Apollon Digital Journal - Issue XIII - 2021 by Apollon eJournal

Our name at Apollon is derived from the Greek and Roman deity, Apollo, while the spelling more closely follows the Greek transliteration. Apollo is the god of music, poetry, art, light, and knowledge, making him one of the most complex deities in the Pantheon. In tribute to his multifaceted existence, our journal utilizes various media to create and reproduce knowledge within the humanities and to encourage critical thinking through multidisciplinary inquiry. With Apollo as patron to our musings and his Muses as inspiration for our content, Apollon seeks to provide our readers with thought provoking, innovative ideas that explore the depth and breadth of humanistic inquiry. ap-ol-lon’

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Acknowledgements

Please take a moment to acknowledge our student editors, faculty advisors, and those who submitted for Apollon XII. We appreciate all of the hard work that has been put into this edition. Additionally, we would like to thank the Humanities Institute for their undying support. Of course, we’d also like to thank you, the reader, for taking the time to review and support undergraduate scholarship. Thank you to everyone who made this journal possible. For more information on the people and organizations listed above, please visit www.apollonejournal.org

“Rooms of Their Own: Spatialized Consciousness of Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway”

By: Teo Chee Yan, Yale NUS College p. 63 “Call of the Distant Mountains”

“The Philosophy of Pragmatism in the Politics of Democracy: A Method of Overcoming Dualism?”

“Unsex Me Here: How Removing Markers of Eroticism Alters the Status of the Female Nude”

By: Mary Gerhardinger, Kenyon College p. 5

By: Madhav Singh, Ashoka University p. 15 “The Case for Soviet Prison Tattoos as Art”

By: Lauren Diener, SUNY New Paltz p. 25

By: Ezequiel Indriago Perez, University of Ottowa p. 39 “The Black Janus”

By: Diallo Simon-Ponte p. 53

“The Forbidden Existence: Anti Homeless Architecture and the Regulation of Public Spaces”

By: Zhi Zhang, Wellesley College p. 73

Table of Contents

Mary Gerhardinger attends Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio where she studies physics with a minor in philosophy. Her essay was written in a class about the role of women in the studio throughout art history, focusing on female art makers, models, and patrons.

Unsex Me Here: How Removing Markers of Eroticism Alters the Status of the Female Nude By: Mary Gerhardinger

Atop a pile of boulders, an unclothed figure sits at the base of a tree. The tree’s upper branch reaches across the top part of the frame the curve of the bough mimicked in the hunched shoulders of the human shape. The figure, with limbs folded so as to obscure their identity, blends in with the background rocks in both color and size. The stones dominate the composition; there is but a hint of geographical space suggested on the right side of the arrangement through a small, light, triangular shape indicative of a mountain in the distance. Although the figure is nude, the human body is not sexed, an important fact once we learn the shape is a woman. Given the context of the female nude in art history, why is this representation of a bare feminine body in nature uneroticized? What is the impact of treating the figure as part of the landscape?

Figure 1 An answer to these questions can be found within the biography of the artist, Anne Brigman, who is herself the sitter of this piece, entitled The Lone Pine (Figure 1).2 A photographer and poet, Brigman is celebrated as “one of the first photographers to take the female nude in the natural landscape as a subject,” as opposed to an object in an indoor space.3 Brigman’s unclothed photographs of herself complicate the representation of the female nude as a trope in art history. In this article, I will examine how Brigman represented the feminine body through an investigation of how she celebrated her own feminine form as human rather than female. By focusing on the form’s humanity and emotional struggle as a universal experience, Brigman elevates the status of all women away from sexual objects. However, she also places the figures in an imagined space, and thus contextualizes their power as fictitious, thereby eroding their authority yet also separating the bodies from a set of Western cultural values. In this way, I claim that her pieces are less about elevating female bodies as feminine and more about expressing a collective human identity of struggle and emotion. First, we must examine a popular use of the female nude throughout art history, to understand how the feminine form has dominated portraiture. The use of the feminine body as an allegory for abstract ideas is a pervasive and oft-imposed concept in art making. Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Figure 2), for instance, famously personifies liberty as a partially clothed woman grasping the French flag in a call to action. Art seems to insist upon the unclothed feminine figure as the way to represent

9 In doing so, art historian Kathleen Pyne argues that Anne Brigman taught Alfred Stieglitz, the leader of the Photo Secessionists, how to more properly portray women naked.10 These representations indicate that Brigman was consciously thinking about how to portray feminine sexuality in a variety of contexts, both imagined and physical.

There are many possible motivations for the creations of these photographs as celebrations of femininity and feminine sexuality, explorations of personal ideas on emotional struggle manifested physically, or even simply investigations into formalist concerns of incorporating a figure into a landscape. Brigman took inspiration from the photographer Frank Eugene who manipulated photographs of women by “rubbing oil onto the negatives with his fingers and adding cross hatching with an etching needle [...] leaving only small portions of a picture recognizably photographic.”

nonrepresentational concepts. Following in this tradition, Brigman’s nude compositions further enforce this connection between the female nude and allegories, maintaining the status of the feminine figure as a tool rather than a person. On the other hand, these personified ideas usually employ ‘idealized’ bodies, which conform to beauty standards of the time (a tradition continued from the time of the Greeks). Brigman, however, alters this idea by inserting her own body in place of the idealized feminine form. Despite having one of her breasts surgically removed after an injury, Brigman still chose to represent her body something less than the ‘ideal.’4 Thus, while she continues to use the feminine figure as a tool for personification, Brigman challenges the idea of perfection and ideality. Figure 2 To what extent, however, did Brigman intend for her compositions to alter the allegorical representational aspect of the female nude and instead highlight femininity in and of itself?

The fact that Brigman situates her nudes in nature, or “wilderness,” further complicates the idea of expressing feminine sexuality in a purely positive or negative manner. The concept of wilderness has a complicated history within North American settler colonialism. By presenting land as untamed and yet controllable, the term has been used as a means to suppress Indigenous people. Within that context, wilderness was often portrayed as feminine and described as ‘virginal,’ eliciting both ideas of purity and the ability to be managed.11

6 Similarly to Eugene, Brigman claimed that she sought not only to represent her subjects but also to “deal honestly with the medium” of photography.7 She was moved by Eugene’s productions and incorporated the method of retouching negatives to execute her artistic vision. Brigman viewed manipulation as “necessary to secure the result she ha[d] in mind.”

8 Through her investigations of the feminine form as representative of a universal struggle for freedom, Brigman used her own female body to “evoke an imagined feminine sexuality.”

In a similar way to Brigman, they reference either vulnerability or strength. Wolfe, in addition to other art historians such as Nancy Kuhl, further elaborates that Brigman’s photographs are a type of performance art which is “antecedent to [...] experimental performance art that emerged in the art world in the 1960s and 70s.”18 Figure 3

Although critics responded well to Brigman’s themes of interrelation, not every audience has felt an emotional resonance with the work. Historically, some pieces have been “dismissed as unabashedly romantic, dramatically staged, or overly idealistic” because Brigman’s idea of representing her own body in nature was radical for the time.15

After the initial reaction of shock due to the radicality of these compositions, art historians have also viewed Brigman as a proto feminist, who laid the groundwork for ecofeminist art. Art historian Ann Wolfe examines Brigman’s use of the female nude through the lens of feminism and draws connections between Brigman’s proto feminist landscape photographs with works made by artists such as Judy Chicago, Carloee Schneeman, and Ana Mendieta among others. For example (see Figure 3), Chicago and Mendieta both photographed their own nude bodies in outdoor scenes, acting as “active agents of renewal and regeneration in nature.”17

Colloquial references like those to ‘mother nature,’ further link femininity and the environment emphasizing nature’s procreative and nurturing characteristics as inherently feminine. In situating her nudes within ‘wilderness,’ Brigman is connecting nature and primalcy to female sexuality and, at the same time, reclaiming the power of nature to suggest strength in femininity. The placement of the nudes in nature, then, neither elevates nor suppresses feminine sexuality suggesting that Brigman’s intent was merely to use female bodies as a form through which to explore her own emotional struggles.

12 Many other critics echo this emotional connection to Brigman’s photographs, claiming to “grasp the very soul of nature” through them.13 These reactions exemplify how, at the time, Brigman’s work was considered in two contexts: both as depicting a subject in relation to nature as well as expressing her own emotional struggle. Importantly, Brigman herself strove to “produce photographs that underscored her deeply held beliefs about the interconnectedness between humans and the natural environment.”

Audience reception, however, is never fully aligned with artistic intent. Public reactions to exhibitions of Brigman’s work from 1904-1924 were varied, although they focused mostly around the incorporation of the body into a natural environment.3 In the first critical piece of Brigman’s photographs in the journal of the Photo Secessionists, J. Nilson Laurvik writes that in her work “the human is not an alien...wherein all that nature holds of sheer beauty, of terror or mystery achieves its fitting crescendo.”

By investigating her work, though, do we actually see Brigman as a feminist?

Although the idea of ‘feminist art’ did not exist until much after Brigman’s productions, the artist’s own writings reveal that she derived “power from [her] camera,” and sought to express this power in her compositions.19 To impose the label of ‘proto feminist’ on Brigman as an artist is thus fitting, as it acknowledges that she was conscious of both her femininity as well as her struggles as a woman. In contrast to “prevailing art practices of the time...Brigman’s photographs of women in the landscape seem radical,” as proposed by art historians Olivia Lahs Gonzales and Lucy Lippard.20 The purpose of Brigman’s photographing of women nude and outside was twofold: one, it challenged the idea that men alone can inhabit the public sphere and, two, that only they can depict unclothed women.21 In breaking out of these conventions, her pieces serve as a “celebration of women’s development and self assertion.”

A visual analysis of Brigman’s photos before 1911 reveals here figures are portrayed as objects within a landscape, rather than subjects against a background. In this positioning, Brigman elevates women beyond representation as sexual beings, using her body as a stand in for the feminine form writ large. While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that integrating the human shape into the landscape raises the feminine form’s power, this integration in effect de emphasizes the body, thereby making it less sexed. Treatment of the bodies as objects rather than subjects is conveyed through the lack of heads within Brigman’s photographs. In contrast to portraiture, the figures in Brigman’s compositions are not meant to be seen as individuals but simply body like forms. Recalling the similarities drawn between the environment and the figure within the first example in this paper, The Lone Pine (Figure 1), we can now understand how Brigman muted the individual identity. Rather than occupying the focal point of the composition, the figure emulates other elements of the landscape, and thus the subject becomes part of the topography. This trend is continued throughout the figure’s body her folded leg echoes the triangular shadow created by a niche in the rock at the bottom of the frame, and the curl of the figure’s head into her body elicits a weariness akin to the heaviness of the rocks, grounding the figure to the cliff. Furthermore, depicted emerging from a crevice created by two rock faces, the centrally located figure in The Cleft of the Rock (Figure 4) moves beyond simply mirroring the landscape towards integration into the scenery itself. Brigman accomplishes this integration through both the arrangement and the physical manipulation of the medium. First, the limbs of the figure continue the lines of the rock, emphasizing the interrelation of the body with nature. Further, diagonal stripes mold the body into the terrain, mimicking the geographical striations of the rocks. These stripes were added after the initial exposure by the artist through a manipulation of the emulsion. In this way, “Brigman’s [figures] are of the landscape, not in the landscape.” Figure 4

This fact is emulated in a comparison of Ballet de Mer (Fig. 5), made in 1913 with The Lone Pine (Fig. 1), created in 1908. The former depicts a figure in motion her movement so expressive it consumes her entire body. In addition to the figure’s outstretched arms, which act as a counter balance to her movement, the turn of the figure’s head away from the audience, as well as her bent left leg implies that she is dancing in a circle or a line. Conversely, Fig. 1 portrays a static figure, whose downcast head sinks toward her knees, decidedly grounded to the cliff. Hence, after this time period, Brigman’s photographs reveal feminine figures, whose bodies express emotions and symbolize universal experiences, such as emotional struggle, rather than merely being a part of their surroundings.

“ In these earlier photographs, by simply integrating the figure into the landscape, Brigman subverts a typically masculine representation, that of a connection to nature. Art historian Deborah Bright claims that males often photographed landscapes as a way to claim their superiority over it as triumphant victors.25 By inserting feminine figures into the natural scenery, Brigman does not declare victory for these figures over their environment, and, instead, situates them as part of the topography making them objects rather than subjects. When the audience learns these figures are feminine, we are able to view their integration into the landscape as an excision of erotic dimension, thereby elevating the status of the female nude from the position of an object which is sexualized to simply occupying the position of object. At the same time, however, Brigman’s compositions after 1911 transcend depictions of the feminine body as part of the landscape while also interrelating the two through a representation of emotional struggle. Rather than merely melding their bodies into the environment, Brigman reclaims her figures’ humanity as emblematic of shared human experiences. These later pieces depict a connection to nature which surpasses merely occupying this natural space and instead emphasizes the expression of the figure toward freedom, as seen in the open bodied motion of the figure in the Ballet de Mer (Figure 5). Ballet De Mer portrays a figure standing on one leg on a beach encompassed by looming rocks and a breaking tide. Pyne asserts that the “circular rhythm of the dancer’s whirling pirouettes [...] ties together the sea and rocks” that surround her, in effect making the figure ‘one with nature’ while simultaneously evoking a sense of grandeur and majesty.26

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Figure 5 After 1911, Brigman “retrofitted the narrative cycle of her photographs away from the Sierran nature spirits toward a saga that told of her personal struggle toward freedom of the body and soul.”28

However, in all of her compositions, Brigman’s figures are not represented as explicitly female figures, but rather as people who have a shared human identity elevating them beyond a representation as purely sexed beings. The aforementioned lack of information about the figure’s head emphasizes that these figures personify a generalized humanity more than an individual identity. Additionally, Brigman removes the typical identifiers of sex, such as breasts and genitalia, through the use of soft focus and contrasting lighting. Even with a small highlight of the proper left breast, the figure in Ballet de Mer (Fig. 5) lacks clear indicators of the body’s sex. Instead, the body in motion becomes an expression of pure emotion. The lack of specificity about sex highlights the humanity of the figures and re enforces the theme of struggle and connection to nature as something universally experienced by all genders. Indeed the ambiguity of these bodies divorces the composition from a specific struggle (for instance women's liberation from the patriarchy) and allows the compositions to speak about struggle writ large. Moving beyond the representation of the ‘feminine’ as sexually available objects (such as Jean Leon Gerome’s Nude (Emma Dupont), Figure 6) or sexually ‘pure,’ yet eroticized beings (like representations of Venuses, for example in Figure 7), Brigman elevates the feminine body toward a depiction of humans who are not defined by their sexuality. Yet, Brigman’s compositions also represent female figures in the position of objects within an imagined space. Several elements contribute to the creation of a mythical place within these photographs, including the lack of information about a specific place. Stark lighting removes any identifying features of the land, and somewhat tight cropping focuses the eye on the figure and the immediate region surrounding her. There is no sense of the figure within the full space. For instance in Ballet de Mer (Fig. 5), the human form is pictured next to a hint of an ocean, while the rest of the space is left for the viewer to imagine. In The Lone Pine (Fig. 1), which is shot downwards from a place of high elevation, Brigman only suggests a location through the faint outlines of mountains on the right side of the composition. The arrangement also mutes the specificity of a spatial location through a tight frame on the rocks as the foreground. Furthermore, the lack of connection between the figure and the ground in Cleft of the Rock (Fig. 4) emphasizes the artificiality of the depiction, suggesting that the body ought to be understood more as a floating creature rather than a Kathleenhuman.Pyne argues that Brigman’s photographs “emerged from the dynamic between a corrupt urban topos and a redemptive wilderness not far away” and created “monsters and goddesses” each with their own mythology and emotions.31 Here, Pyne references the ethereal, almost other worldy quality of the figures in Brigman’s photos. Brigman does this through detaching her scene from ‘reality’ via pictorialist techniques. Often she removes some of the emulsion left on the surface of the photograph, thereby physically altering the information originally captured by the machine.32 Through Pyne’s argument, we can understand how the imagined realm in Brigman’s photographs is inextricably tied to her own spirituality, which furthers the sense of other worldliness. In particular, Pyne claims that the figure in The Lone Pine (Fig. 1), which bears similarities to the tree, represents “the pine’s nymph spirit in its rhyming contour,” and thus elevates the body beyond the physical and into the spiritual realm.33 Brigman sought to make an “imagined feminine sexuality” which, as analysis reveals, refers to the mystical place that each figure occupies.34

Figure 6 The creation of an imagined space situates the photographs within the audience’s imagination and thereby dulls the criticality of de sexualizing the figures. An imagined space is undeniably removed from reality, but the degree to which it is removed depends on how it is represented. Compositions that portray mystical places are not necessarily detached from real life, but through manipulating her photographs, Brigman places them outside the physical world and instead within the viewer’s mind. Depicting figures in an emotional struggle, Brigman’s images appeal to viewers by calling them to meditate on their own emotional and spiritual journeys. Although the image within the physical photograph denotes a particular location, through retouching literally scratching off the emulsion of the surface Brigman divorces the images from reality. She encourages the viewer to create an imagined context to match the imagined space in the photograph. Figure 7 Photography attempts to capture a single moment in time, artificially distilling continual movement into a still shot. In this way, photography as a medium causes the audience to experience time differently than the depicted subjects.35 Recognition of Brigman’s compositions as singular temporal instances allows the images to exist in an ambiguous time. However, time alone is not enough to create a mythical arena within an audience's perception; this requires the addition of a spatial disconnection as well. As these photographs do not exist in space or time, they do not reflect the lived experience of the audience accurately. While Brigman’s work elevates female subjects by mitigating their sexuality, by placing the figures in an imagined space, she similarly relegates their power into the same fiction. Thus, her photographs imply that women’s bodies are only ever de sexualized within a mystical locus. This is not to say that women can never escape representation as sexual beings outside of an imagined space, but that Brigman’s photographs never depict women in this way.

Brigman’s photography exists on a grayscale. Rhetorically, however, her work neither completely elevates nor suppresses the status of the female nude. In her early work, Brigman placed unclothed feminine figures within a landscape, treating them as objects more than subjects. However, after 1911, she represented the figures as interacting with the environment, acting out their emotional struggle with nature. Throughout her work, she lessens the sexual nature of the bodies, not explicitly depicting them as female. To those aware of the feminine nature of the figures, this de sexualization elevates the status of the female nude, as it divorces them from the eroticized gaze typical within the Western art canon, the implied audience. However, Brigman’s work also places these desexualized figures into imagined spaces, thereby dulling the power derived from muting an erotic gaze. The creation of a fantastical space removes the bodies from any temporal or spatial location, and thus separates the bodies from Western cultural values. In turn, this cultural detachment emphasizes the emotion of the figures and fosters a connection with the audience on a human level. In doing so, the compositions focus on how the forms express a shared human identity related to struggle and emotion rather than an expression of the femininity of certain bodies. Although her images exist in an imagined realm, Brigman’s art is an example of how to represent the feminine body as nude without overwhelming references to sexuality and eroticism.

8. Heyman, Anne Brigman, 8.

18. Ibid, 164; Kuhl, Intimate Circles, 33.

7. Naef, The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz, 166.

2. Anne Brigman lived from 1869 to 1950 and worked in association with the Photo Secessionists, led by Alfred Steiglitz, and the pictorialism movement. Therese Thau Heyman, Anne Brigman: Pictorial Photographer / Pagan / Member of the Photo secession (N.p.: The Oakland Museum, Art Department, 1974), 1.

15. Susan Ehrens, “Songs of Herself: Anne Brigman,” in Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography, ed. Ann Wolfe (New York: Rizzoli Electra with Nevada Art Museum, 2018), 182.

9. Kathleen Pyne, Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle (California: University of California Press, 2007), 113.

5. Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Oil on Canvas, Louvre Museum.

13. Heyman, Anne Brigman, 8. 14. Wolfe, “Laid Bare in the Landscape,” 165.

10. Pyne, Modernism and the Feminine Voice, 113. 11. Wolfe, “Laid Bare in the Landscape,” 172.

17. Wolfe, “Laid Bare in the Landscape,” 169.

19. Wolfe, “Laid Bare in the Landscape,” 156.

1.EndnotesAnneBrigman, The Lone Pine, 1908. Gelatin Silver Print, The Getty Museum.

21. Lahs Gonzales and Lippard, Defining Eye, 126. 13

4. Ann Wolfe, “Laid Bare in the Landscape,” in Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography, ed. Ann Wolfe (New York: Rizzoli Electra with Nevada Art Museum, 2018), 160.

3. Nancy Kuhl, Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts (New Haven, Connecticut: Beinecke Rare book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2003), 46.

6. Weston Naef, The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography (New York: The Viking Press with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978), 96.

12. Heyman, Anne Brigman, 6.

16. Ana Mendieta, The Tree of Life, 1976. Silver Dye Bleach Print, Museum of Fine Arts.

20. Olivia Lahs Gonzales and Lucy Lippard, Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century (N.p.: The St. Louis Art Museum, 1997), 122.

Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997. Bright, Deborah. "The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics." Art Journal 51, no. 2 (1992): 60-71. Accessed April 2, 2021. Ehrensdoi:10.2307/777397. , Susan. “Songs of Herself: Anne Brigman.” In Wolfe, Anne Brigman, 180 219. Heyman, Therese Thau. Anne Brigman: Pictorial Photographer / Pagan / Member of the Photo Secession. N.p.: The Oakland Museum, Art Department, 1974. Kuhl, Nancy. Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts. New Haven, Connecticut: Beinecke Rare book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2003. Lahs Gonzales, Olivia and Lucy Lippard. Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century. N.P.: The St. Louis Art Museum, 1997. Naef, Weston J. The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography. New York: The Viking Press with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978. Pyne, Kathleen. Anne Brigman: The Photographer of Enchantment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pyne, Kathleen. Modernism and the Feminine Voice: O’Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle. California: University of California Press, 2007. Pyne, Kathleen. "Response: On Feminine Phantoms: Mother, Child, and Woman Child." The Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (2006): 44 61. Accessed March 20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067224.2021.

Deborah Bright, “The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics,” Art Journal 51, no. 2 (1992): 67. 26. Pyne, Anne Brigman, 110. 27. Anne Brigman, Ballet De Mer, 1913. Platinum Print, The Metropolitan Museum of 28.Art. Pyne, Anne Brigman, 7. 29. Jean Léon Gérôme, Nude (Emma Dupont), ca 1876. Oil on Canvas, Private Collection.

30. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, ca 1485. Tempera on Canvas, Uffizi Museum. 31. Pyne, Anne Brigman, 6. 32. Kuhl, Intimate Circles, 33. 33. Pyne, Anne Brigman, 74. 34. Pyne, Modernism and the Feminine Voice, 35.113. For more on the discontinuity of photography from time, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997), 184 187. BatchenBibliography,Geoffrey.

Wolfe, Ann M. “Laid Bare in the Landscape.” In Anne Brigman, 154 179. Wolfe, Ann M, ed. Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography. New York: Rizzoli Electra with Nevada Art Museum, 2018.

22. Ibid, 126. 23. Lahs Gonzales and Lippard, Defining Eye, 24.126.Anne Brigman, The Cleft in the Rock, 1907. Gelatin Silver Print, The Metropolitan Museum of 25.Art.

The Philosophy of Pragmatism in the Politics Democracy:of A Method Overcomingof Dualism?

By: Madhav Singh Madhav Singh is a student at Ashoka University, pursuing a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Political Science. His current area of interest includes electoral accountability as a determinant of democratic resilience against populist radical right parties and its variation across varieties of democratic regimes. He has written and published several independent research papers in peer-reviewed journals such as the Michigan Journal of Political Science and the International Journal of Policy Sciences and Law. In the past, he has also worked as a research assistant for several organizations and think tanks, including the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Centre de Sciences Humaines, Centre for New Economic Studies, and KPMG Global Services. Apart from academia and research, he is deeply passionate about progressive rock and the French New Wave.

In his seminal lecture, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy," William James described the history of philosophy as that of a clash of certain human temperaments.[1] This clash is also reflected in the history of the philosophy of democracy. Attempts at outlining the form of democracy have most prominently taken either of the two definitions: procedural or substantive, minimal or maximal, thin or thick. Those who align themselves with the former positions view democracy as a form of government best captured by the set of electoral and political rules, processes, and institutions that comprise it, such as free and fair elections, regularized transfer of power, universal suffrage, and so on. Those who align themselves with the latter positions instead view democracy as a form of government greater than the set of its comprising electoral processes, expressed in terms of the substantive outcomes it produces in the interest of its governed population, such as liberalism, constitutionalism, socialism, and so forth. People thus find themselves torn over the pursuit of the so called "correct" expression of democracy and, as a result, this dualism or the conceptual separation of anything into two opposing or contrasting parts, or the state of being thus split over the formal disposition of democracy has come to dominate much of what and how we think of democracy in political science and philosophy. But, as we shall later observe, dualisms exist not just over formal differences in democracy; in fact, they are endemic to the very functioning of democracy itself. Through this article, I submit that democracy is a method of governance but also, more crucially, a way of a conjoint, communicated living that exists in a state of uncertainty: it is wedded to formal and functional dualisms while also striving to overcome them. To that end, I argue for a critical expansion in how we understand democracy (and the democratic life) using the framework of early pragmatism as (1) a conciliatory tool for idle disputes and as (2) a means for linking theory to practice. This paper is structured as follows. The first section, building off a Jamesian mode of analysis, interrogates the formal dualism in the philosophy of democracy represented as the conflict between defining the disposition of democracy in either procedural and objective (clean) terms or substantive and subjective (muddy) terms. I demonstrate how one can overcome this debilitating dichotomy by embracing the pragmatist attitude of looking away from the "first things" of democracy, such as rigid categorizations, and looking towards its "last things"[2] such as practical consequences for problem solving, creative expression, and associational living. In the second section, however, I complicate this reading of democracy by tracing the functional dualism that persists within the practice of democracy in trying to reconcile associated living amongst disassociated members and groups. As a potential solution from pragmatism’s toolkit itself, I present a multidimensional analysis of the notion of social endosmosis to illustrate how it transcends this functional dualism through its novel conceptualization of conjoint separateness. Finally, I conclude by briefly summarizing the takeaways from my argument and presenting a scope and direction for future research.

Lastly, it is humanist owing to the premium it places on the agency and value of all 'thinking' and 'feeling' human beings.

Formal Dualism: Beyond “Clean” and “Muddy” Democracy I began by addressing a popular divide in defining democracy as either substantive or procedural, maximal or minimal, thick or thin. But this dispute over the formal characteristics of democracy is only a small (yet significant) part of the larger dichotomy between what I call the “clean” temperament of democracy and the “muddy” temperament of democracy. “Clean” because it emphasizes the institutions and principles of democracy as uncontaminated from how they are normatively experienced by human beings; “muddy” because it emphasizes the constituents of democracy to be thoroughly contaminated with the complexities and particularities of normatively experienced human influences. This method of analysis borrows from James’ “tender minded versus tough minded”[3] distinction, but it has been contextualized with salient differences to capture the idiosyncrasies of the democratic temper. [4] Table 1 lists the various discords encapsulated by this dualism: The “clean” democratic temper subsists most commonly in the minds of patrician professors and finds its abode amongst the ivory towers of many sanitized classroom (or Zoom) discussions. It is procedural, absolute, objective, and intellectual. It is procedural insofar as it regards democracy as self contained within a fixed system of technical and quantifiable rules and procedures, whether operationalized as the conduct of routine elections, the separation of central powers, or even the equality to vote. It seeks absoluteness in the existence and truth of democracy, which is to say that the principles of democracy can either be present or absent, followed or unfollowed, black or white; there is no possibility of an indeterminate in between or pesky regions of gray areas. It thus also lays claim to an objective mode of analysis, implying that one can and should evaluate the truth about the measure of democracy in a regime(s) independent of the normativity and biases that underline individual opinions. Finally, it is intellectual because it maintains that the knowledge of democracy can be sustained and advanced only through the use, development, and exercise of the 'thinking' intellect, away from the ‘feeling' emotiveness. In contrast, the “muddy” democratic temper usually resides in the minds of plebeian activists and social workers navigating the painful 'facts' of everyday experience. It is substantive, provisional, subjective, and humanist. It is substantive because it considers the substance (rather than principles) of democracy as enmeshed in the circumstances, sensibilities, and attitudes of the people both: the governing and, more importantly, the governed that constitute it. It exists in a state of provisionality as opposed to absoluteness, given that the existence and truth(s) of democracy are contingent on the particularistic and mutable nature of human claims and demands. It accordingly embraces a subjective frame of analysis, highlighting the role of conscious subjects in influencing, informing, and biasing our knowledge of democratic truths through concrete and normative experiences.

Third, the pragmatic method demands the cultivation of an "attitude of orientation" or, the attitude of looking away from "first things," such as principles, categories, or supposed necessities, and of looking towards "last things," such as utility, consequences, and facts.[11] This means that we must turn away from the "first things" of democracy, such as electoral or institutional characterizations, and turn towards its "last things," such as "the habits of problem solving, compassionate imagination, creative expression, and civic self governance."[12] In short, by integrating these three tenets of pragmatism, one goes from asking what does the concept of democracy presuppose? to asking: what does the practice of democracy effectuate? The answer fittingly comes to us from another influential philosopher of pragmatism, John Dewey. Democracy, as seen through the Deweyan eyepiece, primarily effectuates two things. First, a mode of associated living and conjoint communicated experience.[13] And second, the use of this experiential method or, “cooperative intelligence” as a system of inquiry to solve practical problems.[14] But how does the practice of democracy effectuate the aforementioned? Dewey begins by arguing that democracy inspires the custom of expanding a common space for numerous individuals to interact and participate in their shared interests.[15] However, this is not just any common space for every shared interaction the spatial outlook entails a marked nuance concerning its perpetual adjustment and readjustment in light of its dynamic human subjects.

Now, some of us may not be content with having to choose between the principles offered by the “clean” democratic temper and the experiences offered by the “muddy” democratic temper. We may wish to develop a method that, rather than simply picking from the ‘best’ of the laundry lists on both sides, ingeniously combines the exercise of our powers of intellectual abstraction with some positive connection for actual human lives.[5] A method that ultimately preserves a cordial relationship with facts while also treating aspirational constructions cordially as well. [6] Fortunately, such a method can and does exist in the form of the philosophy of pragmatism. Pragmatism very broadly claims that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily and that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical consequences of accepting it.[7] It follows that in order to reconcile the contradictory dispositions of democracy, we must turn towards the understanding of democracy as a practice, as opposed to a position, ideology, or dogma. Here, pragmatism would importantly require the import of three things. First, one must acknowledge and concede that the dualism between the “clean” and the “muddy” character of democracy cannot be settled on purely 'intellectual' grounds, i.e. by appealing to a certain sense of logical, scientific, or metaphysical superiority. And leaving the debate open ended brings with it the same risk of losing the truth as having to pick between one and discarding the other. Instead, we must resort to understanding democracy through the lens of our "passional nature," as a consequence of the precursive faith in the cooperation of many independent persons.[8] Second, and as philosopher Cheryl Misak points out, "pragmatists are empiricists in that they require beliefs to be linked to experience."[9] As such, a pragmatic explanation of democracy that tackles the nature of its being must be "down-toearth,"[10] which is to say that the democratic philosophical doctrine must arise out of the human economy of demand and claim making, intertwined with the natural experience of it.

Reflect for a moment on the common space facilitated by democracy for individuals and of their shared interests. It follows that individuals who may wish to participate in a given interest within this common space must refer their own actions and behaviors to that of others who occupy the same domain for reasons of interconnectedness, positionality, and direction. Plus, the more numerous and varied points of contact, the more there is a diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond, which, in turn, emphasizes variation in their action.[16] Sure, this may reinforce the sustenance of old mutual interests, but, more importantly, it also promotes the emergence of new ones; and with this widening of the area of shared concerns comes the liberation of a greater diversity of personal capacities and thus the security of freer interactions between social groups.[17] As such, for Dewey, democracy proves useful as a method of inquiry into finding solutions for practical human problems, such as inequality in education or barriers in communication, for its purpose becomes to set free and develop the capacities of human individuals irrespective of their race, sex, class, or economic status.[18] In summary, democracy as a practice fosters a common space of shared interests and mutual participation, which supposedly leads to freer interaction between social groups and the upliftment of all individuals.

To account for this functional dualism in the practice of democracy that endeavors for conjointness while existing within the separateness of an undesirable society, I turn towards the concept of social endosmosis. Originally conceptualized by philosopher Henri Bergson, and later by William James, to demonstrate the interaction of the mind with nature, the term was soon appropriated by Dewey as a descriptor for interaction between social groups.[21] However, it comes as a great blow that Dewey only ever employed the expression of social endosmosis once across all his writings, and it remains an undertheorized phenomenon outside a small body of literature. Thankfully, some like B.R. Ambedkar Indian jurist, social reformer, and a student of Dewey have managed to not only preserve the interactive content behind social endosmosis but also complicated it through its contextualized, application oriented usage.

Functional Dualism: Deweyan Democracy in an “Undesirable Society”?

I used the modifier "supposedly" for a reason, which I hope will become clear from a more in depth cause and effect analysis of Deweyan democracy herein. The above delineated effects of democracy as a mode of associated living, conjoint experience, and social upliftment encounter a contradiction from what we took to be their assumed causes. To reach the conclusions of these effects in my previous exploration, I (like Dewey) conveniently assumed at the outset that democracy at least incites a common space for individuals to participate in some shared interests. But what happens when the very emergence of this common space is obstructed internally and externally through barriers that prevent free social intercourse and the communication of experience? For such a condition is what Dewey anticipated through his characterization of an "undesirable society."[19] The nature of an undesirable society matches in content, if not in name, to the nature of a despotically governed state: "there is no extensive number of common interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one sided."[20] Suffice it to say that there is a lack of an equal opportunity to receive and take from the interaction of others, which results in the loss of meaningful experience and arrests the ability to secure flexible readjustment of societal institutions.

Therefore, I submit that a comprehensive understanding of social endosmosis requires serious engagement with its three idiosyncratic dimensions. First, as per the dimension given to it by Dewey, it implies gradation without separation amongst different social groups.[22] This does not mean that differences between social groups based on volume or even dispositions will cease to exist altogether, but that the barriers such as “high” and “low” separating them must be undermined.

Second, in its Ambedkarite flavor, the manner in which social endosmosis undermines these barriers is through fluidity or, by the promotion of numerous channels through which groups and individuals are suffused with the nutrient of each other's creative intelligence.[23] Third, and as noted by Mukherjee, social endosmosis accommodates gradation within fluidity through the idea of the semi permeable "porous septum,"[24] a membrane that provides for the privacy of individuals without enclosing them within impermeable walls. Taken together, the concept of social endosmosis allows Dewey, Ambedkar, and Mukherjee to reconcile the otherwise antithetical ideas of separateness and conjointness, thus facilitating a distinctly pragmatic way of sustaining the democratic life within an undesirable society. Figure 1 illustrates the multidimensional nature of social endosmosis among groups (G1 to Gn) demarcated by porous septa (S1 to Sn 1). Therefore, if democracy is indeed the pragmatic solution to practical human problems, then social endosmosis is what endows viability to that solution by reconceptualizing what barriers mean for the permeability of action. This can be better substantiated once we also identify the consequences of social endosmosis as a "joint activity"[25] through which individuals (1) subsist transactionally with their social environment and (2) cultivate dispositions by the use of things. In our case, the social environment consists of various differentiated groups; the thing to be utilized and experimented with is democracy; and the cultivation of an appropriate democratic disposition will thus take place when individuals contribute to the joint activity of social endosmosis, which will allow them to appropriate the purpose which actuates it (conjointness), become familiar with its methods and subject matters (freer social intercourse), acquire needed skill (communication), and become saturated with its emotional spirit.[26] Furthermore, joint activities like social endosmosis denote power rather than a weakness because they strengthen interdependence and are accompanied by a growth in individual and collective abilities that increase our so called "social capacity."[27] This social capacity makes possible the fulfillment of tasks that might have been otherwise impossible for an individual to accomplish on their own using the means of a singular physical or mental capacity.

Figure 1: Social Endosmosis as Conjoint Separateness

In ultimately tying together the discussion of democracy and social endosmosis, one would be remiss to not respond to what is perhaps the most popular and potent charge against it: the unwillingness of some human agents to associate with others, regardless of the barriers in an undesirable society. Misak frames it best: "[…] these noble sentiments [of democracy and freer intercourse] are again ineffective against those who would argue that they are deeply uninterested in living amongst, or associating with, a minority class, race, or different territorial group and would much prefer to do away with them."[28] There is truth to this, no two ways about it. At first glance, it might seem that Dewey tried to include a failsafe mechanism in his writings to safeguard against this objection using what I call the thesis of resocialization. It posits that all those who partake in, or are exposed, to the experience of communication whether of knowledge, interests, activities, or aspirations have their experience of the communication modified in some form.[29] Thus, the joint activities of communication such as social endosmosis are self sustaining practices once kick started because they set into motion a cycle of the resocialization of previously socialized attitudes. Granted, the real problem, as Misak pointed out, was the act of kick starting them within a disinclined audience in the first place. But where the teacher fell short, the student swooped in. Ambedkar took the thesis of resocialization, combined it with the power of an external influence such as electoral, political, or constitutional reforms and ran with it. In his seminal commentary on the oppressive and undemocratic nature of the caste system in India, he echoed part of Misak’s objection by acknowledging how the “anti-social spirit”[30] of the Hindus acted as one of the worst offenders in fostering exclusivity, isolation, and self interestedness amongst the dominant social group. However, though breaking this deadlock was difficult, Ambedkar realized that a potential solution consisted of mobilizing external influence or actors to kick start the process of social endosmosis. One such instance of his endeavor to achieve the same is evident in his 1919 witness to the Southborough Committee, which decided upon political reforms for India under the British colonial rule.[31] Ambedkar (2014) emphasized how different social groups in isolation tend to create their own distinctive “like mindedness,” but when the same groups are brought together in a political union, it can create a new like-mindedness in place of the old, “which is representative of the interests, aims, and aspirations of all the various groups concerned.”[32] But he also believed that the social divisions in India were different from those in Europe or the U.S.A, and thus political reform had to accordingly share a two way street with social reform and endosmosis if it were to be successful. Additionally, this synthesis of political reform with social reform would go on to become a template for Ambedkar’s activism, as he utilized the same argument in later interventions such as the 1930 Round Table Conference in London, where he justified compensatory discrimination in the form of separate electorates for the untouchables. In short, though Misak’s counter argument represented an often-overlooked limitation of the associational idea behind democracy, proponents of Dewey, such as Ambedkar, found their own ways of building upon the pragmatic tradition through contextual improvisation.

[3] William James, “Lecture 1: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 17th ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1922), pp. 11 13. [4] This is why I refrain from calling this a “rationalistic versus empiricist” dualism of democracy. In my theorization, the “clean” temper is not synonymous with the rationalistic temper, and the same is true for the “muddy” and the empiricist temper.

Endnotes [1] William James, “Lecture 1: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 17th ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1922), pp. 6 7.

[7] Douglas McDermid, “Pragmatism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/pragmati/.2006,

[2] William James, “Lecture 2: What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 17th ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1922), pp. 53 55.

Conclusion My purpose in this essay has been to explain and interrogate the import of early American Pragmatism in the politics, philosophy, and practice of democracy. I have not tried to say all that could be said on the subject. There is scope in future studies for either adopting a more exploratory direction and incorporating the view of other philosophers of pragmatism or taking up a more critical stance by considering further counter arguments and objections to the pragmatic reading of democracy. However, within the ambit of what I did say over the course of this essay, I hope to have accomplished four things. First, to have demonstrated that the formal dualism in the temperament of democracy whether "clean" or "muddy" is myopic because it presents itself as having to pick one over the other and is more concerned with the presumptions of democracy than the practice of it. Second, to have outlined a method of reconciling these temperaments of democracy using the philosophy pragmatism and, in particular, through the Deweyan ideas of associated living and cooperative intelligence in democracy. Third, to have introduced the functional dualism of having to sustain the democratic life within an undesirable society that erects barriers between groups and individuals to prevent or minimize communication, and how the concept of social endosmosis attempts to overcome this through its multidimensional nature and consequences as a joint activity. And fourth, to have engaged with a popular challenge to the idea of social endosmosis and democratic living, and its implications for the creative appropriation of the pragmatic tradition.

[9] C. J. Misak, “Preface,” in The American Pragmatists. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. x x. 22

[8] William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1907), pp. 11; 24 25.

[5] William James, “Lecture 1: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 17th ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1922), pp. [6]20.Ibid., pp. 40 40.

[12] David Hildebrand, "John Dewey", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = entries/dewey/.https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/

[10] Ibid., [11] William James, “Lecture 2: What Pragmatism Means,” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 17th ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1922), pp. 53 54.

[14] C. J. Misak, “John Dewey (1859 1952),” in The American Pragmatists. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 135 135.

New Literary History 40, no. 2. (2009), pp. 352 352. [25] John Dewey, “Education as Direction,” in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 34 35.

[26] John Dewey, “Education as a Social Function,” in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 26 26. [27] John Dewey, “Education as Growth,” in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 51 52.

[29] John Dewey, “Education as a Necessity of Life,” in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 6-6.

[30] B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste,” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar's Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon. (Jhajjar: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014), 51 52.

[28] C. J. Misak, “John Dewey (1859 1952),” in The American Pragmatists. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 135 135.

[31] Arun P. Mukherjee, “B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy,” New Literary History 40, no. 2. (2009), pp. 353 353. [32] B.R. Ambedkar, "Evidence Before the Southborough Committee on Franchise (1919),” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar's Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon. (Jhajjar: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014), 248 49. 23

New Literary History 40, no. 2. (2009), pp. 352 352. [22] John Dewey, “The Democratic Conception in Education,” in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 98 98. [23] B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste,” in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar's Writings and Speeches, vol. 1, ed. Vasant Moon. (Jhajjar: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014), pp. 24 24.

[24] Arun P. Mukherjee, “B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy,”

[21] Arun P. Mukherjee, “B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy,”

[15] John Dewey, “The Democratic Conception in Education,” in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 100-102. [16] Ibid., pp. 101 101. [17] Ibid., pp. 114 115. [18] Ibid., pp. 101 101. [19] Ibid., pp. 115 115. [20] Ibid., pp. 97-97.

[13] John Dewey, “The Democratic Conception in Education,” in Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 101 101.

