(late) Capitalists: The puppet masters

I'm still struggling with a concise thesis for Khan's Scottsboro, Alabama prints but I am starting to realize some key themes and motives within the prints that I can kind of throw out there in this posting. There are two linoleum cuts that really stand out in terms of the thesis I'm fleshing out. The first one on page 82/83 and the second on page 83/83, quote "The bosses to stop the growing unity of white and black workers..""The propaganda of race hate was prepared." The first image is that of the bosses sitting around a table with a paper labeled "Niggers are born rapists" and the second image is the Scottsboro boys juxtaposed below a depiction of King Kong labeled "fiends" and "guilty rape."
A lot can be interpreted from these two images in terms of the emotions that are meant to be evoked or the message Khan was trying to send; however, in terms of an arguable thesis I would say that Khan uses these two particular images, and others throughout the text, to make the following statement. The downfall of a America's misconstrued capitalist system can only be brought about through the solidarity of the wage-laboring class, this includes whites, blacks, immigrants and women. Race hate within the working class is the means in which the boss or the capitalist both allots "limited power" to those lesser than himself (white patrol groups i.e. KKK and/or the police) and how he restricts the upward unifying mobility of the black (and white) working class.

Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart: A Proletariat Novel of Death and Rebirth Through Revolution

"'The old world is dying, but a new world is being born. It generates inspiration from the chaos that beats upon us all. The false grandeur and security, the unfulfilled promises and illusory power, the number of the dead and those about to die, will charge the forces of our courage and determination. The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living....'"(189)

Throughout Carlos Bulosan's novel America is the the Heart there is an underlying theme of death and rebirth through the suggestion of revolution. In this passage, Carlos or Allos is recounting the words of his brother Macario to which Marcario states that: "the old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living." The specific words of death and rebirth are fascinating choices because this suggests that there must be some form of action that causes this death in order for rebirth. Macario's definition of "the old world" is America defined by the first generation Filipino immigrants and he implies that the new world are the sons of first generations who have witnessed the injustices and poverty brought upon their fathers. The diction of the words "false grandeur", "false security", "unfulfilled promises" and "illusory power" alludes to the disappointments and depression caused by the cyclical cycle of labor and what it means to be a Filipino in America.


My critical questions are: Is there another definition of "death" besides the literal dictionary definition? How does revolution result from death and is it in fact the cause of rebirth? What does it mean to be a Filipino immigrant in America?

Splintered Family Trees: Broken Genealogies and Inheritance of Loss in Octavia Butler's Kindred

Passage: 
                "'Doctor-n-gger,' she said with contempt. 'Think you know so much. Reading-n-gger. White-n-gger! Why didn't you know enough to let me die?'
                I said nothing. She was getting angrier and angrier, shouting at me. I turned away from her sadly, telling myself it was better, safer for her to vent her feelings on me than on anyone else.
               Along with her shouting now, I could hear the thin faint cries of a baby" (Butler 160).

Critical Questions: 
          What is the relevance of Alice's string of slurs at Dana and her passivity in response? What is the importance of her constant positioning of Dana as a "race-traitor"? What is the importance of their familial kinship vs. their racial kinship as unfree bodies? How does the juxtaposition of the birth of Carrie and Nigel's baby function in this passage? How does sound/aggressive/liveliness work against silence/passivity/death (even at a soul level) in this text?

Analysis:
        There are a number of connections of kinship explored in Octavia Butler's Kindred, and with the temporal framing of time travel families and relationships exist outside the boundaries of physics. This gives Dana the pain and responsibility to create her line, and as a result to betray her Black ancestors even by saving their lives. This is illustrated in the passage when Alice says "[w]hy didn't you know enough to let me die?" This is an important contradiction that Dana cannot rectify in the action of the novel, as she actually literally knows enough to save her. Her knowledge of her own family history forces her hand in multiple situations including this one, and in the moment she is punished emotionally in a sense, by her great-great grandmother.
     The juxtaposition of this multi-generational trauma is highlighted in the moment through the final line of the chapter notifying the audience of the birth of Carrie and Nigel's child. It explores the loss and disinheritance passed down through family in the novel, physically and mentally. The cries of a newborn in concert with Dana's painful silence and Alice's angry shouts illustrate the ways that trauma lives on and continues in every person under the oppression of histories of slavery. This is shown again when we learn that Nigel and Carrie's children have most assuredly been sold at the end of the novel with Rufus'. There is no true way to rectify the wrongs of slavery, and except for the physical moments that Dana has in the time jump, no true record. Instead, there is a record through silences in families, a lack of written truth, and the holes in genealogies.
   My paper will focus on these moments in Kindred, to explore how a history of loss is illustrated through the physical marks left on Dana's body, and the other slaves and mixed race children of rape and power. The contrast between the written record, and the physical and non-physical trauma of the action of the novel illustrates the ways that loss continues into the present for Dana, and does not end with a paper trail, but with wounds.
   

