Showing papers by "Wai Chee Dimock published in 2019"

Editor's Column–Endangered

Abstract: O NE MOMENT THE STREET WAS QUIET AND DRIZZLY, SO FAMILIAR that I barely gave it a thought. he next moment the headlights were upon me, direct, blinding, a lood of illumination so incandescent and unexpected that what gripped me wasn’t fear but stupefaction. hen I was on the ground, screaming with a rage that took even myself by surprise: “No, I’m not OK! I’m not OK! I’m not OK!” A lot happened during the four weeks I spent at Spaulding Rehab.1 he Red Sox won the World Series. A record number of women and minority candidates were elected to Congress. Participating in these bonds of anticipation, suspense, and elation didn’t make me forget that I was wedded to my wheelchair, another kind of bond, never before contemplated and in many ways more interesting than the others. his unsightly contraption, a marvel of metallic suppleness, was never apart from me or out of my mind: not the new normal but simply part of life, taken for granted and integral to my sense of myself. Not being able to live without it deined me, an identity I got used to with surprising ease. he motto for Spaulding Rehab is “Find Your Strength,” a cleareyed, matteroffact injunction that I appreciated when I arrived, and even more so when I let, still needing an ambulance. For those of us living with the unpredictable course of the injured body, strength is not a given, not a fact in the present tense.2 Not securely lodged, it is rather an aspiredto outcome, the promise of a yettoberealized future. One has to work for it, try to ind it. What one inds varies greatly from one person to another. here is always the chance that the search will be in vain, that this aspiredto outcome will always remain aspiredto, beckoning from a place just beyond our reach. his uncertain future brings to mind the taunt popularized by disability activists: “temporarily abledbodied.”3 Most of us think 1 3 4 . 2 ]

Editor’s Column—Collateral Resilience

Abstract: Many things came to me during my four weeks at Spaulding Rehab: consolatory e-mails, cards, some flowers, and a care package from PMLA that kept me going for the entirety of my stay. What I never expected was a translation of a story by the Japanese writer Shiga Naoya, sent by Scott Miller, dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the translator.

Editor’s Column—Hanging with Chefs

Abstract: I N 2014, CORNELIA BAILEY APPROACHED DAVID SHIELDS WITH AN URgent request. She and her neighbors in Hog Hammock, a slavedescended Geechee community on Sapelo Island, Georgia, were about to lose their homes thanks to skyrocketing property taxes engineered by developers. To generate income they had tried to market one of the island’s specialties, the red pea, but it wasn’t enough. Could another crop be added, perhaps one with a bigger market? Bailey knew she was dealing with an unusual En glish professor. The author of many books on civil society, including Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine (2015), Shields regularly spends time with geneticists, entomologists, and soil scientists. The literature that he reads includes seed catalogs, agricultural journals, eighteenthand nineteenthcentury treatises on plant breeding, and manuals on pomology and geoponics. Farm ecology, seed variety, and soil chemistry are all part of his “philological research” (Shields). All sorts of people go to Shields for help. In 2003, after attending the conference Cuisines of the Lowcountry and the Caribbean, Glenn Roberts, CEO of Anson Mills, came up with an idea that would give new meaning to fieldwork. Knowing that the ricecentered cuisine of the global South would flourish only if the lost classic, the Carolina Gold, were to be restored, Roberts proposed to Shields that they create a seedrecovery project comparable to Native Seeds / SEARCH, a seedconservation project based in Arizona.1 The hope was to bring back not only the once abundant but now vanished Carolina Gold but also “the rotation crops, cocrops, provision crops, forage crops” that make this cuisine possible (Shields). Archival research was needed and Shields was the one to do it. Two and a half years later, the blearyeyed researcher emerged from the microfilm bunker of the Thomas Cooper Library at the University 1 3 4 . 5 ]