The Brilliant, Transcendent Clarity of Chauncey DeVega Applying Cone, Baudrillard, Adorno, Gordon and Postman in his Nuanced Argument about the “Kanye West.”

May 4, 2018 by Styliani GP

[The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. … The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network.

I am reminded of a lecture I attended some years ago where the late James Cone, an intellectual titan and the father of black liberation theology, observed that some of the most difficult students to teach on questions of the color line were those who happened not to be white. Why? Because black and brown students often believe that because they were born into a certain body at a certain point in time, they have special knowledge and wisdom that makes it unnecessary for them to engage in serious study of the color line….

We see this in an America which in many ways has lost the ability to determine what is “true” and what is “fake,” and where lies are now labeled as mere “untruths” or “disagreements.” As with Trump, Kanye West is the human distillation of America’s social pathologies of greed, narcissism and a celebrity-driven culture of distraction and emptiness. Hyperreality is the state of being where these social pathologies exist, and through which they are mediated.

Ultimately, Kanye West is just one more character caught up in the orbit of the human black hole Donald Trump, in a malignant reality where the absurd is now the quotidian….]

Full article here: I love Kanye West | Chancey DeVega for SALON

As Orlando Menes Once Wrote, “idyllic memories are a jeweled noose.” | The Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Detrimental Kitsch

April 14, 2016 by Styliani GP

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 17:
Visitors to the United States Holocaust Museum, which is about to celebrate its’ 20th anniversary, pass beneath a cast taken from the original entrance to the Auschwitz death camp, inscribed with the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes One Free), on April, 17, 2013 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

[…. the Cuban exile community in the United States to which Menes belongs provides a textbook case of the way nostalgia and self-absorption (the other cardinal vice of the exiled and the scorned), however understandable a community’s resorting to them may be, also often serve as a prophylactic against common sense, political or otherwise.

But Cuban Americans are hardly alone in their self- imposed predicament; at various points in their history, the Irish, the Armenians, and the Tamils have been equally trapped in their own particular versions of what the writer Svetlana Boym has called “the dictatorship of nostalgia.” And Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum testifies that American Jews are no less immune to nostalgia’s temptations.]

____________________________________________________________

The historian Tony Judt once recalled that during a visit to Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he saw “bored schoolchildren on an obligatory outing [playing] hide-and-seek among the stones.” He argued, “When we ransack the past for political profit — selecting the bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach opportunistic moral lessons — we get bad morality and bad history.” To which one should add: We also get kitsch.

Even when done well, commemoration almost always skates precariously close to kitsch. One might wish that the Holocaust were an exception in this regard, and that it will always, in Leon Wieseltier’s phrase, “press upon the souls of all who learn of it.” But it is not, much as we might wish otherwise.

This is a distinct problem, not to be confused with the fact that since 1945 the Shoah has regularly been employed to serve political agendas, the most obvious, as Judt emphasized, being to justify more or less any policy of the State of Israel with regard to its neighbors or to its Arab minority. But even when the remembrance of the Shoah is innocent of such subtexts, it has still been smothered in kitsch as Milan Kundera once defined it: all answers being “given in advance and [precluding] any questions.” Again, it is understandable to hope that people will be moved by an act of collective remembrance. And it is often, though not always, right to insist that they have a moral duty to remember. Where such acts become kitsch is when people take the fact that they are moved as a reason to think better of themselves.

It is unfortunate that a prime example of the instauration of this kind of kitsch remembrance is the U.S. National Holocaust Museum itself — the largest and best-known memorial to the Shoah in the world other than the Yad Vashem Memorial Museum and Center in Israel. To be sure, much of what is in the museum is as heartbreakingly far from kitsch as it is possible to get — above all, what Wieseltier called “the objects, the stuff, the things of the persecutions and the murders,” when he rightly described the Holocaust Museum as “a kind of reliquary.”

But these exhibits and films, photographs, and documents are bracketed by two extraordinarily kitschy pieces of set dressing.

As one first enters the museum and before one has seen a single image or artifact of either Nazi atrocity or Jewish martyrdom, one must first walk by the serried battle flags of the U.S. Army divisions that liberated some of the concentration camps (there are no British or Russian standards, even though a great many of the museum’s exhibits concern Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British, and Auschwitz, liberated by the Soviets). And as one leaves the last room of the museum, the final exhibit one sees contains a series of images of David Ben-Gurion proclaiming the independence of the State of Israel, and, beyond them at the exit, a column of tan sandstone that is simply identified as having come from Jerusalem.

One can only hope that in addition to the American triumphalism and what even by the most generous of interpretations is a highly partisan pro-Israeli view of the creation of the state as the existential remediation of the Nazis’ war of extermination against the Jews, the intention here was to palliate what, apart from the part of the exhibit devoted to the Danes’ rescue of most of their country’s Jewish population, is the pure horror of what the museum contains by beginning and ending on an uplifting note.

The impulse is an understandable one. But it is also both a historical and a moral solecism that perfectly illustrates Judt’s admonition that the result is both bad history and bad morality.

Read the full story here:

The United States Museum of Holocaust Kitsch

Alberta Williams King, and Gendered History

January 20, 2015 by Styliani GP

Remembering Alberta Williams as a woman in her own right can not only transform how we think about black history but also add nuance to the celebration of Dr. King.

[On June 30^th, 1974 an armed gunman strode into the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The church, located in the heart of the black neighborhood of Auburn Avenue, employed both Martin Luther King Sr. and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as pastors. While the gunman sprayed bullets, by standers recalled: “the only person he seems to have pointed to was Mrs. King.” Major news outlets like the Washington Post reported “Mrs. King was shot while she was playing the organ in the church where her son once preached non-violence, and where her husband, Martin Luther King Sr., had been pastor for more than four decades.” After devoting considerable space to describing the gunman, M. W. Chenault, the Post lamented: “Mrs. King lost her life in the same red brick church that had been the center of her life since she was born Alberta Williams in 1904. Her father Rev. A. D. Williams founded Ebenezer Baptist Church. And when he died in 1931, Alberta’s husband Dr. Martin Luther King Sr., succeeded as pastor, a position he still holds.”[1]]

“Dr. Martin Luther King’s Mother is Slain” and Lessons from Gendered History | AAIHS

Master Narratives | The True Stories Behind Classic Western Fairy Tales

November 6, 2014 by Styliani GP

Fairy tales, gripping, magical and inspiring, are master narratives. Children subconsciously recall their messages as they grow older, and are forced to cope with real injustices and contradictions in their lives. Some fairy tales are based on legends that incorporated a spiritual belief of the culture in which they originated, and were meant to emulate truth.

Numerous fairy tales, and the legends behind them, are actually watered-down versions of uncomfortable historical events. These darker stories might be too terrifying for today’s little lambkins, as well as some adults! Their horrific origins, which often involve rape, incest, torture, cannibalism and other hideous occurrences, are brimming with sophisticated and brutal morality. Their images cannot be dispelled easily and their lessons are more powerful than the present-day, innocuous fables they resemble.

Read the full story | HUFFINGTON POST BOOKS