| Reading Guide for Week 2 | |
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Tuesday Let’s start by working on your first writing assignment, which will draw inspiration from these two Pew Research Center reports surveying evolving American attitudes toward “capitalism” and “socialism.” These two reports are based on surveys broken down across various more obvious and less obvious demographics. Perhaps the most interesting demographic is age cohort, which will be the focus of your first writing assignment, in which you will test out these two reports. Originally from Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie came to the United States to complete her college education and then to pursue graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. Her novels have won numerous literary prizes, and in 2008 she was awarded a so-called MacArthur Genius Grant. Adichie experienced an intense learning process as a non-American in America, including learning the peculiar racialized system in the United States, so different from how the status of people were understood in Nigeria. In her oft-viewed 2009 TED talk (35+ million views!), Adichie extends from the question of race to consider the danger of ANY kind of “single story.” Thursday As we shall start to see this week, capitalism was/is not some kind of singular or timeless thing, but instead something that was/is multiple and dynamic. Certainly the current neoliberal version of capitalism that has come to prevail in the United States since the 1980s or so had first to be imagined (in the 1950s) and then gradually to extend its influence into and over government practice. This version of capitalism is different from its predecessors and competitors in the United States, and different from versions of capitalism prevailing in other parts of the world. In other words, any version of capitalism has to be situated in its specific time and specific place, as organized into a specific arrangement of power in society, advantaging some and disadvantaging others. Timothy Mitchell (2005) takes questioning of “capitalism” one step further by questioning the very concept of an “economy.” Mitchell argues that the concept of an “economy” was first imagined in the 1930s and then gradually implemented in the 1950s. Mitchell argues for the power of representation, whereby certain kinds of representation were able to create a supposed reality. In other words, certain intellectuals managed to persuade certain governments and others that their particular imaginaries of an “economy” somehow correlated to the existence of something that could be considered real. Of course, these imaginaries of what an “economy” supposedly was advantaged some, and disadvantaged others. In the process of gaining governmental and cultural adherence, these imaginaries correlated above all to political power, not to any reality. Peter McIndoe founded the “Birds Aren’t Real” satire on the frightening proliferation and popularity of sundry conspiracy theories in American life, as professional journalism has been supplanted by the nonsense of social media. People who believe nonsensical conspiracy theories are easy targets for satire, but in this TED 2023 TED talk (nearly 2 million views), McIndoe does something much more compelling and challenging. He focuses on a very different target. |