Exit 11, Issue 03

Exit 11

A Journal of the First-Year Writing Seminars 2018–2019 1

Exit 11

Writing Instructors’ Praise for Exit 11 “What I’ve come to value in a compelling FYWS essay, and what I subsequently turn to as a teaching tool, is an exhibition of a curious mind. From what I’ve seen through evaluating Exit 11 submissions, as well as supporting FYWS, is that writers can prioritize the writing process while relaying an effective and convicted message. The essays in Exit 11 show us that there is always room to improve and that there are a variety of writing methods that can achieve an intellectual outcome”.

NKE M C H U KW U M E R I J E

“One of the qualities of a well written essay is ‘flow’ which aids comprehension even if the reader is only scanning. In technical terms, this means the essay has achieved cohesion which is an elusive quality even for weathered writers. Exit 11 essays portray this cohesion, connectedness of ideas, with great authority. The essays in the anthology are accessible models for teaching analytical frameworks and writing effective introductions. Using student essays as models makes the idea of writing an essay less daunting for a student in First Year Writing Seminars; the idea is: if my peers can achieve this level of excellence, so can I”.

NE E L A M HA NI F

“It’s always a pleasure to read students’ writing around topics that interest them, and contributing to the publication, a sample of the research and ideas coming out of the First Year Writing Seminars, has been wonderful.

Exit 11 encourages our students to take pride in their writing, and to situate themselves within a community of their fellow writers. I look forward to sharing the latest issue with students in tutorials and the Writing Center, as a model of strong, creative academic writing, and as an inspiration”.

SA NNA M C G R E G O R

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“The existence of Exit 11 is a great way to think beyond the common model of class professor as audience, and this can really help to concretize the tricky concept of ‘motive’. My favourite essays in the journal are the ones that fluidly integrate motive and make me forget I’m reading a class paper. Exit 11 also shows how the different FYWS, regardless of the topic, hold the same core values, but also how many kinds and genres of writing ultimately get published”.

SA M I A M E Z I A NE

“Having worked with Sohail Karmani’s course “Power and Ethics in Photography” over the past several years, it has been a joy to see students’ photography appear as the cover of several issues of Exit 11; this has allowed students to connect with the writing contained inside, while appreciating how the volumes are bound by the places and spaces they had been, felt, and reflected upon, communally. It is really a physical manifestation representing how space cultivates writing”.

Z A C HA RY SH E L L E NB E R G E R

“We refer to Exit 11 in class to look at introductions, motive, and thesis. It is useful to show students examples of the many different ways they can say something - and that they don’t have to select a thesis that is 100% provable, but rather one rich with potential for analysis and interpretation”.

KI M B E R LY SP E C H T

“What an absolute pleasure it is to tap into the very best of our student writing from the First Year Writing Seminar in Exit 11. The essays frequently provide me with the answer to difficult teaching questions such as motive, thesis, structure and conclusions”.

R A C HE L W OB U S

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Exit 11: A Journal of the First-Year Writing Seminars Issue 03, 2018–2019 Executive Editor Marion Wrenn Managing Editor Sweta Kumari

Senior Editors Samia Ahmed / Aieshah Arif/ Neelam Hanif / Rachel Wobus Associate Editors Nkem Chukwumerije / Ayan Ibrahim / Sanna McGregor / Samia Meziane / Joshua Mussa / Zachary Shellenberger / Kimberly Specht Contributing Editors Samuel Mark Anderson / Camilla Boisen / Andrew Joseph Bush / Soha El Achi / Sohail Karmani / Piia Mustamaki / Ken Nielsen / Deepak Unnikrishnan / Shuang Wen Photo Editor Sohail Karmani

Student Assistant Larayb Abrar

Founding Editor Asma Noureen Cover Photographer Mareya Khouri Design Consultant Minbar.co

Printer Royal Printing Press LLC

A big thank you to Kalle Taneli Kukkonen, Dean of Arts & Humanities; Bryan Waterman, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Development & Associate Professor of Literature; Kate Nordang, Program Manager (OUAD); and Holly Spence, Administrative Assistant. Each of them has generously supported this publication in various ways. And a special thank you to all our readers and writers.

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I came back to Mina Zayed to take this specific photograph. I knew what I was going for and what it was supposed to look like. After returning from my previous visit and skimming through my images on a large screen, I realized that my photo essay was still incomplete. The fish market with its slippery floor, smelly corners and loads of melting ice was primarily a place of bargains and financial transactions and I needed to capture it. This particular man stole my attention; he was standing on a pedestal with a bright lamp directly above his head, with a huge UAE flag hanging right behind him, and he was always smiling. I was standing nearby for at least twelve or fifteen minutes, trying to focus my manual lens, waiting for someone to stretch over the stand with a banknote. I was ignoring all the other stallholders who spotted an obvious weakness in my Western-like look and who were now eager to sell me a piece of jellyfish for double the price. I almost never ask for permission to take someone’s photograph. It steals the moment as well as everyone’s natural soul.

As usual, I asked for forgiveness instead. Then I left. I had what I needed.

“Mina Fish Market” by Sebastian Kalos

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Table of Contents

P H O T O G RA PH : Mina Fish Market – Sebastian Kalos

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Introduction – Marion Wrenn

P H O T O G RA PH : Timbers of the Gulf – Sara Almarzooqi

Essay 1 18

How to Build a Fire- The Power of Poetry in “This Big

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Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire:

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Absence and Uncertainty: A New Form of Terror

– Runyao Fan

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Ancestors: Our Blood-Related Strangers – Amy Kang

P H O T O G RA PH : Before They Sail Away – Usman Ali

Fake World” – Mary Collins

Ethnicized or Globalized? – Sana Elgamal

Essay 2 42

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No Simple Code: Google and the Exploitation of Altruism – Mary Collins

Representations of the Maasai: Jimmy Nelson’s fantasy

– Mareya A. Khouri

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Praying to Progressive Gods: The Liberating Role

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Kosovo: Convenient Humanitarian War? – Maja Wilbrink

of Violence – Luis Rodríguez

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Bodies of Love, Bodies of Hate – Lin Ye

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P H O T O G RA PH : Transformational Celebration

– Jordan Anthoneil Simpson

Essay 3 79

The Virtual Circus: A Comparison of Appropriation

and Contemporary Instagram Trends – Tatyana Brown

of The Black Body in 19th & 20th Century Freak Shows

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You’re Not One of Us: Britain’s Problem with Returning

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“The Air is Delicate” (Macbeth 1.6.10):

Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More – Rayna Li

Foreign Terrorist – Omar Hussein

The Role of Olfactory Design in

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How do we maintain our sense of cultural identity

P H O T O G RA PH : The Arabian Dream – Mareya Khouri

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Smelly Sounds – Phonetic Symbolism

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Performing Family – a Utopian Vision – Nuraishah Shafiq

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The Paratha, Abu Dhabi and Migration – Abhyudaya Tyagi

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Creativity within Silence – Cameron Wehr

P H O T O G RA PH : The City’s Life – Am Silruk

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Notable Submissions 2018–2019

P H O T O G RA PH : Before the golden hour passes

– Alicja Borzyskowska

in new environments? – Meg Nakagawa

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in Scent – Lachlan Pham

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Introduction The much-beloved belief that “every writer needs a reader” fuels the work we do in the First-year Writing Seminars (FYWS). It informs the way we think about writers, readers, and writing as a form of critical thinking and communication. We not only cherish that idea, we test it regularly by putting it into practice in one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse academic settings in the world. First-year students are joining a student population representing 115 nationalities, a group of people who speak more than 110 languages. So, as you hold this book in your hands, you are participating in a long chain of engaged transformations: these authors were once brand-new first-year students, as students in FYWS they became authors, and now you are becoming a reader for these wonderful essays. If you are a student in one of our FYWS then, as you read Exit 11, we hope you’ll feel the implicit message in its pages: welcome to NYUAD. You are joining an amazing conversation-- as a reader and a writer.

It is hard to understate the value of learning to write clearly, powerfully, and well. It is equally hard to understate the necessity of learning to read widely and wisely. One of the things you will learn in a First-year Writing Seminar is to read closely, to pay attention. This is the first step in learning to write well, and it’s sometimes the first thing we forget to do. As a result, the FYWSs create opportunities for students to slow down and reckon with an array of complex, challenging, transformative texts. That sense-making impulse is one of the features that unify the collection of essays included in this volume. Read for the steady heartbeat of the work we asked these students to do: Pay attention.

Be curious. Read closely. Envision your reader. Make arguments. Make sense.

If this volume is in your hands, then it is there, perhaps, because of a class assignment. You’ve been asked to read an essay or two in these pages. If so: courage. These pieces unfold in surprising ways. They will not only show you

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what it looks like when an author makes a thoughtful, persuasive argument about the significance of a chosen source or cultural practice, they’ll invite you to participate in that sense-making project I was just celebrating. “What’s most rewarding about teaching FYWS, as well as reading the Exit 11 entries,” notes Dr. Piia Mustamaki, “is no doubt getting to witness the students’ own critical thinking flourish. This is also what I value the most in an essay: the powerful result of an imaginative, intellectual pursuit expressed confidently in the student writer’s own voice.” Part of the pleasure of teaching in the Writing Program is the way we see first-year students find their own voices as they become attuned to the demands of scholarly writing. Part of the pleasure of reading these essays is in the way each writer situates their ideas among the ideas of others, and writes for you. As Dr. Ken Nielsen notes, the best essays “are curious, engaging, and, oftentimes, imperfect. They provide you a sense of the writer and take the reader’s experience seriously. They argue and they allow the reader to disagree.”

The essays in this volume were competitively selected over many months.

We cast a wide net and sought essays from the array of classes that make up the First-year Writing Seminars: from “Inventions of Childhood” and “Understanding Fatherhood” to “Saving Strangers” and “Making Sense of Scent”; from “Street Food” and “The Outsider” to “Worlds Connected/ Worlds Apart”; from “Imagined Geographies” and “Taste, Culture, and the Self” to “Power and Ethics in Photography” and “The Politics of Spectacle.”

Though the course themes vary widely, the essays form a coherent collection.

The essays included in this volume transcend their status as a “homework assignment” and reveal their authors as thoughtful human beings making sense of sources, asking analytical questions, using evidence to make sense of the very questions they’ve posed.

As you read, you may notice that each essay follows a different citation format.

The varying citation styles reflect the fact that our faculty draw upon their individual research, artistic practices, and areas of expertise to craft their seminars. Instead of collapsing all of the essays into a single format for an Exit 11 “house style,” we opted to showcase the various modes of citation so readers get a better sense of the logic and purpose of accurate citation within

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a range of disciplines. Let these essays teach you about the work of making creative, complex, (ir)reverent, ethically-sourced and cited arguments.

That’s precisely the kind of work you will be asked to do in the writing course you have selected. And we’re here to help, if you need us. The team of Writing Program Faculty members, Writing Instructors, Writing Center consultants, and Peer Tutors who assist and serve students in the FYWS are poised to help you see what you are capable of – and then push beyond that limit. The FYWS are designed to help you develop a persuasive and compelling presence on the page. We’ll help you find your voice and express your ideas as a thinker and a scholar, as a reader and a writer.

M A R I ON W R E NN DIRECTOR OF TH E W RI TI N G P RO G R A M

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The palm tree captures perfectly the values deeply rooted in the lives of the Khaleeji people. Strength, generosity and patience. This tree has served as a precious resource, trusted by nomads for centuries. I captured this image in a barn on my family’s farm. The remnants of one of the oldest palm trees rested upon one another, carrying in them memories lost to the dust of time. This photograph echoes the palm’s sense of giving, for even though it no longer stands, its timbers will spark up flames for many desert gatherings to come.

“Timbers of the Gulf” by Sara Almarzooqi

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Essay 1

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How to Build a Fire: The Power of Poetry in This Big Fake World M A RY C OL L I NS

Ada Limón’s poem “Epilogue: This Big Fake World” (see Appendix) is a call to readers to live lives that break through the mundane nature of daily tasks in order to make sense of the world. Through a series of sharp and sometimes unexpected images, Limón builds a case for the reader to join her in constructing the best possible lifestyle out of whatever situation they find themselves in, without worrying about what others are doing around them. As the title implies, the piece is grounded in the ‘fake’ and monotonous nature of the world, but it creates an incredibly hopeful message within this bleak context. In just sixteen lines of free verse, the poem captures and enacts a rich perspective on the purpose of life. It ultimately suggests that each person contains within themselves the power to break free from a stifling culture by tearing down the confining aspects of life and transforming them into something positive. Exercising the power to both destroy and create conventions is portrayed as an essential obligation for every individual.

The poem’s message of empowerment is revealed through a compelling mixture of imagery and rhetoric. Limón balances specific, vivid details with generalized calls to her readers in order to create a comfortable yet persuasive tone. She opens with an inviting statement: “The object is to not simply exist in this world / of radio clocks and moon pies” (lines 1-2). This first phrase seems effortless, but it is really doing a lot of work. Within the initial two lines the poem shifts its focus from a very wide discussion of the nature of existence to a small, specific image (“radio clocks and moon pies”) without losing the reader along the way. By establishing this train of thought, the poem begins to attribute enormous significance to everyday objects that would otherwise be considered mundane or unimportant. The opening also functions to establish the credibility of the poem’s speaker. The speaker clearly has a message that they are confident about sharing, as conveyed through the poem’s invitational stance. They have a unique perception of

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the world shown through their descriptions, which makes the reader want to know more, but their tone is relatable and natural. The confidence and accessibility of the speaker amplifies the poem’s call to action. The poem itself becomes situated firmly outside of the monotonous aspects of life it initially describes, promising to reveal the speaker’s compelling secret about intentional living. From the very first lines this promise demands our attention because it contrasts with our surrounding world that is full of mindless words. Unlike the advertisements and news headlines that surround us throughout our daily lives, the poem begins by transforming and enlivening the language of the everyday. And since the speaker appears to be drawing from personal experience, it seems likely that we will be capable of following their advice.

Our confidence in the speaker is essential because it is not immediately clear what they are asking us to do. The heart of the argument is encoded in a string of metaphorical actions. Images of destruction and creation take a central place in the piece:

Shouldn’t we make a fire out of

everyday things, build something out of too many

nails and not wonder if we are right to build

without permission from the other dull furniture? (5-8)

This question is posed directly after the poem’s opening description of the state of the world, offering the beginnings of a nonconformist action plan.

The speaker advises us to burn and build within the same breath. At first this advice may seem self-contradictory—making a fire is practically the opposite of constructing anything. But both images rely on the idea of taking risks without fear of the danger represented by fire or nails. Through the use of metaphor, Limón is creating an argument for a lifestyle that incorporates risk-taking as a way of overcoming mundane conventionality. The imagery is deliberately rich and simultaneously vague, as each reader will have a different idea of what they want to burn or what they want to build. With this room for interpretation comes room for hope. It becomes clear that burning, as described here, is not a purely destructive act. Instead, it is part of a radical act of creating agency that is phrased not merely as a choice but as a responsibility. Through these lines, Limón draws readers into a mutual

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obligation to live a daring life. Readers are afforded a certain comfort and security by being acknowledged as part of such a collective, one that is based on individuality and a rejection of “the other dull furniture.” In this way the poem creates a fellowship out of its readers. Its members are called to both defy and transform the conventions of mainstream culture. According to the speaker’s hopeful stance, rejecting one’s culture isn’t enough—life is best lived when we are defiantly inventing new things out of the old. This relationship between endings and beginnings can also be seen in the fact that the piece is framed as an epilogue. An epilogue is generally meant to end a story, but it also signifies the start of a new story, situating a specific narrative in the vast continuity of time. Similarly, Limón’s poem calls for an ending to conventionality that is not really an ending but a beginning of something strange and exciting and new. What initially seems like a destruction or rejection of culture is actually part of the construction of a new personal culture driven by our own preferences.

The structure of the piece echoes its ethos of destructive creation. It opens with descriptions of disjointed aspects of life, moves to a portrayal of destruction through fire, and ends with the idea of picking up these pieces.

By the end of the poem, the focus is entirely on creation and reclamation.

The speaker suggests a way forward: “[L]et’s make a nest, each us, of our own pieces / of glass and weeds and names we have found” (12-13). In a way, the poem itself is creating this nest. The pieces that it collects are the “radio clocks and moonpies”, the “holidays and lunch breaks”, the “too many nails”. It weaves these dissonant images together in order to form a hopeful ending. Limón is demonstrating through her composition of the poem that it is possible to follow the speaker’s advice. On another level, the poem utilizes a circular structure to reveal its message. It begins with a statement that is inherently a promise. Readers understand that by the end of the piece they will have been introduced to a perspective on “the object” of existence. At the end of the poem, after illustrating a series of metaphorical courses of action, Limón reaches this conclusion: “let all of us hold close to the lost and the unclear, / and, in our own odd little way, find some refuge here” (15-16). The importance of the last two lines is emphasized by the end rhymes, which do not occur throughout the rest of the piece. The poem completes the circle by

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landing on a clear answer that directly corresponds to the question implied at the beginning. The speaker has finally revealed their secret: the ability to live rather than to simply exist lies within each one of us, and we can rest easy knowing that “the lost and the unclear” can be accepted without being solved. The clarity here contrasts with the confusion present in the poem’s earlier imagery. Yet this confusion and complexity is exactly what makes the piece so captivating, and what makes poetry in general such poignant form of expression. Poetry itself can be seen to function by embracing complexity and chaos—by following the very advice imparted by this poem’s closing lines.

In the end, the power that this poem draws through its structure, imagery, and rhetorical moves provides a model for a defiantly optimistic lifestyle.

Ideas of destruction and uninspiring chaos are secondary to the uplifting goal of making something beautiful out of this messy life. It is an epilogue in that it is a promise of endless new beginnings. The impact of this piece speaks to the power of poetry as an art form. By writing this poem, Limón is performing her own radical act of creation, synthesizing her observations of the world into a meaningful piece of art. For readers, encountering the poem offers a chance to pause and reflect on the greater purpose of life, no matter what busy thoughts are crowding their heads at the moment. Choosing to read poetry— to actually absorb it and let the words settle underneath your skin—is a way of enacting Limón’s epilogue.

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W OR KS C I TE D

Limón, Ada. “Epilogue: This Big Fake World.” This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse, Pearl Editions, 2006, p. 66.

A P P E NDI X

Epilogue: This Big Fake World The object is to not simply exist in this world of radio clock and moon pies, where holidays and lunch breaks bring the only relief from the machine that is our mind humming inside of its shell. Shouldn’t we make a fire out of everyday things, build something out of too many nails and not wonder if we are right to build without permission from the other dull furniture?

Out of this small plot we are given, small plot of cement and electrified wires, small plot of cement and electrified wires, small plot of razors and outlandish liquor names, let’s make a nest, each of us, of our own pieces of glass and weeds and names we have found.

Somewhere along the banks of this liquid world let all of us hold close to the lost and the unclear, and, in our own odd little way, find some refuge here.

- Ada Limón

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Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire: Ethnicized or Globalized?

SA NA E L G A M A L

Danny Boyle’s acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire, set in one of the slums in Mumbai, India, narrates the life of Jamal, an uneducated orphan who, despite all odds, emerges from the slum and wins 20 million rupees in the famous Indian television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Through a series of gripping flashbacks, the film not only explains how Jamal knew the answers, but also serves as a lens to inspect the cultural foundation and urban landscape of Mumbai. The concept of globalization, commonly defined as the process entailing the interconnectedness between nations and the spread of practices and people between countries, is vividly integrated in the film. Globalization is portrayed as an indispensable aspect of Mumbai’s transformation, with numerous scenes serving to point to its significance in shaping new Mumbai.

However, an anti-Muslim riot scene, which shows Hindu nationalists fiercely attacking a Muslim community in the slum, depicts violence stemming from religious unrest in globalized Mumbai. The scene showcases the puzzling, contradictory, and dual nature of Mumbai’s transformation – the growing ethnic discrimination and religious intolerance, and the simultaneous transformation from just another one of India’s cities, to India’s promising candidate for global city status. The riot scene in the film adds another layer of complexity to the projected image of Mumbai as a city. Taken together, this scene and the film as a whole articulate the contradiction that communicates a cracked and refracted image of globalization, dismissing the simplistic onesided image of development that is often associated with globalization, and replacing it with one that has greater multifacetedness and complexity.

The anti-Muslim riot scene is the predominant optic through which the phenomenon of ethnic violence can be thoroughly investigated. It begins as an idyllic, laughter-filled scene, with Muslim mothers washing clothes as they watch their children play in the water. This peaceful setting sharply contrasts what follows, where a group of rod-carrying Hindu rioters sprints in

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to attack the Muslim community. The scene portrays armed rioters violently hitting Muslims with rods and mercilessly setting their property on fire. The scene captures Jamal’s personal tragedy of losing his mother, who dies in the riot after being beaten with a rod in the head by a Hindu fundamentalist.

The tremendous force of the blow was depicted by the sound of the rod’s piercing crack upon the mother’s head. The chaos and terror of the riot was made palpable through an array of visual effects. The use of a shaky handheld camera serves to accentuate the utter state of disorder and confusion, while low-level closeups of the running feet of Jamal and his brother Salim amplify their desperation to escape the violence. The blurriness of the shots reflects the extreme state of disorientation of Jamal and Salim in their frantic attempt to escape. The extreme hatred and violence towards Muslims depicted in this scene is a fictionalized version of what Arjun Appadurai describes in his essay “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai,” where he writes “…[Muslims] would be hunted down and killed or evicted from their homes wherever possible” (649). The scene expresses the overwhelming violence that is borne by Mumbai’s Muslims.

The profound hatred and violence are accurately portrayed in the scene particularly in an over-the-shoulder shot where a Hindu rioter throws a flaming bottle that sets a Muslim man on fire. Through such depicted violence, the scene aspires to capture a crucial aspect of Mumbai’s transformation: “decosmopolitanization” and “ethnicization” of the city. In the context of Mumbai, the process of ethnicization, discussed by Appadurai, involves complete eradication of the city’s multiethnicity to create a purely Hindu space (630). Decosmopolitanization, a term also used by Appadurai, is a phenomenon in which values of inclusiveness and shared morality are gradually replaced by social, ethnic or religious intolerance (649). Appadurai introduces the birth of the xenophobic Indian party Shiva Sena which embraced a polarized vision for completely Hinduizing Mumbai. He writes “… [Shiva Sena] managed to violently rewrite urban space as sacred, national, Hindu space” (630). The party publicly attacked notions of cosmopolitanism and religious harmony, and instead cultivated a sense of immense unjustified hatred towards Muslims in the city. The ethnic cleansing depicted in the scene, with Muslims being driven from their homes by Hindu rioters, ties with

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Appadurai’s statement that “…the massive sense of having no place in Mumbai was overwhelmingly borne by its Muslims” (649). The scene, therefore, does not solely capture ethnic violence; rather, it aims to accentuate the deepening Hindu-Muslim conflict, the growing ethnicization, and the fading ethnoreligious intimacy in the new decosmopolitanized Mumbai. The anti-Muslim riot scene, therefore, is a genuine embodiment of Shiva Sena’s efforts – a provoking glimpse into the dark side of Mumbai’s complex transformation.

While the anti-Muslim riot scene serves to highlight Mumbai’s ethnicization and religious unrest, the film is rich in connotations of globalization and depictions of Mumbai as a ‘global city’. The call center which Jamal worked in plays an instrumental role in the film as a microcosm of the prominent theme of globalization. This call center (of a British company) hires Indian employees rather than British citizens in order to save on employee wages.

Jamal only learns about the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? from the call center, which results in him winning 20 million rupees after his victory on the show, and his transition from rags to riches. In this way, globalization is ultimately portrayed in a positive light; it is depicted here as a metaphorical vehicle for a better life, and as essential in today’s modernized world. Another prominent scene in the film that particularly emphasizes globalization is the construction site where Jamal and Salim reunite. Salim sweeps his gaze across Mumbai’s skyline, then, looking down at their unrecognizable former slum, said “We used to live right there, man. Now, it’s all business. India is at the center of the world, bhai” (Slumdog Millionaire). Salim’s statement succinctly encapsulates one side of Mumbai’s transformation; his words highlight the country’s escalating global competitiveness and growing enterprise, India’s astonishing ascent to become a global nation of emerging centrality and modernity. Appadurai writes “… Bombay became a site of crucial changes in trade, finance, and industrial manufacture” (630), clearly marking the city’s transformation to ‘the global Mumbai.’ The depiction of the demolition of the slumland where Jamal and Salim grew up and its redevelopment into a series of high-rise buildings highlights the concept of the diminishing cosmopolitanism in Mumbai, and its intolerance towards not just Muslims, but towards the poor as well.

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Crucially, the riot scene captures the grinding poverty of slum-dwellers. The Hindu rioters in the scene, who are in dirty, impoverished attire, appear to come from a poor region as well, and hence probably inhabit a neighboring slum. To understand the relationship between poverty and violence implied by the riot scene, we can draw upon Appadurai’s statement that “…the most horrendously poor, crowded, and degraded areas of the city were turned into battlegrounds of the poor against the poor” (649). His description of the slums, which indicates that the battles and bloodsheds occurred mainly among poor and impoverished Hindus and Muslims, sheds an interesting light on the puzzling underlying link between ethnicization and globalization. Slumdwellers, who live in dire conditions with no access to basic amenities, are the segment of the society that suffers most from this wave of globalization. This is because globalization results in increased trade and global production, which results in higher demand for high-skilled workers. This translates to lower demand and hence lower wages for low skilled workers and impoverished people (in this case, slum-dwellers). Appadurai describes Mumbai’s globalized transformation when he writes “[Jobs] became harder to get…[Slums] and shacks began to proliferate” (629). He also writes that “… this process began to take its toll on all but the wealthiest of the city’s population” (629). By this description, he points out that the dynamics of globalization have the greatest adverse impact on the poorest sections of society, while the richest are unaffected. Hence, the daily life of slum-dwellers becomes a genuine struggle for survival, and thus, they explode in ritual acts of ethnic warfare. With the rise of globalization rises another parallel, which is the escalating inequality and class segregation. Such urban inequalities preoccupy both Appadurai as a theorist and Danny Boyle, the film’s director. These iniquities manifest themselves in riots of the poor against the poor, as described by Appadurai and depicted by the anti-Muslim riot scene. Taken together, Appadurai’s essay and Slumdog Millionaire illustrate that globalization can be perceived to be a cause for ethnicization – a potent catalyst for social stratification and ethnic violence.

The fact that the years in which Mumbai became globalized queerly coincided with the years when the city was being ethnically cleansed is a genuinely provoking observation that hints at the existence of an elusive

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connection between both processes. The anti-Muslim riot scene in Slumdog Millionaire adds another dimension to the portrayed dynamics of Mumbai’s transformation, depicting an inherent contradiction in the fabric of the city. It projects a paradoxical image of Mumbai as a city aspiring to be truly global yet striving to be ethnically pure, raising the question of whether India is indeed a forthcoming globalized nation or yet another third world.

The juxtaposition of the riot scene within the context of the film as a whole itself uncovers interesting theoretical insights into globalization as a complex multifaceted process with far-reaching effects. As such, perhaps the increasing ethnicization in Mumbai can be, in part, viewed as an unanticipated consequence of escalating global integration amidst the city’s transformation to global modernity. The juxtaposition of globalization and decosmopolitanization in the context of Mumbai’s transformation therefore raises the compelling question: to what extent is a cosmopolitan mentality central to modern globalization?

W OR KS C I TE D

Appadurai, Arjun. “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai.” Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 627–651.

Slumdog Millionaire. Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandon, Performances by Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, and Saurabh Shukla, Celador Films, Film4, 2008.

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Absence and Uncertainty: A New Form of Terror R U NYA O FA N

During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, an unknown man was pictured confronting a column of tanks moving down an avenue. The image is widely considered a symbol of resistance against the state’s overwhelming power. But in reality, the man was pulled aside by two unidentified men after the confrontation and disappeared. Rumor has it that he was arrested by the police; his exact fate remains a mystery. In October 2018, Saudi Arabian journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi went missing after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Only with global attention and pressure were investigations carried out, concluding that Khashoggi was ordered to be killed. Still, many details of Khashoggi’s final moments remain obscure.

Instead of publicly punishing these enemies of the state, the authorities chose to keep the assassins’ fate a secret. This demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish that “torture as a public spectacle” (7) has disappeared. While Foucault’s main argument is that an element of torture in the contemporary penal system targets the mind instead of the body (11), I wish to go beyond it by arguing that the system’s subtlety and lack of public display create obscurity and secrecy, which work upon the people’s mind as powerfully as excessive display of cruelty. The power asymmetry is maintained by the inability to see, through which a new, arguably stronger form of terror (49) is established. In this essay, I will provide a close reading of Foucault’s portrayal of the public executions before the French Revolution as an “exercise of ‘terror’” (49), and how the element of public display has eventually been downplayed through reforms (7). Looking into the shift of the penal system as described by Foucault, I will illustrate how the features of the reformed system retain the element of terror through a different mechanism, one not supported by the excess of spectacle but the absence of it.

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Foucault argues that public executions intentionally establish “terror” by making everyone see that the criminal’s body is fully subject to the sovereign’s will (49). According to him, public executions display “the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength” through “imbalance and excess” (49). Here, we see that two elements are essential to achieving the concept of terror: the offender’s body and the people’s eyes. The body serves as a concrete, physical medium to carry the abstract concept of asymmetric power relation. The ubiquitous force of the sovereign on all of its people manifests itself as actual forces that leave horrible marks on the offender’s body. Through this process, the sovereign materializes the oppression as a direct, relatable pain “before all eyes” (48), and effectively passes the sense of terror into “the hearts of men” (49).

