Haiti's Earthquake and the Environmental Crisis

I thought I should post a link to an older entry considering the current crisis in Haiti:
http://dennishidalgo.blogspot.com/2009/06/haitis-environment-and-social-justice.html

Amazon.Com Labor Practices-- The Response

This is Amazon's Responses to my previous letter. What do you think?

from Amazon.com Customer Service to "dennisrhidalgo@gmail.com" date Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 4:25 PM

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us regarding recent coverage concerning the Amazon.com fulfillment centers.

Amazon takes the well-being of our workforce very seriously and strongly feels that the media coverage does not accurately represent the working environment within our fulfillment centers or within Amazon in general.

It's no secret that the final quarter of the year is the busiest period for Amazon and that everyone in the company is working extremely hard to delight our customers. Our fulfillment centers are integral to our customer commitment. We are proud of the efforts of all who work for us and in return for the commitment and enthusiasm shown by those in our fulfillment centers, we reward hard work and dedication by competitive wages and performance-related pay.

We believe that the Amazon environment is a positive place to work and we believe this opinion is shared by the temporary workers currently employed for this busy holiday season.

Thank you again for taking the time to write to us regarding this issue.

Did we answer your question?

If yes, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=raqfwefh3273991974

If not, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=raqfwefh3273991974

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,

Vasanth S.
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company

Amazon.Com Labor Practices

After reading reports of Amazon's labor practices I decided to send today the following email to the corporation:

Dear Amazon, As a heavy user of your services and loyal costumer I have been deeply concerned with recent news about your labor practices. One of the reasons I have stayed with you for so long has been because of what I thought to be your work and environmental ethic. I believe that a just and fair business can compete successfully. I wish if you could reply to these reports by reviewing your labor practices and publishing a full response for all your costumers to read. Thanks in advance. Sincerely yours, Dennis R. Hidalgo

Fanon on National Consciousness

The purpose of this entry is to help you navigate through FrantzFanon’s chapter on National Consciousness and help you get ready for classroom discussion.

Fanon wrote this book in the three-year period in which he helped lead the psychiatric hospital in colonial Algiers, and as he wrote articles for revolutionary papers, and collaborated with the Algerian resistance. He did not have the assistance of an editor, the service of a computer or the disposal of a vast library (or the Internet for that matter). He engendered this work while he slept about four hours a day, hardly ate, and was under constant surveillance.

This is a work of painstaking pondering that comes from the meeting of considerable intellectual sweat, and hardcore, real-life political experience. At its heart, this chapter is a poignant demonstration of profound compassion for the unprivileged.

As an intellectual that trusted the people, Fanon main interest was to share with the Africans, who were on the brink of catapulting from colonialism, what he already knew about being a postcolonial, and what he thought will happen in the near future; all through the eyes of history. In fact, the Latin American past hanged predominately in Fanon’s head. Most Spanish America had over a century of postcolonial experience already, and Fanon wanted all Africans to avoid the pitfalls rendered clear through Western Hemisphere’s history.

Fanon objective was clear. He wanted to help deliver the promises of nationalism and avoid the “crude and fragile travesty of what might have been”. He had come to the conclusion that the hope of the postcolonial nation was not foreign investment or better relations with wealthy countries, but the mobilizing of its “revolutionary capital, which is the people”. In other words, the national leaders will achieve true independence only by trusting their own people.

But the main obstacle to the promise of nationalism was in fact the national bourgeoisie. These were the wealthy nationals who wanted to run the country after the exit of the colonial government. The problem was that they could not “rationalize” popular action.

The bourgeoisie has been crippled by colonialism; they had no economic power, no imagination and no political will. They were merely invested in small businesses, agriculture, and the liberal professions. They had neither financiers nor industrial magnates. They were “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor.” Unfortunately, this caste had become the intermediary for the economic forces of the richest countries, and had neglected their role as national enablers. Thus, they could not deliver real independence, which in turn explains why postcolonial nations remained hanging as colonial drapes.

Read this chapter with these questions in mind:

What was Fanon's problem with producing only raw materials, nationalizing industries, promoting tourism, competition with other poor countries (as opposed to cooperation), chauvinism and tribalism?

