I have submitted my book mss. to an academic press. This book is the first book (to my knowledge) that analyzes both Melungeons and Redbones (mixed--European/African/Native ancestry) in relation to literature, art and popular culture. I trace the migration of Redbone families from the Carolinas to California using a border perspective; I link the Louisiana/Texas "neutral ground" history/culture to the Mexico-US border. I hope to reach academics, graduate students, undergraduates, the general reader and those studying their own family histories, especially Redbones and Melungeons. I have been able to trace the migration of Melungeon and Redbone families from the Great Dismal Swamp region to the Louisiana-Texas-border region, Oklahoma and California. I discuss not only pirates and bank robbers but also Rev. Joseph Willis. I want to encourage those in the fields of Melungeon Studies and Redbone Studies to continue to search for links to Native communities and to Choctaws and Creeks in particular. Because I am linked to Pitchlynn Choctaws through the Rosses, I hope that others will find my research useful in their studies of their own mixed ancestry families. The contribution that I am trying to make is to synthesize the research in the field of Melungeon and Redbone studies in light of recent DNA findings. I discuss literature, art and popular culture as well as genealogical familial links and migration patterns. Expanding on existing research, I focus on Sand Mountain and two counties in Texas (Anderson and DeWitt). Anderson County is in East Texas. Educators hoping to teach courses that include Melungeons and Redbones will find this book useful because I include a children's Literature author and artist, Clare Turlay Newberry (the "cat lady"), author of April's Kittens and many other books. I discuss the way in which her books helped children to deal with adversity (including economic adversity) and with being different (and/or coming from families that were organized differently from cultural norms). More topics: I also discuss Lisa Alther (Melungeon), Robert E. Howard (new info for his fans), author of the Conan the Barbarian series and Alt-La-Tex stories and DFW (David Foster Wallace--French Canadian). I am related to Solomon Chambers; he was the best friend of Howard's father. I include information about contemporary Native artists (James Luna) and multi-ethnic artists and art collective (BAW-TAF and Las Comadres). Readers studying their own family histories will find new connections linking well-known historical figures, including George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte, to mixed families. Here is a partial list of other historical/well-known figures: Daniel Boone, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte Patterson, Elizabeth Patterson, John Steinbeck, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, H.P. Lovecraft and Francoise Gilot. The methodological approach in this book is grounded in Deleuzian theory and complexity. I have been working on complexity and border since the mid-1990s with geophysicist B.T Werner (CASP0, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego). My DNA results (along with those of my mother) are not surprising given our Redbone background. We both show "South Asian" ancestry. Redbone scholars have traced this ancestry to the Roma community. More Topics--Anarchists, Swamps, Maroons, Resistance, Zombies, Zomia, Pirates and More: Jason Adams (Melungeon/anarchist), Hakim Bey, the Ben Ishmael Tribe, Jean Lafitte (pirate), a short story by Borges ("The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell"), zombies and the Haitian Revolution (and vodoun), Zomia (Jame C. Scott), Hellboy (Mignola).

Melungeon Characters in Literature, Complexity and Dependency Theory

I am writing an article about Kate Chopin and Chris Offutt. Offutt has Melungeon characters in two of his stories. I'm thinking about Wallerstein, the South as "dependent," complexity science and dependency theory. There were heated debates in past decades between marxists and dependency theorists of various types. Given the current widespread interest in anarchist theory, the growing interest in complexity science, and the writings of Wallerstein on complexity science, I am interested in getting a discussion going. What do readers of this blog think about dependency theory in 2011? Does it offer (in any of its versions) useful categories for understanding border regions? The South? Southern writers?

MLA 2011 and My Story

I've just returned from spending Thursday and Friday at the MLA in Los Angeles. My university budget could not cover the full conference expenses so I had to come back just as things were getting started. Staples Center is great--beautiful views from the J.W. Marriott. Euro-boutique but huge hotel--nice architectural touches/lighting.

