Obama – an utopian memory

A short entry I wrote in elation immediately after the Obama election victory. The event seems a long time ago with Obama’s presence in the machinery of the White House becoming nearly taken for granted. I still hold onto the idea that his triumph does signify an utopian event in these dark times:

It has been absolutely unthinkable that an African–American would become president of the US in our times.  Even if we secretly imagined Barak Obama might win the US election, deep down most never believed he would. The real surprise, even though Obama was predicted to win in the last few weeks, was that he did actually triumph at the ballot box.  The impossible happened. The extraordinary enthusiasm and visible elation around the world, needs to be understood in the midst of deeply pessimistic, dark times, when the possibility of progressive change has been a distant memory,  at this conjuncture, where the left is entrenched in a politics of cynicism and defeatism, the possibility of progressive change cannot even be imagined. In these times of neoliberal economic crisis and the futile global war on terror, the Obama victory is sign of possibility.

Thinkers such as Judith Butler and Simon Critchley, with their acute analysis of the inevitable false expectations and disappointments engendered by the new regime, are of course right about the severe limitations of Obama’s concrete policies, but are missing the effectiveness of the progressive utopianism of ‘Obamamania’.  Obama may offer a continuation of the bankruptcy of the contemporary capitalism and American-led geo-politics, but the victory nevertheless is a indicator of political hope, even if his rhetoric was framed within American patriotism and national uniqueness.   Even in terms of race, his victory is not necessarily an immediate sign of post-racial times but maybe of how racial politics are themselves integral to the broad social change. Race in the US, while central to the history of America, has also been regarded in liberal circles as a problematic stain on the ideals of the nation;  something that needs to be eradicated, so that the nation can carry on with its democratic project. What Obama’s victory points to is how race is the modality through which social change needs to be articulated. Further, the grassroots turnout of the electoral vote of working class African–Americans is a sure sign of how class and race are integrally connected in these utopian politics.

While Obama is maybe an empty sign, a fantasy figure, the ‘over-identification’ with him pushes more and more impossible demands onto him. A whole generation of young, racially mixed people went out and casted their vote. This was no endorsement of the democratic system or even of the policies of the Obama-led politics, but a challenge to the present status quo. That in itself seems a radical act when we see the depoliticisation of young people, especially in the west.
What was probably the most moving aspect of the victory was the images of the older African Americans,  many with tears in their eyes, repeating after the victory, that they never believed that we would see a black president in their lifetime. That this happened was itself  an singular victory for anti-racist politics. It defied the assumption that positive racial change was impossible. It does not mean that racism has even alleviated but that in spite of the racism that has been endemic that a black man has been elected to the highest public office in the nation and the world. This in itself may represent a key catalyst for anti-racism at a time where notions of multiculturalism and cultural tolerance are being mobilized by conservative politics and corporate culture. The re-articulation of a language of racial hope and class politics seems possible by the rhetoric of Obama.  While his victory is being dismissed as merely being symbolic, it is in fact at the symbolic level that the Obama victory is most politically significant.

darkmatter journal update

Newsletter – June 09

The Wire Files - Special Issue [4]
We are pleased to announce the publication of the special issue on the critically acclaimed TV series The Wire. The Wire Files brings together an innovative range of writings addressing, through the prism of race, the aesthetics and politics of this compelling urban drama.

ISSN
The journal is now registered with ISSN 2041-3254

Race Mashup
We have developed a unique experimental ‘race mashup’, consolidating data from the internet produced from search terms such as ‘racism’, ‘multiculturalism’ and immigration’. Social networking sites (Delicious, Facebook, Twitter etc.), Blogs and News feeds are tracked in real-time, generating a dynamic snap-shot of the multiplicity of race discourses on the net. Click the Mashup tab above.

Contribute to darkmatter: Reviewers Wanted
If you are interested in reviewing books, films, television or cultural events, send us a brief CV highlighting your areas of interest and a sample of writing to reviews@darkmatter101.org. For book reviews, you may suggest a specific text.

Screening the Gaza Bloodbath

http://latuff2.deviantart.com/ Carlos Latuff

To watch the massacre of the Palestinian on our TV screens is just like watching a snuff movie. The liberal fantasy is that by gazing at the carnage we will somehow stop it. Whereas we infact become complicit in the structure of violence, which is to show the world that Zionism can commit genocide at will, with total immunity. The real sadness is that we watch this disaster without our own culpability – No one is innocent. Either you fight for justice for the Palestinian people or you reproduce the impotent televisual gaze in the form of contemporary orientalist power. We just beocoem the passive consumers of the new empire – An empire driven by the spectacle of the pornography of war.

