Fifth World II

Fifth World NCSSM Journal of Humanities Research

Contents Alternating Sounds—Phonographies of Resistance in Postbellum American Literature

Josh Massey

4

Presidential Campaign Advertisements and their Implications for Change in Presidential Campaigns

Jessica Sullivan

9

Contributing Factors to the Development of Eating Disorders

Christa Parrish

12

Asian American: A Study of Emasculation

Ren Zhang

17

"Globalization in a Grande Cup": Exploring the Economic and Cultural Intricacies Between Starbucks and Costa Rica

Caroline Carpenter

21

The Dormancy of the Street Railway

Eric Schichlein

24

Passed Along The Way: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong

Max Nobel

29

The Mechanics of Moral Crimes

Rosemary Yin

33

The Ethical Cost of Biological Warfare in Unit 731

Joy Lu

36

Listening thru Walls: Sonic Reinscription and the Masquerade in True Detective

William Clark

41

Where the Wild Things Are: The Demonization of Native Americans by the Puritans

Jessalyn Smith

49

How Satire Uses Viewer Vulnerability to Sway Undecided Voters

Theresa Voyles

53

Mni Wiconi: A Discussion of Tribal Lands, Media Representation of Native Peoples, and Federal Environmental Policy

Vivian Mellon Snyder

56

Environmental Injustice: A National and International Perspective

Janis Arrojado

63

How Conservative Evangelism in Politics Led to Trump’s Victory in the 2016 Presidential Election

Emily Hench

67

Letter from the Editors Dear Reader, We, the editors of Fifth World, should like to welcome you to our work, a work of emergences, concerning emergent matters that are here, elsewhere, and always reasserted. This journal takes its name from a specific emergence, that of the Hopi’s conceptualization of and hope for a “fifth world,” deployed in the Kiva mural by Michael Kabotie and Delbridge Honanie which several of us discovered at the Museum of Northern Arizona this past winter. These painters and the modern Hopi tradition are interested in an emergence out of forced conditions of existence—from European invasion, the mining of the Black Mesa, rampant poverty, substance abuse, despair—into a fifth world, a rebirth of the Hopi tradition itself in and through the technologies of the digital age. We are moved by this artful articulation out of violence and are indebted deeply to the voices of those who have come before us. This violence against native human life is absolutely specific and is not the concern of any one of our essays, but it does represent the total presence of an enormity of violence against human and other than human life with which all of our essays are decidedly concerned. Our concerns with this violence, then, even where the specific outlets about which we have written do not target us directly, are the various concerns of emergent writers, thinkers, and beings in the world. If this is to be something like our first emergence, we hope to have done it with grace.

Sincerely, The Editorial Collective Janis Arrojado, Carolina Carpenter, William Clark, Elizabeth Dogbe, Emily Hench, Joy Lu, Josh Massey, Max Nobel, Christa Parrish, Eric Schichlein, Vivian Snyder, Jessica Sullivan, Adam Turner, Rosemary Yin, Tracy Voyles, Ren Zhang

4

Alternating Sounds—Phonographies of Resistance in Postbellum American Literature Josh Massey

T

he notion of “matter” is interesting. To matter means to be material, and to be material means to be visible, but what happens when things are made not to matter, or don’t matter? To not matter is to be immaterial, to not exist, to be invisible; but in what ways does invisibility mean non-existence? This conflict between seeing and being creates a blindness to things oppressive society does not wish to see.1 The aforementioned relationship is constructed by an oppressive society towards African Americans, through the slave trade, Reconstruction, and eventually the Jim Crow era. The African-American is seen by an oppressive society in ways that make their interests and desires disappear, and the literature of the late 19th and early 20th century works to create and reproduce this relationship. An image or discourse of the African-American structured by the minstrelized oppositions between the “happy-go-lucky darky” and the criminal occults any other vision of the African-American, creates a significant risk for those who do not want to play the part of a “happy-go-lucky darky,” because they may instead be labeled as a criminal.2 This binary definition of African-Americans causes their true social and individual forms to be invisible to oppressive society. However, their invisibility is not constrained to the realm of sight, but also interferes with the realm of African-American sound. Their sounds, whether made through voice, instrument, or other medium, can be appropriated and taken out of context. Because of this, “black” music seems to exist in a sphere that is separate and outside (or inside) of the influence of oppressive society; however, it is active within that society. African-American music resists the segregation that works to devalue and belittle its creators; it seeps into the senses of the oppressive majority, affecting its members in ways they cannot explain or stop, forcing its listeners to recognize that there is a problem that needs to be addressed in society as a

whole.3 The “blackness” attributed to the African-American is a “blackness” of a fantasy necessary to sustain and support the construct of “whiteness”.4 Oppressive society has to create a visual image of a stereotypical African-American, so when they listen to “black” music, they wish to hear the sounds of a stereotype. By defining “black” music, “white” music is created as a binary opposite which is viewed in a positive light and accepted by society.5 This raises many questions, and leads us to ask: What makes black music black? On the surface, the obvious answer is that it is performed by African-American artists, but are there lyrical topics, instruments, or rhythms that make “black” music black? More importantly, how have African-Americans transformed blackness into a creative and critical resource for aesthetic and political work? W.E.B. Du Bois starts to answer this question in his book, The Souls of Black Folk. He writes of the African-American as “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world…a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (8). To him, the self-consciousness of an oppressive society impedes the ability of African-Americans to be self-aware; they know themselves as they are known by others, while also knowing that they are different—a difference not defined by the

3 Hip-hop and rap today are examples of this—even though they may say things that are not suitable for the ears of the youth of America (as determined by their parents), they still find a way to communicate their messages to the masses.

1 The “invisible man” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man experiences this issue—he becomes invisible because oppressive society does not wish to see him in the way he wishes to be seen. Without worrying about being seen, he is able to transgress in society in ways he could not fathom doing before.

4 Susan Gubar’s Racechanges explores whiteness and blackness as being both two separate entities, while also being completely intertwined.

In the chapter, “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” she introduces her arguments by examining a vase that has to heads on it—one with “white” features and one with “black” features—that face away from each other. They both make up the same whole head, but their separate halves will never be able to see each other, and when one views the vase, they will only be able to see a side-profile of each head, or one head at a time. Essentially, the vase, though almost a thousand years old, “whose mysteriously doubled features speak to the complementarity of Western and African images of womanly beauty,” gives us a visual image of how race, though socially constructed in order to create separate spheres of being, really creates intermixed spheres of being where perceived “whiteness” and “blackness’ interact constantly (3).

2 To play the part of the “darky” begs mockery, while being seen as a criminal begs lynching.

5 “Black” music in the 1950s was rock music, while “white” music was rock ’n’ roll, which is just “black” music played by white people.

Fifth World

5

“other world,” but by their own “work and striving” (5).

The second-sight African-Americans have is sound, which doubles sight, and alters the ways by which “white” people see and know “black” people (and themselves, in relation to those whom they’ve denigrated). Through second-sight, or sound, African-Americans can understand themselves outside of the stereotypical image of them that is created by oppressive society.6 African-Americans have many ways to express their second-sight, but the most effective way may not even be through vision, but through voice. The voice doubles vision, thus rendering the transparency of vision into the opacity of voice. White people no longer “see” or know black people (or themselves) immediately. Music offers a way for African-Americans to express themselves by complementing or supplementing sight in ways oppressive society cannot interpret or understand. This causes oppressive society panic and confusion that they must remedy quickly, at the risk of losing the image of an African-American necessary for them to identify as “white”. This creates the insistence that African-Americans play the part of “negroes” or “blacks”. In Mel Brooks’ film, Blazing Saddles, this happens in a very apparent way when the white boss asks a group of African-American railroad workers to sing a “good ol’ n*gger work song”.

After a minute of conversation, they break into an acapella version of “I Get a Kick Out of You”, while the now larger group of white overseers stares in awe.7 The boss stops the song after some time, amid great confusion, and says that he wants to hear an “actual song,” like “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” or “The Camptown Ladies [sic]”. None of the African-Americans claim to know the songs, so the overseers sing and dance around while they laugh and point, mockingly. By acting as they think African-Americans act, they have made fools of themselves, raising an interesting point: Do whites play the part of stereotypical African-American better than African-Americans do?8 My answer is yes. The stereotypical African-American, or “darky” is a creation of the white imagination derived from a fantasy of an “inferior” race, and is meant to justify the economic exploitation and political domination of African-Americans. This means that white people should be able to play the part of the “darky” better than African-Americans can, because, after all, they created it.

6 While you can close your eyes and block out any vision of things you don’t want to see, it is much more difficult to block out sound from things you do not want to hear. No matter what, it seems to seep into your senses.

C

harles Chesnutt writes extensively about this in his novel The Marrow of Tradition. In “The Cakewalk,” the titular event is put on by southern aristocrats in order to impress northern businessmen who are interested in “the negro problem” and who are looking to invest in cotton mills in North Carolina. They want to be assured that the labor problem is solved (since slavery is no longer legal) and to see that all is well down south. Their need to witness “this spectacle of a dying race, unable to withstand the competition of a superior type” (Chesnutt, Marrow 115), is put on at the expense of the dignity and pride of those involved.9 The desire to see the “joyous, happy-go-lucky disposition of the Southern darky and his entire contentment with existing conditions” (117) causes one of the main characters (and one of the primary antagonists of the text), Tom Delamere, to dress in blackface as his uncle’s servant, Sandy, and go to the cakewalk himself. Naturally, Tom, a white man, wins the competition because he is white, which causes Sandy to be expelled from his church (for sacrilegious activity) and eventually leads to him being framed for murder. Tom Delamere is the best dancer because he is the best at acting “black.” The cakewalk is a competition which relies on the African-American acting as closely to the “darky” as possible in order to fulfill the racist image of the African-American needed to win the prize. Acting in this way for reward is problematic for the African-American community because it reinforces the racist image of African-Americans that oppressive society relies on as a method of advancing their oppression.10 Because of a minstrel structure of “race,” which criminalizes those who refuse to be obedient, docile and content with their conditions and status, the African-American is characterized as either a “happy-go-lucky” negro or a criminal. To refuse the former is to risk becoming the latter, which is why Sandy is eventually seen as the chief suspect in the murder of Miss Polly Ochiltree (even though it was Tom Delamere who killed her). His actions force the reader to look at the white performance of “race,” and how the white man indeed performs the actions of the “negro” better than the African-American does.

Second-sight promises a resolution in the creation of new African-American expressive forms (the affirmative form of blackness), but double-consciousness does not. An African-American musician is conflicted because there are really two artists in one body. One is the artist who appeals to African cultural ideals, and the other is the artist who appeals to American ideals. They cannot be perfectly balanced, and the entire career of an African-American musician is spent in vain trying to get as close to a balance as possible.

African American artists are conflicted in their performance

7 “I get no kick from champagne; mere alcohol, doesn’t move me at all; so tell me why should it be true; that I get a belt out of you? Some get a kick from cocaine…” (Blazing Saddles)

9 A revitalized south was a work in progress, and in many ways, still is today.

8 Blackface, after all, is a way for whites to exercise their own objectively racist views of African Americans through an entertaining and denigrating medium.

10 See Eric Sundquist’s chapter on Charles Chesnutt in his To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature for more on the play of the “negro”, among other things.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

6

because the “white world” demands compliance with European (not American) forms and despises black cultural productions. Because of this, Du Bois writes of the conflict that African American artists have to deal with. They cannot express their blackness to their heart’s content because the “white world” will criticize and ostracize them because they cannot or will not conform to European cultural ideals.

They have to find a way to turn African and American music into African-American music, or in other words, they have to find a way to escape white contempt while also pleasing themselves and their audiences. (Du Bois 9).

W

hile white listeners danced and jived to ragtime, black musicians were busy playing it. The job of the black musician, as highlighted in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, is to play to the expectations of the white listener and then rag them. The term rag is interesting, because it is a verb, meaning “to make fun in a loud or boisterous manner,” and also a specific instrumental technique: he is syncopating the songs. The ex-colored man rags the classical music he plays, and uses the content of his songs as a commentary of the society he lives in. The ragtime Johnson plays serves as a way to make fun of the oppression he faces as an African-American man immersed into a society that doesn’t want him, or only wants him for their entertainment. When he makes fun of his white listeners, they unknowingly dance and act merrily, because their bodies are acting out meanings of which they are not aware. The ignorance of oppressive society requires a great deal of work, and in this case, their bodies undo the work of consciousness associated with “double-consciousness” and “vision.” There is also an aspect of slavery associated with the ragtime performer only know as “ex-colored man”. His patron, the unnamed millionaire, has him play at his home for parties, but also when he is alone and wants to be able to think and meditate upon things. Sometimes, he has ex-colored man play for hours on end while he sits with his eyes closed, almost dozing. He plays even when he is extremely exhausted because he cannot stop, at the risk of going unpaid. Because of this, he describes his millionaire as a tyrant who possesses a “supernatural power used to drive [him] mercilessly to exhaustion” (Johnson 95). In this aspect, the millionaire acts as master and the ex-colored man as slave, as the latter is forced to play at any and all times the former wants him to play, whether he wants to or not. Because of this, the African-American musician seems re-enslaved to white society, no matter their professionalism and independence.11 Thus is slavery generalized to the whole of society: rather than the property of a single master, the black performer must work for all. Here, however, his patron seems inseparable from a master.

11 African-Americans have struggled, and will struggle, to escape the ensnaring chains of slavery that still, in many ways, surround them today.

In one scene, the ex-colored man plays at is gap is literal, as seen at a house party thrown by the millionaire. Beginning with some classical pieces, he segues into playing ragtime. He is separated from his listeners by a door, but the door serves as more than just a literal partition. As the first note of the rag started to play, the conversation stopped suddenly. It was a pleasure to [ex-colored man] to watch the expression of astonishment and delight that grew on the faces of everybody. These were people—and they represented a large class, —who were ever expecting to find happiness in novelty, each day relentlessly exploring and exhausting every resource of this great city that might possibly furnish a new sensation or awaken a fresh emotion, and who were always grateful to anyone who aided them in their quest. (55) The music of the ex-colored man disrupts the imagination of the white listeners, making them acknowledge his existence in a society that doesn’t. By playing his ragtime at the house party, he makes his listeners notice him (through the door) as the previously unseen source of their novelty.

The separation of the source of the music (the ex-colored man) and the sound of the music (the noise coming from the other room) becomes the occasion of a disturbance.

W

hile some white Americans take the noises of African-Americans for granted, others take advantage of them. Obviously, people like Paul Whiteman used music that they called “dignified jazz” to gain immense profit, but sometimes people would take advantage of black music in a way that doesn’t involve monetary profit.12 In The Great Gatsby, at one of Gatsby’s massive parties, the jazz band starts to play Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World, which causes a huge stir in the audience. When the music is playing, Nick cannot help but staring at Gatsby, and the text is rather vague, because we cannot tell if it is a look of desire, desperation, or admiration. Nick wants Gatsby in some way, but it is unclear if it is in a sexual way, a fraternal way, or both.13 Other people in the crowd swoon and fall, and start to act uncontrollable ways. Women were “putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls” (Fitzgerald, Gatsby 50). The allure of the piece causes its listeners to have strong desires for each other, and to transgress in ways they have not before, but in the origi12 Paul Whiteman worked with the notion that while black music was savage, white music, or rather, an version of black music infused with European-American instrumentation, was civilized. See Man Ray’s Noire et blanche (1926) for an interesting juxtaposition between blackness and whiteness, or African and European standards of art and beauty.

13 Nick Carraway’s homosexual tendencies (see the end of Chapter 2) are of interest, as the emergence of the transgressive individual and the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual was occurring around this time.

Fifth World

7

nal manuscript for The Great Gatsby, a completely different sense is provoked: a sense of confusion, but also a sense of realization. Nick describes a series of interruptive notes that seemed to fall together accidentally and colored everything that came after them until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were oppossed [sic] to it outside. But what struck me particularly was that just as you’d get used to the new discord business there’d be one of the old themes rung in this time as a discord until you’d get a ghastly sense that it was all a cycle after all, purposeless and sardonic until you wanted to get up and walk out of the garden. It never stopped— after they had finished playing that movement it went on and on in everybody’s head until the next one started. Whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet. (Breitwieser 65) In the manuscript, the partygoers come to the harsh realization that the piece is just a cycle, “purposeless and sardonic,” just as life seems to be. In the novel, the partygoers sing and dance gaily, while Nick stares at Gatsby with a sense of desire, which the song seems to evoke from him. Fitzgerald seems to be writing his manuscript from a seemingly controversial point of view in which African-American music can be insightful, and can have intellectual meaning and feeling. The original text addresses the audience in ways the published text does not wish to understand. Just as Nick Carraway says Gatsby’s smile allows one to see oneself just as one wishes to be, rather than as one is, the text’s deletion of these troubling sounds suppresses the realization that who one wishes to be, or what (i.e., “white) is an illusion.

To ruminate further upon the notion of black versus white jazz, it seems no amount of alcohol can create these effects that the “black” jazz seems to create. Jazz History of the World was debuted in Carnegie Hall, to much sensation, according to the novel, but this piece presents an interesting enigma. This is “not black jazz, Carnegie Hall not being a common venue for black bands, and Vladimir Tostoff being an uncommon name in African-American communities” (Breitweiser 62). This imposter jazz is not African-American, but still has some of the nuances present in African-American jazz (instrumentation, rhythm, etc.), which is what causes the sensations that are seen in this scene of the novel. Another, very important question is also posed: Does white performance of black jazz bring forth the soul, spirit, or duende that the African-American performance of black jazz does?

W

hen white artists try to capture and interpret black sound in their own way, something goes awry, and the desired effect cannot be created. The removal of black voice not only affects the world of music, but also that of writing. Charles Chesnutt usually writes his stories in the frame of the African-American laborer, Uncle Julius. In only one of his stories does he sway from the point of view of Ju-

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

lius to his employers, John and Annie. In “The Dumb Witness,” Chesnutt writes the entire story from the perspective of John, the carpetbagger, and the story suffers because of it.

Eric Sundquist describes it as “a conjure tale without conjure and a Julius tale without Julius” (389). The language, inflection, dialect, and storyline as a whole change from the perspective of Julius to the prospective of John. The story is about an ex-slave named Viney, who was the slave mistress of her master, Malcolm Murchison, for many years. When she heard her master was going to remarry, she “broke out in a scene of hysterical violence” and “pleaded, remonstrated, [and] raged” (Chesnutt, Witness 762) until her master was able to calm her down. Afterwards, she went and told his fiancé something that caused her to break off the engagement. In retaliation, Viney’s master cuts out her tongue, and “puts it out of [her] power to dip [her] tongue where [it was] not concerned” (763). Viney is the only person who knows where the inheritance left by Murchison’s uncle is, and she lives a life of (for the most part) silence, rather than telling him where his questionably rightful inheritance is.

When she does talk, she speaks in ‘“meaningless inarticulate mutterings,” the “discordant jargon” deriving from “no language or dialect, at least none of European origin,” which at last pours forth in “a flood of sounds that were not words,” represents a very particularized form of power” (Sundquist 390). Here we see two repressed voices: the voice of Viney, and the voice of Julius—both stolen by the oppressive society they are forced by circumstance to live in.

Eric Sundquist has linked African-American language to both property— “material wealth and social power that is the functional expression of literate control of language”— and literary power— “to the voice of culture as it is ranged along the color line” (Sundquist 391). Because John tells Julius’ story, he removes his literary power in favor of his own, and effectively removes the African-American element of Chesnutt’s conjure stories in order to showcase the white appropriation and theft of black culture. The sound of Julius’s voice is lost, but so is its significance: form and content are inseparably related in dialectal performance.

I

n The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois describes the negro folk song as “the rhythmic cry of the slave”, which, he says, “stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas” (180-181). In other words, African-American music is both the sole and the soul of American music. The soul of American music highlights the neglect that all African-Americans face, but is easily misunderstood by those who have not experienced the plight of the African-American. It is the “singular spiritual heritage of the nation, and the greatest gift of the negro people” (181), but this gift is misconstrued and abused. Artists like Paul Whiteman have done something terrible to African-American music by removing the African-American element from it. What are the blues without the plight of the artist? Or

8

without that artist’s self-conscious political relation to his, her, their work – the work without its critique and negation of an oppressive society? What does it mean when a white artist sings a song that is written by, sung by, and relates to the struggles of an African-American in an oppressive society? This is the process by which African-American music is Americanized (even though “America” is essentially black) into forms like white jazz or turned into minstrel music by racist bigots. When the music of African-Americans loses its political identity with the “work and striving” of African Americans, then it cannot defend African Americans against invisibility, that is when the African-American becomes invisible. Because of this, African-Americans may discover a new way of seeing (knowing) themselves in sounds which double sight, displacing the visual by the acoustic image.

The sorrow songs that Du Bois describes are “a music of unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways” (182), and transcend the boundaries of the English language and American music. African-American music was originally African music and American music, and the African music of the past was not sung in English, but in the indigenous languages of the many tribes and sects of Africa. The original words of the African folk songs have been lost through many years of enslavement and repression of African ideals (religion, spirituality, gender roles, etc.). The music of African slaves is much older than the music of their masters, and Du Bois wants to show that. He speaks of an old song with no identifiable language in the lyrics—an “often crooned heathen melody” (182) that has been passed down to generation after generation of enslaved and free African-Americans. The music and culture of African-Americans was not lost in the middle passage hundreds of years ago, but instead, it was just altered. Though the words may be lost, the sound continues to speak of what cannot otherwise be said. In this way, the sound becomes what Nathaniel Mackey calls a “phantom limb,” a way of touching what touches you.

