A very reverent Alice

In a previous post, I made a call for African, African American, or otherwise non-European-looking Alices in Wonderland. Several reached me, including two Australian editions, Whoopi Goldberg’s urban retelling, and the 2018 Pirelli calendar.

Now, designer Marlon McKenney has published Alice in Wonderland: Re-Mixed.

The book is a drastically shortened, retold version of the classic story, richly illustrated with digital images. These illustrations do an excellent job at normalising the depiction of brown-skinned people in picture books: exactly as I wished for when I made my call last year:

The book also includes some nice finds in the genre (yes!) of Alice art: there is a water-clock tea set; the Cheshire Cat practices voodoo; the White Rabbit is a DJ carrying a bling-bling watch; the game of croquet has been turned into a singing contest; and the Queen of Hearts’s children have been turned into – white – security guards, carrying guns, batons and tasers: ominous, but no less ominous than Carroll’s original.

The special aim of this publication is to bring African American children in touch with African American heritage.* The book thus aims to help consolidate a canon of art works and ideas created by people with African roots. Or, as it seems in some parts of the book, the aim may even be to create a canon of non-whites from across the entire world.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in a book with a didactic tone and little humour. During Alice’s long fall down, for instance,

She saw mystical books, ancient symbols, and pictures of important historical women. Alice was dazed and confused by the images circulating through her mind, yet somehow, they felt vaguely familiar. She’d have to remember to ask her sister about them. [bolds in the original]

At the end of the story,

everyone from Wonderland finally decided to stand up to the Queen and stop her from hurting anyone else anymore.

And after Alice’s return above ground, she says to her sister:

‘I’m just glad to be back where things are really what they seem[.]’

What chafes most in this respect, is that Lewis Carroll’s intentions and methods – to entertain children with nonsensical conversation – have been lost.

And perhaps this is inevitable. The makers of the book clearly thought: what better way to strengthen a new canon than to attach it to an existing canonic work?

But in many ways, the original Alice is an anti-canonic work. Irreverence, critique and irony are at its very heart: Shakespeare is reduced to a textbook portrait of a man with a finger pressed against his forehead; the Battle of Hastings, focal point in the British self-image, is the driest story a crowd of animals can come up with; there are the ineffectual King and Queen of Hearts; haughty Humpty Dumpty falls off his wall; and afternoon tea is a never-ending affair. Every bit of British canonicity is ridiculed.

To create a similar, humorous critique of African American figureheads might, Marlon McKenney may have deliberated, undermine the purpose of his book, which was to offer its readers a first introduction to these people and make it unambiguously clear that they are our heroes. In a typical sentence therefore, Alice’s sister Kenya

was reading aloud from one of her favorite books by the great poet Maya Angelou.

On the other hand, the Re-Mixed retelling also offers a refreshing take on the idea of a canon by mixing up what in books is usually demarcated as two separate realms: that of low culture and of high culture – of street art and salon art: Tweedledee and Tweedledum figure as two breakdancers on cardboard, next to the novels of Maya Angelou; vodou stands next to the high politics of Nelson Mandela.

Refreshing, but also a little risky. Because by following this tactic, and by including icons from across the history of the world, ranging from the Bhagavad Gita, via shamans, Frida Kahlo, and a southern-Asian caterpillar, to Queen Nefertari, all in a text of only a few thousand words, McKenney runs the danger of creating the impression that African American history offers little material that is worthy of a cultural canon. It is as if he only had a few people and works of art to choose from. Granted, every canon-building endeavour has to start somewhere. But by limiting himself to, for instance, twentieth-century North America, the author would have made a much stronger case for the global significance and influence of African American culture.

And perhaps the best service McKenney could indeed have done his heroes, would have been to treat them with a little less reverence. (Okay, apart from Maya Angelou. But Haile Selassie?) Because: once we can laugh with our cultural icons, we know that they have undeniably made it to the canon.

