Exit 11 Issue 04

Exit 11

A Journal of the First-Year Writing Seminars 2019–2020 1

Exit 11

Writing Instructors’ Praise for Exit 11 “Exit 11 serves as a testament to the amount of progress students are able to make on their writing within the span of one short semester. If I had to put it down to three words, I would say it is exciting witnessing the range of astute and innovative topics and approaches, inspiring watching the growth students are making, and rewarding to watch their hard work recognised in the form of published essays.”

A I E SH A H A R I F

“What I’ve come to value in a compelling First Year Writing Seminars 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 HU KW U M E R I J E

“Exit 11 essays are a testament to student achievement. An inexplicable joy emanates at the sight of your name and writing in print; it makes it official that you have arrived. As well as marking the beginning of students’ writing journey at the university, these essays mark the culmination of their learning in the First Year Writing Seminars. The essays chosen for the publication are successful in sustaining their unique ‘voice’ and ‘style’ throughout the text. This is an exceptional feat for a first year student.”

NE E L A M HA NI F

“Exit 11 is a wonderful reflection and celebration of the creative academic writing produced in First Year Writing Seminars, and was a stronger resource than ever in our year of online teaching. It’s been a joy discussing these essays with students finding their voices as scholars and writers, and forging an intellectual community while spread across the globe.”

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 First Year Writing Seminars, 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

“For me, Exit 11 showcases the alchemy of writing, the magic that happens between the blank page and a finished, polished essay. Initial impressions, unformed thoughts and shadows of ideas become sophisticated opinions and revelatory insights that not even the writer knew they were capable of manifesting. Not only does it represent the breathtaking range of material covered across the First Year Writing Seminars, but it’s a fantastic resource for both instructors and students.”

R A C HE L W OB U S

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Exit 11: A Journal of the First Year Writing Seminars Issue 04, 2019–2020 Executive Editor Marion Wrenn Managing Editor Sweta Kumari

Assistant Managing Editor Rachel Wobus Senior Editors Aieshah Arif / Neelam Hanif / Samia Ahmed Associate Editors David Allway / Haewon Yoon / Jamie Zipfel / Joshua Mussa / Kimberly Specht / Nkem Chukwumerije / Samia Meziane / Sanna McGregor / Zachary Shellenberger Contributing Editors Camilla Boisen / Claire Whitenack / Deepak Unnikrishnan / Emily Cole / Ken Nielsen / Najwa Belkziz / Philip Rodenbough / Piia Mustamaki / Sabyn Javeri Jillani / Samuel Mark Anderson / Soha Sarkis / Sohail Karmani / William Gerard Zimmerle Photo Editor Sohail Karmani

Student Assistants Ria Golovakova / Tracy Vavrova Founding Editor Asma Noureen

Cover Photographer Fizza Fatima Rana Design Consultant Minbar.co

Printer Royal Printing Press LLC

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A big thank you to Awam Ampka, Dean of Arts & Humanities, for his enduring support of the Writing Program. We also wish to thank our previous Dean, Kalle Taneli Kukkonen, as well as Bryan Waterman, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Development & Associate Professor of Literature. The digital conversion of Exit 11 was deftly overseen by Cyrus Patel, Global Network Professor of Literature and Professor of English, to whom we send our thanks.

Our gratitude also goes to Kate Nordang, Program Manager and Holly Spence, Administrative Assistant, who have supported this publication in various ways. And a special thank you to all our readers and writers.

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Table of Contents 11

Introduction – Marion Wrenn P H O T O G RA PH : Illuminating Traditions – Sashank Silwal

Essay 1 18

Reframing the Frames of Human Suffering – Eleanor Holtzapple

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The Unseen Effect of Structural and Institutional Racism

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Individuality, Pain, and Imagination: the Relationship of

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The War Between Salgado and Sischy: Not so Black

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In the Sense of a “Successful” Translation – Valerie Li

on the African American Community – Githmi Rabel

the World and People – Haoduo Feng

and White – Jenifer Eda Menezes

P H O T O G RA PH : Carts for Living – Sadeq Mohammed Alkhoori Essay 2 50

Subjectivity and Violence: A Dynamic Framework – Jiacheng Li

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How “Get Out” Exposes the Evolution of Oppression

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The Influence of Socio-Religious Factors on al-Ṣafadī’s

in America – Lady Gabrielle Ashong

Perception of Translation in the Abbasid Era – Reem Hazim

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Homosexuality in Contemporary Uganda – Sam Shu

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The Ambiguous Concept of Evil: A Problem in Assessing Legitimacy – Sonia Claudia Catinean

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A Salad or A Stew: Re-seeing The Hundred Foot Journey – Sophia Lin P H O T O G RA PH : The Traditional Modernity – Rania Sakhi

Essay 3 92

Musk in Islam: Olfactory Sensuality as Spirituality – Danial Tajwer

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Cyborgs: A Technological Future – Gautham Dinesh Kumar Lali

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Behind the Veil: Understanding the Meaning and

Representation of the Muslim Veil in Different Contexts – Guste Gurcinaite

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Pleasantly Painful, Excruciatingly Exciting: The Dominant/ Submissive Binary in Popular Representations of BDSM Scenes – Lucas De Lellis da Silva

P H O T O G RA PH : Sailing at Sunset – Fizza Fatima Rana 133

You Are(n’t) What You Eat: Food, Culture, and Family from a

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Palestinian Identities of Diaspora: Growth and

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Gripping the Controller but Grappling with More: How

Second-Generation Immigrant’s Perspective – Samantha Lau

Representation Online – Sarah Al-Yahya

Player Agency in Virtual Spaces Allows Recognition of RealWorld Violence Rather Than Instigating It – Shehryar Hanif

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Blued, or Be Lewd: A Study of a Chinese Gay Dating App – Sophia Lin P H O T O G RA PH : Flavours of the Souk – Fizza Fatima Rana

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Notable Submissions 2019–2020 P H O T O G RA PH : Connecting the old Dubai to the new – Sashank Silwal

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Introduction The much-beloved belief that “every writer needs a reader” fuels the work we do in NYUAD’s 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 read these essays, 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 of original essays; and now you are becoming a reader of their wonderful work. 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 for a reader, and it is sometimes the first thing we forget to do. As a result, the FYWS 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 you are reading this introduction, then Exit 11 is at your fingertips; and 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

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ways. They will not only show you 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. “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.” As our faculty and instructors will attest, 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 in order to create a sense of urgency and context for their analysis. We hope these wellcrafted essays inspire you to craft your own.

How are essays selected for Exit 11? As Dr. Ken Nielsen notes, 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.” In other words, excellence has many forms of expression; but a unifying feature of excellent essays is their capacity to engage a reader in the development of the author’s idea. The essays in this volume were competitively selected via a democratic editorial process, where every member of the editorial board votes on the merits of the submissions we received. We cast a wide net and sought essays from the array of classes that make up the First-year Writing Seminars: from “Slavery after Slavery” to “Saving Strangers” and “Making Sense of Scent”; from “Imagined Geographies” and “Street Food” to “Taste, Culture, and the Self”; from “History, Memory, and Forgetting” to “Power and Ethics in Photography” and “The Politics of Spectacle,” as well as “Real and Imagined: Women’s Writing Across Worlds.” Though the course themes vary widely, the essays form a coherent collection. Crucially, 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.

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

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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Mosaic lamps capture the rich culture of the Middle East; they illuminated thousands of homes in Turkey and the Middle East, reiterating the people’s values. I captured this image in one of the shops in the Textile Souk, Al Fahidi Street. Unknown to the object, the shiny colored glass patterns caught my attention from afar. The handcrafted hanging lamps are among the few jewels you would find in the shops of the United Arab Emirates.

“Illuminating Traditions” by Sashank Silwal

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Essay 1

Reframing the Frames of Human Suffering E L E A NOR H OLTZ A P P L E

In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, political philosopher Susan Sontag highlights the problems that arise from the modern ways in which society conceptualizes human suffering. This framing that we assign to the suffering of others has made people desensitized to it. Sontag asserts that this indifference is especially prevalent in war photography, because of the way it utilizes framing techniques to circulate images of suffering. She provides solutions to reframe suffering through the attachment of narratives to war imagery. In Frames of War: When Life is Grievable, political theorist Judith Butler shares Sontag’s concern about the rise of desensitization by calling for the redescribing of the social norms which provide the foundation for these frames that condition how we view suffering. Butler claims that these norms create a hierarchy of grievability, where some lives have a quality allowing them to be mourned in occurrences of suffering, while others lack this quality of grievability. Ultimately, this hierarchy gives the power to decide the value of others’ lives. Butler claims desensitization occurs because we are incapable of recognizing - or understanding the existence of - the personhood and precarity of those lives which are framed as encompassing low grievability. A precarable life is one that is recognized as being vulnerable to suffering, and only grievable lives - ones that society truly cares about and recognizes as a human life - have this quality of precariousness. Without recognizing the grievability of the lives of others, our society will not have the motivation needed to properly alleviate human suffering on a state or global scale.

This paper investigates the similarity between Sontag’s and Butler’s claims, both of which assert that we labor under frames of unrecognizability. The frames create indifference towards human suffering and stifle attempts to try to alleviate this suffering. By examining the commonality of Sontag and Butler, this paper argues we can only reframe suffering through the

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attachment and circulation of narratives alongside the frames. In this way, we can increase awareness of suffering while mitigating desensitization to it.

Sontag’s main assertion claims that if we are able to reframe the way we view human suffering, we may be able to motivate others to help those suffering. This creates a more generous world view, where we rely on others for aid in times of need, especially in occurrences of large-scale human rights violations. Sontag argues that the most common framing technique where desensitization occurs is mass media, especially in photography.

Photography, Sontag claims, is a powerful form of media due to its ability to be understood by a wide audience (Sontag, 2004: 18). While there is sufficient access to imagery of human suffering, it is so widely circulated, and without context, that it lacks the desired effect of motivating people to try and alleviate the suffering pictured. Although social norms do teach spectators to react with shock and horror to war photography, they are sentimentally detached from the events of the photo. The viewers have become desensitized to suffering due to the sheer volume of its portrayal in mass media, causing a trend of ‘mounting levels of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture’ (Sontag, 2004: 79). The framing of this genre of violence as acceptable causes a lack of motivation, on the part of bystanders, to intervene in conflicts which cause suffering. Instead of being a mode of engaging others to help, ‘photographs shrivel sympathy’ (Sontag, 2004: 82).

War photography has been framed, Butler would argue, so there is a lack of recognition of the precarity and personhood of the lives in the photos (Butler, 2009: 29). Sontag asserts that a solution to this desensitization is to attach a narrative to the photo, to ensure the viewer is informed of the context in which the photograph was taken and the reasons for the suffering shown (Sontag, 2004: 96). Only then will the viewer be motivated sufficiently to intervene and alleviate the suffering.

Butler’s main goal is to raise awareness for human suffering, or what she refers to as recognition. With this increased recognizability, she hopes there will be an amplification in our motivation to help those suffering. She argues the current lack of motivation is because of the high level of unrecognizability towards the precarity of life. In other words, many don’t recognize the shared

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vulnerability and finitude of life ‘that singularizes our relation to death and to life’ (Butler, 2009: 14). Butler claims that if we were able to use ‘norms of recognition… based on an apprehension of precariousness’ when framing lives, we would then recognize the personhood of others and increase our level of respect for life in general (Butler, 2009: 13). However, modern society has established frames of unrecognizability where, through underpinned social norms ‘that the body is exposed to socially and politically,’ certain lives have been given more or less value depending on how they are framed (Butler, 2009: 3). Due to these framing techniques, caused by socialization, Butler argues that we establish a hierarchy of grievability, where it is easy to be indifferent to the suffering of those we deem to have lives lacking grievability. As such, our capacity to recognize these lives and their personhood is diminished, because we are disinterested and unmotivated to prevent suffering.

Examples of these types of ‘lives that are not quite lives’ (Butler, 2009: 31), are those commonly viewed as half-living or different from the social norm, such as those with mental handicap. Many mentally disabled people are treated poorly, but because this is a norm in many places, people are indifferent to such suffering. In this way, the mentally disabled population is framed as being accustomed to living ‘lower-value’ lives, causing lack of recognition of their precarity and personhood. Like Sontag, Butler believes, in order to remove these frames of unrecognizability, we need to attach a narrative to frames. These narratives show the plight of the unrecognized and the appeal to the emotions of others. With an emotional connection, one is able to mourn and grieve for the lives of those experiencing suffering.

This recognition of their grievability causes current frames of suffering to break as people begin to question them and the social conditions that allow them to exist. Butler claims ‘when those frames that govern the relative and differential recognizability of lives come apart’ (Butler, 2009: 12), following the redescribing of both social norms and framing techniques, we increase our recognition of the lives of the suffering. Only then, with this recognition, are we motivated to provide aid to alleviate suffering.

Butler’s insistence on increasing recognition for human lives, especially of those who are often sidelined in society, emphasizes Sontag’s claim

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concerning the importance of removing indifference towards suffering. To Butler, this increased recognition of personhood is essential to fulfill what she deems our moral obligation to help those suffering, which can only be done by recognizing Sontag’s arguments about the dangers of framing techniques. It is these framing techniques which often cause the wider world to ignore human suffering by giving the frames the power to ‘decide which lives will be recognizable as lives and which will not’ (Butler, 2009: 12). Instead of maintaining these frames, we must break or reframe them, allowing us to act upon our obligation to help others (Butler, 2009: 14). That is why finding solutions to reframe suffering to remove societal indifference is important. Sontag claims the attachment of narratives is a potential solution to indifference (Sontag, 2004: 96), a claim echoed by Butler. Additionally, Butler provides two other solutions: increasing critique of state violence and decreasing social stratification between the ‘ungrievable’ and ‘grievable’ (Butler, 2009: 32). The former solution resonates with Sontag’s argument of appealing to ‘intellectual’ communities to critique framing techniques, instead of allowing us to become ‘consumers of violence as a spectacle’ (Sontag, 2004: 86). The latter solution is also expanded upon by Sontag, where she describes the danger of identifying lives as either suffering or of having ‘the dubious privilege of being spectators [to suffering]’ (Sontag, 2004: 82).

This mentality, pitting the suffering against the spectators, plays a large part in maintaining high levels of desensitization to the suffering of those deemed ‘ungrievable.’ In this way, Sontag shares Butler’s ideas of ways to increase the effectiveness of narratives as a solution to the desensitization caused by frames. Only through the effective implementation of narratives can we increase recognition and open the way for the creation of the necessary motivation to provide aid to those suffering.

Butler’s arguments surrounding unrecognizability towards suffering highlight Sontag’s claims of the danger frames pose in allowing for desensitization of those deemed to lack the quality of grievability.

Additionally, Butler and Sontag propose similar solutions to removing this societal hierarchy of grievability through the attachment of narratives. With these narratives, Butler’s goal of redefining social conditions surrounding the framing of lives can be actualized, by allowing us to recognize others’

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personhood and precarity. Only then will others feel sentimentally motivated enough to try to alleviate global suffering. While Sontag and Butler do not provide any specific examples of this having yet occurred, they hold hope that we can reframe grievability and our societal view on suffering, allowing us to fulfill our moral obligation to provide assistance to those suffering and preserve human rights as a whole.

W OR KS C I TE D

Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. New York, London, Verso, 2009.

Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin, 2004.

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The Unseen Effect of Structural and Institutional Racism on the African American Community G I TH M I R A B E L

“Black News” is the first essay in the California Chapter of Eula Biss’s collection of essays, Notes from No Man’s Land. The essay is based on her time in San Diego, where she worked as a part-time reporter and photographer for the San Diego Voice and Viewpoint, a newspaper that focuses on a specific perspective that is generally left out in mainstream media - the African American perspective.

Her work allowed her to explore a side of San Diego that, as she puts it, never makes it to the travel brochures. I believe that while Biss’s detailed focus on the inherent institutional racism present in Child Protective Services proves how disproportionately African American families are affected, that focus doesn’t allow her to explore how punitive legal systems discriminate against African Americans, which I believe is important since many African Americans are entrapped, both within the child welfare system and the criminal justice system. In this paper, I will be examining the shared racial biases that exist in both systems and why this shared nature is important in better understanding the disproportionate representation of African Americans in these systems, and the consequences of such a bias.

As stated before, in “Black News” Biss focuses specifically on the actions of Child Protective Services and how black families face the threat of separation more frequently than families of any other colour. She claims that “race is the most consistent factor contributing to the decision to remove children and place them in foster care” and we see this claim play out in real life through Ms. Johnson’s story (Biss, 95). Ms. Eve Johnson is an African American woman who is attempting to gain custody of her grandchildren from the foster system.

She has done all that was required of her – she has been “to court hearings, met with social workers, completed the tasks outlined by CPS in the Family Unity Meeting agreement” and much more (Biss, 96). Yet she still does not

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have custody of her grandchildren. She was told that the reason for this is her felony conviction from eleven and a half years ago but Biss makes it clear that this conviction is used only to justify the racist prejudices and assumptions CPS is operating with. In contrast to this, Biss shares with us a personal story of how her mother came to care for her (Biss) stepsister’s child after the stepsister was deemed to be unfit as a parent. Biss doesn’t explicitly tell us that her mother didn’t have to prove herself to be qualified to be a caretaker as Ms. Johnson did. But maybe that is the point. Both society and state grant Biss’s mother possession of certain characteristics — such as the ability to be a responsible caregiver — and stemming from those characteristics, certain rights that Ms. Johnson must prove, though legally there should be no difference in the treatment of their situations. Biss’s structural choice to narrate the introduction and resolution of her stepsister’s child’s situation during Ms. Johnson’s ongoing struggle only emphasizes how the state, influenced by racial stereotypes, has the power and authority to hold its members to different standards. While Biss does devote a significant portion of her essay to Ms. Johnson’s specific struggles, we are constantly reminded that Ms. Johnson’s story is one of many. According to Biss, “African American parents are much more likely to be investigated for abuse and neglect” though no statistics exist to prove this (Biss, 94). Thus, it is clear that Biss not only shows us how violent and terrifying CPS can be to an African American family through Ms. Johnson’s struggle, but she also examines the greater effects of CPS on the African American community.

While Biss clearly and convincingly shows us that the decisions made by CPS regarding black families are based on racist preconceptions, I believe that she missed out on noting that the discrimination present in the child welfare system is part of the discrimination present in most branches of American government. I do understand that she explores the different forms of discrimination faced by African Americans in her other essays.

However, I still believe that the strong intersection present between CPS and the criminal justice system should have been explored in this essay for the following reason.

The discrimination, prejudices and assumptions that exist within CPS don’t exist in isolation. Rather, they carry over into almost every state institution

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and influence how state officials carry out their duties. Specifically, in the case of CPS and the criminal justice system we see that each contributes to the disproportionate number of African Americans present in the other. An article named “Black Families Matter: How the Child Welfare System Punishes Poor Families of Color,” which appeared in The Appeal, claims that “in 2000, Black children represented 36 percent of children in foster care, despite accounting for only 15 percent of the child population” (Roberts and Sagoi).

These children then turn into crossover youth – adolescents who leave the child welfare system only to become entrapped in the criminal justice system as juvenile delinquents. As researchers Lawrence M. Berger et al note in their article, “Families at the Intersection of the Criminal Justice and Child Protective Services Systems,” this “likely occurs because youth involved in the child welfare system have often experienced neglect and physical abuse, both of which increase the possibility of a youth becoming involved in the juvenile justice system” (Berger). Thus, it is clear that the disproportionate number of African Americans present in CPS has an impact on the disproportionate number of African Americans in the criminal justice system. Furthermore, they claim that “maternal incarceration may be directly associated with an increased probability of CPS involvement for children” (Berger). According to the Criminal Justice Fact Sheet by the NAACP, the imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women (“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet”). Accordingly, it can be concluded that even more African American children will end up in the foster care system as a result of their parents being incarcerated. This clearly shows that CPS and the criminal justice system interact and influence each other.

I believe that it is important to highlight that the racism present in CPS is only an extension of the racism present in all social systems, for in general punitive legal systems target African Americans. It is important to recognize and understand the racial biases these systems share, because by understanding that the racial disparities present in each system don’t exist in isolation, we reach the conclusion that it is impossible to cure racism in one system alone. For example, even if CPS magically stops operating under racial misconceptions, that might not lead to tangible results such as a decrease in the number of African Americans in the child welfare system. This is

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because unless the racial discrimination present in the criminal justice system disappears, a disproportionate number of African Americans will continue to be incarcerated which will lead to increased CPS involvement in black families.

This creates a vicious cycle where African Americans become entrapped within these social and legal systems which severely restrict their ability to escape.

Thus, it could be said that biased state intervention only perpetuates the socioeconomic conditions that require intervention in the first place.

Biss next analyses the purpose of these social and legal systems, which is to protect members of society. Yet, in the reality Biss has introduced to us, who is being protected? Is it the children who disappear into the foster care system and later cross over to the criminal justice system? Is it the families who are torn apart, who are always at risk of separation simply because of their skin colour? Or is it white privilege and power? An article by the Economy Policy Institute claims that “race allowed for society to avoid the trade-off between societies ‘demand’ to get tough on crime and its ‘demand’ to retain civil liberties, through unequal enforcement of the law” (Cox). Essentially, the white majority retains its power and status by oppressing the black minority with laws that will never affect them (the majority) and one race prospers at the expense of another. I believe this article is making an astute point and the truth of it can be seen when examining the consequences Biss claims such discriminatory state policing can have on a community.

Biss does not mince her words as she draws a dark comparison between separating black families to the sterilization of black women and ethnic cleansing. At first glance, this seems to be far-fetched. Yes, African Americans are targets of discrimination but it seems impossible to reconcile the fact that the ‘law’ is being used to promote acts as horrific as ethnic cleansing, and specifically that it is happening under the sanction of a branch of government whose very title includes the word ‘protection.’ This is another problem I believe Biss is addressing in her text – the assumption people have that the existence of the law and intervention of the state is enough to prevent massive human rights violations. However, as Biss shows us through Ms. Johnson’s story, the law can be manipulated and twisted to enact subtle discrimination and this is just as deadly, if not more so, than outright discrimination. When

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injustice occurs on a large scale, the social psyche stops terming it as injustice and instead refers to it as status quo. Once we realise this, her conclusion makes sense — the African American community and culture is being slowly eroded. True, the number of physical bodies belonging to the African American population might not be disappearing but if their ability to live as a family, as a community, to share and celebrate their culture is compromised, isn’t it a form of disappearance? She terms it “cultural genocide” in her essay “Relations” and I believe this is an apt description. For example, Biss claims that “a tradition of caring for children within kinship networks…is an integral part of African American culture” (Biss, “Relations” 95). Yet Ms. Johnson is prevented from doing so. The fact that Biss learns this from a foster-care manual while the foster care system itself is preventing Ms. Johnson from raising her grandchildren so that (as Ms. Johnson and Biss believe) they might be placed into a white family is not only ironic but also shows how the state knowingly intervenes and facilitates the erasure of African American culture. However, once again it must be noted that CPS is not the sole entity responsible for disproportionately separating black families. The criminal justice system does its fair share by punitively targeting blacks “whether it is Black immigrants for deportation, Black children for suspension in school, or Black adults and youth for arrest and incarceration” (Roberts and Sagoi).

In conclusion, I believe Biss is correct in her identification of the structural racism present in CPS and the urgency with which she describes its consequences on the African American community. The African American family does face the threat of separation and, consequently, the African American community does face the threat of ‘cultural genocide,’ but we must understand that the reason for this isn’t the discrimination present in one state institution only. Rather, it is the overarching and insidious mentality that justifies the state’s discriminatory policing of African Americans which has seeped into almost every legal and social system. The intensity of pain and fear the African American community feels, the true horror of their precarious and overlooked situation, can only be realized once we understand how these different branches of government impact each other through the African American family.

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W OR KS C I TE D

Berger, Lawrence M. et al. “Families at the Intersection of the Criminal Justice and Child Protective Services Systems.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 665, no. 1, 2016, pp. 171-194.

Biss, Eula. “Black News.” Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, Saint Paul, Graywolf Press, 2018, pp. 87-98.

Biss, Eula. “Relations.” Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, Saint Paul, Graywolf Press, 2018, pp. 29-48.

Cox, Robynn J.A. Where Do We Go from Here? Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Economic Policy Institute. www.epi.org/ publication/where-do-we-go-from-here-mass-incarceration-and-thestruggle-for-civil-rights/.

Criminal Justice Fact Sheet. NAACP, www.naacp.org/resources/criminaljustice-fact-sheet.

Roberts, Dorothy and Sagoi, Lisa. “Black Families Matter: How the Child Welfare System Punishes Poor Families of Color.” The Appeal, 26 Mar. 2018 www.theappeal.org/black-families-matter-how-the-child-welfare-systempunishes-poor-families-of-color-33ad20e2882e/.

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Individuality, Pain, and Imagination: the Relationship of the World and People HA ODU O F E NG

Are we all alone?

Elaine Scarry answers this question in her book The Body in Pain – she separates the world of individuals from the outside world through pain.

“Intense pain is world-destroying”, she writes (Scarry, The Body in Pain 29). The world here doesn’t refer to the natural world or earth, but to the inner world of an individual, which includes the bridge that connects the world of that individual and the outside world – language. The absence of language illustrates the inexpressibility of the pain, which in fact extends to the unsharability of the destruction of an individual’s world. The physical distance between others and the one in pain might only be a “radius of several feet”, yet the pain “splits(s) between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 4). Therefore, every individual is in fact isolated from the outside world.

As pain is the most extreme sensation, it destroys everything within the world of an individual – even time becomes meaningless. This destruction also destroys the connection between the individual world and the outside world, namely language, making the pain inexpressible. Scarry shows the inexpressibility of pain by referring to the absence of language of pain.

Since language serves as the bridge between one individual and the outside world, the absence of the “language of pain” signifies the absence of the connection between the inner world of an individual and the outside world when pain destructs the inner world – the pain drowns the person, yet the only thing others see is the distorted facial expression of the one in pain (Scarry, The Body in Pain 6). Although Scarry identifies attempts from the outside world to approach the one in pain by providing examples in which the one in pain needs another person to speak on behalf of them, “the

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language of agency”, the tool for this purpose, fails to apprehend the entire picture of pain (Scarry, The Body in Pain 13). This is because the person in pain effortlessly expresses the pain, while the external world fails to grasp the pain (Scarry, The Body in Pain 4). The powerlessness of others, especially for those who love the sufferers, becomes the reason for detachment.

Whether the person is suddenly exposed to unbearable pain or has been suffering from some long-term torment, it always feels like the water filling their lungs, and all others can hear is a silent scream. This process extends eternally when one suffers. The individual’s world is annihilated, all the others can only watch, and no one can stop it. The destruction of one’s world happens violently yet silently to others, and it doesn’t stop at the inability to share – what drags the one in pain further into isolation is the doubt that emerges during the process of sharing.

Doubt about the authenticity of pain shared is even worse than the total unawareness of the existence of pain. As Scarry writes, “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 13). The pain truly happens, suffocating the sufferer, yet hearing about pain may raise doubts that push the sufferer further from the outside world. “Analogical verification or analogical substantiation” is the process of reminding others about the pain in someone’s body (Scarry, The Body in Pain 14). Yet, in real life, pain is always associated with physical manifestations: a scar, a punch. This diverts attention of the external world from the body in pain and exaggerates the doubt of the certainty of the pain. That hiatus of certainty leads to a negative reaction from the external world – they cast doubts. This doubt reverses the effect of sharing – it doubles the pain’s annihilating power, and becomes “the second form of negation and rejection, the social equivalent of the physical aversiveness” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 56). The world of an individual is then wholly detached from the outside world. People watch aloofly as those in pain drown and drift away.

Scarry demonstrates this isolation further under an extreme condition, the interrogation between the torturer and the prisoner. The torturer-prisoner model presents the condition by isolating them and comparing the balance between the two individuals’ worlds with the introduction of power. Directly

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facing the distorted face of the prisoner and hearing their tattered cries, the torturer “is not only able to bear the existence of pain, but also able to bring it continually into the present, inflict it, sustain it, minute after minute, hour after hour” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 36). The limitless conceptual distance in the limited physical space signifies the isolation in an extreme circumstance.

Moreover, the question asked in an interrogation by the torturer is “mistakenly understood to be ‘the motive’”, and the answer from the prisoner “is mistakenly understood to be ‘the betrayal’” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 35).

The former is “an absolution of responsibility” to the torturer for his/her cruelty, whereas the latter is “a conferring of responsibility” to the prisoner for his/her “betrayal” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 35). The external world exerts “a covert disdain for confession”, a similar yet more radical version of doubt, which exposes “the inaccessibility of the reality of physical pain to anyone not immediately experiencing it” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 29). Furthermore, with the ongoing process of torture, everything other than the prisoner turns into a weapon against them, and ultimately, the body of the prisoner is assimilated into the “agency of agony” which exposes the ultimate reason for the isolation (Scarry, The Body in Pain 47).

The body is what makes people suffer from pain, and it is the one that blocks the connection between individuals’ world and the outside world. In the case of the prisoner, Scarry suggests that the room where the prisoner is tortured is the weapon against the prisoner (The Body in Pain 40). The room is not only a narrow room – it actually represents the whole outside world, as the broader world is contracted into that room. It is the body that perceives and defines that certain motives and actions are connected to the pain, and then generates pain on the inner world – “the ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain contains the feeling ‘my body hurts me’” (Scarry, The Body in Pain 47). The existence of the torturer does not inflict pain: this pain and suffering is from the body to the inner-world, which may or may not come from the outside world to the body. Therefore, the relationship between the individuals’ world and the outside world can be simulated by the inner worldbody-outside world model. This model demonstrates the claim that the world of an individual is detached from the outside world.

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Imagination, another major subject in The Body in Pain, upholds the model.

Scarry states that “pain and imagination together provide a framing identity of man-as-creator” (“The Difficulty of Imagining Other People.”

169). The imagination constructs our inner world. The inner world imposes self-conscious feelings on the perception of unselfconscious objects. Such feelings, varied among people even on the same object, are personal and represent perceptions of and connections to the outside world. The fact that people always implicitly refer back to their imaginary standard when perceiving the natural world (Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People.” 169) also justifies this point. Such personal perceptions of and connections to the outside world, however, might be distorted. As stated in another work of Scarry, the “Difficulty of Imagining Other People”, “The way we act toward others is shaped by the way we imagine them, and such imagining shows the difficulty of picturing other persons in their full weight and solidity” (99). This difficulty leads to inaccuracy of our perceptions of, and thus our actions towards other people. The inability of others to fully apprehend our perceptions on objects in the outside world and our inability to fully perceive others signifies this bilateral inaccuracy caused by our bodies. Thus the inner world-body-outside world model is established, and isolation becomes obvious.

As it is never the case where the outside world directly connects with the inner world, the body of a person is a medium for the inner world and a receiver to the outside world. It fully separates the two as there is no perfect medium that conveys every detail without loss, nor a perfect receiver that perceives all feelings without nuances of differences. Even pain, the most vibrant and acute sensation, and imagination, the construction of the individuals’ world, fail to fully penetrate the body from the external world’s perspectives. It reveals one truth about the relationship of the individual world and the outside world. That is, our individual worlds are always isolated from the outside world by our body.

As it turns out, we are all alone.

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W OR KS C I TE D

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: the making and unmaking of the world. Oxford University Press, 1985.

Scarry, Elaine. “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People.” For love of Country?

Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, Boston, Beacon Press, 1996, pp. 98-110.

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The War Between Salgado and Sischy: Not so Black and White J E NI F E R E DA M E NE Z ES

Between 1984 to 1985, the Sahel region of Africa experienced a massive drought, during which approximately one million victims died from malnutrition and related causes. Documenting this tragedy for fifteen months was Sebastião Salgado, a recognized Brazilian photographer whose style consists of beautiful, dramatic black-and-white photos. Eduardo Galeano, a journalist, stated that Salgado’s work dignifies his subjects, describing how it “is a poetry of horror because there is a sense of honor” (8). In other words, the viewer is able to see these victims as equals when they are shown in a beautiful way. Furthermore, Fred Ritchen, an editor for The New York Times Magazine, also agrees with Galeano, saying that “People living in disastrous circumstances can be…as beautiful as anyone else” (Galeano). On the other hand, one of the most vocal critics of Salgado, Ingrid Sischy, disagrees with their approach. She states that Salgado’s photographic techniques are “far too busy with…finding the “grace” and “beauty” in the twisted forms of anguished subjects” (92). This is a problem for Sischy because it can ultimately result in anesthetizing the feelings of the viewers (92). It is true that beauty is a focal point in Salgado’s work and that his fame has undeniably come from his ability to take appealing photos. However, what Sischy fails to grasp is that Salgado’s preoccupation with aestheticizing his images does not detract from their meaning but rather acts as a gateway to new audiences by making them more palatable, which is a crucial step forward in helping the Sahel famine victims.

