More Crackhead Student Quotes

Oy, I've neglected my responsibilities. Here's the last batch from the grading. Some of these really hurt my head. I think we need to work on "critical thinking" as a necessary skill for these kids.

"The Europeans carved up Africa like children choosing the flavors of Jellybeans."

"Although Africa did not have structured military armies, the people of Africa were bonded through Nationalism and fought in rebellions as one." (No armies? There goes my dissertation...)

"The British in Africa really tortured there economy and political structure."

"So if man won't fight then leave to the woman to finish what they started on start what they need to finish."

"Because they watched their King get tooken. So she suggested that she would gather a group of women to fight. Since the mens won't do anything." (Apparently Mario Cantone is writing exams now.)

"The letter [from Menelik II] stated that they didn't want to start a battle or anything because they were a good island and stayed to theirself. They didn't want to be divided into something that they wasn't."

"European powers wanted to break up the [African] unit by colonizing different portions, but the African's strong instinct to fight back didn't allow it."

"Screw history." (Succinct, yet satisfying.)

"They were treated poorly, and even killed to some extent."

"But because the African people were semi poor, they only had little old guns while the British fought with big guns."

"African slave trade was started when Poland initially invaded West African shores."

"Document 5 is a picture showing how the Ethiopians beat the Italians; its a good source because it comes from a museum."

"The Germans thought killing Africans was a luxury." (This student got incredibly angry over this idea. I think the self-righteous ones were my favorites, like those students who take a college class in Women's Studies and suddenly realize that sexism still exists.)

"Africans want to maintain a stable relationship with Europe but to stay out of dangerous affairs."

"This process was called the Scrable for Africa. The African American people were not happy about this decision to interrupt their way of livign and corrupt their way of life."

"Africa could have made some sort of deal with Europe with the help of the Royal Niger Company. Instead of letting Europe take their land, Africa could have divided themselves in half. One half of Africa belongs to Africa, while the other half belongs to Europe. Maybe if the Africans did not have too much fear of the white men, they could have gained back some of their control." (I would advocate for putting this student in charge of the Middle East peace process. I think s/he's onto something.)

"In 1896, Italy attacked Ethiopia, but sadly lost."

"With these actions and reactions in effect, the European alliances went out on Africa and rebeled on their homes and land as well as being patience with their decision and the speeches to stop the Europeans."

"They lured the African nations into their web, and then milked them for everything they had."

"Kumalo says they were 'treated like slaves,' and they became pissed, so the Ndebele Rebellion sparked almost spontaneously, with a lot of rage."

"The Ashanti leader declined the offer and the reason she would know so much about a topic like that is because she is the leader of the kingdom and things like that offer would go to her." (Logic....nice.)

"Europe was a powerful colony. They had the guns, germs and steel to take over whatever colony they pleased."

"However [the Berlin Conference] was unfair to Africa because not one African was allowed at the UN meeting dealing with the division of Africa."

"African countries felt they were destroying their culture, killing their kin and they needed to fight back dispite their inadiquit equipment."

"The Ndebele Rebellion pushed forward against the British in South America in 1896."

"West Africa being more materartical, enjoying the protection of the queen."

"The country of Africa prospered in peace up until 1884-1885. The Berlin Conference brought many European visitors to the country Africa but to the Africans, the Europeans seemed more like invaders than visitors."

"Of course the British are going to want to colonize Africa because they're greedy people and they want all the money, land and natural resources they can get." (It's called "capitalism," honey.)

"In 1886 the Royal Niger Company peacefully invaded West Africa in hopes of improving the country."

"The Africans fought the Europeans with sticks and fire."

"It was probably intended as reverse psychology since men are all proud and would never accept a woman taking charge and join in battle."

"Well, a short distance from the strawberry farm , a man had found a map to the monstrous strawberry. So, men being inferior to cows, he decided to give the map to the strawberry-loving cow."

"During that time frame the holocaust was also happening or at least at the begining of the 1800s."

"It's no surprise to hear this because [Menelik II] is emperor of Ethiopia who is Christian. Christians believe in peace, not violence because it is not what God wants."

