Off the Grid

Glenna Gordon interviews Peter DiCampo June 2011

A photographer and former Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana observes the beauty of the dark and the politics of electricity. (With video.)

Photography is a record of light, so how does one photographer capture images without it? And for the 1.4 billion people who currently live without electricity, what does it mean to be without light?

As a Peace Corps volunteer in northern Ghana from 2006 to 2008, Peter DiCampo lived in a village where fires and flashlights were the only source of light after nightfall. A decade-old plan to bring power to the area had brought power lines but no electricity.

By day, as a Peace Corps volunteer, he worked on water and sanitation issues, with a focus on the water-borne parasite known as Guinea worm. By night, DiCampo—a Massachusetts native who studied photojournalism at Boston University—would explore the villages of northern Ghana and document what he saw. The results are lyrical photos that do something unusual: they show you what isn’t there.

By photographing in the dark, DiCampo illustrates what life is like without electricity. And life is vibrant: people dance, watch movies, read the Koran, and hang out. His flashlight portraits would be striking on their own. With the theme of energy poverty as a context, the photographs document the tenacity of their subjects.

His series, “Life Without Lights,” has since expanded into a much larger project, with DiCampo documenting energy poverty in Iraqi Kurdistan, New Mexico, and elsewhere in Ghana. For the next phase of his work, DiCampo plans to focus on solutions as well as on the health consequences of living without lights.

DiCampo, who is now twenty-seven, is part of VII’s mentor program, and his work is on view at VII Gallery in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood until July 12, 2011. DiCampo has been awarded grants from the Pulitzer Center, recognized by the British Journal of Photography, PDN Photo Annual and other prestigious prizes.

After several years travelling around West Africa, DiCampo is now stateside, living in Michigan, where his fiancée, a medical student, is doing a hospital rotation. I reached him there several days after the opening of his Brooklyn show. As for his travel schedule, he said: “I’m not quite sure where I end up next!”

—Glenna Gordon for Guernica

Guernica: Tell me how your “Life Without Lights” project began.

Peter DiCampo: I was a Peace Corps volunteer in northern Ghana in a small village called Wantugu. Wantugu has had power lines since the late 1990s, but at the time there was no electricity running through those lines—almost ten years later. For the first few months that I lived there, I didn’t go out in the night all that often.

As I became more comfortable, I started to check out how the village was different at night. I was kind of just wandering around at night, and there was this scene at the mosque with these kids kind of bent over the Koran with flashlights to study. I made a few pictures, and I was not at the time thinking about anything wider. I was just kind of caught up in how enchanting this moment was—the way they were reciting the passages in the Koran and there was this glow of flashlights all over the place. But I eventually realized that this was a great way to illustrate the problem that these people have—a lack of electricity. They feel like they’ve been overlooked. I was a Peace Corps volunteer at the time, and that was really my primary responsibility.

A couple of years later I was encouraged by a couple of photographer friends to go back and continue it. The bulk of the Ghana work is from a trip in February of last year. And I just kind of extended it into the entirety of the northern region of Ghana, where something like 70 percent of villages are not connected to the national grid, and do not have electricity.

Guernica: How was it different to be in Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer, versus being there to take these photos?

Peter DiCampo: To go back, it was incredible. The Peace Corps really forced me to learn a language and learn a lifestyle that was on the village level. Usually when you move to a new country, you’re in the capital. I’ll never really experience that in any other place, unless I really pick up and move to another culture again, and especially to another rural culture again. And so, when I went back, it was so easy for me to work in northern Ghana, much easier than anywhere else I’ve been. They love it that there’s this foreigner who can kind of communicate in the language—I mean, I’m not fluent—and who knows some of the customs, and can talk about the geography.

How often do you see video or any other form of interview that, for really a very lengthy period, that allows African people to talk in their own language and describe how they feel the issue affects them?

Guernica: So have you seen any changes from when you first were there compared to the most recent time you were there?

Peter DiCampo: Yeah, so getting back to electricity specifically, the village I started all of this in, the village where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, now does have electricity. But no other village that I photographed for the project does, and a vast majority of the north is still not connected.

Life Without Lights from Peter DiCampo on Vimeo.

 

Guernica: How did that come about?

Peter DiCampo: In the fall of 2008—it was an election year—and the government kind of picks up and makes this big show of trying to increase development in the region, to get votes. So it was in 2000 that they put the poles up, in 2004 they put the lines up, and in 2008, they finally connected a small handful of villages to electricity. This village just happened to be one of them. So it’s a great step forward for them, but it’s not an indication of any widespread change.

Guernica: I’m curious, has anyone in the Ghanaian government seen your work?

Peter DiCampo: Not to my knowledge, and it took quite a bit of work to get anyone to talk to us to get basic percentages on how much of the country is electrified. They were hesitant to talk, and very defensive.

Guernica: There is a big NGO push to bring renewable energy to places without electricity, most of which seems to be bypassing existing national grids, and is focusing on solar panels and lamps and other smaller solutions. Do you think this is the right way to go, or should there be a greater push for rural areas to be brought into a grid?

In New Mexico, you’ve got some people out there just struggling to find enough money to put fuel in their generators, and you’ve got other people who have taught themselves to hook up solar and wind solutions, and are completely self-sustaining. It’s incredible.

Peter DiCampo: I don’t see any reason for a grid if you can be self-sustaining, if another renewable source provides enough energy. Pajarito Mesa, just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico—that is a community that has never been connected. And you’ve got some people out there just struggling to find enough money to put fuel in their generators, and you’ve got other people who have taught themselves to hook up solar and wind solutions, and are completely self-sustaining. It’s incredible. They have no reason to go on the grid and be connected, paying their energy bill and have the uncertainty of someone hanging prices over their heads. Right now, I’m in Michigan, and here you have tons of people who cannot pay their bills because there’s one company and they can jack the prices up as much as they want. And if there are people who can’t pay, they shut them off, and they live through the winter like that. People in the Detroit area die from the cold because of that. Being self-sufficient with energy is just one more step towards being an independent person.

Guernica: Well, there’s an interesting political dimension for all of this. If you’re pursing a solution in Ghana that is off the grid, you’re saying to the government, we don’t have any confidence in you to provide us electricity. Whereas in Detroit and New Mexico, there is a government that could provide electricity but maybe it isn’t accessible to people. So it means different things in different places. Is this ultimately about a government failing people in all these different places?