In these times of terror – words fail, images blind, information hides the truth. There is an emergent counter media discourse  challenging the fetish of the impotent gaze of the dominant war machine. My friend and colleague Haim Bresheeth has set up an incredible archive of resources on the Gaza Caranage. Check it out  www.gaza.haimbresheeth.com

‘Way down in the hole’- The Wire files

darkmatter – special ‘dialogue’ issue [www.darkmatter101.org]

call for contributions

The critically acclaimed US television drama The Wire has recently ended its fifth and final series. The Baltimore set HBO show has been celebrated for its gritty realism and complex representation of urban crime, policing and American city politics. Through the TV cop genre The Wire has weaved together issues of drugs, poverty, policing, inner-city murder, surveillance, political corruption, institutions, labour, schooling, print media, youth, sexuality and gender, with an ensemble cast of African-American and white characters and intricate plot-lines, providing one of the most compelling accounts of race, class and the city in contemporary media.

To mark this event the online journal darkmatter [www.darkmatter101.org] is putting together a special ‘dialogue’ issue exploring the aesthetics and politics of The Wire. If you are interested in making a contribution send a 300 words abstract outlining your proposed piece by 30 June 2008. If accepted, final pieces between 1500 to 4000 words to be submitted by 1 September 2008. We welcome contributions in the form of essays, reviews, interviews or creative media pieces on any aspect of the show – from detailed analysis of specific characters and episodes to the examination of The Wire in relation to the history of television, film and literary genre fiction, or as a mapping of the crisis of race, politics and the neoliberal capitalist economy in Baltimore, America and globally.

send abstracts and any enquires to ash sharma [ash.disorient@gmail.com]

 

 

 

 

 

Britz: Muslims and Postmodern Media after 9/11

A post I wrote on the In Media Res online project site for a diaspora media themed week.

Sounds of the Underground

Event that I am speaking at and also playing some ‘old school’ tunes:

Thinking Thru’ Islamophobia Symposium

7 May 2008

Centre for Ethnicity & Racism Studies
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds

Since the end of the Cold War a series of `moral panics’ has swept over Western plutocracies at the heart of which has been the figure of the Muslim. Contestations about Western values such as freedom of expression, gender equality and national belonging have been raised through the interrogation of Muslim settlement in major Western conurbations. For many these moral panics are reminders of a growing Islamophobia. For others, they are a testimony to real problems in Muslim communities and talk of Islamopbobia is at best a distraction and at worst a form of cultural censorship under the cover of which Muslim extremism and intolerance are allowed to go unchecked. Those who do see Islamophobia not as a polemical but as an analytical term are confronted with the paucity of its current formulation. Conceptually, Islamophobia is neither consistently defined, deployed or understood. This has allowed it to circulate widely, but ineffectively: for some to vent grievance, for others to pontificate, and policy and opinion makers to resort to platitudes and clichés while unable or unwilling to see its analytical value as a tool for justice. Islamophobia is in danger of becoming an irritant rather than a source of illumination.

The aim of this symposium is to explore the analytical value of Islamophobia and its limitations. To this end a number of key questions will be addressed:

• How was the phenomena that Islamophobia seeks to conceptualize dealt with prior to the formation of the concept?
• What is it that the category of Islamophobia brings to the table- is it useful and if so why?
• How would a consistent and clearer understanding of Islamophobia help?
• How does Islamophobia relate to other forms of social exclusion?
• What is the relationship between Islamophobia and racism?

Symposium presentations and discussion fall into three areas. Between them, it is envisaged that contributors will cover the representative diversity of conceptual and empirical contexts of Islamophobia in both Muslim minority and Muslim majority countries. Contributions to the first panel Genealogies of Islamophobia explore the function that the category of Islamophobia was recruited to perform, and examine the processes by which Islamophobia entered public discourse. In an effort to furnish a more rigorous understanding of the concept, the second panel Morphologies of Islamophobia is dedicated to the analysis of Islamophobia’s relationship with racism and anti-Semitism. The third panel Sociologies of Islamophobia addresses concrete instances of Islamophobia, trends, monitoring institutions and instruments, published reports and policies, their reception and effectiveness.

Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies at the University of Leeds has a history of critical interdisciplinary engagement with the origins, production and conditions of racism. This Symposium forms part of CERS’ Racialised Hostilities programme of activities for 2008 in celebration of its tenth year of existence.