"During the age of imperialism the European powers spread around the globe like ants."

"Africa was turned into a smorgasbord of land, Europe scrambled for a piece of the omelet they called the goldmine of Africa."

"One European man discovered a new land. He saw naked women and men running around. All they had was a leaf to cover their breasts and other areas."

"We began this test after 9am."

"An additional doc should come from a soldier who was killed in battle so we would knew what he thought about losing to the Ethiopians." (As a historian, I have to say, communicating with the dead would make life SOOOOOOOOO much simpler.)

Ta-da. Grading finished. Will get back to odd grad school angst in a day or so.

Things I've Learned From Grading, Part Deux

Here's today's batch. A few other graders are contributing as well, so it's getting good.

"Around 1884 there was a conference in England. It was called the Berlin Conference."

"The Africans were never a real warring nation because of their seclusion from the modern world. For this reason, they have always been peaceful, and generally left alone." (There goes my research...)

"The white men say their the bad ones but their the ones who have everyone running, in Africa."

(FYI, for those who don't know me personally, incorrect use of homophones is my biggest pet peeve.)

"During the time period of 1884 and 1885 the Europeans tried to take over the African state known as Africa."

"We all must fight in a rebellion for our land holding our nationalism strong. :)" (I love it when they use emoticons on exams.)

"We all have the same red blood pumping through our vains skin tone is a type of diverse beauty. Love is unconditional, African societies expressed their love in rebellions, fighting for their land and nationalism." (This one was such a hippie.)

"The mad Scramble for Africa resulted in a mixture of actions and reactions. Some get what they wanted and others were unfortunate but that's the way the cookie crumbles." (I have no words...)

"The Ashanti wanted to remain independent while keeping a platonic relationship with the British." (So no making out.)

"All Africans were opposed to Scrable in Africa." (They prefer Candy Land.)

"In 1886 the Royal Niger Company sent letters to African Americans, asking them to make a pledge not to enter themselfs into any war with other tribes." (Thanks, Jesse Jackson. I credit you also with the student who last year informed me that Nelson Mandela was the first African-American president of South Africa.)

"The Scramble for Africa was a scary time for Africans. Many of them didn't know what to do and completely freaked out." (Um, OK....)

"The Ethiopian painting depicts a victory of the colored men while the Royal Niger Company is making alliences to support colored men." (I think I preferred "African American" after all...)

"If I was to request a document, I would use thoroughly one stating specifics during the first years around 200 BCE as compared to 1450 CE."

"Without the Silk Road, travel to Asia would be really hard." (Since there are no flights from LA.)

"One disease that can attributed its major success to trade on the Silk Road is the smallpox, which was breed to the domestication of animals."

"The ideas and culture of China were able to escape into the world along the Silk Road." (Quick, somebody catch them!)

"Maybe since Marco [Polo] went there that might be why Mongollia didn't take over Western Europe." (One look at Marco and they were like, "Fuck that!")

"An example would be how Mongols spread disease in to China. Diseases such as sypholis, AIDS gonorrhea, and such. The disease spreading was living on through there people."

"As civilizations died and others were born, the Silk Road's took the journey with them."

Also, if African and Europeans had had the Torah, they would've known how to be peaceful.

Latin Americans are our friends from "down under."

Africa is a country.

More tomorrow, loves.

Things I've Learned From Grading, Part I

I will update my, like, 2 readers on the rest of my academic life in a day or two. For now, I want to share some things I learned while grading today. I will be doing this until Monday, so check back every night for your dose of "What America's Future Knows About the Rest of the World"

"One should take in account such inference since he cannot be biased due to his disposition."

"After the Berlin Conference, many European powers divided up Africa as if they owned it. The Africans did not like this." (i'm shocked.)

"If all of Africa was so upset by the European Scramble why would they sign a form that binds them to a company commissioned by the British? This just shows that some Africans were all for Europe colonizing areas in Africa." (don't you love it when students become apologists for imperialism?)

"The Scramble for Africa seemed short-lived and unable to attain its ultimate goal of dividing up the nations among Europeans." (colonialism didn't work. who knew?)

