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.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, May 25, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, May 4, 2009
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!
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!
Sunday, May 3, 2009
And it begins....
So I'm going to use my blog as a bit of grad student therapy, as well as a way to keep me focused and accountable. Every day, I'm going to record what I'm reading, what I'm writing, and what I needed to read or write that I didn't. Maybe it will prove useful to someone considering grad school. Maybe it will give my colleagues a place to vent. Maybe it will just keep me sane. At any rate....
Today, I read Part I of Alfred Stepan's 1971 book The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil. Not gonna lie, I don't understand much of this Latin America stuff. Well, I should say that I don't have much of a critical context in which to view it. Further, Stepan is a political scientist and BOY is that apparent.
I need to be working on my historiographical essay on the 1959 Hutu Social Revolution, but I did not this weekend. I was really tired and sort of run down, so I took some time off. It's really hard to justify this quarter, given the ridiculous amount of work I took on, but I had to. So, I drank a lot and went to a Derby party. Oh, and I ran on the elliptical for an hour today. I should do more of that.
Up for tomorrow: more Latin America and grading papers on the French Revolution. Ooo, party.
Today, I read Part I of Alfred Stepan's 1971 book The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil. Not gonna lie, I don't understand much of this Latin America stuff. Well, I should say that I don't have much of a critical context in which to view it. Further, Stepan is a political scientist and BOY is that apparent.
I need to be working on my historiographical essay on the 1959 Hutu Social Revolution, but I did not this weekend. I was really tired and sort of run down, so I took some time off. It's really hard to justify this quarter, given the ridiculous amount of work I took on, but I had to. So, I drank a lot and went to a Derby party. Oh, and I ran on the elliptical for an hour today. I should do more of that.
Up for tomorrow: more Latin America and grading papers on the French Revolution. Ooo, party.
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