I delivered a paper on immigration, international graduate students and international faculty. There was a very interesting discussion, and I left feeling hopeful (not a normal feeling for me at the MLA). Two of my grad students were able to attend (and one grad student I will have in a class next semester).

Because so many blogs about academe (specifically, English/Comp Lit/Languages) are negative (and accurate/poetic/wrenching), I hesitate to admit that I did not feel expendable, unworthy, depressed etc. as I normally do at the MLA. I learned about the activities of Women in German and I heard moving, sad and romantic stories from international students, faculty and significant others. So, since I have your attention--support The Dream Act. Educate yourself about the visa situations of international students/faculty you may know (if you are a US citizen). Encourage your institution to take a greater interest in the challenges faced by international grad students/junior faculty. Find out what your college/university is doing to create "third spaces" that bring together scholars from different countries. Not surprisingly, the panel at which I presented included a Comp Lit scholar--but she helped me to see that we in Comp Lit need to lose the beleaguered/handwringing persona (which I have perfected in relation to the "English" part of my own department) and reconceptualize what we are doing.

I tried to recall some moments in my recent life in academe (not counting being outside the US) that were international, inspiring and inspired--and examples of coalitions that might be formed. At my non-elite institution, in 2010, the amazing and wonderful Edith Frampton (a lecturer in my department) and Anne Donadey (Women's Studies) organized a fabulous international women's lit conference (in this economy!). Les Figues (LA-based) Press was there. Anna Joy Springer performed. Susan Stanford Friedman attended. 170 delegates from six continents. It was the combo of Women's Studies/Lit/Performance that really seemed to work. It got me to see that the TT/everyone else hierarchy can be broken down/reconfigured a little bit--temporarily--through projects that are inclusive. Third spaces (Lefebvre/Anzaldua).

The MLA invited lecturers to attend this year--and to get a one day free pass. Tiny gesture--but good.

I spoke with several who attended the MLA this year about "leaving academe." After teaching for 26 years at a state university and moving towards policy myself, I encouraged the discussion. My view is that even those who stay need to change in every imaginable way the status quo. It's great time to get involved with NGOs, policy, think tanks, etc.--places where thinking and being able to write may be a little more respected than they seem to be in the (academic) places where many of us work.

I thought a lot these last few days about my own "story" (we're supposed to tell our stories at this MLA). My story is that my psrents attended Stanford and my grandfather was an inventor and owned a large company. I grew up away from the Bay Area privilege into which I was born due to the divorce of my parents. I went to art school before becoming an academic (San Francisco Art Institute). I painted on cardboard because I could not afford art supplies/canvas. I was unemployed for 4 years after getting my Ph.D. (I got a post-doc the year before I got a TT position). I worked as a maid in Pacific Palisades (near LA) and sold clothes on Melrose (to rock stars). I have been marginalized to the extreme in my institution (because I support Palestinian rights, I'm an anarchist--and they never liked theory much in the English Department--which is what I teach). However, there are new visionary chairs in both of the departments in which I now teach. All of those who "hate" theory have retired. I am currently doing interdisciplinary research (Deleuzian/anarchist/complexity science) with a geomorphologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, and I'm completing a book on Magna Carta, mixed ancestry and rights. I am of mixed ancestry (Melungeon)on my mother's side.

I have just returned from a conference in The Hague (I also spent an afternoon in the Escher museum). I want to remind my readers of the process that led to this. I was interrogated on my campus at San Diego State University a few years ago. Fifty false charges were brought against me. All were dropped after a five month investigation (about which I knew nothing until the very end). The charges included my views on globalization (I was accused of not supporting globalization). I have referred to the work of Anthony Giddens on globalization indirectly in an article I wrote in a book entitled Remoralizing Britain. See http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remoralizing-Britain-Theological-Perspectives-Continuum/dp/toc/0826424651

Here is the irony. I got into trouble at my university (perhaps--causality is a complex topic--for all I know the reasons had to do with nothing more than petty conflicts within a department with an overlay of a reaction to my support for Pat Washington) for hanging out with those in our community who support immigrant rights. I attended a no border camp in Sherman Heights. So did Christian Ramirez. And whose name should come up at The Hague? None other than Christian Ramirez, of the American Friends Service Committee. If only the Quaker organization Barrow Cadbury could come to my campus and donate some money. I might be able to express my views more freely.

