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[aileen001-blog]

Mapping Tropic of Orange

My conception of a map of Tropic of Orange is influenced now by the structural design that my lablitarch group has thought of. So for this post, I will expand or think about an aspect of that design (since that is what is productive at the point). My group is ‘mapping’ the character’s relation to time and space in individual ‘slices’ of the structure. We are focusing on the ‘compression’ and ‘convergence’ theme in the novel by making an accordion shaped structure.

In addition to having each layer show a character’s experience, I was thinking that it might be helpful to have an outer structure, like series of rings around the orange-accordion, so as to better show how the characters are also interacting with the greater world around them. The different levels (picture a stack of donuts with gaps in between them) would be decorated with different images that represent other themes and ideas that are important throughout the novel.  

Levels could show borders, highways, products or consumer goods, television or the virtual. I think these themes tied the characters together. Highways, roads, or driving are present for each. Television, or the internet also seems to play a key role in many of their stories. The viewer would be able to raise up the orange (main structure) so that it rests at different point in the outer structure – therefore connecting each character to each theme.

Specifically for Arcangels section, I think that it could be helpful to have a historical map of North and South America, and to map modern images like corporate logos and goods onto it (because of his focus on NAFTA). Arcangel seems to speak to the place of time in the scale of history, and the present as interconnected with the past (as he seems to bring the past to the present by living through it) and he also conjures to mind a sense of time that is eternal, with his magical, angelic qualities. Often, it feels like Yamashita is speaking through him (especially through his poetry) to convey some of her more explicitly political ideas about the continuing effects of the traumatic past on the present and the need to acknowledge its place in current politics.

[aileen001-blog]

Reflection Three

I am in the final project group that is doing the literary architecture project. We are focusing on “Tropic of Orange”. I am excited to be working on a final that is both a paper and a project, and excited to be working in a group. I think the accountability will be helpful for making steady progress and the teamwork for coming up with ideas.

So far, we have talked about making a model with different rooms or spaces for different characters. We thought about including maps that we label with more of the symbols and characters associations. Including maps could also be a good way to bring up how the idea of borders works within this novel. I like the idea of decorating the model so that is not just cardboard, and this would be another way to express the novel’s structure.

I was also excited by thinking about the idea of making a virtual structure that would be interactive. This is a bit beyond the scope of what we could make, but I think this would allow for us to include more elements of the novel’s structure. It would be cool  to have a space that could include music, that could have certain sounds play when you click on them in one way, and different sounds under other circumstances. We could then include the different ways that people read this novel --- some read all the characters all the way through first, and some read page by page. Maybe there would be some way to include this dual method of reading, such as having some kind of grid in which you can move through the story forward, or through each character upwards. There are different potentials for how separated it has to be – maybe we could make a very interconnected space with just sounds and images and motifs from each character. Maybe we could shape the space just through memorable scenes, passages, or descriptions. Do we have to structure this like an architectural structure – or can we have a virtual painting that has some ‘structure’ to it? I don’t know if that would actually be helpful, just questioning the assignment.

This is kind of how I envision trying to represent a structure for this novel. (The Persistence of Memory -- Salvador Dali.) 

[aileen001-blog]

Reflection Two

In the beginning of this class, I set out with full optimism to “rethink how my identity relies on any binary or us/them system, so that I am able to become less fictitious and more myself, and allow others to be as well.” Wow! What a broad goal.

I think that I have done this in part, of course, by doing the readings and trying to think through them. This is part of any process of learning, at least in the romantic-liberal perception: rethinking your identity and becoming gradually more open minded. I think I have encountered some of the challenges to this process, and it has been less sun and roses than my initial goals made it seem like.

The most difficult readings were the theory – the Fukuyama or Huntington. My response to Fukuyama is still something like ‘what of course history hasn’t ended / of course we are not at some final stage yet’. But that is a large simplification.

I hope in the next part of the semester to be able to connect the theory better to the novels we read, and maybe (ultimately) to myself – though that actually might be a less important goal. Since I am doing this partially retroactively, I am now thinking about my initial goals through the lens of “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” and the self-centeredness of those goals of self-improvement. I didn’t mention needing this knowledge to later do something for anyone else, I thought about this class as a kind of self-help. While this might seem like a somewhat natural thing to do, I think there is some questionable aspect of this.  