Peter DiCampo: I think so. Having spent the time out in New Mexico, it was amazing that I kept encountering situations and this language in the States that I’ve encountered and that inhibit development in Africa. The power lines stopped down the road and the government was kind of complaining about not being able to find the money to put new poles up there. It was a very similar situation.

Guernica: I’m wondering about how political agitation figures into this. If your emphasis is going towards solar lamps, maybe it’s not going towards pushing for rural areas to be connected to a larger electricity system. How much is it government’s problem, and how much is it up to individuals to say, we’re not waiting for the government and we’re going to just do this?

Peter DiCampo: It would be interesting to pose the question to the Ghanaian ministry of energy and say, What do you think would happen if all these villages that you haven’t connected, if they took matters into their own hands? I’ll put that on my to-do list.

This is not really a project about electricity. It’s a project about a government denying people something.

Guernica: Let’s switch gears a little bit. A lot of photography of Africa is labeled “poverty porn.” You obviously are working in a very different aesthetic and tackling the issue of poverty. Is this something that you’re thinking about when you’re shooting?

Peter DiCampo: Well, what I think has been the biggest thing for me getting around this is to use so-called multimedia—which, speaking of terms I’m not crazy about, that’s another one. How often do you see video or any other form of interview that, for really a very lengthy period, that allows African people to talk in their own language and kind of describe in an in-depth way how they feel the issue affects them. That was an extremely important thing for me to do, and I’m really glad I did it. It’s still my favorite way or viewing the project—this five-minute photo film or short film that has three people sitting down and discussing not only the things that the lack of electricity prevents them from doing, but it also has them saying, It’s true that we’re happy anyway, it’s true that there are a lot of things that we’re able to do anyway, which I think shows a certain strength which is very present in African culture that a lot of photojournalism overlooks because it’s so kind of victim-oriented.

Guernica: Do you prefer multimedia for that reason?

Peter DiCampo: I don’t know that I was thinking of all this ahead of time. I was just kind of focused on this new way of telling a story—I was like, oh yeah, I’ve got a video camera now. I quickly realized that this was very important, and they were saying some very interesting things. So, I was thrilled to be able to put that to use. You know, a friend of mine in the Peace Corps pointed out to me that this is not really a project about electricity. It’s a project about a government denying people something. But the actual visuals, what you’re actually looking at, is people living in the same way that they’ve always lived. The visuals are not one group of people subjugating another group of people. The visuals are just, this is what daily life has been like for people forever. The information behind it is about the lack of electricity. But the visuals are more of a positive—this is what they do, this is what life is like.

Guernica: So, on this project, you’ve worked in Ghana, Iraqi Kurdistan and New Mexico. Where’s next?

Peter DiCampo: The next big things I want to be working on are, first, solutions. New Mexico was really the start of all that, and there are some really, really interesting solution projects. For instance, in Benin—which is of course very close to Ghana—in northern Benin, where the climate is very much like in northern Ghana—very dry, sub-Saharan—there is an organization called Solar Electric Light Fund that has used solar to give a whole bunch of villages water irrigation systems so they can farm year-round. In northern Ghana, the biggest problem is that they have a very short farming season and then, that’s it. That’s their income for the year. That’s one thing I want to focus on. And the other thing is on the opposite side of the spectrum: I think I need to show some of the more dire aspects of this situation, which would be health. Cooking indoors with an open fire is one of the top ten killers in the world, especially for women and children, because it causes all sorts of lung disease. Another thing is refrigeration with medicine. People with HIV can’t access the antiretroviral drugs if they don’t have refrigeration.

These types of things are not typical for photojournalism because, once again, they focus on the absence of things. But it just has to be done. To know that so-called energy poverty contributes to one of the top ten killers in the world, and there aren’t many visuals of this, I think that’s the next step.

World's oceans in 'shocking' decline

Comments (147) 

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

Coral reefs are subject to "multiple stressors" that could destroy many within a human generation

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• Acid oceans turn 'Nemo' fish deaf
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The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.

In a new report, they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history".

They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.

The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.

The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.

Its report will be formally released later this week.

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.

"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

These "accelerated" changes include melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.

Fast changes

"The rate of change is vastly exceeding what we were expecting even a couple of years ago," said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral specialist from the University of Queensland in Australia.

Some species are already fished way beyond their limits - and may also be affected by other threats

"So if you look at almost everything, whether it's fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought."

But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life.

Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed.

This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.

Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms - which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.

In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs - so much so that three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline.

 

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"The challenges are vast; but unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen”

— Dan Laffoley IUCN

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Life on Earth has gone through five "mass extinction events" caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity's combined impact is causing a sixth such event.

The IPSO report concludes that it is too early to say definitively.

But the trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say - and far faster than any of the previous five.

"What we're seeing at the moment is unprecedented in the fossil record - the environmental changes are much more rapid," Professor Rogers told BBC News.

"We've still got most of the world's biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] - and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event."

The report also notes that previous mass extinction events have been associated with trends being observed now - disturbances of the carbon cycle, and acidification and hypoxia (depletion of oxygen) of seawater.

Levels of CO2 being absorbed by the oceans are already far greater than during the great extinction of marine species 55 million years ago (during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), it concludes.

Blue planet

The report's conclusions will be presented at UN headquarters in New York this week, when government delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.

In the long run, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to conserve ocean life, the report concludes

IPSO's immediate recommendations include:

• stopping exploitative fishing now, with special emphasis on the high seas where currently there is little effective regulation
• mapping and then reducing the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilisers and human waste
• making sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon dioxide levels are now so high, it says, that ways of pulling the gas out of the atmosphere need to be researched urgently - but not using techniques, such as iron fertilisation, that lead to more CO2 entering the oceans.

"We have to bring down CO2 emissions to zero within about 20 years," Professor Hoegh-Guldberg told BBC News.

"If we don't do that, we're going to see steady acidification of the seas, heat events that are wiping out things like kelp forests and coral reefs, and we'll see a very different ocean."

Another of the report's authors, Dan Laffoley, marine chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas and an adviser to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), admitted the challenges were vast.

"But unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen," he said.

"The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now."

Mashibeats

I spent most of the day yesterday in Manchester’s Australasia bar and restaurant, spinning on the new Emulator DJ screen with the resident DJs from the venue.

