September 2016 – owen morgan UBC term 1, 2016

In response to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” (1861) [PHIL435A]

Upon my first reading of the excerpt from Walking, I considered Thoreau’s writing to be poetry at best; too verbose to follow and of a bombastic tone that disqualified the arguments presented from being considered sound reasoning. Tallying how many times the anecdotal, naturalistic and ‘appeal to emotion’ fallacies were committed, I concluded that Thoreau had broken too many rules of logic to be taken seriously. However, a second reading allowed me to discern the ingenuity of how his argument was formulated. Thoreau, claiming that the intrinsic value of nature is in its aesthetic, divine beauty, is not interested in adhering to rigid standards of deductive logic; for how can the premises of such a novel conclusion be defended in a post-Enlightenment context whereby philosophical discourse was analysed using stringent, almost mathematical, standards that reduce subjects to mere static variables?

Thoreau’s reflection on his veneration of nature and its sublimity is followed by an affirmation of the anthropocentric view that nature’s value is instrumental, that is “To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.” In this latter part of the excerpt, Thoreau deduces that the survival of humankind relies on that of nature, aligning himself with the anthropocentrists before him (Kant, Locke, et al.), perhaps in an attempt to engage their followers. However, in conjunction with the first half of the excerpt, in its entirety, Thoreau’s argument is one for nonanthropocentrism and one that I can mostly agree with.

Question: If Kant, Mill, Locke, etc. were alive to read Thoreau’s argument, how would they respond?

Short Blog Essay #1: Decolonizing Feminism & Neo-Liberalism [GRSJ102]

Mary Dore’s 2014 documentary, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (1), provides a rudimentary summary of the second and third waves of white feminism, while glossing over the significant contributions made by women of color and LGBTQIA+ communities and failing to adequately acknowledge the intersectional nature of systemic oppression. In this sense, it gives weight to the thesis of Bhandar and da Silva’s critical response to Nancy Fraser’s The Guardian article, “How feminism became capitalism’s handmaiden – and how to reclaim it” (2), in which they express frustration at how “White feminists speak of second-wave feminism as if it were the only “feminism” and use the pronoun “we” when lamenting the failures of their struggles.” (3)

denise-ferreira-da-silva brenna-bhandar

(Denise Ferreira da Silva (left) & Brenna Bhandar (right))

While Dore’s film does acknowledge the fact that it was difficult for middle class white women (the proponents of second wave feminism most recognized in the media) to empathize with the struggles of women of color, and briefly covers the emergence of early lesbian feminist activist groups (namely Lavender Menace), it is framed in such a way that places issues concerning less privileged women secondary to those whose femininity is more aligned with Western traditions. Moreover, discussion of the oppression of Indigenous and trans women is omitted entirely, yet such voices are crucial in any manifestation of contemporary feminisms. The progression of the documentary is directed by the mantra, “The personal is political”, yet whose personal experiences qualify for consideration seems to be legislated by a conservative framework that prescribes stringent ideas about what constitutes Woman.

On the other hand, if we regard She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry as a “Feminism 101” targeted at people who have remained indifferent to social justice issues for most of their lives, it is probably quite effective in convincing such an audience that feminist politics are worthy of their support. Nevertheless, this whitewashed account of the history of feminism is outdated and contributes to the perpetuation of racist conceptions of white being the norm and non-white being the “other”. Being released in 2015, the holes in Dore’s recount speak to its complacency.

boston-womens-health-book-collective

(Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, as seen in “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry”)

As a white male, perhaps it isn’t my place to be so critical in analysis of significant works by feminists, such as Dore’s. And I do not claim to have learned nothing from the documentary either; I was not aware of how severely exclusionary treatment of women in academia was all throughout the 1960s and 1970s, nor was I educated of the history of reproductive injustices and abortion rights in the Western world. The educational potential of Dore’s film is undoubtedly powerful. However, the insight I gained from reading Bhandar and da Silva’s 2013 article “White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome” seemed both more valuable and contextually pertinent, equipping me with a perspective from which this very essay was formulated.

Moreover, it is not my intention to discredit or trivialize some of the poignant themes that underpin Dore’s film; for example, towards the end, it alludes to the fact that contemporary feminism is far from redundant (as many people like to believe), and that the sexism experienced these days is more insidious, as well as harder to identify tangibly with simple language. However, I can’t help but think that, like Fraser, Dore’s narrative shares “the same liberal core that Black and Third World feminists have identified and exposed since very early in the trajectory of feminisms,” (3) in how the proportion of white to colored interviewees is something like 8 to 1, and its focus on the prospect of integrating women into existing power structures, in such a way that they are treated equally to men, as opposed to deconstructing imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy; a system under which all minorities have been persecuted and oppressed for centuries.

