Ambiguous Spaces

2004-10-29T08:50:00.000-05:00

I Stand Accused

Why is it that the best music is difficult to like at first? I recently purchased Elvis Costello's "Get Happy" on the basis of the fact that I like Nick Lowe (who produced some of the tracks). At first, I was a little dissapointed. It's mostly blue eyed soul, circa 1980, sung by a man whose voice I had at first found grating. After several spins on the cd player, however, I'm revising my opinion. The record is great. I appreciate Costello's misanthropy and many of the tracks rock. "Riot Act," "I Stand Accused," and "Secondary Modern" are my current favorites. Best of all, the bonus disc is one of the best that I have ever seen assembled. It has live tracks, alternate versions with dramatically different tempos or instrumentations, as well as songs that didn't make the original record but should have. All in all, you get 50 tracks for about the same price as a normal CD. All of his other early work is packaged in a similar way, which is great. You get the tight mastework and the sprawling (but appealing) mess all in one.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-09-24T10:14:00.000-05:00

Forced Labor

While I'm on the subject, the Washington Post has another article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43473-2004Sep22.html reporting on the latest estimate that "10,000 people are working as forced laborers at any given time across the United States" The report, titled 'Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States,' was released by the University of California at Berkeley's Human Rights Center and the Washington-based anti-slavery group Free the Slaves. I haven't read the report yet, so I can't comment on it, but I will be interested to see what the tiest to immigration are. You can access the report at http://www.hrcberkeley.org/download/hiddenslaves_report.pdf. Hat tip: CIS.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-09-24T10:13:00.000-05:00

That's what I'm talking about . . .

David Cho has an interesting article in the Washinton Post about the results of a survey of day laborers in Fairfax County, VA. Read the whole thing at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41909-2004Sep22.html. Now most of these workers were immigrants. No effort was made to ascertain whether they were documented or not, but the article takes pains to point out that some are likely legal immigrants due to assylum rules and testimony or individuals workers. This article dovetails nicely with the point I was making yesterday. Clearly, many of these workers are able to find jobs that pay a legal (if not reasonable) wage. In fact, overwhelmingly, these workers reported earning more than $5.15 an hour and a sizable percentage earned over $10 an hour. However, as I pointed out yesterday, this informal labor market is clearly open to abuse by employers. Two quick quotes:

"At the same time, 84 percent said they have had problems with their employers. The most frequent issue cited was a lack of breaks. Others complained they were paid less than what was agreed upon, and some said they were not paid at all. Other problems included robbery, police harassment and in some cases violence."

AND

"We are not even covered by the company's insurance when we have work accidents and get injured."

Keep in mind that the numbers interviewed was something like 200, and the reports authors do not make any policy recommendations because of the need for more data.

Hat tip: Center for Immigration Studies (http://www.cis.org/support.html ), a restrictionist group that collects wonderful daily summaries of immigration news.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-09-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

Always a Laborer, Never a Citizen

The above was the title of an article that I read about migrant labor from Mexico in the 1920s. In fact, it was one of the first things that I read on the subject. Unfortunately, I have mislaid the cite, but I seem to recall that it appeared in a collection edited by David Guttierez. The reason that I bring it is that it represents my reall fear about contemporary immigration. Let me say that, in general, I am in favor of liberal immigration policies. In fact, I agree with many of my friends on the right that relatively open borders has provided the best anti-poverty program in US history. Studying immigrants has also given me an admiration in what can be accomplished by even the poorest and "unskilled." Still, the one that I find really worrying is the possible erosion of labor standards that mass immigration somethimes brings. In particular, I am referring to illegal immigration and some guest worker programs in which immigrant workers are denied all three of the basic protections of workers in a free labor society--the right to quit/seek more renumerative employment, the right to organize unions, and the right to basic legal protections. Anything less than this is some sort of quasi-slavery.

