A blog for SUNY Geneseo students and faculty interested in American Studies
Here is something that should be acknowledged; we made national news. A swastika was painted on a dorm hall with the word “Trump.” Look, Time mentions us.
These kind of acts have increased since the election and they have been met with social outrage. I’ll come back to this. Continue reading “Just Make It Go Away”
For those of you who might not have seen it, I just wanted to share an article that Dr.McCoy alluded to in our class the other day and had retweeted on twitter. Jamelle Bouie’s “White Won” is both a look at some of the initial emotions following the results from Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning and is an attempt to discuss our nation’s “long cycle of progress and backlash.” I think that the article provides an interesting dialogue to the currently ongoing and expanding conversation, as well as relates to the topic of churning that we have seen throughout Morrison’s works.
In Paradise, Morrison returns us as readers to tracking and tracing. “Ruby” begins a cascade that attends to the violence of those concepts, but I urge you at the same time also to be alert to how the novel insists once again on the both/and.
As part of that, here’s a link to a searchable (yes) index of the “Lost Friends” column that ran in the New Orleans Southwestern Christian Advocate. The column, according to the site’s homepage, ran for decades after 1877, and was composed of “messages from individuals seeking loved ones lost in slavery.”
I woke up today disoriented, unable to think clearly about our country’s future. Yesterday, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. America has spoken. Although this means that many of our constitutional rights have taken a hit with a win by Trump’s linear and alienating rhetoric, it also means that we must come together to teach people love. I saw the following Saturday Night Live skit on my newsfeed this morning and it made me feel better. I hope that it leaves you all in the same spirits.
Eyebrows, Itches, and It.
So I never got around to posting over the weekend like I should have so this post is going to cover multiple topics from class and from Dante.
Eyebrows
I’m not a super social person, and while I am perfectly fine walking up to my friends and randomly asking them about eyebrows I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to ask people in person over the weekend. However, I did make a Facebook status asking my friends about eyebrows. There are two things I would like to note: “B” is my sister whose concentration in college was English; and the first “M” is my sister in law who is an aesthetician. I found it interesting, though not surprising, that everyone who responded was female. While most posts were humorous, many of my friends seemed to be very conscious of their imperfections that likely remain unnoticed by others. Continue reading “Eyebrows, Itches, and It.”
Thanks to the texts I’m reading this semester—specifically Pynchon and Yeats—I’ve had to pay more attention to phallic imagery than ever before. I started to pick up on some of this imagery in Toni Morrison’s Jazz, but I also noticed another kind of imagery, one that I didn’t immediately have a word for. I began to wonder what the female equivalent was of “phallic.” I expressed this curiosity to Brianne and she beat me to the Google-search-bar, sending me a few different links to websites discussing this exact topic. It seems that the choices we’re given are either the word “yonic” or “yoni” which originates in Sanskrit, or the currently more common word “vulvic.” Continue reading “The Yonic and the Phallic”
Today in class Dr. McCoy brought up the town Nicodemus. This really sparked my curiosity, what did it have to do with Paradiso, with Paradise?
Nicodemus is a region of land that is not governed by its own local government but rather by larger administrative divisions. It was founded in 1877 and was named after Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a name of two people a biblical figure and an African slave prince. Nicodemus, the biblical figure, after the crucifixion brought the customary spices to prepare Jesus’s body. Nicodemus also had a discussion with Jesus about being born again. Because of this conversation with Jesus he was a model of rebirth to African Americans after the civil war. Nicodemus was also the name of a legendary figure who came to america on a slave ship and then later was able to purchase his freedom.
Nicodemus Kansas was settled by free slaves after the civil war. Most of the slaves that came were from Kentucky, and their goal was to establish the first all black settlement of the great plains. The town thrived in the beginning but then rough winters that killed crops led them to decline in their population. Today the population of Nicodemus Kansas is only 52 people, which was surveyed in 2000. Clearly a small town, but it is very cool to see that the first ever town created by freed slaves still exists.
After a helpful discussion with Dr. McCoy regarding my last post—specifically my comment about Tupac in The Devil in Silver—in which Dr. McCoy suggested that I consider similar strange intertextualities as “ghostly allusions,” the specifics of my research project have seemingly fallen into place. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of these “ghostly allusions,” so I went home and did some research on the significance of ghosts in literature; I found a dissertation titled “Ghost Novels: Haunting as Form in the Works of Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and J. M. Coetzee,” and although the essay focused on ghosts as a postmodern reproduction and repetition of images created by various visual technologies, its focus on the theoretical discourse of ghost narratives and hauntology was supremely insightful, and synthesized many sources that I otherwise would have had to labor over on my own.
Continue reading “(Re)mobilizing Death: Ghosts, Zombies, and Memory as Biopolitcal Dispositive”
On Monday Dr. McCoy put us into groups and asked us to discuss any remaining questions we had about Jazz, after we had finished reading the last chapter in class and finishing the novel. We began talking about who/ what the narrator was in the story, we came to the conclusion that the narrator was actually the book talking to us. At one point in the beginning of the novel when the narrator is introducing itself to us it says something along the lines of being used to not being used until after dinner, and when it is used the person often falls asleep before they can finish using it (I can’t remember the exact page we found this evidence on). Also when we finished reading the final chapter aloud it finishes with the words ” But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.” (pg. 229). As a group we believed that this was the book telling us that we are the ones with the power to change who we are the book will forever ever the same words it can never be changed, but the book can change us as people. Alpha had the thought that Toni Morrison writes black humanities. She puts stories that can help to show us the defaults in humans, and what we can do to change it. She is the modern day Sophocles, Dante.
Because Morrison wrote her Trilogy based on Dante’s divine comedy, I decided to do some research on how Dante’s Divine Comedy has been related to humanities. I found an article in the Wall Street Journal titled ” The Ultimate Self-Help Book: Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, written by Rod Dreher. The author said that calling “The Divine Comedy” a self- help book “is almost the point of blasphemy”, but he goes onto say that Dante believed this himself which was shown in a letter he wrote to Can Grande Della Scala, in the letter he said “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and lead them to a state of bliss.” How Dante does this according to the author is he makes us reflect upon our own life’s when reading it, which I believe can also be said about Toni Morrison’s Trilogy.
The article:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303663604579503700159096702