Bibliography Ambedkar, B. R. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. Jhajjar: Dr Ambedkar Foundation, Dewey,2014.John. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922. Hildebrand, David. (n.d.). John Dewey. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Green,James,wey/.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deEdition).William.TheWilltoBelieve:AndOtherEssaysinPopularPhilosophy.NewYork:Longmans,andCo,1907. James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1922. McDermid, Douglas. 2006. Pragmatism. Internet Encyclopedia of Misakhttps://iep.utm.edu/pragmati/.Philosophy.,C.J.TheAmericanPragmatists.Oxford,UK:OxfordUniversityPress,2013. Mukherjee, A. P. “B. R. Ambedkar, John Dewey, and the Meaning of Democracy.” New Literary History 40, no. 2 (2009): 345 370 24

The choice to write about Soviet tattooing stems from her passion to expand upon what many consider art. She strongly believes that stigma and past prejudices interfere with the way in which people categorize art whether said art is a valid or invalid form of expression. Her hope is that eventually the art community can remove themselves from the confines of their archaic views, and realize that there are many worthy modes of artistic expression deserving of establishment attention.

The Case for Soviet Prison Tattoos as Art By: Lauren Diener

Lauren Diener is a recent graduate of SUNY New Paltz. She received her Bachelor’s degree in May of 2020, graduating magna cum laude. She majored in art history and minored in creative writing. While at SUNY New Paltz, she completed her senior honors thesis titled, “The Case for Soviet Prison Tattoos as Art.”

Within the span of twenty years, experts have gathered a wealth of information regarding Russian prison tattoos and have been able to apply them to larger areas of interest, such as LQBT life and Russian expatriates. This study draws upon recent scholarship on Russian prison tattoos of the Soviet era to make the case that these tattoos are art and therefore valid subjects of art historical study.[6]

Within the last thirty years, the examination of Russian prison tattoos, under the Soviet regime, as a subject of anthropological study emerged. Soviet prison tattooing grew in popularity during the beginning of the twentieth century, and declined in practice during the end of the same century; this be the period which we are examining.[5] The cache of arcane images that have marked the bodies of inmates offers an untapped wealth of knowledge regarding the daily lives of the downtrodden who were subjected to harsh prison conditions, many for several years at a time. Understanding and legitimizing the study of the images that adorned the body of these inmates has taken time. It has only truly come to fruition as an area of study in the last two decades.

The notion of marking one's body forever in order to convey some message or indicate some sort of esoteric knowledge is fascinating. While a large portion of this area of study has focused on “non Western” people who mostly have inhabited islands in the Pacific ocean, the oldest known bodily inscription actually belonged to a man who lived in the Ötztal Alps.[7] European crusaders and pilgrims got tattooed to prove they had made it to the Holy Land.[8] Even King Charles XIV of Sweden (1763 1844) had a tattoo that ironically read, “Death to all Kings!”[9] History has forgotten the rich tattoo culture of Europe. In her 2004 essay, “Inscribing the Body,” Enid Schildkrout, an anthropologist employed by the Museum of Natural History in New York, made a claim that Western ideology is the reason behind the lack of knowledge surrounding European tattooing. Using what Schildkrout puts forth in her essay, one can formulate an idea surrounding the intrinsic and symbolic meaning within the iconographic language of Russian prison tattoos. According to Schildkrout, contemporary society believes that it is undergoing what some refer to as a “Tattoo Renaissance.” [10]

As possibly the first, and certainly the most obvious, canvas upon which human differences can be written and read, skin has been a topic of continuous interest in anthropology and related disciplines from the earliest descriptions of exotic people to postmodern theorizing about the body in contemporary society.[1] The fields of anthropology and art history have long been intertwined. Symbols are at the core of human communication and in order to decode a set of esoteric images, overlapping practices within the fields of anthropology and art history can be employed. The discovery of the remote practice of human bodily inscription by non European people ignited a desire to uncover and understand the nature of the inscribed symbols.

In the year 1691, English explorer, William Dampier transported a Filipino slave covered in tattoos back to his home country.[2] The slave, Jeoly, became known as “Painted Prince Giolo” and was immediately put on display like some rare artifact.[3] Despite the curiosity surrounding Jeoly, it should be mentioned that human bodily inscriptions have been a part of ethnographic literature even before the genesis of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and before the development in the early twentieth century of art historical techniques for interpreting symbols, such as “iconology.”[4] The study of these inscriptions has almost exclusively dealt with remote indigenous tribes. However, as tattoo culture gains popularity in Western culture, scholars are beginning to look to tattoos as a repository of information regarding other groups, including, subcultures.

However, this notion creates a misleading impression of historical events within the world of Western tattooing.[11] She stresses that we must not view tattooing as a modern creation, but rather as a tradition with deep, widespread roots. To legitimize the study, Schildkrout states that it is not only historians and anthropologists who are interested in inscriptions on the skin. It has also been an area of great interest to psychoanalysts and philosophers. She states that the skin is an ambivalent boundary, as it provides agency to the wearer to perhaps subvert authoritative or penal systems.[12] This statement is of particular interest as the subversion of strict prison systems is perhaps the most essential aspect of Russian prison tattoos. A major component of the Russian criminal subculture is the connection to the “Other.”

Russian prisoners have long been aware of their status as outsiders, and rather than long for acceptance they thrive and celebrate the fact that they operate beyond the bounds of traditional society.[13] Tattooing became an integral part of the celebration of “otherness.” Once used as an agent of authority by those in power to mark prisoners and therefore to easily identify them, tattooing was reclaimed by the imprisoned.[14] The marks once used to deny the personal autonomy of the prisoner, were now being weaponized against the very establishment responsible for imprisonment.[15] The practice of reclamation truly grew in popularity during the mid twentieth century among those imprisoned in Soviet Gulag Thecamps.[16]iconography of the tattoos carved into the skin of the Soviet prisoners was in itself highly anti establishment. Nazi insignia and other jarring images were prevalent, as a means to celebrate the enemies of the Soviet Union.[17] The 1930s was a time within the camps when the anti Soviet imagery really took hold.[18] It should be said that a majority of the tattoos created within the Gulag camps were the product of the “Thieves in Law.”[19] The “Thieves in Law” are a professional criminal organization that ruled during the Soviet era from within prison camps.[20] The group had substantial membership and power, and thus was able to dictate the nature of many of the images inscribed on Russian prisoners. The tattoos worn by prisoners were highly codified and esoteric; the average Russian citizen would not understand the meaning behind most Russian prison tattoos. Imagery and placement are crucial factors that one must take into account when decoding the tattoos. For example, a spider crawling up the right shoulder of a prisoner connotes that the wearer is a thief who is still active.[21] However, if the spider is crawling down the shoulder the thief has given up their life of crime.[22] It is necessary that the iconographic aspects and decoding properties of Russian prison tattoos are mentioned. Outlining every single image and its meaning would be an impossible task and therefore I will focus on the inscriptions that mark the body of one Russian prisoner and the connotations of said inscriptions. The tattoos were heavily saturated with dark ink and produced in a crude manner. Infections were common, and some prisoners contracted bloodborne illnesses from the tattoo needles.[23] Despite the circumstances, the tattoos are quite artful and successful in conveying the intended image. The tattoos that emerged from Soviet prisons can be categorized based on subject matter. There are primarily four categories into which Soviet tattooing has been placed, in addition to any aesthetic significance.[24] 27

The first category deals with interpersonal relationships, which was a popular motif among lesbian prisoners.[25] Shared motifs, or the name of a lover were often the tattoos of choice for these women.[26] It is important to note that both men and women prisoners engaged in the practice of tattooing; however, overall themes of the tattoos differed greatly among the two genders. The tattoos of incarcerated women deal primarily with the emotions connected to a life of crime, broken relationships and the separation from loved ones.[27] Men, on the other hand, were tattooed to convey authority and to demonstrate their place within the prison hierarchy. From here on out, this paper will be discussing the tattoos of men, which fall within the other three categories into which Soviet tattoo imagery has been divided. The second category of Soviet tattoos comprises pictures that indicate one's participation in a group.[28] Images bearing insignia that denote the wearer as a thief, or professional criminal are examples of tattoos that indicate group inclusion. The third category is a collection of motifs that represent the wearer’s own primary interest.[29] The images represented in the third category are largely the same as those in the second category, as it would often be beneficial for the wearer to align themselves with a larger affiliation.[30] The last category deals with tattoos that relate to the self image of the wearer personal details and memories that the prisoner deems worthy of being inscribed on their body.[31] The sheer number of tattoos on the body of one prisoner, documented in a photograph showing a bared chest, shoulder, arm, and hand, suggests that this man has been a criminal for a long time (Figure 1). This status can be validated through the examination of the stars present below the man’s left shoulder.[32] Stars present on the body reveal that the wearer is a professional criminal.[33] Building upon the previous statement, the epaulette tattooed on the shoulder indicates that the man has a great deal of authority within the criminal hierarchy.[34] The man presents his heavily tattooed hand for examination. On his ring finger is a black triangle split in two, which indicates this man grew up incarcerated.[35] The two black triangles on his middle finger suggest that he has a strong aversion to prison administrators and will not cooperate with them.[36] On his left arm is an inscription that reads “communism only produces victims.” [37] It is interesting that this message is not encoded within some shroud of esoteric imagery; any Russian speaking person would understand its meaning. Several of the tattoos present on the man’s body are difficult to interpret, but this fact does not negate their meaning. An important component of Russian tattooing is the theory of “parts of a whole.” [38] Certain tattoos cannot be understood as solitary images; these tattoos require others to play upon in order for the intended meaning to be revealed.[39] It is best to think of each tattoo as a chapter in a book, with that book ultimately being the wearer’s identity. It is common for an area of study to expand in subject matter and content included as it develops and garners validity. The study of Russian prison tattoos is no exception. Once experts began noticing the important cultural and social aspects of the tattoos, they began to look at them within different areas of focus. For example, in light of recent social reforms, it is no surprise that the images present within the iconography of Russian prison tattoos would be used in hopes of creating a broader understanding of the world of LGBT Russian inmates, specifically homosexual men.

Why then did criminal men, most of whom engaged in homosexual acts, hate and punish the homosexual prison population? The answer to this question above is simple: these men had everything taken from them. All they had left was their status. The men of the Russian prisons relied solely on their domineering masculine identities and hierarchical relationships to gain power and rank.[50] They could simply not rise in standing if they did not have anyone to rise above. A major way these upwardly mobile prisoners asserted dominance over the opushcheny was by use of forced tattooing; it solidified the status of the tattooer.[51] 29

Figure 1: Sergei Vasiliev. Russian Prisoner. Photograph. Undated. fuel design.com/russian criminal tattoovasilievarchive/photographs/sergei/printno32/.

The reality for homosexual men in Soviet prison camps was horrific and inhumane. Homosexuality was a punishable offense, and men sentenced for homosexual activity were automatically subjected to the lowest level of the prison’s caste system, called the opushcheny.[40] People of this caste faced brutal beatings and were often starved and left without proper sleeping arrangements.[41] In addition, homosexuals of the opushcheny experienced forced tattooing. Tattoos, which were a badge of honor for most inmates, became a punishment and sign of shame for homosexuals. The markings that were forced upon the bodies of homosexual men can be found within the iconography of Russian prison tattoos. For “active” homosexuals, a bee was often tattooed on the genitals.[42] “Passive” homosexuals were inscribed with an image of a beehive on the buttocks.[43] The message of the imagery is quite clear, one is the “stinger” and the other accepts the “sting.”[44] The placement of the tattoos is very important, as it serves to remind the participants of their status as they engage in homosexual activity. Other forced tattoos include open eyes and a mouse being chased by a cat, both placed on the Itbuttocks.[45]iscuriousas to why homosexual men were treated so horribly in the prisons. According to a study of 1,100 Soviet era prisoners between the ages of eighteen and eighty, serving sentences of one and a half years to ten years, ninety percent had homosexual contact.[46] Out of the population studied, only eight to ten percent belonged to the lowest caste, meaning they were classified as homosexual.[47] In addition to being treated horrifically in prisons, men classified as homosexual were also branded as “non patriotic.”[48] It was a common belief, originating in Stalinist Russia, that homosexuals were perverts and that perverts could never be patriots.[49]

According to Russian society, homosexuals were inherently anti nationalistic, something that was celebrated within the criminal culture.

The act of forced tattooing as a means to denote a person considered to be an “Other” did not originate with the inmates of the Russian prison system. Forced markings had long been used by the Russian penal system to distinguish the criminal from the citizen. Until the year 1846, Russian individuals sentenced to hard labor were branded on their face with the inscription “VOR,” meaning “thief.” [52] In an act of reclamation, beginning in the early twentieth century, prisoners began to use bodily alteration as their own form of self expression.[53] Thus, the esoteric iconography of Russian prison tattoos was born. However, during the cycle of repossession, the prisoners adopted the atrocious practice that they had previously endured: forced tattooing. In order to try and understand the cruel and inherently hierarchical nature of the Russian prisoners, one would have to examine the conditions of criminal life in Russia. The behavior of the Russian criminal can only be understood through the context provided by the Russian criminal underground. Russian criminals held the ideology that their profession also doubled as an artform.[54] Pickpocketing was regarded as the highest form of criminal activity, due to the high level of skill needed to be successful.[55] A good pickpocket is like an actor, wearing need specific garb and performing in a methodical and time sensitive way. In her autobiography, Praskovia Skachko writes of the luxurious life she and her husband were able to afford through the “art” of theft.[56] Skachko credits her ultimate downfall to a costume mishap that prevented her from playing her role as a thief.[57] The subject of “the criminal” became a source of fascination for many of Russia’s general Pettypublic.thieves became a recurring theme in luboks, a collection of graphic prints with a narrative.[58] Luboks are a compilation of lubki, which are the oldest form of Russian popular prints.[59] The lubok and lubki were extremely popular amongst the lower and middle classes, as they had multiple functions and were relatively inexpensive.

Figure 2: Nightingale the Robber. Woodcut. First half of the 18th century. Russian National Library, St. Petersburg. The prints were dualistic, as they had the potential to be didactic as well as ornamental. Prints outlining the exciting tales of the lives of bandits adorned the walls of Russian commoners (Figure 2). Unlike popular Western tales regarding thieves, i.e., Robin Hood, Russian bandits did not possess altruistic motives.[60] The tales laid out in the lubki were not allegorical, and no hidden code of morality could be derived from them. Instead, Russians looked to tales of thieves as a means to inspire freedom and rebellion against the institutions responsible for unfavorable societal situations.[61] The fictionalized bandit struggled internally between the conflicting themes of wanting freedom and having a place in mainstream society.[62] However, it should be noted that such stories did not idealize a life of crime, as many ended with the bandit committing an act of redemption through patriotism or state service.[63]

Figure 3: Prisoners of Belamor, constructing the White Sea Baltic Canal. Photograph. http://www.gulag.eu/gulag/storm.htmlUndated.

The philosophy of perekovka was put on display at Belomor, a Gulag camp dedicated to the construction of Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal (figure 3).[68] Armed with the understanding of the importance of individual expression, Officials enforced that the inhabitants of the camp use forced labor as a means of inspiration. Prisoners were encouraged to write of the personal transformations they endured through the means of autobiographical sketches.[69] A camp newspaper was also provided to prisoners, as well as opportunities to circulate original poetry and produce plays.[70] At a surface level, the aforementioned elements seem to conform to modern ideologies regarding the rehabilitation of incarcerated individuals; providing numerous means of self expression is beneficial to the individual. However, perekovka was not a process devised to be advantageous to the individual. The sole purpose of perekovka was to brutally destroy the previous life of the prisoner in order to make room for a new one that would benefit the Soviet Union.[71] When confronted with a system that wants to erase one’s past, acts of individual expression are seen as most radical.

The famous Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799 1837), wrote “art clings to life through death, sin and lawlessness.”[64] Arguably, the most apparent example of the truth to this statement can be seen in twentieth century Russia. The correlation between crime and art was glaringly obvious. Art, paired with labor, was seen as the most efficient way to remold the common criminal and was employed by the Soviet regime in Gulag camps.[65] Officials of the Soviet Union devised a metallurgical analogy perekovka, or “reforging” to describe their means of inducing loyalty to the state.[66] Perekovka was based upon the notion that humans, much like elements of industry, could be created according to blueprints.[67]

The sordid inner workings of perekovka relied heavily on deceit and the selfish nature of the prisoners. First, a department was created to facilitate the education and reforging of the convicts.[72] This department was divided into smaller sections, and each of these sections was headed by an educator, or vospitatel.[73] The vospitateli were also prisoners, and were given special privileges, such as the ability to neglect extra work or to indulge in a drunken card game, as a reward for their assistance in the reforging process.[74] The fact that officials turned a blind eye to the indulgences of the vospitateli is an indication that the Soviet Union did not fully believe that perekovka would work. They were willing to allow certain prisoners to exist outside of code if it meant control over the greater population. It is without doubt that they hoped perekovka would mass produce the perfect member of society, but it is unlikely that they actually believed that this was possible.

The Soviet Union’s skepticism regarding perekovka is perfectly illustrated in the life of Igor Terentiev. Terentiev was a poet and theater director best known for daring and obscene work.[75] He was a prominent member of the Futurist group, 41°, which aimed to radically transform the world and the language used to express it.[76] He was imprisoned at Belomor from April 1931 until the completion of the canal two years later, and should have been an exemplary example of the capability of the reforging process.[77] Once imprisoned, Terentiev wrote for and led an agitational brigade.[78] The purpose of the brigade was to motivate the prisoners through the use of music, and from all accounts he was highly effective in this line of work.[79] In addition to leading the brigade, Terentiev fulfilled 400% of the work norm, and wrote for the camp’s newspaper.[80] His actions did not go unnoticed, which resulted in Terentiev being awarded separate living quarters and an early release from Belomor.[81] After he was released from the camp, Terentiev moved to Moscow where he participated in the creation of agitation brigades at the Moscow Volga Canal. [82] Terentiev, as a free man, chose to live at the local Gulag camp in order to further his work in agitational theater.[83] He was arrested in Moscow on charges of including anti Soviet themes in his productions, and was executed in June of 1937.[84] There was no proof that the claim that led to his arrest had any validity, and by all accounts Terentiev was truly “reforged.” [85] The Soviet regime may have executed one of few known convicts who actually experienced the desired transformation. There is no way of knowing how many prisoners were legitimately re-forged, as most did not leave behind physical documentation of their lives However, through a closer look into the tattoo iconography prevalent at Belomor, it is certain that a sizable population of prisoners did not subscribe to the ideas presented in perekovka. As previously stated, many of the tattoos that marked the bodies of prisoners were anti establishment. A prisoner could not subscribe to both the methods of perekovka and the criminal code. A choice had to be made, and through the examination of the tattoos, it is evident that many prisoners chose to align themselves with criminal culture.

Political Prisoners at work, White Sea Baltic Canal. Wikimedia Commons, 1932. In many ways, the act of tattooing embodies the prisoner’s experience at Belomor: creation, destruction, and violence. The Soviet regime implemented an entire system dedicated to the eradication of “non beneficial” characteristics in prisoners, and the prisoners responded by permanently covering their bodies with images that celebrate the fruits of their “non-beneficial” behavior. The physical body was a subject of great admiration in Soviet society and was seen as an essential feature of a good Soviet citizen. [86] On “Physical Culture Day,” parades that ran through Red Square displayed the well-built physiques of the Soviet youth.[87] 32

The tattoos served multiple functions and had the power to sustain, create, and enforce an identity within the given social context; the tattoo was a living thing, capable of performing many tasks.[100] One of the roles given to tattoos was the job of courier.[101] Prisoners lived by their own set of values and moral codes, and often this set of rules was exemplified via tattoos.[102] Tattoos could also be an agent used in expressing one’s personal identity. If one were privy to the language of these tattoos, one could find information regarding the personal life of the prisoner, such as time served and agreements entered.[103] The images held the capacity to be both individualistic in purpose and universal; they were both internal and external.[104] Russian prison tattoos facilitated the development of dignity by allowing prisoners to mark their own set of values and ethics on their body.[105]

When trying to understand Russian prison tattoos, one must leave behind all preconceived notions of tattooing. It is important to understand that many Soviet era prisoners felt an extreme amount of pressure to get tattooed, as inmates without tattoos were seen as having no authority, masculinity, or status within the prison.[97] In Russian prisons, as Kristina Sundberg and Ulrika Kjellman have proposed, tattoos acted as a document, or archive, of the past actions and memories of the wearer. It was a way for prisoners to gauge the validity and authority of other prisoners; it was important to the hierarchical nature of the prisons. The tattoos served as absolute truths, and were taken as such.[98] Having a tattoo that was based on a false event could result in the tattoo, or even limb, being cut off the wearer.[99] Russian prison tattoos were taken this seriously because they were virtually all the prisoners had.

The prisoners created a poignant statement when they chose to mark their capable and strong bodies with anti Soviet imagery. It conveys the sentiment that their bodies are not for the consumption of the Soviet regime. The inherently permanent nature of tattoos ensures that no amount of reforging can erase the past, and no matter how reformed the criminal has become, they will always be reminded of previous actions. Russian prison tattooing is paradoxical in that it is a method of both alienation and acceptance alienation from mainstream society and acceptance from the criminal realm.[88] Many of those belonging to the criminal underworld found themselves at Belomor, and as a result, images of life at the camp were popular within the iconography of Russian prison tattoos.[89] Tattoos depicting life at Belomor often brought to light the neglect the prisoners endured. Highlighting the lack of available food, one tattoo consists of a star shaped ration cup, which is labelled “the extra rations of a convict hero of socialist labor.” [90] The cup is outlined with barbed wire and carnations, and the only contents within are a hammer and a sickle and shackles.[91] The wearer of this tattoo is making the statement that the prisoners are only being fed Soviet ideology and forced labor.[92] Tattoos depicting such objects as this ration cup gave the wearer a unique outlet for self expression. Belomor was a “total institution,” meaning that there was no distinguishable boundary between sleep, leisure, and work; prisoners lacked the ability to perceive the natural progression of time.[93] Officials wanted the lack of time related boundaries to break the prisoners. To cope with the disorienting nature of the camp, many prisoners adopted multiple personalities.[94] The lack of concrete personality was essential for the “stripping” process that criminals underwent at Belomor. [95] Officials were so eager to begin the “stripping” process that they removed the clothes, hair, and names of convicts upon their arrival at the camp.[96] In the climate present at Belomor, the act of tattooing served more than an aesthetic purpose, it was imperative in the act of self-preservation.