It was great to catch up with Liverpool DJ Anthony Gaskell and remember the heady days of the Annexe, Cream’s gone but not forgotten back room. (I mentioned this influential weekly session earlier this year.)

We both recalled listening to Yousef every week and having no idea where he was finding his records. These were the days before the musical immediacy provided by the internet! I can still remember the hours I spent and the frustration I felt in 3 Beat Records and HMV – knowing the sound I was looking for but unable to find the tunes that gave me those goosebumps every Saturday night.

We also talked about consistently brilliant producers and Anthony mentioned the staggering talent of New Zealand’s Mark de Clive-Lowe.

When I got home, I checked into my Soundcloud page and noticed an incoming track from MdCL, a live mix recorded at The EndUp in San Francisco this year:

I was falling asleep listening, but for the first time since Cream I couldn’t believe my ears – where was he finding these tunes?! Track after track of the most beautiful, soulful vibes. This mix is something special. I’ve just listened through again and, yes, it really is that good. I hardly recognised a thing so I really hope that he posts a track list soon.

I’ve been checking out some more mashibeats, and came across this recently uploaded recording at the Jazz Cafe in 2007. It’s from the monthly Freesoul Sessions hosted by MdCL when he lived in London, a club night of live improvised jazz-meets-electronics with a rotating cast of musicians and vocalists.

Mark de Clive-Lowe

The line up for this session was:
MdCL – MPC3000, Rhodes, piano, synth bass, FX
Richard Spaven – Drums
Byron Wallen – Trumpet
Vanessa Freeman – Vocals
Bembe Segue – Vocals

 

 

The Kenneth Patchen Award is back! 

Geneva, IL—January 1, 2011—The Kenneth Patchen Award is back!  After a hiatus, the Kenneth Patchen Award for writing is being revived.  In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen.  Beginning in 2011, the Award will be reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and will honor the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year. 

 

Kenneth Patchen is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s.  His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake  The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been a benchmark for beats, postmodernists, and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers on to greater significance and innovation in their own work.

 

Manuscripts must be submitted via email as Microsoft Word documents or as PDF files.  The $25.00 reading fee is payable via Paypal to egerdes@experimentalfiction.com.  Send documents without identification of author anywhere in the file.  The name “Patchen Submission” should be followed by a four-digit number of your choice as the file name (i.e. “Patchen Submission 1234”).  Attach a second file that states author’s name, your four digit number and actual title).  Do not mention the name of the work anywhere in the body of your email.  Preliminary selection of manuscripts will be done by JEF and CCM editors, who will select the ten finalists, which will then be sent on for selection by the judge, famous novelist Yuriy Tarnawsky, himself an admirer of Patchen’s fiction.  The winner receives $1000 and publication by JEF/CCM as well as 20 complimentary copies of the book.  Deadline for entry: All submissions must be postmarked between January 1 and July 31, 2011. Winner will be announced in September.

 

Journal of Experimental Fiction

CCM is the new home of the Journal of Experimental Fiction, edited by Eckhard Gerdes. Together, we’ll be releasing a series of 4 innovative novels per year, including the Patchen Award winner, as well as one traditional JEF anthology selected and edited by Eckhard himself. Fans of JEF can continue to expect the highest quality in innovative and experimental fiction.

Here’s The Journal of Experimental Fiction’s forthcoming publication list. Exact dates are prone to change.

Fall 2010 — Frederick Mark Kramer (JEF 40)
Winter 2010 — Dominic Ward (JEF 41) & JEF 39 (anthology)
Spring 2011– Yuriy Tarnawsky (JEF 42)
Summer 2011 — James R. Hugunin (JEF 43)
Fall 2011 — Brion Poloncic (JEF 44)
Winter 2011 — Robert Casella (JEF 45) & JEF 46 (anthology)
Spring 2012 — Eric Belgum (JEF 47)

Winter 2012 – 2012 Patchen Award Winner published!

For additional information, as well as links to past issues:

Contact: Eckhard Gerdes, egerdes@experimentalfiction.com

http://www.experimentalfiction.com

 

Civil Coping Mechanisms

Civil Coping Mechanisms (CCM) is a DIY kind of literary press. We take the same level of angst as our brethren in shunning those that would be in the immediate position of neglecting our efforts as artisans. Oh yes, we rant. This is our place. We’ll do as we damn well please. This press is a place for coping with the contemporary ennui of the modern literary artist. You need not fret. Your work shall stretch out its wings and flutter as far as its desire.

 

In Fall 2010, to help commemorate this publication event, Civil Coping Mechanisms will also be publishing the novel Hugh Moore by Eckhard Gerdes, a novel inspired in large part by Kenneth Patchen’s writing (Patchen had a brother named Hugh) and containing a preface by Kenneth Patchen’s late widow, Miriam Patchen, whom Eckhard met and befriended at the Kenneth Patchen Conference in Trumbull County, Ohio, in 1989.

 

http://www.copingmechanisms.net

 

Pig Iron Press

 

Pig Iron Press is a trade publishing company that is indexed and circulates internationally.  Areas of interest center in the Humanities, including Poetry and Fiction; the Fine Arts; History; Living History; Education; Scholarship; and Critical Study.  Founder, Publisher, and Editor is Jim Villani.

 

Pig Iron Press sponsored the early incarnation of this award, the Kenneth Patchen Prize, and is the publisher of a book of Kenneth Patchen’s short fiction and miscellany called Still Another Pelican in the Breadbox.

 

Submission Form: Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel

 

I.  Fill out the information below:

 

Name of Author: __________________________________________________

 

Title of Submission: __________________________________________________

 

A four-digit ID number chosen by you to represent this submission:  Patchen Submission ________________

 

II. Format your submission as follows:

 

A.  Use standard submission formatting

 

1. Double space

2. On the first page, top right, include your self-selected four-digit Patchen Submission number.  Do not list your name or address on the manuscript itself.

3. Include title and page numbers in headers top right on page two and following.  Do not include your name.

4. The rest of the formatting issues are up to you.  But, in order to avoid things getting messed up in the formatting when the text is transferred electronically, make sure you send a PDF version of your manuscript. Word is okay if formatting is not a major issue in your work.

5. Make sure you submit this form (scan and submit) separately from your essay.  They may be sent with the same email, but send them as two separate attachments.  Manuscript will not be connected to writer until after the judging is over.  This is going to be a completely fair award. Experienced writers and novices have equal opportunity.

