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Sketchbook #12

1. Queen Liliuokalani was the last queen of Hawaii, succeeding her brother Kalakaua in 1891; it was during her reign that Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown. Area 51, or Homey Airport, is a US Air Force facility in Nevada that is closely associated with UFO related urban legends and whose purpose is not publicly known. The word Anishinaabeg refers to an indigenous group in Ontario that deals with the struggle for self-governance. The Mississauga are a subtribe of an Anishinaabe group in Ontario associated with the Ojibwe Native Americans.

2. No, Lilo and Stitch do not belong to a nation-state. Hawaii is a part of the United States legally, but Hawaiians as a nation were conquered by Englishmen and Americans and do not support the state that governs their land. The agendas of the nation and the state do not align. The characters themselves seek belonging in any sense of the word. While they behave in ways that alienate them from their peers, both Lilo and Stitch seek unity between themselves and their community (including authority figures like Cobra Bubbles).

3. Some people worked hard at just breathing, just breathe

Sketchbook #11

1. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement is a campaign with the goal of pressuring Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian land, extend equality to Palestinian Israel citizens, and allow Palestinian refugees to return. Palestinian boy Faris Odeh was shot and killed by the Israel Defense Forces after throwing stones at Israeli tanks. Haifa, a city in northern Israel, has a large population and has been under Israeli control since 1948. Nakba Day, May 15th, is the day after Israeli Independence Day and is recognized by Palestinians as a day of commemoration of the eviction of Palestinians as a result of Israeli independence.

2. I am originally from Arizona, where illegal immigration is one of the most controversial and prominent topics. The SB1070 act, or the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, required aliens to have registration documents on their person at all times and allowed police officers to stop and question the immigration status of any person under reasonable suspicion. One counter narrative to this is that SB 1070 encourages racial profiling while being completely ineffective at promoting safety of any kind or equality, and that citizens and aliens alike are unfairly treated by the law.

3. Many people believe the law targets people with a “Mexican appearance,” effectively allowing the legal oppression of an ethnic group. Groups like the ACLU believe the law is trampling on the civil liberties of those affected by it. The discussion around this law deals with the deep structures of legal and social racism.

https://www.aclu.org/feature/arizonas-sb-1070

Sketchbook #9 and #10

1. I am Sonia, 27 year old leader of rebel group NlightN. I am a former hightech ethical hacker for the government of Neo Crimea. My neural tech implants were damaged by an unknown attacker after I started uncovering information about the massacre of lowtech and nontech citizens by the state and the system of heavy censorship. The damage altered my physical appearance in augmented reality and the cyber world so that I resemble static on a TV, which I use in conjunction with my hacking skills in order to disrupt their technology. By forcing people to experience at their surroundings with unfiltered senses, I spread awareness of the atrocities committed by our government. I do this by disrupting the censored augmented reality and sometimes affecting the tech implants of influential individuals with the power to help me incite change.

2. Sonia grew up during the transition to full augmented and virtual reality. When she was a child, she was given a lock picking kit by her aunt. Sonia’s aunt loved to scrounge through abandoned piles of antiques from the early 2000s Most of the Franco-Russian Empire had completely destroyed or remodeled any doors with physical locks and keys, but Sonia was able to find some functional locks in old buildings on the outskirts of New Crimea. The sense of wonder and discovery that Sonia felt when she first heard the clear click of that first lock snapping open, allowing her to open the door and peer into a world previously unavailable to her, was what led her to pursue a career in cyber security and hacking. The kit embodies Sonia’s insatiable inquisitiveness about the world around her.

3. Sonia stared warily at the empty pedestal on her book shelf where she kept her lock picking kit. Her cyber vision had been acting up that day- she encountered an unusually high number of distortions in her augmented reality technology- but the disappearance of her most beloved possession was clearly more than a glitch. Sonia’s papers were strewn about on her desk in a way that was very foreign to her usual system of organization, albeit a messy one. Someone had been in her apartment, and they were looking for something. Sonia knew immediately that this search was related to her recent interest in the censoring of lowtechs from the augmented reality network and cyberspace; she had discussed the abnormalities to her superior only yesterday and was met with a stern reaction. It was only when she hacked her own cyber vision and disrupted it to search for her kit that she saw the figure standing in the corner of the room with a rifle pointed at her.