After the detailed analysis of the penal system before the 19th century, Foucault describes how the penal system has been reformed, and how public spectacles designed to inflict physical pain have been replaced by subtle mechanisms that work on the mind (11). Punishment “leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness” (9). In the modern penal system, punishment has been taken away from the public attention. Sufferings are “deprived of their visual display” and punishment tends to “become the most hidden part of the penal process” (9). In Foucault’s argument, this shift corresponds to the changing role of the body, from the recipient of “unbearable sensations” to an instrument of “suspended rights” (11). From physical pain that hurts momentarily, torture has transformed into a psychological ordeal that could last for decades (11).

While Foucault describes the disappearance of public torture as a phenomenon accompanying the body’s new function, I argue that the disappearance of public torture itself can be considered as a new form of “terror” (49).

The two conditions of Foucault’s idea of terror, the manifestation of power and the communication of this manifestation to the people, can be achieved not only through public manipulation of the offender’s body, but also the lack of information on their suffering. To successfully establish terror, the unrestrained power of the sovereign must find a carrier, a tangible representation, which needs to be presented to the people.

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Although the reformed penal system has relinquished its right to produce an insurmountable degree of pain on the offender’s body, the sovereign still has full control over the body, which “now serves as an instrument or intermediary” (11). Instead of tearing the body apart, the sovereign restricts its movement. The body’s complete obedience to this restriction serves as the new manifestation of the overwhelming power, and the general public is informed of it: “The publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence” (9). What distinguishes the two systems is that in the old system, public execution serves as both the announcement and enforcement of the power, whereas the modern system announces the power through trial and sentencing, and the enforcement of it continues long after the public announcement and remains largely obscure. The distance the modern system has put between the justice and the punishment (10) and the segregation it entails produce an information blackout. Despite words and pictures that reach the public from the prison, the people have lost the ability to see for themselves, the most reliable way of cognition. While people in the past see with their own eyes the worst things that could be done to a criminal, they are now left to suspect and wonder. While the people used to be “the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment” (58), they are now denied of that role. The uncertainty allows the formulation of the worst speculation, and the powerlessness reinforces the dissymmetry between the sovereign and the people. Spectacle has a limit, while imagination is boundless. Excess leaves impressions, while absence catalyzes fear. Instead of setting up the stage and offering a cruel show, the sovereign may now leave the work to people’s mind, where a thousand shows, one crueler than the other, maintain the idea of terror through the power of absence.

The absence of display coincides with the concept of the Panopticon. A design for prisons, the Panopticon has a watchtower which allows guards to watch all the cells without being seen by prisoners. Though it is impossible for a guard to watch over all prisoners all the time, prisoners behave themselves because of the perpetual possibility of being seen. As the fear of being watched is not derived from the sight of guards but the possibility of their presence, the Panopticon works even if there is no guard in the central tower. Similarly, when the ability to see is deprived of the people, the terror

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of punishment comes from the range of possibilities instead of the actual penalty. What happened to the man confronting tanks in 1989? Perhaps he was executed, or perhaps the government did not do anything to him.

Regardless, terror is maintained for as long as his fate remains unknown. With uncertainty, ideas of terror and total surveillance work better on people’s minds. The absence of public display not only preserves terror, but also allows it to reach deeper into our fear.

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Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.

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Ancestors, Our Blood-Related Strangers A M Y KA NG

As the old saying goes, “blood is thicker than water,” suggesting we generally feel a close bond with those we are blood-related to—our relatives. We often see the reflection of ourselves within our relatives and thus find them somehow familiar, even if we might not know them personally. Accordingly, many of us spend the time to commemorate relatives who have gone before us—our ancestors. We flip through worn-out albums to look at their blackand-white photos, listen to their word-of-mouth life stories, and share their memories with other relatives. However, the more we try to learn about our ancestors, the more distant, lifeless, and foreign they sometimes become. In her poem “Ancestors” (see Appendix), Stephanie Bolster explores the ironic relationship we have with our ancestors and challenges the near-universal belief that we are connected to our ancestors beyond time, arguing that most of them are, in fact, no more than strangers to us. In doing so, the poem goes beyond its surface meaning and prompts us to question our seemingly selfless intention behind honoring our ancestors. Considering that we do not perfectly connect with our ancestors, do we genuinely honor them out of our curiosity or is it rather out of our self-serving desire to figure out who we are and where we come from through them?

Bolster acknowledges the duality in our relationship with our ancestors from the very beginning of the poem: “We didn’t know them. They’re in us the way a mirror is” (line 1). The first sentence directly states that we have never personally known our ancestors. Then, the second sentence compares the way our ancestors are in us to “the way a mirror is” (1). The phrase that our ancestors are “in us” may be referring to the dominant cultural belief that we should keep our ancestors near our hearts and in our thoughts (1).

This comparison, at first, seems to only recognize how we can see ourselves within our ancestors but paradoxically also points out the inherent limits of how much we can know about them. To elaborate, based on the primary

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characteristic of a mirror to reflect an image of our physical selves, the poet implies that our ancestors, like a mirror, oftentimes do resemble us at least on an outward level, and this resemblance can lead to a greater sense of familiarity with them. However, a mirrored image is one-dimensional and can never wholly capture our three-dimensional and multifaceted reality.

We sometimes mistakenly assume that it can because its main function is to reflect whatever is in front of it. This sheds light upon the other side of the comparison, which is that we can never fully know what our ancestors were like, similar to the limited extent to which we can see and know from a mirror.

We sometimes think we can, but we can never know our ancestors’ warmth, thoughts, personality, feelings. In essence, Bolster suggests that although we are indeed related to our ancestors and might find them familiar, as if they are the mirror reflection of ourselves, such a perception is extremely limited.

We are, in some way, tricked into believing that we are connected with our ancestors in the same way we tend to consider a one-dimensional mirrored image of ourselves as an accurate representation in a three-dimensional world.

The mirror-to-ancestor comparison also provokes us to think that we yearn to learn more about our ancestors in hopes of answering two of the most difficult conundrums in our lives: who we are and where we come from. As explained above, we can often see bits and parts of ourselves in photos and life stories of our ancestors. Since we share genetic and cultural roots with them, many of our traits are often similar to theirs. This is precisely why we seem to find our ancestors familiar to some degree. For this reason, we are prone to look to our ancestors when we try to better understand who we are, just as we look at ourselves in the mirror to get a clearer reflection of what we look like in the real world. Because we are aware that our ancestors’ lives have formed the path that has led to where we stand today, we might be trying to connect with them to get some clue about our origins. This leads to the conjecture that we might be commemorating our ancestors not solely for their honor but rather to use our knowledge of our ancestors, as limited as it is, to learn more about who we are and where we come from. In other words, we honor our ancestors out of our desire for self-discovery and not necessarily for our deep-rooted reverence for them.

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In the following four lines, Bolster focuses on describing how distant we are from our ancestors, and, by making conscious literary choices, characterizes this estrangement with helplessness and an ache. These sentiments of loss come from our supposed inability to connect with our ancestors then trigger us to further ponder why we desire this connection so much. Bolster mentions that we have never known whom our ancestors have loved and have never “kissed” their “mouth[s]” that have “a certain heat” (2-4). In other words, she suggests that we do not know the things we would have known about our ancestors and that we have never experienced what we would have experienced with them, had we ever been so close to them. And, when making these remarks, Bolster purposefully chooses which grammatical tense to use, sometimes deviating from the convention. For instance, the phrase “whomever they loved we never knew” utilizes past tense, even though using present tense seems to be more natural in this context since “we” refers to ourselves in the current state (2). Through this, Bolster may be stressing that we have never, at any point, gotten to know who our ancestors’ loved ones are because we live in times far removed from our ancestors’ times. Similarly, Bolster’s remark that our ancestors’ mouths are “whose we might have kissed had we been then” is grammatically crafted to imply that we could have been close to our ancestors if we had lived in the same time as them (4). In both cases, the difference in time is what keeps us from truly knowing our ancestors. And, due to the linearity of time, we cannot simply break down this barrier. We cannot go back in time. In essence, due to this unbridgeable gap of time, there is no way for us to truly connect with our ancestors, which we long to do. Through her conscious grammatical choices, Bolster successfully captures this sense of helplessness and ache in the nature of the relationship we have with our ancestors. But this in turn brings up a suspicion: why is Bolster expressing helplessness and sadness about our inability to connect with our ancestors if our ancestors are, as she claims, no more than strangers to us? Then comes the conjecture that the sense of emptiness and ache that she refers to does not stem from our love for our ancestors, but rather from our desire to gain something from our connection to them. In other words, this situation is sad, not because we cannot know more about our ancestors, but rather because we cannot know about ourselves through our connection with them as we wished we could.

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Bolster incorporates imagery and literary comparisons to further highlight the distant nature of our relationship with our ancestors. And by doing so, not only does she achieve this purpose, but she also reinforces the aforementioned speculation that our remembrance of our ancestors might come from our selfish intentions to know about ourselves. For example, Bolster compares our ancestors to “stone[s],” “ghosts,” and “dolls they played with” (7-8). The overarching quality these three objects share is their lifelessness. All three of them can easily be manipulated, ignored, and neglected by us because they are lifeless. We kick around stones and ignore invisible ghosts. We play around with dolls but forget about them soon after we’re done. They are rarely ever that important to us; they are merely supplementary aspects of our lives.

By equating the three objects to our ancestors, their essential qualities of lifelessness and relative insignificance are also attributed to our ancestors.

Despite the fact that our ancestors have once been alive, they are simply too lifeless, cold, and almost object-like in our eyes today. They are often as invisible as ghosts are to us, and we often treat them as if we are dealing with a stone or a doll. Even if we neglect our ancestors and “lie them back” like we do with our dolls after we play with them, they won’t respond, leaving “their skin the dusty grey of dust” and “their hair past gloss” (10-11). This shows that the attitude we take in our relationship with our ancestors strikingly resembles the ones we have when dealing with non-living, non-significant objects.

This fundamentally contradicts the way we form and maintain bonds with people who we are close to, such as our relatives. In other words, contrary to our surmise that we really do care about and honor our ancestors like our other relatives, the actual behaviors we exhibit when we interact with them arguably fail to prove this point. This then supports our conjecture that we are, in some way, playing around with the identities and memories of our ancestors, as we do with a doll, to mainly form our identities. Our seemingly selfless and respectful commemoration of our ancestors turns out to be, again, self-centered.

In her poem “Ancestors,” Bolster adroitly suggests that our ancestors are more foreign to us than not by making conscious grammatical choices and deliberately using metaphor, simile, and imagery in her lines. However, this

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is not the only message we can get from the poem. Through the particular way it characterizes our perception of our ancestors, the poem provokes us to deepen our understanding of the dynamics behind our relationship with our ancestors. We get to consider our dominant practice of remembering our ancestors in another light as a self-centered attempt to solve our own existential dilemma rather than out of our deep reverence for them. As limited as our information of our ancestors is, we still strive to use it in order to better understand who we are and where we come from as part of our so-called journey of self-discovery.

W OR KS C I TE D

Bolster, Stephanie. “Ancestors.” Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 99, 19 August 2019. http://pbqmag.org/steph-bolster-ancestors/

A P P E NDI X

Ancestors We didn’t know them. They’re in us the way a mirror is.

Whomever they loved we never knew. There is a mouth in a photograph that has a certain heat but we do not know that mouth. It is whose we might have kissed had we been then.

It is a stitch missed or loosed a twitch resisted.

They held their heads still which gave them the look of stone or ghosts. Eyes held open so they are the dolls they played with, porcelain, chips hidden under the hair. Lie them back and they’d shut into their carriages without a hum their skin the dusky grey of dust even their hair past gloss and pulled so taut it hurts.

- Stephanie Bolster

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Whether it’s capturing moments, recording history, or documenting feelings, photographs communicate stories. This photograph depicts a moment in the last few days of a fisherman’s life at Mina Port as he is forced to leave his workplace. Whilst documenting the silence and emptiness they leave behind, this photograph also attempts to preserve the fading culture of the fishermen.

A memory saved; a narrative uncovered.

“Before They Sail Away” by Usman Ali

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Essay 2

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“No Simple Code”: Google and the Exploitation of Altruism M A RY C OL L I NS

A Google ad appears on the TV screen. The scene is set with a contemplative piano chord as a combination of numbers and letters printed on cream-colored paper appears in frame. As audiences across the US prepare to be mesmerized between chips and dip and football-related small talk, the chord changes and the advertisement cuts to another picture of a similar code. It is not obvious what context the codes are in or what they mean—they are simply there.

Then the narrator begins to speak in a calm, soothing voice. He reassures the consumers by telling them that for most people, these codes won’t mean anything. As he speaks, the soft piano chords continue in the background, and with each chord shift another picture of a code shows up. Some are typewritten, some are printed, some are red, some are black. In many of them the grainy texture of the paper is evident, while in others the background is smooth. The narrator slowly reveals the significance of the codes, explaining that only 7% of viewers will understand what they mean. He describes how this 7% of people will have made big sacrifices in their lives, spending time away from loved ones and putting themselves in difficult and dangerous situations.

Images of soldiers from different ethnic backgrounds can be glimpsed as the narrator states that this 7% does what they do to keep “the rest of us” safe. As the montage comes to an end, the ad’s branding is revealed for the first time: a Google search bar pops up, and the phrase “job search for veterans 12B” is typed into it before our eyes. Immediately, three well-paying jobs pop up below the search term, showing off Google’s search capabilities—all redeemed through the conveniently-placed caveat that “no simple code can define who you are.” But what message is this ad really conveying?

This advertisement was created by Google in partnership with ad agencies Essence and PHD to be aired during the 2019 Super Bowl. The agencies pride themselves on their revolutionary advertising approaches which attempt to extend the limits of what an advertisement can do and be—Essence claims

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that they are actually “making advertising more valuable” through their work.

Such strategies can be seen at play in the elegant, streamlined nature of the Google ad, which strives to cut through the clutter and noise of surrounding Super Bowl ads. It accomplishes this goal by making an emotional appeal to patriotism at a personal level. The Google brand becomes linked to charitable actions. Want to support veterans? Support Google, and you’ll be doing so by extension, the advertisement suggests. This is an uplifting message, and it isn’t entirely far from the truth—the advertisement is nodding towards a branch of a larger campaign, “Grow with Google”, which is focused on creating opportunities for veterans directly through Google itself. According to the initiative’s website, Google is also helping veterans build careers in IT, connect with veteran-owned businesses, and start businesses of their own. Yet however admirable Google’s actions towards veterans may (or may not) be, the “Job Search for Veterans” ad is engaged in a powerful act of manipulation, preying upon our own altruism as well as the present sociopolitical moment in the US. By presenting Google’s product as a solution to veteran rehabilitation, this advertisement is making a larger statement: that powerful, profit-driven corporations like Google can be trusted to unite fragmented viewpoints and ultimately guide society’s moral compass. The ad activates our longing to engage in meaningful action and enact social change, but then channels these altruistic impulses right back into consumerism.

In order to strengthen a sense of trust with its American audience, this advertisement crafts a carefully apolitical appeal to patriotism. It focuses on the individual faces of veterans rather than endorsing specific military conflicts or actions. Although audiences may take issue with the agenda of the US military at large, they are not likely to be lacking in empathy for the sacrifices made by particular veterans, especially when the ad is actually showing repeated images of their faces. In this way, Google associates itself with a form of abstract American nationalism that has the power to make everybody feel good about their country, no matter what side of the political spectrum they identify with. This is a key aspect to the ad’s effectiveness, because it is attempting to appeal to a broad range of Americans in a time of intense political polarization. The Super Bowl is a rare occasion during which advertisers have the chance to capture the attention of a massive number

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of consumers at one time. As a cultural event, the Super Bowl has become much more than simply a football game, and many people watch the game for the ads as much as for anything else. Rather than shock the room through a controversial message like some Super Bowl ads, Google takes the milder approach of trying to reach as many viewers as possible across the political spectrum. Although the advertisement appears to have a strong, serious message, it is, first and foremost, formatted to be inoffensive. It establishes a certain untouchable neutrality. The message is not political, but it is serious.

It’s not something to be joked about or questioned. Therefore, Google, by association, is also not something to be questioned. The gravitas and neutrality are further enhanced through the ad’s comfortable aesthetics—the gentle piano music, the soothing narrator, and the slow typing into the search bar, accompanied by soft keyboard sound effects. All of this creates a somber tone, but simultaneously increases the audience’s sense of comfort despite the rapid juxtaposition of shots. The aesthetics leave the impression that Google is making an inspirational statement even though they aren’t actually saying much (beyond commending the service of veterans and showing that they can type a code into a search bar to look for a job).

The advertisement further overcomes political divides by specifically regrouping its audience within the first few moments of screen time. Rather than reinforcing the separation of right- and left-leaning political parties, it immediately identifies the audience as veterans and non-veterans, a division which paradoxically overcomes the audience’s pre-existing fragmentation.

The bulk of the text is repeatedly addressed specifically towards “the 7%” of Americans who have served in the military. They are the insiders, the ones with legitimate experience-based opinions on this subject, and the rest of us are, in a sense, sheltered outsiders. And as the pictures of military profiles flash before our eyes, they seem full of insider details, from codes to titles to uniforms. We feel, perhaps, slightly guilty that we don’t know more about the people who are serving our country. We want to be inside the loop.

Clearly Google is not buying premium Super Bowl ad space to reach only 7% of the American public. In actuality, the ad has been carefully created to speak to both veterans and non-veterans. The non-veterans are the outsiders,

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but the ad makes them want to become insiders, playing on a sense of guilt and obligation. And when the Google logo pops up at the end, it satisfies this impulse, turning the outsiders into insiders once again. Google resonates as something that everybody can understand—something that can supposedly help everybody—so at the end of the ad, the non-veterans can relapse again into a comfortable complacency with their varying degrees of separation from military sacrifice.

The feeling of satisfaction earned at the end of this ad is characteristic of the innovative style of advertising that Google attempts to pioneer. It’s part of their brand to create ads that invite viewers into more powerful messages and movements. Allegedly, these cutting-edge advertisements are the ads of the future—a new and improved version of advertising that does something different for the world. However, in reality, they’re drawing on the same psychological tricks that ads have been utilizing for decades and using them on a larger (and therefore potentially more harmful) scale. In his essay “Masters of Desire,” Jack Solomon states that “America is a nation of fantasizers” (164), and points out the ways in which advertisers exploit the subconscious fantasies of the nation. His examples are from his own particular cultural moment and most applicable to the 1980s, but his underlying point remains relevant today: ad agencies identify pre-existing desires within consumers and make ads that appeal to these wishes. Some ads prey upon consumers’ more transient desires for sex or food or popularity. Google’s advertisements are simply formulated with a different focus. If we view Google’s ads with Solomon’s theories in mind, we can see that they are, in fact, exploiting our fantasies as much as any other ad. They merely create an appearance of being unlike other ads because they cater to a slightly different category of fantasies.

Ads like “Job Search for Veterans” prey directly upon our desire to make the world a better place, and they offer Google itself as a fulfillment of this desire.

After watching the ad and experiencing a guilt-driven longing to understand each other and care for the people around us (in this case, specifically for veterans who have served in the armed forces), we are told that Google has it covered. We don’t have to worry about anything. We get all of the satisfaction of caring for our country without actually helping anybody.

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And, ultimately, behind this elaborate story about veterans, what is really being advertised here? Taken at face value, the advertisement is selling a simple tool that is part of a search engine. It may be a good and useful tool, but it’s hardly the solution to all the complex issues surrounding the rehabilitation of veterans. In fact, according to a recent NPR article, it isn’t even a particularly original idea: “the Google tool is hardly new; these kinds of code translators have been around for decades and with mixed results” (Cheslow).

The NPR article questions the validity of the ad based on the usefulness of the product it markets and the legitimacy of Google’s other efforts to assist veterans. This is an important line of inquiry, but it draws its motive from the surface level of the ad and fails to consider the ad’s actual purpose. There is clearly another level of manipulation at work behind the straightforward presentation of this job search product. Google isn’t selling this tool—it’s free for anyone to use, so nobody’s going out to buy it after watching the commercial. Instead, what Google is really aiming for is the creation of brand loyalty. As Raymond Williams points out in his lengthy essay, “Advertising: The Magic System”, written in 1961, ads have evolved to move away from simple product description. Williams says that advertisement “has passed the frontier of the selling of goods and services and has become involved in the teaching of social and personal values” (334). The Google ad takes this idea a step further. Google is selling our “social and personal values” back to us, and it is doing so in exchange for our attention, rather than our currency—or so it would have us believe.

In the end, when we click through Google, spurred on by the brand loyalty inspired by an emotionally enthralling ad, we will be exposed to dozens upon dozens of other advertisements, tailor made for our consumption thanks to the analysis of our own viewing habits. These ads likely won’t make us feel like we’re part of some grand movement to save American veterans, but they might lead us to, say, buy a pair of shoes. So, Google’s Super Bowl ad becomes, in a sense, a secondary-level ad. If you follow the money, “Job Search for Veterans” is actually aimed at exposing Super Bowl viewers to a wave of other advertisements. It is full of empty promises. In a time of deeply-rooted political polarization, the act of watching the Super Bowl is one of the few events that brings Americans from all sides of the political spectrum together in one

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cultural moment. Ads like “Job Search for Veterans” come tantalizingly close to creating a moment of genuine connectivity and emotional resonance across these differences. But they drop the ball by leaving audiences with a reassuring promise that consumerism can create meaningful connections and solve largescale societal issues. Google feeds the “nation of fantasizers” a fantasy of the nation which is far from the truth. Although this particular ad may be part of an admirable campaign focused on building opportunities for veterans, it is still very much tied to a larger system of profit-driven manipulation. It avoids making a provocative statement, lulling us into comfortable complacency. In our search for human connection and social change we should aim higher than the pseudo-activism of apolitical advertisements. If we can begin to recognize the carefully-crafted manipulation behind these ads, then perhaps companies like Google will lose the power to take advantage of our sense of altruism.

W OR KS C I TE D

Cheslow, Daniella. “Google Talks Up Vets In Super Bowl Ad. Does It Walk The Walk?” NPR, NPR, 6 Feb. 2019,

www.npr.org/2019/02/06/691553066/google-talks-up-vets-in-super-bowlad-does-it-walk-the-walk

“Homepage.” Essence, Essence. www.essenceglobal.com. Accessed April. 2019.

“Grow with Google.” Google, grow.google/programs/veteranscommitment/. Accessed April. 2019

“Job Search for Veterans.” YouTube, Google, 2019,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJopp9RlPJc. Accessed April. 2019.

Solomon, Jack. “Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising.” Signs of Life in the U.S.A. - Brought to You B(u)y: The Signs of Advertising Summary & Analysis, Bedford/ St. Martin’s, Boston, 2012, pp. 160–170.

Williams, Raymond. “Advertising : The Magic System.” The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader, Routledge, 2009, pp. 13–24.

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Representations of the Maasai: Jimmy Nelson’s fantasy M A R E YA A . KHOU R I

In 2013, world-renowned travel photographer Jimmy Nelson published his project Before They Pass Away, a collection of photographs of indigenous tribes and their “symbiotic… and sustainable” connection to their surroundings (“Jimmy & Projects”). He claims he intends to “put [indigenous people] on a pedestal” by showing the viewer what they “really…look like” and he believes his work is important as these “beautiful people” are “vanishing” due to the forces of globalization, urbanization, and industrialization (“Gorgeous Portraits”). Hence, he feels he must “raise awareness” in order to mitigate the effects of cultural erosion (“Jimmy & Projects”). His supporters believe that his photographs “celebrate the diversity and beauty of people” and are a “beautiful homage to the world’s indigenous cultures” (Geo; The Daily Beast).

While it is undoubtedly admirable of Nelson to attempt to document the beauty of culture and diversity around the world, it is his approach in doing so that is under scrutiny in this essay. Stephen Corry, a critic of Nelson’s work and the director of Survival International, a global organization for tribal peoples’ rights, asserts that his photographs “echo a colonial vision” as they are “manufactured” and fail to convey the true reason why tribes are “disappearing.” Furthermore, Corry suggests Nelson portrays tribal people “as different to “us” as possible” by altering their dress and how they are asked to pose. This is “damaging to the imagery of tribal people” as it glosses over their real context and presents them as a “throwback to a past era” (Corry). The fundamental ethical issue here is that the presence of manipulated untruths delineated as realist ethnographic photographs legitimizes the archetypical tropes that the West associates with the other. In essence, what is prevalent in these photographs is an unmistakable power structure whereby Nelson’s controlling gaze portrays the Maasai people through a colonial vision.

A framework that can help shed light on the extent to which power is played out in Nelson’s photographs is found in Linda Nochlin’s “The Imaginary

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Orient,” an essay from her book The Politics of Vision. Nochlin argues that “Orientalism itself cannot be confronted without a critical analysis of the power structure in which [Orientalist photographs] came into being” (34). What she is effectively saying is that it is crucial to consider the photographer’s approach when criticizing an Orientalist body of work as it will shed further light on the intention and perspective of the photographer.

Drawing on Nochlin’s framework, this essay will argue that despite the apparent semblance of documentary realism, there is a prevalent power structure in Jimmy Nelson’s photographs, which distorts the representation of the Maasai and presents them as inferior and primitive. As a result, the Maasai are used as tools to fulfill Nelson’s fantasy of how tribes are stereotypically perceived and to reinforce colonial ideas about Africa and the superiority of the West.

Nochlin’s lens is useful as it analyzes the issue of colonial power prevalent in nineteenth-century Orientalist art — the fundamental ethical premise of this essay. In the text, she claims that “photography… is hardly immune to the blandishments of Orientalism,” hence her framework can extend beyond nineteenth-century Orientalist art and be applied to Jimmy Nelson’s photographic body of work (39). Nochlin’s criticism of Orientalism is based on the notion of the power structure creating “absences” in the work (35). She states that the absence of history is ubiquitous in artwork representing the other and it suggests that this Oriental world is unchanging. She also claims that although there is an absence of a Western colonial or touristic presence in Orientalist art, the Westerner is implicitly present and “control[s] the gaze,” which convinces the viewer that the works are “scientific” and “exact” representations of the other (37). Additionally, the absence of scenes of work and industry present the Oriental world as “lazy, slothful, and childlike” (39). Nochlin asserts that these absences become so “conspicuous” that they begin to “function as presences” (35). There is merit to her framework as these pseudo-realist motifs, although concealed on the surface, can work to subconsciously mystify and alienate the other. One might reasonably contend that this framework is both a binary way of looking at the world — East versus the West, self against the other — and rigid in its exploration of the issue of power prevalent in photography. For example, Nochlin’s argument that

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Orientalist art can specifically portray “men’s total domination over women” is not entirely applicable to Nelson’s works as he is guilty of dominating both genders (43). Also, we do not see her claim that “violence of Orientals to each other was a favored theme” in Orientalist art reflected in Nelson’s works as his photographs tend to be close-up portrait shots or still, statuesque, and staged depictions of tribal people (52). In fact, a common theme in his work is for his subjects to be presented without motion. Finally, the idea that Orientalist artists “project” strong “erotic and sadistic desires” and fantasies is irrelevant, as Nelson does not sexually objectify his subjects (41). Despite these contradictions, Nochlin’s text serves as a helpful lens as the other absences highlighted in the framework are relevant and can be applied to Nelson’s work to explore the prevalent power dynamic. This can be illustrated further by studying Nelson’s photographs and his approach.

A key approach to Nelson’s photographs is that he claims to be putting his subjects on a “pedestal” to give them power (“Gorgeous Portraits”).

However, close analysis suggests that this is not the case, and his strategies demean them and present them as inferior. He argues that “we have to start documenting [tribes] very quickly because they’re going to disappear” and this is important because “it is our authenticity… it is our origin” (“Jimmy Nelson Channel”). This outdated and colonial idea that indigenous people are vanishing is immediately problematic because it effectively freezes them in the past and denies them a place in the world. In fact, there are approximately 370 million tribal people alive at present, but Nelson neglects this (Cultural Survival). This indicates that he fails to research and understand the tribes he is photographing. Drawing on Nochlin’s framework, Jimmy Nelson serves as a superior power over these inferior people, whereby he is spreading false information to the viewers of his work and controlling their representation through pseudo-education strategies. Before even looking at the photographs, the viewer is biased to believe that this is the inevitable fate of tribes around the world. The use of the word ‘before’ in the title of the project assumes that they are in need of help and idealistically informs the viewer that Nelson’s photographs are a call to action. This is a recurring idea in his photographs of the Maasai. For example, the photograph of five Maasai people standing in proximity to a rusty, dilapidated car serves to reinforce their primitivism and

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relationship to modernity. Nelson’s gaze deliberately presents them under the common Sub-Saharan African stereotypes: they are wearing simple clothing, holding spears, on barren land that lacks vegetation. While one might argue that the presence of the car can suggest modernity, they are shown not to know how to use it. For example, two people are awkwardly positioned on top of the car which shows that they are “untouched by the historical processes improving the altering Western world” (Nochlin 36). These elements serve to mystify the subjects from the viewer and hence, reinforce the distinction between the self and the other. Stephen Corry asserts that Nelson removed “Western manufactured items” such as watches, mobile phones, and modern clothing from his subjects while photographing them. This relates to Nochlin’s claim of an absence of history: it presents the Maasai as unchanging. This also gives more “credibility” to the realness of his work and thus, “authenticates [Nelson’s] Orientalist fantasy” (Nochlin 38). If Nelson had presented the tribes as modern and developed, this would have opposed the common stereotypes associated with them and created a less believable fantasy. This is supported

by Nochlin’s argument that artists can “make us forget that art is really art” by “concealing evidence of [their] touch” by using “authenticating details which denote the real” (38). This gives his work more credibility. Nelson claims that his photographs are “not meant to convey a documentary truth,” but are instead his “own artistic and creative interpretation” of the beautiful people “that struck him as an outsider” (“Jimmy & Projects”). Although he claims that these works are not meant to be reportage, they are still harmful as there is a greater issue of misrepresenting an entire culture at stake. Susan Sontag even argues that “the photographer’s intentions are irrelevant to the final result” (57). Hence, Nelson’s intentions are irrelevant as the final products he creates dangerously misrepresent cultures.

