Bob Kaufman: Beginnings

This past summer I was asked to join a panel on "Radical Materiality" for the 2012 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) conference in San Diego. The four other members of the panel, all brilliant and at this thing much longer than I, have been incredibly supportive as venture down this mysterious, possibly dead end road.

As I wrote last month, the late-poet Bob Kaufman has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Unfortunately, when it comes to Kaufman, there is a definite shortage of available secondary material on his life. This lack, in the absence of a more succinct phrasing, has become my object of inquiry (grad school talk for the thing I am going to write about). I have included my proposal for the conference below:

Radical Disappearances and Sonic Materiality: Remembering Bob Kaufman

Editor Raymond Foye recounts in his Introduction to Bob Kaufman’s The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-78, “Alone together, his pronouncements were extreme and final. ‘I don't know how you get involved with uninvolvement, but I don't want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.’” By the time of his arrival in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1958, Kaufman found himself known to many writers in an already established Beat scene in San Francisco’s North Beach. However, as a poet Kaufman remains mostly forgotten except to writers and a handful of academics. This paper examines Kaufman’s legacy as generative of a radical aesthetic break from his contemporaries, and a rereading of the relationship between space, voice, and poetics. Finally, it is my hope that by exploring the varied iterations and considerations of poetics in Kaufman’s work, this project will revisit Kaufman’s uninvolvement as a radical revaluation of the sonic materiality and performative socialities made possible by his poetry.

Moving forward, this uninvolvement or dearth of information about Kaufman creates a difficulty as I try to move between the poet, the poetry, and the literary movement he seems to vanish from every time he gains a place within it, I am forced to rely on interviews and ethnography. On the one hand, I am okay with it because it means I get to go hang out in San Francisco for a few weeks and bullshit. On the other hand, it means that the source or the trace of Kaufman's life and work is slowly receding back up Grant Avenue in North Beach, and giving way to tourist traps and condo conversions. In other words, my archive, the community and its members are losing footing. While City Lights, Cafe Trieste, and so many other spots remain, the temporal progression persistently alters the spatial reality of North Beach. This is a problem.

Now, I know that I have a few friends out there that deal with poetry, and a few more that deal with performance. That is to say, I would love to hear from some friends on this one. Do these things ever pop up for you in work? Or folks that do not this type of work, is there a way you specifically think about change when it comes to your home or neighborhood? This might seem like a banal question, but it is a huge impediment to me at the moment, and what good is this blog if I cannot use it to ask for help?

Some Kaufman for the road:

(The manifesto from his poetry journal)

Fugitive Images (Part 2 and 3)

I realize it has been a little bit since I last posted. I started off with such vigor, but like many other things in my life, that has slowed. In attempt to keep up the conversations I have started in my own head, and the three of you that have actually been to this site, I want to put up the second section of my research project on Katrina.

This section still requires substantial edits and fleshing out, but it will pursue many of the topics I will present on at a conference October 26th in New York. I hope you all enjoy. (Two disclaimers: I am aware of the many grammatical errors and the general holes in my argument about narativizing photographs, hence the more work to be done.):

Visualizing Criminality:

The continued development of photographic technologies—from to daguerreotypes to instamatics to digital imaging—and the context of their uses simultaneously alters the material traces and the epistemological capacities of photography’s subjects. The ease with which photographs lend themselves to the construction of an archive—not merely their inclusion in—testifies to their unquestioned documentary capabilities. As Seklua famously argues, the advent and inception of photography as a tool facilitated the invention of a social body through racialized, scientific practices.[1] The collection and organization of these visual documents produces “ashadow archive that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain…the general, all-inclusive archive necessarily includes both the traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all other embodiments of the unworthy.”[2]Sekula goes on to argue the scientific practices of physiognomy and phrenology overdetermined that hermeneutic engagement with photography, particularly portraiture and other styles focused on illuminating features of the face and skull. These racialized and classed practices exemplified the socio-scientific lens that imagined criminality and respectability as discernable features captured in the photograph.

While Sekula’s argument focuses particularly on 19^th century portraiture, the conceptual framework of the “shadow archive” allows us to reconsider the objectivity of the photograph as a representative medium. Rather, a photograph’s level of visibility may occur precisely when it can index or exemplify particular typologies. This systematization and organization of the “social terrain,” rests predominately on the arresting function of the image. Therefore, as Sekula’s formulation demonstrates, this visual medium’s ideal capacity for news emerges out of its seemingly endless reproducibility and preservation of the original scene. In ways that I will now explore through particular archival images, the photos circulated in attempts to explain or expose the events of Hurricane Katrina reach their greatest capacity when understood outside of this static framework.