6. The work submitted must be an original single work of fiction long enough to be generally regarded as a novel and to be published individually.

7. Simultaneous submissions are okay, but do let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere so that we can withdraw it from the competition.  The reading fee is non-refundable.

8. If parts have been previously published elsewhere, do not identify those sections on the manuscript itself.  Acknowledgments, dedications, and the like will be dealt with after the winning text has been selected.  Exclude forewords, prologues, prefaces, indices, afterwords, and glossaries unless they are absolutely integral to the novel.  A table of contents for chapter titles is acceptable.

 

 III. Either submit a Paypal payment of $25.00 to cover the reading fee to: egerdes@experimentalfiction.com 

   or send a check to 

Eckhard Gerdes Publishing 

              12 Simpson Street, Apt. D

Geneva, IL 60134

 

 IV.  Submit the work as email attachment or mail as file on CD (include the check).  If you want confirmation of snail mail receipt, send the CD certified or enclose a self-addressed stamped postcard.

 

V. The winner will receive an award of $1000  and a publishing contract with JEF Books/CCM for publication as the Patchen-Award novel of the year.  Winners will be announced at the end of September 1011 and will be published.  All submissions must be postmarked between January 1 and July 31, 2011.

Guidelines for the Very Short Fiction Award category:

We are interested in reading your original, unpublished very short stories!

• We don't publish stories for children, I'm sorry.
• It's fine to submit more than one story or to submit the same story to different categories.
• When we accept a story for publication, we are purchasing first-publication rights. (After we've published it, you can include it in your own collection.)

 

To make a submission: Please send your work via our new online submission procedure. It's easy, will save you postage and paper, and is much easier on the environment. Just click the yellow Submissions button above to get started!

Dates:
The category will be open to submissions for one full month, from the first day through
midnight (Pacific time) of the last day of the month. Results will be posted at www.glimmertrain.org.

 

• January. Results will be posted on March 31.
• July. Results will be posted on September 30.

 

Reading fee:

• $15 per story.

 

Prizes:

• 1st place wins $1,200, publication in Glimmer Train Stories, and 20 copies of that issue.
• 2nd-place: $500
• 3rd-place:$300

 

Other considerations:

• Open to all writers.
• Stories not to exceed 3,000 words.(Any shorter lengths are welcome.)

 

We look forward to reading your work!

Malcolm X in 1961. / Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Malcolm X:

Criminal, Minister,

Humanist, Martyr

By TOURÉ

Published: June 17, 2011

“His aura was too bright,” the poet Maya Angelou said of her first meeting with Malcolm X. “His masculine force affected me physically. A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut.” Malcolm X had that same sort of bone-deep, visceral impact on America. He got under everyone’s skin — either in the sense that he seeped into your pores and transformed you the way the great love of your life does, or in the sense that he annoyed or scared the living hell out of you. There is no middle ground with Malcolm. If you hate him or distrust him, you should consider giving him another try: officers assigned to monitor the wiretaps on his phones sometimes ended up being flipped, because close listening led them to believe that his programs and philosophies were sensible and righteous and that law enforcement agencies should not have been working against him at all. And while Malcolm’s ideas changed America, his life journey has captivated us even more. He went from a petty criminal and drug user to a long-term prisoner to an influential minister to a separatist political activist to a humanist to a martyr. Throughout his life he continually grew upward, unafraid to challenge or refute what he believed, giving hope that any of us can rise above even our deepest convictions to become better people.

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MALCOLM X

A Life of Reinvention

By Manning Marable

Illustrated. 594 pp. Viking. $30.

Related

• Excerpt: ‘Malcolm X’ (April 2, 2011)

• Link by Link: A Digital Critique of a Famous Autobiography (May 9, 2011)

• On Eve of Redefining Malcolm X, Biographer Dies (April 2, 2011)

• Manning Marable, Historian and Social Critic, Dies at 60 (April 2, 2011)

• Books of The Times: ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ by Manning Marable (April 8, 2011)

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The prime document that has kept Malcolm’s story alive over the dec­ades since his assassination in 1965 is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That book has changed countless lives and made Malcolm a central influence on generations of black men who admire his force, his courage, his brilliance, and his way of merging the protean trickster and the bold intellectual activist and the inspiring preacher. But all autobiographies are, in part, lies. They rely on memory, which is notoriously fallible, and are shaped by self-image. They don’t really tell us who you are but whom you want the world to see you as. Did Malcolm X consciously lie in his autobiography? In some cases, yes — he wanted us to believe he was a bigger criminal than he actually was, so that his growth into a Nation of Islam figure would seem a much more dramatic change. He also wanted us to think it was a friend who did sexual things with another man and not Malcolm himself. Sometimes he just left out details that didn’t fit his political agenda or the literary agenda of his co-author, Alex Haley. Some of those choices were right for what they were creating.

For a more complete and unvarnished — yet still inspiring — version of Malcolm’s life, there’s “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” by the late Columbia scholar Manning Marable. It’s the product of more than 10 years of work and draws on Malcolm’s letters and diaries; the results of surveillance conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department; and interviews with Malcolm’s contemporaries, including Minister Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, whom Marable talked to for nine hours. Farrakhan has said that Malcolm was like “the father I never had.”

The loudest rumor before the book’s release was that it would shed light on Malcolm’s secret homosexual past. When he’s a young hustler, we find him apparently being paid to do things with one rich, older white man, but this moment is brief and anticlimactic and does not convey the impression that Malcolm was bisexual. Besides, there are far more titillating things in this book, which dives deep into Malcolm’s sex life. Marable obtained a letter Malcolm wrote in 1959 to Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam, in which he complains about his wife, Betty Shabazz: “At a time when I was going all out to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction.” Marable describes Malcolm as a virulent misogynist and a horribly neglectful husband who repeatedly got his wife pregnant, perhaps to keep her from making good on threats to cuckold him, and also made a habit of leaving for days or months immediately after the birth of each child.

