Remembering China’s Great Leap andGreat Famine
Painting a State of Suspension
by Narges Bajoghli
“The Chronicle of Her Innocence” by Bahar Behbahani at NYU Abu Dhabi
19 Washington Square North, New York, NY 10003
September 29, 2011 – January 27, 2012
“I, and only I, am responsible for what I recall and see, not individuals in the past who could not have known what effect they might have on me.” (Edward Said)
Sitting in her airy studio in Brooklyn, hair pulled back in a loose bun, and in comfortable work clothes with paint on her sleeves, Bahar Behbahani excitedly points to this line from Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place (2000). One of two books sitting on her spotless work desk, Out of Place becomes a natural part of our conversation as we talk about memories, home, childhood, immigration, the Middle East, war, and stereotypes. “The importance of words, symbols, and signifiers to Edward Said really resonates with me,” Behbahani says as she flips through her notebook where she’s copied her favorite passages of his text. “The way he plays with words, his attention to their meanings, is what I try to do with my paintings.” For the Iranian-born artist, Said’s notions of immigration and memories resonate on a deeply personal level. Continue Reading →
Searching Herman Cain's Soul. In Iowa.
By Andy Kopsa
Standing before a crowd of reporters at the Friar’s Club in New York, Sharon Bialek told her story. With her lawyer Gloria Allred at her side, Bialek painted a picture of an unwanted sexual encounter in a parked car in Washington DC: what she was wearing – pleated skirt, suit jacket; a pleasurable dinner and cocktails; and to her surprise, an upgrade to a suite at her hotel, courtesy of her host for the evening, Herman Cain.
Bialek shockingly revealed that Cain “reached for my genitals” and then pulled her head toward his crotch. She resisted and asked, “What are you doing you know I have a boyfriend?” Cain’s reply was simply, ‘You want a job, right?’
For a man who has likened himself to Moses, claims God* told him to run for presidency and is a registered minister at Antioch Church in Atlanta, these charges should be troubling. Instead Cain’s personal response has been indignant, his campaign’s ham-handed and somewhat juvenile. Cain’s lawyer recently cautioned that women considering going public with claims of harassment by Cain should “think twice,” a threat like that of a playground bully.
What Bialek has described is sexual assault. While sexual harassment is serious, sexual assault is, criminally speaking, a whole other level. In Washington DC, where the alleged Bialek – Cain incident occurred, a misdemeanor sexual abuse charge carries a $1000 fine plus up to 180 days in jail. If a case reaches into 3rd or 4th degree assault territory fines can reach $100,000 and jail time soars to 10 years in prison. Continue Reading →
Searching Herman Cain’s Soul. In Iowa.
By Andy Kopsa
Standing before a crowd of reporters at the Friar’s Club in New York, Sharon Bialek told her story. With her lawyer Gloria Allred at her side, Bialek painted a picture of an unwanted sexual encounter in a parked car in Washington DC: what she was wearing – pleated skirt, suit jacket; a pleasurable dinner and cocktails; and to her surprise, an upgrade to a suite at her hotel, courtesy of her host for the evening, Herman Cain.
Bialek shockingly revealed that Cain “reached for my genitals” and then pulled her head toward his crotch. She resisted and asked, “What are you doing you know I have a boyfriend?” Cain’s reply was simply, ‘You want a job, right?’
For a man who has likened himself to Moses, claims God* told him to run for presidency and is a registered minister at Antioch Church in Atlanta, these charges should be troubling. Instead Cain’s personal response has been indignant, his campaign’s ham-handed and somewhat juvenile. Cain’s lawyer recently cautioned that women considering going public with claims of harassment by Cain should “think twice,” a threat like that of a playground bully.