 

A digital copy of the book is available for free from Conscious Culture Publishing.

This post also appears on Culture Weekly, a ‘weekly bilingual culture blog on the creative industries, arts patronage and cultural policy written by scholars at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands’.

* This is my interpretation of the publisher’s blurb, which reads:

CCP is an independent publishing company committed to creating a platform for diverse content that push the boundaries of traditional storytelling. Through the creation of narratives that are a reflection of the people both creating and experiencing these stories, we empower young readers to reach their fullest potential while embracing their history and culture.

Our stories are a reflection of the global community and we believe it is important that young people of color not only see themselves reflected in stories but also have a platform to provide their own authentic voice, culture, and experience. Storytelling is an extraordinary way to educate and empower young readers and show them that they are limitless.

Sexism by anti-sexist activists

Change doesn’t come easily.

7 March is International Women’s Day, activism against gender inequity is experiencing a ‘third wave’, supported by writers, scholars and civic organisations alike – and yet, old habits are hard to shake off, even by these feminists themselves. Old habits, such as belittling women by the way they are named.

Carpenter around 1875 (from Wikimedia Commons).

As I was reading a biography of the activist Edward Carpenter, written by eminent women’s historian Sheila Rowbotham, it struck me that she referred to the women in Carpenter’s life by their first names, while the men were called by their family names. (This is especially clear in the chapter ‘Love and Loss’.) For an online example, see Rowbotham’s earlier publication Hidden from History. 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It.

In European culture, the use of first names traditionally implies intimacy, but also low status and a form of infantility or immaturity. First names are used for children, servants, nurses: Katie; Maud; Mary. Second names, on the other hand, have for a long time been reserved for people of power and authority, such as (male) politicians, authors, and teachers in secondary or higher education: Gladstone; Byron; Snyder.

(For a bitter laugh: google-image search ‘professor’ and then ‘teacher’.)

A romanticising painting of the Shelleys: William Powell Frith (1819-1909), ‘The Lover’s Seat: Shelley and Mary Godwin in Old St Pancras Churchyard’.

The distinction becomes abundantly clear in English literary history with the Shelleys, who were both famous writers. In most narratives about the Shelleys, Percy is ‘Shelley’ while Mary is ‘Mary’. It leads to such statements as ‘In mid-1816, Shelley and Mary made a second trip to Switzerland.’ (This one from Wikipedia, but exemplary of much academic writing as well.)

Another example, about contemporary writers: I use an appointment diary published by an international human-rights organisation, which contains poetry by political dissidents. Two Soviet poets from the 1980s are quoted: Irina Ratushinskaya and Nizametdin Akhmetov. She is ‘Irina’. He is ‘Akhmetov’.

Ratushinskaya, photographed by Mikhail Evstafiev. CC BY-SA 2.5.

Some women seem to be especially prone to being named in a way that places them at the bottom of the pecking order: these are immigrant women and women who have received less formal education.

Not too long ago, I was at a university conference about some of the work scholars in Britain are doing with local communities. Part of the aim was to show that such projects are a two-way street involving true collaboration between academics and people with other kinds of knowledge: knowledge from experience, or from family stories, for instance.

Unfortunately, these good intentions did not translate itself into the naming practices adopted by the (academic) presenters. The non-academic participants, mostly female and immigrant, were referred to by their first names, while the mostly indigenous/white scholars (also women in majority, in this case) were referred to by their family names.

Even scholars who make it their task to challenge racism and sexism have been immersed in a racist and sexist culture from a young age, and clearly even they find it difficult to shake of its influences.

No doubt I have been guilty of the same unfair practice over the course of my life. But once we start to notice how often it occurs, we can begin to be more careful about what we call people.

Michelle? Or Obama? (official White House portrait by Joyce N. Boghosian, 2009, from commons.wikimedia.org)

N.B. When I tried to locate the original source of this photo, the following message appeared on my screen:

Thank you for your interest in this subject. Stay tuned as we continue to update whitehouse.gov.

