Friday, July 12, 2013

Charcot, Augustine

Charcot, a lesson: a hysteric (Marie "Blanche" Wittman) demonstrates fainting:
















from “Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière” (Jean Martin Charcot,1878) (Augustine)




















review of a book about Charcot:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/books/review/book-review-medical-muses-hysteria-in-nineteenth-century-paris-by-asti-hustvedt.html?_r=0
 

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

the lyricism of oppression: against beasts of the southern wild


Two critical views from Jayna Browne and Christina Sharpe at Social Text

http://socialtextjournal.org/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-the-romance-of-precarity-i/
How does a little black girl child orphaned and abandoned become a vision for climate resistance for so many people who watched the film?  It is precisely this kind of misprision, this not feeling or seeing, that subtends  an event like the death of Glenda Moore's sons during Hurricane Sandy.  Riffing on Invisible Man, optic white does not see your plight. 

This isn't the first case of black children being depicted as insensitive to pain, or of black suffering and survival being used to symbolize American democracy….The film romanticizes their abject poverty….This is no maroon society, nor is it like any community of generationally poor people in the US or the global south I have ever seen. Instead the film recapitulates the continuing currency of black suffering, and acts as a kind of "crisis porn," showing how black pain is erotically charged.



Sadly, all the vibrancy in this film is generated by a crude pornography of violence. At the center of this spectacle is the continuous physical and emotional violation of the body and being of a small six year old black girl called Hushpuppy …. Subject to both romanticization as a modern primitive and eroticization, her plight is presented as comically farcical.  Some audiences laugh as Hushpuppy, when enraged at the antics of her disappearing alcoholic oftentimes abusive wild man dad Wink, burns her shanty house. … Hushpuppy has a resilient spirit. She is indeed a miniature version of the ‘strong black female matriarch,’ racist and sexist representations have depicted from slavery on into the present day. Like the unrealistic racist/sexist stereotypical images of grown black women in the recent blockbuster film The Help … Hushpuppy is a survivor. From the onset of the film, she is depicted as a wild child, so at home in the natural wild of the Gulf of Mexico bayou world

Screenwriter Lucy Alibar originally wrote Beasts of the Southern Wild as a play called Juicy and Delicious, which was about an 11-year-old white boy and his father in southern Georgia, where she grew up. In adapting it to a 6-year-old black girl in the Louisiana swamps, Queens-bred director Benh Zeitlin turns it into a maudlin exercise in cultural tourism

the reviewer for Forbes liked it, which is a bad sign

Beasts of the Southern Wild . . . . seemed to devolve into a kind of poverty porn . . . . with noble intentions attempting to redefine the spaces in which poor, rural communities exist in an American framework, but in my opinion, just keeping those same communities positioned as the strange, freaky, idiosyncratic Other. What’s worse here is that Beasts of the Southern Wild plays out as a kind of poverty porn put into black face, with no actual mention of blackness or race as a presence.



Saturday, February 16, 2013

thinking wars


Thinking, the creation of meaning, the internal pact we make with words that they will be moments of human sincerity, the reconstitution of near-historical texts attesting to intellectual lineages—all of these stand in the face of the Orwellian speech of generals, press secretaries, and government leaders obsessed with ensuring their class positions.

--Joan Nestle, "Wars and Thinking." Journal of Women's History 15.3 (Autumn 2003): 49-57.