What Bialek has described is sexual assault. While sexual harassment is serious, sexual assault is, criminally speaking, a whole other level. In Washington DC, where the alleged Bialek – Cain incident occurred, a misdemeanor sexual abuse charge carries a $1000 fine plus up to 180 days in jail. If a case reaches into 3rd or 4th degree assault territory fines can reach $100,000 and jail time soars to 10 years in prison. Continue Reading →
Teaching FBI Agents Bias
Nora Connor: For a time after 9/11, the FBI seemed to stand out among the many government agencies with a hand in the intelligence/counterterrorism game. FBI agents were among the most knowledgeable on Islamic extremism worldwide; FBI agents made important discoveries and arrests in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; FBI agents spoke up forcefully against Bush administration/CIA-approved torture techniques. Like any massive bureaucracy, though, the FBI is a many-headed hydra. It occupies a central space in the ever-expanding national security industry, and it’s this political and social terrain in which the agency competes for relevance and command over resources. That struggle has seemed to me the best way to make sense of, for example, the FBI’s apparent penchant for spending countless hours and dollars wheedling American Muslims into participating in fictional terrorist plots, in order to then arrest and prosecute them. It would seem a foolish, wasteful and counterproductive approach until one remembers that it supplies the FBI with success stories, headlines and a defense of its budget. Continue Reading →
Analogue Media and the Politics of Print Nostalgia
Angela Zito: The Bible as a book, printed, physically available for Christian devotion, remains a powerful and contested artifact in this digital age. Just winding up its US tour, a traveling exhibition of the Bible in China—entitled “Thy Word is Truth: the Bible Ministry Exhibition of the Protestant Church in China”—might have slipped my notice. Today, however, I saw a posting in the online newsletter of the US China Catholic Bureau of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops news service about a planned counter exhibit of a small portion of a hand-copied “prison bible” smuggled out of the Chinese labor reform camp system ten years ago, and recently donated to the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas. Continue Reading →
Serious Scientology
Gordon Haber reviews two recent books about Scientology at Religion Dispatches, Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology and Hugh Urban’s The Church of Scientology. (Read Amy Levin’s interview with Reitman for The Revealer here.) From Haber’s review:
While there is something undeniably disturbing about The Church of Scientology, there’s also something fascinating about it. And maybe, if we can see past the trash-digging and the crazed celebrities, Scientology has something to teach us—if not with its doctrine, then with its particularly American nexus of religion, culture, and business.
Serious Prayer
Journalist or academic with a serious interest in prayer? SSRC has your bag. Click here to apply for the New Directions in the Study of Prayer grant, sponsored by The Templeton Foundation and chaired by Columbia University’s Courtney Bender. Hurry up: deadline is December 1. Continue Reading →
What Secular Space?: The Met Hedges Muslim
Ashley Baxstrom: If you’re in New York (and if you’re not, come), head over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and check out their New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. November 1 marked the grand reopening of 15 enlarged, reconceived and renovated galleries of what the Museum touts as one of the world’s best and most comprehensive collections of Islamic art.
Museum Director Thomas P. Campbell says the exhibit “trace[s] the course of Islamic civilization over a span of 13 centuries, from the Middle East to North Africa, Europe, and Central and South Asia. This new geographic orientation signals a revised perspective on this important collection, recognizing that the monumentality of Islam did not create a single, monolithic artistic expression, but instead connected a vast geographic expanse through centuries of change and cultural influence.” Continue Reading →
How to Make a Zombie
by Nora Connor
In its October issue, Harper’s* revisits the zombie phenomenon–the Haitian kind, that is, not the George Romero kind. Which, come to think of it, makes it a bit of a strange Halloween selection. Journalist Hamilton Morris did his reporting pre-earthquake; the social feature most representative of Haiti’s practical difficulties is an excess of burning plastic garbage, a result of dysfunctional or nonexistent collection. It’s as if Harper’s were running a time capsule piece, giving us a brief glimpse of pre-Year Zero Haiti.
Morris’s piece is also an exercise in the policing of genre boundaries within academic and journalistic endeavors. At least since the mid-1980s, when anthropologist/ethnobotanist Wade Davis published The Serpent and the Rainbow, where there are Haitian Zombies, there are drugs. Davis took the social fact of zombification as a given and attempted to identify the chemical element in the sorcerers’ powder that makes the process, understood as magical or supernatural, “scientifically” possible. He may or may not have found it—TTX, a toxin from the organs of puffer fish that causes temporary paralysis—and gained no small amount of notoriety in the meantime. Scientists jumped on his science, anthropologists shredded his anthropology, historians disputed his history.
Davis was accused of violating the ethical standards of a number of disciplines: he paid for his drug samples, did not report the results of tests unfavorable to his preferred conclusions, participated in (enabled by his presence?) the exhuming of a child’s body, and by some lights amplified a racist narrative of Haitians as primitive and superstitious. Continue Reading →