Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the thirtieth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
My guest today is Lissa Skitolsky. Lissa is an associate professor of philosophy at Susquehanna University (SU) whose research draws on work in Continental philosophy, genocide studies, and hip hop studies to analyze our cultural and political responses to mass violence and expose discursive practices that normalize genocidal patterns of antiblack violence in the United States. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled, Hip Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness?, that is under contract with Lexington Books for publication in its Philosophy of Race series. In her free time, Lissa enjoys listening to underground hip hop and provides massage as a certified massage therapist.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Lissa! We met at the CSWIP conference in October 2016, where you gave a memorable presentation on genocide, mass incarceration, and hip hop. You aim, in your research, to expose the normalization of state violence through discursive practices. Please describe this research and your motivation to do it.
For junior high and high school, I went to a private Jewish day school where I received an early and comprehensive education about the Nazi genocide. Later in college and graduate school, I developed my expertise in the field of Holocaust studies, as I drew on works in Continental philosophy to better explain the political and social phenomenon of genocide in western politics. Agamben’s work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, cleared the ground for the sorts of nontraditional studies in comparative genocide that I continue to publish.
For at least thirty years, however, the field of Holocaust studies has been preoccupied with the “uniqueness debate,” in which scholars, mostly Jewish, claim that since the Holocaust was absolutely “unique” in western history—a historical novum—it cannot legitimately be compared to any other genocide in human history. In fact, for the historian Steven Katz, the Holocaust is the only event in history that can properly be called a “genocide”. His view rejects the more expansive definition of genocide codified by the U.N. in the 1948 Convention Against Genocide, in which the effort to “destroy” a population can take many non-homicidal forms, including the regular infliction of mental or physical pain. In the past fifteen years, many scholars in the field have critiqued and rejected this “uniqueness argument” in order to contribute to the relatively new field of comparative genocide studies.
Nevertheless, these scholars are still bound to the ontology of genocide as an “event,” and their historical genealogies of genocide exclude ongoing antiblack violence in the United States. For the most part, practitioners in the field cannot assimilate the systemic and structural destruction of black lives into their narrow conception of genocide, especially evident in their exclusion of the historic petition “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” from their academic consideration. This petition was presented to the U.N. in 1951 by the Civil Rights Congress to formally accuse the United States of antiblack genocide; it was the first attempt to make use of the new convention to hold a country accountable for genocidal violence against a racialized population “as such.”
Historically, Holocaust scholars have argued that systemic racism in the United States is not genocide, for it cannot be understood in terms of a singular “intent” to destroy black communities “as such.” Recent scholarship in Holocaust and genocide studies indicates that this model has never served to adequately represent the multiplicity of logics that inform and justify every genocidal assault on a specific population. In fact, it can be reasonably argued that the desire for capital and power through the economic exploitation of specific populations will always be included among the competing motives for genocidal actions.
For me, the word genocide is important because it is both a moral term that represents the very worst that a state can do to its people and a legal term that sets limits to the types of violence that a state can inflict. So, for example, I maintain that since the penal system is a system of genocide, we cannot then hope to “reform” this genocidal system; instead, we must abolish a system that has been proved to destroy or undermine the social vitality of multiple communities marginalized by the demands of our white heterosexist supremacy.
In their petition, “We Charge Genocide,” the delegates of the Civil Rights Congress demand recognition of the distinctly genocidal violence perpetrated by the then-current Jim Crow laws in the United States because the term has political power and legal implications. The use of the term genocide was necessary to oppose what they called the “pious phrases” and “deadly legal euphemisms” that had masked the regularity and brutality of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. For this same reason, Claudia Card appealed to the definition of genocide in order to explain and condemn the harm of social death that emerged from the structural discrimination against entire populations in war and in peace, in the legal and medical and academic and domestic areas of human life.
I have no use for analytic definitions of genocide that misrepresent and so distort the real, historical occasions of state violence still directed against the flourishing of particular populations as such. In the United States, the status quo is not livable, but instead produces versions of unlivable life. In my view, we need to abandon our Platonic adherence to the Form of genocide as the method that guides the analysis of discrete occasions of genocide in different eras and on different continents.
In general, I follow Card’s understanding of genocide as the infliction of suffering on a targeted group that produces social death and so undermines the social vitality of that group and the ability of its members to live a decent life and experience a decent death. Card was the first scholar to define genocide from the experiences of the victims—and the harms they suffer—rather than from the psychological intent of the perpetrators. And she understood this shift of focus in terms of a feminist perspective more concerned with the concrete harms inflicted on vulnerable populations than with the ideal “aims” of those who inflict harm on these populations.
