okay, i've been real delinquent, and this isn't going to help matters much, but I want to direct everyone's attention to an important matter. Which you probably already know about. But i'd be remiss if i didn't say something. More real blogging later.
So David Graeber, "small-a" anarchist anthropologist and global justice movement ethnographer, was effectively fired by Yale University last week in a climate in which members of his department had refused to speak to him and had already sought to fire him for his (anti)political affiliations and activities. The powderkeg in this most recent development seems to have been Graeber's support for a GESO organizer (who was in Hazel Carby's class with me last year) whom some senior faculty were trying to expel for reasons related to her organizing.
Some have tried to link this to the Ward Churchill circus, but I think that gives Churchill a lot of credit. There is no merit whatsoever to most of the charges people think Graeber's detractors made against him (none of which happen to be public.) That he is being targetted not because of his scholarly work, which is beyond reproach, but rather because of his defense of the GESO member and his activist praxis and organizing is admitted even by those seeking to give him the proverbial boot. This is extremely scary and extremely fucked up. Like 1996 all over again. As an anarchist about to enter a PhD candidacy, i'm understandably looking at this fight as self-preservation. If you haven't done so already, you'd best sign the petition.
I dreamt last night that the ombudswoman for graduate students (who in reality is very nice and I think somewhat sympathetic--erm, this sounds familiar) was warning me that I shouldn't organize because I'd lose my funding because no prof want an organizing to TA for him or her. In the dream, I was very upset (1) because this was inherently upsetting and (2) because I knew this was a ULP under federal labor law, but couldn't figure out whether this applied or whether it was somehow ok under MD law.
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i feel like that's a totally valid nightmare for a graduate student at a public university who's been legislated out of the right to organize not by the bush NLRB, but rather by a fascist jerk of a governor, to have. I had a dream two nights ago in which i dreamed into existence a never before seen episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Edward Said comes to Sunnydale, only it isn't Edward Said, it's a vampire pretending to be Edward Said, which the gang discovers when (and this episode takes place in the late '90s,) vampire Said claims to be 34 years old, and they calculate that this would have mad him like 14 when he published Orientalism. At some point all the people in the school, which morphs into my first elementary school, are all in the hallway freaking out and everyone's really mad at me. Then Edward Said vampire tries to kill Xander, but Buffy destroys him. Vampire edward said looks nothing like actual Edward Said did, and is instead played by the same actor who portrayed the character of Gavin Park on the Buffy spinoff Angel
ReplyDeleteMy dream makes me feel like I need a break from school. Your dream makes me fear that you've lost it all together. Or just mixed postcolonial theory and Buffy in really unhealthy quantities.
ReplyDeleteyeah, no idea where that one came from. It was pretty ridiculous. I haven't been watching much Buffy lately, and haven't thought about Said in a while either. But i'm feeling mostly sane lately.
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