such a grip on part of our field that people become frustrated when they have to NOT be Marxist for a second irks me. Particularly when Marxism, as a theory, is based on a concept that didn’t work. If Marx had really figured it all out, the revolution would have happened. It was an unavoidable end in his theory. This is not to say that thinkers after Marx haven’t reworked his ideas in interesting new ways, but the foundation of the work is still, to some degree, a buggy (I won’t say faulty—Marx sealed it off himself as potentially untenable) premise.

It’s like people who spout Burke quotes randomly. Yes, everyone views the world from behind a series of terministic screens.

But people were talking about subjectivity before Burke gave it a fancy name. Burke shouldn’t be a godhead, just because he slapped a pretty name on something that is an obvious concept. At least not when the comment is a one-sentence throw away like “it’s sort of like Burke’s terministic screen.”

I wish people in our field would spend more time building new knowledge and less time trying to make the same old knowledge fit everything they see. It’d make us more productive. And I hope someone shatters my teministic screen and kicks me in my means of production if I ever start abusing theorists as my own personal mapquest to the world of understanding.

A second pass at SCALPED or How The Fun was Lost

how’s the weather/how’s my father?/am I lonely/heavens, no!

-Tracy Bonham 

Image from flickr, taken from SCALPED writer Jason Aaron's blog 
at: http://jasoneaaron.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html

About a month ago, give or take, I wrote an entry about the comic book SCALPED from DC. At the time I wanted to reserve full judgment until I’d seen more of the series. Now that I’ve read the first “chapter” in graphic novel form, I feel better talking about it.

At the same time, I’ve recently met a fellow scholar who works for a comic company that attempts to present things in a more positive light. I’m going to keep from naming that group just yet as I don’t want to sound as if I am singling them, or this fellow scholar who I respect a great deal, out in this particular post. I will be talking a bit about this scholar’s work later, though.

I return to the point I was trying to make initially. In fact that point has been galvanized by reading more and seeing that SCALPED actually does get somewhat worse in its depictions of things. The final page of the first graphic novel is of a woman who has been scalped.  I find of late that either what I am trying to argue to some degree is considered highly-counterproductive to people in my field. But I want to restate it, because I feel this is important. I think it might be CRITICAL to ever really making sense of things in this world.

As academics, we walk in a different space. I will not call our space ‘better’ than anyone else’s (that’s been done forever by people who presume there is an Ivory Tower and we live in it), but it is certainly different. We think about things that we seem to assume others don’t (often incorrectly, but sometimes correctly) and we press for meaning in places where meaning isn’t usually saught. When one of us– as I am, as so many are now– tries to go into a more mainstream or “popular” arena, there are things we have to remember.This is rule number one for me: if I’m studying something, I’m studying it. I’m not studying it while figuring out how I can co-opt it, and I’m not studying it reading an agenda onto it. I will read with lenses that reveal agendas (we all do– that’s how the best revelations result), but I won’t come to something and say “because this does X, it is obviously Y.” This is my defense of SCALPED; it’s a story. I have decided that I wish it were just a touch less gritty, but I continue to have nothing but love for the two most commonly associated pieces of contemporary fiction: FX Network’s The Shield and HBO’s The Sopranos. In fact I have posters from each of those two programs (they aren’t currently on my wall– they’re back in my old apartment).

I have no tie to Italian Americans, so I cannot speak from the position of their culture. I have, however, addressed general Italian-Am responses to the Sopranos in this blog before. My father, may he rest in peace, was a cop (in fact my father was a “dirty” cop, though he didn’t go as far as Vic Mackey). As such, I feel that I can fairly say that The Shield isn’t meant to speak for all police officers. The Sopranos specifically screams that it doesn’t wish to speak for all Italian Americans.

These are stories.

Given these are not stories that carry the sacred material or spiritual understanding that the stories of the Cherokee might carry, for example, but these are not meant to be depictions of what is “real.”Fiction is a form of social commentary, but it’s also a form of entertainment and can be seen in a way as the fantasy of the best and worst of us.

I doubt Stephen King was trying to besmirch the name of the automobile industry when he wrote Christine.