Claudia was a friend of mine, and I was honored to be able to visit her before she passed away, as she recovered from a round of chemotherapy. That was the last time I saw her, and we talked a lot about the larger implications of her notions of genocide and social death. Her work and life really inspired me to do the work that I do now, and while we didn’t agree on everything, during that last visit she did affirm my expansion of her notion of “social death” beyond the loss of collective practices to the loss or distortion of the social instinct itself—such as we see in the “camp” or the “prison”—as this expansion of the term helps explain the source of the “loss of generational ties” that also marks the phenomenon of social death. I miss her every day, and I’m not sure that I have written a paper in the past five years that doesn’t reference her work in some way. Insisting on the importance of her work for multiple fields is a key priority in my scholarship.
My own work focuses on illustrating how certain discursive practices that currently normalize state violence in the United States also played a central role in normalizing state violence in Nazi Germany and other genocides. So, for example, during the Bush regime, I published “The Case for Comparison Between Nazism and the War Against Terror: A Study in Bio-Politics,” in which I exposed the role that the idea that “all is possible” played in the logic that justified the illegal invasion of Iraq and in rationalizing genocidal intent in Nazi Germany.
For the past several years, I have been studying the role that the notions of the “criminal” and “criminality” have played in the economy of multiple genocides, as well as the central role that they have always played in the American genocide against black communities. I am motivated to do these sorts of studies because I can detect the traces of the genocidal past in the present social, political, judicial, economic, and educational organization of American culture.
I think that, for the most part, there is an entrenched disciplinary boundary between critical race theory and genocide studies because the latter doesn’t have much to offer the former; scholars in genocide studies have not traditionally encouraged us to understand genocide as a system of logics that undermines the wellbeing of populations targeted by race, ethnicity, gender, sex, disability, nationality, religion, and class—and so, a set of logics that survives any particular “event” of genocide.
I am currently writing an article with my friend and colleague Al Frankowski that criticizes the ontology of genocide as “event” and instead suggests the model of a “social pathology;” further, in the article, we more broadly illustrate how the specific commitments and lines of inquiry in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies are informed by an antiblack bias—a refusal to think black bodies as vulnerable to genocide—that is produced by the structure of recollection, or historical inquiry, that ensures that every scholarly effort to remember and record a specific genocide is, at the same time, an act of forgetting that rests on the perpetual displacement of antiblack genocide in the present. In general, my focus is on contemporary forms of state violence in the United States that are inflicted against multiple populations, and I am particularly concerned with the infliction of violence that does not appear as violence.
Was it your understanding of the pervasiveness of mass violence in history that led you to philosophy?
Yes, but in a roundabout way. My home life and school were pervaded with what I now refer to as “holocaustal consciousness,” a network of narratives about the Holocaust and the “lessons” that we are meant to draw from the narratives which then inform certain discursive and existential and ethical commitments that are viewed as essential to being-a-Jew: support of Israel, Holocaust-centric view of genocide, marrying Jewish, etc. This term—holocaustal consciousness—also refers to the sheer pervasiveness of the Holocaust as a topic of discussion in Jewish life, in both public and private, in which it is regarded as a central reference point for history and ethics and politics and identity.
So, in my home and in my school, the constant discussion about suffering was always a discussion of Jewish suffering, and a discussion about history was always a discussion of Jewish history. In my home, it was rather impossible to avoid a conversation about the Holocaust at any major event or holiday or even in everyday interactions when our parents were giving us “life lessons”: “If you marry a non-Jew you give Hitler a posthumous victory!” While the horror of the Nazi genocide gripped me—when I was 10 years old, my mother took me to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial—I also felt stifled by its constant presence in my lifeworld. As a teenager, I was also listening to underground hip hop, which gave me a better sense of the varieties of human suffering and the complicity of my own country in perpetual genocide.
The disjunction between the popular narratives about suffering and genocide and the lyrics of so many rap songs provoked the sort of critical thought that led me to philosophy, and when I studied philosophy in college, I enjoyed the freedom to ask questions that had previously been impossible to ask in the contexts in which I grew up. I decided to pursue philosophy because I appreciate the tools that it offers to better detect and examine assumptions, habits, ideas, and sociopolitical and discursive practices that support, obscure, and justify the infliction of violence on marginalized communities and the suffering that results.
Of course, I appreciate all kinds of philosophy, but for me the question of how to understand and better prevent the regular, systemic, and state-sanctioned infliction of violence against communities that are already excluded from moral consideration and the full protection of the law is the only question that I am interested in exploring as a scholar who works in the field of philosophy.
Lissa, please explain why you research hip hop and how you use it in your teaching and conference presentations.