“In these songs,” Du Bois writes, “the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate.

Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment” (185). He warns his readers that if they get caught up in the racist repertoire of “coon” songs and “gospel” hymns that they might lose sight of the true “negro melodies” (184). These songs lose sight of the true plight of the African-American, and lose the key element of mourning—the mourning for those lost to slavery and to the violence of Jim Crow, the mourning for the broken promises of freedom and equality first offered by the American Revolution, and eventually renewed by Reconstruction—that all African-American songs possess. The mourning serves, however, as a reminder that morning will soon come—that the light of freedom will one day show itself.

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. “Late Sunday Morning.” Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. 27-31. Print.

Breitwieser, M. “The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eye-Witness.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 47 no. 3, 1991, pp. 17-70. Project MUSE. Web. 10 Oct. 2016.

Chesnutt, Charles W. “The Cakewalk.” The Marrow of Tradition. Ed. J. Sundquist. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print.

Chesnutt, Charles W. “The Dumb Witness.” Stories, Novels, and Essays. Comp. Werner Sollors. New York: Library of America, 2002. 756-69. Print.

DuBois, W.E.B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Library of America, 1990. 7-15; 180-190. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Chapter III.” The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1953. 39-59. Print.

Hughes, Langston. “These Blues I’m Playing.” Short Stories. Ed. Akiba Sullivan Harper and Arnold Rampersad. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. 50-65. Print.

Johnson, James Weldon. “Chapter VIII.” The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. 51-58. Print.

Sundquist, Eric J. “Charles Chesnutt’s Cakewalk.” To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1993. 313-92. Print.

Fifth World

9

Presidential Campaign Advertisements and their Implications for Change in Presidential Campaigns Jessica Sullivan

T

elevised campaign advertisements have been an unrivaled benefit to candidates since their debut during the 1952 election cycle. They allow candidates to deliver their message directly to voters, unhindered by the dissenting voice of their opponents. Unlike in debates, candidates are able to say whatever they please without being contradicted or proven incorrect. Campaign ads also allow candidates to reach voters who may not be engaged in the political process. These voters may not attend rallies or read newspapers, but they watch television and so are still able to receive the candidate’s message.

Perhaps most importantly, campaign advertisements give candidates the ability to decide the issues of the election. Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder (1982), among many others, have tested the agenda-setting potential of news coverage. They have found that frequent news coverage of certain issues leads viewers to perceive them as more important.

Campaign advertisements, which primarily function to repeat messages, work in a very similar way. In making campaign ads, candidates are able to focus on issues which they want to discuss, therefore shaping the discourse of the election.

Their capability to set agendas gives campaign advertisements historical significance, as their messages tend to reflect, and in many ways to inform, the issues and values important during a particular election cycle. In studying these ads, I hoped to identify ways in which presidential elections have changed since the introduction of this form of political communication. This project, however, is not purely historical; it attempts to make sense of current and future political conditions by analyzing those of the past.

In this project, I decided to study the political and historical patterns of presidential elections and the campaign advertisements which function as windows into the important issues of the time. To do so, I have watched every presidential campaign advertisement from 1952 to 2016, placing each election from 1952 to 2012 into a particular group. The groups are as follows: 1952-1956, 1960-1968, 1972-1984, 1988-2000, and 2004-2012. I have deliberately excluded the 2016 election from this grouping, as it does not yet have the historical context necessary to be included. These groups allow for more in-depth analysis of the larger political trends.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

T

he Post-War Elections, from 1952-1956, are the first of these eras. These two elections are unique in that they feature the same two major-party candidates: Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Republicans, and Adlai Stevenson for the Democrats. Despite having the same candidates, however, these two elections were different in that they showed how the candidates became more confident in their use of the medium. The 1952 campaign was the first to use television advertisements. Candidates used ads as brief speeches, public forums, and jingles. This diversity of form is unrivaled in subsequent elections, even in 1956.

These elections are characterized not only by the diversity of form of the ads but by their content. In both years there were several ads on national defense and the economy, issues that may have been so prominent because of their proximity to the Second World War and the Great Depression. In fact, in one Stevenson jingle, he recalls the turmoil the Depression caused for farmers (“Let’s Not Forget the Farmer”). This ad, aimed at those affected most seriously by the Great Depression, encouraged voters to draw upon their experience with FDR—a Democratic icon whose support Stevenson hoped to tap into.

This era gets its name, of course, from its position as the era immediately after the wartime elections. Its political climate was one in search of a new identity in response to the Second World War. Situated between the party shifts of the late 1930s and early 1960s (Knuckey 1999), the PostWar Elections were influenced by World War 2, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Combined with the constant threat of nuclear war, these conflicts threatened the perception, in the United States and abroad, that the nation was emerging as a world superpower, and that peace could be achieved through strength. Similarly, domestic matters reflected a contradiction within the nation’s values. The country celebrated economic stability and a sense of post-war prosperity that women and members of other marginalized groups often were not recipients of. As a result of this tension between the real and perceived state of affairs, there was a desire amongst the electorate for strength, stability, and a patriotic leader. In both elections, General Dwight D. Eisenhower filled this role.

The next era, the Change Elections, occurred during the politically and socially tumultuous years of 1960-1968.

10

These three elections used the form of their advertisements to reflect the political climate of the year. In 1960, both Nixon and Kennedy ran fairly straight-forward, policy-oriented advertisements. These reflected the comparative calm of that election year, although still addressing controversies such as Kennedy’s Catholic faith. This election was actually difficult to assign to a group, as it embodied both the fears and Cold War tensions of the Post-War Elections and the desire for social and political change at home that became symbolic of the 1964 and 1968 campaigns. Ultimately, I decided to put it into this group because of its position as a transitional election: the messages and issues it featured made the discussion of the later two possible. In 1964 and especially in 1968, the ads became more chaotic to reflect the unrest occurring in the nation as a whole. This and the riots at the Democratic National Convention prompted Nixon to run “Convention,” an ad which juxtaposes happy music and images of Humphrey at the convention with violent depictions of the Vietnam War, riots, and poverty. Several ads, including “Convention,” were filmed in jarring, quick-moving styles that matched the chaos of the era. This disorienting form reflected the larger discontent of the 1960s.

These ads focused on a variety of foreign and domestic policy issues, including (but certainly not limited to) the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and nuclear fears. Unlike the Post-War elections, there is very little tension between the real and the perceived. In the ads and in the electorate as a whole, there was a sense of discontent, both with the state of society and with those who were discontent with the state of society. This charged the political discussion, allowing candidates like Barry Goldwater, a Republican seen as a threat to the Republican party itself (“Confessions of a Republican”), to gain support with his rhetoric railing against the lack of morality in America. These issues were emblematic of the era as a whole: a time of unrest seemingly on the cusp of change. Thus these elections gain their name.

The next set of elections, the Character Elections, run from 1972 to 1984. These elections are characterized more by the content of their advertisements than by their form.

In each of these elections, there is attention paid to the candidate as an individual. He is made to seem strong, patriotic, kind, etc. depending on the candidate and the year. 1972, perhaps one of the most glaring displays of poor character in politics, may seem an odd fit with the perceived moral superiority of candidates like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In this election, however, Nixon attempted to portray himself both as the strong, law and order president he promised to be in 1968, and the compassionate man desired during this era. He drew upon his character in “Nixon the Man,” an ad in which he is shown being friendly and funny in less-structured, “behind the scenes” moments. In another ad, “Passport,” he emphasizes his strength and achievements as president. I categorized the 1972 election as a Character Election not because of the moral superiority of the year, but because of its insistence on Nixon’s character as a reason for

his electability.

After the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s subsequent resignation, the American people were in dire need of a political jumpstart: a president who could restore public trust in the office. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, did not quite fill this role, especially after his pardoning of Nixon. However, the next two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, made attempts to do so. Both men ran advertisements emphasizing their upstanding character, humility, patriotism, and personal goodness, often tying those qualities to America itself. The content of these ads reflected the electorate’s desire for a strong, trustworthy leader.

After the “race to the top” of the Character Elections came the “race to the bottom” of the Negative Elections. This era, from 1988-2000, was characterized by a turn towards negative advertisements. Initiated by George H.W. Bush in the 1988 election, campaigns began to run more attack ads and focus more on their opponents’ flaws than their own strengths. In 1988 and in 1992, Bush used a very similar line of attack. In fact, his ad attacking Clinton’s record in Arkansas (“Arkansas 2”) is nearly identical to his 1988 ad attacking Dukakis’ record in Massachusetts (“Harbor”), even with the lines “And now Bill Clinton wants to do for America what he’s done for Arkansas” / “And Michael Dukakis promises to do for America what he’s done for Massachusetts.”

Another hallmark of this era, however, is the candidates’ responses to being attacked. Bush was able to win in 1988 because Dukakis did not respond effectively enough to his attacks. Although Dukakis ran several ads attempting to set the record straight, these ads merely gave more attention to Bush’s attacks and diverted Dukakis’ attention from his own policy. Clinton, who won in 1992, handled Bush’s attacks much more effectively. Unlike Dukakis, Clinton determined his own narrative with a slew of policy ads and a narrative-style biographical ad, “Journey,” in which he frames himself as a small-town, All-American man. His ability to reshape his own narrative allowed Clinton to secure the presidency not only in 1992, but in 1996. In a shift away from the personal attacks of the previous three elections, the 2000 campaign mainly aired policy ads that compared one candidate to another, in hopes of simultaneously encouraging support in one candidate and discouraging support in the other. Although negative campaign ads are certainly not unique to this era, all four of these elections were characterized by an intense negativity and a coarsening of political discourse.

The final era, the Modern Elections, runs from 2004 to 2012. In the same way that television changed the nature of the campaign in 1952, the rise of the internet and the shortening of the news cycle through social media fundamentally redefined the way Americans see presidential elections.

Advertisements, including those paid for by PACs, for the first time were aired online—yet again reducing the agency required to become politically aware. Candidates also drastically increased the number of ads they released, with some Fifth World

11

candidates airing nearly twenty in one election cycle.

These elections were also impacted by the attacks on September 11th, 2001. After these terrorist attacks, the perception of the president changed to one who must be capable of dealing with such a tragedy. This was amplified by the changing powers of the president after the attacks, as well as the endless war in the Middle East. As a result, many candidates since have portrayed themselves as strong and masculine, often emphasizing their military service (John Kerry in 2004, John McCain in 2008).

Any analysis of this era remains necessarily incomplete, as the era itself does not yet have an end. However, it is safe to say that the advertisements of the Modern Elections are influenced by many significant events and developments from the start of the new millennium, including but not limited to 9/11 and the Great Recession.

T

here is widespread debate among political scientists about whether or not campaigning actually sways voters. Some argue that it is only important in swing states, that other states are decided by economic conditions or previous voting patterns (McClurg & Holbrook 2008). However, the impact of campaign ads in defining a candidate’s narrative—especially in recent elections—is undeniable. As Mark McKinnon said, “ads are about news coverage these days” (Geer 2012). Advertisements allow the candidates to get more attention and spread their messages to wider audiences. Campaign ads, like media outlets, have the ability to set the public agenda and focus (or, as the case may be, refocus) public attention on issues that benefit them.

Campaign ads have agenda-setting power, so the ad shifts between eras indicate larger trends between elections. In my project I looked at the differences between these campaigns, but there were many similarities across all or most election cycles. Elections are, inherently, an expression of the desire for a better future and a better country. This is consistent across all of the elections I studied, even when expressed in different forms. In studying these campaign ads, we are able to see the hopes and fears of each generation.

The ads from the 2016 Presidential election certainly reflected this, with the divisive nature of the election permeating these messages. There were only four total ads in this election cycle that did not attack the other candidate: three from Trump and one from Clinton. This election was different from those of the Modern Elections in that it was far more negative, even more so than the Negative Elections from 1988-2000. However, it is consistent with the tenets of diversity and a desire for strength which are characteristic of the Modern Elections. As Knuckey wrote, “A critical election does not simply deviate from earlier patterns; it marks the start of a new pattern” (642). Only time will tell whether this election was a continuation of the pattern started by Kerry and Bush or if it began the next era of American presidential elections.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Arkansas 2 [Advertisement]. (1992).

Bio [Advertisement]. (1976).

Confessions of a Republican [Advertisement]. (1964).

Convention [Advertisement]. (1968).

Essence [Advertisement]. (1976).

Geer, J. G. (2012). The News Media and the Rise of Negativity in Presidential Campaigns. PS: Political Science & Politics APSC, 45(3), 422-427.

Harbor [Advertisement]. (1988).

Iyengar, S., Peters, M. D., & Kinder, D. R. (1982). Experimental Demonstrations of the “Not-So-Minimal” Consequences of Television News Programs. The American Political Science Review, 76(4), 848-858.

Journey [Advertisement]. (1992).

Knuckey, J. (1999, Summer). Classification of Presidential Elections: An Update. Polity, 31(4), 639653.

Let’s Not Forget the Farmer [Advertisement]. (1952).

Liberty Park/Hope Campaign 80 [Advertisement]. (1980).

McClurg, S. D., & Holbrook, T. M. (2008). Living in a Battleground: Presidential Campaigns and Fundamental Predictors of Vote Choice. Political Research Quarterly, 62(3), 495-506.

Nixon the Man [Advertisement]. (1972).

Passport [Advertisement]. (1972).

Peace [Advertisement]. (1980).

Prouder, Stronger, Better [Advertisement]. (1984).

Safire [Advertisement]. (1980).

South [Advertisement]. (1976).

12

Contributing Factors to the Development of Eating Disorders Christa Parrish

“T

his ‘precious’ body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing forms of media, harassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn’t enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself.

– The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, Emilie Autumn To live with an eating disorder is to live in constant bilateral antipathy, the brain and the body never quite agreeing.

What do you do when the most basic human necessity is something intensely feared? You fight, even if you are fighting for the wrong thing.

The history of eating disorders is as loose and undefined as the disorder itself. Anorexia nervosa became a recognized disorder in the 1870s, but the public was generally unaware of it until 1974, when popular media began to feature stories starring women who refused to eat. In the 1980s, anorexia became familiar enough such that Saturday Night Live, among other comedy acts, began picking fun at the disorder, coining jokes without regard to those affected. The public began to take the disorder lightly, finding it comical when skits and TV shows employed the stereotype of the anorexic girl in a wealthy household. “You look anorexic,” became a commonly used hyperbolic exchange between women (Brumberg 8). A full understanding of eating disorders did not occur until the 1990s.

The thin ideal, which is the demand that all women must conform to a certain socially acceptable size, is not a new concept. People, specifically women, have historically tried to conform to their generation’s idea of physical attractiveness (Wiseman et al.). The belief that women should conform to a certain standard is not only present in a scale of attractiveness, but in the means of imposed size. Women are expected to be less than men, and this is not just in physical stature, but in and as their existence.

Eating disorders are now becoming understood as an intersection of interdisciplinary factors. These factors can be divided into two main outcomes: dysfunction in neuronal processes related to appetite and emotionality, and the interactions between cognitive, socioemotional, and interpersonal processes (Riva 1). When analyzing the neurocognitive and sociocultural factors contributing to eating dis-

orders, one discovers that society exacerbates what biology incubates.

N

eurocognitive factors mandate the way humans function. Humans operate on the basis that every action they perform is a consciously made choice, but based on biological principle, choices are determined by anatomical structure and basal neurological physiology. Obsessive compulsive disorder, whether full-blown or in small manifestations, is a common symptom in those diagnosed with eating disorders. Why then, “do not all individuals with either obsessive compulsive features or with a dysfunctional scheme for self-evaluation develop an ED? What is the role of the body experience in the etiology of these disorders?”

(Riva 1) Discrepancies at the neurocognitive level—outlined as cognitive aberrations and body dissatisfaction—offer an increased understanding of why the eating disordered mind operates in its way.

Cognitive aberrations are primary causal factors for eating disorders. As being a consistent aberration found in diagnosed patients, obsession often allows the eating disordered patient a sense of comfort in their food-centered cognition. In individuals with eating disorders, patients are most generally found to “have obsessive traits such as counting calories, food verifications, ritualized feeding. In fact, many studies showed that obsessive-compulsive personality and disorder are found in excess in patients with anorexia nervosa” (Gorwood 165). Individuals diagnosed with eating disorders spend a large portion of time obsessing about food, eating, weight, shape, or other directly correlated matters. Sixty-seven percent of patients self-reported that they had no time free of obsessive thoughts, with seventy-two percent of these patients actively attempting to suppress the obsessive thoughts. Of this seventy-two percent, “50% were not successful and felt that they had little or no control over the preoccupations” (Polivy and Herman 200). A small majority of patients, chiefly restrictive anorexics, found the obsessive thoughts comforting, much like that of a mean of self-regulation (Polivy and Herman 200). This lends the thought that those diagnosed with an eating disorder have an undefinable but established foundation of rigid thought patterns.

Rigid thought is similar to obsession in a way such that if a certain principle is ignored or not followed, relative diFifth World

13

saster ensues. Rigid thinking patterns in eating disordered patients do not allow for flexibility in perception or alteration in dysregulated cognition. Benowitz-Fredericks et al. state that, “Some adolescents develop dichotomous thinking patterns that can lead to eating disorders” (694) These dichotomous thinkings manifest a type of hysteria; the mind restructures itself to think one of two ways, and anything in between is a gross detriment. “Individuals with this type of thinking believe that higher-order goals, such as happiness, are unattainable without first reaching-lower order goals, such as losing weight” (Benowitz-Fredericks et al. 694). The symptoms of obsession and rigid-thought can develop at any point in life, but their causes are best explained by the principle of embodied cognition.

Embodied cognition is defined as the central role of the body influencing the mind. The body acts in three ways: as regulator, as distributor, and as constraint. The body regulates cognitive activity over space and time, solidifying that cognition and action are coordinated. The body distributes data between neural and non-neural structures, and the body restrains the nature and content of representations of this data as it is processed by the cognitive system (Riva 2).

As our perceptions form and bodies interact with the space around us, a small dysregulation can increase in magnitude.

With age comes responsibility, increased pressure, and increased stimulation over all aspects of life; a dysregulation in foundational processes will be destructive as the patient becomes integrated in society.

If these dysregulations are not addressed and are integrated, they can result in a complete lack of internal awareness.

This inability to accurately identify personal states and/or feelings can be especially dangerous when regarding those diagnosed with, or with the heritable potential to develop, an eating disorder. Further theorization relates that “such faulty learning undermines trust in one’s body and increases the need to control both the body and the self” (Polivy and Herman 204). These processes lead, in whole or in part, to general body dissatisfaction.

Body dissatisfaction (BD) is the most dominating factor in analyzing the cognition of eating disorders. BD mandates self-perception; low BD is incontrovertibly associated with the incidence of eating disorders. While social factors influence perception, which creates BD, the current analysis is more concerned with why a mind harmfully influenced by the thin ideal turns to it.

Body dissatisfaction is a main factor contributing to the development of an eating disorder (ED), but it is by no means mandatory. Most causes of EDs can be produced by BDs due to media, family, and peer interactions. “Media influence is thought to precipitate EDs by making women feel dissatisfied with their appearance” (Polivy and Herman 192). In tandem with this, Polivy and Herman also concluded that, “Family and peer pressure, teasing, and more individual psychological influences such as general anxiety converge on the ‘final common pathway’ of BD” (Polivy and

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Herman 192). This raises the question: what separates people? Does or does not the affected capitalize on weight and body shape as a means of self-regulation of their misconstrued identity or control?

I have already noted that many precursors for BD are perfectionism, life satisfaction, current anxiety, and body mass index (BMI) (Ferguson et al.). Life satisfaction has many fluid variables such as age, depressive symptoms, perceptions of parental love, peer competition, and social media use. While BMI is a determinant of body satisfaction, “higher BMIs do not necessarily associate with body dissatisfaction in all girls” (Ferguson et al.).

In addition to these identified factors, there are other theories as to why some individuals react to harmful perceptions about themselves. Riva argues that the development of BD “is strictly related to two different processes: the acquisition of advanced allocentric spatial memory abilities and the emergence of autobiographical memory” (6). The allocentric memory, defined as the personally objectified body, develops simultaneously with the sense of self-narrated memory. This leads to the integration of body image through the contrast of the self with the social ideal body.

Based upon this theory, body dissatisfaction is not predetermined but developed over time through socially orchestrated cognition.

There is a “societal disparagement of overweight and glorification of underweight,” thus causing young women to express dissatisfaction with their bodies (Polivy and Herman 191). Once this dissatisfaction surpasses an unmanageable threshold the individual begins to refocus attention to weight, shape, and eating to gain emotional control. Anorexia nervosa lends to partial gratification through avoiding food to achieve the unattainable label of slim, while bulimia nervosa grants relief through bingeing and purging.

This now defines an eating disorder as a convoluted mean of emotional regulation and body dissatisfaction as a metric.

In Emotion Dysregulation, Self-Image, and Eating Disorder Symptoms in University Women, Linehan discusses his bio-psychosocial model of emotion dysregulation. This model describes emotion dysregulation as a “transaction process between individual emotional vulnerabilities and invalidating responses from the social and family environment” (2), with individual emotional vulnerabilities being broken down into “emotional sensitivity, reactivity, and time needed to recover from emotional events” (2) as well as directly physical factors such as sleeping patterns, physical health, and diet among others.