Am I viewing globalization as a rich resource that I want to get rich (mentally? Personal development wise?) quickly from?

Are there similarities between how I approach learning in general, or specifically, learning about globalization, and how western capitalists act as forces of globalization, looking towards other countries to reap or exploit for economic gain in our age of interconnectedness?

This image is supposed to show ‘narcissism’, but I feel like there are some sexist strings attached to that. Is it so unreasonable to check your phone for second instead of constantly paying attention to that dude?

[aileen001-blog]

On The Internet and Globalization

Increasingly interconnected world!

[neoliberal-dog-blog]

Globalization and diaspora exist as amorphous, contradictory, contested concepts, which makes drawing conclusions on their relationship to each other even more difficult. Given the theoretical frameworks we have engaged—Fukuyama, Appadurai, and Katz to name a few—I believe it is implied that many different interpretations of joue these terms interface have to be employed to constitute their respective meanings. As terms and concepts, globalization wouldn’t be globalization and diaspora wouldn’t be diaspora if they did not exist as contested ideas. What is important then is to hold constant a critical, historically-informed, culturally sensitive reading when invoking their discussion in pertinent contexts.

Globalization and diaspora are not only concepts but processes, constantly constituting or annihilating their subject matter given the context. Thus, because of globalization’s power to disrupt, disperse, and condense aspects of sociocultural and physical space across time, it is possible to construe this work as an active maker in constituting the processes of diaspora and diaspora-making. However, this somewhat unilaterally assumes that globalization came before diaspora, and that diaspora cannot exist without or before globalization. This is a highly-flawed, Western-centric view, for it discounts the global flows and processes of diaspora that took place before the genesis of globalization as a Western concept. Vestiges of those cosmopolitanisms, and new cosmopolitanism that grow out of the processes of globalization, have the opportunity to act as a form of resistance to the hegemonic forces that oppress those whose cultural fluencies run counter to such dominant forms.

For my own sake in attempting to digest these concepts, I have found engaging them through our fictional texts to be immensely helpful. Because books like White Teeth, Diary of a Bad Year, and Open City all confront ideas surrounding globalization and diaspora through radically different aesthetic forms, textual operations, and interpretations of postmodern literary space, I (the reader) feel that I have been given the appropriate space to make critical linkages through and between these concepts that have helped me better articulate issues surrounding them. This does not mean those articulations are all-encompassing; unraveling how these ideas interface comes with the acknowledgement that specific (literary) context doesn’t allow us to make sweeping conclusions. But the ephemerality of globalization and diaspora as concepts in both literary and real-lived time are what make them what they are, and we must take that at face value.

[aileen001-blog]

I like your discussion of globalization and diaspora as processes and not as just fixed, stable categories. I think that this understanding of these two concepts reflects their meaning in itself-- that the definitions of both globalization and diaspora will be so complex and in motion precisely because that reflects the phenomena themselves. This lead me to think, much like you have, that maybe it is not a bad thing I have yet to get the ‘Truth’ about either concept, and that actually, searching for a definite definition might be harmful in the way it mirrors the way that homogenizing ideologies limited real life complexities of people and their histories. So these two terms almost resist fixed definitions. Still, that’s not to say there is nothing to be said about them at all: the different approaches taken by the articles and novels have also helped me understand both ideas more clearly. 

I enclosed an image of several different census questions on race over the last couple centuries, because I am thinking about how globalization and diaspora and ‘American’ conceptions of their members have changed drastically over time, and these conceptions are not ‘natural’ or fixed in any way. I was trying to find a intake form from Ellis Island, but I think that this captures the same idea.

[happymealhegemony-blog]

A Tour of the Border

Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable [On Exactitude in Science] today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.

-Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation”

“Generally speaking, I feel safe in Oberlin,” explains a friend. “During the day I can walk anywhere by myself and still be fine. But after the sun sets, I don’t feel safe anywhere east of Tank.” With these words she constructs a border. It is a border that for some time only she could see. With these words, I construct a border, too, indelibly. 