The constant cycles of images and videos depicting Gulf Coast residents struggling to survive amidst the floodwaters and the endless wait for aid showed quite vividly the general state of chaos for survivors. Figure 2 is in no way different from the plethora of disheartening images deployed in the narration of these events. The two individuals who wade through the water carry a small amount of food with them, each wearing backpacks with the intention of most likely either finding a place to rest or carry more supplies. The caption that accompanied the image.

Figure 2 (AFP/Getty Images/Chris Graythen, 2005).

suggests a similar narration: “Two resident wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, LA.”[3]Rather than concerning itself with any specific action, the AFP’s caption, the French equivalent to the AP, focuses predominately with the setting of the scene.[4] In many ways, this photo is quite ordinary, and only gained recognition when juxtaposed with Figure 1, reproduced above.

Similarly, the scene capture by Figure 1 shows nothing unique (beyond the circumstances). The image of a lone black teenage boy moving through the flood waters with a case of soda and what one can only presume are trash bags of food and other supplies appears no more threatening than Figure 2. He walks through the water steadily, as seen by his waves in the floodwaters. The young man, it may be safe to assume, heads in the direction of other residents trapped by the floodwaters, bringing supplies back. Substantiating this sort of narrative gesturing remains impossible from this vantage point, but it seems as though a side-by-side comparison of the two images would produce a similar conclusion.

The initial appearance of Figure 1 occurred amidst the vast confusion and frantic coverage in the days immediately following the hurricane’s landfall. Circulated widely by the AP, the photograph represented the atmosphere of chaos that had beset those residents of the Gulf Coast area, and specifically those who remained in the submerged city of New Orleans. The caption that accompanied the photograph read: “A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday.”[5]Even when unaccompanied by words, the photograph clearly depicts a moment of duress. The spatiotemporal contextualization of the photograph through the caption, in many ways, makes the photo’s presence unnecessary. The caption could suffice as a relay of those particular conditions, needing nothing more than a change of tense in the first sentence to transform the caption into a headline. When joined together, however, the text that frames the photograph enjoys a visual component that indexes the act of looting. The implied singularity of the moment transforms into, or reinforces, a universalizing figure.

As has been the persistent debate around the image and its caption, there is as much in the actual photograph to suggest an act of survival as one of petty theft. In Van Jones’s brief write up for the Huffington Post, the environmental activist criticizes the racialized uses of these images in the popular press.[6] Even though Jones does not belabor any specific histories of the relationship between visibility and racism, he does articulate the particular disparities between the reproductions of similar scenes. Jones concludes his article stating: “This is the kind of shameful bias that keeps the country divided, even during awful tragedies like this.”[7] While Jones links these events to a much broader history of racial discrimination in the United States, he is also implicitly invoking a particular crisis of visibility in which the reproduced moments, which may appear similar, come to index very different things. Therefore, even as there is no mention of race explicitly in the caption, it only takes but a quick glance to see that the “looter” is in fact a young black man. As much as the image relayed the general disarray of the city and its residents, this moment of disorder could now be located within, or at least considered exacerbated by, the area’s black communities. The historical trajectory of the black criminal figure, though rooted in New World slavery and the articulation of the slave as savage and brutal, finds its most prominent and contemporary form in the United States in the post-World War II period.[8] Many of the same assumptions around race particular to the various incarnations of this figure blatantly emerge in the wealth of news coverage and public reactions.

In particular, the news network MSNBC devoted a special section of their website to these events entitled: Katrina: the Long Road Back.[9] The site, which was more than willing to employ the term “looters,” ran several articles about the unrest and ensuing damage to private property perpetrated by hurricane survivors. Describing one particular scene, an AP article on MSNBC’s site reads: “Looters filled industrial-sized garbage cans with clothing and jewelry and floated them down the street on bits of plywood and insulation as National Guard lumbered by. Some in the crowd splashed into waist-deep water like giddy children at the beach.”[10] This quote, through its very colorful language, consists of at least two components constitutive of the racialization of these events. On the one hand, the infantilization of survivors in such instances draws upon the very same logic that historically undergirded, in part, black criminality. At the same time, the equally awkward descriptions of the National Guard as lumbering about while individuals looted unprotected stores asserts a specific claim about the appropriate functions of a police force, even amidst disaster.

