Nah, it’s not political. I just lifted that from those folks who investigate public feeling. I’m just depressed. One major reason is that the department asked me to rewrite the proposal. Which in and of itself is okay, but I can’t help thinking that I know who on the departmental committee would have strongly suggested that and on what basis. And I strongly disagree with that basis. After having talked with my life-saving director, though, I’ve decided to side with her and say that the department’s comments were excellent, that everyone on the departmental committee read my proposal with sympathy and attentiveness, and that everyone wants to be helpful. She said if I said that to myself enough, I’d ultimately come to believe it. So I’m trying. It kind of works. But then again when I talk to friends or when I think about that particular comment that infuriated me, I still get upset.
But this will help me further clarify things for myself, be more focused, and make my dissertation better in the long run. A piece of good news is that I ran into a professor I had taken a summer seminar with and he very generously offered to read my proposal for me. There are genuinely people who want to help.
I’m still going to be petty and rant a bit more, though.
First, about the professor. You know who. He said in the Freud class the other day if anyone remembered the scene in the movie theater in Black Skin/White Masks where a little boy says “Look, Mama, a Negro!” “In the train,” I said. I was sitting one seat away from the prof. and it was almost an automatic response. I wasn’t intentionally correcting him. It just came out since THAT SCENE TOOK PLACE ON A TRAIN, godamnit. “No,” he said emphatically and scornfully. “It’s in the movie theater.” I came home, took out my copy, and looked up that scene. Fanon is ON A TRAIN when this happens, fuck you. I couldn’t find any other place in the book where the “Look, Mama” thing comes up involving a movie theater. I frankly don’t remember Fanon hanging out at a movie theater in Black Skin/White Masks. Please refer me to the movie theater scene if anyone knows of it. Please.
Another thing. I keep getting irritated in the other (yes, the other) class I’m sitting in on. (I’m sitting in on TWO classes and I’m NOT resentful at all, as you can see.) There’s this guy who keeps asking the same question about how much background knowledge we need to have to read a literary text in every single goddamn class. I don’t know how the angelic prof. humors him. And he does it only when the texts are ones he knows less than some other people in the class. I feel myself wanting to shout, “just close read the text and offer the class your reading then.” And there’s this nice Korean American girl who wants to talk about what Koreans are like and how her visit to Korea allows her to read this line in the poem in this way. I just can’t believe it. I’m just so astounded by her confidence that her short residence in Korea gives her the license to generalize about Korea and Koreans and offer her impressions as analyses. I feel myself wanting to contradict her very often. And it’s so frustrating. It’s not that I don’t appreciate her identity as a Korean American or her efforts to connect with her ethnic origin or whatever. It’s just that I don’t think her experience should substitute for knowledge on Korea. It’s amazing how oftentimes the second-generation people who go back and spend a summer or a year before coming back tend to think that their superficial experience offers an explanation for every single Korean phenomenon.What’s even more depressing is the thought that I’ll probably be encountering more of these people in the future.
November 11, 2007 at 3:08 am
you were absolutely right about the train scene. there are two scenes in theaters (pp. 140 and 152-3n15), but there is no little boy. my edition is the charles lam markmann translation, 1967 (grove press).
by the way, i feel the same way about fil ams who do the summer experience in the “homeland”…i was born and grew up there, but i don’t feel that confidence. i think it’s a second- (or later) generation phenomenon that happens with college students.
November 12, 2007 at 3:02 pm
heh heh, thanks for being supportive, gladys:) i checked the theater scenes you referred me to–thanks–and they make me feel better about the prof.’s “mistake.” or more generous toward it.
because what mattered in the above is not so much the location of the racial hailing but the dynamic of blackness. the prof said the boy pointed to the black man on the movie screen and said “look mama . . . ” i’ve always understood the “look mama . . .” part as Fanon himself being racially hailed and in that moment realizing that he’s not just being called in the third person but that he is actually being called into being as a triple person; that is, the dialect between himself and the world is mediated by the the fact of his blackness. i may be wrong but i read this as Fanon’s revision of phenomenology by introducing race into the picture. i think the prof. might have been thinking of 3n15 on p.152, where you do get a picture of black men watching the portrayal of black men on screen.
per the confidence re. making generalizations–maybe it’s right that you see less and less of that as you get to know the object better. i don’t mind people doing it with close friends at dinner or over drinks–i do it myself and find it sometimes fun to do so–but it’s just doing it in class or such settings where you know your words might be taken as authority (because you’re of that ethnicity) by someone who knows less about the subject that bothers me . . . to me it seems to be a part of a very american politics of ethnicity pervasive in the academy. for example, the prof. above asked me if i knew how to make a pdf on the department copier. i said no. a couple of people said they knew how to. the prof. smiled and said, “oh, maybe it’s [not knowing how to make a pdf] a third world ghetto thing.” i think he was trying to bond–he and I both don’t know how to make a pdf, how third-world-ghetto of us–but it was just so weird. i still don’t know what would qualify either of us as third world ghetto. i mean, if we were to come up with a spectrum of the third world ghetto, i guess i’m closer to the real ghetto than he is, but i still wouldn’t be so bold as to claim that identity for myself. it’s a misappropriation of the experiences of the people who actually live in those ghettos. tenured academics who can maintain places in two big U.S. cities are so not third world ghetto. i don’t know. i’m being morally righteous. maybe he used to live in a third world ghetto and is still haunted by the memory or something . . .
November 12, 2007 at 11:03 pm
lol. his claiming “third-world ghetto” id does sound a bit ridiculous, but i’m sure he knows it. he’s probably very well aware of the politics of cultural brokering in american academy that you’re talking about. so i bet he WAS trying to bond, even perhaps apologizing for shanking you in class…?
…or maybe i am too generous and he has uncritically embraced the strange cultural capital of being racially (and sexually) marginal in the more elite halls of the u.s. academy. i don’t know him or of him very well.
as for your reading of fanon and the triple subject, i think you’re right on. fatimah tobing rony in her book THE THIRD EYE has that reading of triple consciousness in old-school “anthropological” cinema that features people of color. she was probably riffing on fanon, too, although her reading was explicitly of w.e.b. dubois — an expansion of his “double consciousness” theory. good stuff.