Yongho Kim

Category: school

  • movements, notes. capitalism

    class notes. jan 31. freedom movements

    fr nights, Golden town

    Mapantsula
    visual imagery
    thrown out of the window
    Themba
    “John” speaking Afrikaans
    english had subtitles (also aimed at non-english speaking native audience)
    1976 Soweto’s school students boycott Afrikaans language

    Afrikaans develops not to be understood by masters? but why don’t they speak it then?

    violence / peaceful resolution

    Duck
    1. lower middle class
    2. tails cat the N

    Manning Marable: Race is the modality through which class is expressed.

    Nothing but a man – filmmakers are white
    violence: Tactially to attract (white) sympathy

    every slave had to be zambo =//= need to be tamed?
    Lily: nothing but a man “north” as a safe place
    Pathe: Film noir detective, anti hero (Rosenberg?)
    Priest
    Social history -> women making “stuff” possible
    movement history

    (leola Johnson) extradiotigenic personality
    on Abby Lincoln 1963

    Jesse Goldman on Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/linking-racism-and-capitalism-robinson.html
    -Theoretical background: racism & capitalism -> formation of europe
    racism predates capitalism -> influences
    immigratory movements in Africa care about work places of works
    going to another place slavs as natural slaves
    capitalism comes from a social order (racism)
    capitalis is a process of “heteroginization”

    Zach Cheema on Harold Wolpe
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/harold-wolpe-capitalism-and-cheap.html
    (P: racial and labor control in tension)
    white domination
    1. capitalist -less pay >>>> anti-capitalis (less efficiency)
    2. af-am / blacks in SA
    af-am considered inferior
    sa considered equals
    Wolpe is fixating in making Apartheid separate from segregation
    strategies to create breaches among black/white workers

    Jonathan Fredor
    Cooper. black ideology
    songs of Zion Tiembo
    (P: Cooper doesn’t like Frederickson)
    doesn’t walk much about U.S.
    criticizes on mechanical comparison, too much white perspective (no black agency)
    interested in how religions and ideology works

    Shula Marks
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/white-supremacy-review-shula-marks.html
    -highest agers of white supremacy, John S.
    marks is SA historian
    doesn’t like comparative historical method
    generalizing is bad
    not enough info
    George Frederickson had historical inaccuracies

    Peter: comparative history is only done through a U.S. lens, and when you look at Safundi for example, more broad comparisons (brasil, etc) is done

    I brought up racism and racialism from Anthony Appiah, and said Robinson is opposed to Frederickson.

    group discussion
    (what makes a slave) christians are enslaved too, white slaves
    1900-1942
    rights in he americas
    colored in SA, frederickson p.133

    Alessandra Williams on Manning Marable
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/how-capitalism-underdeveloped-black.html
    phenotype condition
    black migration
    common worldview was destroyed
    white working class gave up
    George Lukacs -> racism
    whitenes -> took hold off of whiteness
    (P: prof of Af-Am in Columbia)

    Leonard Thompson -> good overview
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/thompson-history-of-south-africa.html

    • segregation of homelands

    -blacks created their own economic world, niches
    -ANC formation

    Marable & Homeland LEadership

    Lily on Phil Bonner
    http://freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/bonner-delius-posel-shaping-of.html
    Apartheid’s genesis in the 20th C
    processes of social history
    (district 6 was bulldozed after 1946)

    peter: per books, demographic (b/w in sa/am)
    smilarities

    A. Randolph: WWII as a war on racism, going to DC asking for equal jobs
    no jobs! poor jobs

    SA there are jobs, no political power
    structures & mandela/king

  • white supremacy, racism, racialism

    in “White Supremacy: a comparative sutyd in american and south african history”, frederickson makes the distinction between white supremacy and racism.

    first, racism is too ambiguous. second, racism is an essentialistic mode of thought that gives racial attributes to given populations. (frederickson characterizes them as “the fact that populations groups that can be distinguished by ancestr are likely to differn in culture, status, and power” (p.xii)

    racists, then, make the claim that those are natural and bypass historical ciscumstances. white supremacists claim tha these differences favor whites.

    frederickson introduces white supremacy as an alternative, attitudinal term to racism, while leaving racism to the realm of the epistemic.

    the first reason is that in everyday discourse no one admits to being a racist anymore, because it has been conflated with a multitude of overlapping, and differing, meanings. it has been a blind spot for criticism. many administrators in south africa still admit to being white supremacists, however. alabama had a state motto praising the virtues of white supremacy.

    second reason is that scholars can deal more purely with the study of white supremacists practices, without getting stuck at accusing and pointing out the moral wrongs of racism.

