dagblog - Comments for "Humanities Academia in Crisis"

Slowly dying...and why not..

artappraiser — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 04:18:55 +0000

In reply to Humanities Academia in Crisis

Slowly dying...and why not...CRT & colonialism can only be done so many times in so many departments...why spend double or triple or quadruple on the same ideology?

Iowa State is basically shutting down its history department, ending grad study and merging it with other programs. Public intellectuals at private universities, doing public humanities, will prove a very poor substitute for public education.

https://t.co/0y6J5xH7S4
— Sam Haselby (@samhaselby) March 10, 2022

Heck, cut a lot of courses all together by eventually maybe just passing out a new version of Mao's Little Red Book?

Here's the only kind of job

artappraiser — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 17:33:57 +0000

In reply to Humanities Academia in Crisis

Here's the only kind of job in Art History that you see advertised:

VAP Art History at @swarthmore!

We seek an art historian (19th, 20th, 21st centuries) who brings a focused specialty in African (including its diaspora), African-American, and/or Native American art history.

Apply by 03/15https://t.co/xdaVOxc7KK
— Paloma Checa-Gismero (@lapalo) March 2, 2022

REFRESHING interest in doing

artappraiser — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 22:13:26 +0000

In reply to Humanities Academia in Crisis

REFRESHING interest in doing real history the way real old time historians do, by Jamelle Bouie, in the very same publication that published The 1691 Project. Even though it's just a newsletter for subscribers only, maybe it's a very tiny example that the tide is turning against starting with narratives created for political reasons and then filling those narratives in with cherry-picked historical incidents. My underlining:

The Slave Trade Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, Feb. 12

In my Jan. 29 newsletter, I wrote a little about the development of the domestic slave trade in the United States, apropos of my Sunday Review story on the SlaveVoyages database and the effort to measure and quantify the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That newsletter focused on the economics of slave-based cultivation and how it led inevitably to a surplus of enslaved people who could be sold at great profit after the United States ended its participation in the trans-Atlantic trade.

Because that particular story begins in the late 18th century, it takes the existence of chattel slavery for granted. But it occurred to me this week that it would be worth saying a little more about how the enslavement of Africans developed in the English colonies of the New World, if only to underscore the fact that a thorough grasp of this history must rest on the foundation of an objective analysis of class, labor and property relationships. I won’t hit every detail, but you will get the gist.

“Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro,” wrote the Trinidadian historian and political scientist (and later politician) Eric Williams in his 1944 book “Capitalism and Slavery.” “Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan.”

Williams goes on to note that the first instance of slave trading and slave labor during the European colonization of the Americas involved Native people. “The Indians rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man’s diseases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life.”

“The immediate successor of the Indian,” Williams continues, “was not the Negro but the poor white.” In the English colonies, most of these laborers were indentured servants. Some were “fleeing from the irksome restrictions of feudalism”; some were “Irishmen seeking freedom from the oppression of landlords and bishops”; others simply had a “burning desire for land” and an “ardent passion for independence.” Some were kidnapped by unscrupulous traders; others were convicts forced into servitude.

The conditions of servitude were bad to begin with, from the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic to the difficult work on small farms and plantations. They became worse as servitude itself became a “property relation which asserted a control of varying extent, over the bodies and liberties of the person during service as if he were a thing.” Even still, as Williams points out, “The master at no time had absolute control over the person and liberty of his servant as he had over his slave” and “the conception of the servant as a piece of property never went beyond that of personal estate and never reached the stage of a chattel or real estate.”

Most important, a servant’s term of service could eventually come to an end. When it did, he often demanded land. That’s one reason the importation of white servants became politically untenable. It was also true that “the need of the plantations outstripped” the supply of servants. There were only so many convicts England could send, only so many people to kidnap, only so many who would willingly make the journey. African slavery, then, emerges within the context of the instability of white servitude.

“The Negro, in a strange environment, conspicuous by his color and features, and ignorant of the white man’s language and ways, could be kept permanently divorced from the land,” Williams explains. “Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalize Negro slavery, to exact the mechanical obedience of a plough-ox or a cart-horse, to demand that resignation and that complete moral and intellectual subjection which alone make slave labor possible. Finally, and this was the decisive factor, the Negro slave was cheaper.”