[2] Thomas M. Curley, Review of Omai, Pacific Envoy, by E. H. McCormick,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 12 (Spring 1979): 429.

[3] Curley, Review of Omai, Pacific Envoy, by E. H. McCormick,” 429. 34

[1] Enid Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004), 319.

The study of Russian prison tattoos has progressed tremendously over the last twenty years. Enid Schildkrout’s argument for the validity of tattoos as an area of study is no longer needed, as the wide array of material on the subject proves. When taking into account the severity of the Soviet prison system, it is remarkable that a wealth of information regarding the tattooing that went on there exists. Before embarking on this area of study, I would have assumed that the practice of tattooing would not have been permitted within Russian prisons. Even more surprising is that the subjects of most tattoos were quite obviously in opposition to the government. It begs the question, did the authorities not understand the severity to which they were being scrutinized by the prisoners, or did they simply not care? I would believe that they would care as the whole point of perekovka was the reformation of the prisoner into a productive member of society. Tattoos expressing the hatred one has towards the government is not the mark of a reformed individual. However there were tattoos depicting clear messages that any Russian citizen could read, including prison administration (see figure 1). Perhaps the authorities permitted tattooing as it would have caused an uprising within the prison population if they were to crack down on the practice and perhaps the authorities did not find such mark-making to be a real threat. It is because of the willingness of the wearer to incorporate meaning into their images, and the inherently artistic nature of the motifs, that I would categorize Russian prison tattoos as art. The images have a clear audience in other prisoners and specific meanings. The prisoners used their bodies as a medium to portray their life story and to expose the corruption they faced at the hands of Russian authority. In some instances, they risked infection and disease in order to convey messages within the images on their bodies. In addition, they managed to create a series of esoteric images that compose a specific iconographic language. This language relates to different aspects of life: imprisonment, love, sexuality, hardship. Prisoners used the tattoos as a creative outlet to express themselves and their realities. Acknowledgments My deep gratitude goes first to Professor Reva Wolf, who offered me a tremendous amount of support throughout this process. Without her, I would not have been able to accomplish even half of what I did in this paper. The amount of time and effort that she put into my research amazes me and I will forever be grateful for her assistance. My appreciation also extends to Rachel Crook who so graciously agreed to edit my paper. Rachel currently works a full time job in the medical field and, despite the stresses induced by COVID-19, she managed to provide excellent advice on how to improve my paper. There is no amount of thanks that I can give to her, as she has helped me in more ways than I can express. Lastly, I would like to thank the wonderful staff at the Sojourner Truth Library. The closing of the library was obviously something that I had not anticipated and as a result, I was left without crucial resources. The staff at the Sojourner Truth Library worked with Professor Wolf and I to ensure that we had access to the necessary materials. I am indebted to the library staff, as it would have been impossible to complete my paper without proper academicEndnotesresources.

[4] Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,” 319. On the emergence of anthropology as a discipline, see Thomas Highland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2015), 12. The influential art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892 1968) succinctly described the term “iconology” as being “the branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 3. [5] Danzig Baldev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 3 (London: FUEL Publishing, 2008), 25, 43. [6] For a discussion of the contemporary tattoo as art, see Marcia Tucker, "Tattoo: The State of the Art," Artforum 19, no. 9 (May 1981): 42 47. According to Tucker, who proposes that tattooing “is finally once again coming into its own as another aspect of the fine arts,” the act of tattooing possesses two aspects that are relevant imperative to its classification as art: subject/object relation, which she compares to contemporary art that uses the body as a medium, and highly skilled technique; “Tattoo: State of the Art,” 47. [7] Constance Holden, “Isotopic Data Pinpoint Iceman's Origins,” Science 302 (2003): 759. [8] Dunbar Plunket Barton, The Amazing Career of Bernadotte, 1763-1844(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 347. [9] Barton, The Amazing Career of Bernadotte, 1763 1844, 347. [10] Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,” 335 [11] Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,” 335 [12] Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,” 325 [13] Julie S. Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 79.

[15] Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,” 321. [16] Baldev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 3, 25. [17] Baldev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 1, 24. [18] Baldev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 3, 25. [19] Michael Schwirtz, “Vory v Zakone has hallowed place in Russian criminal lore,” New York Times, July, 29, 2008. [20] Schwirtz, “Vory v Zakone has hallowed place in Russian criminal lore.”

[21] Baldev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 3, 43. [22] Baldev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 3, 43. [23] Pawel Maczewski, “The Visual Encyclopedia of Russia Prison Tattoos,” Vice News, December 26, [24]2014.Kristina Sundberg and Ulrika Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” in Journal of Documentation 74, (January 2018): 30. The authors base their discussion of these categories on Clinton R. Sanders’ study of commercial tattoos in “Drill and Fill: Client Choice, Client Typologies, and International Control in Commercial Tattoo Settings,” in A. Rubin, ed., Marks of Civilization: Artistic Transformation of the Human Body (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), 219 32. [25] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. [26] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. [27] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. [28] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. [29] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. [30] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. 35

[14] Schildkrout, “Inscribing the Body,”, 321.

[31] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. [32] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 24. [33] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 25. [34] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 25. [35] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 26. [36] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 26. [37] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 26. [38] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 26. [39] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 26. [40] Laurie Essig, Queer in Russia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 8. [41] Essig, Queer in Russia, 8. [42] Efrat Shoham, “ ‘Signs of Honor’ Among Russian Inmates in Israel’s Prisons,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 54, no.6 ( 2010). 994. [43] Shoham, “ ‘Signs of Honor’ Among Russian Inmates in Israel’s Prisons,” 994. [44] Shoham, “ ‘Signs of Honor’ Among Russian Inmates in Israel’s Prisons,” 994.

[64] Alexander Pushkin, as quoted in Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77. [65] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77.

[66] Julie S. Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal,” The Russian Review 71, (January, 2012): [67]30. Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal,” 30. [68] Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal,” 30. [69] Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal,” 31. [70] Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal,” 31. [71] Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal,” 36. [72] Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal,” 32. 36

[45] Shoham, “ ‘Signs of Honor’ Among Russian Inmates in Israel’s Prisons,” 994. [46] Essig, Queer in Russia, 8. [47] Essig, Queer in Russia, 9. [48] Essig, Queer in Russia, 9. [49] Essig, Queer in Russia, 9. [50] Shoham, “ ‘Signs of Honor’ Among Russian Inmates in Israel’s Prisons,” 985. [51] Shoham, “ ‘Signs of Honor’ Among Russian Inmates in Israel’s Prisons,” 985. [53] Baldev, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 3, 25. [54] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 76. [55] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 76.

[56] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 76.

[57] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77. [58] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77. [59] Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 12. [60] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77. [61] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77. [62] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77. [63] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 77.

[73] Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal,” 32. [74] Draskoczy, “The Put’ of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea Baltic Canal,” 32. [75] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 96. [76] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 96. [77] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 99. [78] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 96. [79] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 100. [80] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 100. [81] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 100. [82] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 100. [83] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 100. [84] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 100. [85] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 100. [86] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 21. [87] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 21. [88] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 106. [89] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 105. [90] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 105. [91] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 105. [92] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 105. [93] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 20. [94] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 20. [95] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 20. [96] Draskoczy, Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, 20. [97] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 30. [98] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 21. [99] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 24. [100] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 24. [101] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 24. [102] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 24. [103] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 29. [104] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 29. [105] Sundberg and Kjellman, “The Tattoo as a Document,” 31. Bibliography Baldaev, Danzig, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 1. London: FUEL Publishing, 2004. Baldaev, Danzig, Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia: Volume 3. London: FUEL Publishing, 2008. Barton, Dunbar Plunket. The Amazing Career of Bernadotte, 1763 1844. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Curley,1930.Thomas M. Review of Omai, Pacific Envoy by E.H. McCormick, Eighteenth Century Studies 12.(Spring 1979): 429. Draskoczy, Julie S. Belomor:Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. 37

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The Forbidden Existence: Anti-Homeless Architecture and the Regulation of Public Spaces

By: Ezequiel Indriago Perez Ezequiel Indriago Perez is a fourth year honors Criminology student at the University of Ottawa with a minor in psychology. He is expected to graduate in June 2021. His areas of interest include the criminal justice system, public perception of crime and law & immigration.

The origin of the term anti homeless architecture and its varying denominations (hostile/ defensive architecture) is unclear. Little is known about when the terms were created and became extensively used to describe the historical phenomenon of public space regulation via physical architectural structures. Moreover, each of the terms used to define this phenomenon has often been conceptualized differently by different scholars depending on the purpose for its use. As such, there is no singular definition used to describe the anti homeless architecture and its variations. For instance, Petty defines antihomeless architecture as “various structures that are attached to or installed in spaces of public use in order to render them unusable in certain ways or by certain groups.”

Contextualization

[6] Whereas De Fine Licht argues that anti homeless architecture refers to “existing infrastructure [that has been] modified so that it becomes impossible to use it in the same way as before.”[7] Although varying definitions exist to define these structures, this work will use Smith and Walters anti homeless architecture definition as “architecture designed to actively exclude particular categories of person.” [8] Unlike other interpretations, Smith and Walter’s conceptualization has a broader scope. They claim that hostile architecture is not solely physical structures such as park benches and spikes, but it can also include any form of non physical deterrents such as CCTV surveillance cameras and ultraviolet lighting resulting in the systemic segregation of homeless people from public spaces.[9] A more conservative definition that solely concentrates on physical structures fails to recognize the extent of anti homeless legislation. In essence, anti homeless architecture can be characterized as both systemic and physical including restricted mobility in public transportation and public spaces.

Introduction

It is estimated that there are at least 235,000 homeless Canadians every year[1] Despite these large numbers, anti homeless architecture is widespread across Canadian cities. For instance, the #DefensiveTO project has collected and mapped over 120 anti homeless architectural structures in downtown Toronto alone.[2] Smith and Walters[3] explain that the construction of urban spaces is not a neutral act. From benches with unusual shapes to spikes on the ground, the planning and construction of public spaces are carefully designed and intentional.[4] As the public has become more aware of the oppressive character innate to anti homeless structures, calls to action have motivated public officials to denounce and dismantle these structures. For example, in 2014 Montreal mayor, Denis Coderre, condemned the use of "anti loitering" spikes in Montreal's streets and ordered their immediate removal after public outrage.[5] Although many applauded the mayor's effort, few failed to recognize the collusion between the local and provincial government and the construction of anti homeless architecture. As such, the current research project will seek to answer: How are public architectural designs and legislations working together to prevent homeless people from seeking refuge in public spaces in Canada? Research in this area will bridge the legal with the physical to fill a gap in the literature. Furthermore, the results from the current work will provide the general public with an analysis that can be used to better understand the phenomenon of anti homeless architecture. Lastly, the current research will provide policy makers with a relevant and contemporary analysis that addresses the State's role in marginalizing homeless communities to incite change in this area. Results demonstrate that the neo liberal conceptualization of the public and the private, the assumed exclusivity of public spaces and the societal conception of homeless people all play a role in the construction and maintenance of anti homeless architecture.

Alas, Jeffrey’s work did not acknowledge the inherent anti homeless nature of his proposals.

The Private-Public Divide and Legislation of Public Spaces

To analyze anti homeless architecture as defined by Walter and Smiths, the following theoretical frameworks will be used: the private and public divide, jurisdiction, and public enemies.

Furthermore, it should be noted that anti homeless architecture is not a contemporary phenomenon. On the contrary, Legro details that anti-homeless architecture can be traced to 19th century England where anti urinating structures plagued the streets of 1800s England. During this period, it was not unusual for the corners of buildings to be filled with stone mounds to deter people from relieving themselves in public spaces.[10] These structures were replicated worldwide in large cities such as New York.[11] Likewise, Legro illustrates a parallel and states that anti roosting spikes have also been used for centuries to prevent birds from gathering in spaces where they are undesired. Although anti roosting spikes are environmental deterrents for birds, the intent behind their creation is similar to that of anti homeless architecture used to deter people from public spaces.[12] Although these structures have been existing in public spaces throughout the world for many years, their presence has evolved. For instance, in the early 1970s, the concept of crime prevention using the environment became very popular. In his work, Jeffrey claimed that the planning and construction of a city could serve as a deterrent to crime if designed correctly.[13] He argued that public spaces where people congregated needed to be planned to prevent rather than reinforce crime. He explained that the presence of deteriorating building facades, graffiti, broken windows, and dark, secluded areas would increase criminality as it seemed inviting for criminogenic behavior. Jeffrey suggested the planning and development of cities should include crime deterring elements such as better lighting and street distribution, uniformity, and overall cleaner environments. During this era, anti homeless architecture underwent a redesign and began being implemented more often in downtown cores and areas deemed necessary for these structures.

Later, in the early 1980s, Wilson and Kelling theorized that physical deterioration like graffiti, empty buildings, and broken windows, and disorder all resulted in increased levels of criminality.[14] This phenomenon was coined the Broken Windows theory, and during the late 1980s and 1990s, it became the guiding principle in the geographical and architectural design and construction of major cities across North America. It was during this time that anti homeless architecture evolved to include non physical deterrents such as surveillance cameras. In her work, Davis opposed the increased regulation and supervision present in cities and claimed that the emergence of ideas that public spaces had to be regulated to decrease criminality resulted in the militarization of streets, creating a public sphere inspired by warfare.[15] Today, the effects of these guiding frameworks can be seen in the widespread presence of anti homeless architecture across large Canadian cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.[16]

First, the private and public divide, as defined by Hunter, states that the division of public spaces into private and public is "inherently political."[17] She explains that liberal political ideology has influenced how spaces are conceptualized. For instance, Hunter argues that in liberal societies, there is an underlying conception which states the private spheres are areas of "legal non intervention."[18] Essentially, liberalism conceptualizes private spaces as areas that should be exempt from governmental intervention. The liberal ideology claims that the state should not be involved in people's private life and private affairs. Alternatively, public spaces are areas in which individuals are all presumably allowed to gather; however, these spaces are regulated by the state primarily through legislation. When examining anti homeless architecture, it is essential to contextualize the phenomenon in the broader societal setting where it is present. Since Canada is a neo-liberal society, anti-homeless architecture can be analyzed through the public and private divide popularized in liberal societies, as Hunter explained. Secondly, Valverde defines jurisdiction as "the governance of legal governance."[19] In essence, jurisdiction determines and distributes state authority between various legal spheres. According to Valverde, the process of legal distribution avoids potential conflicts between different legal fields by carefully establishing who has legal power over a determined legal space.[20] Thus, her concept of jurisdiction explains why there are several levels of governments within Canada and why by laws exist and are enforced. Valverde's definition of jurisdiction helps understand why the government decides to designate specific laws to smaller government levels, such as the provincial government. When analyzing anti homeless architecture, it is essential to recognize the legality of anti homeless by laws through the lens of jurisdiction as "the governance of legal governance." [21] Through Valverde's interpretation of jurisdiction, the legitimacy of anti homeless architecture will be examined.

Photo by Eldan titled “The anti-bench” licensed under CC BY NC SA 2.0

Lastly, Chesnay et al. offer a contemporary example of stigma related to homelessness. In their work, the term public enemies defines homeless people that “cannot be tolerated in public spaces, which justifies the use of legal enforcement to sanitize public spaces.”[22] Similar to Goffman,[23] Chesnay et al. have acknowledged that specific populations often lose their humanity through the process of stigmatization.[24] However, they have applied the term specifically to homeless people and expanded on the idea that homelessness is often seen as dangerous and threatening to ‘regular’ communities. According to Chesnay et al., the state enforces legislation that protects the general middle class from the alleged dangers of homeless people since they have been deemed dangerous enemies.[25] Unlike the concept of Stigma by Goffman that primarily addresses self construction, public enemies refers to the threat explicitly associated with homeless communities. This concept will be used in the current research because it offers a more specific conceptualization of homeless related stigma. The construction of anti homeless architecture would most likely be considered a legal recognition of the threat that public enemies pose when they penetrate public spaces. Therefore, the term public enemies can explain the interplay between concepts of public safety and legislation.

Exclusivity of public spaces

Additionally, section 2 of the Ontario Safe Streets Act prohibits anyone from disposing of condoms in outdoor public spaces. Moreover, anti homeless architecture is used as a non legal tool to remind individuals that public areas cannot be used as private spaces. For example, the extra armrest installed in the middle of many park benches throughout large Canadian city parks prevents anyone from sleeping on the bench.[37]

To begin, public spaces such as city parks are presumed to be accessible for everyone in a community.[26] However, Valverde[27] explains that the regulation of public spaces through legislation such as the Ontario Safe Streets Act and Ottawa by laws render these public spaces quasi private, as they are, in essence, owned and regulated by the provincial and municipal governments. For instance, the very restrictions imposed on Ottawa city parks, such as operational hours, codes of conduct, and permit regulation[28] illustrate that these presumed public spaces do not operate free of governmental regulations. Public city parks can be better understood as private governmentally owned city

Furthermore,parks.[29]considering that there are no explicit regulatory by laws that prohibit individuals from accessing city parks, it is understood that anyone can access and utilize these spaces. However, Hunter explains that the private and public divide of public spaces may challenge the notion that the public sphere is inclusive for all residents.[30] Hunter asserts that liberal ideologies compartmentalize society into two major categories, the private and the public.[31] The reasoning behind this dichotomy is the liberal assumption that the government should only regulate public spaces and permit individuals to enjoy the deregulated private space.[32] Upon analyzing the Ottawa city park by laws and the Ontario Safe Streets Act (1999), it is evident that the private and public divide as conceptualized by Hunter is the guiding principle behind the construction and preservation of anti homeless architecture in Ontario. For example, section 7 of the Ottawa parks by law states that no person is allowed to sell or offer "goods, wares or merchandise" in city parks.[33] Similarly, section 2 of the Ontario Safe Streets Act states that no person can solicit in public city areas.[34] These two examples are clear indicators of the criminalization of requesting money or selling goods publicly. Nevertheless, if an individual requests money from a stranger through a legitimate institutional mechanism such as bank transfers and donations to an organization from home (private space) there are virtually no legal impediments to doing so.[35] As such, the criminalization of certain acts in by laws and legislation is significantly associated with said behavior's geographical location. Hence, the regulation of public spaces reinforces those certain behaviors must be done in a private setting to avoid being criminalized. The issue arises as homeless people are often forced to use public city spaces to engage in everyday activities that ought to be done in private spaces according to the liberal division of public and private spaces. However, many Canadian homeless individuals do not have access to private spaces due to their homeless status.[36] These activities include sleeping, showering, working, and engaging in sexual activity. As the government is attempting to enforce the public and private divide, these activities, when done in public, are criminalized by the Ottawa by-laws and the Ontario Safe Streets Act. For instance, section 3 of the Ottawa park bylaw states that no person is permitted in city parks between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., indicating that sleeping is prohibited in parks.

Although these restrictions apply to everyone in the community equally, they disproportionately affect people that do not have access to private spaces to engage in these activities. As such, the public and private divide measures do not consider the needs of homeless people.

To understand how the government has enacted legal perimeters that restrict particular daily behavior, we must examine the division of governmental power used to produce and maintain anti homeless architecture. As previously mentioned, anti homeless architecture and anti homeless legislation disproportionately affect homeless people.[42] It disrupts their daily activities such as sleeping, working, and engaging in sexual activity because they are not afforded a private space to engage in these activities.[43] The approximately 235,000 homeless Canadians that roam the streets of major Canadian cities are constant victims of regulatory laws that seek to displace these individuals from public spaces.[44] However, it is essential to note that the regulatory laws and architecture that have made this possible are enacted by municipal (by laws) and provincial governments (Ontario Safe Streets Act). Federally, any law that prohibits or prevents someone from seeking refuge, eating, and engaging in sexual activity would be deemed unconstitutional as it infringes upon several sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom. For example, in Victoria v. Adams[45] it was determined that the city of Victoria was violating section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by prohibiting homeless people from building temporary shelters in city parks. Moreover, in Abbotsford v. Shantz,[46] it was concluded that preventing homeless people from seeking refuge in public spaces when homeless shelters were full was unconstitutional as it violated section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Furthermore, beyond Canadian borders, the use of ultraviolet lighting in many public bathrooms in London prevents intravenous drug users from using public areas[38] clearly distinguishing what is acceptable and not in public spaces.

The Ontario Safe Streets Act and the Ottawa park by laws ensure that ordinary citizens feel safe while utilizing public spaces that is, free of anyone engaging in private activities publicly.

[39] These governmental legislations assume that all residents can constantly switch between private and public spaces easily, which disregards the lived experiences of homeless individuals.

