Apr
04

Notes on a Political History of the Zombie (Part 1)

The birth of the zombie in U.S. mass culture begins with White Zombie, the 1932 movie featuring Bela Lugosi.  Lugosi plays a zombifier named “Murder Legendre” (a moniker full of grammatological possibilities).  By 1932, American cinema had begun a serious romance with the monster movie: Dracula with Lon Chaney, Sr.,  had appeared in 1930; Boris Karloff would feature as Frankenstein’s monster in 1931; and, a year after, White Zombie, King Kong would swing on the Empire State Building,  Manhattan’s most famous avatar of the now-imploded Art Deco 1920s.  The monster movie’s popularity in the early 1930s – – one of the most chaotic and anxious moments in the nation’s history – – parallels the rise of the gangster movie and, in another medium, the emergence of the proletarian novel, each engrossed with the power and violence of social difference.

The genealogy of the zombie in American mass culture extends, however, a tad bit beyond 1932.  The concept of the “zombie” – – a malevolently resurrected corpse – – traveled across the Atlantic with enslaved Africans. ‘Though relatively obscure in the U.S., the zombie became a common folkloric motif across the Caribbean.

The etymology of “zombie” is confused: it derives either from African languages or, as Elsie Clews Parsons, an American feminist and anthropologist, conjectured in 1928, from a pidginization of “les ombres,” French for “the shadows.”  In either case, like its referent, the word bears testament to a long history of linguistic and cultural creolization.

Parsons’ article, appearing in a French journal of American Studies, marks also the first appearance of the “zombie” in the official discourse of folklore and anthropology.  What Parsons notes, most interestingly, is the notion of the zombie as a nightmarish recurrence of slavery:  “Stories in my note books tell what happens when you appeal to the ganga to kill somebody in order to enslave his spirit to you or make him a zombi (“fai” zombi) to work for you. . . In one story the zombi becomes a gardener. Night and day he works for his master, and he catches pilferers.”

In Haitian folklore, the zombie is a human reduced to pure labor.  Recall, also, that the first actual zombies we see in White Zombie are workers in Legendre’s sugar mill – – shuffling silently forward to dump baskets of cane into the mill’s grindstone.  Amidst the strikes, evictions, marches, and riots of the early 1930s, it’s not too far-fetched to see the movie’s zombies as part of an emerging, national-populist drama: the zombie master who reduces humans to abject bodies and labor is a capitalist, evil and european-accented to boot!  From the factory-owner’s perspective, zombies are the perfect workers; they labor without protest, without food, without rest.  The message to proletarian viewers is slightly different, if no less true: capitalism wants to kill us!

Labor, enslavement, exploitation: these are some key of the contexts for the folkloric zombie.

But, the arrival of the zombie in anthropology and cinema depends on one other central context.  In 1915, United States troops invaded and occupied Haiti.  The American government commandeered Haiti’s central bank and customs houses, diverting close to half of the national income to American and French interests.  Resistance to American occupation was, for several years, fierce and widespread: 2,000 Haitians were killed in one general uprising in 1918.  In response, the American military built concentration camps and rebuilt Haiti’s roads to improve military communication and transport.  The occupation lasted until 1934, when the newly-elected F.D.R. pulled out the last U.S. Marine.

For 20 years, however, American soldiers, civilians, businessmen, and other factotums of the occupation came into direct and indirect contract with Haitian culture.  The occupation opened up a cultural conduit between white America and black Caribbean folk culture – – an exchange exhaustively riffed in Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo.  One of Reed’s characters lies in the bathtub reading and reflecting on the day’s New York Sun:  “What was this about doughboy zombies?  The tabs were becoming outrageous . . . Recently 1 of the reports had sneaked into a big house chamber and emerged with a picture of a woman undergoing execution – – ghastly but fun.  The picture showed a zombie Marine surrounded by men in white coats.”  Voudou, houngans, loas, and zombies – – all of these forces, unleashed by the U.S. occupation, feed the “Jes Grew” virus, Reed’s metaphor for the black expressivity, incarnated in the novel as jazz,  that threatens to over-run white America and its repressed, protestant culture.

Reed’s novelistic imagining of the afro-diasporic role in U.S. mass culture is not just fictional.  A bit of data mining reveals that “zombie” (or its variant – – “zombi”) only starts appearing in U.S. books around 1920, shortly after the U.S. occupation.  “Zombie” really starts taking off in the early 1930s – – probably thanks in part to White Zombie and its several 1930s and 40s Hollywood successors.

Thus, the U.S. occupation of Haiti adds another important context to the popular cultural birth of the zombie: imperialism and the attendant cultural flows (and racialized anxieties) set in motion by the violent engagement between the U.S. and Haiti.