As a teenager who grew up in Washington D.C. during the 80’s, hip hop served as an important source of wisdom for me about race, racism, and the US, that countered the racist images pervasive during the “war on drugs” and our own parents’ reticence to talk about the ubiquitous amount of antiblack violence or its severity; during the 80’s, our media presented all black men as drug dealers and all black women as “welfare queens.” I am fond of saying “I don’t know what would have happened to me without hip hop,” because it provided me with my first sense of the radical disjunction between appearance and reality, which of course is the basis of philosophy or critical thought.
[Description of photo below: Photo taken from behind Lissa who is engaging with students in rows of seats in a lecture hall. Her arms are folded across her chest. The students, who are facing the camera, are laughing or smiling in response to Lissa.]
In a way, underground hip hop has always served to counter post-racial discourse and white innocence about American genocide by providing explanations—in rhyme!—about how, exactly, antiblack violence informs every major social structure and political institution, and also by providing a phenomenology of black life under conditions of radical vulnerability to state violence. However, from the start, MCs were overdetermined by the media in the racist discourse about rappers as “thugs” and “gangstas.” Even as a teenager, I was blown away by the philosophical insights and aesthetic genius of hip hop. My interest grew in college, as I attended Skidmore College between 1992 and 1996; this era is often referred to as the “golden age” of hip hop. In graduate school, I found respite from the academic environment at a hip hop club in Atlanta—a major site of a distinct underground hip hop culture.
I did not put together my love of hip hop with my research in genocide studies until about three years ago when I started to teach philosophy in a women’s state prison and witnessed the horror of penal culture and the normalization of everyday violence in the rules that govern the prisoners’ lives. Further, I found out that hip hop was important to many women incarcerated there: it helped them to both understand and cope with the conditions of confinement. Lastly, I had a revelation one day and instantly remembered multiple rap songs that explicitly identified the prison system as a form of genocide central to the preservation of white supremacy. Then, I realized that so many of my commitments in genocide studies had actually been informed by insights that I had gleaned from underground hip hop. So, I began to draw on hip hop as an explicit source in my work on the genocidal structure of the American penal system and as a source with which to critique or complement long-standing views in the fields of Holocaust studies, trauma theory, critical race theory, political theory, critical prison studies, and cultural studies.
This research led me to develop a course at SU called “Philosophy and Hip Hop” that serves as a sort of introduction to critical race theory, and in which the performance of hip hop is part of the course requirements. My experiences with this class led me to publish—with my friend and co-author Sheila Lintott—an article in Hypatia entitled, “Inclusive Pedagogy: Beyond Simple Content,” that provides the pedagogical theory that supports this decision to diversify the form, as well as the content of philosophy courses. I have now taught this class four times, and it has been essential to my understanding of the power and value of underground hip hop in a philosophy course about race, justice, trauma, aesthetics, politics, and agency.
My work has also led me to explore the intersections between hip hop culture and penal culture, and draw on the language of prison slang and Hip Hop Nation Language in order to pursue two interrelated aims: (1) to better see and think what Foucault termed the episteme and its role in the normalization of penal violence, and (2) to better see and think the existential position of the people degraded, exploited, assaulted, poisoned, raped, and tortured in the American penal system.
More generally, I think more philosophers need to listen to underground hip hop, because I do not think that philosophical discourse alone can provoke the sort of dis-orientation and re-evaluation needed by those racialized as white in order to see and then begin to pierce the racist colonization of both thought and vision that sustains white innocence and white resentment. In my experience, only an aesthetic means can incite a radical shift in sensibility and, in my view, there is no more powerful and brilliant aesthetic illustration of the nature and harms of antiblack violence than underground hip hop. So now—in addition to working on my book—I integrate some rap lyrics into whatever paper I’m working on as there are an infinite number of rap songs with brilliant insights into the discursive mechanisms of antiblack state violence.
When I present on hip hop at an academic conference, it is often the case that a scholar—usually a man—will object, before I begin, by saying “I just don’t like hip hop. I won’t listen to it. I just don’t like it.” In response, I ask: “Does this sentence make sense to you: ‘I just don’t like rock-and-roll? I just won’t listen to any rock-and-roll song?’” I say this in order to point out that his refusal to listen to a well-established musical genre that originated from black culture and that has largely served as text and testimony about black life, constitutes a sort of racist disavowal of the epistemic and aesthetic value of all rap music. Usually these scholars drop their objections after my presentation and ask for playlists; this experience has motivated me to play some hip hop at every presentation.