While anti homeless architecture functions as a non legal deterrent for those who engage in private affairs publicly, it should nonetheless be recognized as a state initiated program that seeks to achieve similar objectives as the legislation does but more subtly.[41] Ultimately, the government uses both legislation and anti homeless architecture to cement the exclusivity of public spaces. Jurisdiction and public exclusivity

Overall, there appears to be a misunderstanding that public spaces are inclusive of all residents and operate in the best interest of all community members, specifically when reinforcing the public and private divide. However, local and provincial governments use regulatory legislation and physical architectural obstacles to enforce the liberal division of private and public spheres.

Anti homeless architecture functions as a non legal tool employed by local governments to bolster the notion that certain people are not welcomed in public spaces.[40]

Despite the court’s ruling that local governments' provisions to separate homeless people from city parks are unconstitutional, Ottawa park by laws and the Ontario Safe Streets Act are still in effect. Furthermore, anti homeless structures are still present in major Canadian cities[47]. Valverde explains that jurisdiction distributes governmental power between several actors, which explains this phenomenon.[48] For instance, the Constitution Act outlines the legal responsibility that each level of government (municipal, provincial, federal) holds. Section 91(27) of the Constitution Act states that all criminal law matters fall under the federal government's jurisdiction.[49] That is, the federal government is responsible for addressing any criminal law violations.

Similarly, sections 92 and 93 of the Constitution Act detail the powers awarded to provincial governments.[50] For example, health care, education, and civil rights are all managed individually by each province. As such, Valverde states that the division of power through jurisdiction permits the federal government to withdraw from issues for which provincial and local governments would be responsible.[51] This division permits provincial and local governments to enact legislation that is more specific to the communities that they affect. For example, city by laws serve as micro level legislation pertaining to the specific needs of a community rather than the entire country.

Therefore, in various instances, the federal government has upheld and justified provincial and municipal laws that prevent homeless people from seeking refuge in public spaces. For example, in Tanudjaja v. Canada,[52] the plaintiffs argued that the lack of and inadequate housing in Ontario was unconstitutional as it violated serval sections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the courts determined that there were no violations of sections 7 and 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the case as the right to housing was not justiciable. Similarly, in Henry v. Canada[53] the plaintiffs argued that it was unconstitutional for election polls to prevent citizens from voting if they could not present personal identification documentation. It was argued that many homeless people do have access to personal documentation, which would prohibit them from participating in elections. The courts determined that section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms justified voter identification requirements at the election polls. Both Tanudjaja v. Canada[54] and Henry v. Canada[55] illustrate the effects of jurisdiction on issues affecting homeless people in Canada. In both cases, the courts have dismissed seemly unconstitutional acts affecting homeless people using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as justification. The division of power between provinces and the federal government allows legislation to be enacted at the local level, disproportionately affecting homeless people. The courts have demonstrated they uphold the division of power as laid out by the jurisdiction.

"Aritistic Anti homeless Bench" by lavocado@sbcglobal.net is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Similarly, in a United Kingdom based study, eight homeless individuals were interviewed to detail their experiences living on the streets of the United Kingdom. It was recorded that many participants felt stigmatized by non homeless individuals and were victims of discrimination and harassment from the general population.[61] Furthermore, a participant expressed that as a homeless person, “you are not treated like a person, you are treated like a bit of trash.”[62] Similarly, another participant noted that he felt like an outcast and expressed that homeless people are “not on top of the public interest list.” [63] Finally, a participant mentioned being a victim of assault and humiliation from passersby's due to his homeless appearance and status.

"Camden Council anti homeless bench seating“ by renaissancechambara is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Due to the negative perception of homeless people, Dej explains that there is an increased reliance on psychological based community intervention programs that strive to teach homeless people self esteem and responsibilization skills to make them integrate into the Neoliberal model of what it means to be a good resident of a community, able to enjoy public spaces.[64] These intervention programs that focus solely on the individual and their responsibility to change perpetuate the idea that homeless people experience homelessness solely due to personal decisions, which overlooks the influence of systemic barriers that may lead to homelessness.[65] While these programs may be well intentioned, they give the mainstream population a reason to continue victimizing homeless people for their lived experiences and fostering negative beliefs towards homeless populations.

As has been remarked, the presence of anti homeless architecture in large Canadian cities results from jurisdiction. Through court cases, the government has exemplified under which circumstances violations of Charter rights would be acceptable. Specifically, the federal government dissociates itself from provincial regulations such as by laws that regulate parks as these public spaces belong to the provincial jurisdiction. This provision enables anti homeless architecture to continue existing across Canadian cities as they are essentially deregulated by the federal government. Societal conception of homeless people Lastly, the conceptualization of homeless people can explain the prevalence of anti homeless architecture. For example, Dej explains that historically, homeless people have been negatively conceptualized by the field of psychology.[56] Behaviors associated with homeless people have been pathologized and treated as illnesses that need treatment to encourage individuals to foster pro social behaviors while diminishing attitudes associated with homelessness.[57] In a liberal society such as Canada, homeless individuals are often seen as failing to take ownership of their lives.[58] For instance, in a United States based study assessing community attitudes towards homeless people, Dear and Gleeson noted a large group of respondents that engaged in victim blaming towards homeless people.[59] In particular, a participant noted that “the homeless are homeless by choice, and therefore warrant no public sympathy.”[60] Furthermore, there was a general trend in the participants that conceptualized homeless people negatively and attributed their homeless status to personal actions that the individual had taken, leading them to homelessness rather than systematic barriers.

Consequently, the pathologization of homeless people has led them to become enemies of society. Chesnay et al. demonstrate that as professionals and the general population have negatively conceptualized homeless individuals, they have become public enemies that deserve to be cleansed from public spaces.[66] Similarly, Gaetz explains that as homeless people began to be perceived as the reason for the issues in public city spaces such as vandalism and destruction, more mainstream attention was given to homeless people, and there was an increase "demand for politicians to do something"[67] which created a sense of moral panic among residents of Canadian communities. As such, Chesnay et al. attributes the criminalization of homelessness to the public enemy status given to homeless people.[68] For instance, the Ontario Safe Streets Act disproportionally impacts homeless people despite being a seeming neutral legislation. The clauses in the act criminalize behavior that would typically be associated with homelessness, such as soliciting (section 2) and engaging in sexual activity in public (section 4). Due to the conception of homeless people, the Ontario Safe Streets Act was enacted and received public support.[69] Similarly, Ottawa by laws that regulate public spaces illustrate how local governments have conceptualized homeless people. Specifically, they have identified the cleansing of homeless people as a priority through legislation and non legal avenues such as anti homeless architecture. In the case of anti-homeless architecture, as there are widespread negative conceptions of homeless people leading the mainstream to pressure cities “into passing more restrictive park laws,”[70] the presence of anti homeless architecture in city parks and public areas in Canadian cities is a testament to the beliefs that are held about homelessness in the neo liberal society. The rejection of homeless people through physical deterrents exemplifies the municipal attempt to reduce what is considered problematic populations from core areas. Homeless people becoming enemies of the public have led to the presence of legal and non legal deterrents of homeless people.[71] Conclusion Anti homeless architecture has persisted over many years, and the current work aimed to uncover the role legislation has played in its perpetuation. The analysis conducted demonstrates that anti homeless architecture allows major Canadian cities to reinforce and police the notion of the public and private divide as defined by Hunter. Furthermore, the building of anti-homeless architecture is possible through jurisdiction and the division of power imposed by it. Lastly, the conception of homeless people as public enemies is a leading cause of anti homeless structures' perpetuation. It is essential to recognize that although antihomeless architecture is not a legal actor or regulated by legislation, it functions similarly to any other legal deterrent of homeless people. For instance, several parallels are found in the Ontario Safe Streets Act, Ottawa by laws, and the anti homeless architecture construction. As such, equal attention must be given to the factors that enable society to continue marginalizing the homeless community through legislation and anti homeless architecture.

Naomi Smith and Peter Walters, “Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments,” Urban Studies 55, no. 13 (2018): [4]2981.

Endnotes

[5] Lauren Pelley, “Ever wonder why you can't lie down on most city benches? It's thanks to 'defensive design,’”. cbc news

James Petty, “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture,” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 5, no. 1 (2016): 68 [7] Karl Persson De Fine Licht, “Hostile Urban Architecture: A Critical Discussion of the Seemingly Offensive Art of Keeping People Away.” Etikk i Praksis 11, no. 2 (2017): 29. [8] Naomi Smith and Peter Walters, “Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments,” 2984. [9] Naomi Smith and Peter Walters, “Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments,” 2984. [10] Michelle Legro, “The city that will never let you sleep,” Topic. https://www.topic.com/the citythat will never let you sleep. (2018) [11] Michelle Legro, “The city that will never let you sleep,” Topic. https://www.topic.com/the-citythatwill never let you sleep, (2018).

[2]DefensiveTO, “Mapping #DefensiveTO,” Defensiveto, [3]https://www.defensiveto.com/map.(n.d)

[12] Michelle Legro, “The city that will never let you sleep,” Topic. https://www.topic.com/the citythat will never let you sleep, (2018).

[16] Lauren Pelley, “Ever wonder why you can't lie down on most city benches? It's thanks to 'defensive design,’”. cbc news.

[13] Ray C. Jeffery, “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.” The American Behavioral Scientist, 14. no. 4 (1971), 598.

[14] James Wilson and George Kelling, "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety" Atlantic,The [15]rchive/1982/03/brokenwindows/304465/,https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a(1982).

Naomi Smith and Peter Walters, “Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments,” 2981.

[17]1.5192333,spikesdefensivehttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/howdesignleadstorigidbenchesmetalandvisualviolenceinmoderncities(2019).

Rosemary Hunter, “Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism,” Ashgate Research Companion in Feminist Legal Theory, (2016): 19. [18] Rosemary Hunter, “Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism,”: 19. [19] Mariana Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory,” Social & Legal Studies 18, no. 2 (2009): 141.

[6]1.5192333,spikesdefensivehttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/how.designleadstorigidbenchesmetal-and-visual-violence-in-modern-cities-(2019).

Angela Y. Davis, “Are Prisons Obsolete?” New York: Seven Stories Press, (2003).

[1]Stephen Gaetz, “Safe Streets for Whom? Homeless Youth, Social Exclusion, and Criminal Victimization,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 46, no. 4 (2004): 423.

[20] Mariana Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory,”: [21]151.Mariana Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory,” [22]141. Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 55, no. 2 (2013): 164 48

Mariana Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory.” Social & Legal Studies 18, no. 2 (2009): 139 57.

[50] Constitution Act, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), c 11 (1982).

[49] Constitution Act, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), c 11 (1982).

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [28](2012).City of Ottawa, By law No. 2004 276, Parks and [29]Facilities. Mariana Valverde, “Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity. ”

Mariana Valverde, “Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance in an Age of Diversity.”

[23] Erving Goffman, “Stigma Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.” New York: J. Aronson, (1963). [24] Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.” [25] Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.” [26] City of Ottawa, By law No. 2004 276, Parks and [27]Facilities.

[51] Mariana Valverde, “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory.”: 139 57. 49

[30] Rosemary Hunter, “Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism,”: 13 30. [31] Rosemary Hunter, “Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism,”: 13 30. [32] Rosemary Hunter, “Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism,”: 13 30. [33] City of Ottawa, By-law No. 2004-276, Parks and [34]FacilitiesCityofOttawa, By law No. 2004 276, Parks and [35]Facilities Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of AntiHomeless Laws in the United States.” Antipode 29, no. 3 (1997): 303 35. [36] Stephen Gaetz, “Safe Streets for Whom? Homeless Youth, Social Exclusion, and Criminal Victimization,”: 423. [37] James Petty, “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture,”: 68 [38] James Petty, “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture,”: 68 [39] Stephen Gaetz, “Safe Streets for Whom? Homeless Youth, Social Exclusion, and Criminal Victimization,”: 423.. [40] James Petty, “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture,”: 67 [41]81. James Petty, “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture,”: 67 [42]81. James Petty, “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture,”: 67 [43]81. Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of AntiHomeless Laws in the United States.”: 303 35. [44] Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.”: 161 85. [45] Victoria (City) v. Adams. BCCA 563, (2009). [46] Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz. BCSC 1909, [47](2015).DefensiveTO, “Mapping #DefensiveTO,” Defensiveto, https://www.defensiveto.com/map.(n.d)[48]

[52] Tanudjaja v. Canada (Attorney General), ONCA 852. (2014).

[69] Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.”: 161 85.

Urban Geography 12, no. 2 (1991): 155 76. [60] Michael Dear and Brendan Gleeson, “Community Attitudes Toward The Homeless.”: [61]166 S Williams and T Stickley, “Stories from the Streets: People’s Experiences of Homelessness: Stories from the Streets,” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 18, no. 5 (2011): 432 [62]39. S Williams and T Stickley, “Stories from the Streets: People’s Experiences of Homelessness: Stories from the Streets”: 436. [63] S Williams and T Stickley, “Stories from the Streets: People’s Experiences of Homelessness: Stories from the Streets”: 436.. [64] Erin Dej, “Psychocentrism and Homelessness: The Pathologization/Responsibilization Paradox.”: 117 35. https://doi.org/10.26522/ ssj.v10i1.1349.

[66] Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.”: 161 85.

[65] Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti Homeless Laws in the United States.”: 303 35; Stephen Gaetz, “Safe Streets for Whom? Homeless Youth, Social Exclusion, and Criminal Victimization,”: 423; Erin Dej, “Psychocentrism and Homelessness: The Pathologization/Responsibilization Paradox.”: 117 3.; Fran Klodawsky, “Landscapes on the Margins: Gender and Homelessness in Canada.”

[70] Davud Purnell, “Public Parks: Third Places or Places Eliciting Moral Panic?” Qualitative Inquiry 25, no. 6 (2019): 531 34.

[71] Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.”: 161 85. Bibliography Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz. BCSC 1909. (2015). Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act. (1982). Being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11, s 91(24). Chesnay, Catherine T, Céline Bellot, and Marie Eve Sylvestre. “Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 55, no. 2 (2013), 161 85. City of Ottawa, By-law No. 2004-276, Parks and ConstitutionFacilities. Act. being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), c 11 (1982).

[53] Henry v. British Columbia (Attorney General), SCC 24. (2015). [54] Tanudjaja v. Canada (Attorney General), ONCA 852. (2014). [55] Henry v. British Columbia (Attorney General), SCC 24. (2015). [56] Erin Dej, “Psychocentrism and Homelessness: The Pathologization/Responsibilization Paradox.” Studies in Social Justice 10, no. 1 (2016): 117 35. https://doi.org/10.26522/ ssj.v10i1.1349. [57] Erin Dej, “Psychocentrism and Homelessness: The Pathologization/Responsibilization Paradox.”: 117 35. https://doi.org/10.26522/ ssj.v10i1.1349. [58] Erin Dej, “Psychocentrism and Homelessness: The Pathologization/Responsibilization Paradox.”: 117 35. https://doi.org/10.26522/ ssj.v10i1.1349.

Gender, Place and Culture : a Journal of Feminist Geography 13, no. 4 (2006): 365 81.

[67] Stephen Gaetz, “The Struggle to End Homelessness in Canada: How we Created the Crisis, and How We Can End it.” The Open Health Services and Policy Journal, 3. no. 1 (2010): 23.

[59] Michael Dear and Brendan Gleeson, “Community Attitudes Toward The Homeless.”

[68] Catherine T. Chesnay et al.,“Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia.”: 161 85.

Davis, Angela Y. “Are Prisons Obsolete?” New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Dear, Michael, and Brendan Gleeson. “Community Attitudes Toward The Homeless.” Urban Geography 12, no. 2 (1991): 155 76. De Fine Licht, Karl Persson. “Hostile Urban Architecture: A Critical Discussion of the Seemingly Offensive Art of Keeping People Away.” Etikk i Praksis 11, no. 2 (2017): 27 . DefensiveTO. “Mapping #DefensiveTO”. Defensiveto. https://www.defensiveto.com/map.(n.d)

Dej, Erin. “Psychocentrism and Homelessness: The Pathologization/Responsibilization Paradox.” Studies in Social Justice 10, no. 1 (2016): 117 https://doi.org/10.26522/35. ssj.v10i1.1349. Gaetz, Stephen. “Safe Streets for Whom? Homeless Youth, Social Exclusion, and Criminal Victimization.” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 46, no. 4 (2004): 423 56. Gaetz, Stephen. “The Struggle to End Homelessness in Canada: How we Created the Crisis, and How We Can End it.” The Open Health Services and Policy Journal, 3. no. 1 (2010) , 21 26 Gaetz, Stephen., Erin. Dej, and Tim. Richter. “Homelessness Canada in the State of 2016”. Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press, 2016. Goffman, Erving. “Stigma Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.” New York: J. Aronson, 1963. Henry v. British Columbia (Attorney General). SCC 24. (2015). Hunter, Rosemary. “Contesting the Dominant Paradigm: Feminist Critiques of Liberal Legalism.” Ashgate Research Companion in Feminist Legal Theory, (2016) 13 30. London: Routledge. Jeffery, C. Ray. “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.” The American Behavioral Scientist, 14. no. 4 (1971), 598 Klodawsky598., Fran. “Landscapes on the Margins: Gender and Homelessness in Canada.” Gender, Place and Culture : a Journal of Feminist Geography 13, no. 4 (2006), 365 81. Legro, M. The city that will never let you sleep. Topic. https://www.topic.com/the citythat will never let you sleep, (2018). Mitchell, Don. “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti Homeless Laws in the United States.” Antipode 29, no. 3 (1997), 303 35. Ontario Safe Streets Act, S.O. c. 8, (1999) Pelley, L, Ever wonder why you can't lie down on most city benches? It's thanks to 'defensive design’. cbc news. 1.5192333.spikesdefensivehttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/how-designleadstorigidbenchesmetalandvisualviolenceinmoderncities(2019)

Petty, James. “The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 5, no. 1 (2016), 67 81. Purnell, David. “Public Parks: Third Places or Places Eliciting Moral Panic?” Qualitative Inquiry 25, no. 6 (2019), 531 34. Smith, Naomi, and Peter Walters. “Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments.” Urban Studies (Edinburgh, Scotland) 55, no. 13 (2018), 2980 95. Tanudjaja v. Canada (Attorney General). ONCA 852. (2014). Valverde, Mariana. “Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities’ as Resources for Theory.” Social & Legal Studies 18, no. 2 (2009), 139 57. 51

.” The

Valverde, Mariana. “Everyday Law on the Street: City Governance Age Diversity University of Chicago (2012). (City) v. Adams. BCCA 563. (2009). Williams, S, And T Stickley. “Stories from the Streets: People’s of Homelessness: the (2011), 39. Wilson, James, and Kelling, George. "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety" Atlantic (1982).

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Streets.” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 18, no. 5

1982/03/brokenwindows/304465/.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 52

The Black Janus

By: Diallo Simon Ponte 53

[Freshman] Dilution into the Universal Freshman year, at any college, the underlying theme is all about fitting in. Becoming a part of something. Integrating within a scene, a culture, a society you can feel comfortable in. In hindsight, I merely enveloped myself in a cloak of naivete ignoring racist signals, signs, and undertones to feel a part of something I actually could never exist in.

To explain, the moment I stepped on campus I already had a scene, a culture, a society as I had just started my first year on the Division One Men’s Soccer Team. Athletically, it was a crucial time because life was about trying to impress. Impress your coaches and even more so your teammates as it’s they who spend your entire days with. You eat, you sleep, and you do everything together. There’s an initiation your peers put you through but also an initiation you put yourself through. An initiation almost of stripping yourself of things that make you in order to fit in with the whole [the entire].

I am a man of two faces. A question that we as humans all ask ourselves throughout the course of our lives is “Who am I?” The answer to that query is never concrete, but rather dynamic as it is always developing and changing as we navigate our way through the tempestuous hurricane that is life. For each person the answer will have its metaphysical variations based on the many intricate components that (make up who they are) or delineate their being. As I’ve journeyed through my four year liberal arts education here at a predominantly white University, very sparingly I have been presented with the academic tools to introspectively examine myself within the framework of that question. Of my own accord, I began to explore masters of psychoanalytic theory Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung poring over their texts, only discovering that something innate was missing. Evidently, it was the incredibly important racial component that they unwittingly were leaving out. To explore the theme of self, I turned towards critical race theory, extrapolating everything I could from Black scholars Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, W.E.B. Dubois, and Ralph Ellison whereas they became my psychoanalysts. Further than “Who am I?” the questions quickly became “Who are We?” and “What are We in this white world?” all ideas that had been echoing in my head before I had even touched their literature. A quote that resonated with me early on was “everything changes especially when the “we” have to define themselves against a world which leaves no room for who and what they are because they are Black folks in a world where “universal” seems to naturally mean white.”[1] I was a student where the succinct nature of my immediate reality was that I attended a predominately white institution. My Blackness was posed against a sharp white background and very quickly into my collegiate experience I would find out what that truly meant. As a precursor, each person in this story will be identified based on their race whether or not it may seem superfluous to mention. The racial dynamics of this tale are imperative for complete comprehension.

The police had been conditioned by the culture of the University to alleviate dangers to the white body and if that meant incriminating a minority student in the process, then so be it. I was very aware of where the value of my being stood that night in relation to my school. The weight, the burden was immense. That my life and future could be stripped away so effortlessly, caught up in a moment I had nothing to do with. The authority I had perceived was there to protect, was in fact at every waking moment vying to destroy me. Had I been at that party, I am sure that I would not be here now writing this paper.