An important component in Sischy’s critique of Salgado’s photographs is the claim that he “negates the revulsion that can take over when disease or hunger is on display,” which can in turn, “result in pictures that ultimately reinforce our passivity” (92). What Sischy is effectively arguing is that when beauty is incorporated in photographs that represent suffering, it makes it easier for viewers to digest the content presented, but also has the effect of taking away from the main message. Consider for instance, Salgado’s

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photograph of the blind woman in Sahel: The End of the Road. Here, it is difficult to immediately tell that she is a victim of a famine or even that she is blind.

Instead, viewers are drawn to the dramatic use of chiaroscuro or the carefully calculated composition of the woman. There is certainly merit in pointing out that aestheticizing suffering helps the general public to digest heavier content.

However, what Sischy doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge is that Salgado may be deliberately aestheticizing his photos in order to gain relevance.

The reason Salgado’s photos stay relevant is because his photographs create debate, whether good or bad. In the essay “Workers”, Salgado himself claims that his work “must provoke a discussion” and one way in which he achieves this is mixing art with suffering (111). Salgado is aware that this is controversial, yet continues to beautify his subjects to spark discussion. The fact that the debate about his work continues to this day is proof that he has achieved his intent of keeping the stories of those that need help, relevant. If it weren’t for his beautifying take on his subjects, conversation regarding his photos would not take place, and in effect, would not expose new audiences to crucial humanitarian issues.

Additionally, it is much more difficult now to wake humanity up to suffering solely with photographs compared to the golden age of photojournalism in the 1940’s and 50’s. With the invention of the television and the internet, documentary photos are becoming less and less relevant (Kimmelman).

In Witness in Our Time, Salgado acknowledges that there is a new influx of information, stating “…there are more photographers than ever before and that we must live more densely than we have lived until now” (115). As photographers struggle to take photos that stand out of thousands, lighting, composition and the overall beauty of a photo becomes critical. Thus, Salgado’s beautifying take on his subjects helps his photos become noticed to wider audiences and possibly lead to aid for those in need.

One might however argue that gaining relevance can be done in other ways that do not include stirring up controversy. This can be a valid argument, but Sischy does not provide specific ways in which Salgado can do this and simply suggests that it shouldn’t be done. Furthermore, it can be said that pushing boundaries and conventions is important in the progression of photojournalism, and thus controversy is in a way, essential.

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A crucial plank in Sischy’s analysis of Salgado’s photographs is the belief that “he presents people in a way that implies connection to… Judeo-Christian iconography” and as a result, is “sloppy with symbolism” (90). Essentially, this means that Salgado’s frequent use of Christian symbols is another way in which he aestheticizes his photos and distracts viewers from the pain of his subjects. This is perhaps best encapsulated in Salgado’s photo of a man carrying his dying son in his arms. The photo draws many parallels to Michelangelo’s sculpture Pietà, which depicts Mary carrying the body of Jesus after the Crucifixion. She is right to claim that a handful of Salgado’s photographs correlate with Christian ideas, as there are multiple that can be found even within Sahel: End of the Road. Though this is true, Sischy fails to grasp that symbolism often does not distract the viewer, but rather attracts them. It creates a connection between the subjects and viewers. Additionally, combining Christian symbolism with current issues helps the image become more politically relevant. Therefore, there is value in the use of symbolism due to the fact that it acts as a ‘hook’ to engage those that have a specific connection to Christianity.

Despite this, it is also true that the incorporation of Christian symbols in photos that depict suffering and pain is ethically questionable. One could argue that these victims are merely tools in Salgado’s eyes, utilized in order to construct “his visual rhetoric” (Sischy 90). However, photographs are subjective, and Salgado cannot control the way a viewer interprets a photo. Therefore, Salgado should not be blamed for unethically portraying his victims when it is not apparent that these Christian references were deliberately included.

A fundamental premise on which Sischy’s critique rests is the idea that “to aestheticize tragedy is the fastest way to anesthetize the feelings [of the viewer]” (92). In other words, the beauty of a photograph can overpower the suffering and tragedy of the subjects. A key flaw with her argument however is her belief that tragedy is the main theme in Salgado’s work. It is undeniable that Salgado focuses on the suffering of the victims to some degree, however, the real theme is the hope that exists within these images, even at a time of crisis. As Galeano highlights in “Salgado, 17 Times”, “Salgado’s photographs…

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invite us to celebrate the dignity of mankind” (1). Unlike Galeano, Sischy’s perception of Salgado’s photos is one that is overly pessimistic, and confines the subjects to pity. Salgado’s positive outlook on global issues is something very different from, for example, the approach of James Natchwey, who tends to emphasize the shock value of his subjects rather than their dignity. Thus, Salgado’s unique approach makes it possible for more people to engage in the topic of human suffering, rather than recoil in sorrow.

This essay does not argue that Salgado does not beautify his subjects. Instead this essay sets forth the position that beauty, whether that be the composition of his subjects or the incorporation of Christian symbols, is a powerful tool in opening new doors to audience members who have never seen his work before. However, it is important to consider the need for a balance between the beautification of victims and the reality of their suffering. Consider for instance Zohra Bensemra’s photo of a woman injured in a mortar attack in Mosul. This photograph has the right balance of both beauty and documentary elements, as the vibrant red of the woman’s clothes, paired with how she is placed in the center of the photo, helps to grab the attention of the viewers.

However, the vivid blood splatters on her face keep the viewer grounded to the seriousness of the situation. Thus, the aesthetics of the photograph does not overpower the voice of the victims. Despite all of this, it is important not to forget that the most crucial question of all is not about how these victims are photographed but rather what the viewers will do about it. As James Nachtwey puts it, “We must look at it. We’re required to look at it. We’re required to do something about it. If we don’t, who will?” (War Photographer).

W OR KS C I TE D

Bensemra, Zohra. ”Photographer of the Year 2017: Zohra Bensemra”. The Guardian, 21 Dec. 2017, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/agencyphotographer-of-the-year-2017-zohra-bensemra. Accessed 8 Oct 2019.

Debrix François, and Cynthia Weber. Rituals of Mediation: International Politics and Social Meaning. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

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Galeano, Eduardo H. “Salgado, 17 Times”. An Uncertain Grace, edited by Eduardo H. Galeano etal., Aperture Foundation, 1990.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Can Suffering Be Too Beautiful?” The New York Times, 13 July 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/07/13/arts/photography-review-cansuffering-be-too beautiful.html.

Salgado, Sebastião. “Workers”. Witness in Our Time, edited by Ken Light, Smithsonian Books, 2010, pp.108-116.

---. Sahel: The End of the Road. University of California, 2004, p.97.

Sischy, Ingrid. “Photography: Good Intentions.” The New Yorker, 9 Sept. 1991, pp. 89–95.

“The Sahel, Desertification beyond Drought.” We Are Water, 17 June 2019, www. wearewater. org/en/the-sahel-desertification-beyond-drought_318262.

War Photographer. Directed by Christian Frei, performances by James Nachtway, Look Now!, 2001. https://www.quotes.net/mquote/102674.

“War Photographer Quotes.” Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 27 May 2021. <https://www.quotes.net/mquote/102674>.

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In the Sense of a “Successful” Translation Z I XI L I

Ancient Chinese poetry is notable for its aesthetic, rhetorical beauty and depth. Its forms, themes and contexts vary in accordance with constantly changing historical backgrounds such as warfare, love or culture. Translations from the ancient Chinese language to modern Mandarin are implicit and subtle, therefore adding another layer of uncertainty to the complex analyses of the ancient Chinese poetry. Li Bai[李白] was a Chinese poet acclaimed from his own day to the present as a genius and a romantic figure who took traditional poetic forms to new heights. The American poet and critic, Ezra Pound, translated Li Bai’s poetry and made it into a collection named Cathay for Western audiences. From the collection, I have chosen to focus on the poem “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance[玉阶怨]” (Rihaku 5) and to analyze Pound’s mechanisms and approaches, eventually evaluating his translation for its success and credibility.

The Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) was the golden age of classical Chinese poetry; great poets and their works gained reputation and exceptional status. Among them, Li Bai[李白], Rihaku in English, wore the laurel without any doubts. The prosperous Tang Empire bonded closely with the Western world. Merchants and couriers promoted trades and abundant cultural exchanges. The legendary Marco Polo was one of them. Hundreds of years later, this particular situation reiterated itself with Pound translating Li Bai’s poetry for Western audiences.

Although Pound’s translation is not literal and misses the nuances of the Chinese language, it can be considered successful as it promotes contemporary cultural exchange between the Western and the Oriental world, and preserves elegance in a Western context.

However, Pound faced obstacles in his translation process, further complicated by another translation of this poem. He was not the only contributor to Cathay; it was actually translated based on a Japanese manuscript of “The

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Jewel Stairs’ Grievance[玉阶怨]” by Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), an American art historian. Pound was not a native Chinese speaker although he could read Chinese partially. Therefore, he did not know whether Fenollosa’s understanding of ancient Chinese poems was accurate, or if there were errors and typos in the writing and delivery processes in Fenollosa’s translation.

Unavoidably, Pound’s translation deviated from Li Bai’s original version’s literal meanings and lost parts of its stylistic beauty and essence. Pound did successfully, however, manipulate the general, original meaning of Li Bai’s work. His endnotes1 rigorously explained connotations of specific confusing Chinese phrases. As a result, knowing that the definition of a successful translation can be broad, Pound’s translation of “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance[ 玉阶怨]” (Rihaku 5) does not seem utterly unsuccessful, not just from a grammatical perspective, but also from the stylistic and cultural standpoints.

“The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance[玉阶怨]” (Rihaku 5) is not a very typical Li Bai[李白] work. Li Bai’s poems mostly center around themes such as warfare, the empire’s expansive landscapes and friendship. Additionally, his habitual poetic touch is known as “bold”[豪放](Liscomb), referring to his unintentional use of genius poetic and linguistic techniques. However, “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance[玉阶怨]” (Rihaku 5) showcases extremely delicate strokes with visual and sensual details indicated and elaborated in every line[行]. Its message is also believed to convey maids and concubines’ complaints and grievances as they live in the depressive palace. Both the implicitly and the culturally specific theme make Pound’s later English translation harder to achieve.

As a ‘successful’ translation is hard to obtain, “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance[玉阶怨]”s (Rihaku 5) original text and Pound’s translation should be displayed and analyzed alongside to tackle deeper linguistic and cultural nuances, and eventually answer the question of its success.

1 Pound’s endnotes under his translation: “Note--Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore, there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore, a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore, he has no excuse on account of weather. Also, she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.”

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Rihaku’s original work and Ezra Pound’s translated version: 玉阶怨[The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance] 玉阶[stairs made of jade]生[has, grows]白露[white morning dew]， 夜[night]久[long]侵[invade]罗袜[socks made from expensive, flowery fabrics] 。 却下[let down]水晶帘[crystal curtain]， 玲珑[exquisitely]望[stare at]秋月[the autumn moon]2。(Rihaku 5)

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew; It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings.

And I let down the crystal curtain; And watch the moon through the clear autumn. (trans. Pound)

Grammatical dissimilarities between the two languages are obvious. The original text in Chinese possesses a flexible grammatical structure. To some extent, it is free from any strict grammatical rules since there is no subject existing throughout all lines. Sentences in the original Li Bai work are not complete. This flexibility in grammar yields certain ambiguities. According to the word-to-word translations in the Chinese source text in the brackets above, the line “night long invade socks made from expensive fabrics” has its official, modern Chinese scholarly explanation of “the coldness of the night invades, wets my socks made from expensive, flowery fabrics”3.

2 Inside the brackets are straight-forward, literal and word-to-word translations given by me. Pound only has one official version of translation. Inside the brackets are direct English translations of these separate Chinese vocabulary in this poem given by me based solely on their literal meanings with the help of a Chinese-English dictionary.

3 This line is translated by myself from its modern Chinese explanation.

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Another possible confusion lies in the next line where “let down crystal curtain” actually refers to “Then I return to my bedroom and carefully let down the window curtains that have crystal-like textures to block the coldness from entering the room” in its contextual meaning. On the other hand, Pound’s English translation strictly obeys grammatical rules: he strictly used “The jewelled steps are”(1), “It is so late”(2), “And I let down”(3) to make sentences complete (Rihaku). Subjects are clearer; images are more vivid; little or no confusion exists. The audience attains a moderately clear picture of a lady wandering around all alone in the palace in Pound’s English translation.

Therefore, the accuracy of expression and delivery of messages in English might be higher compared to Chinese.

Although English carries greater efficiency in delivering messages, Chinese is distinctive in its implicit charm. Li Bai[李白] never used a single word relating to “grievance” throughout the whole poem while “grievance” is exactly the last word in the Chinese title of this poem: “怨[Grievance]”. He successfully portrayed a girl’s deep melancholy living in the palace without frankly pointing out the encompassing sadness. Chinese is indeed a language full of subtle and implicit elegance, which makes it extremely suitable for the beauty of literary poetic form. But a successful translation also gets challenging for non-native speakers like Pound to seize its literary, cultural meanings and stylistic essence.

Stylistic variances unavoidably exist because of the difficulty for Pound to grasp the contextual meaning. From the Classical Chinese knowledge I possess, the ancient Chinese’s translation obeys three major principles: accuracy[信], effectiveness[达], and elegance[雅]. Pound’s translation, as discussed, focused more on textual meanings alone. Accuracy[信] and effectiveness[达] were partially achieved while elegance[雅] was mostly lost. The Chinese language is extremely dense with its various, rich connotations and denotations: quantitatively, one simple word of Chinese might need one phrase of English or more for both of its meanings and messages to be clearly delivered. There are twenty-five Chinese words in total in “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” while Pound used four complete sentences, thirty-five words in his English translation, still leaving few places of clarifications and most of the graceful, subtle implications out. Included in the short twenty-five Chinese words are

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vivid imagery, implicit emotions, end rhymes4 and other elegant linguistic and stylistic features. For example, the last line in the original Chinese poem “exquisitely stare at autumn moon” composes a picture of a court lady staring at the exquisite moon from her palace window on a lonely autumn night.

However, even if Pound’s English translated version did not include some of the Chinese elegant[雅] characteristics, it should not be directly deemed unrefined or unsuccessful as a translation.

Although partial Chinese elegance[雅] was lost in Pound’s work, as an Englishspeaking poet, he tried to create a “dynamic equivalence” in his translation (Lefevere 6). Ultimately, elegance[雅] directed for Western audiences was achieved. Solely investigating Pound’s English translation without regarding Li Bai’s original work, his sentences are effective in delivering images. No extra adjectives or past tense verbs are present. English-speaking readers would potentially find this piece of the poem ‘well-designed’ and ‘user-friendly’.

Additionally, Pound included twelve syllables with round, rich sounds in the first two lines of his English translation and nine syllables with sharper sounds in the latter two. A vigorous sense of luxury and elegance[雅] in English therefore, exits and shines from English-speaking audiences’ perspectives.

Moreover, Pound’s purposes of translating numerous ancient Chinese poems and making them into Cathay were effectively achieved. His first intention of translation is his strong personal interest in “Oriental” poetry. The second is his purpose of introducing Chinese poetry to the Western world. I read Pound’s intentions from his endnotes’5 explanations of possible confusing Chinese vocabulary in English and his comments on the poem’s standing being utterly implicit for his western audiences. Accordingly, Pound’s translation is consequently elegant[雅] in its English way.

But I am not necessarily elevating or praising Chinese culture here. On the contrary, I feel a little concerned. When Chinese audiences read and

4 End rhyme is defined as “when a poem has lines ending with words that sound the same.”

5 Pound’s endnotes under his translation: “Note--Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore, there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore, a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore, he has no excuse on account of weather. Also, she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.”

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translate Shakespeare, Dante or Goethe, certain original, cultural messages will as well get lost during the trans-cultural and trans-lingual process of literary translation. Pound, as a Westerner, would always face cultural misunderstandings during translation of Eastern work. Struggling with his textual or stylistic accuracy cannot determine the level of success of his translation. Instead, focusing on the translation itself and its ultimate purpose allows us to analyze and evaluate its success more objectively.

Pound’s English translation of Li Bai[李白]’s “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” yields an extremely bright and effective product for Western acknowledgements and eventually cultural exchange. Two languages’ linguistic, aesthetic and cultural differences are largely unavoidable.

Therefore, translation products can never be perfect somehow, especially when examined from both sides. Ezra Pound’s translation of Li Bai’s “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” can be regarded as successful since it smoothly carries out its translation process’s ultimate purposes: which, in Pound’s case, are cultural exchange and exploration of interests. From a broader perspective, the collection Cathay, carrying numerous exquisite pieces, absolutely brought exotic, poetic vitality and dynamism into the kingdom of Western literature.

Receiving and exchanging literature’s vitality and dynamism are indispensable procedures for different cultures’ never-ending exchanges and progress.

Translation can serve as a most effectual path.

W OR KS C I TE D

Lefevere, Andre. Translation, History, Culture: A Sourcebook. Routledge, 1992.

Liscomb, Kathlyn Maurean. “Li Bai, a Hero among Poets, in the Visual, Dramatic, and Literary Arts of China.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 81, no. 3, 1999, pp. 354–389. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3051348.

Rihaku (Li Bai) “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance.” Cathay, edited and translated by Ezra Pound, Project Gutenberg, 2015. gutenberg.org/files/50155/50155h/50155-h.htm.

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Deira, Dubai, is a rich place filled with glimpses of the past and traditional carts that you would only find in this area. Dubai’s history for it being a fishing and trading port inspired people to purchase big carts and assist buyers and traders at that time. These carts are helpful in Deira; though, modernity limits these roles to thrive as in the past. Today, potential customers, essentially from Oman and Saudi Arabia, purchase goods and supplies and need these men in this photograph to assist them in carrying their purchases along the way.

The men portrayed in this photograph are hoping to find any potential buyer in their surroundings. However, the streets were empty, and time affects their profits. Their way to navigate through these barriers is to share profits with other cart holders by forming a community.

“Carts for Living” by Sadeq Mohammed Alkhoori

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Essay 2

Subjectivity and Violence: A Dynamic Framework J I A C H E NG L I

Are rape, murder, or domestic abuse violence? Most would agree they are.

Physical force and coercion are directly imposed upon the victims against their will, which often results in severe somatic, or physical, and mental damages. Are sexism or racism violence? Many would say, yes. A certain population becomes the target of attack or discrimination, their rights to equality are denied or alienated by others, and they enjoy fewer opportunities and face more barriers in pursuit of their life goals. Is abortion violence?

That answer is probably contested. Some argue that women are entitled to full control of their own bodies, so abortion is not violence; others believe that violence exists in the action to prevent a human life from coming to earth. The answers are different because violence is rarely a concept that exists independently of human subjectivity. Rather, it is deeply built into our value systems and social consensus. The reason we generally recognize rape or racism as violence is because the notion that everyone has rights to life, liberty, and equal opportunities has developed to represent our fundamental values, whereas there is no such consensus when it comes to issues like abortion. To conceptualize violence, our formula has to be empirical rather than metaphysical, dynamic rather than static, and interactional rather than separational. This paper proposes a dynamic model of violence in light of the evolution of human subjectivity. It adopts Johan Galtung’s framework of structural violence and incorporates the concepts of slow violence and violence of positivity developed by Rob Nixon and by Byung-Hul Han. Inserting subjectivity into the formulation of violence not only helps us detect violence in its often overlooked and imperceptible forms, but also sheds light on the evolution of violence over time and suggests free, inclusive discourses are essential to approach and address violence.

Galtung defines violence “as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual” (168). Violence exists when humans are “being influenced so

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that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (Gatlung 168). The potentiality is represented as “what it could be” as opposed to “what it is”. For example, war is violence because the loss of lives and realizations associated with those lives could potentially have been avoided by the prevention of war. Poverty is also violence because, for example, the inaccessibility of education, and inability to fulfill life potential through being educated, could have been prevented by opportunities provided under better economic conditions. Galtung’s definition enables us to be aware of not only violence that causes somatic injuries, but also the distribution of power and resources underlying the structures that prevent people from the realization of their potential (171). Expanding on Galtung’s definition, three questions arise so as to fully grasp its implications: What is “the potential”?

What is “the actual”? And how do “the potential” and “the actual” evolve and transform over time?

The potentiality framed in Galtung’s construction of violence is not decided by universal, metaphysical doctrines but by certain humanly constructed value systems. Galtung recognizes the obscurity associated with the meaning of “potential realization” and resorts to “consensus” as the ultimate guide: if what needs to be realized is fairly consensual, then the inhibition of its realization should be perceived as violence (168). For example, Galtung points out that we could raise the question of violence if “the level of literacy is lower than what it could have been”, but not if “the level of Christianity is lower than what it could have been” because the importance of the former is recognized almost anywhere but the latter is held to be highly controversial (169). To add to that point, “the potential” based on consensus is not a static concept but rather constantly evolves over time. For example, black people were widely believed to be “inferior” to white people in 18th century America, and therefore society did not generally regard the miserable conditions and humiliating status of black communities as a form of violence. However, from a retroactive viewpoint, we would immediately recognize that the so-called “consensus” in the past excluded the experiences and feelings of black people themselves, and their peripheralized status was obviously below their potential levels of realization as human beings. Clearly, an element of subjectivity underlies the

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concept of potentiality, which evolves across time with the inclusion of new voices and is transformed by social consensus.

However, sometimes consensus over human and social potential can be totally missing. Byung-Hul Han theorizes “the violence of positivity,” which manifests itself in the form of “overachievement, overproduction, overcommunication, hyperattention, and hyperactivity” under the modern capitalist order (2).

Through the self-exploiting process described by Han, we ourselves become simultaneously the perpetrators and the victims of violence, in which circumstance a consensus over potentiality is inconceivable. Because we ourselves set “the potential,” which is characterized by “overpotential”, our aspired level of realization imposes a form of violence on ourselves (104).

Thus, violence converts itself into the most subjective form – it arises from the subject herself – and therefore becomes unidentifiable. However, Han’s discovery of this internalized form of violence itself plays the role of bringing attention to our modern lifestyle and shaping the consensus: his discovery compels us to question whether what we tirelessly pursue to reach our “potential realization” in modern life is right. This case demonstrates the subjective and dynamic aspects of the concept of potentiality under Galtung’s definition of violence.

Besides “the potential,” “the actual” matters not only in terms of what the reality is but also how the reality is being subjectively received. For example, Rob Nixon detects the imperceptibility of certain violent processes that he calls “slow violence,” where real damages of violence are concealed across the dimension of time. Nixon observes that the events of 9/11 make efforts to raise awareness about climate change much harder because the terrorist attack “reinforced a spectacular, immediately sensational, and instantly hyper-visible image of what constitutes a violent threat” (12).

Public sentiment was concentrated on “the fiery spectacle of the collapsing towers” as the “definitive image of violence,” which contrasted with the threat of climate change that is “incremental, exponential, and far less sensationally visible” (Nixon 13). The invisibility of the climate crisis by no means reduces its destructive effects on vulnerable populations, but a lack of public awareness of the direness of the situation and consequently

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government inaction because of the actuality’s imperceptible nature results in exacerbation of such climate violence.

Moreover, the actuality could be manipulated by those in positions to alter and benefit from how society perceives violence. In his elaboration of the concept of slow violence, Nixon discovers that environmentalists find themselves in confrontation with “well-funded, well-organized interests that invest heavily in manufacturing and sustaining a culture of doubt around the science of slow violence” (39). He calls people funded by big corporations or political interest groups to spread misinformation and confusions that counter established scientific facts “the cultural bewilders” and “disseminators” (Nixon 40). Their careful manipulation of public opinion obscures and deepens the inaccessibility of the actuality of “slow violence” and thereby intensifies the damages of such violence on vulnerable populations. In fact, Marxists have been using the concept of “false consciousness” to describe ways in which the capitalist ideological structures mislead proletariats by shrouding the exploitative relationships between capitalists and workers. The manipulation of information and creation of a misperceived actuality reaches its most extreme and developed form in what Han describes as the “violence of positivity” characterized by self-exploitation (8). Misinformation campaigns transform the victims of violence into contributors to the structure that perpetuates violence. The control of information internalizes itself into the norms accepted by us so that we become our own “bewilders”. In that case, in the guise of freedom under the neoliberal system, the consensus is shaped as excessive forms of positivity and the actuality becomes unified with the perceived potential as overachievement, which expresses itself to the most intensified extent as depression and suicide (Nixon 122, Han 8). Clearly, how the actuality is subjectively received has the power not only to exacerbate violence but also to constitute violence in itself.

Thus, we have illustrated what the potential is and what the actual is by adopting Galtung’s definition of violence. The potentiality establishes its existence in the social sphere in the form of the ideal level of realization based on consensus, which is fluid and in constant change across time. The actuality exists both in the form of the actual reality and the received reality,

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and how the actuality is received significantly affects our awareness of and response to violence. In some cases, the actual reality of damage or “underrealization” is overshadowed by our focus on more immediate, dramatic forms of violence. Slow violence’s imperceptible nature results in inaction in response to violence and the exacerbation of the situation. Moreover, the received reality can be manipulated with private agendas to conceal the real scope of the actual reality. Both the potentiality and the actuality are highly intertwined with human subjectivity, and their dynamic positions determine our understanding of and reactions to what we define as violence and the evolution of its meanings.

Information is the key factor that significantly shapes the consensus over both what the potential is and what the actual is. On the one hand, the existence of misinformation campaigns implies that the developmental trajectory of the concept of violence is not unidirectional, since public opinions could possibly flow in directions that exacerbate existent violence structures. On the other hand, the disclosure of scientific evidence that, for example, corroborates human-engendered climate change, is another form of information that could help raise awareness of environmental violence.

Moreover, information includes not only objective knowledge of reality but also personalized and individualized voices. The voices of ethnic minorities, women, and other groups whose voices were largely unheard in history are now more expressed and gathering momentum: this is also a form of information that both reveals what the actuality for them is and reflects upon what the potentiality should be.

The concept of violence is also expanding. Once the consensus is formed, it has the power to generate public discussions and debates that can potentially produce new consensus over the content of “the potential” and “the actual”.

Society discovers the notion of violence through the work of cultural, intellectual and technological dynamics that produce these consensuses.

Galtung expands the conception of violence by adding to its composition the latent structures that deliver violent actions; Nixon particularly focuses on the imperceptible and invisible form of violence that transforms its structural positions in relation to its victims through time, movement, and change; and

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Han develops the concept of self-imposed violence under the structure that pursues excessive positivity, which forces us to reflect on what we perceive as the normal way of life in the name of modernity. These intellectual works are themselves diverse and influential expansions of the terrain of how violence is understood.

This descriptive framework not only places violence in the matrix of human subjectivity conditioned by social consensus and information, but also carries implications as to how we address violence in the real world. With information and social consciousness as its focal point, this model advocates for free discussions and removal of informational barriers as ways to promote understanding of violence. Moreover, it warns against complacency involved in the production of any theory or definition of violence that claims to be complete or the formation of any social consensus that asserts itself to be advanced and progressive, since real violence is never defined by abstract formulations or doctrines but by dynamic interactions of both social consciousness and the individualized voices of concrete human beings. The conceptualization of violence should be an endeavor to understand real human suffering. Just as human beings themselves and their associated behaviors and consciousness are complex, dynamic, and ever-expanding, the project to resolve violence has to take a form no less diversified, human-centered and self-reflective.

W OR KS C I TE D

Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6, no. 3, 1969, pp. 167–191. www.jstor.org/stable/422690.

Han, Byung-Chul. Topology of Violence. Translated by Amanda DeMarco, MIT Press, 2018.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

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How “Get Out” Exposes the Evolution of Oppression in America L A D Y G A B R I E L L E A SHO N G

On February 26th 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American boy, was killed by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman used the defence that “this guy looks like he is up to no good, on drugs or something” (“Trayvon Martin Shooting Fast Facts”). The unarmed teenager was brutally shot and he died because of his appearance. Although not as blatant as strict segregation rules or human zoos, in modern American society, institutionalized ideas of otherness continue to cause epistemic violence and prejudice. Epistemic violence is defined by Kwame Appiah, a British-Ghanaian philosopher, as a violence manifested through knowledge (Appiah 186). Cases such as Trayvon’s display how latent labels of culture are so deeply embedded into the American liberal subconscious that it can conjure prejudicial thinking and feelings of threat. As a result, despite the abolition of slavery in 1865 and the victories of the civil rights movements 100 years later, American liberalism is not post-racial. According to Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, American liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before law (“Liberalism”). Whilst American liberals believe in a utopic equal American society, the reality is that racism continues to exist in an evolved, more inconspicuous form built on the fear of the “other”, groups of people who do not fit into the white liberal framework. Get Out is an American social thriller directed by Jordan Peele which introduces the complex discussions of race relations in 21st century America. The movie is based on a protagonist Chris Washington (played by Daniel Kaluuya), a black man in an interracial relationship with Rose Armitage (played by Allison Williams). The couple decides to visit the Armitage home for the weekend and though initially, all appears friendly and calm, something sinister lurks behind the façade of the smiles and tea. The first half of the film displays white liberals attempting to understand black culture through a microscopic lens. However, the second half of the movie takes an unexpected turn as we

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are led into a trap of control, greed and manipulation. Get Out deconstructs American liberalism, displaying it as part of a history of racism in America which continues to subordinate African Americans. However, Get Out also portrays a more powerful and unconventional story of the “other”, Chris, not being constrained by victimhood. Within this essay, I will decipher how Get Out explores the intricacies of racial discourse, ignorance and victimization which have led to the present social state of liberal America and the fear of otherness.

Images formed by the media and white liberalism cause black Americans to be viewed as “others” in western society. Director Jordan Peele explores this constructed ideology in Get Out by using his protagonist, Chris, as a symbol of physical objectification. For example, forms of appropriation are immediately unveiled during Chris’s encounter with the Armitage family a few minutes into the screening. The father (Dean Armitage) claims, in his first encounter with Chris, that “some people want to be faster, stronger, cooler” and goes on to describe these allegedly black features as “principle advantages you have enjoyed your whole life”. As a result, in this narration Peele highlights the superficial and minutely limited understanding of black people the Armitage family and, by extension, white American liberals have. In particular, the preconceived notion of the black appearance being an “advantage” is astonishing seeing that, particularly in America, black men are more likely to be racially profiled than any other group (Lockhart). Peele demonstrates this in the introductory scene where Chris is stopped by the white police officer because of a minuscule problem with his tailgate. While Chris complies with the officer’s orders, his white girlfriend raises her voice and attempts to argue with the officer. This is the reality of the black experience the Armitage family overlooks. As a result, Peele is attempting to use the Armitage family as a metaphor for how white liberals tend to overlook the black struggle, only wanting the benefits of the black identity without the experience.

Furthermore, in the encounter between Chris, the officer and Rose, it is clear that Rose is unaware of her privilege. Her privilege is so blinding that she is unable to sense the danger Chris potentially places himself in if he fails to comply with the law. Obliviously, she states “you don’t have to give him your ID because you haven’t done anything wrong”, completely forgetting the unofficial power dynamics which exist in America — her position as a white

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woman addressing the cop, in comparison to Chris, is socially superior. By subconsciously establishing social constructs such as power dynamics and objectification, Peele highlights how the Armitage family are a derivative of unofficial white supremacy as they do not recognize their privilege within their middle-class context.

Edward Said’s analysis of ‘Otherness’ in Orientalism is also helpful to understand the magnitude and complexity of racism in modern American society.

As displayed by the character of Chris, ideas of the ‘other’ are so deeply institutionalized and systematic that fascination instead of understanding engulfs members of the American liberal society. To understand this intricate relationship between othering and epistemic violence, Said tackles the idea of latent and manifest Orientalism to determine the root of the discourse of Orientals. For Said, latent orientalism is an unconscious thinking of the Orient whilst manifest orientalism is the stated views of the Orient. Colonial supremacy historically defined cultural differences unbeknownst to their own as “degenerate, uncivilized and retarded” (Said 206). Therefore, this patronizing western perspective of the ‘other’ is argued by Said to have always existed in a “framework constructed out of biological determinism and moralpolitical admonishment” (Said 208). Said’s description of ‘framework’ captures how restricted Western understanding of the Eastern world can be. Like Chris, Western perceptions of the Eastern world have become so polarized by art, media and discourse that people become objectified by their culture instead of being understood as individuals. As Said highlights, the Western world “rarely” saw or “looked at” the Orientals, instead “they were seen through, analysed not as citizens, or even people but as problems to be solved or confined...and taken over” (Said 208). The description of a framework consequently displays the struggle white liberals have in understanding the “other” past a specific image. In Get Out, Peele displays how this framework is so strong that even well-meaning individuals have trouble escaping it. This mental framework of othering, as displayed by white liberals in Get Out, can further be understood as a manifestation of essentialism. Kwame Appiah’s The Lies that Bind highlights essentialism as the belief of people having a set of characteristics which makes them what they are. Appiah’s argument of essentialism is that humans are not only set in their ways of thinking but that these thoughts can become concrete

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and accepted as a universal truth, especially if it is a negative claim about a group (119). Therefore, does essentialism mean that preventing prejudice in white American liberal society is impossible because subconscious thoughts are innate? Furthermore, does essentialism justify the ignorance of the Armitage family? This is a point of ambiguity in Said’s book.

