[Ministry of Information] vol.10

Workshop- Trash bags: one cat's trash is another cat's treasure

University of Trash
Sculpture Center 44-19 Purves Street Long Island City, New York 11101

Monday June 15th, 3:30-5:30 PM
Mary Taylor and Sophie Statzel

We will facilitate the making of bags-large and small out of scrap materials. We will provide some materials and encourage workshop participants to bring additional materials.  (We will bring a sewing machine).

Recommended materials for participants to bring: old pants, old velvet dresses, belts, old bags, scraps of fabric, shopping bags, leather, old slips, scarves.

Inspired by the revolutionary practice of "reading" in Cuban cigar factories, the workshop will have a reader who will read short stories from Italo Calvino, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Jorge Luis Borges, Ivan Illich and Vladimir Nabokov at the request of participants.




Mary Taylor

[Ministry of Information] vol.09

Report from the center of The Economic Crisis, or How Utopian Myopia can kidnap Free Education

Lately there has been student unrest at the anthropology department at the City University of New York (CUNY), from which I earned my PhD.  Students are "up in arms" about a number of issues, many of which they should rightly be disturbed by. Their intentions are good, but their "demands in the making" seem somehow to be missing their own point.  I can't help but think that the lack of coherence in their demands, for example their desire for more transparency about how and how much students in the department are funded, their concern about the treatment of minority, female and migrant students, a heightened concern about the institutional patterns of inequality, and their lust for "professionalization", strikes me as somehow an allegory of our time, here at the center of the world (economic crisis).

This department, at a public university, has earned a reputation as a bastion of Marxist thought for decades.  Faculty are firmly devoted to both the theorization of political and economic processes that contribute to inequalities, as well as the documentation of the effects and experiences of such conditions.  In the last decade, despite the constant threat of budget cuts to the City University of New York, the anthropology department has been able to offer scholarship packages to students that appear luxurious to those of us whose experience in the department preceded this fortuitous turn.  We had seen it as a good thing that these later students would have to work less as they made their way through the program.  Don't get me wrong, some of my contemporaries had full funding-from the university or even outside sources; many had partial funding; others had none at all. Although we all knew that, we seemed to all agree that we should not try to know exactly just how large the disparities were. What was important was that students were open and helpful with one another-they were academically generous with one another-in contrast to the fierce competitiveness of other "top" departments, where rumor has it, students did not tell each other their thesis topics, even.

So when one student stated that what his classmates are concerned about is "the ad hoc dispersal of department funds to some students" without "a formal application process", and contrasted it with the legitimacy of "official grant or fellowship process[es]", I could not help but want to shout out loudly that all funding is discretionary, unless all students are funded equally -unless attending university is free. Free tuition has up until recently been considered a right in many parts of the world. And it strikes me as very telling that this is happening as students are speaking out all over the world about the state of their universities. Indeed, at the very same moment as Croatian students are blockading the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb and twenty other faculties in eight cities around Croatia to demand THE RIGHT TO FREE EDUCATION!  And I can't help thinking that if these "leftist" graduate students at CUNY really want what they claim they want, they too should be demanding FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION. So why is it that students in a supposedly "leftist" department are taking a moral stance about the department alone when students around the world are taking a stance against a broader structural shift? Its not that the CUNY students don't recognize this structural shift, it's that they believe that the desired outcome will be achieved through their attempts to transform the department.  And in the act, their analytical lens follows a different path than their activism. The structural view of the transformations to "the University" under conditions of neoliberalization and financial crisis, to CUNY in its 150 year lifespan, to its elite institution, The Graduate Center, becomes somehow obfuscated in their localized and presentist narrative about the anthropology department at the CUNY Graduate Center

Founded in 1847 as "the Free Academy", The City University of New York provided free education for students until the mid 1970s. Tuition was imposed for the first time under the pretext of the fiscal crisis in 1976, the very same year that (thanks partly to the introduction of an open admissions policy) white students ceased to make up the majority of the incoming class. Enrollment dropped drastically. This year CUNY students were not even able to rally successfully to stop NY state from raising their tuition $600.00 this coming semester.  They do not recognize, or only in some kind of abstract historical narrative, that the fact of tuition is one root cause of the disparities both in the support they receive and in the representation of different populations in their departments. Take, for example, the sharp drop in the number of African American students at CUNY. From 1999-2005 African American student enrollment dropped from around 40 percent to about 30 percent at City College, from 20 percent to 15 percent at Hunter College, and from 24 percent to 14 percent at Baruch.  Exposing the funding disparities in the anthropology department will not serve to counter inequalities, and it may cultivate a lack of trust and suspicion that exists in other "top" departments.  If the students in the department would "turn left" and chisel away at the root of the problem by demanding a free education for all CUNY students, they would be doing justice to the legacy of the department and of the school, and to the larger questions of inequality that brought them to this particular moment in the bigger picture.


For information on the Croatian student movement:
http://slobodnifilozofski.org/

Sign the petition for the right to higher education free of charge for all
http://ffzg.hr/peticija/

For discussions of the state of higher education at the turn of the Millenium and efforts to combat it:
http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/




Mary Taylor

[Ministry of Information] vol.08

Rites of Return Benefit for Gaza

We're organizing a little thing to get some money flowing for everyday life in the Gaza Strip. The line up is eclectic-film, video, music.  Its only from 8-11, but the more you drink, the more the Gazans will get. Teetotalers and strait edge folks are welcome.

