A blog for SUNY Geneseo students and faculty interested in American Studies
I am skeptical of brands that promote social awareness on social media. Most of the time, it’s a superficial marketing strategy aimed at millennials and Generation Z. In my mind, these large, faceless corporations are conditioning consumers to associate their product with social justice.
Continue reading “Corporate Social Responsibility (and Cherry Garcia)”
I said that my next post would continue the epic saga of homeless people in Victor LaValle’s Big Machine, but I think that post will percolate for a little while more while I write out this post. Percolate, or to bubble and warm up, is an SAT word that is a very useful word to know. The SAT, however, was a test created by upper-middle class white men to admit people with similar backgrounds into college. I will be talking about some of those examples in this next post.
In Imperceptible Mutabilities, Susan-Lori Parks uses a character called “The Naturalist” to serve as a narrator for the confusing plot. Instead of blending in, the character, with his white skin and holier-than-thou attitude, stands out amongst “them roaches” (Parks, 29) that he has been studying. This character archetype is incredibly familiar to many of us, and in my group, we discussed characters like…
The state of uncomfortability is something most people are afraid of, it often 
restrains their actions and subsequently limits them from all the possibilities they may take. There are many paths and decisions that people can make; if half of those decisions are cut off prematurely because of a fear of discomfort, we would lose half the opportunities we have. This fear of judgement and failure we create is simply a protective barrier keeping us from the opportunity to grow—I don’t discredit fear, as it is a natural feeling, but I believe taking power over our fear of an uncomfortable situation can be empowering. In order to take full advantage of our options, we must seek discomfort.
Continue reading “To Seek Discomfort”
For this post, I’d like to look at “faith” and “trust” as two separate concepts. I have used them interchangeably in class, and even in previous blog posts, though they do not always have identical meanings. We have talked a lot about trust in Big Machine, specifically Ricky Rice’s trust in others and his trust in institutions. That is something I would like to get back to. Right now, I would like to look at Ricky’s faith in religion. His faith in the Washerwomen.
After discussing Suzan-Lori Parks’ Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, it was interesting to think about how art is performed and what people (those acting in the audience role) consent to when observing the art. At least from class there appeared to be a simultaneous scopophilic and scopophobic response to theater: people want to view the actors yet don’t want to be viewed themselves during a play. This makes sense considering having actors stare at the audience might lead to some discomfort but, whether they like it or not, the audience is a part of the performance. Continue reading “Observation vs. Engagement”
“The Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people; but they have hitherto given no indications of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character….Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans, their Windhams, their Horners, their Wilberforces?—where their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys?—their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys and Malthuses?—their Porsons, Parts, Burneys, or Blomfields?—their Scotts, Campbells, Byrons, Moores, or Crabbes?—their Siddonses, Kembles, Keans, or ONeils—their Wilkies, Laurences, Chantrys?—or their parallels to the hundred other names that have spread themselves over the world from our little island in the course of’ the last thirty years, and blest or delighted mankind by their works, inventions, or examples?” – Sydney Smith
As we approach the end of the semester, I feel like it’s necessary that I grapple with one thing that has been perplexing me for the past few months. It is something that I think I should make sense of before the class is over. I’m not saying that a class that leaves questions unanswered constitutes a failed attempt; rather, I want to explore one item that has been floating around my head with no real explanation for most of the semester. I am referring to one of our course epigraphs, the one from Sydney Smith’s “Who Reads an American Book?”. Continue reading “Sydney Smith and “Who Reads an American Book”: Some Remaining Questions”
“Modern poetry aims at creating a semantics that is seemingly without syntax, which is to say a semantics in which the opposition between word and thing — between the two articulations of language or between the opposition of linguistic and motor activity — pushes toward the ‘rediscovered truth’ of a simple rather than a double articulation.” ~ Ronald Schleifer
Have you ever heard that one Selena Gomez song, “Love You Like A Love Song”? You know, the one that goes, “I, I love you like a love song, baby / I, I love you like a love song, baby / I, I love you like a love song, baby / And I keep it in re-pe-pe-peat.” Linguistically and musically, it’s not the most stylized, polished, or sophisticated (or necessarily likable) song, but, jinkies, can it get a point across. The repetition throughout the chorus forces the song into your (or, at least, my) mind and keeps it there for eons. As nostalgic as I am (not) for my early teenage years, this song does not come to me unprompted; rather, I was reminded of it when thinking over the relevance of repetition in the context of art and communication. Continue reading “What Selena Gomez Got Right”
If you are reading this post and recalling whether there was a post with a similar title to this, you are absolutely right. This post is a continuation of my previous post, which happened to be my first post on this blog. Like the fractals, the figure of the homeless person returns in full force to the pages of Big Machine, and this permutation of the homeless person rears its head in a unique way.
After reading Tayler’s post about Suzan-Lori Parks play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, it made me think more about the way in which we learn about slavery and observe the continent of Africa. I feel as though the idea of an audience viewing a theater performance and feeling uncomfortable when being called out, strongly relates to the way Americans view Africa. Within Park’s play, the characters only view Africa through the tv from the show “Wild Kingdom,” pointing out the way that Africa is stereotypically viewed as a “wild” place. In our group discussion in class, we looked back to the beginning pages of The America Play and Other Works, we saw this diagram labeled Imperceptible Mutabilities: Continue reading “How We Observe”
The things that Prince depicts in his artwork pertain to mature subjects but looking at his work also reminds me of my childhood. I used to play these “I Spy” games on the family computer in which the player simply tried to find and click on all of the items that were listed for the player to find. I’m not sure why 6-year-old me was so entertained by this, but I used to play for hours—just how I feel like one could view Prince’s artwork for hours and still make new discoveries.