This horrendous experience of being interrogated, the first session without legal representation, led to my turning away from local activism to national and international concerns. I was told by those with more experience that supporting immigrant rights in certain local environments was very difficult and that I needed to get support from outside of the region where I lived. In addition to turning to the national and international context, I also decided to work with faith-based organizations.

The conference in The Hague was entitled Cities of Migration. I brought back some
excellent books, Muslims in Europe, Muslims in Berlin and Muslims in Leicester. These books are part of a series of studies of eleven European cities put together under Tufyal Choudhury (with whom I had a great conversation) and Miriam McCarthy.

One of the most poetic moments of the conference was being given a tiny pink rose attached to red netting tied with a string. Inside of the netting was henna used to decorate the hands and feet of Muslim women. The rose was a symbol of a project in Marxloh (industrial and mining town in the Ruhr region), Germany, in which Muslims and non-Muslims worked together to incorporate a new mosque in their community. A community discussion, initiated by Muslims, led to an agreement to a build a mosque that was only half as high as the spire of the Catholic church. You can read more about this here: http://citiesofmigration.ca/the-miracle-of-marxloh/lang/en/

Greatly inspired, I decided to attend the Greater Golden Hill Community Plan meeting in my neighborhood on Saturday, October 9. I encourage everyone in Greater Golden Hill to attend the next meeting, Wednesday, October 20, at Christ United Presbyterian Church, 3025 Fir Street, San Diego. You will get to follow up on what we discussed: bicycles, bike lanes, bike stands, arrows and sharrows, as well as a festival to share food we had grown, a Farmer's Market in the parking lot at Gala, canyons, water, community art, the rec center, architectural styles (including postmodern architecture), whether or not we need the golf course, etc. My table included very interesting people and we had a lively discussion. We didn't exactly follow our drills. Here were the drills: Streets and Connections (with questions such as "Where would you place green streets and/or complete streets?"; Recreation and Open Space (What are the opportunities presented by Balboa Park?) and Buildings and Neighborhoods (What are the special non-building elements that presently define and enhance your neighborhood).

As can be imagined (by all who live in Golden Hill), we love our neighborhood, we love that we can walk in it, we like the diversity (cultural, architectural, etc.). Some of us would like to see a little more integration (in terms of social class/ethnicity). Since I am an artist, I will mention that one person suggested that we bring an art "expert" to oversee community art projects (and referred to UCSD); another thought that the community itself could organize art projects in Greater Golden Hill.

I met with a young filmmaker/performance artist yesterday. His grandfather is a filmmaker. We discussed body art (Stelarc, Ron Athey, Franco B) and the work of Marina Abramovic. When he asked for the name of a good art school for studying performance art, I realized that it was easier to give names of artists than to give a list of art schools. I did not tell him about my own work in much detail (such as crossing the U.S.-Mexico border wearing a wresting mask). After the meeting, I realized that I had not mentioned some of my own work because it would be very difficult to accomplish today without severe political penalties. Although I was held in secondary when crossing the border wearing a mask and a bridal gown (followed by Berta Jottar, who was videotaping this), I was released after showing a portable altar (a glasses case with botanica powders and related objects). One of the agents said that I was a "bruja" and I was allowed to cross. Within the context of the new legislation in Arizona, this piece would be very difficult to repeat.