It goes: West of North Park Street, safe. East of it, lawless, dangerous. Civilization, wasteland. Here, there. Us, them. Us, other. 

Now I cannot, on an eastward path, pass Tank and help but wonder: how did this border come about? What makes the house on the western side of the Park street any different from the house on the eastern side? Or is it more of a gradient, a sliding scale of danger? So that the farther you wander east from there, the more likely you are to be—what?—mugged? Assaulted?

I set out to see for myself. The attached photos were taken during my tour of this imagined border, starting from the southern end, and ending at the northern one. There is a Church, a park, a laundromat, an apartment complex, a water tower, and a football field. The rest is residential.

I tutored a family on the eastern side of this border. They went to school over there, too. See how it is when such borders are made? I speak of them as though they are lost. I speak of their school as though it were more than five blocks from my home. 

So, again, I pose the question: from what did this border arise? 

Does it matter that (according to Zillow) the average price of a home on the western side of this border is ~$140,000 whereas on the eastern side it is ~$80,000? Or does it matter more that the friend had a single bad experience over “there”? 

Further, this conversation got me thinking: what other borders are there? How else do it’s inhabitants divide up Oberlin? There is the ever-present talk of the “bubble,” of course, but where does the bubble end? Is this an on-campus off-campus border? Or is it the town itself? Whichever it is, and whether we like it or not, our bubble is permeable. See below:

[aileen001-blog]

As a consequence of working in Oberlin this summer, I biked around the surrounding area quite a bit, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

There are places outside of the lawns and sidewalks of Oberlin that are more natural, abandoned and wild. I hadn’t seen them before, but this summer I found the old barns and building frames and pasture fences that are totally immersed in lush greenery like they’re from another time. It all had a secret garden style magic about it. I saw wild turkeys (I think), it was delightful. I watched some top quality sunsets and I breathed hot, earthy, delicious air.

The contrast between this and what I could have expected to find three years ago is sizable.  When I told people I am going to school in Ohio, many responded by trying to comfort me by saying things like “it’s only four years there,” and negatives like the snow, bleakness, and general nothingness of Ohio were brought up.  

I grew up in a coastal city, somewhere outside the borders of Oberlin. It is interesting how value can be assigned from one side of the border to the other, based on lack of knowledge, often, and also by applying the same value system of one place to judge another place. Ohio is made to be a ‘fly-over state’, with little culture or nature to speak of. This view makes sense, in a way, because a place is more than the lovely landscape that I praised, but it is also very dismissive. A place can be denoted as a negative, as a nothing in contrast to another.

This reminds me of the idea that masculinity is defined by positive, present qualities, whereas femininity is the absence of male characteristics. Defining one place by another can lead to one being defined by perceived absence. A place can be nothing or negative in contrast to a place that is positive. It is also like the idea that the teacher has Knowledge, and the student is an empty, blank minded waiting to be filled.

I also like that you tied your reflection, though never explicitly, to racism and racial profiling done implicitly in these statements about borders by students at Oberlin.

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(A photo of an abandoned ferris wheel near Cleveland).

(I forgot these were supposed to be shorter, had already written all this).

[neoliberal-dog-blog]

The most interesting parts of a college town are the borderlands—the sites of contestation, the liminal spaces that harbor no clear distinction between town or college, public or private, local or global. They are the spaces that seem to exist in two separate spheres at once, somehow carving out a spatial imaginary all their own. It was a natural inclination to devote my walk to uncovering these spaces in Oberlin, for I am a lifelong resident of the borderlands. Spending twenty-one years three blocks from the campus of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois has given me unique perspective on the ways in which academia can act as a vector for ever-expanding flows of global capital, as well as how I confront my own positionality as an object of relative permanence in an otherwise transitional collection of life-worlds.

