jasmine @jasminee@scholar.social

Who's that in your AVI, Jasmine?

That's a screenshot from the film Irma Vep (1996, Olivier Assayas) with Maggie Cheung.

Besides being a fantastic and dizzying/disorienting film, I have a soft spot for it bc I first watched it in a class with Prof. Yiman Wang, who would advise my undergraduate thesis! Here's the essay that she wrote on Maggie Cheung and the film Irma Vep: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492536

Re- #introduction

Hi all! I’m starting my PhD in American Culture/Digital Studies at UM Ann Arbor in... oh man, less than a week!

Research interests include:
- Asian American and Comparative Ethnic Studies
- digital visual cultures
- social media mapping/ethnography/networking
- digital strategies of resistance (asterisks by all of that)

Personal interests:
- prison/police abolition
- post-left theory
- the smell of jasmine after a light rain

Reading:

The Yellow Press: Asian American Radicalism and Conflict in Gidra by Lori Kido Lopez

DOI: 10.1177/0196859911412377

You can see some of the archived copies of Gidra here: http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-297/

Also here: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/nikkeialbum/search/?keywords=GIDRA&contributors=&published=&model=collection

"Based on the Freedom School model, UCLA’s undercommons holds weekly outdoor meetings featuring activists from groups such as Black Lives Matter, Critical Resistance, and the L.A. Poverty Department... The primary organizers—Thabisile Griffin, Marques Vestal, Olufemi O. Taiwo, Sa Whitley, and Shamell Bell—are all doctoral students who see the university as a site of contestation, a place of refuge, and a space for collective work."

"The [Mississippi] Freedom schools challenged the myth that the civil rights movement was just about claiming a place in mainstream society. They didn’t want equal opportunity in a burning house; they wanted to build a new house."

http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies” 1972

My dude Bruce is salty af

The moral of this story is “calm down, Jasmine.”

And maybe! Just maybe! I’ve got my own shit around seeing academic texts as either “useful” or “not useful” for, uh, collective liberation

Also I was bitter that social Darwinism was so big in the Chicago school of Communications theory and I’m over here silently seething that Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid is still ignored even if The Theorist Formerly Known as Prince (ha) was writing to biologists and not comms theorists

Sorry

I don’t think either field is “good” or morally superior to another but I do find it weird as fuck to see the influence of Marxist theory on Comms theory and see very little political engagement - I’m reading about Paul Lazarsfeld and I’m like BRUH your parents were socialists what’s this about you seeing your field as a mere weathervane of consumption practices

Maybe I’m misunderstanding him tho

but it is weird to be studying how two different fields (Communications and American Studies) developed and see how Comms was very ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about the sexism and racism that was so prevalent in early theories or the very liberal Do Goody Reformist legacy of early comms theorists

And American Studies has, since the 60s, been trying so hard to distance itself from the CIA American exceptionalism that came from that discipline in the 40s-50s