Anyway, I introduced myself to this artist, with whom I had only communicated by e-mail, by saying that I supported Palestinian rights, and that if that was a problem, we shouldn't continue our meeting. I did this for many reasons (as Peace flotilla news was all over the Internet), including the fact that there are people at my university who have used students to attempt to "get me in trouble" and because I was interrogated for my political beliefs on the campus where I teach (in 2006). I did not want to be spied on or quoted out of context. Why I was interrogated at my university may have to do with: a) anarchism; b) the Pat Washington case; c) petty campus politics; d) the fact that I have supported Palestinian rights since I began working on this campus in 1984. Fifty charges were brought against me. All were dropped. The testimony of some students was used against me (at first, until e-mails exonerated me). My new way of taking security measures, since the investigation, is to meet students in public if I am being interviewed, with witnesses, to keep a calendar as evidence of my whereabouts, and to only say things I would be willing to see published. The rules followed by the press ("off the record") and think tanks ("on the record") don't seem to apply on campuses where activists are harassed, so I have to take precautions.

Ironically, I am now being encouraged (by the dean) at the university where I teach to participate in demonstrations and public statements in support of immigrant rights.

I am now working in the area of policy.

The meeting with this filmmaker/performance artist was interesting in one important way (for women reading this). We did not discuss the work of some male artists with whom I have worked. The names of these male artists did not come up in our conversation. I never thought that I would live long enough to discuss art without having to deal with these names and with sexism in the art world. Because our dialogue was focussed on the filmmaker/performance artist's work, and due to the context of discussion (queer politics/queer theory), issues about credit/fame etc. that would have disturbed me in the past were completely irrelevant.

I write this to encourage women artists not to give up and to concentrate on one's craft. I am not employed in an art department, and yet I was able to have a serious, great discussion about art, with an art student, that somehow managed to be focussed on art (and not openings, who was there, or art world politics). No one whispered to the student that I was not famous enough, or that I wasn't as important as a list of male artists. The massive machinery of the art world broke down for just a couple of hours, during this conversation, and in the margins, at a pizza place, two artists got to talk.

Rate My Professor.com

I have just received an e-mail from my Chair telling me that I need to read the comments on Rate My Professor.com and to adjust my teaching accordingly. His/her e-mail was sent within the context of my informing him/her that I planned to go to the union if he/she continued to use ratemyprofessor.com as a legal, reliable and reasonable tool in evaluating faculty and managing the department when in my view it is none of these. I would like to hear from other faculty members about this.

I teach in California. I have taught for 26 years in a state university. This month, $600 dollars is being taken out of my paycheck under the "furlough" plan. I teach philosophy. It it very difficult to teach the work of Bertrand Russell and others who have written about logic and to be micromanaged in the irrational world of academe in California. Fortunately, the two administrators with whom I am dealing (as I teach in two departments with a joint appointment) have both fallen into a legal trap of sorts; they have put in writing, in the form of e-mails, comments and demands having to do with furlough days and how to fill classrooms with students. In one case, a Chair wrote his/her own view of how to choose the furloughs days. Fortunately, someone versed in the rights guaranteed by the CFA contract informed him/her that he/she was acting against his current understanding of the contract. In my case, my chili-pepper obsessed Chair does not see the absurdity of his/her position. This is unnerving, because it means that a department with a budget of $4-5 million a year is in the hands, to some degree, of someone who equates the anonymous posters on ratemyprofessor.com with the standard student evaluation process. Both systems of evaluaton are problematic, but only one of them is used by the administration at my university. As I am a full professor, it is difficult for the Chair to "control" my classroom; I assume that stooping to ratemyprofessor.com is a way to demoralize and alienate me and others like me. I am a second-generation anarchist and a pacifist, and I assume that the Chair who is doing this may be "channelling" post-9/11 Greenscare tactics, but it may be something else. Whatever the reasons for this Chair's behavior, the behavior itself is disturbing, sexist, demoralizing and illogical. As we all know, the best students in the humanities are not the students writing about how "hot" a professor is or how easy a professor is.