The Nation has an article about this very topic. It appears that blacklisting and intimidation of guestworkers has been a problem for North Carolina Tobacco Growers. Now, some progress has been made, but this is the kind of issue that I would like to know more about. Is anyone aware of other sources out there. The Nation article can be found at
http://www.labornet.org/viewpoints/dbacon/guest.htm.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-08-31T10:38:00.000-05:00

New Discoveries

Having recently gone through a Nick Drake appreciation phase (courtesy Musicmatch Jukebox), I'm now on to Nick Lowe, who is actually quite good. As legions of people who are hipper than me have discovered, his work in the 90s was excellent. I wonder why I never discovered it at the time, particularly since I was busy snatching up every alt country CD I could find. I, of course, also endorse his late 70s-early 80s solo work. The Brinsley Schwartz stuff is pretty good too, altough harder to come by.

The upshot of all this is that I have come to realize that stylistically, I don't really appreciate popular music that sounds more modern than mid-80's roots rock. I feel like I should seek out the cutting edge of today's music or at least buy some old Massive Attack CDs, but my heart is just not in it.

Oh well.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-08-05T14:11:00.000-05:00

Ignorance on Display

Sometimes I think the above would be a better title for this blog. I have begun a cautious foray into literary criticism and like just about everyone, I am interested in the odd debate over the "canon." So far, I have read some of Terry Eagleton's work, who seems to argue that literature be replaced with a study of rhetoric. I have also begun to look at Harold Bloom's work, who seems to argue that we can locate a sort of Western Canon by paying attention to which works have proved most influential to subsequent writers. This seems more defensable to me than an apeal to abstract aesthetic standards. Still, it seems likely that determining influence may be a bit circular. How do decide which writers are important enough to bother with tracing their aesthetic geneology. I'ld appreciate any suggestions from folks familiar with literary criticism about where to look next in my attempts to understand the debate over the canon.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-08-05T13:45:00.000-05:00

Little Boxes

As my suburbs class is winding down, I'm begining to question some of the assumptions that I had going into it. Originally, I had designed the course to be interdisciplinary in the sense of looking at the same issues or phenomenon (in this case the suburbs) through different disciplinary lenses. These lenses ended up being history, literature/film, and poltical science. The tie in was the question "how did the post 1945 suburbs change America socially, politically, and culturally." In some ways, the course has been a success, but like all interdisciplinary endeavors, it threatens to require too little attention to each disciplinary assumptions. In particular, I feel like the literature section of the course has suffered, partically because my training is weakest in the area, but also, because it is much different methodologically than social history or political science.

When I designed this course, I specifically did not want it to be an American studies course. That is, I did not want to seemlessly integrate different disciplinary perspectives, nor did I want to rely on cultural studies methods. Instead, I hoped to stress how different discplines could attack a problem in different ways, with different advantages and limitations. This, I think, has come through ok in the parts that focused on history or political science (I also threw in a bit of sociology by throwing in Herbert Gans' _The Levittowners_). Anyway, I would be interested in hearing anyone elses experiences regarding the planning of interdiciplinary courses. See below for a sketch of the course outline:

Week One--Introduction, comparing US and European suburbs
Week Two--Historical Origins of suburbs through gov. subsidy and industry innovations
Week Three-Social life in 1950s mass suburban developments (Levittowns)
Week Four--Early social commentary on suburbs (1950s)
Week Five--The suburban short story (cheever)
Week Six--Feminism and the suburbs
Week Seven--Return of the Surburbs (Suburban film and fiction in the 1990s)
Week Eight--Suburban residence and politics (qualitative investigation)
Week Nine--Suburban residence and politics (quantitative investigation)
Week Ten--Political Consequences of suburban segregation

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-30T14:53:00.000-05:00

History in the Garden

I'm teaching a class on the suburbs right now, and we are on the literature/culture section. I really enjoyed picking out the novels, films, and shortstories for this class--I've read more Cheever, Updike, etc. than I ever thought that I would. As the class progresses, a theme seems to be emerging--the imperviousness of the suburbs to "the world" or historical events. Let me give an example: the reading/films in question consit of _The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit_, Cheever's "The Country Husband," Updike's _Rabbit Redux_, Levin's _Stepford Wives_, and Boyle's _Tortia Curtain_. In each of these works, suburbia resists history--whether it comes in the form of World War Two, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement, or mass immigration. I'm not saying that this was always the reality, but there is certainly a romanitc, almost pastoral sense that history can, and should, be avoided. The irony is, of course, that the suburbs were possible because of transportation technology and the organization of the building industry along mass production lines. The irony of the commuting train bringing Tom Rath or Francis Weed to their pastoral suburban retreat would not be lost on Leo Marx (or Ralph Waldo Emerson for that matter).