Sheila Rowbotham’s otherwise excellent biography is called Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (Verso, 2009).

Second strike, second chance

Today, universities and other education institutions in the United Kingdom saw another day of strikes. In an earlier post, I was trying to find a way of positioning myself with regard to the strike of 31 October.

In the meantime, I have learnt a lot about work relations in education in this country (and, again, similar things are going on elsewhere). Those doing the most ‘manual’ kinds of work, and therefore (?) receiving the lowest pay, were a minority among participants last time. (I have to say that professors were spotted this time around!) Today, the same was the case: cleaners, for example, did work as usual. Now I see that this may actually have a lot to do with the business models universities have adopted over the past years. Instead of employing everyone who works for them, universities have been outsourcing more and more of the work they need done. Their cafes and restaurants, their cleaning and their security are often run either by external companies or by daughter companies that universities create for this specific purpose. As a consequence, the staff employed by those companies are not directly employed by the university and can therefore not become a member of university labour unions. They are unable to officially participate in a strike organised by education unions, and, as far as I can see, get no legal protection or financial support from them if they were to decide to take any action.

Considering this, speaking out in solidarity with them has only become more important. Another remaining concern is the gap in salaries between female and male academics, as well as support staf. (which is very real even if you just consider the fact that women tend to end up in (economically) poorly appreciated jobs such as cleaning and caring, and men in highly appreciated ones; but even in comparable functions, men get more on average than women).

These concerns, however, run up against the realities of collective action: strikers have to make a single, clearly defined demand. The present demand for an inflation-matching rise in wages/salaries across the board, is what put me off last time. By now, I have learnt that many of my colleagues have similar feelings: demanding higher salaries for themselves, they feel, is unnecessary, unethical, and might lower academics’ image to the level of bonus-chasing bankers’. At the same time, strength still lies in numbers: only by showing up in person employees, students and other allies can really demonstrate they are serious about their worries. Luckily, we have some leeway in deciding how to contribute to this effort. So, instead of teaming up behind a ‘we want more than 1%’ -sign, I did some handicrafting this morning…… and was very happy that this contribution was well-received in town.

However, looking back, I should have gone for this one:

by Cobrophy on Reddit

(N.B. Short-term contracts have a way of boomeranging on the current academic system: having to move home every few years does leave employees with cardboard that’ll last a few rallies…)

Struggling towards a better university? Yes please. Picket-lines over pay? Not so sure.

Here I sit, at my desk, at work, Thursday, eleven o’clock. Everything’s normal, this is where I ought to be.
Or not ought to be. For I am feeling weirdly conflicted about being here.

I work at a university department. And outside my window, my colleagues are on strike.

Employees of European universities have good reasons to be angry.

The way the universities’ money is being divided between hand workers and brain workers, between women and men, en between brown people and pink people, is unequal and becoming even more unequal.

People are paid for only a proportion of the hours they are asked to spend on their work. For teaching, for example, too few hours are being counted by the universities’ managers. Teaching, preparing classes, marking exams, communicating with students, being a mentor: all these things take much more time in reality than what teachers’ bosses seem to think.

A third important problem is that researchers and teachers are being judged by numbers: the numbers of students they attract, the number of doctoral theses they ‘deliver’, the number of articles they publish. Too little value is placed on things that take time and subtlety: helping a student who has problems at home; giving your ideas on the future of education, or helping make your town a nice place to live (feeling that your place has a history and that you are part of it, are important for your well-being); doing more exciting stuff in your classes than ‘going through the literature’ or ‘giving an overview of the period’; coming up with really novel ideas, even if you are no native speaker of common-room English but happen to have been born in China or Cameroon, which makes your articles a little less ‘fun’ to read (English is rapidly becoming the only accepted language for ‘serious’ publications, even though that means many people who are no academics cannot read your research results); or taking the time to read what other researchers have been up to (to prevent that you will be doing the same work all over again!).

