The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 17

The semester starts in about a week.

Here’s a funny thing about Hopkins’ semesters.

They’re about 13 weeks long, with an almost two month long break between the Fall and Spring (a brief “intercession” period is stuck in between). My last class of the Fall is usually somewhere around December 3, while my first class of the Spring is usually somewhere around January 28 or so. And the one-per-week classes that I prefer to teach are only two hours and twenty minutes long. Compared to a school with 16 week long semesters and 3 one-per-week courses…well here’s the math. I end up teaching about 30 hours and 20 minutes per class at Hopkins, compared to 48 hours at, say, Michigan. Extrapolate that over 4 classes per semester, then over 8 semesters (at least), and you lose around 72 hours per semester, 144 per year, and 576 over the course of a student’s undergraduate career.

That’s a big gap.

Now what that means for a single course is simple. I either decide to teach everything I’d teach otherwise, jamming some 48 hours of content into around 30 hours….or that means I just dial it down a bit. Most of my classes suffer from this approach, but the courses I’m teaching this semester probably suffer a bit more. I’m basically teaching a black political thought class that doesn’t do anything close to justice to black nationalism or to black radicalism, much less to black feminism. The nature of Hopkins’ semesters affects my urban film course in two different ways. I can only show 12 or 13 movies at most, but on top of that they can’t really be longer than 2 hours. So I’m pulling what little hair I have trying to figure out which movies to cut and which to keep. I can’t show Boyz in the Hood and Menace II Society for example, so one’s going to have to go.

(About the class in a movie theater thing. As part of Johns Hopkins and the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art’s move to redevelop Station North, Hopkins redeveloped the old Parkway Theater—interesting sidetone, the donor responsible for the largest gift in this initiative is also responsible for the new Agora project…something I’ll probably have more to say about later. The Maryland Film Festival is now housed within it, and Hopkins faculty gets first dibs on the facilities.)

(Here’s the list as of right now if you’re wondering: Sex and the City, Do the Right Thing, Menace II Society, La Haine, District 9, Just Another Girl on the IRT, Girlfight, Paris is Burning, Detroit, Detropia, Escape From New York or Predator 2 or Escape from L A, Slam. I’m only really showing a couple of films—and most of the movies are nineties era. Might sneak in a John Hughes film like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Interested in examining how films like these produce and reproduce racialized spaces alongside public policy.)

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I’ve been writing about how important 1968 was, but in so doing kind of forgot about 1868. If we want to look at what appears to be significant progressive movement in the South, we’d do well to not only go back to the Civil Rights Movement, and to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s move to register and train black voters in the south, but to the first post-civil war governments. Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle focus on South Carolina. In a brief period of time South Carolina enabled what Du Bois called “an abolition democracy”, a radical form of democracy that recognized property rights for married women, that created a range of public goods for citizens (including some of the first public schools in the South), that not only gave voting rights to blacks and the poor but saw a number of them use these rights to elect representatives. Over 90% of eligible black voters turned out in South Carolina elections.

For those on the left who believe voting doesn’t matter, that elections don’t matter, this piece is worth reading. If voting doesn’t matter, then why do both parties work so hard to dampen turnout? (And why does one party work particularly hard at truncating voting rights?)

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I’m not sure whether there will be some type of public announcement, but I’m pretty sure this time next week I’ll have something to say about where my book on HIV/AIDS will be published.

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A lot of books on the shelf right now. Reading The Social Life of Financial Derivatives by Edward LiPuma. What happens when we move from a mode of capitalism in which producing things matters, to a mode of capitalism in which producing things becomes less and less important? For perhaps a couple of decades, maybe more, GM and Ford made far more money off of their financial arm than they did making cars (at least up until the 2008 crash a few years after which GM’s financial arm was spun off). With the growing interest in capitalism throughout the social sciences it seems to me maybe the first thing we should be asking scholars is a very simple question:

What is a derivative?

Scholars who can’t answer that question might need to go sit in the corner until they can.

Picked up Tom King’s The Omega Men as part of a large comics dump. Because I have so many non-fiction books on the shelf for class or for one writing project or another it’s becoming harder to read regular fiction and easier to go back to comics. The Omega Men were DC’s early 80s answer to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (I’m referring here to the original comic book characters not the movies), and were originally conceived of as interstellar freedom fighters. But in as much as they were superheroes, writers underplayed the “freedom fighter” aspect (as well as the politics and economics of the regime they fought). King decided to take the freedom fighter aspect seriously, along with the underlying political economy.

So Superman comes from Krypton. Krypton explodes because it’s core is unstable. There’s one element in the universe that can prevent such a thing from happening—“Stellarium”. What if Stellarium were incredibly rare? What type of power would accrue to the entity that established control of it? What lengths would that entity go to protect it? What if it were only found on one or two planets…and mining it had the unfortunate side effect of making the lives of every living being on those planets nasty, brutish, and short? What steps would “heroes” take to fight this regime? How would fighting this regime change them?

To effectively get at this while still maintaining standard superhero tropes, Tom King makes effective use of the nine-panel grid, which enables him to jam a lot of information into the standard 22 page format.

Reading this you’ll probably swap out “Stellarium” for “oil” in your head. There’s a reason. Tom King used to work for the CIA, so he brings those skills to bear. He’s writing a series on superheroes and PTSD next. Worth reading if your geek tendencies turn in that general direction.

Reading Maurice Hobson’s The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta. I remember when Atlanta became the spot for educated black folk. Sometime in the early nineties before the 1996 Olympics it seemed as if there were a direct line from Detroit to Atlanta as dozens of my classmates moved to Atlanta after graduation. And although the region is still deeply shaped by racial politics, it’s growing by leaps and bounds—the Atlanta region has some 6 million people now. Though I think Hobson overemphasizes how important Atlanta was compared to cities like Detroit and Chicago (comparatively speaking I think Atlanta’s labor politics were weaker, which narrowed Atlanta’s black politics significantly), and gets a detail wrong (Baltimore, not Detroit, burned after King was assassinated) I like what I’m reading so far. Going to write a review for Jacobin.

(Amazon listed the finalists for its HQ. Might write more about this. My money’s on Atlanta.)

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Finally, Detroit just had its auto-prom a couple of days ago as a big kick off to its Auto Show. The big news is that GM is planning on creating an autonomous car by 2019. If you click on the link, the image depicted conveys an idea of personal comfort. And yes, there’s going to be a market for individuals. But the real effect will be seen in the logistics sector—this move will pretty much kill the trucker—and the taxi industry (both the old school model and its uber/lyft variant). As we creep closer and closer to an economy driven by AIs and financial capital it’s clear to me that the future isn’t coming, the future is here.

And on that note….

My name is Lester Spence. This is the (lightly edited) Counterpublic Papers. If you know folks who might be interested, have them subscribe here.