A Postmodern Haiku

The Rhizome Transmits
A Hyperreality
All Simulacra.

A Second Haiku (because):

The map is not the
territory but then all
is just hyperreal.

Achebe's National Psychology

 I found this to be the most profound statements in Achebe's essay:

Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity.

Achebe is playing with the idea that a nation, like a person, has a psychology.  In 1975, however, psychology was still relatively psychoanalytic; as I understand, concepts like repression and the tripartite mind were still in use. (This is in comparison with today, where these ideas are largely relegated to folk psychology and are widely considered pseudoscientific.) Freudian psychology considers the mind to be determined by subconscious and irrational urges and desires.  These desires are formed as a result of early experiences and are almost always sexual in nature.  The thing to take away from this is: if Achebe believes that a nation can be analyzed as though it were an individual, then that nation is subject to the same irrational urges as an individual.  More importantly, its processes should be considered as the manifestations of repressed sexual desires.

Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

The idea of a nation being an individual leads to numerous psychological implications, some of them amusing (e.g. we seemed to have manifested our Oedipus complex somewhere around the American Revolution), some of them less so (e.g. repression of unwanted "behaviors," i.e. people, typically women or minorities).  However, it also says something about responsibility: if nations are like individuals, then they behave like individuals.  And if they behave like individuals, then they, like individuals, are accountable for their actions.  So, nations are morally responsible for their behavior, and when their behavior violates certain moral norms, they deserve to be punished as a whole, to follow Achebe's analysis.

At the same time, this seems a little much.  After all, surely not everyone is responsible for the actions that their nation, as a whole, committed.  And yet, Achebe isn't really implying anything new; we do this sort of thing all the time.  For a great deal of Americans, Germans after WWII were Nazis, Asians after 1950 were communists, and Muslims after 9/11 were terrorists, to name a few.

I worry that I'm taking Achebe's metaphor too far, but at the same time, I can't shake the sense that he's oversimplifying.  Simplifying is useful insofar as it can help to make sense of something, but in this case, I think that Achebe is just making the problem worse: in considering nations as people, you eliminate its actual individuals as moral agents.  It's a helpful metaphor, but taken further, it's just misleading, not unlike psychoanalysis as a whole.

A Call for Postmodern Blackness at Whitworth

You guys remember Josh Swayne? Or Jarvis? (Take a moment for a nostalgic sigh.) Anyway, Josh wrote an article for the Whitworthian a couple years ago that seems particularly relevant to our current study of bell hooks.

The article, called "Identity as 'black' lies in one's own interpretation," pointed out the ways that notions of a unified black identity often alienated certain black students who shared the skin color but not the same sense of identification with the constructed black identity. It brought to the surface the way that students can feel when the color of their skin is regarded as the most important part of them.

Even if it isn't skin color, there are other racial and ethnic identities which ought to be secondary to the experience of any given individual, black or otherwise.

When Swayne draws his conclusion, he is actually arguing for what hooks would call the "authority of experience":

So my fellow white people, if people you know use "black" to describe themselves, let them define "black" as they use it to express their identity, but get to know that identity, black and otherwise. Better than wondering what "black" means would be wondering how someone is doing, who they are and what they are truly like.

"Authority of experience," in my understanding, means that the lived identities of black people are more significant to who they are than their black essence. Asking how someone is doing is an alternative that focuses on the experience of that person, rather than his or her racial category.

Through quoting Jarvis, Swayne shows that not all black people even perceive the black identity as relevant to them, showing the separation from the constructed notion of "blackness" and the reality of possessing dark skin:

Junior Jarvis Lunalo is from Kenya. He identifies himself as black, but for him "black" simply means he has dark skin, and he chooses to identify himself as a Kenyan, not as a member of the black community, while in the United States. One of Lunalo's complaints about the U.S. is that people, when they learn he is from Kenya, make asking him about Kenya the basis of their friendship with him.

This article reveals the social and political importance for a broad understanding of Postmodern Blackness at Whitworth.

I bless the rains down in Africa...

gonna take some time to read the theory we never havaaaaaaave...wah wah. Now Toto is stuck in your head.




Chinua Achebe didn't deter me from my clothes/fashion kick of last post. I've read this piece by Achebe before, but what struck me this time as new and interesting, was his focus on settings. While I have read some eco-theory, this is a different type of focus.

Achebe notes:
Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, "... the thought of their humanity -- like yours .... Ugly."

The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?
(Achebe 1619).

How often do we dissect character development, dialogue, and plot progression for instances of sexism, racism, bigotry, and other unpleasantries? Rarely have I examined the setting of stories and books as maker for societal morals and issues. Simplifying a collection of peoples, countries, and culture, an entire continent to a motif, is wrong.

Yet how often do we still do this?

Harry Potter needs to be exotic, so he attends school in Scotland, a subordinate of Britain. In Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert was unhappy and unsatisafied with her boring and faithful husband, so she left him to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia, where she ultimately marries a factory owner in Bali after communing with peasants. They help her feel worth and the lands heal her. In the animated movie Rio, a bird from the US is shown how to unwind and let go of his intellectual worries and bossiness and fall in love by the passionate simpler Brazilian birds, all while the land and setting is reinforcing the same ideas.

Yes, but what fashion and travel! Here are the current ads for some major chains and designers:

Banana Rep: new advertising campaign is "stylish safari"


Conde Nast Travel magazine: I get this magazine, and the ads and articles often seem to promote travel to ex-colonies, where I can spend a lot of money to people who live there to cook me things and clean my room and provide me with the best products and services that island/colony/country has to offer. Other than the obvious, another problem is that the travel industry aligns people with landscapes, and in turn makes tourists associate both with ideals. For example: Come to Hawaii! The sunsets and rain forests are magical! The people are incredible/simple/always happy/here to serve you! Just like the land! Go to the spa where the water and the servants will make you feel better! Like Achebe says, there is a dehumanization of the people, and an alignment of the setting with an abstract. It goes along with what Nat was saying in her post about tourism as well.

(Also, side note Bridger, Reddit is owned by Conde Nast).

Think this is only in the travel industry? What about all the recent attention to the death of Osama Bin Laden? How many articles aligned Pakistan, the compound, and Bin Laden as a single unit? Our forces went in there and got him. The "there" and setting is aligned with our ideas of the Middle East as another Other. MSNBS describes the situation as "sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy’s operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish" (MSNBC).

Even Obama aligned country with people, he noted in his speech that "over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people" (HuffPo) Pakistan is something that harbors Osama Bin Laden, talks with Obama, and in where the US enters to take action.


Achebe concludes that the point is not setting, but instead:
The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad's great talents (Achebe 1619).