more related of interest

thread of interest:

excerpt that I think can be applied to American history textbooks as well, there is no need to do the complete postmodern tribal propaganda thing or competing histories via identity politics filters; there are still plenty of narratives that are held in common; he has shown that

In this moment, when there has been such a fracturing of any common American identity, has the project that you’re engaged in — of exploring fundamental national stories that might speak to all of us — become quixotic? 

That is really hard to answer. There was never a “project.” It was never like, Let’s do this. I’ve made films for more than 40 years on the U.S., but about “us.” All of the intimacy of that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and all the majesty and contradiction of the U.S. But the thing that I’ve learned is that there’s no “them.” This is what everybody does: make a distinction about “them.” It’s just us.

good example of the kind of crap academics in my field have to deal with, this is what the youngins write and get published and expect to be taught, or off with your heads, profs. It's a brave new world where the evil of western history must be exposed and expunged and totally revised:

evidence of serious fighting at Smith College:

She has far more than earned a place on this blog; what took me so long?

Just to add to the mix, there is a new study out of socio-economics of current academics themselves:

By Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School.

'

separate from that thread:

If you can't put "colonialism" in the title, you might as well fuggeaboutit:

interesting convo, only because it is basically average college students and college educated people talking about the effects

beginning of manifesto of "Strike Museum of Modern Art" group, basically current standard Woke lingo in the arts area. They held a rally today across from the museum:

Strike MoMA:

Framework and Terms for Struggle

We are writing from the unceded territory of the Lenni Lenape. We stand in solidarity with Native American and Indigenous peoples leading the movement for resurgence, decolonization, and reclamation of their homelands. These lands were stolen to create settler-colonial states, and those who were dispossessed continue to live under conditions of siege, surveillance, and extractivist violence. We support land back, an imperative addressed to all settlers and settler-institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the City of New York. At its foundations, this city was established on stolen Indigenous land, and shaped and cultivated by enslaved African peoples. We support the undying fight for Black liberation and its many manifestations here and across the planet. 

Subsequent layers of the city have been built by generations of migrants and refugees from other zones of the world violently impacted by colonial-capitalist modernity. Think of the Mohawk skywalkers whose labor made possible the Manhattan skyline, and the Black, Latinx, and Asian workers who maintain the urban infrastructure today even as they are displaced by real-estate developers in Chinatown, Mott Haven, East New York, and beyond. We support sanctuary for all migrant communities, and the allied movement for degentrification. We support the self-determination of oppressed peoples everywhere fighting against the imperial states, repressive regimes, occupying powers, comprador elites, and global corporations whose calculations have forced so many people from their homes in places like Puerto Rico, Haiti, Honduras, Palestine, Iraq, and Kashmir. From within the belly of the beast of U.S. empire, we acknowledge our responsibility, and act in solidarity with struggles to get free.

From the Dutch West India Company to the Rockefeller dynasty to the bankers, speculators, and warmakers who sit on the board of MoMA today, their accumulation has only been possible through our dispossession. A system of imperialism, colonialism, and racial capitalism with gendered violence at its core. We stand in solidarity with all those who strike against patriarchy every day, at work, at home, in the fields, in the prisons, in the detention centers, in the streets, in the shelters. Stolen land, stolen people, stolen labor, stolen wealth, stolen worlds, stolen horizons. This is the modernity to which MoMA is a monument.

When we strike MoMA, we strike its blood-soaked modernity. The monument on 53rd Street becomes our prism. We see our histories and struggles refracted through its crystalline structure, and foreclosed futures come into view. The museum is converted into a theater of operations where our entwined movements of decolonization, abolition, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism can find one another. Why strike MoMA? So that something else can emerge, something under the control of workers, communities, and artists rather than billionaires.

I. The Case Against MoMA

Any day now, hedge fund billionaire Leon Black is likely to resign as the chair of the board of MoMA. It has been six weeks since the deep financial ties between Black and Jeffery Epstein resurfaced in the headlines. Black has already announced that he is stepping down from Apollo Global Management, but MoMA remains silent about his ongoing role at the museum. Artists and community groups have demanded that Black be removed, and calls for action have been circulating publically for a month. Last week anonymous sources confirmed to the media that Black is facing pressure from other members of the board to step down. They know his  continued presence on the board is a recipe for crisis, but getting rid of him could set a precedent and put at risk MoMA’s use of his priceless art collection. The museum administration is in a classic decision dilemma.

