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Saturday, December 11, 2004
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COUNTDOWN TO
THE MLA CONVENTION The Modern Language Association’s annual convention is almost here, and to get us all in the mood, UD offers a look at recent essays and presentations by humanities professors. She’ll start with three examples of one writer’s work in race, gender, and colonialism. RACE: In a recent paper, this professor condemns Curious George as a racist justification for slavery because George represents a black man brought, like a slave, to America. Once here, George is given various tests to perform, which compounds the racism with speciesism. Sexism also appears when the story portrays George as an excellent test pilot, erasing NASA’s chauvinist history (why not a woman test pilot?). GENDER: In line with her interest in “representations of women in outer space in contemporary culture,” this professor has written a paper called “Retiring the Space Chimps.” She summarizes its argument: This paper examines the late 1990s media event surrounding the “retirement” of the non-human primates who became known as the “space chimps”—the original Air Force chimps sent into space with Project Mercury and their descendants. These chimpanzees, used as surrogate astronauts in 1960s, form part of the baby-boomer generation—the generation that seeks retirement (in places such as Florida) in the 1990s. Drawing on the discourses of the space program (NASA), primatology, the military, and gerontology, I argue that non-human primates continue to serve in their retirement years as surrogates for humans and, moreover, that they invite us to consider outer space as a significant imaginary retirement home for baby boomers. What can the representation in popular culture of these non-human primates tell us about the interrelationship of the earth, outer space, species, gender, and age? COLONIALISM: In “Coprophagy, Conservation, and Colonialism in Gorillas in the Mist,” this professor looks at the film “Gorillas in the Mist” and extends the argument of another post-colonialist theorist who asserts that the presence of shit in certain post-colonialist works of art “underscores the divided self of the protagonist and the division between him and the new nation.” In the Fossey film, “postcolonial excrement is produced not by humans, but by animals - in particular non-human primates who walk the divide between nature and culture, animal and human.” A number of previous scholars assume that “the excremental actant, we might say, is a black African male. What might we conclude, however, when the shit is dung, and when it is displaced onto, into and out of the bodies of the white western woman and the (especially) male gorilla, both fighting to establish their space in the Francophone African jungles of the 1960s and 70s?” She continues: When Fossey returned to the United States for a visiting stint at Cornell University in 1980, her biggest fear, she later admitted, was that she would forget to flush the toilet. The disposal of feces defines, this anecdote reveals, the border between nature and culture, jungle life and academic life. And this border was flushed from the body of woman, the white primatologist who made her way to Africa not for overt political reasons but to become intimate friend and protector of the mountain gorilla - a species not known for flushing toilets. Fossey, like the author of Curious George, is a racist colonialist stooge: “If indeed written shit does not smell, it would appear to be the work of Fossey's book to cleanse the postcolonial state by focusing on the author's beloved animals, rather than on the quite shitty lives of the humans around her. (Fossey famously wrote "This book is about gorillas, not people.").” |