Moreover, Said’s exploration of Western prejudice of the East is similar to the prejudicial framework the Armitages’ use to analyse Chris. In Orientalism, Said strengthens his arguments about the western prejudicial thinking of the Eastern world by highlighting social and psychological influences as the causes of epistemic violence. Due to essentialism, it is possible that many members of the Westernized world did not choose to view the Eastern world as others but were conditioned to do so. Said highlights that latent and manifest orientalism created the understanding of Orientals as being “backwards, isolated, stagnant and mysterious people” (Said 206). Said defines latent Orientalism as an unconscious perception of the orient and manifest Orientalism as the more visible displays. Examples of these forms of manifest Orientalism include paintings and writings by novelists which display recurring images of sensual women, bearded men and sparse deserts. Therefore, if members of the Western world have only been educated by this discourse of the East, their ignorance seems inevitable. Peele displays this idea of essentialism in Get Out by showing that the Armitage family are already hard-wired with a particular image of Chris. Therefore, though Chris is being praised for his physical “advantages”, these perspectives, whether positive or negative, stem from the discourse created by the latent and manifesting portrayal of African Americans . By highlighting the stereotypes that the Armitage family make in their speech and behaviour with Chris, Peele displays how generalizations of one individual are used by white liberals to singularly categorize African Americans. As a result, instead of learning about the individual, American liberals are blinded by a preconceived ignorant understanding of the individual’s group. The ignorance of American Liberals to the black identity is the exact flaw Peele captures in Get Out. Peele also conveys the various forms of appropriation in America, which alienates marginalized groups, to deconstruct racism for liberal white

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America. For this essay, I will define appropriation as the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of culture. Appropriation is explored in Get Out as stemming from morbid fascination and ignorance of American liberalism; it is displayed in lingo and actions used between encounters with Chris and the Armitage family. This idea of fascination also complicates Said’s analysis as it depicts otherness as not only being a symbol of fear, as suggested in Orientalism, but one of intrigue. Although the Armitage family believes using racially stereotypical phrases allows inclusivity, it causes further isolation for Chris. By using these racial interactions, Peele intrinsically explores racism by boldly highlighting examples of manifest appropriation. One form of this manifestation is the dining room scene half way through the film which captures the Armitage family enjoying their dinner. Chris sits next to Rose whilst the rest of the Armitage family sit on the opposite side of the table.

The brother, Jeremy, says “if you pushed your body, you would be a fucking beast”. Other examples of appropriation include Chris’s interactions with Rose’s father, Dean. Dean uses phrases such as “thang”, “I would have voted for Obama for the third time” and “my man”. These forms of vocal appropriation display how American liberal society continues to use ignorant and artificial interactions to incorrectly understand and accept black Americans. As a result, Peele is suggesting that there is rarely a genuine understanding between liberal America and African Americans.

Furthermore, appropriation is seen in Get Out as casting out black Americans from the American Nation. Liberal Americans most likely do not understand their privilege or racial inequalities because their perceptions are both biased by a superficial understanding of the other and their patriotic nationalism.

Steven Elliott Grosby, a professor at Clemson University, presents the causes and issues of patriarchy in Nationalism by highlighting how a nation can be a “collective consciousness” but differ on an individual basis (Grosby 119).

A nation is not a “colony of ants” but “social relation of several individuals as a consequence of those individuals participating in the same evolving tradition” (Grosby 119). Like Peele, Grosby explores the idea that nationality does not automatically grant one all of the benefits of their nation. American nationalism is built on the foundations of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

However, this is a myth which applies to only a small group of predominantly

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white, middle-class men and women. The treatment of othering of Chris in Get Out highlights how alienated he is in his nation. The values of what America believes of its nation is a paradox to how the citizens of the nation are treated.

Grosby’s analysis of the patriotic bias highlights why liberal America believes in a fabricated form of equality. As suggested by Grosby, the principles of a nation are actually “the conception that one has of oneself” (132). Liberal Americans have a romanticized relationship with their nation which critically hinders their ability to escape their conditions and see from the perspective of subordinate groups who are excluded from their nation’s benefits.

Although Nationalism and Orientalism both provide key evidence for the subordination of the “Other” in the Western world, they fail to depict the other as existing beyond a state of victimhood. Said depicts the Orientals, from the perspective of the Western world, as an “outsider and weak partner of the west” (Said 209) whilst Grosby states that “The layer that represents recognition...may or may not coincide with the recognition that one is a citizen of the political and legal relation of the state” (Grosby 221). Said’s claims of a static American liberal society suggest that the others are also constrained in an unchanging position of victimization. In comparison, Grosby displays how the other can remain subordinate in a nation despite being a citizen. However, Peele complicates their analysis of the subordinate other’s social position by highlighting how Chris evolves from victimization to social triumph. To emancipate himself from his enslavement, Chris uses the tools which were initially used by the white elites to enslave him. For example, he kills Jeremy with a bocce ball, an object associated with white middle-class privilege. Chris also saves himself by picking cotton, a powerful depiction of how African Americans can assert their own identity with elements which were historically used to oppress their ancestors. Peele demonstrates that for African Americans to avoid social enslavement and most importantly, to save themselves from victimization in a static liberal society, they must fight the countless barriers of American liberalism. As a result, whilst Said suggests that social change is impossible because of the “mental framework” of liberal America (207), Peele shows that it is possible for African Americans to overcome oppression. Peele displays that the African American position in liberal America should not be portrayed as a cyclical system of oppression and victimhood. As a result, Peele

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challenges the conventional helpless image of the “Other” by making Chris a survivor and a symbol of resilience.

In conclusion, Get Out asserts that racism continues to thrive under the veneer of white American liberalism. Ultimately, the ending scenes of “Get Out” are the most important part of Peele’s aim of punching the message of American liberal racism to the audience. In the last act, Chris (a black man) lies on top of Rose’s bloody body as a police car approaches in the distance. This is perhaps the highest point of tension in the thriller because the audience knows how this set up looks in the eyes of white America. For a moment, we are heartbroken as we know that Chris would be unquestionably imprisoned if a white cop steps out of the car. Although this was Peele’s original idea, he chose to have an alternate happy ending and rightly so. Peele uses this ending to empower his African American audience members by pausing their feelings of hardship and subordination in American liberal society. This pause is Peele’s attempt to encourage African Americans to use resilience to escape victimhood in liberal white America. In all, the true thriller of “Get Out” is not the attempted forceful enslavement, but the American system. The irony of Get Out is that by highlighting the stagnancy, ignorance and weaknesses of white liberals, Peele makes American society become the Other.

W OR KS C I TE D

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Chapter 6.” The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.

New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018, pp. 119–186.

Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele, performances by Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams and Bradley Whitford, Universal Pictures, 2017.

Grosby, Steven Elliot. Nationalism: a very short introduction. Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Lockhart, P.R. “Living While Black and the criminalization of blackness.” Vox, 1 Aug. 2018, www.vox.com/explainers/2018/8/1/17616528/racial-profilingpolice-911-living-while-black.

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“Liberalism.” Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, 2021, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/liberalism. Accessed 25 May 2021.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London, Penguin Books, 2019.

“Trayvon Martin Shooting Fast Facts: CNN Editorial Research.” CNN, 11 June 2012, edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayvon-martin-shooting-fastfacts/index.html.

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The Influence of Socio-Religious Factors on al-Șafadī’s Perception of Translation in the Abbasid Era R E E M HA Z I M

Translation is more than just a cultural and linguistic mediator; historically, it has also involved the transfer of power and authority between the source culture and the receiving culture. Lefevere, a translation studies historian, describes translation as “a channel opened… through which foreign influences can penetrate the native culture, challenge it, and even contribute to subverting it” (2). The response of the receiving culture to the translation of foreign texts is often influenced by the culture’s social, political, and religious context. For instance, Arab scholars had different responses to the translation of Greek books into Arabic during the reign of the Abbasid Caliphate (7501258 CE), and their attitudes towards translation largely depended on the ruling dynasty and the social and religious atmosphere of their time. This paper explores the socio-religious factors influencing the remarks of an Arab scholar, al-Ṣafadī, on Graeco-Arabic translation in his book, Al-ghayth al-musjam fī sharḥ Lāmīyat al-‘Ajam. al-Ṣafadī’s social status as a member of the ulama and the strong Sunni current fostered by the Mamluk Sultanate influenced his thoughts on the integration of Greek logic philosophy into Islamic culture and the translation methods used by the Abbasid translators.

Khalil Ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (1297-1363), born in Safad, Palestine, was a calligrapher, poet, and historian who worked as a scribe in the chancery, authored “hundreds of books,” and copied over five hundred more (BehrensAbouseif 90). al-Ṣafadī lived during the reign of the Mamluk Sultanate (12501517 CE), which succeeded the Ayyubid and Abbasid dynasties and ruled over Egypt and Syria. It was characterized by a ruling class of mamluks, or military slaves of “servile origin” (Northrup 244). In the 14th century CE, the Arabs of the Mamluk Sultanate built upon the wealth of literature they inherited from the Abbasids and invented a new genre of literature: the commentary-

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anthology. In this genre, the commentary (usually about a poem) serves as a framework for gathering a sequence of texts of various types to give the educated person an overview of subjects relevant to the modern, Mamluk Age (Bauer, “Mamluk Literature” 113). A prominent example of a commentary anthology is al-Ṣafadī’s book, Al-ghayth al-musjam fī sharḥ Lāmīyat al-‘Ajam, or “Flowing Desert Rains in the Commentary upon the L-Poem of the Non-Arabs” (Muhanna 52). In Al-ghayth, al-Ṣafadī provides an extensive commentary on Lāmīyat al-‘Ajam, an Arabic poem by the 12th century Persian poet, Al-Tughrai.

In his equally insightful and entertaining digressions on the poem, al-Ṣafadī touches upon the topic of translation in the Abbasid era, making some remarks about the Greek-Arab translation movement sparked by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun. al-Ṣafadī’s work was significantly influenced by the social environment of the 13th century, which witnessed an increase in public interest in education and literature. The Mamluk era saw the proliferation of madrasas, library endowments, and the practice of book-copying, which provided scholars with a variety of resources and sparked the middle class’s broad interest in literature. The Mamluks inherited the concept of the madrasa, an academic institution that provides religious education services for the public, from the Ayyubids (Behrens-Abouseif 16). These institutions were mainly established and sponsored by Turkish mamluk rulers and elites in order to legitimize their rule over their Arab subjects (Igarashi 26). Many of the books in these madrasas were supplied by scholars and members of the elite, as it was customary for them to endow large collections of books and private libraries to academic institutions, creating a “substantial resource of books available to scholars and students” (Behrens-Abouseif 34). Not only were books on religious topics mass-produced by mamluk scholars, but copying manuscripts was also common practice among academics because it allowed them to procure materials for their studies and amass their own libraries (BehrensAbouseif 17, 34). Combined, the spread of religious foundations such as madrasas, scholars’ endowments of their private libraries, and the common practice of book-copying adopted by academics, “led to the spread of mass education that brought about a broad, literate and semi-literate middle class that displayed great interest in literature of any kind” (Bauer, “Anthologies”

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2). These circumstances gave rise to the commentary-anthology mentioned earlier, and it was in this context that al-Ṣafadī wrote his books.

In Al-ghayth, al-Ṣafadī digresses from his commentary on the poem and narrates the story of how Greek logic and philosophy were introduced to the Arab world (al-Ṣafadī 46). al-Ṣafadī attributes the Greek-Arabic translation movement sparked during the Abbasid era to al-Ma’mun, the Abbasid caliph who, according to al-Ṣafadī, requested Greek books from the king of Cyprus (46). al-Ṣafadī then explains how the Muslims have always split into different groups because of their diverging theological opinions and schools of thought, and how each group needed to prove their arguments using logic and reasoning (46). Finally, he reaches the conclusion that al-Ma’mun aggravated the conflict between Muslims by ordering the translation of Greek books about logic philosophy into Arabic, which supplied those who opposed Sunni Islam, such as the Mu’tazila, a rationalist school of Islamic thought, with the tool of dialectic disputation to strengthen their arguments (al-Ṣafadī 46-47).

In order to understand why al-Ṣafadī had a negative perception of the translation of Greek philosophical books, it is important to understand the scholarly group to which he belonged and the type of literature they were writing in the 14th century. al-Ṣafadī was a member of the ulama, religious scholars who partook in ‘ilm, or “religious learning” of the “Ḳu’rān, ḥadīth and fiḳh” (Gabrieli 2). In contrast, the udaba were scholars who studied adab, or “the sum of knowledge which makes a man courteous and “urbane”” (Gabrieli 2). Adab is characterized by its “profane culture… based in the first place on poetry,” oration, and rhetoric (Gabrieli 2). In the Mamluk empire, the line between adab and ‘ilm became blurred, and the ulama also took on the role of udaba and wrote about secular topics in a process Thomas Bauer calls the “ “adabisation” of the ‘ulamāʼ” (Bauer, “Anthologies” 1). As such, while al-Ṣafadī’s commentary-anthology is a work of adab, or of secular nature, the arguments and remarks he makes in the book, specifically, his thoughts on the Greek-Arabic translation movement, are highly influenced by his religious background as a member of the ulama and the religiously-charged context in which he lived.

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For instance, it is likely that the strong Sunni currents fostered in the Mamluk era shaped al-Ṣafadī’s perception of the translation of Greek logic books as a threat to Sunni Islam (Rosenthal 1). Prior to the Mamluks, the Ayyubids, specifically Salah al-Din, pursued religious policies that aimed to eradicate competitors to Sunni Islam, mainly Isma’ilism and Christianity (Northtrup 266). The Bahri Mamluks who succeeded the Ayyubids “pursued even more energetically” these religious policies, resulting in “an even more intensely Islamic and Sunni religious environment” (Northrup 266). Writing in such a religiously-charged climate, where “extremism was less tolerated” , it is only natural for al-Ṣafadī to immediately associate the translation movement with its religious implications (Northrup 271). The introduction of foreign concepts such as logic into Islam enabled rationalist, non-mainstream schools of theology such as the Mu’tazila to defend their views.

Additionally, al-Ṣafadī’s writing hints towards another influence on his opinion: his first teacher, Ibn Taymiyya, whom he quotes saying that God will punish al-Ma’mun for introducing these philosophical sciences to the Muslim people (46). Ibn Taymiyya was a highly influential Hanbali theologian who insisted “on an extreme, morally rigorist Sunnism based on a literal interpretation of the Qu’ran and Sunna” (Northrup 267). A controversial figure in Mamluk theological discourse, he was imprisoned at least six times, usually due to his religious beliefs (Northrup 267). Ibn Taymiyya “denounce[d] all the innovations (bid’a) which he regarded as heretical,” which made him inevitably clash with scholars of different schools of thought (Laoust 3). For example, he wrote a long treatise, called Dar’ Ta’arud al-’aql wa’l-naql, denouncing the rationalist methods used by theological schools like the Mu’tazila (Griffel 12). Considering that al-Ṣafadī quoted Ibn Taymiyya at the outset of his discussion, and taking into account the latter’s outspoken antirationalist beliefs, al-Ṣafadī may have inherited his opposition to rationalist schools of thought from his teacher. In turn, this religious bias colored his view of translation in the Abbasid era.

Not only does al-Ṣafadī bring up the Greek-Arabic translation movement as a whole, but he also discusses the translation methods used by translators in

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the Abbasid era. al-Ṣafadī argues that the word-for-word translation method was poor (“radee’a”) because it resulted in the incorporation of Greek words, syntax, and metaphors into the Arabic text (46). Throughout the course of his commentary, he deviates from his discussion on the proliferation of GreekArabic translations and outlines two translation methods adopted during the Abbasid era: the first is when the translator looks at a Greek word, finds an equivalent for it in Arabic, then moves on to the next word (in other words, word-for-word translation), and the second is when the translator reads the Greek sentence, understands it, then expresses its meaning in Arabic (al-Ṣafadī 46). al-Ṣafadī labels the first type of translation as poor for two reasons: first, because there are no Arabic expressions that correspond to every Greek word, so many Greek words were left untranslated, and second, because the syntax in one language does not always match that in another language, and the use of metaphors that are recurrent in each language often leads to more mistakes in translation (46). al-Ṣafadī’s criticism of word-for-word translation can be attributed to his great “concern with linguistic problems,” as is evident in his other book, Taṣḥīḥ al-taṣḥīf wa-taḥrīr al-taḥrīf, which is a long treatise on commonplace Arabic “misspellings and misreadings” (Rosenthal 2).

However, there is more to his interest in Arabic grammar than personal preference. al-Ṣafadī’s criticism of word-for-word translation can also be linked to his social status as a member of the ulama. Because of the aforementioned spread of education and scholarly training in Mamluk society, the ulama sought to differentiate themselves from the rest of the superficiallyeducated public through “linguistic proficiency, especially a flawless mastering of Arabic grammar” (Bauer, “Mamluk Literature” 110). In fact, Bauer indicates that al-Ṣafadī showed restraint every time he quoted passages that exhibit “interference of the spoken language” because he wanted to conform to ulama standards, though he “never denied” that he was entertained by them (“Mamluk Literature” 110). In Al-ghayth, al-Ṣafadī shows how wordfor-word translation interferes with the Arabic language because it results in the existence of untranslated Greek words, Greek syntax, and strange metaphorical expressions in Arabic. The ulama who held high regard for the Arabic language and its grammar would not tolerate the existence of foreign words, syntax, and metaphors in Arabic text. Therefore, it is possible that al-

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Ṣafadī was biased against this method of translation because he was “afraid of violating professional ulama standards” (Bauer, “Mamluk Literature” 110).

The Sunni religious environment in which al-Ṣafadī lived and his high regard for the Arabic language and grammar prompted him to view Greek-Arabic translation in the Abbasid era in light of its influence on Islamic theology. It also propelled his fears of promoting and empowering the rationalist schools of thought within Islam. However, the rise of the commentary-anthology in the Mamluk era reveals the existence of a society of eager lifelong learners and their high demand for books that touch on broad fields of knowledge.

Studying the factors that brought about such an attitude towards learning is of extraordinary relevance, as education in our modern age is attempting to replicate exactly this attitude in students and create a culture of selfmotivated, lifelong learning.

W OR KS C I TE D

al-Ṣafadī, Khalil ibn Aybak. Al-ghayth al-musjam fī sharḥ Lāmīyat al-‘Ajam.

Commentary by Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Nabatah, Azhar Press, 1888.

Bauer, Thomas. “Anthologies, Arabic Literature (Post-Mongol Period)”.

Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. Ed. Kate Fleet et al., Brill Reference Online.

2020.

Bauer, Thomas. “Mamluk Literature: Misunderstandings and New Approaches.” Mamluk Studies Review, vol. ix, no. 2, 2005, pp. 105-132. doi:10.6082/M1BP00ZC. Behrens-Abouseif, Doris. The Book in Mamluk Egypt and Syria (1250-1517). Leiden, The Netherlands, Brill, 2018. doi:10.1163/9789004387058.

Gabrieli, F. “Adab.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Ed. P. Bearman et al., Brill Reference Online. 2020.

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Griffel, Frank. “Ibn Taymiyya and His Ash‘arite Opponents on Reason and Revelation: Similarities, Differences, and a Vicious Circle.” Muslim World, vol. 108, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 11–39.

Igarashi, Daisuke. “The Waqf-Endowment Strategy of a Mamluk Military Man: the Contexts, Motives, and Purposes of the Endowments of Qijmās AlIsḥāqī (d. 1487).” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 82, no. 1, 2019, pp. 25–53. doi:10.1017/S0041977X18001519.

Laoust, H. “Ibn Taymiyya.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Ed. P. Bearman et al., Brill Reference Online.

Lefevere, André. Translation, History, Culture: A Sourcebook. Routledge, 1992.

Muhanna, Elias. The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition, Princeton University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. action?docID=5153831.

Northrup, Linda. “The Bahrī Mamlūk Sultanate, 1250–1390.” The Cambridge History of Egypt, edited by Carl F. Petry, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 242–289.

Rosenthal, F. ‘al-Ṣafadī’. Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Ed. P. Bearman et al., Brill Reference Online.

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Homosexuality in Contemporary Uganda SAM SHU

This As the “Pearl of Africa,” Uganda has always been under the spotlight on the international stage. With the help of rapid globalization in the past decades, Uganda has been exposed to unparalleled opportunities for its development, but it has also drawn the public’s attention in a variety of circumstances. One of the instances of such attention, without doubt, lies in the debate of LGBT rights in the country. It was not disputed widely across the globe until the proposal of the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill in 2009, and the subsequent release of the 2012 award-winning documentary Call Me Kuchu, directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright, which brought the issue to a wider audience. The documentary specifically focuses on the LGBTQ community and its struggles in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, before and after the bill proposal. It primarily revolves around David Kato, Uganda’s “first openly gay man” who had dedicated himself to promoting LGBT rights in Uganda. But with beliefs rooted in Christianity from the colonial era and African cultures that existed for centuries, the vast majority of Kampala’s citizens denied him such an opportunity and even trampled on the legitimacy of the community’s existence. It has become clear that the interactions of modern Western values and local traditional norms are the key factors shaping people’s understanding and judgment of homosexuality in Kampala as portrayed explicitly in Call Me Kuchu. In particular, with the help of Lydia Boyd’s research on individual personhood and social concern of youth recruitment in Kampala, and discussions of Christianity and the origin of homosexuality, the national hatred towards homosexuality depicted in Call Me Kuchu can be seen as a display of ekitiibwa (honor and respectability) in African values and a denial of Western influence.

In the documentary, the concern with homosexuality extends beyond personal choices and is more linked with a family’s overall lineage and individual personhood in a collective environment. In the scene where one of

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the main advocates, Stosh, opens up about her journey, she talks to her aunt through phone trying to explain her identity as a homosexual. However, her aunt rather considers this as Stosh’s profession instead of acknowledging this as part of her identity as a normal human being. She asks whether Stosh earns money from it, leaving Stosh helplessly arguing that “There’s nothing I earn.

It’s me. It’s who I am.” Such family denial is studied in Lydia Boyd’s essay “The Problem with Freedom: Homosexuality and Human Rights in Uganda.” In the essay, Boyd introduces the concept of ekitiibwa, which refers to “honor” and “respectability,” and accentuates the idea that “even as the region underwent dramatic social changes with the introduction of Christianity and colonial rule, the demonstration of ekitiibwa through submission to networks of kinship and clientage defined proper personhood” (705). In other words, the importance of ekitiibwa in Uganda, dating back to even before the colonization period, is evident in that it is highly regarded in sexual relationships, namely marriages from today’s perspective, and also in kinships and clans. From ancient times, ekitiibwa has been the most significant trait of a person and was determinant of one’s social status. It was largely maintained by marriage, procreation and kin relationships. Therefore, violations or deviations of ekitiibwa by any means are not only a threat to the individual, but rather the whole lineage within a preformed societal structure. What is more, ekitiibwa defines “proper personhood” in the sense that in a collective environment that emphasizes clans and kinships, living without ekitiibwa means living without the quality of an individual person in the society, and therefore someone in such condition would be disregarded as a family member. Although in Boyd’s essay she also claims homosexuality to have always been practiced in Uganda, it was never accepted because no proper kind of marriage was formed, therefore practicing it is a complete deviation from the virtues of ekitiibwa, a kind of “freedom” the Ugandans speak against. Thus, the role of homosexuality is always deviant under such traditional beliefs. In Call Me Kuchu, Stosh is facing exactly the same situation where she is denied by her whole family as she is violating the traditional beliefs of ekitiibwa and putting herself and the entire lineage or clan at risk. Her individual personhood, with the loss of ekitiibwa, is fractured in her family’s collectiveness, and as she miserably speaks out the truth, “It is one thing being outed and another one being denied,” we can see how strongly

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holding such traditional beliefs are restraining her from being her true self even in the contemporary society.

However, a family’s denial of homosexuality does not simply originate from traditional beliefs of individual honor or collective respectability; it also stems from the fear of Western influences over Uganda and the homosexuality youth recruitment rumors in Kampala society. One of the most shocking scenes in the documentary takes place in a campaign where someone preaches to elders on helping their children out of the conspiracy of homosexuality recruitment. The preacher is indignantly shouting at the crowd in the open field about the “homosexual youth recruitment agenda,” claiming “it’s going to hurt the nation and hurt families,” and it is “sweeping into [their] education system, and parents are losing their rights over the education of their children.” His attempt to brainwash the audience by throwing out extreme statements on homosexuality is heavily and excessively responded to by the crowds. Some of them are holding hands hailing prayers in a circle, either standing or kneeling with twisted sincerity and pain on their faces. Some close their eyes tightly and murmur the prayers along with the preacher, and others are helped by the preacher himself. All the faces look distorted, drenched in sorrow and resentment, and behind all the hyperactivity lies a deeper layer of enervation, helplessness, and fear towards the unknown possibilities of homosexuality. Boyd in her essay also discusses the fear that Ugandans claim homosexuals to be “operating in conjunction with Western norms and values that are threatening (even ‘inhuman’), and … are so dangerous (not normal humans) because they are themselves supposedly unconnected to kin, clan, and lineage relationships” (709-10). That is, Ugandans believe that homosexuality is an imported Western influence and it is completely against the nature of the land as it has nothing pertinent to their cultural affiliations with kinships and clans, and this is where ekitiibwa plays a crucial role. The different yet congruent expressions from the crowds in the campaign are explicit rejections of homosexuality and regarding it as a Western threat over their own African culture.

At the same time, it is clear how the Western religion Christianity itself has created contradictions in the issue, especially in the scene of David’s

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funeral after he was unexpectedly and brutally murdered. During the scene, there were two groups, one of which is the radical religious believers and the other is the mourners. The radicals were resentfully judging David and the entire LGBT community in Uganda and praying for their “total destruction,” constantly repeating words such as “you should repent” and “you’re going to hell.” While the other group, led by Bishop Senyonjo, who ardently protects the human rights of the community under his doctrines, were grieving for their lost warrior and eulogizing David for his bravery and contributions to the community. Christianity came with the missionaries during the colonial period from Europe, and after years of development it became the religion most Ugandans live by. However, Ugandans did not spend much time rejecting such foreign values as they are doing currently towards homosexuality.

Instead they embraced Christianity and incorporated it into daily practices.

On this issue, we can see that Ugandans are regarding Christianity as a Western version of ekitiibwa, which essentially expresses the same values as their traditional beliefs. In Christianity, honoring God becomes the key factor defining proper personhood, and Ugandans also regard the religious believers as clans who share honors and values with each other. Therefore, they accepted such values much more easily and intertwined them with their existing ones.

While we are certain Christianity is historically brought from the West, and even though the majority of Ugandans argue that homosexuality is not inherent, whether or not homosexuality came along with Christianity from Europe remained a mystery. Right after the funeral scene, the Rolling Stones editor posed his thoughts about the issue. He suggests that “People need to know that human rights do not mean gay rights, especially in Uganda,” drawing a line between two concepts that are generally equivalent when it comes to LGBT rights, and implying that gay rights are not acceptable in Uganda. What is hidden behind the words is his belief that homosexuality does not belong to Africa and his determination that African traditional values are on the more righteous side. In fact, the origin of homosexuality has been heatedly discussed. For instance, in the essay “Homosexuality is an African Thing,” Muniini K. Mulera claims homosexuality is inherent in Africa, and as “African as most of the other imported behaviors and tastes from Europe

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which have become part of our contemporary culture” (94). He enumerates words in different African local languages that express homosexuality and several scholarly pursuits of literature on homosexuality to back up his argument that homosexuality has existed in Africa long before the colonial expansion. This unique viewpoint challenges the aforementioned youth recruitment rumors and dismisses the social contention that homosexuality should be resisted as it is against African traditional values, values that, ironically, are partially based on a religion also from the West. While on the other hand, in a response essay “Come on Dr. Tamale, Gayness is not African,” Mary Karooro Okurut regards homosexuality as “an influence brought in from the outer world”, and calls for the society to “uphold … African values that we hold dear, not to blindly copy and make on Western culture wholesale” (100-101). Okurut’s ideas are again implicitly connected to rooted beliefs in individual personhood and ekitiibwa that are superior to values imported from the West. She believes homosexuality is a violation of the law of the land, a threat from societies that do not cherish and uphold their collectiveness and respectability standards, and it should be inexorably opposed. From these polarized opinions, we can witness distinctive interpretations of traditional values, where the former admits homosexuality as a part of them while the latter defies it as against their clan-driven society. The complication within such an important issue is that the immense discussion of the origin of homosexuality shows the public’s reluctance to allow homosexuality to permeate into their own society and they try to oppose it as an outer force and claim their own cultural practices instead.

Regardless of its foreignness, the conception of homosexuality is not easily accepted in Ugandan society. From looking through the role of ekitiibwa, to the deep-rooted Western resentment and how Christianity is aligned with ekitiibwa, we are starting to discern the intricacy of the issue that emerged long before the 21st century. Clearly, traditional values such as ekitiibwa that emphasize individual personhood in a clan and kinshiporiented society and the fear of Western influence over the country are indispensable in analyzing the national resentment towards homosexuality, but it is also interesting to see how the documentary, clearly made primarily for Western audiences, is omitting discussions of the significance of such

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African traditional beliefs with no more than a few lines in its 85-minute entirety. In other words, the documentary overlooking the importance of values including ekitiibwa was a clear oversight that led to the failure of the audiences to contextualize and more deeply understand why LGBT rights are so opposed. The complexity of the issue itself truly makes us ponder over the confrontation between traditional values and fundamental human rights, but after all, who are we to judge?

W OR KS C I TE D

Boyd, Lydia. “The Problem with Freedom: Homosexuality and Human Rights in Uganda,” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 3, 2013, pp. 697-724.

Mulera, Muniini. “Homosexuality is an African Thing,” Homosexuality: Perspectives from Uganda, edited by Tamale, Sylvia, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), 2007, pp. 91-4.

Okurut, Mary K. “Come on Dr.Tamale, Gayness is not African,” Homosexuality: Perspectives from Uganda, edited by Tamale, Sylvia, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), 2007, pp. 99-101.

Call Me Kuchu. Directed by Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright, Cinedigm, 2012.

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The Ambiguous Concept of Evil: A Problem in Assessing Legitimacy SONI A C L A U D I A C ĂTI NE A N

The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention has remained a topic of great debate among academics and politicians alike. Because of its vulnerability to be abused, justifying the use of force on humanitarian grounds became a pretext for foreign nationals to intervene not for humanitarian reasons but for selfish motives. One of the most controversial cases where the issue of legitimacy was called into question was the Kosovo War in 1999 when NATO attacked the Serbian military positions. The legitimacy of the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia represented a complicated legal challenge for NATO because it did not receive prior approval from the United Nations Security Council. On what grounds can we nevertheless deem it legitimate?

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights considered that the intervention was justified because all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and the outcome of the intervention was humanitarian: the liberation of the majority population of Kosovo from a long period of oppression under Serbian rule. However, a critical examination leaves us wondering about this legitimacy: ‘NATO military intervention was illegal yet legitimate’ (Kosovo Report, 2000: 4).

Despite being legitimate, NATO intervention has since been disputed by many legal theoreticians, such as Robin May Schott, who questions the situation of war and moral judgments about it: ‘instead of legitimating some wars as just, it is better to acknowledge that both the situation of war and moral judgments about war are ambiguous’ (Robin, 2008: 122). NATO framed the situation in Kosovo as warranting a humanitarian intervention through an array of carefully crafted speeches by political leaders, such as Tony Blair and Vaclav Havel. In their speeches, Blair specifically responds to criticism trying to establish the calm and trust in NATO’s power, while Havel praised NATO intervention: ‘Nevertheless, I consider President Clinton’s drive within the Alliance to enlarge it by the three new countries to be one of the

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most significant international political steps of his administration’ (Czech Television, March 2001: 99).

What is especially noticeable from these speeches is the assertion of the purported evilness of the enemy – in this case, the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. However, how can NATO countries justify their humanitarian intervention relying on the evilness of their enemy as an argument? In this essay, I analyze the social construction of legitimacy in the Kosovo case to expose that its justification relied on the concept of evilness. Although purporting evilness is used as an argument for intervening, one should ask if evil even exists and if it has any moral relevance in the discourse of humanitarian intervention. In The Myth of Evil, Philip Cole argues that the idea of evil is a mythological concept. He states that someone described as evil is a victim in a story with a prescribed role and it does not represent a valid argument to judge someone’s behavior (Cole, 2006: 6). On the other side, May Schott states that violence cannot be morally justified since it still represents an evil means. Both authors reject evil as a standard universal principle as well as its validity for moral judgment. Given these dubious credentials, I argue here that evil is a fickle concept that ultimately undermines the moral criteria of humanitarian intervention. How can we approach the goal of humanitarian intervention, to end human rights violations, if we use the violence that bases legitimacy on the concept of evil? If evil does not have any constituency, how can we deem humanitarian intervention in the Kosovo war legitimate? Thus, by questioning the narrative of legitimacy framed around the concept of evil, I thereby claim that the real problem that we face today is that we have no moral standards left to assess legitimacy.

