Closing thoughts? Share here.

Also, please share revisions of paper 3 here, and any other papers you were pleased with this semester.

Please post your final creative projects and presentations here.

Relevant and beautiful piece in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/30/t-magazine/black-authors.html?fbclid=IwAR2RmFVdL3GxZnUTuwTFp_Pfi2DU9Z4yINEJQpEcxstGpTg2TuxS8mrAp8I

I have been thinking a lot recently about what I want to do with my life and what major I see myself pursuing. I know that we are only freshmen and we have time to experiment and decide; however, most of my trouble has been deciding which of my interests to pursue because many of them differ dramatically, or so I thought. Growing up, and even occasionally at Middlebury, I have felt pressure to choose between either stem or humanities. It upsets me to think that I might not be able to study what I am truly passionate about because a border exists between my interests. As a way to remedy my diverging interests, I am interested in potentially transcending some of those borders as a way to gain a better understanding of both.

A specific roadblock for me thus far has been choosing to study either religion or science, which are notoriously conflicting fields. I do not see myself as a particularly religious person, but I do view myself as somewhat spiritual, and I enjoy studying other religions and their origins. Recently, I have been wondering if there is a common denominator between religion and science. A common thought is that as one becomes more scientifically aware, they begin to lose touch with religion because it is deemed no longer relevant in explaining previously inexplicable phenomena – and this is especially the case as science and technology continue to advance at an exponential rate. But there is more to religion than just believing in a God, and sometimes religion can just be about feeling spiritual and in touch with the world. I find that as I learn more about the world and how it works, I am reaffirmed spiritually because only a God of some sort could have created such complex creations. I do not necessarily see myself as a creationist, but I do believe that there is more to the origin of life than just evolution. In Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, he concluded by saying “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Whether life was created by a Creator or through scientific processes, there is something spiritual about the world’s beauty, and I have found that I feel most spiritual when I am outside surrounded by nature, or when I am experiencing the world’s intricate creations.

I am curious as to how we can further bridge the gap between the disciplines because I think that we have much to learn from crossing the pre-existing borders. I am not sure how religion’s presence or lack thereof plays a role in many of your lives, but I am interested to know if you think that religion and science can or should converge, and if so where?

-Isabelle

Through the texts we have analyzed this semester, we have made numerous journeys across borders of race, sexuality, nationality, and more. As we cross these borders, we are attempting to understand people and experiences that may not be like our own. In doing so, we are sensitizing ourselves to situations that may be racist or homophobic or sexist or generally malicious. We no longer need to identify with the problem to be able to identify it. (Additionally, the word “woke” is term that has recently gained popularity; however, is the general public attempting to become “woke” for the purpose of understanding and empathizing with others, or is it to ultimately gain public favor and respect?) Despite these endeavors to sensitize ourselves, there are aspects of American society that we have become desensitized to, namely, mass shootings.

As we journey across these borders between people so that we may empathize with experiences we may not have had ourselves, we are simultaneously becoming desensitized to mass shootings, and we have consciously accepted that as an unchangeable fact. We know that the event is tragic, we feel sympathy towards the families and friends of the victims, we see that America is getting increasingly violent by the day, but ultimately, we are able to shrug it off and say, “It’s a tragic thing that happened, but in a week, we’ll forget about it.” And we do. We did.

On November 7^th, 2018, there was a mass shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California. Thirteen people died, including the gunman. It was college night; many of the people who died were still in their twenties, one victim being as young as 18. In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t even be writing this post if it were any other shooting, but to me, it’s not (even though in actuality, it really is). I’m from Thousand Oaks, California, and I didn’t realize how desensitized I had become until it took a shooting in my own hometown for me to cry again.

I found out on Thursday, the day after the shooting. Finding out about the shooting was like falling belly down into a body of water twenty feet below. The cold water shocked me. The impact nearly killed me. The current tumbled me around and I couldn’t tell which direction led to the surface. Twenty minutes after finding out about this news, I had to go to class. Class was class. Normal. Relatively uneventful, but in my own mind, I was still being strangled by the current, rereading the headings printed on my brain, trying not to break down into tears, praying to God that when they released the names of the victims, I wouldn’t recognize a single one of them.