Essentially, malformed emotional regulation creates a vicious cycle of vulnerability and invalidation. This applies directly to eating disorders for those with deregulatory emotional conservation have lowered abilities to identify and describe emotion, and in some cases, the disorder encourages negative behavior: “Binge eating, with or without subsequent purging, provides distraction from or amelioration of painful inner states, negatively reinforcing the behavior”

14

(Monell et al. 2). Malformed emotional regulation leads to higher instances of body dissatisfaction. In the case of bulimia nervosa, the individual restricts or binges and purges to achieve an emotional release of some sort (Polivy and Herman 197). The race against time to achieve the “perfect” body becomes an existential project: without the continuous battle, life has no meaning, coherence, or emotional fulfillment. The focus on weight makes life definite and simple.

If any sense of inadequacy is present, identifying oneself through weight serves as a “maladaptive solution” (Polivy and Herman 197). Cases where the loop is broken induce severe loss of control.

“Bruch defined [anorexia nervosa] as a ‘struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness’” (Polivy and Herman 201). Focus on weight, loss of weight, and any association thereof provides a means by which an identity can be fabricated to elude the dealing with true emotional issues. “Gaining a sense of control and pride in one’s ability to control one’s eating combats the feeling of being taken over by thoughts of food or lacking control of one’s thoughts, eating, and weight” (Polivy and Herman 204). The loss of control leads individuals diagnosed with eating disorders to feel fatter and more pessimistic; thus, Froreich contends that an eating disorder is a “desperate attempt to compensate for an underlying sense of ineffectiveness and lack of control”.

This lends that a definable cause of an eating disorder would be a perceived lack of control in one’s life. Ineffectiveness and fear of losing self-control are the largest predictors of EDs (Froreich et al.). Most patients recall that their dieting began when they perceived life to be out of their immediate control, so they rationalized controlling food intake as a viable solution (Froreich et al.). These unhealthy behaviors are “functional within the context of the patient’s belief system” (Riva 1), and they allow for an overarching sense of well-being. Outside of the internal monologue, though, there are factors that have a significant influence.

Culture develops perceptions about the body; this is a fact backed by ages of communal living. Paul Schilder states that, “There exists a deep community between one’s own body-image and the body-image of others.” Society as a collective is programmed to conform to a general ideal physical form. The “body schema,” or innate body model, allows for an understanding of how one’s own existence is separated from the outside world; the innate body model defines how individuals perceive the world around them. Essentially, the body is experienced through different neural representations that are not at all connected to legitimate physical appearance (Riva 6). Bodily perceptions are created in part by societal input, meaning that while neurocognitive factors mandate the basic function, no scientific artifact presents pathology unless exacerbated by societal influence.

W

hile neurological factors mandate internal processes, sociocultural factors temper the external pro-

cesses, which in persistence and development of negative media influences and cultural standards, have the potential to form eating disorders. Media has many different forms, but for the scope of this paper social media, television, and magazines are of most interest. It should be noted that even though eating disorders in males are not irrelevant, the scope of this paper cannot address them because of the starkly different nature they possess (Peterson, Paulson, and Williams 695).

Media create an environment where all are forced to value body shape, be it other’s or their own; through weaving an intricate “web of pressures and experiences” (Leavy and Ross 68) that culminate in an “intense and ritualistic focus” on the body, young women come to idolize “the cultural ideal female body, which is much thinner than what a healthy woman should look like according to the medical industry” (Leavy and Ross 66).

Social media correlates highly with increased body dissatisfaction, peer competition, and reinforcement of disordered eating. Increased social media usage, namely Facebook, is directly linked to decreased opinion of self; through analysis it has been found that the number of friends and time spent on social media positively correlated with increased body dissatisfaction (Mabe, Forney, and Keel). “Facebook intensity, online physical appearance comparison, and online fat talk were significantly and uniquely associated with disordered eating” (Walker et al. 157), while that the time spent on Facebook was positively associated with increased body image dissatisfaction, engagement in appearance comparison, and risk for eating disorders (Cohen and Blaszczynsk 9). Facebook represents the merging of two influential social factors: the media and the peer, thus, it produces new forms of peer competition mediated by the visceral image.

Negative influences are created indirectly through peer competition via social media. This does not exist across all media, but Ferguson et al. found that peer competition, not television or social media exposure, leads to negative influences. When defined as an arena for competition, social media was found to prerequisite negative outcomes.

This competitive phenomenon seems dependent on culture for negative influences were found in a higher frequency in highly educated women, women who had acculturated more to the majority culture, and women who were white and Hispanic. The creation of unhealthy peer competition, though, is not the only detrimental use of social media.

Television and magazines, as a primary source of entertainment and information for much of the world’s urban population, reinforce the problematic thin-ideal. With frequently repeated exposure to television displaying those who are of below average weight, chronic self-awareness and concern over outside perception causes depression and anxiety to which disordered eating serves as a sense of relief.

For as many instances as the media refutes eating disorders, there exists a subliminal glorification two-fold greater in magnitude. Whatever positive effect they were trying to

Fifth World

15

achieve, the opposite is produced. The average young woman is “surrounded by images of thin women, and she knows that all women don’t look like Christina Aguilera, but her subconscious registers her own body type as being something other than beautiful” (Collins 2).

The self-discrepancy theory (SDT) as postulated by Harrison states that “body-specific self-discrepancies would mediate a relationship between media exposure and disordered eating.” The SDT assumes that people hold three central beliefs: who they are (actual self), who they would like to be (ideal self), and who they ought to be (ought self). The ought self is almost always observed from a third party. An ideal discrepancy is present when the actual self does not match the ideal self, and it generally represents the absence of a desired outcome. For example, “my actual body is short but I would like to be tall”. When the actual self is different than the ought self, an ought discrepancy occurs; ought discrepancies represent the presence or threat of a negative outcome. For example, “my actual body is round but my parents think it should be slender.” When an individual is exposed to a discrepancy, they experience emotional distress.

The application to television is this: habitual contact with social information that supports the thin-ideal (which mediates an ideal or ought discrepancy) could make body related self-discrepancies chronically accessible, thus leading to repeated negative effects and patterns of disordered eating (Harrison). Harrison’s study that concluded, however, that the prediction was supported by exposure to television, but not by magazine.

Fashion magazines are a primary promoter of underweight being a normal, healthy physical state. From 1956 through 2005, Seventeen and YM magazine were analyzed for their written, internal content of dieting, exercise, or both. The general conclusion was that written content related to exercise increased in Seventeen, and content related to dieting increased on a parabolic curve over time in both magazines. The average model size increased in YM, but there was no change in Seventeen over a forty-nine-year period. Regardless, “models are so thin that it is almost impossible for women to achieve that which is presented as ideal without resorting to extreme measures” (Luff and Gray 1). In another study conducted, it was found that “fashion magazines averaged 14.8 articles over 6 months on weight reduction compared with 11.2 and 5.7 articles in traditional and modern magazines, respectively” (Benowitz-Fredericks et al. 695). It can be concluded that magazines do not have as significant of an effect on the population as television, but they are indeed furthering the distribution of the thin ideal.

Culture magnifies preexisting dissatisfactions, which cause eating disorder pathology to present itself in extreme outlets; this expression is due to the misinterpreted idea that the affected cannot pursue their “ideal” body through any other means that will be as effective as an eating disorder.

Western culture, when compared to Latino and African cultures, proves to be more apt at breeding eating disorders.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

After viewing slides containing a mixture of mass media thin ideals and controls, African-American women reported no changes from pre- to post body dissatisfaction, while Caucasian women reported a significantly increased magnitude of body dissatisfaction (Debraganza and Hausenblas). In Cuban women, levels of media exposure had no relationship to the incidence of EDs (Jane, Hunter, and Lozzi). It is postulated that the culture of abundance should not be held as a major factor contributing to ED pathology, for “such a culture may value slimness, but whether a particular individual takes this valuation to a pathological extreme depends on additional factors” (Polivy and Herman 192). Previously in the paper it was proved that while cognition mandates the intrapersonal function of the individual, these factors have little to no effect without exacerbation from sociocultural factors. Thus, as the world becomes westernized, the culture begins to be adopted across ethnicities where the “thin ideal” has not necessarily permeated, and in turn increases the pathology of EDs.

E

ating disorders are caused by a perverse collaboration of neurocognitive and sociocultural factors, but it is rather difficult to directly say which factor is primary. Within the neurocognitive realm, cognitive aberrations and body dissatisfaction contribute to the development of an eating disorder in an interesting way: they do not have binary relationships. Both can contribute to an eating disorder independent of the other’s existence, but they also appear to depend on one another. Body dissatisfaction is the most cited cause for the development of eating disorders, but it can exist whether the physiology and biochemistry are imbalanced or not. It is worth noting that strictly physiological factors can breed an eating disorder independent of unregulated chemistry, though they seem to magnify in effect when acting together. In contrast to this, the identified sociocultural factors were indeed binary. In analyzing the discourses of media and culture at large, it was found that the sociocultural premise is either effective or it is not.

If this paper is treated as a mathematical model for the development of eating disorders, it would be most appropriate to treat the sociocultural factor as a constant, for it is always present as a punitive ideal, while the independent variable is how one reacts to it based on their neural physiology. Although it has been necessary to simplify sociocultural effects in this paper, it is mandatory to understand the sociocultural determinations and psychological consequences of these injurious ideals.

Often an eating disorder is perpetuated as a cry for attention, a rebellious act, or an outright nuisance, but what if it is something more? What if something rampant is running through the minds of five percent of the world’s population that is more than a simple choice to not eat? The answers are right in front of us, begging to be discovered.

16

Autumn, Emilie. The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls. United States: Asylum Emporium, 2011.

Print.

Riva, Giuseppe. “Out of My Real Body: Cognitive Neuroscience Meets Eating Disorders.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8 (2014). Print.

Benowitz-Fredericks, Carson A., Kaylor Garcia, Meredith Massey, Brintha Vasagar, and Dina L.g.

Borzekowski. “Body Image, Eating Disorders, and the Relationship to Adolescent Media Use.” Pediatric Clinics of North America 59.3 (2012): 693-704. Print.

Saguy, Abigail C., and Kjerstin Gruys. “Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders.” Social Problems 57.2 (2010): 231-50. Print.

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. Print.

Cohen, Rachel, and Alex Blaszczynski. “Comparative Effects of Facebook and Conventional Media on Body Image Dissatisfaction.” J Eat Disord Journal of Eating Disorders 3.1 (2015). Print.

Walker, Morgan, Laura Thornton, Munmun De Choudhury, Jaime Teevan, Cynthia M. Bulik, Cheri A. Levinson, and Stephanie Zerwas. “Facebook Use and Disordered Eating in College-Aged Women.” Journal of Adolescent Health 57.2 (2015): 157-63. Print.

Wiseman, Claire V., James J. Gray, James E. Mosimann, and Anthony H. Ahrens. “Cultural Expectations of Thinness in Women: An Update.” Int. J. Eat. Disord. International Journal of Eating Disorders 11.1 (1992): 85-89. Print.

Collins, Jill Meredith. “NURTURING Destruction: Eating Disorders Online.” Off Our Backs, vol. 34, no. 11/12, 2004, pp. 20–22.

Damiano, Stephanie R., Karen J. Gregg, Emma C. Spiel, Siân A. Mclean, Eleanor H. Wertheim, and Susan J. Paxton. “Relationships between Body Size Attitudes and Body Image of 4-year-old Boys and Girls, and Attitudes of Their Fathers and Mothers.” Journal of Eating Disorders 3.1 (2015). Print.

Debraganza, N., and H. A. Hausenblas. “Media Exposure of the Ideal Physique on Women’s Body Dissatisfaction and Mood: The Moderating Effects of Ethnicity.” Journal of Black Studies 40.4 (2008): 700-16. Print.

Derenne, J. L., and E. V. Beresin. “Body Image, Media, and Eating Disorders.” Academic Psychiatry 30.3 (2006): 257-61. Print.

Fairweather-Schmidt, A., and Tracey D. Wade. “Do Genetic and Environmental Influences on Disordered Eating Change from Early to Late Adolescence?” J Eat Disord Journal of Eating Disorders 3.Suppl 1 (2015). Print.

Fardouly, Jasmine, and Lenny Vartanian. “Appearance Comparisons and Body Image in Women’s Everyday Lives.” J Eat Disord Journal of Eating Disorders 3.Suppl 1 (2015). Print.

Ferguson, Christopher J., Mónica E. Muñoz, Adolfo Garza, and Mariza Galindo. “Concurrent and Prospective Analyses of Peer, Television and Social Media Influences on Body Dissatisfaction, Eating Disorder Symptoms and Life Satisfaction in Adolescent Girls.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 43.1 (2013): 1-14. Print.

Froreich, Franzisca V., Lenny R. Vartanian, Jessica R. Grisham, and Stephen W. Touyz. “Dimensions of Control and Their Relation to Disordered Eating Behaviours and Obsessive-compulsive Symptoms.” J Eat Disord Journal of Eating Disorders 4.1 (2016). Print.

Goodman, Lynne. “From Starving to Stuffing: Profile on Anorexics and Bulimics Anon.” Agenda 15 (1992): 28. Print.

Gorwood, P. “The Human Genetics of Anorexia Nervosa.” European Journal of Pharmacology 480.1-3 (2003): 163-70. Print.

Hammond, William A. Fasting Girls: Their Physiology and Pathology. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1879. Print.

Harrison, Kristen. “Ourselves, Our Bodies: Thin-Ideal Media, Self-Discrepancies, and Eating Disorder Symptomatology in Adolescents.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 20.3 (2001): 289-323.

Print.

Jane, D. M., G. C. Hunter, and B. M. Lozzi. “Do Cuban American Women Suffer from Eating Disorders? Effects of Media Exposure and Acculturation.” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 21.2 (1999): 212-18. Print.

Leavy, Patricia, and Lauren Sardi Ross. “The Matrix of Eating Disorder Vulnerability: Oral History and the Link between Personal and Social Problems.” Oral Hist Rev Oral History Review 33.1 (2006): 65-81. Print.

Luff, Gina M., and James J. Gray. “Complex Messages regarding a Thin Ideal Appearing in Teenage Girls’ Magazines from 1956 to 2005.” Body Image 6.2 (2009): 133-36. Print.

Mabe, Annalise G., K. Jean Forney, and Pamela K. Keel. “Do You â likeâ My Photo? Facebook Use Maintains Eating Disorder Risk.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 47.5 Monell, Elin, Louise Högdahl, Emma Forsén Mantilla, and Andreas Birgegård. “Emotion Dysregulation, Self-image and Eating Disorder Symptoms in University Women.” J Eat Disord Journal of Eating Disorders 3.1 (2015). Print.

Peterson, Kathleen A., Sharon E. Paulson, and Kristen K. Williams. “Relations of Eating Disorder Symptomology with Perceptions of Pressures from Mother, Peers, and Media in Adolescent Girls and Boys.” Sex Roles 57.9-10 (2007): 629-39. Print.

Polivy, Janet, and C. Peter Herman. “Causes of Eating Disorders.” Annual Review of Psychology Annu.

Rev. Psychol. 53.1 (2002): 187-213. Print.

Fifth World

17

Asian American: A Study of Emasculation Ren Zhang

I

n April of 2004, American men’s magazine Details published an article entitled “Gay or Asian?” The column consisted of an image of Asian man with various racist and homophobic commentaries on his outfit and appearance. It begins: “One cruises for chicken; the other takes it General Tso-style. Whether you’re into shrimp balls or shaved balls, entering the dragon requires imperial tastes.” The article then proceeded with comments on the model such as “Delicate features: Refreshed by a cup of hot tea or a hot night of teabagging” (McNalley 52). The exotic Orientalist imagery that the article attempts to juxtapose with stereotypes of gay men invokes a message that the two are related or perhaps the same. Like femininity, homosexuality, as Connell writes, is “the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity, the items ranging from fastidious taste in home decoration to receptive anal pleasure. Hence, from the point of view of hegemonic masculinity, gayness is easily assimilated into femininity” (Connell 78). To associate homosexuality with femininity is to argue for the subordination of both gay and Asian men and all women to a certain racialized version of masculinity.

Before continuing such a discussion, it is important that we provide definitions and distinctions between words such as “masculinity,” “femininity,” “emasculation,” and “feminization,” for they are words that often appear together. We can establish that as result of patriarchal histories, the idea of masculinity is constructed through both physical appearance and behavior and is often assigned traits that have been deemed as desirable and dominant such as physical strength, intellect, and leadership. Femininity is then defined as the opposite, a lack of masculinity.1 Both femininity and homosexuality become ascribed to the behaviors that masculinity and heterosexuality repudiate.

Although “Gay or Asian” was certainly not the first time 1 As Ling notes, it is important to distinguish “emasculation” and “feminization” as not occupying the same lexical space as they apply to history and culture. Within the context of Asian America, he argues that emasculation can be considered the product of the oppressions faced

by Asian American men, with feminization being just one of the methods in which such oppressions occur (Ling 314). The idea of feminization is important to consider because the patriarchal nature of society establishes masculinity and femininity as a gender binary where masculinity is composed of many desirable traits such as strength, courage, and sexual desirability. Femininity is then defined as a lack of these traits. Ling, Jinqi. “Identity Crisis and Gender Politics: Reappropriating Asian American Masculinity.” An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. King-kog Cheung. N.p.: Cambridge UP, 1997. 312-37. Print.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

I was introduced to stereotypes that aimed to erase Asian American masculinity, something about the pure absurdity of the article and its coarse insinuations sparked a need to better understand this violence. I sought to better understand this as not merely a series of punctuated incidents, but as the product of a hegemonic system of race and gender whose origins can be traced to the historical encounters of the earliest Asian American immigrants with an emergent white nationalist masculinity. My attempts to seek such an understanding have resulted in a discovery that such an emasculation originates and is sustained through a racism that is, like so many other racisms, the result of a perceived threat to the white supremacist society by people of color.

This emasculation occurs in many forms, including the form of a normative heterosexuality developed through the characters of the homosexual and the asexual and is normalized and instituted through societal constructs such as the model minority and the bamboo ceiling. In modern times, much of Asian American masculinity or lack thereof is defined through a frequent misrepresentations of Asian American men in media forms such as film or television.

T

he emasculation of Asian American men is a reaction to their perceived threat to white society; such a threat justifies the renewed dominance of white men over Asian American men in order to assert and maintain their higher position within the social hierarchy. Such a need for dominance is often expressed in terms of the sexual dominance of an unruly racialized nature. The assertion of this sexual dominance establishes the supremacy of white male sexuality over Asian male sexuality. Eng recognizes this when he writes that “the Westerner monopolizes the part of the “top”: the Asian is invariably assigned the role of the “bottom” (1). Because of the hegemony of heterosexuality and patriarchy, the male is established as the sexually dominant, on top, which forces the female into the role of the sexually submissive, on bottom. Therefore when the Asian American man is portrayed as the sexually submissive, the bottom, he is inevitably feminized, thus eliminating all forms of maleness or identity which do not conform to white heterosexual masculinity. If heterosexuality and masculinity are to be considered the dominant forms of sexuality and gender respectively, then it suggests that the two of them are mutually constitutive. When masculinity is articulated to heterosexuality, femininity is then identified with homosexuality. The construction and correlation of the male/female

18

and heterosexual/homosexual binaries enables the dominance of white male sexuality over Asian male sexuality to emasculate Asian men. Eng writes that “If Asian American male subjectivity is psychically and materially constrained by a crossing of racial difference with homosexuality—what Fung describes as the conflation of ‘Asian’ and ‘anus’ —then its relation to these dominant social norms and prohibitions takes on a distinctive critical cast and an urgent critical dissonance” (14).

While the sexual emasculation of Asian American males may find itself in such a “queering” of heterosexual Asian Asian men, the dominance of white men and masculinity can be found within homosexual spaces in both the figurative and the literal sense. The sexual submissiveness and therefore lack of masculinity is perpetuated within both heterosexuality and homosexuality. Similarly to heterosexual intercourse, the nature of homosexual intercourse finds itself as also constructed of a sexual dominance because there is a literal physical penetration that imposes the body and sexuality of the dominant onto, and into, the submissive. Nguyen provides a very thorough discussion of the portrayal of homosexual Asian men in gay male society through their representation in gay pornography. In his book A View From the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation he writes that Asian men are depicted in gay pornography as possessing “a working-class status, Chinatown address, bad accents, bad hair, flat faces, small dicks, and propensity for bottomhood” (Nguyen 61).

Such a representation seeks to continue the establishment of the sexual binary of the white top and the Asian bottom through sexual dominance, implying the generalized racial, cultural, and social dominance white masculinity over Asian masculinity.2

A

ccording to a 2012 Pew Research Center study, Asian Americans are the “highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States” (1). Given their early history as poorly paid unskilled laborers, it is easy to look upon Asian Americans as the personification of the “American Dream,” where America provides the opportunities and liberties for immigrants to achieve upward social and economic mobility. Due to their perceived higher degree of socioeconomic success compared to the rest of the United States, Asian Americans occupy a unique space within the group of American racial minorities. In fact, Asian Americans as a group are often scapegoated in that they are used as an example of successful racial minorities, thus disproving the notion that racial minorities in the United States are inherently disadvantaged in the American socio2 It should be noted that it can be perhaps dangerous to completely conflate the idea of sexual bottomhood with a submissiveness that goes beyond the bedroom. As Nguyen points out, “for some gay Asian male subjects, adopting the bottom position can be an enjoyable and affirming sex act. To invoke the title of the well-known sex-positive feminist, lesbian magazine, they are perfectly happy ‘on their backs’”(Nguyen 61).

economic system.3 This directly attempts to imply that the failures of other racial minorities such as African Americans to reach a similar status to that of Asian Americans is not the product of an American system of socioeconomic white supremacy. By pitting racial minority groups against each other in this way, the underlying causes of institutional racism that create these barriers and are responsible for these disparities are left unaddressed and unscathed.