In the process of justifying their legitimacy, NATO uses media as a form of spreading the ideas of evilness far and wide, influencing public opinions. In his speech, ‘A New Generation Draws The Line,’ the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, offers a moral framework of why they should no more appease dictators, identifying Milosevic with evil: ‘Milosevic’s actions in Kosovo have given rise to scenes of suffering and cruelty people thought were banished from Europe forever’ (Blair, 1999). After 3 weeks from the beginning of bombing, Blair responds to criticism, trying to emphasize the essential role NATO has

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in stopping the ethnic cleansing committed by Serbs. As a strategy of gaining credibility and trust in NATO, Blair affirms that the non-intervention in Bosnia was a mistake and this time they promise they will not give up the war till Milosevic agrees to stop the atrocities. He states that the battle is not between the civilians but with the ‘architects of Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing’ (Blair, 1999), pointing out that those responsible for the crimes will be brought to justice. On the other side, the use of the motive of ‘50th NATO birthday’ (Blair, 1999) leaves space for interpreting the real reason that stayed behind NATO intervention. Naom Chomsky reminds in ‘Humanitarian Imperialism – The New Doctrine of Imperial Right,’ that the real motives of the Western countries of intervening were ‘the cohesion of NATO and the credibility of American power’ (Chomsky 2008: 45) in order to support American primacy.

Both Blair and Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, remind in their speeches that the war in Kosovo is ‘the first war ever fought that is not being fought in the name of interests, but in the name of certain principles and values’ (Havel,1999: 98), and ‘In this conflict we are fighting not for territory but for values’ (Blair,1999). In his speech held in Ottawa on April 29, 1999, Havel argues for the human rights that are more important than the rights of states, and this war is the great example that can affirm it: ‘the bombardment and the war were not an expression of a warrior’s cravings or a special liking for war, but an expression of great care for human destiny’ (NIN, November 2000: 100). He does not omit to remember that NATO countries, including the Czech Republic which became a NATO member two weeks ago before the beginning of the NATO bombing, are doing their best to annihilate the genocide caused by the evil side: ‘The Alliance of which both Canada and the Czech Republic are now members is waging a struggle against the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević’ (Havel, 2002: 98).

However, purporting the evilness of the enemy as an argument for legitimizing the use of force can be problematic, as many scholars, such as Philip Cole asserts. Cole’s aim is to discover whether the idea of evil has any place in a secular understanding of humanity, or whether it is a mythological concept.

The fundamental problem is one of explanation and whether the concept of evil can play any constructive or useful role in explaining human action. Cole

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rejects the idea that there is the traditional approach where evil is a force which creates monsters in human shape: ‘Evil is something to be feared, and historically, we shall see, it is the enemy within who has been representing the most intense evil of all’ (Cole, 2006: 2). He states that evil is a myth that we have created about ourselves. In emphasizing the carelessness with which the idea of evil is used, Cole offers an example, where the woman who killed her ex-husband’s wife together with her two children, is considered to be evil. The answer given to the question: ‘Why did she do it?’ (Cole, 2006: 5), ‘because she was evil’ (Cole, 2006: 5) is incomplete and does not represent a real description of the person. In this situation, evil is used as a grand narrative in justifying one’s behavior. Cole argues that in order to judge someone’s behavior, one must seek to understand ‘the social, psychological, historical conditions that act as the background for horrific acts’ (Cole, 2006: 8). In this situation, the idea of evil fails to help us understand how such events happen and the evidence provided for judging someone’s behavior undermines the existence of the concept of evilness. Therefore, the use of force as a response to the evilness of the enemy cannot be considered a valid argument.

The problematic idea of using the concept of evil to justify the use of force is also analyzed by the feminist philosopher Robin May Schott. She argues against the thesis that war can be just, as Hannah Arendt said: ‘Violence can be justifiable, but it will never be legitimate’ (Arendt cited in May Schott 2009: 123). May Schott also criticizes Michael Walzer’s theory of Emergency Ethics.

Walzer argues that the conflict between two parties should be understood as the conflict between just and unjust causes. He focuses on the evil acts committed by the just side in war in two cases: double effect and supreme emergency (Walzer cited in May Schott 2009: 129). The task of the doctrine of double effect is to explain the permissibility of the exceptions when civilians may be justifiably killed. What is decisive in this case is the goodness of intention, that the evil on the side of the just party is to be understood ‘as the evil effects of the good intentions’ (May Schott, 2009: 130). However, according to Kant, we have no transparency in what motivates us to act in a different way, so we can never be sure if our intentions can justify an evil outcome, “Since we cannot know our own or another’s moral motivation, it is best to assume that moral motivation is inadequate.’ (May Schott, 2009: 124).

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In case of a supreme emergency, when the human values are under significant threat, soldiers are licensed to use the force and sacrifice the rights of innocent people: ‘one might well be required to override the rights of innocent people and shatter the war convention’ (Walzer cited in May Schott 2009: 129).

However, how can we maintain a commitment to protect human rights and at the same time to justify the overriding of these rights? Here May Schott argues that even if Walzer recognizes the ambiguity of the moral situation, he does not recognize the ambiguity in moral judgment. She states that Just War Theory cannot address the problem of evil in terms of war, and hence cannot justify the individual’s intentions.

NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 is one of the most controversial cases that faced the difficulty in answering the question: ‘How to enforce human rights when these are violated within a state?’ (May Schott, 2009: 135). Since the doctrine of humanitarian intervention promotes the responsibility to protect human rights from being violated, how can collective political violence be legitimate when the use of force is seen as an evil means that undermines the doctrine? The concept of evil calls into question rather than clarifies the way a humanitarian intervention can be morally justified. First of all, ‘if such evil exists, we have to make it comprehensible’ (Cole, 2006: 5) and that means to define evilness as a standard principle. However, how can we be sure that what was considered evil centuries ago can be considered evil today? As Nietzsche said: ‘All things are subject to interpretation – whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power not of truth.’ The concept of evil is changeable and is subject to interpretation. Using it as an argument for justifying the use of force is therefore questionable. Secondly, one must look at both sides to be able to recognize that there are evil interests on both sides. Chomsky states that ‘the real reason for the bombing was that Yugoslavia was a lone holdout in Europe to the political and economic programs of the Clinton administration and its allies’ (Chomsky, 2008: 45).

In this case, using the concept of evil raises questions in deciding whether NATO intervention had indeed humanitarian reasons for justifying their intervention.

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One of the most essential questions that one must ask when analyzing the use of force on humanitarian grounds is the criterion of justifiability.

What happened in the Kosovo War needs to be understood as an absolute necessity of reassigning our moral standards in legitimizing a humanitarian intervention. The narrative of legitimacy framed around the concept of evil is the result of the social construction, of the way we react to human rights violations. Our reaction should be then justified under fundamental concepts that bring clarity and not rootle ideas that produce errors. If “evil has no roots” (Arendt cited in May Schott, 2009: 123), if it is only a superficial approach to the discourse of humanitarian intervention, then we cannot use it to justify violence. We need a deeper understanding to be able to label a humanitarian intervention legitimate. ‘Or must we also understand humanitarian intervention as perhaps justifiable but never legitimate?’ (May Schott, 2009: 135)

B I B L I OG R A P H Y

Blair, Tony, A New Generation Draws the Line (Newsweek, 1999) Chomsky, Noam, ‘Humanitarian Imperialism: The New Doctrine of Imperial Right’, Monthly Review, 4th ser., 60, (2008), 22-50 Cole, Philip, The Myth of Evil: Demonizing the Enemy, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) Havel, Václav, ‘Protecting people from tyranny of a state sovereignty’, in NATO, Europe, and the security of democracy: Václav Havel selected speeches, articles, and interviews, 1990-2002, ed. by Luboš Dobrovský, translated by Alexandra Brabcová et al. (Pardubice: Theo Publishing, 2002) Schott, Robin May, ‘Just War and the Problem of Evil’, Hypatia, 23rd ser., 2 (2008) 122-140

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A Salad or A Stew: Re-seeing The Hundred Foot Journey SOP H I A L I N

How can a movie about inclusiveness and racial tolerance promote stratification and racism? Released in 2014 and directed by Swedish director, Lasse Hallström, The Hundred Foot Journey is exactly a movie of such paradoxical nature. It tells the success story of a talented Indian cook, Hassan, whose family moves from India to a little town in France to start an Indian restaurant. Fascinated by the French restaurant across the street, Hassan starts learning and soon masters the French cuisine. He becomes an extremely successful chef in Paris and lives happily ever after with his French sweetheart Marguerite. At a first glance, one may see this movie as a cliché that celebrates diversity and denounces discrimination through characters like Jean-Pierre, a xenophobic French chef who sets the Indian restaurant on fire and is then fired by his boss. However, this essay argues that the movie does the exact opposite: it reflects and promotes social stratification and Orientalism, making a coercive argument about assimilation. This essay will draw on cultural critic Edward W. Said’s theory of Orientalism and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of taste. Said defines Orientalism as “a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences” between the Western world and the Eastern world, while Bourdieu argues that taste is a marker of social class and “social subjects…distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make” (11, 6). These two theories will aid an understanding of The Hundred Foot Journey and the discriminative, Orientalist argument it makes.

This movie marks French taste as the superior one that’s associated with higher social class while associating Indian taste with the inferior lower class. When Hassan’s family brings their family recipes and savory Indian food to their Maison Mumbai across the street from the Michelin-star French restaurant, the owner of the French restaurant, Madame Mallory, says that they have also brought “the death of good taste in St. Antonio” (00:41:1700:41:19). The movie uses parallel editing to create a juxtaposition of the

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French restaurant and Maison Mumbai on its first night of business. On the Indian side, customers are tricked by Hassan’s father; food is butchered in an open kitchen that is permeated with smoke and doesn’t seem very sanitary; dishes are served on big plates without much aesthetics (00:40:24-00:40:45).

The movie also ‘spices it up’ with Bollywood music playing so loudly in Maison Mumbai that it can be heard clearly in the French restaurant (00:40:5000:41:01). Meanwhile, across the street, elegant string music is played quietly in the background; people are chatting in a genteel manner; food is served with delicate plate representation (00:40:17-00:40:23).

Bourdieu sees these different tastes as the classifiers of people. In his book Distinction, he argues that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (6).

In other words, the things we choose put us into our respective class, and in this way, our preferences and tastes also determine and define what the groups and classifications are. For example, some people like to go to the museum, and by doing so, they are classified into the higher social class that is associated with the appreciation of fine art. And in turn, the art-loving social class also distinguishes itself from others. Similarly, the representation of the two restaurants in this movie doesn’t just mark their distinction in respective ethnic backgrounds, but also renders French taste and those who possess such taste as more refined, civilized and correct compared to the Indian counterpart across the street. Bourdieu also points out that such representation of taste is the agent of social stratification. Through Bourdieu’s words, one can see that the French taste possessed by Madame Mallory and her classy customers is “sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished” that is “forever closed to the profane” — the Indians in this movie whose taste is depicted as “lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile” (7). The world of French cuisine is “the sacred sphere of culture,” (7) as Bourdieu calls it, created by the superiority of the French taste. A clear separation of class is thereby created in this movie with the French standing on top of the Indian family, and this “sacred sphere” does not allow intruders unless they break into the sphere by assimilating into the French culture and adopting the French taste.

The story of The Hundred Foot Journey doesn’t just separate French taste and Indian taste into two unequal classes; it does so in a racist, Orientalist way. In

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his book Orientalism, Edward Said describes Orientalism as “a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab people and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the US. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized and at times dangerous” (12).

He argues that “the Orient” does not actually exist; instead, it is produced

by European culture (12). This means that the western world construed the notion of “the Orient” based on the dramatized and twisted differences between ‘us’ Europeans and ‘those’ non-Europeans to assert their superiority over the so-called “Orient.”

Orientalist exaggeration and distortion prevail in The Hundred Foot Journey.

An instance of this can be found in the mayor’s word of caution for Madam Mallory when she files a complaint about noise coming from the Indian restaurant: “These people are different. They are not French. Some in the village, the worst sort, say ugly things about them. Be careful you are not seen in sympathy with them [the Indians]” (00:41:34-00:42:08). If heard or read without any context, this ‘word of caution’ sounds like a warning against some sort of terrorists or violent gangsters. But in reality, it is a warning against Hassan’s family — an ordinary Indian family. The exaggeration in the mayor’s words is exactly what Said is pointing at, although in the context of the perception of Indians instead of Arabs. Similarly, the movie distorts and exoticizes Indian music, stripping away its playful and enjoyable characteristics and making it function like some obnoxious noise that Hassan’s father uses to provoke Madam Mallory (00:32:34-00:32:39). And even when Hassan’s father is not attempting any provocation, such as on their restaurant’s opening night, the Indian music is made loud and disturbing to their neighbors (00:40:50-00:41:01).

This movie not only shows class stratification and Orientalism in its story, but also promotes them by celebrating the upward social movement of Hassan and indicating that assimilation is the only way to success. The hundred-foot journey in the title of the movie refers to the one-way journey Hassan makes from the Indian restaurant to the French restaurant. This ‘journey’ is glorified throughout the story. Hassan starts out in the kitchen of his mother, cooking flavorful Indian dishes like samosa. After bringing his dishes to their Indian

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restaurant in France, he is faced with Madam Mallory who doesn’t even see their restaurant as “a restaurant” (00:24:07-00:24:09). Now, as one may start hoping that this gifted Indian chef would promote his home cuisine that he seems to hold so dearly to his heart, Hassan instead falls in love with both French cuisine and the French girl Marguerite. He leaves his Indian restaurant and his box of Indian spices behind and walks to the French side of the road (01:19:20-01:20:00). At the end of the story, Hassan becomes a renowned chef—or more precisely—a renowned chef fully assimilated into the realm of French cuisine. Throughout the “Frenchization” or assimilation of Hassan, he becomes more and more distant from his cultural heritage and background, and also more and more successful. This reinforces and affirms the superiority of the French and the West, whose class is associated with more refined cuisine as well as success and fame. At the end of the story, Hassan stands next to Marguerite, declaring himself as the successor of the French restaurant. This time, they are more similar than different not only because they are wearing the same outfit as business partners but also, more importantly, because Hassan has fully adopted the French way (01:51:07-01:51:24). It’s important to distinguish that he adopts rather than adapts to the French way. He becomes one of the French rather than harmoniously living with them despite his differences. His appearance has changed to become more classy and chic; his cuisine has changed from the Indian dishes his mom has taught him to the French dishes; he himself has changed. He is almost completely stripped of his original cultural identity. The only bit of it left is the bit of Indian spices he adds into his dishes—something to spice them up without changing their French nature.

This movie seems to be painting an image of ‘the good outsider’—Hassan, who gives up his background to assimilate into the Western world and become an ‘insider.’ And this coercive argument about assimilation and ‘othering’ of all people and things that are not French may have its root in the assimilation policy in France since the eighteenth century. Hassan and his culinary journey of success are comparable to the Senegalese in the Four Communes and their way to acquire French citizenship in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The Senegalese in the Four Communes had to conform to the French civil code in order to obtain French citizenship; similarly,

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Hassan needs to throw away his Indian self and become “Frenchized” in order to succeed (Diouf 1). And this forced assimilation is still relevant today in French society. “If you want to become French, you speak French, you live like the French and you don’t try and change a way of life that has been ours for so many years,” said former French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2016 (McPartland). And Hassan is the perfect follower of this doctrine delineated

by Sarkozy.

The Hundred Foot Journey stands in the course of history as not only another clichéd movie, but also one that divides people into classes of higher and lower tastes, celebrates Orientalism, and depicts assimilation as the only way for upward social mobility. The dish cooked by this movie is not a bowl of salad, where different cultures coexist harmoniously; it is a pot of French stew where differences melt away, and what remains is forever the French taste of stew.

This stew has been cooked for centuries in France and may continue sizzling for centuries to come.

W OR KS C I TE D

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1984.

Diouf, Mamadou. “The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation and the Civility of the Originaires of the Four Communes (Senegal): A Nineteenth Century Globalization Project.” Development and Change, vol. 29, no. 4, 2002, pp. 671696., www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-7660.00095.

McPartland, Ben. “‘Stop Telling Immigrants to Be French and Help It Happen’” The Local, 23 Sept. 2016. www.thelocal.fr/20160923/stop-forcingimmigrants-to-be-french-and-help-it-happen.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1980.

The Hundred Foot Journey. Directed by Lasse Hallström, performances by Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal and Charlotte Le Bon, DreamsWorks Picture, 2014.

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This photograph was shot at Al Bastakiya, also known as Dubai’s historical district or the place that preserves the memories of an era that takes us back to the formation of the federation of the Emirates. The first time I looked at these objects, I was surprisingly fascinated by the contrast it reflects between the “glamorous” and “old” Dubai. I found the way the TV, image frames and carpets were positioned very interesting and thought they were placed there on purpose but I was told that they were just abandoned a while ago. The idea behind this photograph is to show how Dubai is equally significant for its traditional lifestyle and culture but also for its modernity and gliz.

“The traditional modernity” by Rania Sakhi

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Essay 3 91

Musk in Islam: Olfactory Sensuality as Spirituality DANIAL TAJWER

The unmistakable odor of musk — sometimes pungently animalistic in spirit, at other junctures almost effervescently sweet, or even still a rousing mélange of the two — has served as a traditional object of both veneration and infatuation within Islamicate societies, a distinction that arguably harkens back to the very genesis of the Islamic world-system itself in the seventh century (Al Shindagha).

This should not be taken to insinuate that the recognition, appreciation, and cultivation of musk can, by any means, be deemed an exclusive feature of Dar al-Islam. The natural spatial distribution of the musk deer1 from which one extracts the aromatic substance is centered, both presently and historically, not in the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East and North Africa, but in a geographic range stretching from the Tibetan Plateau to the easternmost extremities of Eurasia (Mudasir-Ali 137). It comes as no surprise, therefore, that musk figures prominently in the panoply of curatives upon which the folk remedies of the latter region frequently depend. Contemporary practitioners of traditional medicine from Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese backgrounds all continue to ascribe immense importance to the purportedly salutary uses of musk in treatment, indeed to such an extent that “there are at least 884 [documented] traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions and 347 products that use musk in China” (Feng).

Although medieval Arabic pharmacologists proved no less enthusiastic about harnessing musk’s restorative properties, I argue that what truly differentiates Islamicate civilization’s preoccupation with musk from its counterparts elsewhere is its articulation of a unique conjugation of smell’s spiritual and secular applications. Far from propounding a rigid dichotomy between two mutually exclusive categories of eroticism and self-abnegation, musk in Islamicate societies owes its position of prominence precisely to its cultural 1 Although the exact species delimitation of musk deer has been subject to dispute, a common estimate suggests that there are approximately eight identifiable species, all sharing the genus Moschus (Mudasir-Ali).

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ubiquity — a preponderance that is in large part sustained by the Islamic coupling of sensory pleasures with connotations of the divine. Moreover, by virtue of its valence in profane and sacred contexts alike as the epitome of perfection, the invocation of musk frequently carries a unifying motif of longing, which typically entails desires of rapture that are not immediately fulfillable due to the metaphysical limitations of temporal existence. Moreover, when analyzed through the lens of the odorant’s enduring scarcity, the Islamic perception of musk illustrates the faith’s broader emphasis on moderation in practice: good scents, like other fine things in life, should actively be encouraged in pursuit of the greater goal of beautification, but not without taking into consideration and controlling the morally pernicious hazards of overindulgence.

The duality between spirituality and sensuality that characterizes references to musk in the Islamic tradition is extensively documented. Most prominently, the prestigious pedigree of musk emanates from none other than the two most authoritative founts of Islamic jurisprudence: the Quran and the Hadith themselves. Perhaps the most straightforward acclamation of musk’s primacy in Islam comes from the Sunan An-Nasa’i compilation of Hadith. In one instance, the narrator Abu Sa’eed rather matter-of-factually recounts that “the Messenger of Allah said: The best of perfume is musk” (An-Nasa’i). Surah Al-Mutaffifin from the Quran testifies to a similar end, going as far as to explicitly identify the pleasant fragrance of musk as one of the bounties granted unto the residents of Jannah2. Whilst celebrating the eternal contentment of those Muslims who have become denizens of Jannah, the Quran elaborates, “Thou wilt recognize in their faces the beaming brightness of Bliss / Their thirst will be slaked with Pure Wine sealed / The seal thereof will be musk: And for this let those aspire, who have aspirations” (86:24-26). While endorsements from Islam’s preeminent religious texts endow musk with an aura of spiritual legitimacy, the belief in the olfactory supremacy of musk equally translates into significantly more carnal manifestations. Love poems brimming with decidedly sexual undertones furnish a particularly instructive example of the rhetorical power of musk. Umar ibn Abi Rabi’ah, one of the progenitors of the ghazal genre, utilizes the sexually charged imagery of redolent musk effusing from his beloved’s breast to convey the sheer intensity of the attraction he feels for her: “Strong musk and ambergris mixed 2 The Arabic-language word used to indicate the Islamic concept of paradise.

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with camphor diffuse from her breast” (King 297). The seventh-century Arab poet’s appropriation of musk — a scent intimately bound to its deeply religious origins in the Quran and the Hadith — as a channel to instead express lust sheds a light on the immense, multifaceted flexibility of musk when wielded as a symbol of meaning within Islamicate societies. As such, it becomes apparent that, at least when dealing with Islam, understandings of musk cannot easily be confined to strictly binary spiritual-or-profane interpretations.

What bridges the gap between the ostensibly antagonistic spiritual and secular applications of musk within Islamicate contexts is the aromatic substance’s common function: to stimulate momentary bliss, while also summoning a profound yearning for greater pleasures that, for whatever reason, remain starkly outside of an individual’s immediate reach. That the predominant perception of musk within medieval Islamicate societies was overwhelmingly positive is undeniable. Clergymen and drunkards coincide in their praise for musk: the Sufi scholar “Al-Suyuti [assigns] musk primacy [over alternatives like ambergris, saffron, and civet] for both religious and worldly reasons,” whereas one of the khamriyyat3 of the legendary Abu Nuwas extols a bottle of wine for giving unto its imbibers “a perfume in [their] breath like a diffusion of musk when the pod is slit open and crumbled” (King 327, 319). While providing for obvious instantaneous gratification upon being smelled, the critical factor enabling musk’s service as a vehicle that communicates longing for greater, inaccessible pleasures is the physical ephemerality of all scents. Medieval Arabs were keenly aware of how rapidly the potency of a scent dissipates following exposure to the atmosphere. A vernacular expression dating back to the Abbasid period relates, “the Arabs say of a thing that is to be held tenaciously because of its preciousness that it is like musk . . . if you set it out it becomes exhausted,” in effect amounting to a lamentation of the inability of good things — including pleasing scents — to endure for as long as humans wish they would (King 327).

Frustrations with the ephemerality of musk are further compounded by its paradisiacal associations. Although tales abounded in the medieval Islamic world of musk’s having in actuality “[arrived] in this world from the original Eden,” commentators along the likes of Al-Ghazali tend to “[emphasize] the completely otherworldly character of the aromas of paradise; they can only 3 Usually translated as “wine songs.” (Galer)

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be compared with musk, the best aromatic in this world, but they still excel it by far” (King 367, 353). Bluntly stated, musk as experienced in the temporal realm qualifies, at least in the eyes of Al-Ghazali, as nothing more than a pale reflection of its eternal equivalents in the afterlife. Consequently, the mounds upon mounds of musk historically consecrated to the task of incensing places of worship — for instance the “hundred mithqals of Tibetan musk” that regularly went into perfuming the Dome of the Rock during the Abbasid Caliphate — not only gained practical currency as a welcoming “sign of [the space’s] availability for prayer,” , but also as a constant reminder of the exponentially superior and immortal fragrances that await believers in paradise, if only they resist the temptations of this world (King 346, 347). Even in far more secular milieus, such as the “Tale of Aziz and Azizah” from The Book of the Thousand and One Nights, the use of musk continues to correspond with the motif of yearning remaining unsatiated. In the story, the splendidly handsome Prince Taj al-Muluk’s dashing looks and beguiling charm prove to be so irresistible that “they were the main theme of the most loving verses of the poets, while the chastest of philosophers felt their livers confounded by the seduction of his presence” (Mardrus and Mathers 482). One particularly love-stricken poet among the Prince’s litany of admirers decides to give voice to his affections in verse: “Musk kisses / To faint under musk / To feel his body bend like a wet branch / Beauty looked into his mirror at morning / And turned from her own shadow / That has eaten of the west wind and drunk dew / Musk kisses / To love the musk, musk, musk of his nakedness!” (Mardrus and Mathers 482). Here, again, while the speaker delves into remarkable detail (e.g. “bend like a wet branch”) to indicate the ardor of his homoerotic intentions, the repeated comparisons of the youth to musk underline the degree to which the Prince Taj ul-Muluk’s beauty, like the unfathomable musks of paradise, seems almost hopelessly out of reach in the present moment. It is precisely musk’s symbolism and foreshadowing of the eternal joys of paradise that renders its ephemerality within this world all the more painful.

Among the various roles played by musk within Islamicate societies, another important consideration is the extent to which the social norms governing the uses of musk reproduce the broader dynamics of the Islamic faith’s selfprofessed moderation vis-à-vis the pursuit of worldly pleasures. In commenting

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upon Mary Thurkll’s Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam, Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Arizona State University Richard Newshauer voices a common scholarly consensus that “early Islamic traditions emphasize a much more opulent materialism in imagining paradise than do Jewish or Christian traditions: Islamic paradise is a “‘feast of physical pleasures,’ ([Thurkll] 157) which may include sensory and sexual fulfillment” (Newhauser 589). Surah Al-Mutaffifin’s coupling of musk with alcohol as among the luxuries afforded to the dwellers of Jannah is representative of this approach; the “pure smell, pure pleasure” of houris mentioned elsewhere in the Quran, who are “not merely perfumed,” but rather “are made entirely of sandalwood” constitute another olfactory example (Ackerman 63). According to Islamic tradition, “paradise is the idealized mirror of the real world, where all of the negative aspects of this world are transformed. Within this world, the base and ignoble dominate” (King 367). Critically, what this moral framework entails is that, whereas the consummation of pleasures within the temporal realm almost always comes attached with a price tag of negative consequences, in Jannah, these pleasures are untethered from their worldly negative consequences—allowing for limitless hedonism in abandon. Applying these theoretical principles to musk permits us to comprehend their operation more clearly. Firstly, Islamic teachings do not discourage wholesale the acquisition and appreciation of material pleasures within the temporal world. This understanding provides the basis for a revealing divergence between early Christian and early Islamic attitudes on the acceptability of donning elaborate perfumes. Where “with [the advent of] Christianity [to Europe] came a Spartan devotion to restraint, a fear of seeming self-indulgent,” and the subsequent result of men no longer “wearing scents for a while,” in the Islamicate world, “musk remained lawful . . . in fact, its use was encouraged” (Ackerman 61, King 368). Indeed, the relentless enthusiasm for musk within Islamicate quarters arose not despite, but with full awareness of musk’s erotic potential as an aphrodisiac — elite women were expected to “wear a perfume, even one containing musk, before going to [their husbands]” in a society where an incense burner “carried by a woman was a sign of readiness for sex” (King 312, 292-293). Alternatively, “women could be condemned as prostitutes for wearing perfume that could be smelled by others” when outside of the house (King 293). Indulging in pleasures along the lines of

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sex and perfume was actually encouraged within these Islamicate societies, but only when an individual would uphold a self-restraint that was respectful of the ethical boundaries delineated by the prevailing socio-religious norms.

Medieval Islamic medical literature on musk and its potential pharmacological applications exposits another way to conceptualize Islamic injunctions on moderation. Musk was hailed as a panacea for all sorts of debilitating ailments: colic, quartan fever, vomiting, phlegm, heart palpitations, joint pain, gout, abdominal disorder, epilepsy, apoplexy, vertigo, migraines, period pains, and hemorrhages in women, among many others (King 312). Anya King arrives at a similar conclusion, arguing that “as can be seen by the great range of uses to which musk was put, it approaches being a universal remedy” (312).

It is important to notice, however, that musk was never prescribed in its raw, unadulterated form, but rather always administered in medieval Islamicate medical recipe books (e.g. the Aqrabadhin by the Gundeshapur physicist Sabur ibn Sahl) as part of a predefined formula compounded with other ingredients (King 310). This dilution was necessary because exposure to raw musk could prove seriously injurious to an individual’s health; Islamicate physicians belonging to the Ibn Mandawayh-Ibn Kaysan tradition “[warn] that musk can be quite dangerous,” with Ibn Kaysan himself observing that “every perfumer or person in his presence who opens this musk gets a nosebleed from the potency of its scent” (King 308). Islamic beliefs about moderation in religious practice align strikingly with these aforementioned beliefs regarding the medical uses of musk — that which is considered perilous in extreme quantities (i.e. musk and religiosity) is perceived as a one-size-fits-all solution to the many ills one has to confront in life. Surah al-Baqarah offers one of the Quran’s most transparent claims to wasatiyyah, or moderation, at the beginning of its one-hundred and forty-third verse: “Thus we have made of you an Ummat4 justly balanced” (Hanapi 51-52). When perceived through the lens of musk’s medical applications, the Islamic principle of wasatiyyah can be understood to intend an even-handed mixing of the sacred (i.e. musk) with the profane (i.e. the other compounds) in order to arrive at a veritably balanced lifestyle.

4 Nation, usually understood as the collective community of Muslim believers.

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One final wrinkle that can introduce additional nuance on the subjects of musks, moderation, and Islam is the ecological depredations associated with the perpetuation of the musk trade. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) designates the wild musk deer as an endangered species , a protection that has resulted in the prohibition of musk deer hunting in both the People’s Republic of China and India (Feng, Mudasir-Ali 138). Though King contends that “nowhere has any indication of a long-lasting shortage of musk been found within the Islamic world; it seems to have always been available for the right price”, this should not be misconstrued to mean that the Islamic world was immune to diminution of the global population of musk deer (367). igh prices for musk, which even in the presentday occupies the dubious distinction of being the world’s most expensive medical resource (fetching approximately $250 per gram) , were a direct consequence of the increasing rarity of the material (Feng). Even the caliphs of the Abbasid royal court mourned the astronomical costs of procuring musk — the courtesan Safi al-Hurami lamented how a previous supply of musk had been depleted only a few years into the profligate caliphate of Al-Muqtadi and how “he had to have more prepared at a high cost” (King 288). Surah Al-Baqarah from the Quran designates humanity as “a vicegerent on earth,” environmentallyminded Muslims can interpret this vicegerency status as also entailing a responsibility to shepherd the earth with a keen environmental consciousness (2:30). Bearing this interpretation in mind, the parameters of Islamic pleasureseeking once more become transparent — humanity is encouraged to pursue the finer things in life, but only if it can successfully do so without jeopardizing the lives and interests of others, in this case the exhaustion of the musk deer population. This is in contrast with existence in the afterlife, where all luxuries are supplied in infinite quantities.

In sum, the fact that musk, a word etymologically derived from the Sanskrit word for testicle, could end up occupying such a distinguished position within the Islamic worldview exposes much of the internal tensions within the religion between the spiritual and the profane (King 15). Applied in both sanitized, religious applications and erotic poetry, musk unites these disparate realms in its longing for pleasures that are not immediately achievable. Moreover, be it through medical or ecological considerations, an understanding of musk allows

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one to better conceptualize Islamic principles of wasatiyyah in action. Ultimately, by paying greater attention to neglected areas of inquiry such as scent, we can break traditionally Eurocentric conceptions of the world—perhaps even breaking the binary between the spiritual and the secular altogether.

W OR KS C I TE D

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage Books, 2000.

Al Shindagha Museum, Dubai, 9 Nov, 2019. Ethnographic research.

An-Nasa’i. Sunan An-Nasa’i. Sunnah.com. www.sunnah.com/nasai/21/88.

Accessed 1 Dec 2019.

Feng, Jinchao, et al. “Asian Medicine: Exploitation of Wildlife.” Science, vol. 335, no. 6073, pp. 1168, 2012. Accessed 10 Dec 2019.

Hanapi, Mohd Shukri. “The Wasatiyyah (Moderation) Concept in Islamic Epistemology: A Case Study of its Implementation in Malaysia.”

International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 4, no. 9 (1), 2014, pp.

51-62. Accessed 12 Dec 2019.

King, Anya H. Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World. Brill, 2017.

Mardrus, J.C. and E.P. Mathers. The Book of the Thousand and One Nights.

Routledge, 2013.

Mudasir-Ali, Bhat G.A. “Musk Deer Trade and Worldwide Depletion.”

Environmental Policy and Law, vol. 46, no. 2, 2016, pp.137-149. Accessed 10 Dec 2019.

Newhauser, Richard. “Review of Mary Thurlkill, Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam.” Speculum, A Journal of Medieval Studies, vol. 93, no. 2, 2018, pp. 588-589. Accessed 7 Dec 2019.

