The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 7

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY NOV 03 2017

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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COVER

INDY

Cola La Caye Skye Volmar

NEWS

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 07 NOV 03 2017

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Week in Review Pia Mileaf-Patel, Sydney Anderson, and Liz Cory

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Abs-tension Oriana van Praag

METRO

FROM THE EDITORS She told me: you remind me of my daughter. She told me: clean a wool coat with ice cold water. She sat outside of East Side Market, not so much asked me as told me to watch her things. She walked into the liquor store, ostensibly in search of an ATM. She came out with two nips, one of which she downed in front of me, immediately afterwards informing me that she is developing an allergy to alcohol that causes discomfort in her gut and bowels. Then she passed me the other one with the gruff sentiment, “I bought two, I drank one, here’s yours.”

She has beautiful wool coats and is on her way to a condo in Orlando that her sister owns, her sister that owns many condos (but none in Rhode Island). She gave me a candle when I got off the bus—the fancy trolleylike one—and it turned into the lot and we looked at each other like, “It’s happening, drink your nip sister,” and said something that I can’t quite remember. What she said was something along the lines of, “Bless You. Bless this Day. Bless the Moment that We Met. My Daughter is Particular about her Father, you are Particular about Everything, and I Love You.” It reminded me eerily of when I was in a car crash last week, and the first responder picked up the broken side mirror saying, “Let’s clean this up so no dog or Christian cuts their foot on it.”

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

Edge of Glory Ella Comberg

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On the House Erin West and Kerrick Edwards

ARTS 15

Pushing Daisies Zak Nguyen

FEATURES 11

Failure to PrEP Mitchell Johnson

TECH

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Small World After All Olivia Kan-Sperling

METABOLICS 07

Eat My Ass Audrey Chisholm

LITERARY

— MB

MISSION STATEMENT

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EPHEMERA

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Have U Boozed Yet? Liby Hays

ReCAPTCHA Tiffany Bushka

X 08

Ouchy Nicole Cochary

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Super Like Fabiola Millan

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Fall 2017 MANAGING EDITORS

ARTS

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

Maya Brauer Ruby Gerber Erin West

NEWS

FEATURES

Isabel DeBre Chris Packs WEEK IN REVIEW

Eve Zelickson METRO

Jack Brook Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins METABOLICS

TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson LITERARY

Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle

Dominique Pariso Neidin Hernandez

EPHEMERA

SCIENCE

X

Liz Cory Paige Parsons

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Maya Bjornson Liby Hays

LIST

Lisa Borst Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS

Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Nora Gosselin Anna Hundert Mariela Pichardo Paula Pacheco Soto Marly Toledano Kion You

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

Anzia Anderson Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Frans van Hoek Kela Johnson Teri Minogue Pia Mileaf-Patel Isabelle Rea Ivan Ríos-Fetchko Claire Schlaikjer Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Sophia Meng

COPY EDITOR

Miles Taylor Cate Turner

SOCIAL MEDIA

Fadwa Ahmed SENIOR EDITORS

DESIGN EDITOR

Eliza Chen

DESIGNERS

Amos Jackson Ashley Min WEB MANAGER

Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER

Maria Gonzalez

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove Will Tavlin MVP

Cate Turner THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN ROYALTY

BY Pia Mileaf-Patel, Sydney Anderson, & Liz Cory ILLUSTRATION BY Carly Ann Paul DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Purple Reign This week’s saddening use of zeugma ([zoog-ma] noun: a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses) came in the form of a Daily News’s internet headline: “Texas school district photoshops homecoming queen’s hair color, apologizes.” The anything-but-ebony-haired reigning queen, Ebony Smith, wore her hair long, shiny, and purple to North Shore Senior High School’s homecoming in Galena Park, Texas. In the school’s important press release of their homecoming event, Smith’s hair was filtered to appear brown, with a residual, accidental purple halo of fly-aways that the intro to Photoshop video on YouTube hadn’t covered. “It wasn’t even Photoshopped correctly,” said Smith, a true millennial, to KHOU-TV. “You can still see purple outlining. It’s just very embarrassing.” The principal of North Shore High, however, would perhaps argue that he really did just fine for a first stab at using Adobe’s photo editing software.

If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, the school then insisted that Smith dye her hair brown after homecoming (perhaps the principal’s small attempt to get back at the so totally unfair Photoshop critique), referencing the ultimate law of the land, moral code of all moral codes: their student handbook. In addition to the usual—attendance policies, mission statements, dress codes—the Galena Park Independent School District handbook contains a list of banned hairstyles in its own section, right on page one, titled “Unacceptable Hair and Grooming.” Statute number one: facial hair is banned, and “students are to avoid inappropriate hair color,” which includes, explicitly, orange, green, and purple. Disciplinary action, however, is left in the hands of school district officials.

Smith said she would dye her hair brown after the incident was publicized. Her mother, on the other hand, is outraged. She told Daily News, “Keep her as who she is. That’s who the students voted in.” At the point where one’s biggest critic, their mom, is defending purple hair, shouldn’t the high school let it slide? Not at North Shore.

The Galena Park Independent School District’s motto? “Leading, Learning, Serving… with Passion.”

But what isn’t at the forefront of the school district’s officials’ minds is the fact that Smith’s bright shade is called “Purple Passion.” Perhaps Smith’s purple hair was her own passionate form of self-expression, but not quite what North Shore had in mind when using the word. It might be worth noting that each of the students featured on the cover of the handbook has brown hair. The Indy suggests North Shore add a clause to their chapter on academic honesty: while plagiarism is not tolerated, rash originality is strongly discouraged. And while they’re at it, spicing up packed lunch is great in theory, but to ensure cohesion at their drab institution all students should eat un-toasted jelly sandwiches and celery sticks every day for the sake of consistency. The Indy also suggests a mandatory course in social media usage for administrators.

The school corrected their mistake too late, swapping the Photoshopped photo to a black and white version, where the purple, and everything else, was all rendered in grey. In writing, the school district does “regret this mistake. “In the photo, Smith is stripped of her purple hair, but we all know it’s there. Her crown, however, is a standard homecoming queen tiara. Perhaps not everything is bigger in Texas, just more purple.

–PMP

The Imperial Fries

The Princess Daiquiris

Lobster frittata. Truffle risotto topped with gold leaf.

Crumpets with jam and butter. Eighteen types of caviar eaten off of a tiny diamond encrusted spoon. Cronuts topped with rosé champagne caviar. Hermès handkerchiefs perfectly folded and pressed, thrown away after each use. This is how a Queen dines.

Chicken nuggets. Fat grease dripping from a flaccid burger bun. Meat from guess-which-animal-parts and you-probably-don’t-even know-the-species. Soggy fries.

Irritated employees. The rank smell of rotting lettuce.

Creepy clowns. This is how Her Highness’s subjects dine.

But it turns out the Queen doesn’t mind stopping in for an annual McFlurry. The Queen of England owns a McDonald’s located in Oxfordshire, just outside of London. With a net worth of $500 million, Queen Elizabeth’s portfolio is varied—a fleet of swans, a royal ship with gold door handles and a private hospital, Rembrandts, Michelangelos, and Da Vincis, and a Range Rover with a custom-made corgi statue on the bonnet, to name a few. In 2008 the Queen added to this collection, purchasing the Banbury Gateway Shopping Park. The park opened in 2015, and it is home to a Costa Coffee, Starbucks, Marks & Spencer, a Primark, and McDonald’s. The McDonald’s isn’t just any old golden arches. It’s a British McDonald’s featuring delicacies like porridge, bacon rolls, and cheese and herb melts.

But not even the Queen of England’s McDonald’s is immune from stinging Twitter reviews. A review of tweets about the Banbury Mickey D’s (or, as they say in the UK, “Maccy D’s”) reveals many complaints, though the Indy isn’t sure what level of quality customers expect when they’re paying £3 for a Big Mac. Earlier this week, Twitter user @carolegreen tweeted that she was eating her meal at the Banbury McDonald’s “when a very rude and miserable cleaner decided to mop the floor including [her] feet.” The Queen responded to Carole’s tweet, “you won’t @ me tho.”

Twitter user @khalidf355 was outraged about the portion size considered “large fries.” While the Queen owns the McDonald’s, she is known to avoid the establishment, and perhaps this was Her Highness’s way of sending a message. In January of 2016, one Twitter user photographed a squirrel with its head stuck inside of a milkshake cup outside of the franchise. Other strange things are afoot at the Banbury McDonald’s: in August, @PoppyDouglass documented a man riding a horse and buggy through the drive-through, with a small dog in a basket in the passenger seat, as he picked up a tea. The archaic anglicism might go to prove: the sun never sets on the golden arches.

Since August 3, 2001—for those uninitiated: the release date of The Princess Diaries—the coolest way to spontaneously become a princess has been to find out that your grandma Julie Andrews is actually the queen of an obscure-yet-prosperous European country called Genovia, famous for its pear cultivation, and you are now heir to the throne. Sure, suddenly being bequeathed royal responsibility during the tender years of high school had its highs and lows for Mia Thermopolis, but she ended up with an empowered self-image and the storybook kiss she dreamed of.

But Mia Thermopolis’s “Best Spontaneous Princess” title may have just been usurped by Ariana Austin, a non-fictional American woman who met her real-life prince at a nightclub. Austin recently married Joel Makonnen, Prince of Ethiopia, after over 10 years of courting since their first encounter in 2005 at Pearl, a Washington, DC nightclub.

At first, Makkonen didn’t reveal his royal status to his crush. Instead, he went with a cringy pickup line: “I said, ‘You guys look like an ad for Bombay Sapphire,’ or whatever the gin was,” as Makkonen told the New York Times.

Makkonen is fifth in line to the imperial throne of Ethiopia, as the great-grandson of Emperor Haile Selassie. These days, Makkonen may just be a typical, starry-eyed newlywed settling into a traditional life in Washington, but he also has a bulging passport to match his royal origins. Makkonen was born in Rome, went to grade school in Switzerland, boarding school the French Alps, and attended graduate programs in Washington, DC. While Makkonen was finishing a law degree at Howard University, he stayed in touch with Austin, who had just completed a Masters in Arts Education at Harvard.

After several years of dating on-and-off as they each pursued their own education, Makkonen proposed to Austin at her parents’ house. For a moment, Austin thought Makkonen’s vigorous knocking on the door was a burglar trying to enter the house, so she called her parents. “She thought somebody was trying to break in, and it was just the poor guy trying to propose to her,” Austin’s father, Bobby Austin, told the Times.

Austin and Makkonen were married on the morning of September 9 at an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Maryland. “I think we both had this feeling that this was our destiny, but I felt like I had things that I had to do,” Ms. Austin told the Times. The wedding festivities lasted late into the night, culminating with a reception held at Foxchase Manor in Manassas, Virginia, with over 300 guests in attendance. The Indy’s sources have yet to reach Mia Thermopolis for her thoughts on the latest tale of royal happenstance to capture public attention.

–SA

–LC

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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EDGES AND BORDERS New luxury student housing on Canal Street

BY Ella Comberg ILLUSTRATION BY Kela Johnson DESIGN BY Ashley Min

Rhode Island is building. New residential projects are popping up all over the state, but the bulk of development is concentrated in downtown Providence. Luxury apartments are beginning to encircle Providence Station.