My exploration of the Oberlin borderlands quickly became an exercise of self-reflection. I immediately began evaluating the borderland landscape in front of me in terms of the borderland landscape I left behind. Walking down the 100 blocks of Elm St., Forest St., College Ave., and even Morgan St. further south, I couldn’t help but question whether this was Oberlin, or Carbondale, or Bloomington, Indiana, or Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Champaign, Illinois. The bucolic tree-lined streets of stately older homes divvied up into rental properties have cars parked beside them with license plates that run the gamut from Massachusetts to South Carolina to Iowa to Washington, DC (as pictured in the second picture above). These license plates act as visible signs of liminality and infiltration of global capital. In both Oberlin and Carbondale, one can walk two or three blocks beyond a borderland and see nothing but “local” license plates and no evidence of student life-worlds (as apparent in the first photo above). The physical landscape can stay looking relatively constant, yet the ideological landscape may more closely resemble social spaces located outside of the bubble of cosmopolitanism conjured by academic institutions.

Throughout my walk, I couldn’t help also thinking about how globalization can become embodied in personhood. A person walking down the street visibly construed as a student is immediately assigned a set of loaded assumptions and social characteristics. Students operate in college towns as signs of temporality, signifiers for active flows of cultural, social, and financial capital. It is for this reason that I have always felt between worlds. In Carbondale, I am as much a townie as twenty-one years in one place can make me, yet am assumed to be a liminal instance of cosmopolitanism. In Oberlin, I am assumed to be one in a sea of wealthy coastal urbanites, yet come from a background that far more closely mirrors the experience of growing up low-income in rural Ohio. The borderlands are but another manifestation of the infinite messiness of globalization, always in the process of being disentangled.

[aileen001-blog]

I like the question you pose about what makes a place. This sense of placelessness you bring up reminds me of the end of a book I read, where the main character is lying in her bed thinking ‘I could be anywhere right now’, recounting all beds of her twenties. “It could be any time, any bed.”

I’ve had that feeling lying in bed before, and I thought this is another example of how a generic place, like the bed, can confuse our sense of time, and make us feel outside of time. It could also show how specific places, also the bed, can take us back in memory, to another specific moment, but how that repetition can also make the experience feel more timeless because of the connection. When spaces or feelings repeat it can make us feel like time is at a standstill.

I like the idea of identities containing many more (hidden) borders than are apparent. My experience of college is much more cyclical and haphazard than a linear progressive movement. College life has involved a continuous identity border crossing, with beginnings and endings in time as borders as well.

I like what you said about ‘how globalization can be embodied in personhood’. Despite its lack of socio-economic diversity, Oberlin does seem very globalized to me in a way, because the students are from many different cities and different cultural backgrounds.

When I was accepted to Oberlin, my mom said jokingly it must be the right school, because it sounds like ‘Berlin’, the city in which she went to college. Of course, this didn’t become a serious part of my decision, but maybe this was a sort of tiny connection placebo, making me feel closer to my mom’s experience, closer to home, even though home would still be 2,000 miles from Oberlin and from Germany over 4,000.

(Also I forgot that these are supposed to be shorter but I had already written this so oh well.)

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My Bed by Tracey Emin

[aileen001-blog]

Reflection One

While I have a general sense of what the concepts globalization and diaspora mean, I don’t have a deep-seated intuitive understanding of them. I think that studying these ideas through literature, as opposed to only reading academic writing or theory, will make them easier to fully connect to.

The barrage of hate-generated current events has also motivated me to take this class. Just looking towards the Western canon doesn’t seem adequate right now. I want to finally take a class on contemporary literature. Reading Guillermo Gómez-Peña, with his vision of mass hybridization and restructuring of society, has confirmed that this is what I want to be reading and thinking about.

Gómez-Peña has brought up other ideas that I want to continue with throughout the semester. For instance, American identity has historically depended on standing against an ‘other,’ and this identity as a white mono-culture is a fiction. I grew up to a degree within this American dream, and I still feel more stuck within the fantasy idea of America than I want to be.

Because of this, I also want to think about these ideas in relation to myself. I want to rethink how my identity relies on any binary or us/them system, so that I am able to become less fictitious and more myself, and allow others to be as well.

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Life is a Dream and Then You Wake Up

- by Enrique Chagoya [Mexican, b. 1953]

1991 / Charcoal, pastel on paper