Announcements: A Take on Dr. Lisa Duggan's "Normativity and Its Discontents"

In case you missed Dr. Lisa Duggan's recent talk at UT, you're in luck: undergraduate Cole Wilson has provided this wonderful write-up of the event with a few of its takeaways. Enjoy!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1lfgrs2sKMLisa Duggan was invited by the American Studies Department, in conjunction with UT’s English Department, Anthropology Department, and a whole host of other offices and programs as the AMS Department’s bi-annual Spring Speaker. Her presentation centered on the role of diagnosis in the American security state and the rewriting of neoliberalism.Duggan opened with a discussion of her coming to this project as a sexologist and theorist interested in Disabilities Studies, namely, diagnosis in post-9/11 America. She looked to the Showtime program Homeland for one case study in order to understand how diagnosis figures into post-empire US culture and the security state, and the ways that the ways we interpret diagnoses are embedded in our understandings of empire. For an overview of the show, click here.She chose this program due to the show’s focus on its protagonists’ mental illnesses. Carrie Mathison suffers from bipolar disorder, but often abandons her medication in order to summon stunning detective work, ultimately at the cost of her sanity. As Duggan put it, she “flies off the rails” in exchange for fits of brilliance. But, Duggan argues, this is justified by her diagnosis. The same goes for Nicolas Brodie, a CIA agent who suffers from PTSD after his years of being a POW. In a crescendo, Brodie attempts to assassinate the Vice President with a suicide vest. Despite this attempted terrorist attack, in a cliché mode no less, Duggan argues that the viewers sympathizes with Brodie due to his diagnosis. He exhibits what Duggan calls “humanized terrorism.”This is all juxtaposed with Abu Nazir, a grossly ambiguous terrorist figure whose race, location, and affiliation are all skewed in order to present a vague villain that preys on both racial and dogmatic stereotypes of Arab men. He is American islamophobia incarnate. His lack of a diagnosis, argues Duggan, produces a character that is villainized on all fronts because he is simply a “terrorist.”Beginning her second case study on Ayn Rand, Duggan opened with a few videos in order to set the tone for those of us who haven’t read Atlas Shrugged. The 2011 movie trailer, the GOP’s embrace of Ayn Rand, and a Simpson’s rendition of the classic novel, all illustrated Rand's continued cultural prevalence.Duggan began with an observation of Rand’s justification of cruelty. Coined “optimistic cruelty,” a play on Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” she states that Atlas Shrugged illustrates the desirability of selfishness through its protagonists’ embrace of capitalism. This again is an example of American neoliberalism being rewritten in contemporary America: her fantasies mobilize consent of neoliberalism.But, how does Atlas Shrugged represent contemporary America, being decades old? According to Duggan the Great Recession of 2008 brought about record sales of the novel. Moreover, as an audience member asserted, high schoolers and middle schoolers are still being prescribed novels and essays by Rand. The word “indoctrinated” was readily thrown around after this statement.Duggan wrapped up her presentation by noting how Rand “solicits anti-government fantasy in industry” and how she makes neoliberalism attractive, even with its innate cruelty. She goes on to discuss how this attractiveness and fantasy produce a sense of rebelliousness, pointing to Steve Jobs and Donald Trump, who both played, or play, the role of the rebel in a neoliberal America.Her argument was compelling, insightful, and engaging. If you missed her talk, you can read up on this subject in her book The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy or follow here on Twitter to catch her the next time she’s in town.

Grad Research: Josephine Hill on Communism and Hybrid Corn

Congratulations to UT AMS grad student Josephine Hill, who recently published an article called "Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA" on Not Even Past, the blog of the UT History department. You can read the article here, and we've included an excerpt below.

Today we often associate hybrid or genetically modified corn with agricultural monopolies, big business, and capitalism, in the early Cold War some feared that the rise of hybrid corn would sow the seeds of Communism in the United States. Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick’s editorial cartoon, “Alien Corn,” published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 28, 1948, shows Henry A. Wallace grinning at a corn plant, whose leaves bear hammers and sickles and whose tassel sports a Soviet star –- the fruits of Communism. Wallace was the founder of the Hi-Bred Corn Company (today owned by the Dupont Corporation). He was also vice president to Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940), Secretary of Commerce (1945-1946), and 1948 presidential nominee of the Progressive Party. Appearing during the 1948 election season, the cartoon most directly reflects contemporary suspicions about Wallace’s possible Communist sympathies, which were fueled by his endorsement from the U.S. Communist Party, his progressive platform that included universal health care, voting rights for African-Americans, and an end to segregation, and his interest in Eastern religions. Here, the fear of the “alien” seems to have stronger political than environmental implications, yet this title presciently describes the many ways in which these two concerns would become more and more closely intertwined.

Announcement: Dr. Jigna Desai, "Contesting Nueral Citizenship: Feminist Crip of Color Neurocultures"

Please join us for a talk, Contesting Nueral Citizenship: Feminist Crip of Color Neurocultures, by Dr. Jigna Desai on Monday, March 7, 2:00-3:30pm in CLA 3.210. The description is below.

"With the emergence and rise of neural knowledge and its mainstreaming in contemporary culture and society, new forms of knowledge are transforming how we identify, understand, and manage personhood and citizenship vis-a-vis conceptions of “normal” and “abnormal” brains. In short, we live in an era characterized by neurocentrism where the brain is seen as central to explaining who we are. Drawing on intersectional feminist, queer, and disability theories of biopolitics and citizenship, the presentation addresses contestations over our neural selves, imagining feminist crip of color possibilities."

Dr. Desai teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Alumni Voices: Jeannette Vaught and Jenny Kelly presenting at "Envisioning American Studies" conference

If you'll be in Ann Arbor in March, we highly recommend you check out the University of Michigan's "Envisioning American Studies" conference, a part of their 80th anniversary celebration of their American Culture program. Ph.D. alumni Drs. Jeannette Vaught and Jenny Kelly have both been selected to present research relating to their dissertations - now manuscripts - in this discussion of the vanguard of American cultural analysis. Congratulations to both of them!For more information, see the 80th anniversary website here.