The old Union Trust Building on Westminster Street will undergo rehabilitation to create residential and commercial space, and a new private student housing project broke ground this month on Canal Street. By the summer of 2018, the Edge at College Hill, a 15-story apartment building, will dwarf the three-to-five-story brick buildings that sit at the base of College Hill.

As a result of this widespread development, Rhode Island is creating construction jobs more rapidly than any other state in the country, and more people are working now than ever before in the state’s history. But the equitable economic benefit that building projects present during construction often ends when residents start to move in; steep prices at market-rate housing developments are inaccessible to most of the state’s population.

possibility at the groundbreaking on October 17, stating, “When this project is done, we’ll have hundreds of new apartments and shops anchoring this part of the city, connecting the East Side to downtown.”

Perhaps it is the development’s location, steps from both downtown’s Kennedy Plaza and College Hill’s Market Square, that makes Raimondo confident in its ability to unite these socially and physically distinct neighborhoods. Even more so than other recent residential projects in the area, like the proposed adaptive reuse of the Union Trust Building or the new Chestnut Commons development in the Jewelry District, the Edge is not firmly planted in one neighborhood. The development’s promotional rhetoric insinuates that the Canal Street location is appealing for its liminality; though technically on the East Side, it is close enough to downtown for residents to feel that they are a part of both spaces.

As DBVW asserts, residents “will be able to choose from views of the Providence skyline, historic College Hill, and the Rhode Island State House.”

+++ +++ The Edge at College Hill is part of an emerging trend of privately-owned, student-centered residential developments near (but not on) college campuses. The building, designed by the company DBVW Architects, is expected to offer 202 residential units of various sizes and 10,000 square feet of ground floor retail space when completed this summer. During construction, the project will add hundreds of jobs, ranging from day laborers to architects. But by the time school starts in the fall, The Edge will become far more exclusionary: the development expressly caters to students from Brown, RISD, and Johnson & Wales, and currently listed studios in the new building start at $1,650 per month.

The Edge at College Hill is by no means the only development of its kind or name. Geographically disparate projects from different developers across the country, including the Edge Student Village at Temple University in Philadelphia, the Edge at the University of Oklahoma, and the Edge at the Pennsylvania State University, are all unified by a quasi-modern visual style and an appeal to urban life. All built within the past decade, these developments claim to offer students not only a residence, but a lifestyle. Each project is geographically grounded, not in the heart of campus, but at its “edge,” existing between traditional university life and post-collegiate freedom. +++ Despite its student-centered location and appeal, the nomenclature of the Edge at College Hill implies potential movement beyond the edges of Brown and RISD’s campuses. Governor Raimondo remarked on this

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The Edge’s immediate neighbors to the east and south are small businesses—New Rivers, Arias Lounge, Fat Belly’s Pub—that occupy smaller, older brick buildings.

To the west of the Edge’s lot, though, towers the 13-story Citizen’s Bank building. Brent Runyon, President of the Providence Preservation Society, worries that the Edge may “stick out like a sore thumb” on the otherwise smallscale, colonial East Side. “Generally, we would not be in favor of taller buildings on College Hill, especially in areas where they would be conspicuously tall,” Runyon told the Independent via email. He pointed to the brutalist style of the 15-story Sciences Library at Brown as a point of comparison to the Edge, saying of the SciLi, “I'm not sure anyone would argue that it is a good fit for the neighborhood.”

Even if the Edge aesthetically mirrors downtown skyscrapers to a greater degree than its historic neighbors, DBVW Architects and Vision Properties are clear in their commitment to making the Edge a space for students—specifically, students who can afford the steep rent. Compared to market-rate rent averages in Providence, the Edge’s prices soar; where Rhode Island Housing’s annual rent survey reported the average price of a one-bedroom in Providence as $967 in 2016, the Edge lists one-bedroom apartments for $2,000.

Above-average rents plague other recent projects near the Edge. Just across the river, the Commons at Providence Station will also offer one bedroom apartments for roughly $2,000 when completed this summer.

Both Providence Commons and the Edge were awarded a tax incentive from the Rhode Island Commerce

Corporation, which provides “redeemable tax credits covering up to 20 percent—and, in some cases, 30 percent—of projects costs” for ground-up developments and historic rehabilitations across the state. The Edge has been approved for the credit for both its main 15-story tower and its reuse of older buildings at 100, 106, and 108 North Main Street.

Since the start of the Rebuild Rhode Island program about two years ago, the tax incentive has financed projects which have created 3,500 construction jobs, but none of those projects have been completed. Of the program’s 24 approved projects, only one residential development has plans to allocate low-income units. That project, Prospect Heights in Pawtucket, involved the rehabilitation of a New Deal-era housing project with help from both Rebuild Rhode Island and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program. A rare combination of federal and state housing funds made that project possible, but most other projects through Rebuild Rhode Island include no provision to economically diversify residency.

As the Commerce Corporation’s President Darin Early explains, the tax incentive serves to support projects, not influence them; questions of location, aesthetic, sustainability, and affordability are largely left up to the developer. “We’re not going to steer developers,” Early told the Independent.

To Early, the value of the tax incentive lies in its ability to create jobs and in its investment in protecting Rhode Island taxpayers. Projects aren’t awarded the credit until they receive a certificate of occupancy, and “if the project does better than expected, the state can get paid back its investment.” In terms of what projects get approved for the credit, Early says that the Commerce Corporation’s public board looks for “catalytic projects” that will “move the market, the industry, or property type… something that has an impact beyond simply building a building.” +++ Early is correct in saying that the Edge has a massive ability to influence the urban fabric of College Hill.

However, the very elements of the Edge that Early lauds as “catalytic”—its commercial space and appeal to young people—are almost certain to engender gentrification.

The Edge would not be the first student-centered luxury housing project on the East Side to do so.

257 Thayer Street, which opened in 2015 and lists one bedroom apartments starting at $1,495, similarly appeals to wealthy students interested in convenient, independent living near Brown. Though 257 Thayer leases very limited ground floor retail space, the development has brought wealthy clientele to the immediate Thayer Street area, influencing the retail market on Brown’s

NOVEMBER 03, 2017

dense commercial strip. Small businesses like Nice Slice and What Cheer? have been replaced by chains, many of which serve the elite; By Chloe, a vegan restaurant with locations in affluent New York, Los Angeles, and Boston neighborhoods, will open on Thayer Street this year.

Other changes prompted by development are perhaps more utilitarian. The Edge will replace a parking lot between Canal and North Main Street, offering a critical response to the car-centric nature of downtown Providence. With a design that both appeals to students and gestures towards environmental concerns, the Edge allots no spots for car parking, but will provide room for 95 bikes. The project is concurrent with plans by the

pedestrian movement around College Hill is encouraged, Raimondo’s vision of the Edge as facilitator for movement across the Providence River is inhibited by physical barriers. These physical barriers are only intensified by the insularity of the development. Surely the inclusion of restaurants, cafés, and a gym on the ground floor of the Edge will only further discourage movement and engagement off of College Hill.

Rhode Island Department of Transportation to make Canal Street between Smith and Washington Streets, where the Edge will be located, safer for pedestrians and more accessible to bikers. The impact of such changes though, is limited when residency at the Edge is inaccessible—many car-less Providence residents who would benefit from improved bike lanes and sidewalks are unable to afford a $1,650 studio.

The value of such transit-oriented efforts around the Edge and on the East Side is further stunted by Memorial Boulevard. With four high-speed lanes and sidewalks barely wide enough for two pedestrians, the Boulevard remains a daunting barrier for those crossing the river without a car. Even when cyclist and

changes for a city constantly working to counter challenges to walkability. Indeed, the uncovering of the Providence River by Mayor Buddy Cianci in the 1990s created the future home of the Edge, which BVDW now advertises as “the highly acclaimed Providence River Walk.” But when understood in their geographic context—adjacent to a luxury housing complex for students—improvements to transit seem more exclusionary.

The same argument could be made regarding the Edge. Planned to replace a parking lot on a mixed commercial and residential strip, the new building will not directly displace any existing homes or small businesses. But, when understood in its greater urban context, allocation of state taxpayer money to an exclusionary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Viewed independently, infrastructural investments like increased bike accessibility and street safety are positive

development seems unwise, especially when lower-income neighborhoods in Providence remain almost untouched by Rebuild Rhode Island’s funding. While the program supports one affordable housing development and other accessible programs like the Urban Greens Food Co-op on the West End, most projects are in the vein of the Edge.

Early and many others maintain that residential projects—even those that are inaccessible to the majority of the city’s population—will attract businesses that are good for the whole city’s economy. However, sustainable downtowns are formed by invested, long-term residents.

The students who will make their home at the Edge will do so only for a few years, likely leaving Providence after graduation. The very nature of the Edge, and projects like it across the country, is to maintain a short-term residential population interested more in a temporary student community than in the existing commercial and social urban structure.

Runyon offers a more positive long-term view of the development, arguing that even if the Edge is serving students now, it has the potential to serve other populations in the future. “We in the historic preservation field take the long view. We want good buildings to last; and to last, buildings must be adaptable to new uses. Will Edge College Hill last? Will it be able to accommodate new uses? Probably. Of course, we’ll always need housing, so the question there is really whether it can change the type of housing it offers, should the need arise.” Runyon thinks the Edge will be able to meet the challenge and become more accessible in the future. Even if the residential population is transient, the building, he argues, will persist.

The possibility of reusing once-luxury apartments for new, more equitable purposes is complicated by the lasting nature of gentrification. The Edge itself evidences this trend; it can be seen as the most recent marker of a nearly century-long gentrification of the East Side.

Where a Cape Verdean immigrant enclave in Fox Point once stood, Brown students and faculty now make their homes. Indeed, contemporary development on the western edge of College Hill mirrors earlier neighborhood change on its southern tip. When a midcentury push for historic preservation in Fox Point engendered the neighborhood’s gentrification, value was placed in the older architecture. Now, the Edge is notable and desirable for its newness, its stature, and its contrast with historic buildings. But questions of residency, equitability, and just who gets a seat—or, a studio apartment—on College Hill remain.

ELLA COMBERG B’20 does not want to live at the Edge.

METRO

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BRINGING IT Rosa Parks’ house for public history and political action

content warning: racism, police violence This coming March, Providence will become a home for a memorial to one of the most significant figures in US Civil Rights history. Rosa Parks’ former house in Detroit will be shipped piece by piece from Berlin, where it is currently in the possession of the American painter Ryan Mendoza. Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) agreed to host the house in Providence after Mendoza reached out to CSSJ director Anthony Bogues in August.

Mendoza came into possession of the house in the summer of 2016 after it was loaned to him by Parks’ niece, Rhea McCauley. Earlier that year, McCauley found the house in disrepair and purchased it for $500 to prevent its demolition. Dismayed by Detroit’s disinterest in preserving a significant memorial of her aunt, McCauley decided the home would be best kept outside of the US. She communicated with Mendoza, who had done other art projects in Detroit, and took him up on his offer to host the house in Berlin. The choice to move the house overseas was also a political statement for McCauley: “When America decides to stop murdering her citizens in cold blood, then maybe the house will come back,” she told NPR in October of 2016. Her statement came just two months after police shot and killed two unarmed Black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, triggering national uproar and protest over racist police violence.

