February Commquote

This month's feature is a poem that appeared in The South Carolina Review a few years ago (Volume 40, Number 1, Fall 2007). The poet is Michael Cadnum.

Foreign Tongue

Pay too much for the great pink
naked hares I carried through
the flies and the lottery ticket sellers
those weeks before the gunfire.
We wanted to be alone in the world, but we settled

for being bad at it, taping past tenses
to the kitchen shelf. One day
you didn't have to peek into the book,
and began flirting with the accountant
upstairs, and the owner of the broom shop,

dustpans and pirated DVDs. This was before we
burned the early footage, me jockeying
the delete button, you getting
it all with your ultimate megapixels,
and before we stayed awake all night,

shots--those silvery automatics every cop sported in white
leather holsters--pricking up and down
the mud river. What lasted and what didn't--
the aqueduct, the pagan temples, contrasted
with your patience in watching me sweat

the local dialect, mayors and grandees
disappearing every night, carved into the outgoing
wakes ebbing down the whitebait-
angry moon.

--Michael Cadnum

December CommQuote

Our quote this month features a profoundly hilarious take on interpersonal communication. Leave it to The New Yorker (December 6, 2010). The cartoonist is Bruce Eric Kaplan.

"Did you remember to do everything I asked, even the small things I said in passing that didn't sound like real requests?"

June CommQuote

"Today we're beginning to realize that the new media aren't just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. Historically, the resources of English have been shaped and expressed in constantly new and changing ways. The printing press changed not only the quantity of writing but also the character of language and the relations between author and public. Radio, film, TV pushed written English toward the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom. They aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial language and bodily gesture. If these "mass media" should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won't be because there's anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we've failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage."

--Marshall McLuhan
from "Classroom Without Walls," Explorations in Communication
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)

Themed issues on TVIII, language and discrimination, and coloniality

The Journal of Language and Social Psychology (Volume 26, Number 2, June 2007) titled Communication, Language, and Discrimination and edited by Richard Clement features articles that aim to draw attention to "current conceptualizations of the links between language and discrimination, delineate communicative features related to discrimination, focus on the experience of victims of discrimination, and outline measures that may contribute to thwarting discriminatory practices or limiting their impact" (writes Itesh Sachdev in the issue's Prologue).


New Review of Film and Television Studies (Volume 5, Number 1, April 2007) is devoted to "TVIII." What is TVIII? "TVI generally refers to the origins of the medium (beginning in the 1930s), a time that John Ellis (2000) has defined as a period of ‘scarcity’ because of its lack of consumer choice. TVII refers to the changes in technologies and institutional structures that took place in the 1980s (deregulation, the introduction of cable and satellite and so on), or what Ellis describes as a period of ‘availability’. TVIII therefore labels television’s present state and beyond; a time of increased fragmentation consumer interactivity and global market economies—what Ellis defines as ‘choice’. As Jane Roscoe has recently put it (2004): Content is more dispersed across… platforms, and our engagement with it is more fleeting. Our experience of contemporary media is fragmented rather than unified or centralised. Instead of our viewing habits being controlled by the ‘flow’ of schedules, our viewing is now clustered around events, and through technologies such as personal video recorders, DVDs, and subscription television services. Choice is the buzzword…" (Issue editors Glen Greeber and Matt Hills in the editorial introduction).


A double issue of Cultural Studies (Volume 21, Numbers 2-3, March/May 2007) is on the subject of coloniality. The issue, edited by Walter D. Mignola is titled Globalization and the De-Colonial Option. Kicking off the issue is "the seminal article by Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano, published at the beginning of the 90s, when the dust of a crumbling Soviet Union was still in everybody eyes. At the beginning of this century [2002], Arturo Escobar (an anthropologist from Columbia current residing in the US) wrote a critical review of what he called ‘the modernity/coloniality research program’." This article follows the one by Quijano. The rest of the issue reflects the research and publications of those participating in the project that continues to meet yearly and exchange research and views, as reported by W.D. Mignolo in the issu'es introduction, Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial Thinking). The 500+ page issue is divided into five sections: I The Emergence of An-Other Paradigm, II (De)Colonization of Knowledges and of Beings, III The Colonial Nation-States and the Imperial Racial Matrix, IV (De)Coloniality at Large, and V On Empires and colonial/Imperial Differences.