SO! Amplifies: The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

Breaking down the paywalls of academia can take many forms, but lifelong learning collectives centered around a shared passion may perhaps be one of the most fun.  The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club is an international group of people connected by a love of blues and jazz culture, who read books together and tune in—free of charge—via Youtube Live to lectures and Q and As from experts and scholars from around the United States.  Literature scholars such as Jessica Teague have discussed jazz poetry and August Wilson’s blues influence; dancer and scholar Dr. Fenella Kennedy has offered an online mini-workshop and discussion forum; and blues musician Tad Walters has played music and discussed the Delta Blues and its origins, among other lectures. All of these lectures are available on the Book Club’s website and on YouTube for anyone to enjoy.

An open-access scholarly project founded in 2014, The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club (BJDBC) was the brainchild of Sara Cherny, Damon Stone, Devona Cartier, Brenda Russell, and Kelly Porter (no longer a participating member).  This team envisioned a free online space where people could learn about and discuss the history of blues, jazz, and African American dances, enriching both their own knowledge and the knowledge of the blues and jazz groups in which they participated. The Book Club’s current administrator, Chelsea Adams—PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with a specialty in blues and African American dances in literature—took over operations in 2016.

Since then, Adams has worked hard to create a space where all blues and jazz lovers could access new scholarship on both the music and the dances done to that music, building a website to better facilitate the growing global group.  Adams even coordinates live lectures at times that work the best to connect audiences who regularly chime in or visit the BJDBC website from Australia, England, Korea, Spain, France, Canada, Brazil, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, China and Hong Kong, among other places.

A Blues and Jazz Book Club live lecture by Dr. Jessica Teague, UNLV English

Recently, the Book Club has expanded to include multiple offerings for both scholar and enthusiast.  One addition is quarterly feature articles, interviews, and community spotlights on blues and jazz topics. International dance instructor Julie Brown recently wrote the article “A Landscape of Slow Drag,” cataloguing and exploring how scholars and dancers have described the partnered blues idiom dance. Also featured is a never-before-published interview with Joe McQueen, the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame inductee and Ogden, Utah’s King of Jazz.

Other feature articles have been spotlights on community engagements, literary criticism, and even a how-to on how to dive into research on blues and jazz topics. Practicioner and dance historian Damon Stone’s  “A Brief Introduction to Savoy Walk,”   Dr. Caryl Loney-McFarlane’s “‘Inside Nothing’: The Silent Protest March in Tony Morrison’s Jazz and Dr. Licia Morrow Hendricks’s  “A Dog Named Blue: Song as Patrilineal Legacy in August Wilson’s Fences have all been popular pieces among group members and beyond.  The website will soon publish an article all about Barbara Morrison‘s work in LA for the California Blues and Jazz Museum and the charity event called Signifyin’ Blues that raises money for her museum (forthcoming June 15th, 2019). And, in September 2019, Pat Taylor will be writing our third feature for the year on her work and life as a jazz dance choreographer.

Start Jookin’ with the Blues and Jazz Book Club this Summer!

The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club’s signature offering is of course its quarterly book readings, where groups around the globe read together.  Currently, we are reading Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition by Adam Gussow, which we will finish during the first week of July 2019 (access the schedule here).  Should you want to join us to read in 2019, future offerings include Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formation in African-American Culture by Katrina Hazzard-Gordon (Summer 2019; start date July 21), Moanin’ at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin’ Wolf  by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman (Fall 2019; start date September 15), and a blues-inspired novel for December 2019, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (December 1). For the full 2019 reading list, click here.

Furthermore, the group’s website is a hub that also offers new reading lists and watch lists, including ones on African American history (and soon to include updated lists for blues and jazz music, and African American dance) and a discussion questions archive, where readers can find past discussion questions for previous books and films that they can access for their own thought or to read and discuss these books with others.  Our Facebook page not only has regular posts about not only the Book Club, but also shares other research, news and information on blues and jazz around the United States, as does our Facebook Group.  

The JBDBC will be reading Moanin’ at Midnight this Fall!

“Open access groups like Book Club offer a friendly environment to learn how to approach academic literature,” Book Club Organizer Adams says, “while enjoying gaining more knowledge about their hobbies and interests. It’s a form of scholarly outreach that I think is vital if we truly believe in the idea that our research can make a difference outside of the academy.

Groups like this are important because they offer guided access to scholarship and literature to people who for one reason or another do not have the opportunity to learn in formal academic environments or other professional institutions. Scholarly literature is a specific and often intimidating genre to tackle alone, even if someone is interested in learning more about a topic.”

And the engagements the Book Club has are rich and multifaceted.  “My favorite experience with a live lecture,” Adams remembers, “was with Dr. Kennedy, when they demonstrated dances out of Jean and Marshall Stearns’ diagrams from their book Jazz Dance. Watching the group actually learn how to dance some of these dances listed in the book was a joy.”

In April 2018, the Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club announced the goal to provide two yearly scholarships: a Community Learning Scholarship for blues and jazz events to bring out a scholar, musician, or practitioner to teach about blues or jazz culture and history, and another for an individual with financial need to attend an event with a blues or jazz history and culture focus or to perform research. To provide these scholarships, the Book Club relies solely on community donations. To date, they have been able to raise the money to fund one Community Learning Scholarship, which will be open for applications starting in August of 2019.

If you would like to participate in the Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club, please check out our website:  bluesjazzbookclub.com. We accept abstract submissions for feature articles on a year-round basis, and have multiple volunteer positions available, from one-time positions like guest lecturer to rolling positions such as book discussion leader. If you would like to support the open-access project goals but do not have time to volunteer, we always welcome donations to the cause!

Featured Image from the Blues and Jazz Book Club, “A Landscape of Slow Drag,” 1925/Published 1961, Info Likely from Harlem, NY Dancers.

Currently a PhD candidate in English at UNLV, Chelsea Adams focuses her studies on African American literature, blues and jazz music, and African American dance. She writes about minority culture representation in literature, with a focus of representation of black musicians, dancers, and the art forms they produce. She also runs the Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club, an international online book club project, to offer the public open access information about the history of blues, jazz, and black dances. You can learn more about Chelsea and her work at cjuneadams.com

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:tape reel

SO! Amplifies: Memoir Mixtapes–Kaitlyn Liu

SO! Amplifies: Cities and Memory–Stuart Fowkes

SO! Amplifies: Feminatronic

 

Amsterdam Design Debat, @Droog, 28 mei 2019 17.00

Hoewel we massaal bezig zijn met ontspullen, en we dus niet zitten te wachten op nog weer een nieuwe theepot of een andere stoel, groeit de aandacht voor design. Het label design wordt letterlijk overal opgeplakt. Wat is er aan de hand? Waarom is design zo populair?

Dat is de vraag achter het Amsterdam Design Debat, dat op dinsdag 28 Mei 2019 @Droog zal plaatsvinden. Bij binnenkomst worden deelnemers en publiek ingedeeld in verschillende vakken, publiek mag zelf kiezen:

Design voor kunst en discours

Design voor creatieve industrie en economie

Design voor een betere wereld

Alles om ons heen is design. Er is over nagedacht. En beter nadenken kan de oplossing zijn voor het dilemma dat veel mensen voelen: aan de ene kant de noodzaak of zelfs de behoefte om te blijven consumeren, aan de andere kant de zorg over het milieu, de klimaatverandering of ons privéleven.