The infantilizing description of the unseen looters paints a picture of enjoyment, rather than the possibility of necessity. The metaphor of being child-like recalls cultural theorist and literary scholar Wahneema Lubiano’s succinct formulation of what it means to be “mugged by a metaphor.”[11] Lubiano states, “‘Like being mugged by a metaphor’ is a way to describe what it means to be at the mercy of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and global capitalist constructions of the meaning of skin color on a daily basis.”[12] To be at the mercy of such formulations arrests the individual or individuals, making them available to the production of narratives at once premised on their bodies, and simultaneously occurring wholly outside of them. Therefore, the depiction of enjoyment which stages the scene of looting attempts to tell us something about those individuals we may only know through this subjunctive narration.Depicting the exercise of looting as carefree and a quotidian event presumes a detachment between those described and the severity of the situation. In other words, the positing of enjoyment within the context of disaster instantiates the racialized claims of “looting acts” that are exacerbated when one’s supposed enjoyment can only be understood as a disregard for the very circumstances that made such an act possible in the first place.

In the other half of the above quote, the unidentified AP author bemoans the seemingly inappropriate response of the National Guard as individuals waded through water with trash bins full of goods. While there are no quotes regarding looting by police officers or National Guard personnel in the article, the inability or unwillingness of police to interrupt these individuals depicts a sort anarchistic playground in which the “giddy children” run free.The article reproduces a quote from tourist Denise Bollinger, whose first visit to New Orleans happened to coincide with Hurricane Katrina: “It’s downtown Baghdad. It’s insane. I’ve wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not.”[13] Bollinger’s wholesale dismissal of the city, premised on what appear to be her own racist and xenophobic assumptions, echoes the overall tone of the article. The loss of order exemplified by the inability of police forces to simultaneously address the looters and to “commandeer” a pharmacy for medical supplies, presents an impossible situation that the individuals grabbing clothes, food, etc. are supposedly exploiting.[14]

In MSNBC’s coverage, Figure 1, and the picture’s caption, the semblance of order in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is intimately tied to the protection of private property. Resonating with the ubiquitous depictions of black criminality, the resulting formulation of such a view is the valuation of private property over the necessary requirements of sustaining life. This relationship, present in above examples and other well-circulated photographs warning of injury or death to looters, further complicates the relationship between the images of black looters and white scavengers. The juxtaposition of these images does not tell us anything revelatory about racism in the United States. Rather, the solidification of black criminality through the photograph and its circulation must be seen as standing in opposition to the systematized, humanitarian efforts structured alongside the presence of specific modes of policing. Through this formulation, the problematic of black criminality remains in any attempt to carry food or clothing to one’s family, or think about the possibility of sustaining one’s self, even if only preliminarily.

“The Best in Some, the Worst in Others”:

As the chaos of Hurricane Katrina settled, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour famously said these events “brought out the best in some, the worst in others.”[15] Barbour’s pithy comment expresses a widespread view about the vast array of human responses under a near unprecedented level of duress. As the previous section demonstrated, the particular circumstances that call for the subjunctive identification or classification of criminal behavior always require a context that makes such a term intelligible. However, the same logic conditions the possibility of recognizing and celebrating those instances of heroism that outline acceptable modes of survival. The collections of heroic or inspiring images are undoubtedly dwarfed, in volume and exposure, by images such as Figures 1 and 2. However, the number of stories and images depicting these moments certainly exist. Notably, actor Sean Penn showed up in several news photographs carrying evacuees to boats through waist deep water. Similarly, the story of ex-Marine John Keller captivated so many that actor/producer Will Smith plans to turn Keller’s inspiring tale into a major motion picture.[16] Keller, also known as the “Can Man”, oversaw the evacuation of an estimated 244 residents, most of them elderly or disabled, from his apartment building.[17] In addition to these exceptionally visible individuals, the anonymous individuals depicted as unselfish and inspiring during Katrina garnered recognition through the media’s coverage.

Figure 3, reproduced below, displays a similar moment in which the individual foregrounded in the photograph assumes a prominent position in this rescue effort. From a technical standpoint, the pilot of the boat is clearly the subject of the image, while the other individuals in the boat and the background are slightly out of focus. The centrality of the man and his seemingly unwieldy oar reminds a viewer of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” or a number of iconic poses. However, when one looks beyond the boat pilot, the photograph contains, or does not contain, several startling aspects that seem to simultaneously contextualize and enclose the meaning of the image.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the image and the thing that best contextualizes it occurs behind the people in the boat.The electrical wires hanging off slanted posts appear to be no more than four or five feet above the water at their lowest point. The combination of severely drooping lines, which may or may not be live, and the high flood waters shows the viewer a few of the dangers traversed by evacuees. The pilot’s oar, which seems ill equipped to propel the boat in any efficient way, potentially offers another function. Not only does it navigate waters below, it may also help traverse potential hazards above the water. The image, therefore, captures a multitude of dangers that the man at the boat’s stern is best equipped to confront.