“Did you know anyone in the shooting?” People asked this after hearing the connection I have with Thousand Oaks. It’s a difficult question to address because my answer to this question is both yes and no. Although I didn’t know any of the victims personally, I was still connected to them, still connected to the shooting. I knew people who were there, inside the bar and outside of the building. They were people from my graduating class, people from the neighboring high schools, people from my church, people who go to the college down the street that my friends go to. The victims were people from my community.

I did not personally know the victims, but our lives were very much, and unknowingly, intertwined. We all knew Thousand Oaks as home, as our own little city in sunny Southern California that no one outside of the county knew about. Now everybody knows about it—or at least they did for that one week. Now the all names are fading away.

Best friends or absolute strangers, why must there a reason to justify the grief over these lives lost? Can’t it be simply because they were people? Perhaps I didn’t cry about the other shootings because I wasn’t as personally connected to those victims, because I couldn’t imagine myself or my friends in the others shootings as easily as I could with the Thousand Oaks shooting. If I were to have cried over this shooting simply because the victims were human and nothing more related me to them, then the other shootings should have also left me with sleepless nights. But they didn’t.

It is because I was desensitized to the other shootings. The OED defines “desensitize” as “to free (someone) from a neurosis or complex.” (“Neurosis” as defined by the OED is “anxiety or malaise experienced by an individual, group, nation, etc.”). Desensitization frees us from the ball and chain of grief, allowing us to continue on in life. It allows us to remove ourselves from the situation and to not be able to see ourselves within every victim of a shooting. It allows us to hear about shootings and still be able to eat our next meal. It allows us to hear about the 307 shootings that have happened this past year and not lose at least a day to grief for every single one of them.

We talk about sensitive subjects not to become desensitized to the issue but to become aware of it. Race. Sexuality. Immigration. Citizenship. We talk about these things so that we can point out flaws in the mindset of our society that hold us back; similarly, we should talk about these shootings that have become so distinctively American. Even if it circulates in the news for only a week (or shorter—the Thousand Oaks shooting was on the cover of The New York Times for only one day before devastating fires took the lead), give it that week to discuss the issue. We will continue to be desensitized towards violence—it’s the only thing that allows us to remain levelheaded in the midst of these tragedies—but that doesn’t mean that desensitization should inhibit our ability to discuss and be empathetic towards the issue at hand.

-Tatiana Shepherd

In the midst of my research on Amazonian biodiversity, I learned more about Brazil’s recent president elect, Jair Bolsonaro. Coined “Tropical Trump,” Bolsonaro plans to open the Amazon to widespread infrastructure and agriculture, threatening the biodiversity, oxygen production, water sources, and indigenous land (to name a few) in the Amazon biome. By ceasing to protect the Brazilian Amazon and prohibiting the creation of new indigenous territories, Bolsonaro would destroy the border between natural and artificial life, exposing protected territory to destruction.

Brazil contains the majority of the Amazon. Within this land is 8% of the world’s freshwater supply, 20% of the world’s biodiversity, and 7% of the world’s land mass. Needless to say, the conservation of this area is crucial to protecting the earth from natural catastrophe.

Since 2016, the Workers Party has not ruled Brazil. While they cautiously grappled the border between environmental conservation and economic benefit, their rule resulted in a high crime rate, as well as security threats. Despite deforestation rates dwindling significantly since 2005, the Brazilian population chose national security. The lack of protection under the Worker’s Party bolstered Bolsonaro’s campaign, as he won the election because many Brazilians want to protect their nation’s borders from wealthier countries. Willing to sacrifice environmental health and indigenous rights, Brazilians are choosing national sovereignty and economic power. However, as Bolsonaro’s promises come into fruition and mass destruction takes place, the cultural borders between Brazil and other highly modernized countries will disappear. Industrialized farms will plague the Brazilian amazon, rather than indigenous territories and wildlife.

Like our current president, Bolsonaro is driving borders between various demographics of people within Brazil; those who support him, and those who are calling his impending rule an “Apocalypse Now” movement. The majority of the Brazilian population, however, is ignoring a significant aspect of their country, instead putting walls up to create tunnel vision. It’s clear how Bolsonaro’s environmental regulations- or lack thereoff- will fare in the future, when we face immense global health issues. How will cultural, environmental, and political borders be redefined in Brazil when this occurs?

sidenote: Indonesia is already struggling with an extreme surplus of carbon emissions due to Bush’s 2007 proposal regarding ethanol energy. Why do nations fail to look over their own borders and observe the problems endured by countries who made similar decisions? Similarly, why do we fail to look at history while contemplating decisions?