Wie kiest voor een soberder leven, voor ‘ontspullen’, mag hogere eisen stellen aan wat hij overhoudt. Wie zich ergert aan de drukte in de stad, zou op zoek kunnen gaan naar een slimmere inrichting van zijn omgeving. Wie teveel kleren heeft, is wellicht geïnteresseerd in productiemethoden voor hergebruik. En wie zijn mening wil uitdragen zoekt naar orginele vormen van visuele communicatie.

We signaleren ook steeds meer nieuwe vormen van design. Het waaiert uit en zo bestaat sinds enige tijd het begrip Design Thinking. In de jaren 90 werd dit begrip geintroduceerd als een methode voor onderzoek en proces op het gebied van innovatie. Maar inmiddels heeft Design Thinking zich gemanifesteerd in de wereld van business, management en marketing. Een andere vorm is Design Fiction. Het wordt ook wel Design for Debate genoemd of speculatief design. Het gaat over het maken van prototypes, het is een soort oefenen voor de toekomst met nieuwe ideeën. We kunnen producten en situaties perfect simuleren met nieuwe technologie.

Maar de meest populaire vorm van design tegenwoordig is het design voor een betere wereld. Ook al was je eerst een vervuiler, het is nooit te laat om iets goeds te doen. Massaal worden designprogramma’s ontwikkelt die oplossingen kunnen bieden voor het klimaatprobleem en andere bedreigingen voor de aarde.

Het Amsterdam Design debat wordt georganiseerd omdat we benieuwd zijn naar de onderlinge verbanden tussen verschillende vormen van design, de toekomst en de betekenis van design als vorm van kunst.

Amsterdam Design Debat @Droog, Staalstraat 7 Amsterdam, dinsdag 28 Mei 2019. Aanvang 17.00 uur, inloop 16.30 uur.

Contact: info@imagesociety.nl

www.selfdesign.nl

Deelnemers:

Jasper van Kuijk (cabaretier en columnist), Yuri Veerman (ontwerper en performer), Anja Groten (ontwerper Hackers en Designers), Caroline Nevejan (wetenschapper, Chief Science Officer Amsterdam), Nikki Gonnissen (directeur Thonik/president AGI), Jurgen Bey (directeur Sandberg Instituut), Richard van der Laken (ontwerper, directeur What Design Can Do), Hans Gubbels (directeur Cube Design Museum), Ruben Pater (designer), Mark van Iterson (Heineken Design), Tessa de Boer (Maison the Faux), Angelique Spaninks (MU), Marleen Stikker (Waag Society), Roosje Klap (designer), Geke van Dijk (STBY), Ben Schouten (HvA), Dirk van Weelden (schrijver), Koert van Mensvoort (Next Nature), Luna Maurer (Moniker), Kim de Groot (Mona Lisa’s), Carolyn Straus (Slowlab), Guus Beumer (Het Nieuwe Instituut)

Moderator: Dagan Cohen (Social Inc, What Design Can Do Challenge)

Het Amsterdam Design Debat is een initiatief van Mieke Gerritzen en Geert Lovink. Met dank aan het Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Stichting Droog, Stimuleringsfonds voor Creatieve Industrie, The Image Society en het Institute of Network Cultures.

What counts in research? Dysfunction in knowledge creation & moving beyond

One of the long-term challenges to transitioning scholarly communication to open access is reliance on bibliometrics. Many authors and organizations are working to address this challenge. The purpose of this post is to share some highlights of my work in progress, a book chapter (preprint) designed to explain the current state of bibliometrics in the context of a critique of global university rankings. Some reflections in brief that are new and relevant to advocates of open access and changes in evaluation of scholarly work follow.

  • Impact:it is not logical to equate impact with quality, and further, it is dangerous to do so. Most approaches to evaluation of scholarly work assume that impact is a good thing, an indicator of quality research. I argue that this reflects a major logical flaw, and a dangerous one at that. We should be asking whether it makes sense for an individual research study (as opposed to weight of evidence gained and confirmed over many studies) should have impact. If impact is good and more impact is better, then the since-refuted study that equated vaccination with autism must be an exceptionally high quality study, whether measured by traditional citations or the real-world impact of the return of diseases such as measles. I argue that this is not a fluke, but rather a reasonable expectation of reward systems that favour innovation, not caution.  Irreproducible research, in this sense, is not a fluke but rather a logical outcome of current evaluation of scholarly work.
  • New metrics (or altmetrics) serve many purposes and should be developed and used, but should be avoided in the context of evaluating the quality of scholarship to avoid bias and manipulation. It should obvious that metrics that go beyond traditional academic citations are likely to reflect and amplify existing social biases (e.g. gender, ethnicity), and non-academic metrics such as tweets are in addition subject to manipulation by interested parties including industry and special interest groups (e.g. big pharma, big oil, big tobacco).
  • New metrics are likely to change scholarship, but not necessarily in the ways anticipated by the open access movement. For example, replacement of the journal-level citation impact by article-level citations is already very well advanced, with Elsevier in a strong position to dominate this market. Scopus metrics data is already in use by university rankings and is being sold by Elsever to the university market.
  • It is possible to evaluate scholarly research without recourse to metrics. The University of Ottawa’s collective agreement with full-time faculty reflects a model that not only avoids the problems of metrics, but is an excellent model for change in scholarly communication as it is recognized that scholarly works may take many forms. For details, see the APUO Collective Agreement 2018 – 2021 section 23.3.1 – excerpt:

23.3.1. General Whenever this agreement calls for an assessment of a Faculty Member’s scholarly activities, the following provisions shall apply.

a) The Member may submit for assessment articles, books or contributions to books, the text of presentations at conferences, reports, portions of work in progress, and, in the case of literary or artistic creation, original works and forms of expression

b) Works may be submitted in final published form, as galley proofs, as preprints of material to be published, or as final or preliminary drafts. Material accepted for publication shall be considered as equivalent to actually published material…

h) It is understood that since methods of dissemination may vary among disciplines and individuals, dissemination shall not be limited to publication in refereed journals or any particular form or method.

There may be other models; if so, I would be interested in hearing about them, please add a comment to this post or send an e-mail.

The full book chapter preprint is available here:  https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39088

Excerpt

This chapter begins with a brief history of scholarly journals and the origins of bibliometrics and an overview of how metrics feed into university rankings. Journal impact factor (IF), a measure of average citations to articles in a particular journal, was the sole universal standard for assessing quality of journals and articles until quite recently. IF has been widely critiqued; even Clarivate Analytics, the publisher of the Journal Citation Reports / IF, cautions against use of IF for research assessment. In the past few years there have been several major calls for change in research assessment: the 2012 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the 2015 Leiden Manifesto (translated into 18 languages) and the 2017 Science Europe New vision for meaningful research assessment. Meanwhile, due to rapid change in the underlying technology, practice is changing far more rapidly than most of us realize. IF has already largely been replaced by item-level citation data from Elsevier’s Scopus in university rankings. Altmetrics illustrating a wide range of uses including but moving beyond citation data, such as downloads and social media use are prominently displayed on publishers’ websites. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of how these metrics work at present, to move beyond technical critique (reliability and validity of metrics) to introduce major flaws in the logic behind metrics-based assessment of research, and to call for even more radical thought and change towards a more qualitative approach to assessment. The collective agreement of the University of Ottawa is presented as one model for change.