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-28T15:33:00.000-05:00

Summer Reading--Help!

This weekend was a working weekend for me. By Sunday afternoon, I was tired of grading, writing tests, and responding to student questions, so I went to the libary to lose myself in a book. For some reason, I was in the mood for a fantasy novel. Unfortunately, with the exceptions of Tolkien, I've never really read a fantasy novel that I liked. Even as a kid, I found Terry Brooks, David Eddings, and folks like that unsatisfying. I read them anyway because I had lots of free time, but by my midteens, I gave up fantasy reading altogether. Since then I've reread LOTR every five years or so and that has satisfied me. For the next few weeks, however, I have more free time than usual, all of which I cannot spend working, and I'm looking for a decent fantasy novel. It needn't be too deep (something along the lines of those Thomas Covenant Books would be fine), but I don't want a retread of LOTR. Any suggestions?

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-27T10:42:00.000-05:00

Raise Up Your Glass, For Good King John

My copy of Shakespeare's collected works begins with the comedies, then goes into the history plays, and ends with the tragedies. I suppose I'm some sort of philistine for not really appreciating The Tempest, but I've decided to skip over the comedies and go right into the history plays. I have heard that many people don't like these, but so far I'm enjoying King John. It has politics and intrigue. The Bastard is a great character. Best of all, I can hear Katherine Hepburn's voice whenever Eleanor speaks. Does anyone know the reputation of this play? Why isn't it performed more often?

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-24T09:38:00.000-05:00

Living Tradition

Slowing, I'm making my way through "the Tempest." I have to say that it is a bit unsatisfying, but perhaps that is because I prefer tragedy to comedy. As usual, I find that my battered copy of Shakespear's plays can't sustain my interest all by themselves, so I've begun to search for something outside of the text to make it meaningful. Reluctantly, I picked up Harold Bloom's _How to Read and Why_. I say reluctantly, because I've always found him rather tiresome as a public intellectual. Still, for the dedicated amateur, this book is a decent introduction to what he calls the "difficult pleasure" of reading. In fact, this describes Shakespeare's work pretty well. I have also found a pretty interesting blog (http://shakespearemag.blogspot.com/). It is interesting to see how the plays keep getting updated in a way that makes there performance a living tradition rather than simply antiquarianism. In some ways, the existence of this sort of tradition makes it irrelevant whether Shakespeare is overrated or not.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-23T12:53:00.000-05:00

LOCKED IN

OK, my reading plans have been sidetracked a little by the unexpectedly immense amount of work that the class I'm teaching requires, but I have continued apace with my reading of _Grand Delusion_. Having progressed about 200 pages in the book, I'm going to back off of my prior assertion a bit. I'm still a bit bothered by the lack of any historiographical discussion in the text or the footnotes. I would even appreciate a bibliographic essay. Still, I've begun the appreciate the strength of the book. It is basically a blow by blow narrative of the the Government's policy making process in regard to Indochina. In particular, I'm intrigued by the argument that the Republican criticism of the Truman "loss of China" and the US participation in the Korean war hamstrung the Eisenhower administration in it's efforts to keep the French from pulling out of Indochina. The result was that the Republicans adopted the containment policy that they had campaigned against in 1952, despite the fact that they controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. I don'
t believe in historical analogies, but this does suggest some basic constraints that electoral politics imposes on the foriegn policy makers even after they win at the poles.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