-Anna

Here is a list of updated questions for Paper 3. Let’s use this space as requested to give feedback to each other, and to really get to the heart of what makes a good (compelling, original, debatable, significant, focused) question.

• In her book Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine places unnatural images and stories of erasure together to draw attention to the relationship between white perceptions of beauty and psychological erasure of black bodies. (Clara)
• How does Claudia Rankine use second person narrative and images with historical content as a way to create more intimate relationships between races and within a race, respectively, in order to overcome discomfort about the discussion of race? (Tatiana)
• In a lyric written about the lives of black people and the struggles they face in modern America, how does Rankine use white, or negative, space, coupled with often dark images and black text, as a larger metaphor for her book? (Sammy)
• How does Rankine depict breath as central to her experience of the racialized world? How does the inability to breathe connect itself with lack of space, environmental insecurity, and Hurston’s “sharp white background” to represent Rankine’s emotional and environmental suffocation? (Rhys)
• How does Claudia Rankine use words and space to examine how occupation of space and spatial awareness prolongs and intensifies racial divides?   (Kaila)
• How does Rankine use the particular visual medium of photographs in Citizen to reflect the feelings of alienation from the population that are prevalent in modern American black society? (Justin)
• How does the Avant-­Garde form in which Rankine writes her Lyric, accentuate its meaning and underlying message to white people about subconscious racism and the history of racism in America? (Skylar)
• How does Toomer’s experimental use of color, specifically in reference to physical appearance, reflect his vision of a new hybrid race, beyond constructs of black and white? (Jaden)
• How does Rankine’s deliberate placement of white spaces in contrast to blackness actively engage the reader and promote the acknowledgement of race as opposed to color-blindness? (Isabelle)
• Does the modernist structure of Jean Toomer’s Cane repress the reader that is not part of the hyper-educated elite? Is the fragmentation of narration used in Cane that is indicative of a fragmented black identity in America actually working to make Cane less accessible? (Aidan)
• How does the musicality of Rankine’s Citizen challenge the traditional lyric and allow Rankine to advocate for individual action to combat racism? (Acadia)

   

   

   

Here is the space where you respond to the films of Lee and/or Beyonce (preferably both). Remember: Lee’s film was released in 1989. Please also consider both films in relation to recent conversations about Cane and Citizen.

You may be interested in these supplementary materials at some point:

Spike Lee Interview: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/02/spike-lee-amazing-rant-against-gentrification.html?gtm=top&gtm=top

Kiese Laymon: “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”—http://gawker.com/5927452/how-to-slowly-kill-yourself-and-others-in-america-a-remembrance

The play that I usually teach in addition to Citizen and “Do the Right Thing” is Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles, 1992 and its adaption into the film of the same name…for future reading/viewing if you’re interested in learning more about the Rodney King riots.

For this post I thought I’d share the connections I’m discovering at Middlebury. In one of my classes called Education in the U.S., taught by Tara Affolter and Stephen Hoffman, we are creating a racial autobiography. It’s an analysis of several incidents that have taken place during our lives and have shaped how we came to understand race today. By the end of the writing you are to explore your current understanding of race on the Middlebury College campus. I personally wrote about how I am aware of my racial identity but have yet to think about other racial backgrounds. Because I’ve lived in Vermont, the second whitest state, I’ve learned to navigate conversations about race and spaces with white people. I’ve been observing that a lot of people of color (POC) are having a difficult time making the transition at Middlebury. Several people are coming from big cities with diverse communities. Of course there are various races in those locations but never was white the most dominant race. For them, problems with race have never been so blatantly obvious. For me, navigating race has never seemed like a problem.

This assignment drew a lot of parallels to Cane and Jean Toomer’s personal story in the forward. As explained, Toomer dealt with a lot of race and ethnicity problems. He was of mixed descent and looked “white passing.” He never explicitly claimed a particular identity, arguing that he belonged neither to the white race nor the negro, but the human race. With this in mind he was able to maneuver the North and the South. I wouldn’t say this was easy for Toomer. However it does make me think about who gets what pass and why? For me, I get a pass because I grew up in Vermont. For other POC there is no pass at Middlebury.

