The book we are reading for this week is called Zeitoun, written by Dave Eggers. Zeitoun is a new kind of genre, a nonfiction. Eggers use the character in the book, called Kathy Zeitoun as a special perspective to portray the natural disaster Hurricane Katrina as well as the post-Katrina time. Hurricane Katrina took place at New Orleans in 2005. However, same as another tragedy took place in America, 9/11, I don’t know anything about Hurricane Katrina until last week, when Dr.Luger showed a documentary about Katrina.  Because I feel so distant about Hurricane Katrina, I am not sure about the correctness about my opinion. However, the first thought appeared in mind was so similar to what I felt when I started reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and getting into those small stories in 9/11. However, racism should the main topic this time.

As a matter of fact, the documentary Dr. luger firstly showed us formed the primary ideas about Hurricane Katrina. After finishing the documentary, I kept thinking that would the government react the same if Hurricane Katrina Happened in a modern and white community? At the beginning, what I learnt from documentary is that Hurricane Katrina was not as destructive as I imagined. Some of the buildings in the documentary was still intact under the wind and rain. To be honest, apart from the flooding, Hurricane Katrina was not as devastating as a high level of earthquake. So why people paid so much attention on this tragedy after the Hurricane was over? Above all, these were my superficial ideas for the first few minutes of that documentary. Then, there were several interviews of some of the refugees. I discovered that, in the video, most of the refugees are black, which made me to think about the problem of racism and racial discrimination. This documentary showed numbers of moment that made me think that if the black has less privilege than the white while being evacuated and accepting governmental help after the disaster. The people who was waving their hands and asking for help on a floating wood brick, the people who was sitting in front of the hospital waiting for treatment and the people who has become homeless after the disaster were all black people. Actually, the delay of governmental help could be the biggest killer after the disaster, because there were so many people died due to starving, disease, dehydration and infection and all of those causes could have been avoided if the governmental support could arrived faster. Even though New Orleans is one of the cities with the highest population of black people, I still can not shake the thought that racism was one of the reason that government did’t provide immediate aid.

Back to those discussion about 9/11, I mentioned that me, as an example, was ignorant about what happened in 9/11 and the impact of 9/11 until several years after it took place, and I pointed out that people from other country don’t actually care about those tragedy happened in other nations unless there  is a direct impact. However, apart from racial discrimination, I think those discussion can also be applied of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is not a prosperous city in USA and some people believe that the poor had been abandoned by society long before the storm. Radically, USA would not care about the poor much because there would be only little loss even if the poor were entirely destroyed. What is more destructive than a disaster is indifference.

The topics of this week was too diverse to come up with a general theme, but fortunately, we have invited a librarian from UBC’s library to give us a small lecture on our proposal article and thanks for that I get a jumpstart of my article as well as came up with something intriguing on this blog.

Last week I started reading Timothy Recuber’s article: The Prosumption of Commemoration: Disasters, Digital Memory Banks, and Online Collective Memory. This article mainly examines how the online commemoration mentally contribute to people who have suffer from the two disasters: 9/11 and the hurricane Katrina, the interdependence between online archive and the commemoration of disaster as well as how internet has created the construction of collective memory of tragedy or natural disaster. Timothy Recuber gathered information from many Internet forums of both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and he discovered that when people gather their ideas together and discuss that issues, the online commemoration would become therapeutic and healing. Moreover, the therapeutic commemoration somehow promotes the ramification of collective memory in some physical landscape. As matter of fact, not everything on this article is necessarily related to my proposal article, so I have just selected some valuable ideas.

My topic of my proposal article will be mainly examining that is it really possible that the collective memory and commemoration is therapeutic all the time?  It is undeniable that social network allows users to engage in various social cause including the commemoration of tragedy and disaster and Timothy has discovered that users are all seeking ”SELF-HELP” so that they can transform the traumatic emotions to something positive. Does online commemoration really help people in that way? The concept of collective makes me to connect it to something I have learnt in my psychology class. There is a term called: Group Polarization, which indicates that while people are discussing their opinion on something and they are listening to others, their own point of view becomes more extreme, because the discussion reveals points that was previously considered. Literally, this term is usually used in measuring how valid the experiment is. In the case like timothy’s article, is it really possible that all the collective memory and commemoration is positive in term of group polarization?  Are those discussions going to remind the people who have suffered from the disaster?  Are those online commemorations really acting as a remedy or those users are just having an illusion that they were healed?