I don’t think Clive Barker was trying to ruin the concept of solving puzzles forever when he wrote The Hellbound Heart and spawned the Hellraiser movies.

 I will agree with what many have said about SCALPED; I don’t want anyone  to think my people ALL behave that way. Sadly, however, I know there are bad Cherokee. I’ve seen them, met them, faced their behaviors. As such, I wouldn’t want a comic book about the cliche Noble Savage to try to depict my people, either (or that part of me, anyway– a small portion of my people are Euro).I disagree that SCALPED should be boycotted, though, or that it should be outright defamed.

If you don’t want to read it, don’t read it because it’s only a marginally good story (I sort of like where it was going while simultaneously wishing it wasn’t going there). If you don’t like that Aaron is portraying a tribe as corrupt, write commentaries about it.

But I think it’s wrong to say “WE shouldn’t be presented this way,” which is what I hear many, many people saying.As a kid, I went through a period as an outcast where I identified strongly with the villains in the stories I read. I wanted to be Lex Luthor. I wanted to be Darth Vader. I wanted to be the Joker so much I asked my parents for a big black trench coat (thankfully I was old enough that the stigma that goes with that look now hadn’t hit… imagine that as a faux pas). Why should any group of people be exempt from representation as the villain?

Perhaps it’s just my twisted postmodern view, but I think part of decolonization is saying “sure, we want to appear in this medium the way anyone else does.”

Of course I’d feel better if this were an Indigenous artist creating the evil mafia-like tribe with their corrupt casino, but I think it sets us– all of us– back to claim that something should be off-limits.

The second problem is that when we start twisting things so that they fit a popular genre but they are entirely positive, we ruin the recipe. I see this all the time with educational video games (which are growing exponentially). The reason a game like Grand Theft Auto is fun is because it’s a specific sort of fantasy release for the gamer. It doesn’t mean that gamer will want to go actually commit crimes (there’s research that proves this, btw… I don’t have the citations handy but will gladly fish them up if you email me).

On some levels yes, we can sanitize and reappropriate popular genres. But on another level, we risk rupturing what is appealing about them for the sake of our tinkering.

Use SCALPED as an example of what Native Americans aren’t, but think carefully about the implications of saying “we won’t be depicted like the Sopranos or like the cops on the Shield” is really saying. It’s asking to be removed from a specific conversation.If you’re someone who wants us out of that conversation, I extend to you all the respect in the world. But I feel like *I* am embedded in that discourse. It’s part of the tapestry of my life. And in order to use it, to study it, and to feel a part of it, I see no choice but to allow things like SCALPED to become a part of what we consume and accept.  

There’s a move in the field of rhetoric to attempt to bring about social change. At times I find that sort of a strange call to arms. I love the concept, but we should be bringing about social change every day by virtue of the fact that we’re teaching others to read and write, to look at things critically and to understand how to interact with the world around them. But commenting on something like SCALPED can provide a space for social change. Sure… it’s a negative way to see any tribe, even a fictional one.

But it opens a number of illuminating dialogues:
-What does it mean to leave your land and go back?
-What does it mean to lose respect for your land and your ways?
-What is the brutal history of scalping? How does that sit in comparison to current society?
-If life looks bad on this fictional reservation, what does it look like on a real reservation?
-If a non-NDN is writing this story about a fictional tribe, how would, say, a Cherokee who liked the Sopranos write the same story? What is lost in a cultural translation? What is gained?
and the most important question…

-Why is it out there, why is it selling, and why do people keep reading?

There’s much to be learned. I don’t think we learn that by simply saying “what it says is bad.” Sure, that’s pretty obvious. I doubt anyone will read it and say “I want my people thought of this way.”But it starts a valuable conversation, and more importantly, it shows us in mainstream American culture in a way that isn’t as the Lone Ranger’s sidekick, or the X-man with the knives, or the guy in the headdress who gets big as a superpower. It’s an opening to appear in a different way. I consider it empowering. And I know some of you disagree. I love you anyway. 🙂 

A second rant, since I’m doing this in twos: when interdisciplinary goes wrong

I want a girl with shoes that cut/and eyes that burn like cigarettes... -Cake

I’m trying this year to work on a project that is considered “interdisciplinary.” I’ve been asked to look at it “as the rhetorician.” That’s no problem for me. I like being the rhetoric person. My take on rhetoric is a little different than many, but I can justify the moves I make, going back to fountainhead Aristotle and twisting from him.

