Category: McCoy 432 Spring 2018

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”

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?”

Continue reading “Personification of Storms”

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.

Continue reading “Mark Spitz is Unstuck in Time: A Comparison of PTSD in Zone One and Slaughterhouse-Five”

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”

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”

During Dr. Defrantz’s discussion of dance, I took a concerted interest in the historical discussion of the quadrille and its parodic descendant, the cakewalk. The discussion of the two dances was one of cultural preservation through the performance of memory, and the ways in which this performance evolved over the past 150 years was a great point of interest. The idea that a dance was able to start as a parody of an upper class performance, but then attain enough cultural capital to become an accepted form of performance by the people who were originally lampooned by the dance.  It has me thinking about how memories and can evolve as they move further and further away, temporally, from their point of inception.

Continue reading “In Memory of the Cakewalk”

Is there an outright ban in using the word, “zombie” to refer to zombies in literature, television, and movies? While reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, he never refers the zombies as zombies. There’s actually a small quote acknowledging this fact stating, Continue reading “The “Z” Word”

I have a couple drafts lined up for future posts, but they were all too acrobatic in nature to complete (i.e. triple flips upon triple flips).  So those posts will come someday soon, and in their stead is a continuation of some of the concepts brought up in Dr. DeFrantz’s awesome lecture today.

Continue reading “Conscriptions into Performance”

A major theme in Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, along with just about every other piece of literature or cinema in a post-apocalyptic setting (zombies or otherwise) is the evaluation of how much the world can change with a single event. In Zone One, the survivors labelled the first day of the zombie outbreak as the “Last Night,” stating that “everyone knows where they were.” Mark Spitz is rational for assuming that the world will never return to “normalcy,” and intentionally tries to distance himself from who he was before the Last Night.However, he often finds himself reminiscing about the previous world, from remembering certain landmarks before they were ruined to imagining what certain zombies were doing before they turned. When he snaps back to reality, the distinct split between how things were and how things are now is always jarring. 

Continue reading “The “Before’s” and “After’s””

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”