A blog for SUNY Geneseo students and faculty interested in American Studies
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?”
I’ll be the first to admit that I stopped posting on the blog the last few weeks because I got stuck. Stuck in my own busy semester, stuck in the unexpected emotions that surfaced in me while watching Levees, and stuck in the shock of realizing that I hadn’t noticed some of these important things before. But after class today, and being able to ground my thinking in course readings (I think I’m just naturally comfortable with words), I think I might be getting unstuck.
With that in mind, I’ve been really interested in the concept of “names” especially in recent posts by Helen and Christina that highlighted the difference between male/female named storm, since the idea of being conscripted into a role and the connections to gender stereotypes is not something I had spent time thinking about. However, what I really wanted to focus on for this post was the idea of “retiring” hurricane names, which Christina does mention. Continue reading “More on Hurricanes and Names”
I mulled over my thoughts on When the Levees Broke during spring break, and my conclusion was that the film as a whole was incredibly dense, both in factual and emotive value. Since the film was informative, I was able to know more about the timeline of the events during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and more about the reactions and stories of individuals. The film evoked real feelings from me, as I’m sure it did for everyone who watched the documentary.
Beth’s words ring true when she said, “when you were moved by Levees it was done as a work of art.” Through our reaction from When the Levees Broke, I think it’s really important to consider the effects that are created from art. This is especially important as well considering our current political climate and how art is the salvation we need to cope with current events.
Continue reading “The Power of Art as Experienced in When The Levees Broke”
Feminine-named hurricanes are more deadly than ones with male names. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and repeated again and again by news sources looking for an easy story, this is because female names create expectations about severity levels and the need for evacuation.
Specifically, feminine-named hurricanes are seen as less likely to be severe and dangerous because of stereotypes around women, the study suggests. As a result, people do not evacuate and there is a higher death rate because of it.
This study has, since its publication in 2014, been questioned due to certain procedures the researchers used, including doing little to control for storm severity, which has nothing to do with the name. These are picked out years in advance. However, the fact remains that male-named storms still do have fewer deaths on average, and it’s an interesting concept to explore in the context of Roach and Blood Dazzler. Continue reading “A Further Exploration of Names and Hurricanes”
In class we speak very intimately about hurricanes. We also have spoken about the significance of names, as they can be a representation of identity and experience. Naturally, such discussion leads to the question, “how does a hurricane get its name?” I had already started doing research on the subject but became motivated to write up my findings when the question came up in our last class meeting. So here are the Twenty-one Names To Avoid Calling Your Baby This Year Unless You’re Planning to Romanticize Hurricanes:
Alberto, Beryl, Chris, Debby, Ernesto, Florence, Gordon, Helene, Isaac, Joyce, Kirk, Leslie, Michael, Nadine, Oscar, Patty, Rafael, Sara, Tony, Valerie, William.
May 2011 sparked a very interesting perspective on American culture. Osama bin Laden was killed by navy seals, and we celebrated. At the time I was a junior in high school, and I remember GOING CRAZY. Me and my gang of kooks got a bunch of beer and threw the infamous “We Got Him Party,” and like you guessed, at no point did we stop shouting in each other’s faces “WE GOT HIM!” The performance of celebrating death certainly empowered us, which was what really got the momentum of the shin-dig going. However, this performance of death is important to analyze in that it is like no other I have ever witnessed and is still happening. In reflection I now look back at that party with complicated emotions. Yes, this was a productive event for the safety of our nation, but what about my celebration of death made it insensitive?
“Echoes in the Bone” quotes Victor Tuner in his book “Forest in symbols” saying “Celebrations of death function as rites of social renewal, especially when the decedents occupy positions to which intense collective attention is due, such as those of leaders of kings.” The connections between this text and the death of bin Laden is blatant.
I would never hesitate to admit that the death of Osama bin Laden was a great thing. He was the most impactful terrorist in American history. Obviously, he was viewed globally with intense collective attention since he was responsible for the formation of the terrorist group Al-Queada. Although Al-Queada is still an active terrorist group, since the death of their leader in 2011, they have had “tactical issues,” with its leadership and no longer operates on the scale that the group previously had. This is fluent with Peter Metcalf’s quote in “Echoes of the Bone,” “It seems that the most powerful natural symbol for the continuity of any community, large or small, simple or complex, by a strange and dynamic paradox, to be found in the death of its leader…”
The news of his death provided a sense of comfort (or social renewal) to a large part of the American population who were living in fear of terrorism since September 11th 2001. By renewing the sense of powerful American pride, the death of the terrorist marked a turning point for American moral in the war against terror. Obviously, this event called for some sort of celebration.