Now, just one year later, Mendoza says, “it’s time for the house to return home,” a move that McCauley told the Detroit Free Press was “a step in the right direction.”

Police violence against Black Americans has certainly not abated. However, Mendoza and the Parks family see the house’s return as a timely intervention into current national debates surrounding memorialization and the continued presence of white supremacy in the US. The house itself is in disrepair: it has chipping paint, a crumbling roof and is barely structurally sound. McCauley says the house’s state is essential to conveying her aunt’s lifelong struggle against the racism that followed her from Montgomery to Detroit, and to demonstrate how histories of the Civil Rights Movement are still undervalued in the US. It was in Detroit where Parks struggled to find housing and employment, and where she eventually passed away, barely able to afford rent.

After it is shipped from Berlin to Providence, the house will be made available for public viewing for the first time in the US, chipped paint and all. As Bogues and Evans recognize, the way Civil Rights history is commemorated influences contemporary narratives of racism today. The house has the potential, both nationally and in Providence, to disrupt contemporary myths of a post-racial America and to highlight the continuity of Black activist work in the face of persistent antiblackness. However, the house on its own does not respond to white nationalist groups in Charlottesville. Only the specific narratives crafted about the house, in addition to the political action accompanied by this accounting for

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history, can do so. Beyond opening space for dialogue, the house brings with it a responsibility to carry on its former resident's legacy of Black freedom activism. +++ Parks’ time in Detroit was marked by her commitment to radical activism, including organizing around fair housing and employment discrimination and police brutality. The Detroit house is a material representation of these contributions, which have been overshadowed by the focus on Parks’ involvement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In the wake of the Boycott, Rosa and Raymond Parks were denied employment throughout Montgomery. Finally, after receiving multiple death threats, the Parks family moved to Detroit in August of 1957 and settled into Parks’ brother’s house. Parks would go on to describe Detroit as the “Northern promised land that wasn’t.” The systemic racism and segregationist politics she had encountered in the South were rampant in the North. There, she and her family experienced job and housing discrimination, prompting her to comment that there wasn’t “too much difference” between Montgomery and Detroit.

Parks had been staying in her brother’s house for two years when, after a brief leave from Detroit, she moved with her husband and mother into a two-room apartment at the Progressive Civic League. After finding employment at the Sewing Stock Company, Parks moved to the Virginia Park neighborhood. In the following 40 years, she continued as an active leader of the freedom struggle in Detroit, fighting for open housing and school desegregation and protesting police brutality.

In 2002, Parks received eviction notices from her apartment when she could not pay the $1,800 a month rent. Although benefactors stepped in to support her housing for the remainder of her life, Parks passed away three years later, nearly penniless, at age 92. Meanwhile, the house on Deacon Street, home to Parks for just a few short years, was foreclosed and placed on a demolition list in 2008.

In an interview with the Independent, Bogues, a notable figure in public histories of US chattel slavery and Civil Rights and a leader of the house’s curatorial efforts, recognizes that popular accounts of Parks “freeze her in that moment rather than see that she was a figure who continuously fought for justice and racial equality.” For Bogues, it is essential to highlight her as “a figure of social justice” beyond the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in order to do justice to her underrepresented history of radical activism. +++ The house is neither an intervention into depoliticized narratives of Parks’ life nor simply a testament to the pervasive climate of antiblackness in the US. Bogues, Mendoza, Evans, and the Parks family understand the house’s homecoming as an intervention in a specific

national conversation about white supremacy and public history.

Bogues recognizes the potential for the house to “trouble the particular narrative that we are in a post-racial society” but hopes that the house will do more than point out the existence of racism; he aims for it to “open a space for dialogue around the continued persistence of structural racism in this country.” This space for dialogue is especially critical in the wake of the white supremacist violence on display in Charlottesville during a protest against the removal of a Confederate statue. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, Mendoza stated,“If you look at the current situation in America, you have all of these monuments to the Confederacy—which are monuments to slavery... There are very, very few monuments to the Civil Rights movement.”

Civil Rghts memorials are not only educational tools, but, as Francois Hamlin, Brown University scholar of Black Freedom Struggle Movement and board member of the CSSJ, told the Independent, are important because they provide material reminders of histories of resistance, contextualize contemporary justice efforts, and create continuity with the past. This too is critical in how the house will be presented this March.

Other scholars of Civil Rights have noted that the house, as a relic of late 1950s Detroit, troubles myths of racism as an exclusively Southern issue. Parks’ continued struggle with segregationist policies and racial injustice after leaving Montgomery are testament to underrepresented histories of the Jim Crow North. Again, this is immediately relevant as events in Charlottesville turn contemporary debates about public monuments back toward the South. As Parks’ story makes clear, the North has its own history of antiblackness to contend with.

On one level, the house, as a memorial, functions as a project for raising consciousness about the reality of persistent discrimination. It is worth questioning who the audience is for this project and who needs these reminders. The ‘interventions’ proposed by the curatorial team and articulated here operate differently for white Americans and communities of color nationally and locally in Providence. +++ In March, Parks’ home will be open to public viewership at the Waterfire organization’s newest warehouse location on Valley Street in March. But what exactly the installation will look like and how it will be integrated into the city is still being debated in conversations between Bogues, Evans, and others. It is critical to consider how the house can open dialogue that is specific to Providence, and how it can support local organizing which contests racial inequity, including housing discrimination, employment, and racist police violence. These conversations must engage not only scholars and public artists, but also community leaders, activists, and local residents, in asking how the project can support local organizing.

NOVEMBER 03, 2017

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BY Kerrick Edwards & Erin West ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Barnaby Evans, director of Waterfire Providence, and one of the sponsors of the house in Providence alongside Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, told the Independent that he and the curatorial team are thinking creatively about how to expand public engagement with the house. He is currently in conversation with city schools about bringing classes to the house and creating theatrical performances about Parks’ life. Brown will also host a multi-day conference on race, history and memorialization.

As Evans and others continue to develop programming around the house, material political action needs to be considered alongside efforts to inspire conversation.

Providence, the Parks house’s new home in the states, is another Northern city that remains plagued with racial inequality. Black households in Rhode Island make just 52.5 percent of the white median household income, compared to a higher national average of 62.2 percent.

While more than 23 percent of Black Rhode Islanders live in poverty, less than 11 percent of white Rhode Islanders do (according to 2015 data). Can the presence of Parks’ house do anything to offer redress for this inequity?

Bogues’ interest in prompting dialogue may be the first step in any intervention, but dialogue needs to translate into political action in order to offer any real response to the racial injustice Parks dedicated her life to combating.

As Parks did in Detroit, Black Rhode Islanders today continue to lack employment opportunities. The Black unemployment rate in RI is 16 percent (the sixth highest in the country) compared to 9.2 percent of all US citizens. How might the house’s curatorial team support Rhode Island Jobs With Justice in its campaign for an end to tipped wages? The presence of Parks’ house in Providence could also speak to conditions of racist police violence, as McCauley called for, by supporting efforts to implement the Community Safety Act, or holding a fundraiser for local police accountability group AMOR. Just as Parks struggled to access affordable housing in her lifetime, so do Black Rhode Islanders to this day with a Black homeownership rate of only 29.4 percent, the 10th lowest in the country. The Parks house could host a rally, pressuring city lawmakers to include affordable units in new downtown housing construction or provide a venue for meetings for Direct Action for Rights and Equality, a group that organizes around tenant rights in the city. Additionally, in considering the continuity of racism in housing policy from Parks’ day to the present, the project organizers—Brown and Waterfire—cannot ignore their own participation in processes such as gentrification, displacement, and monopolization. Anthony Bogues told the Independent he recognizes the need to “think about questions of relationship to community in trying to develop what we call public humanities and public history.” Can the Parks house be used to elevate Brown’s history of gentrifying the Cape Verdean community of Fox Point? Or ask for careful consideration of what Brown does with the land it buys in the new Jewelry District? Through the Parks house project, how could Waterfire take seriously its commitment to housing

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security in the neighborhood where it purchased and renovated a large post-industrial building?

It’s unclear where the house will travel after its brief stay in Providence. It may be purchased by the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, yet there are also strong calls for it to return to Detroit. Mendoza has stated that he thinks the best place for Parks’ home is on the White House lawn, directly in front of a house built by slaves. However, during its months in Providence, the house presents a unique opportunity for one city to respond to Parks’ unrelenting call for racial justice: “Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.”

KERRICK EDWARDS B’18 AND ERIN WEST B’18.5 are looking forward to visiting the house.

METRO

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EAT UP

BY Audrey Chisholm ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Thoughts on the body horror of Raw

content warning: gore, eating disorder Before it hit the US, Julia Ducournau’s debut film Raw generated early buzz for its allegedly nauseating blood and guts. Rumors spread of audience members fainting during the screening at the 2016 Toronto Film Festival.

And while this story billed Raw as a hardcore gore fest, it soon had most critics raving. Variety declared it a “muscular yet elegant” film while Rolling Stone celebrated it as a “clever feminist parable.”

Its protagonist is a freshman veterinary student, Justine, who finds her mind and body violently challenged in her new surroundings. Older peers impose brutal hazing rituals, and Justine finds no solace in her eye-rolling older sister, Alex. When the so-called elders force the rookies to eat raw rabbit kidneys, Justine protests that she is a vegetarian—just ask her sister. Alex hardly comes to the rescue. “You’ll be happy you did it,” she says before prying open Justine’s mouth and forcing her to swallow the kidney. Justine vomits, but it can’t be purged. This taste of flesh will not be her last.

Female cannibals are not new to the screen. Claire Denis’s maligned 2002 film Trouble Every Day follows lovers who eat out their partners in more ways than one.

Her cannibals get hungry when they get horny, devouring their unsuspecting victims in the cruelest of ways.

Criticized for its abject eroticism, it revels in the connection between sexual pleasure and violent consumption.

Jim Mickle, on the other hand, turns cannibalism into a family affair in his 2013 film We Are What We Are. Mickle unites patriarchal drama with rural gore. In it, the family matriarch lovingly prepares home-cooked meals for her brood that take the notion of finger food to a whole new level—proving that cannibal or no, the gendering of domestic tasks still plagues the American family. A modern cannibal tale, Raw fits in somewhere between the two. However, Ducournau departs from these works with a fable that boldly weaves together desire and control through the locus of an unwilling female body.

Ducournau is aware of the horror conventions that precede her own work. Women have most often been reduced to doomed virgins, wombs for demon babies, and mutilated limbs. And she does make use of body horror conventions to shock and nauseate, but her camera has a unique movement that builds dread as much as it elicits empathy. As Justine’s body is besieged by violence, the viewer is both disgusted and worried. When she breaks out in a ferocious rash, the scene lingers over her damaged skin and highlights her horrified reaction. Her heavy breathing creates the soundtrack to a prolonged look at dry, red skin and large, pink boils. When she is later puking up an inexplicable mass of hair, the camera

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moves in and stays put, giving us a terrified Justine and the revolting vomit in the same shot. Her growing hunger punctuates these earlier scenes of bodily change.