Pay close attention at Fanon’s relentless assault on the national bourgeoisie. What was his problem with this “little greedy caste”? On the other hand, what is the responsibility of a strong bourgeoisie?

How do religious revivals may fuel racial rivalries?

What is the meaning of this phrase: “a racism of contempt: it minimizes everything it hates”?

How could African unity be achieved? What are the problems with a single party? What are the (harmful) pillars of regimes in underdeveloped countries?

Explain Fanon’s ideal: intellectuals collaborating with the masses against the national bourgeoisie.

What is the role of political party?

How Brasilia might have been a good example?

Note the industrialization and development against nature.

What was Fanon’s mood towards the plight of the African women?

What was his take regarding obscure language? And what does the unyielding black market said to him?

For Fanon, what produces the wealth of the rich? And what is the role of the education of the masses?

What are the pitfalls of youth’s pastimes, sports and national consciousness, and the quest for heroes?

What can the army bring to the construction of the nation, and what are the dangers of having the army involved in politics?

What do you find useful and revelatory in Fanon’s long essay?

Fanon ended the chapter with something that we may find controversial. He thought that a nation that is just coming out of colonialism should cultivate a sense of strong nationalism before developing social consciousness. In other words, people should feel united and develop a feel for national responsibility before demanding social justice. What do you think of this?

Postcolonial Ecofeminism (Robert J. C. Young)

You would not come to this class to read and learn about what you would normally get from standard media. So, the title of Monday’s discussion should not be a complete surprise. Its newness may require that you would read and meditate about these issues more carefully than you would with more familiar topics. These types of topics, nevertheless, would surely help you appreciate the human experience on the other side of nationalism.

You already know that in this context postcoloniality means the people’s ambivalent experience and subordinate position even after independence from a colonial power. In other words, it is that state in which a former colony has nominal sovereignty because the former master (or new foreign ones) has not left entirely or has taken on new forms of domination. The struggle for freedom, thus, continues, not so much by pushing the foreign away, but in redefining the social structures that continues to promote inequality and subordination, which colonialism donated to the new nation (“inherited from colonialism”).

But what do ecology and feminism have to do with postcoloniality?

Robert J. C. Young’s challenge in chapter 5 is simply asking us to appreciate the perspective of the women who struggled against colonial and later postcolonial domination in India and other parts of Asia and Africa. Their experience is not totally transferable to other postcolonial female experiences because each group had faced different set of trials and had had different types of needs. Rather, it is the overarching theme of resisting a modern patriarchal nationalism that puts them together in the same crowd.

The section titled “Gender Politics in India” illustrates how notions about traditional roles for women are hard to reject. Even Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the great reformer who appropriated ‘feminized’ modes of struggle, came at times to reinforce, instead of reject, conventional Hindu and puritanical Victorian concepts of women and femininity. Young vindicated Gandhi, though, by showing that he genuinely realized that women’s politics were more radical than most nationalism. It argued for equitable relations between men and women, sustainable connections to the land, and a life-style and medicine that encourage collective health. These are the contributions of postcolonial women and their politics.

In “Gender and Modernity” Young threw us several ideas about modernity that could easily mystify if you fail to pay close attention. On the one hand he wrote technology and a politics of egalitarianism defines modernity. On the other, he asserted that (mythical) cultural nationalists and their obsession for a fabled past, where women stayed at home and were submissive, is all part of modernity. But his more interesting contribution, by far, was that there are several types of modernities, that there are different types of Third World modern experiences, and that even the West represent a diversity of modernities (think about how different is New Zeeland from the U.S.). The best explanation of modernity, however, is Young’s, and it appears in this section: the interaction of the West with the Rest.

Women’s struggle for equality and sustainability is the epitome of the postcolonial predicament according to the section “Women’s Movement after Independence.” While nationalist movements sought desperately to present a unified face during the conflicts against the direct colonial rule, after impendence, the same nationalists (i.e., Religious nationalisms) who preached equality and freedom tried relegating women to submission. Since the role of women actually degenerated with the “nation,” postcolonial feminism had been at the forefront of a “politics of egalitarianism that supports diversity rather than the cultural uniformity demanded for nationalism.” (99)

The section “Feminism and ecology” shows how “macho” nationalism continued with the same colonial politics of exploitation. It reinforced the same old social hierarchy; it exploited workers, women and the environment. Like the colonial government, the new nations colonized forests and minds in responses to market-oriented and scientific notions of the time. This brought deforestation and desertification to local economies and otherwise clean ecosystems.