Even as the image shows the dangers present in such a moment, the photograph also possesses a seemingly posed quality. At least six of the eight passengers in the first boat are staring off to their right at some unknown or invisible destination. The naturalness of this gesture lends itself to the photograph’s effectiveness as a realistic representation. However, as realistic as the image may seem in its reproduction of this moment, the general anonymity of those in the picture force us to ask: What is actually being reproduced or produced? Although the central figure of the image allows us to glean certain aspects of the situation and contextualize the photograph, neither he nor any other aspect of the image offers an opportunity for identification. No person or object in the image bears a mark or symbol that offer any kind of identification. The qualities of this image that remain static emerge as a function of and quality that lends itself to circulation. The supposed homogeneity of hundreds of thousands of evacuees defies any need for specificity or history, but rather relies on the arresting capacities of photographic reproduction.

Figure 3, (2005/AP Images).

Figure 3 shows up in numerous accounts of Hurricane Katrina. Included in several books, and even dawning the cover of Eric Mann’s Katrina’s Legacy (2006), the photograph’s dissemination and iconicity relies heavily on the ability to consistently recognize its content as indexing Katrina’s severity and the display of rescue. The Police Association of New Orleans (PANO) even used the photograph, which actually identifies New Orleans’ police officer Anthony Villavaso at the front of the boat, in an effort to support a group of police officers in New Orleans known as the “Danziger 7.” PANO, relying on the transportability of the image and its display of heroism and service, posted the photograph at the center of a widely circulated call for monetary support titled “Support the 7.”

The Danziger 7 are a group of seven New Orleans police officers convicted of shooting six unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans on September 4, 2005. Two of the civilians died, and the other four critically injured by a barrage of shotgun blasts and assault riffles fired as all six ran away from the officers. The seven officers, one of which was Villavaso, and several superior officers were charged with a variety of crimes ranging from first-degree murder to obstruction of justice. The ensuing investigation and legal battle lasted until a federal grand jury indicted Villavaso and three fellow officers on charges of first-degree murder on July 13, 2010, (the other three officers were indicted earlier in the year).

Throughout the investigation and trial, PANO supported the seven officers in public and with monetary support. Villavaso’s photograph became central to this effort as PANO adopted it in order to show his, and the police’s, service to the community. Centering the image on a flyer asking for monetary support, PANO captions the image:

"Accused Danziger Officers Performing Rescues During Katrina"

New Orleans Police and Volunteers used boats

to rescue residents from a flooded neighborhood on

the east side of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

left much of the city under water in late August 2005.

Officer Villavaso is piloting the rescue boat and

Officer Barrios immediately to his left (just his head visible).[18]

Villavaso’s service to the community, and the visual record of such actions, testify to his moral character and call upon others for support in his time of need, (the caption above is followed shortly thereafter by a payroll deduction form). PANO, and their use of this photograph, refocuses efforts away from the highly publicized failures of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other law enforcement agencies by invoking the long history of organized police presence in the region. The civic and legal accountability indexed by Villavaso’s authority at the helm of the boat demands the viewer—in spite of the singularity and uncertainty of the photograph—take into account a long history of protection—as the moment at the Danziger Bridge, in its isolated singularity, must be understood as separate from the history they hope to invoke.

The use of Villavaso’s image presents a striking visual alternative to the wholesale condemnation of local and federal authorities after Hurricane Katrina. Capitalizing on the use of photography, PANO employed a technique used by numerous political movements of the past century. Most notably, the Civil Rights movement used the photographic medium to cast a positive light on movement participants, especially when opposition used racist slander to attack their character. As Leigh Raiford notes in Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, “Rather than visualizing African Americans as the scourge of the nation, activists employed photography to depict state crimes against an aggrieved people.”[19] Raiford shows the ways in which photography aided these struggles by depicting an air of respectability and dignity. At the same time, she is highly critical of the ways in which the deployment of such images limits the ways in which these individuals are rendered visible, stating “The deployment of similar, and at times the same, photographs for such radically different purposes in the same historical moment reveals a crisis of representation.”[20] In the use of Villavaso’s image at the helm of the rescue boat, his depiction within a mode of respectability and civil service creates a similar sort of crisis when considering the heinous crimes committed. Similarly, the invocation of a particular historical record of police service to the citizens of New Orleans represents another sort of crisis when considering the very legacy called upon to support the Danziger 7.