Here’s the problem, though. Rhetoric is not a well-defined discipline. If I walk into a room with a chemist, a cartographer and a plumber, no one’s going to ask the chemist to explain, from the origin of his field to now, why he’s mixing the silver nitrate with the hydrocholoric acid. No one’s going to want the cartographer to trace back to cave paintings to explain why he can make a map, and no one will expect the plumber to reference natural stone formations as he talks about how water is bent.

As a rhetorician, we’re still expected to define what rhetoric IS before we do it. Imagine if Kobe Bryant had to stop and explain the history of basketball before taking a fall away jumper. Imagine if Tom Brady had to explain what “metrosexual” meant before hitting the street with his manpurse. It’s unheard of.

So in this interdisciplinary project, people keep asking me why I don’t use this or that… or why I can’t go back to this or that theorist. And I have to explain “I’m not looking at it THAT way.” I am attempting, in this project, to look at things through a Native American (actually a Cherokee) lens, THEN pulling in a few select western theorists to expand the scope.

Perhaps I’m becoming too… arrogant, but I feel like as a PhD student, this is the time for me to start saying “okay, here’s my thinking, and I want to defend it and see where it goes.”

I love the idea of interdisciplinarity, but if we’re going to come together, it seems like we shouldn’t try to box each other in. Or in other words, I won’t ask the math guy to explain to me why there are digits from 0-9 if he doesn’t ask me why I can’t just use Foucault for everything.

🙂

Come on, Come on, tell me if it’s “like that”…

Stand in the place where you were/now face west/think about direction/wonder why you haven’t now… -R.E.M.

 I recently read Wisdom Sits in Places by Basso, which is an ethnographic study of how the Apache see land and the stories told about land (that’s really not a fair summary, but it gives you context). As we discussed the text, several people in the class started talking about how their experiences of place were “just like” what is described in the book, but what they were describing was in fact different from what the Apache in the book were doing. The Apache saw physical places as taking on agency based on events that happened at a specific time in that place, and these places were named in ways that instantly called to mind a vivid mental picture (this isn’t a direct quote but a comparative example: “Cluster of rocks which water flows down, smoothing,” a place that might take on agency because of a story wherein a boy steals from another boy then slips on the rocks and falls to his death. Those hearing the story would then associate that lesson with that place and would carry it with them any time they thought of the place, giving that location the ability to act). This is not “just like” how people think of the arch in St. Louis when someone says “St. Louis” because one time the person went to St. Louis and saw the arch. Knowing there is an arch in a place called St. Louis doesn’t give St. Louis agency, and understanding that difference is critical if one wants to understand the Apache on their terms. 

 In the same class I presented this commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a7K2uCJvvgI then asked the following question:

If we think about the importance of place, what does this advertisement get right, and what negatives does it re-inscribe? 

For some reason, the question (and my follow-ups) were poorly received, but I think there’s a lot to be unpacked here.

The ad features a man who is NOT a Native American “playing” Native American. It also plays with a very simple train of thought: “Natives love the land. Pollution is bad for the land. What if the Native American cried when we littered?”  One of the things I am fascinated about in popular culture is the way these stereotypes crop up and repeat (this commercial has been lampooned everywhere, even in the Simpsons and Family Guy).

 And certainly the core “nugget” is correct: Native Americans DO—in general—think about land (and nature) in a different way than do those who have colonized their lands. I was hoping we could unpack everything that goes wrong and how it re-inscribes either dangerous or painful misconceptions, but my classmates weren’t interested. Perhaps I’ll do all that work myself at some other point. 

But the big point I was trying to make is that the indigenous sense of “place” is not “just like” knowing X thing is in Y place so you think of Y when you hear X. That’s not even close, really. That sounds like someone who doesn’t understand attempting to map something to a construction that the person DOES understand.

 It’d be as problematic as me saying “I can kill turtles in Super Mario, so I’m an assassin!” 

Of course if I jump on someone’s head after eating a mushroom the size of my chest, it might kill him (or her).  I digress.