We are also talking about wars and terrorism this week, but we have moved from Foer’s novel to a new article called “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”, written by Judith Butler. The main idea of Butler’s article is about the dislocation of perspective and the vulnerability of human. Butler pointed out that when people was looking at the tragedy of 9/11, many of them ignored certain things like the well-being or the death of the others, however, they only pay heavy attention to everything that matters the most to them. Meanwhile, there are several insightful questions in the article that worth considering: when is life grievable? what do we ignore? and who do we need to mourn?

Personally, 9/11 merely has some impact on me. I was in primary school when first I heard about that tragedy. What I could see on the media were how the government has react, how the American economy was impacted and how the refugees have moved on to new life. However, I could hardly hear any report of the died people. As I mentioned in the previous blog, what we see is what the media wanted us to see. The media might concealed something but I believe those people deserves to be concerned. Like Butler has mentioned “what allows a life to become visible precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way?” In some people’s eyes, they should focus more on their own benefit rather than concerning strangers’ life and it seems to me that people has the tendency to ignore things that are not related to them.  For example, I haven’t realized the seriousness of 9/11 until i turned high school. However, I still believe 9/11 is very distant. We can not say 9/11 has nothing to do with me. The exchange rates of currency might be changed, the airport security might be more restricted. But these events seem to be so remote as well. people would be indifferent if it did not impacted their life somehow.

Secondly, Butler also pointed out that everyone should accept his vulnerability to others, not just physically but also mentally. For example, people can easily get hurt, especially at war, but we can not deny the emotional impact of the war, even if the war zone is distant. Oskar in Foer’s novel i would be a great example. Oskar’s father lost his life during 9/11. Since then, Oskar has developed obsession on his father and become a entirely different boy to his family. Although Oskar hasn’t been in 9/11, we can still easily see his mental trauma, which magnifies the negative impact of terrorism and the emotional vulnerability of human. Foer’s novel is realistic example of Butler’s argument. Foer backs Butler up by showing how Oskar has emotionally suffer from the grief of the death of his father. Moreover, Butler’s article has conceptualized Foer’s story, like why Oskar was so vulnerable and why people were so indifferent about it.

In the first ASTU lesson, we started to read the novel called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. This book talks about one tragic story of a family in post-9-11. The boy named Oskar Schell has lost his father during this tragedy and he suffered a lot from that. He had extreme difficulties facing his father sudden death and somehow developed kind of symptom of PTSD, such as irrational thought and obsession of his father. Personally, I think Oskar is a weird kid. In the book,Oskar was portrayed as a mind wondering boy who is always inventing things. He was extremely curious about everything that is related to his father and he tried to find out how his father die, which is literally impossible at that time. Moreover, he abreacted his irrational anger of his father’s death on his mother. I believe Oskar is a character with more infection than Naomi, the girl we read in Obasan.

This book implicitly reflect the negative effect of war on terror. We can easily see that terrorism has the power to distort a kid’s psychological well-being. By using a small group of people, Oskar’s family, to reflect the situation of a larger society, Jonathan has made this book compelling and realistic. However, I found out that not every people is perfectly aware of it at that time. I was grade 4 when this tragedy happened, but I haven’t realize the seriousness of that event until I started my high school and I was not the minority that was unaware. Perhaps I was in China and the information faded when it got into our ears. What I heard the most at that time is about American economy’s fluctuation. All people were talking about is how America was going to react economically and how their own country was going to benefit, rather than showing their concern to families and children who were traumatized. Only when I finished the book, I realized how influential terrorism is, especially on children. It is quite revealing that people sometime cares more about what can they gain and ignores the well-being of the other’s.

Apart from the sociological perspective, I also found the book very intriguing. The difference between the novel I read before and this novel is that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is not novel that consist of only English characters in line. There was plenty of other element in this novel, such as letters Oksar wrote, interesting illustration. Some illustrations in the book seems to be totally irrelevant to the text, but somehow I can actually feel the implicit connecting in between.

Last week, I finished the first literature review about the term national memory with my group and we come up with the definition of it: National memory is the way we commemorate the past and perceive events in history as a nation through private and public memories, and from there construct and form the identity of our Nation. This week we started the book named Obasam by Joy Kogawa. It is a novel that tells a story about a little girl, Naomi, a Japanese Canadian during the WW2 and the novel is written in a child’s perspective. Yet I have not finished the book, but I found so many connection between them already, especially about national identity.