This Chair does not wish me to "talk" about this situation, so I thought that I would blog about it instead with an off-campus community. I am aware that it will recycle in cyberspace until sucked into the Singularity.

The background of this situation is that early in the summer, the Chair took away a class he/she had assigned me a year, begged me to "help out" by teaching a large-enrollment class, promised to fill it and said that I would have a TA. One week before the first day of the semester, he/she explained that because of comments on ratemyprofessor, my class had not filled, and I would not get a TA. He/she also mentioned that perhaps he/she had opened too many sections of this GE course.

I will be teaching the class with the support of students. Two students who are not in the class have volunteered to help out, Facebook is bringing in students and a team of seven students who are enrolled have stepped up to take leadership roles. Thanks to social networking software, I have gotten many students to add the course. Having been banned by the administration for five years due to my politics from teaching large-enrollment, I will now be teaching a large number of students, basic literary theory, Kafka, Deleuze, etc.

Is anyone else being subjected to ratemyprofessor micromanagment?

Since 2000, I have been investigated by a team of faculty without union representation once and I have had fifty charges (all dropped) brought against me (2006). During the first meeting of the second investigation, I had no union representation.

If nothing else, I hope that my story encourages the reading of the book Academic Repression, published by AK Press. Despite all of this, I will continue to meet weekly with local activists and anarchists in an off-campus study group and I will be teaching Deleuze in two departments.

La Marquesa's b-day

All right folks. Y'all got to watch an alt.celebrity death match (one fac/one admin) yesterday. For those who missed it, Pat and La Marquesa got into it over: multimodal analysis, triangulation, Hinton 1993. Now that Pat and I have "modeled the behavior" of knights, we all (The pICT 2005) have to return to the lowlier (and less prestigious--go to my web site http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~marquesa/ and click on Manuel de Landa--in the interview with Manuel Landa, there is a section on knights vs. archers) task of strategizing together about bringing those of us in the humanities into a project being run out of the College of Undergraduate Education. This is my concern: it's being "run" with certain unexamined/unstated assumptions that "feel" more like "College of Sciences" than "Arts and Letters," or English and Comp Lit.

We all need to read, if we have not (I have not yet), Perry R. Hinton, The Psychology of Interpersonal Perception.

Those in the sciences who get grants are judged by a different set of criteria than those in the humanities. We have to do research because that's how they judge us--not by grant amount--many of us do not get grants.

Simply put, it's not that Pat and I are on opposite sides of anything. I want to bring quantitative and qualitative thinking together into our classrooms. Math and lit in the same undergrad lower division class. However, like all real research institutions (and we are now having the kinds of problems they have), we will have "tense" moments when funding seems threatened--anyone's--for any reason.

Assessment is more complex. We are moving from party school to think tank. Out of respect for all sides, we need to be UN-style "sensitive" to possible misunderstandings. When the term "assessment" is used by an administrator in the presence of both tenured and untenured faculty without cushioning/explaining--many of us got to feel like students during the last four days--we're being graded on what????? We are not "recalcitrant." We are terrified. There's a difference.

Brock and Hicks haven't had lunch yet to work out the relationships among: digital culture, ontology, epistemology. I am sure he will inform me of the correct relationships and the software that can be used to relate all data in all possible configurations using multidimensional scaling, peanut butter....sunlight...a piece of glass...

It's all good. I remember being a grad student at UCSD and hanging out at UC Irvine (Program in Comparative Culture) (late 70s). The hard/soft divide can get much uglier than yesterday--yesterday, we were on the same side. Ugly is when people have fully funded high stake differences--when "multimodal" is not a term respected by all.