Césaire says there are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the universal. I was drifting towards the latter. It was not long after, the historically white Jesuit institution I attended reminded me of the thin line I walked on their campus. Nothing good ever happens at the University townhouses and the following incident only strengthens that sentiment. The universe or some higher pro Black powers that be, must have been at play one night because I felt an unexplainable force pull me away from a party my teammates were throwing. In the fifteen minutes I happened to leave and stop at a friend’s, a massive fight had broken out at the previous house involving some kids on my team and visitors. Later down the road, charges were pressed, and witnesses were called in by the Department of Public Safety to recount. When my team captain stepped away from the questioning, he approached me with a tinge of incredulity.

All round me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me… [3]

For me being the only person of color on the team, that sacrifice involves more than just possibly altering the music you listen to, or the way you dress, or how you interact with girls because suddenly there is an athletic status quo you must adhere to. That sacrifice for me included stripping down my Blackness to where it became acceptable in a New England division one locker room because as Fanon points out “the Black man must not only be Black; he must be Black in relation to the white man.”[2] Out of necessity I split, I bisected, I morphed. My psyche transformed to imitate a Janus-like quandary: the Roman deity represented by a single head with a double face. That duality embodied the persona I now had to adopt. I had to be as Black as the locker room allowed me to be and I remember the first time my loyalties were really tested. The entire team was at a party one night and out onto the lawn behind the house spilled a large group of people. Of the congregation more than half the kids were Black whom I had briefly met in my short time at the University either from the culturally reciprocated head nod or in passing at the dining hall and the remainder of the students were a few of my teammates. The tempestuous nature of the situation was immediately noted in the fact one of the Black students was being aggressively held back by his friends. As an almost environmentally appointed liaison, I stepped up to see what the story was. The recap I got from the African American faction was that one of the white juniors on my team had called one of the Black kids the n-word. Here that duality (the Janus effect) of who I now had to be identity wise grabbed hold and shook me to my core. Why did I find myself walking over to my teammates to look for another perspective? Why when I heard the justification of “I didn’t call him a nigger, I called him a nigga” did I for the slightest of heart beats try to rationalize in my head why that might be acceptable? The subconscious and now tangible pressure that had been coolly simmering was now searingly hot.

“You won’t believe what they just asked me” he said. “After I had laid out everyone that was involved several times, they continued, ''Are you sure that Black kid on your team wasn’t there?”

[Sophomore]WhereShall

A moment forever imprinted into my mind that acted as a catalyst for the change I began to undergo, happened the summer leading into my sophomore year. I was going through my camera roll showing my younger siblings the joy college parties would soon bring them. I stopped at one where I was dancing in a crowd of people who at the time, I perceived to be my friends. My twelve year old brother remarked, “You look like the token Black kid” and my heart hit the floor. He had meant it in a slightly pejorative joking manner, but a fog was lifted from my eyes and the façade began to crumble. Growing up, I had been conscious of my positionality in certain situations and social dynamics, always ensuring I removed myself from the labeling of the token. Yet here I was the oldest, being reminded by the youngest, that as a Black man you must always critically observe the scenes you involve yourself in. I had drifted too deep into the universal, and this snapped me out of a proverbial sunken place. Things began to become clearer and the direction I needed to follow began to appear before me. Sophomore year I decided to stop using my athletic time commitment as a deterrent for attending Black Student Union meetings. They were held once a week, every Sunday for about two hours and I wasn’t able to attend every single one, but I made a deliberate effort to go to as many as I could. I actually began to feel a part of something: a community that welcomed me forth for whoever I was and made no attempt to impose conformity. It was there I learned about the short history of the BSU and the fervent pushback from the University administration to oppose its creation a couple of years prior. In 2015, unarmed Michael Brown was gunned down by police in Ferguson, Missouri. In 2015, Freddie Gray was murdered in police custody. In 2015 faculty and administration were still having a hard time understanding why safe spaces for minority students on their campus were imperative to their health and well-being. The students fought hard and prevailed so in 2015 the Black Student Union was founded at the PWU. I learned that an institution that masquerades Black students on their highway billboards and yearly newsletters drafted new policies to derail the formation of the Club. Unheard pseudo policies were created stating the Club’s constitution needed to be submitted to a University board for review, in an attempt to slow progress. Our Blackness was blatantly being policed at the very highest level. I was becoming aware of the school I was enrolled at, and I drew strength from those meetings seeing other Black students fight valiantly against the caustic white oppression. Sophomore year, I roomed with my white teammates but lived directly across from three Black students, which was comforting beyond measure; knowing I could step across the hall into a world where I was understood where a dialogue of the feelings was able to be discussed. A space where the daily basis was able to be expressed because of a mutually shared foundation. A cultural context which meant cultural comprehension. That solace was warming; however, I was still far from being able to fully understand my emotions as well as properly navigate the social dynamics that existed outside of that hallway. There was one weekend in the Spring semester where my white roommates and I went to a party down the beach. When I arrived, I found the theme on that night was “white trash.” People were dressed in camouflage, dirty ripped white t-shirts, smeared in Black paint, had draped themselves in American flags, and written ‘Murica all over their bodies. I do not suppose my readers to be entirely ignorant of what demographic flocked to that party, so it seems rather irrelevant to elaborate. It is only now I’ve realized how ironically telling it is that a “white trash” themed party was scattered with American flags. At the time, I didn’t know how to feel being in that atmosphere.

I Find Shelter from Now On?

All I knew was the stigma associated with white trash is that it is pervasively racist. The entire time all I could think about was the lynching of Black people by Southern whites, this championing of a decrepit scandalous president, and all the piercing stares I was getting. Whether they were bitter looks or not, I couldn’t differentiate. I was mad. Should I have been mad? Was this party racially charged? Was I thinking properly? I tried to express this to the friends I arrived with, but they didn’t see the problem. I couldn’t process my feelings, so I locked myself in the bathroom and punched a hole in the wall. Never have I ever displayed anger in that fashion before. I didn’t know what was going on. I left that party soon thereafter with a million thoughts swirling in my head, but I couldn’t grasp one of them. I was trying to remember who I was but was having trouble coming up with a name. A couple of weeks later I sat with two of my white female friends at the secondary Cafeteria on campus. It was a place I didn’t frequent often but they wanted to go there so I decided to submit to the consensus. My entire life I have repeatedly promised myself that I would never steal. That I would never adhere to the farcical common denominator stereotype that Black people are thieves. When tempted by peers in the past to go along with their antics I always firmly stood my ground with a definitive reluctance. Yet for some reason that day (if perhaps it was to impress the girls that I was with) nineteen years of consistent affirmations went out the window and I stole a plate of sushi. I hid the platter on one side of the exposed countertop, walked out of the line for the register, and five minutes later walked back to get it when a “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” struck me in the back of the head. In unfamiliar territory, I froze. The worker behind the sushi station had seen me. I was caught and I was exposed. He approached me, a very visible anger in his eyes, and said, “I see you stealing in here all the time, give me that” and directed me towards the cashier. Fortunately, I was let off with a warning and walked away a dejected shell of myself, his words ringing in my ear. “I see you stealing in here all the time.” I rarely stepped foot into this Cafeteria, and not once had I stolen a single item from their inventory, yet still, he had associated me with a supposed consistent thievery. I had fallen right into the stereotype trap I had so vigorously fought against my whole life. I was forgetting who I was, and the anchoring oppression was sinking its teeth deeper into my psyche. Ravenous, it continued to claw its way into my being splitting my face into two without regard for anything in its path. I was bleeding profusely. And then I took an African American Art History course.

When a student, very infrequently I might add, learns about Art History throughout most American middle and high schools, it is largely focused on Europe’s contributions to the discipline, failing to encompass the full scope of artistic evolution and influences throughout the world. After a couple of introductory Art History classes during my freshman year, I realized that I had been deprived of an abundance of cultural and artistic expression. Therefore, Sophomore year, I enrolled in an African American Art History class to expand my knowledge on a topic I thought I knew a lot about. Growing up, my parents always said, “Know your history, so no one else can define it for you,” something that seemed to have slipped my mind in the past couple of months. They knew that our Black cultural heritage wasn’t going to be taught in the typical American classroom.

So, at a young age, I set out to immerse myself in learning all that I could about African, African American, and Caribbean history. Prior to course enrollment, I presumptuously perceived that I had a good foundation on the subject matter from the museum exposure I had grown up with. I was soon to find out that I was so terribly wrong. On the first day, my professor posed the question “Who can name any African American artists?” Not a single person in the class of 30 could name one and neither could I. Dismayed, I sat incredibly still in my seat. Was the Art world something I’d completely skipped over in my youthful studies? I had prided myself on all that I thought I knew on African diasporic history only to realize that I had merely skimmed the surface of an ocean of information. We studied Barkley Hendricks, Bill Traylor, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Jacob Lawrence, James Van der Zee, Gordon Parks, and the list went on and on. That class changed my life, and I cannot stress enough how important it was for a young Black man to see his own image reflected in something so masterful and beautiful. In the echo chamber of Euro centric imagery and ideology that the Jesuit institution is, I was able to reclaim myself. I didn’t know it at the time but my submersion into Black American heritage “my way of living history within history, [this] history of a community whose experiences appear to be unique” was a metaphorical praxis of the core principles of Negritude.[4] Sitting in class I felt teleported into a new psychological geography. Yet every time the bell rang, I was expelled back into the surrounding ignorance, a rebirth of sadness that would only heal until next period. In the dying weeks of my sophomore spring, I took my newfound learnings in stride, applying to be a member of the student body government Diversity & Inclusion board. I was inspired and a new intellectual energy, a new empowered intensity, and a newly enlightened heat raged within. Going into junior year I was going to repossess my own narrative for I was tired of not writing the plot.

[Junior] The Black Man’s Burden Junior year was a time when I felt like I was the spokesperson for the entire Black race in my locker room and I was. “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.”[5] I had successfully won the position on the Diversity & Inclusion board becoming a University wide representative, which emboldened me to speak a bit louder in life. Even as a Freshman I had checked the usage of the n word by my white teammates but now, as an established Junior I was fervent in my approach. Anytime I heard it uttered I locked it down. “Watch your fucking mouth. Why do you think you could say that?” An aggressive approach, something familiar in the toxic masculinity typical of a men’s locker room. My explanation when asked “Why can’t I” almost became robotic I heard that retort so often. “Words carry cultural context, and the n word has been used by whites for hundreds of years to oppress Black people. Words bear weight, and through slavery, through lynchings, through the killing of my people that word has been used in alliance with that. I don’t care if you hear it in a song don’t fucking say it.” Some were receptive and from others I heard “Oh come on Diallo, I’m not racist my best friend from home is Black. My driveway is Black. I’m wearing Black clothes. I have a Black lab. My trash cans are Black. How could I be racist?” All meaningless responses, all insignificant replies, all missing the fucking point.

The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of “a certain world,” forever after lost to him and his. When that happened, the white man must have been rocked backward by a force that he could not identify, so little used as he is to such reactions. Somewhere beyond the objective world of farms and banana trees and rubber trees, I had subtly brought the real world into being.[6] Some were receptive. Too many were not. They’d agree with what I was saying but their subsequent actions spoke different, as that prior interaction became cyclical. Their entitlement was magnificent. All their life the white world had told them everything was theirs. That they laid claim to everything they touched. Who was this Black kid to tell them they couldn’t say a word? The task was immense and being the only African American in the locker room, I felt I was up against the world. I began to branch away. Each originator of Negritude speaks on the moment they truly begin to reject the world around them; for Césaire it was post high school in Martinique as he found himself incredibly displeased with the incessant adoration of all things European. For Senghor, he rebelled against the notion his Senegalese high school teachers pushed that “through their education they were building Christianity and civilization in his soul where there was nothing but paganism and barbarism before.” [7] This moment was mine. I began to question everything. I questioned all of my friendships, asking who did I really like, who really liked me, who was fetishizing my Blackness, who was touting my friendship as an internal justification that they weren’t racist themselves? It wasn’t the overt racism I was repelling against as I had always done so, but now scrutinizing the covert. I began to notice more and more these projections of who people expected me to be. White mothers visiting and being extraordinarily surprised that I was a well mannered nice boy to their sons, my roommates. I began to critically examine why these white kids were consistently asking if I had drugs at parties, why I wasn’t dancing, why all the time they were so stunned I had a “good” vocabulary. I questioned even the Black students that lived across from me my sophomore year. They let several of their immediate white friends gratuitously use the n word which definitely made me look at them differently. But who was I to judge? I was only very aware of what the overarching pressing whiteness at an institution such as this could do to you. I heard a story from one of their white girlfriends with whom I happened to be friends with at the time tell me when she was alone in his room one night, she overheard his white roommate in the hallway call him a nigger behind his back. He thought she was asleep on the bed when she was in fact wide awake. This had happened months ago, and she’d never told him and now I felt called to action. But wait, was I in the right to go blow up his entire reality? Should I go tell him about his roommate with whom he had several months still to live, racially abused him months ago? Should I tell him his white girlfriend knew about it the whole time and didn’t come forward? That strain may have been too much for one man to handle in the current environment we existed. I didn’t have a conclusive answer.

[Senior] Finality “The echo of “nigga” chanted by the entire white crowd around me failed to reverberate through my bones as it once had the first time I began to socialize on this campus.” [10] It was Senior year and I no longer cared about attempting to navigate the social dynamics around me, I had given up the Sisyphus like task.

All these questions that I was asking myself at the time, reflecting constantly made me feel rather isolated in my Blackness. There were times when I would be hanging out with my white friends and just couldn’t take it anymore to the point where I had to excuse myself. Wearing a second face was exhausting. I found our values, these core principles, the things that concerned us and were relevant to each of our current lives at the time, were not at all similar. The African American art that I had fallen in love with, I tried to share that love with those around me, to communicate what it was doing, but those cries fell on deaf ears. I returned the miniature, wondering what in the world had made him open his heart to me. That was something I never did; it was dangerous. First it was dangerous if you felt like that about anything, because then you’d never get it or something or someone would take it away from you; then it was dangerous because no one would understand you and they’d laugh and think you were crazy. [8] When I began to retreat, the people around started calling me moody, as that was their interpretation of what I was going through and that adjective carried a tinge of pain. How could I express to them what was going on, what I was feeling, in this echo chamber of whiteness where there was no space for it? I was regularly attending BSU meetings and was a very active member on the Diversity & Inclusion board, which were my salvation during Junior year because I was fed up. I was fed up with white people looking towards me when a perceived hood rap song came on to rap it with me as if their knowledge of the lyrics gave them some sort of racialized “hip” validation. They looked to me for this rhythm that I was supposed to somehow impart on them. The “presence of the negroes beside the white is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance…” [9] I began to distance myself from it all. I was finally realizing what I wanted in life and acknowledged that this wasn’t it.

I was handing out Black power t shirts in the dining hall for Black History Month. I kicked a kid out of my townhouse party who was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. I organized a school wide trip to the African American Art Exhibit: Soul of a Nation at the Brooklyn Museum. A trip where I wanted to see who was willing to step outside of their comfort zone and into a fresh space. Perhaps one of discomfort but that’s vital to breaking down our preconceived misconceptions. I was trying to find my footing, and this was my response to the oppressive whiteness I felt that permeated throughout this campus. It wasn’t much, but for me it was something.

Graduation was the light at the end of the tunnel and all that mattered. Yet in spite of my mental detachment, I still was disgusted when I saw students standing on tables at parties reciting ironic nationalistic Trump chants over Snapchat. I watched one of my better white friends who I think has been relatively aware of how I’ve struggled over the past couple of years make a racist remark about my skin color for the amusement of females. We were driving in his car late one night and as he was on facetime, a girl from the background called out “Where’s Diallo?” He replied, “you can’t see him, he's too dark.” It’s funny because you think that three long years at a PWI in New England means you’ve heard it all, that you’ve mastered a way to encounter the racism you hear on a daily basis, and yet racism doesn’t care about your feelings. It rips and tears and eviscerates as it always finds a way to leave you stunned. In a very perverted sense, the PWU shaped me to judge my white friends and teammates on who had said the least prejudiced things. I would look around at a party, at this homogenous mass of students chanting the n word with a cultish fetishized desire and feel a helplessness from not having the strength to stop it all. I knew it wasn’t my job and that I couldn’t cure all ignorance. If I spoke, would they even listen? Still encroaching upon my mind were thoughts of “Was I giving up, was I too scared, was I in fact helpless, was it even worth it?” I started leaving the room when “Dreams and Nightmares,” a song by Meek Mill came on with the repetitive use of the n-word as I knew I would lose friends by the end of it. I said I didn’t care but to a degree I couldn’t help it. This beast of burden, this system I had been involved in for four long years had snared me in its entrapment and the only true liberation I felt possible was graduation. Graduation. Graduation. Where I would no longer have to periodically switch off parts of my consciousness to survive. Leaving all this in my past was the light at the end of the tunnel, but even so a little voice deep down kept whispering to myself something I didn’t want to admit. That it wouldn’t end here. I quieted those whispers and repressed that voice because I needed hope to surmount this last collegiate hurdle of Senior year. My diploma meant more than just a degree but a finality I was ready to claim on a sun that had finally set. As I write this last paragraph, it is a very surreal moment which now claims my conclusion at this institution. To analyze who I’ve been and who I’ve now become, so my journey ahead is better illuminated. Now it is my time to carve out my own individualized path free of my PWU’s constraints. I was a man of two faces and am now no longer. So, in a paper hopefully devoid of clichés, I’m going to end it with a rather applicable one. Know from whence you came, so you can know where you are going.

Endnotes [1] Diagne, Souleymane Bachir "Négritude", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta ries/negritude/.https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/ent(ed.), [2] Frantz, Fanon. “Fact of Blackness.” In Black Skin, White Masks, 109 140. Grove Press, 1952, 110. [3] Fanon, Fact, 114. [4] Diagne, Negritude, 5. [5] Fanon, Fact, 112. [6] Fanon, Fact, 128. [7] Diagne, Negritude, 11. [8] Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Modern Library ed. New York: Modern Library, 1994, 43. [9] Fanon, Fact, 129. [10] Pérez, Loida Maritza. Geographies of Home : a Novel . New York: Viking,1999. [Adaptation] 62

By: Teo Chee Yan

Rooms of their Own: The Spatialized Consciousness of Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway

Teo Chee Yan is currently a sophomore at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, majoring in Global Affairs. Her interests lie in the humanities, and she is especially concerned with politics and international relations. Outside of university, Chee Yan has worked for various non profit organizations as well as public policy and governance think tanks. In her freshman year at college, Chee Yan took a Literature and Humanities class taught by Professor Carissa Foo, where she explored different texts, including Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Intrigued the stream of consciousness style, Chee Yan examined the intersection between space and consciousness and produced this essay for the class.

Introduction

The feminist critique on the politics of space was central to Virginia Woolf’s conception of the private space in many of her works. Scholars have discussed at length Woolf’s interrogation of the private space as “the site of middle class female domestic confinement” and its duality as “the site of dynamic female potential” in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her later works The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938).[1] Beyond Woolf’s preoccupation with gendered spaces, what is perhaps less widely addressed is her portrayal of “the imbrication of space and individual consciousness”[2] and the complex relationship between physical space and the identity one manifests within it. This relationship is perhaps most markedly and thoroughly explored in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), where Woolf employs the stream of consciousness narrative mode. By weaving in and out of characters’ minds to construct a narrative of the titular character’s life, Woolf skillfully elucidates the intersection between physical space and individual consciousness. As Woolf reveals the interiority of her characters through the spaces that they inhabit, Woolf’s explication of spatialized consciousness in Mrs Dalloway warrants deeper study and further dissection. This essay pays particular attention to Woolf’s use of physical space in Mrs. Dalloway to explore and evince the mental and emotional headspace of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway, a middle aged upper class lady, and Septimus Warren Smith, a young World War I veteran suffering from shell shock and hallucinations. Woolf seeks to examine the relationship between characters’ interiority and their private rooms, namely the attic room for the former and Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room for the latter. For both Clarissa and Septimus, the private rooms facilitate their ruminations in two ways: First, the privacy of their rooms provides the characters with a refuge from the gaze of society and enables them to engage in candid dialogue with their truest and innermost selves. Second, the objects and physical space of the private rooms anchor their consciousness to the present reality even as their minds wander across fluid time and space, transfixing past, present, and future into ordinary and yet revelatory moments of being. Yet while these evanescent moments of private reflection translate to a renewed sense of vigour and enthusiasm for life in Clarissa, expressed through her love for parties, Septimus’ moments of clarity lead him to embrace the liberation of death as he renounces life and thus preserves its dignity. In revealing the characters’ interiority through their deepest reflections in the private space, Woolf evinces the striking similarity between the parallel characters of Clarissa and Septimus, providing a lens through which we can begin to understand Septimus’ eventual suicide. Ultimately, as we navigate Clarissa and Septimus’ consciousness amidst the physical space, Woolf subtly highlights the transcendent healing power of the private space as the “heart of life”.

Gilbert and Gubar’s seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic further highlights its paradoxical image as a space of women’s physical confinement as well as one associated with their creative freedom and imagination.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf denotes the attic room as the titular character’s private space, into which she retreats for a respite from the public eye. Historically, in Victorian literary culture, the attic room has been associated with the social oppression of women, as well as a place of release: consider, for example, Bertha Mason’s imprisonment in Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver’s retreat into the attic in The Mill on the Floss.