______________________________________________________________________

Bibliography

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry. 2014. Documentary. Salt Lake City: Mary Dore.
Fraser, Nancy. 2013. “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden – And How To Reclaim It”. Article. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal.
Bhandar, Brenna & da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2013. “White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome”. Blog. Critical Legal Thinking. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/10/21/white-feminist-fatigue-syndrome/.

3 Potential Big Ideas [FNIS100]

Parallels between Indigeneity, and Indigenous issues / histories in colonial Australia / Canada

Both being developed “Western” nations, colonised (at least in part) by the British empire and both currently facing backlash for their respective governments’ tokenistic attempts at ‘reconciliation’ (as they call it), I think it would be interesting to delve deeper into their Indigenous communities’ common struggles and examples of global solidarity between the two groups.
Considering the violent imperialist history of both nations, these frivolous attempts at establishing some sort of truce (e.g. former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the “stolen generation” in 2007) and how they contradict with ongoing celebration of this past violence (e.g. “Australia Day” continues to be a celebrated national holiday in Australia, which is essentially the day the genocide started), seem to have finally encouraged the support of an increasing amount of non-Indigenous people as they realise the realities of continuing injustices.
I’d also like to shed light to the fact that both countries are now being faced with terrorist threats yet there is little talk in mainstream media, public discourse or even academia about how the means by which they were settled by the British / French would be considered terrorism by today’s standards. History is thus re-written by Western institutions in order to absolve responsibility for such atrocities; that is, these countries weren’t invaded or terrorised, but “discovered.”
Being an exchange student from Australia, I think such an enquiry would allow me to develop a more holistic understanding of Indigenous issues on a universal scale and how, being of British descent, I have a duty to educate myself with regards to these issues and how colonial behaviours and attitudes are inherited
Question: How are the histories of colonisation in Australia / Canada similar and in which ways are their persecutors related?

2. Appropriation of Indigenous Canadian / American culture in Western art

While this is an entirely different topic, one example of the aforementioned inherited colonial behaviour is the appropriation of traditional Indigenous dress for the sake of fashion by settlers / white people. If one simply looks through photo albums for American/Canadian/Australian music festivals, for example Coachella, one will see myriad examples of this.
I will use examples such as this as the basis of broader arguments about how relatively nuanced manifestations of systemic oppression of Indigenous / other oppressed peoples, in art and culture, are perhaps more harmful than those that can be more easily identified / explained to white people, because:

They cannot be punished by law
Of the recent trend of brash ‘free speech’ rhetoric / politics

I’m interested in this topic because I produce music and try to make art, myself, and so I’d like to better understand how I can continue to create without appropriating Indigenous cultures in any way and also, I attend a lot of music events where this sort of thing is very common
Question: How can white people learn to understand the harm they are causing when they wear headdresses to music festivals (for example), especially in a neoliberal context where ‘free speech’ is the mantra of the young ‘left’?

3. The simplification / trivialisation of Indigenous cultures / peoples by white categorical thinking and the contribution of this to Indigenous erasure

This is my least developed idea but during the last lecture, I began to think about how the categorisation of Indigenous peoples of Canada into three broad categories (First Nations, Métis and Inuit), mostly for the sake of simplifying legislation (on which the survival of these peoples depend) contributes directly to the erasure of sacred cultures / languages.
This desire to categorise and compartmentalise knowledge / culture is a white, post-Enlightenment epistemic convention. Hence, it is insensitive to the rich cultural history of ancient Indigenous peoples. In Sydney, I was taught by a professor Clint Bracknell, whose family is from the Wirlomin Noongar clan of Western Australia, and he opened my eyes to the idea that hundreds of Aboriginal languages are being erased, as they are primarily oral and literature is the dominant means by which knowledge is retained and history is told, in today’s world (if you’re interested, the Guardian interviewed him about this: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/may/26/aboriginal-language-wikipedia-faces-cultural-hurdles-say-researchers)
These are the kinds of ideas I want to explore but as you can probably tell, my vision for this particular idea is still quite vague.
Question: How can ancient Aboriginal cultures survive or be revived in a world that is largely oblivious to their value?