Justine is a wide-eyed, serious student who looks at the cruelty of her school and peers with bewilderment.

In a competitive environment where students cut open a dead dog by day and openly degrade each other by night, she is outmatched by her external situation and internal turmoil. The setting is utilitarian in design and purpose.

Cold, grey buildings drip with the fluids of animals and humans alike. Dissected animals littered throughout the scenes point to the arbitrary imposition of human-animal boundaries. Raw explores the herd mentality of vet school and suggests that the behavior of these young adults is primordial and, ultimately, animalistic. Justine learns that discipline is a human myth. +++ Raw asks if we can reconcile the cruelty of the body with the pleasures it offers in return. As a site wrought with external imposition and internal conflict, the young woman’s body is a rich subject. Ducournau seems obsessed with its potential as a place where pleasure can be subsumed by a horrifying imaginary. Justine’s flesh cravings coincide with her sexual awakening. A virgin when she enters school, she finds herself fascinated by her handsome roommate. The audience gets nervous about her lingering looks. When he offers to take her virginity, he gets more than he signed up for. The biting becomes more than playful foreplay; their fraught encounter leaves her plunging her teeth into her own arm to quell the hunger, an orgasmic sign of worse things to come.

Like many growing girls, Justine has to negotiate her newfound desire and appetite in a man’s world. Eating is not a purely biological act of chewing and swallowing.

It becomes an exercise in keeping up appearances. The female cannibal is a threatening figure because she renders the act of eating so explicitly grotesque. In a review of the film for the Atlantic, Kate Robertson wrote that female cannibals “offer an image of resistance to society’s demand that women keep their appetites under control.”

Before taking her first bite of gas station shawarma, she tells her roommate she can’t do it if he’s watching.

He laughs and warns that she will “kill a guy’s hard-on for life” with those words. But eating becomes even more difficult. The indulgent shawarma begets a late-night feast on his raw chicken. Justine crouches by the minifridge, checking to make sure he won’t see. She groans with the first bite of tender meat. This is not your typical

midnight binge.

But animal meat proves increasingly unsatisfactory.

She gets thinner and her cheekbones begin to sink in as she functionally starves herself. Onlookers offer pallid advice. After she has expelled the mass of hair, a girl in the bathroom tells her to use two fingers the next time; it will come up faster. But Justine’s descent points to the impossibility of control.

“Someone tells you to eat a raw rabbit kidney, and you do?” asks the doctor. +++ We inhabit the bodies we inherit. Justine learns that the hard way; it turns out that she comes from a long line of cannibals. Raw is also a story of sisterhood taken to its extreme. In one of the film’s most grisly scenes, the rituals of feminine grooming take a nasty turn. Alex aims at waxing Justine’s bikini line and ends up losing her own finger. The camera is unflinching as Justine takes the inevitable first bite from her sister’s body. The sisters have literally torn each other apart. Perhaps they both have something to learn. Alex too is a cannibal, and she must show Justine the ropes. It is a teachable moment.

But Raw does not settle for a purely empowering version of sisterhood. Tensions continue to rise after and outside of the finger eating, and their relationship is as toxic as it is nurturing. Justine rejects Alex’s brutality, and Alex taunts Justine with her satiation. The shared condition does not erase their differences as sisters—they can commiserate, but their suffering is still distinct.

In a world where female bodies have been exploited, starved, and assaulted on and off screen, there’s something undeniably attractive about the girl who bites back.

But the film’s ending cautions against simplistic moralizing. This is a world where indulgence is punished and regulated by an inescapable order. Justine suffers on her way to womanhood, and Alex ends up institutionalized for her hunger while their mother, it is revealed, has made it through only with a husband-turned-hor-d’oeuvre.

Her dad, at his wit’s end with his family of maneaters, blithely encourages her to find a solution. The ending finds Justine at a loss—she can’t win, but none of us can.

When it comes to desires, we can try to starve, binge, harm, and fuck them away. But ultimately, Ducournau says it best: the body speaks for itself.

AUDREY CHISHOLM B’18 wants to find the warehouse where they store the mutilated female limbs from the Saw franchise.

NOVEMBER 03, 2017

CHRONICLE OF A FRAUD FORETOLD The dilemmas and pitfalls of voting in Venezuela’s rigged elections

BY Oriana van Praag ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

"You have a house, and you know there are thieves around. If the thieves are going to break into your house, you should at the very least lock it and surround it with electric wire. That way they have to do something. If you leave your doors open, you are making it easier."

María was going to vote in Venezuela’s gubernatorial elections, scheduled for Sunday, October 15 of this year.

On the preceding Thursday, she found out her center had been changed: instead of voting at a school near her home in Guarenas, she would have to vote in Vista Hermosa, a barrio atop a nearby mountain. The change concerned María: she had never heard of the place, and worried it might be difficult to reach and unsafe for her to visit.

The outskirts of Caracas, where she lives, teem with makeshift homes of red brick and tin roofs. Known as barrios, they house the majority of the city’s poor, many of whom migrated from rural areas in search of better living conditions. The persistent precariousness of these residences is a testament to Venezuela’s systemic inequality, which has concentrated oil wealth in the hands of relatively few. It was such glaring injustice that catapulted Hugo Chávez to power in 1998, on the promise to redistribute the country’s riches and build a participative democracy.

During his administration, high oil prices translated into a considerable reduction in the poverty rate but relatively modest improvements in structural poverty. Even though Chávez’s diagnosis was correct, his solutions were inefficient and fell short of achieving systemic change. Social programs were hindered by corruption and clientelism, and antagonism toward the private sector led to greater dependence on oil. By the time of Chávez’s death in 2013, oil prices had fallen and poverty was approaching levels prior to his presidency.

His successor, Nicolás Maduro, has presided over the greatest economic and social crisis in Venezuela’s history.

The numbers are overwhelming: 82 percent of the population is below the poverty line and 90 percent of households report having insufficient income to eat. This year, the economy is expected to contract by 12 percent and the inflation rate to reach 1,600 percent. The government’s approval rating has taken a hit: from 57 percent in 2012 to 24 percent this month. In the absence of popular support, however, the regime exerts control.

Three days before the governor elections, the National Electoral Council reallocated 273 voting centers, affecting over 715,000 voters. The majority of those centers were in middle-class neighborhoods that had historically favored the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), a coalition of political parties formed in 2008 to oppose Chávez’s United Socialist Party (PSUV) in elections. Aside from creating logistical problems for the opposition, transferring those voters to other centers provided the government with greater control over electoral conditions.

When María arrived at her old voting center in Guarenas, vans full of people were coming back from Vista Hermosa. Visibly shaken, the passengers advised those waiting to be transported over against voting.

Pro-government armed groups, known locally as colectivos, had prevented their vehicles from reaching the

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electoral center. Heeding their advice, a group of voters decided to go home. Another group, including María, decided to take the risk.

A van dropped them off at the base of the hill. The trail up to the voting center was steep and blocked by armed men from the colectivos, but the group decided to charge ahead. This time, they were allowed to pass. María recalls hearing discussions between government campaign members, “because the order was not to let [them] vote.”

The electoral center was too small for the number of voters that had been transferred to it, and several of its voting machines failed. In some stations the queues went on for hours. However, people didn’t leave until they had voted. “I think Venezuelans are fighting,” María told the Independent. “But it is a battle of David versus Goliath.

[The government] has the infrastructure... they have everything. If they were truly confident, I doubt they would be implementing all these strategies.” +++ María’s story is not unique, nor is it especially tragic.

Violence was registered in 60 percent of voting centers overseen by the Electoral Observation Network, one of only two independent organizations authorized to monitor the elections. According to the MUD, such incidents may have affected over 350,000 voters. However, violence was just one card in the deck of government coercion, which went into play well before October 15.

Regional elections should have taken place last year, but the Electoral Council had delayed them until further notice. After losing the National Assembly to the opposition in 2015, the regime did everything possible to avoid the ballot box. Last October, for example, it halted a referendum drive that could have recalled Maduro mid-way through his term. Were it not for international pressure and sustained street protests, these elections may have never taken place. But when they did, it was on the government’s terms.

The vote was originally scheduled for December, but the Electoral Council moved it up by two months to reduce the amount of time the opposition had to prepare electoral logistics. As a result, 39 percent of the centers monitored by the Electoral Observation Network didn’t have accredited witnesses from Venezuela's multiple political parties and 44 percent did not follow counting protocols. And for the first time in Venezuela’s history, people were not marked with semi-permanent ink to prevent them from voting multiple times. When combined with the failures in supervision, that change might explain why there were 1,600 ballots cast where fingerprints did not coincide with the individuals who voted. But even if the magnitude of abuse is enraging, it’s not surprising.

Therein lies the conundrum of this electoral fraud: it was to be expected. +++ The Electoral Council has been controlled by government

affiliates since 2006, when there ceased to be international witnesses to elections. However, the ruling party was popular enough at the time its electoral victories could not be explained by irregularities alone. Chávez could fend off accusations of growing authoritarianism by citing the number of elections his government had held and won, even if those elections weren’t always free and transparent.

Things changed after his death in 2013. No longer supported by the majority, the ruling party had to further tamper with electoral conditions in order to remain in power. In fact, the opposition claims Maduro’s victory that year was fraudulent, given his slim margin of victory and the number of irregularities reported on election day. Proving that would have required a comprehensive audit by the Electoral Council, which was denied.

In its absence, fraud can only be proven if the government directly manipulates electoral results. That was not the case in 2013, but it was in this year’s elections for a National Constituent Assembly (ANC).

In July, the regime held elections for a legislative body that would supersede all branches of government and be tasked with drafting a new constitution. According to Venezuelan law, it should have first held a referendum to see if the majority of voters desired a new constitution.

The opposition decided to boycott the vote, so only ruling party candidates ran for seats. Still, the Electoral Council announced an impressive turnout of 8.1 million voters.

Days later, the company that supplied the Council with voting machines claimed the results had been altered by at least one million votes.

Considering these instances of electoral fraud, why should the opposition participate in the governor elections? The dilemma divided the coalition in the months leading up to the vote, and it has nearly torn it apart in the vote's aftermath. +++ Elections in Venezuela were not a handover from the government, but, rather, the product of sustained popular and international pressure. Between March and July, the country was engulfed by the largest and bloodiest demonstrations of its history, with protesters decrying the assumption of legislative powers by the Supreme Justice Tribunal. The regime met the protesters with its entire repressive arsenal: expired tear gas, rubber bullets fired at the head, freely-operating colectivos, and sometimes even the rifles of military personnel. By July, 114 people had died and over 1,900 injured in the protests, many of them under the age of 18.

The eyes of the international community finally settled on Venezuela. On July 16, over seven million people voted in an informal referendum rejecting the Constituent Assembly and demanding free and transparent elections.

Even though the government agreed to hold governor elections, it refused to change the Electoral Council. The opposition was faced with a dilemma: on the one hand, it risked losing political spaces to the regime; on the other, legitimating a fraudulent process.

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After much hesitation, the MUD decided to participate in the elections. The coalition reasoned that one of two things would happen: either the opposition would win by a margin so wide that all of the government’s tricks would fall short, or the regime would commit a fraud so obvious that it would merit international condemnation.