Whether Black stays or goes, a consensus has emerged: beyond any one board member, MoMA iself is the problem. MoMA Divest offered a summary of its reasoning as follows, "Five MoMA board members — Steven Tananbaum, Glenn Dubin, Steven Cohen, Leon Black, Larry Fink — have been identified and targeted by different groups over the last year for their ties to war, racist prison and border enforcement systems, vulture fund exploitation, gentrification and displacement of the poor, extractivism and environmental degradation, and patriarchal forms of violence. Board members also have ties and donate to the NYPD Police Foundation. In short, the rot is at the core of the institution, which includes PS1." We agree, and also point to Honorary Chair Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire who is also president of the Zionist lobbying group World Jewish Congress and a major Trump donor. Deserving of recognition as well is board member Patricia Phelps Cisneros, whose billions come from the right-wing Grupo Cisneros media-industrial empire in Latin America. Speaking of Latin America, let's shine a light on Steven Tananbaum, Jeff Koons enthusiast and chief investment officer at Golden Tree Assets, one of the hedge funds involved in extracting wealth from the people of Puerto Rico through the PROMESA debt-restructuring program. And how could we forget Paula Crown and James Crown of the General Dynamics armaments fortune, whose Crown Creativity Lab on the second floor of the museum hosts The Peoples Studio, an “experimental space where visitors can explore the art and ideas of our time through participatory programs.” This is the condition of modernity that we find at Modernism Central: death-dealing oligarchs using art as an instrument of accumulation and shield for their violence.

At the ground level, MoMA is also a messed up workplace. Elitism, hierarchy, inequality, precarity, disposability, anti-Blackness, misogyny. Remember the back-end workers who were furloughed and fired last year while the high-ups have carried on in luxury. As an estimated two thirds of the arts and culture jobs of the city have been lost, MoMA’s “David Rockefeller Director” Glenn Lowry continues to take home 2.3 million dollars a year, or 48 times the amount earned by an educational assistant. Sources have confirmed that just before the pandemic, MoMA management dis-invited unsalaried contract workers from the 2019 Christmas party, including people who had been there for decades. HR posted a memo in the Operations Room. A small detail, but it says a lot. Shout out to the O Room!

This document comes from a movement perspective that de-exceptionalizes the museum. We refuse to acknowledge the separation of the museum from the rest of society. We see MoMA as existing on the same plane as the violence of the ruling class that has controlled it since its inception with the oil wealth of the Rockefellers in 1929. No more rationalizing the regime. They have long enabled the killing of our people and non-human relations and they have always expected us to thank them for their philanthropy. Yes, we know that Aggie Gund read The New Jim Crow and sold a Lichtenstein to fund the Art For Justice Fund. It was a project in collaboration with Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. The man who declared “it would be a grave error to demonize wealthy people'' following the ouster of Kanders from the Whitney, and who called the cops on Ford Fellows and their friends when they protested his “nuanced" support for new jails. If any doubts remain about the connection of the Ford Foundation, liberal philanthropy, and counterinsurgency, we direct you to this classic study.

What about the art? We love art, but we have zero allegiance to the art system of which MoMA is the epicenter. Art exists beyond MoMA. Art is not a luxury, and it is a vital part of our communities and movements. Art is one of the few means of production available to oppressed peoples for the creation and sustaining of worlds in the face of death and destruction. The aesthetic forms and imaginative powers of art require material support: economies of solidarity, platforms of cooperation, infrastructures of care and mutual aid. But the political economy of the art system is antithetical to these life-affirming practices. It is predicated on property, scarcity, competition, and assimilation. One canon. One center. One meta-narrative of modernity, however diversified and globalized it may have become. It is governed by gatekeepers, critics, and canon-makers who try to create the measure by which art lives or dies, giving access to a select few while leaving the rest with the false choice between eating and making art. It doesn't have to be this way.

As 150 artists and art workers put it in their open letter last month, “we must think seriously about a collective exit from art’s imbrication in toxic philanthropy and structures of oppression, so that we don’t have to have the same conversations over and over, one board member at a time. This thinking can only catalyze action once we state plainly: We do not need this money. Museums and other arts institutions must pursue alternative models, cooperative structures, Land Back initiatives, reparations, and additional ideas that constitute an abolitionist approach toward the arts and arts patronage, so that they align with the egalitarian principles that drew us to art in the first place.” Such calls for collective exit change the terms of the conversation, and point in the direction of something beyond MoMA.

There is no blueprint for dismantling MoMA, but here is the starting point [....]

throwing in this "energy research" publication, even though it's not Humanities, because it certainly sounds like lots of Humanities "research".

rack your brain so that you too can have a paper with "colonialist" in the title:

see whole thread:

a glimmer of hope!