All of this colonization was for the short-term commercial values of the marketplace, “trying to control nature just as patriarchy tries to control women.” (102) Women, however, because of their experience as cultivators and family enablers possessed repositories of knowledges about balances in nature and the effects of ecological disruptions. It is no wonder, then, that it were women activists who began the Chipko (tree huggers) movement and developed a philosophy of politics that resisted centralization, corruption and exploitation. Instead, they promoted justice, self-sufficiency, and empowerment of local knowledges.

In the section “What makes postcolonial feminism ‘postcolonial’?,” Young asked if postcolonial feminism amounted to a separate strand within postcolonial thought. His answer was simply no. In this section Young addressed the malleability of postcolonial theory by explaining how feminism is at its core, and thus inseparable. It is also applicable to a wide variety of politics, and even though they might not include obvious gender perspectives, they all work from the same paradigm: the pursuit of collective justice and equality. These struggles may be waged inside the nation or in exile, as the examples of Radia Nasraoui and Gisèle Halimi shows.

In the last section, “The untouchables: caste,” Young readily admitted that postcolonial struggle is not limited to the legacy of the colonies. There are older vices that plagued modern society. In the Indian example, we see the caste system, which is much older than the British colonial government. The plight of the Dalits is its most explicit case injustice. “A quarter of the Indian population is made of such Dalits.” And they do most of the menial jobs, and live segregated from the rest, with little access to anything we normally see as good from modernity.

In class I want you to think seriously about the meaning of feminism and its opposite, namely, patriarchalism. How women’s social position as historically close to the land and responsible for sustaining families shaped their politics differently to that of men.

You should also ponder over the dark side of macho-nationalism, its insistence on cultural uniformity. Most importantly, I expect you to deliberate on the reasons and causes of nationalisms continuing with the same unfair hierarchies imposed by colonial rules, and with the exploitations inaugurated by the colonial masters.

How do you fit Young in Benedict Anderson's frame of thought? What parts correspond, even if slightly, and what elements are diametrically apart?

Sara Chambers's Letters and Salons

Letters and Salons

Beyond woman’s comprehension

We have stories about heroines, but not much about women thinking about the nation because their ideas were less public than their actions and whatever they wrote have been left out of literary canons. Though the record is hardly there, women were a cornerstone in the construction of national communities in LA. Sáenz, Sánchez, and Arriagada show that through correspondence and friendship, women played an important role as mediators.

Like Benedict Anderson thought, the writing and reading was a catalyst to the imagination of nations, but in the women’s case, it was through the writing and reading of correspondence, and through the socialization in salons. In this way women became intermediaries working toward national unity, and occasional critics of the excess of masculine-driven nationalism.

They were pioneers because the stereotype and the society’s drive was to mold women to the subordinate role of domesticity. Women who publicly thought were ridiculed and demonized. The only positive tendency of domesticity was that women were trained to raise loyal and virtuous citizens.

Even other women writers who published on feminine journals advocated the idea of domesticity for women while, contradictorily, violating themselves such a role by publishing their work. It was on the more private arena of letters that middle-class and elite women vented their frustration more freely.

This study relies mostly on unpublished documents in the form of letters. These letters could not be considered strictly private since they were also meant to be read in public and shared with others.

Sara C. Chambers add an important twist to (or challenge) Anderson’s thesis of the imagined community not only be including women in the creation of the national, but also by arguing that the imagination process happened through social interactions at smaller and tangible communities of “writers, readers, conversationalists, and political conspirators.”

The author does not make the connection directly, but her insistence in the fact that males’ leaders focused on the abstract while women focused on the concrete relationships of friends may be one of the most important contribution of this study since for most people who were not elite male, this was exactly the case.

