Culture

We have one unconference, one competition and one networking conference all cooking in our burners. Come check it out!

Nota Bene : All text is taken verbatim from each event's site. I will be posting about each event shortly.

This comes from the Jewish Heritage E-Report of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments

Webwatch: Explore the Jewish communities of the Deep South with the Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) Digital Archive Project

The Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) Digital Archive Project is designed to present a history of every congregation and significant Jewish community in the South. Currently, the Project team, led by Dr. Stuart Rockoff, has completed profiles for almost 100 Jewish communities in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee- and will add other states in the future. The archive has posted on-line a detailed, yet succinct history of each community. For most, there is information and photographic documentation of the synagogues and cemeteries. The History Department also houses a major oral history project that seeks to capture the stories of Southern Jews before they disappear. The ISJL Oral History Archive already houses over 500 interviews. The ISJL is committed to making its oral history collection a nationally recognized resource for scholars and students.

The Digital Archive is designed to be a continual work-in-progress. If you have additional information about any of the communities or congregations, please contact the archive at: rockoff_at_isjl.org.

This is the infamous clip from The Original Kings of Comedy. I fell in love with Bernie Mac ten thousand times again after this movie.

This is the story of his sister's children living with him. His sister was allegedly a drug addict who lost custody of her kids and Bernie took them in so the court wouldn't separate them. He talks of his trials and tribulations raising the children after years of being "childless" (his daughter was at the time 25 and living on her own).

Bernie talked the truth not just of his family but of the reality of a lot of black folks --and I am not just referring to gringo blacks, but to all Negro families in the hemisphere of América. You can have in one family, even among siblings, one living The Middle Class Dream while the other is still stuck in Ghetto Hell.

You all know why I hate the word "Hispanic". So when Marisa from Latina Lista sent this around the other day, I couldn't stop myself from bashing them for using that most detested word.

As a Latinoamericanista by training, Latin American and by extension, Latino, means to include non-Spanish speaking countries like Brazil and Haiti. Hispanic doesn't.

Also, when we speak Latino, we don't speak of people who are only of Castillian Spanish ascendancy. They could be descendants of Persian Jews, Lebanese Christians, Tagalog Filipinos or simple any of the hundreds of Native South American and Caribbean tribes that populate our countries.

If universities across the country can make a distinction between Hispanic and Latino studies, it would behoove the political elites to make those distinctions, no? It's why I've never understood the insistence of advocacy and organizations to use the anachronistic term "Hispanic".

Any organization that doesn't embrace the diversity of the Latino community, with all our languages, ethnicities, cultures and races, is bound to always be political weak. Especially in these times when mobile and internet technologies, along with transnational economies, are breaking down the barriers of racial, ethnic and linguistic identity while fortifying those of class.

Anyhow, thanks Marisa. Am pulling a lazyweb on this one and just cutting and pasting on the blog.

This is just so unbelievable it feels like I am in an episode of the Twilight Zone's rendition of Lord Of The Flies.

The fact that the accusation has been published in a few newspaper blogs makes it even worse : LA Times and Chicago Tribune are both alleging that Obama flipped the middle finger to Clinton during the course of a speech in North Carolina.

This.
Insanity.
Has To.
STOP!

You know, because he can't have that much class. Obama could have never scratched his face just because. Especially when it is in the middle of one of the snarkiest and wittiest dressings-down of the media and political elite by any presidential candidate in recent memory.

Yes, you read that right. Some idiot over at both the Chicago Tribune, LA Times took the spweage of several pro-Clinton and Republican blogs and ran with it. They actually took the time to slow down the footage to show how Obama's scratching his face is somehow akin to flipping the bird.

It's just ... OMFG ... this is just outrageous!

A brother cannot have class at all. That's basically what these people are saying. How can he take it and throw it back at them with the class, intelligence and snark they only attribute to their own whiteness? How can this negro be a thug without being a nigger? How can he brush it off and still look damn fucking good doing it.

Festival of Native Arts
Fairbanks, Alaska, Feb. 28 - Mar. 1, 2008, 6 PM to Midnight
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Charles Davis Concert Hall and Regents Great Hall

Free to the public

Includes traditional Potlatch, crafts fair, Native Film Festival...

For more information, please contact festival@uaf.edu

I started writing "Una Carta Abierta a Barack Obama" about a week ago. It was at the same time I wrote my love letter to John Edwards and my pointed rant to the junior Senator of New York about Billary. Yet I had a heck of a lot of trouble putting my words down.

First, it was my ambivalence between writing in English and Spanish. Whenever I started in English, I'd have to stop. Words failed me in my adopted language, like they always do when I am working through a profound realization.

What was most interesting is that words in prose failed me.

My area of expertise in Latin American Studies is not only history but aesthetics. More exactly, neobaroque aesthetics in contemporary Latin American poetry. I know it's a mouthful, but I have a reason to invoke them : poetic language is considered not just revolutionary, but mind altering and conscious raising. Poetic language for the likes of a Jose Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy or David Huerta, is a tool for altering consciousness, for exploring the multiplicity inherent in identity and for exposing the duplicity in "what you see is what you get".

The kind of triangulating race-bating the Clintonistas have unleashed on Barack Obama is giving me and a lot of other negroes a communal headache.

In times like these, it is necessary to break open a bottle and pop a few in the hopes of not having to invoke the name of Rodney King.

Enjoy!