The captioning of the image invokes this history of service to the people of New Orleans on behalf of Villavaso and the entirety of PANO’s membership roster. Although the caption references Katrina, the invocation of past service recalls an entire history of such support to the community. In the construction of the flyer, PANO echoes their commitment to police personnel on their web site’s “History” section: “Whether on individual or class issue the Police Association of New Orleans has faced every challenge. The amount of individual and class litigation victories, recovered wages, promotions, reversed suspensions, legislation, and success stories continue to grow. The Police Association of New Orleans has truly lived up to its motto of ‘Representing New Orleans Finest’.”[21] While this passage does not speak directly to the caption of the image, the invocation of unwavering support in the past complicates the history of New Orleans’ police departments and their relationship to the claim of public service.

The history of police power in New Orleans and PANO’s emergence in 1969 weave an intricate story of political influence and authority. Even though PANO represents the first instance of an organized police union in the city, the history of police influence on politics dates back to the formation of patrol units as early as 1764.[22] In Disturbing the Peace, historian Brian Wagner describes the first signs of a modern police force in New Orleans taking the form of slave patrols to prevent runaway slaves and guard against maroons. It was in these confrontations between the police and slaves that the debate emerged around the extent of police power, and whether or not they could carry weapons. Although police found themselves stripped of weapons for a period, by 1805, amidst a heightened fear of slave revolts, the New Orleans police were permanently militarized.[23] Wagner argues, municipal police justified their need for weapons as follows:

In a city as violent as New Orleans, with a sizeable population of transient riverworkers [sic], it would have been easy to refer to many familiar situations where it would be good for the police to have guns, but the supporters of the department decided to evoke a more traditional rationale. When they argued that the police needed weapons to protect the city, the threat they summoned was from slavery. Often, it was the fugitive slaves in the swamps. Whether they were reminding citizens about the potential for an organized slave revolt, or publicizing the occasional raids on outlying parts of the city, or decrying the damage that the maroons had done to the discipline of their slaves, the police were clear that they could never protect the city against the slave population without their weaponry.[24]

The extent of police authority and their ability to use force rests largely on the dangers inherent to the city, but also the intensification of those dangers under the threat of a slave rebellion. The unquestioned criminality and unruliness of black slaves aided the police force in their debate. Therefore, the construction and deployment of this logic posits the pre-emancipation, black population wholly in opposition to civil and legal order.

Following Raiford’s conceptualization of a “crisis of representation,” Figure 3’s use by PANO to buttress the support of Villavaso and the rest of the Danziger 7 seemingly contradicts the very assumptive logic the photograph supposedly substantiates. Unlike Raiford’s examples, the image of Villavaso, as far as I can tell, has only been used to cast a positive light on the helmsman, or as an example to place blame elsewhere, (i.e. FEMA, the hurricane, etc.). However, the crisis in the image and its subsequent invocation occurs when PANO demands the viewer to witness Villavaso engaged in an act of rescue of black community members, when the very act we are meant to forget or justify was the murder of two black men. Ultimately, the disavowal of those two murdered men reinstantiates the divisions between an acceptable understanding of order and service, and the exclusion of every criminal act as wholly oppositional to that structure.[25]

To invoke a history of service in this instance traffics in a legacy of opposition and violence. Therefore, the crisis of this image does not suggest that those evacuated in the image are modern day slaves, or that those shot on the Danziger Bridge were fugitives or potential insurrectionists. Rather, the positioning of the police as only acting on behalf of the public good and the omnipresent threat to order in the city of New Orleans suggests a relationship that has always been necessary. Whether the threat emerges from within the city’s various black communities or in the form of a hurricane, the image and caption indexes a certain indispensible component of civil order. Even as the image shows an act of rescue and invokes the aforementioned reliance on civil order, its static reproduction of honor and inspiration belies the acts of abandonment occurring elsewhere at these moments. Similarly, as PANO deploys this image to venerate Villavaso, neither the image nor its use as propaganda can account for the particular break in order that the police force has historically represented.

---

[1] Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39, (Winter, 1986) 3-64.

[2] Ibid, 10.

[3] Reproduced in: Van Jones, “Black People ‘Loot’ Food…While White People ‘Find’ Food”, The Huffington Post, 1 September 2005, 1 March 2011 < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-jones/black-people-loot-food-wh_b_6614.html>.