America Is In the Heart -- Thoughts

"I had not seen this sort of brutality in the Phillipines, but my first contact with it in America made me brave. My bravery was still nameless and wanting to express itself. I was not shocked when I saw that my countrymen had become ruthless towards one another, and this sudden impact of cruelty made me insensate to pain and kindness, so that it took me a long time to wholly trust other men [….] I became afraid I would never feel like a human being again. Yet no matter what bestiality encompassed my life I felt sure that somewhere, sometime, I would break free. This faith kept me from completely succumbing to the degradation into which many of my countrymen had fallen. It finally paved my way out of our small, harsh life, painfully but cleanly, into a world of strange intellectual adventures and self-fulfillment." (109)

There are many references throughout the novel that describe scenes amongst the Filipino immigrants as bestial and violent. They are reduced to non-human status time and time again. During the boat scene as Allos travels to America the separation and tiering of physical space on the boat that not only falls in line with class-structure, but dictates not just space on the boat, but the starkly varying conditions of those spaces. The Filipino men are driven down and locked up away from sunlight, deprived of food, medicine and other basic necessities, even called beasts by the nameless white-girl who is suntanning.

"It was now the year of great hatred: The lives of Filipinos were cheaper than those of dogs," (143). There is a recurring theme not just in Bulosan's narrative, but in the narrative of slavery and free-labor this startling lack of humanity towards laborers and minorities.

In the first passage above, despite the brutality, violence and darkness and tone of this excerpt, Bulosan writes of an unwavering belief in hope and change that is rooted to education, "intellectual adventures and self-fulfillment."

Just like his desire to become a doctor when his sister Irena dies, and then a writer to bring back the voiceless, nameless people he has loved, Bulosan's words become his escape, when flight and travel does not work. No matter where he moves to in America this violence proceeds him. Fittingly, the title, America is in the heart is the guiding force for Bulosan. This spirit rooted in the performative, healing power of words and intellectual fulfillment, help him evade violence and steer him towards other horizons beyond the whore-houses and gambling sights so many of his fellow countrymen disappeared in.

A Brief Look Into the Mind of a Cog.

Text: Jack London’s, “The Chinago” (1909)

Besides, it might not be a mistake. He did not know what went on in the minds of his superiors. They knew their business best. What was he to do their thinking for them? Once, in the long ago, he had attempted to think for them, and the sergeant had said: “Cruchot, you are a fool! The quicker you know that; the better you will get on. You are not to think; you are to obey and leave thinking to your betters.” He smarted under the recollection. (London 238)

Critical Questions:
How do the few in power maintain control of the masses? How far up the chain of power is oppression present? What are the motivations of the white “overseers” in the plantation systems of pre and post slavery?  How is white labor divided against non white labor to keep it in place?

Analysis:
For my paper I'm interested in examining the modes of power the capitalist exercises down the hierarchy of command. How is each cog formed and kept in its place. Whiteness is just as constructed as blackness. In this passage London attempts to portray the brief internal struggle and reflection of a white police officer. While the majority of the piece is following the thoughts of Ah Cho we have a brief insight into one of the minds of the “white devils” he has to deal with in the story. While at first glance narrations of white supremacy such as this seem to simply frame the white against non-white but it goes deeper than that. “You are not to think; you are a to obey…” is the pivotal line in portraying the near mechanical nature of enforcement of ideals down the line of command.
Since the capitalist system requires control over as many bodies as possible by as few people as possible to maximize profit, the capitalist must engineer social tools to maintain their control. What becomes necessary is arms of influenced to be formed to maintain the best interest of the capitalist agenda. By segmenting the population and reorganizing it against itself it becomes easier to manipulate. For the white capitalist individual to impose his will upon the large labor force he can segment smaller groups of people, slightly above each other to force those segments apart from each other and in some respects attach their success to their compliance in maintaining the status quo. The white officer is not dragging Ah Cho to his death out of an act of pleasure or desire to kill a “coolie” but more out of a fear of thinking outside of the realm he has been permitted to think in. While hardly considered a slave by any comparable physical standards the officer is conditioned to believe a certain way and forced to operate within his confines for the safety of his own well being. His own free will is stripped from him and he becomes a kind of slave to the system. Self preservation is undoubtedly among the highest of natural desires. Our own survival relies on at least some form of selfishness. Using this to their advantage the capitalist can manipulate all of his subjects into following along with anything so long as it becomes the personal self interest of the right people to keep going, There is no profit to be gained by Cruchot by delivering Ah Cho to his death, only the threat of his own life or career for speaking or acting in the benefit of Ah Cho to his superiors. Ah Cho is artificially reframed against Cruchot simply because of the structure of the system set up by the capitalist elite.