Graphic novel cover- work in progress

Sketchbook #8

1. Technological: The robots controlled by the sleep dealers (Memo) from across the border and the remote controlled planes piloted by the military (Ramirez) are both based on modern day drones and developing drone technology.

Socioeconomic: The US’s desire for Mexican labor without the actual people is based on the US’s current flawed immigration policies that reflect corporate America’s need for cheap labor in contrast with political America’s desire to restrict new citizenship, as well as the attempts to introduce even harsher programs for preventing illegal immigration.

Ecological: The company Del Rio Water’s construction of a dam and use of machine gun cameras to protect their property may be a criticism of corrupt corporations that will try to repackage and sell everything, even necessities, at the expense of average people.

2. New York City is well known as an immigration hub. The city implements devices like spikes in benches and ledges that prevent homeless people from resting in those locations. The NYPD utilizes stop and frisk practices that allow police officers to search people without a warrant or reasonable suspicion; this policy encourages racial profiling as the officers often target black and Latino people. New York has issues with garbage disposal, which leads to worsened air pollution by waste collection trucks and an excess of garbage in the streets.

As a poor migrant in New York, I am unable to walk through the city without being stopped at least a couple of times a day by the police. My privacy is physically violated each time, and I feel a bit of my dignity slink away with each stop. When I could not find a job in this crowded city and found myself without a home, I resorted to sleeping wherever I could find a spot without the spikes. Unfortunately, nearly every spot that is not a pathway with heavy foot traffic has spikes that periodically raise and lower, so I often have to make the choice between being tripped on and kicked or covered in grid shaped bruises. My best option is to pull some cardboard boxes from the abundance of garbage on the streets and lay it out on the spikes, without getting caught by the police.

Sketchbook #7

1. The Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1960 involved the British military and revolved around their colonial practices- the uprising eventually collapsed. Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who now writes in Gikuyu instead of English, challenges traditional education systems and the alienation of audience members from theatrical processes.

2. Colonialism: “Then things changed, I don’t know how gradually or suddenly, but they changed.” “I was aware of trees being cut down, leaving only stumps, soil being dug up, followed by pyrethrum planting. It was strange to see the forest retreating as pyrethrum fields advanced. More remarkable, my sisters and brothers were working seasonally in the new pyrethrum fields that had eaten up our forest, where before they had worked only across the rails in the European-owned tea plantations.”

This passage shows the ecological impact of colonialism on wa Thiong’o’s home. Every hint of natural beauty native to Kenya is replaced with either the decaying remains of destruction or a foreign reminder of what has been taken away, from the animals to the forest to the labor of the people who live there.

3. “In time, I began to connect a few threads, and things became clearer as if I was emerging from a mist. I learned that our land was not quite our land.” “How did we come to be ahoi on our own land?”

Wa Thiong’o considered the forest a part of his home and identity, and its forced disappearance reveals the harsh reality that one’s perceived possessions can be taken by those in power. The passage demonstrates counter narrative because it focuses on the sense of loss felt by individuals on the other end of colonialism, rather than the economic factors or the gain of the colonizers. This colonialism is also unusual to the master narrative because it is internal (but still related to the external British colonialism).

Sketchbook #5

1. Atlantis

The White Death (Scotland ghost girl)

Elisa Day

Kuchisake-onna

Kappas

Gaffer Death

2. La Llorona master narrative: “[La Llorona] is destined to spend all eternity searching for her dead children. Her lament, ‘Mis Hijos!’ becomes the blood-chilling cry… warning children that any misbehavior might lead to abduction by this female phantom.”

La Llorona counter-narrative: “could infanticide then be retaliation against misogyny, an act of vengeance not against one man, but man in general for a betrayal much graver than sexual infidelity: the enslavement and deformation of our sex?”

Kuchisake-onne master narrative: A woman’s face was mutilated by her samurai husband for infidelity. Now a malicious spirit, she stands on the streets of Japan and asks passersby if they find her beautiful, mutilating or killing them based on their answers.