According to Nochlin, the other “exists as an actual place to be mystified with effects of realness, it exists as a project of the imagination a fantasy space onto which strong desires could be projected” (41). Jimmy Nelson’s gaze works to stage his photographs to present a particular predetermined story or idea. To visually portray this story clearly, he implements common stereotypes about the Maasai into his photographs to give his work credibility. This is found in most of his long-shot photographs, such as that of the Maasai tribesman

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standing on a cliff wearing a headdress with a shield, depicting a barren background, lacking signs of industry. This informs the viewer that Tanzania and Kenya, the countries where the Maasai are located, are underdeveloped.

Tribal people and their relationship with modernity (Nelson)

This can dissuade the viewer of the photograph from visiting the countries, which, on a grander scale, can impact their tourism and economy. Nelson also photographs his subjects wearing tribal paint and ornate beaded jewelry.

Although these are innate to the Maasai culture, it is significant to consider that these are not worn daily, but only during traditional ceremonies and events. Hence, Nelson uses these accessories to portray the Maasai as exotic; the viewer immediately notices the differences between themselves and the other. Although Nelson’s celebration of beauty is not problematic, his act of staging the photographs and manipulating the truth in order to fulfill his fantasy is. One might argue that Nelson is not at fault as it is the viewer who enjoys looking at exotic photographs and considers the idea of seeing what is often unseen pleasurable. However, his approach is dangerous as it presents them as props to entertain the viewer. Although Nelson claims to promote the “positive visibility” of tribes, his reliance on clichés to illustrate his ideas is harmful to the Maasai as when the photographs are viewed, the colonialist tropes are reinforced and the culture is misrepresented (“Jimmy & Projects”).

Although Nelson claims that his photographs are not documentary, they still work to psychologically educate the viewer. This is also exemplified by the contents of Nelson’s book Before They Pass Away, in which Nelson attempts to

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embellish his works in pseudo-educational factoids. Before his photographs of each tribe, he includes information about them, which has been translated into multiple languages (Nelson) This gives “credibility to the realness of the work” and thus, authenticates the “Oriental reality” brought about by his “colonial” gaze (Nochlin 38). One might argue that Jimmy Nelson has good intentions as he created the Jimmy Nelson Foundation in order to fund projects that “put indigenous people on a pedestal” (“What Drives Us?”). However, the issue is that he is asking for donations and there is an implication that by photographing these people, they will automatically be saved from vanishing.

Instead, the donations are going directly to Nelson and he is directly benefiting from this, not the Maasai people.

Another issue with Jimmy Nelson’s work concerns consent. When photographing the Chukchis, he was unable to photograph them “until [he] got to know [them]” and wait to see “how [they] interact with one another”, and after many weeks, he was able to photograph them(“Gorgeous Portraits”). While it is admirable of him to ask the Chukchis for consent, an issue arises when we consider what it is they exactly consented to. Did they consent to an aesthetic representation that presents them as props to fulfill a white man’s fantasy? Were they aware of the extent to which the photographs will be viewed —books, TED talks, exhibitions viewed by hundreds of thousands of people? Although Nelson often “shows them [his] pictures” (“Gorgeous Portraits” ), it is crucial to note that they are shown the unedited selection before Nelson cherry picks the ones that tell his story the best. In her well-known book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag argues that when photographs “hang on walls” or are “published in books”, their representation is reduced to “art” (104). Jimmy Nelson’s fantasy extends beyond the composition of the frame, his photographs are edited to have a sepia or blue tint with a vignette blue around the image. This creates a cinematic photograph, which fictionalizes the Maasai and makes the struggles they face such as the “theft of their land and resources” by developers and the fact they are “invaded and annexed… raped and killed” seem insignificant (Corry). While one might argue that presenting the violence the tribes face would still not help them, it is still a more authentic representation than Nelson’s as it presents the reality of their lives not the reality of Nelson’s

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gaze. Nochlin argues that the function of this picturesque representation is “destruction”, it results in “incipient modification and cultural dilution” and creates the mindset that “precious remnants of the disappearing ways of life are worth hunting down, preserv[ing], and transform[ing] into exotic images for enjoyment” (50-51). What she is effectively saying is that the picturesque encapsulates the Maasai and presents them as culturally inferior because their representation using alternative conventions distinguishes them from the viewer. This is harmful as it presents them solely as objects of voyeurism, hence demeaning them.

Ultimately, there is merit to Linda Nochlin’s framework and when applied to Jimmy Nelson’s body of work, it can serve as a tool to unpack the power dynamic present between Nelson and the Maasai. Despite the appearance of documentary realism, there is a prevalent power structure which distorts the representation of the Maasai and presents them as inferior and primitive.

Hence, the Maasai are used as tools to fulfill Nelson’s fantasy of how tribes are stereotypically perceived and to reinforce colonial ideas about Africa and the superiority of the West. Although one might argue that this framework is both a binary way of looking at the world and rigid in its exploration of the issue of power prevalent in photography, it still functions as a useful lens.

This conversation is crucial in terms of today’s concern over how tribes are photographed and approached by foreigners. When considering the recent story of the American Christian missionary who illegally trespassed on a remote Indian island to “declare Jesus to these people” and was killed by arrows, this issue becomes more important (Withnall). Foreigners need to respect tribal people and their traditions when visiting their land and photographing them in a way that does not misrepresent them or undermine their struggles. Although Jimmy Nelson is guilty of projecting his fantasy onto the Maasai, a photographer who does this better is Mohamed Altoum, a 33-year old Sudanese photographer who strives to capture “how urban migrants identify with the home they left behind and how they reconcile that longing to… find their feet in the big city” (Orubo). Altoum represents modern Maasai people in a manner that is devoid of the common tropes associated with them and highlights their highest and lowest points (Altoum). Another photographer, John Obiero, documents “shifts in Maasai architecture” brought

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about by changes in economic status or the disappearance of local building materials (Orubo). What Jimmy Nelson and travel photographers as a whole can learn from these photographers is their approach in representing the Maasai, which strives not to fulfill the photographer’s fantasies but to present a more authentic reality of the subjects’ lives — be it the beautiful or the ugly.

A flawed and distorted artistic representation of an ethnic group results in the alienation and inferiority of that group from the majority and such a basis for representing the other can even function to harm them in further aspects.

The artist’s harmless intent does not warrant a harmful representation, and an abstract artful representation can be misinterpreted as one that is realist ethnographic.

The most riveting photographs are captured by accident, without excessive on-site adjustments to the mise-en-scène and over-editing; such images can arise through an appreciation of the captivating diversity that exists between the self and the other. Hence, photographers need to be aware of the power they possess when representing the dignity of the other: they should approach a cultural group with respect by avoiding prejudices, making time to educate themselves beyond the camera frame through conversations with the people, and ultimately, putting the subject first. They are partakers in the culture, but it is not their own.

W OR KS C I TE D

Altoum, Mohamed. “Portraite.” Mohamed Altoum. 22 Nov. 2018, mohamedaltoum.com/photostory/portraite/.

Corry, Stephen. “Turning a Blind Eye to Pure Old Vibrations.” Truthout, 1 June

2014, truthout.org/articles/turning-a-blind-eye-to-pure-old-vibrations/.

Cultural Survival. “Issues.” Cultural Survival. 22 Nov. 2018,

www.culturalsurvival.org/issues.

“Fotograf Jimmy Nelson: Im Überschwang Der Bilder.” Geo. 6 Nov. 2017, www. geo.de/magazine/geo-magazin/19883-bstr-wie-jimmy-nelson-die-vielfaltund-schoenheit-der-menschen-feiert.

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Nelson, Jimmy. “Jimmy & Projects.” Jimmy Nelson, 2015, www.jimmynelson.com/jimmy-projects Nelson, Jimmy. “Gorgeous Portraits of the World’s Vanishing People.”

TED, Oct. 2014,

www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_nelson_gorgeous_portraits_of_the_world_s_ vanishing_people?language=en Nelson, Jimmy. Jimmy Nelson Channel. YouTube, 1 Aug. 2016,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=67SrRDc55Bk.

Nelson, Jimmy, and Mark Blaisse. Before They Pass Away. TeNeues Verlag, 2017.

Nelson, Jimmy. “What Drives us?”, Jimmy Nelson Foundation, Aug. 2018, jimmynelsonfoundation.com/foundation/.

Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. Westview Press, 2010. pp. 33-59 Orubo, Daniel. “20 East African Photographers Capture The Maasai People Free Of Stereotypes.” Konbini United States, Konbini United Kingdom,

23 Nov. 2017, www.konbini.com/ng/inspiration/20-east-african-photographers-capture-the-maasai-people-free-of-stereotypes/.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2004.

“A Beautiful Homage to the World’s Indigenous Cultures.” The Daily Beast,

The Daily Beast Company, 14 Oct. 2018,

www.thedailybeast.com/a-beautiful-homage-to-the-worlds-indigenouscultures.

Withnall, Adam. “American Killed by Remote Island Tribe Was Missionary

Trying to ‘Declare Jesus to These People’.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 25 Nov. 2018,

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/john-allen-chau-killed-tribenorth-sentinel-island-andaman-christian-missionary-a8646201.html.

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Praying to Progressive Gods: The Liberating Role of Violence L U I S R OD R Í G U E Z

Every May, the denizens of La Esperanza make their way along the dusty road that winds around arid hills to the recently planted field that serves as the border between their town and the rival town of Rancho las Lomas. On a cool afternoon, men and women of all ages take turns to fight a member of the opposing side until blood is drawn; each drop being offered to Tlaloc in exchange for a drop of rain, a corporeal sacrifice by two towns that would ensure a wealthy harvest in the coming year. This bloody ceremony to the Aztec rain god seems something the Spanish conquistadors would have found in Mexico hundreds of years prior, not a festival that takes place within a modern context. The anachronism is heightened as the celebration occurs in one of the most crime-ridden and violent states of the country. However, the festival’s yearly occurrence in various towns along east Guerrero and the seemingly euphoric attitude of the participants seem to counter the violent nature of the entire event. The violence is ritualistic in its purpose while allowing for an element of catharsis to be enjoyed on both sides, erasing the differentiation of “some others from other others” (Ahmed 47) that allows a circulation of hate in a society, all the while achieving a sense of independence and equality. This bloody ceremony not only serves as a way for the native farmers to “renew contact with their people’s oldest, inner essence, the farthest removed from colonial times” (Fanon 148), but also as a way to elevate women from just a “signifier for the male other” (Mulvey 7) towards an equality with their male counterparts on the battleground. Through the cathartic violence carried out in the festival, the participants achieve a liberation from themselves, from a weighing colonial past, and from typical gender norms.

No purer liberation from the traditional has existed than in the form of the carnival studied by Mikhail Bakhtin. An element of carnivalesque underlies the whole Aztec rain festival and comes close to Bakhtin’s conception of the ideal

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carnival, at least as it existed before a “narrowing down of the ritual, spectacle, and carnival forms of folk culture,” (33) after medieval times. The festival’s highlight is the extraction of blood for offering, but the townspeople also enjoy the event with a bountiful feast made from slaughtered cows and turkeys, as well as a mezcal drunkenness that permeates the population. These feasts are “the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (Bakhtin 9). Every member of the community participates in the preparation of the meals, the decoration, the dance, and the other rites that form part of the larger rain festival. The sacrifice of blood for rain attracts a sense of freedom, a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” (Bakhtin 10). In La Esperanza, the violence of the people provides the excuse for the very carnival that liberates the common man from the proceedings of the regular order.

Despite the carnivalesque characteristics of the event, the dual contexts of one of Mexico’s most criminal states as well as a 21st century setting beg the question, “Is there a place for ritualistic violence within a modern context?”

Affect theorist Sara Ahmed proposes that violence can come from hatred, as a “means by which the identity of the subject and community is established” (58). The reason for the event would then be a mutual hatred between the two rival towns, but this is not what is observed. As a ritual, both bands come together to perform an ancient ceremony, an established and previously agreed-upon commitment. Affect theory could look at why the two sides are battling each other and establish hatred “in the negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, between communities, where ‘others’ are brought into the sphere of my or our existence as a threat” (Ahmed 51). Yet, no boundaries are to be negotiated and no threat is imminent to either side.

Adversaries will often shake hands and laugh after a match, wiping away all negative emotions after the fight with a shot of mezcal. The reconciliation afterwards breaks the circulation of hatred, impeding the creation of a surplus value that would then be “distributed across a social as well as psychic field” (Ahmed 45). It would seem like affect theory has serious limitations, yet Ahmed’s ideas about hatred highlight some other, more hidden aspect of the use of violence in the festival. Perhaps the motive for the participation of the people in the use of violence does draw on hate, but only when it “operates

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at an unconscious level, or resists consciousness understood as plenitude” (Ahmed 44). Built up emotion in the unconscious of individuals sets the stage for violence to be the expression of hatred. Within the context of the carnival which occurs yearly but briefly in the people’s lives, all-out fighting will be acceptable and cheered on. Troubles the participants create and carry throughout the year can be released through ritual fighting, allowing for a cathartic experience through which, by the end, no hateful emotions persist.

Through socially sanctioned violence, a person releases built up emotion from a year of arduous labor, providing a commonsense justification for the festival that celebrates violence yearly.

The cathartic nature of the violence in the festival not only allows for individuals to free their unconscious, but it has the capacity to liberate an entire race of people. For most of what was New Spain the indigenous people were prohibited from continuing their traditions and rites, including what the Spaniards saw as a “horrifyingly alien custom of human sacrifice [that] remained an unsettling obstacle in the minds of the European observers” (Dodds Pennock 2). The imposition of Spanish rule crushed attempts of praying to any other deity than the Catholic God, and thus, any acceptance of human sacrifices and festivals that celebrated them. The indigenous inhabitants were convinced that such sacrifices were a regression into barbarism, through the cultural alienation explored by postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon (149).

Centuries of colonial rule over the Aztec rendered them powerless and effectively reduced their heritage and customs to only a handful of followers.

Yet, as another postcolonialist scholar, Achille Mbembe, points out: “it is precisely the situations of powerlessness that are situations of violence par excellence” (133). Perhaps, then, it is not hatred between the participants but a hatred of the colonizers which led to the re-establishment of the violent festival. A twist on affect theory of hatred finds that it is not the feeling of “againstness” between two groups that leads to violence between them.

Rather, the establishment of a differentiation between the colonizers and the colonized is what allowed for the latter to return to violent customs.

This twist directly contradicts the imposition of colonial rule and its teachings. The reclaiming of culture that Fanon describes to be essential for

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a national identity serves two roles: to return to a past that “was not branded with shame, but dignity, glory, and sobriety” (148), as well as producing a “differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Ahmed 48) which allows for a return to the practices of human sacrifice and violent rites now performed by the people of La Esperanza. The catharsis of violence between the Spanish and the Mexicans had to wait until the period of decolonization for its expression in the form of the Aztec rain festival, liberating the participants by allowing them to return to their culture and heritage. By allowing them to establish an identity for themselves.

The liberating force of violence proves to be a powerful tool for the oppressed, and this may also be the case for the women of La Esperanza. During the Aztec empire, women served only one important purpose: to be the bearers of new life. “Childbirth was a fundamental experience in the life of every woman, an occasion for femininity to be shared and celebrated” in Aztec society, and the only role of politico-social importance a woman could ever aspire to was that of a midwife (Dodds Pennock 42). The image of a woman purely as the vessel used to bring forth new life is understood by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey as man’s imposition of the deep-rooted union between a female and “her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (7). Yet, in the reclaiming of the past by the people of La Esperanza, women have gained the opportunity to fight alongside men as part of the sacrificial ritual. Not only are women participating in violence, but they take on another typically male activity and join in on the drunkenness of the town. Through this “alignment” between the genders and through the use of violence, women establish an identity for themselves (Ahmed 58). In the carnival, men and women all help to prepare the food for the feast, and the women are allowed and encouraged to drink and fight. This celebration, from the dinner table to the battleground, dissipates traditional gender roles and places women on the same level as men. The once-a-year occurrence of the carnival is what allows for the catharsis to be achieved in the fighting, as this is a unique opportunity for women to behave in an unwomanly manner and release themselves from the limitations of their gender which are enforced the rest of the year.

The legacy of the Aztec empire leaves behind a question for societies in the present: is there a place for ritualistic violence within a modern context?

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The case of La Esperanza consistently shows that through violence, a form of catharsis is achieved as unconscious emotion is released into another body in the fight. This catharsis is also the result of centuries of colonialism as a response to the oppressive colonizers that prohibited the continuation of traditional Aztec rituals, especially human sacrifice. The hatred that births the violence of the rain festival does not refer to the inter-town rivalry, but maybe it is the differentiation between the Spanish and the Mexicans in the period after colonization. This period of the postcolony when the festival is recalled as a way to build a national identity has also allowed for women to achieve some sort of equality with their male opposites in the context of the carnival. The violence is not a response to the crime-ridden state of Guerrero, nor is it a senseless exchange of punches. Violence takes on a heavy cultural, religious, and social significance, which not only allows for a break from the laborious norm, but encourages the formation of a unique identity and plays into progressive gender understandings. And perhaps even a drop of blood will bring a drop of rain as well.

R E F E R E NC E S

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second Edition. Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky.

Indiana University Press, 1965.

Dodds Pennock, Caroline. Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture. Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 1961 Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 1957.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, Issue 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.

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Kosovo: Convenient Humanitarian War? MAYA WILBRINK

‘This is probably the first war ever fought that is not being fought in the name of interests, but in the name of principles and values...[a war] fought for ethical reasons.’1 Referring to NATO’s 1999 Operation Allied Force in Kosovo, Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Havel nobly declared the ‘first ever ethical war’.2 Havel’s words served to frame NATO’s mission in Kosovo as humanitarian intervention, with the righteous purpose of saving the Kosovars Albanian and preventing genocide.

In global politics, military humanitarian intervention is legally mandated by chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which permits its use in response to threats to peace, if approved by the Security Council.3 Indeed, given President Milosevic’s regime’s oppressive treatment of the Kosovar Albanians and the real threat of genocide, the situation in Kosovo certainly was a threat to peace that warranted response. However, despite the legitimate humanitarian justification, the morality of the execution of the intervention remains contentious. By choosing airstrikes as the means of intervention, NATO chose the most convenient option for themselves. Whilst ensuring the safety of ally lives, the airstrikes increased the immediate danger for the Kosovars by hastening Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing.

Philosopher Judith Butler’s understanding of frames as constructions of social political reality provides a means to process the moral hypocrisy evident between NATO’s humanitarian justification and the execution of the airstrike campaign. In Frames of War, Butler posits that these frames may be broken or exposed at any time if reality no longer aligns with the frame’s 1 Václav Havel, NATO, Europe, and the Security of Democracy: Václav Havel - Selected speeches, articles, and interviews 1990 – 2002, ed. by Luboš Dobrovský (Prague: Theo Publishing Pardubice, 2002), 96.

2 Ibid 3 United Nations, Charter of the United Nations (1945), 9-11.

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representation of events.4 A pertinent question follows: can NATO’s framing of their actions in Kosovo as humanitarian co-exist with the convenient use of airstrikes?

The answer remains ambiguous. Here, I will argue that NATO’s intentions for intervening were genuinely humanitarian, as the NATO leaders framed, and their actions did indeed somewhat contribute to ending the Kosovo conflict. However, the actual execution of the intervention through airstrikes revealed the implicit differential assigning of unrecognisability to the Kosovar Albanian’s, thereby undermining the moral premise of ‘humanitarian intervention’. As the humanitarian frame could no longer be reasonably applied to the moral hypocrisy evident in the execution of the intervention, NATO’s frame was broken in Butlerian terms. Extending the case of Kosovo more broadly, the labelling of NATO’s actions as humanitarian intervention highlights a gap in the current understanding of the moral criterion of humanitarian intervention. As Political Theorist Michael Walzer argues, intervention does not currently require a classification of equal recognition between the lives of the intervening party and those they are purporting to save, nor does it qualify the means by which the intervention should take place.5 This gap has created dangerous loopholes for intervention only when it is ‘convenient,’ which seriously bankrupts the morality of humanitarian intervention.

Creating the Humanitarian Frame: How and Why Operation Allied Force was framed by NATO as a humanitarian intervention, with the purpose of saving theKosovar Albanians and preventing genocidal catastrophe. An interpretative frame is defined by philosopher Judith Butler as a means to construct a social-political perceptual reality.6 The humanitarian frame was constructed by NATO through repeated emphasis on the unfolding conditions within Kosovo, and the violent consequences of non-intervention.

The conditions created a moral imperative according to leaders of the NATO

4 Judith Butler, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (NY: Verso, 2009), 23.

5 Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (Yale: Yale University Press, 2004) 100.

6 Butler, 8.

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force, including the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel. In a speech, Havel justified NATO’s decision ‘because decent people cannot sit back and watch systemic, state directed massacres of other people.’7 With similar righteousness, on March 24, 1999, the day the strikes began, US President Bill Clinton explicitly presented the rationale for the airstrikes: ‘Our mission is clear…to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo; and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military’s capacity to harm the people of Kosovo.’8 Here, protecting the Albanian Kosovars is directly referenced by Clinton as the driving force behind the intervention. A month later, when it appeared that the bombing was not succeeding in its goal, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair reiterated the importance of the mission, going as far as to draw parallels between Serbian President Milosevic and Hitler.9 The rhetoric surrounding NATO’s actions served to create an interpretative frame of morally justified military humanitarian intervention.

Yet, how exactly was this humanitarian frame created, a frame which warranted saving the Albanian lives in the first place? According to Butler, we grieve lives a priori, meaning the knowledge is inherent and independent of experience, and in order to grant lives grievable status, we must first register them within our domain of apprehension.10 The distinction between these terms is clarified by Butler: ‘apprehension is less precise than recognition… apprehension can imply marking, registering and acknowledging without full cognition.’11 Examining NATO’s actions as a function of Judith Butler’s grievability framework, the decision to intervene to protect the Albanians prosecuted by Milosevic’s regime, as opposed to non-intervention displayed in similar cases, demonstrates that the people in Kosovo were indeed apprehended and even framed as ‘grievable’ by NATO. However, despite the grievable status granted to the Kosovar Albanians, the means of 7 Havel, 97.

8 Charles Babbington, ‘Clinton: Containing Milosevic is Goal’, Washington Post Archives (1999) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/march99/clinton25.htm?noredirect=on [accessed 4 November 2018].

9 Tony Blair, ‘A New Generation Draws the Line’, Newsweek (1999).

10 Butler, 7.

11 Butler, 6–12.

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implementation of the intervention through airstrikes demonstrates their inherent lesser value in the eyes of NATO. Returning to Butler’s grievability framework to understand this hierarchy, she explains a life must first be apprehended before it can be given grievable status, as this then allows it to be recognised.12 Not all acts of knowing are acts of recognition, because a life has to conform to a certain notion of what constitutes a recognisable life.

NATO’s refusal to commit ground troops and reliance on airstrikes as a means to avoid risking ally lives exemplifies the differential aspect of the grievability framework, in which different values are assigned to lives based on their group membership. The use of airstrikes demonstrated that the Kosovar Albanians were not recognised, and instead were seen as less grievable compared to the lives of NATO armies. Although the Albanians in Kosovo were grievable to the extent that intervention became justified, their lives were viewed as expendable enough to risk the apparent ‘greater good’ of ending the conflict.

Breaking the Humanitarian Frame This differential grievability creates a moral contradiction in the humanitarian justification of the intervention and its execution. The eleven-week military airstrike campaign conducted by NATO provided Milosevic with the pretext to accelerate and intensify his ethnic cleansing campaign, as the majority of the atrocities against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo occurred after air warfare commenced. The worsening state of affairs was even recognised by the Clinton administration itself, with an official acknowledgment in days following the first airstrikes that the situation had taken ‘a dramatic and serious turn for the worse.’13 Despite the violence unfolding on the ground, NATO continued airstrikes and refused to consider ground troops, which not only reduced their effectiveness in halting Serb aggression, but also increased the collateral damage, including the accidental deaths of innocent Albanians and Serbs.14 This highlights a moral contradiction, as political philosopher Michael Walzer

12 Ibid, 12.

13 Daniel Williams, ‘Brutal Conditions Enveloping Kosovo’, Washington Post Foreign Service, 26 March 1999, A01.

14 Adam Roberts, ‘NATO’s “Humanitarian War” over Kosovo’, Survival – Global Politics and Strategy, 41, no. 3 (1999), 102 -23.

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aptly asserts in his chapter in Arguing About War: ‘When it is our action that puts innocent people at risk, even if the action is justified, we are bound to do what we can to reduce those risks, even if this involves risks to our own soldiers.’15 To be sure, Walzer iterates that responsibility for the intensified Serbian campaign against Kosovar civilians belongs to the Serbian government and army that committed the atrocities. However, insofar as the intervention did nothing to respond to this violent result, NATO is not absolved of blame.16 Through imposing the risk of death on the people in Kosovo whilst refusing to accept the same for their own soldiers, especially as that acceptance was necessary to help the intervention, NATO’s execution of the campaign demonstrates a moral hypocrisy.

This moral hypocrisy challenges the existence of the humanitarian frame created by NATO, as the frame does not survive independently of reality.

Butler qualifies that frames may be broken if the actual socio-political reality can no longer be reasonably sustained.17 Frames that seek to determine what is seen must be reproduced in order to circulate, yet this very need for the frame to exist somewhere else requires a constant breaking from context.

As she explains: ‘the frame does not hold anything together in one place, but itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage, subject to temporal logic by which it moves from place to place.’ Once a frame has been broken, Butler asserts that the previously created reality is challenged, exposing the authority who initially sought to control the frame.18 In the case of Kosovo, NATO’s refusal to commit ground troops served to break the moral force of the humanitarian frame surrounding the intervention, as NATO’s actions could no longer be reasonably viewed as humanitarian. Although the intention behind the airstrikes indeed remained humanitarian, the air campaign exposed the conditional nature of the intervention, which occurred only because it was convenient for the intervening forces.

15 Walzer, 100.

16 Ibid, 100.

17 Butler, 8.

18 Ibid, 10.

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Extending this gap between the justification of Nato’s intervention more generally, the events in Kosovo reveal an inconsistency in the moral criterion of humanitarian intervention. Although the use of airstrikes by NATO is often regarded as having contributed to the eventual peace deal, significant lives were lost in the process that may have been avoided if ground troops were used. The framing of NATO’s actions as humanitarian partially arises from the fact that humanitarian intervention fails to address the appropriate methods of the intervention, instead leaving it dangerously open to interpretation by the intervening party, which will naturally act in its own best interest. Along with failing to require appropriate means, humanitarian intervention does not maintain equal grievability between the intervening forces and those they are purporting to save, which in a real sense corrupts the moral credibility of the word ‘humanitarian,’ as was evident in Kosovo. As Walzer argues, this dangerous inequality between the expendability of lives allows for campaigns that unfairly risk the lives of ordinary citizens. In other words, as Walzer continues, ‘How can we use military force in someone else’s country unless we are prepared to deal with the unintended consequences of our actions?’19 In fact, the internationally adopted framework of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is often described as being developed as a direct answer to the inconsistency of humanitarian intervention. In a report outlining R2P by the creators of the revolutionary framework, Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun reflect on how there existed ‘no agreed rules for [humanitarian intervention] such as…

Kosovo.’20 The authors then cite that ‘great misgivings surrounded the means by which the allies waged the [Kosovo] war.’21 By beginning their report with this context, R2P is set-up as a direct response to the previously acknowledged failures of humanitarian intervention, as exemplified in Kosovo.

Conclusion NATO’s reluctance to deploy ground forces in defence of the values they claimed to be fighting for reflected a lack of moral courage, which undermined the humanitarian credentials of Operation Allied Force. Although the intention 19 Walzer, 100.

20 Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Foreign Affairs 81, 2002, 100.

21 Ibid, 101.

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behind military action is certainly relevant in judging its legitimacy, the real consequences of said military action must be of the utmost importance.