China Men and the Deception of Free Labor

Excerpt from China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston: "The women…bent his toes so far backward that his arched foot cracked…They gathered his toes, toes over and under one another like a knot of ginger root. Tang Ao wept with pain. As they wound the bandages tighter and tighter around his feet, the women sang foot-binding songs to distract him….Every night they unbound his feet, but his veins had shrunk, and the blood pumping through them hurt so much, he begged to have his feet re-wrapped tight" (4).

Critical Questions: Whom do the women represent? What is the significance of a mythical fable?

Analysis: In my paper, I want to explore Kingston's use of myth and how it serves to represent the fantasy of life as a free laborer. A parallel seems to exist between the fables Kingston tells and the deception of the capitalist promise of the "American Dream," particularly for Chinese laborers. In this specific passage, I was intrigued by the metaphor of the "Land of Women" and what is says about the labor experience. Here, the women are representative of American capitalists. The pain that Tang Ao experiences symbolizes the physical hardship of Chinese laborers, and the gradual disintegration of physical and mental well-being during the labor process. It's interesting that the "women" give off the impression that they are helping Tang Ao prepare for his future, when in reality they are manipulating and changing his physical form. The last sentence in which he begs to have his feet re-wrapped encompasses the cyclical process of labor, and how it traps the individual into that process. In whole, I aim to explore the notion of the "free laborer" as deceiving, which is mirrored in Kingston's writing style.

The Fear of the Unknown

Text: Kindred, by Octavia Butler.

"I was reading to him. I had been reading to him regularly since his father caught me that first time. Tom Weylin didn't want me reading on my own, but he ordered me to read to his son. Once he had told Rufus in my presence, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself! A nigger can read better than you!'
"She can read better than you too," Rufus had answered. His father had stared at him coldly, then ordered me out of the room. For a second I was afraid for Rufus, but Tom Weylin left the room with me. "Don't go to him again until I say you can," he told me. (Butler 102)

Critical Questions: How does Dana's educated and liberal background affect her relationships with the people she have encountered in the days of slavery in the 1800's?

Analysis: The fact that Dana had the ability to read and write, intimidates Weylin. Dana proved to be quite different in the eyes of the whites, due to being 20th century oriented where the norm is that blacks are seen as an equal. To be literate is a luxury even to whites during that time period, and for a black woman who is supposed to be a slave, knowing how to read, ultimately gives herself a type of unspeakable power. Tom Weylin beats his slaves for minor insubordination and when crossed he can be impudent and violent.  He suspects that there is not much that he knows about the world, however he deeply fears the unknown. Thus, after questioning Dana's "odd" behaviour, and how Rufus essentially embarrassed him, he realised that his son was speaking the awful truth and that sparked the violent flame inside him and further encouraged him to take advantage of the status of being "white",  as his only defense mechanisms to protect his authority.

The Slavery Kaleidoscope: Blurring Family and Profit

Excerpt from Octavia Butler's Kindred:

      I looked over at the boy who would be Hagar's father. There was nothing in him that

      reminded me of any of my relatives. Looking at him confused me. But he had to be

      the one. There had to be some kind of reason for the link he and I seemed to have. 

      Not that I really thought a blood relationship could explain the way I had twice been

     drawn to him. It wouldn't. But then, neither would anything else. What we had was

     something new, something that didn't even have a name (29). 

Critical Questions: 

1. If Rufus is her relative, why is she unable to identify him?

2. What kind of lines are blurred when the whites and blacks are intermixed into "familial" ties? 

3. How is it possible to differentiate between family and property when a person's status encompasses both spaces? 

     In the text, "family" has an ambiguous definition. There are certain notions of what a family should be, but the characters in Kindred do not encompass this definition: the lines are not clearly drawn. Butler derives two definitions of family: they differ from the master to the slave.  

    This is most obvious through the character Tom. While he shouldn't beat his white son, he does. He punishes Rufus in an animalistic way that is similar to the manner in which he punishes his slaves. At the same time, after Tom's death, Rufus inherits all of the "property" including the slaves. By this definition, family acts as a place-holder for the maintenance of power by the master's definition. In retrospect, because the slaves cannot foster the typical familial relations and they have no property to claim, the slaves identify their family with who they live and work with. They act as a community when they teach each other to read, introduce new skill sets ( Sarah teaching Dana to cook/Dana teaching Nigel to read), etc despite whether or not there is a blood relation. However, as the excerpt above reveals, the division between the master and slave is blurred once there is a master and slave relation.

