 |
|||
|
|
A Response to the 2006 FMS Summer Institute -- It is getting late in August, the trees here are already giving some of their loosest leaves to the wind, and I am still excited about the summer FMS gathering. I visualize sharing meals together in the shadows of dead tree trunks carved back to life by artists from among the 1,000 cultural groups of Papua New Guinea, as dusk gave way to the flicker of fire light and warm darkness. But the sharpest sensory memory I have of the colloquium at Stanford this year is auditory: The din of animated conversation and laughter fills the hallways in the interstices of plenum, rises from the tables where we are eating lunch and dinner in small groups. Grows even louder on the buses later at night, as we return to our hotels, the infants already limp on our shoulders. And, oh, that dance party! Salsa, meringue and cumbia get many of us out on the floor in twos. Punjab folk bangra re-draws us as a circle. As the strains of Sufi music connect with the heart, we form parallel lines and electric slide our way through the rhythms. The beats of reggae and rhythm and blues reconfigure us again into ever-shifting pairs. But it is not merely the conviviality in and of itself that electrifies me about FMS. It is the ideological chemistry that creates the conviviality as its byproduct. We are spending entire days together--from the first sips of juice and tea and coffee in the morning, to the reluctant “good night” after talking into the wee hours--sharing and debating and honing ideas with important political ramifications, an academic global positioning system to lend locational precision to how we all got to where we are, here, now, together. As a white, female, lesbian, transgender, working-class, non-academic member of the FMS Advisory Board, I am acutely aware when I use the word “we” in reference to FMS that I must do so with consciousness and clarity, because there is not just one “we” in this coalition. Therefore, I’d like to clearly state my shift at this point to talking about one particular and numerically smaller “we” in FMS—we as white participants. FMS reminds us that being a “minority” is based on the reality of the relationship of forces between institutionalized power, oppression and resistance, not on a head-count. Taking part in a colloquium with scholars of color from nations battling hegemonic oppression inside and outside the borders of the imperialist U.S. offers us a welcome learning opportunity. As white scholars and activists in the U.S.—a prison house of nations dominated by a white oppressor nation—we have our work cut out for us in terms of deepening our own understanding of the histories of class and national oppressions that brought the larger “we” together to do the work of FMS. Such an analysis, and the willingness to take on the tasks that history hands us, will provide greater consciousness about the actual material basis for unity, and will reflect itself in all of our interactions. As a white FMS participant, I commit to being a part of this ongoing work—actively and with gusto. As inter-disciplinarians—back now to that larger “we”--we are learning each others’ languages at FMS, in more ways than one, translating the multiple lexicons that describe different tools and products of methodologies in sciences and humanities in order to compare and contrast our ideas. After long years of post-modernists telling us that if our identities fall like trees in the forest, and they refuse to listen, then our lives do not make a sound, post-positivist realism is academically remapping the global trails of social and economic history that lead us to where we have arrived together--our diverse and overlapping identities in resistance to the historically established rule of finance capital and the ideologies that justify it. All this makes FMS exhilarating for me, and unlike any other academic conference that I know of taking place in the U.S. now. Many of the sessions, this year and in previous years, brought us to the brink of a critical question that requires collective discussion in order to answer: How can our knowledge of the present, and the past that is still inherent in it, help shape the future? The final panel at Stanford still inspires me, and it impels us to think strategically about the goals we hope to achieve—both in the academy and in the larger society of which it is an interactive part. So as the heat in Palo Alto cools, and autumn approaches, where I live, I welcome this blog as a vehicle to propel the forward motion of this dynamic and vital FMS discussion with comments and new posts. |
||