I’ve applied to this conference to present my paper on The Mikado — where I argue that white people bizarrely decided they wanted in the late 1800s to inhabit their Japanese knick-knacks. I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t like to do that right now.
Anyway, if I go, I get to stay a couple of nights on that OTHER Oxford’s campus, and perhaps I will acquire a vaguely British accent by the time I get back — what Carrie Bradshaw referred to as a touch of “The Madonnas.”
I imagine that being asked to even stand near the janitor’s closet at Oxford gives one a certain credibility in academia. I imagine finding that slip of paper that fell out of Chaucer’s pocket after an unusually rowdy drinking game on Michaelmas. In it I find the answer to all things. I am then hailed, after my critical work appears, as the greatest scholar of my generation — all because somebody invited me to stand near the Janitor’s closet in July in Oxford in the context of an academic conference.
They are going to study white people. I am not sure I like that idea. I mean, I’ve heard that they like to take over countries.
It sounds interesting — a study of white people? In their natural environments? I imagine the following titles to accepted conference papers:
- Crushing the Beer Can: Angry White Male Sublimation in a Globalized Context
- Twinkies From Scratch: Filling the Void of Suburbia with Whipped Cream Werldschmerz
- Andy Griffith for President: Mayberry and the Tea Party
- Baby Got Back? Lamentation and Skinny Buttock Syndrome
- The New Global South and The New Global Trailer Trash
- Double-Knit Dichotomies: Fashion Victimization in the American Heartland
- Corgis and The British Monarchy
- The Shopping Mall Speaker Putsch: Kenny G.‘s Insidious Rise to Power
- Fear of Garlic and Nordic Superstitions — an Ancient-World Understanding of Flavorlessnes
- The Pearl and the Clitoris: A Queer Critical View of The Junior League
Anyway, I’m sure the conference organizers are much more enlightened than I am and will put together an even better grouping of critical works than I have presented here.
Further details and information for the 2011 meeting of the Whiteness: Exploring Critical Issues interdisciplinary research and publications project