 

Open Book Publishers’ statement on Knowledge Unlatched and the Open Research Library

On 16 May 2019, Knowledge Unlatched announced the beta launch of a new hosting platform for Open Access books, the Open Research Library (ORL). Our books are a prominent part of this nascent project, both on the website and in the marketing associated with the launch, and this, together with Knowledge Unlatched’s claim that they are ‘working with publishers and libraries worldwide’, might give the impression that we are actively participating in and endorsing the platform. However this is not the case: we were not informed or consulted about this project at any stage; we were not told that our books would feature on this platform; and we do not support ORL. In fact we have grave concerns about its approach and business model, and those of Knowledge Unlatched (KU), which we will set out here.

Continue reading "Open Book Publishers’ statement on Knowledge Unlatched and the Open Research Library"

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening

Pedagogy at the convergence of sound studies and rhetoric/composition seems to exist in a quantum state—both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  This realization simultaneously enlightens and frustrates. The first page of Google results for “sound studies” and “writing instruction” turns up tons of pedagogy; almost all of it is aimed at instructors, pedagogues, and theorists, or contextualized in the form of specific syllabi. The same is true for similar searches—such as “sound studies” + “rhetoric and composition”—but one thing that remains constant is that Steph Ceraso, and her new book Sounding Composition (University of Pittsburgh Press: 2018) are always the first responses. This is because Ceraso’s book is largely the first to look directly into the deep territorial expanses of both sound studies and rhet/comp, which in themselves are more of a set of lenses for ever-expanding knowledges than deeply codified practices, and she dares to bring them together, rather than just talking about it. This alone is an act of academic bravery, and it works well.

Ceraso established her name early in the academic discourse surrounding digital and multimodal literacy and composition, and her work has been nothing short of groundbreaking. Because of her scholarly endeavors and her absolute passion for the subject, it is no surprise that some of us have waited for her first book with anticipation. Sounding Composition is a multivalent, ambitious work informs the discipline on many fronts. It is an act of ongoing scholarship that summarizes the state of the fields of digital composition and sonic rhetorics, as well as a pedagogical guide for teachers and students alike.

Through rigorous scholarship and carefully considered writing, Ceraso manages to take many of the often-nervewracking buzzwords in the fields of digital composition and sonic rhetorics and breathe poetic life into them. Ceraso engages in the scholarship of her field by demystifying the its jargon, making accessible to a wide variety of audiences the scholar-specific language and concepts she sets forth and expands from previous scholarship (though it does occasionally feel trapped in the traditional alphabetic prison of academic communication).. Her passion as an educator and scholar infuses her work, and Ceraso’s ontology re-centers all experience–and thus the rhetoric and praxis of communicating that experience–back into the whole body. Furthermore, Ceraso’s writing makes the artificial distinctions between theory and practice dissolve into a mode of thought that is simultaneously conscious and affective, a difficult feat given her genre and medium of publication. Academic writing, especially in the form of a university press book, demands a sense of linearity and fixity that lacks the affordances of some digital formats in terms of envisioning a more organic flow between ideas. However, while the structure of her book broadly follows a standard academic structure, within that structure lies a carefully considered and deftly-organized substructure.

Sounding Composition begins with a theory-based introduction in which Ceraso lays the book’s framework in terms of theory and structure. Then proceeds the chapter on the affective relationship between sound and the whole body. The next chapter investigates the relation of sonic environments and the body, followed by a chapter on our affective relationship with consumer products, in particular the automobile, perhaps the most American of factory-engineered soundscapes. Nested in these chapters is a rhetorical structure that portrays a sense of movement, but rather than moving from the personal out into spatial and consumer rhetorics, Sounding Composition’s chapter structure moves from an illustrative example that clearly explains the point Ceraso makes, into the theories she espouses, into a “reverberation” or a pedagogical discussion of an assignment that helps students better grasp and respond to the concepts providing the basis for her theory. This practice affords Ceraso meditation on her own practices as well as her students’ responses to them, perfectly demonstrating the metacognitive reflection that so thoroughly informs rhet/comp theory and praxis.

Steph Ceraso and students share a “sonic meal.” Photo by Marlayna Demond, UMBC.

Chapter one, “Sounding Bodies, Sounding Experience: (Re)Educating the Senses,” decenters the ears as the sole site of bodily interaction with sound. Ceraso focuses on Dame Evelyn Glennie, a deaf percussionist, who Ceraso claims can “provide a valuable model for understanding listening as a multimodal event” (29) because these practices expand listening to faculties that many, especially the auditorially able, often ignore. Dame Glennie theorizes, and lives, sound from the tactile ways its vibrations work on the whole body. From the new, more comprehensive understanding of sound Dame Glennie’s deafness affords, we can then do the work of “unlearning” our ableist auditory and listening practices, allowing all a more thorough reckoning with the way sound enables us to understand our environments.

The ability to transmit, disrupt, and alter the vibrational aspects of sound are key to understanding how we interact with sound in the world, the focus of the second chapter in Sounding Composition. In “Sounding Space, Composing Experience: The Ecological Practice of Sound Composition,” Ceraso situates her discussion in the interior of the building where she actually composed the chapter. The Common Room in the Cathedral of Learning, on the University of Pittsburgh’s main campus, is vast, ornate, and possessed of a sense of quiet which “seems odd for a bustling university space”(69).  As Ceraso discovered, the room itself was designed to be both vast and quiet, as the goal was to produce a space that both aesthetically and physically represented the solemnity of education.

Cathedral of Learning Ceiling and Columns, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Image by Flickr User Matthew Paulson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

To ensure a taciturn sense of stillness, the building was constructed with acoustic tiles disguised as stones. These tiles serve to not only hearken back to solemn architecture but also to  absorb sound and lend a reverent air of stillness, despite the commotion. The deeply intertwined ways in which we interact with sound in our environment is crucial to further developing Ceraso’s affective sonic philosophy. This lens enables Ceraso to draw together the multisensory ways sound is part of an ecology of the material aspects of the environment with the affective ways we interact with these characteristics. Ceraso focuses on the practices of acoustic designers to illustrate that sound can be manipulated and revised, that sound itself is a composition, a key to the pedagogy she later develops.

Framing the discussion of sound as designable—a media manipulated for a desired impact and to a desired audience–serves well in introducing the fourth chapter, which examines products designed to enhance consumer experience.  “Sounding Cars, Selling Experience: Sound Design in Consumer Products,” moves on to discuss the in-car experience as a technologically designed site of multisensory listening. Ceraso chose the automobile as the subject of this chapter because of the expansive popularity of the automobile, but also because the ecology of sound inside the car is the product of intensive engineering that is then open to further manipulation by the consumer. Whereas environmental sonic ecologies can be designed for a desired effect, car audio is subject to a range of intentional manipulations on the listener. Investigating and theorizing the consumer realm not only opens the possibilities for further theorization, but also enhances the possibility that we might be more informed in our consumer interactions. Understanding the material aspects of multimodal sound also further informs and shapes disciplinary knowledge at the academic level, framing the rhetorical aspect of sonic design as product design so that it focuses on, and caters to, particular audiences for desired effects.

Heading Up the Mountain, Image by Flickr User Macfarland Maclean,(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Sounding Composition is a useful and important book because it describes a new rhetoric and because of how it frames all sound as part of an affective ontology.  Ceraso is not the first to envision this ontology, but she is the first to provide carefully considered composition pedagogy that addresses what this ontology looks like in the classroom, which are expressed in the sections in Sounding Composition marked as “Reverberations.”   To underscore the body as the site of lived experience following chapter two, Ceraso’s “reverberation” ask students to think of an experience in which sound had a noticeable effect on their bodies and to design a multimodal composition that translates this experience to an audience of varying abledness. Along with the assignment, students must write an artist statement describing the project, reflecting on the composition process, and explaining each composer’s choices.