It will be interesting to learn what the heck she is talking about:

the meme that's all the rage with curators around the world, at museums large to small, anything that they can dig up that can be squeezed to fit the meme, just so they can say they did a show:

Americans never dropped the main features of the system tho, even though they fought a frigging revolution so as to no longer be a colony. 

Another bit of evidence that U Chicago continues to be one safe harbor for the study of History:

"Strike MOMA" is still at it:

ugh, Hannah here writes the typical elite white woke youngster screed:

I really want to slap her out of it, really. Come back when you live some actual life.

does this guy have a way with words or what? 

He's not picking a fight, he's just sayin

btw he's a real person trying to break into politics, maybe starting with a little too high aspirations...

It's like every funder has to do something on topic or they will get grief for it; it's almost like an epidemic, there's no other history that needs research:

good lord, arguing  that the Jane Bronte archives needs to be decolonized so the poor colonized peoples (born in the USA) can understand them-- the horrors in pursuit of approval of The Woke will never cease:

From comments on The Real Cuba Isn't a Potemkin Airbnb

Antonio García Martínez on what people taking to the streets are protesting, Jul 14

NCmom·Jul 15

I cancelled my WSJ subscription over the comments being censored on the Cuba articles. Lots of "don't mistake Cuba for Marxist/ Communist" allowed to run wild. My comment got censored for responding "so we are supposed to ignore that the Castro's and Canel are very vocal that they are Revolutionaries for Marxism and the Communist regimes they run??" WSJ found my comment violated their terms. I can only imagine how much overtime their 25 year old censors making $45K a year were working to promote a narrative they blindly follow.

I'm embarrassed to be a millennial. Bubble test ruined my generation. Critical thinking, nuance, objective facts, scientific debates, learning the why and how of history - none was taught in school and only a few of us have developed those skills as adults. We bought the degrees we wanted - we were clear on this a decade ago. But as we approach 40, most of my "friends" haven't matured a bit - they still feel entitled to everything simply because of pieces of paper ("degrees") we all bought in our early 20's with minimal effort compared to those with an actual job learning a genuine trade. They embrace CRT because it boosts their egos, which their limited accomplishments in life have failed to do. Those of us with an appreciation for all we have, who volunteer our time and willingly give our treasure to actual charities improving lives, and who raise our children with a timeless western values based in faith, are seen as an outcast minority. We are a happy, successful and fulfilled minority, but we are still a minority.

My generation often supports Marxism because most my age don't actually know anything about it. They literally couldn't name 10 Marxist regimes or dictators. They don't know who the Bolsheviks were, much less what they believed. They haven't a clue how many people starved in China, or died in the gulags, much less anything about Castro and Cuba. They put BLM signs in their front yards because they think its trendy, not because they want equity (or even equality for that matter). None of this wokeness cost them any actual time or money. It's like they never matured beyond middle school. They certainly don't have an appreciation of long term consequences that exceeds that of the average 11-year old.

The Society of Cultural Anthropology’s Campaign to Present American Populism as Fascism

by Matthew Porter @ Quillette.com, Aug. 5

Earlier this year, the Society of Cultural Anthropology (SCA)—a subdivision of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)—published a series of essays exploring the topic of American Fascism. The project was run under the SCA’s “Hot Spots” category, which editors at the SCA’s journal, Cultural Anthropology, dedicate to writing that “goes beyond the headlines to consider current events and pressing global issues from the perspective of anthropologists and others on the scene.”

The 18 essays, published on April 15th, explored the concept of fascism in relation to the January 6th United States Capitol attack, in which a mob of Donald Trump supporters violently disrupted the session of Congress assembled to formalize Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Given these events, and the broader political developments leading up to them, the series seemed timely and necessary. But the actual contents were intellectually disingenuous, with most authors watering down the definition of fascism in order to fit an identifiably partisan narrative [....]

hmmm, may be a small sign of hope (if they still have "something the matter with them in Kansas," that is)

Using this measure, Norris found that “American scholars on the moderate right and far right report experiencing worsening pressures to be politically correct, limits on academic freedom and a lack of respect for open debate,” compared with the views of moderate and more left-wing scholars:

from

I don't even know what she said to get the reaction, this is all that matters, kudos to her for using tenure as it's supposed to be used instead of being a scaredy cat of the mob:

She self-describes as Paleontologist & liberal arts prof. Posting about science and the things that make me smile and/or scowl. she/her/hers @makeaplanetpod Vermont, USA sites.williams.edu/pac3/

the horror, so ignorantly Amero-centric (as bad as any "ugly American" in the 50's but zero self-awareness about that) and so so utterly racist:

like a giant squid with 20,000 tentacles reaching everywhere and everything:

reminds me of phrenology

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

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.

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?

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