"White people during the Scramble for Africa had no sense of indecency or justice." (Truth.)

"Several genders, including men, women, and sometimes children would do anything with in there power to fight back against the white people." (children constitute a gender....)

"Obviously the Africans were the least enthused by this hustle for their territory." (out of the mouths of babes, indeed.)

"A useful document that would have came to good use in this is an account of a slave. It would show how the servents of the devil (Europe) felt during this time."

"Multiple of Africans took action into their own hands."

"Islam had invaded Eastern Africa taking many cultures that Africans had followed for many years and thrown them in the trash." (Muslims are never Africans, fyi.)

Also, I learned that Ethiopia was, in fact, not part of Africa, and that Menelik II did not care what happened to the rest of the continent.

Favorite of the day:

"Africa went serious on Germany, which comes to be Europe." (Remind you of anybody?)

More to come, stay tuned.

Do you ever have those days....?

OK, so I've already had like 2 mini-breakdowns today. I think I'm just really exhausted and feeling really overwhelmed. I feel like I've already done so much work, but there's still so much left to do, and I don't know how to handle it. On the one hand, it'll be nice to get away for a week and grade papers in which I have absolutely no personal stake. On the other, all the mental preparation is a little nuts, and thinking about grading papers for 8 hours a day, 6 days in a row is really daunting.

At the moment, though, I'm really stressed about this dissertation workshop. Not really sure why I'm going in the first place. My proposal was really quickly put together, and that's very obvious. Also, since this was 2 months ago, I've pretty much completely changed my topic at this point. Add to that the fact that pretty much everyone else is at a far more advanced stage of research, and I'm feeling really intimidated by the whole thing, and like I'm not going to handle criticism well, even though I know the proposal needs a huge amount of work. I hope I can learn a lot in this process, but right now, I fear I don't have the energy to get through it. I need to sleep for about a week, and then just watch TV for about 4 days. All "Golden Girls" and reality TV. I sort of feel like Blanche in this clip right about now.

All in all, today is epic suck. Hopefully I will have better things to report by Sunday.

Blah

I hate days like today. I woke up at 5:30 and couldn't go back to sleep because my brain wouldn't quit working. I still have ugly-ass ringworm on my neck and it looks like I got bit by a vampire, and not the hot kind that drives a flashy car. I still have 50 midterms to grade by 3pm tomorrow. Which are not going to get done, since I left them at the office.

I spent the entire day revising a response paper that I'm fairly sure one of my profs will eviscerate, and then 4 hours in 2 different seminars talking about African cities and state-building in Burma. Ick.

And then my friend bailed on me after promising to take me to In-N-Out, so I had to make crappy pasta. If it weren't for Texts From Last Night, I'd just end it now. :)

Tomorrow, teaching about the Holocaust! Then just one more response paper and a prospectus and I am done with this hellish awful quarter.

Memorial Day 2009

I spent the weekend reading/writing about the Modern African City. I am not sure what precisely that entails.

What is modern? After 9 weeks in a seminar on modernity, I can honestly say that I have no idea. There is a level of industrialization and technological development that can be called "modern." But that does not seem to be what most modernization theorists (and, indeed, their critics) are writing about.

Democracy seems to be part of modernity, at least in its originally-conceived form. There has been a lot of debate over this. I tend to think that democracy has very little to do with modernity. In fact, I think liberalism has very little to do with it either, since liberalism doesn't seem to work in a lot of places.

Things associated with Europe and the U.S. seem to be part of modernity. However, this focus on a specific culture of modernity make me fairly sure that modernity should not be a universal goal. Though a lot of postcolonial theorists want to argue that there are multiple or alternative modernities, I am not so convinced. James Ferguson has a really interesting take on it, in that most of the Africans he encountered (he's worked primarily in southern Africa, Zambia, South Africa and Lesotho) subscribe to this more "western" definition of modernity and actually desire it, because it is associated with stability and luxury. In fact, Ferguson has argued, it's insulting to tell a person that their culture is an "alternative modernity," when the modernity they seek is one in which they are not starving (or something like that). He was our guest in seminar last week, and he has reaffirmed my belief that there are some good anthropologists out there. :)