Self-reflection in the private space

Figure 1: Artistic representation of popular conceptions of “the madwoman in the attic” in the Victorian literary imagination. Woolf’s choice of the attic as Clarissa’s private space is therefore significant, situating Clarissa amidst a broader understanding of the “quintessential woman in the attic”.[3] In the attic room, as Clarissa engages in critical evaluation of her private self vis à vis her public persona presented to others, we see that Clarissa embodies the trope as a woman who retreats into the attic to escape the oppression of Victorian society and seeks her true identity in its privacy. As Perla Korosec Serfaty also notes in The Home From Attic to Cellar, the public dimension of the home’s visible spaces serves as a visage of a person’s mode of being on socially acceptable terms, while simultaneously acting as a mask that distances the outsider from the private dimension of hidden spaces, such as the attic.[4] We see this manifest as Clarissa notes upon entering the attic room that it is in the attic that “[w]omen must put off their rich apparel” and “disrobe”.[5] As she withdraws from the visible space of the sitting room and retires to the safety and comfort of the hidden attic room, the shedding of these layers of fine clothing is akin to Clarissa’s casting off of her outward layers of social identity as a hostess, wife, and mother, serving an important function in dismantling the veneer of upper class nobility and refinement that Clarissa otherwise constantly maintains to leave only her most fundamental and vulnerable self. In the attic, Woolf also alludes to the ineffability of the self as Clarissa ruminates upon how “she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world” she was.[6] Clarissa is described to be “composed,” which suggests an intentional construction of a public identity compatible with societal expectations, departing from her true nature with its “faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions”.[7] Woolf thus creates a striking juxtaposition between the constructed Clarissa “who sat in her drawing room,” a “radiancy…in some dull lives” and a “refuge for the lonely,” and the real Clarissa we see in the attic, vulnerable, brooding, and isolated.[8] From this, we glimpse the attic’s liminality as Clarissa straddles the public and private spheres within it and is afforded the mental headspace to recognize and confront the divergence between her public and private self. Woolf thereby highlights the relationship between space and the identity one manifests within it, setting up the private space of the attic as a site of critical self examination and in turn potential reconciliation of the divided self.

The nature of the attic room as a private space also creates a refuge that permits Clarissa to express her repressed emotions, free from the judgment of society. Korosec Serfaty describes the attic as an “intimate place that only the dweller is thoroughly familiar with,” where its quality of being safe and secretive affords one with “opportunities of withdrawal and protection”.[9]

the cleanliness and material purity of the attic room with its “clean” “white” sheets and bare decor,[15] we also observe a spatial correspondence in how Clarissa’s mind wanders back in time to reflect on the innocence and purity of her youthful days with Sally in her attic bedroom in Bourton, her childhood home. She recalls “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” when Sally kisses her, igniting what she describes as a “religious feeling”.[16] Her superlative choice of words reflects her passionate emotions, while her allusion to this “religious feeling” expresses a divine feeling of transcendence, emphasizing the purity and spirituality of her love for Sally. The sheer extent of her love and idolatry is also evident as she seems to sacralize the moment, likening Sally to a goddess to devote oneself to. Herein, Woolf demonstrates the transformative power of the attic room as it turns conventional notions of spirituality and religion on its head, morphing the sacrilege of homosexuality into something sacred and holy, thus masking its transgressive nature. As Clarissa permits herself to emancipate her otherwise shameful and repressed sexual desires and relishes them at their full intensity, uninhibited by heteronormative societal expectations, we gain a brief glimpse of the healing experience that the individual undergoes through reflections in the private space.

This quality of the attic room is demonstrated as Clarissa unveils her deepest secret amidst the safety and privacy of the attic, confronting for the first time her socially transgressive queer desires towards “the charm of a woman”, and in particular that of her childhood friend Sally Seton, who Clarissa has not seen in years.[10] In the “emptiness” of the attic, Woolf draws out the emptiness that Clarissa feels within herself, as she senses her lack of “something central” in her relationship with her husband Richard.[11] This realization prompts Clarissa’s acknowledgment of her attraction instead to a woman, as she “did undoubtedly…feel what men felt” despite having a “scruple” “sent by Nature”.[12] Here, we see the ironic juxtaposition of Clarissa’s internalized homophobia from society, which leads her to “resent” her queer desires as unnatural and transgressive,[13] against her emphatic and almost orgasmic expression of homophilia in the attic, as she relives the moment of attraction in her head: It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over the moment.[14] Revisiting the moment in the privacy and safety of the attic, Clarissa’s rapturous description is completely uninhibited and unabashed, characterized by hyperboles of rushing to the “farthest verge,” and being touched by “astonishing significance” and “extraordinary alleviation.” It is only in the most private and intimate of spaces in the attic, that Clarissa allows herself to indulge, utterly unbridled, in forbidden fantasies about women to their fullest Amidstextent.

The attic offers a private space that affords reflection and a temporal respite for the individual who contends with self and society, personal values, and social norms. Yet, as in the case of Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I, private space can be a luxury. In comparison to the complete privacy of Clarissa’s attic room, Septimus’ only refuge lies in the semi privacy of Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room. The space is not his own but belongs to his neighbor; he also shares the sitting room with his wife Rezia. Despite the nature of the sitting room as one with communal functions, Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room nevertheless serves as the only safe space available to Septimus that shelters him from the prying eyes of society and enables him to become his true self.

Figure 2: A shell shocked soldier from the First World War. Shell shock is a term coined in World War I by British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post traumatic stress disorder many soldiers were afflicted with during the war before PTSD was termed. In the relative privacy of Mrs Filmer’s sitting room, Septimus, who suffers from shell shock [17] due to the ravages of war, gains a respite from his hallucinations and his all consuming fears of Dr. Holmes and Bradshaw, who threaten to institutionalize him, as well as traumatic apparitions of his fallen comrade Evans, that constantly plague him elsewhere. The sitting room thus enables Septimus to regain some sense of normalcy as Rezia notes that he “become[s] himself” and “speak[s] as he used to do” for the first time in days.[18] Through Rezia’s eyes, Woolf makes it clear that Septimus’ return to his true self can be attributed to the fact that they are “alone together”, in the safety of Mrs Filmer’s sitting room where they are able to poke fun “privately” without fearing that anyone would overhear them.[19] This idea is reinforced by Septimus’ own inner monologue: The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on the wallpaper, but he would wait, he thought, stretching out his feet, looking at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait in this warm place, this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in the ground, or some arrangement of the trees (one must be scientific above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird.[20] Deciding contentedly as he watches Rezia sew to “wait in this warm place” reminiscent of “the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening,” where “warmth lingers”,[21] Septimus’ description of the sitting room evokes a sense of comfort, tranquility, and security that starkly juxtaposes with the hyperstimulation and anxiety we observe in him at the park, earlier in the novel.

Ultimately, through Clarissa’s cathartic release of repressed emotions and intimate examination of her core identity in the attic, Woolf alludes to a larger social commentary on how the stifling societal expectations of Victorian England suppress the free expression of identities and emotions, thus necessitating the existence of the private space as the only recourse through which incompatibilities between individuals and society can be mediated.

The objects and physical space of the private room serve to anchor the characters’ memories to the present reality, even as their thoughts wander across fluid time and space. Through Clarissa’s ruminations in the attic, Woolf presents the inextricable link between the past and present, illustrating how perception of the present is mediated by memories of the past. As Clarissa revels in the moment of impassioned attraction to women, she is drawn back to reality by objects in the attic, specifically ones associated with her husband Richard as she notes that “against such moments there contrasted the bed and Baron Marbot and the candle half burnt”.[24]

Woolf makes Clarissa’s attitude clear as Clarissa’s orgasmic description of the moment of attraction is juxtaposed against the plainness of language in her detached and monotone listing of mundane objects linked to Richard, highlighting the banality of her humdrum marriage to a man she does not truly love. Woolf filters Clarissa’s perceptions of her marriage through her memories, and it is through the lens of her past experiences with a passionate love that Clarissa views her present marriage and gains awareness of what is lacking. In the same way, the dressing table in the attic pulls Clarissa from a past memory of Bourton back to the present, and as she looks upon her reflection in the glass, she is suddenly cognizant of the “[m]onths and months” that still lie ahead of her.[25] The attic exists as a liminal space that transcends time, as past, present, and future coalesce and are transfixed in a single moment. The moment is significant and revelatory, a turning point where Clarissa suddenly abandons her fears and “plunge[s] into the very heart of the moment”, enkindling hope for life (for “[s]he was not old yet”) as if she had been “fix[ed]” by her “mus[ings]”.[26]

Beyond that, the sophistication of Septimus’ inner monologue in the sitting room is also significant in demonstrating his lucidity and the sharp clarity of his thoughts as he sheds the appearance of a raving madman to reveal his genuine and articulate self in the safety and serenity of Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room, suggesting that like Clarissa, it is only in the private space that Septimus is liberated at least momentarily from the mental oppression of societal forces to truly become himself. However, where the semi private sitting room experiences lapses in privacy, Septimus also experiences a concomitant compromise of his mental faculties. Through Rezia’s recollections in the sitting room, we are reminded of a time when “the girl who did the room” discovered and ridiculed Septimus’ papers in Mrs Filmer’s sitting room.[22] Septimus’ relapse into his hysterical ravings about “Holmes” and “human nature” as a result of this breach of privacy thus emphasizes the inextricable link between the security of the private space and individual consciousness.[23] Ultimately, whether it is in the way Clarissa no longer conceals the facets of her identity incompatible with her public persona, or in how Septimus’ mind is no longer compromised by delirium and fear, the safety and tranquility of the private space as far as it is truly private negotiates the tensions that exist between individuals and external forces, providing an escape that enables and sustains the endurance of the true self. The healing power of the private space

The healing power of the private space is evident again at the party, as Clarissa enters the private “little room” where “there was nobody” upon hearing about Septimus’ death.[27]

Figure 3:’Et in Arcadia Ego’, a 1637 38 painting by Nicolas Poussin depicting a pastoral scene. The inscription on the tomb reads ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, literally translated to ‘Even in Arcadia, here am I’. The ‘I’ commonly understood to refer to death, the painting is a memento mori reminding us that even in the idyllic Arcadia, death still lurks. As for Septimus, the significance of the physical space of Mrs. Filmer’s sitting room in anchoring him to the present reality is all the more pronounced as he grapples with his hallucinations and struggles to differentiate between delusion and the real world. Despite the compromised nature of the sitting room as an inconsistently private space, Septimus maintains his grip on reality through the permanence of the objects within it, which function seemingly as a compensatory mechanism for what the room lacks in constancy. Septimus tries to ascertain the nature of reality and seeks confirmation by looking around the room at the “gramophone”, “the plate of bananas”, and even “Rezia [who] sat sticking pins into the front of her dress”.[33] In contrast to the volatility of his hallucinations, the “still” ness of these objects and the physicality of Rezia as she trims the hat emphasizes their concrete materiality and substantiality to Septimus,[34] anchoring his sense of reality and causing the “[m]iracles, revelations, agonies, loneliness, falling through the sea, down, down into the flames” that he raved about in his delusional state to all “[burn] out” and disappear.[35] As Septimus tells himself that “[h]e would not go mad”,[36] we see that the objects in the room serve not only as physical proof that grounds Septimus to the current reality, disengaging him from his hallucinations, but also function more significantly to preserve Septimus’ sanity and control over his own mind. This moment where Septimus makes the conscious effort not to go mad reflects a moment of revelation and clarity, and his specific use of the modal verb “would” demonstrates a metacognitive awareness of his past, present, and future mental state, while at the same time conferring him with a sense of authority and control over himself that he typically seems to lack.[37] We see such a moment of clarity materializing once again seconds before Holmes enters the room, as Septimus meditates upon how best to take his own life: 69

As Clarissa’s “terror” and “awful fear” of “this life, to be lived to the end” gives way to an “incredible” feeling that “no pleasure could equal” the experience of living life through the triumphs of youth and age,[28] Woolf charts the shift in Clarissa’s attitude towards death from one that is filled with a sense of foreboding, reminiscent of et in Arcadia ego[29] (“Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here’s death”[30]), to one that indulges in the reverie of life and embraces the liberation of death as the words “Fear no more the heat of the sun” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline come to her.[31] Clarissa’s consequent imperative that “[s]he must go back” to the party thus represents her renewed hope and vigour for life, even and especially in light of inevitable death.[32] Ultimately, through Clarissa’s epiphany in the attic and her moment of private reflection away from the hustle and bustle of the party, Woolf seemingly alludes to the restorative power of memory and reflection that can only be invoked in the private space, and elucidates the significance of these ordinary, evanescent moments of being.

Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs Filmer’s nice clean bread knife with ‘Bread’ carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was coming. Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of thing, had packed them. There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury lodging house window; the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out.[38]

transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps perhaps.[42]

The objects of the room once again tether Septimus’ thoughts to present time and space, the split second before Holmes intrudes into the private space and he kills himself. Like before, Septimus demonstrates an acute and almost morbid level of rationality as he detachedly evaluates the merits of each object as his means to an end. This rationality does not falter even as he seemingly contradicts himself when he commits suicide despite saying that “[h]e did not want to die”.[39] As Septimus notes that “[t]he sun was hot” just moments before his death, the line harks back to the recurring refrain “Fear no more the heat of the sun” of Cymbeline, and Woolf seems to invite us to view Septimus’ death as an emancipation from the labour of life.[40] Clarissa’s “transcendental theory” about death further supports this Itreading:[41]endedina

When we perceive Septimus’ suicide through the lens of Clarissa’s “transcendental theory”, we come to realize that the Septimus we see at the moment of his death is but a small fraction of his entire being diffused across time and space, “so momentary” compared to “the unseen part,” and Woolf seems to suggest that the transcendent, spiritual part of Septimus still lives on even after his physical death.[43] Ultimately, though the moments of revelation evinced by the physical space appear to propel Clarissa and Septimus in opposite directions, one towards a renewed love for life and the other towards an embrace of death, the familiar lines of Cymbeline that punctuate both Clarissa and Septimus’ thoughts unite the two and reconcile their seemingly contrasting outlooks. While there is an embrace in death as the catharsis of the labour of life, it is ultimately this acceptance and fearlessness of death that empowers one to live life with exuberance and vitality. Yet Clarissa and Septimus are not the only parallels. In Hermione Lee’s biography Virginia Woolf, Lee recounts Woolf’s note that Septimus was to be “founded on [herself],” yet “not so much character as idea”[44]. The similarities between Woolf and Septimus’ lives are uncanny, both suffering from mental illness, threatened with institutionalization, and attempting suicide by throwing themselves out of a window. As we consider Septimus the idea and what he represents, Mrs Dalloway reveals keen insight into Woolf’s own illness and suicide, and perhaps engenders a more hopeful understanding of Woolf’s tragic death. After all, though the “apparition” of Virginia Woolf may have ceased to exist for a long time, the “unseen part” “spreads wide”, and it has and will continue to live on in her literature and legacy.[45] 70

Endnotes [1] Stevenson, Christina. “‘Here Was One Room, There Another’: The Room, Authorship, and Feminine Desire in A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 49, no. 1 (2014): 112 [2] Jiménez, Ángel Luis, "The Politics of Space and Place in Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Three Guineas and The Pargiters". Graduate Theses and Dissertations. (2009): 2 [3] Donaldson, Elizabeth J.. “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3 (2002): 99 [4] Korosec Serfaty, Perla. “The Home from Attic to Cellar.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 4, no. 4 (1984): 304 [5] Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925. (Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26 [6] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 32 [7] Ibid, 32 [8] Ibid, 32 [9] Korosec Serfaty, “The Home from Attic to Cellar.” 312. [10] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 27 [11] Ibid, 26-27 [12] Ibid, 27 [13] Ibid, 27 [14] Ibid, 27 [15] Ibid, 27 [16] Ibid, 30 [17] Shell shock is a term coined in World War I by British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post traumatic stress disorder many soldiers were afflicted with during the war (before PTSD was termed). [18] Ibid, 121 [19] Ibid, 121 [20] Ibid, 122 [21] Ibid, 122 [22] Ibid, 119 [23] Ibid, 119 [24] Ibid, 27 [25] Ibid, 31 [26] Ibid, 31 [27] Ibid, 156 [28] Ibid, 157 [29] Et in Arcadia Ego is a painting by Nicolas Poussin. Its literal translation is “Even in Arcadia, there am I”, with ‘I’ referring to death. The painting is a memento mori, ominously reminding the viewer that even in the blissful utopia of Arcadia, death still exists.

[30] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 156 [31] Ibid, 158 [32] Ibid, 158 [33] Ibid, 120 [34] Ibid, 120 [35] Ibid, 121 [36] Ibid, 120 [37] Ibid, 120 [38] Ibid, 126 [39] Ibid, 126 [40] Ibid, 126 [41] Ibid, 129 [42] Ibid, 129 130 [43] Ibid, 130 [44] Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. (Print, Vintage, 1996), 373 [45] Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 129 130 71

Bibliography Donaldson, Elizabeth J.. “The Corpus of the Madwoman: Toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 99 119. Jiménez,www.jstor.org/stable/4316926.JSTOR,ÁngelLuis,"ThePolitics of Space and Place in Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Three Guineas and The Pargiters". 2009. Graduate Theses and https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/2030.Dissertations. Korosec Serfaty, Perla. “The Home from Attic to Cellar.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 4, no. 4, 1984, pp. 303 321., doi:10.1016/s0272 4944(84)80002 x. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Print, Vintage. 1996. Stevenson, Christina. “‘Here Was One Room, There Another’: The Room, Authorship, and Feminine Desire in A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2014, pp. 112 132. Woolf,112www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/pacicoasphil.49.1.0JSTOR,.Virginia.MrsDalloway.1925.Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 72

By: Zhi Zhang

Zhi (Marina) Zhang is a rising senior double majoring in Art History and Physics. Born and raised in a traditional Chinese family, she became deeply fascinated by ancient Chinese artistic cultures since she was a child. The author loves to explore the nuanced variances of the ink play and started to investigate the root causes hidden behind the brush strokes of ancient artists. Her favourite period in the long history of Chinese art is the Yuan Dynasty a time when literati paintings began to flourish and gradually took central stage of Chinese literati culture. She is also interested in the interdisciplinary approach to art through the lens of cutting edge technology.

Call of the Distantant Mountains

[1]

In 1279, the last lingering hope of Southern Song was annihilated as the Mongolian warmongers triumphed in the naval battle of Yamen. Kublai Khan declared the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, and China, for the first time, fell to foreign rulership. It is a subject that still puzzles the scholars today as to how one of the most epochal periods of Chinese culture prospered under the reign of “barbarous” alien nomads. The artistic creativity of the Yuan scholar artists was not strictly circumscribed by the already well established pictorial conventions. Rather, they strove to make the past serve the present. Among them stood the most pivotal figure at the turn of the 13th century Zhao Mengfu, whose reputation had long been tormented by his active service in the Mongolian court despite his identity as a royal descendent of the past Song dynasty. Notwithstanding his loyalty issues, Zhao’s artistic contributions were undeniably prodigious. A comparative study between Zhao Mengfu’s Twin Pine, Level Distance of ca. 1310 (Fig. 1) and Guo Xi’s Old Trees, Level Distance of ca. 1080 (Fig. 2) reveals two of Zhao’s most acknowledged theories: first, his commitment to cultural archaism (fugu 复古) and seeking of “antique spirit” (guyi 古意) in paintings; second, his instrumental synthesis of calligraphy and painting techniques (yishu ruhua 以书入画). Collectively, they attested to Zhao’s ingenuity in dialogue with the ancient, as well as his revolutionary approach in revitalizing the history and rendering it anew. Zhao Mengfu was not the first to advocate the search for guyi. Yet, his archaism was not a schematic reproduction of prototypes but a refreshing and original reinterpretation of the cannon. The aim was to breathe new life, or “spirit resonance” (qiyun 气韵), into paintings in order to deprive them of the lingering academic orthodoxy. He wrote in 1301: “The most precious quality in painting is the antique spirit [or conception]. If this isn’t present, the work isn’t worth much, even though it may be skillfully done. Nowadays, people who paint in a detailed and delicate manner with bright colors consider themselves to be proficient artists. They are unaware of the fact that works lacking antique spirit aren’t worth looking at. My own paintings may seem to be quite simply and carelessly done, but the true connoisseur will recognize that they adhere to old models and are thus deserving of approval. I say this for connoisseurs and not for ignoramuses.”

Figure 1. Zhao Mengfu (1254 1322), Twin Pines, Level Distance, ca. 1310, Handscroll, ink on paper, 10 9/16 x 42 5/16 in. (26.8 x 107.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ex coll.: C. C. Wang Family, Gift of The Dillon Fund, 1973 74

The inscription offered a lucid explanation of his theory, clearly stating his loathing for the recent ostentatious styles and at the same time, nodding to the canon of old masters. In lieu of scrupulously abiding by one single style, Zhao combined merits across different masters and selectively revived the past. Apart from its theoretical importance, Zhao’s classicism was also instrumental in purging the remnant obsequiousness and decadence of Southern Song Academy art, which he might as well have read as a harbinger with the fall of the dynasty. Juxtaposing Zhao Mengfu and Guo Xi’s two seemingly similar landscapes elucidates Zhao’s selective quotation from, as well as deliberate revision on, the past model explicitly invoking Guo Xi’s composition and motifs, Zhao boldly reduced imageries to be painted at a minimal level and left most space empty. At first glance, the two paintings closely resemble each other with respect to their composition. They share the vista of “level distance”, which is achieved by setting the viewpoint on a nearby mountain to gaze at one in the distance as defined by Guo Xi himself. Landscape in level distance is oftentimes associated with the format of a handscroll, which presents a stark contrast with the monumental landscape in large hanging scrolls with Guo Xi’s Early Spring was a pinnacle exemplar. Monumental landscapes were political metaphors of ideal Confucian court hierarchy in which the paramount peak symbolized the emperor and eulogies for the prosperous society under his rulership. By contrast, preeminent mountain is absent in level distance layouts, which signals one’s momentary detachment from petty officialdom [2].

