Neha recently made a caring blog post about the irony of aid, thinking about Jo Cosme’s tarot cards, the etymology of aid, and the essential lack of care in the U.S. response to Hurricane Maria, especially epitomized in the “ayuda” that Trump attempted to provide by slinging a paper tower roll into a crowd of Puerto Ricans. Adding on to her blog post, I’d like to think about how this reaction is largely emblematic of The United States’ historical and contemporary relationship with Puerto Rico in general. This is a complicated and entrenched topic, so I’ll touch on just a bit of this relationship.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the article we read on prison abolition– “Free Us All”— and the lessons about care embedded into it. I don’t think it is easy for many to associate radical politics with care, partially because of the connotations associated with the word “radical.” Yet, this is exactly what is happening in the feminist and female-led defense campaigns for incarcerated people in the United States, and in campaigns beyond our borders.
When Saidiya Hartman said that “care is the antidote for violence,” she put prison abolition into a feminist and humanist frame. And Hartman’s idea about care is at the core of our self-reflective assignment. So I think it is important that I start to think about what it means to use care as an antidote to violence.
By Matt Albanese, Noah Mazer, Tree McNulty, Isabel Owen, Melissa Rao, Don Rothwein, and Davina Ward
The Story of Typhoon Tip
The scientific knowledge for Typhoon Tip/Warling is extensive. According a 1980 article entitled “An Analysis of Super Typhoon Tip” by George Dunnavan and John Diercks, Tip is the most studied storm in recent memory. Forty piloted missions were flown into the storm. The mission was carried out by the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron at the Anderson Air Force Base in Guam.
Gamboa de Baixo, a low-income black neighborhood in Salvador, Brazil. The construction of Contorno Avenue in the 1950s and 60s rendered the neighborhood invisible by placing it directly under the road, which symbolized modernity and progress for Bahian elite.
A few weeks ago, Christina wrote a rich blog post about using the concepts of sentinel species and range to contextualize post-Katrina New Orleans as a “canary in the coal mine.” She discussed how what happened in New Orleans allowed for increased discussion on topics like climate change, the environment, and how our government reacts to disaster.
In class, we got our first glimpse of ACORN through Josephine Butler and her granddaughter, Tanya Harris. Both wore bright red T-shirts adorned with an ACORN symbol– a typical field uniform– as they were interviewed on a hot, bright day amid the destruction in the Lower Ninth Ward.
“…Catastrophe may reemerge from memory in the shape of a wish.”—Joseph Roach
Radar image of Hurricane Hattie at peak intensity prior to making landfall on British Honduras on October 30, 1961.
I feel that this is a quote that we have not yet unpacked so deeply in class. Even so, this piece of Roach’s discussion on performance, autochthony, allochthony, and origins stuck out to me. Maybe it’s partially the elegance of the phrase: the juxtaposition of starting with the heavy consonance and lexical drama of “catastrophe” and ending with a wistful “wish.” Plus, the evocations of “wish”, for me, are almost magical—of blowing out birthday candles and of coins dropped into fountains—and I think of our most treasured hopes and dreams.
In February, 2017, Muhiyidin Moye leaped across police tape to remove a Confederate flag from the hands of a Demonstrator in Charleston, South Carolina– and it was captured on national live television. A prominent Black Lives Matter activist, Moye took an intersectional and local approach to his work, rising in protest in Mount Pleasant against Trump’s attempted Muslim ban, and speaking vehemently about the structural inequality and history of white terror that led to the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston in June 2015.
Muhiyidin Moye during a meeting with the North Charleston, S.C., City Council in 2015, discussing the killing of Walter Scott. Credit Chuck Burton/Associated Press
“Echoes in the bone refer to not only to a history of forgetting but to a history of empowering the living through the performance of memory.” —Joseph Roach, “Echoes in the Bone”