    (so both reasons given by frederickson are of a methodological nature, not by some theoretical reason, such as the one given by appiah.)

    kwame anthony appiah claims in “in my father’s house” that racialism is the mode of thought where racial differences exist. then racism, is the judgement involving the placement of blacks and other colored peoples in an inferior relationship to the white race. he argues this in ch.1, “the invention of africa”, p.13, while trying to make a case for Crummell. i think he also mentions DuBois as an example of racialist thought.

    so frederickson seems to be borrowing on appiah’s theoretical framework of the epistemic aspect and activist (?) aspect of racism. but they differ in terminology

    appiah -> concept -> frederickson -> public discourse
    racialism -> epistemic division of races by attributes -> racism -> racism
    racism -> black and other races are inferior -> white supremacy -> racism

    now, rachleff briefly presented the idea of racial prejudice and racial discrimination as sub-branches of appiah’s “racism”, i don’t where he brought it from (his own?).
    appiah -> rachleff -> notion -> frederickson -> public discourse
    racism -> racial prejudice -> to claim some form of hierarchical racial order -> (no term) -> racism (reverse discrimination if the agent is not white)
    racism -> racial discrimination -> to execute out racial prejudice, e.g. school segregation -> white supremacy -> racism (terrorist, if agent is not white)

    now maybe racial discrimination and the rest of the concepts needs to be separated, because racial discrimination is a form of praxis, while the others are forms of cognition?

    back to the book..

  • aphasic narrative in Spanglish

    Independent Project Paper
    January 28, 2005
    Yongho Kim

    In this paper I argue that the recently premiered film Spanglish, a documentary about the “integration” of a Mexican single mother into white U.S. society through the eyes of her daughter, represents a form of an essentialist reading of their social texts that can be analyzed using the notion of double consciousness.

    Spanglish is the story of Flor, a single household mother, and Cristina, her daughter, who come to the U.S. via the migrant trail and get established in California. The story progresses as a narrative in the past tense from Cristina’s perspective as she writes her college admissions essay to Princeton. (The essay is read aloud in the admissions office by an employee)

    The film starts off with an image of Mexico that self-consciously works around breaking the overused image of realismo mágico, a literary device in Latin American literature that emphasizes the supernatural in everyday life. The film shows some clear examples of such device (such as a big and long tear scene with Cristina), ridicules it, and the single family moves over the border to California.

    Once Flor starts working in California, she realizes that the pay is never enough, and decides to start working for a white family as a nanny. Pay is great, and the white family is full of little middle class problems – unmotivated children, weight-complexed daughter, combative husband-wife relationships – that Flor helps solve with her “Mexican wisdom”, a remix of age old European desires regarding the good old customs that can probably be traced back to Rousseau’s noble savage.

    It could be argued that Spanglish is just a comedy film, and that none of the stereotypes herein presented intend to represent the reality of white middle class family crises nor Latina nannys. The response is twofold: first, the director already presents us with well known truisms from White America towards Latin America, which is magical realism, and crosses it out after playing with it a while, as if saying: “this is what you have been hearing all along – now let me tell you what the real thing is like”. Second, the film takes on a documentary quality insofar as it takes the voice of Cristina, the daughter, looking back at the past.

    The second essentialist reading of social realities in the U.S. is through the main theme of Spanglish, which deals with the affectionate relationship between Flor and John, the white family’s father (whether this was a deep friendship or a love affair has been purposefully hidden from the public). The main point made regarding love in the film is that white women talk too much. Naturally, for the dialectical relationship to occur, brown women ought not to talk. And so it happens. Flor cannot talk, because she cannot speak English.

    The director, James L. Brooks, portrays the scene with tact, but what remains in the center is that what awakens a sense of longing and/or loving in John towards Flor is the fact that she is quiet and yet gets the job done (i.e. making children happy, “discussing” house problems with monosyllables and gestures, housecleaning). Although there is a crucial moment in the middle where Flor recourses to Cristina as her interpreter to settle down some misunderstandings between her and John, the occasion is an eventful scene focused around the viewer’s pleasure of seeing two women ramble in Spanish (and English)

    The point might be to suggest that relationships can develop without language, and the brown woman in her quality of undocumented immigrant might be simply a device for that rhetoric. It is of noting, however, that even giving this definition (that things go smooth when problems are not talked about) is given by the enligsh speaker, John, the master signifier, who claims that “we [John and Flor] have been communicating so well through silence all this time” in the movie itself. Thus, the film gives its viewers the sense that what Mexican immigrant women want is for the English speaking male, to speak for them, and tells them that former misconceptions such as magical realism were wrong.