Original Quagmire

Finally, I'm reading Robert Mann's _A Grand Delusion: America's Descent into Vietnam_. I love these narrative histories. If they're done right, you get the sense of the decisions that people had to make in the past without the benefit of hindsight. In the past, I have thought that John Lukacs does a good job of showing the contingency of events in works like _The Duel_ despite his use of vague concepts like "character," which I usually find tiresome. So far (3 chapters in), I find Mann's book to be well written and engaging. Glancing at the footnotes, however, is not always reassuring. Like many journalists, he simply doesn't address the complicated historiography that exists. The bits about McCarthyism seem especially one dimensional. Still, the parts that I have read so far are prologues to his real story, so perhaps the research becomes more in depth as the book goes along.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-07T21:43:00.000-05:00

Ghosts and Savages

The fourth book that I am reading is Steven Pinker's _The Blank Slate_. One chapter in, it looks like he is attacking a strawman. Still, my experience with "human nature" arguments in my graduate training was that they should be dismissed in favor of social constructionism. That is, when "human nature" was mentioned at all. Usually, there was an implicit assumption that questions having to do with human nature were not really the provenance of history so we didn't have to deal with them. Still, I waded through Judith Butler, so I feel obligated to get the other perspective. It always bothered me that gender studies that we read didn't really address evolutionary biology, even to refute it. In fact, after reading _Gender Trouble_ I concluded that being neither a philosopher, nor an evolutionary biologist, I was uniquely unqualified to judge Butler's arguments. Luckily, in my own research, whether sex is constructed or is natural doesn't come up since all of my subjects assumed that it was natural.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-07T21:33:00.000-05:00

This is the Life We've Chosen

The third book that I have started is Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_. Despite early undergraduate sucess in Russian History, I know little of the literature. Alas, this book was recommended by Carmelo Soprano's would-be psychiatrist in one of the early episodes (he refused to accept her "blood money"). The introduction by Joseph Frank that prefaces my copy of the novel was helpful in putting the novel in context, especially the insight into Dostoevsky's inovative use of third person perspective that is nonetheless attached to one central character. I'm excited about this one. Already in the first chapter, I'm impressed by Dostoevsky's description of what it's like to be cut off from other people--the self absorption, inappropriate responses to external events, and the eventual avoidance of acquaintances.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-07T21:25:00.000-05:00

To Ebb, Hereditary Sloth Instructs Me

The second book that I'm reading is Shakespeare's "The Tempest." My knowledge of this play comes from Leo Marx's discussion of it in _The Machine in the Garden_, where Marx refers to it as the first bit of American Literature. To asuage my feelings of inadequacy in not being familiar with the classics, I'm trying to get through every Shakespeare play in the next year or so. We'll see.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

Book One: The Old Testament

The first thing that I am trying to get through is the Old Testament. I was raised a Christian, so I'm familiar with this text, but I have always read it in the past as a proof text for doctrine--almost like an oracle where every passage is as important as every other. This time, I'm trying to read it as literature. To prevent getting bogged down in the boring bits in Leviticus or Numbers, I have decided to read three different books at once: one historic/mythological, one prophetic, and one poetic. I'm starting with Genesis, Psalms, and Isaiah. In some ways, Genesis is the most interesting, if most familiar. It strikes me how God is portrayed as being physically present--walking with, and talking with, and even contending with his people. Still, I'm familiar with most of these stories. What intrigues me the most so far is the first few chapters of Isaiah. I had hoped to read the Old Testament as a text in itself, but after reading a couple of chapters, I couldn't resist and dug up an old Lutheran Commentary. According to the authors, Isaiah is the Christian bible in miniature, divided into one chapter for every book of the bible. I'ld be interested to learn Isaiah's place in Judaism. Isaiah is also noteworthy as the prophet with the biggest vocabulary and already I have encountered several images like "beating swords in ploughshares" (of course I'm reading the King James Version). Next time I'll post a quote.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-06-07T21:06:00.000-05:00

Books on My Shelf

One of my vices is beginning books and not finishing them, not because they are not interesting, but because there is something else that I just have to start reading. The upshot of this habit is that I have begun many of the classics, but the only time I finish them is when I'm on vacation and can devote enough time to finishing them before my interest wains (sic). But not this time! I have decided to read several books at once, a little at a time. If my theory is correct, I will also gain the added bonus of making comparisons between them.