However, despite R2P’s intent to resolve this inconsistency, perhaps not even a rebranding of the framework will fix the problem, as the issue lies in the unavoidable conflicting political interests of intervening parties. Indeed, it is far easier to theoretically discuss the need for the risking of troops to substantiate claims to the humanitarian high ground. The next question that inevitably arises is perhaps substantially more difficult to contend: whose lives exactly can we risk to save others, especially when the people we are saving are not technically bound by national obligations? The fact remains that we cannot force people to submit their own lives, even if it is for the noble purpose of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe. If we are to hold the moral boundaries so high, with the already murky conceptions of imperfect duty, the danger becomes no one intervening at all. Yet, even with this danger, the moral status of humanitarian intervention, especially considering the convenience of its misuse for political leaders, urges us to not become complacent.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Babbington, Charles, ‘Clinton: Containing Milosevic is Goal’, Washington Post Archives (1999) Balanzino, Sergio, ‘NATO’s Humanitarian Support to the Victims of the Kosovo Crisis’, NATO Review, Summer 1999, p9.

Blair, Tony, ‘A New Generation Draws the Line’, Newsweek, April 19, 1999, Vol. 133 Issue 16 Butler, Judith, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (NY: Verso, 2009) Evans, Gareth and Sahnoun,Mohamed, ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Foreign Affairs 81, 5-23, 2002.

Havel, Vaclav, NATO, Europe, and the Security of Democracy: Václav Havel – Selected

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speeches, articles, and interviews 1990 – 2002, (Prague: Theo Publishing Pardubice, 2002) Roberts, Adam, ‘NATO’s “Humanitarian War” over Kosovo’, Survival – Global Politics and Strategy, 41, no. 3, 102-123 (1999) United Nations, Charter of the United Nations (1945) Walzer, Michael, Arguing about War (Yale: Yale University Press, 2004) Williams, Daniel, ‘Brutal Conditions Enveloping Kosovo’, Washington Post Foreign Service, March 26, 1999, A01.

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Bodies of Love, Bodies of Hate LIN YE

The human body has been a powerful focus for many spectacles ranging from public execution hundreds of years ago, to movies and TV programs in the modern era. How does the human body render power to spectacles? In an attempt to answer this question, I will clarify two categories of objectification – deprivation and projection – and argue that objectification of the human body sustains the spectacle. Through deprivation, the spectacle strips away subjectivity, individuality, personality, and complexity from the individual by manipulating and displaying the physical body as the sole focus in the spectacle. The body thus becomes a void container, where the spectators can project their interpretations and imaginations. I will draw examples from painful public executions and pleasurable movies to demonstrate that the deprivation of subjectivity sustains spectacles by engaging the audience with strong sensory stimulus. Applying the logic of Sara Ahmed’s affect theory, I will illustrate that projection of intangible concepts onto the human body sustains spectacles by making them reproducible across time and space. These reproducible and self-sustaining qualities grant spectacles immortality and make them a latent danger in objectifying people.

While some performances grab the attention of the audience by accentuating the physical human body as a sensory stimulus in order to generate an intensive, engaged response among spectators, other spectacles simultaneously ignore the subjectivity of the individual to whom the body belongs. The human figure is merely a body, rather than a person. Public executions in France in the 17th-18th century were a spectacle of atrocity that imposed extreme physical torture on the body of the criminal before taking away his/her life. Since crime constituted an attack on the sovereign (Foucault 47), this torture was enforced by the sovereign to terrify the audience and instill fear (58). By instilling fear through torture, the sovereign restored its absolute, unrestrained power in the minds of the audience (49).

The significance of the spectacle is not the torture itself, but the display

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of this torture as well as the criminal’s bearing of that torture. In this spectacle, the body was treated as a purely material object to be destroyed.

In order to highlight the physical body as the sole focus in the spectacle, the state stripped away subjectivity from the criminal and merely left it as a sensory stimulus. In response to the intense exhibition of the body bearing torture – screams, blood, agony, and death – the activated spectators demanded to engage in the execution. The audience demanded to witness: they complained when they could not see anything and initiated protests when the executioner took the criminal out of their sight at the last moment (58). Furthermore, the spectators participated in the execution by offering verbal insults or even physical attacks to the condemned (59). In part, the reactions of the audience perhaps originated from their disassociation from the criminal – when they did not relate to him/her as a fellow human being, they saw the criminal only as an object open to being manipulated. The objectification of the criminal’s body through deprivation thus sustains the spectacle of public execution by engaging and activating the audience in that moment through an exhibition of pain.

Deprivation of subjectivity from the body appears not only in spectacles of atrocity but also in spectacles of pleasure – for example, movies. In Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the objectification of female figures in movies, she argues that the presence of a female figure is an “indispensable element” which, however, “tends to work against the development of a story line” (11). Rather than existing in relation to the story itself, the female figure exists in relation to the male protagonist instead (7). Movies present the female figure not as an individual with subjectivity in the story but merely as an attractive body, an “erotic object” (11). While the male protagonist takes control and propagates the storyline, the female figure becomes possessed by the male protagonist when she falls in love with him (13). On the one hand, she functions as a key element in building the omnipotence of the charming male protagonist by becoming an object possessed by him. When spectators identify with the male protagonist, they are able to share his omnipotence as well as the possession of the female figure. On the other hand, the presence of the sexualized body of the female figure on the screen satisfies “a primordial wish for pleasurable looking” (9). In order to appeal to spectators by satisfying their desire for

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such pleasure, movies highlight the bodily features of the female figure and simultaneously deprive her of subjectivity. Such a seductive, amorous presentation of female body parts in movies shows that the narratives assume a male perspective that spectators are forced to gaze from. While male spectators can engage with movies by identifying with the protagonist, female spectators might internalize the male gaze and use that to evaluate their fellow female figures. Either way, spectators gain pleasurable experience from looking at the spectacle on the screen. Objectification of the female body in movies through deprivation, therefore, offers a pleasurable experience that engages and activates spectators, sustaining the temporal spectacles when the movie is in action.

While spectacles of public executions as well as movies deprive the human bodies of subjectivity and treat them as material objects, the stakeholders in spectacles also objectify the body by projecting abstract concepts onto it. Such a projection turns the body into a symbol. The dynamic relations between a particular body and other bodies as illustrated by Ahmed sheds light on why a symbolic body in a spectacle is replaceable. With an analogy to capital, Ahmed points out that affect circulates among many bodies (45). When we hate a body of the other “who comes to stand for and stand in for, a group of others” (53), what we essentially hate is not this particular body, but what that body represents. Thus, any body can become the object of hate. The affect of hate does not reside in any particular body (44) but rather in the relation between the object and projection of spectators. Therefore, the affect of hate is hard to locate, yet replicable in circulation among all bodies (45), which enables it to generate a magnified effect (49). Similarly, objectification of the human body through projection also enables the affect initiated by the spectacle to circulate and perpetuate itself.

The body of hate can represent not only a group of others that we hate, but also an identity, a feature, or anything abstract that we hate. By projecting abstract concepts onto a particular body, spectators are essentially objectifying this body, turning it into a symbol for what they think the body represents or should represent. Through symbolization, the criminal’s body in French public executions transcended into a mere material being and became

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an object of hate that needed to be destroyed for what it represented. For the sovereign, the body represented a threat to the absolute authority of the prince whose destruction was necessary to restore power. For the audience of executions, the body represented evil and guilt, whose destruction was necessary to restore justice. Either way, the criminal’s body on the scaffold no longer simply belonged to himself/herself. Rather, the body was transformed into a symbol onto which spectators or creators of spectacles projected their interpretations. What the state or the public essentially hated was not the body of any particular criminal, but the abstract concepts represented by the body: threat, crime, and guilt, among others. Therefore, the body on the scaffold could be anyone’s, and the same affects would be achieved. As long as spectators can make a link between a body and what they hate, the affect of hate can always be replicated. Different from deprivation of subject, which sustains a particular spectacle at one point, objectification through projection renders spectacle as some form of circulating “immortality” - the affect of which can be reinvigorated regardless of time and space.

Ahmed’s argument can apply to an even broader context of affects other than hate. As shown in public executions, the circulation of affect illustrated by Ahmed applies when the human bodies are objects of hate. But what about the bodies that are objects of love, or objects of desire? In contrast to the object of hate which needs to be destroyed, the object of love induces spectators’ desire to possess. The female figure in movies is such an object that bears love.

As discussed previously, narratives of movies highlight the female figure as an attractive body from a male perspective. When spectators are forced to adopt this male perspective, the female body represents beauty and pleasure which spectators should love. While the male protagonist possesses the female figure, spectators would also possess the female figure by identifying with the male protagonist and thus sharing his power (Ahmed 13). However, what they essentially love gazing at is not any particular body itself but the beauty that body represents. What the spectators essentially love and find pleasure in is not the possession of this particular body, but the possession of such beauty which can be represented by any bodies. The female body here is a symbol that grants abstract beauty a concrete form for the spectators to perceive. Some might disagree that “any bodies” can become such a symbol since some bodies

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are more attractive to some people than others. However, the statement does not hinder the idea of a replaceable symbol. What makes some bodies more attractive than others is not any intrinsic features of the body itself, but variable standards for beauty. No matter which set of beauty standards anyone adheres to, any suitable body can become a symbol that embodies beauty. No matter to whom that particular body belongs, the affect of love induced by the female figure can be reproduced at any time as long as spectators project pleasure and desire onto the body. Thus, objectification through projection sustains the spectacles in a longer time span since it allows not only hate but also love, as well as other potential affects, to be reinvigorated.

Both processes of deprivation and projection in the objectification of the human body contribute to sustaining the spectacle. The former is effective during temporary spectacles by engaging the audience, while the latter maintains the affect of spectacles beyond any particular spectacles.

Objectification through deprivation of subjectivity highlights a particular feature of interest, no matter if it is atrocity and agony, or beauty and pleasure.

Thus, it directs the acute focus of spectators onto the physical body and grasps the attention of spectators to induce an intensive affect in the audience.

Objectification through projection enables circulation of affects since these affects do not reside in a particular body but in the relationship between a body and what the audience projects onto it. The affects come into concrete being by borrowing the bodies. Therefore, the elimination of any particular body would not eliminate the affect. A spectacle can always be reinvigorated, awakened from hibernation.

However, as impressive as the effect of objectification on spectacles is, we should be cautious about its potentially dangerous implications. On the one hand, no matter if it is deprivation or projection, objectification is essentially a dehumanizing process where the subjectivity as well as complexity of an individual is ignored and stripped off. Though the deprivation process is easy to detect, the projection process easily happens unconsciously even in daily life. In that case, what we perceive is not a person himself/herself, but an oversimplified understanding of him/her. On the other hand, the sustaining effect of objectification can get out of control when the affect starts circulating

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and accumulating among spectators. Spectators might be actively engaged not because of the spectacle itself, but because of what they project onto the body of focus, which they can relate to. Eventually, spectators see what they want to see in the spectacle rather than the spectacle itself. This may lead to loss of truth in the spread of the affect and further violence or infatuation directed at the body of focus. In cyber-violence, spectators quickly join in insulting and attacking the person of attention before they confirm the truth. Though the scaffold of public executions no longer exists, the internet could potentially become another scaffold. Other than violence, a blind infatuation for a public figure could give an individual excessive power to instigate the masses and manipulate society.

Sometimes what we create endures longer than we ourselves do. Displaying mortal bodies and making temporal connections between these bodies to an abstract concept, spectators can eventually create “immortal” spectacles. Any particular spectators or creators will perish, but spectators and creators never perish. Any particular spectacle will end, but spectacles themselves never end.

We are all part of these immortal spectacles – as spectators or as performers – and there is no exit.

W OR KS C I TE D

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1975.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.

Ahmed, Sara. “The Organisation of Hate.” The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2014, pp. 42-61.

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Essay 3

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Technology has undoubtedly permeated all aspects of our daily life; traditional celebrations have not been spared. This animated image captured at the Onam Harvest Festival in Mussafah, Abu Dhabi foreshadows the harmonious relationship expected between religion, tradition and technology in our distant future. Moreover, it exemplifies the plurality of the United Arab Emirates seen through the miscellany in the frame.

“Transformational Celebration” – Jordan Anthoneil Simpson

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The Virtual Circus: A Comparison of Appropriation of The Black Body in 19th & 20th Century Freak Shows and Contemporary Instagram Trends TATYANA BROWN

Black people have a history in the United States of having their bodies used for white consumption. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Black people were placed on stages and in cages in zoos, and museums.

The “freaks” on display at museums, zoos, carnivals, and sideshows can be compartmentalized into five classes: natural freaks, people of determination with physical deformities; self-made freaks, who generate their own curious identity (i.e. tattooed people); novelty act artists, who are noted for their performances rather than their bodies (i.e. fire-eaters); “gaffed freaks,” who use performances to fake physical deformities (i.e. unattached “Siamese Twins”); and non-Western freaks, ethnic people (i.e. “savages” and “cannibals”) who were typically kidnapped from communities of color, often as children, to perpetuate stereotypes of being the lowest humans in the social hierarchy to white crowds for their entertainment.1 The non-Western freaks, and in the case of this paper, specifically those of the Black race, were intentionally advertised to cater to 1 Springhall, John. 2008. “The Freak Show Business: Step Right Up, Folks.” The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to 1940, 37-56

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white people’s “voyeuristic interest in the culturally strange, the primitive, the bestial or the exotic,” creating a power dynamic that allows the audience to self-perceive as normal, while making the distinction that the performers were separate, or more accurately, beneath humanity.2 In the past, Black children were kidnapped, placed in cages and on stages, and made to grow up exhibiting their Black bodies so white people may perceive and do with them what they choose. Today, the sentiment behind freak shows is echoed on a virtual stage, where non-Black people, especially those who are white or white passing, not only look at the Black body, but take features of it to attach to themselves for social gain. Social media platforms like Instagram allow for the quick spread of mass culture under the influence of cultural actors, as well as their sometimes institutionally racist biases. The recently popular aesthetic of the “Instagram Baddie”, or “Insta Baddie” for short, is an example of this, as it often entails the display of large lips, dark skin, small waists, wide hips, afrocentric hairstyles like cornrows or laid edges, and Black-American originated fashion aesthetics like long nails and colorful wigs. This aesthetic is used to make people look older, sexier, and more mature, which relates to how people see Black children, especially girls, who naturally have this body type as older than they actually are. This paper will try to connect the larger story of racist history in freakshows to internet trends on Instagram that appropriate Black physicality and show how Black people historically have suffered for it.

Afro-centric hairstyles are among the most popular of Black body features that non-Black people appropriate or exploit. Black hair tends to be treated like a spectacle, as it stands out when compared to the hair types more commonly presented in races without African ancestry. One human biology study conducted by the National Institute of Health found that of the 8 types of human hair, 4 of them were only prevalent in countries with a large presence of Black people like the West Indies, Ghana, South Africa and the United States (refer to Figure 1).3 Therefore, the afro-centric hair type both encompasses half the range of human hair types and is largely exclusive to the Black race.

2 Ibid.

3 Payne, Joanna. “The ‘Good Hair’ Study Results.” Perception Institute, 2018

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While there is variation among the hair types of non-Black races, afro-textured hair tends to be the only to be naturally curly, coily, kinky, or wooly.

Fig.1: The geographical spread of hair types in the Good Hair Study by the National Institute of Health

With the uniqueness of the afro-textured hair types also comes the uniqueness of the hairstyles used to care for them. Afro-textured hair types are often prone to dryness, tangling, and fragility.

Historically, styles like cornrows, bantu knots, and twists have been used to protect the moisture, hydration and strength of afro-textured hair.4 Many other races cannot achieve afrotextured hair unless manipulated to do so, and by extension, their hair does not demand the same care methods as afro-textured hair does. Consequently, non-Black people have little reason to use afro-texture hairstyles for the health of their hair, so their use tends to be for stylistic purposes. If there were not social and political consequences for Black people wearing afro-texture hairstyles in the United States, non-Black people wearing the same hairstyles 4 Allen, Maya. “The Fascinating History of Braids You Never Knew About.” Byrdie, Byrdie, 29 Apr. 2019

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would be acceptable, as there would be no power dynamic between them.

However, afro-texture hairstyles have a political history in America that does not fare in favor of Black people.

Afro-texture hairstyles are often criminalized in public American institutions like schools, military, airports, and businesses when worn

by Black people. In 1981, Renee Rogers, a Black woman flight attendant employed by American Airlines for 11 years was told that her cornrows violated the company’s grooming policy and she was instead asked to wear her hair in a bun.5 Just 5 years ago, in 2014, the U.S. Pentagon, which oversees the military, lifted its ban on some dreadlocks, cornrows and twisted braids to be worn by female military personnel, revising the original policy that disallowed styles that are “matted and unkempt.”6 In 2018, Andrew Johnson, a Black 16-year-old wrestler in New Jersey, was ordered by a referee to cut off his dreadlocks or forfeit his wrestling match. So, in order to participate, he chose to have them cut, and a white woman came from the sidelines and sloppily chopped them off.7 Black American people like Andrew have a history of making their hair complicit to Eurocentric standards of beauty and professionality to participate in daily life. Much of this comes from non-Black people making laws about grooming and their biases seeping into the institutions they run. In one study, white women, who make up a large majority of female managers in the U.S.,8 were found to demonstrate the highest bias against afro-textured hair, rating it as “less beautiful,” “less sexy/ attractive” and “less professional than smooth hair.”9 The combination of these beliefs and the laws that enforce them leave Black people internalizing 5 Tharps, Johnson. “Library Guides: Title VII’s Application of Grooming Policies and Its Effect on Black Women’s Hair in the Workplace: Rogers v. Am. Airlines, Inc. 6 Henderson, Nia-Malika. “Pentagon Reverses Black Hairstyle Restrictions.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 13 Aug. 2014 7 Blackistone, Kevin B. “Wrestler Being Forced to Cut Dreadlocks Was Manifestation of Decades of Racial Desensitization.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 28 Dec. 2018 8 Elmer, Vickie. “Women in Top Management.” SAGE Business Researcher, 2015 9 Bates, Karen Grigsby. “New Evidence Shows There’s Still Bias Against Black Natural Hair.” NPR, NPR, 6 Feb. 2017

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fear of retaliation against their hair, and therefore, fear of being marginalized from basic needs like job acquisition and school attendance. Black women are almost twice as likely to experience social pressure at work to straighten their hair compared to white women.10 At a national scale, Black people are aware that they are often legally, socially and politically defenseless when it comes to their hair; yet, non-Black people are allowed to not only wear the same hairstyles without consequences but also profit socially and financially from doing so.

On January 30th, 2018, Kim Kardashian posted an image of herself on Instagram with blonde cornrows stretching down to her shoulders, decorated with a set of 3 beads on each braid.

Her caption was “BO WEST”, accrediting the style to Bo Derek, a white female model and actress who appeared in the 1979 film 10 with the same hairstyle.11 There are clear power dynamics here: it took one white actress in a Hollywood film to have a hairstyle renamed after her though it has been worn by Black women since as early as 3500 B.C; and it took one white social media influencer to receive over 2.3 million likes on Instagram for the same hairstyle, except perhaps without beads, that Black people have often had to file lawsuits about to wear in everyday spaces.12 There is a curiosity and exotification that non-Black people apply to hair textures they 10 Payne, Joanna. “The ‘Good Hair’ Study Results.” Perception Institute, 2018 11 Pham, Jason. StyleCaster. “Kim Kardashian Fires Back at People Accusing Her of Cultural Appropriation over Her Braids.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 30 Jan. 2018 12 Allen, Maya. “The Fascinating History of Braids You Never Knew About.” Byrdie, Byrdie, 29 Apr. 2019

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cannot achieve. Kim Kardashian leverages the exotification of afro-textured hair in her advantage, noting herself on Snapchat that she is “really into [her Bo Derek braids],” and implicitly promoting to her audience that they should be too.13 The hairstyle becomes part of her brand, and considering she is the 6th most followed person on Instagram,14 a social media platform used by 1 billion users as of June, 2018,15 the message of appropriation of Black physicality being acceptable reaches far. Using afro-texture hairstyles promotes her in two ways. First, her Eurocentric body features, which are the features already praised by both laws and people for their beauty, allow her to be perceived as beautiful, and a pinch of afro-texture hairstyle pushes her from beautiful to exotic, which may explain why the “Insta Baddie” aesthetic reaches for racial ambiguity, a balance between ideal Afrocentric and Eurocentric features.16 Her cornrows are an accessory to whiteness, if you will. Second, she makes an industry out of making the Black body seem more attainable to those not born with it, pushing non-Black women to wear afro-texture hairstyles, unblurring the mysterious line that separates the Black body from the non-Black body. Though cornrows are not meant for her hair, they are a signifier of afro-textured hair, therefore wearing them gives non-Black people a certain proximity to exotified Blackness, while remaining comfortably within the Eurocentric beauty standard. There is a deeper racist history to the satisfaction non-Black people get from being able to breach the curiosity of the afro-textured hair. The many pictures Kim Kardashian posts in cornrows, her online stage, national attention, non-Black audience, and blatant disregard for the harm it does to Black people has a strong resemblance to the white managers of the Barnum & Bailey circus who put Black people in circuses for white people to see their hair.

13 Pham, Jason. StyleCaster. “Kim Kardashian Fires Back at People Accusing Her of Cultural Appropriation over Her Braids.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 30 Jan. 2018 14 “Top 25 Instagram Influencers in 2019 - The Most Followed Instagrammers (Visualization).”

Influencer Marketing Hub, 16 May 2019 15 Carman, Ashley. “Instagram Now Has 1 Billion Users Worldwide.” The Verge, The Verge, 20 June 2018 16 Yancy, George. “Whiteness and the Return of the Black Body.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

2005

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Though Kim Kardashian’s domination of Instagram and the Barnum & Bailey Circus’ domination of American entertainment are 100 years apart, they echo each other. While there is no longer a physical stage, Kim Kardashian presents herself on the virtual stage of Instagram, and while it may not physically travel America like the Barnum & Bailey Circus did, it does indeed cross state and international boundaries. Similar to how Instagram is a top form of entertainment today, with users spending 53 minutes per day on average with the app,17 the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey sideshow, also known as “The Big One”, was the top form of entertainment in America in the 1920s and ‘30s.18 Freak shows at the time were a primary source of entertainment, drawing hundreds of thousands of people in some cases.19 This is significant because both platforms carry a social weight, in the sense that they have the authority to influence.

Additionally, both the circus and Kim Kardashian’s Instagram presence confirm Western racial hierarchies by representing people of color in degrading ways to draw and entertain white crowds. In 1899, two boys of the ages of nine and six years old were abducted from their home in Truevine, Virginia, USA to be performers in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.20 In the era of eugenics, a science set on improving 17 Molla, Rani, and Kurt Wagner. “People Spend Almost as Much Time on Instagram as They Do on Facebook.” Vox, Vox, 25 June 2018 18 Ferranti, Seth. 2016. “The Horrifying True Story of the Black Brothers Forced to Become Circus Freaks - VICE.” Vice. VICE. October 22, 2016 19 “Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism.” 2019. Youtube. Discovery Science. February 17, 2019 20 Ferranti, Seth. 2016. “The Horrifying True Story of the Black Brothers Forced to Become Circus Freaks - VICE.” Vice. VICE. October 22, 2016

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the genetic quality of a human population by excluding the genetic groups judged by white people to be inferior, the Muse brothers were used as an example of what should be genetically removed. The Muse brothers were granted by the circus to be used as a case study in a textbook called You and Heredity, where the author describing their bodies then wrote “by sterilization and birth control we might reduce the proportion of the ‘unfit’, and by stimulating births in other quarters we might increase somewhat the proportion of the ‘fit’.”21 George and Willie Muse were Black albino, with blue eyes, white skin, and kinky blonde dreadlocks, described by You and Heredity as “the odd effect produced by combing out the woolly strands and letting them grow for exhibition purposes.”22 At the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” the boys were raised being forced to act as “cannibals” biting heads off chickens and snakes, “ambassadors from mars,” and most notably, sheep-headed “freaks,” in which they were made to run frantically through an obstacle course of sorts and be captured.23 Their kinky hair, which they were told by their manager to grow into dreadlocks, was used to assign them the qualities of being untamed, filthy, and primitive, all of which resemble qualities of animals. In the early twentieth century, the comparison of Black people to animals was common, as anthropology was being established based on the idea of mapping civilizations from highest to the lowest, where the lowest were Africans. These were scientific beliefs, upheld by “leading men of science from Harvard and Princeton and Columbia University [who] were saying that Africans are midway between an orangutan and a human being.”24 This, in turn, validated white people to feel secure as the superior race and therefore justified in doing what they willed with Black people and their bodies. Kim Kardashian’s Instagram post of her in cornrows works in a similar manner as it delivers the idea that white people are allowed to use Black body parts for their own consumption.

21 Scheinfeld, Amram. You and Heredity; Assisted in the Genetic Sections by Morton D. Schweitzer. JB Lippincott Co, 1939 22 Ibid.

23 Jeffries, Stuart. “American Freakshow: the Extraordinary Tale of Truevine’s Muse Brothers.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Mar. 2017 24 “Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism.” 2019. Youtube. Discovery Science. February 17, 2019

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The usage of Black people against their will to entertain and satisfy white consumers and validate their curiosities about Black people’s hair is also used as a financial opportunity for entertainment businesses like the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Kardashian brand. In one image, Kardashian poses with blonde braids flowing down her back, captioning the photo “Futuristic Barbie. They’re here!!! Ultralight Beams are BACK with 3 new shades and 3 classic shade favorites!!! Shop now at KKWBEAUTY.COM.” In this post, she associated her image, in which she wears a traditionally afro-texture hairstyle with the mystifying nature of the future then links it to her makeup products, which have yielded her $350 Million net worth.25 The way she presents herself is used to imply that her consumers can take on the same image, and they do. The recent trend of “Instagram baddie,” largely championed by the Kardashian sisters goes beyond just appropriating Black hair. It also goes as far as encouraging nonBlack people to pursue larger lips, darker skin, wider hips, and the Ghetto Fabulous fashion aesthetic,26 which was created by African Americans.

Kim Kardashian’s sister, Kylie Jenner, who has also worn cornrows on her Instagram page, profits off of the enlargement of lips with her product the Kylie Jenner Lip Kit, which recently made Jenner a “self-made” billionaire by 20 years old.27 Kim Kardashian’s other sister, Khloe Kardashian, whose

25 Robehmed, Natalie. “How 20-Year-Old Kylie Jenner Built A $900 Million Fortune In Less Than 3 Years.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 14 May 2019 26 Smith, Danyel. “Ghetto-Fabulous”. The New Yorker. 21 April 1996 27 Robehmed, Natalie. “How 20-Year-Old Kylie Jenner Built A $900 Million Fortune In Less Than 3 Years.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 14 May 2019

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net worth is $40 million,28 is famous for her show Revenge Body, in which she works with other people to achieve their “dream body” while stunting her own, which has a shocking resemblance to the natural body of many Black women: small waist, large breasts, large bottom.

The Instagram baddie aesthetic, which heavily relies on Kardashian images and makeup products, has taken over Instagram, with the hashtags #baddie and #baddies combined having over 3 million posts. The Kardashians have created an industry out of the appropriation of the Black body, making it a part of mass culture, especially among young women. Kim, Kylie and Khloe have also all had children with Black men, which is another sign of their interest in the Black body particularly. Similarly, the Barnum & Bailey Circus was incredibly lucrative during its time. In his day, P.T. Barnum was considered a major entrepreneur from his expansion of the idea of the circus. He is still celebrated today for his “innovative ideas” by the 2017 film The Greatest Showman, which grossed $435,000,000 worldwide.29 Some performances, like the singer the “Swedish nightingale” earned him $500,000 in profit.30 During the time of George and Willie Muse, then called Eko and Iko, they were top performers in the circus. People would pay the equivalent of $30 to take pictures with them.31 However, their pay always favored the circus and never them personally. After their abduction, James Herman “Candy” Shelton, acted as their manager “as they toured the US in a series of circuses, using the money they earned to pay for their board, lodging and clothes, but never letting them have their wages.”32 The circus used the money they 28 Friedman, Megan. “Kylie Jenner Says ‘Not a Dime’ of Her Billions Was Inherited.” Harper’s BAZAAR, Harper’s BAZAAR, 21 Mar. 2019 29IMDb, The Greatest Showman. IMDb.com, Inc. 30 Biography Editors. “P.T. Barnum.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 16 Apr. 2019 31 Jeffries, Stuart. “American Freakshow: the Extraordinary Tale of Truevine’s Muse Brothers.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Mar. 2017 32 Jeffries, Stuart. “American Freakshow: the Extraordinary Tale of Truevine’s Muse Brothers.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Mar. 2017

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gained only to keep the brothers’ performance in motion and maintain the overall profit of the circus. Though George and Willie both had their bodies exploited to entertain white curiosity for 27 years, they still suffered financially while white people gained profit.

Lastly, perpetrators of this violence like the Kardashians and the Barnum & Bailey Circus avoid responsibility and pretend that their actions are harmless.

The Barnum & Bailey Circus exploited more than just the Muse brothers because they also set the precedent that other Black people were meant to be treated that way. Members of the cast of the Barnum & Bailey Circus were used to justify the genetic separation or disposal of Black people, such as the case of the Muse brothers. Today’s laws and institutions still express ideas about the Black body not having much value and about Black humanity being limited. Though the Barnum & Bailey Circus may not have exclusively created these ideas, it has done work nationally to reinforce them.

Newspapers and public writings shared in being desensitized about the exploitation of black bodies in zoos, museums and freakshows.