The Holy Quran. Quran.com, trans. by Yusuf Ali. Accessed 5 Dec 2019.

Thurlkill, Mary F. Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam. Lexington Books, 2016.

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Cyborgs: A Technological Future G A U THA M DI NE SH KU M A R L A L I

Technology is deeply ingrained into the daily lives of humans in the 21st century, but it was unnerving when I saw it ingrained into a person. He swept his hand across the RFID door lock (a digital lock that can be unlocked with a particular radio frequency) and it beeped. At first, there was confusion and then our heads turned to face each other and he said, “Oh, I have a chip in my hand that I use to unlock my phone. That’s why it beeped on the lock.”

This was one of my first encounters with a person that had a technological implant, and in my mind, I was thinking, “That’s so damn cool.” It made me imagine the possibility of merging humans with technology and the numerous ways in which it could transform our lives. Imagine a future where your smartphone or your computer is a part of you, not physically as a whole device but in terms of computing and technological prowess. Your brain interfaces with the internet, smart contact lenses show you information and even augment what you normally see. You get notifications on the fly, and you no longer need to worry about remembering any information. How amazing would it be to go to work as a software developer, have a monitor in front of you, but also have screens augmented into your surroundings displaying your emails and tasks? Your work gets analyzed in real-time and powerful algorithms find the most relevant information that you need to get your work done. This may all sound like science fiction, but with the rapid advancement of technology, many things that were thought to be previously impossible are happening. Scientists often debate whether or not we should be embracing technological changes to our body but I say that we should all augment ourselves to prepare for the technological future. I am going to discuss the advancements being made in AI and robotics, how it can alter our control over the world and a possible future of augmented humans.

To understand what this future might look like, we need to first define what a cyborg is: a human augmented with machine parts to make it stronger, smarter and faster than the average human. However, they are often depicted as evil machines built for destruction and the killing of humans.That’s

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fiction; reality is different. What we have actually experienced, for the most part, is cyborg technology helping us to have a positive impact in the form of human enhancement. Bionics has helped people to regain a lost part of their lives, artificial limbs are giving people back the ability to achieve the dreams that they believed they had lost. One such person is Jason Barnes, who was interviewed by The Guardian after breaking a Guinness World Record.

He lost his arm in an accident and believed that he would never be able to play the drums again. But today he is recognized as the world’s fastest drummer, with a bionic arm that can hold more than one drumstick and play at frequencies that normal drummers can only dream of (“Jason BarnesAmputee Drummer”). Bionic limbs, in my opinion, are the kind of pioneering technology that has created speculation and advancement in the world of human augmentation. Starting off with helping humans with disabilities to live a normal life, we are now entering an era where bionic body parts are used to push the frontiers of human ability. Hugh Herr is an MIT professor whose legs were amputated after a climbing accident. He now designs bionic limbs and is creating ways for humans to not only control their artificial limbs but also receive information back from the limbs. This opens up a whole new domain of bionics, where your prosthetic no longer feels separate from you but operates as your own leg would. Herr, in his TED Talk, also speculates on the future possibility of entering an era where you wouldn’t just replace your lost limbs with artificial limbs but you could rather opt to have anything you wished for. Do you want to fly? Attach some mechanical wings. Do you want to breathe underwater? Add some gills. “During the twilight years of this century, I believe humans will be unrecognizable in morphology and dynamics from what we are today. Humanity will take flight and soar” (Herr).

Bionics give humans the ability to extend the limits of their physical prowess and allow us to control our evolution in a way that has never been done before. However, we are not the only ones going to evolve as the development of AI and robotics technology accelerates. Research being done with artificial intelligence is creating another branch of evolution that involves enhancing the capabilities of algorithms and machine learning.

The underlying algorithms of many platforms are collecting petabytes upon petabytes of information that brings them closer to perfect accuracy in

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their tasks. Jayshree Pandya, founder of a strategic security risk intelligence platform (RISK), describes the creation of “neuromorphic” chips that have been designed to mimic the human brain. These chips are embedded with machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence so that they can continuously change the ways in which they process data for learning, modeling, and pattern recognition. But with this development, she also fears creating a superintelligent species in the form of machines incorporated with artificial intelligence that could possibly supersede humans in cognitive ability. How are we to overcome this “intelligence explosion” if it occurs in the future (Pandya)? Once machines become smart, they will inadvertently learn how to make themselves even smarter, make decisions for themselves, and live in their own reality where their thoughts will be shaped not by the algorithms we designed but with the ones that they modified to suit their inputs and outputs. This could potentially lead to a struggle between machines and humans if there is even a slight chance of our realities conflicting with theirs. Since I see no slowdown in the rate of technological progress, I believe that we need to be prepared for a situation in the far future where we would have to enforce control over intelligent machines.

As robots get more intelligent it would become increasingly difficult to predict their actions. As depicted in the movie Ex Machina, a superintelligent robot created to satisfy the Turing test turns against its own creator and murders him. Machines interface with technology in a realm different from our physical world. It is a world of 1s and 0s, signals, and encryptions; a domain where a human needs to put in much more effort to understand and visualize. Interfacing with machines is not intuitive to humans and this will be a factor that will disadvantage us against robots. Whilst machines and AI are interacting directly with technological devices that we have created, humans would be typing code into a computer and then processing it in order to carry out our requests. If we are going to be masters of what we create, then we need to be masters in the domain of our creations. This mastery will only be achieved if we can take control of the technological world. Only if we augment ourselves to interface effortlessly with technology will we be able to hold the reins to our technological creations. The first steps of this augmentation are already taking place in our daily lives.

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If we carefully examine our current lives, we can already see signs of us becoming cyborgs. In the book WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, Tim O’Reilly explores how humans are already cyborgs. Smartphones and the internet have armed us with tools that we have incorporated into our lives. These tools have allowed humans to evolve from hunter-gatherers into farmers, and then from farmers into industrialists, and from industrialists into scientists and technologists. At each step of this process that has spanned over thousands of years, technology has been the factor creating the revolution. The iron plowshare and noria helped to transform ploughing and irrigation systems for farmers, the steam engine created industrial power and the transistor revolutionized computer technology which is why we all carry a computer in our pockets today (Buchanan). In his article “What Will Our Lives Be Like As Cyborgs” O’Reilly describes the ways in which technology has given humans the ability to rise above and beyond what we would normally be able to accomplish: The marriage of humans with technology is what made us the masters of other species, giving us weapons and tools harder and sharper than the claws of any animal, projecting our strength at greater and greater distance until we could bring down even the greatest of beasts in the hunt, not to mention engineer new crops that produce far more food than their wild forebears, and domesticate animals to make us stronger and faster. (O’Reilly) Technology has helped us produce more food, faster transport and more powerful machines. But now we are moving into another era, one that goes beyond just mere survival and into a realm of artificial evolution.

Interfaces between the biological realm and the technological realm will dominate the platform creating human-machine interactions. In the scientific research article, “Cyborg Intelligence: Recent Progress and Future Directions”, the biological component of cyborg intelligence was divided into: perception and behavior, decision making, and memory and intention (Wu et al.). The artificial intelligence component was separated into: the sensor and actuator, task planning, and knowledge base and goal layers. These two components constantly interact and share information.

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The ultimate goal for the future of BMI is to be able to train the AI with the information received from the biological component, allowing it to make better and better decisions and eventually provide users with the best actions to take based on its analysis. “[It] requires the biological and AI units to adapt to each other within the system and adjust their actions according to changing environmental situations, thus possessing enhanced learning, memory, and problem-solving capabilities” (Wu et al. 45). In one of their experiments, “Monkey Hand-Gesture Decoding”, microelectrodes placed in the brain of a monkey monitored the spikes in neuron activities created from hand movements. A machine learning algorithm then classified the different signals to interpret what kind of hand motion was made. This information was then sent to a robotic arm, which then replicated the hand action such as holding, grabbing, pinching, and hooking (Wu et al. 47). This experiment can go on to have huge impacts on the future advancements of cyborg technology. The process of the experiment involved decoding brain signals and transmitting them to a machine and this is exactly what we need to improve on. Imagine the same concept being applied to your laptop: you can type out pages and pages without ever actually touching the keyboard, browse the internet just by thinking about what you want to find and also keep track of all the information coming in and out of your devices. Although we have not accomplished this yet, as technology advances we would have the ability to form a symbiotic relationship with machines and the flow of information will be faster and greater than ever imagined. And we are already seeing signs of such advancement as entrepreneurs become more ambitious with BMI technology. Some companies have started using this technology to develop prototype products with some very interesting applications.

Notable companies, like CTRL-Labs and Neuralink, are jumping on the bandwagon of BMI technology to become pioneers in this field. O’Reilly explores the efforts of entrepreneurs in creating novel technologies that allow a brain-machine interface. In its bare essence, these companies want the same thing: send what your brain wants to the devices you want to communicate with. This can have many uses and, as I have noted earlier, many begin in the medical field. Sending and receiving signals between prosthetics and their owners will be the initial stages of this technology.

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CTRL-Labs, recently acquired by Facebook, wishes to decipher each neuron signal from your brain to give you complete control over your digital life through non-invasive technology whilst Elon Musk, founder of Neuralink, wants to drastically improve the speed at which we interface with our technology using neural implants. CTRL-Labs is allowing users to control devices and robots without having to use much physical effort like moving around a mouse or typing into a keyboard but rather by using the natural motion of the human body. One such advancement that currently exists as a prototype is a smartwatch-like strap that deciphers the neural signals going to your fingers and allows you to control virtual objects as well as robots like a six-legged mechanical spider simply by moving your fingers (“CTRL Labs Makes It Possible”). Elon Musk, on the other hand, plans to have electrodes threading into the brain. Although this is still in its initial stages of development, the plans are to use these electrodes to treat any form of brain related disorders and damage. After that he wants to create a form of brain-machine interface that will allow users to control computers with their brains. In the long term he envisions a symbiosis of AI and the mind with a “high-bandwidth brain-machine interface” that will allow us to keep up with the progress of artificial intelligence (Gilbert). But when this technology is ready, will people be willing to accept it?

One of the main concerns with technological enhancement is privacy invasion. One scenario of this took over the media in 2013 when Google Glass was released. Google Glass is a wearable technology that allows users to record what they see at any time in addition to other personal assistant features. “The device was quickly banned at some restaurants, bars, and movie theaters, creating an unspoken social warning: Take it off if you don’t want to be creepy” (“Reality Check”). There was a public aversion to the technology as it infiltrated the freedom of people, creating uncomfortable social scenarios. But what if someone needs a bionic eye to allow them to see?

Will they be met with the same rejection? Another potential moral problem that exists is “dehumanization” (“Reality Check”). Will people become less emotional and less empathetic as they begin to think like machines? I would argue that people are already using their phones and social media excessively and there has been greater connectivity than ever before. There has never

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been a time in human history when you could miss someone and immediately get to see the person’s face and hear the person’s voice from miles away. If anything, technology has allowed us to break the barriers of space to get in touch with our loved friends and family. But will everyone be able to afford these technological enhancements? State of the art prosthetics sell for thousands of dollars and very few have the luxury of affording them. Gennady Stolyarov, a transhumanist writer says, “Some would express fear that emerging augmentations would create an arms race that threatens to leave behind those who choose not to be augmented. But this assumes everyone will seek to compete with everyone else” (“Reality Check”) I think it is evident that the affluent in society will have access to technological improvements associated with a cyborg future. However, I also agree with transhumanist writer, Gennady Stolyarov’s argument in The Rational Argumentator that the enhancement of humans will not involve an immediate ascent of the rich to cyborg dominance but rather a gradual growth whereby each class of society accepts the enhancements available to them at the time. Just like how the wealthy in society might be able to afford supercars whilst the not so wealthy people would have to drive ordinary cars. However, as production increases and costs decrease, more and more technology will be entering the market for consumers at a lower price. Hence, I believe, despite all the opposition, that cyborg technology will be even more prevalent in the future. This will unlock doors that were previously closed for the human species and our civilization.

What I envision will be the peak of human evolution is when we integrate ourselves so deeply with technology that it becomes impossible to form a distinction between humans and technology. Yuval Harari, in his book Homo Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind describes one possible future of humanity as one where the collective human race has cyborg abilities that allow us to access each other’s memories and live someone’s life as if it were their own. “Such a cyborg would no longer be a human, or even organic” (Harari 457). I would like to take this point further and ask you to imagine a future where humans are no longer bound to their physical bodies. If we can access the thoughts, memories, and experiences of everyone and everything on this planet then the level of consciousness and reality that we will be at is indescribable. We would form an amalgamation of “something intangible”,

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something which can take any physical form and if we truly are just thoughts and memories transmitted as signals then we can indeed allow ourselves to be embedded into any avatar. Robots and machines with far greater physical abilities than humans can be inhabited and we will be able to do what is currently impossible. Just imagine being able to transfer a fraction of our human race as a species into a spaceship with some robots and send them off to explore the cosmos. Conditions that our physical bodies may not be able to withstand, such as the radiation on Mars, or the heat of Venus can now be explored by us in another form. And this would just be the beginning of things that we could possibly achieve.

Although some of my predictions range into the realm of science fiction, I think it is evident that the majority of our reality was once science fiction.

Traveling faster than sound, talking to someone at the other end of the world instantly, being able to enter virtual worlds of your imagination and experience them, and now we are even modifying our DNA and replacing our limbs. All these things, just about 30 years ago, would have seemed impossible. They would have been portrayed in movies and books as magical or impossible feats. The power of technology allows us to turn that magic into reality. Now with bionic technology improving, AI becoming smarter and neuroscientists discovering more about our brain, I believe that a cyborg future will definitely be a reality and it will allow us to explore the world in all possible ways. For a future that will enable humans to coexist with machines and take complete advantage of technological advancements, I believe that we will need to augment ourselves and become cyborgs. One day, you won’t be reading this essay, instead, it would just be a part of you.

W OR KS C I TE D

Buchanan, Robert Angus. “History of technology.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Oct. 2019, www.britannica.com/technology/history-of-technology.

“CTRL Labs Makes It Possible to Control Machines With Our Minds.”

YouTube, uploaded by Fast Company Feb. 2020, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YmkZKiJh95g.

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Garland, Alex, director. Ex Machina. Performances by Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac, and Sonoya Mizuno, Universal Pictures, 2014.

Gilbert, Ben. “Elon Musk finally took the wraps off his new brain microchip company that plans to connect people’s brains to the internet by next year” Business Insider, July 2019. www.businessinsider.com/what-is-elonmusk-brain-chip-company-neuralink-2019-7 Harari, Yuval N. Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind. Harvill Secker, 2015.

Herr, Hugh. “How we’ll become cyborgs and extend human potential.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, June 2018. www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_how_we_ ll_become_cyborgs_and_extend_human_potential.

“Jason Barnes-Amputee Drummer” Touchstone Rehabilitation, 23 Apr. 2018. www.touchstonerehabilitation.com/blog/amputee-drummer-jasonbarnes.

O’Reilly, Tim. “What Will Our Lives Be Like As Cyborgs? A case for embracing the “augmentation” of human minds and bodies.” The Atlantic, 27 Oct. 2017. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/cyborg-future-artificialintelligence/543882/.

Pandya, Jayshree. “The Troubling Trajectory of Technological Singularity.” Forbes, 10 Feb. 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ cognitiveworld/2019/02/10/the-troubling-trajectory-of-technologicalsingularity/#28976a236711.

“Reality Check: Are Cyborgs the Next Step in Human Evolution?” AltexSoft, 15 Dec. 2017. www.altexsoft.com/blog/engineering/reality-check-arecyborgs-the-next-step-in-human-evolution/.

“Beyond bionics: how the future of prosthetics is redefining humanity.”

YouTube, uploaded by The Guardian, 26 June 2018, https://youtu.be/ GgTwa3CPrIE. Wu, Zhaohui, et al. “Cyborg Intelligence: Recent Progress and Future Directions.” IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 44-50, 2016.

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Behind the Veil: Understanding the Meaning and Representation of the Muslim Veil in Different Contexts G U STE G U R C I NA I TE

In high school, I was an active member of our debate club. There, I engaged with many global issues which were often overlooked in the public discourse of my home country. It was in this environment several years ago, in 2015, that for the first time I encountered the question of the Muslim veil ban in Western Europe. At the time, the ban was only enforced in France and the Netherlands. One debate round, which I now recall, started with a motion proposing to ban the full-face veil in the EU. In this round, I proudly opposed the motion, defending democratic and feminist values, though I did not join the opposition side by choice but by the chance of a coin flip. Just like any other debate taking place in a debate club, it was merely a creative exercise lasting for forty minutes. For us at stake were not the lives of real people, but rather a win or a loss and a chance to participate in another tournament.

Our arguments too were generalized, lacking informed understanding and personal interest. In fact, one could say that in Lithuania, lack of awareness on questions where Islam is concerned is taken for granted. Muslims in Lithuania only constitute 0.1% of the population and teachings on Islam or the history of the Muslim countries are not a part of our school curriculum.

Hence, my personal lack of engagement with these topics comes as no great surprise.

Nevertheless, when not so long afterwards, one by one, regional and federal authorities across Europe began implementing veil bans in 2016, I, at the time already considering myself a feminist, felt deeply puzzled. Unlike my debating experience, this time I struggled to align myself with either the proposing or the opposing sides. Measuring the question by my liberal European standards, I lacked an intuitive understanding of why Muslim women were expected or even themselves chose to veil. But even more so, I could not grasp why

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the authorities in parts of Europe were so troubled by veiled women that they needed to ban this custom. To me, neither of these standpoints were associated with feminism, which I saw as the right of both genders to choose freely and be treated as equals.

My current pursuit to understand questions about the Muslim veil, gender equality in Islamic communities and the veil ban in Europe is a challenging journey. With my personal position fluctuating along the spectrum between the two mainstream sides, locating and fixing it requires me to ask questions about both the origin of the veil and the interests of the European leaders.

This essay, therefore, is my attempt to answer questions that puzzle me in the debate on the Muslim veil and reflect on my changing understanding.

To inform my understanding of this nuanced issue, I first ask, what is the relationship between the past, Islam and the veil? A potential answer could be that it is complex and oftentimes misinterpreted by parts of the Western nonMuslim audience, as well by some modern Muslim communities themselves.

This view is supported by Moroccan writer Fatema Mernissi in her book “The Veil and the Male Elite” and by an American scholar Samina Ali in her speech “What does Quran really say about a Muslim woman’s hijab?” These two women, who both identify themselves as Muslims and feminists, argue against the view that the Islamic veil has a religious origin that is allegedly secured by the Islamic scriptures. To support her position, Samina Ali stresses that there are only three verses in the Quran which discuss a woman’s clothing, however, none of these are specific to the veil and none of these are definite (Samina Ali 2:07-8:30). If a reader of a non-Muslim background, like myself, was to double-check her claim and look at the mentioned verses, it may even come as a surprise how abstract these verses appear to be. For instance, the Quran says “the best garment is that of nice, modest conduct” (Quran 7:26).

More specifically, the scriptures also order Muslim women to “cover [their] chest” (Quran 24:31) or “draw a shawl around your persons when outdoors” (Quran 33:59). By looking at these, it could be argued that even in foreign cultures, such as that of Western Europe, these verses would be compatible with dress norms that are freely followed by the majority of the population.

This could already be seen as proof that in Islamic scriptures there is nothing

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written on women’s dress that would fundamentally differ from the content of religious scriptures of faiths that are more popularly endorsed in the West.

Moreover, the Quran does not single out women but also gives some general guidelines to men on how they should dress. Interestingly, the guidelines for men, just as those for women, focus on modesty, yet are not explicit (Musharraf 29).

Hence, drawing from this evidence, I intuitively ask why then, has the veil through time become associated with Islam and piety? In her book, Mernissi endeavors to answer a similar question. Using historical narratives from the formation of the caliphate after Prophet Mohammed’s death, she seeks to prove that through later years, the male Muslim clergy used their exclusive power to interpret the scriptures without restraint which resulted in rewriting of their original meaning (Mernissi 49-81). According to her argument, guidelines on women’s dress underwent a process just like that, turning it into a measure of a woman’s piety. Samina Ali more boldly argues that the interest of the male clergy was to reinforce male control of women in an already patriarchal society (Ali 2:09-17:40). Building on Merissi’s and Ali’s arguments, it could be held that the origin of the veil is political and in the historical context of the Arab world, its affiliation with the scriptures has locked Muslim women in a patriarchal power structure.

Many scholars, nevertheless, have upheld divergent views from those of Mernissi and Ali. An American anthropologist Lila Abu Lughod who has written on the topic of agency of Muslim women in her book “Do Muslim Women (Still) Need Saving?” is one of the authors holding a different view.

Unlike Mernessi or Ali, Lughod claims that historically the veil has given Muslim women “portable seclusion,” allowing them to move out of segregated living spaces in the ancient Arab world (Lughod 36). This view suggests that the veil empowered women in their social realities, where the masculine already was the public and the feminine was domestic. Nevertheless, Lughod’s argument could be seen as more applicable to modern or more recent historical times. Importantly, Lughod disregards the historical sequence of events that scholars such as Mernessi so rigorously studied to trace back the relationship between the veil and Islam. Firstly, Lughod’s notion

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of pre-existing patriarchy is weakened by narratives about independent Muslim women in Prophet Mohammed’s times, which both Ali and Mernessi bring out. Images such as that of Mohammad’s first wife Khadija, who was a successful businesswoman, or his third wife A’isha, who led an army after Mohammed’s death, help to disprove the idea of pre-existing patriarchy.

Moreover, Mernessi’s and Ali’s previously introduced claim that the Muslim clergy and their interpretation of religious norms on women’s dress have undermined the position of women in the past is strengthened by the nature of the clergy’s parallel interpretations of the scriptures. Samina Ali stresses that just like comments on the veil, other teachings such as that a woman should be sexually submissive to her husband or that she only needs to finish primary schooling before marriage all serve to cripple women’s agency (Ali 12:09-17:40). Consequently, it seems most convincing that the relationship of the veil, Islam and the past is a political one.

Nevertheless, the context in which a modern veil-wearing Arab woman lives clearly differs from the context of a veil-wearing Arab woman in the eighth century. Beyond time, many other significant variables impact the life of a Muslim woman, including her geographical location and the socioeconomic and political conditions in which she is situated. Hence, I now ask why do individual Muslim women (still) veil? With experiences of modern Muslim women being so diverse, it becomes apparent that the veil has significantly progressed from its origin. Consequently, I begin to skeptically view the practice of treating the veil as a symbol, as symbolism presupposes a singular meaning behind it. To support my view, I attempt to deconstruct several symbols that are commonly attached to modern-day veiling practice. Firstly, as reflected in some pro-veil-ban arguments in Europe, such as that made by French authorities, the veil is oftentimes interpreted as a symbol of women’s oppression in Islam. Abu Lughod is one scholar who has written with a purpose to show that the veil does not represent a Muslim woman’s position in society. Lughod’s work can be seen as relevant when discussing the veil in a modern context specifically because she uses empirical evidence from her anthropological fieldwork in modern-day Egypt to support it. Through a narrative of one Egyptian Muslim woman’s life, Lughod shows that historical,

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political and economic conditions are the primary cause of her hardship.

Meanwhile, neither the fact that she is Muslim nor the fact that she’s a Muslim woman gives her a disadvantage in her community. By musing “why so many… presume that just because the Muslim women dress in a certain way they are not agentic individuals,” Lughod criticizes the supposed link between the veil and a woman’s condition as a hasty generalization (Lughod 9). Armed with this awareness, as I look around, I find evidence of Lughod’s criticism in the Western media. Ironically, some Western media sources are highly critical of appearance-based discrimination that takes place in its cultural contexts, such as racism or face-based appearance discrimination of women and youth in the workplace. Nevertheless, the same media struggles to get rid of the notion that Muslim women are represented by their dress.

Lughod strengthens her argument by questioning mainstream assumptions, such as how can one “distinguish dress that is freely chosen from that which is worn out of habit, social pressure or fashion” (Lughod 19). Hence, acknowledging the presence of numerous assumptions in this debate, I take a stance that using the veil as a symbol of Muslim woman’s social condition is faulty. Alternatively, as discussed earlier, in some contexts the veil is treated as an exclusive symbol of a woman’s piety. While some Muslim women seem to have internalized the latter meaning of the veil due to the generated common knowledge in their communities, this symbol is also far from universal. Valerie Behiery, a scholar with a focus on culture, gender, and the Middle East, also criticizes the practice of treating the veil as a measure of a woman’s piety. Similar to Lughod, Behiery explains that as a merit of such symbolism, the veil falsely becomes a “site of analysis” for the Islamic way of life, whereas its meaning for individual veiled women is actually unique (Behiery 405). Behiery supports this argument by citing studies that reveal that not all women who veil are practicing Muslims (Behiery 405).

Another unique piece of evidence which she brings in is the “New Veiling Phenomena,” a movement where young Muslim women choose the veil as a symbol to reject traditional control of women in the family and patriarchal society (Bahiery 404). Wearing the veil gives these women autonomy to pursue education and employment in the public arena. In this case, the veil obtains a unique political meaning which again disproves the pious symbol of

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the veil. Therefore, the apparent lack of consistency in both of these symbols of the veil causes me to embrace the fact that each veiled Muslim woman develops her own meaningful connection to the veil. This makes me reflect that the motive and the meaning behind the choice of a Muslim woman to veil are variable in different contexts.

Having the aforementioned complexities in mind, I ask, why some Western European countries are so troubled by the Islamic veil? Since 2016, the federal veil ban has been enforced in six European countries, and even more have passed the veil ban on local levels. Scholars studying this recent development such as Valerie Behiery and Asif Mohiuddin notice that some of the greatest proponents of the ban are former colonial empires, such as France, Netherlands, and Denmark. With debates taking place on religious freedom, gender equality, secularism and even fear of terrorism, it, hence, can be argued that proponents in the veil ban debate are using the language of contrasts to strengthen their modern Western self-identity. In her book “Short History of the Veil,” Valerie Behiery attempts to trace back the historical relation of Western European states, Islam, and the veil, and show that some Western European leaders have been persistently constructing an artificial Muslim identity in their home countries. Using evidence of scholars Kahf and Ahmed, Behiery shows that through history, in Western Europe narratives about Muslim women have not been consistent. For instance, in medieval period Europeans saw Islamic world as culturally superior, and popular literature depicted the Muslim woman as a powerful figure, a “queen or a noblewoman” or even as someone “intimidatingly sexual,” which did not conform with “European idea of normative femininity” (Behiery 389).

However, with the onset of the colonial period, the language describing the veil as a “manifest of female oppression in Islam” was evoked (Behiery 388).

Such evolution, Behiery suggests, “demonstrates that representations are constructions, contingent upon time, place and culture” and that they are inseparable from questions of political and economic domination (Behiery 389). Building on her argument, it could be claimed that the premise of modern-day construction of the image of an oppressed veiled Muslim woman or, more recently, the dangerous veiled Muslim woman, in the West is related to the desire of Western leaders to remain at the forefront of globalization.

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A Bangladeshi activist and a scholar, Asif Mohiuddin, in his work “Islamophobia and a Discursive Reconstruction of Religious Imagination in Europe,” supports this view and suggests that in Europe, arguments favoring the veil ban are constructed in a way which projects Muslims as a threat to the values and identities of the local society. He claims that a language of “positive-self,” read liberal-minded Westerner, and the “negative other,” read traditional-minded Muslim, portrays the veil as incompatible with Western values of human freedom, democracy and, more recently, feminism (Mohiuddin 136). As an illustration, the former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls promoted the burkini ban in France, stating that the traditional Islamic women’s dress is “the expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women” (Kroeat). Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel strongly supported the partial ban on burqa and niqab in Germany, claiming it “has to be spelled out clearly” that German laws “take precedence over codes of honor, tribal or family rules, and sharia law” (Oltermann). Evidently, statements of both Valls and Merkel portray Islamic tradition as backward and incompatible with superior Western values.

It is also noteworthy that their language implies singular and exclusive interpretations of the meaning behind the Muslim veil, namely, women’s enslavement and religious command, overlooking the individual motives of women. I become aware of a similar tone that is adopted by some European leaders not only with regards to the Muslim veil, but also with regards to the more recent refugee crisis and the rise of the terrorist threat. Although these questions are related to intrinsically different realms, the lenses through which some European authorities look at them, nevertheless, remain the same. On that account, I embrace the view that some Western European leaders strive to lead the globalization movement by any means. It may be that by seeing Islam and Islamic countries as a threat to their influence, they discriminate against Muslims to downgrade their culture. On a similar note, regulations on Muslim women’s dress in Europe can be seen as a tool of neocolonial agenda aiming to promote the narrative that the Muslim society is alien and inferior.

The immediate question which follows from this observation is how the Muslim veil ban affects the positions of Muslim women in the European

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societies. It would be erroneous to think that political processes take place in a social vacuum. Therefore, it can be argued that the top-down dismissal of the legitimacy of the veil influences views of the broader European society, spilling over Islamophobia to the public. Importantly, regulations on Muslim women’s dress seem to create derogatory stereotypes of the Muslim “other.”

A scholar in law and gender studies, Kimberley Brayson, in her work “Of Bodies and Burkinis: Institutional Islamophobia, Islamic Dress, and the Colonial Condition,” supports this view. She writes that veiled Muslim women “act as ‘avatars’ in the public-political imaginary, as the body of the Muslim woman is made responsible for perpetuating gender oppression and a threat to national security” (Brayson 68). To deconstruct the process of how the society adopts similar projections of a veiled Muslim woman’s identity, the argument of Rey Chow could be applied here. A cultural critic specializing in the post-colonial sphere, she explores a similar question in her text “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” Considering that some European authorities provide the public with a readily available narrative about the veiled Muslim woman, the audience is asked “to stare at the world as though it was a naked body,” whereas the woman herself, or, the other, “is turned into an absolute entity in the form of an image” (Chow 325, 329). It then could be argued that in this constructed image, the veil serves as visual proof of the Muslim woman’s oppression by both patriarchy in the Muslim society as well as Islam in general. Provided that the authority is seen as credible by the public, many people, therefore, may accept such biased representations which lead them to “foresee the image before it appears” (Chow 326). While the relationship between the authorities and the public oftentimes is more complicated than this, some strong evidence nevertheless supports the argument that similar processes take place. Importantly, constructed Islamophobic representations cause many Muslim women in Europe to experience instances of hate crimes and discrimination in various public spheres. For instance, analyzing the burkini and full-face veil bans in France, Kimberley Brayson argues that “law produces spaces where some subjects belong, and others do not by assuming that French public space is always already white and non-Muslim” (Brayson 79). She further claims that veiled Muslim women who deviate from the French “univocal, assimilationist concept of citizenship” becomes vulnerable

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to racism (Brayson 79). Several occurrences such as an incident that took place in a beach in Nice, France, in August 2016 seem to confirm her claim. In this case, French policemen felt empowered by the recently evoked burkini ban to strip a Muslim woman off her Islamic dress on a beach. Strikingly, a witness to the scene reported that onlookers on the beach shouted “go home” and some also applauded the police (Quinn 2016). The praise by the onlookers of the unveiling and the claim that the Muslim woman was not at home seem to confirm the acceptance of the politically-promoted “stranger danger” narrative by the general public. Moreover, systematic Islamophobiabased discrimination also takes place in various public spheres, including employment and education. For example, an empirical study on a workplace discrimination against veiled immigrant Muslim women in Norway found that employers are less likely to consider woman as “well-qualified for the job” if she is a veiled Muslim, regardless of her educational background (Strabaca et al. 2679). An empirical study by Itaoui further complicates the understanding of the social effects of Muslim discrimination by European authorities. The author claims that “Islamophobia as a form of racism experienced by young Muslims affects mobility and the use of public space by creating mental maps of exclusion” (Itaoui 264). Given the case of the legal veil ban and considering that veiled Muslim women can be easily identified as Muslims because of the visual veil, it can be claimed with certainty that their mobility is affected the most. Evidently, a clear pattern emerges suggesting that social conditions of veiled Muslim women in Europe are strongly disturbed by the Islamophobic narratives promoted by some legal European authorities. In light of this evidence, I also accommodate a stance that the veil ban in Europe is detrimental to the feminist cause, which should aim for equality of genders, regardless of their religion, culture or, even more so, dress.

Conclusively, by tracing back the origin of the veil and following its evolution through time and location, I come to see the question of the Muslim veil as an extremely complex one, comprised of multiple layers in which political power, culture, and religion intertwine. As I realize that a single metanarrative about the veil, a veiled woman, and Islam does not exist, I am now more critical towards the sources that claim otherwise. Most importantly, this exploration has helped me to overcome my own biases towards the Muslim

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veil and the Western values of democracy, freedom, and feminism. Rather than taking Western values for granted, I now attempt to discern between an informed impact agenda and ideologically-motivated discourses. The latter are best reflected in the arguments of some European authorities favouring the Muslim veil ban which, however, are discriminatory towards Muslims and only distort the social conditions of their lives in Europe.

W OR KS C I TE D

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Harvard University Press, 2015.