To encourage students to think of sound and space and the affective relationship between the two following chapter three, Ceraso developed a digital soundmap on soundcities.com and had students upload sounds to it, while also producing an artist statement similar to the assignment in the preceding chapter. Finally, in considering the consumer-ready object in composition after the automobile chapter, students worked in groups to play with and analyze a sound object, and to report back on the object’s influence on them physically and emotionally. After they performed this analysis, students are then tasked with thinking of a particular audience and creating a new sonic object or making an existing sonic object better, and to prototype the product and present it to the class. Ceraso follows each of these assignment descriptions with careful metacognitive reflection and revision.

Steph Ceraso interviewed by Eric Detweiler in April 2016, host of Rhetoricity podcast. They talked sound, pedagogy, accessibility, food, senses, design, space, earbuds, and more. You can also read a transcript of this episode.

While Sounding Composition contributes to scholarship on many levels, it’s praxis feels the most compelling to me. Ceraso’s love for the theory and pedagogy is clear–and contagious—but when she describes the growth and evolution of her assignments in practice, we are able to see the care that she has for students and their individual growth via sound rhetoric. To Ceraso, the sonic realm is not easily separated from any of the other sensory realms, and it is an overlooked though vitally important part of the way we experience, navigate, and make sense of the world. Ceraso’s aim to decenter the primacy of alphabetic text in creating, presenting, and formulating knowledge might initially appear somewhat contradictory, but the old guard will not die without a fight. It could be argued that this work and the knowledge it uncovers might be better represented outside of an academic text, but that might actually be the point. Multimodal composition is not the rule of the day and though the digital is our current realm, text is still the lingua franca. Though it may seem like it will never arrive, Ceraso is preparing us for the many different attunements the future will require.

Featured Image: Dame Evelyn Glennie Performing in London in 2011, image by Flickr User PowderPhotography (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Airek Beauchampis an Assistant Professor of English at Arkansas State University and Editor-at Large for Sounding Out! His research interests include sound and the AIDS crisis, as well as swift and brutal punishment for any of the ghouls responsible for the escalation of the crisis in favor of political or financial profit. He fell in love in Arkansas, which he feels lends undue credence to a certain Rhianna song. 

tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Queer Timbres, Queered Elegy: Diamanda Galás’s The Plague Mass and the First Wave of the AIDS Crisis– Airek Beauchamp

Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music -Carlo Patrão

Sounding Our Utopia: An Interview With Mileece–Maile Colbert

Vocal Anguish, Disinformation, and the Politics of Eurovision 2016

Eurovision—that televisual song pageant where pop, camp, and geopolitics annually collide—started last week. This year’s competition is hosted in Tel Aviv, and continues a recent trend in the competition in which geopolitical controversy threatens to overshadow pop spectacle. Activists accuse the Israeli government of exploiting Eurovision as part of a longstanding government PR strategy of  “pinkwashing”: championing Israel as a bastion of LGBT+ tolerance in order to muddle perceptions of its violent and dehumanizing policies towards Palestinians. The BDS movement mobilized a campaign to boycott Eurovision. Reigning Eurovision champion Netta Barzilai, echoing many pro-Israel voices (as well as celebrities concerned about “subverting the spirit of the contest”), referred to the boycott efforts as “spreading darkness.”

Protesters outside BBC Broadcasting House demonstrate against the 2019 Eurovision song contest being held in Israel. Photograph: Penelope Barritt/Rex/Shutterstock

While this year’s competition opened already mired in contention, I’m going to listen back to the controversial winning song of the 2016 contest, whose media frenzy peaked in its aftermath. That year’s champion, a pop singer of Crimean Tatar heritage who goes by the mononym Jamala, represented Ukraine with a song called “1944.” Just two years before, Crimea had been annexed from Ukraine by Russia following a dubious referendum. Some Crimean Tatars—the predominantly Sunni-Muslim Turkic-language minority group of Crimea—fled to mainland Ukraine following the Russian annexation, viewing the Ukrainian state as the lesser threat; many of those that stayed continue to endure a deteriorating human rights climate (though there are some Crimean Tatars who have bought into—and who reap benefits from—the new Russian administration of the peninsula.)

Screen Shot 2019-05-07 at 6.50.50 PM

Screen capture from Stopfake.org

Jamala’s very presence in the contest inevitably evoked the hot geopolitics of the moment. Her victory angered many Russians, and the subject of Eurovision became fodder for conspiracy theories as well as a target of disinformation campaigns waged online and in Russian-influenced media in Ukraine.  In much of the Western European and North American media, the song was breathlessly interpreted as an assertion of indigenous rights and a rebuke to the perceived cultural genocide enacted against Crimean Tatars by Russian state power.

In the wake of her victory, many commentators described Jamala as giving voice not only to the repressed group of Crimean Tatar indigenes living in the Russian-annexed territory of Crimea, but to threatened indigenous populations around the world (for better or worse). But indeed, it was not only her metaphorical voice but the sound of vocal anguish that intensified the song’s effectiveness in the contest and made it relevant well beyond the specific geopolitical bog shared by Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians, and Russians. Specifically, the timbre, breath, and dynamic force of Jamala’s voice communicated this anguish—particularly during the virtuosic non-lexical—wordless—bridge of the song. Despite her expertly controlled vocal performance during the dramatic bridge, Jamala’s voice muddies the boundaries of singing and crying, of wailing from despair and yelling in defiant anger. To pilfer from J.L. Austin’s famous formulation, what made Jamala’s performative utterance felicitous to some and infelicitous to others was as much the sound of her voice as the words that she uttered. Put simply, on the bridge of “1944,” Jamala offers a lesson in how to do things with sound.

“Netta from Israel Wins the Eurovision Song Contest” by Flickr User David Jones, CC BY 2.0

Some background: the world’s longest-running televised spectacle of song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest began in 1956 with the peaceful mandate of bringing greater harmony (sorry not sorry) to post-war Europe. Competitors—singers elected to represent a country with a single, three-minute song each—and voters come from the member countries of the European Broadcasting Union. The EBU is not geographically restricted to Europe. Currently, some fifty countries send contestants, including states such as Israel (last year’s winner), Azerbaijan, and Australia. Many of the rules that govern Eurovision have changed in its 62-year history, including restrictions governing which language singers may use. Today, it is common to hear a majority of songs with at least some text sung in English, including verses of “1944.” Some rules, though, have been immutable, including the following: songs must have words (although the words need not be sensical). All vocal sounds must be performed live, including background vocals. Voters, be they professional juries or the public—who can vote today by telephone, SMS, or app—cannot vote for their own nation’s competitor (though unproven conspiracy theories about fans crossing national borders in order to vote in defiance of this rule have, at times, flourished.) Finally, reaching back to its founding mandate defining Eurovision as a “non-political event,” songs are not permitted to contain political (or commercial) messages.

Both the title and lyrics of Jamala’s “1944” refer to the year that Crimean Tatars were brutally deported from Crimea under Stalinist edict. Indicted wholesale as “enemies of the Soviet people,” the NKVD rounded up the entire population of Crimean Tatars—estimated to be some 200,000 people—packed them into cattle cars, and transported them thousands of miles away, mostly to Uzbekistan and other regions of Central Asia. The Soviet regime cast this as a “humanitarian resettlement” intended to bring Crimean Tatars closer to other Muslim, Turkic-language populations. However, Crimean Tatars, who estimate that up to two-thirds of their population perished before arriving in Central Asia, consider this a genocidal act. They were not given the right to return to Crimea until the late 1980s. So, through clear reference to a twentieth-century political trauma with consequences that stretch into the present, “1944” was not the feel-good fluff of classic Eurovision.