One New York Times article from 1906 wrote about Ota Benga, a Congolese boy kidnapped to be placed in a cage in the St. Louis World’s Fair and, after it ended, the Bronx Zoo. The article downplayed the severity of the treatment Ota Benga received in these facilities: it indicated he was not in a cage, but a “vast room… a sort of balcony in the open air”; it stated that the purpose of giving Ota Benga a monkey was intended to show “a remote parentage between human and animal being”; it describes Ota Benga’s activities as childlike and jolly by saying “[he] swings himself, counts his money, plays with the chimpanzee, fixes his arrow, all the time good-humored, cheerful, happy.”33 Ota Benga killed himself at 27 years old. The reduction of 33 M.s. Gabriel, M.d. “OTA BENGA HAVING A FINE TIME.; A Vistor at the Zoo Finds No Reason for Protests About the Pygmy.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Sept. 1906

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his suffering in the explanation to the public is to reduce the need for blame against white people for their actions and to reduce the guilt that white people experience. Similarly, Kylie Jenner’s response to criticism about her wearing cornrows was “mad if I do, mad if I don’t,” which blatantly disregards the harm that her appropriation has on Black people. When criticized for her “Bo Derek Braids” post, Kim Kardashian’s response was “I’ve definitely had my fair share of backlash when I’ve worn braids. I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel around the world and see so many different cultures that have so many different beauty trends.”34 In this response, she victimizes herself by focusing on the backlash she has received and not the ramifications for the Black community, such as continued institutional racism. When these non-Black people who appropriate the Black body were criticized, they had the comfort of knowing their consequences are minimal. This is the same response that has existed throughout the history of American Black body exploitation. John Springhall, author of Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to 1940, captures this well: “Whites in blackface also set off the African American in what would now be seen as a self-evident racist stereotype. Novelist Caryl Phillips has a famous black performer complain: “Everything in goddamn vaudeville is always rush, rush, rush, with the Jews playing the Germans, and the Germans playing the Irish, and the Irish playing the Chinese, and everybody thinking they can play colored because what’s a poor colored man going to do to stop them?”35 The perception of the powerlessness among people of color when exploited by white people is evident. Black people know they are limited in their legal and political defense, and white people know they have the advantage of seeming harmless.

The Kardashian family and the Barnum & Bailey circus echo each other in the way they exploit the Black body. In both contemporary and historic times, 34 Pham, Jason. StyleCaster. “Kim Kardashian Fires Back at People Accusing Her of Cultural Appropriation over Her Braids.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 30 Jan. 2018 35 Springhall, John. 2008. “Blackface Minstrelsy: The First All-American Show.” The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to 1940, 57–80

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they have taken advantage of the largest social platforms, confirmed western racial hierarchies, monetized their use of the Black body and assumed they have done no harm in executing it all.

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Byrdie, Byrdie, 29 Apr. 2019, www.byrdie.com/history-of-braids.

Bates, Karen Grigsby. “New Evidence Shows There’s Still Bias Against

Black Natural Hair.” NPR, NPR, 6 Feb. 2017,

www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/06/512943035/new-

evidence-shows-theres-still-bias-against-black-natural-hair.

Biography Editors. “P.T. Barnum.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television,

16 Apr. 2019, www.biography.com/business-figure/pt-barnum.

Blackistone, Kevin B. “Wrestler Being Forced to Cut Dreadlocks Was

Manifestation of Decades of Racial Desensitization.” The Washington

Post, WP Company, 28 Dec. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/sports/wrestler-being-forced-to-cut dreadlocks-was-manifestation-of-decades-of-racial-desens

itization/2018/12/27/66f520ba-0a10-11e9-85b6-41c0fe0c5b8f_story.

html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7e8990a379ee.

Carman, Ashley. “Instagram Now Has 1 Billion Users Worldwide.” The Verge,

The Verge, 20 June 2018,

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billion-count.

Elmer, Vickie. “Women in Top Management.” SAGE Business Researcher, 2015,

https://businessresearcher.sagepub.com/sbr-1645-95535-

2666211/20150427/women-in-top-management.

Ferranti, Seth. 2016. “The Horrifying True Story of the Black Brothers Forced

to Become Circus Freaks - VICE.” Vice. VICE. October 22, 2016.

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Friedman, Megan. “Kylie Jenner Says ‘Not a Dime’ of Her Billions Was Inherited.” Harper’s BAZAAR, Harper’s BAZAAR, 21 Mar. 2019,

www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/a22117965/kardashian-family-

net-worth/.

Henderson, Nia-Malika. “Pentagon Reverses Black Hairstyle Restrictions.”

The Washington Post, WP Company, 13 Aug. 2014,

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pentagon-reverses-black-hairstyle restrictions/?utm_term=.c81c9ab2372e.

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Youtube. Discovery Science. February 17, 2019.

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Muse Brothers.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Mar. 2017,

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extraordinary-tale-of-ruevines-use-brothers.

M.s. Gabriel, M.d. “OTA BENGA HAVING A FINE TIME.; A Vistor at the Zoo Finds

No Reason for Protests About the Pygmy.” The New York Times, The New

York Times, 13 Sept. 1906,

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vistor-at-the-zoo-finds-no-reason.html.

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spent-growth-data.

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Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, no. 63: 32–42.

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of Cultural Appropriation over Her Braids.” Business Insider,

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Fortune In Less Than 3 Years.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 14 May 2019,

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a Biography, by Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully.” Victorian Studies

53, no. 2 (2011): 329-31. https://doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.53.2.329

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The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to

1940, 57–80. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612129_4.

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You’re Not One of Us: Britain’s Problem with Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters OM A R HU SSE I N

Enshrined in Article 15 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is ‘the right to a nationality’ and protection from being ‘arbitrarily deprived’ of one’s nationality (UN General Assembly 1948).

However, the UDHR has always been an aspirational document, not because it is not legally binding (indeed, many of its principles have been formalised in international treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) but because, as Hannah Arendt believed, ‘human rights have never been universal’ (Boucher 2011: 223). History is littered with debates regarding who qualifies as truly human and, consequently, is entitled to human rights.

Arendt held the stance that one’s membership in humanity and their claim to possessing human rights is uniquely contingent on their status as a citizen of a political community. Hence, citizenship represents the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt cited in Boucher 2011: 222). By including an individual in a moral community which stems from the political collective (Dossa 1980: 319), citizenship enters one into the plurality of humanity, thus protecting their rights from desecration. Without the status of citizenship, so to speak, one is only human in the most basic sense: ‘nothing more than a savage’ (Boucher 2011: 222).

Arguably, the deprivation of citizenship designates an individual as external to the political framework which dictates the humane treatment of its members. Arendt argued that the Nuremburg Laws ‘systematically transformed [Jews] from political beings into natural creatures without any legal claims’ and this created the prerequisite conditions for the Holocaust to take place in isolation from ‘moral law and justice’ (Dossa 1980: 320).

Whilst Arendt’s emphasis on citizenship as a condition to claiming the possession of human rights is problematic in its implication that those who

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have not achieved an arbitrary standard of civilisation are not worthy of said rights, it highlights the significantly intertwined nature of human rights and citizenship. Consequently, if we are to subscribe to the tenets of the UDHR and aspire to create truly universal human rights, we must seriously challenge and scrutinise any nation which seeks to encroach on the human rights of an individual by revoking their citizenship. Indeed, such attention is urgently required in scrutinising the denationalisation policies adopted by Western nations in dealing with returning foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs).

Whilst the practise of revoking citizenship has been implemented, to varying degrees, by a number of nations to combat FTFs returning from fighting in jihadist conflicts in Syria and Iraq (Braun 2018: 311), this paper will focus specifically on the UK’s approach to the denationalisation of FTFs where there has been a 600% increase in the number of Britons losing their citizenship between 2016 and 2017 (Dearden 2019). Through an analysis of Islamophobia within the UK, I will argue here that anti-Muslim sentiments in the UK have allowed for the government to strip numerous British nationals of their citizenship with impunity and shirk its commitment to human rights and the rule of law. The paper will demonstrate the ways in which the othering of Muslims within Britain has prevented widespread outcry against the policy of denationalisation despite the erosion of human rights in a Western liberal democracy.

Whilst the British government has frequently utilised the power to denationalise citizens in recent years (Dearden 2019), the issue has gained greater prominence following the case of Shamima Begum. Having left the UK for Syria in 2015 to join Islamic State (IS), Begum resurfaced four years later in 2019 pleading to be allowed to return to the UK. Within six days of Begum’s request, the British government revoked her citizenship on the grounds that she is eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship due to her heritage (Ark 2019). Despite the questionable legality of the British government’s response, especially in light of the Bangladeshi government’s insistence that Begum will not be allowed to enter Bangladesh (Ark 2019), there was immense support amongst the British public for the Home Secretary’s decision to strip Begum of her citizenship. Indeed, in a snap poll done by Sky News, 78% of Britons indicated support for the revocation of Begum’s citizenship with 65%

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supporting the decision even if it left her stateless (Carr 2019). In light of such decisive support amongst the British public for Begum’s denationalisation, a pertinent question which arises is why is there such overwhelming support in Britain for a policy of denationalisation which violates the sanctity of the citizenship rights of a British-born citizen and shakes the foundations of human rights within the UK? It is a truism that people will place greater value on that which they feel has the greatest impact on their lives, and the same egocentric and subconscious calculations of value are present in the realm of human rights. David Luban describes the differential allocation of value to different rights depending on those perceived as being the most pertinent to oneself as the ‘Mel Brooks theory of rights’ (Luban 2005: 243). Luban’s theory is named for a statement

by American actor and filmmaker Mel Brooks that ‘tragedy is when I break a fingernail, and comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die’ (Luban 2005: 243). In other words, people are willing to allow the violation of human rights if they do not think it will affect them, particularly if they view the violation as increasing their own security (Luban 2005: 243). Examining the denationalisation of FTFs through the lens of the ‘Mel Brooks theory of rights’ in the context of overwhelming public support for the revocation of their citizenship prompts the realisation that the construction of the British identity is not completely inclusive. The fact that the public is not simply indifferent but strongly support this infringement on British Muslims’ citizenship rights leads me to consider that British Muslims’ rights are viewed, informally at least, as separate to the rights of other Britons because it is unlikely the government’s denationalisation policies would be so widely supported if the majority of Britons viewed the policies as encroaching on their rights. In other words, the othering of British Muslims as not truly British has allowed for their rights to be violated with the approval of the wider population.

Statistically, the othering of British Muslims from mainstream society is prevalent, considering that 35% of people in the UK ‘believe that Islam is a threat to the British way of life’ (Perraudin 2019). The oppositional construction of Islam and British culture as irreconcilable legitimises the exclusion of British Muslims from the wider British national identity. How

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can those who adhere to a faith that threatens ‘the British way of life’ be fully recognised members of the very identity they seek to undermine? The perception of Islam in Britain as ‘separate and other’ from other cultures due to a lack of shared ‘aims or values’ and the view of Islam as ‘threatening’ have been identified as factors which engender a negative view of Islam, thus contributing to the formulation of Islamophobic narratives within the UK (Runnymede Trust 1997). Consequently, these Islamophobic narratives of Muslims as not only incompatible with, but dangerous to British society play a significant role in casting doubt on the validity of a British Muslim identity as Islamophobic sentiments within the UK construct the constituent parts of this double-barrelled identity as mutually exclusive. Thus, it becomes clear that legitimacy of an individual’s claim to the British identity is not only determined by their passport or where they were born or where their parents are from, but also by the faith they adhere to. In fact, another feature of Islamophobia stemming from anti-Muslim prejudice in the UK, identified by the Runnymede Trust, was that ‘hostility towards Islam [is] used to justify… [the] exclusion of Muslims from mainstream society’ (Runnymede Trust 1997). To put it differently, Islamophobic narratives and beliefs set the frames of who truly qualifies as British.

These frames which are delineated by Islamophobia can be understood more profoundly through the lens of Judith Butler’s ‘frames of recognition’ (Butler 2009: 5). In her book, Frames of War¸ Butler argues that the value which is allocated to a life is dependent on our ability to recognise that life as grievable. The recognition of the grievability of any life is dependent on ‘norms of recognition’ which are the constructed socio-historical normative understandings of life through which life becomes recognisable as worth protecting (Butler 2009: 4-6). As a result, we can infer that those who are perceived as aberrant from the normative understanding of who qualifies as British lack grievability which leads to their dehumanisation and the devaluing of their rights. Specifically, Islamophobia’s framing of the Muslim and British identities as mutually exclusive is profoundly related to a myriad of social and political realities in the UK which form the prerequisite normative context for the othering of British Muslims from mainstream society. For instance, following the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 bombings in

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London, the British government has maintained a ‘high level of perceived threat’ from ‘Islamist terror’ in order to legitimise their ‘intrusive policies of surveillance’ and ‘the general assault on civil liberties in the name of protecting the citizenry’ (Alam and Husband 2013: 246). This prevalent depiction of the dangers of Islamist terror within the UK as real and imminent reinforces the notion that British Muslims are ‘inherently alien’ to the UK (Alam and Husband 2013: 247). Thus, Islamophobia constitutes a frame which prevents Muslims from being recognised as members of the political and moral community which Arendt believed was the source of ‘human status’ (Dossa 1980: 319). Not only that, indeed if we understand the value of a life as contingent upon a person’s complete membership of a political community which can protect that life, then we realise that Islamophobia renders Muslims as un-grievable, ultimately dehumanising them and permitting the violation of their rights.

With this in mind, we can begin to understand that the denationalisation of FTFs does not only cause them to be dehumanised, rendering them beyond the protection of the ‘civilised polis’ by ‘tear[ing] away the cloak of humanity’ (Boucher 2011: 221), but it is the concrete and overt manifestation of the dehumanisation of Muslims within Britain resulting from anti-Muslim prejudices. Arguably, as long as an individual possesses citizenship, at least nominally, even if others don’t fully recognise them as a member of their community they have ‘all the rights and obligations it [citizenship] entails’ (Boucher 2011: 221). However, policies which allow for denationalisation (like the policies being pursued by the UK government with regard to the revocation of FTFs’ citizenships) imply that the citizenship of Muslims is conditional upon their good behaviour. This leads me to consider that if citizenship is conditional, then it can be constructed as more of a privilege which has been given to British Muslims and can be taken away as opposed to an inalienable right. Casting doubt on the inviolability of British Muslims’ citizenship blatantly challenges the legitimacy of their claims to not only a British national identity, but to their membership in humanity which is contingent on them being recognised as political beings. Thus, the revocation of citizenship represents an official exile from one’s political, social and

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moral community which places an individual beyond the pale of humanity – dehumanising them in the most absolute sense.

Undeniably, the return of FTFs to Britain poses a present and serious predicament. It is notoriously difficult to prosecute those returning from IS territories. Indeed, of the more than 400 FTFs that have come back to the UK, only 40 have actually been prosecuted, and other approaches to managing the threat of returning FTFs, such as permanent surveillance, are impractical (“British Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters” 2019). Thus, one could quite reasonably argue that the revocation of the citizenship of these jihadists is a necessary evil to deal pragmatically with an impossible situation. However, populist policies which dehumanise British Muslims are not the solution.

Policies which appeal to anti-Muslim prejudices in the UK and cast doubt on the validity of the British identity of Muslim Britons further reinforce Islamophobic narratives which exclude British Muslims from mainstream society and can lead to greater division within society. In order to create a truly inclusive and pluralistic society, we cannot give credibility to the Islamophobic prejudices which propagate the narrative that Muslims are not truly British. Whilst there already exists some scholarship on how the government’s approach to anti-radicalisation and counter-terrorism has actually exacerbated the othering of Muslims in the UK, it is necessary to investigate this further as ultimately the government has a responsibility to protect the rights of all its citizens and it cannot provide that protection at the expense of minorities. Being truly committed to human rights entails a commitment to the rights of all humans but especially those of a nation’s own citizens regardless of religion.

B I B L I OG R A P HY

Alam, Yunis, and Charles Husband. 2013. “Islamophobia, community cohesion and counter-terrorism policies in Britain”, Patterns of Prejudice, 47: 235-252

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Ark, Rumyana van. 2019. “British Citizenship Revoked, Bangladeshi Citizenship Uncertain – What Next for Shamima Begum?”, Icct.nl <https://icct.nl/publication/british-citizenship-revokedbangladeshi-citizenship-uncertain-what-next-for-shamima-begum/> [accessed 10 May 2019] Boucher, David. 2011. “Banal but Not Benign: Arendt on Evil,” in Evil in Contemporary Political Theory, ed. by Bruce Haddock, Peri Roberts and Peter Sutch (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 204–27 Braun, Kerstin. 2018. “‘Home, Sweet Home’: Managing Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Germany, The United Kingdom and Australia”, International Community Law Review, 20: 311-346 “British Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters”. 2019. European Eye on Radicalization <https://eeradicalization.com/british-returning-foreignterrorist-fighters/> [accessed 16 May 2019] “British Nationality Act”. 1981. (1981: National Legislative Bodies/National Authorities) Carr, Harry. 2019. “Shamima Begum: 78% of Britons support revoking IS bride’s UK citizenship - Sky Data poll”, Sky News

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Dearden, Lizzie. 2019. “Shamima Begum: Number of people stripped of UK citizenship soars by 600% in a year”, The Independent

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Dossa, Shiraz. 1980. “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust”, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 13: 309-323 Judith Butler, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable, (NY: Verso, 2009) Luban, David. 2005. “Eight Fallacies About Liberty and Security,” in Human Rights in the ‘War on Terror’, ed. by Richard Ashby Wilson (Cambridge:

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511511288.014

Perraudin, Frances. 2019. “Third of Britons believe Islam threatens British way of life, says report”, The Guardian

<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/17/third-of-britonsbelieve-islam-threatens-british-way-of-life-says-report> [accessed 15 May 2019]

Pinto, Mattia. 2018. “The Denationalisation of Foreign Fighters: How European States Expel Unwanted Citizens”, King’s Student Law Review, 9: 67-78 Runnymede Trust. 1997. Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (London: Runnymede Trust), p. 5 UN General Assembly. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Paris: UN General Assembly)

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“The Air is Delicate” (Macbeth 1.6.10):1 The Role of Olfactory Design in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More R AY NA L I

Imagine running down a cobbled alleyway, brushing through the stagnant summer air, chasing a mysterious someone by a faint trace of her perfume.

Imagine opening up drawers of crispy old files with yellowing pages, breathing the smell of feathers and fur in a taxidermy shop. Imagine the sharp smell of pine, of a symbolic Birnam Wood, and the loamy scent of fog and rain. Imagine three witches, standing hand in hand, in the opening scene of Macbeth. This is not a dream, but rather, it is the vividly detailed world of Sleep No More—an immersive theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy by British troupe Punchdrunk. Since its inception in England in 2003, Sleep No More has been staged across the globe in Boston (2009), New York (2011–), and Shanghai (2016–).2 In 2011 when the New York production opened its door to visitors, the show was showered with such tremendous acclaim that its maker Punchdrunk became synonymous with immersive theatre as a genre of performance.3 Since its premiere in Asia on December 14, 2016, the Shanghai production has experienced continued sell-outs and extensive media attention.4 However, Sleep No More is more than a business success; it is a theatrical experiment whose innovations and achievements continuously challenge the accepted norms of both performance and production—to me, it is a show remembered by its scents.

1 References to Macbeth are to William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

2 Rose Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 6–7.

3 Ibid., 2.

4 Shu Pan, “Review of Immersive Theatre Production Sleep No More (Shanghai),” The Paper, 15 December 2016. This source was originally written in simplified Chinese.

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The opening reflection of my most recent visit to this immersive theatre venue lends itself to my exploration of the multi-sensory design strategies employed in the world of Sleep No More, which functions as a lens into the broader topic of immersive theatre as a contemporary arts practice. While Sleep No More’s unique smellscape is such a triumph—to the extent that patrons would willingly pay CNY199 (US$30) for a scented candle that smells like the set5— olfaction has long been overshadowed and overlooked in the world of performance. Despite the many explanations for scent’s limited use in traditional theatres, the significance of olfaction in the emerging field of immersive theatres remains elusive and its merits rarely examined. Yet, as exemplified by the tremendous success of Sleep No More, it is high time that theatre makers reconsider the role and capacity of scents in the performing arts. Drawing on established performance and cognitive theories about the use of scents while using Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More as an example, this paper seeks to contextualise the practice of olfactory design within a focused case study and highlight the various instances in which scents have enhanced the delivery of dramatic effects. In turn, this paper examines the significant and sophisticated new role that is gradually assumed by olfaction in a new era of participatory storytelling, in which patrons and critics demand more from theatre makers than ever before.

1.

Defying the Limitations of Scents Onstage

As theatre goers, seldom do we realise that the word “theatre” itself automatically implies the valuing of one sense above all others: the English word “theatre” owes its root to the ancient Greek theatron—a place for viewing.6 The theatrical world’s predominant emphasis on sight is widely reflected in the prosperous industries of scenery, costume, hair and makeup, lighting, and choreographic design, which all pertain to the audience’s sense of vision. Complementing vision’s dominance is audition, hence the word “auditorium”—a place for hearing. In fact, the history of performance is so 5 YeShouPaiLaoBanNiang, “Beast × the Mckinnon Hotel | Release of the Limited Edition Collaboration Series; Bring Sleep No More Home,” 2018. This source was originally written in simplified Chinese.

6 Susan L Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 58, no. 2 (2018).

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centred on these two senses that critics have related traditional spectatorship to “the dominance of the eye and then the ear, with a certain suppression of the other senses”.7 However, while the modern theatre is commonly required to be a fragrancefree zone, it is untrue that smell has always been shunned from performances and performance spaces. Historically, the beginnings of Western theatre in ancient Greek festivals and various religious performances were suffused with intense aromas associated with sacrifice.8 Productions of Macbeth in Shakespeare’s time featured special effects produced by two fireworks— “rosin powder” and “squibs”—both employed, in part, for being strikingly malodorous and utterly fitting for the ominous presence of the supernatural witches who: “hover through the fog and filthy air” (1.1.11).9 In this regard, smell has a long history of being used as an agent to produce meaning in the performing arts. Olfactory design is a useful possession in theatre makers’ creative arsenal.

But why is scent such a rarity in theatres today, to the degree that “almost every use [of scent] is likely to be considered non-standard to some extent”?10 Underlying the gradual elimination of scents from most performances seems to be the conventions of traditional theatres—an overpowering proscenium arch, an elevated stage, assigned seating, regulated intermissions, and so on. Indeed, the “fourth wall conventions of realism” encourage a division between the watchers and the watched, “permitting only sight and sound to cross its divide”.11 The physical structures of a traditional proscenium theatre and the distancing effect it invites makes the use of scents particularly 7 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 19. quoted in Josephine Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4, no. 1 (2016): 44. A similar viewpoint can be seen in Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 131–32. Here, the author calls vision and audition “bullies” in the sensorium.

8 Sally Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” in The Senses in Performances, ed. Sally Banes and André Lepecki (New York: Routledge, 2007), 29.

9

Jonathan Gil Harris, “The Smell of “Macbeth”,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2007): 466.

10 Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 132.

11 Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” 29. A similar viewpoint is seen in Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense- Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 36, 44.

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challenging. On one hand, technical hurdles must be considered. The immobility of the audience and the different spatial locations they occupy pose challenges to the “production, dispersion, and removal of odours”.12 Questions about odour detection, olfactory fatigue, stage managing and cuing need to be solved before olfactory design can be realised.13 On the other hand, the proscenium theatre and the traditional mode of performance it breeds have conditioned its viewers to rely primarily on vision and audition as modes of sensing and sense-making. Under the bombardment of dazzling stage lights and a live orchestra, traces of scent will likely go unnoticed. In this regard, olfaction is placed at a disadvantaged position in traditional performances.

However, scent is slowly starting to reclaim its place in immersive theatres, of which Punchdrunk is a leading practitioner. The term “immersive theatre” is used to describe a style of “contemporary performance practice involving a visceral and participatory audience experience with an all-encompassing, sensual style of production aesthetic”.14 Unlike traditional theatre’s excessive focus on vision and audition, immersive productions’ defining feature lies in the physical repositioning of the audience within an imaginary world by “exploit[ing] all that is experiential in performance”.15 Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More is a prime example of immersive storytelling, whose unique production framework defies the limitations of olfactory design discussed above. This site-specific performance takes place in a six-storey, lushly furnished “hotel”, in which audience members don masks and are left to freely roam “some 100 rooms” and probe “some 3000 drawers and hidden doors” as cast members re-enact pivotal scenes from Shakespeare’s

12 Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 132.

13 Michael McGinley and Charles McGinley, “Olfactory Design Elements in Theater: The Practical Considerations,” in Designing with Smell: Practice, Techniques, and Challenges, ed. Kate McLean Victoria Henshaw, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins and Gary Warnaby (New York: Routledge, 2018), 219–26. This design manual provides a comprehensive review of the technical considerations involved in olfactory design for performances.

14

Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 35.

15 Ibid.

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Scottish tragedy.16 This radical elimination of a stage and dispersion of the cast (and the audience) throughout a multi-storey performance space quickly make an omniscient view of the story impossible. Yet, this limited viewpoint, complemented by the “distraction” posed by a multi-sensory and interactive environment, in turn empowers the audience to break from the passive receiving of information and attend to their “internal feelings (both emotional and sensational) as much as external occurrences”.17 Specifically, Punchdrunk’s “screwing the proscenium” has unleashed the many potential applications of olfactory design.18 2.

Harnessing the Evocative Power of Smell

Most published criticisms and reviews of Sleep No More mentioned the show’s unique scents and the feelings they conjure.19 On various social media platforms, frequent goers compose elaborate prose in memory of their whimsical encounters at the performance.20 In fact, such frequent pairing of scent cues with emotional experiences is no singular occurrence, nor is it utterly surprising. Humans’ sense of smell has long been acknowledged as inextricably linked to the formation and retrieval of memories, capable of both crystallising an episode of memory in time and triggering vivid remembrance. Various factors, both innate and learned, collectively contribute to the enthronement of smell as the most effective trigger of memory and emotions. At the same time Punchdrunk has devised many ways to harness the evocative power of scents in the interest of enhancing both its performance and production.

16 Erik Piepenburg, “Stage Is Set. Ready for Your Part?,” The New York Times. and Pan, “Review of Immersive Theatre Production Sleep No More (Shanghai).” In the New York production, the fictional hotel is named “The McKittrick Hotel”; in Shanghai, it is named “The McKinnon Hotel”.

17 Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 40.

18 W. B. Worthen, “‘The Written Troubles of the Brain’: “Sleep No More” and the Space of Character,” Theatre Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 94.

19 See ibid., 79. Worthen noted in his opening observation “an intense, loamy smell”, followed by a comment that “it’s entirely creepy”. See also Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience, 162.

20 For an example, see dreamingofmanderley, “Scent of a Boy Witch,” ed. Tumblr (2012). The blogger compares the smellscape of the performance space to “the scent of a long-lost lover”, linking various smells to the seductive character “Boy Witch”.

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The origin of smell’s emotional potency traces back to basic human anatomy. According to Rachel Herz, a leading expert on the psychology of smell, the olfactory bulbs—receptors of sensory information—are located in proximity to the limbic system, where “brain structures responsible for emotion are found”.21 Within the limbic system, the amygdala is “critical for the expression and experience of emotions” while the hippocampus is “necessary for associative learning and various forms of memory”.22 By virtue of olfaction’s advantaged neuroanatomical structure and unique physiological mechanisms, an olfactory stimulus can evoke memories and emotions in the limbic system before the frontal cortex can consciously identify an odour.23 In the case of Sleep No More, the performance and design both function in mimetic mode: much of the events, emotions, and themes are implied in scenes of abstract, speechless contemporary dance and fragmentary, almost surreal, properties and sets.24 Due to the lack of language and the quick pace of action, the audience is often left confused, overwhelmed, and unable to decipher the information presented the moment; however, the subtle yet constant presence of a background scent can serve either as a hint to the immediate course of action, or as an olfactory “bookmark” through which the audience can relive the moment beyond the duration of the event itself.

For instance, the ballroom, symbolic of Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane Hill, is characterised by a sharp, crisp scent of pine—the impending danger posed by a “moving” Birnam Wood.25 Here, Punchdrunk’s touch of olfactory design not only serves to illustrate—to complement the presence of physical trees in the space and to denote the setting and time—but also to evoke a mood of grave austerity and an ambience of malevolence through a thematic association between the smell of pine and the actualisation of the witches’

21 Rachel Herz, “I Know What I Like: Understanding Odor Preferences,” in The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick (Oxford: Berge Publisher, 2006), 191.

22 Ibid.

23

Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 135.

24

Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience, 140.

25

Li, Rayna. observation notes, March 24, 2018.

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third prophecy.26 On a technical level, the scent of pine is a piece of olfactory stage direction forecasting the upcoming action in the story and contributing to the overall immersivity of the production. On a thematic level, the scent, emerging anew as a precursor to a scene of vengeance and justice, serves as a lingering reminder that inspires an intense and lasting intellectual engagement from the audience.