[4] Founded in 1835, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) actually pre-dates the Associated Press and claims to be the world’s first news agency. The AFP, which is responsible for the distribution of Figure 2, has many similarities to the AP, but stands apart through their commitment to transparency and accuracy. As the AFP states on their web site, their mission is to always adhere to three principles: accuracy, speed, and clarity. In relation to accuracy, they state, “Accuracy is the absolute priority. Reporters and editors check, then double-check the facts. Every story, every claim is sourced. Coverage is balanced. AFP gets the other side of story, always seeking a response to accusations, claims and recriminations.” This is not to suggest that this statement somehow exonerates, or that this reading is an indictment of the AFP. However, the AFP does seem to be more concerned with adhering to a set of ethics than the AP. This may also be reflected in the AFP’s decision to remove Figure 2 from circulation after much criticism.

[5] Reproduced in: Jones, “Black People ‘Loot’ Food…While White People ‘Find’ Food”.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] The historical rise of black criminality in the United States is far more complicated than this brief explanation would suggest. However, for the sake of remaining focused within this argument, I merely refer to the post-war period as the beginning of predominate articulations of black criminality in relation to prisons and specific institutions of discipline and punishment. With the vast expansion of the prison system in this country during this period, incarceration rates of black men skyrocketed as well, (and more recently black women). Therefore, even as this particular paper engages in a somewhat reductive historicism, I am also aware of the complex web of institutional, social, and cultural constructions of black communities and individuals as pathologically criminal.

[9] MSNBC is a conglomerate jointly run by the National Broadcast Company (NBC) and software giant Microsoft.

[10] “Looters Take Advantage of New Orleans Mess”

[11] Wahneema Lubiano, “Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State Narratives,” Mapping Multiculturalism, ed by Avery F. Gordon & Christopher Newfield, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 64-75.

[12] Ibid, 64.

[13] “Looters Take Advantage of New Orleans Mess”

[14] Ibid. In its last section, the article refers to an incident in which the National Guard broke into a pharmacy for medical supplies. The title of the section is “Police commandeer pharmacy”.

[15] Jones, “Black People ‘Loot’ Food…While White People ‘Find’ Food”

[16] As of 2011, the script is still in the development stage under the control of Smith’s Overbook Entertainment and writer John Lee Hancock.

[17] Elizabeth Mullener, “The Can Man,” The Times-Picayune, 25 March 2007, Lexis Nexis Academic, Web, 13 March 2007.

[18] .

[19] Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011,) 9.

[20] Ibid, 17.

[21] < http://www.pano1544.com/index.html>.

[22] Brian Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2009.)

[23] Ibid, 62.

[24] Ibid, 66-7.

[25] This juxtaposition, or what I call a crisis, does not attempt to homogenize New Orleans’ black communities. Rather, the act of homogenization takes place within the discourse of black criminality I have attempted to stay in conversation with, or at least attentive to, throughout the course of this paper. The use of community in the reading of the Villavaso photograph and the subsequent campaign by PANO attempts to understand the ways in which the rendering of the “black community” as a monolithic entity with a clear inside and outside aids in the definition of figures like the “black criminal”. Through the troubling of these distinctions, it is my hope that the ways in which we understand such terms as service and aid amidst events like Hurricane Katrina may take on a broader definition.

Hearing Bob Kaufman's San Francisco

Those of you that are familiar with this blogger's sordid past may recall that I once worked at one of San Francisco's most famous historical sites: City Lights Books. Having grown up in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, City Lights was more of a church to me that the catholic school I attended several blocks away on the other side of Washington Square Park. When I returned to the city in 2008 after a nine year absence, I was offered a position in the mail room of the store's publishing division. My year at City Lights was one of the most enriching spaces I had the fortune of experiencing during my time in the city. Aside from meeting some of the most brilliant artists in the San Francisco Bay Area (see D. Scot Miller's blog AfroSurreal Generation: http://dscotmiller.blogspot.com/), I also was introduced to an entire archive of poets, writers, and artists that I had remained entirely unaware of despite my self-proclaimed literary knowledge.

Amongst these many discoveries was the poet Bob Kaufman (far right in above photograph). Kaufman, whose autobiographical context remained hidden or unavailable much in the same way Ondaatje writes the life of Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter, remains prominent in my mind several years removed from San Francisco. Called by some, the "original beat," Kaufman's relationship to that entire generation of writers and artists remains somewhat difficult to articulate. The aesthetic differentiation of Kaufman's poetics from the likes of Ginsberg is the sense of movement that seems to animate a form that is not entirely different, at least at first glance, from his contemporaries.

I dedicate this post to Kaufman largely because I am trying to get down on paper what may or may not someday materialize into a completed project. The work of Kaufman and its place(s) within and across multiple genres intrigues me as someone whose interests--among many--are post-WWII cultural production in the San Francisco Bay Area and the intersections of radical politics and literary forms.