     Dana is unable to name what Rufus is to her in the excerpt above. He "confuses" her, and therefore she isn't able to identify him as anything specifically. Her definition doesn't match up to what Rufus is, yet she feels inclined to save him and help him throughout the book. She refers to him as a "link" in the above quote recognizing that he is more than just another person; but also not necessarily "family". Her interrogative nature in the quote demonstrates the true confusion that comes with slavery when profit and family become inter-twined. As Dana travels back and forth between times she realizes "...slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships" (229).  Rufus expresses confusion in the book as well. He treats Dana differently than he treats the other slaves while also treating her as if she is his "property" when he punishes her and forces her to work in the fields.

 He respects her to a degree and allows her to have certain privileges that other slaves are denied, he confides in her. But the fact remains that family and profit cannot exist together. This is apparent  Rufus attempts to kill Dana, and when Dana later kills Rufus. 

Duck Season, Rabbit Season, Nigger Season, Monkey Season

For my third blog post, I would like to tackle the overlapping history of racism that affected Blacks and Filipinos.

In 1899, Black soldiers were sent to the Philippines in the Philippine-American war. Throughout this war, the same kind of violence toward Filipinos overseas was happening back in the U.S.: brutality was not limited between oceans and both people suffered. The discourse between Blacks and Filipino's were similar as both were considered savages and needed to be tamed for their own good. The "White Man's Burden" romanticized the duty of whites to civilize these "children" with their "wisdom." One must note that the idea of Filipino savagery and "browness" parallels that of "blackness" back in the U.S. Cartoon depictions share the same characteristics of dark, big-lipped, pickanninies with white's attempting to educate the masses. The dehumanization of Filipino's are also seen many years later in Bulosan's America is in the Heart where his fellow friends and family are constantly referred to as "little brown monkeys." Native Filipino's during the war were seen as targets and only the one's younger than 10 were spared. One soldier took pride and joy saying that killing Filipinos "beats rabbit hunting." One can say that for an American soldier, every day was monkey season.



While this war was happening in the Philippines, white supremacy was dominating the south in the U.S.  While the war was taking place, America recently adopted the idea "separate but equal" due to a landmark ruling Plessy vs. Ferguson. Post-slavery became a never ending disenfranchisement of blacks and a cycle that continues for many years to come. Many blacks were hunted down in "nigger hunts." A powerful form of depicted violence came in the form of lynching. This became a spectacle for letting Black's know that they should stay in their place or else this is what happens. Mutilations, burning of bodies, and selling the body parts became a twisted commodity as spectators were the consumers of this gruesome display of power. Black citizens were offered a "chance" to assimilate themselves by enlisting in the war. Herissa S. Balce quotes a Filipino child wondering "why does the American Negro come from America to fight us when we are much friend to him, and me all the same as you. Why don't you fight those people in America that burn Negroes, that made a beast of you, that took the child from its mother's side and sold it? This connection and understanding of power shares is resolve because Blacks in war end up becoming an instrument in a destruction of one race while also letting their own race be tortured back at home. There were many cases of the all-Black regiments defecting and joining the fight against the U.S.

It's truly hard to imagine the different aspects of racism during the late 1890's and early 20th century. Both Blacks and Filipinos share a unique history of receiving brutality from the U.S. around the same time period. The idea of "hunts" of Blacks and Filipinos demonstrate that murder was a game that the U.S. was best at.


Sources:
http://nerissabalce.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/2006-balce-lynching-empire.pdf
and
Abe Ignacio et al., “The Filipino as a Racialized Other” and “Killing ‘Niggers’ and Rabbits” (2004), 80-95 and 96-113

Kindred and the Power of Observation

“The time, the year, was right, but the house just wasn’t familiar enough. I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time, Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse … Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.” (Butler 191)

The focus of my paper is the way in which Butler uses the character of Dana as a medium through which the reader is able to garner a deeper understanding of the intricacies of slavery in the context of a neoslave narrative. Dana serves as a modern day lens into the past and the reader is gaining knowledge through a secondary degree of exposure to the action. There is a repetitive focus in the text on the language of observation on behalf on Dana, particularly on her sensory abilities. In the passage above, Dana is reflecting on the seeming reality of the past in comparison to the seeming falseness of the present moment. She makes note of how the “smells and tastes were stronger” and how she felt more pain. These sensory details take centerstage within this moment of reflection. It is through her experience of the past that she is gaining a better understanding about her history, her life, and herself. However, the power of her observational abilities do not end there. Through her perceptions, Dana has a distinct impact on those characters in the past, particularly Rufus. In this way, she is a figuration of what Georg Simmel calls the “stranger” insomuch as she “imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself”. Through her relationship with the past, Dana is both teaching and learning, shaping her identity and those of her ancestors. 

