Michael Potts
I was born and raised in Berkshire, England. I did my undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy at the University of Bristol, moved to Wales, and then a few years later to New Zealand to do my Phd at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.
My Phd was entitled "Progressive and Reactionary Attitudes to Technology in Twentieth Century Literature: 1937-2013" and looked at how technology in 20th century literature often served as a "marker" for other issues, so as to allow a sublimated discussion of issues that were becoming problematic, such as degeneracy or concerns over population growth and immigration.
My research interests are quite broad, but centre on the intersection of environmentalism and ecology with issues of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. I have contributed papers to as Australian Literary Studies as well as the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and other publications.
Most of all, though, I enjoy teaching and helping to show students that writing is not some arcane art that only a few can master, but a process that can be demystified and made to work for them.
Address: New Zealand
My Phd was entitled "Progressive and Reactionary Attitudes to Technology in Twentieth Century Literature: 1937-2013" and looked at how technology in 20th century literature often served as a "marker" for other issues, so as to allow a sublimated discussion of issues that were becoming problematic, such as degeneracy or concerns over population growth and immigration.
My research interests are quite broad, but centre on the intersection of environmentalism and ecology with issues of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. I have contributed papers to as Australian Literary Studies as well as the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and other publications.
Most of all, though, I enjoy teaching and helping to show students that writing is not some arcane art that only a few can master, but a process that can be demystified and made to work for them.
Address: New Zealand
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Papers by Michael Potts
researcher and activist Emma Kowal examines statements acknowledging native title to land
as anti-racist speech acts that, paradoxically, often worked to “maintain White identities
and manage White stigma by questioning White belonging” among a group that
“experience[s] belonging through a sense of not belonging” (pp. 180-1).
Kowal’s work in this area builds on Erving Goffman’s theory of performativity, via the
work of Sara Ahmed. In ‘Declarations of Whiteness: the Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’
(2004) Ahmed argued that statements of anti-racism were non-perfomative because they
were “[not] a turn away from the white subject and towards something else, but another
way of ‘re-turning’ to the white subject”. Indeed, Ahmed remarks, “the most astonishing
aspect . . . is that ‘antiracism’ becomes a [properly] white attribute” which licences the
externalisation of racism on to the ‘other’ of the less educated, unhappy, racist working-
class white.
In other words, White Anti-Racism according to Kowal and Ahmed actually re-
inscribes white privilege through licencing a “fantasy of transcendence” by externalising
racism and a problematic heritage of racist exploitation on to ‘bad’ whites. Racism therefore
becomes a product of ignorance not inequality, of poverty not power. The fantasy of
transcendence “allows racism to be seen as what the working classes (or other less literate
others) do” further fostering the sense of belonging through not-belonging (Ahmed).
My chapter looks at white anti-racism on social media as a performative discourse that works to define and demarcate the boundaries of acceptable white behaviour and discourse. It shows how online media content is often created to cater to this performative aspect of white identity, and how this creates a condescending and unnuanced picture of both ethnic minorities and working-class whites, as well as licencing the myth of meritocracy.
At their worst, the rap videos played on cable TV resemble the war chants of a conflict that has not yet been joined. Only among a group as narcissistically lost and clueless as white suburban America would these messages be welcomed as just another species of entertainment. In the disorders of the Long Emergency, when the poor become really poor by world standards, the urban ghettos may explode again, and the next time it happens it will be in the context of a much more desperate society than the one that witnessed the 1992 Rodney King incident and its aftermath.
~ The Long Emergency (300-1_.
James Howard Kunstler is a social critic and bestselling author of fictional and non-fictional books on resource depletion, urban planning and environmental degradation. His work has appeared in, and is favourably reviewed by, such progressive and liberal periodicals and newspapers as Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Slate and The New York Times. Kunstler’s focus on sustainability in urban planning, peak oil and the problems of resource depletion have made him a respected commentator who is regularly invited to give guest lectures at colleges and universities.
But there is another issue of great concern to Kunstler which has received almost no serious attention or comment: the importance of a “common culture” and refusal (as Kunstler sees it) of large swathes of Black America to partake in it. His first popular non-fiction work The Long Emergency (2005) ended with a section in which he discussed the probability of social breakdown under the pressures of resource depletion and climate change in a society in which he believed African American disfunctionalism and materialism had been allowed to flourish, enabled by cheap credit off the back of the oil boom and justified and excused by a professional class of “diversity cheerleaders”. “There are real political issues facing the black underclass minority in America” Kunstler declared, “and the outstanding one would seem to be how much longer significant numbers of them can afford to put off growing up. The twenty-year-long peak oil blowoff has made this experiment in arrested development possible” (298). His later non-fiction work on the same subjects, Too Much Magic (2012) pursued a similar trajectory. After devoting most of the book to an earnest discussion of the perils of climate change and other urgent issues, Kunstler ends with a chapter entitled “The Multicultural Dilemma” in which he develops an argument that multiculturalism is an ideology of the unsustainable twentieth century that arose in order to help white America deal with changing demographics, rather than from a genuine desire for social equality. The problem, as Kunstler explained in a web log entry on the death of black teenager Trayvon Martin, is that “the Civil Rights victories of 1964 and 1965 — the public accommodations act and voting rights act — created tremendous anxiety among African Americans about how they would fit into a desegregated society, so the rise of black separatism at exactly that moment of legislative triumph was not an accident. It offered a segment of the black population the choice of opting out of the new disposition of things”. Encouraged by the academics, journalists and commentators who espoused multiculturalism, Kunstler believes that Black culture, and specifically young Black men developed “an oppositional culture saturated in violence that will never accommodate itself to any kind of a common culture” (“American Anxiety” July 2013). After the more recent police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Kunstler doubled down on his victim-blaming rhetoric, asking “are we hard-wired to self-segregate . . . Do we have different standards of behavior for different races? Does that work? (“Mr Bad Example” August 2014).