At the beginning, we know this story happen during the WW2, which indicates the relationship between Japan and countries  is not harmonious at all. At the same time, as a family with Japanese blood, their national identity have been chanlleged. At page 169, Kogawa brought up a piece of report about Canada’s Japanese repatriation plan. “670 solemn-faced Japanese…sailed out of Vancouver Friday night…..1000 of them will sail for Japan about June 15th”. This piece of news can fully demonstrate the relationship between Japan and Canada.The word I found interesting in is the Solemn-faced Japanese. Personally, I believe the word implies that those Japanese were not actually proud of their national identity during that time. Not a fair representation of the past because people share so many different perspectives based on their private memories, which may be altered and biased by your environment and personal experience.(Maggie Andrews)  In this situation, negative representation and the environment of war has altered the memory about Japanese and also that memory of Japanese. As a result, the national identity is altered as well.

That piece of news implicitly indicate how will Naomi and Stephen be discriminately treated in the school as well. And at the button of  page 67, there is an anecdote about Stephen. Stephen has been mocked because he has been recognized as a Japanese. However, when Stephen asked his father about his national identity, his father denied their Japanese identity. This part also  represent the Japanese were not proud of their identity at the moment and Naomi’s father was trying to bend in by the identity of Canadian. Again, this is another piece of evident that shows the national identity will be altered by the unfair representation or the present environment. Moreover, the most interesting part I found is the riddle at the button of this page, mentioned by Stephen: We are both the the enemy and not the enemy. This riddle ironically describes the awkward situation of a Canadian Japanese. Because they have the blood of both countries and the relationships is not at all harmonious.

Reference

Kogawa Joy, Obasan. Toronto: Penguin, 1983. print

Andrews, Maggie, Charlie Bagot-Jewitt, and Nigel Hunt. “Introduction: National Memory  and

War.” Journal of War & Culture Studies 4.3 (2011): 283-88. UBC Summon. Web. 15 Oct. 2014.

The texture of retracting in Marjane Satrapi’s “persepolis”(Hillary Chute 2008), published by the feminist press at city university of New Yorks is the topic I would choose for today’s blog. To be honest, I realized there is so much thing that need to be analyzed in depth after I finished skimming through the article. Obviously, it is an article that gives a deep analysis on the book persepolis in various perspective that is totally new for me, such as politic, traumatic experience, violence, pictorial features and memory.

First of all, I would start with the part that impressed me the most, the pictorial feature. Actually,  pictorial feature also has several subbranches, including the usage of colors and the style of the comic. Evidently, the colors are black and white and it differ persepolis from not only the today’s color-rich comic but also the traditional persian miniatures. Apart from what I discussed in the previous blog, there is something new. One statement by Chute caught my attention, ” The minimalist play of black and white is part of Satrapi’s stated aim, as with avant-garde tradition, to present event with a pointed degree of abstraction in order to call attention to the horror of history…” ( Chute 2008). With all due respect, I seriously doubt that. Chute mentioned the use of black and white can ultimately call attention to the horror of history. Even though I know little about avant-garde tradition, I can not actually have the same realization, because in my eyes, avant-grade tradition means the opposite of conservative and I can not find some relationship in between. In addition, in the end of the sentence, Chute mentioned “endemic images”, only then can I understand. Personally, I believe that history can only stay unadulterated when it is inherited in its own medium, like Chinese history should be told in Chinese. So, endemic images, as another kind of medium, is making a perfect sense.

Sequently, the perspective of traumatic experience and violence is another interesting topic to me.  It is not hard to discover that dead body or piece of it are consistently appearing in the book, and fatal punishment, executions, torture are somehow becoming significant role in persepolis. However, I can only feel its reality rather than something horrific. Then there is a terminology “ostensibly transparent representational model”, which can literally explain the reason why i have that feeling. Moreover, by drawing those image in the perspective of a child, Satrapi was actually demonstrating that model. Personally, depicting in a child’s eye is, in some way, more effective. However, according to Chute, there is no perspective can fully represent trauma, just like we can not thoroughly describe something abstract, like the word–horror. This is the part I share the same feeling.