In a decade, the 1930s, of wide and deep struggle against American capitalism (from the general strikes that rocked  San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo in 1934 to birth of the United Auto Workers and beyond),  the zombie joined an army of monsters (ranging from Kong to Dillinger) that fascinated Americans, each serving as a figure of fear and fascination, each embodying an unstable amalgam of rage and desire.  In the 1930s, Legendre’s slaves were on the march . . . their shouts filled the streets of Detroit, Union Square in New York City, and the fields of California’s Central Valley.

How to explain, then, the resurgence of enslaved, mindless bodies on today’s movie, television, and computer screens?  Our two historical contexts – – labor and imperialism – – should prove crucial to understanding our current fascination with the zombie.  One major shift in the zombie genre – – the figure of the zombie master and his enchanted slaves giving way to the terror of swarming and endlessly multiplying, out-of-control zombies – – underscores the genealogy of zombies and capitalism even as it disrupts and complicates this relation.  The “many-headed Hydra” of zombie power re-emerges under new conditions and within new struggles . . . .

 

Mar
07

The Figure in the Carpet: Recognizing Authentic Learning

The hive is alive!  My students are busy annotating, commenting, creating, collaborating on our digital anthology of American literature.  I know something significant is happening in the class because I see the students demonstrating all the kinds of things that I associate with real learning: excitement, self-organization, intensity, questions, failure, and an energy that overflows the three hours and two classrooms that we share each week.  But, I ask myself, even if I seem to see the signs of authentic learning, how can I know that the students are engaged in authentic learning?

In other words, what is authentic learning and how do we (teachers) grasp it?

First, what is non-authentic learning?  Here, I rely on John McClymer and Lucia Knoles and their very powerful essay, “Ersatz Learning, Inauthentic Testing.”   McClymer and Knoles argue, passionately, that too often teachers ask students to study without learning.  In other words, teachers construct curricula related not to authentic knowledge but to tests and other institutional rituals.  Math teachers require students to solve boatloads of sample problems, but not to learn math.  Students study to pass tests, not to master disciplines.  In the ersatz paradigm, we train students in “artifical coping techniques,” techniques which hopefully result in higher test scores but which we (as professionals and learners) would never deploy.

In other words, ask yourself this question the next time you design a course, construct a curriculum,  create an essay prompt, or prepare a lecture: are the problems, issues, ideas, and arguments that I’m asking students to learn about the same problems, issues, ideas, and arguments that I find exciting, engaging, and fulfilling in my discipline or field.  If you answer “no,” welcome to the world of ersatz learning – – where education demands a lot studying but very little real learning.

One path out of the ersatz educational world has been plotted by folks like Randy Bass.  Imbibing deeply at the well of insight provided by scholars like Sam Wineburg, Randy outlined an approach to authentic learning dubbed “the novice in the archive.”  (This idea and a host of other rich approaches to learning and technology can be found in “Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History” – – sadly, this first really important expression of digital humanities seems to have disappeared from the web.)  Bass argues that, thanks to the distributed nature of the web and the proliferation of on-line archives, students now have access to the very same kind primary material that scholars use to make knowledge.

Authentic learning, then, requires that we see students as “novices in the archive” – – “cognitive apprentices” to expert learners like ourselves.  What we teach students is not how to pass tests, but how real scholars engage with, understand, and make meaning out of materials, problems, and questions that drive our own inquiry.  Teachers, courses, and curricula don’t “deliver” information into vacant student brains; instead, teachers construct opportunities for students to learn how to learn – – like historians, or literary scholars, or mathematicians, or scientists, etc.

Remember the buzz you felt when you started making those connections between Frost’s semantically unstable stanzas and the tenets of James’ and Dewey’s emerging pragmatism?  That’s the buzz you want to create for your students.  And, that’s the buzz of authentic learning.

The “novice in the archive” has been tremendously important for my teaching.  After all, what are my students doing as they construct their digital anthology?  They’re learning how teachers and scholars provide the kind of apparatus that deepens and enriches a reader’s engagement with American literature.

Still, something technocratic  – – perhaps even narcissistic – – lingers over the “novice in the archive.”    Do all expert-learners really learn in the same way?  Do I really approach Frost’s “Mending Wall” the same way as my other comrades in literary studies?  Do my courses have something more to offer my students than a model of “expert learning”?  Will a generation of Doctor Casaubons “win” a better future than a generation of credentialed Cylons?  After all, the archive, as Jorge Luis Borges relentlessly documented, can be a very happy labyrinth.