That’s a Malcolm we all haven’t seen before. Meanwhile, the Malcolm we do know starts coming into view far earlier than expected, given that he’s known for metamorphosis. Born in Omaha in 1925, Malcolm was drilled as a child in the principles of Marcus Garvey — nationalism, separatism, Pan-Africanism, black pride, self-reliance, economic self-­empowerment — by his parents, Earl and Louise Little. Malcolm’s father was a particularly powerful role model: a devoted Garveyite who in 1930s Michigan stood up for what was right for black people, even in the face of death threats, and then paid for his bravery with a gruesome end. The apple did not fall far at all. And as a young man working the streets of Harlem, Malcolm came to know most of the stars of ’40s jazz and absorbed their example, learning to use pace, tone and space in jazz­like ways and perhaps to become a sort of jazzman of the spoken word. “He lived the existence of an itinerant musician,” Marable writes, “traveling constantly from city to city, standing night after night on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an instrument. He was consciously a performer, who presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger and impatience the black masses felt.”

As Malcolm moved away from the insular religiosity of the Nation of Islam, which at the time counseled members not to vote, and into political issues, his relationship with Elijah Muhammad began to rupture. Many know that Muhammad’s womanizing — the married minister fathered children with several young women — was one cause of the break between them, but few know how close their sexual paths ran. Evelyn Williams, one of the most fascinating characters in the book, fell in love with Malcolm when he was a street hustler, then moved to Harlem and joined the Nation after he became a minister. Malcolm proposed to her but changed his mind days later. After he became engaged to Betty, Williams ran screaming from the mosque. She was soon sent to Chicago to work for Muhammad and later had his baby.

That must have been painful for Malcolm, but Marable does not cite Muhammad’s womanizing as the main reason Malcolm broke with the Nation. Instead, he points to an incident in Los Angeles in 1962, when police officers burst into a mosque and shot seven Nation members, killing one and paralyzing another. Malcolm moved to create a squad that would assassinate members of the Los Angeles Police Department, and when Muhammad vetoed that idea, Malcolm lost faith in him, wondering if he really cared about his people’s lives. Right there the bond was irreparably shattered. Later, Malcolm told Farrakhan, a protégé turned rival, about Muhammad’s affairs, a conversation Farrakhan said he would have to report to the minister. This set Malcolm’s death spiral in motion.

Malcolm saw the end coming months in advance. He said, “There are a lot of people after me. . . . They’re bound to get me.” He spoke of living like a man who was already dead. He survived narrowly several times and yet did nothing to insulate himself. He could’ve moved to Africa for a few years, could’ve used armed bodyguards, could’ve had the audiences at his rallies searched, could’ve carried a weapon. But he did nothing, even as his inner circle screamed that he needed protection. Some who were close to him wonder if Malcolm wanted to die or if he had embraced death as an inevitability. Marable names the men who killed Malcolm and describes his last moments in such excruciatingly visual detail that it could bring tears or cause nightmares. He makes it plain that Nation of Islam figures ordered the killing, planned it and carried it out, but he also speculates that both the man who ordered it and the man who fired the fatal shot may have been F.B.I. informants. Did the bureau have Malcolm killed? Did it stand by and knowingly let him be killed? Marable is unsure.

As the book reveals, the F.B.I. struggled with how to deal with Malcolm — i.e., how to discredit him — because he was so disciplined, so law-­abiding and too smart to actually create the violence that would allow him to be arrested. Marable shows us Malcolm in Africa, watched by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and points out “the David-versus-Goliath dimension”: “Malcolm had few resources and was traveling without bodyguards, yet the attorney general and the F.B.I. director were so fearful of what he alone might accomplish that they searched for any plausible grounds to arrest and pros­ecute him upon his return.” Of course, they found nothing. Similarly, an exhaustive biographer combing through Malcolm’s days pulls away the curtain to show us the entirety of his life, and the emperor remains clothed. He has some failings, but Malcolm is still the empowering figure his autobiography showed us he was.

 

Touré’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” will be published in September.

Forgotten Fathers: 
Parenting and the Prison Industrial Complex

by David J. Leonard | special to NewBlackMan

 

Happy father’s day to all the fathers and grandfathers, but especially to those in Attica, San Quentin, Angola, and countless other prisons throughout the United States. For many, this is a day of celebration, of happiness and reflection. It is a day where kids give their dads homemade gifts and extra-special hugs. While everyday as a parent brings smiles and laughter, it is day where it is hard not to feel special as a dad. Yet, it should also be a day of reflection, where we as a society think about those who are unable to celebrate as a family. I am speaking about those among us who as  Angela Davis laments have disappeared from the public imagination: incarcerated fathers.

 

According to a report entitled  “Children of Incarcerated Parents,” in 2007 America was home to 1.7 million children (under 18) whose parent was being held in state or federal prison – that is 2.3 percent of American children will likely be celebrating father’s day away from dad. Despite hegemonic clamoring about family values, the prison industrial complex continues to ravage American families. Since 1991, the number of children with a father in prison has increased from 881,500 to 1.5 million in 2007. Over this same time period, children of incarcerated mothers increased from 63,900 to 147,400. Roughly half of these children are younger than 9, with 32 percent being between the ages of 10 and 14.

 

The problem is even more pronounced when looking at Black and Latino fathers. The numbers are startling: 1 in 15 black children lives away from their parent because of incarceration. For Latinos that number is 1 in 41, compared to 1 in 110 for white children. For incarcerated African Americans (1 in 3 black men are currently in prison, jail, on probation or parole), father’s day isn’t simply a day of disconnect from their sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, but one that highlights their separation from their own fathers and entire family. 

The consequences of America’s war on drugs (a war principally waged against black and brown America), of America’s “New Jim Crow”  (see Michelle Alexander’s work), are evident on this day. Too many fathers, particularly black and Latino fathers, will celebrate alone, away from their sons and daughters. Writing in response to the widespread debate about the state of black fatherhood, Michelle Alexander makes clear the links between the new Jim Crow and “missing black fathers” in America. “Here's a hint for all those still scratching their heads about those missing black fathers: Look in prison,”  writes Alexander. She continues,

 

The mass incarceration of people of color through the War on Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The absence of black fathers from families across America is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites.

 

The systematic efforts to break-apart families, destroy communities, and separate fathers and mothers from their children is a direct result of the incarceration of drug users. According to Alexander, as of 2005, 4 in 5 drug arrests were for possession by individuals with no history of violence; in the 1990s alone, a period that saw a massive expansion of America’s war on drug users, 80 percent of those sent to prison were done so for marijuana possession. Yet, again we see how this is not a war on drugs or even illicit drug use, but use within the black community even  though whites are far more likely to use illegal drugs.  In a number of states, between 80 and 90 percent of all drug convictions have been of African Americans.