The brief research I have conducted on Kaufman leads me to ask a few questions/thoughts I would like to keep in mind as I move on this project:

1. Kaufman, someone who was seemingly not interested in leaving the sort of archive his contemporaries had the good fortune to have collected for them, challenges our conception of the poet/artist/performer. As someone who was interested in getting "involved in uninvolvement," Kaufman the figure evades us. What does it mean to be a poet who relies on the sonic deliverance of his poetry to ensure its capacity for (re)production? (Kaufman did not start writing down his poems until the late 50's when he moved to San Francisco.)

2. Kaufman took a vow of silence to protest the Vietnam War. What does his silence do to the sonic dimensions of his poetry? Do they have to be considered the same? Or does Kaufman's "uninvolvement" make us reconsider the sets of relations we may or may not consider inherent between the poet and poetry?

3. An oft unrecognized figure in a predominately white, male literary movement, I am curious about the emerging radicality (and its various forms) in the area and if there might be any connection between Kaufman and these emergent political forms. In particular, does this relationship, real or imaginary, have anything to do with the shared spaces or origins of their performance?

From James Baldwin's film Take This Hammer

I realize that these thoughts are somewhat scattered and probably only make sense to myself. However, this will be the project that occupies the majority of my time for at least the next year, so I wanted to try and lay a some kind of foundation for things to come. More on Kaufman soon.

Link to Baldwin's Film: https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/187041

"Fugitive Images" (Part 1)

I an attempt to get off on the right foot, I am posting something I wrote a while ago. This is the introduction to a research project I recently "completed" on Hurricane Katrina and photography. Before I moved to Durham, NC, I was living in Brooklyn and attending school in the city. This project represents a culmination of the research that took up about 18 of my 24 months in New York. I will post more of the project, but I am hesitant as I know the project will continue to grow and change over time. Enjoy:

The Structures of Circulation,[1] an Introduction:

Founded in 1846 in New York, the Associated Press exists today as the world’s largest non-profit, news co-operative. A conglomerate of some of the news industry’s largest media outlets, the AP provides one of the easiest and most accessible sources for the circulation and dissemination of individual news stories, videos, and photographs. At the same time, the AP acts as one of the largest photography and video custodians in the world, with readily accessible archives dating as far back as 1896. With over 10 million photographs in their possession, many of the most iconic news photographs of the last 100+ years remain maintained and leased through the AP’s archives. Images ranging from the violence of war to the triumph of sports, the quotidian to the once in a lifetime, there is no shortage of topics cataloged in these collections.However, while the vastness of the AP’s archives is unquestionable, the seemingly effortless accessibility and unmediated sale of these documents for the purposes of wide-range circulation poses a set of questions about the politics of reproduction.

The AP archives, in many ways, defy the traditional structure, and perhaps even ethics, that have sustained particular forms of academic research for so long.[2] While on the one hand, the AP archives, through their digitization, are accessible to a much wider audience. At the same time, their access is submitted to an economy regulated by copyrights and regulated reproducibility.Unless one acts as or on behalf of a member of the AP co-operative, they must pay certain fees to reproduce images, videos, etc. This does not differ greatly from any other image or video-leasing database, however, the mechanized and typological systems of organization that constitute the AP’s archives on the internet structure a very specific mode of engagement with archival documents. The AP’s web site uses a search engine, a system in which the initial terms of engagement with the document are almost entirely those of the researcher. This sign of technological development, not foreign to most databases, and the possibilities of reproduction made available by AP’s archives tells us something about the relationship between visibility and documentation, particularly when they surround incidents that most directly effect people of color and communities of color. One of the most striking examples of this is Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 decimated much of the U.S. Gulf Coast region and supposedly made acutely visible the pervasiveness of racism in this country.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina—an event that is as much a socio-historical event as a meteorological one—there remains a variety of representations of this event. Through film, written accounts, photography, government documents, news media, and artistic renderings, to name a few, the formal and informal collections each attest to the severity of this disaster. At the same time, there are a number of accounts that focus on the collective and individual responses amidst, and in the face of, these dire conditions. These aspects represent the human element of this tragedy, an entry point that many U.S.-based news outlets used for their coverage.

Those photographs collected during and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina constitute one of the most familiar and widely circulated archives of U.S.-based disaster images in the 21^stcentury, rivaled perhaps only by those of the 9/11 attacks in New York (2001) and the Gulf Oil Spill (2010). Many of these images, controlled by the AP, perpetually exhibit the natural destruction and wide range of human responses to this event. While either taken by AP photographers or archived by the AP, many of the same images find themselves deployed and circulated in a variety of different ways. Those who remember the media coverage of the event will surely remember the national news’ distinction between “black looters” and “white scavengers,” (an example examined later in the paper). This comparison perhaps best typifies the potential issues when such an archive finds itself deployed in the service of particular narrative frameworks.