Both scenarios assumed a high turnout among opposition voters, underestimating the influence of the more radical factions of the opposition calling for abstention.

Darío, an engineering student at Venezuela's Catholic University, was among those who abstained. He disagreed with putting a hold on street protests to participate in elections without first changing the Electoral Council. Aside from lessening pressure on the government, that would set the opposition up for defeat. “They are smarter than us at this, they have been cheating all their lives,” he told the Independent. “We can’t win at their game: trying to discover their tricks and find ways to demonstrate them.”

When election results rolled in Sunday night, opposition voters were forced to reckon with his argument. The defeat was staggering: the ruling party had taken home 18 out of 23 states and won 54 percent of the popular vote.

When compared with the 2015 elections, it had gained over 377 thousand votes and the MUD had lost over 2.37 million.

The initial reaction was surprise. Polling agencies had predicted the opposition would win at least half of the governorships, and it seemed impossible for a government with such a low approval rating to win the majority of the popular vote. Even more startling, it had won in urban districts the opposition considered its strongholds. Shock was soon displaced by anger, as reports of violence and electoral irregularities emerged. Then came self-doubt, and the suspicion that the opposition had it coming. +++ Still, the government’s victory cannot be explained by electoral irregularities alone. Part of the reason the regime fared better in these elections was because it employed an ambitious strategy of social mobilization and control.

Last year, Maduro launched a program to distribute subsidized food and staples through communal committees, known as CLAP. The committees first performed a population census, which recorded the number of program beneficiaries in each community, where they lived, and what they needed. That information allowed the government to create the carnet de la patria, an electronic identity document that regulates access to social programs. Venezuelan economist Michael Penfold argues that the cards could allow the regime to exercise control over program recipients. “If they have not been renovated, people’s access to their main source of subsidized food is limited,” he wrote in ProDavinci. “Renewing that access might depend upon the fulfillment of expectations about the social and political behavior of the beneficiary, especially when the government is facing an electoral event.”

Indeed, the system was put to the test during the governor elections. In poor urban areas, the government

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set up stations to renew the carnet de la patria close to voting centers. According to multiple testimonies, renewal depended upon electoral participation. Rosa, 53, told Caracas Chronicles that her neighborhood’s communal council had threatened that, “if you didn’t vote, you wouldn’t get your CLAP bag.” And she would rather be safe.

Since both processes are electronic and were developing in close proximity, there is a possibility that program beneficiaries were scared of voting against the government.

Word on the street is that the regime has access to election data: “The opposition says it’s secret, but chavistas suggest they know,” said Carlos, 37, in an interview with Caracas Chronicles. “It’s a risk; I work in the public sector and there’s no way I’ll put my work at risk right now. If it’s hard to live with my salary. Imagine without it.”

Government coercion and control coincided with high abstention rates among the opposition. Even though electoral irregularities may end up accounting for a large portion of that abstention, they will never be able to explain it in full. The opposition’s defeat in the governor elections had a great deal to do with its internal dynamics.

The coalition’s discourse leading up to the vote was weak and hesitant: party leaders changed their stances repeatedly, and they failed to provide an explanation as to why the elections were important. For people like Darío, who had risked their lives in the protests, it seemed like the MUD was capitulating to the regime. However, they did the government a favor by abstaining. The regime never wanted them to vote: aside from creating physical and procedural barriers, it tried to discourage participation. According to political scientist Juan Manuel Trak, “the purpose of many of those practices was to create the perception that voting cannot transform reality.”

Additionally, the government insisted that participating in the elections implied recognizing the Constituent Assembly.

The best possible scenario for the regime was a low opposition turnout: enough participation to validate the electoral process but not enough to make it lose.

Electoral abstention has proven to be self-destructive unless supported by all parties and part of a larger political strategy, as was the case in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. However, so was going to elections without a coherent narrative and a unified leadership.

The Achilles’ heel of the coalition is division in the face of government attacks. María believes discussions about political strategy should take place aguas adentro: if opposition leaders debate each other in public, the regime will find weaknesses to separate them. Unfortunately, that is precisely what has occurred since the elections. By demanding elected governors be sworn in before the Constituent Assembly, the government has created a fracture between parties that still believe in the electoral route and are willing to make concessions and those that demand institutional change before negotiating or participating in another election.

The MUD is likely to be replaced or profoundly transformed in the coming months. Meanwhile, the regime will work to create an environment that allows it to hold elections without risk of defeat.

There is a fine line to walk if the opposition hopes to avoid getting trapped in an electoral dead-end.

With municipal elections scheduled for December 2017 and presidential elections due in 2019, it cannot afford to make another mistake. One thing is certain: divided, it cannot win.

ORIANA VAN PRAAG B’19.5 misses her home.

NEWS

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PrEP FAILURE Drugs and stigma in the ‘post-AIDS’ era

BY Mitchell Johnson ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Ashley Min

content warning: homophobia, racism In February of this year, several media outlets picked up a story about a gay man in the Netherlands who became the third reported case of “PrEP failure.” PrEP, or Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, is a kind of drug taken once a day to prevent HIV infection. So far, the drug has failed to prevent infection only three times since it was approved by the FDA in 2012. The first two cases of PrEP failure occurred because of drug-resistant strains of HIV, but in the third case, the man contracted a strain of HIV that otherwise should have been prevented by a daily regimen of PrEP. The reporting on this event found an explanation for the man’s infection in the amount, and frequency, of his sexual partners. In an article for Jezebel, Rich Juzwiak described his sexual habits as “astounding,” listing the number of his sexual partners over the course of several months. Juzwiak went on to note the frequency with which he engaged in sex without a condom, as well as a list of the recreational drugs he used (all publicly available information, because the man was participating in a PrEP study).

For those old enough to have read the news during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, these descriptions might feel painfully familiar. In 1987, the publication of Randy Shilts’ book And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic led to a flurry of national attention on the sexual habits of Gaëtan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant Shilts labeled the “patient zero” of AIDS. Shilts paints Dugas as stereotypically self-obsessed, with a “voracious sexual appetite” and a careless disregard for safety. Dugas embodied the existing cultural fears about AIDS, and his body was mobilized to confirm homophobia and xenophobia (he was said to have brought AIDS to the US from abroad) already present in discussions of the disease. After Shilts’ book, Dugas quickly became a national figure, labeled by the New York Post as “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS,” and was soon cemented as the origin story in early canonizations of the AIDS epidemic. This theory has since been debunked, but the myth, and the homophobic discourse it represents, still linger.

In the coverage of both Dugas and the Dutch man at the center of the third case of PrEP failure, the sexual habits of individual gay men are laid out as objects of public scrutiny and matters of concern for public health.

Invocations of promiscuity and hygiene converge on the bodies of two individuals, animated by the spectacle of queer sexuality. Both men’s bodies exist as archetypes, vehicles of confirmation for long-running fears and unspoken assumptions. “He’s far from the only one racking up such numbers,” the Jezebel article explains.

The fear of “PrEP failure,” in its invocation of two groups long associated with HIV—queer people and drug users—shows the extent to which the archetype of Gaëtan Dugas still resonates in the public psyche. The advances in treatment and prevention epitomized by drugs like PrEP (available in the US as Truvada) have changed the way the disease manifests on the body.

These drugs also change public representations of HIV and AIDS, recasting old stigmas in the context of pharmaceutical treatment.

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Though aggregated by Jezebel, the original reporting on the third case of PrEP failure originally appeared in Poz, which offers health information, lifestyle articles, and advice on living with HIV. The coverage of “PrEP failure” appeared as a note of uncertainty in Poz’s otherwise thoroughly optimistic tone. Typical articles about PrEP are titled “PrEP Greatly Benefits Gay Men’s Sexual Health and Well-Being,” or “PrEP is Cost Effective and May Even Save Money in Many Scenarios.” Poz provides necessary health information, and works to combat stigma by portraying people with HIV in ways that highlight their agency and humanity. As the magazine itself says at the beginning of most of its issues: “Together, our stories can change the way the world sees HIV/AIDS.” If the discourse surrounding AIDS has, for the past three

drugs or treatment plans. Truvada, frequently mentioned in Poz as a viable option for both the prevention and treatment of HIV, earned the pharmaceutical manufacturer Gilead over $3 billion in 2016. The magazine’s interest in promoting health aligns with the pharmaceutical industry’s interest in selling drugs.

While Poz and the broader world of HIV public health have, for the most part, begun promoting PrEP as a crucial part of ending the epidemic, PrEP’s early years were marked by skepticism and ambivalence toward the drug. “Despite its proven efficacy as an HIV prevention strategy among men who have sex with men,” Kane Race wrote in a 2015 essay for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, “PrEP has so far emerged as a reluctant object, partly because of its putative association with the supposed excesses of unbridled sex.”

PrEP’s implicit promise of sex without condoms, for many public health officials and AIDS activists, appeared

decades, largely centered on tragedy and hopelessness, Poz crucially reframes the narrative in ways that presume the vitality of people with HIV. But the facts of treatment and prevention achieved through pharmaceuticals are inextricable from Poz’s goals of destigmatization. This is represented by the pages of the publication itself: full-page ads for drugs permeate the space between articles, often about the benefits of similar

to negate the safer sex practices implemented by queer communities in the wake of AIDS. In a now-infamous Huffpost article from 2012, writer David Duran coined the term “Truvada Whores,” saying “for gay men who just like bareback sex, Truvada is just an excuse to do what they want to do.” PrEP is at once utopian and terrifying—promising to end the epidemic and evoking images of rampant, “risky” queer sex.

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The idea that risk-free sex without a condom was being sold for profit added to this reluctance. As a prevention medication, the market for PrEP is potentially unlimited. Regan Hoffman, the former editor-in-chief of Poz, is quoted in a 2013 New Yorker article calling PrEP “a profit-driven sex toy for rich Westerners.”

Much of the early controversy around PrEP has dissipated. Public health initiatives now routinely highlight the benefits of PrEP—earlier this year, the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center promoted PrEP in a series of billboard ads, with bold text urging people to “F*ck w/out Fear.”

Health insurers have also largely agreed to cover PrEP, under the logic that prevention is ultimately far more cost-effective than treatment. Poz, now under a new editor-in-chief, similarly promotes the drug, devoting an entire section of its website to PrEP. The potential of PrEP to end the AIDS epidemic has largely supplanted early fears about its potential to encourage high-risk sex. Major media outlets—PBS, CNN, the Washington Post, and others—have run stories about the tantalizing possibility that PrEP could be “the end of AIDS.” PrEP has come to represent not just one method of HIV prevention, but the possibility of an AIDS-free future.

lawmaker who recently brought up this very prospect) are replaced by the logic of the undetectable: the quarantining happens inside the body.

The Poz article about the third case of PrEP failure ends optimistically. “The good news is that the person is now doing very well on therapy,” a scientist is quoted as saying, “and his infection was caught early because he was in a PrEP program.” The spectacle of the promiscuous queer body, which featured so prominently at the beginning of the article, is replaced with the quiet respectability of the chemically managed body. The same drug that failed to prevent HIV could easily be the one now mobilized in suppressing it.

