In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept across the city of New Orleans, bringing with it unprecedented damage and destruction. However, as we have recently discussed in my ASTU class, Hurricane Katrina was not as much a natural disaster as a ‘policy’ disaster. Many of the preconditions in New Orleans, especially the geographic concentration of poverty-struck African Americans and other minorities near the weakest levees, set a vulnerable precedent for the hurricane to easily take advantage of. However this was not the only reason for the horrors that ensued after the hurricane came and went.

We also discussed in class what role the inadequacy of bureaucratic institutions had in the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Lots of red tape and bureaucratic restrictions not only impeded the immediate help being brought to New Orleans, but also left lasting impacts on the city for future years, resulting in many evacuees not returning to the city following immediate evacuation. A Pittsburgh Post Gazette article posted in September of 2005 noted how immediately following the hurricane, Homeland Security and the US National Guard restricted the Red Cross and other emergency relief organizations from delivering food as it contradicted the required evacuation policies in place in the city. This delayed aid process left huge amounts of death and damage, as can be seen by many statistics, including the fact that 11% of the deaths from Hurricane Katrina came from heart conditions (most likely due to a lack of access to medication). These bureaucratic faults are also very prevalent in the book Zeitoun, telling the narrative of a Syrian-American man who stays in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and provides help immediately following the storm.

Immediately following the storm, the character Zeitoun experiences a horrific arrest by the national guard, and is led to a makeshift prison in a bus station, complete with wired fencing and portable toilets. Author Dave Eggers uses this example to show the prioritization of allocating resources to a prison as opposed to the suffering people in the downtown area. Together the facts of bureaucratic faults as well as the traumatic narrative in Eggers’s novel enlighten an image of chaos that ensues when bureaucracy and red tape meet with emergencies in need of immediate response. Following the outcomes of Hurricane Katrina, from literary accounts to statistics, it is obvious that there is a need for innovation to create new bureaucratic practices that can act productively when faced with emergencies, not in the ways that the National Guard dealt with Hurricane Katrina.

Sources:

Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2009. Print.

“Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts”

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/23/us/hurricane-katrina-statistics-fast-facts/

“Homeland Security won’t led Red Cross Deliver Food”

http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/05246/565143.stm

Earlier in the school year, our ASTU class read the graphic memoir Safe Are Gorazde by Joe Sacco. The book follows Sacco, an American journalist, reporting on testimonies (mostly individual) from the war in Eastern Bosnia in the early 1990’s. Although the author does provide some factual evidence at times, the majority of the book is spent telling individual stories from Bosnian muslims of their personal experiences from the genocide that took place. As much as the individual testimonies do create a mosaic of narratives from this violent period, the similarity found in many of the narratives causes me to question if the book is really working to create a variety of viewpoints, or more-so a single-view, master narrative of trauma. And if the book is really only creating one master narrative, how restrictive is this to the reader’s understanding of what took place in Gorazde?

This idea came to me after our class read an article by American literature scholar Ilka Saal, discussing the role of narrative perspectives in trauma literature. Although the article focused on a different piece of literature, I believe some of the concepts can easily be applied to Safe Area Gorazde. Discussing post-trauma narratives, Saal suggests, “translating of the wound into narrative poses important aesthetic and ethical questions… with regard to what kind of narrative perspectives, structures, and tropes we ultimately deploy to render the ineffable fathomable”. In other words, Saal is arguing that when putting human trauma into literary format, it is important to be considerate when choosing which perspectives are remembered and which are forgotten. “Formal decisions are crucial in determining our historical, cultural, and political understanding of the event” (Saal). With this condition in mind, it is hard to look at Sacco’s book merely as a narrative mosaic of various testimonies; Safe Area Gorazde can clearly be seen as a well organized collaboration of various testimonies of the same perspective. As before reading Saal’s article, I felt that the book gave me a well-rounded understanding of what took place in Gorazde, I am now questioning some of the assumptions I made earlier about trauma journalism. I now see that to get a fuller understanding of what took place in Gorazde, it is essential to expand your readings past one piece of literature — however varying that piece of literature may seem — as literary accounts of trauma are almost always entered around just one perspective.

Sources:

Saal, Ilka. “Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 451-476 Web. Project Muse. 25 February 2015.