Additionally, western portrayals of Asian Americans tend to be limited to East Asians, erasing the cultural identities and struggles of other Asian Americans such as South Asians and Southeast Asians who do not fit within this umbrella. Lisa Lowe criticizes this homogenization of Asian American identity by arguing that it “implies we are ‘alike’” and that it reduces “racial and ethnic diversity into a binary schema of ‘the one’ and ‘the other.’” Therefore, if one intends to examine Asian America as a single entity, when it is in fact a body of people diverse in “national origin, generation, gender, party, class,” one then begins to forget about the “differences and hybridities among Asians” (Lowe 1037).

We are then faced with a narrow- minded analysis that simultaneously ignores the struggles of Asian Americans who are unable to live up to the model minority stereotype and depreciates the accomplishments of those Asian Americans who are able to be successful (Pew 2). Much of the underlying cause of this problem can be directed to the issue of selective immigration, where the plight of first-generation Asian American refugees who immigrated in search of asylum is overlooked in comparison to more established Asian American communities. Groups such as these become vulnerable to suffering from much higher rates of poverty when compared to other Asian American groups and even the United States as a whole. In addition, they also tend to be underrepresented in areas that are typically associated with model minority Asian Americans such as institutions of higher education (Suzuki 25). On the other hand, Asian American men who are academically and financially successful lack recognition and acknowledgement when compared to their peers because their accomplishments are simply seen as meeting what is already expected of them. This creates a catch-22 situation where Asian American men are effectively emasculated through both their achievements and their failures.

I

t is also important to recognize the influence of media upon perceptions of Asian American men and their masculinities. We have already touched on this in a way in our previous discussion about Asian men in gay pornography but here I would like to focus on their presence in film and television. We can essentially establish that the media impacts Asian American masculinity through the manners in which they are portrayed upon the screen and not portrayed 3 It is crucial to note that holding economic power is distinct from holding political or social power.

Fifth World

19

on the screen.

Though we have since moved on from a time that portrayed Asian men with white actors in yellow face, such as Mickey Rooney playing the character of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the fact remains that when a film or a television show contains male Asian American characters, they are inevitably pigeonholed into a few select character tropes because of their race. The male character is imagined in universal or racially unmarked terms, while the Asian-American male is constructed according to the racist conventions of Asian difference. As Iwamoto and Kaya note, “these heroic portrayals rely heavily on Asian masculine stereotypes, such that the Asian male hero often relies on ancient or mysterious martial arts, thus continuing the tradition of exoticizing and ‘othering’ Asian men” (Iwamoto and Kaya 287). The lack of romantic interests for the Asian male character invokes an asexuality that then removes any ideas of masculinity that may have been previously afforded to him by his physical characteristics. We can then also consider male Asian characters on the other side of the spectrum of personality such as Rajesh Koothrappali from the tv show The Big Bang Theory or Long Duk Dong in the movie Sixteen Candles. While such representations may be seen as jokes, they are nevertheless instrumental in the reinforcement of these systems of oppression that aim to strip Asian American men of their control on gender expression.

Additionally, in American cinema, when the Asian American man is not portrayed as a racist caricature, he is often not seen at all. As Asian American screenwriter Alan Yang said in his 2016 Emmy Speech, “There is seventeen million Asian Americans in this country and there is seven million Italian Americans. They have The Godfather, Goodfellas, Rocky, The Sopranos. We got Long Duk Dong...So we got a long way to go” (Mardo). When Asian American males are denied the roles of leading characters, and at best reduced to the sidekick who inevitably sacrifices themselves at the climax of the conflict, they are denied the masculinities that are afforded to their white male replacement protagonists.

Additionally, female Asian characters frequently find themselves portrayed as cold and asexual while they star alongside the white male protagonist until they reveal romantic interest later on in the movie. This trope is known as the white male gaze, where in the Asian female is presented as an object of desire for the white male in way that implies the dominance of the white male over the Asian male. Only the white male is able to release the repressed sexuality of the Asian female, further perpetuating the emasculation of Asian men in not being able to be sexually successful.

M

asculinity is the resultant product of the culture and the society (Iwamoto and Kaya 285). In this case, masculinity for Asian American men is shaped by the predominantly white notions of masculinity imposed upon them that at times exclude them from masculinity altogether. Let us assume that gender identity is, as Judith Butler theorized,

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

a series of performances, that “the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (Butler 903). If that is the case, it would seem that Asian American men have little freedom in such “gender performances.” The narrative that they attempt to construct, the acts they perform to determine gender, is forced upon them through societal pressures because they are continuously growing up in and being influenced by a society that has already situated them racially by regimenting their behaviors and expectations. Consequently, such a performance is evaluated both consciously and unconsciously by others, leaving such a hijacking of Asian American masculinity. Chen writes that “when White American men are used by popular culture as standard bearers of masculinity, Asian Americans are forced to accept the racial hierarchy embedded in the discourse of American manhood. In effect, Asian American men are given a false choice: either we emulate White American notions of masculinity or accept the fact that we are not men” (Chan 156). Unfortunately, the decision for an Asian American man to attempt to conform to white masculinity often comes at the expense of women, particularly Asian American woman.4 The linking between patriarchy and masculinity presents the temptation and possibility of ignoring the hegemony of masculinity in an attempt to acquire patriarchal power. Such desires may manifest in the form of Asian American men attempting to reclaim their masculinities through the acquisition of white women, a symbol of patriarchal power (Nemoto 82-83).

Such a technique would be considered regressive and antifeminist because of the way it views women merely as a tool used in moving up the hierarchy of masculinity; it also prizes white women over Asian American women. The attempt of Asian American men to adopt white masculine norms is a losing battle, for even if one does manage to emulate all the prized qualities of the masculine white man, the Asian American man will still never be fully accepted into white masculinity. This is resultant of underlying racism, one that lies in the physical differences and long established stereotypes. For Asian American males, attempting to don white masculinity is merely a facade that will eventually fade and

4 Though emasculated, Asian American men still belong to the hegemonic masculinity that oppresses women and are willing to barter their low positions as an Asian American for a high position as a male.

Kobena relates this exchange to black men by writing that machismo, the attempt to reclaim masculinity through macho behaviors as such as toughness and physical aggressiveness, is “shaped by the challenge to the hegemony of the socially dominant white male, yet it assumes a form which is in turn oppressive to black women, children and indeed, to black men themselves, as it can entail self-destructive acts and attitudes” (Mercer and Julien 113). Mercer, Kobena, and Isaac Julien. “Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier.” Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. Ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996. 97-164. Print.

20

expose the Asian American hidden beneath.5 What options does that leave the Asian American male then? Lowe argues that it would be dangerous for them to oust white masculinity and simply replace it with their own Asian American masculinity by referencing Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon argues that “the challenge facing any movement dismantling colonialism (or a system in which one culture dominates another) is to provide for a new order that does not reproduce the social structure of the old system” (Lowe 1038). He fears that such a reproduction would continue the injustices of the previous system under new rulers. This obsession with reclaiming one’s Asian American masculinity can be found in such a manner that it attempts to establish an “authentic Asian masculinity” that is often rooted in patriarchal tradition and dominates Asian American identity.6 This necessitates the use of a third unique option. Because Asian American men are simultaneously emasculated of their own masculinity and refused entry into white masculinity, they are then given,as Chan suggests, an opportunity, however anguished and injurious, to construct a new “alternative” Asian American masculinity that is “non patriarchal, anti-sexist, and anti-racist” (Chan, 10-11).

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. N.p.: Blackwell, 2004. 900-11. Print.

Chan, Jachinson. Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.

Connell, Raewyn. Masculinities. Berkeley: U of California, 1995. Print.

Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, Duke University Press, 2001. Print.

Hyun, Jane. “Leadership Principles for Capitalizing on Culturally Diverse Teams: The Bamboo Ceiling Revisited.” Leader to Leader 64th ser. 2012 (2012): 14-19. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

Iwamoto, Derek Kenji, Aylin Kaya, and S. R. Wester. “Asian American Men.” APA Handbook of Men and Masculinities. Ed. Y. J. Wong. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 285-97. Print.

Lowe, Lisa. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. N.p.: Blackwell, 2004. 1031-050. Print.

Mardo, Paola. “Master of None Writer Alan Yang Had the Best Emmy Speech Ever.” Film School Rejects. Film School Rejects, 2016. Web. 01 Jan. 2017.

McNalley, Whitney. “Gay or Asian?” Details Apr. 2004: 52. Print.

Nemoto, Kumiko. “Climbing the Hierarchy of Masculinity: Asian American Men’s Cross-Racial Competition for Intimacy with White Women.” Gender Issues 25.2 (2008): 80-100. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

Nguyen, Tan Hoang. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation.

N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Park, Michael . “Asian American Masculinity Eclipsed: A Legal and Historical Perspective of Emasculation Through U.S. Immigration Practices.” The Modern American 8.1 (2013): 5-17. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

Peffer, George Anthony. “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women under the Page Law, 1875-1882.” Journal of American Ethnic History 6.1 (1986): 28-46. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Ono, Kent A., and Vincent N. Pham. Asian Americans and the Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009.

Print.

Suzuki, Bob H. “Revisiting the Model Minority Stereotype: Implications for Student Affairs Practice and Higher Education.” New Directions for Student Services 2002.97 (2002): 21-32. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

“The Rise of Asian Americans.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (June 19th, 2012). Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

Yang, Wesley. “Paper Tigers.” NYMag.com. N.p., 8 May 2011. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

5 Eng writes that one must remember what Miss Wakasuki said to her son in Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar, “Look in the mirror, Richie.

We can change our names, but we can never change our faces” (Eng 116).

6 Asian American writer Frank Chin for instance, has been criticized for connecting “the lack of a male-oriented Asian American heroic tradition and the invisibility of Asian American cultural expression” and “effectively ignoring women” (Ling 318-319). Ling, Jinqi. “Identity Crisis and Gender Politics: Reappropriating Asian American Masculinity.” An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. King-kog Cheung.

N.p.: Cambridge UP, 1997. 312-37. Print.

Fifth World

21

"Globalization in a Grande Cup": Exploring the Economic and Cultural Intricacies Between Starbucks and Costa Rica Caroline Carpenter

T

he neon green encircled mermaid now acts a beacon to coffee drinkers everywhere. Since its origin, Starbucks has worked to create its own branding. In every frappuccino you are also consuming the image by which the company has presented itself for years. Starbucks markets itself as more than simply a coffee company; it markets itself as a lifestyle, crafted like a Iced Lightly Sweet Chai Latte to appear as high-end yet accessible, artsy, humanitarian, and revolutionary.1 Knowing that Starbucks is marketing a lifestyle through its coffee, one must be careful about the cultural implications that are also purchased. Starbucks is not ashamed to promote its own morality when it comes to its work in countries in which the coffee is grown. However, when a closer lens is put on the company and its dealings, it can be seen that the impact that its dealings have on both the origin country and the store consumers can be detrimental. Starbucks has quite the price to pay when it comes to perpetuating economic disparities between the consumers of its origin countries as and those of its own United States’ stores.

This consequence also contributes to the perpetuation of the “white savior” mentality that Starbucks consciously (however “unconscious” they may claim) incorporates into its superstructure.

In Marxist theory, the capitalistic mode of production consists of two parts: the substructure and the superstructure. The substructure is made up of the means and interactions of production. In the realm of Starbucks, the would consist of coffee plantations in origin countries, farmer support centers, and mechanisms of exportation to Starbucks stores. The superstructure consists of all noneconomic aspects of a society such as art, religion, education, and culture. In Starbucks’ case, this can be described by the company’s commodified ethnicity (Italian names for orders, Costa Rican Arabica beans, etc.). Starbucks takes part in what

1 In his book Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, author and professor Bryant Simon summarized this factor of the company’s identity: “Starbucks speaks to a deeply felt American need for predictability and class standing, community and authenticity, revealing that Starbucks’ appeal lies not in the product it sells but in the easily consumed identity it offers.”

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

neo-Marxists would refer to as lat(t)e capitalism, which means that the company’s ultimate goal, of course, would be to generate capital. Part of Starbucks’ superstructure has been inherent to the company goals and creation, but many aspects of what they incorporate into company culture has been in reaction to the consumeristic desire for multiculturality in their product. There is a distinct experience that Starbucks must create to ensure customer satisfaction. This is an experience that goes far beyond a diligent barista.

Now that consumers have a growing concern over the origin of its products, consumers are also seeing the effects of export-dependent economies such as Costa Rica. Kim Feller wrote in her book Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, and Cappuccino, “It’s a sad consequence of the historic north-south coffee relationship that many farmers once had no idea what kind of coffee their bean produced.” Since the Costa Rican coffee industry is so dependent on exportation, few farmers have actually tasted what kind of coffee their beans produce. The beans that are left within origin countries are often the third tier of quality coffee.

When visiting Doka Coffee Estate in Sabanilla, Alajuela, Costa Rica, I took the opportunity to go on one of the marketed tours. The tours touted both the history of the specific plantation, Costa Rican coffee history, as well as the intricate coffee-making process utilized every day. At one stop on the tour the guide sat in front of the group three different sacks, overflowing with coffee beans. The first sack of beans, which were of perfect shape and a beautiful pre-roasted white, and without a shred of a shell, would be sent, we were informed, to private purchasers around the globe (“like beans could also be purchased in our gift shop,” conveniently mentioned our tour guide). The next set of beans was very similar to the first, but shells were scattered about the sack and the pale color was not as uniform. When asked where we thought this sack of beans would be sent to, the group responded with an obvious “to local Costa Ricans.” Our guide shook his head knowingly and told us, “Those, mis amigos, are what fill your Starbucks cups.”

We all immediately turned our eyes to the last bag of coffee beans. There was a huge difference in coloration as well as remnants of shells scattered throughout the bag. These were the beans that filled Costa Rican coffee mugs. These beans

22

were still fit for consumption, but would have Starbucks quickly attacked by food critics and coffee purists. It was as if the entire group collectively had to swallow a lump in our throats.

This disparity between coffee qualities is exactly what strikes a chord in the hearts of Starbucks consumers. This concern has caused Starbucks to set goals for increasing the number of Starbucks stores in origin countries. Starbucks opened its first store in Costa Rica in 2012, and currently has a goal set for at least five new openings in the country per year, with a goal of twenty-five total by 2020. Peter Torribiarte, director of Costa Rica’s agronomy center, is enamored by the idea of more Starbucks stores in origin countries. He states that, Opening stores in countries of origin completes the circle. It’ll be different than the neighborhood stores in the States because people know more about coffee. Many of them are involved with its production in some way. They’re more sophisticated about it. We believe coffee should promote a social conversation, and that conversation is expanded when you can talk about a specific origin. (Fellner 85) Not only are these questions of production remaining in origin countries open for discussion, but interrogations of the economic disparities between plantation workers and Starbucks stores may raise questions which the Starbucks corporation cannot easily answer. The opening of Starbucks in origin countries is a wonderful idea in theory, but it will be interesting to see if locals are able to afford the very beans they produce, or if the booming tourism will be keeping the new stores alive.

Starbucks has certainly been an advantageous addition to origin countries, specifically in the case of Costa Rica. According to locals, the company has proved to help the country’s industry benefit both economically and environmentally. Juan Gerado, owner of his own non-Starbucks-affiliated coffee plantation, is a big critic of the company’s choice in coffee planting and brewing techniques, but had praise for the company as far as its impact on Costa Rica. “They’re excellent for Costa Rica,” he stated. “We used to have excellent quality in the 1970s and 1980s. Then the huge multinationals started to push for quantity. Now thanks to Starbucks, we can go back to quality: we have quality controls, houses for workers, water standards” (Fellner 87). The “huge multinationals” to which he is referring are companies that were much quicker in the globalization game such as Nestle, Kraft, and Proctor & Gamble.

One revolutionary aspect of Starbucks’ buying requirements are CAFÉ Practices. Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFÉ) Practices was created to ensure that all of its suppliers would be consistent with the values placed in the Conservation International Program (a program Starbucks first sponsored in the Chiapas region of Mexico starting in

1998). CAFÉ Practices act as Starbucks’ buying guidelines2 which outline the criteria for product quality, economic accountability and transparency, social responsibility, and environmental leadership necessary before purchase. The final criteria were decided in 2004.

Environmental policy and advocacy have become a staple portion of the company’s regulations and projects both in the United States and specifically Costa Rica. The first Farmer Support Center for the Starbucks company was created at the base of the Poás Volcano in San Jose, Costa Rica in 2004. The area is now used as a central agronomy center for the company. At this support center, Starbucks provides coffee process technique training for Costa Rican farmers (even those not yet certified for their own purchase). The area is specifically used to develop different techniques for the coffee-making process in order to provide the most environmentally-effective method of producing the same quality coffee beans (1912 Pike Staff). Based on research and experimentation conducted in this very agronomy center, Starbucks implemented a new coffee bean cycle that reduced water use in their process by 90% and recycled it for other uses on the plantations. The pulp of the coffee bean is also being used for fertilizer and the parchment in the process used as a drying fuel in order to reduce overall waste in the facilities (Fellner 82-83). Hacienda Alsacia, the 240-hectare farm purchased in 2013, has set big goals for itself in maintaining the Costa Rican coffee industry. Hacienda Alsacia not only provides refinery to the coffee-producing process, but Starbucks’ first agronomy center acts also as a hotspot for new methods and technologies for the coffee industry.

One such project that the center is currently working on is the development of trees that are resistant to coffee rust.

Coffee rust is a disease that targets the leaves of the coffee trees and creates yellow spores that weaken, and occasionally kill, coffee trees. Starbucks brought in Carlos Mario Rodriguez, who oversees all of the Starbucks Farmer Support Centers to conduct the research. Rodriguez was very successful in creating a disease-resistant tree and is currently working on various hybrids of such to spread to the rest of Costa Rica. At the 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Starbucks announced that they would be donating 20 million of these upgraded rust-resistant trees to farmers across Costa Rica as part of their global “One Tree for Every Bag” initiative (Lopez). The center and all of its research results is open to any Costa Rican coffee farmer who wants to learn.

This openness, according to Starbucks, is in order to ensure the future of the country’s coffee industry. They hope the industry will continue far past their own legacy (1912 Pike Staff).

2 Starbucks has outlined in their website the specifics of these guidelines. The website also includes pdf file of a “scorecard” of sorts that investigators use to evaluate each specific responsibility. The total score is calculated on a scale from 1-100. The higher the score, the higher priority of trading Starbucks will engage in with the producer (“Responsibly Grown and Fairtrade Coffee”).

Fifth World

23

Starbucks maintains a positive relationship with the people and economy of Costa Rica, but they do not do it without want of profit. Part of their charity and morality is for the consumption of its own audience. In every Starbucks store there are conveniently placed pictures of farmers in simple clothing smiling with a farm distinctly in the background. Bryant Simon condemned this marketing technique in his book: When it comes to lending a hand far and wide-to absolution and dissociation- many customers seem willing to pay an even higher premium for a feelgood story about global peace than they are even for green solace and everyday discoveries. Starbucks’ coffee costs more, a New York sales clerk acknowledged while waiting in line for her latte, but she didn’t care because it made her feel “better intellectually.” Another Starbucks regular added she appreciated the “cheerful fliers” with pictures of “happy...Costa Rican coffee growers” They let her believe that “we aren’t making the world a more vicious place by frequenting this coffee juggernaut.” (204) This is a common sentiment for coffee lovers, and patrons, in general. Consumers have a feeling of purpose in every cup that they buy, knowing that their money is going to help the “little guy.” There is sense of both accomplishment and relief when seeing the face of the person who is thriving, it seems, because of their coffee purchase. This plays into an overwhelming trend of social responsibility as consumers, but also an unfortunate trend of believing that rural communities need helping. It’s quite possible, even likely in some cases, that the family pictured beside the “global3” coffee bags, dressed in simple, often traditional, clothing, earns an equivalent wage to the average Starbucks customer. These pictures are used much in the same way that Sarah McLachlan utilizes watery-eyed dogs and “In the Arms of an Angel” to get people to donate to the ASPCA. It helps a consumer sleep better at night knowing that their frequented locations can be trusted in making the world a better place.

To appear authentic, one must portray authenticity, which is exactly what Starbucks plans for every promotional endeavor regarding coffee farmers. Pictures are not where Starbucks stops in proving their authenticity to customers.

If you search under Starbucks’ website under the section of “social responsibility” you shall find videos upon videos of “some of our very best friends” as Starbucks phrases it. These videos allow consumers to walk through the lush rainforests of Cost Rica, the mountains of Mexico, or wherever their heart may desire to take them. These videos act as windows to what goes on behind-the-scenes of Starbucks coffee production. Bryan Simon jokes that, “they are what I would call

3 The irony lies in the fact that the “special” bags of coffee marketed in lines and around Starbucks stores often are produced from the same harvest that is your daily cup.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

‘corupmentaries’-movies made to contribute to a company’s brand mythology. And, of course, you are not supposed to think about what isn’t there, the evidence the filmmakers leave out or don’t explore” (Simon 206).

One cannot purchase the benefits of the substructure of the company, without also facing the consequences of the produced superstructure. Though we can commend Starbucks for its actions in benefiting origin countries, such as Costa Rica, in the realms of fair trade certification and environmental practices, we must also remain mindful of cultural aspects of the company. Attention must be paid to the constructed images and relations that Starbucks manufactures through its products and locations. We must be wary of the atmosphere created by “corupmentaries” and posters of coffee farmers (who deserve to be recognized, but not marketed). Though they prove to improve the economic standings of those who work for them, the disparity between those who can purchase their coffee in the United States versus those in origin countries is a stark difference.