Recently Rob O’Neill, the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden, has appeared in the media for speaking out against president Trump’s plan for a military parade. His status in this story proves we as a culture still celebrate his achievement even years later. If any other SEAL spoke out against Trump’s military parade, they would just be another person speaking out against the president. By acknowledging O’Neill in the news, we are celebrating the death of bin Laden since it is known that is the only event changing O’Neill’s status from Navy SEAL to celebrity is his achievement. Most news outlets didn’t even use his name in their headlines, they only printed “ Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden slams Trump’s military parade”
The mission to kill bin Laden was also performed in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” which was celebrated in American box offices only a year after the event. It stared Chris Pratt and Jessica Chastain and made $132 million by marketing its narrative as “the greatest manhunt in human history.” It received overwhelmingly great reviews from publications like the New York Times and Time Magazine.
When talking about the performance of memory, this movie is the most obvious example. The events in the film are supposedly accurate performances of the mission to kill the terrorist and also explains how the mission was a near disaster. By performing the memory of the assassination—just like the actual assassination—it empowered Americans in the face of the things many of us have come to fear, via celebration.
Largely the difference between this celebration of death and the party I attended, is that the movie considered all events surrounding the assassination. In addition to explaining the mission, it offered a wider perspective by highlighting the ones lost in terrorist attacks, honoring the ones protecting our country and meditating on the progress that still needs to be done. Since the movie properly noted all the sensitive topics surrounding the assassination, this celebration of death was largely not viewed as offensive.
Looking at on my phone, I still have a photo of me and my friends smiling and holding the banner that said, “We got him!” and I know now that we took this too far. This can clearly be viewed as insensitive, not because a horrible human was killed, but because the “We Got Him Party” focused in on one death by ignoring the larger scope of a situation that included thousands of innocent deaths. This performance is the same and different as the performance of the tot-tanic that we discussed in class. It’s different in that, a celebration of death wasn’t out of line; but it’s the same in that we chose to ignore sensitive subject matter that was affiliated with the event for the empowerment of our performance. A celebrating a death that implies progress and greater safety in our country wasn’t an issue, attending a party that’s invitation said “come over and devour some chips and al queseo” was.
Upon attending an event titled “A Collision of Worldviews: An interview with Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell”, which was part of this year’s commemoration for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. here at Geneseo, my eyes were opened to a whole new way of perceiving musical traditions in terms of both their origins and their power.
Continue reading “Rich Musical Tradition Wrought from Intense Oppression”
I left class on Friday with no shortage of ideas for blog posts, prompted by Beth to consider why Patricia Smith would elegize Luther B (a dog) in several poems across Blood Dazzler. The poems tell a story of how the “Rottweiler, bull, whatever” (30) Luther B is left chained to a tree in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, struggles to survive and eventually “ascends” (69), assumed to be towards heaven after dying; however, the dog’s owner evacuated her home, and a poem from her perspective shows her belief that Luther B would have escaped the chains and easily ridden out the storm.
There is a lot to unpack in these poems, but I want to focus on the overall importance of the elegy – why a dog deserves an elegy, and why the story of a dog deserves to be told in Smith’s collection of poems about Katrina. I was also inspired by themes of dogs and progress in David Byrne’s album “American Utopia,” so I apply Byrne’s perspective on what dogs can represent and relate it to the importance of Luther B’s elegy. Continue reading “Dogs, Elegies, Progress, and David Byrne”
In my earlier blog post, The Boundary Between Light and Darkness, I commented on the light-dark interplay that Steve Prince’s “Katrina’s Veil: Stand at the Gretna Bridge” and Francisco Goya’s “Third of May 1808” utilize. Namely, in Prince’s piece, I saw the use of only black and white as a commentary on the racial tension present in America, namely New Orleans. The white and black simultaneously blend and separate figures in the print, showing how there was tension between citizens of the same city before, but particularly after, Katrina. Beth commented on this post, mentioning that there might be merit in looking at how surface tension connects with racial tension. After digging up my prior experience in general chemistry and looking at the definition of surface tension, the connection between the two terms was as clear as water.
Science and literature are different languages to express similar concepts about humanity. This blog post is an attempt to explore the relationship of science and literature in the context of some class concepts. Weeks ago, Beth (1) mentioned the concept of “the canary and the coal mine.” We did not unpack it at the time, but that moment made me think about range, as discussed in my Biogeography class and When the Levees Broke.