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“Coin in memory of the genocide of Crimean Tatar people” by Flickr User National Bank of Ukraine (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Jamala’s performance of “1944” at Eurovision was also atypical in that it largely eschewed pizzazz and bombast. Little skin was shown, there were no open flames, no smoke machines befogged the scene. Instead, Jamala stood, mostly still and center stage, encircled by spotlight. Large projections of flowers framed the stage for the first two minutes of the song, as she sang verses (in English) and a chorus in (Crimean Tartar) that utilized lyrics from a well-known twentieth-century Crimean Tatar protest song called Ey, Güzel Qirim (Oh, My Beautiful Crimea). The groove of the song is spare and rather slow, and the singer’s voice meanders within a fairly narrow range on both verse and chorus.

But then comes the vocalise on the bridge: two minutes and fifteen seconds into the Eurovision performance, the song’s chilled-out but propulsive motion stops, leaving only a faint synthesizer drone. In the sudden quiet, Jamala mimes the act of rocking an infant. Beginning in the middle of her range, she elaborates a melismatic wail that recalls the snaking modal melody of the traditional Crimean Tatar song Arafat Daği. The bridge consists of two phrases interrupted by a forceful and nervous inhalation of breath. Her breath is loud and intentional, calling attention to the complex ornaments that she has already executed, and preparing us for more ornaments to come.

Over the course of eight seconds, Jamala’s voice soars upwards, increasing steadily in volume and intensifying timbrally from a more relaxed vocal sound to an anguished belt. At the apex of the bridge, the Eurovision camera soars above the stage just as the singer looks into the camera’s eye. Meanwhile, the screens framing the stage explode into visuals that suggest a phoenix rising from the ash. The crowd erupts into applause.

Other renditions of “1944” deliver a similar emotional payoff at the climax of the bridge. In the dystopian narrative of Jamala’s official music video, a tornado whips free, setting a field of immobilized human figures into chaotic motion (minute 2:35). In a reality TV song contest called Holos Kraïny (the Ukrainian Voice), a young singer’s powerful elaboration of the bridge propels a coach out of her seat as she wipes tears from her eyes (minute 3:42). In other covers, the bridge is too difficult to attempt: one British busker leaves the “amazing vocal bit in the middle” to “the good people of Ukraine to sing along.”

Timbrally and gesturally, I also hear the resonance between the plangent sound of the duduk—a double-reed wind instrument associated most closely with Armenia, and often called upon to perform in commemorations of the 1915 Armenian genocide—and Jamala’s voice on the vocalise. According to Jamala (who generously responded to my questions via email through her PR person), this was not intentional. But the prominence of the instrument in the arrangement, the lightly nasal quality that her voice adopts in the bridge, and the glottalized movements she uses between pitches suggest that this connection might have been audible to listeners. After all, the opening melodic gesture of “1944” is sounded by a duduk, and it re-enters spectacularly just after the peak of the bridge, where it doubles Jamala’s vocal line as it cascades downwards from the high note. Through sonic entanglement with the duduk, Jamala here communicates anguish on another register, without translation into words.

The performance of sonic anguish through the voice might be understood, in Greg Urban’s terms, as a “meta-affect.” Jamala delivers the emotion of anguish but also fosters sociality by interpellating listeners into the shared emotional state of communal grieving. I paraphrase from Urban’s well-known analysis of “ritual wailing” to argue that Jamala, through this performance of vocal anguish, makes both intelligible and acceptable the public sentiment of grief. This utterance of grief is a statement of “separation and loss that is canonically associated with death” (392) that included the Eurovision audience as co-participants in the experience of grieving, of experiencing anguish over loss. A popular fan reaction video by “Jake’s Face Reacts,” posted to YouTube, and the hundreds of comments responding to it, attest to this experience of co-participation in the experience of grief. Furthermore, the power of this meta-affect is almost certainly heightened through normative gendered associations with performative anguish. Lauren Ninoshvili (2012) identifies this in the “expressive labor” of mourning mothers’ wailing in the Republic of Georgia, while Farzaneh Hemmasi (2017) has recently elucidated how the voice of the exiled Iranian diva Googoosh became iconic of the suffering, feminized, victimized nation of Iran.

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“Googoosh, collection du pasteur de l’église St Paul” by Flickr User Stéphane Gschwind (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The sociologist of music Simon Frith once wrote that “in songs, words are the sign of the voice” (97). To put it in slightly banal terms, songs, as we generally define them, include words uttered by human voices. (Or if they don’t have words uttered by voices, this becomes the notable feature of the song, c.f. Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, Pete Drake’s talking guitar, Georgian vocable polyphony). But non-lexical vocalities also function as a sign of the voice, and, as scholars such as Ana Maria Ochoa (2014) and Jennifer Stoever (2016) have argued, expand our capacity to recover more complex personhoods from the subjugated vocalities of the past. In fact, often the most communicative, feelingful parts of songs occur during un-texted vocalizations. As generations of scholars have argued, timbre means a lot—Nina Eidsheim’s The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Duke University Press: 2019) presents a very recent example—and it is often overlooked when we take the key attributes of Western Art Music as our sole formal parameters for analysis: melody, rhythm, harmony, form. So as we watch the parade of aspiring Eurovision champions duke it out in the pop pageant of geopolitics, let’s attune ourselves to the vocal colors, the timbral gestures, the ululations and the growls, to the panoply of visual and auditory stimuli demanding our attention and, more important (depending on where we live), our vote.

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Featured Image: “Jamala” by Flickr User Andrei Maximov, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

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Maria Sonevytsky is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine, will be out in October 2019 with Wesleyan University Press.

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Critique and Post-Critique or The End of “Critiquiness”

Review

Critique and Post-Critique or The End of “Critiquiness”

Juliane Römhild
FULL TEXT

Juliane please add a title here that includes ‘review’ and the full details of Critique and Post-Critique 🙂

Critique and Post-Critique, edited by Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker, continues Rita Felski’s exploration of new critical approaches beyond the suspicious reading practices that usually travel under the heading of critique. After her earlier volume The Uses of Literature (2008), in which she outlined four different reading modes based on a neo-phenomenological examination of the experience of reading, and Beyond Critique (2015), in which she explained her dissatisfaction with the status of critique as the master-discourse in literary studies in more detail, Critique and Post-Critique now gathers a range of essays from such prominent critics as Toril Moi, Heather Love, Jennifer Fleissner and Ellen Rooney. The collection offers a range of views on the tensions and potential connections between the practices of critique and the new dawn of post-critique. The title of the book is programmatic: the majority of contributors to this volume are not interested in doing away with either post-structuralist critical practices or symptomatic reading entirely—perhaps an impossible undertaking anyway as Felski and Anker point out: “the ‘post-’ of post-critique denotes a complex temporality. An attempt to explore fresh ways of interpreting literary and cultural texts that acknowledges, nonetheless, its inevitable dependency on the very practices it is questioning” (1). Instead, the overall direction of this volume is to curb the excesses and complacencies of a critical framework that once started as the cutting-edge of left-wing criticism and has become academic mainstream in the humanities. Accordingly, several essays call for a rejuvenation rather than the abandonment of critique.

