I briefly forgot that there was a 24th of december, and thought that that holiday I don't celebrate was today instead of tomorrow. Usually I'm pretty good about figuring out stuff like dates and cardinal directions, but the fact that I've barely left my apartment now in over two weeks has apparently thoroughly befuddled my once keen sense of the useless. Or marginally useful.
For the first week of seclusion, I was extremely productive. I wrote 26 pages in three days. I read like four books. I took lots of notes. The last week's been more difficult, and i'm not sure if it's cabin fever or what. I need to finish regardless, and I don't really understand when finishing papers became this hard (maybe it's the added stress of trying to be "an academic" and having so much of your self worth wrapped up in what and how you write.) When I have left my apartment in the last couple weeks, which has been rarely, I've mostly just walked around my neighborhood, investigated a couple taquerias, found a halfway decent pizza place on 5th and 50th, and made innumerable trips to Key Foods for pasta supplies, candy canes, fat free saltines, and caffeinated soda. As much as I love walking to manhattan every day (which I have not done in weeks,) I also love not having to go to Manhattan. And as much as I hate the fact that I've been unproductive, I love not having to be on the NYU campus or in the panopticon more than words can express. Finally getting internet access in my apartment after a year and a half of living here was a smart move.
My paper-writing was slightly aided by the fact that the entirety of the 1968 San Francisco Newsreel film Black Panthers is on Youtube in its entirety (in six parts). It would be cool if someone would post Finally Got The News or Columbia Revolt or El pueblo se levanta or At The River I Stand, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Black Panthers documents a mass rally/birthday party for Huey P. Newton, who was then in jail on trumped up charges of shooting a police officer. The rally clips are spliced with Okland cops talking about the shotguns they carry, rallies outside the courthouse in which people sing "No more brothers in jail (off the pigs)/the pigs are gonna catch hell (off the pigs)" and extended interviews with Newton in prison and several other figures (all men.) Stokely Carmichael had a pronounced New York/West Indian accent, which makes sense, because he was born in Trinidad and went to Bronx Science before Howard and SNCC and the Panthers and Ghana and CLR James was proclaiming him as the revolutionary hope of diasporic/transnational West Indian radicalism. But I don't think I'd ever seen him on film or heard his voice before, and that was interesting. There's a short clip of Kathleen Cleaver speaking at a rally, but the filmmakers chose to run a Huey Newton voiceover over the footage, so you can't actually hear whatever she was saying. This makes for some problematic gender politics.
This seems way too short to actually be Newton's dissertation, right? Anyone know the story with this?
how did the paper go? i wrote 21 pages in two days. It was bad. It was like, embarrassingly bad.
ReplyDeleteStill not done. Trying to get there
ReplyDeleteUMI says that Newton's dissertation is 169 pages, and gives the following abstract:
ReplyDeleteStatement of the Problem. The Black Panther Party (BPP) was formed in this country in 1966 as an organization comprised of Black and poor persons embracing a common ideology identified by its proponents as "revolutionary intercommunalism." Since its inception, the Party has been subject to a variety of actions by agencies and officers of the federal government intended to destroy it politically and financially. It is the major contention of this dissertation that these officials' efforts to destroy the Party were undertaken precisely because of the BPP's political ideology and potential for organizing a sizeable group of the country's population that has been historically denied equal opportunity in employment, education, housing and other recognized basic needs. A corollary to this theory is that governmental efforts at destruction of the Party, successful in various degrees, were only thwarted or held in abeyance when they reached their logical consequence: destruction of the right of dissent for all groups, which is indispensable to the functioning of a democratic society.
Method. The method employed to substantiate this theory is an examination of numerous measures undertaken by the government to, in the words of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" the BPP. For the most part, records and documents of relevant government agencies initiating and participating in this campaign of destruction against the BPP provide the evidentiary basis for the dissertation. These records and documents, many revealed herein publicly for the first time, have been discovered in litigation involving the BPP and government agencies, Congressional investigations and media exposes. In addition, first hand knowledge of the author as a witness or participant to certain events, interviews with persons knowledgeable about relevant matters and secondary sources of information (e.g., other studies and news reports) are used and identified.
Results. The result of this study is an illustrative history of what happens to a minority political organization that explicitly challenges the policies and practices of a government intent on controlling the pace and degree of integration for a sizeable group of persons seeking full socio-economic participation. Moreover, this study shows the limits to which, so far at least, a government can go in a constitutional democracy before it must choose between destroying the minority political organization or the constitutional democracy.
Conclusion. It is the conclusion of this dissertation that the federal government was forced to temporarily suspend the most egregious actions directed at destroying the BPP, but that these measures pose an ever-present danger of recurrence to minority political organizations representing a significant segment of the population who seek to seriously achieve full participation in the socio-economic life of this country.
Then the link may be to the full diss. Thanks!
ReplyDelete