Ali, Samina. What Does the Quran Really Say about a Muslim Woman’s Hijab?, Tedx Talks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J5bDhMP9lQ [accessed 2 December 2019] Behiery, Valerie. “A Short History of the (Muslim) Veil.” Implicit Religion, vol.

16, no. 4, 2014.

Brayson, Kimberley. “Of Bodies and Burkinis: Institutional Islamophobia, Islamic Dress, and the Colonial Condition.” Journal of Law and Society, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, pp. 55–82.

Chow, Rey. “Where Have All the Natives Gone?”, pp. 125-51 in Angelika Bammer (ed.), Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Itaoui, Rhonda. “The Geography of Islamophobia in Sydney: Mapping the Spatial Imaginaries of Young Muslims.” Australian Geographer, vol. 47, no. 3, 2016, pp. 261–279.

Kroet, Cynthia. “Manuel Valls: Burkini ‘Not Compatible’ with French Values.”

POLITICO, POLITICO, 25 Aug. 2016, https://www.politico.eu/article/ manuel-valls-burkini-not-compatible-with-french-values/ [accessed 6 December 2019] Mernissi, Fatima, and Mary Jo. Lakeland. The Veil and the Male Elite: a Feminist Interpretation of Womens Right in Islam. Basic Books, 2006.

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Mohiuddin, Asif. “Islamophobia and the Discursive Reconstitution of Religious Imagination in Europe.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 39, no. 2, Mar. 2019, pp. 135–156.

Musharraf, Muhhamad Nabeel. Dress Code for Muslim Women - A Detailed Analysis of Relevant Quranic Verses and Prophetic Traditions. 2018, https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/327714996_Dress_code_for_Muslim_ women_-_A_detailed_analysis_of_relevant_Quranic_verses_and_ prophetic_traditions [accessed 2 December 2019] Oltermann, Philip. “Angela Merkel Endorses Party’s Call for Partial Ban on Burqa and Niqab.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 6 Dec. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/06/angela-merkel-cdupartial-ban-burqa-niqab-german [accessed 6 December 2019] Quinn, Ben. “French Police Make Woman Remove Clothing on Nice Beach Following Burkini Ban.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Aug. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-policemake-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach [accessed 6 December 2019] Strabac, Zan, et al. “Wearing the Veil: Hijab, Islam and Job Qualifications as Determinants of Social Attitudes towards Immigrant Women in Norway.”

Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 39, no. 15, June 2016, pp. 2665–2682.

The Quran. Translated by Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin, edited by Farida Khanam, Goodword Books, 2011.

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Pleasantly Painful, Excruciatingly Exciting: The Dominant/Submissive Binary in Popular Representations of BDSM Scenes L U C A S DE L E L L I S D A S I LVA

Chains, ropes, dominatrices, and a lot of latex. With the increased representation of BDSM in popular culture, the historically pathologized practice has gained a confined, yet refreshing space previously dominated by normative sexual expressions. Because of the centrality of power relations in BDSM, the practice is often informed by binaries: object versus subject, passive versus active, pleasure versus pain, dominant versus submissive.

In real life, these binaries are played with and the BDSM space becomes a queer space. However, instead of queering sexuality and deconstructing the aforementioned binaries, BDSM representation in popular media has reinforced fixed binaries out of the necessity of appealing to the heteronormative gaze.

There are several ways in which one could classify the binary between who makes the action and who receives the action in BDSM. Instead of using the vocabulary of active versus passive, or subject versus object, I have decided to use the language of dominant and submissive. The reason for that is because this is the vocabulary used in BDSM itself. Using any other form of categorization would be part of constructing an argument about agency.

The vocabulary of “active” and “passive” presupposes that only one of the individuals is actually putting the action forward, while the passive is only able to receive the action, as if there is no agency whatsoever involved in this interaction. The same connotation goes with the terms “subject” and “object.”

In this vocabulary, the active or the subject is the one detaining all the possibilities for action. These words imply that the “active” or the “subject” has something that is withheld from the “object” or the “passive.” Therefore, I will use the language of dominant (dom) and the submissive (sub) to analyze the mediatic portrayal of their interplay.

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With the concept of intersectionality in mind, the binary of submissive and dominant in the representation of BDSM scenes is inherently informed by gender identity, class, race, and sexual orientation. I decided to focus on two specific representations of monogamous interactions within BDSM: the normative heterosexual, and the queer representations. By monogamous interactions I simply mean the interaction between two people instead of a group sexual interaction. By queer, I do not only mean homossexual interactions, but rather the interaction between two inividuals in which at least one of them is not cisgender or not heterosexual. There are inherent differences in how these interactions have been portrayed. The main difference is that the queer monogamous BDSM relationship already exists outside of the expectations of normative sex, while the heterosexual BDSM potrayal tends to conform to the rules of normative sexuality. Because of that key difference, BDSM representations of normative heterosexual versus queer relationships tend to diverge accordingly. Before analysing these representations, it is necessary to delve into a discussion on violence and power within discourses of sexuality.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the seventeenth-century marks “the beginning of an era of biopolitics.” Foucault defines this kind of politics as “a power that...endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (The Will to Knowledge 137) which were “embodied in institutions such as the army and the schools” (The History of Sexuality 140). These power dynamics initiated a discourse on sex and sexuality that defined a ‘normal’ sex. The concept of “normal” became “heterosexual, monogamous, romantic, private, married, and suburban, while abnormal became non-heterosexual, non-monogamous, unromantic, public, unmarried, and urban” (Rubin 152). The emergence of normative sexual discourse shaped realities, produced agencies, categorized populations on the basis of sexuality, and set the truths of whose sexuality is honorable and whose sexuality is shameful.

A bit of reflection on the definition of biopower would lead us to believe that BDSM is automatically marginalized by normative biopolitics. Indeed, BDSM embraces acts that are non-heterosexual, non-monogamous, unromantic,

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public, un-married, and most likely urban. However, there is an important distinction to be made: the practice of BDSM has historically diverged from its representation in popular media.

The mediatic representation of BDSM often portrays harmful normative binaries. Weiss argues that in popular media “SM is simultaneously exciting and other, and conventional and every day” (110). Contemporary representations of BDSM “reinforce[s] boundaries between normal and not normal by allowing the viewer to consume a bit of the kinky other while buttressing the privilege, authority, and essential normalcy of the self” (Weiss 114). It is no coincidence that several BDSM fictional stories result in a normative monogamous love relationship, as seen in the movies 9 ½ Weeks, The Piano Teacher, and Secretary, or it portrays BDSM subjectivities as a product of deviant pathological behavior soon to be cured, such as in the music videos Madonna’s Erotica and Christina Aguilera’s Not Myself Tonight.

From the inaccuracies of Fifty Shades of Grey, that ignore respected procedures on consent, to the exoticization of bondage in Aguilera’s music video, BDSM representation in popular media has often conformed to the pathologizing, exoticizing gaze of its nonpractitioners. This gaze successfully imposes the oppressive binary of an active subject who has full power and control versus a passive object who has no agency and is completely at mercy of the agentive dominant.

However, I argue that there is power, but there is no violence in BDSM. Bauer analyzes Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to differentiate power from violence: “violence acts upon bodies, it forces and destroys, it forecloses all possibilities…A power relationship may rely on consent or violence or both, but it can only exist if there are possibilities to act, even for the one who is subjected to that power” (179). Even if it makes reference to violence, power requires some possibility of action. Violence, on the other hand, halts all possibilities, a complete shutdown of action. In a BDSM setting where there are two people who consensually engage in BDSM, we might feel inclined to think that the dominant has power over the submissive and exerts violence upon the latter. That is a misuse of the word violence and a misunderstanding of the plurality that the word power encompasses. Consent is a fundamental

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part of BDSM practices. For example, there is often a safe word with the power of halting all action, which gives the submissive complete control of a determined action. In actuality, the dominant’s journey to please the submissive, and the submissive’s ability to end everything within the pronunciation of one single word gives an incomparable agency and power to the submissive. Therefore, the submissive holds a variety of possibilities for action, which is against the definition of violence stated above.

The situation aforementioned exemplifies what is called the eroticization of power, an essential feature of BDSM. Ortmann defines the eroticization of power as “the way people can perceive power as having a sexually exciting dimension” (120). The transference of power from the dominant to the submissive creates fantasies that reveal the plurality of human sexuality.

Therefore, the eroticization of power is a gateway to a healthy queer sexuality.

In mediatic representation, the erotization of power can either reinforce pre-existent harmful binaries that are used in technologies of oppression, but it can also use the aforementioned binaries to queer power. In the scenes I analyse, when representation reinforces pre-existent harmful binaries, historically oppressed social groups are assigned the role of passive obedience, being sexually abused over and over again. When it is used to queer power, power is attributed to these same historically oppressed social groups.

We shall look into two different cases that can help us better understand the potential harm caused by problematic representation of the eroticization of power. The music video Not Myself Tonight features the pop singer Christina Aguilera wearing clothing closely associated with the BDSM culture, including gags and latex jumpsuits. With a whip in her hands, Christina is portrayed as having control over her sexual interactions with both women and men.

An uncritical interpretation of the music video might assert that Aguilera is assuming a sexual subjectivity that is rarely given to women. However, Aguilera performs extreme femininity. The expression of her sexuality is only free when she presents herself as a sexual object, as a prey. Rather than assuming a sex-negative stance, I am arguing that the control she assumes is satisfying for the male gaze. Even though the queering of her sexuality happens through her sexual interactions with women, the end of the music

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video concludes with a normative heterosexual relationship. The lyrics “I’m kissing all the boys and girls/Someone call the doctor cause I lost my mind” and “In the morning/When I wake up/I’ll go back to the girl I used to be” (Aguilera) further reveal a layer of pathologizing BDSM and non-normative sexualities. The music video, therefore, is made for the normative gaze. In other words, Aguilera temporarily queers her sexuality only for the purpose of entertainment.

Similarly, BDSM culture was assimilated into the blockbuster Batman Returns to construct the character of the Catwoman for the male gaze. In an iconic scene, the villainess invades Shrek’s, and starts destroying the place. Upon seeing her, the security guard, with a gun in his hand, says that he does not know whether he should “open fire or fall in love” (Burton). A bit further in the movie, upon her encounter with Batman, the character utters “meow”, in a discourteous, sexually suggestive manner. This piece of dialogue became an icon of sexual appeal in popular culture. The Catwoman also portrays conventional femininity and is until nowadays a female sexual symbol. Even after she is portrayed as having “power” over her own sexualization, in the end, the Catwoman is still portrayed as selfish, whose sexual behavior is only a tool for seducing, controlling and fooling her enemies.

I argue that the female BDSM portrayal in heterosexual settings conforms to the discourse of normative sex constructed for the male gaze. Therefore, as a result, such a portrayal does not queer sexuality and does not unveil the plurality of human sexuality, but rather eroticizes BDSM culture in order to pretend to be sex-positive and empowering to women, and only further objectifies them. Simone De Beauvoir, in the Second Sex, accounted for this type of representation as the role of “the seductress”: for women, “erotic transcendence consists of making herself prey in order to make a catch. She becomes an object, and she grasps herself as an object” (De Beauvoir 349).

Through BDSM, the woman makes herself (and is made into) an object of male pleasure, and that is displayed as taking control of her own sexuality. The fantasy of female empowerment through the portrayal of dominatrices end as soon as the men have access to her flesh — exactly what happens at the end of Aguilera’s Not Myself Tonight: she will become “herself” again, after the

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touch of her flesh by her male heterosexual partner. This means that even though Aguilera and the Catwoman are portrayed as dominatrices, they are confined to the objectification of their male counterparts. The traditional expected sexual behavior of women being passive is temporarily broken for the entertainment of male expectators, but in the end these representations push their female characters into object position, thus reinforcing traditional oppressive binaries.

Realizing that the appropriation of BDSM symbols and icons in popular media was not working in favor of the free expression of sexuality in normative heterosexual relationships, I turned to the analysis of queer BDSM relationships. This shall make clear weather the media portrayal of BDSM sexualities is directly related to heterosexual understandings of sexuality. I turned to two TV Shows: Queer as Folk and Pose. Both of them explore the lives of non-heterosexual people, focusing largely on expressions of LGBTQ+ culture.

Pose is a TV show written and produced by Ryan Murphy, who is himself a queer person. The show deals with the New York ballroom culture in the 80s, and gives voice to Latinx and African American characters. The series portrays dozens of trans, non-heterosexual, and gender non-conforming individuals gaining international recognition for its diverse cast. One of the main characters of the show, Eureka, was in a relationship with a male character who was wealthy and financially sustained her, but did not support Eureka’s plan of going through sex reassignment surgery, which resulted in her breaking up with him. In the second season of the show, she is paid to perform the role of a dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon. She finds empowerment through her role, as it gives her financial independence to survive, giving her a chance to make a revival in the ballroom scene without resorting to prostitution or without having to seduce “her man” back. We cannot undermine the importance of her financial independence: the BDSM scene gave her a chance to live again. However, in a certain moment of her job, while she is taking a break, another trans person who works as a dominatrix comments on her clients: “[s]ometimes I feel bad for these guys… too scared to feel pleasure, so they turn to pain” (“Buttlerfly/Cocoon.”). This complicates our understanding of how BDSM is portrayed. First, it is a gateway for the survival of trans women

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who are systematically oppressed and can not find jobs in the mainstream workforce. BDSM is one of the few scenes in which alternative gender performances are tolerated, giving the trans character a chance to reinvent herself. On the other hand, the heterosexual white men who pay for their services are portrayed through a pathologizing language, as sexually deviant people who are “too scared” and psychologically unstable enough to aim to pursue pain. This narrative is sustained and concluded with one of Eureka’s white, powerful clients undergoing a cocaine overdose during BDSM. Under these lights, those who seek and participate in BDSM are psychologically divergent, unstable, lustful, drug-consumers, cowards, and sexually repressed persons. Before anything, it is important to highlight that characterizing this interaction as “queer” is not self-evident: the relationship between Eureka and her male clients is, of course, a heterossexual one. However, by calling it queer, I refer to the fact that Eureka’s gender identity inevitably falls under the “nonnormal” as it was historically constructed. Thus, the problematic portrayal of BDSM interactions here stems from a representation that heterosexual men who engage in sado-masoquistic practices have unhealthy desires, unhealthy lives and “too much to spend.” In this portrayal, the problem is less about reinforcing binaries but rather reinforcing the representation of men who take part in BDSM as deviants.

Older than Pose, the TV show Queer as Folk is well-known for being the first hour-long drama TV show that portrayed the life of gay men and lesbian women in the United States. One of the first portrayals of BDSM in the show happened in episode 15, directed by Alex Chapple and written by Garth Wingfield. Ted is a middle-aged gay man who feels uncomfortable with his aging, and is often portrayed as an old-fashioned, clumsy, and shy character who is constantly looking for a younger partner. He goes to an LGBTQ+ club on a “leather ball” night, where he sees a BDSM performance between two men.

The club also hosts a dark room where multiple gay men are having sexual interactions with elements of BDSM. Coincidentally, Ted knows the dominant men who lead the BDSM performance: Dale Wexler, a millionaire and a past classmate of Ted. They both head to Dale’s house, where he exclaims: “[I] t’s amazing, Ted, how [BDSM] has allowed me to expand my horizons...you have no idea what can happen once you give yourself permission.” Ted,

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skeptically, replies: “[to] what? To chain people up, tie people down?”, to which Dale responds: “that can be the most liberating of all... relinquishing control, allowing someone else to give you pain, pleasure. Whatever you most fear and desire. Why don’t you allow me to introduce yourself to the real Ted Schmidt?” (“The Ties that Bind.”). In this scene, the homosexual relationship is portrayed as beneficial both to the dominant and to the submissive. Dale, a rich businessperson, finds in BDSM an opportunity to liberate his feelings that are repressed by living in a heteronormative work environment. Ted, by consensually giving up all control and agency, would discover another layer of himself, and discover “the real Ted Schmidt”. The abandonment of agency comes with an erotic transcendence that allows Ted to redefine himself and how he handles his agency. The latter portrayal is not perfect, but it still offers the audience a positive light to BDSM. This representation establishes BDSM as a healthy, transcendental, and exciting form of sexuality. It unveils the experimental nature of sexuality and presents the parties involved with the potential for personal transformation.

However, we see again the same kind of image attributed to the heterossexual male in Pose: a rich, powerful, millionaire male, who strongly conforms to masculinity. It seems that BDSM in both portrayals is deemed non-accessible, only attainable for those who have enough wealth. This representation is in agreement with a historical trend that pathologizes alternative sexualities. In Queer as Folk, the absence of the opposite gender makes explicit that agency is accessible for both the submissive and the dominant. The pathologizing of Dale, the more masculine-presenting character, however, seems to conform to the notion of BDSM performative male subjectivities being inherently sexually repressed.

I have argued that the mainstream representation of BDSM does not reflect the potential that BDSM as a practice has of queering sexuality. Representation has often reinforced fixed binaries of active/passive, and object/subject. In normative heterosexual representations, as seen in Batman Returns and Not Myself Tonight, representation does not offer any type of prolonged sexual liberation for women, it rather only reinforces their objectification. It implies the binary of subject versus object, under the guise of women being

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the subject. She is an agent, a subject, only to the extent that the man does not touch her flesh. In queer representations, the myth of the all-powerful rich white man is still perpetuated, and there is still a level of pathologizing towards the BDSM scene. In this representation, there is an implied rationale of the “normal” man — white, rich, powerful, straight-acting, constantly trying to free the expression of his sexuality through BDSM, either by dominating or being dominated. While this representation is more flexible towards the binary, it reinforces the pathologizing gaze of BDSM. In real life, BDSM spaces are welcoming, consent-driven spaces in which one can fully explore the plurality of human sexuality. Queerness is often welcomed, and pre-established gender and sexual roles are turned upside-down via the eroticization of power. There is a need, therefore, for the representation of BDSM spaces to be as plural and diversifying as the practices outside of popular media. The current representation of BDSM further contributes to stigmatization and reinforces harmful binaries.

More importantly, it impedes the exploration of the full spectrum of human sexuality.

W OR KS C I TE D

Aguilera, Christina “Not Myself Tonight.” YouTube, uploaded by Christina Aguilera, 29 April 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-tHcQR67Y. Bauer, Robin. Queer BDSM Intimacies: Critical Consent and Pushing Boundaries.

London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Burton, Tim, director. Batman Returns. Story by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm, Warner Brothers Pictures, 1992.

“Buttlerfly/Cocoon.” Pose, season 2, episode 3, written by Our Lady J, FX, 25 June 2019. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81136443.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Vintage, 1949.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage, 1990.

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Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punishment. Vintage, 1982.

Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge. Penguin Books, 1976.

Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Edited by Carole S. Vance. Pandora, 1992, pp. 267-293.

“The Ties that Bind.” Queer as Folk: The Complete First Season, written by Garth Wingfield, Warner Brothers, 2001.

Ortmann, David M., and Sprott, Richard A.. “Power is Hot.” Sexual Outsiders: Understanding BDSM Sexualities and Communities. Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

Weiss, Margot D. “Mainstreaming Kink: The Politics of BDSM Representation in U.S. Popular.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 50, no. 2, 2016, pp. 103-13.

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As the weekend progresses in Old Dubai, the liveliness and zest of its people grows exponentially. With wonders waiting to be found in the historic district, across the creek all the way to the souk, what better time to explore the many hidden gems scattered downtown? So, before the night falls and the sunset hues fade away, the people huddle together on a boat, making the most of their time as they float on glistening waters and take photographs on their mobile phones. In the distance, the street lamps flicker and turn on, bidding farewell to the day and the events it brought forth. Absorbing the moment, I stand a few metres away, watching as the boat sails away in the twilight, into the night.

“Sailing at Sunset” by Fizza Fatima Rana

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You Are(n’t) What You Eat: Food, Culture, and Family from a SecondGeneration Immigrant’s Perspective SA M A NTHA L A U

Setting aside the more pressing consequences of the persistent global pandemic we find ourselves in these days, I’d like for a moment to reflect on one of the things I miss most about the world outside of my house and its walkable radius: yum cha. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of yum cha, it is, in my humble opinion, the supreme Chinese dining experience, often described as Chinese brunch. At Imperial Kingdom, my family’s go-to restaurant – so crowned after years of trying and testing competitors in our surrounding suburbs – there are only two timeslots, 11am and 1pm, which fall perfectly into the brunch time range.

I grew up going to yum cha very frequently, which explains why I miss it so much whenever I’m deprived of it for a long period of time, such as now when I’m back home in Melbourne but in lockdown. When I was younger, extended family gatherings would always be a choice between dinner out at a Chinese restaurant or 11am weekend yum cha. And if the decision ended up being dinner that month, my parents, sister, and I would end up hitting Imperial Kingdom by ourselves despite the inconvenience of having to share three-piece dishes among four people.

With this kind of frequent exposure to yum cha, I am pretty confident in claiming I know almost all the dishes. I can identify when Imperial Kingdom is trialling a new dish, and I know when they’ve gotten rid of an old one (RIP, chan bao with the crackly top); I even know the secret items they won’t put on their menu. I’m well aware of the food customs, too: serve others before you serve yourself, be on the constant lookout for others’ teacups so you can quickly fill them before they’re drained, and, if there’s one piece of food left on a plate, make sure to insist that someone else finish it, and if they try

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pushing it onto you, keep insisting until they give up. Also, fight to pay the bill, furiously. This may involve pretending to go to the toilet.

The point is, I’m pretty sure I have yum cha worked out – and, for a secondgeneration immigrant who doesn’t have many, if any, aspects of her ChineseMalaysian heritage ‘worked out,’ this confidence is a big deal. When I’m at yum cha, I feel a rare connection to the culture of my parents – what I term my ‘heritage culture’. I’d even go so far to say I feel fluent in it.

But then, inevitably, one of the servers will come by with their trolley and ask me what I want, and things begin to fall apart. I can understand their question, I can see the dishes I want, and even perhaps remember their names, but I can never remember how to quickly and politely indicate in Cantonese – a dialect I should know – that I want that plate or that steamer.

Which then reminds me that, even though I know all of the secret menu items, I wouldn’t know how to order any of them. Nor would I be able to confidently book a table over the phone. Of course, I could just use English, but it’s in these moments that I’m hit with the reality that it’s not a choice: I have to use English, unlike almost everyone else in the restaurant speaking Cantonese. And so, the illusion of being fluent, of fitting into my heritage culture, is shattered.

This situation is partly a sob story about my cultural anxieties as a ChineseMalaysian-Australian (yes, I know, it’s a mouthful), but it’s also a situation which highlights the complex relationship between food and heritage culture for a second-generation immigrant like me. Having grown up without other significant cultural touchstones like dress, religion, music, shows, and language, I have spent most of my life trying to use food as a way to gain access to my Chinese-Malaysian culture – and I am by no means alone in this endeavour. Though there exists little literature on this topic, through interviews with second-generation immigrants of various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, researchers have suggested that “food maintains its central role as a tool for connecting with or rediscovering heritage identities” (Weller and Turkon 70), and that even for those who “have never visited ‘the homeland,’ food can serve as a ‘root and/or route’ of culture” (Paul 6). This sentiment is echoed by personal essays such as

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Alicia Wittmeyer’s The New York Times piece, “I Admire Vegetarians. It’s a Choice I Won’t Ever Make,” in which, as a Chinese-Malaysian-American who is “realistically, not that Malaysian,” she calls food “an important link in a connection that can sometimes feel tenuous.” Other reflection pieces like Eater’s “The Rise (and Stall) of the Boba Generation” highlight how secondgeneration immigrants have capitalised on this notion that food serves as an important connector to heritage culture: in the piece, author Jenny Zhang describes how Asian Americans have sought out and adopted “tokens of Asian-American popular culture – rice, dumplings, pho, soy sauce, Korean barbecue” alongside the famous bubble tea beverage, in order “to signify and perform a shared idea of identity” – namely, an Asian one.

Amongst Wittmeyer’s reflections is the claim that food is “the most accessible of cultural touchstones.” If this claim is true, then, coupled with food’s supposed ability to connect me to my heritage culture, it’s no surprise that I may have become overly dependent on cultural foods, such as those found at yum cha, to create and sustain a feeling of connection to my Chinese-Malaysian background. Indeed, Wittmeyer’s reticence towards adopting a vegetarian diet because she fears alienation from her culture and its meat-eating traditions itself illustrates how heavily reliant on food an individual lacking other cultural touchstones might become in order to feel connected to their heritage culture. Zhang similarly broaches this topic in an interview with a 23-year-old university student of Italian, Lao and Vietnamese descent, who says that “to prove my Asianness, I need to adopt the mainstream Asian culture that people know as Asian: drinking bubble tea, eating certain foods, using chopsticks;” in this student’s case, despite her awareness of the perhaps problematic perception of food and its consumption as being measures of cultural membership, she nevertheless continues to submit to this expectation.

Like the student in Zhang’s piece, I have often tried to use food as “an identity-validating symbol” (Weller and Turkon 70), a proving ground for my Chinese-Malaysianness. If I can consume, learn about, and produce enough cultural food, then perhaps I can rightfully claim my spot in the ChineseMalaysian community – or so my thought process goes. Of course, there are

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several problems with this line of thinking. The first is that a false equation of food with culture can itself be damaging to the heritage culture to which I’m trying to connect in the first place. To quash my cultural insecurities, I overcompensate by overplaying my love for traditional cultural foods which are less widely eaten or accepted in Australia – including but not limited to chicken feet, pig trotters and intestines, and fermented Chinese cheese.

Just like Michelle Zauner, who off-handedly references a “sad Asian-fusion joint” in her essay on Korean food and missing her late Korean mother “Crying in H Mart”, I scorn high-end fusion food restaurants in favour of the small Chinese joints in my city, whose low price points, relaxed approach to hygiene, and no-nonsense service I fondly use as measures for ‘authenticity’ in an attempt to position myself as gatekeeper for what does and does not constitute ‘true’ Chinese-Malaysian culture.

In her extensive analysis of food symbols in Asian American literature, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong articulates exactly why such behaviours can be problematic. Taking author and playwright Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon, one of the first plays written by an Asian American to receive mainstream acclaim in the United States, Wong defines Chin’s concept of “food pornography” as “making a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’ aspects of one’s ethnic foodways,” which “in cultural terms…translates to reifying perceived cultural differences and exaggerating one’s otherness in order to gain a foothold in a white-dominated social system” (55). Wong goes further, explaining that “food pornography appears to be a promotion, rather than a vitiation or devaluation, of one’s ethnic identity” (55). Wong’s analysis of Chin’s commentary on ‘food pornography’ is very much based on its deployment out of financial necessity, given that Chin’s protagonist abandons his dream of becoming a writer for the more profitable and secure job of a Chinatown tour guide, at which he excels by “pandering to the worst fantasies of gawking tourists, feeding them appropriate doses of ‘foreignness’” (59). Chin’s protagonist and I may differ in our motivations for performing ‘otherness’ – he, to make a living, and I, to assert belonging to an ‘other’ culture – but the result is the same: we both end up perpetuating stereotypes which ultimately pigeonhole ourselves and others within our own culture.

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It is not only this realisation which has encouraged me to challenge the extent to which I depend on food to connect me to my heritage culture; through my yum cha example, I’ve also illustrated that food cannot make me feel sufficiently Chinese-Malaysian – at least not by itself. The fact that my feelings of inadequacy at yum cha are triggered by situations in which I am unable to communicate fluently in Cantonese suggest the importance of language, either more than or in conjunction with food, in creating a connection between me and my heritage culture. Again, I am not alone in holding this belief; in Wittmeyer’s essay, she directly correlates her lack of proficiency in Cantonese with being “not that Malaysian,” later also writing that when ordering food in Malaysia, “I have to hold up my fingers to indicate how many I want, because I forget how to say any number larger than three in Malay.” Similarly, Zauner confesses she “can hardly speak Korean,” citing her “elementary-grade Korean skills” for her inability to understand the conversations had between her mother, aunts, and grandmother over dinner in Korea. While Zauner does not, unlike Wittmeyer, explicitly equate her inability to speak her mother’s native language with a watered-down cultural identity, the very mention – and perhaps one might even read as the lamenting – of these language barriers by both authors reflects their belief in the salience and value of language, alongside food, as a connector to heritage culture.

By contrast, literature about second-generation immigrants who are proficient in their parents’ native languages highlights the success with which this cultural touchstone, even more so than food, connects them to their heritage culture. In their research on the role of food in identity maintenance and formation for first- and second-generation Latino immigrants in Ithaca, New York, Weller and Turkon found that of the individuals they interviewed, those with proficiency in Spanish “tended to regard language skills as being of greater importance in identity maintenance and formation than the consumption of heritage foods” (63).

Such a finding was established based on the attitudes of one particular second-generation interviewee, who ranked his ability to speak Spanish as his “primary tie” to his Latino background (Weller and Turkon 63).

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Having come to acknowledge both the inability of food to create and hold a significant connection to my Chinese-Malaysian culture and the issues that arise out of forcing it to do so, it is all too easy to write food off entirely for its failure to fulfill the primary role I had assigned it all these years. Yet, it is in fact due to this decoupling of food from its previous role that I have come to realise and appreciate what (or who), if not heritage culture, food has successfully connected me to: my parents.

In recent years, food has played a central role in bringing me closer to my parents by helping to bridge the cultural divide that has always existed between us. Having been born and raised in markedly different contexts, the usual generational divide you might observe between my parents and me is only further compounded by our cultural differences. These differences have, for most of my life, opened up a rift between us, filled with misunderstandings and clashes over university and career decisions, the importance of friends versus family, as well as the unconditional expectations of filial piety and obedience. Because of these differences, I’ve always felt that I understood very little about my parents and the reasoning behind their actions and beliefs, and therefore rarely felt a deeper connection to them. The laws of filial piety may suggest that there is no need to look beyond the fact that your parents are just your parents in order to have a harmonious relationship them, but, as I’ve mentioned, filial piety is one of the things my parents and I don’t see perfectly eye to eye on. In any case, I have never been entirely comfortable with settling for seeing my parents as just my parents, and with taking whatever they say as gospel. For me, this kind of set-up is a far cry from the connection I seek with them. I’ve always hoped to bridge the gap between us, and food has been instrumental in helping me achieve this goal.

The relationship between food and parents for second-generation immigrants has not yet been widely or explicitly explored, but this fact does not mean it is a novel topic. In her thesis on second-generation immigrants’ experiences with “ethnic food” in Toronto, Canada, Kerith Paul notes that certain dining experiences sought out by her interviewees in their adulthood are done so “to connect with their immediate family” (one interviewee specifically cites yum cha!) (26). Similarly, in her essay, Zauner ponders

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whether the Korean individuals she observes at the H Mart food court are “thinking of [their families]…whether they’re eating to feel connected to, to celebrate these people through food.” For Zauner, it’s clear that her connection to Korean food is deeply tied to her connection with her mother – after all, it was her Korean mother who raised her with “a distinctly Korean appetite.” She spends much of her essay recalling and reminiscing about memories of her mother, all of which contain food at their core – whether it is spending hours making dumplings together in America or gorging on Korean-Chinese food for their first meal whenever they travelled back to Seoul. It’s not only the fond memories created over preparation and consumption of food with her mother that highlight the link between food and connection to parents in Zauner’s piece, but also her mention of food as her mother’s way of expressing parental love: as Zauner writes, “I could always feel [my mother’s] affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”

In his personal essay, Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon also conceives of food as “a conduit that [transmits] love,” describing his mother’s insistence on cooking him his old comfort foods whenever she visits him in “Bread is practically sacred”. In the piece, Hemon also unpacks his parents’ food habits, writing of their “poor-people food ethos, where nothing should ever be wasted,” their perception of food’s innate “hierarchy of value, wherein meat and bread are at the top” and vegetables at the bottom, and their disregard for adopting dietary changes even at the advice of medical professionals. All of these food-related attitudes and behaviours, according to Hemon, reveal a great deal about the environment in which his parents grew up: one where “subsistence could never be guaranteed, where living was always survival”, and where food – particularly bread, “the poor people’s most basic staple” – came to “[equal] life.” The article’s subtitle only drives home the significance of food in allowing second-generation immigrants to learn about their parents: as Hemon writes, “Nothing taught me more about my parents…than the food they cherished after fleeing wartorn Bosnia.”

Like both Hemon and Zauner, cultural food seems to be one of the keys for me to connect with and better understand my immigrant parents.

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However, the importance food takes on in my case is not necessarily because of distinctive memories made over food, nor because of any rare coded display of affection that might be transmitted through its preparation and consumption (my mum actually dislikes cooking, and though my parents do show their love by always leaving me the best cuts of meat and my dad also has no qualms about verbally announcing he loves me on a daily basis). It does have to do with learning about my parents and their pasts, though not necessarily through analysis of their food habits (many of which are actually identical to those of Hemon’s parents). Rather, the reason food has been critical in allowing me to learn about and feel closer to my parents is because of the rituals my family have created around it.