 

The impact of the war on drugs transcends father’s day. The systematic effort to dismantle families results in isolation and disconnection from community, support systems, and loved ones 365 days per year. It has resulted in a brain drain and systematic removal of grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters – entire communities. On average, children live 100 miles away from their incarcerated parents. A 2000 U.S. Department of Justice Report found that over half of America’s prisoners have not been visited by their children. An expansive and far-reaching criminal justice system touches so many of our lives.

 

In 2007, my wife gave birth to our son. Without question, this day was one of the most joyous and heart-wrenching days of life. In addition to his birth coming 1-year after the death of our daughter Sophie (she died the day after she was born), it was about 24 hours after I hadt one of the most painful conversations with my father.

 

The memory is still vivid. I was sitting in my office, preparing for parental leave of absence, when my phone rang. I could hear the sadness and fear in his voice. He had been convicted and was facing jail time. He was scared of losing his career, the life that he had worked so hard for up until that point, and a future of seeing his kids and grandkids grow up. Listening to my father’s voice was disheartening; the prospect of having to tell my children that grandpa wasn’t going to be there for our next visit was terrifying then for many months to come. Thankfully (and revealing the ways in which privilege operates within the criminal justice system), our family never had to see him go jail. I did, however, see the financial and personal difficulties that besiege so many families. Too many families are being split apart because of expanding and overzealous criminal justice system. Too many fathers and mothers have to tell their children that they have to go away. Too many children wake up each and every day with a parent locked up. Too many children have to go through a metal detector simply to deliver a father’s day wish today.

 

Last year, in  “Imagine What Father's Day Is Like for All the Dads and Sons in Prison,” Stephen H. Phelps offered the following father’s day reminder: “Let us take advantage of this Father's Day to turn our well-wishing toward the ends for which our hearts are shaped; toward compassion for every son and every father who is in prison. And especially for black and brown men in prison.” Reminding us all that “these men are your sons. We are all their fathers,” Phelps calls upon us to collectively remember those who are unable to share this day with their children, who because of the troubling war on drugs are unable to be the fathers they would like to be. So, on the 40th anniversary of the racially-based and ineffective war on drugs, lets work toward the greatest present of all to not only fathers, but mothers, children, and our society at large: its end. 

 

***

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums.  His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. He is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and the forthcoming After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press).

__________________________

 AlterNet / By Stephen H. Phelps

>via: http://www.alternet.org/rights/147224/imagine_what_father%27s_day_is_like_for...

On Neoliberalism

Sherry Ortner

• The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
• A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
• Inside Job a film by Charles Ferguson

Whatever happened to “Late Capitalism”? It became neo-liberalism.
- Marshall Sahlins (2002:  59)

I begin with Marshall Sahlins’s little koan because I remember being somewhat mystified myself by the shift in terminology around the year 2000, from “late capitalism” to “neoliberalism.”  Writing this brief review essay has given me the opportunity to think about this, and to suggest an answer.^[1 ] In addition I am interested in bringing together some of the grand narratives of neoliberalism on the one hand, and a range of ethnographic work on the other.  I apologize in advance for a certain U.S. bias in the discussion.

From one point of view, there is no hard-and-fast distinction between late capitalism and neoliberalism, and in many ways neoliberalism is simply late capitalism made conscious, carried to extremes, and having more visible effects.  The real break is generally agreed to have been between the kind of capitalism in place in the U.S. from about the 1940s to the 1970s (there is no established term for this; Lash and Urry [1987] call it “organized capitalism”), and what came after (i.e., late capitalism or neoliberalism).  This break involves two somewhat interrelated shifts.  The first is a shift from a so-called Fordist to post-Fordist framework defining the relationship between capital and labor:  under Fordism there was a kind of truce between capital and labor, and (organized) labor did fairly well in terms of pay and job security; under post-Fordism, the truce is over, and labor has become dispensable, disposable, and replaceable.  The second is a shift from a Keynesian theory of the relationship between the government and the economy, to a post-Keynesian (“neoliberal”) theory:  under Keynesianism, the government was expected to play a role in regulating the economy and in sustaining social programs for the general well-being; under post-Keynesianism/neo-liberalism the government is supposed to do neither (key texts from this period were Mandel 1978, Harvey 1989, and Lash and Urry 1987).^[2 ]

But if late capitalism and neoliberalism are two names for more or less the same set of changes in the capitalist system, the terminological shift from the first to the second signals – I suggest – a change in the story or narrative in which the changes in question are embedded.  The phrase “late capitalism,” which was the dominant term in the 1980s and 90s, was embedded in a narrative of “globalization,” a concept that had positive as well as negative aspects, while “neoliberalism,” which has become the dominant term since about 2000, is embedded in a much darker narrative, a story of a crusade powered by ideology and/or greed, to tilt the world political economy even more in favor of the dominant classes and nations.

I want to make it clear that the economy known as “late capitalism” in the 80s and 90s was not really much more benign than the economy we now call “neoliberalism.” Either/both emerged from the dual turn from Fordism and Keynesianism, that is, from the metaphoric social contracts that had protected industrial labor as well as the citizenry in general from the worst excesses of capitalism.  But in the 80s and 90s, accounts of late capitalism were closely tied up with “globalization,” and while globalization was certainly understood to have its down sides (labor outsourcing, unemployment, and deindustrialization^[3] at the sending end; extreme labor exploitation at the receiving end, etc.), there was also a fairly influential set of arguments about the ways in which other aspects of globalization (flows of technology, information, media, etc.) could be seen as positive and liberating  (see especially Appadurai 1990).  Globalization remains real and indeed as multi-layered and multi-valent as ever (see Hannerz 1996; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Tsing 2005).  But neoliberalism is now embedded in a different, and more consistently dark, set of stories, to which we now turn.

NEOLIBERALISM:  THE BIG PICTURE

On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008) in Heathrow Airport a year or so ago, and read it on the long flight back to Los Angeles.  The book gave me nightmares.

