So many of my friends on Twitter and Facebook have commented recently about how they always see me online, but that they rarely see me in real life. It's a bit scary frankly, but that doesn't mean we're any less connected. Luckily, I still see my students during office hours and my colleagues too: at talks and meetings. Yes, believe it or not!
This week though, there's a twist. Tomorrow, that's Friday, I'll hold my office hours online and EVERYBOY can tune in and ask questions and participate. The plan is to talk about the role of social media in the Iranian post election crisis and about Iranian cinema on the 31st anniversary of Islamic Republic of Iran. I consider this an open forum, so join in with your thoughts.
As I spoke with James today about the flow of the questions tomorrow, I also thought it would be important to address the way that social media have impacted activism, journalism and Humanities scholarship. Also, my hero Walter Benjamin, "The Reel Evil Films from the Axis of Evil Film Festival" that I curated in 2003 and the continued persecution of the Baha'is in Iran are important topics for discussion tomorrow.
So let's chat, 12 noon EST. Tweet your comments and questions with hashtag #dukelive Or email them to live@duke.edu or post a comment on Duke's Ustream page on Facebook
Boy was that ever so much fun! There were about 277 people tuned in at one point. Another 100 have now watched the program online. Best office hours ever! Won't ever top that! Thanks everyone for tuning in and for asking great questions.
I remember it vividly. About exactly a month ago, I woke up to the image of a sheet of carbon paper left over from some dream in the early morning hours and, too, to the smell of fresh school copies made on cranked copiers. Strange nostalgia! I don't remember ever seeing one of those machines -- whatever they were called-- and I had to ask around if anyone remembered them.
As a kid, I was always suspicious of a test if the page didn't stain my fingers with that warm, light blue or purple ink. It wasn't fresh enough, was it? But more importantly, no hand-out, no test, was really that important or that good, if it didn't have that intoxicating smell you remember if you are of my generation. The ditto sheets, made by spirit duplicators, belonged in our childhood classrooms. We did our French verb conjugations on them. Churches had them too, if you were so inclined. And, yes, it may just have been "the spirit", yes that intoxicating smell of alcohols in the solvents used as "inks" that eventually banned the "Banda" machines from schools. As much that, as the "high-volume xerox copiers" that displaced them. The memory of those spirits still excites us.
But why all this nostalgia?
Just reading the Wikipedia entry on the ditto sheet, had my friend Chris and I nearly in tears.
For my part, at least, looking back, there was an atmosphere surrounding those ditto sheets that never really returned after I was done with school. I remember the sheets in my college classrooms, too. Vaguely. But it was the collective ritual of raising up the sheet and smelling the spirit of the verbs to be conjugated; the ritual of standing outside in the school yard in the freezing cold, wrapped in our hats and gloves, and feeling the wet snow pressing through our leather boots and our thick woolen socks and talking and talking and talking endlessly over the answers to the questions on the test, as some smoked and some cuddled and massaged, or jumped up and down to stay warm... It was that whole sense of belonging to each other, to that place, to that light, to that piercing northern air, and to that moment. All of that was summed up in the fragrance of the ditto sheet. And as strange as this sounds: There was aura there, reproduced over and over and over again, as my world turned.
I clung to every single one of those sheets we got in school, put them carefully in my folder, and kept them perfectly neat through all my years in Norway.
Today, even the most important xeroxed papers get left behind after my faculty meetings. I insist to have the URL of the website to "what-ever-it-is" rather than lug another pile of paper home, folded, soiled with chewing gum and torn up here and there for a to-do list, an email address, or a book mark.
The generation before ours doesn't really have that nostalgia for the ditto sheet. Not really. They remember cutting, I mean literally cutting and pasting paragraphs together to write their essays with scissors and glue. That generation gets worked up by the sound of the typewriter. And frankly it doesn't care much for our texting habit.
