Biodun Iginla | University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (original) (raw)

Papers by Biodun Iginla

New York, New York: In any case, to discourse about New York and its transformation, or you shoul... more New York, New York:
In any case, to discourse about New York and its transformation, or you should say its transformations: For transformations are precisely what define the city and what set its conditions of possibility—and what animate the people who live there. You’re a New Yorker even if you weren’t born there. But you or anyone else can most certainly be a New Yorker even if you weren’t born there. You become a New Yorker the first time you say: “That used to be Danny’s and that used to be Clancy’s,” before the Internet café plugged itself in and before Starbucks installed itself. You start constructing your private New York the first time the city came into your view. Maybe you were in a cab leaving La Guardia when, on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, you saw the Manhattan skyline. All your worldly possessions were in the trunk, and in your hand was a piece of paper with an address on it that would turn out to be your first home. You say to yourself: “Look, there’s the Empire State Building; look there: The World Trade Center towers.” Maybe your first time in New York was when your parents dragged you there on vacation as a baby and towed you all over the gigantic avenues while shopping for holiday season gifts. Your first view of the city from your stroller was the legs of adults on the sidewalks, and you wondered why the sidewalks sparkled at certain angles.

What’s going on now: The many names of ISIS (also known as IS, ISIL, SIC and Da'ish) FOR the thir... more What’s going on now:
The many names of ISIS (also known as IS, ISIL, SIC and Da'ish)
FOR the third time in as many decades America is leading a powerful coalition to war in the
Middle East. On September 23rd the offensive expanded dramatically as coalition aircraft and
missiles struck in Syria, widening the theatre beyond its initial arena in Iraq. Their target is a
radical jihadist group that has grabbed headlines since June, when its black-clad gunmen burst
beyond territory they had captured during Syria’s civil war and seized big chunks of Iraq,
including the country’s second biggest city, Mosul. Alarm has grown as they have massacred
hundreds of prisoners, sometimes with grisly televised beheadings, and hounded thousands of
Christians and other minorities from their homes. Nearly everyone shares a desire to destroy this
scourge, yet they cannot seem to agree on what to call it. The group has been variously dubbed
ISIS, ISIL, IS, SIC and Da'ish. Why the alphabet soup?
Part of the trouble is that the group has evolved over time, changing its own name. It started as a
small but viciously effective part of the Sunni resistance to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq that
called itself al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI. In 2007, following the death of its founder (and criticism
from al-Qaeda for being too bloodthirsty), AQI rebranded itself the Islamic State in Iraq, or ISI.
This group suffered setbacks on its home turf, but as Syria descended into civil war in 2011 it
spotted an opportunity. By 2013 it had inserted itself into eastern Syria and adopted a new name
to match, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Increasing the confusion, ISIS changed its
name yet again in June this year, declaring itself the State of the Islamic Caliphate (SIC), a title
that reflects its ambitions to rule over Muslims everywhere.

The European migrant crisis[n 1] or European refugee crisis[n 2] arose through the rising number ... more The European migrant crisis[n 1] or European refugee crisis[n 2] arose through the rising number of refugees and migrants[10] coming to the European Union, across the Mediterranean Sea or through Southeast Europe, and applying for asylum. They come from areas such as the Middle East (Syria, Iraq), Africa (Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Gambia), South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh),[11][12] and the Western Balkans (Kosovo, Albania).[13] According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as of October 2015, the top three nationalities of the over half a million Mediterranean Sea arrivals since the beginning of the year are Syrian (53%), Afghan (16%) and Eritrean (6%). Most of the refugees and migrants are adult men (65%).[14] The phrases "European migrant crisis" and "European refugee crisis" became widely used in April 2015,[15] when five boats carrying almost two thousand migrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with a combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200 people.

Capitalism and technology, working for each other, like the two-headed monster Janus and also lik... more Capitalism and technology, working for each other, like the two-headed monster Janus and also like a transnational condominium, have both created various machines that enslave us all by transforming human life on earth. What follows is a brief historical sketch of how capital and technology brought this about.

Beginning in the mid-1970s through the early 1980s in the West, the capitalistic process assigned value to information (and knowledge): that is, capital valued information as a form of labor and merchandise. Briefly, within the capitalistic process, what is valued is what can be exchanged: that is, a form of merchandise is what has exchange-value. Once this process began to value words and ideas, as distinct from material goods, the new time of capital, armed with the new labor-power of (information), began to free itself from the time of concrete labor. As a result, capitalism became less concerned with organizing space into functional sectors than with subsuming the totality of time under its own laws of unequal exchange.

This new process ruptured the pact between capital and labor, which was actually an agreement among labor, management, and the state; that is, with the cooperation of labor and management, the state arbitrated and regulated productivity, wages, and profits. Before this new system was set in place, the production of consumer goods developed mass consumption (in other words, supply worked to create demand). In this model, US domestic workers became consumers of the merchandise they produced (to quote Henry Ford: "Our workers should also be our customers").

However, by the mid-1970s, the saturation of domestic markets for consumer goods led to the expansion of capital into third-world countries. This expansion was necessary so that these goods could be produced and consumed by a third-world urban work force that was both abundant and ready for work, but that was not organized and thus not expensive. These new modes of production, consumption, and distribution led to the establishment of Free Production Zones (so-called FPZs) and Export Processing Zones (so-called (EPZs) within the context of the new international division of labor and the imperial transnational capital.