Flight in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart

Critical Questions: How are multiple Americas and worlds explicated in America Is in the Heart? How does flight tie into the production of the narrator's political consciousness? What role does flight serve in the text?

For my paper, I am interested in pursuing the meaning and material effects of flight in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. Flight comes up time and time again throughout the text, always in moments when the narrator Carlos is threatened. When he first arrives in the United States, Carlos feels that it is “like coming home after a long voyage” even though he “ha[s] no home” there (Bulosan 99). However, this positive hope quickly dissipates when he and his friends find themselves broke and unable to pay rent, and are sold into indentured labor at a fish cannery by their landlord (Bulosan 100-101). Carlos learns that his “life in America” will come to be “a long flight that carrie[s] [him]” and allows him no respite from precarity and poverty (Bulosan 101). He continues to run from situations that turn violent and risky, such as the theft of Filipino workers’ wages by a crew leader at an apple-picking job (Bulosan 107-109). These are the material manifestations of Carlos’ flights, and they are a necessary outgrowth of the precarious economic situation Filipinos are placed in by their status as immigrants, noncitizens, and people of color.

            However, I am even more interested in the function of flight as a concept that emerges through both the material and the internal psychic aspects of these experiences. After Carlos is released from his servitude in the fish cannery, he returns to Seattle. Once there, he says:

           

I was already in America, and I felt good and safe. I did not understand why. The gamblers, prostitutes, and Chinese opium smokers did not excite me, but they aroused in me a feeling of flight. I knew that I must run away from them, but it was not that I was afraid of contamination. I wanted to see other aspects of American life, for surely these destitute and vicious people were merely a small part of it. Where would I begin this pilgrimage, this search for a door into America? (Bulosan 104)

This passage is remarkable because Carlos is thrown into a psychic state of flight between two entirely separate and contradictory notions of America. That “destitute and vicious people” fill him with “a feeling of flight” [my emphasis] confirms that flight functions at the material and affective level. That is, flight is the ambiguous ontological condition that results from the experience of economic dispossession. Carlos’ original belief about America is that the criminal classes, drug users, and others are only an incidental failure of its generally benevolence. This is the means by which he is able to say, “I was already in America, and I felt good and safe.” Yet Carlos seems to sense the limits of this expectation when he feels he “must run away” to “search for a door into America” [my emphasis]. He realizes he is not yet there yet at all, but rather located in its outside. However, Carlos does not fear “contamination” because he still sees himself as separate from those who have been poisoned, or ontologically refigured, by a cruel and undesirable desperation. He believes that they are still a part of America, but that he must also find “a door into” the real America, one in which these figures of flight are absent.

What flight achieves, then, is a materialization of the interaction between “America” and the dispossession of people. Although it remains unapparent to the narrator, flight, as movement and a “feeling” exuded by particular kinds of subjects, is in fact absolutely vital to the constitution of America. As the novel progresses, the proletarian form becomes a complex struggle to arrive at a “good” and “safe” America, which is played out in the constant oscillation between flight and the return to temporarily stable territories. Carlos’ original purity from the “contamination[s]” of desperation does not last long, and he will find himself, like his fellow Filipinos, so “ruthless” that he fears he will “never feel like a human being again” (Bulosan 109). But that he manages to escape the full extent of ontological violence seen in his peers is contingent, very specifically, on his taking advantage of the open possibilities that emerge when one is in flight.  