In my experience, if you want rock ‘n’ roll in teaching and learning, you have to go back to the source – – the Johnny Rotten, as it were – – of authentic learning in America – – Ralph Waldo Emerson.  You’ll recall Emerson’s original punk manifesto against ersatz education: “The American Scholar.”  (If not, we’ll have to send the Adjustment Bureau to your home or office to revoke that AP English credit you earned oh-so-many decades ago!).  In addition to laying waste the cultural authority of the canon (c. 1837), Emerson fomented the idea that the goal of school should be incendiary: “[Colleges and other institutions of learning] can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.”    The office of the scholar or teacher, Emerson frothed: “is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”

In other words, authentic learning is about awakening consciousness.  About creating passion.  About lighting selfhood on fire.  About self-revision.  Not in any cheap or dianetic way, but by inviting students to become “novices in the archive,” but only if the “archive” serves as a means to rethink self and world.

Is there “authentic learning” going on in my classroom this semester?  So far, a few cracks and holes have appeared in the archive.  I’m still fomenting a complete prison break . . . .

 

Feb
09

Sin Jefes: The Leaderless Academic Community

To begin with a stupid, but not snide, question: if your university or college has a president, who elected him? . . . exactly! . . .so why do we stick with this term to designate the head honcho of higher educational institutions?  Surely, there are more accurate words to describe an appointed leader who exercises authority with some formal but little substantive accountability to those whom he or she commands.

The college or university president is a symptom of one historical mode of managing complex organizations.  The esteemed historian of higher education, Frederick Rudolph, divides the history of the college president into two periods: the era of the “old-time president” and the era of the “new president.”  Through the 19th century, the old-time president governed a small, typically denominational, local institution that was focused on the “moral” education of young men.  He taught, governed, and supervised the cultivation of budding “gentlemen.”  By the end of the 19th century, this paternalist figure had been replaced by the leader of a large, national, secular institution oriented toward research and the dissemination of knowledge.  Gadfly-extraordinare, Thorsetein Veblen called these figures – – like Andrew White of Stanford, Daniel Coit Gilman of Hopkins, and Charles Elliot of Harvard – – “captains of erudition.”  Their ultimate 20th century avatar was Clark Kerr whose “multiversity” summarized and codified the modern “uses of the university.”

Veblen’s witticism points to the parallels between the emergence of the American corporation – – large, national, complex, hierarchical – – with its “captains of industry” and the rise of the similarly complex, hierarchical, and bureaucratic American university.   The management of the widget factory was duplicated in the knowledge factory.  As Rudolph notes, the pivotal decade here was the 1890s, when old-time college presidents across the country were replaced in rapid succession by non-clergymen and “great administrators.”  This is of course the same pivotal decade that Allen Trachtenberg focuses on in The Incorporation of America,  his classic study of the birth of corporate capitalist culture.

So, here we are in 2011, when deans become “vice presidents,” provosts are now routinely titled CEO’s, and academic technology directors have become CIO’s – – Chief Information Officers.  In other words, Kerr’s multiversity, which pushed higher ed closer towards modern corporate modes of organization (an example of what the sociologist Paul DiMaggio calls “institutional isomorphism“) , has become an even deeper and more entrenched way of thinking about how universities and colleges should be structured.

Ironically, at the same time, popular management theory looks increasingly to the topographies of the web to re-think business and management models.  Think Wikinomics.  Or, the Cluetrain Manifesto.  Or, more recently, The Smart Swarm.  And, one of my favorites, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.  These all share a similar theme: to master the dangerous currents of “fast capitalism,” businesses need to learn from the web’s new architecture of participation – – collaboration, sharing, mass expertise, granularity, etc.  The key word in all of this is: decentralization.  Business needs to learn to decentralize decision-making, authority, control, information, and creativity.  According to Starfish and Spider authors, Brafman and Beckstrom, organizations ought to be schooled by the Apache tribes who resisted Spanish conquest for hundreds of years:

The current paradox: over the past couple of decades, universities and colleges have borrowed much of their self-idealizations and structure from the corporate world, even as the corporate world has been moving away from “industrial age” organizational models and thinking.  In the era of the network, an institution, e.g. the university, which prides itself on creativity, originality, and innovation, remains trapped in a legacy system from the era of the robber barons.

I borrow the title of my post, “Sin Jefes,” or “Without Bosses,” from the famous Mexican anarchist and revolutionary, Ricardo Flores Magon, to underscore the strange convergence between themes (self-organization, autonomy, worker-power, etc.) of classical anarcho-syndicalism and motifs of the new read-write web.  (A strange convergence to be taken up in detail later.) But the questions posed by both Magon and business “theorists” like Brafman and Beckstrom are the same:  can the multiversity, like the industrial-era corporation it mimics, survive the era of the network?  do the new topographies of the web offer alternative models for the organization of the university? what would it mean for the university to abandon the spider in favor of the starfish?

In other words, isn’t it time we paid attention to the network and  started learning how to live without bosses?