Clearly Kunstler has a problem with African Americans and with Black culture, blaming everything from criminal activity to aggressive rap lyrics on a refusal to integrate with the “common culture” of America, a process he believes is aided and abetted by those he contemptuously refers to as “diversity cheerleaders” who excuse bad behaviour by pointing to injustices and inequalities in society. Whilst this is a particularly reactionary and simplistic response, Kunstler is, of course, entitled to his views and to expressing them in print. The real question though is why they haven’t been challenged by the media, particularly in the liberal and left-leaning journals and periodicals that would normally be alert for the kind of victim-blaming Kunstler indulges in, but which seem to be oblivious in this case. Neither is this effect limited to the media. Harlan Morehouse, a lecturer interested in the intersection of race, culture and the environment, writes in a blog post of his horror at attending a guest lecture by Kunstler at the University of Vermont at which Kunstler, after discussing the usual roll call of ecological and resource depletion threats began talking about post-oil agrarian communities and who would be suitable to participate in them and lead them. “It became clear” Morehouse remarks, “that Kunstler’s explanation of ‘who?’ was thoroughly racialized, sexualized, and masculinized”. Observing with some disquiet how the largely progressive audience of university students and faculty applauded the lecture Morehouse notes in bewilderment that “I was left wondering how such a seemingly ‘progressive’ and ‘forward-looking’ crowd could relish in a politics so acutely at odds with its apparent own” (“Reactionary Progressivism” Geocritique June 2013).
My chapter will use the example of James Howard Kunstler to ask why, in a twenty-first century world so acutely aware of the dangers of racism, such prejudiced and reactionary sentiments are allowed to go more or less unchallenged and the author of such sentiments be lauded as an important voice whose words must be heeded. It will look at the claim of necessity which is implied by reference to ecological imperatives and ask if we have been too willing to overlook the dangers of reactionary sentiments proffered under the guise of a discussion of ecological and societal breakdown. I will argue that this is not an isolated phenomenon, and that we cannot allow our concern over ecological degradation to blind us to the kind of exclusionary logic perpetuated in the books and blog postings of James Howard Kunstler and others like him who talk about the Black community only in terms of violence, failure and obstreperousness.
Book Reviews by Michael Potts
Thesis Chapters by Michael Potts
researcher and activist Emma Kowal examines statements acknowledging native title to land
as anti-racist speech acts that, paradoxically, often worked to “maintain White identities
and manage White stigma by questioning White belonging” among a group that
“experience[s] belonging through a sense of not belonging” (pp. 180-1).
Kowal’s work in this area builds on Erving Goffman’s theory of performativity, via the
work of Sara Ahmed. In ‘Declarations of Whiteness: the Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’
(2004) Ahmed argued that statements of anti-racism were non-perfomative because they
were “[not] a turn away from the white subject and towards something else, but another
way of ‘re-turning’ to the white subject”. Indeed, Ahmed remarks, “the most astonishing
aspect . . . is that ‘antiracism’ becomes a [properly] white attribute” which licences the
externalisation of racism on to the ‘other’ of the less educated, unhappy, racist working-
class white.
In other words, White Anti-Racism according to Kowal and Ahmed actually re-
inscribes white privilege through licencing a “fantasy of transcendence” by externalising
racism and a problematic heritage of racist exploitation on to ‘bad’ whites. Racism therefore
becomes a product of ignorance not inequality, of poverty not power. The fantasy of
transcendence “allows racism to be seen as what the working classes (or other less literate
others) do” further fostering the sense of belonging through not-belonging (Ahmed).
My chapter looks at white anti-racism on social media as a performative discourse that works to define and demarcate the boundaries of acceptable white behaviour and discourse. It shows how online media content is often created to cater to this performative aspect of white identity, and how this creates a condescending and unnuanced picture of both ethnic minorities and working-class whites, as well as licencing the myth of meritocracy.