Kuchisake-onne counter-narrative: This woman may actually represent society’s obsession with assigning value to women based only on physical qualities. By punishing people for their judgement of her appearance, she expresses resentment for a society that requires a woman to be beautiful and presentable to succeed or even live peacefully.

3. New York, post-2001

Japan, 1950s

4. Japan, 1950s

A Place from Multiple Perspectives

Sketchbook #4

1. The Gila River War Relocation Center was aJapanese internment camp in Arizona notable for its lively and resilient senseof community in the face of adversity. As nonprofit organization and legacyproject, Densho focuses on collecting accounts and documents from the World War II Japanese American internment camps.

2. Racism, encouraged by Xenophobia, is the most overt structure that intrudes on the lives of A.K.’s characters. In “Yellow Creosote Blossoms, Piss-Stained Gaillardia,” the justification used by internment camps to remove everything from niceties to basic civil liberties is emphasized by Ruthie’s interaction with the guards. The guards take away things like the outhouse created by the internees when they see them working collectively to solve their own problems under the guise of preventing subversive or harmful activity, but really they are trampling any sign of community, organization, and resilience they see.

3. Kaneshiro (Kane) Araki from “Whiskey Over Barbed Wire” is a young man who sprouts wings and uses them to transport whiskey into the internment camp at night. His superpower, the ability to fly and courage to do so, is also his disability. His courage, resilience, and ambition ultimately lead to his confrontation with the guards and his injuries by their hands.

Sketchbook #3

1. Tonton Macoutes was a police unit that frequently violated human rights, created by dictator Papa Doc Duvalier as a part of the Haitian paramilitary; it was named after a Haitian myth about a bogeyman who consumed children who exhibited poor behavior. Edwidge Danticat wrote the 1994 novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, as a fictional documentation of life in Haiti and New York that tackles issues of race and gender. The Haitian coup d’état consisted of conflicts lasting weeks that eventually led to the overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake including large aftershocks that affected about three million people and killed over 100,000.

2. “These [strong] people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.” This passage reveals quite a bit about the way people in Danticat’s world cope with adversity, especially unequal or seemingly random hardships. Those who experience more than their fair share of suffering are seen as just capable enough to carry that weight, indicating that people prefer to be able to rationalize why unfortunate circumstances follow them or the people they care about.

Sketchbook #2

Meticulous Masquerade is anaspiring writer and graphic novelist from Southern California who is currently majoring in visual arts at UCSD. As a studying artist whose interests range from painting to performance art and everywhere in between, Meticulous Masquerade is eager to create and illustrate her first graphic novel and hopefully future graphic novels as well. Creative expression, both written and pictorial, is her passion. Meticulous Masquerade’s artistic focus is primarily in fine arts and illustration. Her work is often concerned with and influenced by mythological subject matter and she hopes to contribute to discussions of social issues with her art and written works. Meticulous Masquerade has earned awards for her entries in art shows as well as in writing competitions. While she mainly works in traditional media, Meticulous Masquerade has a limited knowledge of Photoshop and digital art.

Sketchbook #1

1. The word curandero refers to a healer or shaman of Native American culture who remedies physical and spiritual illness. A Xicana or Chicana is a common identity used by Mexican-American women to refer to themselves and the collective group of these women. Coyolxauhqui is the Aztec mythological magician who unsuccessfully attacked her pregnant mother and was turned into the moon. The Cihuateteo of Aztec mythology were spirits who died in childbirth- regarded as a type of battle- and who stole children, caused illness, and who serve the Aztec moon deities.

2. Moraga focuses heavily on the patriarchy’s influence on the identity and psyche of Mexican women. For example, Moraga explains that Mexican women wander in search of their lost selves because they “never had the power” to define their roles and individuality under the strict enforcement of patriarchal values.

3. The original Medea is a character in Euripides’ play in which her husband leaves her in order to greedily pursue power and another wife. Medea copes with his betrayal by killing her children as an act of revenge against her husband. Pain, scorn, and rage guided her actions.

4. (sketch)

5. I included a depiction of Madea in my cover for The Hungry Woman, a person who the writer would call a Chicana. Madea is also a curandera, or a healer. I also drew three of the four Cihuatateo, who are based in Aztec mythology.

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