Klein tells the story, in deep and extensive detail, of an ideologically driven and often quite intentional campaign of “erasing and remaking the world” (2008:3) on the part of a network of true-believer neoliberal economists and politicians.  The book reads like a John Le Carré novel, in which concealed nefarious forces seek world domination, and in fact Le Carré wrote a blurb for the cover.  The sober academic might feel the book has a certain paranoid tinge, especially since it starts with some mind-control experiments funded by the American government during the Cold War.  But keep reading.  When Klein gets into the well-researched and highly specific details of particular cases of economic “shock therapy” that have been imposed on many countries (and some cities) of the world, with mostly disastrous results for almost everyone but the very rich and the banks, the reader comes to know in his or her gut what “neoliberalism” is all about.

By the phrase “disaster capitalism” in her title, Klein means not only the general ways in which extreme free-market capitalism is an economic disaster for many people and countries, but the more specific fact that real disasters (the debt crisis of New York City in the 70s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Hurricane Katrina in 2005) are explicitly seen as the best breeding grounds and opportunities to transform old economic regimes into neoliberal ones.  A large part of “transforming old economic regimes” involves selling off state-operated properties, goods, and institutions to private buyers, and replacing those state operated entities with private, for-profit ones.  In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, the city of New Orleans was persuaded to sell virtually the entire public school system to private, for-profit operators.   Discussing the New Orleans case as her opening example, Klein sets up the premise of the book:  “I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism’”(p. 6).

If social or natural disasters do not offer themselves up, Klein shows convincingly that they will be manufactured, the war in Iraq being the latest case in point. Let us follow the Iraq war thread into David Harvey’s 2007 book, A Short History of Neo-Liberalism, where it is his opening example.   Like Klein, Harvey sees “the management and manipulation of crises” (p. 162), whether floods, wars, or financial melt-downs, as part and parcel of establishing the neoliberal agenda.  And like Klein, he provides abundant evidence to show that the war in Iraq was a crisis manufactured to “impose by main force on Iraq… a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation”(p. 7).

Harvey offers a clear definition of neoliberalism as a system of “accumulation by dispossession,” which has four main pillars:  1) the “privatization and commodification” of public goods; 2) “financialization,” in which any kind of good (or bad) can be turned into an instrument of economic speculation; 3) the “management and manipulation of crises” (as above); and 4) “state redistribution,” in which the state becomes an agent of the upward redistribution of wealth (159-164 passim).

Harvey places particular emphasis on the last point, the upward redistribution of wealth.  He takes issue with other writers who argue that the enormous growth of social inequality since the beginnings of neoliberalization in the 1970s is an unfortunate by-product of what is otherwise a sound economic theory.  Instead Harvey sees the vast enrichment of an upper class of capital owners and managers at the expense of everyone else as an intrinsic part of the neoliberal agenda:  “Redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project.” (p. 16).

I have heard Klein and Harvey dismissed as “conspiracy theorists,” and both books do have something of this quality, Klein’s somewhat more than Harvey’s.  In part the effect is created, I think, because both writers eschew a language of abstract social forces, and show that real individuals in real times and places expressed clear intent and understanding about what they were doing.  Harvey also shows a kind of massive patterning in the redistribution of wealth that he says cannot be understood in any way other than as part of a fairly intentional project.  I myself found the data very convincing but the reader will have to judge for him- or herself on this point.

In any event one does not need to buy Klein’s and Harvey’s histories to see neoliberalism doing its work in both wealthy and poor nations of the world.  The polarization of wealth, including both the amassing of huge fortunes at the upper end of the class structure, and the increasing impoverishment of many people and countries at the lower end, is a fact.  We can see it in the statistics, which are apparently robust and indisputable.  We can also see it ethnographically, and here we return to the anthropology.

NEOLIBERALISM ON THE GROUND: ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES

Ethnography does many things that cannot be accomplished by overarching works like those just discussed.  Ethnographies – of course I don’t have to say this to anthropologists, but it is worth putting on the record anyway – provide depth, richness, complexity, humanity, even humor, to bring to life abstract accounts of “economic restructuring” and “polarization of wealth.” But most of all – as I reflect on various studies of people and places at the short end of the neoliberal stick – ethnographies remind us that people live in worlds of meaning as well as of material conditions.  I want to look briefly here at three different anthropological examples of what people make of their lives and of the world as they experience in various ways the massive dislocations of late capitalism/neoliberalism/globalization.

James Ferguson writes of the people of the Copperbelt of Zambia (2002), where a nascent industrial economy has collapsed under “declining terms of trade, increasingly worked-out mines, and the crushing burden of a debt crisis” (p. 137).  The depleted mines are part of a local and specific environmental history, but the declining terms of trade and the debt crisis are clear effects of neoliberal restructuring.  Ferguson describes the economic hardships that have come about as a result of all this as “staggering” (p. 139), but he moves beyond that to try to understand the larger sense of profound loss people are experiencing.  He argues that, within the earlier discourse of “modernization,” people saw themselves and their nations as moving toward some kind of “modern” future, including a sense of joining a “world society” and connecting up with what Ferguson calls “the grid of modernity.”  Now however they feel themselves disconnected from the grid, both literally and metaphorically, and with a sense of abjection or “humiliating expulsion” from the global modern community (p. 140).

Jean and John Comaroff show us another face of the ways in which people suffering under the effects of late capitalism/neoliberalism (2001) make sense of the new world in which they find themselves.  They use the phrase “millennial capitalism” to call to mind not only the real timing of the economic transformation in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, but also to capture the magical, supernatural, fearful overtones associated with the turn of the millennium.  Drawing on earlier ethnographic research by themselves and others, in South Africa and many other parts of the world, they call attention to the recent proliferation of “occult economies,” magical (by way of, say, wealth-sucking zombies) and quite practical (by way of, say, extravagant Ponzi schemes) ways of gaining great wealth without productive labor.  While cautioning that it is difficult to measure any real growth in the frequency with which such beliefs and practices are appearing, they argue nonetheless that these beliefs/practices have become part of the public discourse in ways that are new, and have taken on new meanings in an economic order in which speculative financialization – what has elsewhere been called “casino capitalism” – has become normalized.