Here's how it works: I read one or two chapters and then pick out a quote that grabs me (because it embodies an important point, or is simply poetic, funny, or clever). I'm going to try to post at least one quote a day. Of the five things that I'm reading, I out to be able to come up with one interesting passage.

Posted by Catfish DuBois

2004-04-13T14:06:00.000-05:00

Metaphor, Theory, and History

Towards the end of his 2001 critique of "whiteness studies," Eric Arnesen charges that scholars used "Whiteness" as simply a metaphor for social status or ranking. Arnesen's point, was that whiteness theory added nothing to earlier attempts to understand white racial identity. In its present (2001) state, whiteness studies were empiricallycally barren and undertheorized. It might be an attractive metaphor (all immigrants had to "become white"), but ultimately, it flattened out the past in an oversimplistic and inaccurate way.

At the time, I thought that Arnesen's critique was devastating. I still do. But lately, it has me thinking about the common way that metaphosubstitutesbstitues for theory in historical writing. In a sense, we historians are an untheoretical lot. We simply aren't trained for it. We don't (usually) have any pretensions to THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Mostly, we try to go into the archives with a fairly simple question, find a good hook to hang the evidence on, "get the story right," and tie it to some important issue. Sometimes this might be related to contemporary issues. Other times, it might even be tied to some kind of theory (see efforts in the 1970s to determine the precise moment that the United States became CAPITALIST). But even the most sophisticated theorists rarely go about using theory in the rigorous manner that (good) social scientists do. You can't. Historians are expected to be comprehensive in a way that I think social scientists aren't. Not consulting certain archives, records, or other sources can be damning, regardless of how good your evidence or how elegant your argument (quantitative historians seem largely exempt from this rule, probably because most historians don't know enough statistics to engage their arguments in the first place). The upshot is that historians, even devotees of Foucault, or (in the elder days) Marx mostly rely on metaphors to do the theoretical work for them. This has many advantages. A metaphor, particularly if it's catchy, can double as the "pre-colon" title of a book or article (the post-colon part tells what the book is actually about). This, of course, has the added bonus of the book's argument doubling as the title. Even the best researched books, thus, get reduced to their metaphor (think "imagined communities", "the middle ground," or "the wages of whiteness").

I bring this up because it relates to the title of this blog and, incidentally, my dissertation. At a fairly early stage in my academic career, I decided that I was going to study immigrants in the South and the way that they adjusted to the color line. This led me to a "how Italains became white in Birmingham" MA thesis, and eventially a (still in progress) dissertation on the same subject. Though the topic was the same, it was clear, even as I wrote my MA thesis, that the argument of the dissertation would have to be different. What I have settled on is the metaphor of "Ambiguous Spaces." The idea is that immigrants to the South often set up places like stores in black neighborhoods or lived in racially transitional areas where the rules of the color line were often ignored. My dissertation follows the rise and fall of these places and the effect that they had on race relations in Birmingham. In time honored fashion, I also realized that my metaphor can be ripped from its original context and be used to describe my professional activities--working in an interdisciplinary undergraduate program where boundaries between disciplines are blurred and ignored. So this blog is my attempt to combine my efforts to finish my dissertation with my present job (which I like, but wish it offered more opportunities to discuss some of the big questions like "what does disciplinary mean?" Hopefully, I'll also get a chance to post some random book and cd reviews. Cheers.

2004-04-11T23:07:00.000-05:00

Hi,

This blog is sort of a catch-all for my interests, mostly academic and professional. It should function as part dissertation journal, part comment on the fields of distance education and interdisciplinary studies (from the perspective of a skeptical advocate). Most posts will inevitably be various musings on subjects which I don't really have a forum to discuss in my everyday life. Great fun of course.