The book opens with an excellent overview by Felski and Anker of the philosophical and political underpinnings and the development of critique as a heterogeneous body of theory. It offers a possible definition of the term itself and looks at the disposition of the critic before situating critique as a political project in the field of cultural and social history. It then includes a useful summary of the current status of nascent post-critical approaches and concerns.

The first section of the book includes essays on the “Countertradition of Critique”, invoking thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Donna Haraway and Nietzsche to outline alternative histories of critique and/or criticism. Opening with a deceptively straightforward account of critical practice based on the question “Why this?”, Toril Moi draws upon Wittgenstein to explore a form of criticism that rejects the psychoanalytical depth model of literary criticism and the critic as detective, revealing the “hidden” truths of the text. Instead, driven by the question “Why this?”, the literary critic seeks to clarify their own sense of confusion or irritation with a text. This does not do away with the chain of cause and effect as the argumentative model of criticism, but it reconceptualises the political drive of critique as a thematic rather than a methodological concern—not all answers the critic may find are necessarily politically charged. According to Moi, this opens up a wider and richer field of potential answers available to the critic. Moi’s main critical activity is based on the much-maligned practice of re-telling, or paraphrasing, the text as involving an inevitable (and potentially difficult) act of interpretation in the process. The next essay by Heather Love enters the fray of academic and intellectual politics more directly by using the work of Donna Haraway for a critical reading of Bruno Latour’s contributions to the field of post-critique. According to Love, Haraway’s often undervalued cross-disciplinary expertise offers a potential bridge between the critical practices of the humanities and the more fact-based approach of the sciences, resulting in a comprehensive ethos of care and a sustained awareness of “how knowledge is made”. Simon During offers an alternative history of the origins of critique. He traces several aspects of critique in Nietzsche’s writing before showing central features of critique, such as irony and polemic, in 18th century writing—long before the ascent of the post-war philosophy and cultural criticism usually associated with critique.

The next section of the book focusses more closely on “Styles of Reading” with essays offering close readings of particular texts or styles of interpretation. Jennifer L. Fleissner offers an astute exploration of suspicion in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love with reference to Latour, reading the novel as a meta-critical response to the issues of symptomatic readings in the humanities/science divide. Fleissner is followed by an inspiring contribution by Ellen Rooney, who, drawing on Althusser and Marx, offers a spirited defence of symptomatic reading that recuperates precisely the elements critique seems to have lost: the willingness or ability of the critic to be surprised, and with it a sense of humbleness and revived analytic prowess. C. Namwali Serpell writes on literary cliché, much maligned by critique—a rich source of meaning if approached as “a material form of language” and a “mode of affective exchange” (165) rather than a stale collection of truisms hiding their own emptiness of meaning. Elizabeth S. Anker closes this section with an astute analysis of Coetze’s theoretically charged writing, which invites and eludes critique in equal measure and for that reason enjoys great popularity among scholars. It therefore lends itself to Anker’s meta-critique of our own scholarly preferences, the strengths and weaknesses of critique.

The last section of the book takes a closer look at “Affects, Politics, Institutions”. Several articles in the first two sections could also be read under this heading. It opens with an excellent analysis by Christopher Castiglia of our misgivings of critique. Castiglia locates our dissatisfaction not in the method of critique but in a critical disposition he calls “critiquiness”: “a combination of mistrust, indignation, ungenerosity, and self-congratulation” (214). Castiglia traces the suspicious Us-against-Them stance of critique back to its roots during the Cold War era when, in contrast to the melancholic resignation many critics feel today, political engagement was driven by strong sense of hope and political agency, which he wishes to recuperate for our present. Hope is coupled with imagination for Castiglia, the speculative mode of fiction and a firm belief in “the potential lying in wait” (226). This turn towards the future is also at the heart of Russ Castronovo’s essay on the politics of critique. Taking the famous picture of Edward Said throwing a stone as his starting point, he addresses the wide-spread frustration and disappointment with the apparent ineffectiveness of critique as a radical mode of thought that, despite its dominance across the humanities, has not even managed to protect its own domain from neo-liberal assault. Tracing the political mission of the critic back to Matthew Arnold, he locates the potential of critique not in the pursuit of any specific political agendas. Instead, he looks towards critique as a form of Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianic power” (246). Critique works best when missing the political mark (just like Said’s stone) by training our sense of imagination, of openness and possibility. John Michael takes his criticism of critique one step further: together with our belief in art, our belief in critique as the harbinger of a better world and the provider of truth has fallen prey to the same logic of secularisation and pluralisation that has continued to erode religious faith in many corners of the globe. Accordingly, looking to Whitman as the poet of democratic plurality (“I contain multitudes”), Michael suggests a different role for the modern critic, who should act as translator. Translation rather than revelation “is the activity of reconstituting, redescribing, and recontextualizing meanings” (271) based on close attention to the text and with an acute awareness of its own performance of meaning. In the last contribution, Eric Hayot looks more closely at the different temporalities of critical fashions, human ageing and political and institutional change. It cannot be accidental that the prevalent spirit of disillusionment originated with a generation of critics who were just passing into middle-age. Hayot sees the problem with the different speeds of human, political and institutional change, all of which contribute to our current sense of crisis. Rather than take this crisis for granted, he encourages us to question our own comfortable beliefs in a world going to the dogs and remember Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, which always holds the potential to disrupt the status quo.

Critique and Post-Critique does not offer a comprehensive or even particularly clear vision for our post-critical future. Instead of new critical approaches, we find meditations on the role and identity of the critic in our current time, speaking specifically to the state of academia in the US. However, several connecting threads between individual contributions emerge: it seems that the self-righteous complacency of “critiquiness” rather than critique is at issue. For several contributors, post-critique seems to mean a return to the vibrant, radical roots of critique. Rather than a turn to “surface reading” as suggested by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid and Reparative Reading” and Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” are the cornerstones of post-critical thinking. Most contributors still locate at the heart of their practice the progressive political mission to change the world and therefore remain loyal to some of the founding principles of critique. Symptomatic reading remains a much-valued practice, although the suspicious detection of the truth somewhere hidden in the depths of the text is dismissed as a gesture of “critiquiness” rather than critique. Toril Moi’s question “Why this?” broadly resonates with the logic of symptomatic reading; her suggestion of paraphrase as a valid critical method has commonalities with Michael’s figure of the critic as translator and the repeated call for close, attentive reading throughout this volume. The self-reflexive stance of critique remains key to any sense of critical integrity and is crucial to the deepening conversation between humanities and sciences about how knowledge is created across the disciplines.

Over the course of the book, a figure emerges that I would call the “good critic”. The “good critic” can be found across all critical territories within and beyond critique: open-minded, self-reflexive, and driven by a genuine interest in and close attention to the text. The good critic remains willing to be surprised by the text and accepting of the inevitably provisional character of any reading. To other readers and students, the good critic is an advocate of hope, of poetic imagination and intellectual curiosity, of self-awareness, and political agency. Critique and Post-Critique is essential reading for all practitioners of literary criticism. It offers a good overview of the history of critique and the current debates surrounding it, as well as food for thought for our professional identities as critics and scholars.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.

ISSN: 2202-2546

© Copyright 2015 La Trobe University. All rights reserved.