Real research institutions get their labs shut down, their funding lost...all the time...really important stuff...delayed, ruined...over... I went to Berkeley as an undergrad. My grandfather has patents (ionizer, electric car). Tracy and I both grew up with some exposure to all this (Tracy grew up in a lab). It's pretty sad seeing grown researchers trying not to get emotional when it happens. Tracy's father worked at Rockland Institute. One day you're inventing the precursors to Prozac (no, Tracy's father didn't make any money---would we be here?) running the lab...next day you're in charge of making sure the top floor is secure--a sort of well-respected night watchperson (but woops, you lost your funding/space). It happens. So bajale (calm down and, please, get over yourselves) non-humanities people. Quit "telling" us and consider learning from us. We're "way" closer to our colleagues at the elite research institutions than you are. Like them, we already know how to "do it in our garages." Just like good fashion, ideas come from the street.

I would like to answer a question Brock implied.

Brock made a statement which I mentally rewrote as a question he was having trouble formulating. He stated: "You (read: tiny earthlings) don't have to do research (in relation to the last four days). You can just do a project (that he gets paid to study????)." What he may have meant was: "Wow. You seemed stressed. Just add a blog assignment to your class." Or " Why are you stressed?" We in the humanities do not have the time/infrastructure to "just do a project." We have to do research all the time--not curriculum development that we do and you guys study as we do it. For some of us, this is not the first workshop/curricular reform project activity at SDSU. For some of us, we have done so many of these projects that a special form of post-traumatic stress kicks in when we see the weird brown plastic coffee cups/holders (topographically speaking, what are they and will the coffee really stay in there?), no more coffee in the big icky silver thing (we're four minutes late and the coffee's already gone), and we're asked to "come up with new ideas for courses." We need to do research in relation to all other activities all the time.

Please do not look down us. No one shot stipend is worth giving up our dignity (all we have left).

Curriculum development in our world (the humanities) is despised (ranked lowest for you quantitative types) by all committees (from who decides which lecturer for which class to RTP) all the time judging all aspects of our lives (ranking, room assignment, use of Xerox machine). We get that you don't get that. We brought it up over and over for four days. You did not hear us yet. Each one of us in the humanities can explain our own, unique versions of lack of access to rooms, etc. What version would you like: a high level researcher from a country that is not the United States, a leader in her field, who gets invited to international film conferences constantly and can't get a smart classroom to teach film? She crosses the border from unnamed country, parks, goes to AH, checks out the equipment (laptop, whatever), carries the equipment upstairs. That's what we're talking about. Some of us can explain these counterintuitive relationships to you in several non-English languages. If what we do does not lead to an article in a refereed journal, it will not "count." We do what we do (teaching/research) without grant money, for the most part. Regarding the research, we do it, as in free beer, for free.

Sara warned us not to put things in blogs that we don't want to be there forever (or until The Singularity/the big black hole suck). I live a little less sad knowing that this pre-wicki still in blog form attempt at communication in which I try to get those outside the humanities to "understand" may never die. Please read it over and over. We can help you "get it." We won't be impatient explaining it to you over and over...

On a happier note, Qualcomm corporate headquarters is not what they showed us. It's HTH. Latest report (while driving to school) from my son on what he and Alex Dodge were discussing last night on line: the computing capabilities of a rock. Discussion began in relation to how far back the ability to lie goes. That (using John Nash's chart and the entire tradition of software and other research out of which it came, genealogically) was "caused" by concern with Bush's "lies" about Iraq and rhetorical tactics used by Hitler. They were discussing an issue in the field of rhetoric: how far back lying goes... So we in the unfunded humanities win this round...the kids are talkin' about "our" stuff (in relation to computing, of course). For free.

Off topic: today is my birthday. 54. Happy to be working with researchers...hopin' to move towards policy shifts...thank you Qualcomm. I applied to Stanford when I was twelve...they asked me to finish the sixth grade...the eighties were good...it's been hard...when my son quit making math the center of his life (may be temporary), I remembered I loved set theory...and now it's getting good again...

Don't forget to check out that journal Sara mentioned. Cool web site: http://www.reason.com/