REGISTRATION: Early registration is advised as participant spaces are
strictly limited. Registration fees:
£30 (Academics and unwaged)
£60 (others)
Registration includes morning coffee, lunch and afternoon tea.

For registration or further details contact:
Ms Marie Ross
Research Support Officer
Tel: 0113 343 4407
Email: m.b.ross@leeds.ac.uk

Update – Extimité: On Žižek and Race

Call for Papers – Special issue of International Journal of Žižek Studies http://zizekstudies.org/

Guest Editors: Ashwani Sharma ash.disorient@gmail.com and Valerie Hill v.hill@coventry.ac.uk

The notion of race is routinely invoked in contemporary academia while at the same time its analysis is dissipated across a range of disciplines and topics so that it seems it has either no critical coherency or else its orthodoxy is assumed such that the racial reading is always already predictable in advance. This creates the paradoxical situation whereby racism in its numerous and mutating modalities is rampant globally, yet the concept of race or racism is hardly examined directly at all. Identity, culture, ethnicity, difference, diaspora, multicultural are the metonymic chain of equivalences that arguably invite a post-racial, post-political understanding of racism, with the possible effect of leaving racisms to operate in new configurations, even in the guise of anti-racism. Does the critical work of Slavoj Žižek offer a cogent and sustained theoretical and political intervention beyond this impasse?

A striking aspect of Žižek’s output has been his consistent interrogation of various forms of racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism.  So far there been little direct commentary on this aspect of his work in the ever growing body of secondary literature. This special issue of the on-line International Journal of Žižek Studies (http://zizekstudies.org/) will examine the critique of racism across Žižek’s  corpus addressing to what extent Žižek offers a distinctive understanding of the workings of race that is essential to the contemporary geo-political context, and the ways his approach can be further mobilised in political analysis of race, media and culture now. In particular, this issue invites papers examining Žižek’s analysis of racism, nationalism and imperialism through Lacanian psychoanalysis, dialectical materialism and ideological critique; the critique of liberal democracy, multiculturalism, cultural studies, postcolonialism and neo-liberal global capitalism; and his commitment to a praxis of universalism, anti-racism and Marxism.

Abstracts (500 words) by 31 March 2008 to Ash Sharma ash.disorient@gmail.com and Val Hill v.hill@coventry.ac.uk

Žižek and liberal multiculturalism

Sara Ahmed has written an interesting piece on Žižek’s critique of liberal multiculturalism on darkmatter:

In his plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference (2007)¹ Slavoj Žižek repeatedly asserted that liberal multiculturalism – and its ‘politically correct’ premise of respecting the other’s difference – is hegemonic. When asked questions about this position from the floor, he stated insistently that it was an ‘empirical fact’ that liberal multiculturalism was hegemonic, and challenged anyone to prove otherwise. I am writing this response as a way of taking up his challenge…continues

My initial response:

I don’t think there is such a significant difference between Sara Ahmed’s astute analysis of liberal multiculturalism and Slavoj Žižek’s critique. In rather simple terms, Žižek would argue that liberal multiculturalism and liberal monoculturalism are two mutually constitutive modalities of contemporary global racism. The more substantial difference, and maybe this is effectively implied in Žižek’s elevation of liberal multiculturalism as being hegemonic, as a critique of liberal-left positions, is what do we do politically – the issue that is rightly raised by Ben Pitcher. Here Žižek’s position is quite clear and consistent – he does not see multiculturalism as a site of hegemonic struggle. There is no progressive form of multiculturalism for him. In fact, by marking it as the master signifier of politics, we end up with contemporary modes of liberal racism, sexism…(i.e. others remain as others to be tolerated, but deprived of their radical Otherness…)

Žižek’s argument is really about the broader ‘cultural turn’ in politics. If we want to hold on to a politics of multiculture then what form does it have to take now? What is the relation between culture and politics? Hasn’t the fantasy been that multiculturalism can articulate particular, at times contradictory and oppositional struggles, into a hegemony of progressive social politics? Does this become impossible when progressive projects such as feminism and anti-racism are themselves how racism and sexism operates? e.g. liberal white feminist critique of Muslim patriarchy becomes the justification for Islamophobia etc. Of course this has always been the challenge (and maybe the limitations) of hegemonic politics but aren’t we now in a situation that the very grounds in which the hegemonic struggle takes place is contained within the contours of liberal-capitalist ‘post-political’ democracy. A space, exemplified by liberal multiculturalism, where differences are allowed but as long as they don’t challenge this order. Culture, in whatever radical constructionist, anti-essentialist way we understand and mobilise it, comfortably operates within and is the predominant ideological form of liberal democracy.