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“I’ll eat you up!”: Fears and Fantasies of Devouring Intimacies

“I’ll eat you up!”: Fears and Fantasies of Devouring Intimacies

Eva-Lynn Jagoe
Abstract

Through storytelling, this essay explores hunger and desire as it weaves fairy tale with theories of orality. Jagoe links an infant’s need for nourishment with the confusion of love that can morph into a devouring possessiveness. The motifs of eating, of taking in, and of containment are discussed in relation to Little Red Riding Hood, Maurice Sendak, Slavoj Zizek, and family memoir. From the ghoulish imagination of children and fairytale, to the sexual complexity of adolescence, and on to the limits and capacities of maternal love, Jagoe interrogates an intimacy that nourishes instead of devours, that contains instead of consumes.

Keywords

Storytelling; Orality; Fairytale; Memoir; Motherhood

FULL TEXT

My family ate my twin. Shortly after he and I were born, my parents fell on hard times. Faced with so many hungry children, they checked to see which one of their round babies was fattest. He was, just by a bit. So they roasted him at 400°.

“Even me, did I eat him?” I asked my siblings, who told me the story.

“Yes, we all sat around the dinner table and you licked your fingers. That’s why you’re fat now.” And then they would pinch my waist and pretend to bite my arms as I squealed with pleasure and fear.

I tried to erase the image of his pudgy legs, his soft baby belly, crisping in a hot blaze of fire as he became our suckling roast. I escaped that death but, as the extra mouth to feed, I also caused it.

For the rest of my overfed childhood, I missed my other half and wished I hadn’t been such an insatiable baby. To love people seemed like a delicate balance of getting what I needed from them without eating them up. Because if I devoured them, I’d be left with even more of a gaping void than the one the hunger had originally sought to fill.

The tall tale that my siblings told me seems particularly macabre, but it’s not so different from the many fantasies and fairy tales that permeate our culture. Parents, lovers, children, wolves, witches, and monsters titillate and threaten with the charged phrase, “I’ll eat you up!” It’s both a happy ticklish delight and an ominous menace. The realm of love and intimacy tastes of the flesh and blood and drool and tears and milk of each other. But where does it stop? How much can we give and take so that we are each nourished but not eaten up? The trick is to maintain happy intimacies in which we are contained but not consumed, delighted but not devoured.

It’s hard to get that ratio right, though. Because devouring is seductive, and seduction is devouring. Yes, of course “Little Red Riding Hood” ends with the wolf’s comeuppance, but most of the story is about his wily lure. When he meets Little Red, he professes admiration for her flashing red cloak and encourages her to enjoy herself in the wild wood. How different from her authoritarian mother, who admonishes her to be polite, constrained, and careful! The wolf makes her feel not like an undisciplined child, but rather a delicious creature whose desire for attention should be indulged. So when she exclaims about those big eyes, ears, hands, and mouth, the charming beast gives the response that she most hopes for but fears: “the better, my dear, to see you… to listen to you… to touch you… and… to eat you up!” His rapacious attention is dangerous but oh-so-thrilling. And irresistible too, because they confirm to the girl that, despite her mother’s admonishments, she is indeed palatable exactly as she is.

As Little Red grows, she’ll probably learn that there are plenty of hungry fellows out there, all of them willing and eager to eat her up.

My first big bad wolf ate me up when I was 16. He was an airplane pilot, but I got to control the direction of his motorboat across the blue waters of the Mallorcan sea. My kid cousins were heaped in the back as I stood at the helm, acutely aware of the blonde and silver hairs on his chest, his Rolex and wedding band glinting in the sun, his gaze taking in my tanned belly.

Back in Barcelona, my body was looked at with less admiring eyes from the women of my mother’s family. I was foreign—my height from my American father, or maybe a product of my upbringing in a land of nutritional excess. My shape was unfamiliar to these Spanish relatives, who spoke in judgmental and incomprehensibly antagonistic tones about my long legs, rounded hips, loose limbs. I heard rebuke and rejection in my mother’s “I don’t know what you do to men!” Did she really not know? Did she not see in me what they saw? Did she just see fat and gangliness where they saw voluptuous willowiness?

I now get that my mother was also issuing a warning, one that spoke of her lived knowledge of how men can treat girls. But like Little Red, I was in no mood to accept maternal injunctions. Men found me sexy! They paid attention to me, they looked at me, and I felt powerful as we flirted. Like Miranda gazing from the shore at all the men who shipwrecked their way into her world, I was excited by their existence. “O, brave new world that has such people in’t!”

So when my aunt’s husband said he would take me back to the hotel on his motorcycle, I wasn’t going to be held back by the apparent uneasiness of the other adults. When I snuck back into my room a couple of hours later, my 14-year old cousin was awake and asked me where I had been. We stood in the moonlight whispering. I told her he had taken me to the beach, and angled myself so that she couldn’t see the scratches and dirt on my back.

Maybe I didn’t tell her because she was still a girl, and I didn’t want her to know that her dashing uncle was a predator. Or maybe because I didn’t have the words for it, my Spanish hardly up to the task. When I think about it now, I say it in English, “he ate me out.” But it was not just that I didn’t have the linguistic ability to say it; it was also that I couldn’t map it on the spectrum of my sexual knowledge at the time. My mother had made it clear to me that men always want one thing, and that their need for it is so uncontrollable that it is up to us women to protect ourselves. So did it count as a sexual act if there was no penetration or ejaculation? He hadn’t taken off any clothes. How to define his laying me down on a rock and putting his head between my legs? Was it something that he wanted, or something that I had unknowingly elicited? Who was taking, and who was giving? Is the power in the eating, or in the being eaten?

My inability to understand and answer these questions did not just stem from the fact that I was an inexperienced girl. I think he, in his philandering pilot life, had drawn strict and arbitrary lines around what was acceptable. Maybe if I had answered his phone calls afterwards I would have found out the parameters: fuck only certain orifices, or eat but don’t get eaten. These kinds of caveats seem like so many bets hedged, but they are also constitutive of how each of us defines intimate acts.

Take, for instance, the strange sexual parameters of philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. You would think he, so psychoanalytic and world-wise, would be comfortable with oral and anal practices. His body, after all, is so unmistakably a body as he gives his lectures, gesticulating and twitching, sweating and spitting. But he is remarkably reticent to share his body, as evidenced in an interview with Decca Aitkenhead that was published in The Guardian on June 10, 2012. There he answers questions about Hegel by talking about his own sexual limits:

I am very—OK, another detail, fuck it. I was never able to do—even if a woman wanted it—anal sex. You know why not? Because I couldn’t convince myself that she really likes it. I always had this suspicion, what if she only pretends, to make herself more attractive to me? It’s the same thing for fellatio; I was never able to finish into the woman’s mouth, because again, my idea is, this is not exactly the most tasteful fluid. What if she’s only pretending?

Zizek, one of our contemporary society’s most voluble talkers, has no problem ejaculating words into his listeners’ ears. Yet from his penis comes another substance, “not the most tasteful” one, which he will not release into a woman’s mouth or anus. Of what is he so wary? One of the definitions of “attraction” is “the action of drawing or sucking in”. So it could be that he distrusts being sucked in by a woman pretending that she likes to suck him in. Or, on the other hand, it could be that he doesn’t fear that his cum isn’t a “tasteful fluid”, but that it’s too tasty, and that once she gets a taste of him, she’ll eat him up.

Zizek and the pilot are the same generation. I know in my gut that my predator wouldn’t have asked me to perform oral sex on him. In her latest book, Girls and Sex, Peggy Orenstein talks to teenage girls who consider blow jobs to be the thing they do when they don’t want to have sex, when they feel they owe the guy something, or just as part of making out. They don’t expect reciprocity, and in fact, feel that it requires a high level of trust and commitment to let a man perform oral sex on them. When I was young, my friends and I thought of blow jobs as an extreme act that came after a sexual penetrative relationship had steadied. To take a guy into my mouth was a lot more intimate than into my vagina, and his mouth was much more personal than his penis.

