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Back-To-School Beatitudes – 10 Academic Survival Tips

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Suggested by Cristina Serna and Catriona Rueda Esquibel, from the Crunk Feminist Collective blog:

  • Be confident in your abilities.
    • If you feel like a fraud, you very likely are suffering from impostor syndrome, a chronic feeling of intellectual or personal inadequacy born of grandiose expectations about what it means to be competent. Women in particular suffer with this issue, but I argue that it is worse for women-of-color (particularly Blacks and Latinas) who labor under stereotypes of both racial and gender incompetence. The academy itself also creates grandiose expectations, given the general perception of academicians as hypercompetent people. Secret: Everybody that’s actin like they know, doesn’t really know. So ask your question. It’s probably not as stupid as you think. Now say this with me: “I’m smart enough, my work is important, and damn it, I’m gonna make it.”
  • Be patient with yourself.
    • Be patient with your own process of intellectual growth. You will get there and it will all come together. You aren’t supposed to know everything at the beginning. And you still won’t know everything at the end (of coursework, exams, the dissertation, life…).
    • Getting the actual degree isn’t about intellect. It is about sheer strength of will and dogged determination. “Damn it, I’m gonna walk out of here with that piece of paper if it’s the last cottonpickin’ thing I do.” That kind of thinking helps you to keep going after you’ve just been asked to revise a chapter for the third time, your committee member has failed to submit a letter of rec on time, and you feel like blowing something or someone up.

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Pussy Riot statements and the failure of media

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The Russian feminist punk band has been in the news lately; three twentysomething young women rockers were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”– that is,  their guerrilla rock performance on the altar of a Russian Orthodox Church. For less than a minute, the women danced, singing “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out!” and crossing themselves until they were apprehended by security guards.   What you probably haven’t read is their own insightful analysis of what their acts meant in Russian’s current political context.  From their closing statements in their Moscow court trial:

Yekaterina Samutsevich charged that Putin has been “exploit[ing] the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic…” by making use of

the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself….

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

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Mujeres Talk: Corrido de Norma Cantú

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August 31, 2012, is the last day that renowned Chicana, feminist scholar Dr. Norma E. Cantú will be at the University of Texas, San Antonio’s English Department. To honor her work, Dr. Larissa Mercado-López (one of her former students) led … Read More

Remembering the Life of Aaronette M. White

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Aaronette White

African American Studies Professor Aaronette M. White of UC Santa Cruz passed last Tuesday at the age of 51, possibly of an aneurysm.  In a facebook thread, Angie Chabram writes “let’s memorialize her by putting her picture and the write up in a public place other than the net. I am going to put this lovely person I didn’t know outside my door!” I did the same.

Here is an excerpt from Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ essay (at Feministwire 8/18/12) celebrating Aaronette’s life:

It is with deep sadness and profound devastation that I share that radical Black/Pan-African feminist activist and social psychologist Aaronette M. White, Ph.D., recently made her physical transition. While there is presently uncertainty about the exact date and time of her sudden death, no foul play or harm was done to her in the last hours of her life. Her body was found in her apartment on Tuesday, August 14, 2012. The belief is that she suffered an aneurysm. She was 51-years old.

….Aaronette’s activism, scholarship, and writings were frequently ahead of the curve. She constantly championed unsung warrior feminist women who were predominantly of African descent. However, she celebrated the resiliency and (sometimes armed) resistance of all women she defined as freedom fighters.

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CFP: Word Images: A Norma Elia Cantú Critical Reader

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Although ethnography is defined many times as “the study of the Other,” in Norma E. Cantú it becomes the study of the subjective self and the others who relationally define the self.

Author Norma E. Cantú’s writing describes a border culture not only because it speaks Spanish, is bilingual and bicultural, and is mostly located in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, the U.S. and México, but also because it depicts a bicognitive reality. Sara García has pointed out that Cantú writes about “the border from within the border,” what Mary Louise Pratt calls “the contact zone.” In her work, Norma E. Cantú depicts the internal, moral, and linguistic borders that Chican@s cross continually throughout their lives in various and diverse manners.

With its mixture of writing and orality, past and present, all mediated by memory, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, Cantú’s first groundbreaking novel, could also be read as testimonial literature if defined by Margaret Randall as “the possibility to reconstruct the truth.”  We invite submissions on Norma E. Cantú’s oeuvre and vision, including but not limited to her criticism, folklore, theory, and literature, as well as her newspaper articles. We welcome academic papers about Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera and all other works authored by Norma Elia Cantú, including poetry, short stories, opinion pieces, etcetera.

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