Hey Bloggers,

Its hard to believe that it has been since term one that I have been the class blogger, and it is also equally hard to believe that we are almost finished our first year at University!  So much has gone on since then in ASTU, but these past few weeks in particular there has been a lot that has happened.  We recently read a short story entitled “Redeployment” by Phil Klay that follows the return home of a American Soldier that has been fighting in Afghanistan and how being overseas has really changed what it is like for him now at home.  We also had the opportunity to participate in a very interesting joint lecture held by some of our CAP professors that focused on the Black Lives Matter movement, so in this post I want to focus on the blogs that covered those two topics in particular.

The joint lecture that we had on the movement that is Black Lives Matter- often seen on social media as #BlackLivesMatter- has an interesting overlap with the material that we have been analyzing in ASTU.  In particular we have been looking at post 9/11 literature that has also labelled there to be a “good” guy and a “bad” guy. In Ryan’s blog he talks about the work of Judith Butler is relates to the Black Lives Matter movement as she has forced us to consider this distinction between “us” and “them” that has been around for longer that most of us have lived.  Butler’s work also centred upon who’s life we see as grievable and who’s lives we don’t, who are we responsible for and who are we not?  In Clara’s blog she also decided to focus on the Black Lives Matter lecture and talked about one of the websites that we had to look at.  The photo she provided in her blog with all the “dead” bodies that are meant to represent Michael Brown and the way he was killed shocked me too.  It really put into perspective for me just how bad the situation was, just how black men are shot by police each year is shocking.  Along with that image Clara also brings in the theories of Judith Butler to question who lives matter and who’s don’t? How can the police force and the US government justify their actions towards the black population?

Along with the blogs about our Black Lives Matter lecture there were also a number of blogs about the short story “Redeployment” by Phil Klay, Martin’s blog, Jackson’s blog and Erin’s blog, focus on this topic. I found Jackson’s blog was interesting to read because he made a comparison of Klay’s story to the Hollywood film American Sniper, the movie shares many similarities to Klay’s short story.  Connections are made because both characters are military men who have many internal troubles and a lot of emotional baggage following their return home from war.  Both characters share the reality that home doesn’t feel like home anymore, they come to a conclusion that they feel more at home and more significant when they are fighting at war.  In her blog Erin focuses on the narrative of Sgt.Price in the story and how he invites us to see the return home of a soldier as a harsh and upsetting thing, not a reunion full of smiles and tears of joy.  Along with that Erin also looks at Klay’s story through the lens of Judith Butler who questions what life we distinguish as grievable, particularly in this story that concerns the lives of the Iraqi’s.  Lastly Alex’s blog is similar to Jackson’s as it centres upon the film interpretation of stories like these.  Alex talks about the PTSD that some soldiers experience after they return home from war having seen horrific things, and how something as simple and comfortable as going grocery shopping can be so scary and unfamiliar.

Those are just a few of the topics that the blogs were about last week, other topics discussed include The Reluctant Fundamentalist and various post 9/11 poetry that we analyzed in class. Great job of the blogs!

Until next Time,

Magda 🙂

Hello fellow bloggers!

After reading all of the great blogs from this week I was quite surprised not to see an overwhelming response to one book or topic, all of the blogs were more or less about different things.  This was good because it gave me an opportunity to read about lots of different and interesting topics!  Some of the common themes I found when reading were that a few people focused on the recent literature review and group presentation we did in class, and others focused on the graphic narrative Safe Area Gorazde written by Joe Sacco, and his illustration style.

Some of the blogs that focused on the recent literature review and group presentation were Paolina’s blog, Kate’s blog, Erin,s blog, Gabo’s blog, and Inneke’s blog .  I found all of these blogs shared to be similar in that each blogger introduced their key word that they were given to research and told us a little bit about the scholarly conversation on that key word.  Both Inneke and Kate wrote about ‘forgetting’ as their key word and Gabo focused on his key word that was ‘Technologies of memory’.  When Paolina wrote about ‘cultural memory,’ she provides us with definitions of how other scholars define it and how it ties into the novel we have just finished in class which is titled Obasan by Joy Kogawa.  Paolina explains that Obasan is a good example of cultural memory and how it is produced through a traumatic event.  Another blogger who talked about their keyword was Erin.  Erin focused on ‘national memory’ and came at it from more of her own perspective.  She introduces the term ‘selective remembering’ which Sturgeon defines as the act of “strategically forgetting painful events that may be too dangerous to keep in active memory” (Sturken 7).   In her blog Erin argues that the events of the transatlantic slave trade were are not an act of selective remembering, and are taught often in schools in America.  Rather the bombs dropped in 1945 by the Americans in  Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would be a more appropriate example of selective remembering from an American point of view.

There were three blogs that addressed Sacco’s drawing style in Safe Area Gorazde (Alex, Sandra, and Mia).  If I had not been the class blogger this week, I would have chosen to analyze further the illustration style of Joe Sacco.  Both Sandra and Alex compare Sacco’s drawing style to the style used in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.  The drawings in Persepolis are much more simplistic and a lot less detailed, it almost appears that they could have been drawn by a child.  In contrast Sacco illustrates in such detail, he uses an immense amount if expression in every persons face.  The amount of detail he uses really helps to understand the harshness and the trauma that all the people of Gorazde are faced with.  Alex brings up a good point in his blog about Persepolis being a first hand account and Safe Area Gorazde being written form the eyes of a journalist.  Does this have anything to do I wonder with the way that each author chooses to illustrate?  Sandra picks up on the fact that Sacco’s drawings don’t look like drawings in a regular comic book, and that may seem unappealing and/ or peculiar when one first starts to read it.  Mia also  contributes by focusing primarily on the faces of the people in Gorazde.  Sacco creates what seems like a real person coming out of the book, he adds every detail such as wrinkles, and shading around the eyes.  Mia observes that maybe the words on the page can not fully describe how powerful the image actually is, and that often an image speaks louder than words.  I agree with her on that, I think that with the images being so detailed it is easy to get an accurate representation of what is going on by just the drawing alone.

I hope that my blog gave everyone a bit more insight on what infamous ASTU class was blogging about this week!

Until next time,

Magda Adkins 🙂