    Finally, the entire narrative of the film takes place in Princeton’s admissions office, where at the end of the essay, after telling how Flor was fired from her nanny work by John’s wife after she found out about the relationship and Cristina was unwilling to let go the white privileges of going to a private school, Cristina decided her primary identity was being the daughter of her mother, a Mexican single household immigrant mother, but in front of white admissions office workers, in order to get herself accepted in another stronghold of whitedom in academia. Thus identity formation is used to please and reaffirm white expectations of how minorities should perform or self-identify in the United States.

    (some references, I ended up never using for lack of sleep)
    Reference
    Dávila, Arlene
    2001 Latinos, Inc: the Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press
    Dibango, Manu
    1994 “The Shortest Way Through”: Strategic Anti-essentialism in Popular Music. In Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. Pp. 51-66 New York: Verso
    DuBois, W.E.B
    1994 The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
    Fiske, John
    2004 Understanding Popular Culture. New York: Routledge
    Lipsitz, George
    2001 The Lion and the Spider: Mapping Sexuality, Space, and Politics in Miami Music. In American Studies in a Moment of Danger. Pp 139-67

  • Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota's Political Terrain

    Contested Bodies: Immigrants as a Singularity in Minnesota’s Political Terrain
    Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride Internship Paper
    January 27, 2004
    Yongho Kim

    The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride of 2003 was a national movement aimed at claiming immigrants’ rights in the legislative branches of the United States. It gathered a critical mass of religious, labor, progressive and other political organizations and individuals to actively demonstrate and lobby in the Congress and the streets of New York City, and strategically located towns positioned along the path from the twelve departure cities to Washington, a move that intentionally followed the path laid by the freedom rides from the civil rights era.

    The Minnesota Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (MN IWFR), planned by the two organizers who took a leading role during the national ride, Mariano Espinosa and Quito Ziegler, came together as a state-wide initiative that consisted of thirty immigrant riders and allies riding a bus that connected various key cities for voter mobilization and immigration law reform. Riders made connections with local organizers, contributed to voter registration efforts, and lobbied with representatives to have them support pro-immigrant legislation, symbolically marketed through AgJobs and the DREAM Act.

    In this paper, leaving the effectiveness of the movement aside (as the process is still ongoing), I argue that pro-immigrant efforts such as the MN IWFR injected a dose of instability and self-doubt in Minnesota’s political arena prior to and after various Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives, and the U.S. presidential, elections.
    (more…)

  • anth490 negoatiating the course

    Assignment: Bring in a list of at least 5 topics or skills you would like covered in the course.

    • spotting statistical exaggerations and issues of overinterpretation

    as a student who had at most two weeks of training doing linear regressions, I want to learn the basics of faulty statistical analyses.

    • macro phenomenoms

    as anthropologists mainly trained to study the observable, how do we deal with the big stuff? is there a big stuff? when can we say that the NYT is “wrong” in this and that?

    • simplifying anthro

    when people ask me what anthropology is, I usually give them the british social functionalist definition, because it sounds most “social scientific”. what could be a non biased explanation of what anthropology is for nonanthros?

    • is there a way to deal with workplace stress that doesn’t sound like another bourgeios urban advice?
    • i’ll improvise #5

  • a decommodification agenda by capturing state power?

    so after reading Patrick Bond’s Strategies for Social Justice Movements from Southern Africa to the United States fpif.org/papers/0501movements_body.html

    Bond is thinking about circular state measures that eventually weaken local communities, and talks about fundamental change that doesn’t rely on state power, when he writes:

    …South Africa’s independent left fully understands the need to transcend national-scale capitalism. One step along the way is the strategy of decommodification.

    The South African decommodification agenda is based on interlocking, overlapping campaigns to turn basic needs into genuine human rights including: free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS, at least 50 liters of free water and 1 kilowatt hour of free electricity for each individual every day, extensive land reform(…..)

    so I think, if Rachleff is sending out something, there’s gotta be something new in there. The “measures”, as I reade them, of decommodifying services into basic human rights seems to require state intervention, and as he describes local movements in environmental justice, I thought he would provide some sort of theoretical framework to understand these processes. But then., the conclusion comes back with a reliance on state-administered reform:

    The latter [change that advances a nonreformist agenda] would include, for example, social policies stressing more generous and universal state services, controls on capital flows and imports/exports, and inward- oriented industrialization strategies allowing democratic control of finance and production in order to meet social needs.
    ……
    We must capture state power through elections in which a democratic political party amasses community/worker/peasant support by generalizing the sorts of struggles discussed above, eventually contending with those elites who remain locked into neocolonial power relationships.

    so I have never taken a polisci course, and so I have always trouble figuring out the influences of macrogroups, hierarchies, and unequal relationships. In other words, when dealing with historic processes, I always started with the little practices and observable phenomenom. am I missing something in Bond’s analysis of how to materialize a “nonreformist agenda”? at least when put into words, doesn’t it look like another developmental rhetoric?