1912 Pike Staff. “The Coffee Farm Dedicated to Ensuring the Future of Coffee.” 1912 Pike. Starbucks, 14 July 2016. Web. 10 Oct. 2016.

Arias, L. “Starbucks Will Have 25 Coffee Shops in Costa Rica by 2020.” The Tico Times. Producciones Magnolia, 16 Oct. 2015. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.

“Coffee Purchasing.” Starbucks Coffee Company. Starbucks Corporation, n.d. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.

Fellner, Kim. Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2008. Print.

Global Responsibility Report 2015. Seattle: Starbucks Corporation, 2015. PDF. Lopez, Jaime. “Get to Know Starbucks’ Coffee Farm in Costa Rica (VIDEO) - Costa Rica Star News.”

Costa Rica Star News. N.p., 27 Mar. 2016. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.

Michelli, Joseph A. The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Print.

Patton, Leslie. “McDonald’s Is Moving to Sustainable Coffee in Latest Menu Change.” Bloomberg. com. Bloomberg, 5 Oct. 2016. Web. 19 Oct. 2016.

“Responsibly Grown and Fair Trade Coffee.” Starbucks Coffee Company. Starbucks, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.

Roseberry, William, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach. Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Print.

Schultz, Howard, and Joanne Gordon. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul. New York: Rodale, 2011. Print.

Simmons, John. The Starbucks Story: How the Brand Changed the World. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Business, 2005. Print.

Simon, Bryant. Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. Berkeley: U of California, 2009. Print.

24

The Dormancy of the Street Railway Eric Schichlein

A

t 11:00 am on the eighteenth day of April in the year 1939, a parade of streetcars trundled towards the car barn in downtown Wilmington.1 They were packed with local dignitaries and the lead trolley was driven by a veteran of the company, W. B. ‘Tuck’ Savage. With this short celebration, nearly half a century of history came to an end.

In 1888, “a system of horse-drawn street cars” arrived in Wilmington courtesy of the Wilmington Street Railway Company (Howell 170). Later that year, Wrightsville Beach was connected to the city for the first time. The Wilmington Sea Coast Railway Company ran locomotives from “Front and Princess streets” in Wilmington via a trestle to “the Hammocks” (Howell 171). 2 At the time of their construction, Wilmington was one of the largest cities in the state, with a population of 20,056 in 1880 (US Census Bureau 467). Wrightsville Beach had yet to even be incorporated; it was merely a small collection of cottages, nowhere near the resort town it would become. Four short years after the horse-drawn streetcars were introduced, they were phased out. In a sign of modernity, the entire trolley system was electrified. Accompanying this, a generating plant was built by the company to power the system and the town.

The man responsible for electrifying the system was Hugh MacRae. He purchased the company from John D. Bellamy with the help of Northern financiers. MacRae, though, was a native Wilmingtonian like Bellamy. His father, Donald MacRae, was a successful local businessman.

Primarily, he owned the Wilmington Cotton Mills, but he also had interests in banks, railroads, and real estate in Florida and Western North Carolina. As his father aged, Hugh gained greater control of Donald’s businesses and began shaping them into a burgeoning empire. Upon his father’s death, he assumed total control and began expanding his portfolio through the founding of companies to dabble in his various interests. Through these companies, he exercised a paternalistic influence over entire towns and shaped their future through development projects.

1 A note on vocabulary, street car, street railway, and trolley are all used interchangeably throughout this paper. Essentially, all three terms refer to a wheeled vehicle that travels along tracks inlaid in the streets of the city.

2 The Hammocks was the name, at the time, for Harbor Island, one of the two islands that make up Wrightsville Beach. Harbor Island is located on the Intracoastal side and Wrightsville Beach proper abuts the ocean.

The Consolidated Railways, Light and Power Company, otherwise known as the Consolidated Company, is one such company; it played a significant role in the development and modernization of Wilmington. MacRae formed the company by orchestrating the North Carolina General Assembly to pass a bill ordering the Wilmington Gas Light Company to, “‘consolidate with the Wilmington Street Railway Company or with the Wilmington Seacoast Railroad Company or with both’” (Davis 5). Under his leadership, the Consolidated Company was used as an instrument to develop the Hammocks, a barrier island group owned by the company. This strategy had two prongs: extending the trolley system and encouraging the use of it. Therefore, the company built the first and only trestle across from Harbor Island to Wrightsville Beach proper before continuing southward along the island. Importantly, the only way to access the island was the streetcar system. At the end of the line, construction was begun on the Lumina, one of the defining attractions of the island for decades to come. The Lumina encompassed a “dance hall, … bowling alley, restaurants, and movie theater.” Lighting the exterior were over 1,000 incandescent light bulbs which they claimed: “sailors navigated their ships by” (Eades Our State Magazine). The luminescence of the pavilion exaggerated or not, indicates that it served as a shining advertisement for a future defined by electricity and it was a powerful incentive for the streetcar which monopolized access to the resort. At this point, Wrightsville Beach had only recently incorporated itself in 1898 and had a yearround population of only 22 people (Census Bureau, 1900 Census, 467). From these humble beginnings, the town would go on to become one of the premier resorts in the region, a heritage clear today.

The golden age of the Lumina Pavilion coincided with the golden age of the streetcar system. It survived for barely a decade after the automobile replaced the trolley. In 1940 Tide Water Power, the new name of the Consolidated Railways, Light and Power Company, submitted to the North Carolina Utilities Commission, the regulatory body that oversaw the company, a request for “the abandonment of electric railroad service in and between the city of Wilmington and the town of Wrightsville Beach” (NC Utilities Commission Report 1939-1940).3 52 years after its inception as a horse drawn street car system and 48 years after 3 In 1940, the commission was renamed the North Carolina Utilities Commission from the North Carolina Corporation Commission.

Fifth World

25

Figure 1. Tide Water Power Company. Map Showing Suburban Developments Along the Lines of the Tide Water Power Company Connecting Wilmington & Wrightsville Beach. Scale not given. 1911.

the electrification of the system, the street railway in Wilmington, NC had come to an end. Much changed in those 52 years, there were new corporate strategies and new methods of transportation. The streetcar could not survive that duo of change.

H

ugh MacRae was a local visionary. He transformed the modest series of businesses his father owned into a veritable empire. Tide Water Power Company is a perfect example; during his tenure, he used the company as a tool to develop Greater Wilmington all the while growing the company into a behemoth. The utility he created in 1902 was not the same utility he left in the 1930’s. At the turn of the century, Consolidated Railways, Light and Power Company was primarily a transit company which happened to have a nascent electric business. The receipts from other businesses, including the electricity division and the gas division were dwarfed by the receipts from the street railway until 1915. Thus, to grow profits the company needed to grow its nascent electricity business while ensuring steady profits in its traditional operations. Throughout the early 1900’s the Consolidated Company went far beyond its roots as a transit company to foster demand for electricity. On a micro scale, this entailed selling complementary goods like appliances and providing services to retrofit properties with electricity. On a grander scale, that meant real estate development and the coöpting of the street railway to tout the benefits of a future power by electricity. This strategy worked, in 1930 receipts from businesses besides the streetcar totaled $1,200,207.68 while receipts from the streetcar totaled a mere $178,749.98 (North Carolina Corporation Commission 1930-1931 Report). Over the last 30 years, the Consolidated Company had used a bold strategy to create the right conditions for a utility company to survive and in the process, had transformed itself into from a transit company into a utility company. As these three decades of metamorphous came to a close, the will to follow through on large, bold projects withered and the transformative transit aspects of the company suffered from declining profits. The largest of the development projects were in Wilmington,

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

which grew by 59 percent from 1900 to 1940. New Hanover County is one of the smallest counties in the state, yet at the time it had plenty of space for Wilmington to expand.

The logical direction of expansion for Wilmington was East towards Wrightsville Beach. West was the Cape Fear River and to the North and South infrastructure was lacking.

Running to the East, though, was the streetcar line between Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach. Mushrooming off that line, the initial suburbs of Wilmington would be developed.

As it so happens, Tide Water Power Company owned significant tracts of land to the East of the city, as seen in Figure 1. Writing in 1917, Thos. Davis outlines the landholdings of Tide Water Power, which included “Winter Park Heights, … Harbor Island, … Oleander, … and a tract of land conveyed by W.A. Wright” (Legal Opinion Regarding Titles, Rights-of-Way, Franchises, etc). Work had already begun on improving these parcels when Davis enumerated them in 1917. Starting in 1905, Winter Park and Carolina Place were developed as roomier alternatives to the city.

However, these nascent suburbs would continue downtown’s orientation towards the streetcar as suggested by the hearty support expressed in a December 13th, 1906 Wilmington Morning Star article urging the double tracking of the suburban streetcar line. The explosion of subdivisions within the 1945 corporate limits of Wilmington would continue for nearly two decades after the turn of the century.

This was marked by double-digit increases, from census to census, in the population of the city and the county. Between 1910 and 1920 Wilmington grew by 22.7%. It was during that decade that further suburbs, beyond Carolina Place and Winter Park Heights, were built.

A prominent example is Audubon, which provides an intimate view of Tide Water Power Company’s attitude toward development. The lots were sold by the company and it had its “own architects draw the plans to suit the tastes of the buyer” (Wilmington Morning Star). The all-pervading role of Tide Water Power Company in the construction of the suburbs illustrates the importance of design to the company. The totality of the company’s control over the development of the suburbs shows how far the company was willing to go to promote its vision of modernity. This notion is further supported in the same article from the Wilmington Morning Star which trumpets the modern amenities like “water, sewage, gas, electric lights, and telephone” these neighborhoods offered.

These advertisements for electricity were expensive, though. If the city sought to expand, any “new lines … [would need] double track [throughout] the greater portion” (Smith Wilmington Morning Star). Those difficulties in expansion are indicated in Figure 1. Outside of the city center, only the Wrightsville Beach line was capable of reaching new suburbs beyond the 1945 corporate limits. If developments were to expand Northward or Southward from that singular line, they would run into the same problem faced by earlier expansionists: a lack of access. As mentioned earlier,

26

though, the automobile began to effectively compete against the streetcar in the late 1920’s and 1930’s which presented an opportunity for developers. No longer would their developments be constrained by the street railway line. Even as the suburbs were released from bondage to the streetcar, they became dependent upon the automobile. By the 1930’s, not only was the streetcar no longer necessary for transit to the suburbs, it was not even an effective advertisement for electricity. The growth in receipts from Tide Water Power Company’s utility divisions greatly exceeded the growth of the streetcar business. Gradually, the streetcar business began to shrink. The streetcar had accomplished its goal of growing the electricity businesses at the expense of itself.

Tide Water Power Company’s shifting priorities, which would go on to consume MacRae and the streetcar, were aided by the completion of many of the projects begun decades earlier. By the start of the 1920’s, “Carolina Place was almost totally filled, while in Carolina Heights only a few vacant lots remained” (National Register of Historic Places Application for Carolina Heights). Rather than begin anew and repeat the process of building out more suburbs and expanding streetcar access, the company chose to abandon the old method largely due to the costs associated with it.

The streetcar, which had played such a major role in the initial suburbs, grew increasingly insolvent as the 1930’s continued. Starting the decade, the streetcar business alone made a profit of $45,445.75 but that was minor compared to Tide Water Power Company’s electrical generation business which reported a profit of $439,584.88 that same year (NC Corporation Commission Report 1929-1930). It takes until the 1934-1935 report for the obsolescence of the old way to be made clear. By 1935 receipts from the streetcar had hit $103,101.21, barely half of what they had once been while expenses had shot up resulting in a large loss (NC Corporation Commission Report 1934-1935). With finances like that, the old ways were over at Tide Water. No longer would the company go to such expenses to promote its vision of modernity. Now, it was the turn of the automobile companies and the oil and gas companies to present their vision of the future: one defined by filling stations, and wide car filled streets.

T

he streetcar did not just die from its own success; it was aided by growing competition. It was clear by the 1930’s that the ever growing adoption of automobiles and the Great Fire of 1934 had made the streetcar obsolescent in the eyes of many local leaders.

It was a cold January day in 1934 on Harbor Island.

There were few families on the island at the time, as the annual summer tourist season was long over, and the town was quiet. Around noon, that silence was broken by the arrival of the “dread god of fire” (Smith Wilmington Morning Star). As the fire spread, the beleaguered town fought back, forming a bucket brigade and enlisting the help of the

Wilmington Fire Department. At the time, as mentioned earlier, the only access to the island was the rail trestle used by the streetcars. As a result, the Wilmington Fire Department, which had fire engines, was unable to aid the town until it had loaded its engines on flatbed railroad cars and transported them across the Intercostal Waterway. Once on the island, the fire engines proved little use as there were no roads on the island, only trolley tracks. The long delay in aid and the dearth of adequate equipment conspired against the town and lead to the loss of nearly a “third of the popular resort” according to Lamont Smith, a Wilmington Morning Star reporter, who flew over the destruction later that day.

This significant loss had a silver lining, it was an opportunity for Wrightsville Beach to dramatically transform itself.

Up to this point, Tide Water Power Company had exercised significant control over the island. Its streetcar system operated a monopoly on access to the island, it had once owned Harbor Island, and it was a key real estate developer.

Now, the streetcar’s monopoly had failed and the company’s economic development of the island, heralded by the Lumina, was largely in ruins. This allowed the town leaders to assert control and present their vision of modernity: one that builds upon the now common use of electricity and introduces the modern wonder of the day – the automobile.

The opening of a new drawbridge from Harbor Island to Wrightsville Beach is perhaps best indicative of this shift.

This notion is further supported by the abandonment of the Trolley lines in 1940. Essentially, the vision of the future the streetcar championed in the early 1900’s was out of fashion.

he building of the drawbridge was a portentous moment not just for Wrightsville Beach but for all of Wilmington. As discussed above, it was another volley in the war over modernity between the streetcar and the automobile. The story of it begins not with the Great Fire in 1934 but rather three decades earlier when cars were still nascent and the street car yet reigned. In 1900 there were 8,000 automobiles registered in the United States4 (State Motor Vehicle Registration). That was an inconsequential amount considering the population of the United States at the time was 76,932,905 persons5 and the population of Wilmington was 20,976 people (US Census Bureau 1900).

Rather than automobiles, railroads were the primary form of intercity travel and increasingly were adopted as transit within metropolitan areas. Unlike today, the purview of the streetcar extended beyond large cities like New York, to mid-sized cities across the country. Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, Wilmington, Asheville, among other North Carolina

T

4 This does not include Alaska and Hawaii, both of which did not join the union until 1959.

5 This number includes Native Americans not taxed, who were counted separately from population in the 1900 Census, but were added back by the author.

Fifth World

27

cities, all offered streetcar systems at some point or another in the first decades of the twentieth century (NC Corporation Commission 1899-1900 Report). Furthermore, these systems were not trivial but rather were an integral part of the fabric of the city considering the ridership they attained as shown in Table 1. However, as automobile adoption grew the streetcar faced growing competition. Between 1900 and 1940 the number of automobiles increased exponentially while streetcar ridership gradually dwindled, especially in the 1930’s. This compounds the notion the Great Fire of 1934 illustrated: the streetcars were increasingly obsolescent.

Year

Number of Registered Automobiles in the US

1900

8,000

Number of Street Railway Riders in Wilmington, NC 849,4967

Number of Street Railway Riders in Asheville, NC

1905 1910 1915 1920 19278

77,400 458,377 2,332,446 8,131,522

-------2,665,179 4,305,846 ---------

1930 1935

17,481,001 23,034,753 22,567,827

2,167,503 2,076,374 1,268,0259

5,695,758 5,031,519

1940

27,465,826

-------

---------

775,762 2,516,444 3,726,030 5,358,128 6,667,400

the drawbridge to Wrightsville Beach. The improved state highway system across the county echoes the implications of the Wrightsville Beach drawbridge on a larger scale.

Both the drawbridge and the larger road network are signs of the pervasiveness of the automobile and the decline of the streetcar as a viable substitute good. They were old and out of date in comparison to the seemingly ever more popular automobile.

A system which had defined Wilmington for half a century disappeared on an August day in 1939. It was heralded in the Wilmington Morning Star with the subheading, “parade and dinner mark the passing of an old mode of transit”.

Leading the parade was “W.A (Tuck) Savage who operated the first electric trolley car in Wilmington” (Wilmington Morning Star). Following behind were other streetcars loaded with dignitaries. The mentioning of old in the headline highlights the reasons for the demise of the streetcar. It was old, it no longer was beneficial to Tide Water Power Company and it no longer was viewed as the pinnacle of modernity. With its demise, the baton had passed to the automobile, which championed its own vision of the future.

The pomp then had a dual purpose: a funeral for the streetcars and a celebration of the modern new buses that would replace the streetcars. Today, buses continue to operate in the city. Just as the streetcars ran for 50 years, so have the buses ran for nearly 70 years. Is it not time then for a change?

--------10

Table 1. Automobile Adoption6 vs Street Railway Riders per 5 Years.

United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration. State Motor Vehicle Registrations, By Years, 1901-1995. Washington. Web.

Relying solely upon total national registration of vehicles belies the local nature of the issue. The inclusion of the below maps, however, cements the idea established above that by the late 1920’s and the 1930’s the streetcar was considered obsolescent. In particular, attention should be paid to the differences in quantity and quality of the roads between the below fragments of North Carolina Highway Maps. Figure 2 depicts the state highway system in Wilmington in 1916.

Shaded white lines are roads improved via asphalt paving while bordered unshaded roads are unimproved roads composed primarily of dirt. Twenty-four years later, the North Carolina State Highway and Public Works Commission created the map in Figure 3. All the roads shown in Figure 3 are improved, while the same five highways in 1916 are unimproved. Beyond the increased quality, the number of roads in the region had increased. Most significantly, one can see

6 Automobile herein refers to public, private, or commercially owned vehicles. This excludes pickups, panel vans, delivery vans, and buses.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Figure 2. North Carolina State Highway Commission. Highway Map of North Carolina Prepared by the North Carolina State Highway Commission for the Five Year Federal Aid Program. 1916. 1:696,960. “North Carolina Maps”. (10-17-16).

28

“Building in Wilmington in 1916 and Suburbs During 1916 Totals Million Dollars.” Wilmington Morning Star, 31 Dec. 1916.

Agreement. Tide Water Power Company, City of Wilmington, and the Board of Commissioners of New Hanover County, July 1917.

Bliss, Michelle. “The Great Fire.” Wrightsville Beach Magazine, Mar. 2010.

C . M. Sawyer. North Carolina Primary Highway System. 1940. 1:823,680. “North Carolina Maps”.

(10-17-16).

Davis, Thos. W. Legal Opinion Regarding Titles, Rights-of-Way, Franchises, etc. 4 Aug. 1917.

Howell, Andrew J. The Book of Wilmington. 1930.

MacRae, Hugh. “To Messrs. R. C. Cantwell, Jr., W. M. Kenly, Jr., Waddel Waters.” 11 Feb. 1916.

North Carolina State Highway Commission. Highway Map of North Carolina Prepared by the North Carolina State Highway Commission for the Five Year Federal Aid Program. 1916. 1:696,960.

“North Carolina Maps”. (10-17-16).

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1899-1900. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1904-1905. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1910-1911. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

Figure 3. C.M. Sawyer. North Carolina Primary Highway System. 1940.

1:823,680. “North Carolina Maps”. (10-17-16).

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1914-1915. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1920-1921. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1924-1925. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1930-1931. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

North Carolina. North Carolina Corporation Commission. North Carolina Corporation Commission Report 1934-1935. Raleigh. 1900. Print.

Oren, Eades. “Lumina Pavilion.” Our State, 30 Apr. 2014.

Smith, Lamont. “Beach Fire from Plan Gives Semblance of Modern Inferno.” Wilmington Morning Star, 29 Jan. 1934.

“Streetcars Will Make Final Run Here Tuesday.” Wilmington Morning Star, 16 Apr. 1939.

Tide Water Power Company. Map Showing Suburban Developments Along the Lines of the Tide Water Power Company Connecting Wilmington & Wrightsville Beach. Scale not given. 1911.

United States. Census Office. 1900 Census. Washington. Census Office. 1901. Print.

United States. Census Office. 1910 Census. Washington. Census Office. 1901. Print.

United States. Census Office. 1920 Census. Washington. Census Office. 1901. Print.

7 This number does not include the passengers of the Seacoast Railway Company which operated the railway from Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach.

8 No report from the North Carolina Corporation Commission is available which shows data for 1925. Therefore, data from the North Carolina Corporation Commission 1925-1928 Report, with data from 1927, was used.

United States. Census Office. 1930 Census. Washington. Census Office. 1901. Print.

United States. Census Office. 1940 Census. Washington. Census Office. 1901. Print.

United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration. State Motor Vehicle Registrations, By Years, 1901-1995. Washington. Web.

9 Buses were now operating in conjunction with the street railway at this point. They carried 45,573 people.

10 Buses were now running in Asheville at this point. They carried 3,441,241 people in 1935.

Fifth World

29

Passed Along The Way: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong Max Nobel

I

n 1979, Jean-François Lyotard thus instituted the term ‘postmodernism,’ previously found only in the critique of art, into the context of philosophy with the following quotation: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” The metanarrative, understood by Lyotard as an essential attribute of modernity, is a larger master narrative that aims to order and explain knowledge and experience within a single account of culture and history. It offers societal legitimization by the progressive realization of a presupposed “transcendent and universal truth.” The modernist metanarrative is the story of progress through ecumencial human reason. Art in modernism serves to clarify and further this metanarrative, with individual creative expression meant to conform to the realities of technological progress. The postmodernist incredulity towards this artistic philosophy manifests itself in its advocacy for dissident subjectivity and the intertextuality of smaller, often contradictory narratives, with truth lying within the discourse between them. It posits that the spaces between a film’s scenes, and the words and images they encompass, are no less meaningful than the scenes. It aims to break down the social, political, economic and technological cultural demarcation of modernist structuralism through positioning itself as a cultural response to social, political, economic and technological changes.

The transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the colonial rule of the United Kingdom to the postcolonial rule of the People’s Republic of China occurred on July 1st, 1997.

Internationally, it was referred to as “the Handover”; in China, it was referred to as “the Return.” It was interpreted by many as marking the end of the British Empire. The British Empire acquired the territories encompassing Hong Kong from three separate treaties. They were the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the Treaty of Beijing in 1860 and The Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory in 1898, giving them control of Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and the New Territories, respectively. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to the United Kingdom in perpetuity. The control of the New Territories was obtained with a 99-year lease.

By 1997, the New Territories were fully integrated into and home to nearly all of the economic production and developments in Hong Kong. As the 99-year lease neared its end, the status of the New Territories following its expiNorth Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

ration was intrinsically tied to Hong Kong’s economic future. From the start of negotiations in 1984 to the transfer of sovereignty in 1997, nearly 1 million residents emigrated from Hong Kong, with a sharp uptick following the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, leading to a significant loss of capital.

In July, 1992, former Member of Parliament Chris Patten became the 28th and final Governor of Hong Kong. Unlike the majority of his predecessors, he had been a career politician, not a diplomat. The Legislative Council elected by the election of 1995 was originally meant to serve past the handover, providing institutional continuity to Hong Kong’s return to the People’s Republic of China. Beijing had expected this Council to be elected by functional constituencies with limited electorates. This changed upon Pannen’s enactment of election reforms in 1994, expanding the constitutional definition of functional constituencies to allow nearly every subject of Hong Kong to “indirectly elect” the members of the Legislative Council. His actions were condemned by Beijing and given unprecedented support by the citizens of Hong Kong, with his institutional push towards democracy seen as a championing of their rights. Following the handover, the Legislative Council elected under Patton was dissolved and replaced with an unconstitutional Provincial Legislative Council lacking any democratic functions. An election was held in 1998 with the rules in place prior to Patten’s reforms.

Historicity was defined by Frederic Jameson in 1989 as “a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.” It achieves “the brutal transformation of a realistic representation of the present... into a memory and a reconstruction.” Jameson posits this as a consequence of postmodernism, defined as cultural narratives of experience and representation, understood in historical, economical, political and aesthetic form. This aesthetical form is self-fulfilling, being that, as Jameson puts it, “the ‘search’ automatically becomes the thing itself: to set it up is by definition to realize it.” Jameson describes postmodernism as a “cultural dominant”, a classification (un) informed by culture’s place, within this postmodern space, as a communicative dominant. In viewing postmodernism as a product of history, Jameson finds it in accord with his

30

Marxist historical narrative, a product that, for all his lamentations, Jameson argues must be represented and experienced as such.

In citing a “crisis of historicity,” Jameson comes upon the postmodern problem: that being the experience of time in a culture governed by the representation of space. This experience is itself a function of language, be it historical, economical, political or aesthetic. Postmodernism is the expression of this language of experience through tableaux, wherein the experience is one of cumulative subjectivity.

This language is interrogated, interpreted and communicated through culture, a response to a modern that cannot be.

Jameson found his influence most potently exerted in the theorization of the postmodern in China. Introducing postmodernism through lectures during the dawn of the cultural fever in 1985, his most significant contribution was his 1987 book Postmodernism and Cultural Theories. This work would go on to shape the Chinese scholarly engagement with postmodernism in the 1990’s, reaching its apex from 1994 to 1997. Its critical approach allowed it to be interpreted as both an endorsement and criticism of postmodernism’s Chinese manifestation. Its most popular Chinese reading was that of its endorsement of mass culture as a space newly created by and for popular freedom, which exists in tension with Jameson’s description of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”. Where Lyotard rejected the possibility of freedom within the master narratives he mistrusted, Jameson acknowledges the possibility of freedom within the spaces between the micro narratives that the master narrative is imposed upon, a freedom expressed, as it is in Chungking Express, through Pop Art. Pop Art emerged as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, a movement that, in its rejection of representation, sought to create a universal visual language through which a psychological and interpretive interior could be expressed and understood. Rejecting such an attempt to construct the pinnacle of the creative process, Pop Art reasserted the authority of representation, appropriating popular iconography through its recontextualization. Chungking Express evokes the aesthetics of Pop Art in its execution of hyper-stylized, antirealist space. Imparted with déjà vu, the film condenses complexities of meaning and association into objects, examining them through their contextualization. Acknowledging and engaging in its audience’s search for romance, the film is both indebted and committed to its popular tradition. The film exists within a transition, reflecting and responding to the fluidity in which it resides. The film is electrified. It captures a moment in Hong Kong, a transient tableaux of a setting in the process of fading. It is a moment that is vibrant, fleeting, and floating all the while, passed along the way.

The transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China announced a postcolonial transition for the British postcolony. As Hong Kong entered a new era in its history, there emerged a need to define its new identity.

As Hong Kong was confronted by an ambient modernity, it

turned to postmodernism to respond to a narrative still in development. This engagement with its culture illuminated a remembrance that had yet to be understood.

W

ong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express features two stories, told in sequence, of lovelorn police officers ruminating over their relationships, both fading and floating, with women in contemporary Hong Kong. The characters in one story can be found drifting through the background of the other, nearly intersecting at the film’s midpoint. The original title translates to “Chungking Jungle”, referring to the metaphoric concrete jungle of Hong Kong and the Chungking Mansions where much of the film’s first story is set. The english title refers to the Chungking Mansions and the Midnight Express, a fast food outlet featured most prominently in the film’s second story.

The first story concerns 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), an undercover police officer (his name, He Qiwu, is provided as an afterthought). Dumped by his girlfriend May on April 1st, he spends much of the story obsessively buying pineapple cans with the sell-by date of May 1st, the one month anniversary of his breakup with May that corresponds with his birthday. When the day arrives, unable to rekindle any former romantic connection, he vows (through voiceover) to fall in love with the next woman to walk into the bar where his sorrows are being drowned. This woman is the unnamed drug mule in a blonde wig (played by Brigitte Lin) whom we have followed as she settles (and struggles to settle) scores journeying through the the hyper-stylized Hong Kong underworld. The potentially amorous encounter is cut short when she, visibly worn-out) falls asleep in their hotel room, leaving 223 more alone than ever, with the hotel food failing to successfully serve as consolidation. The story ends on a hopeful note, with the woman paging him a birthday greeting the following day.

The second story follows 633 (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a uniformed police officer recently rejected by his flight attendant girlfriend who, like 223, searches for solace in the fast food joint Midnight Express. There he meets Faye (actress and diva Faye Wong), a fey young woman who quickly becomes obsessed with his private life. After the keys are dropped off by 633’s flight attendant ex, she proceeds to remodel his apartment, with 633 attributing the changes to the capabilities of the inanimate objects contained therein.

Upon finally noticing her he asks her out on a date, with them set to meet at the California Bar. Faye sends him a message revealing her choice to go to the real California instead, complete with the promise that she will return in one year’s time. 633 is the new owner of the Midnight Express when she returns, and Faye is a flight attendant herself. The story ends with the possibility of them ending up together after all.

The Hong Kong depicted in Chungking Express is one of living contradiction, vivid inconsistencies of changing sense and sensibility, where the distance of space informs identi-

Fifth World

31

ty. It is this search for a local identity, coupled with an encroaching global urbanity, that drives this construction of an image of a city inflected by its own transience. As Wong Kar-wai explains, “things change very fast in Hong Kong.

The locations for my first two films have disappeared already… I’m trying to preserve [the lifestyle of Hong Kong in certain periods] on film.” This sense of loss pervades the film’s context of an emerging local consciousness, a sense confronted by its characters response to both their emotional and physical space. Time is itself a mercurial character, its appearance and dialogue permeating across the film’s frame.

Marc Augé defined non-spaces as “spaces of circulation, consumption and communication”, spaces defined not by their own narratives, but by the transitions they play host to. The semi-titular Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express exist as such non-spaces, as does the airport so many characters pass through. It is telling then that the film’s greatest moments of intimacy occur within these non-spaces, meaning resides not within personal narratives or environments, but rather within the spaces between them. It is then not lost in but within translation that clarity is transiently found.

Placelessness was defined by Edward Relph as “the casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place.” It is a phenomenon whose presence in Hong Kong is contingent on the metanarrative of globalization. It is characterized by its absence of local memory, its presence is not derived from Hong Kong’s narrative and identity but by the globalized one imposed upon it. For its international audience, these placeless locations: airports, business districts, hotels, and restaurants represent the urban glamour invoking both the necessity and the opportunity of the global city. This metanarrative is subverted

by Wong Kar-wai in his intentions of making Chungking Express “like a postcard of Hong Kong.” The fly-over of a neo-futurist neon metropolis is passed over in favor of a walk through the city hidden beneath it. We are instead taken a tour of the places that remain, observing the remnants of local life in tandem with the questioning of the postmodern definition of local identity. The Kai Tak airport we continue to come back to was in the process of closing as the film was being made, once the gateway to modernity of old Hong Kong, unable to handle the continual increase of traffic. Like the Kai Tak airport, the places from which those memories of old Hong Kong were formed are in the process of disappearance. Memories of the present rest in similar uncertainty, formed from a context increasingly aware of its own transience.

Where then, do our characters find themselves? The Kai Tak airport is the clearest marker of this evolution.

Its identity as an airport, a space of placelessness, is contradicted by its ties to local memory, a space of place. And so, like so many other things in postmodern space, it lands somewhere in between, in the aforementioned non-space shared by the semi-titular Chungking Mansions and Mid-

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

night Express. Another occupant is the McDonald’s Brigitte Lin’s drug mule takes the Indian girl she kidnaps to for an ice cream. A product of globalization adapted by local culture, it shares the distinction of being, with its fellow non-places, the homeliest space depicted in the film; more so than the apartments our two cops find themselves increasingly detached in. When 663 finally develops a personal connection to a space beyond the objects it contains, it is upon taking ownership of the similarly non-spaced Midnight Express.

With the placeless inherently detached and the place increasingly so, it is within the shared ambience of the nonspace, between global representation and local experience, that relationships in postmodern Hong Kong are formed.

The manner in which the characters respond to their emotional milieu marks a transition in Wong Kar-wai’s filmography. As he explained, “Chungking Express represents a real break: the characters accept their loneliness, they’re more independent, and they see in their quest not a kind of despair but a kind of amusement.” As Faye confesses at one point to 663, “I just want to enjoy life.” This transition reveals itself within the space between the film’s doubling.

The film’s dual narratives, with their similar plots, themes, visual motifs and characters, use doubling to both examine the malleable temporality of collective memory and the ubiquity too inherent in chance. As they continually refer to each other, a narrative is formed of the fluidity of individual identity in postmodern space, rendered as the regions of modern communications. In this heterotopic urban environment of contemporary Hong Kong, subjectivity is called into question. Memory becomes the means through which time is perceived. Even as life occurs, its experience is that of memory.

The language Wong Kar-wai uses in the film is one of heightened expressivity, employing stylization to reveal depth upon the surface on which the film functions. The abstraction of movement through audiovisual composition provides musicality and vitality to the ambient freneticism of the film’s urbanly textured mise-en-scène. Accompanying the stylized veracity of the film’s Hong Kong is its fascination with American popular culture. This is most prominently demonstrated through Faye’s devotion to and hypnotically incessant playing of The Mamas & the Papas 1965 song California Dreamin’. Its inclusion is a reminder of the deracinated globalization of American culture, and its increasing utilization of young people in Hong Kong and everywhere else to communicate both with themselves and each other. Its repetition subconsciously establishes it as an essential component of the film’s setting, one found incomplete in its absence.

Chungking Express uses its obsession with numbers and deadlines to contemplate the meaning and arbitrariness of signs and relationships. Our protagonists are identified not by their names but by their numbers. 223 uses the expiration dates on pineapple cans to assess the transient nature of time and love. As his story nears its close, he poses a rhetorical

32

question: “Is there anything in the world that doesn’t have an expiry date? If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.”

This sentiment brings the political subtext to the forefront for a colony facing an expiration date of its own.

The handover of Hong Kong from a British colonial rule to a Chinese postcolonial one on July 1st, 1997 was the question dominating and anchoring cultural and sociopolitical definitions of its identity in a postmodern space. Boarding passes are found in many characters possession, and many scenes show them watching others leave Hong Kong from airports. The flight attendant with which 663 is involved leaves him and Hong Kong, with a message announcing their breakup reading “change of flight—your plane cancelled”. Faye leaves them as well, before returning to him and Hong Kong as a flight attendant.

Wong Kar-wai has related the film’s political subject to the evolution and normalization of urban alienation, saying, Days of Being Wild centers on various feelings about staying in or leaving Hong Kong. That’s less of an issue now that we’re so close to 1997. Chungking Express is more about the way people feel now. In Days, the characters are not happy with their solitude; it’s the same with the characters in Ashes of Time. The people in Chungking know how to entertain themselves, even if it’s just by talking to a bar of soap. They know how to live in a city.

Chungking Express visualizes postmodernity through the experience of time, not the depiction of space. Various techniques are used to illustrate the varying paces at which life is perceived. The interest in the divergence of physical and emotional distance regarding a continually progressing modern communication is made explicit at the film’s beginning, with voiceover remarking: “Every day we brush past so many other people. People we may never meet, or people who may become close friends.” This notion of missed connections is seen in the manner the two stories barely fail to overlap, and in the fact that the most important of these within the film occur not between the characters who never meet, but within the relationships between the characters who do. While the failure of spatial coexistence to bring people together is demonstrated in the film, also demonstrated is the understanding that those who spatially coincide are still very much emotionally alive, if emotionally complicated by, and complicating perceptions of, their surroundings. With the world defined by a mercurially perceived freneticism, individual spaces like homes provide areas of respite and expressive control. 663 uses his apartment as a stand in for people and places (through the anthropomorphized objects he keeps collected within) and as an emotional outlet (he believes it can cry on his behalf).

Technology is also demonstrated to have the capacity to fulfill these purposes (such as Faye’s CD from which California Dreamin’ plays). Chungking Express illuminates the complications presented by the postmodern condition on developing

and finding meaning in modern interpersonal relationships and communications.

P

ostmodernism is a fragile term, as defined as the modern it responds to. Postmodernism is a tool to question and understand a modern not yet sufficiently developed to answer. Postmodernism is used in Chungking Express and to contextualize and confront the presence of an ambivalent and ambient future in the floating present and fleeting past.

Chungking Express. Dir. Wong Kar-wai. Perf. Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Faye Wong. Criterion, 1994. DVD. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Print.

Fifth World

33

The Mechanics of Moral Crimes Rosemary Yin

T

he criminal justice system is created by the people and in America, law is seen as a vital part of democracy.

Yet, its application to the people often eliminates an individual or group’s ability to behave according to their own moral standards. In other words, law provides a physical and inflexible version of morality which applies to all people in a given society. The criminal law seeks to punish wrongdoers, protect Society, compile an inventory of the socially unacceptable acts, and simultaneously educate the public of the acts a small but influential minority of legislators have disapproved (Friedman 10). Many believe that action can and should be taken to discourage behavior only if there is a potential for substantial harm to others as a result of said behavior, or as John Stuart Mill believes, “[t]he only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” (Meier and Geis 23). The elite often portray Society and social order as victims of harm, justifying the necessity of moral crimes.

Jurists often draw the distinction between crimes which are mala in se and mala prohibita (Friedman 125). Mala in se are crimes which are deemed inherently evil in themselves, while mala prohibita crimes are deemed evil by societal rules, such as laws and rules of conduct. In literature, the term “moral crime” refers to a special category of crimes mala prohibita, which involves only the harm of Society. Committing “moral crimes” is commonly blamed and punished as a source of societal decay or as an offence against “public decency” (Friedman 126). Although the law aims to be an application of accepted moral codes of conduct, its codes are altered by various power dynamics. Past examples of US moral legislation are the Prohibition movement, and drug laws concerning opium and cocaine. These specific three examples are significant because of their racial origins; the laws are fueled by public discrimination and governmental oppression towards minority groups such as German immigrants, Chinese immigrants and African Americans. Across history, groups in power have abused other classes. American history shows that the wealthy white elite are no different.

P

olitical and societal order is defined and maintained by a certain elite subcommunity. Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Friedman writes that the “criminal code reflects ... some notion of the moral sense of the community ― or, to

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

be more accurate, the moral sense of the people who count, and who speak out, in the community” (125). Politically, groups which hold sound power are given a greater say in legislative policies, resulting in the acts associated with minority groups to be deemed immoral.

The first factor which causes inequality is the different levels of natural involvement; those strongly immersed in the political process have financial ability to take time off from work, and the resources to push for their goals and priorities (Jacobs). Donations from the enormously wealthy have also become transformed into “speech” through decisions like Citizens United (Bai). A similar bias exists in the voting process, favoring those who are highly educated and white. In 2000, 56.4% of whites voted, compared with 53.5% of blacks and 27.5% of Hispanics (Jacobs). The voices of minorities are stifled further by the unequal responsiveness of public servants. A Princeton study found that constituents with incomes at the 75th percentile of distribution had three times more leverage on senators than constituents with incomes at the 25th percentile (Bartels). Citizens who earned at the bottom fifth percentile of income distribution receive extremely little representation from senators; they are essentially treated as marginal citizens. The weighted system of political representation is largely influenced by money, as well as politicians’ desire to become re-elected. Therefore, they cater more to the wealthy, the constituents who are likely to vote in favor of their Congressman who acts with their best interests. Jacobs notes “[t]he socio-economic bias in citizen politics implies as well that the concerns of members of disadvantaged groups -- for example, racial and ethnic minorities, women, immigrants, and lower-income groups -- are systematically less likely to make themselves heard.” The additional representation that the powerful acquire creates many mala prohibita crimes which deem certain acts linked to minorities as immoral and criminal. The mala prohibita specification specifies the importance of human designation; crimes mala prohibita are, after all, judged illegal by morally relativistic standards.

I

t is important to note that the moral differences are often, in this literature, perceived from mere patterns portrayed in public forums. In other words, a few anecdotes or outliers are seen as impenetrable proof of cultural characteristics.

The specific moral standards of a societal subset are virtually impossible to identify and quantify. However, the public of-

34

ten makes broad generalizations based on media representations and mass hysteria. The Temperance movement and the Nixon campaign are notable examples of manipulation, which create perceived moral differences between societal groups, identifying some as threats to the general fabric of Society and others as threatened. The US’s racial and socioeconomic groups have historically been constructed socially, through events such as slavery and segregation, anti-immigration laws and sentiment, and differences in resources and education. Moral laws are an example of social standards which are based on involuntary statuses but still continue to affect the lives of minorities and the powers of the wealthy and white.

The Temperance Movement, which banned the manufacture and distribution of alcohol, was catalyzed by prohibitionists who identified drinking as a sign of moral destitution as well as the root of behavioral problems of the people and of Society. The Movement most notably resulted in the ratification of Amendment 18 of the US Constitution in 1919, which prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes” (US Const., amend. XVIII). The 18th Amendment remained law from 1920 to 1933, but even before that time, class and racial divides were surging up from under the surface of Society. One can identify the xenophobic and racist sentiments of the Nativist Party, commonly known as the Know Nothing Movement, as an early indicator of the Temperance Movement (Grimm). The Nativists were a group which reacted to the perceived threat of immigrants and Catholism (Grimm).

The “native” public was also overwhelmed by the financial and political number of immigrants. German brewers outnumbered “native” brewers by about three to one, saloons promoted fraternizing, networking and professional growth for immigrants and immigrants ascended political ladders (Rathod). Non-immigrant upper class were wary of the immigrants’ entrepreneurial success in the alcohol industry but also complained of the effect alcohol had on their immigrant, working class employees (Rathod). Upper-class business tycoons joined forces with Prohibitionist movements to curb the intoxication which seemed to be rendering their workers economically inefficient; Henry Ford, on behalf of the Anti-Saloon League, established business protocols within Ford automobiles which encouraged total sobriety and dismissed workers who were caught buying liquor twice (Rathod).

One of the primary organizations which demonstrated for Prohibition was the Anti-Saloon League. The sentiments of the ASL led to partnerships between the ASL and the Ku Klux Klan, official as of 1915 (Rathod). Like the ASL, the KKK both relied upon and fueled the nativist fire by citing the epidemic of immigrants violating Prohibition laws.

Imperial wizard Hiram Evans cited governmental crime sta-

tistics such as, “[i]n Arizona 85 per cent of the bootleggers were aliens; in Connecticut 90 per cent of arrests were of aliens”, to embolden public vigilantes (Rathod). The KKK’s actions reveal that, firstly, moral crimes weren’t used solely to target minorities but also to symbolize the “otherness” of minorities and, secondly, the brutal redundancy of the “justice” system; the percentages of immigrants who were caught breaking Temperance laws were high because they were targeted, yet the high numbers are used to enrage vigilantes who violently regulate the immigrants’ behaviors a second round (Rathod).

Ever since 1795, there has been the vague requirement of “good moral character”, but this phrase was without specification until Prohibition. The 1952 Immigration Act lists violations which disqualify “good moral character”, a list which includes both Nazi activity and habitual drunkenness (Rathod). The government has used legislation to link Nazi activity with immigration, immigration with alcohol, and alcohol with immorality. The patterns of alcohol and perception show the complex interaction between perceived the physical, economical and political from immigrants threats to the “native” or white elite, and its consequences of citizen vigilantism and governmental illegalization through appeal to the nation’s moral standards.