At their worst, the rap videos played on cable TV resemble the war chants of a conflict that has not yet been joined. Only among a group as narcissistically lost and clueless as white suburban America would these messages be welcomed as just another species of entertainment. In the disorders of the Long Emergency, when the poor become really poor by world standards, the urban ghettos may explode again, and the next time it happens it will be in the context of a much more desperate society than the one that witnessed the 1992 Rodney King incident and its aftermath.
~ The Long Emergency (300-1_.
James Howard Kunstler is a social critic and bestselling author of fictional and non-fictional books on resource depletion, urban planning and environmental degradation. His work has appeared in, and is favourably reviewed by, such progressive and liberal periodicals and newspapers as Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Slate and The New York Times. Kunstler’s focus on sustainability in urban planning, peak oil and the problems of resource depletion have made him a respected commentator who is regularly invited to give guest lectures at colleges and universities.
But there is another issue of great concern to Kunstler which has received almost no serious attention or comment: the importance of a “common culture” and refusal (as Kunstler sees it) of large swathes of Black America to partake in it. His first popular non-fiction work The Long Emergency (2005) ended with a section in which he discussed the probability of social breakdown under the pressures of resource depletion and climate change in a society in which he believed African American disfunctionalism and materialism had been allowed to flourish, enabled by cheap credit off the back of the oil boom and justified and excused by a professional class of “diversity cheerleaders”. “There are real political issues facing the black underclass minority in America” Kunstler declared, “and the outstanding one would seem to be how much longer significant numbers of them can afford to put off growing up. The twenty-year-long peak oil blowoff has made this experiment in arrested development possible” (298). His later non-fiction work on the same subjects, Too Much Magic (2012) pursued a similar trajectory. After devoting most of the book to an earnest discussion of the perils of climate change and other urgent issues, Kunstler ends with a chapter entitled “The Multicultural Dilemma” in which he develops an argument that multiculturalism is an ideology of the unsustainable twentieth century that arose in order to help white America deal with changing demographics, rather than from a genuine desire for social equality. The problem, as Kunstler explained in a web log entry on the death of black teenager Trayvon Martin, is that “the Civil Rights victories of 1964 and 1965 — the public accommodations act and voting rights act — created tremendous anxiety among African Americans about how they would fit into a desegregated society, so the rise of black separatism at exactly that moment of legislative triumph was not an accident. It offered a segment of the black population the choice of opting out of the new disposition of things”. Encouraged by the academics, journalists and commentators who espoused multiculturalism, Kunstler believes that Black culture, and specifically young Black men developed “an oppositional culture saturated in violence that will never accommodate itself to any kind of a common culture” (“American Anxiety” July 2013). After the more recent police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Kunstler doubled down on his victim-blaming rhetoric, asking “are we hard-wired to self-segregate . . . Do we have different standards of behavior for different races? Does that work? (“Mr Bad Example” August 2014).
Clearly Kunstler has a problem with African Americans and with Black culture, blaming everything from criminal activity to aggressive rap lyrics on a refusal to integrate with the “common culture” of America, a process he believes is aided and abetted by those he contemptuously refers to as “diversity cheerleaders” who excuse bad behaviour by pointing to injustices and inequalities in society. Whilst this is a particularly reactionary and simplistic response, Kunstler is, of course, entitled to his views and to expressing them in print. The real question though is why they haven’t been challenged by the media, particularly in the liberal and left-leaning journals and periodicals that would normally be alert for the kind of victim-blaming Kunstler indulges in, but which seem to be oblivious in this case. Neither is this effect limited to the media. Harlan Morehouse, a lecturer interested in the intersection of race, culture and the environment, writes in a blog post of his horror at attending a guest lecture by Kunstler at the University of Vermont at which Kunstler, after discussing the usual roll call of ecological and resource depletion threats began talking about post-oil agrarian communities and who would be suitable to participate in them and lead them. “It became clear” Morehouse remarks, “that Kunstler’s explanation of ‘who?’ was thoroughly racialized, sexualized, and masculinized”. Observing with some disquiet how the largely progressive audience of university students and faculty applauded the lecture Morehouse notes in bewilderment that “I was left wondering how such a seemingly ‘progressive’ and ‘forward-looking’ crowd could relish in a politics so acutely at odds with its apparent own” (“Reactionary Progressivism” Geocritique June 2013).
My chapter will use the example of James Howard Kunstler to ask why, in a twenty-first century world so acutely aware of the dangers of racism, such prejudiced and reactionary sentiments are allowed to go more or less unchallenged and the author of such sentiments be lauded as an important voice whose words must be heeded. It will look at the claim of necessity which is implied by reference to ecological imperatives and ask if we have been too willing to overlook the dangers of reactionary sentiments proffered under the guise of a discussion of ecological and societal breakdown. I will argue that this is not an isolated phenomenon, and that we cannot allow our concern over ecological degradation to blind us to the kind of exclusionary logic perpetuated in the books and blog postings of James Howard Kunstler and others like him who talk about the Black community only in terms of violence, failure and obstreperousness.