#george lipsitz

[2mercia2furious]

i've been trying to figure out for the past month why i just don't feel like writing fic stuff rn. i'm for certain it's not just writers' block, it's grief.

today i ran into this list of books just removed from the Nimitz library. the majority of the texts on race, racism and identity are ones i taught, read or included in my work.

we don't really have a name for this kind of grief, do we? teacher grief, scholar grief, archival grief just don't do it justice when you're watching your colleagues and your field get devoured. it's not even really anticipatory at this point either. this is the part where the once slow train speeds past you.

and there's this anger that comes from seeing how vulnerable people are when they're denied access to things that could have helped. it's bitter like a stomach ache from too much coffee, and it claws back at you when you think you're well beyond its grasp.

please do what you can to protect your local library or start a little free library with books about the real history of this place.

[jacobwren]

Domination produces resistance, and resistance plants the seeds of a new society within the shell of the old.

George Lipsitz, What Is This Black in the Black Radical Tradition?

[just-like-barth]

As i have argued elsewhere, we cannot attribute our investment in whiteness to the color of our skin. Sadly, it is a chilling reflection on the content of our character. (George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place, 50)

[ave1125]

Cultural Appropriation: Motoko Kusanagi is White?

Cultural Appropriation: Motoko Kusanagi is White?

In a recent article from the New Republic, Ryu Spaeth makes the case that it is fine to cast Scarlett Johansson, a white female, as Motoko Kusanagi, a robot detective in future Tokyo. I think the problem with this article is that it doesn’t recognize the link between cultural appropriation and power relations. It is true that the distinction between cultural cross-pollination and cultural…

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[whatisfeministpedagogy-blog]

Living with contradictions is difficult

“Living with contradictions is difficult, and, especially for intellectuals and artists employed in academic institutions, the inability to speak honestly and openly about contradictory consciousness can lead to a destructive desire for ‘pure’ political positions, to militant posturing and internecine battles with one another that ultimately have more to do with individual subjectivities and self-images than with disciplined collective struggle for resources and power.”

George Lipsitz (2000) ‘Academic Politics and Social change’, in Jodi Dean (ed.) Cultural Studies / Political Theory, Cornell University Press, pp. 80-94.

[lusilly]

Because racial projects are flexible, fluid, and relational, the contours of anti-Black spaces are relevant to all communities of color. They are crucibles where other kinds of cruelty are learned and legitimated. When discrimination succeeds, it does not stop with one group but rather becomes generalized as a social principle and practice.

George Lipsitz, "How Racism Takes Place"

[steveambush]

The main problem posed by the inter-cultural collaborations orchestrated by Paul Simon or David Byrne stems from their unwillingness to examine their own relationship to power or to allow for reciprocal subjectivities between and among cultures. By placing themselves at the center, they elide their own historical specificity as well as that of their colleagues and collaborators. They obscure power relations in the present as well as the enduring consequences of past acts of subordination and suppression. Most important, they define delight in difference as a process organized around exotic images from overseas, with no corollary inspection of their own identities. Their escapes into postmodern multi-culturalism, however well-motivated, hide the construction of ‘whiteness’ in America – its privileges, evasions, and contradictions.

George Lipsitz, on Paul Simon’s Graceland and David Byrne’s Rei Momo (and their lack of self-conscious understanding of the unequal power relations informing their collaborations on these recordings)

Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London: Verso, 1994, pg. 63.    

[brick-wahl]

Cultural appropriation

I am still trying to get my mind around the fact that the concept of cultural appropriation, whereby the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture is inherently a negative, oppressive act, was developed by a third generation Jewish immigrant from the Bronx named George Lipsitz (no h) who has made his career as a professor of African-American Studies at UC Santa…

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