Sacco, Joe. Safe Area Goražde. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2000. Print.

Recently in my Arts Studies class, we read the collection Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak as part of our study of memory pertaining to 9/11 and the war on terror. The book contains a collection of poems, written in various styles, by detainees at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison. The poems cover a range of tropes, mostly dealing though with a sense of frustrated longing. Another important aspect of the book though is the careful notice to give biographical context to each individual poet. One of these biographies reads, “Sheikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost is a Pakistani poet and essayist…. Dost was a respected religious scholar, poet, and journalist… before his arrest in 2001” (Falkoff 33). These short biographies serve to contextualize the poem the reader is about to encounter, and possibly affect the way that the reader understands the message.

In our CAP geography class one concept we recently talked about was the idea of commodity fetishism, an aspect of consumer culture where the consumer only looks at a commodity or good (i.e. an iPhone, soccer ball, etc.) as an individual object (Barnes, 2015). Off of this idea, Marx has then argued a need to defetish – to grasp the real life of – a commodity. To “defetish” commodities, geographers often create commodity/supply chain analyses that trace the trajectory of a product, “from its conception and design, through production, retailing, and final consumption” (Barnes 2015). Below is an example of a commodity chain analysis for shark fins in East Asia.

Although this sonly one example of a commodity chain analysis, practically any physical good can be directed in this way. Can the process of defetishing commodities only apply to physical objects though? Looking at Poems from Guantanamo I would argue not, with the poets’ biographies as the main example. Without the biographies, the collection of poems would simply appear to come from an ambiguous, generalized prisoner. However, with the biographical context of each poet, the reader is reminded of the significance of each individual prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, in a sense “defetishing” them, and seeing how their lives outside of prison have affected the world. This act of human defetishing reminds us that each person is their own individual, and could be seen to contradict the narcissistic “us and them” dichotomy that has become so prevalent in the post-9/11 era.

Sources:

Barnes, Trevor. “Commodity Fetishism.” University of British Columbia. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. 30 January 2015. Lecture.

Falkoff, Marc. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 2007. Print.

This term, our ASTU class will be focused around 9/11 and the war on terror. As we had a lot of discussion last term about memory and its role in various aspects of modern life, I’d like to start off this term with some discussion about memory in the context of terrorism. There are many ways you could connect these two topics, but for this blog I’d like to focus on the question: what happens to memory when terror strikes? We have already discussed heavily in class 9/11 and many of the outcomes including the sense of unity that arose between the American people following the attack. However, this unity did not include Muslim Americans, those citizens who by merely practicing their first amendment rights (freedom of religion) were grouped with the extremists responsible for the attacks on September 11th. And according to an article by The Daily Beast, the “anti-muslim bigotry” initially sparked by the attacks, has only grown steadily over recent years. Dean Obeidallah notes in this article, “Today… only 27% of Americans have a favourable view of Muslim-Americans.” Even when we spent time in class discussing what came to mind when we thought about the phrase, “9/11”, no one mentioned the anti-Arab sentiment that has become character of much of the western world. This goes to show that terror may have a dangerous effect not only on our immediate emotions, but also on our lasting memory.

Another example of looking at terrorism interfering with memory can be found in the recent Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, where extremists killed 12 journalists. In the aftermath of this attack, social media sites have been covered in the newly-iconic “Je suis Charlie” picture, which online users share or like to show their support of the “freedom of speech” that was attacked on January 7th.

However good these intentions of protecting “free speech” may be, many users who share this photo are horribly unaware of the free speech that they are supporting. The Charlie Hebdo magazine is, as Sara Flounders puts it, “notorious for its racist, anti-muslim caricatures.” Most notably, the satirical magazine is known for depicting the prophet Muhammad in “grossly obscene” ways (Flounders). In another response to the outcry of this attack, Huffington Post UK journalist Mehdi Hasan says, “Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic,” criticizing this “satirical” magazine on the principles of their content. The Charlie Hebdo attack has shown how much grey area there is in the often black and white, clash of civilizations-esque concept of terrorism. Both through 9/11 and the recent attack in Paris, we can see how when terror strikes, memory is often blinded causing us to create these black and white ideas of what is happening around us.