As you know, Lissa, issues of identity and the relations between identity, identification, and self-identification have been central to many of the interviews that I’ve conducted in this series. You have recently come to identify as disabled, drawing associations between your experience of trauma and your theoretical commitments. Please explain these associations and your identification as disabled more generally.
As you mentioned, I have only recently come to view myself as disabled, and have only recently started to think about how my mental disability has informed my work, even though I have experienced clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for more than twenty-five years. Only recently, did I file my mental disability with the Human Resources office at my university, in order to receive certain accommodations that would lessen my anxiety and the possibility of certain triggers that exacerbate the symptoms of my PTSD.
Although I have been reading works in trauma theory for fifteen years, I was not diagnosed with PTSD until three years ago. Upon hindsight, it is strange that my academic interest in trauma theory did not lead me to recognize my own symptoms, but I told myself that since I did not suffer from intrusive flashbacks that I must not have been traumatized by my experiences of violence—indeed, I felt sure that I had escaped them “scot-free,” without lasting wounds or distress. Since receiving the diagnosis, I have been relieved to better understand the source of some of my emotional pain and my struggles at work and to find a variety of helpful therapies, but I have also been overwhelmed by anxiety about my ability to appear “normal.”
It has been overwhelming to realize how central PTSD has been to my commitments, or rather, the outsized role that it has played in my work in genocide studies and my volunteer work in a women’s state prison. For I’m preoccupied with patterns of violence that are predictable, but foreseeable, and so entirely preventable, and the forms of harms that they inflict; the different varieties of useless suffering inflicted on the same categories of people, over and over again. I guess, in my work, I’ve been trying to understand the source of my pain by immersing myself in the study of sociopolitical-discursive structures that inflict traumatic wounds. It was a roundabout way of coming to terms with my own experiences, and ultimately that academic approach did not help me confront or attend to my own symptoms of PTSD.
However, I can see that PTSD has also provided me with a sort of “negative wisdom” that motivates me to do the work that I do and immerse myself in communities that have suffered and continue to suffer from traumatic violence—particularly the women I visit in prison and underground rappers. This wisdom is “negative” because it is based on a hyperawareness of and hypersensitivity to the gravity of harms that we are capable of inflicting, our inability to “overcome” the suffering produced by these harms, and a constant anxiety about the continuity of this suffering in the midst of all waking hours. I don’t think that I could have the relationships that I have with women in prison and with underground rappers if I did not understand some of their psychic pain. So, my condition very much feels like a double-edged sword, insofar as it has provided me with a path toward meaningful scholarship, but at the cost of feeling and appearing “normal.” Also, I’m not much of an optimist . . .
Tell us about your forthcoming book in George Yancy’s Philosophy of Race series.
In general, this book—Hip Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness?—is organized around four ways in which underground rap music provides essential philosophical text and testimony about antiblack racist oppression in the United States:
First, the content of underground rap serves to illustrate the specifically genocidal character of American racism.
Second, many underground rap songs also illustrate that the continuity of genocidal politics in various historical forms—slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration—is made possible in part by the refusal to recognize the structural importance of genocidal racism to American politics.
Third, the form and content of underground rap music reflect the structure of PTSD, and so serve to illustrate the traumatic (as opposed to the tragic) nature of useless suffering inflicted by predictable, foreseeable, and preventable state policies that systematically exclude racialized populations from moral consideration and the protection of the law.
Fourth, the form and content of underground rap and hip hop culture represent a significant form of agency within and against systems of racist oppression in the United States. In other words, hip hop has allowed for a space to cope with and resist racist practices in the city and prison cell.
The book is intended to open specific paths of inquiry and inspire new philosophical interest in the texts and testimonies that emerge from hip hop. In the first part of the book, I present three analyses of the text of many underground rap songs in relation to the academic discourses of critical race theory, genocide studies, and trauma theory. In the second part of the book, I present three analyses of hip hop as a form of testimony about the penal system and the trauma of black life under conditions of antiblack racism.
In the book, there will also be a link to a website with resources for integrating hip hop into the classroom—playlists and syllabi—as well as a link to a documentary that I made this year with Ben Gottleib on the underground hip hop scene on the East Coast. The documentary, which is titled “I’ve Got To Testify: Voices From the Underground,” has great interviews about hip hop culture with unsigned, underground rappers, as well as many brilliant performances by rappers who may never get signed. Producing this documentary was essential to the methodology of the book, as it draws on the testimonies and texts of underground rappers in order to illustrate philosophical insights essential to hip hop culture that could change the lines of inquiry in multiple fields.
