The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 14

This week I checked out the 8pm showing of Alex Garland’s Civil War with my youngest son.

After I came out, he asked me what I thought. I was silent. 

“Oh. I guess as a political scientist you saw the movie with different eyes.” 

If you have a chance to check it out do so. 

I remember writing about DC’s DMZ years ago when it made the jump to the television screen, as well as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower during the pandemic when we were close to Parable’s timeline (in fact the presidential election that sets everything off is the 2024 election). 

In both cases, the works are more about contemporary anxieties than it is about the “facts” that lead to fracture. We see that in this case as well, with the added “benefit” that it’s the present (DMZ was published in 2005, while Parable was published twelve years before that). While according to my daughter there’s enough population movement between Texas and California to at least begin to connect them at the hip, there’s no way we even get a two-term President who then is able to seize a third term without getting the electoral votes of one of those states, and then alongside of that there’s no way that any state would secede without having to first engage in an intra-state conflict against its own central cities. 

But with that said, because of the fact that we appear to be closer to this than we’ve ever been, Civil War feels truer than those accounts. It certainly looks truer, with a couple of critical exceptions. Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura (who I’d just seen in Donald Glover’s Mr and Mrs Smith) and Stephen McKinley Henderson, all do wonderful jobs in their roles. Because Dunst pretty much grew up on screen—she was 12 when she appeared in Interview With a Vampire—she’s particularly believable as a weather-worn war journalist. But while I find her performance believable, and find the photographic journalism focus believable, I found the print focus (to the extent there is one) less believable. I’d find it believable, if for instance the print journalists were from a foreign newspaper. Maybe Garland’s making a statement as to what journalism itself should aspire to in this moment, but as he’s British I think it’s more likely that he made decisions based on what he thought the American public would tolerate. The second challenge I had was with the few people of color in the film. In a couple of instances they behave in unbelievable ways. No spoilers here, but you’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it. 

I’ll check it out again, probably soon. But if you do so be prepared. It’s a hard watch.

….

So I’ll come back to an event I mentioned last time…Michael Dawson’s retirement. Michael Dawson is arguably one of the two or three most important scholars of black politics of the last forty years. Dawson is not only associated with one of the most important concepts used to explain post-civil rights era black behavior, the black utility heuristic (commonly called “linked fate”—here I refer to the phenomenon of black folk using what’s best for blacks in general as a proxy for what may be best for them as individuals), he’s also largely responsible for the two datasets most mainstream black politics scholars used to examine black attitudes and behaviors (the National Black Election Study and the National Black Politics Study). He used those datasets to write two of the most important books on black politics (Behind the Mule published in 1994 and Black Visions published in 2001). And then on top of that, he produced PhDs who themselves went on to make signal contributions to the subfields of black politics and racial politics. At the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University no less. Cathy Cohen (Chair of the newly created Dept of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago), Taeku Lee (Bae Family Professor, Harvard Dept of Government) and Christopher Parker (Professor of Political Science, UC Santa Barbara) are probably his most renowned students, and I’d also add here the late Mark Q. Sawyer (UCLA), but there are at least two dozen more. Finally with the creation of the Center for Race, Politics, and Culture, the Race and Politics project, and the Race and Capitalism project, he helped institutionalize the study of race into political science. You can be said to have had a successful career if you’d just done one of these things….I cannot think of anyone else who’s done them all (much less successfully).  

The intellectual sessions associated with the conference focused on linked fate and its conceptual development, his critical work on black political ideologies, and then his recent Race and Capitalism project. What I’d have liked to see is a discussion of the role capitalism plays in linked fate on one hand and political ideological development on the other—some argue that in many instances what we think of as “linked fate” is really the interests of a specific class of black folk articulated as the needs of the race, while an ideology like black nationalism looks pretty different if most black elites strongly support capitalism than if they don’t. But what struck me near the end was Dawson’s response to a question raised by Melissa Harris-Perry (“what is our charge going forward?”).

His paraphrased answer was “Do the work needed to push black people forward, and keep your job.” 

There was a moment, when the work required to do both was more or less the same. If you were to ask me when that moment started, I’d say somewhere around 1999 or so, when political science departments finally released they needed to start hiring folk who studied race and politics. 

But I think that moment might be ending. How quick that moment closes will be in part related to what happens in November. And the sobering reality is that we leave that moment, just as folk like Dawson are retiring. 

…

While in Chicago I was also able to hang out with my fraternity brother Glenn Eden, Chair of Choose Chicago, one of the city’s most important tourist commissions. I happened to be there as they debuted a series entitled “The 77: A City of Neighborhoods,” a set of documentaries featuring Chicago’s neighborhoods. Chicago, like most cities over the past few decades, put a significant amount of resources into its downtown at the expense of its neighborhoods and working class populations in general. And then when neighborhoods have been the focus of development it usually comes at the expense of long standing institutions and working class populations, forced to move out as a result of some combination of increased rents, mortgages, and then increased policing. 

Below is the documentary on Humboldt Park, about 25 minutes long.

The through line for all of the documentaries are food and drink, as you can tell a range of stories through the restaurant and bar scene, and the end goal is to get people to visit the neighborhoods and consume their wares. 

But what stood out to me was the fact that the documentaries didn’t shy away from the broader politics shaping neighborhood development. As I watched this documentary for example, I’d say to myself “they’re going to ignore the reason Puerto Ricans fled Puerto Rico in the first place,” only to see them wrestle with the effect of imperial power on Puerto Rico. In the documentary on Uptown (home to one of the oldest Vietnamese and Chinese communities and to some of the city’s oldest queer communities as well) interviewees and city experts deal fortnightly with gentrification and the threat of high rents, the impact of the Vietnamese war, as well as the impact of the national response to AIDS, on how the communities functioned. Again as the documentaries weren’t designed to generate political change but rather to spur tourism one’s mileage may vary. But talking about it with Glenn he noted that everyone working on the project felt that the only way to authentically cover the neighborhoods was to be forthright in talking about the political conditions that generated them. In my Urban Policy class—one more to go for the semester!—I framed it as a form of development. If we were to go back in time to Rahm Emanuel’s time in office, it’s hard to imagine a documentary designed to spur tourism in Chicago taking the approach they took. 

….

Be good to one another. If you feel like you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot.

And keep hanging.