Fresh Reads: June 20-26

[justindburton]

Whatever you read that might be of interest to the rest of us this week, post it here. We can chat about it here, too.

[justindburton]

Last week, Kanye's blog posted "Mama's Boyfriend," a song that feature's West's vocals but which Kanye claims is not his music. Over at Grantland, Molly Lambert takes a look at the Freudian side of the lyrics and at the broader hip hop landscape of introspective sexism.

The lyrics here aren't particularly surprising, given Kanye's ongoing persona as a guy who confronts his demons for the bottom line, but they do strike me as a different take on the "mother anthem" that so many rappers produce.

[justindburton]

One more Grantland link, this time to something that doesn't talk music. Jay Caspian Kang discusses his complicated fan-player relationship with Ichiro Suzuki. He looks at the American catch-all "Asian" and how it relates to his Korean roots and the hitting phenom's Japanese roots. It's a wonderful meditation on the complexities of racial and ethnic identity, as Kang cannot help but think of Suzuki as his own while also feeling a bit guilty about it. 

The main reason I'm posting is because of this quote in the middle of the essay:

When I got home that night, I thumbed through my copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Timeand read the following passage, heavily underlined back in my days as a malcontent freshman: "If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have deliberately been constructed to make you believe what white people say about you… Please try to be clear, dear [nephew], through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you." As I read that passage, I realized that the images of the Civil Rights Movement and the multicultural education I received as a child in Boston had never lost their buoyancy, always floating on the surface of my consciousness, but that the rhetoric that underscored those images etherized, not completely into the air, but into a strange, misappropriated residue. I could watch Ichiro stretching in the on-deck circle and conjure the image of Jackie Robinson sliding home in 1947, but that association never brought hope, but rather a wariness that both told me that the association was wrong and that the only reason why I was cheering for Ichiro was because someone, something else had lumped us together.

Even back then, at the age of 19, I knew that the comparison was catastrophically wrong. But I still made it, and even today, when I certainly am old enough to know better, every time I see Ichiro, I still feel both the warmth and the embarrassment of that particular misappropriation. In my defense, I will say that when you are a first-generation immigrant, the templates for assimilation always belong to somebody else. You can staple your assimilation to Ichiro, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, or Hank Greenberg, but you will always be wrong. But I don't know how else anyone is supposed to stumble toward American-ness than through these categorically wrong, sentimental avenues.

Ten years later, it seems to me that what I should have done was to shrug off Baldwin and understand that some ideas are better left on the pitch of the academy, where no score is kept and nothing is really ever at stake.

It's that last line - "nothing is really ever at stake" with academia - that is most problematic in this article. I'm sure that for many of us who work at universities or who are graduate students this is not a particularly new sentiment. I hear this idea in words like "esoteric," and I occasionally even hear it from graduate students who just want to get to a practice room and find the cultural studies readings I've assigned them to be a hindrance, not an enlightenment.

I'm always ready with an answer about the value of academic work and academic freedom, as well as the ability of theoretical concepts to change action (sometimes over the extremely long haul), but I often end up feeling unsatisfied in my attempt to convince someone of the value of scholarship. Sometimes I think it's my fault - if I had only explained myself better! - sometimes I think I'm speaking to a close-minded person, and sometimes I think that it's all too complicated to unravel in a single conversation. After all, I reflexively value anything theoretical or esoteric, and I do it because of a lifetime of experiences (many of which I probably don't remember and can't possibly analyze) that predispose me to academia. In many cases, I'm probably talking to someone who's experiences have tipped them in the other direction, toward a certain wariness of academic speak. A single discussion can't change either one of us.

Ultimately, though, I think that there's a very good 2-minute apologia for academia that can convince someone as introspective and thoughtful as, say, Kang is, that something really is at stake in academia. That, in essence, some kind of score is being kept. It's something I'm working on and hoping to master in the coming years. For those of you who have been at this academic thing longer than I have, how do you answer the person who suggests that nothing is really at stake in the academic world?