Sources

Flounders, Sara. “Charlie Hebdo, the Free Press and Racism.” Workers World. N.p., 13 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2015.

Hasan, Mehdi. “As a Muslim, I’m Fed Up With the Hypocrisy of the Free Speech Fundamentalists.” The Huffington Post UK. AOL, 13 Jan. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2015.

Obeidallah, Dean. “13 Years After 9/11, Anti-Muslim Bigotry Is Worse Than Ever.” The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. 14 Jan. 2015.

In our ASTU class these past few weeks we have been reading and focusing on the novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa. One of the important events that we brought up while discussing this book was when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney used excerpts from Obasan in his formal apology to Japanese-Canadians, made in 1988. In our class discussions, we mainly focused on how big of a step this was towards recognizing the hardships that Japanese-Canadians were faced with during and after world war two, and didn’t look at it with a critical eye at all really. However, in our class visit to the Joy Kogawa Fonds I found a couple of interesting archival pieces that struck an interest in looking at what exactly led up to or inspired, so to speak, PM Mulroney’s address made in late September of 1988.

One of the documents that I found was a letter sent in February of 1988 from students at the University of Windsor who had recently read Kogawa’s Obasan. It was sent to PM Mulroney, requesting that he make a formal apology to the surviving Japanese-Canadians that had endured the internment during the second world war. It reads, “Please make this apology from Canadian citizens to Canadian citizens. It is long overdue”. This rhetoric is very similar to the attitude in Kogawa’s novel and the view that the Japanese-Canadians held that they were being interned by their fellow countrymen. I also found an article published in The Vancouver Sun in March of 1988, entitled, “300 Attend Rally to Demand Redress for Japanese,” that reported on a rally that had occurred in Vancouver demanding more compensation than the $12 million that had been given to the Japanese community which was roughly equal to $1.49 per week for four years for the surviving Japanese.

It wasn’t then until late September of that year that PM Mulroney and the Canadian government offered “Symbolic Redress Payment” of $21,000 to surviving individuals that had gone through internment in Canada. It is also important to note that this official statement came a month after US President Ronald Reagan made a formal apology to interned Japanese-Americans and offered them each roughly $20,000 as a form of symbolic redress payment. I think with this evidence it is fair to assume that for some reason there was a reluctance of the Canadian government to follow through with a formal apology to Japanese-Canadians. This also shows us what kind of motivation the Canadian government takes to follow through with something that seems like common sense. Did PM Mulroney truly feel the need to formally apologize and offer compensation to Japanese-Canadians, or did he only make this address to look on par with the US and their civil liberties bill? Judging by what I have researched and looked at, I would say it was a mix, but still it is scary to think that politics might have had a part to play in this basic civil rights issue.

Sources:

Apology to Japanese Canadians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxVZtQULIMQ

US Civil Liberties Act: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MooPi2Ycuxo

There was a roughly twenty year gap between world wars 1 and 2. Looking at that record, it is pretty remarkable to consider we have gone nearly 70 years since the dropping of the first atom bomb without seeing a world war 3. There are many claimed explanations for this, ranging from views of heightened social standards and human rights to questioning of the profitability of war in general (Joshua Goldstein & Steven Pinker, 2011). However absent traditional war may be in this day and age, violence is still very prevalent all around the world. In an interview with BookForum, Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir Persepolis that tells of a young girl growing up during the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, discusses violence and its role in the world today. “Violence today has become something so normal, so banal–that is to say everybody thinks it’s normal,” (Hajdu 2004, 35).

A way to look at this is violence as an evolved form of war. In a blog post discussing violence in the 21st century, Robert Hariman, professor at Northwestern University, shows us–mostly through images–how war and violence are still prevalent in the 21st century, specifically in developing nations, citing one-on-one cases of commonplace brute force.  He cites author Barbara Ehrenreich in contemplating, “To look at war [or in our case violence], carefully and long enough, is to see the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.” (Ehrenreich, 1997). Through this predator metaphor, Ehrenreich is essentially saying that by examining the evolution of “war” throughout history, we will find it to be pessimistically ongoing. As much as we may think that we have come to a time free of armed warfare, we have unconsciously entered a time of normalized violence, characterized by commonplace brutality masked by the absence of prototypical war.