It was more cost effective, for merchants, to purchase captives from the Atlantic coast of Africa and ship them to sites in North America and the Caribbean: “The money which procured a white man’s services for ten years could buy a Negro for life.” For kidnappers, it was easier to steal an African man or woman than an English one. And the experiences of the servant trade informed the emerging slave trade: “Bristol, the center of the servant trade, became one of the centers of the slave trade. Capital accumulated from the one financed the other.”

“The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘subhuman’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best,” Williams writes. The planter, he continues, “would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”

One thing I’d like you to consider, and this is something I will return to in the future, is the extent to which racial distinctions and racial divisions are rooted in relationships of class, labor and property, even when they take on a life and logic of their own. And if that’s true, I would like you to think about what that means for unraveling those divisions and distinctions, and consigning the ideology of “race” to the ash heap of history.

If you're going to continue

artappraiser — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:03:29 +0000

In reply to Humanities Academia in Crisis

If you're going to continue to do history by skin color, the work more academics in history should be doing in having a REAL Black History month, warts and all:

I whole heartedly support raising awareness about the realities of the pre-colonial and colonial African slave trade.

May we see many more such projects so people regain a sense of perspective and dare I say... some appreciation and humility. https://t.co/UH75ILlq4K pic.twitter.com/1oAyhbQoTP
— Naninizhoni (@naninizhoni) February 6, 2022

In the long tradition of

artappraiser — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 00:31:02 +0000

In reply to Auf Deutsch no less.

In the long tradition of nitpicky German scholarship uber alles, to the point of meaninglessness. (Speaking of organizing file folders and archives on another thread, the culture does have a reputation for doing that to the max, too.)

Auf Deutsch no less.

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:14:40 +0000

In reply to My first peer-reviewed

Auf Deutsch no less.

yes, they have even

artappraiser — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:03:15 +0000

In reply to Humanities Academia in Crisis

yes, they have even infiltrated elite institutions in Montgomery, Alabama:

How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. On Saturday, February 5 at 10 AM, MMFA Director Angie Dodson will host a Zoom discussion...https://t.co/74VWtnPC4P
— Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (@MontgomeryMFA) January 28, 2022

My first peer-reviewed

artappraiser — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 07:28:57 +0000

In reply to The Poetry Vs Colonialism

My first peer-reviewed article, about anti-colonialism and Subcarpathian Ruthenia in 1930s Czechoslovak literature, is out now! Find it here: https://t.co/t4mlPg51o5
— Jonathan R Parker (@JRParker_Hist) January 30, 2022

sounds painful. poor peers had to read the whole thing!

The Poetry Vs Colonialism

artappraiser — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 07:25:53 +0000

In reply to Decoloniser heal thyself

The Poetry Vs Colonialism team are delighted to invite you to an anthology launch party at the Museum of London on Feb 22 - 18:30 (in person) or 19:00 (online) (times in GMT). With thanks to @lailanadia for sharing this news with us. More info & book here: https://t.co/KsNhCuLvvt
— Keats-Shelley Assoc. (@KSAAcomm) January 31, 2022

next up in PHL 418: Topics in Anti-Colonialism pic.twitter.com/Lt53kXIXuG
— Shelbi Nahwilet (@qaxaawut) February 3, 2022

Literature, Colonialism, and the Nobel Prize: W.B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore | March BISR Online Courses | https://t.co/lEDWHH7Bbb pic.twitter.com/209o2bT6HR
— Brooklyn Institute (@BklynInstitute) February 1, 2022

'The festival evokes and perpetuates colonialism in more ways than one. Shiny and accessible, this collaboration between western elites and Indian upper caste elites has become the international guardian and gatekeeper of ‘Indian literature’.
— Samantha Asumadu (@SamanthaAsumadu) January 31, 2022

Decoloniser heal thyself

artappraiser — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 19:07:01 +0000

In reply to Humanities Academia in Crisis

Decoloniser heal thyself

Decolonisation is a new form of Western elitism that risks turning campuses into ideological bootcamps

"CLR James’s insight, that traditions are copious, and no one’s to monopolise, rarely clutters the manifestos and advisory texts of today’s campus decolonisers. And on closer inspection, some of the authors have a colonial problem of their own." https://t.co/DWwMBWHDsQ
— Bill King (@DivertimentoNo2) February 3, 2022