A blog for SUNY Geneseo students and faculty interested in American Studies
As someone who studies history, I’ve always been concerned with memory. And this class has memory at its center. It has allowed me to think of the ways that memory can represent a both/and. It reminds me that memory is a double edged-sword. Continue reading “Concluding thoughts: Confederate flags, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, & the both/and of memory”
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.
Continue reading “Response to the “irony of aid”, providing aid within the colonialist context”
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.
Continue reading “Thinking about care; remembering Salvador”
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.
“This process of forgetting is essential to the social construction of the city, creating in essence two cities, a ‘visible city as much as an invisible city.’” –Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil
Continue reading “Global Connections: Invisible and Hypervisible Salvador”
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.
Continue reading “Response to Christina’s post on sentinel species”
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.
Continue reading “What happened to ACORN? Have we seen this before?”
“…Catastrophe may reemerge from memory in the shape of a wish.”—Joseph Roach
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.
Continue reading “Catastrophes, wishes, and provision ground ideology”
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.
Continue reading “On the life and death of Muhiyidin Moye, Black Lives Matter activist”
“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”
I felt my most profound stirring at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem when I entered the Children’s Memorial. Continue reading “Instruments for and against memory”