Tonight I saw the Howard Gospel Choir perform. The entire choir was made up of POC. While I was hearing them hit unbelievable notes and listening to their voices vibrating as one entity, I was also noting the various shades of black skin. These observations reminded me of Toomer’s poems in the novel. In these poems words like yellow, honey, and gold are used. I think of these descriptions as shades of black. These words surrounded the larger text about the negro race. This leaves me questioning, who or what defines race? What are the consequences of race in different settings? What’s the difference between familial race and capital race?

The last thing I want to note is the current political change we are seeing. In the recent election the Republicans managed to retain their control of the senate. Yet in the House 92 women won, a total of 112 women — the most women to ever serve in Congress. Women also hit a series of significant milestones. Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids are the first Native American women elected to Congress. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are the first Muslim women representing their states in the House. Even greater is the 17 African-American women who won Houston court elections. With these drastic racial power shifts, I’m excited to see where the race conversation will go!

–Hawa

Throughout this course, we have been evaluating borders in terms of separations between individuals, but, as I hear Jaco Pastorius, my favorite bass player of all time, playing in the background, I am forced to considered borders as they apply to art. I mean this as it applies to the borders we create between genres of art, as opposed to something like the lines in a piece of physical art or the evaluating punctuation as a form of a border. This especially applies after our recent introduction into modernist literature, which looks to eschew genre. For the sake of my argument, I am going to frame this in terms of musical genres and their respective borders.

Most of the time, when we hear a new song, we try to place it in some genre. It could be rap or blues or rock or jazz or funk or pop. But these seemingly innocuous labels can be problematic. Rock is heavily influence by the blues, and many of the greatest rock bands like “The Beatles” and “The Rolling Stones” drew heavily from the great blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. This is not to say that genre cannot be a useful tool in finding and indexing music, but it can be somewhat limiting as far as artistic production goes.Take, for example, a young musician who considers themselves a math-rock guitarist. Math-rock, and its heavier spinoff math-core, is a new form of music that prides itself on being technically complex and almost hellish to play that many of the students I met last summer at Berklee were really into. Most math-rock songs are riddled with random key changes, odd time signatures, polyrhythms, and extended arpeggios. Now, say someone were to only listen to bands like Chon, Jawbox, or Upsilon Acrux, they run the risk of developing a really narrow mind in terms of what musical inspiration they have to draw on.

This is one thing I love about Jaco Pastorius. Jaco is regarded as one of the gods within the electric bass world, and is known for his work as a jazz fusion bassist with the group Weather Report as well as his solo work and the Jaco Pastorius Big Band. Right off the bat, the title “jazz fusion,” and what these musicians were trying to do, plays into to this idea of borders as they relate to artistic expression. Bands and artists like Weather Report looked to synthesize a wide range musical influences from rock to afro-cuban to funk and combine them with certain aspects of jazz, including expert improvisation and wicked technique, or chops, to produce an incredibly unique sound.

Biographically, Jaco’s life and musical journey embodies this blending of musical genres as well. Growing up in South Florida, there were stories of how a young John Francis Pastorius III would lie awake at late into the night listening to Cuban music on a small AM radio. The son of a musician, as the young bass player grew up, he would sneak into the traditionally black neighborhoods of Fort Lauderdale as he sought to play with the best musicians around. So much of this comes through in Jaco’s playing, and I think my bass teacher, Patrick Pfeiffer, sums things up nicely in the track notes of a tribute he did to Jaco on his most recent album: “From the lyrical Continuum to the crisp and funky Teen Town, from the fluid Donna Lee to the R&B-flavored Chicken, and finally to the contemplative Amerika (which is also an ode to my adoptive country and its magnificent people), Jaco combined commanding technical ability with beautiful melodies and an unmistakable underlying funk attitude. He gave everything.” (Patrick Pfieffer, Soul of the City)

Thank you all for listening to my rantings about music and bass.

As an added bonus, please enjoy one of my favorite Jaco songs, Havona off of the album Heavy Weather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMQUFvv0WRY  Jaco’s mind bending solo starts at 2:35.

As a second added bonus, please enjoy my high school jazz band try to play Havona last spring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpHzI8Fzgjo  my feeble attempt at Jaco’s mind beniding solo starts at 3:47. Headphones are required. Apologies for the low frequencies.

–Sammy Dubner