Capital became extremely fluid, eroding to a certain extent the boundaries and functions of the traditional nation-state: no restrictions on first-world investment and transfers of capital, as third-world governments were eager for first-world revenues, and first-world transnational companies were eager for cheap third-world labor. A truly symbiotic relationship, which in turn has led to this contradictory phenomenon: The condominium that comprised (first-world) imperial agents and (third-world) local elite needed at the same time a weak nation-state in relation to capital (to not impose restrictions on the fluidity of capital) and a strong nation-state in relation to labor (to guarantee a needy domestic labor, by, among other tasks, imposing taxes and other measures, like overpricing, punitive to the poor). In the early 1990s, GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, transformed into WTO, World Trade Organization) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) simply formalized a situation that had existed since the mid- to late 1970s, and even then, the provisions and regulations came nowhere near acknowledging the extraordinary optimum transfer of capital, goods, and people that had prevailed before. This would explain the confused impassioned debates about NAFTA, WTO, and especially the one in 2000 in the US about the admission of China into WTO, which were quite confused across ideological divides with strange bedfellows-- like labor unions and conservative Republicans.

Books by Biodun Iginla

You ran into Isabel at Three Lives Book Store on Waverly Place and 10th Street in the West Villag... more You ran into Isabel at Three Lives Book Store on Waverly Place and 10th Street in the West Village in New York one wistful afternoon at 1 PM in the spring of 2016. She was wearing a black British military jacket and a red skirt and a black fedora and black combat boots and she was absolutely stunning to say the least, with jet-black frizzy hair.
And you were both browsing in the fiction section of the bookstore. You came to this bookstore often because your close friend Jenny Feder owned it and also because it is within walking distance of your home, an apartment building on Sheridan Square and Christopher Street. Your home in the West Village is also close to the number 2 express train that does not run full time. The rest of the time, if you’re coming from uptown, you take the local number 1 train that ran full time after changing trains on 14th Street. The bookstore was buzzing with customers browsing, chatting. There was a guy who looked like a professor talking intensely to a young woman, perhaps one of his students.

I first saw Monica on February 2013 at the psych ward at Bellevue Hospital on 1st Avenue and 27th... more I first saw Monica on February 2013 at the psych ward at Bellevue Hospital on 1st Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan. I saw her just before dinnertime when she was at intake at the nurse station on the 18th floor of the hospital. She was in the process of being admitted. I had been admitted a month earlier. A white woman: she caught my attention because she was dressed like a Muslim, which I found out later she’s not. Her face was covered by some kind of chador.
In any case, my hospital friend (Zora—more about her later) and I soon went into the dining room for dinner. We all write out our desired menus the day before. She and I sat at our usual table, which also was shared by one other patient.
Minutes later, Monica walked in, still in her white Muslim garb. She got a generic meal since she was just admitted minutes before. She cast glances around to see where she might sit. She saw the one vacancy at our table and made a beeline. We all encouraged her to join us. When she sat down, her chador fell off to reveal an extremely attractive, even pretty woman. At that point, I didn’t know she was blonde—she was wearing a hijab as well. Zora looked at her as if she was from another planet—an irony since we all patients in any psych ward were considered to be from another planet. In other words, loony beans, loco, or whatever one chooses to call psychiatric patients.
Monica said absolutely nothing during the entire meal at the table. Obviously I was intrigued by her: What’s up with the garb since she was a white womaromancen? Was she a convert? I figured there must be a story there.

Let me tell you about Veronica Compton. Our paths crossed on Bainbridge Island, off Seattle, in ... more Let me tell you about Veronica Compton. Our paths
crossed on Bainbridge Island, off Seattle, in November
2013, shortly before Thanksgiving. Veronica was an
integral player in the Hillside Strangler case in Los
Angeles in 1980.
First, some background. The Hillside Strangler is the
media epithet for two men, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo
Buono, who were convicted of kidnapping, raping,
torturing, and killing ten females ranging in age from 12
to 28 years old during a four-month period from late
1977 to early 1978. They committed their crimes in the
hills above Los Angeles, California.
The first victim of the Hillside Strangler was a
Hollywood prostitute, Yolanda Washington, whose body
5
was found near the Forest Lawn Cemetery on October
18, 1977. The corpse was cleaned and faint marks were
visible around the neck, wrists, and ankles where a rope
had been used. It was discovered that the victim had been
raped.
On November 1, 1977, police were called to a La
Crescenta neighborhood, northeast of downtown Los
Angeles, where the body of a teenage girl was found
naked, face up on a parkway in a residential area. The
homeowner had covered her with a tarp to prevent the
neighborhood children from viewing her on their way to
school. Bruises on her neck indicated strangulation. The
body had been dumped, indicating she was killed
elsewhere. The girl was eventually identified as Judith
Lynn Miller, a runaway prostitute who was barely 15
years old. The coroner's report further detailed her being
bound much like the first victim, Yolanda Washington.
Five days later, on November 6, 1977, the nude body of
another woman was discovered near the Chevy Chase
6
Country Club. Like Judith Lynn Miller, she had been
strangled with a ligature. The woman was identified as
21-year-old Lissa Teresa Kastin, a waitress, and was last
seen leaving work the night before she was discovered.
Two girls, Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14,
boarded a school bus and headed home on November 13,
1977. The last time they were seen was getting off this
bus and approaching a car. Inside the car were reportedly
two men. A young boy, cleaning up a trash-strewn
hillside near Dodger Stadium, found their bodies,
November 20. Both girls had been strangled and raped.