The leniency of oral tradition

[Page 150 of Chinamen. In the chapter, "The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains". ] "But this time, there was no railroad to sell [Ah Goong's strength to. He lived in a basement that was rumored to connect with tunnels beneath Chinatown. In an underground arsenal, he held a pistol and said, "I feel the death in it." "The holes for the bullets were like chambers in a beehive or wasp nest," he said. He was inside the earth when the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire began. Thunder rumbled from the ground. Some say he died falling into the cracking earth. It was a miraculous earthquake and fire. The Hall of Records burned completely. Citizenship Papers burned, Certificates of Return, Birth Certificates, Residency Certificates, passenger lists, Marriage Certificates- every paper a China Man wanted for citizenship and legality burned in that fire. An authentic citizen, then, had no more papers than an alien. Any paper a China Man could not produce had been "burned up in the Fire of 1906". Every China Man was reborn out of that fire a citizen. Some say the family went into debt to send for Ah Goong, who was not making money; he was a homeless wanderer, a shiftless, dirty, jobless man with matted hair, ragged clothes and fleas all over his body. He ate out of garbage cans. He was a louse eaten by life. A fleaman It cost two thousand dollars to bring him back to China, his oldest sons signing promissory notes for one thousand... Maybe he hadn't died in San Francisco, it was just his papers that burned; it was just that his existence was outlawed by the Chinese Exclusion Acts. The family called him a fleaman. They did not understand his accomplishments as an American ancestor, a holding, homing ancestor of this place. He'd gotten the legal or illegal papers burned in the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire; he appeared in America in time to be a citizen and to father citizens. He had also been seen carrying a child out of the fire, a child of his own in spite of the laws against marrying. He had built a railroad out of sweat, why not have an American child out of longing?" To gain entry into the United States after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, one had to go through humongous amounts of intentional legal red tape to gain official, legal entry into the United States. Their immigration "papers" served as a way to recognize their official residency status in America. These papers were official and stored in the Hall of Records. The written document inflexibly and unequivocally confirmed or denied the legal status of any Chinese immigrant. However, in the great Earthquake of 1906, the building, like most of San Francisco, burned to the ground. Oral tradition and expression took over as the main way to prove one's legal residency in the United States, even if the immigrant was not legally recognized as such. By claiming to be someone else whose papers have burned down, or claiming that the papers burned down in the "Great Fire", the Chinese pioneers were able to evade the harsh restrictions of entering America and loopholed their way into the country by using the tenuous connections of the oral agreement (which, in many cases, is not legally binding because of the non-concrete and official wording on the document). Note the ambiguousness of the language that the author uses, "some say he died falling into the... earth", while later in the passage it says, "maybe he hadn't died in San Francisco, it was just his papers that burned". Even then, the stories and ambiguities are clearly identified but not explained as seen in the phrase, "he had been seen" which is a way to distance the event from factuality. Instead of using objective, matter-of-fact language to describe these events, there's a certain flexibility and detachment given to this passage. By attributing the sight and story to someone else and not the author, the story gains credibility and objectivity for the readers while also supplementing mystery and interpretation.

“On Mortality Again” - Maxine Hong Kingston

“The last deed of Maui the Trickster, the Polynesian demigod who played jokes, pushed the sky higher, roped the sun with braided pubic hair from his mother, pulled the land up out of the ocean, and brought fire to earth, was to seek immortality for men and women by stealing it from Hina of the Night. He instructed the people, the beasts, the birds, and the elements to be silent. Hunters walked through forests and fishermen waited in this same silence. In silence the snarer caught birds alive, plucked the few red feathers, and released them; the seer read the clouds, heard spirits and did not disturb them. Children learned and worked silently. There was a chant that could hardly be discerned from silence. Maui dived into the ocean, where he found great Hina asleep. Through her vagina like a door, he entered her body. He took her heart in his arms. He had started tunneling out feet first when a bird, at the sight of his legs wiggling out of the vagina, laughed. Hina awoke and shut herself, and Maui died” (Kingston 122).

Critical questions: How does myth, be it Chinese or American or something else entirely, function in Kingston’s China Men? Does Kingston construct a new mythology of immigrant Chinese men? How does this specific myth of Maui and Hina reflect the subjugation and taming of the land as told in the larger myth of “The Great-Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains”?

In this vignette, it is possible to read the figure of Maui as a colonizing force. With the express purpose of seeking immortality, he instructs and persuades those around him to remain silent while he attempts to steal Hina’s heart (in the least romantic sense possible). The use of “silence” as a literary device calls to mind the complicity in this act by many different parties. Hunters, fishermen, bird snarers, and children all wait for Maui to bring them immortality. It is interesting to note that hunters, fishermen, and bird snarers all share a singular purpose - to maintain their livelihoods through dependence on natural resources, much like the Chinese laborers on the sugar cane plantations.

Maui’s death-by-entrapment-in-a-mythical body signals a kind of deus ex machina solution against the attempt to steal Hina’s life force. The use of the deus ex machina as a literary device is often seen as a cop out, while in myth, the deus ex machina offers a clean-cut ending to an otherwise complex and difficult story. Unfortunately, there is no solution that can be mandated by divinity, and there can be no quick fix or quick stop to the process of colonizing - literally stealing the immortality of the land.

This vignette is fascinating to me because as the closing vignette of “The Great-Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains,” it mirrors the closing vignette of the previous section, “The Ghostmate.” Both tell stories of men being “taken in” by women. In “The Ghostmate,” the travelling man is taken into the beautiful house of a beautiful woman, and stays for too long - when he returns to the “real” world, he discovers that his family is gone, and the beautiful woman’s house is instead a tombstone. In “On Mortality Again,” Maui is consumed by Hina and he dies. I believe that these short vignettes and retold traditional myths, when interspersed with the stories of various fathers and grandfathers, act as a kind of validation of Kingston’s myths.