In the midst and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there are few communities as homogenized and memorialized as the various communities of black New Orleanians who remain dispersed, romanticized, vilified, and, at times, transformed into refugees.The hypervisibility^[3] of these residents during the storm generated an endless cycle of news stories that trafficked in the familiar troupe of black victimhood, whether self-imposed or otherwise.Similar to past tendencies of major news networks to articulate moments of crisis and violence within predominately black communities as unstable and potentially violent, (Hurricane Betsy (1965), Watt’s Riots (1965), L.A. Riots (1992)), explanations of Hurricane Katrina came to rest, at least in part, on the specter and fear of black criminality. The young boy pictured in Figure 1, so effortlessly branded a looter, begins this discussion in the following section. Although black criminality is not the only troupe employed or made available by the coverage of these events—nor is it the only one taken up in this paper—in some ways it is the most familiar and easily accessible from a critical lens.

Figure 1. (Associated Press/Dave Martin/2005).

AP archives structure and operate within a particular desire for visibility. At once accessible, and endlessly reproducible under certain conditions, the disseminated news photograph mobilizes the visual as inseparable—or highly critical to—the narration of specific events. Photographs of Hurricane Katrina, as news or narrative, are no different. The selected images from the AP tell us something, or at least opens up the possibility of asking, about blackness and this desire for visibility. Each photograph, as I argue in the following pages, services the construction of what Allan Sekula refers to as a “social terrain” premised on the relationship between knowledge and visibility.[4] However, within this particular archive, the circulation of these images destabilizes such terrains, even in their attempt to codify them. Drawing on the work of Sekula and others, I am interested in a mode visibility that at once recognizes the potential for an image’s movement as it actively engages and resists such terrains.

Within such an analytic framework, this paper attempts to engage with the following images while mindful of certain guiding principles or steps. First, to engage in a reading of the selected images is to be simultaneously concerned as much with what the image captures, as well as what surrounds it. Therefore, crucial to the actual process of reading are the sites of deployment and the social life, if you will, of each image. The best record of these sites comes in the form of publication, captions, and contrasting images. Second, an engagement with the politics of reproduction remains crucial throughout this paper. Part of the argument this paper puts forth rests on the critique of reproducibility so masterfully argued by the likes of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten.[5] Hartman, followed by Moten in dialogue with Hartman’s work, criticize the ways in which scenes of violence carried out on the black body immure us to such violence. Although Hartman and Moten respectively make different choices regarding the reproduction of such scenes, both are acutely aware of the politics and stakes in such an act. However, in my choice to reproduce the above and following images, I attempt to argue against the technological, historical, and visual reproducibility allowed for and promised by an institution such as the AP. With this in mind, it is my hope that the reproduction of these images bears not the reinstantiation of a singularity that their deployment would initially hope to suggest, but something more akin to a specificity which animates alternative readings of these images. Finally, circulation cannot be understood as a suitable replacement for understanding movement within the image. The importance of these images should not be lost within the framework of critique. These photographs, and particularly those people in the image, do not cease to have value, but rather, must be reconsidered alongside their particular modes of circulation. In the instance of this archive, the precondition for circulation rests upon a static characterization of blackness. Circulation functions in the service of a certain malleability of the captured subject to fulfill the desires of racial and class identification placed on the capacity of this visual medium. The interest in movement as a resistant and dynamic component of the image animates a different possibility of reading the image, even in the context of their circulation.

---

[1] Although “circulation” seems as though it is a rather straightforward term, it emerges quite a bit throughout the course of the paper and therefore, I feel, deserves at least a working definition. Generally thought of as the public availability of knowledge of something, circulation must also be understood to have certain limits. Separate and distinct from merely those who have not been exposed or have access to something, circulation should be understood as restricted or imposing a set of restrictions on that which we attempt to follow, from its formulation, reproduction, and reception.

[2] I am weary of using the term “ethics” in relation to the archives and archival practices of academic research. It seems as though particular disciplines and modes of research persistently traffic in a practice of unethical readings, and therefore are always already void of any tradition of ethics. Therefore, I do not want to make the AP stand alone in this charge, but I do feel the relationship between ethical practice and their mode of dissemination/circulation is at the heart of what I am trying to argue in this paper.

[3] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University, 1997).

[4] Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter, 1986) 3-64.

[5] Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003).