Considering the emotional intensity of the show’s content and the overwhelming elaborateness of its environs, it seems common that in the patrons’ hour of need for cathartic sense-making, they would somehow recall the show’s ever elusive yet infinitely evocative scents. In turn, these inextricable associations between Sleep No More’s olfactory cues and the vivid remembrances they trigger in the audience’s mind shed light on the potential implications of scent in promotion and marketing. According to Josephine Machon, “a vital component of immersive theatre” is an “energised liveness and the consequent live(d)ness of the performance moment”—a paradoxical experience of a “lasting ephemerality”.27 In other words, an integral part of an immersive experience is its “aftertaste”; it is only so powerful and memorable because the events are lived and re-lived, the emotions felt, ruminated, rewritten, and memorialised. By the same token, patrons are not simply after a US$30 candle branded with the show’s name, but the many thrills and excitements of show-going the aroma evokes in their mind.28 On the flip side, the other indispensable condition in the creation of scent-memories lies in nurture: odours acquire their meaning through associative learning.29 While “smell is a powerful generator of memorial affect”, comments Susan Feagin, Vice President of the American Society 26 Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” 30–31. In this article, Banes proposed a taxonomy of “theatrical aroma design” based on the “representational functions that the odors in the performances are intended to discharge”. Among the six identified uses of scents in theatres, “to illustrate words, characters, places, and actions” is most common, followed by “to evoke a mood or ambience”. However, Feagin criticises that using smell solely as illustration is “discouraging”, “unimaginative”, and “uninteresting”. Feagin favours the use of scents as a way to create “mood and atmosphere”.

27 Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 39.

28

See note 4 above.

29 Herz, “Understanding Odor Preferences,” 190.

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for Aesthetics, “the variability of associations among different people for a great range of odours might in some cases compromise its potential”.30 The importance of environmental influence in forging scent preferences suggests that olfactory design for immersive theatres needs to be culturally sensitive—both to the setting of the story and the target audience. Since the aesthetics of Sleep No More are rooted in a contemporary audience’s nostalgia for an irretrievable past,31 the successful expression of its dramatic effects relies heavily on the audience’s capacity to empathise with the designed environment.

Among the various versions of the show, Punchdrunk’s bold decision to relocate its show to an Asian context challenged its designers to reimagine the basic premises of the production. In response to a different body of viewers, Felix Barrett, founder of Punchdrunk and director of its shows, revealed that special care has been taken to ensure the compatibility of the production design with its cultural environment: “every show is completely bespoke to the building it occupies … everything [the characters] touch needs to be coherent as well”.32 In the New York production, the “Paisley Sweets” candy shop appeals to the audience’s happy childhood memories with the scent of traditional candies and caramel.33 In Shanghai, the Scottish setting faced a Chinese twist. Instead of a Euro-American candy shop lined with jars of pear drops, striped humbugs, and aniseed balls, the Shanghai venue features a traditional herbal medicine shop equipped with an apothecary cabinet, and of course, the distinct smells of patchouli and camphor.34 The significant presence of herbal remedies in the Chinese culture makes these medicinal smells a meaningful equivalent to New York’s choice of caramel as a sensory reminder of childhood innocence and comforting familiarity amidst 30 Feagin, “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre,” 135–36.

31 Barrett, Felix qtd. in Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, “Interviews,” in “SMG Live Presents Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More” (program), August 2018, 17. Barrett revealed that the inspiration of Sleep No More “came from film noir soundtracks and the atmospheres they create”.

32

Barrett, “Interviews,” 17.

33 Piepenburg, “Stage Is Set. Ready for Your Part?”. Published electronically March 16, 2011.

This article reveals that the set’s sweet smell of candy owes its origin to a caramel-scented spray administered before each performance.

34

Li, Rayna. observation notes, March 24, 2018.

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an otherwise dangerous noir world. Through thorough research and crosscultural collaborations, Punchdrunk is able to address the cultural specificity of scent-induced memories with carefully curated olfactory details.

All things considered, the theatrical magic of Sleep No More resides in “the uniqueness of each experience for every individual”.35 By the same token, the smells of Sleep No More are certain to bear different meanings for each audience member given the different circumstances we have encountered both in life and in Punchdrunk’s fictional hotel. “What’s crucially important is the detail in the work”, revealed Artistic Director Barrett in an interview with Josephine Machon, “there’s always the promise of more to discover”.36 In the spirit of Barrett’s vision, my analysis of Sleep No More’s olfactory details is in no way exhaustive. Rather, a select few examples seek to provide a sample of what olfactory design can accomplish in the emerging field of immersive theatre. Yet, the study of olfactory design in theatres, traditional or immersive, does not end with one case. Smell’s natural properties—its subtlety, its elusiveness, its capacity to evoke memories and emotions—are an infinite repertoire from which theatre makers can draw creative inspirations and devise sophisticated works. Olfactory design makes the air delicate. The creative spirit makes the air delicate.

35

Machon, “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres,” 36.

36 Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 159.

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B I B L I OG R A P HY

Banes, Sally. “Olfactory Performances.” In The Senses in Performances, edited by Sally Banes and André Lepecki, 29–37. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Barrett Felix, and Maxine Doyle, “Interviews,” in “SMG Live Presents Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More” (program), August 2018.

Biggin, Rose. Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience : Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. dreamingofmanderley. “Scent of a Boy Witch.” edited by Tumblr, 2012.

Feagin, Susan L. “Olfaction and Space in the Theatre.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 58, no.2 (2018): 131–46.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. “The Smell of “Macbeth”.” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2007): 465- 86.

Herz, Rachel. “I Know What I Like: Understanding Odor Preferences.” In The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick. Oxford: Berge Publisher, 2006.

Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres : Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

“Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres.”

Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4, no. 1 (2016): 34–48.

McGinley, Michael, and Charles McGinley. “Olfactory Design Elements in Theater: The Practical Considerations.” In Designing with Smell: Practice, Techniques, and Challenges, edited by Kate McLean Victoria Henshaw, Dominic Medway, Chris Perkins and Gary Warnaby. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

Pan, Shu. “Review of Immersive Theatre Production Sleep No More (Shanghai).” The Paper, 15 December 2016.

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Piepenburg, Erik. “Stage Is Set. Ready for Your Part?” The New York Times.

Published electronically March 16, 2011.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Worthen, W. B. “”The Written Troubles of the Brain’: “Sleep No More” and the Space of Character.” Theatre Journal 64, no. 1 (2012): 79-97.

YeShouPaiLaoBanNiang. “Beast × the Mckinnon Hotel | Release of the Limited Edition Collaboration Series; Bring Sleep No More Home.” 2018. Published electronically April 2, 2018.

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How do we maintain our sense of cultural identity in new environments?

M E G NA KA G AWA

Growing up as a half-South African, half-Japanese person and having lived in multiple different countries, I often find it difficult to define my own identity.

Furthermore, coming to NYU Abu Dhabi and meeting numerous students with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds has made me question how we maintain our sense of cultural identity in new environments. Of course, there are many components that make up our identity such as religion, political views, race, gender etc. However, for the purpose of this essay I will be focusing on a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s national and cultural identity. In order to grasp a stronger understanding of how we maintain our sense of identity in new environments, I surveyed 10 students from NYU Abu Dhabi about their experiences with identity. The methodology used to conduct this survey will be further explained in the body of this essay. In order to analyse the results of these surveys, I will be looking at theoretical concepts from Fredrik Barth and Pierre Bourdieu to strengthen my argument that moving to a new environment does not undermine or negatively affect notions of belonging and identity; instead, mobility allows the concepts of belonging and identity to evolve and become stronger and much more diverse.

Before I begin with the analysis of the results that I collected, I will discuss the methodological approach as to how I carried out my survey. To begin with, rather than choosing to conduct one-on-one interviews, I instead asked participants to answer questions via Google forms. The reason I chose this method rather than face-to-face interviews is because I believed that the participants would feel more comfortable typing out their experiences and because it gave them more time to thoroughly respond to the questions.

Furthermore, considering that this research was conducted over a short period of time, in order to assure quality responses, I chose to limit the number of participants to 10 people. I am aware of the limitations of my research in that I have only collected responses from a small group of people. If this essay

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were to be written over a longer period of time, I would have conducted research on a larger group of people. In order to keep the variables of my research as controlled as possible, I decided to conduct surveys on first year students only. The reason I chose first year students is because they are new to the environment and are still adjusting. Upperclass students have had more time to adjust to life here in Abu Dhabi, and therefore by asking first year students I would be able to get more authentic responses. I asked three in-depth questions to the students that I surveyed. The first question I asked was “how has your notion of cultural identity changed since moving to a new environment?” The second question was “how do you maintain your sense of cultural identity within a new environment?”. The last question I asked was “Do you think that being in a new environment strengthens or undermines your concept of identity?”

The responses I received when I asked the students how they maintained their sense of identity in new environments relate to the concept of habitus introduced by Pierre Bourdieu. Looking at how we construct the notion of identity in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus based on his book, The Logic of Practice, I will look at how this concept can be related to the findings of my primary source. Bourdieu defines the concept of habitus as the way culture shapes a person’s identity. More specifically, it can be defined as the way in which people perceive and interact with the social world around them, and the dispositions people develop as a result of these interactions.

These dispositions are shared with people from the same background including their social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education, and more (Bourdieu 61). Through his discussion of habitus, Bourdieu makes it evident that it is not the geographic location that impacts a person’s identity, but rather the cultural environment that they are brought up in. This means that even if a person grows up in a country different from their origin or nationality, if they practice their customs and traditions and are in an environment where their neighbors or peers do the same, they will still be able to maintain a sense of their identity and belonging. When I asked the students how they maintain their sense of identity in new environments, most said they spend time talking to people from back home in order to keep in touch with their family and culture. However, one student said that he takes time to

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remind himself to be proud of his identity: “I remind myself why I am proud of my identity, and that by sharing my culture with others I am able to teach people about my culture and in exchange I can learn something new from them.” In the case of this student, instead of feeling excluded from groups that he would normally interact with, he sees this challenge as an advantage that allows himself to have a deeper understanding of his own identity. The overall consensus of the survey I conducted led me to conclude that students did not feel as if their concept of identity was endangered by living in a new environment. Although the survey I conducted was done on a small scale that consisted of only 10 students, and this is not an accurate representation of how others may feel, it still gives the overall idea that perhaps being in a new environment does not undermine our concepts of cultural identity.

Despite the common belief that in order to maintain a sense of ethnic or cultural identity it is crucial to stay within the same region or country, this is not necessarily the case in reality. In his book, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Fredrik Barth makes it evident that ethnic groups do not have to be bound to specific geographic locations in order for them to exist. Considering that identity has much to do with the ethnic group that one associates themselves with, it is important to define what exactly anthropologists mean when they refer to the term “ethnic group”. According to anthropologist Raoul Naroll, ethnic group can be defined as, 1. largely biologically self-perpetuating 2. Shares fundamental cultural values, realized in overt unity in cultural forms 3. Makes up a field of communication and interaction 4. Has a membership which identifies itself, and is identified by others, as constituting a category distinguishable from other categories of the same order. (Naroll as quoted in Barth 13) Based on these definitions, it is evident that ethnic groups are not defined in terms of where they are located, but instead what their practices are and how members of an ethnic group communicate and interact with one another. It

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is not so much the geographical aspect, but rather the culture-bearing aspect that is most importantly emphasized when classifying persons from certain ethnic groups. Identifying a person’s culture is dependent on a person’s exhibition of particular traits of the culture. This concept comes to show that persons of a specific identity can occupy different niches and still retain their sense of belonging. One point that Barth emphasizes throughout his book is that regional diversities do not entail differences in cultural orientation (13).

This concept introduced by Barth can indeed be related to the findings of my survey conducted on the students here at NYU Abu Dhabi. Many students stated that they are able to maintain their sense of identity despite being in a new environment because they continue to talk to their friends and family from back home, and on campus they hang out with people who share the same ethnicity as them in order to celebrate certain events that they celebrated back home as well. Furthermore, as one student mentioned in her survey, students at NYU Abu Dhabi often form cultural groups such as the African Union or the Asia-Pacific Union and host events to celebrate traditions and practice their culture, and this serves as a form of maintaining one’s identity in countries other than their own.

The overall focus of my research paper is to grasp a deeper understanding of how we construct and maintain notions of our identity in new environments, whilst arguing that being in a new environment strengthens one’s identity rather than undermining it. Keeping this focus in mind, the responses I got were all crucial in answering the research question of this essay and supporting my argument that your environment does not undermine your sense of identity. In relation to the first question I asked, “how has your notion of cultural identity changed since moving to a new environment?”, one student made an intriguing comment when she mentioned that after coming to NYU Abu Dhabi, you are asked on a daily basis as to what your cultural background is and where you are from. This is something she did not have to face back in her home country in Zimbabwe because people already assumed that she was from Zimbabwe. Hence, she finds this act of explaining her identity as a force that strengthens it as she is able to reconfirm her identity and culture, and remember where she comes from. Despite being in a different environment from that of her hometown, it is these small daily actions that

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allow her to maintain her identity. In terms of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, in which he discusses that our social environment plays a crucial role in developing our sense of identity, we can see that this student’s statement on how these acts of explaining her identity to others serves as a way to maintain her identity. Even if a person is not living in their home country, certain acts that they perform in relation to the society that they are brought up in allows them to conserve notions of their identity.

In response to the same question, a student from Spain stated that instead of feeling like her identity is weakened by being in a new environment, being in a new environment challenges her to shape her identity: “I don’t think I would use the term undermine, but rather the term evolve. Yes, my identity has evolved since coming to NYU Abu Dhabi in the sense that being in such a diverse community challenges you to figure out who you are while also asking yourself how you can relate to everyone else you are studying with.”

By this, the student means that she is able to realize certain things about her identity that she would not have been able to identify with had she stayed in Spain for her entire life. In addition to this, she feels as if being in a new environment allows her to understand the differences between each and every person, thus allowing her to understand how she can relate to others in order to create stronger relationships. This is a crucial finding as it emphasises that being in new environments allows us to transcend cultural barriers and look beyond differences, a concept that Barth discusses in his book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Barth writes, “interaction in such a social system does not lead to its liquidation through change and acculturation: cultural differences can persist despite inter-ethnic contact and interdependence” (10). His theory can be used to analyze this student’s statement as it shows that just because your identity changes, it does not mean that it becomes undermined. Instead it becomes stronger whilst undergoing change.

Contrary to other students, there was one student who mentioned that being in a different environment does in fact threaten his identity, however this was something that paradoxically strengthened his identity. He stated that “people undermine my identity but at the same time it enforces my will to maintain

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my identity.” Since coming to NYU Abu Dhabi, there were times when he felt as if he was excluded from student groups that he should have been a part of because other students did not recognize him for his ethnicity. For example, he felt that this made him feel as if his identity was “threatened”; however, it also encouraged him to strengthen his identity more than he would have in his home country such that he does not let others undermine who he is and what his cultural identity is in his new environment.

Contrary to Barth’s argument that mobility does not negatively impact or weaken ethnic identity, other anthropologists such as Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga argue that there is in fact a significant relationship between location and belonging. The second section of this essay will be taking a look at arguments that contradict both my thesis statement and Barth’s concept that mobility does not undermine the legitimacy of cultural identity. In her book Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture Setha Low discusses the concept of space and place focusing on the effect movement and migration have on identity and belonging. The concept of transnational spaces is heavily emphasized throughout the text and is discussed by Low in terms of the negative effect it has on notions of identity and belonging. Within her book, perspectives from different sociologists such as Gupta and Ferguson are introduced. While Gupta and Ferguson discuss the concept of transnational spaces from an optimistic approach stating that in regards to “the isomorphism of space, place, and culture, this process of cultural globalization creates new translocal spaces and forms of public culture embedded in the imaginings of people that dissolves notions of state-based territoriality” (92), Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga look at transnational spaces from the perspective that transnationalism results in deterritorialization, affecting “loyalties of groups in diaspora, manipulation of currencies and other forms of wealth, and strategies that alter the basis of cultural reproduction” (28). In addition to this perspective, Arjun Appadurai’s perspective on mobility and transnationalism is that it creates a world where “minorities and migrations are flowing into nation-states, threatening the stability of ethnic coherence and traditional rights” adding that the increase in transnationalism results in pressure to maintain a sense of nationhood in terms of territory. By discussing the concept of deterritorialization as a result of increasing transnational spaces,

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these anthropologists make it clear that mobility degrades a person’s sense of nation-state, identity and belonging because the increase in transnational spaces leads to a decrease in the concept of nation states. As the concept of nation states decline, it becomes more and more difficult to identify oneself in terms of a country, and Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga see this as undermining concepts of identity and belonging. These concepts introduced by other sociologists show a different perspective that can be taken into consideration regarding the results of movement to new territories.

However, despite these arguments contradicting the notion that moving to a new environment does not undermine or negatively affect notions of belonging and identity, taking a look at Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus shows that one does not shape their identity based on the physical aspect relating to where they were born and the geographical location of where they grew up, but rather more abstract concepts and the emotional connections and interactions they had with the people and society around them. Even if a group of persons is displaced or they have moved from one location to another, they are still able to maintain their identity and belonging through the concept of habitus. A real life example of this are the Kurdish people who are spread throughout the Middle East and certain countries in Europe. Considered the largest ethnic group without a nation of their own, the Kurdish have a population of about 25-30 million with the majority living in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Despite their lack of a nation to identify themselves with, they still maintain their Kurdish identity by “a shared culture, language, set of symbols, memory and experience, and future political aspirations” (Sheyholislami 21). Other examples include the Pakistani immigrants in Britain who continue to share religious and cultural traditions despite being far removed from their homeland. Madawi Al-Rasheed explains that this is made possible because of the ways in which we determine identity and belonging. When people identify themselves with their ‘homeland’, they do not do so in objective terms such as its physical features including climate and scenery, but rather with the feeling of national and ethnic belonging. These feelings are able to cross borders and be carried with migrants despite their mobility (Al-Rasheed 43). This is a key example that resonates directly especially with students at NYU Abu Dhabi

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as they are able to maintain their cultural identity through their social life despite them not being in their original country. As one student mentioned, cooking food that she would eat back home was a way for her to remember family traditions and practice those traditions in a new country.

Throughout my essay, I have argued that being in a new environment does not undermine a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultural identity. Instead, it strengthens a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of identity as it allows them to understand other cultures and it encourages them to focus on maintaining their own identity. By looking at the concepts introduced by Fredrik Barth, Pierre Bourdieu, and other arguments introduced by Setha M. Low, I was able to further strengthen and support my thesis statement and analyze the results of my survey. Although I can make improvements to my essay by surveying a larger number of people and asking more in-depth questions, I was able to use the results of my survey to grasp important ideas raised by students regarding how they maintain their cultural identity and the different challenges that they may come across. By looking at theoretical concepts introduced by sociologists, it has become evident that social aspects rather than geographic or physical locations are more important in maintaining cultural identity. It is not the geographic or physical aspects of a nation or territory but instead the behaviours and cultural practices that form the fundamentals of a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity.

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W OR KS C I TE D

Al-Rasheed, Madawi “The Myth of Return: Iraqi Arab and Assyrian Refugees in London*” Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 7 No. 2-3 1994.

Barth, Fredrik. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, Waveland Press 1998.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice, Polity Press 1992.

Chatty, Dawn. Displacement and Dispossession in the Middle East, Cambridge University Press 2010.

Low, Setha M. and Lawrence-Zúñiga, Denise. Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, Wiley 2003.

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For the past couple of years, the modest, burqa-clad woman has been shunned by the media for choosing to cover up, becoming a target of Islamophobia, harassment, national bans, and anti-feminist hate speech. The garment is falsely labeled as a symbol of oppression. However, unbeknownst to such ignorant views, Muslim women have the right to choose to wear the burqa, and many feel empowered by the privacy and control over their body it provides in a hypersexualized world. The purpose of this photograph is to epitomize this sense of empowerment. The modest woman exists, she enjoys her fried chicken, and she can devour it in a burqa should she wish to.

“The Arabian Dream” – Mareya Khouri

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Smelly Sounds: Phonetic Symbolism in Scent L A C HL A N P HA M

Stinky. Musty. Stench. Dusty. Stale. All these words describe a scent and contain a /st/ consonant cluster. One might also astutely discern the distinctively negative connotation shared amongst these words, perhaps going so far as to associate a sense of subtle yet inescapable displeasure that accompanies exposure to these scents. This correlation between the sounds of a word and its connotation may initially seem purely coincidental.

However, it would be unjust and wholly unscientific to dismiss such a relationship based on an intuition. After all, the concept of phonetic symbolism, which refers to the nonarbitrary connection between semantics and speech sounds, is a well-demonstrated phenomenon in several languages including English. Granted, its occurrence is most prominent in â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and mainly limited to â&#x20AC;&#x201C; lexical fields relating to hearing itself such as onomatopoeia, but the reach of phonetic symbolism has been found to extend into the sense of sight. The same may potentially apply to olfaction until proven otherwise which naturally leads us to the hypothesis: Individual phonemes of scent words contribute meaningfully to their connotation.

From the outset, the hypothesis for this investigation is perfectly set up for disproof. In applying the oft-inapplicable phenomenon of phonetic symbolism and examining an already tenuous relationship between scent and sound, I was fully prepared to find nothing of statistical significance and, in many regards, this study finds that there is indeed insufficient evidence to support the hypothesis. Nevertheless, any socio-linguistic paper would be incomplete with a merely cursory foray into the immensely multifaceted realm of connotation. Ultimately, connotation relies on a complex amalgamation of context and lived experience and whilst the sounds of scent words may not necessarily share a direct causative link with connotation,

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it certainly is one factor among many. This paper will be divided into two discrete sections. The first will resemble a free-form research paper, which attempts to establish a quantifiable relationship between scent wordsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; phonemes and connotations in English. The second part seeks to justify any findings and contrast them with the French language.

PART 1

To determine if there is a relationship between the phonemes of scent words and connotation, 287 scent-related words were first collected. These words range from sources of scent (deodorant, skunk) and emotions caused by the act of smelling (intoxicating, nauseating) to likenesses (savoury, floral) and direct descriptions (musky, pungent). The words were subsequently input into a simple program through which a subjective score from 1 to 5 was assigned to the word based on the positivity of its connotation. The scores were given mainly based on SentiWordNet, which is essentially a large online repository of words and their corresponding scores along two spectra: negative-positive and subject-objective (Esuli). The data for the repository is created via a machine learning process in computational linguistics which gathers information about words via association, relying on the assumption that if a word is commonly surrounded by or defined by positive words, it is also a positive word (Esuli). The same applies to the other metrics as well.

Importantly, some of the scores sourced from the repository were selectively overwritten as they were subjectively inaccurate â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a natural consequence of its indirect and inhuman judgement capacity. The same words were also translated into their individual phonemes according to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), using another online repository, the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary Corpus Reader (Bird et al); each phoneme was given the same score as its source word. The IPA was selected due to its status as the international standard, making it the most robust open-source transcription library. With this information, a discrete frequency histogram of scores was established for the words:

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This plot allows us to make a direct comparison with the score distribution for each individual phoneme. If a specific sound does indeed contribute meaningfully to the connotation of scent words, its score distribution is expected to differ appreciably from that of scent words. Conversely, if it shares a similar distribution then the effect of the phoneme on the sound’s meaning, at least along the positivity spectrum, cannot be proven and may as well be random. What the latter situation likely indicates is that the phoneme itself makes no difference to the connotation of the word and thus it should be found proportionally in words of all scores. To compare the above frequency histogram to those of the phonemes, the Kolmogorov– Smirnov test was applied, which allows for determination of equality for two one-dimensional probability distributions. For most phonemes, it was found that there was no statistically significant difference for its distribution, essentially confirming the nonrelation between individual phoneme and a word’s meaning; we can be more than 95% certain that the score distribution for a phoneme is not different than the distribution for all scent words. This can be qualitatively demonstrated by the /ʌ/ phoneme, for example:

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Evidently, this score distribution strongly resembles the score distribution for scent words, being bimodal, peaking at the extremes score of 1 and 5 and having the fewest 2 scores. Exceptionally, a few phonemes did demonstrate a statistically significant difference in distribution, but these results were disregarded as they were more likely attributable to a low sample size. That is to say, there were several phonemes whose distribution did differ from the distribution of all scent words but this is probably better explained by the few data points available for these phonemes. Additionally, due to the high variance values, using the student’s t-test (which is technically inappropriate for non-normal distributions), no significant difference was found between the mean scores for the phonemes and scent words.

Despite these negative findings, there appeared nevertheless to be minor differences in the average score for the scent words and the phonemes.

For example, the mean score for the scent words was 3.05 whereas the mean score for the /s/ phoneme was 2.69. With this, each word was given a ‘sound value’ score which was calculated by summing the difference between each of its phonemes and 3.05. The ‘sound value’ score for the word stink (/stIŋk/): score’stink’ = meanscore(/s/) - 3.05 + meanscore(/t/) - 3.05 +meanscore (/I/)-3.05 +…

This produced a normal distribution of ‘sound value’ scores around an approximately 0 mean. These scores were compared with the originally assigned score for the words and it was found that negatively connoted words (score lower than 3), positively connoted words (score greater than 3) and neutrally connoted words (score of around 3) corresponded at a level of 53% to the sign of its ‘sound value’. This contrasts with an expected

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36% if the distribution were merely random and points to the unintended conclusion that it is rather the unequal combination of only slightly positive or negative phonemes which reflects a word’s connotation.

In summary, these results show that individual phonemes are not associated with a scent word’s connotation at least along the positive-negative spectrum.

This is made evident by the fact that no single phoneme is noticeably overrepresented in positively connoted or negatively connoted words. That said, if we are to consider the sum of the minor deviations of the scores for each phoneme from the average of all scent words, we find that this is a much more reliable predictor to determine the connotation of scent words.

PART 2

As previously noted, the study of phonetic symbolism is rather limited because, by and large, these relationships do not exist in most lexical fields.

The reason scent is being considered at all is because it falls into the category of sense where phonetic symbolism has been identified. Onomatopoeia, in a much more literal sense, demonstrates a relationship between meaning and sound, with words like ‘bang’, ‘woof’ and ‘murmur’ evidence of an attempt to imitate sounds with human language. As for sight, the relationship is a little less obvious with seemingly arbitrary sounds demonstrating some identifiable semantic patterns. For example ‘gl-’ is commonly seen in words associated with light and brightness: ‘glare’, ‘glimmer’ and ‘glow’ (Sadowski).

Both these phenomena are documented in linguistic literature. On the other hand, there is no literature on the sense of smell despite the identification of some potential patterns. Crucially, this investigation into the phonetic symbolism of scent words provides a preliminary analysis to address this gap in the literature.

However, while it is one thing to identify these patterns as part 1 seeks to do, it is entirely another to justify how they may exist, which is ultimately the intent of part 2. An analysis on the phonetic symbolism in brand names found that the front vowels connoted sharpness as a consequence of its high position in the mouth and shortness (Lowrey et al). This matches the expectations for /ʌ/ and /i/, which had close to average mean scores.

These sounds are prominent in several negative biting smells ‘acrid’, ‘acid’

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and ‘rancid’. But sharpness is not necessarily negative, it is often related to spices or intense fruity smells, which explains the presence of these vowels in ‘citronella’ and ‘cinnamon’. Conversely, back vowels like /u/ and /ʊ/, which scored more highly are perceived as “smoother, richer and creamier” (Lowrey et al). These sounds, in scent words, are almost always positive as in the terms ‘perfume’, ‘aroma’ and ‘pheromone’. The relatively low-scoring velar nasal /ŋ/ preceding /k/ finds itself in several negatively-connoted ‘stink’, ‘skunk’, ‘rank’ and ‘dank’ reflective of “disgust and dislike” (Lowrey et al). The existence of phonetic symbolism is abundantly clear, but its cause remains ambiguous.

Whilst a class poll confirmed the relationship between the sound of words and their connotations, it also brought into question the causative link. To test whether the identified relationships are a consequence of convenient, cherry-picked examples or if the attributed scores of the phonemes truly reflect, in some manner, the connotation of the scent words, a survey consisting of 9 fabricated lexemes was presented to a class. In this way, one can attempt to verify the connotations of phonemes without conflating them with the connotations of the words to which they belong. For each made-up word, participants were requested to determine whether they believed the word to be positive, neutral or negative based purely on its sound so that its spelling does not influence the sentiment towards the word.

In general, the ‘sound value’ of the word corresponded strongly with the overall sentiment felt towards each word. The ‘gaïac’ (/geIək/) stems from a technical French word for a type of tree and also has a ‘sound value’ of close to 0; six of eleven respondents believed the word to be neutral.

Similarly, the word ‘pidous’ (/pidəs/) was composed of the lowest scoring phonemes whereas the word ‘umori’ (/umɔri/), was composed of the highest scoring phonemes; seven respondents found the words negative and positive respectively. However, upon hearing the justifications for their responses, it became clear that, given no context for these words and being exposed to them for the first time, the respondents relied much more heavily on their understanding of similar sounding words rather than assessing the fabrications on their own auditory merits. ‘Pidous’, for example, was compared to ‘penis’ and ‘umori’ to the Japanese term,

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‘umami’. These observations show that the experiment ultimately did not succeed in evoking connotation based on sound rather than on already known words, but it leads to a more nuanced conclusion. The very failure of this experiment is indicative of an indirect causal link; the identified correlation may rather come from association with other similar words.

That is to say, one manufactures links between connotation and sound as they draw connections between phonemes and the meaning of known words. The intuition that the phonetic symbolism in scent is coincidental stems from this very fact. After all, there seems to be no reason for the sounds of scent words to reflect what the words mean because the processes of developing neologisms and appropriating loanwords are largely independent of phonetics.

