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[lazyfredricjameson]

Netflix should always be your primary text.

[lazyfredricjameson]

Title: “Faculty Salaries Up 3%”

Article: “That amounts to about 1 percent, adjusting for inflation, the association notes with a cheeky reference point: presidents of institutions that participate in the AAUP’s annual study make 4.78 times more, on average, than their full-time professors.”

[lazyfredricjameson]

Hey, all. I had to buy this book for a class I’m taking at CMU and I’ve discovered that it provides a lot of resources for understanding the basic conversations surrounding literacy theories. A lot of the work is dated, but foundational to the field. I’m providing the table of contents because you can honestly find all of these articles somewhere, which saves you on shipping. 

[lazyfredricjameson]

Thus, on the one hand, English departments organize the use of cheap labor for the supra-income-generating composition course/product (given how many students take these courses, often many times, in comparison to how much their instructors earn); and on the other hand, they re-code the elite, high-brow gate-keeping of (literacy) discourses and language by removing freshman English teachers and their students.

Carmen Kynard, “Writing While Black: The Colour Line, Black Discourses and Assessment in the Institutionalization of Writing Instruction” (7)

[lazyfredricjameson]

In short, literacy is defined in context. It follows that if definitions of literacy are dependent on the context and community in which literacy is used, then the concept of a literate text must also be dependent on context and community.

Beverly Moss, A Literacy Text Arises: A Literate Text and a Literacy Tradition in African American Churches (4)

[lazyfredricjameson]

The intermittent controversies that arise every other decade or so over use of African American language in the classroom point to the fact that educational institutions have not internalized and accepted systematic approaches that center African American discourse community students in the literacy experience.

Elaine Richardson, African American Literacies (15)

[lazyfredricjameson]

Some more data on Black homeownership in America. If you’re curious about regionality and demographics as they relate to this week’s readings, this may be a handy resource. 

[lazyfredricjameson]

A Harney and Moten interview conducted shortly before the release of The Undercommons. There’s a lot in it, but they offer some context and additional information on this week’s reading. 

[lazyfredricjameson]

Though Mad Men is often criticized (rightly so) for its lack of recognition of Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement, this scene—in conversation with the Sparks piece—may help us understand why writers made such a rhetorical choice for most of the show’s tenure. 

Hint: Racism isn’t just a Southern practice. 

[lazyfredricjameson]

The university, then, is not the opposite of the prison, since they are both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social individual. And indeed, under the circumstances, more universities and fewer prisons would, it has to be concluded, mean the memory of the war was being further lost, and living unconquered, conquered labor abandoned to its lowdown fate. Instead, the undercommons takes the prison as a secret about the conquest, but a secret, as Sara Ahmed says, whose growing secrecy is its power, its ability to keep a distance between it and its revelation, a secret that calls into being the prophetic, a secret held in common, organized as secret, calling into being the prophetic organization.

Harvey Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (42)

[lazyfredricjameson]

In the lampooning of Black sentience and progress minstrelsy took this notion beyond legal codes, into culture, and then into mass media, its representational logics evolving over time until they were rendered near invisible—but still present, dangerous, and ready to be activated. It is in this way that the rhetoric about Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign reveals that race in America grows more complex in its blatant nuances and still remains the unfinished business of our politics, our culture, and our society.

Anthony Sparks, “Minstrel Politics or ‘He Speaks Too Well’: Rhetoric, Race, and Resistance in the 2008 Presidential Campaign (37)

[lazyfredricjameson]

To make claims for inclusion and humanity via the U.S. juridical assemblage removes from view that the law itself has been thoroughly violent in its endorsement of racial slavery, indigenous genocide, Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex, domestic and international warfare, and so on, and that it continues to be one of the chief instruments in creating and maintaining the racializing assemblages in the world of Man.

Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (81-82)

[lazyfredricjameson]

Concise, helpful article on rap and hip-hop music/discourse.

[lazyfredricjameson]

hints in the tags

[lazyfredricjameson]

It’s not fasting for sixty days, but it’ll do. 

Commodification? Dialogue? Both? You decide. 

[lazyfredricjameson]

[Beyoncé's] next movements can be read as destructive, not only to the people around her but also to herself. She has invested so much of herself into a love that has harmed her. She reacts out of her own humanity. It is in this moment we begin to see how Beyoncé’s generation of Black churched women will make their own lemonade out of lemons in ways that will contradict Black Church teachings.

Candice Benbow, “Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ and Black Christian Women’s Spirituality” (par. 2)

[lazyfredricjameson]

Why study Hiphop discourse? Hiphop is a rich site of cultural production that has pervaded and been pervaded by almost every American institution and has made an extensive global impact. Hiphop discourse, no matter how commodified or 'blaxploited,' offers an interesting view of the human freedom struggle and aspects of the knowledge that people have about the world.

Elaine Richardson, Hip Hop Literacies (9)