For the entirety of my life, my family has made a point of eating dinner together every night, at least when it’s feasible – a tradition apparently passed down from their own parents and their parents’ parents. I’m not sure that my parents would support my claim that they deliberately upheld this ritual in order to carve out a physical and temporal space for the whole family to come together at the end of our separate days; they would more likely say that they maintained the practice because that’s how it had always been done – and, besides, eating together makes cooking and cleaning more convenient. At the end of the day, I suppose it doesn’t really matter why we have this food ritual: if it’s the latter reason that motivated my parents to sustain this tradition, the former has nevertheless been the result of their decision.

Dinnertime in my household is marked not only by food, but by communality. No matter what you’re doing, you’re expected at the dinner table by the time the dishes have been cooked (or a bit before, if you’re me and have to set the table). It’s not that eating together is strictly enforced; if you’re caught in a situation or task whose start and end times are out of your control, dinner will go on without you – it’s just that we’d much rather wait for you if possible. Neither parent ever explicitly spoke this ‘eating together’ rule into existence or threatened us children with punishment if we failed to comply – it’s just silently understood.

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However, while communal dinner may be a routine for my family, I hope this does not imply begrudging submission to the practice. In fact, I’ve come to understand just how valuable this ritual is, especially since in recent years it has become even more than just about spending time in each other’s company: it’s now also marked by the rich conversations that flourish over the meal. The bulk of our conversation actually usually happens after dinner, when our plates have been wiped clean, our cutlery set down, our stomachs filled (and possibly expanded). It’s in these moments when we’re all lingering in our seats slowly digesting, my sister and I not yet ready to tackle the large washing pile, that my parents start to become a little more talkative about the past.

It’s at our dining table that I have learned the most about my parents and their (hi)stories, where their nostalgia, grief, joy, laughter, and tears have surfaced, occasionally all at once. It is here, at this table, that they’ve helped me trace our family’s migratory past, starting with their great-grandparents’ respective journeys from the Guangdong and Fujian provinces of southern China to the small towns of Ipoh and Taiping in West Malaysia, to my parents’ own leap to Melbourne almost thirty years ago. It’s here that my mum has told me about how lucky she was growing up as the youngest child of seven because she never had to experience the same level of hunger and poverty that her elder brothers and sisters did. It’s here that my dad has reflected on how strong-willed my grandmother was, always working late into the night sewing clothes to put food on the table and pay school fees, all the while also cooking, cleaning, and raising four kids. It’s here that I’ve learned that my parents, too, grew up with their own identity struggles in a country they felt tried to make them suppress their Chinese heritage. It’s here that my parents have shared their relationship origin story (which disappointingly follows a rom-com plot to a tee) and made me gasp in horror telling me about when they first moved to Kuala Lumpur and had to spend most of their Saturday washing clothes by hand together because they didn’t have a machine back then. It’s here that my dad has recounted stories from his time spent studying in England, contrasting the excitement of no one telling him what to do at seventeen with the crushing pressure of knowing that failing any subject – and thus having to

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cough up money his parents didn’t have in order to repeat it – was out of the question. It’s here that I’ve been reminded of the career dreams and family ties they gave up in pursuit of better opportunities for my sister and me, and the residual pain of these sacrifices.

Like for Hemon, it’s because of food that I’ve been able to uncover more about my parents’ lives (separately) and life (together) long before my sister or I appeared, and hence come to better understand why they are the way they are today. But, rather than this knowledge coming to me through observation of how my parents relate to and view food, it has come from their own sharing and storytelling over our dinner table. In this way, food has literally and metaphorically brought my family together – not necessarily through the nature of food itself, but through the experiences that revolve around it and the conversations that may only be accessed during those experiences.

Of course, I must concede that it is not only food and its rituals which have played a role in connecting me with my parents. It’s also the changes to our lifestyles, like my parents’ job changes and my move to Abu Dhabi for university, as well as family conflicts, which have made us realise each other’s importance. Today, my parents’ willingness and ability to share their personal narratives is probably a product of us all having more energy, time, and patience for each other. Still, it is our food rituals which have provided the opportunities for my parents to extend the invitation for me to hear their stories – and it is by accepting this invitation that I have been able to come into their world, to learn more about them and to feel closer and more connected to them.

Sure, there may remain differences between us that we may never reconcile – that is a given. But, having come to understand at least a fraction more about them, it becomes easier for me to see how these differences might have transpired. For instance, I can see more clearly now that our different priorities in life stem from the fact that they, like Hemon’s parents, have been driven by survival for the best part of their lives. Now that we are comfortably middle-class, living in a country my parents conceive as more just and prosperous than their own – though I’ll be the first to tell you it’s

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not without its own issues – I’m free to set my sights on the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy. For my parents, it’s a difficult paradox: they operated on the very bottom tiers for so long so that their daughters wouldn’t have to, yet the fact that this goal has now been realised doesn’t necessarily make it easier for them to suddenly abandon their survivalist mentality (who knows if that’s even possible after all these years?). In some ways, they continue to operate in this way, while I reap the rewards of being able to discover my passions and search for fulfilment. They fought for this result, but I’m not sure they’ve accepted it yet.

This kind of insight on why we diverge in our opinions and approaches towards many things in life does not result in us agreeing on everything – which I’ve come to realise should not be the goal in itself anyway – but it does allow me to extend a greater level of compassion towards my parents when we do come into conflict with each other. And this – an underlying respect for and understanding of my parents in spite of our disagreements – has made me feel much closer to them than I ever have before.

But why does it matter that food has helped to close the distance between my parents and me? How is this fact significant beyond being a feel-good happy resolution to years of parent-child disconnection? I argue that feeling closer to my parents does something to the way I feel about my cross-cultural identity. Because the rift between us arose largely out of my straddling two cultural contexts – the Chinese-Malaysian one I saw inside our home and the Australian one I saw outside of it – it formed a large part of the tension and negativity I felt about being between cultures. It wasn’t only my connection to a larger Chinese-Malaysian culture that I saw as being adversely affected by being born and raised in Australia, but also my connection to my parents, who I believed should have been part of the group of individuals who understood me most. My cultural anxieties were manifesting themselves not only on a larger cultural level, but also within my own family home.

Now that I have at least resolved some of the tension caused by my ChineseMalaysian-Australian identity on a micro level with my parents, I wonder if I might find a similar resolution to the disconnect I feel on a macro level

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with my heritage culture. Now that I feel more connected to my parents, might I feel more Chinese-Malaysian? Perhaps my parents are the gateway to feeling more Chinese-Malaysian, the “access point” for my heritage culture, as Zauner puts it. After all, it is from my parents that I inherited the ChineseMalaysian part of my cultural identifier; perhaps I’m more comfortable claiming it now after learning about our family’s migratory past and where this label came from in the first place?

Or perhaps my search for connection to my heritage culture was never really about the Chinese-Malaysian label at all, but about being closer to my parents. This theory would seem to be supported by the fact that I started actively learning Cantonese a few months ago in order to communicate and connect more deeply with my parents, rather than as a conscious attempt to connect to the larger Chinese-Malaysian culture.

Truthfully, I am not convinced myself by either of these theories. I think it would be naïve – and, to an extent, dishonest – of me to conclude that feeling more connected to my parents has somehow magically eradicated the rest of my cultural angst about not knowing in which context(s) I fit as a mishmash of cultural labels. In reality, there remain so many questions about being Chinese-Malaysian-Australian and trying to ‘fit in’: what does it mean to belong somewhere – be it to a place, culture or label? What would it take for me to realise this belonging? Why am I even in pursuit of it, and is it worth it in the end? Finding the answers to these questions – if there even exist any – might take a lifetime’s worth of soul-searching, which I am not sure I’m prepared to undertake and reflect upon in the time I have left to write this essay.

In the meantime, while these questions remain unanswered, I think I can conclude that feeling more connected to my parents is a partial resolution to the problems borne out of my cross-cultural identity. It does not solve everything – far from it. But it has reduced at least some of the tension that I’ve associated for all these years with being a second-generation immigrant; it has, no matter how marginally, made it feel like less of a bad thing to be Chinese-Malaysian-Australian. And maybe that feeling is enough for now.

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W OR KS C I TE D

Hemon, Aleksandar. “‘Bread is practically sacred’: how the taste of home sustained my refugee parents.” The Guardian, 13 June 2019, www. theguardian.com/food/2019/jun/13/bread-is-practically-sacred-how-thetaste-of-home-sustained-my-refugee-parents.

Paul, Kerith. Nourishing place?: immigrant children’s “ethnic food” experiences. 2009.

Ryerson University, Major Research Paper. Ryerson Library Digital Repository. https://digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/object/RULA%3A1097.

Weller, Daniel L., and Turkon, David. “Contextualizing the Immigrant Experience: The Role of Food and Foodways in Identity Maintenance and Formation for First- and Second-Generation Latinos in Ithaca, New York.”

Ecology of Food and Nutrition, vol. 54, no. 1, 2015, pp. 57–73. EBSCOhost, doi:10.

1080/03670244.2014.922071.

Wittmeyer, Alicia P.Q. “I Admire Vegetarians. It’s a Choice I Won’t Ever Make.”

The New York Times, 15 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/opinion/ sunday/vegetarian-vegan-meat.html.

Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton University Press, 1993. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt7rqk0.

Zauner, Michelle. “Crying in H Mart.” The New Yorker, 20 Aug. 2018, www. newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/crying-in-h-mart.

Zhang, Jenny G. “The Rise (and Stall) of the Boba Generation.” Eater, 5 Nov. 2019, www.eater.com/2019/11/5/20942192/bubble-tea-boba-asianamerican-diaspora.

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Palestinian Identities of Diaspora: Growth and Representation Online SA R A H B A SHA R A L - YAH YA

Introduction Arguing that those with power cannot fully impose their hegemony on a historical discourse, Siegfried Kraucer, one of the leading film theorists and cultural critics of the 20th century notes that “There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in” (Kraucer 8). History, as we know it, might be predominantly written by victors. However, in the current time of globalization and modern tools that act as vehicles for transmission, silenced memories can come to life resembling weapons “to those against whom the tide of history has turned” (Abu Lughod and Sa’di 6).

Through a cultural project of eight years entitled We Were and Still Are…Here, Tarek Bakri, a Palestinian researcher, attempts to break the wall Kraucer speaks of by documenting Palestinian oral history and the collective memory of Palestinians after the year of the Catastrophe or “Nakba” which is the year a settler-colonial state of Israel was established on 80% of mandatory Palestine through the destruction and massacre of hundreds of villages and towns (Masalha 2-3). He does so through sharing stories of the past and stories of individuals returning to visit what they define as their home villages. Bakri shares his work in the form of audiovisual productions or text posts and images shared on his social media pages: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and his website. Fueled by his dedication to the homeland and a belief stated on his website that “memory is an undeniable human right and that memory is identity” (Bakri We Were and Still Are...Here), he accumulated over thirty thousand followers on Facebook and thousands of followers on other social media platforms.

Looking at Bakri’s work, one can ask: how can we look at the online world and social media as vehicles for memory transmission and historical narratives? The concept of media and how it carries, shapes, and manages

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memory is often present in theories of memory and history. For instance, in his Theory of Social Memory, Peter Burke argues that memory is affected by the “social organization of transmission”, specifically citing five different media employed for this transmission; oral traditions, still and moving images, actions/rituals, and space (47-48). What about online space and the digital realm? Andrew Hoskins, a memory researcher, addresses this question in his book, Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. According to Hoskins, digital memory is different, it is seen as a transformer of the parameters of the past (The Restless Past 5). Hoskins also outlines concerns regarding digital memory and its validity, depth, accountability, and bias (“Memory of the Multitude” 85-109). Nonetheless, I believe we should look at the online world as an extension of the physical world, specifically in terms of memory because it provides us with more options to archive, commemorate, and resist forgetting what is specifically relevant for populations dealing with realities of loss, dispersion, and struggle, such as the Palestinians (Schulz 2).

The desire to commemorate and resist forgetting is reminiscent of Pierre Nora’s work on lieux de memoire. A lieu de memoir’s fundamental purpose is to “stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial” (Nora 19). It emerges from “moments of history torn away from the movement of history” and a will to remember, and it is “material, symbolic, and functional” begging the question, can’t lieux de memoire also exist online? (Nora 12, 14, 19) This inquiry leads me to other questions regarding the role of social media in memory. Is social media sufficient in communicating complex collective memories and collective trauma? Is it powerful enough to serve purposes like blocking forgetting?

There is an inextricable link between society and social media as all content online is socially mediated. Bakri’s work is in line with sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s work On Collective Memory, a concept he developed.

Specifically, Halbwachs argues that collective memory exists within a social context where the memory of the group aids the memory of the individual (38). Similarly, sociologist Jeffrey Alexander looks at and dissects the concept of collective trauma which he deems dependent upon social

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mediation, specifically through trauma carrier groups that represent trauma and make meaning out of it for the wider community (Olick et al. 308-309). Informed by concepts of collective memory, collective trauma, and digital memory, this essay aims to explore Tarek Bakri’s online memory project as a lieu de memoire, and Bakri and his team as a carrier group. I will argue that works like Bakri’s play an important role in creating and solidifying the Palestinian identity of the 21st century which keeps an important historical conversation and narrative alive. It is crucial to analyze Tarek Bakri’s work as his project paves the way for many others that hope to achieve similar goals specifically in the Arab world and in the context of the Palestinian cause, but also in other contexts. I will first cover the historical context of the Nakba and the implications it has on generations of Palestinians. Then, I will look at the Palestinian identity in diaspora and how Bakri’s work plays a role in reshaping and informing it about historical events and inherited trauma. Finally, I will look at common criticisms of forms of digital memory and analyze how Bakri’s We Were and Still Are…Here manages to rise above them.

Nakba and Palestinian Generations of Diaspora In A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe draws a timeline of the existence of the Zionist movement and settlements in Palestine. In his chapter on the Nakba of 1948, he covers the military plan of Zionist forces highlighting their goal of cleansing a future Jewish state of as many Palestinians as possible (Pappe 129). 1948 was a year of massacres committed against Palestinians, many of whom were killed, evicted, or terrorized out of their lands (Pappe 130). This is what Pappe referred to as “a grim scene” (135) that repeated in almost every village; Israeli soldiers surrounding a village from three sides, leaving the fourth for villagers to flee. When people refused to leave, they were forced onto lorries that drove them to the West Bank or remained to be blown up and destroyed with the village (Pappe 135-136). One example is the massacre of the village of Tantura, on May 23, 1948. The night before May 23, Zionist forces attacked the village from all four sides which led to a large number of villagers being held captive. Out of a population of 1500, 200 men were massacred by Zionist

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forces (Pappe 136) and the rest were held in prison camps and then released through prison exchanges to exile (Al-Wali 6). That year, the 14th of May was the day Zionists celebrated the birth of the state of Israel, while the Palestinians mourned the day of Nakba or ‘Catastrophe’ the next day, May 15.

As a result, the majority of Palestinians live in the diaspora; a term relating to a group of people that were forcibly scattered to at least two countries in the world, with most having refugee status (Schulz 2, 8). Nonetheless, many anthropological accounts highlight that the Palestinian cause is often disregarded and excluded from history and reduced merely to a humanitarian question of refugees, rather than an ongoing struggle for independence and statehood (Abu Lughod and Sa’di 4). These experiences of exclusion and exile “have been the building blocks in shaping Palestinian national identity” (Schulz 2). The Swedish professor and researcher of Middle Eastern affairs Helena Lindholm even argues that the main narrative of Palestinian identity, one of suffering and struggle, was composed in diaspora (Schulz 2).

Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora The displacement of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians was rightly termed the Catastrophe as it depicts the collective trauma endured by this group which is deeply rooted within their collective identity today (Pappe 138).

Alexander explains this link between collective trauma and identity. He sees trauma as attributed to phenomena that affect collective identity and destabilizes structures of meaning and culture ( Olick et al. 308). In the case of the Palestinian Catastrophe, the trauma is not entirely an event of the past.

It is ongoing and the consequences are still evident, leading to a constant revision and re-remembering of the past by Palestinians ( Olick et al. 309).

Schulz refers to Palestinians as people whose main characteristics are that of unwanted mobility and rootlessness. She argues that for current generations, Palestinian identity is what is constituted by journeys in exile and everything that comes with that such as experiences of suspicion and harassment (Schulz 85-86). The main term Palestinians have associated with diaspora is “ghurba”, directly translating into estrangement which indicates the traumatizing potential of their continuous Nakba (Schulz 91). This estrangement tends to

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trigger desperate searches for lost roots, says Schulz (85). As Burke states, “when you have these roots you can afford to take them for granted, but when you lose them, you feel the need to search for them” (54).

One of the main ways Palestinians in diaspora deal with this trauma and loss of roots is through the creation of institutions that could serve their interests. Lieux de memoire, such as Tarek Bakri’s project, serve that purpose. In his posts, Bakri vocalizes the trauma of Palestinians in the diaspora through the individuals he films and interviews. In one of his YouTube films, he follows a third-generation Palestinian coming from Sweden to visit her family’s village “Lubya”. Overwhelmed with emotions, she asks herself: “if they did not expel them from this land, I should have been born here. Who would I have been if I were born here? What would I be doing? They took my language. They took our land…It’s so hard.” (“Don’t Cry Grandma, We Will Return Soon” 1:50 – 2:15). In this clip, Bakri communicates questions that many Palestinians ask themselves in diaspora that indicate a conflict of identity. Visually documenting these moments could be seen as a form of “meaning making”, one of the main ways trauma carrier groups who are “collective agents of the trauma process” articulate the social pain of their people (Olick et al. 308). “We Were and Still Are…Here” serves a goal of communicating trauma to viewers globally who have access to such content due to its online nature. Hence, it gains international solidarity which goes to show the functional aspect of Bakri’s project.

What should be noted here is how Bakri’s approach differs from that of traditional archiving in terms of addressing the Palestinian identity. In an interview, he emphasizes this difference saying that historians have covered a lot, but he is certain that thousands of stories have not been told yet. He describes these materials as “dry” and says that his project changes this dynamic as it is predominantly linked to the refugee narrative.

Through accompanying people to visit their village, he builds his collection of memories and achieves his functional goal of visually documenting the post-Nakba generation (“Tarek Bakri: Protecting Palestinian Memory is a Collective Responsibility”). His approach triggers emotional reactions from his audiences as they leave comments about how bittersweet it is to

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watch such content. A commenter on one of his Facebook posts says: “… your happiness touches our hearts and makes us happy” (Dhadha). Tarek recreates physical experiences for viewers online and allows them to put themselves in the shoes of the individuals he films. This indicates his role in carrying and representing trauma as he can address and involve generations of Palestinians in diaspora signifying the material aspect of his work. Although it is online, he succeeds in communicating highly physical experiences and triggering reactions of pain and praise.

Furthermore, Bakri strengthens the Palestinian identity in diaspora by enabling Palestinians to live experiences that are linked to space and geography. As mentioned earlier, Peter Burke looked at space as one of the media through which transmission of memory occurs (Olick et al. 190).

This idea is inspired by Halbwachs’s work On Collective Memory through space, where he says: “Every collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework” (Halbwachs and Jeanne 6). Indeed, Schulz makes it a point that collective memory in the context of Palestinian nationalist discourse is linked to geography and the symbolic memory of orange groves and olive trees (15). Symbolism that includes elements of the land plays a unifying role for Palestinians in exile which is why symbols recur in many cultural representations (Abu Farha 344-345). Although online, this aspect does not escape Bakri’s project. In almost every video, subjects are filmed gathering soil and olive branches in bags or picking oranges. One of his videos, titled “She Returned to Jaffa and Reclaimed Two Oranges”, starts with him telling the woman he is accompanying “Alright look, let us take something from your village, as something borrowed on the hope that one day we return here and give it back” (1:46 – 1:50). This extends beyond the realm of video as the subjects often take what they collect back to other Palestinians in diaspora. Also, audiences watching are being educated about this symbolism and how images of the land are intertwined with their identities, thus achieving the symbolic aspect of a lieu de memoire.

Bakri’s work does not stop at reflecting images of trauma and communicating them as a carrier group. He takes it a step further by invoking messages of hope and return which strengthens the position of a

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Palestinian in diaspora. An example is a post he made to commemorate 72 years since the Nakba. On Facebook, he wrote “they went far after Nakba and expulsion and said: “The old will die and the young will forget.” Let’s take a tour in these photos to see how Palestine looked and how the generations are not letting go [of] the right to return to Palestine through the initiative “We were and Still are .. Here”” (“Today Marks 72 years”). In the same post, he gives an example of Ahmad AlKhalidi, a third-generation Palestinian who came from Australia searching for his grandfather’s house. AlKhalidi named his daughter Jaffa, maintaining his connection to the land and hoping to return. Presenting such emotions online triggers similar reactions from audiences in the comments. One comment from YouTube says “Returning is inevitable if we all work together and hold ourselves responsible…”

(Khanfar). The right to return has been considered as the “foremost of Palestinian rights” by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Schulz 140).

This right has a legal basis as seen in UN Resolution 194 and article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Abu Sitta). Holding on to an internationally recognized right is one of the strongest positions Palestinians in diaspora can take, and in his work, Bakri clarifies that, supporting identities in fragmentation. Bakri not only succeeds in presenting social pain but also sparks a spirit of responsibility and hope.

Digital Memory: Common Criticisms This final section looks at criticisms of digital memory and examines how Bakri’s project navigates such challenges by achieving just as much as traditional forms of archiving and more, which strengthens him as a carrier group and his project as a lieu de memoire.

When thinking of digital memory, there are always threats that digitization poses to remembrance that we must consider. History and memory mediated online are exposed to threats of privacy and security (Hoskins, “The Restless Past” 5), as well as the threat of being vulnerable to any changes in the network (Hoskins, “Memory of the Multitude” 105). However, we must pay attention to Bakri’s focus on using his online platform to resist erasure which is evident in the title of his project; “We Were and Still Are…Here”. Rather than going for a descriptive title, he chooses a statement with underlying

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meanings of persistence and through it, he clarifies the educational aim of his project. This statement is omnipresent in his work. He uses it as a recurring hashtag to sign his posts.

When asked about his concerns about digitization in an interview, Bakri indicates that technology adds a dimension that is not present in other media, which is the possibility of audience interaction and addition (“Tarek Bakri: Protecting Palestinian Memory is a Collective Responsibility”).

This links back to the common concern of digital memory hindering deep engagement with content as the goal of making everything “taggable” and “likable” sometimes overpowers anything else (Hoskins, “Memory of the Multitude” 104). Nonetheless, a scroll through Bakri’s page shows that his project is reliant on audience participation. On a Facebook post of his, several comments add to the historical instance he is sharing from a different angle. An example is this comment: “Thank you, Thank you so much<3 This place was also visited by the martyr Abdelqader Al Husseini before he died in the battle of Al Qastal…I remember my grandma describing to me how he looks in detail, and she told me he attended the meeting in the “Jibreen” home” (AlKhawaja). Allowing users this form of agency to add and engage in historical discourse not only keeps this crucial conversation alive but also enriches and helps Palestinian identities to be more confident and resilient. Representation and solidarity provided by Bakri’s work communicate the population’s trauma and aids them in growing out of it, keeping the return in mind.

Conclusion The Nakba had and still has an extreme influence on the identity of Palestinians in diaspora. Through collective remembering, communities of Palestinians remain connected, sharing their suffering and trauma. In this essay, I explored the digital aspect of remembrance, particularly analyzing We Were and Still Are…Here as a medium of communicating and maintaining Palestinian identity and struggles. The debates around this form of memory transmission are many, however, in this essay, I looked at Tarek Bakri as a carrier group and his project as a lieu de memoire, and explored how his work succeeds in influencing the (re)construction and strengthening of the

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Palestinian identity. However, can we treat all online content in the same manner? How can we evaluate anonymous pages and productions? The questions about digital memory are endless, and the discussions still seem to be few. Bakri’s project, however, is a great way to start this conversation.

WORKS CITED

“‫[ تبكيش ســتي عن قريب راجعني‬Don’t Cry Grandma, We Will Return Soon].”

YouTube, uploaded by Tarek Bakri, 13 Jan 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3CSctalv0g&. “‫[ عادت إىل يافا واســرجعت حبتني برتقال‬She Returned to Jaffa and Reclaimed Two Oranges].” YouTube, uploaded by Tarek Bakri, 4 Feb 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-JO5DeXNqM&.

Abu Salman, Sitta. “8. The Right of Return: A Basic Right”. Palestine Remembered, 7 Aug. 2001, www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Right-Of-Return/ Story439.html.

Abu-Lughod, Lila and Ahmad Sa’di. Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. Columbia University Press, 2007.

Abufarha, Nasser. “Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange, and Olive Trees in Palestine”. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 15, no. 3, 2008, pp. 343-68. www.doi.org/10.1080/10702890802073274.

Al-Wali, Mustafa. “The Tantura Massacre, 22-23 May 1948”. Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 2001, pp. 5-18.

Alexander, Jeffery. “From “History as Social Memory.”” The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffery K Olick et al., Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.

307-10.

Alkhawaja, Salam Alazzeh. Comment on “‫[ مــا إن أعلنــت‬Once the UN announced]” Facebook, 5 May 2020, www.facebook.com/Tarek.Ziad.Bakri/ posts/10157881084995845.

Bakri, Tarek. “72 ‫[ يصــادف اليــوم الذكرى‬Today marks 72 years].” Facebook, 15 May 2020, 11:46 AM, www.facebook.com/Tarek.Ziad.Bakri/ posts/10157915180125845.

---. “‫ حراســة الذاكرة الفلســطينية مسؤولية جامعية‬:‫[ طارق البكري‬Tarek Bakri: Protecting Palestinian Memory is a Collective Responsibility].” Interview by Asmaa Azayzeh. Arab48, 10 May 2020, www.bit.ly/3bYC6y5.

---. Tarek Bakri: We Were and Still Are .. Here. Tarek Bakri, 2019, www.tarekbakri.com/en.

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Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Dhadha, Moreed. Comment on “#‫[ عروس_عــكا‬#Akka’s_Bride]”. Facebook, 16 May 2020, www.facebook.com/Tarek.Ziad.Bakri/posts/10157916555905845.

Halbwachs, Maurice and Alexandre Jeanne. “Space and The Collective Memory.” The Collective Memory, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950.

Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Hoskins, Andrew. “Memory of the Multitude: The End of Collective Memory” Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, Routledge, 2017, pp. 85-109.

---. “The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media.”

Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, Routledge, 2017, pp. 1-27.

Khanfar, Mamoun. Comment on “‫[ عادت إىل يافا واســرجعت حبتني برتقال‬She Returned to Jaffa and Reclaimed Two Oranges].” YouTube, January 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v= i-JO5DeXNqM&.

Kraucer, Siegfried. History, the Last Things Before the Last. Oxford University Press, 1969.

Masalha, Nur. The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. Zed Books, 2012.

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Memory and Counter-Memory, special issue of Representations, no. 26, 1989, pp. 7-24.

Olick, Jeffrey K, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. The Collective Memory Reader. New York, Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.

Pappe, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge University Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, www.ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/lib/nyulibraryebooks/detail.action?docID=1357478.

Schulz, Helena Lindholm and Hammer, Juliane. The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. Routledge, 2005. von Moltke, Johannes. “Siegfried Kraucer.” Oxford Bibliographies, www.oxfordbibliographies .com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo9780199791286-0123.xml.

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Gripping the Controller but Grappling with More: How Player Agency in Virtual Spaces Allows Recognition of Real-World Violence Rather Than Instigating It SH E HRYA R H A NI F

From the lack of a story in Tetris to the basic damsel-in-distress plot of Super Mario Bros. to the decades-long espionage saga of the Metal Gear Solid series, video games have evolved, increasingly tackling themes and issues previously only confined to film and literature. In this regard, the medium has particularly distinguished itself from its aforementioned counterparts by offering control directly to the players. Instead of solely relying on ageold narrative tropes, video games enable players to actively shape their experiences and build their own stories. However, as a result of affording players greater agency, many video games have been specifically attacked for encouraging physical violence and prejudiced behaviors. In extreme cases, politicians and media figures have even blamed the corrupting influence of video games as the root cause of mass shootings. I, however, argue that video games do not necessarily teach violence, but rather allow players to grapple with it. Because players have agency in the video games they play, they are not routinely conditioned into learning violence; rather, their takeaway is molded by their interactions with both story and gameplay. Through a meta-analysis of past texts on video game representations, I will demonstrate that player agency in single-player video games enables consumers to better understand violence — particularly indirect violence that is often free of blood and gore — because they are able to re-interpret their real-world experiences in light of their virtual actions. Since players must grapple with their choices and actions, they have better opportunities for self-reflection, and this leads to the development of greater empathy, a subversion of expectations, and a more nuanced understanding of social relations.

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Video games have had an image problem that has only recently begun to change. They have long been viewed as shallow, being good only for hedonistic pleasure. Some, such as film critic Roger Ebert, have even said that “video games cannot be art” (Ebert); their sole purpose is short-term entertainment, not long-term cultural impact. However, psychological research by Oliver et al. indicates that video games can indeed provide “meaningful” (390) experiences. Over time, narratives have become more emotionally mature, exploring nuanced issues like identity and isolation in a more lifelike and complex manner (393). Even when they do not follow the stereotypical approach of prioritizing “fun” (393), such games have achieved critical and commercial success. For example, 2010’s Heavy Rain followed the heart-aching story of a father searching for his missing son. Though the “game at times felt more like an interactive movie than a video game” (402), it was highly praised for giving players greater freedom in how they approach the story and autonomously make choices because it led to them being more emotionally invested in the narratives. Oliver et al.’s work also showed that video games were most appreciated when the plot provided greater insight about issues that players connected with (396). Even when the form of presentation was unrealistic, they could endear people as long as their subject matter addressed relatable topics and/or provided an emotional outlet. Video games can, thus, shed light on issues that are otherwise on the periphery of people’s awareness.

The overlap of story and gameplay can lead to a profound and enduring impact on players. Research by Ricci et al. indicates that people recall information better when it is presented in the form of video games, rather than text. Because of the “immediate feedback, … and goal direction” (305), people pay greater attention to what is being presented, retaining what they learn long after they are done playing, so that they can use it to inform their real-world decisions. For instance, point systems in spelling games can instill the importance of having a good eye for detail and/or correctness through positive gratification and negative punishments. Because video games disseminate messages so effectively, game developers have increasingly tackled complex topics in innovative ways.

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In particular, a greater proportion of video games, rather than depicting only physical violence, are kickstarting discussions about the forms of suffering that are normally imperceptible and difficult to externalize. Unlike tangible somatic injuries, emotional and mental pain festers inside the mind, whereby a person becomes their own source of ill-being. Because it is difficult to express, the violence of internal anguish is further worsened by feelings of isolation. Video games can help remedy these issues of solitude by serving as accessible representations of otherwise-abstract issues. By putting players directly into the characters’ shoes, they can illustrate the troubles that others go through in a lifelike, unglamorized manner, and thereby provide a certain degree of relatability that is conducive to higher levels of empathy.

Consequently, video games can provide a voice to the voiceless. For example, 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was lauded for its depiction of schizophrenia, with psychologist Charles Fernyhough calling it the “best representation [he’s] heard of what these experiences are like” (Sherrif). The game’s basic premise is about Senua, a young female warrior who journeys to Hell to save her lover’s soul, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Senua’s bigger battle is with the psychosis she developed as a result of her father’s abuse.

Throughout the game, the player experiences the eponymous character’s “voices”, both as an important narrative device and as a key gameplay mechanic. Herein, the developers centralized the protagonist’s personal struggle in the story, putting the player in constant confrontation with the strain of her mental illness. Because games like Hellblade demand active engagement with complex issues, they are able to provide relatability and cognizance otherwise missing in film due to passive viewership. People are able to broaden their understanding of what constitutes violence and consequently recognize it as more than just what is tangible.

Players can better identify real-world oppression by first experiencing it in virtual spaces. Sociologist Johan Galtung has described “structural violence” as the “difference between the potential and the actual” (168). According to him, many forms of violence are not physical but rather result from the unrealized gap between people’s potential social standing and their actual reality (the former is often better). Because resources are finite and the

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“power to decide over [their] distribution … is unevenly distributed” (171), the spread of wealth and power is inequitable. Problematically, such real-life social exploitation lacks “drama” (171), remaining invisible and consequently unaddressed. In comparison, gore and blood is more spectacular, and draws attention — both in real life and in video games. However, because video game depictions of physical violence tend to be heavily embellished, players are likely to find the representations of indirect violence that are innate to society’s power structures to be more consistent with their sense of reality and, therefore, more memorable.

Denham et al.’s case study of the crime-simulator Grand Theft Auto V demonstrated that players gain insight through video game representations of structural violence. Interviewing fifteen college students, they found that the game’s depictions of systematic exploitation in Los Santos — a satirized recreation of Los Angeles — were readily seen to reflect the real world even if they were presented in an exaggerated manner. For example, by “playing into … stereotypes” of “white-wealth and white-poverty,” the game could “orient the player inside of this culturally imagined poverty using the player’s ‘transgressive imagination’” (8). Because players’ expectations of capitalism’s dangers aligned with the game’s hyperreal image of financial injustice, they were able to obtain a more acute awareness of the inequitable distribution of wealth present in their own society.