The greatest challenge to this investigation’s hypothesis were interviews with three native French speakers from Tunisia, Morocco and Burkina Faso, which emphasised that connotation, more often than not, is independent from sound. Initially, the exploration of French was intended as merely a comparative analysis with the phonetic symbolism of English scent words.

Given that English derives much of its vocabulary from French and the two languages share similar roots, the expectation was that there would be valuable comparisons from which to extract a discussion on cultural and linguistic determinism. Instead, and inadvertently, the fact that the native speakers came from wildly varying backgrounds and gave often opposing opinions, reinforced the highly subjective and individualistic nature of connotation. These interviews were simple, involving the oral presentation of several French-related scent words followed by a rapid-fire verbal response consisting of the associative thoughts each individual had about the word. After an explanation of phonetic symbolism, all interviewees felt hesitant to make sweeping generalisations about the sound-meaning relationship. One interviewee would begin identifying a phonetic pattern such as a ‘bodied’ sense to the /ø/ phoneme in voluptueux (voluptuous) and crémeux (creamy) but immediately backtrack, upon considering some exceptions. An interesting observation made was that French speakers place significant emphasis on ease of pronunciation and fluidity of expression.

Consequently, words which are more difficult to pronounce i.e. cause greater

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strain on facial muscles such as the /g/ and /r/ phonemes in ‘rugueux’ (rough) often had negative connotations. (Importantly, the standard English postalveolar approximant /r/ is distinct from the French guttural uvular fricative /r/, which demands a more strenuous narrowing of the uvula.)

This remark is an interesting counterpoint to the indirect causative link in phonetic symbolism; the unpleasant and mildly uncomfortable production of certain sounds can result in negative sentiments. That said, notable among the responses were the ones that relied on a personal explanation. The word ‘terreux’ (earthy) received significantly different opinions amongst the interviewees with one fondly reminded of their childhood games in the rain during the typically dry Burkina Faso climate whilst another recounted their miserable days of trudging through mud. These contrasting attitudes fall strongly in line with the views of Rachel Herz who contends that “our responses to odors are learned, not innate” (202). She states that acquisition of the emotional meaning of smells occurs through experience, citing her enjoyment of skunk smell and another’s distaste for the smell of rose (195).

The high variance of opinion toward smell further weakens the link between sound and smell; it is impossible to discover a consistent relationship for phonetic symbolism if the measured variable, connotation, varies significantly from individual to individual.

Distilling the influences of connotation into just phonemes is perhaps an interesting thought-experiment but it fails, like any other quantitative metric, to accurately and reliably encapsulate meaning. The investigation has shown that, at the very least, constituting phonemes may be used to predict the connotation of a scent word as negative, neutral or positive at an accuracy of 53%, but this may be a correlative consequence rather than a causative one. Ultimately, the more significant qualities of scent words are a subjective matter, best informed by idiosyncratic experience, context and opinion.

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W OR KS C I TE D

Bird, Steven, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper. Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit. O’Reilly Media, Inc, 2009.

Dubois, Danièle. “From Psychophysics to Semiophysics: Categories as Acts of Meaning.” Speaking of Colors and Odors, edited by Martina Plumacher and Peter Holz. John Benjamins Publishing, 2007, pp.169–84.

Esuli, Andrea. The SentiWordNet Sentiment Lexicon, 2019. https://github.com/aesuli/SentiWordNet. Herz, Rachel. “I Know What I Like: Understanding Odor Preferences.” The Smell Culture Reader, edited by Jim Drobnick, Bloomsbury, 2006.

Lowrey, Tina M., and L. J. Shrum. “Phonetic Symbolism and Brand Name Preference.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 34, no. 3, pp.406–14.

https://doi.org/10.1086/518530.

Peterfalvi, Jean-Michel. 1964. “Etude du symbolisme phonétique par l’appariement de mots sans signification à des figures.” L’Année psychologique, vol. 64, no. 2, pp.411–32.

https://doi.org/10.3406/psy.1964.27255.

Sadowski, Piotr. “The sound as an echo to the sense: The iconicity of English gl-words.” The Motivated Sign, edited by Olga Fischer and Max Nannyohn Benjamins Publishing, 2001, pp.69-88.

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Performing Family: A Utopian Vision NU R A I SHA H SH A F IQ

Hope. It is a fragile thing. Most find it futile in the face of a world so vast in its inequality that even the act of imagining kinder realities is most often mocked as naïve. Systems of oppression are so deeply embedded within the functioning of our society that not only is it difficult to imagine different ways of structuring our world, but a great many individuals feel severely disempowered and without agency to actually pursue efforts in realizing such conceptions. In an era of global capitalism and rampant neoliberal ideology, the struggles one faces in improving the ills of society are no longer so well-defined. Who are we fighting? What are we fighting? As a well-known film theorist Robert Stam indicates, “the enemy now takes a more diffuse, abstract and quasi-ungraspable form” (3). Yes, sometimes the root of abject suffering manifests itself within a person – some politician, a CEO, a drug lord, or any other person who stands on a socio-economic model that pits capital above human life – but often, these people stand in for institutions of power, institutions that prescribe certain means of existing within our world that normalizes inequality as a way of maintaining the status quo. One such institution is the family.

How family has typically been understood is bound by the model of the heteronormative nuclear family. Such a definition may not necessarily suffice for those who do not conform to normative ways of being (e.g. sexuality and gender), and thus isolates these individuals from others.

Humans are socially conditioned to expect love and this model subjects them to the violence of prejudice and discrimination. Such a definition deprives people of the means to fulfill the basic need for dependency and intimacy – be it physical, emotional or social – that is inherent to human nature (Davies and Robinson 42). Without the support of family in all its forms, from emotional stability to financial security, one is left vulnerable in a society that privileges the very few at the expense of so many others. Thus, where does hope lie, if one is to challenge such a deeply ingrained and vastly

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assimilated idea of family geared towards isolation and violence? The answer is in the radical. It requires a redefinition of family, completely stripped of both the constructs of the nuclear family and heteronormativity, and one that is grounded in the formation of a connection between two or more people that enables them to take on the fundamental roles of a familial unit.

These roles include exercising responsibility over the wellbeing of others and providing support which can only take place through the existence of love within a collective.

I am arguing for a model of family that asks for a complete restructuring as opposed to the existing forms. One cannot create a more equitable social space for non-conforming subjectivities if a heteronormative schema serves as oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s basis for reorganization. Instead, one must identify what exactly leads to the construction of familial belonging and actively bring that into being instead of passively accepting the normative notion of family as the default means of organizing social units. In order for me to do this work in redefining family, I turned to the Netflix show Sense8 and its own radical re-conceptualizations of human connection and community. Through this process, I found that choosing to empathize with anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pain can performatively create a utopian model of family.

The heteronormative nuclear family simply refers to the social unit formed between a mother, a father, and their children. However, the implications of such a structure are far less simplistic. Firstly, heteronormativity dictates binary roles associated with the mother and the father figures within this familial model; roles that must correlate to their biological sex, a phenomenon that becomes part of the formation of gender as a social construct. I find Judith Butlerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notion of performativity crucial here as discussed by Davies and Robinson. According to Butler, repetitive performance of certain practices such as the arbitrary roles of each parental figure, normalizes the construction of gender and the validity of the nuclear family. This performance leads to a widespread perceptual assimilation that the modes of existing within this familial model, as well as the model itself is the default way of functioning successfully within the society; an assimilation that dictates biological, social and legal understandings of the

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term family (42). This restriction leads to challenges in inducing a large-scale willingness to accept different models of family which one must combat through the consciously performative capacity of more radical definitions of family. Furthermore, there is a reproductive function attached to the nuclear family manifesting in the belief that the lack of children renders a family incomplete. A biological inability to reproduce children is rectified through methods like adoption and surrogacy enabling couples to still attain the structure of a nuclear family. Due to the prevalence of the nuclear family form and its performative replication on every strata of society, this model of family serves as something towards which one aspires and considers a manifestation of their fulfillment and success in life.

I want to argue against the tendency to measure one’s fulfillment, particularly in the attainment of a familial presence in one’s life, against the standard imposed by the heteronormative nuclear family. This default family structure, into which most people are born, is restrictive in its acceptance of diversity in all its forms including sexual orientation and gender; this structure is inherently conducive towards isolation and the production of violence and pain. Thus, such a model should not be considered the normative means of constructing a family, but merely one of several options.

Sense8, created by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, as well as J. Michael Straczynski is an ambitious cinematic enterprise highlighting the inequality present within the society and imagining solutions to address these including those perpetuated by normative ideas of family. The audience follows eight characters, strangers to one another who are suddenly linked by a superhuman bond, giving rise to the intersection of various human experiences. Through some of these characters’ narratives, the show provides an apt visualization of how the nuclear family is a model rooted in isolation and violence.

Nomi is one such character. She is a transgender woman whose parents, particularly her mother, subjects her to transphobia refusing to accept her for her true identity. This prejudice projected at her is due to Nomi’s inability to conform to heteronormative constructions of gender correlating with biological sex. Transphobia is one of the many institutionalized forms

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of violence perpetuated by heteronormativity (Zilonka 395), and it manifests in violent acts that encompass both the physical and emotional. In Nomi’s case, such acts can be seen when as a youth she is forced by a group of adolescent boys under a boiling hot shower in the male locker room to the point of being burnt, as well as when her mother refuses to call her by her chosen name, opting instead to refer to her by her birth name, ‘Michael’ (“Death Doesn’t Let You Say Goodbye” 32:07; “I Am Also A We” 10:25).

Furthermore, the depth of this violence is encapsulated in its capacity for self-infliction due to internalized heteronormativity and the pervasive belief that the nuclear family is the only structure through which one finds familial belonging and support, something Nomi notes with, “the real violence, the violence that I realized was unforgivable, is the violence that we do to ourselves when we’re too afraid to be who we really are” (“Death Doesn’t Let You Say Goodbye” 33:33). The violence Nomi experiences at the direct and indirect hands of her parents, the latter through their inability to protect her from other sources of hatred and discrimination, including herself, isolates her from her biological kin. This isolation occurs because the notion of the nuclear family, particularly that predicated on biological kinship, being a default structure generates an illusion of love that leaves one bereft and unsatisfied when one does not conform to heteronormative modes of being.

This isolation is not merely limited to those who are perceptibly nonconforming, such as those belonging to the LGBTQ+ community, but everyone who is unable to experience belonging and love from people society has deemed one’s family, simply on the basis of the biologically reproducible model of the nuclear family. Thus, I would like to characterize these individuals as queer, and by doing so detach the term from solely its affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community. I mobilize the term queer as a “relational” term, one that is opposed to the categories of identity sustaining heteronormativity (Davies and Robinson 40). I also draw here on José Esteban Muñoz’s definition of “queer”, a distinguished scholar of queer and performance studies. He understands ‘queerness’ as the quality that enables one to reject the reality one possesses as sufficient evoking the

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potential for constructing new modes of existing that lends itself towards utopia – a reorganizing of the existing world to both critique and upend the ruling status quo (1-3, 133). Thus individuals, regardless of their identity expression, can be characterized as queer when they do not passively accept, but instead actively play a role in the reconstruction of family.

Queer subjectivities which do not find love and support within the nuclear family occupy a space to create their own familial unit. These families destabilize heteronormativity as a foundational pillar of society by demonstrating that family structures within such a framework do not need to be reflexively accepted as the norm (Davies and Robinson 42).

However, the hegemony of heteronormativity positions these individuals to emulate the nuclear family by directing them to act as consumers of reproductive technologies, including IVF, surrogacy and adoption (43). A queer reconceptualization of family must extend beyond the replication of the nuclear family and instead identify at its most fundamental level, how love and belonging can exist within a collective.

The bond between the principal eight characters in Sense8 – the sensate bond – serves as an interesting case study to deconstruct the formation of familial belonging and understand how to actively create a social unit upon such connections. This bond is psychic in nature, enabling these eight strangers who are geographically separate from one another to occupy each other’s mental landscapes, experiencing and harnessing similar emotions and physical movements, as well as interacting as if they were physically in one another’s presence. The sensate bond is emblematic of the highest form of human connection, unmediated by any physical technology, one that gives rise to a new, more advanced type of being (Mincheva 32-4). As humans that are not yet nor may ever be at that stage, such a bond is something we can only aspire towards and we do so by drawing from this sci-fi rendering of human relationships to enable praxis.

Underlying this unique connection is pain. The bond is initially borne from the physical pain of the sensates’ ‘mother’, Angelica Turing, who undergoes the agony of physical labor to birth this connection. This pain is intensified by the emotional anguish Angelica experiences due to fear that her newborn

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sensate ‘children’ will be discovered and harmed for their newly-acquired abilities. Consistently throughout the series, pain is the intermediary around which the bond between the sensates matures from an involuntary linkage to genuine support and love for one another. One such instance can be seen in the episode “I Have No Room in My Heart for Hate”. In one of its scenes, Sun is grieving for both her parents and mourning her role in her brother’s development as corrupt and profit-driven. In response to her pain, every other sensate appears, each offering solidarity and support in their own way, be it an acknowledgement of a shared experience in their own life or reassurance regarding Sun’s emotional turmoil. This demonstration of care and empathy culminates in all eight embracing one another (26:27 – 32:33).

The way in which “pain connects us […] binds us better than anything else” (“Amor Vincit Omnia” 18:13) can be extrapolated using Sarah Ahmed’s Affect theory and her notions of “love as empathy” as well as the relationality of pain. Love manifests when one longs to feel the other’s pain for themselves, thereby relinquishing them from the experience of undergoing it alone.

However, pain is a solitary thing, and it is almost impossible for multiple people to ever fully understand the experience of one person. And thus, a part of love as empathy is also acknowledgment of one’s struggle. An example is the recognition of pain subjected by the normative definition of family and the absence of belonging felt from this social construct. Such acts are restorative, allowing for pain to be a facilitator of relationships as opposed to a source of isolation (29-30). Pain, regardless of its various manifestations in different life experiences, is universal in its feeling; the acknowledgement and support in engaging with each other’s pain through the process of empathy is foundational to the formation of familial relationships. This process is integral to the existence of love within a collective.

Just as the structure of family cannot be taken for granted, neither can one assume that the process of empathizing across differences be accepted as a passive process that requires no effort. One must choose to actively participate in the formation of the love and support that is the basis of a true family. One must choose to construct and maintain healthy relationships,

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unrestricted by the arbitrariness of heteronormative structures. This choice must exist across both biological and fictive kinship. Only deliberate and active decisions directed against the formation or rejection of relationships can give rise to an agency capable of challenging normative modes of being. Agency, particularly amidst pervasive powerlessness, can lead to the conviction needed in sustaining radical models of reorganizing society.

Every family, regardless of its resemblance to the nuclear family or the presence of biological relations, is at its core made. The true definition of family should not be attributed to “something as accidental as blood.

But [to] something much stronger […] choice” (“We Will All Be Judged by The Courage of Our Hearts, 14:59). Choice enables one to be selective in harnessing the performativity Butler discusses (Davies and Robinson 42), and conscientiously bring into being the different ways of existing within society. The performativity of family is instrumental in the realization of a utopian world, as it has been for the creation and maintenance of our inherently unjust society.

However, actualizing utopia goes beyond performing everyday practices and roles associated with the familial unit, but also towards the creation of art forms like Sense8, which plays an integral role in the visualization of alternative realities. Film theorist Robert Stam attributes terms such as “radical”, “subversive” and prefigurative” to art that explores the possibility of utopia. Sense8 is an example of such art, as well as what José Esteban Muñoz terms a “queer aesthetic” (1). There is a liminality inherent in descriptors such as “queer” and “radical”, a liminality reminiscent of the anthropological Turnerian usage of the word. The world evoked by these revolutionary art forms lie somewhere between physical manifestation and utter illusion, potential and impossibility, justifiable hope and futile wistfulness (Mincheva 38, Muñoz 1, Stam 6-8). Its evocative function, this ability to visualize and interrogate different worlds is essential to performativity. Art is necessary in the expansion of the imagination without which one would be at a loss regarding the options available from which to choose to performatively bring into existence. For many, including myself, the capacity to imagine alternative ways of organizing and creating families would be non-existent or limited if it were not for Sense8.

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Hope. It is a fragile thing. Many find it futile, but this need not be the case any longer. The redefinition of family demonstrates that agency is very much still within our possession if we are to play a conscious and active role in choosing the various modes of existence, we perform into being, such as the people we consider family and what exactly familial belonging constitutes. In the face of vast structures of inequality, we must not discount hope, for we must turn to it to illuminate alternative versions of our world that are kinder to the diversity of the human experience.

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2014.

Davies, Cristyn, and Kerry H. Robinson. “Reconceptualising Family: Negotiating Sexuality in a Governmental Climate of Neoliberalism.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, vol. 14, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp.39–53.

Crossref, doi:10.2304/ciec.2014.14.1.39.

Mincheva, Dilyana. “Sense 8 and the Praxis of Utopia.” Cinephile, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.

Sense8. Directed by Lana Wachowski et al., Netflix, 2015.

Stam, Robert. Keywords in Subversive Film-Media Aesthetics. Malden, MA, 2015.

Zilonka, Revital, and Jennifer Job. “Curriculum of Connection: What Does Sense8 Teach Us About Love, Community and Responsibility in Days of Despair?” Interchange, vol. 48, no. 4, Nov. 2017, pp.387–401.

Crossref, doi:10.1007/s10780-017-9309-y.

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The Paratha, Abu Dhabi and Migration A B HY U DAYA TYA GI

In the middle of Hamdan Street, I finally remembered that I had a paratha in my hand. It was still piping hot, so I took my first bite carefully. Suddenly, the road became dead silent. Cars stopped whizzing past me. Thursday night shoppers disappeared. For a brief moment, Abu Dhabi’s frantic urban life was reduced to me and my paratha. Over the next few days, I would have the pleasure of tasting several other delicious parathas in Abu Dhabi. Whether it was the simplicity of Al Saif’s plain parotta, the quirkiness of Paratha King’s Aloo Cheese Paratha or the chewy goodness offered by Tea Point Cafeteria, almost every variant of the “Abu Dhabi” paratha delighted me in its own particular way.

But none of them evoked the same nostalgia as the humble aloo paratha offered by Come and Eat Cafeteria. The softness of the aloo and the pungency of the masala struck me. More importantly, the paratha looked, smelled and tasted like home. According to Mohan Bhatt, the owner of Come and Eat, their paratha was supposed to be reminiscent of Delhi’s famous “Paranthe wale Gali”- the narrow Old Delhi street known for its parathas (Bhatt).

However, for me, the paratha took me back to another claustrophobic yet special lane: my mother’s kitchen. Behind each paratha and parotta I enjoyed is a similar story, stories of partition, discrimination, identity, migration, and most importantly, stories of people. For the paratha in Abu Dhabi has become representative of the migrant experience, in its invocation of nostalgia and familiarity, its role in identity formation and its inherent ambiguity, sparking discussions surrounding authenticity and class.

At its most uncontroversial, the paratha is a form of South Asian unleavened flatbread. The vagueness and generality of this definition is necessary, considering the diversity of the dish and what it has to come to embody throughout the subcontinent. With regards to its origins, the common belief as articulated by Pakistani writer Bisma Tirmizi is that the flatbread “definitely originated in the northern part of the subcontinent” (Tirmizi).

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Yet some scholarly evidence suggests that the first mention of a parathastyle bread in the subcontinent comes from the South Indian state of Karnataka (Achaya 85). The ambiguity surrounding the history of the paratha is also emblematic of its modern status, as various groups throughout the subcontinent claim the dish as their “own.”

Indeed, the paratha (and its variants) have become an essential aspect of several cuisines across South Asia. From the royal “tava ka paratha” in Lucknow to Malabar’s parotta, the dish has evolved based on the needs of its consumers (Pant 30). Nowhere is this more evident than in Punjab, which is usually considered to be the “home” of the paratha. In the region’s legendary highway dhabas, new varieties of parathas emerged in response to the needs of the travelers that roamed them (Pant 31). The paratha was perfect for the road, as it could be enjoyed in both a dining setting and as a takeaway item. Moreover, the filling nature of the Punjabi paratha made it a cost-effective option for low-income truck drivers and migrant workers. And perhaps most importantly, affinity for the paratha was (and is) shared by the diverse groups that travelled along North India’s highways.

Since then, the paratha has come to be associated with migration. This association was strengthened by India and Pakistan’s gruesome partition in 1947 to 1948. In the largest migration in history, the paratha travelled with the Punjabis that made and consumed it. This was especially true in New Delhi, a city that “grew out of the refugee camps that sprung up along its limits” (Hindustan Times). In the Indian capital, the paratha acquired a new meaning, becoming a quintessentially “Delhi” dish, with a reach far beyond the narrow lanes of Parathe Wale Gali.

The paratha’s connotations with migration and transience have continued into the 21st century, perhaps most evidently in relation to South Asian migration to the Gulf. In a country like the United Arab Emirates where 58% of the population is South Asian, the paratha has acquired special significance. The dish is so popular that even something as niche as “paratha-only” places seem to be flourishing. As Dharmesh, the Abu Dhabi branch manager of Paratha King, said, “we’ve had an amazing response.

Amazing response” (Dharmesh). Corporate platitudes aside, there seems to be truth to his claim. On several visits to the restaurant, I always found

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it moderately packed, even at odd hours. However, Paratha King is the symptom, not the cause of Abu Dhabi’s love affair with the paratha. From high-end restaurants to single-vendor cafeterias, almost every South Asian restaurant in the city seems to have some variant of the paratha.

To analyze the significance of the paratha in Abu Dhabi, I decided to interview the people that care most about the dish: those whose livelihoods depend on the paratha. This included owners, vendors, waiters and chefs in restaurants or cafeterias that sold parathas. I mainly focused (with the exception of Paratha King) on what Kamran, the owner of Punjab Flower restaurant, described as “third-grade restaurants” and cafeterias: standalone establishments with relatively affordable parathas (Kamran).

The Paratha and Migrant Memory: The role of food in migrant communities has been a topic of much academic research, especially in anthropology. As discussed by Brown and Paskiewicz, the scholarly consensus is that food habits tend to be “stable, enduring and resistant to change” (Brown & Paskiewicz). Moreover, Ghassan Hage argues the presence of food from one’s place of origin can help enhance the “feeling of familiarity,” which in turn assists with the process of home-building (Hage 42). This theme of familiarity was present in almost all my discussions about the paratha.

For some, this familiarity with the paratha breeds nostalgia. Mohan got visibly emotional, when discussing the “triangle sugar parathas” of his youth (Bhatt). Similarly, there was a glint in Mohammed’s (a paratha chef in Ghalib restaurant) eyes as he described the paratha-eating exploits of his childhood (Mubasher). For others, the paratha’s familiarity was comforting.

As Kamran put it, “without the paratha, it is like the morning never came, as if the sun did not rise” (Kamran). Ravi Singh (who owns a nameless cafeteria near Madinat Zayed) put it in more pragmatic terms: “Eating a paratha in the morning is just a mindset, a trend that we have been following since childhood” (Singh). Indeed, restaurants and cafeterias attempt to take advantage of this familiarity. As Mohan described it, “Our goal is to give the feeling that you’re somewhere in Punjab or the North and we try to relate it

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to your hometown or home country” (Bhatt). Such evocation of nostalgia lies behind countless parathas in Abu Dhabi, as thousands of migrants consume the dish as a reminder of home.

The Paratha and Identity: Beyond nostalgia and familiarity, food is also an important component of identity. Claude Fischler writes in his paper on Food, Self and Identity, “Food is a central component of collective belonging” (Fischler 1). Dishes like the paratha allow migrants to maintain some semblance of belonging towards their place of origin. For example, Mohan has spent more than twenty years in the UAE, developing a sense of belonging and identity. He describes himself as “almost a citizen” (Bhatt). For him, the paratha is now his “main connection” back to his birthplace of Delhi and his previous identity.

Another long-time Abu Dhabi resident Kamran argued that the “paratha is part of our blood in North India and Pakistan” (Kamran).

For some interviewees, the paratha was also symbolic of some notion of a pan South-Asian identity, especially as a dish that bridged national divides between India and Pakistan. Kamran (who is Pakistani) expressed great pride in the fact that “80% of his clientele is Indian.” He attributed this to the paratha, arguing that it was a “special part” of our shared heritage (Kamran). In Karachi City restaurant, the opposite is true as Ali is the Indian manager of a restaurant with a predominantly Pakistani clientele. Ali even sheepishly admitted that he preferred “Pakistani parathas” over the parotta of his youth (Ali).

However, the relationship between paratha and identity is not limited to past recollections. For it can be argued that the paratha has also become a part of a unique “Abu Dhabi” identity, at least for South Asian migrant communities. As Ibrahim (a customer at Fine Chicken cafeteria) put it to me: “Everyone in Abu Dhabi will have some form of the parotta or paratha once a day” (Ibrahim). While certainly an exaggeration, I heard similar claims from most of my interviewees. This is perhaps best encapsulated by the classic “Abu Dhabi” combination of the paratha and karak chai. The latter’s versatility is a perfect complement to almost all types of the paratha. With a plain paratha, the cinnamon can help invigorate one’s taste buds. On the

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other hand, its soothing touch can provide much-needed relief after a fiery stuffed paratha. This combination is best seen behind Madinat Zayed, where one can find a sea of cafeterias serving Kerala-style parottas and karak (usually for one dirham each). Indeed, some of the best parottas I tasted were at “tea cafeterias.” Ibrahim and Ranjith (an employee of Fine Chicken cafeteria) were adamant that the “parotta is best with karak” (Ranjith). Yet, it was the owner of Great Ways Cafeteria Riyas who put it best: “the parotta, karak and Abu Dhabi have a special connection” (Riyas). Thus, the Abu Dhabi paratha has already acquired an identity, related yet separate from the significance of the dish in South Asia.

One interesting aspect of the paratha and its identity pertains to the Emirati and Western affinity for the dish. Throughout my interviews, vendors would (unprompted) tell me about the Emirati or Western love for the dish. Niyam (the owner of Tea Point cafeteria) claimed that the “parotta is first preference for most people - lots of Emiratis/Westerners come for it” (Niyam). Dharmesh claimed that “Europeans and Americans come [to Paratha King] and get fresh parathas. They love it because they have only had ready-made food their whole lives” (Dharmesh). Ravi Singh argued that the “paratha has special significance for Emiratis too, they prefer it to their own food sometimes” (Singh). According to Ghassan Hage, who looked at the significance of Lebanese food for migrants in Australia, such a focus on receiving “culinary recognition by the dominant culture” is not unusual for migrant communities for it provides “a source of pride in social settings where” the dominant culture had “shown little recognition of ethnic value” (Hage 423). In a country where South Asians are often placed at the bottom of racial hierarchies, pride in the paratha can be seen as part of a search for validation.

The Paratha and Authenticity: When Kamran arrived in Abu Dhabi 20 years ago, “almost every North Indian or Pakistani restaurant had the same four to five dishes. The only parathas you could find were aloo parathas and plain parathas” (Kamran). To say that has changed would be a gross understatement. On one small stretch of Hamdan Street, one can find everything from “cheese parathas” to “beef fry poratta sandwiches” to “chocolate parathas.” According to Kamran, this is

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the result of cut-throat competition which has forced “food engineering,” even in “third-grade restaurants” like his (Kamran).

While Kamran is relatively open to these changes, that can’t be said for all of my interviewees, many of whom were outraged at the inauthenticity of new paratha variants. Ali, Mohammed and Dharmesh even went to the extent of listing “acceptable” paratha varieties. Mohammed was especially derisive of the cheese paratha, exclaiming that “anyone who calls it a paratha is just fooling themselves” (Mubasher). Dharmesh expressed similar outrage when discussing non-vegetarian parathas (Paratha King is a “pure vegetarian” restaurant). “The identity of the paratha is vegetarian. Sure, some Indian man can come to Abu Dhabi and make keema/egg parathas… but that is fusion and no longer a paratha” (Dharmesh). From a very narrow North Indian perspective, Dharmesh need not look further from Delhi’s aforementioned Paranthe Wale Gali, where all parathas are strictly vegetarian. Yet such a blanket statement on vegetarianism and the paratha ignores its history throughout the subcontinent. As Mohammed argued, the “keema paratha” has existed for centuries (Mubasher). Similarly, Ranjith pointed out that the combination of parotta and beef fry was considered a “classic” in Kerala (Ranjith). Thus, the suggestion that an “authentic” paratha has to be vegetarian is not only exclusionary, but also historically inaccurate. Nonetheless, the rigidity of some of the earlier comments is indicative of the significance of the paratha.

There is also immense controversy surrounding the correct flour for a paratha. After all, this is the main difference between North Indian/Pakistani parathas and Kerala parottas. The former is made using atta flour (which includes the endosperm, husk bran and germ of the wheat grain), while the latter is made using maida flour (which only contains the endosperm).

For several Malayali interviewees like Sameer (the manager of Chickin cafeteria), Selim (a waiter at Rafeeda refreshments) and Majid (a vendor at Black tea cafeteria), a parotta should ideally be made using maida. However, all of them also accepted that flatbread could be made using atta. This was in contrast to Dharmesh who exclaimed that a paratha could “only be made using atta” and that they “would close down the restaurant before

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ever putting maida in a paratha. Never. Never” (Dharmesh). At a deeper level, these arguments about “authentic” parathas illustrate ignorance or a refusal to acknowledge the diversity of the paratha’s history (and perhaps the diversity of the subcontinent). Indeed, author Alan Levinovitz has postulated that the conversation surrounding “acceptable” or “good” food can be representative of wider fault lines in society. He argues that “the first thing leaders do to introduce an us-them dichotomy is introduce dietary rules” (Hamblin). In a country like India where food (through bans on cow slaughter) has been used in attempts to impose a unitary national identity, it is difficult not to see Dharmesh’s proclamations about vegetarianism and atta as a natural extension of such an ideology.