Sáenz developed its sense of patriotism for Ecuador not from an abstract idea, since she had lived most of her life in Peru and Colombia, but from her personal acquaintances and from her exilic perspective. It is interesting that despite her being the most politically educated and democratically oriented of the three she still supported a military leader who sought to change the constitution to expand his tenure in power. Her contribution was not limited to influencing Simón Bolivar and Juan José Flores, but one that helped create a sense of national identity that favored order over other merits.

Sánchez’s, like Sáenz, spent time in exile, but differently from Sáenz, this augmented her patriotism because she revolved around like-minded people. Moreover, since she did not have competing (provincial) loyalties, as Sáenz had, and Argentine’s early national history was simpler than that of Ecuador and Colombia, it was easier for her to imagine an Argentine that was more homogenous than that of Sáenz. Still, her sense of national identity was rooted in her relationships with other Argentines, and not in any abstract idea of the nation.

Arraigada was the least euphoric patriot of the three. She lived in a southern isolated province, and this isolation may have influenced the way she imagined the nation. It was because she had the least of friends that her extended network did not yield a broader vision of the nation. This distance from the locus of power, however, allowed her to make a more critical appraisal of Chile than the other two writers. Chambers thought that her choice of reading, the romance novel, may have also influenced her lack of strong attachment to the new nation.

All three women, Chambers argued, are not representative of their class, but they are neither unique. This means that through her lives we can get an insight into the role of women in the formation of early national identities. It was not their radicalism that put these women apart, but how they managed to carve a niche of substantial independence in order to affect politics and ideology that make them special to history. Their ideological contribution was the argument that tolerance and negotiation was better than confrontation and personal ambitions.

Editing your paper: Anderson's last chapters

These are rephrased comments I shared with one of your classmates about his essay. They may help you all as you rework your own.

Another encouraging fact of your essay is that you are trying to make a unitary entity around an issue (with subcategories), and not a fragmented outline with the different themes found in the chapters. This is the way to go: to gather all the data around one single issue and make sense throughout the essay based on it (thesis). I see your intention and attempt, but, as you alluded in your email, it needs serious work. This means that you have to think hard about the way you organize your essay around a single issue or concern.

It is usually helpful to begin with a sort of question or problem. For example, what IS Anderson’s main contribution in chapters 8 to 11 to the understanding of the creation of nations? There must be something in these chapters (Patriotism and Racism, The Angel of History, Census, Mao and Museums, Memory and Forgetting) or at least of key group of issues, which you could put together that would be the heart of your essay. As soon as you have that center, your essay will flow easier and smoother.

Let me give you a recap of what we have seen yet and how the last chapters may fit within the broader view.

Anderson’s book follows the modernization argument (“we are progressing and becoming better, thus, the present is mostly better than the past.” You can imagine why I would have problems with this assumption) in explaining the creation of nations. This means that for Anderson nations developed as a necessary component of industrial society, though neither "economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, or imagined community" (65).

Differently from others who have written about nationalism, Anderson stressed the impact of culture and the role of print capitalism in developing new nations. In regards to culture Anderson contended that pre-national culture was a broad religious society (“imagined religious communities” like Mediaeval Christianity). Nations replaced this religious culture with their own distinctively imaginary national cultures (national hymns, and a plethora of new hallowed ceremonies), which gave citizens a rationale for dying for a nation (before people died mostly for their religious communities).

For Anderson print capitalism is at the core of his premise. According to him, print capitalism, publishing in vernaculars, was the catalyst in spreading consciousness of similar identities, and thus, creating, somehow involuntarily (in other words, it was not the intent of print-capitalism to create nations) these new national cultures.

Chapters 8 to 11 help the reader understand how these new national cultures become so effective in polarizing people. These chapters deal more specifically with the nations’ powerful love and attraction, and their specific and narrow interpretation of history, with the creation of new monuments and numbering of people.

Below are more links you may explore. The idea of reading these links is not to take-in everything they say. Instead, the idea is to allow what you find in these links to stimulate your thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities

http://www.lai.at/wissenschaft/lehrgang/semester/ss2005/rv/files/anderson.1983-1991.pdf

http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/anderson.htm

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Radhika-Desai/3085