I think this is the challenge Žižek poses – how do we conceive of politics in this context. For him the only universal hegemony is global capitalism and without opposing that all other struggles will be easily incorporated into its logic. In that, even progressive multiculturalism in its form of radical (deconstructive) particularism, is how global power operates. (See Hardt and Negri for example).

Žižek’s position is that instead of struggling over cultural differences in the form of trying to hegemonise the field by creating shared consensus, that to be truly progressively multicultural we need to struggle over what we oppose – a politics of negation. Instead of trying to find common shared elements, we should fight politically and unconditionally over say anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism etc. This does appear to end up as a standard left position. One of the questions to ask is how is culture conceptualised and situated in these struggles. The orthodox left tends to see culture as an ideological problem, as best as form of (nationalist) resistance. Žižek, through his Hegelian-dialectical Lacanism, offers a more complex understanding of culture, subjectivity and ideology that questions conventional representational, as well as immanent materialist, politics. He is advocating a dialectical politics of division and confrontation – we need to take sides and fight for our position. And crucially, the political antagonisms are not between cultures but within and across cultures. Maybe this is a universalism after the (multi)cultural turn?

Extimité: On Žižek and Race

Call for Papers – Special issue of International Journal of Žižek Studies  http://zizekstudies.org/

Guest Editors: Ashwani Sharma (ash.disorient@gmail.com) and Valerie Hill (v.hill@coventry.ac.uk)

The notion of race is routinely invoked in contemporary academia while at the same time its analysis is dissipated across a range of disciplines and topics so that it seems it has either no critical coherency or else its orthodoxy is assumed such that the racial reading is always already predictable in advance. This creates the paradoxical situation whereby racism in its numerous and mutating modalities is rampant globally, yet the concept of race or racism is hardly examined directly at all. Identity, culture, ethnicity, difference, diaspora, multicultural are the metonymic chain of equivalences that arguably invite a post-racial, post-political understanding of racism, with the possible effect of leaving racisms to operate in new configurations, even in the guise of anti-racism. Does the work of Slavoj Žižek offer a cogent and sustained theoretical and political intervention beyond this impasse?

A striking aspect of Žižek’s output has been his consistent interrogation of various forms of racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. So far there been little direct commentary on this aspect of his work in the ever growing body of secondary literature. This special issue of the on-line International Journal of Žižek Studies (http://zizekstudies.org/) will examine the critique of racism across Žižek’s corpus addressing to what extent Žižek offers a distinctive understanding of the workings of race that is essential to the contemporary geo-political context, and the ways his approach can be further mobilised in political analysis of race and culture now. In particular, this issue invites papers examining Žižek’s analysis of racism and nationalism through Lacanian psychoanalysis, dialectical and ideological critique; the critique of multiculturalism, cultural studies and neo-liberal capitalism; and his commitment to a praxis of universalism.

Possible topics include: racism as ideological fantasy and enjoyment; the relationships between contemporary anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and ethnic nationalism; critique of (de)constructive identity, discourse and cultural race politics; commodity culture and the politics of difference; the articulation between capitalism, race and class; the politics of anti-racism and Marxism; Hegel, Freud and Lacan as post/anti-colonial theorists; Fanon and Lacan; sexual difference and race; multicultural and anti-racist racism; crisis of representation and the dialectics of the racial Real; film and multiculture; the racial gaze and fetishism; subjectivity and otherness; colonialism, radical democracy, multiculturalism and the state; decolonialisation and psychoanalysis; critical race theory and psychoanalysis; materialism and race theory; Eastern Europe as Other; Jewish identity and Palestinian politics; Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as theological politics; Žižek and Badiou’s critique of hybridity, difference and the Other; Orientalism now; the Real of whiteness; the racial sublime; 9/11, violence and the war on terror; anti-racism and psychoanalysis; remembering slavery and literature; comedy and race; eurocentrism and anti-imperialism; postcolonial melancholia; Mao, Marxism and postcolonial theory; Asian racism; cyberspace and identity; genetics and new scientific racism; skin, body and identity; popular culture, postmodernism and multiculture.

Abstracts (500 words) by 15 March 2008 to Ash Sharma ash.disorient@gmail.com and Val Hill v.hill@coventry.ac.uk