I didn’t continue seeing the pilot because he scared me. I didn’t understand if he had raped me, or if I had been given something I wanted. Did his wife allow him to eat her? If she didn’t (and she obviously didn’t—not her, my sweet and infirm Catholic aunt!) then did I hold a knowledge and a power over her, and over him? He did, after all, risk his marriage and his reputation, to get a taste of me, and I gave it to him. With his big mouth, he showed me that I was delicious. And that was something that my mother had never been able to give me: the feeling that I was irresistible and delectable.

It wasn’t just me that my mother found inedible. She didn’t eat much of anything. When I was 11, she developed a spasm in her throat. Her oesophagus would constrict around any food she tried to swallow. She would choke on steak, spitting chewed pieces into her napkin. Potatoes, even mashed, stuck in her throat. It wasn’t about soft or chewy, hard or stringy; it was something less predictable about density, consistency, and taste. She would sit at the dinner table, silently crying, as my father attempted to keep the family conversation afloat.

She went down to 92 pounds that first year, as she went through various traumatic experiments of oesophagus stretching, drug treatments, and psychoanalysis (which she rejected after about a month: “it’s so stupid, they just want to blame everything on the mother”). She only started to recover under a regimen of Valium and occasional sips of holy water from Lourdes. She regained her weight once she decided to allow herself whatever she could swallow. Mostly delicate sweet pastries and thickly buttered thin toast, slices of cheese and finely mashed tuna salad. Nowadays, she no longer feels hunger, but is often weak or shaky because of blood sugar drops and spikes.

This debilitating psychosomatic illness had its benefits. It got her out of going to endless dinners and social events with my philanthropist father. She was free from the scrutiny of the American women who towered over her at cocktail parties, tossing back their martinis and canapes while she sipped at a tonic water. She could stay at home and watch PBS, or tidy her clothes. I would say that it gave her more time to be with her last child still at home, but that’s not how I remember it.

Instead: I would burst into her room, diving onto her bed with my belly full of the Doritos or chocolate chip cookies that I had wolfed down when I got home from high school. She would be reclining on her chaise longue next to the window, her head propped by her hand, eyes closed, a cup of tea and a few shortbread biscuits on the little table at her side. She would smile at my stories of Regina and Anne fighting over a KitKat, or of the saying that the nuns told us about why we should avoid premarital sex: “it’s like potato chips, you can’t have just one.” Sometimes she would interject a comment (“How do they know? They’re nuns!”), but after a few minutes she would say that I was tiring her with my talking. I would quietly close the door behind me, feeling like my mouth was too big and too American, but the next day I would crash in again, unable to stop trying to enliven her.

A couple of decades later, when she would see me kissing my babies voraciously, my mother would say the Spanish refrain, “cuando son pequeños, te los comerías a besos. Y cuando son mayores, te arrepientes de no haberlo hecho” (when they’re little, you could eat them up with kisses. And then when they get older, you wish you had). I think she was genuinely curious about my consuming love for my children, and that, in quoting that old wives’ saying, she was trying out the words of women who can’t control their maternal hunger for their children. I didn’t totally recognize myself in the refrain. I did find their fat little cheeks and toes delicious, and would eat them up with my kisses and take in their scent with big gulps of breath. But they were also eating me up. My sons got fatter and heavier as I got thinner, the blubber sucked out of me as I lay like a nursing seal, giving them the nutrients they needed to thrive.

There’s a sketch by Maurice Sendak that is the opposite of my mother’s refrain (Sendak 1992, 75). In it, a screaming baby is soothed by suckling at his mother’s breast. He gets bigger and bigger as he opens his mouth wider and takes in more of the breast, then her head, then her whole body, until he is a happy fat child standing alone on the stool that she had sat on.

Maurice Sendak cartoon

Sendak, Maurice. Illustrator to I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book, 1992

This image circulates on breastfeeding blogs, striking a chord with the new mothers who feel that they are being consumed by their insatiable little babies. Sendak portrays both the necessary selfishness of the child and the unconditional love of the mother, and the danger of giving free rein to either.

There’s a different ratio that needs to be maintained. A mother’s role is to give, but also to take away; to provide sustenance, and to teach limits. Not too much, not too little, but just right: that’s what a mother and child negotiate as they feed their inexhaustible love. Sendak represents this beautifully in his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are, which I read to my son hundreds of times. It was always at dinner time. I would put a peeled and cored pear half on his high chair tray. His face, covered in peas and cereal, would light up as he stuck his thumb in the little hole I had cut out of the middle so that it wouldn’t slip out of his too tight clutch. I would open Where the Wild Things Are, and read him the story of a mother and child who work through the pleasures and perils of eating and of being eaten. Max is sent to bed without dinner because, at the end of a day of mischief in his wolf suit, he threatens his mother with “I’ll eat you up!” In his bedroom, he is unrepentant, and his anger dissolves the walls so that he sails away to “where the wild things are”. There, he proves that he is even scarier and more full of romp than they are, and is crowned king. When he tires of their wildness, he sends them to bed without their supper.

But it’s tiring to be so wild, and Max is “lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all”. The wild things cry “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”. Ah, the tables have been turned! The wild things use the same threat that Max made to his mother, but this time it is attached to expressions of need and love. They are panicking, scared of being unloved and abandoned. Like the voracious breastfeeding child, they would consume their ruler in their hunger to have all of him. To keep him close and not risk separation.

Max, however, has learned the lesson taught to him by his mother, and knows that sometimes love is about limits. She makes it clear: he can’t eat her. But that doesn’t negate the fact that she is the one who “loves him best of all”. So he knows how to respond to the wild things’ hunger, and does so in one word that takes up the whole page: “No!”. They gnash their teeth and bare their claws, but he leaves them and returns to his room, where he finds his supper waiting for him. “And it was still hot.”.

And with that, I would close the book and my son would wag his head happily and hold his arms up for me to pick him up. I’d scoop him into my arms and growl “I’ll eat you up” as he sucked my chin and smeared pear chunks into my kissing mouth.

Oh, but it’s sad! Those wild things are so deliciously enticing, and game for rumpus. They let Max be their ruler, and do whatever he commands. So what have they done wrong, that he would leave them like that? Their wild love is not, unfortunately for them, what he needs, much as it tempts him. It’s delectable but dangerous to be amongst creatures that could, at any moment, gobble him up. So he returns to his mother and the walls of his room, where he is not a hero or a leader, but a contained individual. He is diminished but held, hungry but not devouring. He has learned that saying “I’ll eat you up” also means “I love and need you”, but that he is not allowed to actually devour his loved one. And he is comforted by less than he thought he needed, the soup an adequate substitute for the flesh of his mother.

It’s not so awful that my older siblings made up that story about eating my “twin”. I was their baby sister, after all. They sucked on my pudgy baby feet and fingers as I crammed them into their mouths. They let me gnaw toothlessly on their chins and noses, and wiped off the drool and vomit that I smeared on them. In the face of a mother who had little hunger for us—who found our hunger off-putting—we nibbled at each other, learning what was edible and what was not, learning the limits of each other.

 

References

Opie, Iona and Peter. Orenstein, Peggy. Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. New York: Harper Collins, 2016.

Sendak, Maurice. Illustrator to I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book. Edited by Iona and Peter Opie. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1992.

—–. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper Collins, 1963.

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