Rather than questioning the efficacy of PrEP, Poz describes the third case of PrEP failure in ways that justify the drug’s necessity. The man’s history of sex without condoms serves to prove PrEP’s implicit assumption that traditional safer sex practices for the groups most at risk of HIV are a lost cause, and that money should be spent on prevention through pharmaceuticals rather than sex education or accessible condoms. PrEP and PEP become the only viable solutions to the perceived excesses of his sex life. +++

+++ Before Truvada was PrEP it was PEP (Post-Exposure Prophylaxis), a viral suppression drug. It existed as a treatment medication before testing revealed that it could also work to prevent infection in HIV-negative people. In 2012, it was approved for use for “treatment as prevention,” and in 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that as many as half a million Americans—those deemed the most at risk of contracting HIV—begin taking the pill.

Opposite PrEP, on the other side of infection, is undetectability, the point at which the HIV virus has been so suppressed through medication that it doesn’t show up on tests, and transmitting the virus is impossible. A common slogan in Poz is “Undetectable = Untransmittable.” But undetectable status is not stable: it entails the constant management and surveillance of the presence of HIV within the body.

The regime of doctors’ visits, data gathering (PrEP prescriptions come with the requirement that one visit the doctor every three months and self-report their sexual habits), and the pill itself, characterizes both PrEP and PEP, treatment-as-prevention and treatment-as-treatment. The differences between the two become, in many ways, irrelevant. PrEP confuses the distinction between those with HIV and those without, recasting those without HIV as perennially at risk, and those with HIV as having the potential for total viral suppression.

The temporality of the illness shifts, and neither drug has an endpoint. The body is at once always in danger and always managed.

Similarly, pharmaceuticals shift the space in which HIV manifests. Whereas HIV and AIDS used to define, stigmatize, and encompass the bodies that had them, pharmaceuticals reconfigure this stigma in terms of behavior and ‘risk’ rather than identity. Deviance and illness become a matter of percentages, capable of optimization. Old fears about quarantining people with HIV (even as they resurface, as in the case of a Georgia

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

In 1955, the GD Searle pharmaceutical company, in conjunction with the Puerto Rican Family Planning Association, began the first large-scale test of the contraceptive pill in Puerto Rico. As explained by Paul Preciado in the book Testo Junkie, “Puerto Rico’s trials are not an exception but rather belong to a larger history of colonial and hygienicist scientific experimentation.” Racist fears surrounding the birth rates of Puerto Rican women provided the justification for these early trials. While posited as a liberatory drug for white cis women, the pill’s history is tied up in eugenics, forced sterilization, and colonization; it is a technology that emerged from logics of racial purity.

In the early 2000s, Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical company that owns Truvada, conducted some of the first tests of Truvada for PrEP in Peru, Equador, Brazil, and Thailand. Tests were also conducted among sex workers in Cambodia and Cameroon, before pressure from activists forced those governments to close them.

Both PrEP and the contraceptive pill exist at the intersections of sexual health and population management. Both drugs aim to mediate sexuality, decoupling sex from its assumed result. Like the pill, which drew on ideas of racial purity, PrEP invokes notions of blood purity, protecting those who take it from what has always been a racialized disease. In 1987, after years of refusal to even speak the word AIDS, President Reagan announced plans to “determine the extent to which the AIDS virus has penetrated our society.” The racist fear of national infiltration (AIDS was, falsely, said to have originated in Africa) has always been embedded in AIDS-related fears of queer sex. HIV prevention is an important health initiative, but the ideologies behind the fear of infection should be questioned. PrEP promises the chance to “F*ck w/o Fear.” But fear of what, exactly? And whom?

To save money, Gilead tested PrEP on communities of color in the Global South, but the drug is still primarily accessible to the white, Western populations who can afford it. These disparities exist within the US, too—as of

2015, 74 percent of Truvada prescriptions in the country went to white people, despite the fact that black, gay, and bisexual men and trans women of color remain the most likely demographics to contract HIV. In the US, PrEP can cost upward of $14,000 per year without insurance.

To combat this disparity, government agencies, NGOs, and other public health groups attempt to bring PrEP into communities of color, framing PrEP as the solution to disproportionate rates of infection. A recent Gilead marketing campaign showed images of shirtless Mexican wrestlers lying in bed together, and black men flirting on the subway. Nearly every issue of Poz has a person of color on the front cover. Still, there remains a wide gulf between the actual consumers of PrEP and its current target-audience, between those who take it and those deemed most in need of it. A 2016 Rolling Stone article asked, “Why Aren’t HIV Prevention Pills Going to the People Who Need Them?” The people in question were, of course, people of color. Rather than discussing the structural inequality behind disproportionate rates of HIV for black and brown people, the article collapses the disparity into a single problem: the lack of PrEP. Despite promises of “the end of AIDS,” PrEP fails to substantively address the AIDS epidemic, with its attendant stigmas and inequalities. In a literal sense, the third case of PrEP failure reveals the ways that some individuals will always fail to fit the molds constructed by technology. Pharmaceuticals are directed objects, created from pre-existing conceptions of disease and of which affected bodies are most deserving of care. This is reflected in the chemical substance of the pill itself: a recent study found that PrEP was far less effective at preventing vaginal HIV infection. Like the 2009 scandal over an HP webcam’s inability (or refusal) to recognize black faces, or the legions of medical procedures hostile to trans people, PrEP is not a neutral technology.

Even when the drugs technically succeed, people still fail to achieve the empowerment that HIV medications promise. Near the end of a personal essay published in Poz, Andrew Spieldenner, a queer person of color and AIDS activist, expresses ambivalence about his medications: “I am virally suppressed. I do not know if I believe I am not infectious. I don’t know if it’s just the HIV or if this is a burden carried under my ethnic skin my whole life.” His moment of failure reveals the cracks in the PrEP utopia—a utopia contingent on profit and bodily management. As new HIV medications are developed and put into place, and as scientists continue to search for something like a “gay gene” while computers claim the capability to identify “queer faces,” these technologies will inevitably fail, and there will always be people who fail them.

MITCHELL JOHNSON B’18.5 fails, regularly.

FEATURES

12

FIVE MOVIES ON SMALL SCREENS

BY Olivia Kan-Sperling ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Westfall DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Rear Window (1955) University Building Auditorium I saw this for class. We were supposed to think about the male gaze and how Jimmy Stewart’s binoculars are a symbolic phallus. The professor said: “You have to see it big to understand the director’s vision—let the images overwhelm you!” My dad likes to do that, too. He bought a projector once for Christmas, and family movies now take place on a white sheet draped over our bookshelf. In an act I’ve always interpreted as a demonstration of his commitment to cinema and an implicit reproach to me, he always pulls up a chair to be as close to the screen and speakers as possible. So I went to the screening with my friend, who is a boy, who likes movies, who of course I sort of had a crush on.

Professor Phil Rosen, my dad, this crush: very symbolic triumvirate, Knowers of Cinema, that put me in the art building lecture hall at 8:00 on Tuesday, March 6. The symbol here being something like: my compulsive desire to appeal to men? Grace Kelly spins around the room, turns on the lights one by one, and says her name at Jimmy Stewart, who mocks her for never wearing the same dress twice. “Only because it’s expected of [me],” she murmurs. I don’t remember what I was wearing, but I assure you that I was performing for the male gaze at the time. Sadly, the male gaze was not on me. The snowy planes of Grace Kelly’s face were expansive and flawless on the big screen, exactly the way Hitchcock intended for us to see them.

one of tiny, fairy-like proportions. This is the appeal of bonsai, teacup pigs, and those little erasers in the shape of animals and sushi. Detail becomes all the more absorbing because of its delicacy, and the experience more private because you, and only you, are able to see it.

I watched this completely covered by my sheets— like a precocious child reading past bedtime under the covers, or maybe masturbating to something mildly illicit—and propped my phone up on my pillow. The boy scouts, pixie-like, trooped through a pin-sized forest, their dog a tiny toy. The stormy Rhode Island coast lost some of its depth but acquired the look of an early American landscape painting, only in 2.7x4.8 inch dimensions. Wes Anderson’s movies are already like a Victorian doll house, with their detail and symmetry and white children; like all of these things, smaller made it better. +++ Rather than simply an interplay of colored light and sound and shadow on a wall, video becomes material when introduced into a diversity of settings. It takes on new forms (the mirror on my shelf, a miniature portrait) and new functions (a warm fire, background noise) it didn’t have before, and in turn is formed by the setting in which you see it. It enters into a dialogue with the textures and people and routines of your daily life. This is why small screens can be so intimate, and online streaming services are successful enterprises. +++

Babette’s Feast (1987), 13’’ Macbook Pro, Isabelle’s Dorm Room I rented this movie in Standard Definition on Amazon using a gift card I had gotten from a University survey I took about the drinking habits of my friends. One of these friends is named Isabelle. We were lying in her bed.

The feasters drank wine, and we shared a warm coconut LaCroix. The sound was quiet and the computer overheating on my lap so we had to use earbuds and lean in to hear. Isabelle fell asleep next to me and I could feel her breathing into my shoulder. I kept forgetting to pay attention so I used the “x-ray” feature, which gave me a dropdown menu with the names of the characters and sometimes “trivia.” I did not turn off the app that changes my computer display’s color at night, and with time the screen’s sunset tinged the actors a sickly gold, and my laptop glowed like a cozy hearth. Thanks to the warm fire and lack of “blue light,” I fell asleep, too.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012) iPhone 6, My Bed There is a voyeuristic quality to smallness, to holding a screen in the palm of your hand – like peering into an 18th century locket in which the portrait, intricate and detailed, of a loved one is painted. The miniature is special and secret, because it belongs to a different world,

Suicide Squad (2016) Middle Seat on an Airplane I watched this movie on a big airplane on a small screen framed by the fuzzy, printed China Airlines seat coverings. It was all very appropriate: the sequences of images were so tight, so packed with action and narrative (a closeup of a character’s eyes means it’s a memory, a shot of a beautiful woman means it’s his wife, the single teardrop means she’s dead), that my vision and brain felt cramped and nauseous like the rest of my body—this movie did not need IMAX 3D to make an overwhelming experience. There were a lot of characters, each with a two minute backstory, and they were shuffled in and out of the film like cards in a playing deck, so it didn’t matter much when the captain interrupted to say that the pretzels were coming.

The destruction scenes, on the other hand, were expansive and extensive but not quite soothing. When they blew up buildings I re-read the safety manual.

Sometimes I switched to the flight trajectory visualization and watched the tiny white airplane crawl across its blue field and leave its green trace for a long time. The screens had a feature through which you could “chat” with other passengers. I chose seat 32B. There were several scripted options for conversation starters, so I selected “Have you bought anything from the in-flight Duty Free yet?” and,

as a follow-up, “I am having one of those sleepless nights.”

I waited the rest of the movie for a response. Mostly I watched the other scenes of the movie over my neighbor’s shoulder and the person in front of me’s shoulder and the other person in front of me’s shoulder. My main experience of this movie was thus: almost exclusively the scenes where Margot Robbie is almost naked and each of these scenes repeated like six times. This is a good thing about small screens—you can pick and choose the story yourself, and often the product is greater than the sum of its parts (the parts being, in this case, Margot Robbie juxtaposed with everything on this airplane).