Foong Ping identifies Guo’s Old Trees to be an intimate work dedicated to his literati friends who, in turn, read from his quivering autumn scenery a “nostalgic longing” and a melancholic, embittered sentiment toward the court [3]. Well versed in the multilayered undertone of level distance format, Zhao Mengfu had the opportunity to see in person Guo’s Old Trees and in his colophon (Fig. 3) a written inscription of commentaries attached as an additional page to the scroll he noted: “Tall mountains and flowing rivers fill the world, Aspiring to draw them with water and ink is Mydifficult.whole life I have followed the lofty message of forests and Constrainedsteams;bypetty official duties, I have been unable to achieve it.” [4]

Figure 3. Zhao Mengfu, colophon attached to Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance. Figure 2. Guo Xi (ca. 1000 ca. 1090), Old Trees, Level Distance, ca. 1080, Handscroll, ink and color on silk, 14 × 41 1/8 in. (35.6 × 104.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of John M. Crawford Jr., in honor of Douglas Dillon, 1981

Zhao’s own Twin Pines was probably painted after he had been summoned back to the court for the second time in 1309 by Emperor Renzong [5]. He had gone on a long sojourn to Dadu (present day Beijing), the Yuan capital far away from his home Wu Xing (present day Hu Zhou, Zhe Jiang province) twice now. Emperor Renzong was fervent in Zhao and compared him to the great scholar artists like Li Bai and Su Shi [6]. Nevertheless, Renzong never assigned Zhao to any significant political post, as Khan once did. In fact, Zhao was mainly in charge of artistic and cultural duties during Renzong’s reign. Therefore, it is reasonable to date Zhao’s colophon to an early stage of his career, and his Twin Pines, a later time. Maxwell Hearn denotes chaoyin (朝隐) as what characterizes Zhao’s career “becoming an official but detaching… and maintaining the moral purity of a hermit”. The sense of detachment finds its counterpart in Guo's intimate landscape as well, but Zhao rendered it differently and quite Despiteinnovatively.thepolitical vicissitudes, Zhao was nevertheless luckier than his southern literati peers to have access to the collection of Northern School old masters like Li Cheng and Guo Xi during his stay in Dadu. Twin Pines manifests the Li-Guo formula of a tripartite “hills beyond a river” plan [7] trees and rocks occupying the shore in the foreground, a river creating the sense of spatial recession in the midground, and misty distant mountains in the far background. The layout is diagonal in both Zhao’s Twin Pines and Guo’s Old Trees, but the opposite directions convey completely different messages. Guo Xi’s design is well calculated the island, mountains, pavilion, shore constitute a stable trapezoid compositional framework. It is also self contained one starts the scroll of Guo Xi with distant mountains at the upper right and unfolds until the leftmost edge where the figures traveling to the right redirect the view back into the landscape (Fig. 4). On this wise, Guo Xi’s painting evokes rationality and order, as was typical of his contemporary landscapes. On the contrary, the layout in Zhao’s is much more uninhibited. The large foreground covers the entire space on the rightmost section and thus captures the visual focus. The islands and mountains are depicted in parallel linear forms, suggesting they are within proximity to one another, thus obscures the boundary between midground and background. Connecting the direction of one of the pine branches, the islands run all the way across the scroll as though, if not limited by the dimension, they can extend beyond the physical surface. Opposite to the carefully calculated design of Guo, Zhao Mengfu breaks the paradigm of the three-part plan and reveals unbridled spontaneity in the landscape.

Figure 4. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of figures traveling into the landscape.

Let us remind ourselves of Zhao’s role in the Mongolian court as a descendent from the Song imperial line, to turn to serve the enemy of non Han ethnicity was morally and ethically unacceptable, especially given that many of his peers from Wu Xing resolutely rejected the invitation of Yuan court. Yet it was not without considerations for the well beings of his people that Zhao eventually set foot in Dadu under Khan’s call. Afterall, to advise the ruler in upholding righteousness is, ultimately, to enhance the lives of people, whereas being a cynical hermit contributed none. The History of Yuan documented Zhao’s immense achievement in assisting the tax reform during Khan’s rule [8]. By the time of Emperor Renzong, however, Zhao’s bureaucratic responsibilities were truncated. We could only imagine how conflicted Zhao must have felt to be constrained in a foreign government where only his art was valued. The vast voidness in the painting thus should be read as a reflection of the chaoyin mentality of the artist, who probably yearned for a tranquil spiritual residence where he could temporarily withdraw from the exhausting confinement of political intrigue. The conscious selection by Zhao from Guo’s motif repertoire also exhibits his tendency toward minimalism, which laid profound influence for the late literati artists, especially Ni Zan. It is worth noticing that the term minimalism is not to be confused with its canonical definition in Western Figure 5. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance, detail of pine and samplings. art history. Literati artists did not purposefully seek abstract forms, they seeked succinct portrayal of outer reality, and their contemplation, most importantly, was to be conveyed in the very lack of imagery. The basic elements of a landscape rocks, trees, mountains and river are present in both artists’ works but in different forms. The pavilion and the stone bridge of Guo Xi have been eliminated by Zhao, and the multiple figures have been reduced to a singularity. For Guo Xi, capturing the nuances of seasons and times are quintessential to his natural landscapes. Thus, the withered vines on old, gnarled trees and misty mountains are typical of him as an indication of an autumn evening scene. On the contrary, signs of naturalness are obscure in Zhao’s scroll. He painted tall straight pine trees with unnaturally downward stretching branches that makes it difficult to demarcate the exact season is it summer as the tree trunks are robust and thriving, or is it winter since the branches are bowing (Fig. 5)? The bone like saplings protruding from the rocks are ambiguous as to whether they are withering or sprouting. The evergreen character of pines further deemphasizes the need to specify a season in his painting. Leaving no trace of mist or atmosphere, the simplistic forms of distant hills minimize the sense of temporality, too. Additionally, both artists utilize empty space to allude to the river flow and confirm its existence with protruding islands and fishing boat(s).

In Twin Pines, the lonely fisherman drifts on more spacious emptiness and seems to be enveloped by void, evoking extreme solitude and vulnerability (Fig. 6). Recalling Ma Yuan’s Angler on a Wintry Lake of 1195 (Fig. 7), this use of blank space has already been fully exploited. But Zhao rejects Ma’s accuracy and precision specifically the naturalism in human and water ripples, which, to his taste, are defects of academic dogma. The figure in Zhao’s painting calls upon a sense of primitivity and candidness suggests communal actions, with lines of sight directed toward one another (Fig. 8 11). The only figure that appears on himself is also implicitly connected to the community as it looks like he is preparing for their arrival (Fig. 12). Foong Ping notes that even the birds and trees occur in pairs and asserts that the iconography of paired inhabitants is a metonymy of the patron painter relationship [9]. Unlike Guo Xi, whose customized landscape aims to evoke emotional resonance of literati friends who share similar experiences by narrating a perceptible story in his subject matter, Zhao “has eliminated the emotion laden atmospheric and narrative details of the earlier work” [10] by removing the pavilion stone bridge and excess figures. Although Guo Xi’s landscape

Figure 6. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance, detail of fisherman.

Figure 7. Ma Yuan (1160 1225), Angler on a Wintry Lake, 1195, 141 x 36cm. Tokyo National Museum.

Figure 9. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of old man servant pairs. 78

contains figures actively engaging each other, it ultimately conveys a bittersweet pre departure melancholy, whereas Zhao’s landscape, though cool and spare, is unpretentiously elegant and imparts a feeling of nonchalance that, again, accords with the idea of chaoyin. In other words, Zhao paints solely under self expression, which fundamentally distinguishes him from Guo Xi, who is patron driven, private or imperial regardless. Some judged that Zhao Mengfu is never amongst the top ranked artists, arguing that his artistic achievement were limited due to the overt obsession with past canons [11]. Yet, Richard Vinograd, who criticizes harshly of Twin Pines’s formalistic deficiencies in his essay, still acknowledges that “Zhao Meng fu’s transformations of the manner are evidence of his historical understanding of past art, of his characteristic process of adaptation of old styles, and of what is original within his often archaistic and tradition keeping art” [12], as also discussed above. To further investigate Zhao’s originality and creativity, it is necessary to examine Zhao’s application of the synthesis of calligraphy and painting (以书入画) another revolutionary artistic theory of his in Twin Pines.

Figure 8. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of fishermen pair.

Figure 12. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of the only figure that appears on himself. 79

Figure 13. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance, detail of colophon overlapping with painting.

Most straightforwardly, the synthesis is exemplified by literally writing the long inscription in the same pictorial space with the painting, as opposed to on a separate sheet of paper that is later attached to the scroll. A z oomed up image of the colophon clearly shows the calligraphy is already overlapping with the strokes of the mountain (Fig. 13). It becomes so crucial- a part of the entire composition that, with its removal (Fig. 14), the composition mislays its visual stability since Guo Xi’s trapezoid layout is not kept intact here. The long inscription takes up the entire vertical slot on the left, therefore remotely echoing the large foreground on the

From Left to Right: Figure 10. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of servants pair.

Figure 11. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of woodcutters pair.

Figure 14. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance, colophon removed. right. Artist’s inscription on their painting is a tradition established well before Zhao’s time, yet the content of Zhao’s is unusual - it is not a narrative anecdote or a poem, but an art historical commentary that candidly reinforces his favour of old masterpieces over “recent painters”. The function of a colophon has evolved from merely adoring the poetic qualities of natural landscapes to asserting the selfhood of an artist. Accordingly, this very colophon epitomizes the communion of both of Zhao’s major theories lacing together text and image, the former professes his motivations behind cultural archaism and the latter, his praxis.

Figure 19 (right). Guo Xi,Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of pulsing thickness. Figure 20 (left). Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of pulsing thickness

Figure 21. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of crab claw technique. From Left to Right: Figure 15 and Figure 16. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance, details of flying white technique on rocks. Figure 17. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of rock’s outline. Figure 18. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of cun (皴). 80

On a more profound level, the synthesis refers to the conception of calligraphy and painting coming from the same origin (书画同源), which also arose well ahead of Zhao. But as the most accomplished calligrapher of Yuan, if not of all times, he is the most pivotal figure considering the instrumental vocabulary of calligraphic brushstrokes he has established. After his painting Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees of 1300, Zhao wrote down one of the most influential colophons in the development of literati paintings: “Rocks like Flying-white, trees like the Great Seal script; the sketching of bamboos should include the eight Strokes of calligraphic technique” [13]. Flying white is a technique in calligraphy that is produced when the brush moves so swiftly that the drying hair begins to separate, thus leaving blank spaces from within the ink. Outlines of rocks in Twin Pines brilliantly exhibit the application of this technique in landscape elements (Fig. 15 16). Their left edges are emphasized with broader ink, invoking the use of cefeng (侧锋) - writing with the side of brush hairand hence produce more variation of texture than the thinner linings of the right sides. The flying white fabricates the shape but refrains from substantiating any interior volume. In general, it produces an effect of perfunctoriness but also highlights the artist’s hand and his impulsive execution.

By contrast, the outlines of Guo’s rocks are results of sophisticated but realistic representations of nature angular and jagged, they concur with the late autumn bleakness on the one hand and, on the other hand, “demarcates space below and behind the rock” [14] (Fig. 17). The ink washes varied meticulously in accents and gradations to build naturalistic volumes. The convention of adding texture using cun (皴) is conspicuous in the shoreland (Fig. 18), but Zhao clearly has decided not to pay homage to this “un calligraphic” technique. The two artists deviate even more greatly in the depiction of trees. Guo’s gnarled old trees are realistically rendered, with outlines of alternating thickness and intermittent breaks (Fig. 19 20) that makes evidence of the artist’s careful planning as he employs the brush. The branches demonstrate Guo’s renowned “crab claw” (蟹爪枝) technique (Fig. 21) tangling with each other, faithfully reporting the tree types prevalent in Northern areas. Zhao, in line with his didactic quote, invokes the style of zhouwen (籀文), or Great Seal Script (大篆). The contour of twin pines (Fig. 5) runs across the paper within one stroke, non stop, leaving no room for pause and re planning thus manifesting spontaneity. The varied thickness and zigzag brushwork of Guo is replaced with the rounded and uniform outline, which are more suitable for depicting tall and straight pines.

Figure 26. Guo Xi, Old Trees, Level Distance, detail of mountains. 81

This approach bears immediate reference to seal script writings, as can be seen in Zhao’s own Record of the Miaoyan Monastery (Fig. 22). “Crab claw” technique is faintly visible in Zhao’s handling of the saplings, but he dredges Guo’s straggled branches into arrayed skeletons. Cursory at first glance, the sapling de facto reflects the artist’s superb control of his brush, which is comparable to Zhao’s distinguished running-cursive script (Fig. 23 25). The brushwork is charged with vigour and composed elegance, running fluently yet displaying rhythmic flexibility. Moreover, Zhao’s mountains are also exemplary of calligraphic painting. The way Guo suggests mist and remoteness is by applying diluted ink wash blocks, to give form to mountains while muting their outlines (Fig. 25). However, Zhao radically rejects any interior texture and chooses to keep only the outline (Fig. 26). Naturalistic texture and volumes give way to calligraphic linearity. Despite the fact that Zhao painted Twin Pines when he was in Dadu, his gently sloped hills are poles apart from Guo’s precipitous peaks while the latter evokes the topography of the Taihang mountains (Guo’s hometown, also in proximity to Dadu) whereas the former resembles more likely of the Jiangnan (江南) region. Within a few pale-inked brushstrokes, Zhao outlines not what is in front of his eyes but perhaps a nostalgic mind landscape of his hometown. Shallow in form but definite in clearly outlined existence, they echo the enduring pine trees in the foreground and await the artist’s homecoming. Figure 22. Zhao Mengfu, section from Record of the Miaoyan Monastery, ca. 1309 10, handscroll, ink on paper, 34.2 x 364.5 cm. (13 7/16 x 143 1/2 in.), Princeton University Art Museum. Bequest of John B. Elliott, Class of 1951 From Left to Right: Figure 23. Zhao Mengfu, Twin Pines, Level Distance, detail of sapling branches.

Figure 24 and Figure 25. Zhao Mengfu, selections from Former Ode on the Red Cliff, 1301, album, ink on paper, 30.8 x 449.5 cm. National Palace Museum.

The effect of unifying calligraphy and painting is twofold. First, it is a means through which Zhao tries to achieve antique spirit. Drawing inspiration from diverse calligraphic models, he was able to synthesize disparate styles into an original one zhaoti (赵体). Analogously, he creatively utilized various calligraphic strokes to accommodate the pictorial models. The “brush spirit” (biyi 笔意) of not only old masters like Guo Xi but also ancient calligraphers flow within Zhao’s brush and hence imbues his painting with antique spirit. In addition, integration of the two art forms grants the brushwork the autonomy to exceed the constraint of creating representational forms but to mirror the artist’s mind. As early as in the Han Dynasty, Yang Xiong has written: “Handwriting, is the mind’s painting” [15]. The second canon of Xie He’s Six Laws states the “bone method” (gufa 骨法), which also emphasizes the link between handwriting and personality. Centuries later, Zhao reflected upon these ancient teachings by revolutionizing the function of painting. After him, landscape paintings need not be true to nature but should first and foremost express the artist’s selfhood. Wen Fong effectively denotes that “the difference between the Sung and Yuan landscape painters may be described as that between one who seeks nature and one who is nature”. [16] In summary, Zhao Mengfu does not only inherit the legacies of old masters but passes them on in a renovated version that reflects his fully developed artistic theories, that is, instrumental archaism with the service of synthesizing calligraphy and painting. Casting away the highly aestheticized vision of the immediate past, Zhao actively searched to resuscitate the antique spirits. His formation of the canon is encapsulated by his Twin Pines, Level Distance. The history is not dead in this painting the composition and semiotics derived from Guo Xi constitute the skeleton of the painting. But Zhao simplifies the motifs and fleshes them out with innovative incorporation of calligraphic brushworks as well as intimate inscriptions which explicitly reinforces his artistic ideals. Thus, Zhao’s artistry is never to be overlooked, but is rather buttressed by his success in making the past serve the present. A “mind’s painting” as his is, the minimalistic use of brush and ink does not incline to construct a welcoming landscape but outlines one that only Zhao himself can relate exclusively. What exactly is occupying his mind? What does it feel like for a royal descendent to serve the invaders? Zhao Mengfu leaves few surviving messages on this account. Nevertheless, though torn by his dual identities between the past and the present, he endures and survives like the straight pine trees. He gazes nostalgically into the hills beyond the river, where the distant history may enlighten a path for the future. Endnotes

[4] ‘Twin Pines, Level Distance’, The Met, n.d., /40508.https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search

[1] James Cahill, Hills beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yüan Dynasty, 1279 1368, 1st ed, His A History of Later Chinese Painting, 1279 1950 ; v. 1 (New York: Weatherhill, 1976).

[5] Maxwell K. Hearn, ‘Painting and Calligraphy under the Mongols’, in The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, ed. James C. Y. Watt (New York : New Haven [Conn.]: Metropolitan Museum of Art ; Yale University Press, 2010). [6] ‘《元史列传第五十九》’, 中国哲学书电子化计划, https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=350758&ren.d., map=gb#p4. “以孟頫比唐李白、宋蘇子瞻。又嘗稱孟頫操履純正，博學多聞，書畫絕倫，旁通佛、老之旨，皆人所不及。” 82

[2] Alfreda Murck, Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent, 1st ed., vol. 50 (Harvard University Asia Center, [3]https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1dnn9rx.2000),PingFoong , ‘Guo Xi’s Intimate Landscapes’, in The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court, Harvard East Asian Monographs 372 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).

LI, CHU TSING. ‘The Role of Wu Hsing in Early Yüan Artistic Development Under Mongol Rule’. In China Under Mongol Rule, edited by John D. Langlois, 331 70. Princeton University Press, Murck.ctt7zv4pr.15.http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.wellesley.edu/stable/j1981.,Alfreda.PoetryandPaintinginSongChina:TheSubtleArtofDissent.1sted.Vol.50.HarvardUniversityAsiaCenter,2000.https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1dnn9rx. ‘Twin Pines, Level Distance’. The Met, n.d. /40508.https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search 中国哲学书电子化计划. ‘《元史列传第五十九》’, emap=gb#p4.https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=350758&rn.d. 中國哲學書電子化計劃. ‘《揚子法言問神卷第五》’, n.d. https://ctext.org/yangzi fayan/juan wu/zhs?en=off. 83

[15] ‘《揚子法言問神卷第五》’, 中國哲學書電子化計劃, n.d., https://ctext.org/yangzi fayan/juan wu/zhs?en=off. “书, 心画也。”

[16] Fong, Sung and Yuan BibliographyPaintings. Bush, Susan. The Chinese Literati on Painting. Hong Kong University Press, Wen. Sung and Yuan Paintings. New York: distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1973. Foong, Ping. ‘Guo Xi’s Intimate Landscapes’. In The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court. Harvard East Asian Monographs 372. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. Hearn, Maxwell K. ‘Painting and Calligraphy under the Mongols’. In The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, edited by James C. Y. Watt. New York : New Haven [Conn.]: Metropolitan Museum of Art ; Yale University Press, 2010. . ‘Shifting Paradigms in Yuan Literati Art: The Case of the Li Guo Tradition’. Ars Orientalis 37 (2009): 78 106. Lee, Sherman E. Chinese Landscape Painting. New York: Harper & Row. Li, Chu Tsing. ‘Recent Studies on Zhao Mengfu’s Painting in China’. Artibus Asiae 53, no. 1/2 (1993): 195 https://doi.org/10.2307/3250514.210.

Cahill,.ctt2854hr.http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.wellesley.edu/stable/j2012.James.HillsbeyondaRiver:ChinesePaintingoftheYüanDynasty,12791368.1sted.HisAHistoryofLaterChinesePainting,12791950;v.1.NewYork:Weatherhill,1976.Fong,

[13] Wen Fong, Sung and Yuan Paintings (New York: distributed by New York Graphic Society, [14]1973).Foong, ‘Guo Xi’s Intimate Landscapes’.

[7] James Cahill, Hills beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yüan Dynasty, 1279 1368, 1st ed, His A History of Later Chinese Painting, 1279 1950 ; v. 1 (New York: Weatherhill, 1976).

[10] MAXWELL K. HEARN, ‘SHIFTING PARADIGMS IN YUAN LITERATI ART: The Case of the Li Guo Tradition’, Ars Orientalis 37 (2009): 78 106. [11] Chu-Tsing Li, ‘Recent Studies on Zhao Mengfu’s Painting in China’, Artibus Asiae 53, no. 1/2 (1993): 195 [12]https://doi.org/10.2307/3250514.210,RichardVinograd , ‘“River Village: The Pleasures of Fishing” and Chao Meng-Fu’s Li-Kuo Style Landscapes’, Artibus Asiae 40, no. 2/3 (1978): 124 42, https://doi.org/10.2307/3249802.

[8] “《元史列传第五十九》,” 中国哲学书电子化计划, [9]emap=gb#p4.https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=350758&rn.d.,PingFoong , ‘Guo Xi’s Intimate Landscapes’, in The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court, Harvard East Asian Monographs 372 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).

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