Sources:

Goldstein, Joshua S., and Steven Pinker. “War Really Is Going Out of Style.”New York Times 17 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Print.

Hajdu, David. 2004. Persian Miniatures.” BookForum, October/November, 32-35

Hariman, Robert. “The Evolution of Violence in the 21st Century.” Web log post. No Caption Needed. WordPress, 4 Feb. 2008. Web. 9. Oct. 2014

Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Metropolitan, 1997. Print.

As a white, middle-class, Californian male, it would be obscene to say that privilege has had no part in shaping my identity. Both of my parents attended university, and while I was was growing up they worked well-paying jobs. In a world of growing divorce rates, I’ve been lucky enough to see my parents not only love and support me, but also do so to each other for the past twenty-one years of their marriage. I also consider myself lucky that they’ve kept me educated. From pushing me to do well in school and attend university, to playing National Public Radio in the car every morning (even when I begged them to change it!), my mom and dad set learning as an essential, lifelong practice.

The older I grew, the more prevalent it became to me that I was privileged. In the graphic memoir Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, the protagonist Marji goes through a similar experience when she makes the realization, “I finally understood why I felt ashamed to sit in my father’s cadillac,” (Satrapi, 33). Marji begins to understand class inequality the same way that I understood my born socio-economic advantage. After this realization, people like Marji and I can’t help but wonder how they can understand or help people with problems that they themselves haven’t personally gone through.

The title of my post comes from a lyric from the popular song “Same Love” by the musical group Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. The song discusses the writer’s passion in progressing towards equality in the social world with an emphasis on eliminating the prejudice that LGBT individuals experience. Although the writer himself hasn’t gone through the harassment and struggles that members of the LGBT community have, he strongly emphasizes the ability and more so the responsibility of social progressives not in this community to support this social justice movement. If this “I’m not the same, but that’s not important” principle is valid across all platforms, then it is quite possible privilege is an irrelevant factor in a person’s ability to help those in need. For Marji and I both then, we should not feel bad about our advantages in life, but more so understand our responsibility to use those advantages to better the lives of those with less.

Sources:

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2003. Pritn.

Growing up in the most populous U.S. state, by grade seven I was used to 30+ student classrooms as the norm. Throughout middle and high school, you would hear concerned parents discuss over-filled classrooms and the negative effects they were having on our youth. “Where are our tax dollars going?”, “Why aren’t my kids getting the time they need?” were among the common concerns about the struggling public school system in California. However plentiful the concerns for this fact of matter were, not much attention was being given to the growing diversity of backgrounds in any given public school’s classroom. Out of the thirty-five kids in my grade nine Spanish class, probably 10 were white, 12 were latino, 8 were asian, 3 were black, and 2 were middle-eastern. Each one of us had a different history with the Spanish language, and with learning in general.

Not just in California, but all over the world, classrooms are becoming more diverse. In a 21st century classroom, how can teachers create and apply a curriculum that understands and works around a diverse group of individual students? Is it enough to vary instruction through visual, auditory, and kinesthetic models, or does the teacher have an obligation to learn individual narratives and shape learning around them?

The Ontario College of Teachers claims as one of their standards of practice, “[Teachers] treat students equitably and with respect and are sensitive to factors that influence individual student learning.” Although the standards of practice do not specifically detail the teacher’s full obligation to the individual student, this statement covers the principle that teachers must understand their students as individuals, all coming from different interpretive communities, with different ideas of learning and the role of education in one’s life.

In her paper discussing the role of interpretative communities in remembering and learning, Farhat Shahzad suggests it is important to build up networks between teachers, parents, and peers to “bridge the gap” between the classroom and the individual’s interpretive community. We can then see that the responsibility expands beyond just the teacher. A well-rounded education system requires not only a committed educator, but also the cooperation of parents and peers in creating a learning community. The idea of learning involves many different inputs, and a fluid education system must recognize the need to relate school to an individual’s own home community and vice versa.

Sources:

“Ontario College of Teachers: Standards of Practice” http://www.oct.ca/public/professional-standards/standards-of-practice

“The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning” by Farhat Shazhad, Canadian Journal of Education 34,3 (2011): 301-316