Hello Readers!

This week we reflected upon two scholarly articles: Ilka Saals, Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Narrative Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Judith Butler’s Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect.” Frames of War: When is a Life Grievable? London: Verso. Butler’s article was mainly discussed in this week’s class blogs as it regards the impact of interpretation and perspective through the concept of how we remember trauma through the way we value life.

Let’s start off with Priya who questions why the lives of some people are given more importance than others. She told her bloggers that it made her wonder that if we still have the ‘us’ and ‘them’ perspective then why claim to be ‘globalized’. When the term global citizen really exists then why don’t we consider everyone as one of ‘us’ and why don’t we eliminate the ‘them’ perspective. Likewise, Sania’s questions how a global citizen can relate to what Butler is trying to say, where the global voice will always value some people over others. Nicola ponders the idea that everyone is vulnerable and able to use trauma transfer, which was prominent in Saal’s essay. She uses the example of the Syrian refugees coming to Canada as a key indication to show the world that the ‘us’ and ‘them’ concept is diminishing. With this hopeful perspective there is a great recognition of mutual vulnerability between people. Through a different interpretation, Kihan was the only blogger who talked about the c̓esnaʔәm Tour. She connected the tour to the ‘us’ and ‘them’ where she illustrates that the burial ground is a celebrated multicultural Canadian society and a mainstream public’s apathy towards Indigenous ancestors which alludes to a greater issue of a mainstream Canadian view of Indigenous lives as “ungreivable”.

Moreover, Ina says who we identity ourselves with and how we differentiate ourselves based on personal values, beliefs, culture, gender or looks. She inquiries on whom and how one decided one person’s value over another’s and how we deiced whom we go to war with. She made a very interesting point by illustrating that there always seems to be sides and the ‘us’ and ‘them’ almost seems unavoidable in some situations. Kendall indicates, “You’re either with me, or a threat to me.” This frame of mind has been the natural self-preservation instinct that has kept humans alive for thousands of years. This made Kendall believe that humans are capable of understanding one another, despite differences in culture, religion, beliefs, and norms (basically the way we value life).

On the other hand, Kaveel explains how he is still unable to voice his thoughts because he is still puzzled why the US does what it does on the world stage. The issue of ‘frames’ as a negative force is one that was largely emphasized in Butlers work. Kaveel reveals that Butler really goes deep into the issues of morality of war and discusses the frame we often perceive of, the US wanting to spread their ‘ideals’ and doing well for the world by American Exceptionalism. Which takes me to Nico who also expands upon American exceptionalism. He believes that there seems to be a large inconsistency between the justifications a country in the West would receive in comparison to a country in the Global South. He shows us how perspectives from a larger context connect to an ethnocentric lens to view humanity.

Taylor denotes how Butler focuses on the vulnerability of the body, as well as the impact of interpretation and perspective regarding the lens through which we see and remember trauma. With some deaths that affect us more deeply than others she says we value different peoples’ deaths at varying degrees. In another manner, Dione’s blog conveys the reason why it is not beneficial to understand one event through another is because numerical comparison is hard to avoid. Finally, Diego’s uses the word “pseudo-comic book” to explain how both the imagery and text are present throughout the novel. Even though this book does not look like a regular graphic novel the imagery still had a lot of meaning with the intense imagery.

Overall, the blogs written this week were very insightful even with the difficulty of Butler’s essay. The blogs posed a lot of questions, which went further with the themes of absence and misconnection that we talked about last week in class and I cannot wait to read more!

Anyways, thanks for reading my long blog!

-Imaan