Most upheavals and revolutions have failed in their attempt to achieve their goals once the so-called "opposition" has come to power. This is as much true for the Algerian War of Independence of the 1960s as it is for the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s. Women took to the streets, shoulder to shoulder with their men in both revolutions and when the war was won, those very women were forgotten. Once again, banished to their apartments. Assia Djebar's Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade speaks about this in a poetic language that still haunts me now almost 20 years on.
In the Algerian War of Independence, men donned veils to hide weapons and women walked "naked" in the streets of Algiers to accomplish various missions "dressed" like European women in the Quartiers. So the use of the veil as a technology, as a weapon of war, is not new. In Iran it dates back beyond the Babi movement of the 19th Century.
In our time, in our upheaval, Twitter, YouTube, Flicker and Facebook are the technologies by which global involvement in the post-Election crisis of 2009 in Iran has been accomplished. Much has been exchanged and acheived in the last 6 months since the June 2009 election in these very media: images of Neda's martyrdom were circulated on social media, videos of student protests were distributed and then, later, appropriated by traditional media networks, and global pleas for Human Rights were voiced and campaigns launched through them.
But had you told me yesterday, the day before the six month anniversary of the election, that I would see my male friends and colleagues veil to support a tortured and humiliated student activist (Majid Tavakoli) in Iran -- a man photographed in a veil in Iranian State news because of a speech he gave in public, I would never have believed you.
Last night and today my friends, my heroes, and my colleagues appear in social networks in green and black and blue and multicolor headscarves, acknowledging the plight of both men and women in a State that does not recognize the rights of a people to be free.
Hamid Dabashi (the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field.) Photo credit: Golbarg Bashi
And the many many hundreds of Iranian men and boys on social media who call themselves Majid. They veiled. They caught us completely off guard. And stunned our senses in the most revolutionary ways!
UPDATE 2: To suggest, as some have, that these gestures are mere acts of "postmodern transvestism" is to disregard their function within the long history of forced veiling and forced unveiling in Iran and to ignore the many roles played by the Iranian chador in the nation's uprisings from the Babi movement to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
This archival video from March 1979 shows the early demonstrations by women against the imposition of the veil (hijab) on women in Iran:
(My deepest gratitude to Golbarg Bashi for drawing my attention to this archival footage. Golbarg Bashi is a Swedish-Iranian feminist and a Professor of Iranian Studies at Rutgers University)
Placed in the proper light of history and in the blinding glare of a bloody struggle for civil and human rights in Iran today, only fools would call this quiet show of strength and resilience in the face of brutal force, a gesture of "postmodern transvestism". In one stroke these brave "Majids", have openly shown their resistance to an enforced gender apartheid, their opposition to a State that consistently violates Human Rights, and voiced their desire for civil liberties. In this, they have just now arrived to stand proudly next to their sisters who have been at the forefront of the movement for basic rights for all since the early years of the last century. In looking at the photographs below, I am reminded of the words of the great Persian modernist, `Abdu'l-Baha : "...let it be known once more that until woman and man recognize and realize equality, social and political progress here or anywhere will not be possible. For the world of humanity consists of two parts or members: one is woman; the other is man. Until these two members are equal in strength, the oneness of humanity cannot be established, and the happiness and felicity of mankind will not be a reality."
That's me in awe of the "devastatingly charming" @mbhulo! He set off a lot of bells and whistles at Heathrow.
What I love most about being on Twitter is the unbelievable mix of amazing people I get to meet in real life. In the last two weeks I met a number of the people I adore on Twitter on a trip to Europe. I met @redjives and @seddigh at a conference in Leiden, @mbhulo at Terminal 5 in Heathrow, and @marxculture in South Kensington. While in England, a friend @dariushimes to whom I was initially introduced through my Twitter friend @toddicus, suggested I go and visit the Hackelbury Fine Art Gallery. There, a favorite photographer of Darius and mine, Masao Yamamoto, was showing his newest work.
It was also on Twitter that I met @secondcinema a while back and had the opportunity to give an interview on my work on Iranian Cinema at the Carolina just before I headed to London. I love the Second Cinema interview which I have embedded below. But what thrills me more is that I can now say that I am iTunes downloadable. And you know what? THAT rocks!!!
