"A Poverty of the Mined"

Another interesting post by Daniel Moshenberg on black prof:

He responds to Orlando Patterson's op - ed piece in the NY Times called A Poverty of Mind via a reading of Kara Walker. "Since Patterson avoids defining `culture’, he can say whatever he wants, and it must be correct, or at least happily beyond correction. Patterson’s writes of a "cool pose culture." For Fanon, for example, that’s not culture; it’s consciousness, and frozen consciousness at that. Those who engage in it purchase and consume and are persuaded, intensively and profitably so, that they do not make it. It is the gift that keeps on taking. [...]

Patterson writes about the `disconnected fifth’. Of course, this hearkens to the talented tenth. Fine. But the cultural studies question would be that of the connectedness of the disconnection. (It would also interrogate the seductive neatness of twenty percent. How is the minority a majority? This is the Pan-African Black Consciousness cultural critique. When is one in five equal to nine in ten?) The political economic question is who derives profit and power from the establishment and maintenance of a disconnected, surplus?, population? The cultural question is who derives pleasure from a disconnected population? Who, personally and structurally? The cultural studies question is what becomes of profit, power, pleasure in the calculus of the disconnected fifth? A poverty of the mind is also a misery of the mind. It’s also a misery of the mined, those whose bodies and lives and more are read as always already used, depleted, and best forgotten. (read more).