The Virgin Suicides (1999) 13’’ Macbook Pro, My Bedroom While watching this, I liked to wear pink bathrobes and light candles to match the story. This self-staging is less to feel like I am in the movie (I always feel like I am in a movie, but maybe that’s the male gaze talking), and more to feel like the movie is all around. Making things with and out of movies, self-aestheticizing and enmeshing the screen stuff with real stuff, can be done most extravagantly in private; in my experience, audiences at the local CinemarkTM are not likely to play along (it is understandable; they have their own fantasies).

And so I watched this exclusively in my room, over the course of a couple days, keeping it minimized in a little rectangle in the lower right corner of my laptop in the interim periods. It lived there with my homework and to-do lists and texts and porn and thinkpieces I never read. One of my favorite things about Macs is that a .mov thumbnail can play from beginning to end in miniature, literally embedded in your desktop beside folders and screenshots and drag-and-drop detritus. I couldn’t do this with The Virgin Suicides, because I watched it on Putlocker, but same idea, just augmented by “Why Slavic Girls Make the Best Girlfriends” ads. It became like a ballerina music box that plays when you open it: a pretty, usually-ignored thing in my space, secret and mine.

Theaters are always see-and-go; the lights come up and everything is gone and you blink and shake yourself up awkwardly at having found yourself experiencing emotions in the dark with strangers. By the time you’ve reached your car, the world is only parking lot and shrubs-in-mulch again. But the Lisbon girls and their pink beds lived with me: in my room, and especially in my laptop, that personal multi-purpose object, purposes being everything from writing papers to looking at my reflection in the smudged and darkened screen. I kept the Putlocker tab open for a while after finishing the movie so I could go back and watch parts of it periodically. Even after I lost it to a Chrome crash one night, Sofia Coppola’s careful world, with trinkets and floral and perfume, overflowed its boundaries; it resonated in the little mirror on my shelf and the pink candle on my windowsill.

OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING B’20 is the still point of the turning world.

13

TECH

NOVEMBER 03, 2017

THE ART OF FLOWER POWER Visual appropriation during the Vietnam War

BY Zak Nguyen ILLUSTRATION BY Alexandra Hanesworth DESIGN BY Ashley Min

In the late 1960s, American poet Allen Ginsberg developed the idea of Flower Power in his essay “Demonstration or Spectacle as Example, as Communication or How to Make a March/Spectacle,” which outlined the strategic use of flower imagery to change war psychology and encourage critical thought rather than violence.

Although he didn’t actually use this phrase in his essay, “Flower Power” would become one of the most influential slogans used by peace-promoting hippies during antiVietnam War protests. Almost all forms of hippie culture were flooded with floral imagery as the spread of Flower Power motifs gained momentum, popping up on textiles, propaganda, and even vehicles. Hippies who donned floral clothing and flowers in their hair were referred to as flower children. This shared iconography inaugurated a new aesthetic in mainstream American youth culture, and for the first time, flower imagery existed as a powerful symbol of overwhelming peace and love, as well as the psychedelic, the carefree, and the individual. In a scene photographed by Bernie Boston in 1967, a protester surrounded by police placed a flower into the barrel of a rifle. Art critics and anti-war activists alike called it groundbreaking.

Except it wasn’t. Allen Ginsberg may be the person who is credited with introducing the idea of using flowers as a symbol for peace during the Vietnam War era, but flowers were already a widely understood symbolic representation of peace—in Vietnam. Not only were flowers already widespread symbols in Vietnam, but all throughout East, South, and Southeast Asia as well: floral representations of peace are a staple of Asian religious art.

In Buddhist and Hindu art, flowers of all kinds have been used to represent peace for about as long as these spiritual practices have existed. While Boston’s photograph, itself titled Flower Power, marks a significant moment in American cultural history, the image of weapons transformed into flowers was not unprecedented. In the age-old story of Buddha’s ascent to enlightenment, he calls on the Earth Goddess, who aids him in defeating the elephant-riding demon, Mara. The Earth Goddess brings forth a flood to wash away all of Buddha’s enemies, and transforms their weapons into lotus flowers—symbols for peace and transcendence.

Is it just a poetic coincidence that flowers symbolized peace in both American hippie culture and ancient spiritual practices of Asia? Perhaps. But starting in the early ’50s, during the Beat Generation, Ginsberg became a practicing Buddhist and eventually became involved with Krishnaism. It seems entirely possible that Ginsberg lifted flower imagery from his Asian religious and spiritual influence. Buddhism and flowers weren’t the only things from Asia to become a part of American hippie culture either—macramé, the papasan chair, and mandalas also became iconic symbols of the countercultural movement, just to name a few of the more recognizable examples. +++ During the time that Flower Power was popularized after the Beat Generation rolled into the hippie movement, its appropriation of Asian cultures coincided with American

15

ARTS

military involvement in Southeast Asia. After all, the idea of Americans—specifically white Americans of notoriety and power—infiltrating Asia to unnecessarily take part in something for their own benefit was a form of oppression integral to the development of what became the Vietnam War. Simply put, Flower Power was a cultural repetition of the American mindset that led to the Vietnam War in the first place: in both cases, white Americans utilized Asian resources for their own benefit, disregarding the lives of Asian people who were suffering while they occupied their land.

Leading into the Vietnam War, the US had briefly allied with Vietnam during World War II, while it was still a French colony. Together they fought off Japan’s occupation of mainland Southeast Asia, but the US ignored Vietnam’s requests for aid in gaining independence from the harsh rule of France afterwards, because France was an ally to the US. Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese nationalists (known as the Viet Minh) who opposed French rule originally planned on founding a democratic state out of Vietnam based on the US Declaration of Independence, but due to the lack of support from the US, they modeled their self-governance around communism instead. The battle of Dien Bien Phu, a fight that marked the end of French colonial rule and the beginning of American involvement in Vietnam, saw the country split into two self-governing entities—the communist North Vietnam and democratic South Vietnam. It was only when the Viet Minh turned to communism as a result of America’s initial failure to acknowledge them that the US decided it was worth engaging in warfare. There is a reason why some historians claim that the US “lost” Ho Chi Minh to communism—to white Americans, Vietnamese lives didn’t matter under the harsh colonial rule of the French, since

France was an ally to the US. But when Vietnam turned to communism, Cold War politics convinced them that they needed to recognize events happening in Vietnam— in other words, it seemed that the entire reason the US went to Vietnam in the first place was that they placed more significance on the Cold War mindset that opposed communism than Vietnamese people themselves. In fact, former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara even admitted to deceptively convincing American citizens that participation in the war in Vietnam was necessary.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which American media claimed had been an unprovoked attack North Vietnam launched an on a US destroyer on routine patrol, followed by deliberate attacks on two US ships two days later, was revealed to have been entirely fabricated in an attempt to encourage the US to go to war. McNamara both withheld information from president Lyndon B. Johnson and completely lied about the second attack—it never happened. The real truth, which involved a buildup of military pressure on North Vietnam from the US in coordination with attacks on North Vietnam from South Vietnam and Laos, was completely ignored. And in doing this, McNamara usurped President Johnson’s military power and the American public’s support for the sake of going into one of the bloodiest wars in American history.

Flower Power’s appropriation of South Asian Buddhist influences was not physically violent, but interestingly similar in how it replicated American occupation—Ginsberg and other white Americans attempted to learn peace from Eastern religions, and eventually used these teachings about peace to protest the violence of the Vietnam War. But unfortunately these teachings about peace in Vietnam weren’t exactly popular or even promoted while Vietnam suffered through French rule, and only gained cultural momentum in the US when

NOVEMBER 03, 2017

American soldiers’ lives were at stake during the war. In both situations, decisions to engage with Eastern cultures were based solely on whether or not Americans could benefit—the American government only decided to recognize the events happening in Vietnam after it felt that the rise of communism was a threat, and the hippies only decided to utilize the symbolism of Flower Power for America, not for Vietnam. But while the decision to engage in war with Vietnam was fueled by McNamara’s lies and the fear of communism, the quick growth in Flower Power’s popularity resulted from America’s artistic and visual interests. +++ Flower imagery in Western art throughout history has, for the most part, been used as a symbol of aesthetic beauty more than for its other valences. From Dutch still life paintings of the 17th century, to Garden of Eden landscapes of the Middle Ages, and even to Van Gogh’s Irises (a modern painting influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints), floral arrangements are portrayed in a way that emphasizes beauty and nature, and oftentimes religion's relationship to beauty as well—on Christian epitaphs as well as in paintings, the beauty of eternal life and the yearning for life after death were often represented through bouquets of flowers and ears of corn. The sight of flowers in Christian paintings evoked memories of a “paradise lost”—the Garden of Eden. In American art, flower paintings were primarily used as scientific or natural studies up until roughly 1900. American still life painters like Severin Roesen became popular for their gorgeous realistic paintings of magnificent bouquets, fruit, and overwhelming compositions full of flowers.

As much as they were meticulously executed realist and naturalist studies, they were also magnificent images that were vibrant, detailed, and luxurious.

The turn of the 20th century saw American artists explore flowers as they investigated abstraction.

American artists were no longer interested in botany or representational depictions of nature. Instead, they sought to use flowers as their own language, often in reference to their associations with nature and beauty.

Modernists like Marsden Hartley painted flowers with thick black lines and abrupt (yet organic) shapes, defying the realistic, naturalistic still life paintings that were made before his time. Although Georgia O’Keefe rejected the idea that her flowers were symbols for female genitalia, she painted flowers in a way that almost gave them human characteristics. Flower imagery and symbolism retained some associations with decoration from earlier time periods, but simultaneously became abstracted in different ways in American art during the 20th century, broadening the list of reasons why artists would want to use flowers as a visual tool or symbol. Flower Power falls right into that category. But what made Flower Power so readily accepted and embraced was America’s artistic interests outside of the language of flowers—as abstract expressionism’s popularity in the ’50s dwindled, interests in newer movements like pop art, minimalism, and neo-expressionism spiked. People were interested in

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

elements of popular culture, like comic books, advertisements, movies, and cultural symbols, as well as images that consisted of vividly colored, recognizable objects, and images that were repetitive and simple. These were the perfect circumstances for the rise of Flower Power, as flowers could be depicted in ways that satisfied the interests of all these movements. They could be easily portrayed in ways that were simple, colorful, repetitive, and patterned, to the point of being used widely as a cultural symbol. Flower Power was the marriage of all types of modern visual interests during the ’60s and ’70s.

Despite this, as a combined artistic, cultural, and political movement, Flower Power was a failure. While it piggybacked on interests in American modern art movements, prompting a striking aesthetic shift in American art history, the movement’s lack of consideration for the ideas that inspired it make it self-contradictory. At its core, it was only a replication of the US government’s involvement in Vietnam, but at a level that was more cultural than it was governmental—which was exactly what it was trying to protest to begin with.