Fraternity & Fecundity as not so Fraternizing

Excerpt from Carlos Bulosan's (1946) America is in the Heart:

            (24) "The unorganized revolt in the southern province ended in tragedy; the peasants were shot down and those who survived were throw into medieval dungeons. But these conditions could not go on for long without disastrously rocking the very foundation of Philippine life. These sporadic revolts and uprisings unquestionably indicated the malignant cancer that was eating away the nation's future security and negativity influencing the growth of the Philippines from a backward and undeveloped agricultural land into a gigantic industrial country. The wealth that was not already in the power of the large corporations, banks, and the church was beginning to flow into the vaults of new corporations, banks, and other groups. As bloodily as this wealth concentrated into the hands of the new companies, as swiftly did the peasants and workers become poorer.
                    "But some were favored by this sudden upsurge of industry. The sons of the professional classes studied law and went to the provinces, victimizing their own people and enriching themselves at the expense of the nation. In a few years these lawyers were elected to the national government, and once secure in their positions and connections, they also took part in the merciless exploitation of the peasantry and a new class of dispossessed peasants who were working in the factories or on the vast haciendas.
                   "These conditions could not continue forever. In every house and hut in the far-flung barrios where the common man or tao was dehumanized by absentee landlordism, where a peasant had a son who went to school through the sacrifice of his family and who came back with invigorating ideas of social equality and of equal justice before the law, there grew a great conflict that threatened to plunge the Philippines into one of its bloodiest revolutions" (Bulosan 24).

Critical Questions & Reading
1. If natal alienation entails that one can neither inherit from one's immediate ancestors nor bequeath anything to one's descendants, then who is left out of the patrilineal processes of political representation?
2. The doctrine of partus sequitut ventrem- "the offspring follows the condition of the mother"- or- "follows the belly the womb"- applied only to slaves and assured that the one thing that could be legitimately passed down from generation to generation among slaves was their status as slaves. Since the conduit of the chaining together of generations as slaves was the slave woman's body itself, what kinds of cognitive, psychological, and sexually un-gendering  dispossessions are taken for granted?

                  Fraternity is fraternity is fraternity: "it names a relation between brothers, men who share a common father. It refers to a heritage that has excluded at least half of humanity from the social, political and economic rights of brothers (Derrida 2005). What is the relation between fraternity and fecundity? Where is the sister among the brothers? Moreover, there are three basic questions that any economic system must answer to begin operation/ exploitation: (1) What will be produced? (2) By whom will it be produced, (3) For whom will we produce? With this sense, the reproduction of the state of the mother entails processes of asymmetrical laboring that falls at the feet of females who will be dispossessed as laboring units, who will reproductively labor as substitutable and fungible subjectees for the benefit and upward mobility of the brother.

Migrant Worker, Migrant Soul

The U.S. has a longstanding history of creating its own rules (regardless as to whether these rules run in conjunction with the nation’s founding principles, inscribed in the almighty Constitution) in order to reap the benefits of “expansionism”—really just a fluffy term for imperialism (the U.S.—just as it has its own ideological, damsel-in-distress narrative of how it ushered depraved, savage countries under its wing and nourished all the poor with its riches—employs words that obfuscate the true nature of their meaning). Mae M. Ngai, in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, addresses one instance in which the U.S., through a series of cases in the early 20^th century, creates a new legal category that would allow the nation to sweep up the Philippines, but deny Filipinos citizenship:

            Known collectively as the Insular Cases, the Court’s rulings invented a new legal category called ‘unincorporated territory,’ which alleviated the United States from the promise, assumed in the Northwest Ordinance and by historical practice, of eventual statehood and, with it, equal status and full citizenship rights to its inhabitants….The Court made the innovative claim that the territories acquired from Spain belonged to, but were not part of, the United States.

                                                                                                                                    (100)

What does this mean for the Filipino immigrant—the “National”—to be discouraged from crossing over to the metropolitan mainland they’re called to pledge allegiance to?

            Nationals occupied a liminal status that was neither citizen nor alien.

                                                                                                                                    (100)

I’m interested in pinpointing Carlos Bulosan’s character’s internal journey towards self-identification as a Filipino assimilating (not quite “benevolently”) into American culture. He consistently struggles to unify nostalgic remnants of his native land, with the vicious, unforgiving nature of life on the mainland—his conceptual dream-home, constantly re-defined by the impermanency of his experience. What kind of future can the migrant laborer hope to establish? How does American imperialism/capitalism affect the Filipino immigrant, given its lengthy history of using race to condemn others as disposable units (e.g. subsuming Filipino’s and all immigrants of color under the term, “nigger,” and accusing their men of slandering the virtues of white women in a very Jim Crow-esque attempt to strip them of natural rights)? The Filipino immigrant must locate himself amidst the aftermath of a very gritty timeline, whilst cultivating a future, or means of subsistence, in a country that refuses to recognize him as an equal.