For a final example of how people try to make sense of the effects of neoliberalization of their lived world, we may look at Steven Gregory’s study of everyday life and local politics in the Dominican Republic.  Where Ferguson’s study conveys a sense of the profound wounding of identities and loss of faith in the future brought about by the collapse of the modernist project under neoliberalism; and where the Comaroffs’ discussion shows us what might be called the deep irrationalities, which nonetheless have a kind of rationality, triggered by an out-of-control economy; Gregory focuses on the ways in which the neoliberal order generates new forms of (state) power, and new points of friction between the more and less powerful, on the ground.  In this context, Gregory’s actors appear more political, more willing to take on the authorities under particular conditions, and more active in keeping specific injustices clear and well in view.  For example, when the state sold off the national electrical utility to a private company, and the company began imposing blackouts to get people to pay their bills, people took to the streets “in widespread, unrelenting protests throughout the country”(p. 14).

For poor communities within rich nations, as well as for poor nations in an increasingly unbalanced world, it is likely that we see manifestations of all of these ways, and no doubt more, of making sense of the craziness and the gross injustices of the neoliberal world order.  A sense of humiliation and abjection, a great deal of magical and irrational thinking, as well as a certain clear-eyed sense of injustice and the necessity for standing up to it when it is not too dangerous to do so – all of these and many other ways of understanding/experiencing/reacting to/dealing with the pitilessness of neoliberal theories and practices can no doubt be found, in various mixtures, in most parts of the world.

I confess it is easy to be pessimistic about the state of the world today, and very hard to see a way out.  But I take some small measure of heart from a recent story in the New York Times about the impact of a new documentary by critical filmmaker Charles Ferguson. Ferguson has a PhD in political science, made millions in Silicon Valley, cashed out and began making politically critical documentary films.  He first made a spectacular award-winning documentary on the Iraq war called No End in Sight (2007), and more recently made a documentary about the 2008 near-crash of Wall Street, Inside Job (2010).^[4] The latter is a powerful critique of the economists, bankers, and politicians who basically saw what was coming and proceeded with what they were doing anyway.  One of the story lines in the film concerns academic economists who sit on the boards of major banks and financial corporations but fail to disclose this in their C.V.’s, on their web sites, and presumably in their classrooms. There is a stunning moment in the film when Ferguson is interviewing the Dean of the Business School at Columbia University, and pressing him about his failure to reveal his potential and real conflicts of interest.  The dean suddenly realizes that he has been exposed on film, gets very angry, and calls a halt to the interview.  But the damage has been done.

I saw the film when it came out in October.  Recently, I opened my morning New York Times and found the following story on page one of the business section:  “Academic Economists to Consider Ethics Code.”  The proposal for this code, according to the Times reporter, “is partly a response to ‘Inside Job,’ a documentary film … that excoriates leading academic economists for their ties to Wall Street as consultants, advisers or corporate directors.” The reporter goes on to say that “the film has rattled the [economics] profession,” and he quotes an M.I.T. professor who said about the proposal for the ethics code, “’You could call this the ‘Inside Job’ effect.”  (Chan 2010).  It’s important to note that the proposal for the code of ethics has not passed yet, and indeed may not pass.  Thus one must recognize the ways in which the Times reporter and his editors are adding value and impact to the film by giving the (possible) code of ethics story this kind of coverage.  The story itself is a political act.

I find all of this encouraging on a number of counts.   I am encouraged that there are wealthy persons like Ferguson who have both a critical intelligence and a conscience, as well as the talent to make a powerful film.  I am encouraged that the film had the power to expose and shame an influential person, his field, and his institution, and possibly bring about some small but real change. I am encouraged that the Times covered, and indeed constructed, the story.  It will only be out of some complicated conjuncture of people and forces like this – between wealthy and powerful renegades like Ferguson, powerful media like the New York Times (and smart reporters like Sewell Chan), anthropologists and others writing and teaching about what is going on, and ordinary people themselves, in their infinite practical wisdom, in every part of the globe – that some kinds of solutions may emerge.

REFERENCES CITED

Appadurai, Arjun.  1990.  “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.”  Public Culture 2(2):1-24.

Bell, Daniel.  1974.  The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.  New York:  Harper Colophon Books.

Chan, Sewell.  2010.  “Academic Economists To Consider Ethics Code.”  New York Times, December 31: B1, 2.

Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff, eds.  2001.  Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.  Durham:  Duke University Press.

Dudley, Kathryn Marie.  1994.  The End of the Line:  Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Ferguson, James.  2002.  “Global Disconnect:  Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism.”  In J.X. Inda and R. Rosaldo, eds., The Anthropology of Globalization, pp. 136-153.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing.

Gregory, Steven.  2007.  The Devil Behind the Mirror:  Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic.  Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press.

Hannerz, Ulf.  1996.  Transnational Connections:  Culture, People, Place.  London and New York:  Routledge.

Harvey, David.  1989.  The Condition of Postmodernity.  Oxford:  Basic Blackwell.

2005.  A Brief History of Neoliberalism.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Inda, Jonathan Xavier and Renato Rosaldo, eds.  2002.  The Anthropology of Globalization.  Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing.

Jameson, Fredric.  1984.  “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”  New Left Review 146, July-August, pp. 53-92.

Klein, Naomi.  2008.  The Shock Doctrine:  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  London:  Penguin Books.

Lash, Scott and John Urry.  1987.  The End of Organized Capitalism.  Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press.

Mandel, Ernst.  1978.  Late Capitalism.  Trans. J. De Bres.  New York:  Verson.

Ortner, Sherry B.  n.d.  Not Hollywood:  Independent Film as Cultural Critique.  Manuscript.

Sahlins, Marshall.  2002.  Waiting for Foucault, Still.  Chicago:  Prickly Pear Press.

Taylor, Timothy D.  n.d.  “Music in the New Capitalism.” In A. Valdivia, ed., International Companions to Media Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt.  2005.  Friction:  An Ethnography of Global Connection.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

 

1. ^[1] See also Taylor n.d. for another sorting out of these and related terms.  I am grateful to Timothy Taylor for excellent comments and suggestions on this article. ↩
2. ^[2] The title of Harvey’s 1989 book, The Condition of Postmodernity, signals the connection between late capitalism and postmodernity, a major theme in the 80s literature (see also Jameson 1984).  I had hoped to include a discussion of postmodernity in this essay, but I have run out of time and space.  The connection between the two phenomena is central to my book on the independent film scene in the U.S. in the 1990s and 2000s.  See Ortner n.d. ↩
3. ^[3] “Deindustrialization” and the related “post –industrial society” are part of an earlier vocabulary of “late capitalism” (see Bell 1974, Dudley 1994). ↩
4. ^[4] Ferguson and his films play a significant role in Ortner n.d. ↩