Forget the ivory tower … Dr. Ania Loomba would prefer a tent. A tent outside City Hall, that is. A professor of literature, Renaissance studies, post-colonialism, and feminist theory, she knows a thing or two about activism and social justice. Therefore, it may not be a surprise that Loomba is a strong proponent of the Occupy movement and a leader of the student and faculty group OccupyPenn.
Loomba was born and raised in India, where she studied for three of her four degrees. She later got her Ph.D. in England, and after moving back and forth between the U.S. and India she and her husband finally settled in Philadelphia. She has been teaching at Penn since 2003.
Loomba describes her areas of expertise as 16th and 17th centuries English literature and culture and 20th century postcolonial studies. She teaches classes in Renaissance studies (she calls renaissance drama her “first love”), the history of race and colonialism, gender studies and feminist theory (her first book was about disorderly women during the renaissance), as well as post-colonial studies and South Asian literature and culture. (This spring, she’s teaching English 101: Shakespeare and Film, and English 769: Dissent: history, theories and futures.) Dr. Loomba recognizes a common thread in her work, from “the classes I teach, the books that I write… I became an academic so that I could actually talk about justice and equality, and Occupy is just an extension of that,” she told Her Campus.
Her Campus sat down with Professor Loomba to talk about the Occupy movement and why Penn students should care about it. Read on to find out why Professor Loomba’s activism makes her a true campus celebrity.
Her Campus: How did you get involved in the Occupy movement?
Dr. Ania Loomba: In a very practical way I have been thinking about questions of inequality in my classes for years. In the beginning I was just generally reading about this movement and just about the time when it started I was going to give a talk in Chicago about Renaissance political systems and a friend of mine who was also going to be a panelist at that symposium was going to talk about the commons (the enclosure of public land in renaissance England). I was also teaching Thomas More at that time, and we were just reading Utopia, where he criticizes how the rich began to enclose more and more common land and a lot of people were rendered poor.
Then, the occupation here started and I wandered downtown and I saw this big banner that said “commons, not capitalism.” I took a picture of this and I sent it to my friend, and she asked me “is your campus doing anything about this? Because Columbia University has a big statement of support, and over 200 faculty have signed it and their president has signed it, and we are doing the same at Syracuse.” So then a group of us actually got together and we drafted a faculty letter of support.
Then, I started going into the occupation, and I got more involved bit by bit. I met some young students actually from Penn who had started a people of color group, but there was everybody there: white people, black people, Latinos, Indians, everybody. These young people were really trying to bring it home to Philadelphia, and they were dealing with the curfew law and the stop-and-frisk policy. In effect, these students were arguing that these policies had become a way of monitoring black people. They were saying that Occupy Philly needs to look at the situation on the ground in Philadelphia.
Basically, from the faculty statement and students getting involved, we were talking about forming a bigger group, and just at that time an Iraq War veteran was shot at the protest in Oakland. In Philadelphia, they had asked for a 99-minute strike in support of this protestor who was struggling in the hospital, so we decided to meet in front of Van Pelt Library. There were students, faculty, and staff workers, and at that point we just said that anybody who wanted to join this group could join it, and that’s how we formed a small group called OccupyPenn. I mean, we’re not really pitching our tents and occupying Penn, but it is a support group.
HC: Could you sum up the exact message of the Occupy movement?
AL: Well, basically what they are expressing is anger against the profound inequality that we see everywhere in society around us. But, I think more than that they see that it is a kind of economic system gone wrong, a system that has created a way for the rich to be constantly bailed out and helped by the government and the poor to be abandoned. I think what they’re precisely targeting is the nexus of government and big business. They want to see that broken. They would like whoever is in power to take note of the miserable state of affairs for the majority of people in this country.
HC: What does the concept of the “99 percent” mean to you?
AL: This phrase was really coined by the economist Joseph Stiglitz, when he wrote an article for Vanity Fair entitled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” He said “The top one percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”
We are all part of the 99 percent. There is no way we are part of the top 1 percent. But, I think beyond the question of where exactly you are on the spectrum, there’s a way in which you can join and be part of the movement for greater equality. We all have to get together to address the system. If the rich were only going to back the rich and the poor were only going to back the poor, you couldn’t talk about creating a solution in any way. It just wouldn’t work. You have to talk a little bit about the good that you can do for somebody that’s not you.
HC: What do you think of the criticism that “America’s 99 percent is the world’s 1 percent?” Is that a valid criticism of the movement?
AL: In many ways, it’s true that the levels of poverty are much more drastic in other parts of the world, and even if you’re very disaffected in the United States, you’re still a citizen of the most powerful country in the world. But if we keep looking at it that way then we will never be able to talk about questions of inequality and injustice within this country. Americans are very privileged, but the conditions of poverty that I see here are pretty appalling, and they have to be seen in their own terms. There’s no use looking at who is the poorest in the world. I think it’s completely wrong to say that every American is better off than everybody everywhere else. Let’s address issues of poverty, inequality, destitution and unfairness going on within America.
HC: Do you see the potential for Occupy to make a big impact and bring about real changes?
AL: I think that depends on how much this movement can be sustained by a majority of the people. This country has been seriously lacking in the culture of public protest, but through this movement I have met some of the most amazing students here at Penn and here in Philadelphia. They do not have all the answers, but they are asking the right questions. For me, that’s the most important thing. How can you get the right answers if you don’t even allow people to first say something is wrong?
From my point of view, this movement is already a huge success because it has forced the public discourse in this country to change a little bit. People are now talking about it. Voters in Ohio have just voted to preserve unions’ bargaining rights, and I don’t think they would have done that without this movement. This movement is not going to be very easy to swallow for a lot of people, because it’s asking some very fundamental questions.
HC: What do you think Occupy needs to do to sustain its current momentum?
AL: It has to be an imaginative movement … it can’t be only about physical occupation. If it’s going to last and if it’s going to really make a change it’s going to have to do many more things than just physically squatting places. It has to go and conceptually occupy a lot of spaces. It’s spawning off a lot of movements, people are taking it and running with it in a lot of different ways.
HC: Any last piece of advice for Penn students about what they can do to help?
AL: All the most beautiful literature and art in the world must think about human relations. We say so much about caring and empathy, but I think its time to think about what it really means for us on an everyday basis. As one of the students here at Occupy Penn put it, it’s not an extracurricular. It’s not what you should be doing in your free time, but you should be thinking about it and doing it all the time. It should inform whatever you do. You are all privileged students, so use that privilege a little bit; spread it around. You should give and share, but charity is not the same as working to make sure that the system is such that people will need less charity from you. The culture of giving is much stronger in the U.S. than it is in my native India, and that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t replace action.