Still, media depictions of structural inequalities are not new; in fact, many movies and books (e.g., Parasite, V for Vendetta) have been lauded for highlighting class divides. However, what differentiates Grand Theft Auto V from these alternate media forms is how it utilizes player agency to manipulate expectations about violence. In the aforementioned study

by Denham et al., participants saw the game’s interpersonal violence to be exaggerated and the game mechanics (e.g. shooting, driving) to be flawed (15). Because they knew the game’s physics and death mechanics were inaccurate, they did not believe much in them; the gameplay mechanics only served the purpose of entertainment. In contrast, although they too were heightened, the narrative tropes were found to be relatable (8). As there was such a jarring contrast between how realistic the social commentary and

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player actions were, the environmental storytelling was able to effectively provide meaning beyond the virtual space. Because video games can offer hedonic and eudaimonic gratification through distinct avenues, violence’s different forms can be presented in contrasting manners, making it easier for players to compartmentalize their understanding of them. For example, in the case of Grand Theft Auto V, the player’s recognition of structural violence stemmed from the game world’s contextual information while their opinion of physical violence’s gratuitousness was based on the illogical gameplay.

The game did not forego physical violence but was still able to address other forms of social injustice. Thus, the interplay between different design aspects allow for unique depictions of structural violence that inform people’s understanding of the real world.

Video games can utilize the freedom of player agency to subvert expectations and comment on real-world autonomy. Gameplay does not have to be just an exercise of players’ freedom; rather, it can reveal individuals’ lack of volition. As described by Bourdieu and Passeron, people often unsuspectingly fall prey to “symbolic violence”, whereby they follow “power[s] … [that manage] to impose meanings and … impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force” (4). Through implicit cultural norms, people inculcate ideologies that support the domination of certain groups/individuals and the subordination of others. These power differentials translate into acts of violence that are often unconscious in nature. Privy to these concerns about individuals’ independence, developers have leveraged the notion of control to raise awareness about social injustices.

Case in point, the first-person-shooter, BioShock, can be seen as not just a critique of objectivism but also a demonstration of symbolic violence. The game follows protagonist Jack in the underwater city of Rapture, a former utopia that now stands abandoned. For the majority of the story, the player is guided by the voice of the anonymous Atlas. The player constantly accepts Atlas’s advice at face-value, seeing him as a kind benefactor that only has Jack’s well-being at heart; this association is reinforced by imagery and reminders about the “influence” Atlas can have and how he will use it for

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good. Eventually, however, the game reveals that Atlas only meant to use Jack for his own benefit and had fed him lies about his purpose. Though the player had believed that they were the one in power and had been following someone else’s advice only by choice, the truth was that their implicit bias to trust the power hierarchy had led to them becoming another person’s pawn.

A replay of the game shows that the player’s various actions were all shaped in one way or the other by their trust in the influential Atlas. Therefore, even when they killed other characters, the players were indirectly committing violence against themselves. By letting someone else dictate their choices and actions, they had inadvertently surrendered their own individual agency. Herein, the game’s depiction of willful subservience serves as a metacommentary on real life: just as Jack follows Atlas blindly in the game, people in the real world also have a tendency to support groups that are working against their interests, which in turn leads to symbolic violence.

Thus, player agency can show people how they can be unconsciously subservient to other powers even when they believe themselves to be in control.

The player’s active involvement in video games also allows self-reflection on the moral responsibility of violence. According to Galtung, structural violence lacks an evident “subject-object relation” (171) since there is not always a clear perpetrator or victim. Video games have also increasingly looked inwards about the agency of violence by asking players to reconsider the consequences of their in-game and real-world actions. For instance, in BioShock, on one hand, Atlas was pulling the strings, while on the other, Jack (and, by extension, the player) was the one committing the final acts of physical violence. Herein, like most cases of invisible violence, the line between intention and consequence was blurred. However, rather than provide a morally deterministic conclusion about the violence, the experience of playing a game offers players the chance to reexamine their past actions in a different light, thereby providing insight through experience and introspection. Consequently, the game is able to convey the message that violence’s roots are not always traceable to a single source; the final act of social injustice is often the culmination of many agents and factors. Here, the game mechanics act as a storytelling device that can be used to convey the complex and varied nature of violence.

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Similarly, video games can play around consumerism and help players grapple with the “violence of positivity” described by post-Marxist ByungChul Han. According to Han, the modern era is characterized by “an excess of mobility, of consumption, … and of production” (90); such violence manifests as mundane parts of everyday life. In this regard, video games’ various personalization features reflect real-world consumerist patterns. In fact, according to Denham et al.’s research, Grand Theft Auto V players felt that the game most mirrored their “sense of the real” in the case of “passive” actions like shopping (11). Given an abundance of choices, players were motivated to buy and attain customizable apparel even if the only effect was a change in appearance. Because the game’s diegesis implicitly pressured them into buying more goods, players were able to recognize the “embedded transactional nature of capitalism” (11), which similarly creates artificial needs for new goods and services (i.e., the feeling that “more is better”).

In this case, even though the in-game currency did not require real-world payment, the game’s virtual economy still mirrored the exploitative ethos of commercialization. By encountering such representations of social systems, players are able to better navigate through exploitative situations that can prove harmful in the real world. Thus, video games do not need to confront the topic of violence head-on to be effective. Rather, subtextual cues can often be enough for people to link their personal experiences and further their understanding of social injustice.

Player agency leveraged in the form of story decisions and non-traditional, choice-centric gameplay can also be very impactful. In fact, the last few years have seen an upsurge in graphic adventure video games where players have plentiful opportunities to shape the central narrative but little other gameplay flexibility. These games do not completely dispose of the conventional gameplay mechanics but rather decenter them; their primary objective is to tell a meaningful (and possibly branching) story based on the player’s choices. Because of this non-conventional approach, this new genre of games has received great praise, being particularly highlighted for their greater moral complexity. Conventional role-playing video games often shape their story according to a narrow point-based system, which rewards “good” deeds and punishes “evil” ones (Sicart 208). As a result, the

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structure of such video games is highly linear and akin to moral policing. In contrast, due to the higher number of branching paths, decisions in graphic adventures are made with little foresight of their potential consequences and without the constraints of an evaluation system. The uncertainty mimics that of real life, where people have to navigate through unforeseen circumstances. Because choices in graphic adventures carry a greater weight in the story compared to most video games, they are likely to be made with more care, thereby offering better opportunities for introspection — both when a decision is initially made and when its results pan out.

In particular, engagement with a more in-depth and flexible narrative allows for a better understanding of violence’s effect on social relationships. In this regard, Telltale Games’s The Walking Dead is an insightful example of a graphic adventure that places “player agency [not in the gameplay, but] … in the players’ interpretations of the game text” (Stang) and consequently imparts a greater emotional effect. In the game, the player takes on the role of Lee Everett, a university professor, who amidst a zombie outbreak has to take on the role of surrogate father to Clementine, an eight-year-old he met by chance. To survive, Everett has to often choose between bloodybut-pragmatic and pacifistic-but-risky decisions — neither of which are strictly encouraged nor discouraged. Herein, Clementine acts as an ethical barometer, with the story implicitly encouraging the player to consider what she might take away from their choices (Stang). But even Clementine does not always immediately react towards the player’s choices with gratitude or disapproval; rather, depending on what Everett does, she will eventually start altering her behavior in social situations (e.g., how easily she trusts other human beings). As a result, the game draws the player’s attention to the unintentional ramifications of their actions, demonstrating how violence is neither isolated nor one-time; its aftereffects often spread out and affect individuals that are neither perpetrators nor direct victims. Because of their emotional connection with Clementine, the player is able to directly relate to the story and gain insight about the interconnectivity of their actions.

Thereby, the game conveys to the player that violence, by nature, is often muddled and can impact third-parties in unforeseen ways.

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Not all video games require violence, and peaceful resolution can bring its own unique insights. Many role-playing games now allow players to advance the story through a variety of non-violent means, such as stealth or dialogue. Rather than depicting gratuitous violence, such games present the player with the option to not commit harm and leverage it as a narrative tool instead. Such video games’ circumstantial violence is “latent” in nature; even if it “is something which is not [necessarily] there, [it] might [either] easily come about” (Galtung 172) or be prevented. For instance, in 2015’s Undertale, the player controls the sole human in a world brimming with distrusting monsters, but is never forced to fight during any of the game’s many physical confrontations. Rather, the protagonist is able to converse with other characters and solve the issues that have caused them to become violent, thereby defusing the situation peacefully. In fact, the player can complete the entire story in a pacifist manner. Consequently, because they provide the player with alternate avenues of gratification, games like Undertale demonstrate how violence is often unnecessary and sometimes even counterproductive; many times, other avenues of action are just as effective, but are ignored because they lack the immediate apparency of the violent route. Moreover, since they place the moral imperative of violence on the protagonists’ shoulders, the games encourage — but do not force — the player to seek out peaceful forms of resolution. As a result, people will be able to realize that real-world violence is often the result of deeper problems that can be more effectively neutralized through an empathetic and intentional exploration of other people’s motivations rather than through violent means that endanger all involved parties (including both the perpetrator and the victim). Even if the structural problems enabling the violence are outside of one’s control, particular crises can still be resolved on a case-by-case basis (like when two individuals are directly interacting with each other and actively make the choice to take the pacifist route), so as to prevent social injustice from coming to fruition.

When a video game offers players the ability to impact the virtual space around them, it simultaneously provides them with hyperreal social contexts with real-world generalizability. Interactions with the game world, manipulation of various gameplay mechanics and a direct influence on a

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game’s narrative can all help improve players’ understanding of invisible violence. Because players are actively engaged in gameplay, they have a better spatial awareness of unfolding action and are able to link the video games’ signs and symbols to both their own individual experiences and the outside world’s structural oppression. Still, there is less clarity regarding whether higher levels of agency also increase the amount of insight obtained by players. Given how a player’s understanding of violence is closely tied to the overall impact a game imparts, deciphering the relation between player agency and meaningfulness is key to understanding players’ perception of video game violence. In this regard, case studies of players’ choices in open-world games should be conducted, so as to understand why people choose the gameplay paths that they undertake: do they select options that maximize entertainment or the ones that provide the most meaning, or is it something in between? Although video games have already proven themselves to be a profoundly powerful medium for depictions of violence and injustice, leveraging the potential impact of player agency will only further allow them to fully transcend storytelling media to become a tool for greater social impact.

W OR KS C I TE D

BioShock. Xbox 360 Version, Irrational Games, 2007.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Passeron, Jean-Claude. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Translated by Richard Nice, Sage Publications, 1977.

Denham, Jack, et al. “The reification of structural violence in video games” Crime, Media, Culture, Oct. 2019.

Ebert, Roger. “Video games can never be art.” Roger Ebert, 16 Apr. 2010, https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/video-games-can-never-be-art, 29 Apr. 2020.

Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6, no. 3, 1969, pp. 167–191.

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Grand Theft Auto V. PlayStation 4 Version, Rockstar Games, 2014.

Han, Byung-Chul. Topology of Violence. Translated by Amanda DeMarco, MIT Press, 2018.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. PlayStation 4 Version, Ninja Theory, 2017.

Oliver, Mary Beth, et al. “Video Games as Meaningful Entertainment Experiences.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture, vol. 5, no. 4, Oct. 2016, pp.

390–405.

Ricci, Katrina El, et al. “Do Computer-Based Games Facilitate Knowledge Acquisition and Retention?” Military Psychology, vol. 8, no. 4, Nov. 2009, pp.

295-307.

Sherrif, Sibzy. “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice: Bringing the Madness to Life.”

Sinister Games, 09 Sep. 2018, https://sinister-games.com/sinister-gameshome/hellblade-senua-s-sacrifice-bringing-the-madness-to-life, 29 Apr. 2020.

Sicard, Miguel. The Ethics of Computer Games. MIT Press, 2009.

Stang, Sarah. “’This Action Will Have Consequences’: Interactivity and Player Agency.” Game Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, May 2019.

The Walking Dead. Windows PC Version, Telltale Games, 2012.

Undertale. Windows PC Version, Toby Fox, 2015.

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Blued, or Be Lewd: A Study of a Chinese Gay Dating App SOP H I A L I N

Today, forty million people, which is more than the entire population of Canada, are using an online dating app called Blued (Jing; “Canada Population (LIVE)”). Blued is not just any dating app; it is a dating app based in mainland China, specifically designed for gay men. Its features closely resemble those of its western counterpart, Grindr, including profile photos, messages, live video streaming, and private live chat. Although Blued may not be a novelty in countries like the U.S., where Grindr has been around since 2009, Blued is unprecedented in the more conservative and less tolerant Chinese society.

Many news pages covered the success of this untraditional Chinese app. For example, CGTN — a Chinese international news channel — described this app as “taboo-busting” (“Taboo-busting gay app”). Similarly, India Today claims that this app has helped the gay community “develop a positive selfimage and fight social prejudices that force [gay people] to stay anonymous” (Reuters). However, by doing a close analysis of the app and drawing upon relevant literature about the social practice of “passing”, this paper will show that Blued’s popularity is a product of heteronormativity and homophobia in China. Instead of being “taboo-busting,” Blued is conforming to and reinforcing the existing norms by providing an online space for Chinese gay men to lead a double life and creating a culture that invalidates the realness of gay identities and relationships.

Firstly, an overview of (in)tolerance in China illustrates why this app may appear to be “taboo-busting.” Homosexuality remains a stigmatized subject and is often pathologized in China. Until 2001, the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (CCMD) had classified homosexuality and bisexuality as mental disorders (Wu 118). Even after the release of CCMD-3, which removed such classification, many health professionals in China still consider homosexuality a disorder that requires sexual orientation conversion efforts (Bhandari). The Chinese government is also curbing the acceptance of

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homosexuality with its laws and regulations. Although there is no law ruling being gay as illegal, the Chinese government frequently uses the phrase “not encouraging, not discouraging and not promoting” when addressing the topic of the gay community in China (Mountford 3). This stance taken by the Chinese government further alienates gay people in China, deeming them part of an obscene subculture that cannot be officially recognized and needs to stay out of the public sphere.

Part of this ‘obscene’ community was Geng Le, the founder of Blued. A New York Times article written by Javier C. Hernández covered Geng Le’s life story: for more than a decade, Geng Le led a secret double life. In the real world, he lived with his real name, Ma Baoli. He was a policeman, a husband, and a father in Qinhuangdao in northern China. Meanwhile, online, he was Geng Le—an activist who created a website, Danlan.org (Mandarin for “light blue”), in 2000 for gay men in China to connect and share their stories. His double life was discovered by his supervisors at his workplace in 2012, and as a result, he had to come out of the closet. Consequences then followed: because discrimination based on sexual orientation was, and is still, legal in China, he was ‘rightfully’ fired from the police force (Mountford 5). His wife left him, and his whole family was ashamed and distressed. That was when he, with his pseudonym Geng Le, created Blued, the first gay dating app in China (Hernández).

Geng Le is not the only individual in China who has faced an incredible amount of family and social rejection because of his sexual orientation.

According to a survey done in China by Peking University in 2016, “58% of respondents (gay and straight) agreed with the statement that gays are rejected by their families… Fewer than 15% [of gays] said they had come out to their families, and more than half of those who did said they had experienced discrimination as a result” (J.P.). A study done by the UN Development Programme found out that “only around 5% choose to disclose their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression at school, in the workplace, or in the religious communities” (“Being LGBTI in China” 8).

In these statistics, it is overwhelmingly apparent that Chinese society largely rejects the gay community and forces Chinese gay men to stay in the closet.

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Being in such an inhospitable climate, gay men in China are compelled by society’s standards to conform to the heterosexual norms. In the book Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China by Tiantian Zheng, a sociologist and anthropologist at the State University of New York, Zheng includes a detailed account of her interviews with several Chinese gay men.

One of the interviewees commented that “when a person…wants to live like a normal person, he has to get married [to a woman],” and the other interviewees agreed with this distressing but true statement (Zheng 142).

That is what Geng Le, the founder of Blued, did as well—he married a straight woman and had a child. In fact, according to research done by Beichuan Zhang, a Professor at Qingdao University, as much as “80 percent of gay men in China have, due to the toxic combination of family and societal pressure, entered traditional marriages with straight women” (Bram). This data further demonstrates that the need to comply with the heterosexual norm in China is both real and utterly coercive.

One may question how the popularity of Blued, the gay dating app, fits into this homophobic and heteronormative society. CGTN offers a seemingly plausible answer—this app challenges and perpetuates societal norms. However, the truth is that Blued offers Chinese gay men a place to hide digitally. While hiding in the closet and conforming to the heterosexual norms, Chinese gay men have always sought out other ways to connect and fulfill their sexual desires.

Before the era of social media, the most popular gathering places for gay men in Beijing were public bathroom stalls (Buoye et al. 305-306). Bathroom stalls offered these men the discretion and anonymity they needed, given that their sexuality was disapproved of in public. In Chinese society today, with the readily accessible Internet, gay dating apps like Blued have taken over the role of bathroom stalls. Blued now functions as bathroom stalls, where Chinese gay men gather to connect and fulfill their needs without having to come out to the public. It is a digital place parallel to the physical place where gay men would usually gather. Like the bathroom stalls, Blued grants its users the discretion and anonymity they need. On Blued, people are visible only to others on the app. Although users have personal profile pages, they are not obliged to use their real names, put in real information about themselves, or show pictures with their faces. Blued is like a sheltered sanctuary for these gay men

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in China, whose identity and orientation can bring them discrimination and rejection out in the real world.

This hidden sanctuary offered by Blued helps users live a double life. Blued’s founder, Geng Le, had lived a double life for many years, being both a husband to a woman and a gay activist online. The double personas he took on enabled him to both conform to societal expectations and fulfill his desires. Similar stories are found on Zhihu—a Chinese question-and-answer website similar to Quora—where some Blued users shared their thoughts and experience of using Blued: “To me, Blued may be one of the only ways we can find people like us because, in the general environment of China, we are not accepted…Even when I meet someone like me in the real world, I won’t ‘come out.’ It’s too risky…” said an anonymous Blued user on Zhihu (Anonymous). Another user who marked himself as a student from southern China on Zhihu said he was often approached by middle-aged men who are already married to women in real life but using Blued as a hook-up app (Xiaoluluanzhuang). Because users can easily construct a persona that may or may not be the same as the persona they take on in real life, Blued enables closeted gay men to be openly gay online.

This kind of double life—ranging from only revealing one’s homosexuality to marrying a woman in real life and being gay online—is comparable to the life of gay men in New York City before WWII when the society was aggressively homophobic. George Chauncey, a professor of history at Columbia University, wrote about gay men in New York during that time in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890– 1940. Chauncey observed that to cope with the hostile environment, gay men in New York developed their system of subcultural codes, including dress code, style of speech, etc., that helped them to recognize one another but remain unintelligible to others (Chauncey 4). These codes enabled them to pass as heterosexual, straight men. Passing is a kind of cultural performance in which individuals present themselves as persons they are not. It enables people to “escape the subordination and oppression accompanying one identity and accessing the privileges and status of the other” (Ginsberg 3).

Borrowing this terminology, we can see that many gay men in China today

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are also passing. Today, Chinese society is less hostile towards gay men than American society back then, where being gay in public meant the risk of violence and arrest (Chauncey 5). However, Chinese gay men still feel pressured by societal norms to pass as heterosexuals to avoid the rejection and discrimination that are likely to arise from being openly gay. Apps like Blued are like the New Yorkers’ codes, enabling gay men in China to seek out each other online while passing as heterosexuals in real life.

Passing seems to be a reasonable strategy for Chinese gay men to cope with the homophobic society. However, the double life that Blued facilitates invalidates the legitimacy and seriousness of gay relationships and practices, thereby leading its users to consider their passing identity as more meaningful and real than their actual identity. This can be illustrated through a closer look at Blued’s user interface. There is a noticeable difference between Blued’s interface and that of other dating apps such as Tinder. For example, on Tinder, to connect with someone, a user first has to swipe right on the profile of the person he or she is interested in, and then wait to see if that other person is also interested to get matched. This already fast-paced dating model is made even more fast-paced on Blued. Blued does not have the swiping feature. Instead, upon opening the app, the user sees something similar to a menu—a grid of nearby users’ profile pictures. All the user has to do is click on the person he is interested in and send him a message directly. To make things even simpler and faster, the personal information one can put in only includes age, height, weight, race, body type, location, the language(s) he speaks, and what he is looking for (e.g., friends, relationships, or hook-ups). There is nothing like hobbies or a few lines to describe oneself. Everything is so straightforward that the app seems only to be facilitating the meeting of sexual needs, instead of actual meaningful relationships.

This instant hook-up culture promoted by Blued’s user interface corresponds to what one of the interviewees noted in Tiantian Zheng’s research: “in China, being gay is only a ‘youthful fling’ that is never meant to last. When people got older, they would have to stop their gay life and lead a normal life—a straight life” ( 142). Blued reinforces this conception that being gay

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and connecting with other gay men can only be for temporary fulfillment of desires instead of for long-term relationships. Thereby, gay men who use Blued to lead a double life are prompted to see that their sexuality is something obscene that needs to be hidden away from the public persona.

Even in their secret gay life on Blued, their gay relationships are ‘youthful flings’ that are by no means normal like the heterosexual relationships they may have in real life. Therefore, the app’s user interface and culture demonstrate that Blued conforms to and even reproduces the existing heteronormative norm in China, instead of challenging it.

Furthermore, Blued reinforces the legitimacy of heteronormativity in China by preventing the construction of self as a gay person. American philosopher Judith Butler argues that “that which it excludes in order to make that determination remains constitutive of the determination itself” (Butler 309).

In the context of passing and double life, Butler’s words can be interpreted as saying that by claiming one identity, a person also denies the other one.

More specifically, when passing as heterosexual, a person denies the realness of his identity as a gay man. Butler’s idea illustrates that by facilitating passing and a double life, Blued reifies a person’s heterosexual persona and stifles the construction of the person’s true gay identity. The question of realness also arises from Geng Le’s life story. Till today, he is known by his pseudonym, Geng Le. He still resorts to the put-up persona to appear in public. Even though it has been many years since he came out of the closet, he still associates his fake name, Geng Le, with his real identity as a gay man.

Behind his seemingly empowering and revolutionary public image, he is still questioning the legitimacy of his homosexuality and conforming to the established system of heteronormativity by hiding his real identity behind his fake name.

“Blued, or Be Lewd” seems like a fitting hidden slogan for Blued. In the homophobic and toxically heteronormative Chinese society, this app suggests that gay men have only two choices—either being openly gay and thereby considered “lewd” in the real world or passing as a straight man and only revealing their identity on discrete and anonymous social media platforms like Blued. It was due to stigma and social pressure that

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the founder of this app resorted to a pseudonym and a secluded online platform. Similarly, it is the lack of tolerance and support for the Chinese gay community that gives rise to the popularity of Blued. On top of that, Blued itself promotes an instant hook-up culture that reinforces the notion that gay relationships are not legitimate and cannot be normalized like heterosexual relationships. The lack of realness in the secluded world of Blued reproduces heteronormativity and rejects Chinese gay men by prompting them to accept their passing heterosexual identity as a more real and valid identity.

As much as one may hope that such an unprecedented platform in China may lead the society closer towards acceptance and tolerance, it is regrettably true that this app is just another “bathroom stall” where Chinese gay men have to hide and avoid being seen as lewd. The situation in China calls for actions that will bring about true changes in the way the Chinese gay community perceives itself and is perceived by the rest of the society.

“Blued, or Be Lewd” should not be the future of gay men in China.

W OR KS C I TE D

Anonymous. Post. Zhihu, 02 Sep. 2019, https://www.zhihu.com/ question/343919440/answer/811545134.

Bhandari, Bibek. “Conversion Therapy Still Promoted in China, Investigation Finds.” Sixth Tone, 19 Apr. 2019, https://www.sixthtone.com/ news/1003870/conversiontherapy-still-promoted-in-china,-investigationfinds.

Bram, Barclay. “China’s ‘Tongqi’: The Millions of Straight Women Married to Closeted Gay Men.” Vice, 14 Dec. 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/ article/43gdpp/chinas-tongqi-the-millions-of-straight-women-married-tocloseted-gay-men.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Subordination.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Aabelove, Henry, and Barale, Michele Aina, and Halperin, David M. New York, Routledge, 1991.

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“Canada Population (LIVE).” Worldometers, https://www.worldometers.info/ world-population/canada-population/.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York, Basic Books, 1994, https://hdl.handle. net/2027/heb.00516. Accessed 28 Nov, 2019.

Ginsberg, Elaine K. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Duke University Press, 1996. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1167624.

Gudelunas, D. “There’s an app for that: The uses and gratifications of online social networks for gay men.” Sexuality & Culture: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, 2012, pp.347–365. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119012-9127-4.

Hernández, Javier C. “Building a Community, and an Empire, With a Gay Dating App in China.” The New York Times, 16 Dec. 2016, https://www.nytimes. com/2016/12/16/world/asia/building-a-community-and-an-empire-witha-gay-dating-app-in-china.html?nytmobile=0.

FEI, GE. “Second-Class Citizen / Homosexuals in Beijing.” China: Adapting the Past, Confronting the Future, edited by Thomas Buoye et al., University of Michigan Press, ANN ARBOR, 2002, pp. 300–309. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/10.3998/mpub.22778.38. Accessed 25 May 2021.

Jing, Meng. “The Ex-Cop behind China’s Largest Grindr-Style Gay Dating App.” South China Morning Post, 3 July 2018, https://www.scmp.com/tech/chinatech/article/2150373/meet-gay-ex-cop-behind-chinas-largest-grindrstyle-gay-dating-app J.P. “Chinese Attitudes towards Gay Rights.” The Economist Newspaper, 5 June 2017, https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/06/05/ chinese-attitudes-towards-gay-rights.

Mountford, Tom. “The Legal Status and Position of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the People’s Republic of China.” Out Right Action International, 07 Jan. 2016.

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Reuters. “Chinese Dating App Blued Helps Gays Fight the Blues, and AIDS.” India Today, 8 Jan. 2015, https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/ story/chinese-dating-app-blued-helps-gays-fight-the-blues-andaids-234705-2015-01-08.

“Taboo-busting gay app a market success.” CGTN, 10 Sep. 2016 https://news. cgtn.com/news/3d4d7a4d354d7a6333566d54/index.html United Nations Development Programme. “Being LGBTI in China – A National Survey on Social Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression.” 2016.

Wu, Jing. “From ‘Long Yang’ and ‘Dui Shi’ to Tongzhi: Homosexuality in China.”

Journal of Gay & Lesbian Psychotherapy, vol.7, no.1-2, 2003, pp. 117-143.

Xiaoluluanzhuang. Post. Zhihu, 28 Nov. 2019, https://www.zhihu.com/ question/311309811/answer/893822571.

Zheng, Tiantian. Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/10.5749/j.ctt173zm6h.

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Making my way through the dusky alleys of Old Dubai amidst the chatter and clatter of the souk, I found myself stationed in front of a bewitching sight: rows of cylindrical containers stood before me, each one positioned on a higher pedestal than the other, filled with a variety of herbs and spices.

The November sun rays fell gracefully on the barrels, illuminating their bright-coloured contents while the vendors indulged in conversations with the tourists – some narrating the history of trade, others bargaining to their benefit. Scents emanating from the rack tingled my nose and unlocked memories of the lively spice bazaars in Lahore, reminding me of their typical hustle and bustle. In the background, however, the barely-visible flag of the UAE added a sense of placement and profoundness in the situation. Taking in the warmth and nostalgia radiating from the view, I lifted my camera and clicked on the shutter.

“Flavours of the Souk” – Fizza Fatima Rana

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Notable Submissions of 2019-2020 Abdulla Saeed AlHemeiri

The Black Destrier

Acklinda Liu

A desire to become cyborgs—Brain Computer Interface and unnatural selection

Aiganym Khamitkhanova

Human Rights Education in Postmodernism: Overcoming Cheap Sentimentality

Al Reem Al Neaimi

From the Neighborhood’s Chaiwala to Global Fast Food Chains: Abu Dhabi’s “Street Food” Story

Amina Kobenova

Objectified - But Not Alone

Amna Khalid AlMehairi

The Uniqueness of the Sense of Smell

Ana Maria Radu

Searching for the ‘we’ in Transitional Justice

Anna Oura

Psychological Coercion in Modern Slavery

Anne-Maria Salmela

Love in the Big Brother Bubble

Armaan Agrawal

Lokaksema, his Translations and the Events Surrounding Them

Ayesha Ahmed

Female Genocidaires: Perpetrators or Victims?

Beniamin Strzelecki

Bridging the conservative values and progressive art in Sharjah Art Museum

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Bevan Chu

A Tale of Two Places

Danial Tajwer

The Invisible Hand: On the Imperceptibility of Scent and its Consequences

Eleanor Holtzapple

Reconciliation Limiting Recognition and Justice

Emília Vieira Branco

The Moral Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Justifying War Against the American Indians

Emma Anderson

Examining Eco-Anxiety: Violence Against the Planet, Violence Against the Mind

Farah Elmowafy

How Early European Archeologists Made Ancient Egypt Racist

Fiona J. Lin

The Rise of Hallyu: Translation in the Age of Modern Media

Githmi Rabel

The Destructive Nature of ‘Sinhalese- Buddhist’ Nationalism

Githmi Rabel

War and its power to create ‘outsiders’

Habiba Eldababy

Self-immolation as Protest Suicide: A Form of Sacrifice?

Hayoung Song

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Roger Ballen: A Mate or a Manipulator?

Itgel Munkhjargal

Afghanistan through a Photojournalist’s Lens

Itgel Munkhjargal

Mass Media and its Role on Public Image

Joanna Jagodzinska

Why can’t we just all be independent?

Joonha Yu

Incremental Cultural Transition

Joseph Hong

Bedouin Women: More Than Just Desert Heroines

Karim Boudlal

Dissident self-harm: when slow violence bursts on the scene

Klara-Josefin Ehrnst

The Migration of Language

Kojo Vandyck

Once Upon a Time in Nigeria

Liam Richards

The Spirituality of Scent

Maha Mohamed

Why We Keep Missing the Mark with Transitional Justice: The Restoration of Consensus Iuris

Mansour Tahirou Abdoulaye

Understanding race and racism through the grey zone

Mbiko Mayaka

Food: Yet Another Platform for Discrimination, or a Platform to be Unapologetically African?

NOTABLE SUBMISSIONS 2019-2020

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Michael Xu

More Than Black-Or-White: Beyond the Dualist Perspective

Milena Baghdasaryan

The Effectiveness of the Translation of Information Technology Terms into Armenian

Nouf Najed

Therapeutic Scents of Astrology

Patrick Dowd

The Treaty of Waitangi: A Story of New Zealand’s Identity

Patrick Dowd

Awakening Trauma through Waltz with Bashir

Pengyu Wang

Challenging Postwar Amnesia in Lebanon: Missing Memories

Polina Pinskikh

All the Demons: Fairytales, Film, and Feminism

Prince Larbi Ampofo

The beautiful, ugly, trivial and important

Rita Fahmy

West Africa’s Slave Coast: A Profile on The Similarity of Local Slavery and European Trading in the 18th Century

Sejin Park

The Coronavirus Election

Shamma Al Khoori

Smell, Touch & Taste, Tangled In The Web Of Memory

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Shreya Goel

“Where are you from?” A Dilemma faced

by Indian Migrants in the UAE

Smarika Sharma

Merits of the Inexpressibility of Pain

Soja Rajakaruna

Fifteenth of August - Commemoration or Solemn Reminder?

Sojin (Gloria) Noh

Perfume: A Social Marker of Communication

Srinika Rajanikanth

Memory and the Self: How much of our identity is our own?

Thais Alvarenga

Authentic Little Women

Vee Nis Ling

Is the “Feminist Muslim Woman” A Myth?

Victoria Marcano

The Rhetoric of Human Nature

Yasmine Abdelhamid

Stories and Survival

Zain Raef

The Syrian Civil War: Who Defines Us?

Zineb Louali

Wili Wili Hashouma

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This picture depicts Abra Water Taxis, Dubai’s most traditional mode of transport. Deviating from it is the background of Dubai’s skyline, a pictureperfect representation of a modern city. The contrast between the old and the new highlights Dubai beyond its quintessential modernity and sheds light on its infinite complexities. Finally, the idea behind the sunset was the end giving way to a new beginning.

“Connecting the old Dubai to the new” by Sashank Silwal

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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. Exit 11 highlights the best of our students’ essays--their complexity, their impossibility. As a journal we keep in the Writing Center, Exit 11 serves as a great teaching tool, as a way of showing students that what they are trying to accomplish is indeed possible.”

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 be able to publish this volume regardless of the unprecedented challenges we faced during this pandemic.

Our writers, editors and administrators stayed committed to this project. The online 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

C O V E R P H O T O : F I Z Z A FAT I M A R A N A 190

EXIT 11