While I unfortunately missed Friday’s class where Dr. DeFrantz came in and worked with students, I did attend his lecture the day prior called “The University Dances: Fifty Years in Motion.” He seems to be highly esteemed within the Dance Studies community as he was published multiple times and earned his PhD at New York University. Something he discussed that caught my attention was Katherine Dunham’s fellowship in the Caribbean following the completion of her masters. She traveled there as an acting anthropologist, but after the first day, she opted to learn about the local people through dancing with them directly. Dr. DeFrantz called this “Intercultural Communication,” and I will revisit this later in the post after providing a proper background of Dunham. Continue reading “Intercultural Communication Through Dance”
“Gloriously Catastrophic Futures”
The English historian Horace Walpole once declared, “The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic.” In response, Joseph Roach includes in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance the following quote: “The conception of history as a vast performance of diaspora and surrogation haunts intercultural musings such as Walpole’s, which transform invented pasts into gloriously catastrophic futures.” Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and the genre it is a part of are proof that these kind of transformations are still very much alive. Continue reading ““Gloriously Catastrophic Futures””
Hell in a Bucket
The last epidemic scare for the Western world was Ebola, a virus that still claims hundreds of lives in Africa every year. There was a measure of worry when two health care workers from the US were brought home from Liberia in order to receive treatment, and as you might have guessed, there was public outcry. Why bring this plague overseas and endanger the whole US? The truth however is that Ebola, though quite deadly and terrifying, cannot realistically produce a worldwide outbreak of infectious disease. It spreads through contact with infected body fluids; to avoid Ebola, don’t touch the sweat, blood, or bodies of the sick or dead.
Remembering the (Un)Dead
The classical depiction of the “living dead” in old stories was fairly literal: The long-deceased, through necromancy, witchcraft, or some other form of magic, would rise once more to roam the earth in a complicated state between “living” and “dead.” While the concept of the dead rising once more to wreak havoc on the living dates as far back as ancient Mesopotamian mythology, the term “zombie” originates from Haitian folklore, which involves the raising of the dead from a sorcerer known as a bokor. Continue reading “Remembering the (Un)Dead”
Challenges to Care: Familial Response to Displacement and Trauma
By Jenna Lawson, Clio Lieberman, Helen Warfle
The progression of disaster narratives culminating in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One brought us to reflect on what we know of families in disaster scenarios from our “Parenting in the Zombie Apocalypse” course with Dr. Kirsh. In light of this connection, we challenged ourselves to examine how familial ties and affective bonds are explored in the course materials. Earlier in the course, we mentioned how children can often be conscripted into performances of victimhood, especially in the context of nationally covered disasters. Particularly, the case of Jackson Shepherd during Hurricane Sandy exemplified how even infants, who are obviously unable to consent, are brought into these conversations to provoke sympathy. On the other hand, black children are disproportionately seen as older than their age, provoking stronger consequence from government forces or even their own communities instead of a gentler consideration. Continue reading “Challenges to Care: Familial Response to Displacement and Trauma”
Personification of Storms
The naming of storms has been discussed in a few posts thus far in relation to “female-named” storms perceived as being less threatening and dangerous compared to more “masculine-named” storms. These perceptions are due to the stereotypes created around the gender binary, as Helen mentioned in her post. She states, “As a result, people do not evacuate and there is a higher death rate because of it.”
In society, I believe naming is a crucial indicator of identity. But the questions that I still ask in my head are “Do names serve as a way of proposing an identity or does the identity come first and then the name?”
Mark Spitz is Unstuck in Time: A Comparison of PTSD in Zone One and Slaughterhouse-Five
After reading Zone One and thinking about the themes in the book, I realized what grounded me amidst the complex timeline of the narratives was my experience not only in consuming zombie media like I mentioned in my last post, but also in reading war novels. For example, I read Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Johnny Got His Gun for a war novels class I took in freshman year.
Something I will highlight in this blog post, however, is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five because it mirrors the narrative of Zone One in many ways. I think, like any author and their work, Whitehead had a very important point in having this complicated narrative. One objective was to reflect the characters having Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, or PASD. This correlation of narrative to character is also true true of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
New Orleans Bounce: A Circum-Atlantic Performance
New Orleans is traditionally considered the home of the genre of bounce music. The city is designated as both the genre’s origin point and its continuing center. To some degree, this is true. Artists considered at the foundation of bounce music all hail from New Orleans. Bounce music maintains its prominence in the region through concerts and festivals. However, treating the genre as an entirely autochthonous product overlooks the rich network of places and identities that have shaped the musical form as we know it today. Continue reading “New Orleans Bounce: A Circum-Atlantic Performance”
How To Teach Colson Whitehead in College Classrooms
This semester, I’ve read novels by Colson Whitehead in two of my classes. The experiences were different since in this class I read the novel as a student, becoming aware of plot twists at the same time as everyone else, but I also read Whitehead for a class that I’m TAing for. For that class, I had read the novel (The Underground Railroad) before the students and I helped plan discussion questions and was pretty involved in deciding what we were going to focus on in class.
Depending on who you ask about the merits of an English major, sometimes I feel the need to defend teaching contemporary novels in the classroom. So I’m writing this post in an attempt to both reflect on my experiences with Whitehead in college classes and in anticipation of anyone who might think these novels don’t “fit” with their idea of an English literature/college writing class. I thought it might be fun to switch up the structure of how I usually post and include a list and flex my educational mindset a bit. Continue reading “How To Teach Colson Whitehead in College Classrooms”
Code noir, Casting a Shadow on People’s Memories
After Dr. DeFrantz’s discussion on how Code noir influenced some dance forms, I started thinking about the lasting effect slave codes left on society. Reiterating what Dr. DeFrantz touched on in the discussion, the codes specifically targeted enslaved African peoples in the French colonies in the eighteenth century. It placed restrictions on enslaved people’s religious practices, marriages and relationships, when they could meet together, and how they could be treated, among other aspects. As Dr. DeFrantz highlighted, these codes separated people into categories based on color, influencing how the rules affected them and how they were viewed in society. Code noir essentially went out of effect in 1803 when the U.S. took possession of Louisiana, eventually being replaced by the American slavery system many people are more familiar with.
Continue reading “Code noir, Casting a Shadow on People’s Memories”