Even apart from prejudice, the conversation surrounding the authenticity of dishes like the paratha is fundamentally flawed. As New York University professor Krishnendu Ray puts it, the search for “authentic” cuisine is often just a search for the “true copy of our expectations” (Godoy). In that sense, the arguments for “correct” or “real” parathas are analogous (in their fallacies) to the orientalist critique of Gulf cities as “inauthentic.” Moreover, the nature of migration is such that it is “fluid,” illustrating the futility of a search for authenticity (Godoy). This is especially true for a constantly evolving dish like the paratha in a constantly evolving city like Abu Dhabi.

The Paratha and Class: Beyond the more abstract significance of the paratha, the dish retains value because of its practicality. As Bhatt said in our interview, the paratha “is the initial meal of the day which can fill you up till the afternoon”. Indeed, the paratha may have more commercial value in cities like Abu Dhabi than it does in India. According to Dharmesh, “it is far easier to sell [parathas in the] UAE because people don’t have time. They leave home at 8am and they come home at 7-8pm, so they order from places like ours... [In India] 90% of the people know the secret of making the paratha. Here people don’t have time and basically everyone want parathas in the morning” (Dharmesh). Yet despite this supposed practicality, restaurants like Paratha King or even Come and Eat cafeteria may not be affordable for wide swathes of the migrant population. As Dharmesh himself admits, the paratha may

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not be affordable for low-income migrant workers. “Most of the working population has a meal budget that is less than 3-4 dirhams, with which they can only afford a roti” (Dharmesh). Dharmesh’s rudimentary calculations are supported by data. According to Gulf News, 30% of the working population of the UAE earns less than 1000 dirhams per month, which corresponds to a monthly food budget of around 250 dirhams (Khan & Almario). This tallies to a daily budget of around 8 dirhams, leaving a meal budget of around 2-4 dirhams (depending on the number of meals in a day). At Paratha King, the cheapest paratha is 13 dirhams, far beyond the budget of such workers. Even at Come and Eat cafeteria, a plain paratha costs seven dirhams, rendering it unaffordable for such low-income workers.

While Dharmesh’s estimations were accurate, his claim that such workers can’t afford parathas deserves further scrutiny (Dharmesh). This is mainly because there are several Punjabi (from both sides of the border) restaurants like Ghalib, Punjab Flower and even Ravi Singh’s cafeteria which offer parathas for 1.5 dirhams or less. According to Mohammad, the paratha’s practical value does actually extend to low-income workers. “In the morning, the paratha is very important for labor and migrant workers” (Mubasher).

It isn’t just the price of such parathas that make them ideal for low-income workers. Parathas at such restaurants tend to be huge in size and littered with ghee, thus providing the required nutrients for individuals who have to spend long days in the sweltering Abu Dhabi sun. Indeed, several Pakistani places like Ghalib and Karachi City only serve parathas in the morning from 6am to 11am, mainly attempting to cater to the migrant worker population, and others (such as security guards) who spend long hours in the outdoors.

The Kerala parotta is also relatively affordable. Across 13 parotta places that I visited, the average price of the cheapest parotta was 2.85 dirhams. While a plain parotta may lack the nutritional value of the big Pakistani paratha (and thus be less affordable in terms of net consumption), it is still substantially more affordable than parathas at restaurants like Paratha King or Come and Eat Cafeteria (where the cheapest paratha is 7 dirhams). Moreover, most of these places also offer parotta sandwiches with protein for an additional 1-2 dirhams, thus further enhancing their affordability.

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When I asked Sameer (the manager of Chickin cafeteria) about the significance of the paratha or the parotta, he politely retorted: “Do you like parottas?” I replied in the affirmative. “There is the significance of parotta” (Sameer). In a sense, Sameer was right: like any dish, the most important function of the paratha will always lie in its ability to provide joy and relish through taste. However, having investigated the paratha and the role that it plays in Abu Dhabi, one can’t help but feel that behind each paratha lies a story: a story of homes from Karachi to Kerala; a story of migrants and citizens; a story of complicated identities and simple beliefs; a story of vegetarians and non-vegetarians; a story of atta and maida; and most importantly, a story of people. It is only when these stories come together that one can enjoy the culinary delicacy that is the “Abu Dhabi” paratha.

W OR KS C I TE D

Achaya, K. T. The Story of Our Food. Universities Press (India), 2000.

Ali. “Parathas at Karachi City.” 6 May 2019.

Bhatt, Mohan. “Parathas at Come and Eat Cafeteria.” 6 May 2019.

Brown, Lorraine, and Irena Paszkiewicz. “The Role of Food in the Polish Migrant Adjustment Journey.” Appetite, vol. 109, 2017, pp. 57–65., doi:10.1016/j.appet.2016.11.024.

Dharmesh. “Parathas at Paratha King.” 7 May 2019.

Fischler, Claude. “Food, Self and Identity - Claude Fischler, 1988.” SAGE Journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/053901888027002005.

Godoy, Maria. “Why Hunting Down ‘Authentic Ethnic Food’ Is A Loaded Proposition.” NPR, NPR, 9 Apr. 2016,

www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/04/09/472568085/why-huntingdown-authentic-ethnic-food-is-a-loaded-proposition.

Hage, Ghassan. “Migration, Food, Memory, and Home-Building.” Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz,

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Fordham University, New York, 2010, pp. 416–427. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt1c999bq.32.

Hamblin, James. “Purity Through Food: How Religious Ideas Sell Diets.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 17 Sept. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/05/the-puritanical-approachto-food/392030/.

Hindustan Times. “The Decade That Changed Delhi.” News Headlines, English News, Today Headlines, Top Stories, www.hindustantimes.com/static/ partition/delhi/.

Ibrahim. “Parathas at Family Refreshment.” 6 May 2019.

Ibrahim. “Parathas at Fine Chicken Cafeteria.” 10 May 2019.

Ismail. “Parathas at Black Tea Cafeteria.” 6 May 2019.

Kamran. “Parathas at Punjab Flower Restaurant.” 6 May 2019.

Kelly. “The Difference Between Maida and Wheat Flour.” LinkedIn, 2017,

www.linkedin.com/pulse/difference-between-maida-wheat-flour-kellymaize-mill-machine/.

Khan, Rabab, and Manuel Almario. “How UAE Expats Earning Less than Dh5,000 Live.” Gulf News – No.1 in UAE and Dubai for Breaking News, Opinion and Lifestyle, Gulf News, 7 Nov. 2018, gulfnews.com/going-out/society/howuae-expats-earning-less-than-dh5000-live-1.2295611.

Majid. “Parathas at Black Tea Cafeteria.” 6 May 2019.

Miyan. “Bite and Relax Cafe.” 6 May 2019.

Mubasher, Mohammad. “Parathas at Ghalib Restaurant.” 7 May 2019.

Mukul. “Paratha at Canopy Restaurant.” 10 May 2019.

Pant, Pushpesh. “INDIA: Food and the Making of the Nation.” India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/24393273.

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“Paranthe Wali Gali, Old Delhi: The Legend Lives On.” NDTV Food, 3 May 2018, food.ndtv.com/opinions/paranthe-wali-gali-old-delhi-the-legend-liveson-1220710.

Ranjith. “Parathas at Fine Chicken Cafeteria.” 10 May 2019.

Riyas. “Parathas at Great Ways Cafeteria.” 10 May 2019.

Sameer. “Parathas at ‘Chickin.’” 6 May 2019.

Selim. “Parathas at Rafeeda Refreshments.” 6 May 2019.

Singh, Ravi. “Parathas.” 10 May 2019.

Sengupta, Jayanta. “India.” Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History, edited by Paul Freedman et al., 1st ed., University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2014, pp. 68–94. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt7zw3tn.9.

Singh, Shivani. “‘Vadiya Khao’: Refugees Taught Delhi How to Eat out in Style.” https://Www.hindustantimes.com/, Hindustan Times, 14 Aug. 2017, www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/vadiya-khao-refugees-taughtdelhi-how-to-eat-out-in-style/story-Y5sG96AYWu7gQ9e5V6TXxN.html.

Tirmizi, Bisma. “Food Stories: The Paratha Platter.” dawn.com, 1 Apr. 2014, www.dawn.com/news/1097051.

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Creativity within Silence C A M E R ON W E HR

Without producing a sound, John Cage revolutionized music. The 1952 debut of his three-movement composition 4’33” in which the only note instructed the player to be quiet brought about a swarm of criticism; some believed that his piece mocked interpretations of modern art from a new perspective.

The silence within Cage’s 4’33” served as a catalyst for differentiating while new school of thought in which composers and music analysts began to view sound and composition questioned its status as music. However, Cage’s radical piece mainstreamed conception and the perception of music which encouraged the biological, philosophical, and psychological examination of music and sound within our selective attention.

In this research paper, I intend to establish silence as an inherent social construct to musical perception in order to argue that creativity necessitates silence. I will first show the historical use of silence within compositions in order to demonstrate its value of contrast in producing vivid emotion. I will then discuss the differentiation of music’s conception and perception, through both music philosophy and semiotic theory. This conversation will transition to a biological standpoint in order to highlight the sounds that humans naturally deem insignificant and thus diminish in their auditory perception. From this, I contest that creativity is borne out of silence through the widening of sound production outside of conventional musical thought increasing the unpredictability of communication. Analysis of the social construction of conventional, or socially significant, sound and its corresponding relative silence will emphasize that the conscious attention to ambient noise will increase our awareness and, subsequently, our ability to engage with new creative processes.

Since its inception, silence has pervaded music. William Beeman notes that there are tertiary, secondary, and principal sources of silence that separate notes, movements, and the beginning and end of the performance, respectively; therefore, silence is “a problem of cognitive framing” (24).

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Composers have utilized this separation of notated sounds throughout history: from Handel’s Messiah to George Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana to Ludwig von Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Their significance has varied, but the overall intent to create a sense of wonder, apprehension, or excitement has allowed composers to strategically implement silence as a means to emphasize the “actual,” conventional music.

Rather than highlighting the value of the notes’ musical conception as the driver of emotion and excitement, it is the silence that gives a background for which sound can become dramatic, mellow, or joyful. By this logic, silence serves only as a social construct through which people can gauge significant noises, which are otherwise unworthy of our immediate attention; it is this contrast that allows certain sounds to be conceived as music.

Cage’s 4’33”, therefore, upends conventional music because it brings the background noises of ambient sound to our forefront attention. There is no longer a social construction by which we can gauge music from ambience, melody from white noise. In justifying his composition, Cage states that, “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound” (191). If we assume that silence serves only as the contrast to sounds, we realize that silence can only be relative; the complete absence of sound, as silence commonly connotes, cannot exist without a noise to differentiate that sense of absolute silence. Rather 4’33” as music brings our attention to ambient noise because it questions our fundamental assumptions of music. At a lecture given at the Black Mountain College Satie Festival, Cage stated that: If you consider that sound is characterized by its pitch, its loudness, its timbre, and its duration, and that silence, which is the opposite and, therefore, the necessary partner of sound, is characterized only by its duration, you will be drawn to the conclusion that of the four characteristics of the material of music, duration, that is, time length, is the most fundamental. Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: It is heard in terms of time length. (Kostelanetz 81) Sound, no matter its secondary attributes of pitch, volume, or timbre, requires the relative silence before and after it in order to be recognized.

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Its characteristic duration motivates the composer’s emotions; its absence creates a sense of white noise that we naturally filter out. By bringing this ambient sound to our immediate attention, we perceive that music, and sound in general, requires a corresponding silence more than just a motivating factor but as an intrinsic component to its auditory perception.

When addressed so overtly, sound duration forces us to differentiate musical perception from musical conception. Christopher Shultis asserts that, while we can be unfamiliar with a composition’s musical harmonization and structure or its historical significance, we cannot abstain from its perception; there is “neither thought nor preconception” when we listen to music (343).

Auditory art, such as music, requires nothing but the passive participation of the listener in order to be perceived; however, it is within the listener’s active participation that they can fully appreciate its significance and conceive an attachment to the piece’s sounds. A music composition’s meaning and value derives itself within the instantaneous moment. There is no permanence in sound. As philosopher Salomé Voegelin states, its interpretation relies upon the listener to “invent it in listening to the sensory material rather than to recognize its contemporary and historical context” (7). The conception of music, in this case its interpretation, relies firstly on the perception of sound and secondly on the process and categorization of such sound. Such categorization inherently relies on the conception of emotions that are dependent upon the upbringing and culture of the listener. The acculturation of such sounds produces different interpretations that range solely based around the composition’s historical conception. When researching American and Chinese listening cognitive habits, researchers Xiao Hu and Jin Ha Lee found that Americans were more partial to music with lyrics while Chinese listeners preferred instrumental music (536). The conception of vocal and nonvocal music relies upon the cultural preferences and the constant presence of certain music conditions the brain to be more partial to such sounds. The sounds, over time, gain an emotional attachment of familiarity. In short, while the perception of music represents the objective manifestation of sound, its conception concerns itself with the subjective secondary historical and acculturation context.

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Because silence consists only of duration, silence as a performative art streamlines active engagement with the listener’s sense of self and their surroundings. When discussing music, philosopher Theodor Adorno realizes that the composition’s “cognitive character becomes radical in that moment in which art is no longer content with the role of perception” (112). When we focalize silence, we no longer passively listen rather we must become aware of our own present selves within the environment. Music no longer serves as a device to forget ourselves, but it acts as a way for us to think more critically about our self-consciousness. In analyzing silence, we must realize the sense of time and place that is inherent to the everyday actions of those around us. However, when we contemplate our surroundings, we interpret these external sounds through the internalized meanings to which we are accustomed. Within the field of semiotics, Rosario Mirigliano reasons that within a sound’s “nature as sign, it is already endowed with meaning” (50). Within the instantaneous moment of hearing, we process the sound to signify some emotion from its secondary attributes. Out of survival, we condition our hearing to distinguish sounds like ocean waves from car sirens based around their immediacy. Although we can alter our understanding of the sounds around us, we cannot separate our conception of such sounds from its perception. We must examine our own presence within our environment in order to reevaluate our reactions to those noises around us.

The value we attribute to sound determines its immediacy. When silence is contrasted with a random noise, a fixed pitch, a diatonic melody, or a random melody, the reaction of the auditory complex within the brain is extremely similar, indicating that the initial response to stimuli is the same (Patterson et al. 768). The auditory complex solely registers that there is noise; any subsequent judgement or conception forms an instantaneous secondary process to establish the emotion or signified intent of the sound.

Because the culture in which people associate defines the standards of music, the conception of music is therefore learned. In this way, sound becomes accultured because of the actions that surround certain sequences of pitches.

Take, for instance, La Marseillaise, the French national anthem: though our auditory complex processes each sound similarly, the conception of a single march-like melody slowly becoming harmonized fosters a sense of

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patriotism as many different individuals coalesce to become one. Once we realize that the association of sound with vivid emotions like patriotism constitutes what we deem valuable, we become more conscious of our perception of sound, or rather what sounds we naturally diminish because of their perceived insignificance.

However, the differentiation between the perception and the conception of sound is somewhat blurry because the brain conditions itself to react to certain noises in specific ways. When studying the superior temporal sulcus portion of the brain using functional magnetic resonance, researchers found that the region responded significantly when listening to individual vocal sounds as compared to control stimuli like scrambled voices and amplitudemodulated noise (Belin et al. 311). From an evolutionary standpoint, this auditory selective attention only seems consequential since the human voice is the primary way that humans can differentiate from other animals.

The brain conditions itself to seek out human voices in order to connect with others. Though the perception of sound presents as the same, as with the previous study, the conception of significant sound within the brain allows us to accentuate such timbres and sounds. This is obvious when we also consider that musicians with increased exposure and experience to refining their sense of hearing allow for more accentuated recognition of non-vocal sounds, which may be attributed to the structural adaptation in cerebral gray matter in use-dependent activities like music-learning (Gaser and Gottfried 9244). Such neural plasticity during childhood conditions our brains to heighten our sense of hearing towards specific sounds that are biologically important. This development complicates the differentiation between our perception and conception of sound; while they are inherently different, they are intrinsically connected. By understanding that our conception of sound, through our learned experiences during maturation, alters how and what we hear, we can examine how our cultures have valued certain sounds and pitches and analyze their effects on our perception of culture and international situations.

Silence as a performative art allows us to analyze this conception of sound without our biologically-altered cognitive frames of auditory recognition.

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Much along the lines of Adorno’s assertion of active engagement, Cage’s own philosophy when composing 4’33” was to “remove purpose” because “by eliminating purpose, what I call awareness increases” (Kostelanetz 81). When we remove our ability to passively conceive music as we have acculturated our hearing, we suddenly must focalize something other than what we regard as customary; we must recondition our perception of sound.

If we remove the stimuli that naturally attract our hearing, we broaden our selective attention to encompass sounds that would otherwise be diminished within the superior temporal sulcus portion of the brain. Cage’s intent of “removing purpose,” therefore, is paradoxical: in highlighting the absence of conventional music, Cage forces the listener to reevaluate the fundamental cognitive frame of hearing. Even in silence there is a societal purpose. By choosing certain sounds or relative silence, composers either perpetuate or critique the standards of music and sound in place; the process of creation is a constant state of choosing what to highlight and what to exclude from conception. Therefore, performing silence questions conventional norms of cognition and our societal conditioning in order to acknowledge evolutionary tendencies in basic sensory experiences.

Human development relies upon social, intellectual, and physical experimentation and exploration; by shifting our perceptions of sound and music, we can interact with new creative processes. In trying to create silence through digital media, software engineers have come up with new techniques to analyze data composition in order to produce new sounds beyond the original intent of the computer software (Cascone 14).

By examining this “emptiness” and channeling it for data sequencing, technicians have created artificial sounds that fall outside of natural timbre and pitch, pushing the boundaries of conventional music to include artificial timbres and pitches like square-wave frequencies and semitones. The acknowledgement of what sounds people choose to notice allows for new avenues of data collection. In this way, the instruments that create the music are musical because of their dual role as processor and producer. Christopher Shultis describes this idea when he states that creativity “is a process of diminishing the role of the self in the creative act” (316). When someone abstracts themselves from their work, they abandon any sense of ideology,

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of ingrained biases, of cultural affiliation. Within the modern era, creativity relies upon the sole act of the creation itself and not the culture upon which it relies in order to derive meaning. When art is able to stand alone as the sole form of its own engagement, it requires no preconceived notion of beauty or ingrained values of power and grandeur; the sound demands attention in and of itself rather than the idea it emulates.

In order to remove purpose, creators must replace intention. John Cage, alongside Christian Wolff and Steve Reich, most famously attempted this through different methods: from the square root method, where the music would fit a square rhythmic and melodic pattern, to the acknowledgement of time before rhythm, where there were differing sets of notes to be completed within a uniform time period. However, as Shultis notes, “to remove intention requires the omission of even the ideogrammic nature of language. It requires a complete removal of all symbolic reference” (343).

If we consider, then, that music, as a form of communication, intrinsically holds emotional value, we cannot escape its cultural significance; however, with the abstraction of melodies with which cultures associate and the invention of new artificial sounds, composers now have a new scope of creative endeavor. This release from the confines of musical and cultural ideologies derives, in part, from the abstention of predictability. Much like in music, in languages such as English, “half of what we write is determined by the structure of the language and half is chosen freely” (Weaver 56). The adherence to a specific set of notation and specific sounds allows music to become acculturated because of its predictability; without the expansion of such symbols and pitches, creativity runs dry. Unintentionality, or the absence of intention, signifies the ultimate removal of purpose because it abstains from predictability. Unintentional music serves no societal purpose other than the mere satisfaction of sound and the sense of hearing.

Silence as music, therefore, has purpose, but its purpose is to remove the conventional notions of music. By performing silence, the composer suspends conventional music’s intention as perceived and shifts the attention to the audience. Music creation serves as a device to reinforce or critique the noise society deems insignificant and, in this, substantiates or

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degrades the cultural ideologies that become associated with sound. In order to combat this acculturation, composers must abstract sound in order for the listener to value it for its inherent qualities. Silence, being completely intentional in allowing space for unintentionality, increases unpredictability and thus the opportunity for creative endeavors.

Silence as a performative art is necessary for the future of musical creation and production. Throughout the history of music, composers have utilized silence in order to contrast the significance of different aspects and subjects within the composition, building a sense of suspense, excitement, or mellowness. The abandonment of conventional music within John Cage’s 4’33” deconstructs this emotional production when the composition brings attention to the sounds that humans biologically filter out within their everyday lives. The differentiation of perception and conception of music allows analysts to realize that the emotional value we attribute to music is not inherent but acculturated based on societal standards of music.

However, our conception of music may alter our perception of music; therefore, we must be cognizant of the influence of our conception of sound in order to interpret our perception of sound. By increasing our awareness of the sounds around us, we interpret the sounds that are produced throughout our everyday lives without the reliance upon cultural ideology in order to derive meaning. Silence as a performative art abstracts sounds in order to establish sound as the sole creator and producer of significance. Once we acknowledge silence as music, we can endeavor within new fields of creative processes to reinforce or challenge social norms of sound.

B I B L I OG R A P H Y

Adorno, Theodor W. “Schoenberg and Progress.” Philosophy of Modern Music.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1976, pp. 29-133.

Beeman, William. “Silence in Music.” Silence: The Currency Of Power, edited by Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb. Berghahn Books, 1st ed., 2006, pp. 23-34.

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Belin, Pascal, et al. “Voice-selective areas in human auditory cortex.”

Nature: International Journal of Science, vol. 403, 2000, pp. 309-312.

Cage, John. “Experimental Music.” Silence. University Press of New England, 1961, pp. 7-12. “45’ for a Speaker.” Silence. University Press of New England, 1961, pp. 146-192.

Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal. The MIT Press, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 12-18.

Gaser, Christian, and Schlaug, Gottfried. “Brain Structures Differ between Musicians and Non-Musicians.” Journal of Neuroscience. Society for Neuroscience, vol. 23, no. 27, pp. 9240-9245.

Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage, Psychology Press, 2003, p. 81.

Lee, Jin Ha, and Xiao Hu. “A Cross-cultural Study of Music Mood Perception between Americans and Chinese Listeners.” International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 2012, pp. 535-541.

Mirigliano, Rosario. “The sign and music: A reflection on the theoretical bases of musical semiotics.” Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music, edited by Eero Tarasti. Mouton de Gruyter, 1995, pp. 43-62.

Patterson, Roy D, et al. “The Processing of Temporal Pitch and Melody Information in Auditory Cortex.” Neuron. Cell Press, vol. 36, 2002, pp. 767-776.

Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver. “Communication Problems at

Level A.” The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949, pp. 6-24.

Shultis, Christopher. “Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention.” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 2, 1995, pp. 312–350.

Voegelin, Salomé. “Listening.” Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2010, pp. 1-40.

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Abu Dhabi is the city of diversity. Not only is it a place for people who come from different backgrounds, but it also contains many ranges of non-human resources. The contrast between industrialization and nature is somewhat combined perfectly with each other. In this photo, I want to show the beauty of the two components, materialism and human lives, although they are different from each other, the combination of the two depicts beautiful scenarios and brings lives to the place. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Lifeâ&#x20AC;? by Am Silruk

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Notable Submissions of 2018-2019 Daniel Ahn

Living City: Analysis of Mumbai Depicted

in Slumdog Millionaire as both Catalyst and

Agent of Change

Koki Ajiri

The Crossroads of Food and Memory

Aiya Akilzhanova

Cover Letter for “Mastering the Art of

Emirati Cooking”: Final outcome was a film

Omar Ould Ali

Disney’s metaphors and metamorphosis:

between the past and the present

Odmaa Bayaraa

A Woman’s World, A Man’s Home Mongolian

gender identity through time

Kenza Benchekroun

Politics of Affects

Prajjwal Bhattarai

The racism behind Kampala:

Colonial inferiority complex through

Fanon and Gramsci

Ana Blatnik

Confession: The Baton of Power

Sofia Chavele-Dastamani

Imaged or Reinvented?

Li Cheng

The Construction of Gender Roles through

Photographic Representation: A Feminist

Analysis of the Campaign “Like Skin” by

Suitsupply Janine Micahella G. Contreras The Children of the Emperor

and the Childhood of Their Own

Makda Delelegne

Birth of the Modern World:

Africa and its Diaspora

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Tamoghna Dey

A Peace Offering: Aesthetics

vs. Documentation

Savion Garcia

Women in Power: Spectacles During

and After Marcos’ Reign

Yaman Garg

Hidden Connections and Shared Exclusions:

South Asian migrants in Abu Dhabi and

Madinat Zayed shopping Centre

Hannah Greene

Photographs: A Lens to Understanding,

or a Spectacle for Pity?

Matthew Gubbins

Why “HIM”: Evaluating the Significance

of Sam Smith’s Abu Dhabi Concert

Michelle Hughes

A repressed woman’s agency in

Slumdog Millionaire

Michelle Hughes

‘Call Me Kuchu’ and Accept my Existence

within Ugandan Society

Sebastian Kaloš

Colourful Ignorance

Priyan Kaur

Human Rights: The New Apology

Bianka Kiedrowska

Expressions of Maleness and Masculinity

Tintié Ahmed KONÉ

Humanitarian Aids and Child Soldiers in

Sudan during and after the Second Civil War

Ayan Marwaha

Fear, Power, and the complicacies of political

life in the Gulf

Elza Meiksane

The Power of Narrative in Nonviolent

Resistance Alex Miliutkin

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A sense that is lost and forgotten

Furqan Mohamed

Racism or Recreating: Challenging

Hegemonic Narratives about Racism

Victoria Mondello

Debate vs. Dialogue: Ada Limón’s

Approach to Feminist Ideas

Dalvin J Mwamakula

Africans and Change:

Changing the education system

Yoon Kyeng Nam

Punishment: the double-edged blade

Paula Navalon

Graffiti as a Weapon of Protest

Auguste Nomeikaite

‘For Us, By Us?’ American Hip-Hop

in the Process of Translation

Panos Oikonomou

When scent is not representable in binary

Joshua Oyos

The One-Child Policy and Shifts in the

Definitions of Chinese Childhood

Cristalina Parra

Pierre Bonnard: Toilette and Perfume

in Shaping Identity

Andrijana Pejchinovska

The Narrative of Victimhood:

A Story of Genocidal Justification

Manahil Qadir

Gender And Childhood: A Closer Look

At Maupassant’s “Useless Beauty”

Victor Quinonez

The Ethical Context of the Recognizability

of Life

Victor Quinonez

The Moral Imperative of our Time

Isabel Rios

Scent Synecdoches: Exploring the

Objectification of Women In Visual Media

Elena Sepetovska

On being a black man

NOTABLE SUBMISSIONS OF 2018–2019

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Ibrahim Suleiman

Scent as Paradox: Insights from Tom

Tykwer’s Perfume, The Story of a Murderer Melia Summers

Beloved to This World:The Role of Scent as a

Metaphor to Understand God in Sufism

Vlado Vasile

Frozen conflicts: a remnant of Stalinist

ethnic policy or a modern-day geopolitical

challenge?

Monica Lee-Chen Yang

Understanding the Cause and Mitigation

Method of Climate

Seungjae Yu

Building American Community

Aruzhan Zhakaibekova

Exploring womanhood in Shifa Mwesigye’s

“Ssengas and the Single Woman”

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What fishermen at Mina Zayed have in common is their passion and a place at the small concrete strip of Abu Dhabi that they have turned into a community. Daily life on the dhows, like the one from which this photo was taken, is a simple routine but a difficult experience. Waiting is a big part of fishing and it’s hard to do. Some men lie barefoot on piles of fishing nets called gargoor, smoking shisha as they look to the sky. Others gather on the boats lined up along the port and hang their laundry on the straps hoping for it to dry before the golden hour passes. The next morning, as they set out to the sea at 5 am, these fishermen will be the first to experience the clear tides of the Arabian Gulf.”

“Before the Golden Hour Passes” by Alicja Borzyszkowska

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NOTE S

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“What I enjoy the most about teaching my First-year Writing Seminar is how the structure of the course allows for a development of radical curiosity. In my class we ask complicated–well, impossible–questions and we beautifully fail to answer them. That’s not to say that we don’t answer them, but we work together to realize that a fundamental part of academic knowledge production is to realize that these questions cannot be answered in full, at least not by one person, thinker, writer. The best essays are curious, engaging, and, oftentimes, imperfect. They provide you with a sense of the writer and take the reader’s experience seriously. They argue and they allow the reader to disagree.”

Ken Nielsen, Associate Director of the Writing Program and Director of the Writing Center

“As a managing editor, it is a matter of great pride and pleasure to finally hold the third issue of Exit 11 in my hands. The editorial meetings involved regular reflections and debates on what we value in students’ essays. Those discussions and deliberations also helped us grow as teachers of writing. Exit 11 displays the strong team work of the editors alongside the academic caliber of NYUAD students.”

Sweta Kumari, Managing Editor & Associate Instructor of Writing

F R O N T C O V E R P H O T O : M A R E YA K H O U R I BACK COVER PHOTO: AM SILRUK 176 EXIT 11