Author Archives: peijia ding

Connections and broken lines

Hello everyone,

Hope everyone is having a great reading week so far!

There was a whole range of responses this week in regards to what we learned in ASTU for past few weeks, ranging from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer to the discussion of monuments of war and art of 9/11 to poetry of Juliana Spahr in This Connection of Everyone with Lungs.

Many students decided to focus on the poetry by Juliana Spahr, written in response to the event of 9/11. Jacqueline wrote about the physical effect of Spahr’s “Poem written after September 11/2001” and how the structure of her poem forces the readers to breathe in a way similar to mediation in yoga. This physical connection of Spahr’s work is distinctly tied to Butler’s concept of “the body” and its interconnectedness to other individuals and events around the world. Similarly, this point is also picked up by Nico, who elaborates that it is because of our interdependence on one another and the precariousness of life through our perishable bodies is why we are interconnected.

Yet this idea of connectedness is challenged by Raphael, who questions whether “it is too optimistic or idealistic” in the fact that we can generalize all human beings as connected. Which is a very true statement to make, because in a sense, we are divided by many social boundaries such as class and wealth. I agree with Raphael in that matter because there is the question of how exactly is this connection between one another the same – especially considering the social, economic and political factors that goes into the creation of human connections. I can see a sense of disconnection through Mariana’s post about the bed analogy in Spahr’s poems, how it is a place of privacy and comfort that is protected by geological locations. Therefore, those who are safe in a bed in one area of the world is not fully or truly connected to other human beings who are not in the same situation as that individual.

This leads me into Rachel’s blog post, in which she talks about her experience as the 3rd generation of war survivors. When Raphael questioned this connection between humans around the world, I felt like Rachel’s connection with other humans regarding war/trauma would not be the same as her grandparents’ connection – which further emphasizes the point that the connections of people cannot be generalized to the mere fact that we breath that therefore we are connected.

On the other hand, Isabelle and Kihan focused on a more architectural and artistic rendition to the event of 9/11 and its aftermath. Isabelle focused on a sculpture created as a result of 9/11, the “Tumbling Woman” by Eric Fischl. The controversy of this sculpture was surrounded around how it was perceived, as a woman hitting the ground at high impact rather than the supposed graceful dancer. Isabelle noted that because the sculpture was not hung in the air, it portrayed a whole different meaning than what it could have meant if it were hung. How a public representation of (a) trauma through a physical structure is also critiqued by Kihan, who focuses on the transition of monuments – from the pedestal-styled glorified war heroes to an interactive and inclusive contemporary monuments that commemorates the “elusive collective”.

The term of the “elusive collective” is also seen in Diego’s post, in which he questions the identities of those who died in the 9/11 attack. He implies that it isn’t just “white” Americans who passed away in this attack, but also people who were of the same race as the terrorists and other minorities. Therefore it poses the question of “who has the right to say that they suffered more or less?” because ultimately, everyone suffered as a collective whole from 9/11.

That is to say, the topics and discussions of ASTU in the past few weeks really opened my eyes to ideas and concepts that I never experienced before. Never would I have thought poetry could control me physically nor have I ever thought about monuments in different perspectives. But I am curious about just how really connected are we and the validity of that connection – especially with the ongoing development of technology and communications – and perhaps we shouldn’t use the same standards of judging and interpreting these connections as times continue to change. That aside, there were so many other great blogs I couldn’t get to this week but I would definitely recommend you guys to take a look!

Keep writing and keeping enjoying your reading break!

– Peijia Ding

Link

Hi, my name is Peijia and I am one of the class bloggers for this week! That is to say, I hope I can formulate an interesting class post for this week’s ASTU reading, which is an article called “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” by Farhat Shahzad. This article goes on to explore how interpretive communities around us shape how humans learn and interact with one another.While Shahzad never made a solid conclusion as to how these communities actually shape how we learn and remember, I did find some similar themes of questioning self-identity from some of the blogs posted this week.

The blogs of Ken Sakamoto and Kihan Yoon-Henderson (hi if you are reading this!) explore the interpretative communities that exist in their lives that seem to be a little more confusing than the rest of us. The reason for that is (that) they are both of mixed blood, with parents from different parts of the world and each with their own different cultures. In their blogs, both of them identify with struggling to choose with which race they identified more of – being Asian (sorry to be general but just to keep it simple) or White? Both of them have a similar response, in which that being seen as more “White” was more favoured than being seen as “Asian”. This is not surprising considering that most of the world’s population in some sense tries to cater to the “White”/Western culture.

So what exactly do I mean by that?

There is a lot of push towards identifying yourself as White or Western as opposed to a minority race. This is because of how our society is set up. Kihan mentions in her blog post how in Korea, her looks are sought after by Korean citizens who desire a more Western look. Ken, on the other hand, seemed to idolize his American background for a period of time.

Why is this happening?

The answer could be found in history. In my history class, we learn how Britain and France and all these countries with a large Caucasian background colonized and brought their ideologies to all other parts of the world. Similarly, in sociology, this concept of colonizing and spreading western ideologies was also discussed. And now this term of “colonizing” or “assimilating” may—in fact—actually be globalization.

While we usually think of globalization as a positive spread of many cultures, it actually may not be. In an alternate perspective, the term globalization can also be seen as Westernization. For example, the globalization of fast food joints such as McDonald or KFC is historically tied in with Western culture. By bringing these fast food joints to other areas of the world, not only are we serving non-traditional foods with a side of fries, we are also serving the idea that you can be a part of the western culture when you consume Western products. So does that mean the interpretative community of your local fast food joint really does impact how people self-identify if the communities of these joints are not local to the area? To some degree, yes, it does. Look at this one blog (How McDonald is posh in China) explaining the significance of McDonald in China, and how its interpretative community represents not only the western culture, but also a status of middle class. If you want to be seen as a somewhat affluent, westernized individual in China, McDonald is an acceptable place to go.

I realize I went on a bit of a tangent, but I feel there is some connection between how individuals like Ken and Kihan to the larger movement of globalization to other parts of the world in terms of how to identify who or what you belong with. While they have been personally impacted by the interpretative communities of family and school, we can also realize that large scales of worldwide or cultural communities also exist. The Western culture can be seen a giant interpretative community that shapes parts of life as we know it. That leads me to think, as the world continues to globalize and change, will there really be an identity we can clearly distinguish for ourselves?

Peijia Ding