Monday March 30, 8-11 PM
@Nublu
62 Ave C (between 4th and 5th)
**There is no sign on the front-just walk in that door!
Money goes to Gazans through Mercycorps

"Rites of Return" Remembering Europe in Palestine

The "shift from a reformist to a radical agenda in political Islam is best understood in the context of the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism", writes Mahmood Mamdani.  In his book Good Muslim Bad Muslim, Mamdani explains the historical processes that have produced political Islam and "Islamic fundamentalism", what he argue are markedly modern forms. Focusing on Afganistan, he contextualizes how the word Muslim has become a synonym for terrorist on the tongues of many in a broader history of first colonialism and then the Cold War.

I want now to historicize the story of Palestine, which got its name from the Romans in the second century.  Palestine came under British "protectorship" at the end of World War 1, when the Ottoman ("Turkish") and Austro-Hungarian Empires were divvied up by the triumphant League of Nations. From the late 19th century onward, European Jewish "zionists" began to settle in the region, which until then had only a small Jewish minority (9%), prompted by their periodic and often severe persecution in Europe.  The Holocaust that killed an estimated 6 million European Jews was a decisive moment for the foundation of the Israeli state. Many Jews fled to Israel for their lives, and their wishes were now supported by the collective guilt of allied counties after the war.

By 1917 the British had already agreed to support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. In the next few decades, Muslim peasants were displaced to make room for zionist settlers.  In 1947, a day before the British Mandate in Palestine would have been terminated, Israel proclaimed itself an independent state. The UN had drawn up a partition plan for the territory, but a war broke out between "Arabs" and Israelis, because Palestinians were still set on self determination for the region as a whole. Native Palestinians, feeling that the partition was unfair, were aided by Arabs from the newly independent neighboring states, defying all predictions that the Palestinians were "too weak" to fight.

770,000 Palestinians fled their homes, leaving not only the parts designated to become Israel in the Partition plan, but also those that Israel captured in the war.  Although the UN passed a resolution declaring that refugees wishing to return should be permitted to do so and that those wishing not to should be compensated for their property, few did, resulting in a refugee crisis. Refugees and those descended from them now amount to 4 million.

The 1993 Oslo agreements meant the withdrawal of Israeli defense forces from Gaza and the West Bank. Since then, Israel has taken over some of this territory, and Israeli settlers continue to colonize portions of it.  The Camp David Peace summit in 2000, at which agreements were expected to be made on refugees and their right of return, Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and territorial issues was followed by the second "shaking off", or intifada, inspired by the failure of the Palestinian parliament to declare an independent Palestinian state.

Even with Israel's concessions, like the "disengagement" implemented in 2005, one only need to superimpose the map of the original 1947 partition plan and the current map of the region to see what a brilliant job Israel has done in expanding itself, and naturalizing borders less and less favorable to Palestinians.  But perhaps even more naturalized is the idea that the conflict between Jews and Palestinians are age old enemies in the region, rather than between a local population and European settlers.  This is not to say that we should desire Israel to disappear, and ore than we can expect Europeans to leave the New World to the Native Americans. We can, however, remind ourselves of that history.

But lets go back to the question of refugees and citizenship. One of the major obstacles to a long term peaceful agreement is the issue of the right of return for displaced Palestinians and their descendents. Defined as a "Jewish state", Israel's demographic weight would be tipped by any such move. In fact, allowing Palestinians to return would ultimately mean that Muslims would outnumber Jews in Israel.  Israeli nationality laws are written in favor of people with Jewish heritage, regardless of their birthplace, while those Muslims born on what is now considered Israeli soil who did not remain there face great difficulties. This right, ironically, is called "the Law of Return."

It is thus that Israeli citizens, even those who may wish for peace and justice for Palestinians, find themselves in a problematic situation-their own ability to become Israeli citizens is the flip side of the impossibility of such citizenship for Palestinians.  This fact is so obvious that 200 Jews in the diaspora renounced their legal right to Israeli citizenship in order to pointedly declare that they reject Israel's dispossession of Palestinians (see jewsrenounce.org). The Israeli state is a contradiction. It is a modern state that emerged after WW11, yet it defines citizenship in religious terms.  Zionist settlers, persecuted as they were in Europe, were nevertheless European colonists in the Middle East.




Mary Taylor

[Ministry of Information] vol.0６

INVITATION

The MINISTRY OF INFORMATION cordially invites you to a reception at the center of the　global economy in the magnificent City of New York.

On the Occasion of the Passing of the Year 2008

It is 1930 and the tallest building in the world has just been completed in our proud metropolis. Some citizens pay "voluntary taxes" of food for the growing ranks of the unemployed, while others retreat to gilded bordellos free from agitators. On the way to the Ministry of Information New Years Eve　Party your driver skirts the University in Exile roadblock and passesWashington Square Park, where the arch is being aligned with 5th Avenue by
Metropolis and University to facilitate auto traffic through the park.  Markets are　plummeting. Soldiers and civilians die in the wars.  SOMETHING IS IN THE AIR.

--We warned you.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

• March 2003  Invasion of Iraq
• September 2005 Hurricane Katrina Dispossesses New Orleans' African Americans
• July 2007  Global Stock Markets Tumble
• October 2008 Layoffs Sweep From Wall Street Across New York Area
• November 2008 Barack Obama Elected President of the United States of America

• 10:00 Cocktails
• 12:00 Toast
• 12:30 Big Band Orchestra, Mambo.

 Official Recession Event. Bring the liquor of your choice and only those guests whom you trust.  Jacket required.