So, problems enough. And these problems do not just exist in the UK, where today’s strike is taking place: universities in various European countries, and no doubt elsewhere, face exactly the same issues.

The universities themselves are not always very responsive to these issues. To give just one example: instead of hiring more teachers, they organise ‘relax’ sessions for their existing pool of teachers. One vice chancellor even sent out an email to all his staff, insinuating that they don’t care about their students and that they will be social outcasts if they participate in the strike. This message was almost enough reason for me to join the strikers in front of our building.

But do not universities and their employees share a common goal? Where is the conversation between management and workers? (This is exactly what a colleague also said to me.) Are the managers only there to ensure that their institution has a financial future (and I do understand that that is hard enough). Or a human future as well?

In spite of these issues, The higher education unions of Britain have chosen to focus on the slogan ‘13% pay cut (in real terms) since 2008’.

2008. Precisely. The year the crisis began.
It would not surprise me if real-term pay have been lowered equally drastically across all European sectors, and not just at universities.

Now I need to add that I am new to this environment. I don’t know precisely how unions and strikes and contract negotiations work at universities, and particularly in the country where I work now. This makes my observations stronger, but weaker at the same time: I realise that.
I was quite surprised, for example, to be found guilty of officially crossing a ‘picket-line’ when all I thought I was doing was say hi to my colleagues on strike, go to work and do some writing for myself. I had no idea there was something like an ‘official picket’.

I am doing no teaching or other work for which my bosses could ‘miss’ me at the moment, so I thought there would be no point in me striking (except, perhaps, my presence in the crowd).
All I would harm would be myself. You could even consider that the university is actually doing me a favour at the moment by providing me with an office, internet, supporting staff and tea water. But then again, as the picketers pointed out to me, the very fact that I consider it this way, and that the university does not seem to be valuing sufficiently the enormous contributions of all those PhD-students who teach for little or no salary, short-term contract workers who need to move to a whole different city or even country every three year, and 0-hour-contract, associate and honorary staff, is not right.

There is something rotten here. Education and research need rethinking.

But what I don’t understand, is why unions focus on salary levels, and then send pretty-well-paid members to the streets.
Because where were the cleaners, the data-entrists, the PhD-students, the fixed-contract workers this morning? I spoke to a couple of them at work. They were either afraid of striking/missing out on their meagre income (but didn’t they invent funds and stakingskassen for those people?). Or they felt they owed it to themselves to do their work. Or replied that they were actually quite satisfied with what they are being paid at the moment.
Perhaps even more importantly, where were the professors? (That is to say: I did not see any. But there may have been a few that I have not yet met.) If anyone is in a strong position to speak for those without a steady contract – if anyone has a paternalist obligation towards their juniors, it is them. But perhaps the strike focused too much on salary-levels for them to feel they had reason to protest?

Another thing I don’t fully understand, is why some picketers (only some of them!) try to prevent colleagues and students from entering university buildings, sometimes in quite nasty ways. I read on the English wikipedia that this is a well-worn strategy: ‘harming the business through loss of customers and negative publicity’. But I seriously doubt whether making people dislike you creates any understanding of the issues workers at universities have to deal with – and of the questions about education and research that we all have to deal with, as members of a society.

But all of this calls for a large-scale demonstration by students, parents, teachers – in short: citizens – rather than an employees’ strike.

And here I am, sitting at my desk, at work, scared of running into colleagues on strike (with whom I sympathise very much! Only I don’t see the use of my not meeting a deadline today, and I don’t identify with the pay demand the union has printed on their banners). I’ve only just begun my work here, and I’ve already come out as a scab.

P.S. Look out for my related column on the ‘mad professor’, or the ‘secluded scholar’ (whichever name you prefer), and the problem of ‘public engagement’.

Note: this column was posted a few hours after it was written.