T

he Temperance Movements and organizations such as the Anti-Saloon League used dry laws to target German or Catholic immigrants. Drug laws, on the other hand, primarily targeted Chinese immigrants and African Americans. David Musto, an advisor for the Carter administration during the War on Drugs, notes the association of foreign groups with certain drugs: “cocaine raised the specter of the wild Negro, opium the devious Chinese” (Musto 65).

Opium was legal and widespread. Companies such as Merck imported opium in order to produce patent medicines for a wide range of ailments (Chambers). The public and governmental both ignored problems of addiction due to the belief that consumption of opium through injection and medicine were not addictive, as well as a lack of concern regarding the addiction of lower-tiered society, such as Chinese-Americans, prostitutes and gamblers (Chambers).

Public hysteria increased when the reliance of white women upon opium became apparent, due to doctors’ prescriptions to aid menstrual and menopausal issues (Chambers). Media identified only the act of smoking opium as unacceptable, and coincidentally, the public associated foreign Chinese immigrants with the opium dens (Chambers).

Opium dens were owned by Chinese immigrants, but “native”, white Americans could also enter (Kirk). Journalists concentrated on the ways in which Chinese habits of smoking opium had corrupted whites, mainly, white children and women (Kirk). Accusations against the Chinese, of immorality and seduction of white women, coincided with a false perception of the immigrants’ rapidly expanding

Fifth World

35

communities. Although the Chinese immigrant population never exceeded 100,000, many media outlets reported a population over 200,000 which “is as great as that of all voters in the State [of California]” (Chambers). As available jobs decreased, white Americans pushed to expel Chinese immigrants by forming labor Unions opposing Chinese laborers such as the Workingman’s Party and the Anti-Coolie Labor Association. White workers also killed Chinese workers during riots and destroyed Chinese homes (Chambers). The government began to penalize the Chinese through mining, tax, land ownership and voting bills. A House Representative determined the Chinese as “morally, the most debased people”, and a Senator blamed Chinese workers as “an injury to white labor” (Chambers). In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act halted Chinese immigration and naturalization for ten years (Chambers), a reflection of public opinion which demonized Chinese immigrants with substance and job related propaganda.

C

ocaine is the third example of racially charged moral laws. Cocaine comes from Erythroxylon coca and is processed with other chemicals to decrease its purity to about 53-59% (Chambers). Crack, a derivative of cocaine with nearly the same formula, is processed with substances such as baking soda which reduces its purity to about 80% (Chambers). The only other differences between the drugs is the crack’s crackling sound and the more rapid effect of crack than cocaine (Chambers).

Like opium, cocaine was initially used among the white population for more socially accepted purposes such as medicinal prescriptions. Cocaine was even featured in drinks

by Coca Cola, yet its prevalence abated when Southerners perceived a link between cocaine use, blacks and violence (Chambers). Many whites feared that cocaine would lead black men to rape white women, and reduce their regard for Jim Crow laws (Chambers). A 1910 testimony showcases many public fears: “colored people seem to have a weakness for [cocaine] ... a great many of the southern rape cases have been traced to cocaine” (Chambers). Rumors of cocaine-related violence are chronologically traced to the rising political power of the African American community; emancipation ended slavery and blacks were able to vote, black labor was no longer free and whites had increased competition in the workforce (Chambers).

Unlike opium and alcohol, cocaine did not immediately result in federal regulations which targeted the black minority through moral crimes. From the 1930’s-1960’s, cocaine was used by the lower class and considered immoral but after 1970, when cocaine crept into the upper elites, it was widely accepted in public opinion (Chambers). It is not cocaine which has been used as a discriminatory tool but rather, crack, its cheaper derivative, which was found in urban areas and with a more addictive and violent connotation (Chambers). Five grams of crack cocaine required a minimum 5 year sentence ― the same minimum sentence as 500 North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

grams of cocaine; a maximum sentence of life applied to any offender who possessed 50 grams of crack compared with 5 kilograms of cocaine (Chambers).

U

S laws against moral crimes have shown xenophobic and racist trends, specifically, against the German, Chinese and Black community. By focusing on historical events as well as laws prohibiting substances such as alcohol, opium and cocaine, one can identify causes and patterns of inequality, misconstrued, however, as moral differences and threats against the political, economical and familial well-being of the white community. Minorities have been accused of stealing jobs, holding too much political power and seducing white women. In all three instances, public opinions, media depictions and governmental policies are complicit.

Bai, Matt. “How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game?” New York Times, 17 July 2012.

Bartels, Larry M. “Economic Inequality and Political Representation.” The Unsustainable American State, Feb. 2009, pp. 167–196.

Chambers, Cheryl. “Institutional Racism: Is Law Used As A Tool To Perpetuate Racial Inequality.”

Ph.D. North Carolina State University, 2008. Print.

Friedman, Lawrence M. Crime and Punishment in American History. New York, BasicBooks, 1993.

Grimm, Lisa. “Beer History: German-American Brewers Before Prohibition.” Serious Eats, Serious Eats, 12 Oct. 2011.

Jacobs, Lawrence R. et al. “Inequalities of Political Voice.” Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn, Russell Sage, New York, 2005.

Kirk, Andrew T. “Dens of Hell in the Cities of Zion.” Journalism History, vol. 35, no. 4, 2010, pp.

229-237.

Meier, Robert F., and Gilbert Geis. Criminal Justice and Moral Issues. Los Angeles, CA, Roxbury Pub. Co., 2006.

Musto, David F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1973.

Rathod, Jayesh. “Distilling Americans: The Legacy of Prohibition on US Immigration Law.” Houston Law Review 51.781 (2014).

Riek, Blake M. et al. “Intergroup Threat and Outgroup Attitudes: A Meta-Analytic Review: Appendix.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 10, no. 4, Nov. 2006, Sage Journals.

Warren, Mary Anne. Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997.

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. Drops Of Water. 1st ed. Alexandria, VA.: Chadwyck-Healey Inc., 1996. Print.

36

The Ethical Cost of Biological Warfare in Unit 731 Joy Lu

V

ivisections without anesthesia, poisonous gas chambers, and subfreezing temperatures to induce frostbite were all cruel realities for several thousand Chinese, American, and Russian civilians in Japan’s Unit 731. One of the forgotten atrocities from World War II, Unit 731 was a project organized by the Japanese Imperial Army in which methods of biological warfare were tested. Researchers used human subjects to study biological weapons through methods such as injecting a pathogen in a test subject or providing contaminated water to Chinese communities and observing how the deadly diseases spread through a population.

The location in which these experiments occurred is an important part of explaining the necessity to research this topic. Although Unit 731 was a project created and organized by the Japanese, the actual headquarters of Unit 731 were in Manchuria, China which the Japanese occupied during World War II. It seems that they did not want to have an unethical site of experimentation on Japanese soil.

It was based in the Pingfan district, and the city of Harbin, the largest city in Manchuria (“Nightmare In Manchuria”).

Human experimentation began as early as fall of 1933 (Harris, Sheldon H).

General Shiro Ishii set up the secret laboratory and directed over 5000 Japanese soldiers and scientists in conducting these experiments (LaFleur, William R et al.). General Ishii is considered the Father of the Japanese Biological Warfare program, and he believed that biological and chemical warfare were crucial and powerful tools that Japan needed if it were to become a global power. His ideas of researching biological warfare became a reality as the Japanese government allowed him to set up a research facility (“Nightmare In Manchuria”). Ishii also recruited some of the best medical professionals in Japan to assist on the project. Many of the scientists were willing to help because they believed they were making advances in science and that they were serving their country in times of need.

Human experimentation is an important part of research to advance science. There are, however, standards to be set for human experimentation so that it is executed in a humane and ethical manner. The experiments conducted must have a strong and worthy cause to benefit society (Shahnazarian, Dalar). In addition, the researchers are not allowed to force the test subjects to do anything they did not want to do. Full consent of the test subject must be given without the coercion of the researchers. In Unit 731, the researchers never stopped to ask the test subject for consent

or give them a choice. The researchers of Unit 731 failed to recognize the value and importance of human life, or chose to ignore its importance, or subordinated its importance to the life of their national community. Others suggest that they did not see their test subjects as people, and they justified their wrongdoings with the argument that similar tests are conducted on animals.

While ethically, Unit 731 was wrong, information discovered in Unit 731 is useful from a scientific perspective.

The dilemma is whether the use the research findings from a study that killed thousands of people are ethical. In using the data collected, we as a society are acknowledging that the scientific data and information is more important than the lives of the humans who were killed, but we are also acknowledging the sacrifices the prisoners made—not by choice—which can result in lives of this generation to be saved. I study the scientific advancements and the conditions in which the use of the information is ethical. Finally, I compare the extrinsic and intrinsic values to determine that in Unit 731, the information gained to advance biological warfare was considered more important and more valuable than the cost of human life and unethical human experimentation. I explore how the Japanese violated human rights and the basic definition of what it means to be a person and treat others as people.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, biological warfare is the use of toxins of biological origin or microorganisms as weapons of war. Biological warfare was an attractive means of warfare for the Japanese because they did not have to involve themselves in the fighting but still could inflict serious damage to the enemy. In addition, the Japanese were desperately trying to keep up with many of the powerful Western countries such as Germany and the United States that had already used biological warfare in previous wars such as World War I (Smart, Jeffery). Biological warfare was General Ishii’s specialty, and he was a strong advocate for improving this form of warfare. He spent years in Western countries, observing their techniques and methods for the most effective biological weapons, and when he returned to Japan, he attempted to emulate the advanced techniques (“Nightmare In Manchuria”). The Japanese conducted their research using humans as test subjects because the data for making advances in biological warfare could not be gathered any other way. New advances in biological warfare allowed for improved war techniques that can kill the enemy more efficiently. Seventy percent of the humans used Fifth World

37

as test subjects were Chinese. By experimenting on Chinese civilians, the Japanese were able to kill or harm the enemy while simultaneously testing out and improving biological weapons to use on other, perhaps stronger, enemies such as Western powers like France, the United States and Great Britain.

The Japanese studied biological warfare by testing their weapons on various Chinese communities. They dropped food, clothes, and contaminated water at these sites, and observed how quickly the disease spread, and how many casualties occurred as a result. They tested at least 25 different disease causing agents during the time of Unit 731’s operation. One example was poisoning the water wells with diseases such as cholera and typhus (Drea, Edward et al.).

This type of warfare, using disease strains and agents to kill people, is a subgroup of biological warfare called germ warfare. Additional examples of germ warfare included the use of planes to drop fleas infested with the plague over Chinese cities or using food such as wheat and rice contaminated with disease strains to kill civilians. Sometimes, within Unit 731 prison cells, the Japanese researchers would infect one prisoner with a specific disease and study how long it took for the disease to spread (Watts, Jonathan). Othertimes, the Japanese researchers disguised the disease causing agents as vaccinations, but instead injected strains of syphilis and gonorrhea into prisoners (Harris, Sheldon H). Through his research, Ishii found that dispersing the pathogens through water was more effective than dispersion through air. It is believed that the Unit 731 headquarters in Pingfan was producing over 300 kilograms of germs and bacteria at one point, and at the peak of the biological warfare research, the Japanese had enough bacteria to kill the entire population of the world several times (“Nightmare In Manchuria”).

In 1941, Ishii discovered an efficient method of transmitting the disease to his enemies without directly involving himself and putting himself and his men in harm’s way: the flea. The Japanese researchers took fleas and allowed them to bite rats that carried the plague, anthrax, cholera, and other lethal diseases. Once the flea carried the disease, the Japanese scientists used them as contaminants to make the clothes and food infectious and dangerous (“Nightmare In Manchuria” and Watts, Jonathan). Through his research, Ishii found that a flea that carried the infective strains of the plague were carriers for up to one month, and that the power of one bite was enough to infect victims and transmit the disease. As a result, the estimated number of deaths of Chinese civilians is between 400,000 and 580,000 people (Harris, Sheldon H). The information that the Japanese learned from the experiments conducted in Unit 731 were to be used in a planned attack on San Diego, California, in “Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night”, but before they could carry out the attack, the Japanese Army surrendered, finally ending World War II (“Nightmare In Manchuria” and Watts, Jonathan).

The ethics of biological warfare can be evaluated by

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

comparing what was gained by perpetrator, the Japanese, to what was lost by the victim. The greater the gap between the two, the more unethical the issue becomes. The Japanese took something from these prisoners to benefit themselves at terrible expense to these prisoners. In addition, biological warfare and conducting research on biological warfare violates the Hippocratic Oath, an oath on the ethical obligations of a physician. The original oath was written in Greek around 5th century BCE. Physicians who have taken the oath promise to “apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgement” and “keep them from harm and injustice.” Physicians also promise to “come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice (“Guides: Bioethics: Hippocratic Oath”).” The researchers who conducted research on test subjects clearly violate the Hippocratic Oath, using their knowledge and power of healing for the wrong purposes.

Informed consent is the most important factor when considering the ethics of human experimentation. According to the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects at the University of Southern California, informed consent is a voluntary agreement which goes beyond just signing a form. The human subject must understand the research being performed on them, and more importantly, the risks involved in this research (Shahnazarian, Dalar). In the case of Unit 731, the human test subjects were put into one of three situations. One, the Japanese secret police took civilians, mostly the poor and homeless Chinese people off the streets in Manchuria, against their will and transported them to the Unit 731 headquarters (“Nightmare in Manchuria” and Kristof, Nicholas). In addition, American, Chinese, and Russian prisoners of war, and individuals with mental but no physical defects were taken to Unit 731 for experimentation (Watts, Jonathan). Two, the Japanese researchers intentionally misled civilians to participate in their study by giving false information. The researchers would tell Chinese civilians that they had vaccines available, then inject strains of the diseases they were testing. In other cases, the Japanese researchers took advantage of the fact that the children were hungry and naïve by providing sweets laced with strains of disease. As a result, now vulnerable populations including children, women, and prisoners receive extra protections to ensure that they are not being taken advantage of (Shahnazarian, Dalar). And finally, three, the test subjects, usually in Chinese villages, were unknowingly subjected to the experiments.

Before Unit 731 and World War II, biological warfare was a relatively new and unpolished form of weaponry. The German and French were the first to use biological warfare during World War I. As a result, the Geneva Protocol was created in 1925. The Geneva Protocol only applied during international conflicts such as major wars, and it prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons. Japan was one of the 196 states that ratified the treaty, but through the Unit 731 program, the Japanese did not honor the legisla-

38

tion (“Geneva Protocol”).

There was also additional legislation put in place to prevent unethical human experimentation practices after Unit 731, most notably the Nuremberg Code in response to the German experiments involving human test subjects.

Drafted in 1947, the Nuremberg Code emphasized the importance of voluntary consent and conducting experiments that yielded beneficial results to society (“National Institute Of Health: Office Of History”). While many experts regard the Nuremberg Code as a landmark document, it has no legal force behind it. Still, it is a significant document that formally recognizes that doctors should avoid conducting painful practices that can hurt the human patients. In addition to the Nuremberg Code, in 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was created; it prohibited the creation and stockpiling of biological and toxic weapons. Japan ratified this document along with 172 other states including Germany and the United States (“Biological Weapons – UNODA”).

Through the years, despite the treaties proposed, there have still been several cases of countries using biological warfare. So, what can stop countries from using biological warfare? The general trend in the drafting of the treaties by large groups of people is an important step in improving medical ethics because it unofficially holds the countries to a standard internationally agreed upon. While the intention of creating treaties is good, it is still not effective enough.

The most effective solution presented thus far is incorporating a multitude of techniques to educate scientists about ethics and increase ethical awareness. Beyond drafting treaties, it is also important to start discussions about medical ethics in the scientific community and address medical ethics in scientific journals and mainstream media. The treaties are unenforceable by nature, so through education and the instilling of strong morals, people will be less inclined to turn to unethical scientific practices (Reyes, Daniel). Beyond focusing on the education of scientists on ethics, the role the government plays in many cases is just as important. Even though it is recognized that biological warfare is an unethical practice, if the practice is validated by the government, the scientists and workers involved will be less inclined to do the right thing. The people in power, typically those in the government, use the reasoning that the possession and use of biological weapons is acceptable when other countries also have similar weapons. This logic is flawed, because it would start a never ending cycle as countries try to best one another in the security dilemma. Instead, a standard must be set, and it has been multiple times through the Geneva Protocol, Nuremberg Code, and the Biological Weapons Code. What’s more important is that the countries need to honor these standards set by an international community. Just because biological warfare cannot be prevented does not make it ethical.

While I have concluded that using the information from an unethical project is ethical, some provisional boundaries need to be established to determine in what cases the infor-

mation is ethical to use. Ideally, the scientific data would not be useful to advance biological warfare because no countries would have biological weapons. Unfortunately, it is likely that several countries still possess biological weapons in our modern society, even after understanding that the use of biological weapons is unethical. I have determined that the scientific data and information found as a result of the experiments conducted in Unit 731 can be used ethically to help people in the modern society. For example, one of the experiments in Unit 731 subjected the test subjects to extremely cold temperatures to induce frostbite. Afterwards, test subjects were studied and different forms of treatment were tested. The Japanese found the most effective form of treatment was “not rubbing the limb, which had been the traditional method, but rather immersion in water a bit warmer than 100 degrees (Kristof, Nicholas).” If the use of information after the events were over was considered unethical, then the new more effective form of treatment for frostbite would not be used. Would we, as a society, continue to use the old method of treating frostbite, even when we knew that there was a better form of treatment because the way that the information was obtained was unethical? If the information about the more effective treatment of frostbite was used in modern society, it would benefit thousands of people, potentially saving lives and improving quality of life in a way that would not have been possible without the findings of Unit 731. If the information can be used in a way that is justified to help all people in our world, its use is ethical.

More importantly, the research findings should be available to all people, not just the Japanese, and the Japanese should acknowledge and make efforts to benefit the Chinese and Russian people, the groups that were targeted most in Unit 731.

There is no denying that there is some scientific value in the information that the Japanese discovered, although there is controversy as to whether the information should be used because of how the information was obtained (Steinberg, Jonathan). Based on the facts of Unit 731, it is ethical to use the information, if it will improve the lives of others in future generations. The Chinese, Russian and Americans have already endured through the suffering and the pain, and while it must be properly acknowledged that thousands of prisoners were treated terribly in order to obtain this information, the information and data is still here nonetheless. The only thing that these professionals can do to help others is to use the information and data uncovered through the experiments in Unit 731 to better treat patients and keep people healthy—all people, not only the citizens of the state who conducted the experiments. If scientists and doctors chose not to use the information from the experiments, the data for better or worse gets “wasted”. When put in perspective, using the data and information from Unit 731 to help others is actually an acknowledgement of the pain and suffering that all the prisoners went through. It would mean that they died for something that helped oth-

Fifth World

39

ers, even if it was through force and no consent.

The data gathered from the experiments in Unit 731 proved extremely valuable to the United States government, so much so, that they were willing to overlook all the terrible and cruel experiments conducted on the prisoners of war.

After the Japanese surrendered, and World War II was officially over, many people felt that the Japanese needed to pay for what they had done. The Russians held the Khabarovsk trials, and a limited number of officials and workers were punished. The Americans secretly granted immunity to several of the top officials in Unit 731, including General Shiro Ishii (“Nightmare In Manchuria”). In exchange for the immunity, the Japanese provided the data they had gathered from the experiments they had conducted on the test subjects. The Americans promised immunity to the researchers if the Japanese shared the information with only America, and not the other allies—especially Russia—as the United States began to enter the Cold War (Gold, Hal). This negotiation implies the importance of the data that the Japanese gathered, despite the inhumane lengths they went to get this information. The Americans knew that they could not perform or repeat the unethical experiments that the Japanese had conducted, and they realized that the information the Japanese had found could not be determined anywhere else.

This was a good and bad thing. While the information was valuable since it was the only one of its kind, there was also no way to replicate or recreate the experiments to confirm that the data and information was accurate. The actions of the American government show the value of the information gathered from these horrific experiments.

Is there a price or value of a human? This is a heavily disputed question, and I have found that there are two different values: extrinsic and intrinsic values. Perhaps what is most difficult to understand about the argument of ethical research practices on humans and the ethics of using the information afterwards is the comparison of extrinsic values to intrinsic values. My final goal was to determine the ethical cost of biological warfare. I have already determined that the bigger the gap between the perpetrators and the victims, the more unethical a practice is. But beyond just the extrinsic values, or pure scientific information, what is more important is the intrinsic value of a person, the core of human rights. The intrinsic value of a human gives us certain rights we have as humans. These rights should be, and for the most part are, protected by law. Moreover, the intrinsic value of a human is one of the biggest factors that make us human, distinguishing humans from other species. It is clear that the Japanese researchers gained physical scientific evidence from their experiments, something tangible and of great value. What is sometimes more difficult to understand is the intrinsic values that are lost from both the perpetrator and the victim. As the perpetrators, the Japanese researchers lost a sense of human rights, in particular the core meaning of what it means to be human and failed to recognize the value of human life. While the Japanese made the argument to use

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

the information because they claim it benefits the greater good of humanity, this excludes the group of Chinese test subjects who died for the information. Moreover, it contradicts the purpose of the experiments because it carries the war into civilian populations, going against the theory of just and legal warfare. Why does one human get to determine and decide the fate of another human? This perpetuates the idea that the Japanese researchers did not see the test subjects as equals or humans. The victims were treated as inanimate and disposable objects. Through Unit 731, they were stripped of their identity as a human, and the Japanese took away what it means to be human. The intrinsic value of a human, and of mankind, was belittled.