At first I got the book “Persepolis”, I was surprised, because this is the first time a comic book is required as a textbook. Actually, I love reading comic book, so, immediately, Persepolis evoked my interest. Then I explored deeper about this book…

The background is set in 1980, under the Iran-Iraq War and revolution. The author Satrapi used two perspective, the main character, Marji and the narrator Marjane to convey ideas. On the first hand, using Marji to create the main string, in the eye of a child, on the other hand while the narrator Marjane is providing supplement to the story. Personally, I am impressed by this kind of genre. Unlike those comic book I read before, they usually use the firs person angle. As a matter of fact, they’ve never use two aspect throughout the whole book, which makes the book less idea-voluminous

Moreover, the role of Marji, in my opinion, is very colorful. Marji’s brain is full of fantasy. She love western culture. She always dreams to talk to god and be the last prophet. However, in the eyes of conservative Iran women, marji is quite a symbol of western corruption and her mother and grandmother have no idea to “correct” her idea. Evidently, this part can connect to the “global citizen” concept, which is Multi-culture should be accepted. Actually, Marji is actually a good demonstration of global citizen, because she did not resist foreign culture and turn back to stereotype under people’s judgement. For more specific example, we can look at the “veil” chapter, every women are required to wear veil. After Marji’s mother has been taking photo in the street demonstration and the photo has been published, she dyed her hair and wore sunglasses for a long time. Although, the publisher is forbidden to publish people’s picture without the person’s permission, in my eye, this is a kind of loss of identity, because she was not willing to be recognized by other. However, Marji was looking forward to take part in demonstration since she was child but her parent did not allow her to. Obviously, the contrast can verify the point.

Beside, I found that the style of those pictures are impressive, not only just because it is black and white, but also I found tremendous metaphors and symbolizations. Despite of those we have talked about in class, I found numbers of them as well. The most important one is the imagine of god in page 13.The appearance of god is in mostly white with some simple black curve, and the background is completely black. It gave me a strong contradiction between black and white. It did conveyed that god is very holy and important to Marji. Secondly, I discover that sizes of imagines are various accordingly. Such as pages 42, 95, 116, the author used a entire page for picture, and the event or story in that page is actually more important than others. In a word, the significance of the event and the idea the author tried to convey can be reflected from the size of the imagine.

While I was exploring deeper, I found a movie edition of Persepolis: The subtitle is in my mother language and I found there are some slight difference in between. The languages used in the movie is interesting and the action of those characters are more vivid. Unfortunately, there is no free english subtitle edition. For those who are really interesting, you can pay for it.

To be honest, I don’ have anything valuable to write on my first blog, so I can just talk about my feeling after class. Now I just have a vague idea about university essay writing, which is, in my opinion, very complicated. In my high school life, even international school, I have no idea about university essay writing, let alone genre, skills of citation, or any things else we have learned in class. At that time, we don’t need to communicate with previous scholars and we don’t need to find the gap of knowledge, which is a possible reason of essay written in high school remains in highs school. However, as we stepped in to a higher level of education, we need to master this skills.

Actually before the ASTU, I know a kind of format of writing, called APA style. It is most common format in psychology essay in USA and it is required in my nowadays psychology essay writing as well. APA has its way to title and cite. I don’t have a specific idea because I didn’t get that far, but I believe APA style will share some similarities with the style we are learning. In senior high school, we just need a clear frame, appropriate support of your views and enough word number. Since there are so many differences, I realize the important of having this class.

Most importantly, we need a unified format of essay to provide knowledge for the further student in standard way, so that they can explore more on the base of our ideas. Then I thought about citation. Undoubtedly, the knowledge of previous scholar should be protected, that is the reason way we need to have citations.  Moreover, we do need the list of references to find out the reliability and sources of your evidence. Abstract can give readers a brief introduction of what you are doing immediately. Lastly, communication to the previous scholars and find the gaps of konwledge is the most essential part, because we are standing at giants’ shoulder so that we can explore something new. The gist of research is to find out the insufficiency or the improvable parts so that we can contribute to that, and that is what communication can help with.

Because the lesson have just begun, my opinions may be very superficial. As we are getting deeper, maybe I can come up something with depth. One last thing, in the APA style, I don’t know why we need a entire blank paper just for writing down title and author, is that environmental? haha.

If you are taking psych and you want to know more about APA, here is the link. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/.

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