    —-

    also: what was this NEPAD business? Because the new president of Kenya about a year ago had made some strong statements about NEPAD that made the party of the outgoing president rave. It’s been a while since the news went out, thoguh

  • [Jack Weatherford] ANTH490 Checklist for Invited Speakers

    Checklist for Invited Speakers: Anthropology 490

    Before the Class:

    1. Explain to the speaker carefully what you want the speaker to do.

    2. Find out if any special equipment or handouts are needed.

    3. Decide on the format with the speaker. How long will the speaker speak? Is the speaker one member of a panel? Or will it be all question and answer, slide presentation, or what?

    4. E-mail or write a confirmation restating the time, place, topic and other relevant information.

    5. Send directions to the speaker or precise instructions on the location of the class. If the speaker is coming from off campus you might arrange to meet outside the building. Show the speaker where the washroom is located, and escort the speaker to the class.

    The Day of the Class:

    6. Have water for the speaker — but also offer tea or coffee in addition to the water.

    7. Introduce the speaker to the class in three to five minutes. Give the background of the speaker and re-state the topic or purpose of the talk.

    8. Have questions prepared and have other students who are prepared to ask them.

    9. At the end of the class, escort the speaker out of the building.

    After the Class:

    Within 24-hours, have the thank-you letter in the mail. Even if you send an electronic version, you must send a paper one for the speaker’s file. The letter must contain at least three paragraphs of at least two-sentences each, as follows:

    Paragraph 1: The General thanks in which you summarize the entire event. E.g, “Thank you for speaking to our anthropology seminar on your work educating homeless children in the …..” Always begin the letter with “Thank you.” Never begin with a phrase such as

    I want to thank you…. I wish to thank you….. I would like to thank you…

    I am writing to thank you… or I am Joan who invited you…..

    Paragraph 2: Specific thanks in which you single out one part of the presentation.
    “E.g, “The class particularly appreciated the description of how you entered this work
    and applied the skills that you had……”
    “I very much enjoyed hearing about the individuals whom you described because….”

    Paragraphs: Looking to the future. Repeat one phrase of thanks and offer good luck or success for something else. E.g,

  • Protected: MNFR second journal entry

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  • Class Notes. movements. Introduction

    class notes, Freedom Movements
    January 24, 2005

    -SNVC (?)

    • we are reading M.L.King and N.Mandela, not because they are everything that their respective movements represented, but in order to get an initial idea of what the main body of texts “representative” in public discourse of the movements is about. That way it is possible to at least talk about some”thing” when directing criticism.
    • David Garrow legal research historian.
    • Anthony Marx. political scientist trained in Amherst
    • Clay Carson. SNIC. Curator of MLK in Struggle

    Meyekiso
    Krog TRC
    Churchill

    Frederickson: watch for structures & ideologies

    Screening of Mapantsula
    What makes black film?

    • Spike Lee argues the screenwriter, director, actors, need to be black, etc, etc
    • Mapantsula differs

    Added today: I still don’t get the difference.
    -bg: 1985 state of emergency in SA. the figure of totsi (another word for mapantsula, or the young gangster)

    • rapid urbanization after ww2. large scale forced migration of a male workforce. black worker towns. prime example: Soweto.

    -hustler, mapantsula outside the cities or the SA version of “ghettoes”
    -regarding the social formation of totsis: greater exposure to american-led mass culture -> the big trend of the times was the detectivesque film noir -> young people identify with it to express their anger
    -what goes on today is a different matter, where young people of color have started killing other people of color. some social scientists trace the roots back to the 1950’s totsis, whereas the two phenomena deserve differential treatment.
    -theoretical framework: infrapolitics. (Will Seidt, Weapons of the Weak – studies resistance in the Phillippines)

    • McDonalds, gangster realities of the 90’s: TUPAC, Dona Carey New York [I don’t get this reference] – role in american icons.
    • makers of mapantsula told distributors that they were maknig “just another gangsta movie”. when the movie was released, it was banned in south africa.

    Mapantsula notes
    knowledge -> black body

    on the syllabus
    “do the right thing” <- smiley character? malcolm & king not as opposites. instead nothing but a man. Mapantsula was filmed in 1988

  • Strategic repositioning within academia

    arguing for the statement that Cultural Anthropology belongs to the humanities and not to the social sciences

    December 20, 2004
    History of Anthropological Ideas
    Yongho Kim

    This paper defends the position that Cultural Anthropology, as a field of study, belongs (and should belong) to the humanities division. In so doing, I argue along two main points: 1) that anthropological work, as well as any others, engages with the humanities at a more fundamental level than the social sciences, and 2) that the field of anthropology would benefit from positioning itself within the humanities division rather than in the social sciences.
    (more…)

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