The documentary was made possible by a grant that I received from SU that covered my meals and lodging in different cities, but we couldn’t afford to pay any of the rappers who enthusiastically participated in the project, and who were animated by the desire to talk about their love of hip hop for hours and hours. My access to and welcome in these communities in Philadelphia, New York and Sunbury—as a white Jewish academic woman—was made possible by my work in the prisons, which is very hip hop, insofar as prisoner advocacy and testifying to the conditions and consequences of confinement is a central priority in hip hop ethics. So, the project was made possible by the real social ties that connect members of Hip Hop Nation, and in itself became an experience of hip hop love—I know that sounds strange, but I don’t know how else to describe it.
My book is relevant to scholars who work in the fields of black studies, testimonial research, cultural studies, genocide studies, trauma theory and critical race theory. It intends to contribute to current scholarship in four ways:
First, it addresses and begins to rectify the relative neglect of hip hop in the fields of critical theory, genocide studies, and trauma theory;
Second, it contributes to the field of hip hop studies by drawing on underground rap as source and evidence for moral, political, epistemological and ontological claims about the nature and consequences of antiblack racism. In this way, it departs from the majority of texts in hip hop studies that focus on the nature and/or history of the genre itself and its significance in American culture;
Third, it contributes to the field of critical prison studies by illustrating the importance of underground rap for a phenomenology of carceral life and a means of resisting its genocidal logic;
And fourth, it offers pedagogical advice for philosophy professors about how to integrate hip hop into the classroom and how to lead discussions about specific rap songs in courses on critical theory, ethics, and political theory.
It’s a project inspired by my intense love for the genre and culture: I am a serious hip hop head, and I can’t get through any day without listening to underground rap. Right now, I’m preoccupied by the appearance of more queer women in the rap scene—I adore Young M.A. and B.L. Shirelle and Bates—and with the current tensions between the newest subgenre of hip hop known as “trap” and the more traditional form and content of rap music. This tension is hilariously illustrated in a clip where Snoop Dogg mocks this new subgenre of trap by delivering a pretty decent imitation of the flow.
[Description of photo below: photo of Lissa (middle), Bates (left), and B.L. Shirelle (right), who are sitting close together on a couch and laughing at the camera. Lissa, whose eyes are closed in laughter and whose right arm is around Bates’s shoulders, is holding a plastic cup with her left hand, on her own right leg. Bates, on whose thighs an open laptop rests, is gesturing with their right index-finger in the direction of the person taking the photo. B.L. Shirelle, whose right arm is around Lissa’s back, holds a bottle of water on their right leg with their left hand. Graffiti and stickers adorn the wood-paneled wall behind them.]
I am proud that the women I visit in prison inspired this book and continue to provide insights essential to my argument. I am also thrilled to be able to draw on and analyze the songs of my friends, or “my crew” of local underground rappers, who regularly present with me at colleges: J. Remedy, B.L. Shirelle, M-Life, Bates, Dynasty, DJ CashOut Casper and Kelo. Lastly, I am thrilled that the cover art will be an original work of art by the celebrated hip hop muralist DonChristian Jones.
Would you like to recommend some articles, music, or other material on the topics we’ve discussed in this interview or something we didn’t touch upon?
In terms of works in hip hop studies that have paved the way for my research, I would recommend the following texts: H. Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook, eds. Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language; H. Samy Alim, Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture; Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, eds., That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader; Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop; and Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
I have also been inspired by this text that my friend and colleague El Jones wrote: El Jones, Live from the Afrikan Resistance!
I was fortunate enough to take a seminar in graduate school (at Emory University) with Cathy Caruth, and her work in trauma theory was essential to the development of my work. I am also indebted to Al Frankowski’s recent book on The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization: Toward a Political Sense of Mourning, which has enabled me to better understand the relation between modes of remembrance and the re-occurrence of patterns of traumatic violence.
Here is a short playlist of underground hip hop songs that have been especially helpful to my research:
“Claimin' I'm a Criminal” Brand Nubian
“The Beast” Fugees
“Life Goes On” 2Pac
“Police State” Dead Prez
“Sound of da Police” KRS-One
“Tip the Scale” (feat. Dice Raw) The Roots
“Reagan” Killer Mike
“16 On Death Row” 2Pac
"How Long Will They Mourn Me" 2Pac
“Family Business” Kanye West
“Mystery of Iniquity” Lauryn Hill
“Restricted Movement: Picking Cotton” B.L. Shirelle
Lissa, I am sure that readers and listeners will appreciate this assortment of texts and music. I also want to thank you for your passionate remarks throughout this interview.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Lissa Skitolsky’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
_________________________________________
Please join me here again on Wednesday, October 18th at 8 a.m. EST, for the thirty-first installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
Comments