Jack Halberstam, Nadine Naber and the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference

Two weeks ago I was at the Critical Ethnic Studies conference, and heard some fantastic talks (with my absolute favorites being Nadine Naber who provided a beautiful critique of Lee Edelman's No Future and David Lloyd who spoke on a number of issues including the economy and BDS) and some not-so-fantastic ones. I didn't imagine this would warrant a post here until I saw what Jack Halberstam (who also spoke at the conference) posted on Bully Bloggers about it.

Halberstam describes various plenary speakers as providing "brilliance," and "provocation," their arguments "brilliant," "elegant," "insightful," "brave," and "moving." When it comes to the two brown folks though, something interesting happens. Nadine Naber and Lisa Hajjar (who I unfortunately missed, and whose name Halberstam misspells as "Hajar"...) seem to have lacked all that brilliant, provocative, elegant, insightful, brave and moving discussion, but did a good job "trying" to speak. They "tried" to discuss the 'Middle East' and Naber "tried to bring some formulations from contemporary queer theory to bear upon activism by queer Arab groups." Halberstam offers nothing else, except that apparently "[t]here was much discussion after each presentation about whether it was ethical to leave up disturbing images of violated bodies as backdrop to a lecture."

Is it really even necessary for me to explain why this is offensive/obnoxious? That he even brings up the images used during the lecture makes me think he didn't listen to Naber's talk at all, where she quoted various U.S. and Israeli political figures to demonstrate how worthless they understood Palestinian lives (particularly children's lives) to be and linked this to the importance and usage of imagery of dead children at protests (and then tied this to her critique of Edelman).

I'm just unsure why Halberstam felt the need to mention Naber and Hajjar at all if it was only to make a patronizing remark between the apparent "brilliance" and "provocation" the rest of the plenary speakers provided. David Lloyd's talk didn't even warrant acknowledgment from Halberstam... what a shame Halberstam couldn't have just forgotten to mention Naber and Hajjar as well.

As an aside, Critical Ethnic Studies marks the second time I've heard Halberstam speak, and both times I've been thoroughly disappointed. Both times I heard a lot about Lady Gaga and animated films, but failed to really understand what he was arguing. Maybe I'm not clever enough, or maybe I need to know more about U.S. pop culture to understand, but what I did manage to gather from his talk at Critical Ethnic Studies was a call to kick out the "dinosaurs" (his term, if I remember correctly) of academia and strip them of tenure, and give tenure to the young, cutting-edge academics instead. I suppose it's only at a ridiculously cushy private university with a nearly three billion dollar endowment like USC that a professor, like Halberstam, can have the gall to make such a statement in this economic climate where professors at other (less disgustingly rich) universities are being furloughed, forced to take on larger course loads with larger class sizes, forced to take on more administrative work, etc. etc. and perhaps don't have the same amount of time to dedicate to cutting-edge research on Lady Gaga. It's interesting comparing Halberstam to Lloyd (also at USC) and their very different levels of awareness around the economy in their talks.