Here is a video I captured of the Masao Yamamoto exhibit:
Here's a video from the conference on Iranian Cinema that @redjives & @seddigh attended and which I spoke at
A few weekends ago, I met my new friend Andre Blackman at Madhatter for a brief breakfast and exchange. We were first introduced by Jody Ranck who I have only met on Twitter . Both Andre and Jody tweet on public and global health issues and though my work has very little overlap with the work that they do, I am invested in following their work and interests online as well as in "RL".
Andre told me about his vision for public health and his idea for using Social Media in the context of global health that morning, and as he was doing that, I decided to turn the microphone on and ask him to say some of the things he was telling me to my friends on Twitter. Here's the recording.
To my surprise, as we were getting ready to go, Andre asked if he could ask me some questions on camera about the uses and influences of film and social media on public health. Here is his interview with me on video.
As I say in the interview, the fact that I've been working on the films of the Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami, brought his 2001 film A B C Africa to mind.
In A B C Africa, Kiarostami captures a documentary focus on issues related to AIDS in Uganda with a celebratory joy that permeates the lives of the people he encounters throughout.
To me, this film is a document of the possiblities of social media. It is Kiarostami's first digital film, one in which he handles his own camera and thus experiences the camera's democratization. But A B C Africa is also a film which combines important "information" regarding a global threat with something which I refer to as "counsel"-- the imparting of lived experience, of wisdom, of life. Walter Benjamin has suggested that "counsel" or "wisdom" "is less an answer to a question than a suggestion about the continuation of an ongoing story" ("Storyteller"). Counsel is the gesture of weaving experience into the fabric of life. To tell stories while creating things with our hands is a form of counsel that contrasts with the dissemination of information-- which according to Benjamin is devoid of the aura of a lived life and largely the function of newspapers and some forms of documentary film.
As I was talking to Andre, I saw how social media can functionally transformation a world dominated by information. In fact I realized that social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, allow us to broadcast moments of our lives and experiences --counsel-- as we share critical information about a world that concerns us. Knowledge, once again, is imbued with life experience in our time.
UPDATE:
Andre followed up on our conversation this week with a post of his own on "The Promise of Film and Online Video for Public Health" in his blog Pulse + Signal. Check it out! Here.
I never tire of watching Abbas Kiarostami's Five. The combination of natural, elemental forces, and the human and technologically mediated incident simply bring me to life and charge me with wonderment and delight.
I have for some time now enjoyed my exchanges around art, books, photography, music, philosophy, literature, technology and the wonders of our age with my friend Darius Himes. And we have, off and on, both remarked on our love for Kiarostami's work. Then suddenly yesterday, amidst the hustle of the Duke-at-work-Saturday, I discovered that Darius had used one of our favorite Social Media tools Qik.com to make a short film about the book and the wind. I love it. It reminds me of passages in Kiarostami's Five. Elegant and elemental. Wind and paper ... then, movement, the essence and object of cinematic fascination from the start. (Remember the rustling of the leaves in Lumiere's The Baby's Meal [Repas de bebe, no. 88, 1895]?**)
** In Lumière’s Repas de bébé, of 1895, it was not the relatively repetitive activity of feeding the baby that captured the attention of the audience, but the small matter of leaves rustling in the background, moving discontinuously in an otherwise imperceptible breeze. A small matter perhaps, but for an audience familiar with the closed circuit of mechanical illusions of motion (via such devices as thaumatropes, zooetropes, phenakistascopes) the discontinuous demarcated the territory of the real, and confirmed the verisimilitude ceded to the camera. --Thomas Zummer "Arrestments: Corporeality and Mediation"
I presented this essay as talk in Toronto for the 40th Anniversary of Iranian Studies.
The essay addresses itself to the century long history of cinema in Iran, focusing on the history of the senses as they combine with and are extended by film technologies. It argues that Khomeini’s aim was to produce a transformed and Shi’ite Iran by purifying the sensorial national body by means of film technologies. I thought you would enjoy reading it.