Urbanization also seems to be an integral part of what most theorists would consider modern. My reading this week was about African cities, primarily Johannesburg and Kinshasa. Clearly the Kinshasa reading was a little more interesting to me due to my professional interest in Congo. I'm still working on my response paper for the week, and our discussion is Tuesday, but I see a pretty profound relationship between the way the city was constructed during colonialism and in the immediate postcolonial era and the overwhelming alienation that has plagued urban populations since. Mechanisms for constructing identity seem to be completely disrupted, forcing urban inhabitants to find new ways of belonging. While wage labor once served that purpose, in places like Kinshasa, formal wage labor doesn't exist anymore. Kinshasa is a city of lumpen. What's more, these cities are predominantly male, which creates the need for new forms of family structure.

What was perhaps most striking (at least to me) was the role of Western popular culture in how new social identities are constructed. Westerns were very popular in Kinshasa in the 1950s and young men fancied themselves cowbows in the Wild West. Indeed, Kinshasa (or Leopoldville, as it was called prior to independence in 1960) is a frontier. Today, those cowboys have been replaced by soldiers or hunters or the Terminator. I couldn't help but wonder what sort of impact these films had on the types of violence that have become so very prevalent in contemporary Africa (can we call it "postmodern"?).

I should confess that I really like post-apocalyptic movies, probably because I'm interested in how people construct social network and identities, and the idea of a tabula rasa really intrigues me. But I like them also because they are films. They are fiction. So much of Congo (and many other conflict-ridden African countries) are like real post-apocalyptic worlds, and this article about Kinshasa did nothing to alter this particular perception of mine. In this reality, I don't know that these films are good things. They glorify violence, simplistic ideology and, often, an extreme objectification of women.

I don't like censorship, and I think conversations about the effects of violence in popular culture in the U.S. are largely predicated on trying to control things we don't understand rather than actually protecting our children/their children/our women, etc. But in places where violence is so prevalent, what kind of impact do these messages have? The message of particular pieces of art largely depends on the context of the experiencer, right?

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about this weekend. Had a great time on Friday night celebrating my best friend's dissertation defense, and watched the first two "Terminator" movies on Saturday night (contributing, no doubt, to my processing of these readings). Partook in crepes at Coffee Cat on Saturday and Sunday. Yum. Hoping to hear something about the new place tomorrow so I can start packing.

2 weeks left in this quarter!! It'll be nice to have a little time to luxuriate and take my time going through 6000 pages of Jan Vansina's brilliance.

A Day without Nails

The nails came off this morning. They will make a comeback on Friday, when I have time for a manicure, but they were just entirely too long and grown out to do much typing, and therefore, they had to be sacrificed.

I felt really tired and crappy today, so I didn't go to seminar this evening. I should have, because there's no crying in grad school, but I gave in and went home instead.

I finished Jan Vansina's Antecedents of Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom. Overall, an absolutely outstanding piece of historical scholarship. I'm really getting more into the precolonial history, and I think, ultimately, that's where my project is going to end up. Vansina is really challenging the "ethnic" reading of Rwandan history, much like David Newbury. It's really refreshing to read Rwandan history that is not about the 1994 genocide. Eventually I think we're going to be able to reclaim the historiography from all the pop historians who like to sell books by casting Africans as tribal and primitive and genocidal, and then we can view the genocide for what it was: an aberration, both for the continent and for Rwanda itself. Whatever the postcolonial history has been, it is markedly different than the precolonial.

Also graded a section of papers today. I'm underwhelmed. I have really smart students and am usually impressed with their work in class, but I just don't think they "got" the assignment. I think students really struggle with how to write a history paper about a novel. They always seem to do a literary analysis instead of placing the novel in a historical context. Boo. A lot of decent-to-good writing, which was a plus.

I need to start writing tomorrow, and getting some of this precolonial stuff down to paper, as my first draft of my historiographical essay is due next Thursday. Tomorrow I get to watch some colonial cinema, and then go have Wow-Cow. So even if the rest of the day sucks, yay, ice cream!