Where was this infatuation with peace that the Flower Power movement promoted when the Vietnamese were still under French rule? Why didn’t Ginsberg and other white American beatniks and hippies promote peace to the same extent for Asia, the very place that Buddhism and Krishnaism originated, during a time when Asian people were suffering from the likes of none other than white European colonial powers? Ginsberg, among many other white American beatniks, was already a practitioner of Buddhism before the Battle of Dien Bien Phu even was fought. The appropriated Flower Power movement only arose when white American hippies decided they needed it, after American soldiers’ lives were at stake—similarly to how the US decided it wasn’t worth engaging with Vietnam until after the rise of North Vietnam’s communist regime and the country’s participation in Cold War scrambles for global power. As the saying from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now goes, “The Viet Cong were invented by the Americans, sir!” Flower Power was a visual and spiritual power struggle between white Americans and Vietnam, where white hippies took what they needed from the very people the US had subjected to the suffering of war, in order to protest that same war.

And both the North and South Vietnamese were left with no voice and no chance of winning.

I can only imagine what my family—a group of South Vietnamese refugees—probably felt when they arrived in America during the early to mid-1970s: nothing but tremendous relief. Blinded by the violence they were forced to endure as refugees, they had no choice but to assimilate to American culture as a survival tactic. They were unaware of the ways that Flower Power was a harmful movement that excluded Vietnam while capitalizing on Vietnamese culture and its people. When I reflect on Flower Power, the most worrisome aspect of the movement is that many hippies were considered the progressive counterculture of their time.

+++ While the hippie movement in America has ended for the most part, American interests in art and visual languages have not. Contemporary visual aesthetics act as powerful conduits for different aspects of American culture thanks to the speed at which information travels, whether through Google Images, Pinterest, Urban Outfitters, Stranger Things, or the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But aesthetics as a form of political activism is something that is not talked about nearly as often. Political symbols— such as Flower Power, the pride flag that has been used to represent the movement for LGBTQ rights in the US and, in a more contemporary context, the “pussyhats” that some activists who participated in the Women's March wore as symbol of resistance to President Trump—are still just as powerful, and cling easily to the mindsets of people fighting for specific movements, which is often part of the reason why they become so popular. What the Flower Power Movement failed to do was recognize the source of its imagery as a repetition of the very thing it was trying to fight against. Similarly, the way that the pride flag is now waved in predominantly white spaces and the way rainbows have become representative of white queer experiences is criticized for excluding the queer people of color who have fought for LGBTQ+ rights, hence the inclusion of the black and brown stripes on Philadelphia's new pride flag released this past summer. The "pussyhats" that were used as a response to Trump are criticized for not being inclusive of women of color, transgender women, or transgender men. Given how Allen Ginsberg initially spoke about the use of flowers as symbols with a purpose of making a “spectacle” that was meant to disrupt the violence, rather than as symbols taken from Asian religions, it’s easy to only want to focus on what the flower symbol actually did visually rather than the historical or cultural context from which they were taken, and the same can be said about just about any other symbol that has been used to define political movements. Because of that, symbols within activism should be just as aware of the histories and sources that symbols are taken from.

Privileging the visual status of our symbols, rather than the legacies of their contextualized meanings, makes the potential political power of these symbols practically null.

ZAK NGUYEN RISD’19 dressed up as a flower child this Halloween.

ARTS

16

PISSED PANTS ACADEMY

BY Liby Hays

It was the day I met Paula Abdul on an airplane, and she was very beautiful, very glamorous, and she was sitting next to me in the airplane seat.

ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

“Are you a water scientist or something?”

She asked because I was holding a bottle of water.

She was working on a screenplay on a computer nicknamed “the Box.” The screenplay was about a group of friends who were the little blobs at the end of plucked hairs, who attended an elite private school and dealt with problems like parents’ divorce. What united all of the blobs was their interest in fashion. The working title of the script was “Pissed Pants Academy,” but it was being rebranded as “The Bratz Movie” to tie it in with a line of dolls popular with young girls. Paula was writer, choreographer, and head couturier. Due to the demands of the project, she hadn’t slept in three weeks or longer. Her finger traced idly round the napkin ring where fibers had been impregnated with wet.

The project she described as her “creative component.”

I had to ask, had to say it, but I’d have knelt if I could. I’d have knelt on a bed of dry leaves trembling, if I could have.

I asked if she was boozing. I asked if she was trashed. I asked if she was sauced up. I asked if she’d had a few too many, if she was under the influence, if she was sloshed, if she was buzzed, if she was knackered, if she was hammered, blitzed, soused, far gone.

I was fiendish, goading, but once I started I couldn’t be stopped.

Then Paula turned to me, with eyes like dry ore.

“And now...” she intoned, “And now we must draw the conclusion, the dark germ that all conclusivities draw from and preclude, brazen chapping-hand that wags and wanes with the splendid rot of oaks...”

“And how, I, Paula, middle name Me—lone puff adrift in paradise—can recall, and think back to those selfsame days, On that plane, on that day of days, A story in which there were a number of interested parties, involved parties, mutually involved and implicated with one another, but there was also, on the other hand, a dark fact they knew and shared amongst themselves, a dark fact tearing them apart and severing their privileged bonds, and the dark fact was this: inequities…”

“And how a dark prince, wan prince, was introduced to the story, who intervenes in this dark and wormbitten fact

For the sole purpose of negotiating an arrangement, and deed, favorable to all constituents.”

“And how, I—lone puff adrift in paradise—and Paula, dim taskmaster, palsied bureaucrat, rank with spleen, Grew to understand one another, in that brief span,

And how Paula, bold and crinkly, wan and pale, Proceeded to lay it all out, and put it all in, and give it all up, and bring it back out how she how threw it all down, and gave it all up, and threw it all in, and wrought it all out and spat it back up and brought it arrrooound towwwwwn,

and recouped, recompense, Abdul, dogpound pound-it, On that plane, on that day of days.”

On her breath, a desirous patchouli, The Lady Abdul. :*

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LITERARY

NOVEMBER 03, 2017

THE

LIST!

FRIDAY 11 ∫ 03

SATURDAY 11 ∫ 04

SUNDAY 11 ∫ 05

OEDIPUS REX

OPENING DAY AT PAWTUCKET WINTERTIME FARMERS MARKET

BIRD AND WILDLIFE CARVING EXHIBITION

REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT BENEFIT DAY

SEEKONK RECORD CONVENTION

Classical High School 7pm (and on Saturday too!) $5 for adults, $3 for students ————— For some reason this strikes me as a hilarious play for a high school to put on— forget Grease or Into the Woods, go watch some local teens act out the scaffolding of the entire Symbolic order!

MI GENTE! A PUERTO RICO BENEFIT SHOW / DANCE PARTY

Aurora 7 PM Suggested donation: $10 ————— Door money and a percentage of bar sales will go toward relief efforts in Puerto Rico.

Also the last public event at Aurora! :( TATER FRATERABO / SURFACING / LACANTHROPE / VISIBILITIES

Hope Artiste Village 9 AM ————— Is it really wintertime? Preempt your coldweather blues with some local produce items. If I were you, I’d make a big hearty root vegetable soup this weekend.

Lang’s Bowl-a-Rama Cranston 3 PM ————— Join Women’s Refugee Care for an afternoon at the Indy’s favorite bowling alley, Lang’s Bowlarama, to support refugees from the Great Lakes Regions of Africa (Congo, Burundi and Rwanda), resettled in Rhode Island.

Audubon Environmental Education Center Bristol 10 AM — $5 ————— “During this popular event, acclaimed and award-winning artists from New England and New York will exhibit their incredibly lifelike carvings.” <3 Ramada Seekonk 10 AM ————— Billed as “the original New England rock n’ roll collector’s convention”! Makes me think it will just be a hotel lobby full of aging Modern Lovers fans, which I’m totally here for. Buy and sell LPs, 45s, cassettes, posters, CDs, and more.

MONDAY 11 ∫ 06

~ ask a punk ~ 7:30 PM ————— Want to hear the most embarrassing story of this List writer’s entire life? One time, on a farm in Virginia, I made out with Tater Fraterabo and then got a terrible allergic reaction right afterwards, then promptly decided I was gay. Now they are playing a noise set in a Providence basement alongside some local favorites! Wild.

THE RIVER IS IN US: BOOK LAUNCH AND SIGNING

Ralph Lemon in Conversation Granoff Center at Brown University 4 PM ————— Choreographer, director and visual artist Ralph Lemon is artistic director of Cross Performance, a company known for crosscultural and interdisciplinary performances and presentations. He’s the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts bestowed in 2015 by President Obama (!!), and is teaching at Brown for the 2017-18 school year.

TUESDAY 11 ∫ 07

WEDNESDAY 11 ∫ 08

THURSDAY 11 ∫ 09

ELECTION DAY!

AGE OF CONSEQUENCES SCREENING AND PANEL DISCUSSION

FUN HOME — BENEFIT FOR AIDS CARE OCEAN

There are some referendums up for vote in several municipalities around Rhode Island this year. If you’re registered as a voter in another state, you probably should have already sent in an absentee ballot, but maybe if there’s an important election in your state, you can make some phone calls to get out the vote?

JANET JACKSON

Dunkin Donuts Center 8 PM ————— Tickets from $16 Always wild stuff happening at the Dunk.’

This is a pretty affordable price to be in the presence of a true icon.

HOROSCOPE ∫ PISCES

Books on the Square 5 PM ————— Join Native American Brown Alumni and Brown University Manning Assistant Professor of American and Ethnic Studies Elizabeth Hoover for the release of her first book, The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community, an ethnographic exploration of Akwesasne Mohawks’ response to Superfund contamination and environmental health research.

BERT Building at Brown University 4 PM ————— Join producer Sophie Robinson for a screening and discussion of the film Age of Consequences, which “investigates the impacts of climate change on increased resource scarcity, migration, and conflict through the lens of US national security and global stability.”

Then maybe after you go to that, you could donate some money to No LNG in PVD to battle environmental racism in our own community.

Shirin Neshat in Conversation Granoff Center, Brown U. 5:30 PM ————— Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist based in New York City who is recognized for her influential work in film, video and photography. Her subjects reveal contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, antiquity and modernity and the spaces in between them.

STATE

Providence Performing Arts Center 7:30 PM $40 — $75 ————— This is pretty steep but I guess theatre generally is? I haven’t seen the Fun Home musical yet but the book is a real favorite, obvs (see List: Friday). If you’re trying to see the musical, ACOS is a really worthy cause!

DAN DEACON WITH LAZY MAGNET

AS220 9 PM ————— Sold out but maybe you can get in at the door? When Dan Deacon played at Brown’s Spring Weekend a couple years ago, he sat on my friend’s laptop and broke it :( Maybe he’ll be more careful this time around.

It’s always witch season for you, sweet P, but it’s really witch season now. You probably look amazing and maybe have been casting many good spells. But, alas, a full Taurus moon opposes the Scorpionic sun this weekend. You’ll feel the urge towards nice, simple extroversion (yes, wild, I know), but your mouth/body will betray you. Chaos will pour out of your pores; you’ll be even more confused than usual; I am sorry. You’ll also want to throw your $$ everywhere (fuck you, Uranus). While you’re at it, spend some Taurus-moon-food-loving energy on a Lord of the Pies pizza passport ($20 for So Much Pizza—that’ll show Uranus, that asshole [yes, again. I am sorry]).