Ngai, Mae M. "From Colonial Subject to Undesirable Alien: Filipino Migration in the Invisible Empire." Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004. 100. Print.

Capitalism's Oppression of a Race

     I have decided to write my paper on “Scottsboro Alabama: a story in linoleum cuts,” by Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez. Throughout the story, Khan and Perez imply that capitalism is what encouraged elite whites to exploit and abuse African Americans. The reason why Khan and Perez do so is because they wanted their audience to overthrow the capitalistic regime that was in place and replace it with a communist government. 

     On page 99, Khan and Perez provide an interesting image, which has a member of the Ku Klux Klan replacing the statue of liberty. In the member’s left hand, he is holding a lynching rope and in his right hand, he is holding an electric chair. At the bottom of his feet is a mirror image of a dollar sign. The dollar sign by the member’s feet is implying that capitalistic greed was the root of all atrocious acts against the African American population. The image also emphasizes how capitalism and its cruel acts, utilized to insure maximum profits, have replaced the guarantee of liberty and equality for all. At center of the member’s body is a swastika, which works to compare America’s capitalistic government to a fascist regime. 

     In succeeding pages, the Communist Party and the International Labor Defense are credited with spreading news of the Scottsboro trial and defending the Scottsboro teens. By doings so, Khan and Perez show that a Communist government would not discriminate against its people. Hence, persuading their audience to replace capitalistic ideals with communist principles. 

toni morrison on race as a social construction

in light of ferguson and examining racial identity as a social construction in Hong Kingston's China Men....

this is a short clipping of a longer PBS interview where Toni Morrison discusses how all races—not just the black, the brown, the yellow, but also the white—are constructions that white people have historically held onto.

"And if the racist white person, I don't mean the person who is examining his consciousness and so on, doesn't understand, that he or she is also a race that's also constructed, its also made and also has some kind of serviceability. But when you take it away, if I take your race away and there you are all stung out and all you've got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? Do you still like yourself?"

Commentary Through Comedy (Extra Credit)

http://youtu.be/yBWbc40JLRI

http://youtu.be/V0Lmr1BEI1o


Humor has a way of addressing the things that can't be talked about. This is why stand up comedy has become so popularized. Satire is used to talk about subjects that are "swept under the rug". These "jokes" create social awareness to the audience.

In the first clip, Sierra Katow addresses the social issues that come with being an Asian American. While the crowd laughs at her jokes, her "truth" and deeper issues are addressed. She addresses substitutability within our American society when she claims, "I don't know, they are all yellow to me!" when she herself is Asian. This substitutability is entrenched in our country's history, yet she is making note that it is still current.

In the second clip, Dave Chappelle creates humor regarding social stereotypes regarding blacks. He addresses the few options that African Americans are given. Twenty-seven seconds into the clip Chappelle says:

                          You gotta focus. You gotta stop blaming white people for your
                          problems. You've gotta learn how to: rap or play basketball or
                          something nigga you're trapped. You are trapped. Either do that
                          or sell crack, those are your only options....go out there and be somebody!

The audience burst with laughter, but in this laughter they are acknowledging the truth of this statement. Humor is powerful. It can be used to address topics that politically are not "spoken" of, but are nonetheless true.

Often, people of color, Asian Americans, and women create jokes about issues that pertain to themselves. While people may laugh at the jokes, the goal of the comedian is to bring these issues to people's consciousness. Comedy is a tool used to comment on serious issues. It is unique in that average citizens are able to enjoy it and understand what the comedian is trying to communicate. Comedy isn't reserved to a strictly academic audience, but rather it is aimed at the average citizen. Comedy bridges the gap between the larger issues at hand and the average citizen. It creates awareness by addressing topics that are not spoken of.

Oversized Hands Asserting Authority in Scottsboro

               Throughout the Scottsboro narrative, power hierarchies are depicted through the over-emphasized illustration and large size of hands. For the majority of the narrative the images of large hands are paired with the white oppressors. However, near the end of the book the story, when the Scottboro boys became a cultural icon motivating masses to fight for racial reform, the illustration of large hands shifts in association to the working class characters. 

               This shift in authority starts with this image, in which two large hands are shown in tandem. In frame is a white and clean hand with a large jeweled ring on its finger, contrasted with a textured dark hand strangling it. The darker hand appears to belong to the working class, strangling the elitist hand of the jury, and the white other oppressors within the narrative. The perspective and placement of these two hands within the scene create a resemblance to actual human figures, suggesting a death of this oppression. The images following this one replace the large portrayal of the oppressors hands, with a growth in relative size of hands belonging to the working class. Through this repeating aesthetic and depiction of hands, authority and power hierarchies are reinforced throughout the progression of the story.