by Quentin Lewis

Quentin's Weeknotes 4/10/22-4/16/22

weeknotes comics books teaching movies museum indigenous writing

This Week:

  • I finished reading volume 2 of “Once and Future”, an action-packed collection about the undead monsters of English mythology. Museum workers will save the world!
  • After years of it sitting on my shelf, I finished reading John Hartigan Jr.’s “Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People”. I almost wrote a booknotes about it, but I feel like I’m still pondering it; it’s a dense, theoretically rich book that deftly engages with anthropology’s long wrestling (for better or worse) with race. But I’m troubled by its conclusions. On one hand, I am drawn to its calls to complicate race and its intersections with class, gender, geography, and other social fields and forces. I am also inspired by the book’s foregrounding of White people as subjects of analysis, something I’ve done to a lesser extent in my own scholarship. The book also has rich chapters on the historical relationship between whiteness, poverty and Eugenics, as well as deft cultural analyses of films and music that draw on hillbilly and “white trash” metaphors. On the other hand, the book necessarily detaches racial categories from power, with a regular refrain to study race without racism, and examine poor White people through vectors of class, gender, and geography. But this raises questions for me about what is actually being studied. Hartigan says “cultural analysis” is a better framework than Whiteness (drawn from that new right-wing bugaboo “critical race theory”), but I worry that such an analysis can be easily divorced from power, making White people just another subject category to be analyzed (or protected by the law!) and leaving in place the fundamental violence and terror of racial hierarchy, not to mention the complicated mess of sadism and desire lurking at the heart of white supremacy.
  • In MUST204, we talked about Colonialism and collections, and the students began a short, in-class group project where I give them a fictional collections management problem to solve.
  • My wife and I finished watching “Sorry to Bother You”, a dark and strange and radical and funny film about racism, capitalism, and human-horse hybrids. It’s a hard and heavy movie that is lightened by its humor and genuine weirdness.
  • I finished a draft of an exhibit panel about the Quinney brooches which we repatriated to the Stockbridge-Munsee.
  • I also finished a draft of a piece of short fiction that I’ve been trying to finish for almost two years.
  • It was spring break in Oneonta, so I had a few take-your-kid-to-work days.