After looking at how the prisoners unwillingly served as human guinea pigs for the Japanese and investigating what ethical research constitutes as, I have come to the conclusion that the experiments carried out in Unit 731 are unethical because the Japanese researchers made no effort to protect the human participants from pain and suffering, and there was no informed consent from any of the human test subjects. The Japanese researchers violated the core being of a person, treating the test subjects like objects instead.

Next, I determined that biological warfare was an unethical practice. I looked at the legislation on biological warfare, most notably the Geneva Protocol and the Nuremberg Code, and I determined that the respected ethicists and world leaders and diplomats were correct in their treaties to outlaw such dangerous, destructive warfare. I also looked at the gap between the perpetrator and the victim, those who benefit the most and those who hurt the most, and I determined that the gap was too big for such warfare to be conducted in the modern world.

My next argument sought to determine whether the use of the data and information found in the experiments of Unit 731 was ethical after the program had closed its’ doors.

In order to answer this question, I first looked at the information that was obtained and considered to be of value in the medical community. I evaluated whether the data the Japanese found could have the potential to benefit people in today’s society and perhaps improve the lives of people who would not have an improved standard of living without the information from Unit 731. After I identified the data that benefit the most people, I looked at how the information from Unit 731 was negotiated with and used as a powerful tool in protecting the Japanese researchers. I determined that the useful information from Unit 731 should still be used in modern society if it can be used to improve the lives of people outside of the warfare aspect, and most notably useful in the healthcare aspect. The use of the information gained from the experiments can only be used under certain provisional boundaries. By using the information that resulted from their forced death and sacrifice to improve the lives of people now, the scientists can in a way pay tribute for what the prisoners died for. Based on the evidence, it is ethical for modern-day scientists to use the information, but

40

only if they use the information in a way that benefits and heals all people.

My last question focused on comparing the extrinsic and intrinsic values of a person to determine that the information gained to advance biological warfare was considered more important and valuable than the cost of human life in the case of Unit 731. I determined that the intrinsic value of a person and their self-worth is more valuable than the extrinsic value of a person should be. This is a difficult concept to understand because the intrinsic value of a person is not tangible and not something easily felt. I explore how the Japanese violated human rights and the basic definition of what it means to be a person and treat others as people.

One of my research mentors recently reminded me that research never ends. While conducting research on my current project, I realized there were several more questions that needed to be answered. An interesting topic for the future could be to compare nuclear warfare to biological warfare, not the specific act of using these weapons, but how the arguments for and against biological and nuclear weapons are crafted similarly and how they are compared.

Unit 731 left a legacy of pain for the thousands of people affected by the secret program. The unethical research conducted is infamous because of the live vivisections with anesthesia, injecting human test subjects with infectious disease strains, and intentionally spreading epidemics around Chinese cities to test biological weapons among other horrendous experiments. On the other hand, the information gained to advance biological warfare cannot be overlooked.

The data proved valuable and important in the field of medicine. Important questions can be raised regarding the ethics of the experiments conducted and how the research and data was used after the program ended. While horrific, Unit 731 is an important event to remember, and the lives lost in the experimentation can be honored and used to improve modern medicine and help people.

“Biological | NTI”. Nti.Org, 2015. “Biological Weapons – UNODA”. Un.Org, 2016.

Drea, Edward et al. Researching Japanese War Crimes Records: Introductory Essays. 2006.

“Geneva Protocol”. U.S. Department Of State, 2016.

Gold, Hal. Unit 731. Tokyo, Yenbooks, 1996,.

“Guides: Bioethics: Hippocratic Oath, Modern Version”. Guides.Library.Jhu.Edu, 2016.

Harris, Sheldon H. Factories Of Death. London, Routledge, 1994,.

Kristof, Nicholas. “Unmasking Horror -- A Special Report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity”. New York Times, 2016.

LaFleur, William R et al. Dark Medicine. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 2007,.

“National Institute Of Health: Office Of History”. Nuremberg Code, 2016, https://history.nih.gov/ research/downloads/nuremberg.pdf.

“Nightmare In Manchuria”, director. Michael Brockhoff, 1998.

Reyes, Daniel. “Actionbioscience - Promoting Bioscience Literacy”. Actionbioscience.Org, 2003.

Ryall, Julian. “Human Bones Could Reveal Truth Of Japan’s ‘Unit 731’ Experiments”. The Telegraph, 2016.

Shahnazarian, Dalar. “Office For The Protection Of Research Subjects”. Usc.Edu. Smart, J. History of Chemical and Biological Warfare: An American Perspective. Air University. Retrieved 29 October 2016.

Steinberg, Jonathan. “The Ethical Use Of Unethical Human Research”. New York University, Department Of Bioethics.

Watts, Jonathan. “Tokyo Victims Of Japan’s Notorious Unit 731 Sue”. The Lancet, vol 360, no. 9333, 2002, p. 628. Proquest.

Fifth World

41

Listening thru Walls: Sonic Reinscription and the Masquerade in True Detective William Clark

I

n the third installment of his Cage quintology, the late James Incandenza, whose head was consecrated in and, as we later reconstructed, crumped in a microwave oven, and who was dead, on account of the microwave or Wild Turkey or, surely not but maybe, something of the immaterial, at the age of fifty-four in the Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar, and buried in Québec’s L’Islet County along with the Clipperton suicide footage gives the viewer this: The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent, the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs (Wallace 988).1 I should like to consider this vignette as an instance of phantasmagoria,2 not as a critique of scopophilia, but as a structure of thrown image and as a threshold to the kind of séance I am interested in, first here and then in (the voodoo of) southern Louisiana. I go to these places first in interest, but, then, also as they are explicit (and profane) occasions for witnessing the ongoing redistribution of the riches of

1 This brief description of the late Incandenza’s film is included in the 24th endnote of David Foster Wallace’s brilliant and moving Infinite Jest. The endnote documents Incandenza’s impressive filmography. Heath and Heaven were oft used actors in Incandenza films.

2 I am using this term after Walter Benjamin, as in his unfinished Arcade’s Project. We will understand it variously here, but first as an opening or cut that one enters as “in order to be distracted.” Thinking with southern Louisiana is to think in Creolized language (See Éduoard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation). I mean to think about the English (false) cognate of the French “to ask” or “demander,” whereby “as in order to be distracted” is compounded with “as [an] order to be distracted.” We will regard this assertion of “the distraction” or “periphery” later. It should be necessary from this, the start, to understand the phantasmagoria as diverse and poststructural, as a deployment multiply directed by the narrators thru their narrative, “now a landscape, now a room.” See the opening chapter (page seven is cited here) of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Trans.

Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pr. of Harvard U Pr., 2003.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

human life that have been strangely altered in ways intimately bound up with capital and, inescapably and categorically, race. The phantasmagorical, here the carnivalesque, in its multiply effective critique, is at work at once to conjure the damned to undam the reservoirs of life and then to afford them theaters in which to speak about the ways in which those two-way witnessing waters have been redirected or stilled in the discursive efforts of American white supremacy.

These effort are latent in looking (spectator sport) and are effaced in speculative finance. It is unavoidable for us here to invoke Emerson and his infamous eyeball which should be understood after the Incandenza film as grotesque, maximally bloated, gorged on vision, wrong vision: Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God (Emerson).

This transcendental vision of the transcendentalist par excellence organizes wrong vision rightly around occulted sumptuary laws governing illusory relations in which one can look or consume the sight of others3 without being infected by the look, which is, for us, an infection not of a penetrating “look of the Other,” but of an invaginating sonic engagement, what Du Bois has already called “second sight” (Du Bois 3). Therefore, what Emerson describes at once as a “transparent” eyeball is revealed in fact to have always been “colored” or, indeed, “black” in real ways. Pace Emerson, I would describe transparency as the spectator’s technique of visual, racial oppression that imagines black people, black

3 Compounding “sight” and “site,” I should like to understand, elsewhere perhaps, imperialism, imperial impulse, or what Glissant (again in his Poetics of Relation) refers to as an arrowlike nomadism as inextricable from the kind of ocularcentrism that I am interested in here.

42

entertainers or entertainment as see-thru.4 This technical event and feat (which requires the forging of a great blind spot), this spectator’s “look” produces spectral sound, which reinscribes itself upon the bloated eye, not as transparent film but as blackened lens—call them sunglasses, so one can really see what one is doing (in the glare).

I should like to concern myself here with the brilliant first season of the limited television series True Detective, but before I conduct or disclose an open reading of the objective text, we must, as Marty Hart (one of True Detective’s protagonists), move thru, lens this reading thru a series of stills, vignettes, or photographs that pre-curse our concerned and concerning text. But worry not, for “these aren’t as bad if you don’t know what you’re looking at,” even as you look still (E5). We can account for this insufficient “badness” by the kind of look, the insufficient kindness of the irresponsible look, the kindly effaced look, the kind of thrown look specific to the enthroned. This look is also a business look, a busied look, caught up not in taking a look around,5 but in a complicated and programmatic economy of looking— ostensible business, the pretense of late capital—devoutly to be unwished, the authentic investments of which must be disavowed. But we would do well to first take those thrown looks, as they may be coming at us as a useful approximation or appropriation of speculation and usefulness itself—in other words, as politically essential, as an obeying and entertaining performance or masquerade (masking recalcitrant subterfuge). As authentic, this kind of obsession to understand and control thru narrative (reconstruction) is overseeing unto oversight. But as post-equivalent, this entertainment to which I refer, this spectacle, this explicit phantasmagoria is the masked rendering of the sociological (and very real) haunting that weighs as a heavy summons upon the living both in its spectacular drama and thru its thinking and thought condensation within the living as

4 Think of how intelligible the absolutely unintelligible world of Julius (and by extension that of slavery) is imagined to be by John and Annie in Charles Chesnutt’s “Uncle Julius Tales,” which will appear again in a moment. I am referring to both the ideology and praxis of a criminal justice in which one touches the body “as little as possible, and then only to reach something other than the body itself,” which is also the paradoxical nature of Nature, which looks to identify “the natural” even as it is mobilized in and thru imagined “transcendence.” This is to say that the sacredly transcendent comes to be profaned at once by its (bodily) wants and then by the reinscription of the wants of the other, the suppressed or violated body. See Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1975.

5 I take this language from the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I take it as a look of exploration and not explanation, without foresight, which is also, as Fred Moten notes, precisely foresight, a looking ahead with a certain torque to shape what is being looked at.

spectral.6 This entertainment, this captivating (un)seen takes captive the captors in its appropriated employment, which is the function (captivation) of the occult in True Detective—a phantasmal aberration in the topology of white supremacy and in the narrative (both thereof (white supremacy) and of our detectives) by which, in the reconstruction of a realistic and probable narrative of the case with which the show is concerned, narrative itself is subverted, complicated, knotted, doubled, bleeding, and breaking. The very instance of reconstruction, of looking again, is an occasion of a returning look, or, more specifically, a returning sound, “second-sight,” an echo, a reinscription scarring the source or dominant narrative, revealing what was already implicit there (the veil as whiteness itself), extant in equal part, but only as a post-equivalent phantasm (conjuring phantoms).

The transparent eyeball is made opaque by sound; the transcendent(al) is rematerialized by blackness. I should like to understand this issuance of significant sound as it come outs of a confused and opaque nexus of incessant aggravations and displacements that “evade every natal occasion” or narrative origin that has to be understood in the language of the police and of detection and how, as attempts to make good sense of impossible narrative lengthen, as (pre)determinacy is enforced and policed, the narrative becomes all the more opaque and colored (Moten quoting Mackey 68).

What I want to do with this essay is to, in part, begin to understand the ways in which after slavery’s abolition the slave master is displaced and becomes one of so many poor and rural white laborers, and, in the process, finds ways to hijack his reduced position, that of the consumer, enthroning in his stead “signs of the time,” fixed fashions which are unbound to corporal bodies as to maintain transcendent (or transparent) mastery as such. I would suggest that these signs act out of reciprocal obligation and economy between “classes” (which act at once to dedifferentiate race and, then, to undo that work, separating disenfranchised whites from black (coerced) labor), and are, therefore, anything but arbitrary. The arbitrary sign is apt to link instead two progenies (disenfranchised white<—>coerced black) in an unbreakable reciprocity, such that the father (signifier), in jealousy, throws his weight back towards the disenchanted world of the signified (which is always illusory and with which there is no mutual obligation). The means towards patricide are then here fratricide. But just as the techniques of social death work to transcend the illegality of slavery in America, so does black recalcitrance work to transgress every boundary, those lines and techniques of social death. This, in True Detective, is the work of two black men, Maynard

6 I am thinking here of Avery Gordon’s crucial and moving Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997. We will later depart from her formulation of the haunting as a “mediation” in understanding the haunting voice of black interrogation in True Detective as an instance of mediation thru the specific technique that is control that, after Kung Fu Kenny’s verse on “Control,” acts with all due, returning force, “like Vietnam on this shit.”

Fifth World

43

Gilbough and Thomas Papania, who have integrated themselves within the specific hegemonic institution of police, of criminal justice. They are responsible for mediating the reconstruction of the murder of Dora Lange as it is told by our (white) protagonists, Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, but who, crucially, reconstruct it on their terms. In other words, these two men, these two interrogators, effectively hijack the show, making game-pieces out of every character and an arcaded board out of the topology of the narrative which, as the detectives reconstruct their story, is shown not to be a romantic reconstruction but a biting, realistic, and re-racializing critique. No longer is that recording lens in the interrogation room (“REC”) transparent film; it is opaque, darkened, colored, blackened. The voice of the black men scars every image of the case. We can now understand the mirrored act of spectacle in the Incandenza film as the reaffirmation of a tradition by which the very idea of tradition is reimbursed in the next generation, in which an unseeing look (always imagined not to be returned) is invested.

There is in this transparent mirror, however, an alluvium deposited by the many excluded generations that is indistinct and unexplored but issues significantly, issues oral, musical, euphonic, altogether sonic signs that are denied and insulted but are also inexplicable and dangerous. In their silent suppression and indeterminate affect, they inform the narrative as a punctum which puts to test the juridico-legal punctuations of that suppression, that maladroit rearguard mission.7 I wish to understand the techniques of the interrogators as necessarily improvisational—necessarily so, because they are retrospective and reconstructive but also never “present,” as it were, because they are improvisational, without foresight/site. This is a paradoxical improvisation, then, as, too, it is the historical, political work of the radical black tradition. It is, in this way, an occasion also of a foresound and foresounding, amplifier and amplifying, but not programmatic. The interrogators must at once improvise while also looking ahead with a certain and necessary torque or vocal force to shape what is being looked at as the interrogated two (whose experience is resounding and being resounded (remastered)) don’t know what that is, what their experience was. The interrogation is here a doubly-voiced force of questioning (that is not a line of questioning) that operates in weird (wayward, occulted) temporalities, “twisted epoché[s],” “redoubled turn[s]” prescribing and extemporaneously forming and reforming rules (Moten 63).

These rules are themselves, we must note, out-of-bounds and operate beyond (and towards) the home territory of the interrogated—low blows coming from the lower frequencies.

This structure (of interrogation), which is un-programmed 7 We can imagine a dark, back-grounded figure approaching the staged, mirrored image, a dark shape in a poorly lit room—one-way answering and talking at submitted to reverse-way interrogation, the questioning of the back-grounded voices, voices from behind the veil, voices from within the walls, if it were that “these walls could talk,” laments Kung Fu Kenny.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

and un-programmatic but also structural and coded—that is to say not but nothing other than improvisational—, is the work of skilled technicians, designed to extort and coerce, thru super-legal, racial means, admission (of the latent slavery (in (the) Hart and Cohle/soul) of police hegemony, displaced whites, and continuing plantation politics). The technicians employ and are employed by their invaluable technique, which is what I shall henceforth call the masquerade and which is the necessary means to and always in the service of the real political work and literary critique in which Papania and Gilbough are interested.

To construct their terms and narrative of criticism, it is necessary that they assume that those realms of white supremacy which they are interested in destroying “are sufficiently exotic [and, here, dangerous] as to require a disguise, a journey, and an ‘experiment’ and that such difference can be effectively assimilated through sartorial means alone” (Schocket). They assume the power of the police,8 that very institution responsible for so much violence unto black people (for this reason, the choice is specific). But this assumption is mediated by the masquerade. This “experiment,” as Schocket describes, echoes, as it is scripted by the interrogation and interrogators, in Cohle. For him, it is the great scientific experiment of true detection but also his involvement in undercover work, “deep narco,” and sustained drug abuse.

Beyond the clothing and undercover, for Papania, Gilbough, and Cohle, there is something essentially same which can be understood. This notion of sameness is taken very seriously by the black interrogators, taken for granted by Cohle, and not taken at all by many of his (Cohle’s) ilk, who only have the need of casually positing sameness to further liken at or concede towards discrimination. It is the truly egalitarian position, the active theorization of egalitarianism, then, that allows the detectives to “manipulate vestments during strategic moments of entry”9—“entry” here understood to be the moments in which their desired course of narrative (the apparent distraction or punctum) is flirted with but also the rampant penetration of those same, frenzied moments.

Cohle’s “journey ‘down’ [into the depths of the Lange archive and the case] ultimately serves to echo and circumvent other journeys ‘up,’ reducing [his] mobility to a mere play of cultural signs” (Schocket). The power of the police is contained and suspended thru its embodiment (rematerialization) by the two black men who are fundamentally exogamous

8 In their masquerade or “put-on,” that is to say, as in vetement, they make the investment of a radical history in that institution and bank on its force.

9 This language is also and overtly that of penetration, but a sneaky one by a sneaky tower: imagine the Washington Monument (rather, the Bill Clinton Monument) slowly blackening as it is infected by the angry botched of the Mississippi Delta. The interrogative coercion begins as a gentle coaxing (moves thru a threshold), acts respectfully, even obediently, as in order to later strike, penetrate. “Let me put the head in / Ooh, I don’t want more than that,” Kung Fu Kenny assures in “Lust,” promising “just a touch.”

44

to it, is possessed by the raging ghosts of black bodies it has systemically and systematically eterminated (and continues to experminate). Too, attending to this movement up10—the ever increasing implication of the ruling classes in the occulted madness of the poor and rural white, we might understand that Papania and Gilbough are working, thru Hart and Cohle, upwards thru the hegemonic structure of police, theorizing blackness against it, initiating an “upstart vertigo pursuing an intransitive ‘crust’—abject, indomitable, ‘beauty’ endowed with aspects of camouflage,” initiating, to wit, an emergent understanding of interior blackness (egalitarianism) even within the most hating, even as they are to the manipulating black theorist the most “abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” ghosts David Walker (not himself abject but a brilliant theorist of abjection) here (Mackey 115). The black interrogators work against these, the abject Hart and Cohle, but also against the aims of “empirical,” “rational” detection (that which leads to (always ends with) the prosecution and incarceration of young black men or obscurely justified violence unto black bodies) and its very language (detective language). The total, evaluable world (of detection) is shown to be a false creation (empirical dagger of the mind), a speculative toute-monde that will be rent into a chaos-monde by échos-monde (to borrow a formulation by Édouard Glissant), interrogating voice, the returning and repetitive sound, the inexplicable, signifying sounds that are ignored in (the) reconstruction (of the Civil Rights movement) and that are redressed in the interrogation, sonically reinscribed. The interrogation is an aggressive compromise, a lexcio-syntactical reformation, a will to the deformation of the dominant narrative and its ideological/linguistic architecture. It argues against the look. This second sight, this event in which the detectives are seen, questioned, spoken at, is the site of argumentum adversus oculos, the debarred and debarring look, and, as it is being recorded, the detectives are liable to make mistakes, expose (themselves by) their bad reconstruction.

“REC”: the inscription on the lens of the camera, the subject of the first shot of the show. Marty Hart is the camera’s subject. The camera witnesses his interrogation. The second scene plays out in much the same way, this time with Cohle being questioned by the men. It is in the third scene that the narrative reaches its first temporal switchback to that which is being recounted by Hart and Cohle: the gruesome rape and murder of Dora Lange. This show will actively switch between the two worlds of the murder case and the reconstruction thereof. Thus, Hart and Cohle should be understood as figures of signification actively determined by their black interrogators, between these two worlds. In other words, Hart and Cohle are actively being manipulated 10 I am thinking, of course, of Curtis Mayfield’s banger “Move On Up.” My argument would seem to you later like this, as locatable in a tradition of Black Optimism but that is also a post-equivalent, violent Black Operation more like the work of Tyler the Creator and another essay.

by a black interrogation which acts with an unanswerable torque against the terms of the interrogated. Any unscripted operations performed by the two detectives should then be understood as another improvisation within historical contexts that have already been mapped.11 The murder of the young white woman Dora Lange is shocking, yes, but is it so different from or so much worse than the too-many-to-list, documented accounts of unpunished rape and murder done unto so many black women throughout and after institutional slavery? This working and reworking of the Dora Lange case can be understood then as motility in and thru “the actual multiplicity of distinct and overlapping public discourses, public spheres, and scenes of evaluation that already exist” (Derrida 120). This territory, then, this topology, this physiognomy of Dora Lange, is the turf upon which the variously constituted violence of continuing slavery have already been exacted—this metonymy is unavoidable. Their course already mapped, it is impossible for Hart and Cohle to move freely here. The “protagonists” become characters following, are characterized to have always followed the hidden transcript of Papania and Gilbough.12 What becomes increasingly obvious for Cohle is that something is awry in, accidental to the investigation. This bad euphony, this silent scream is the result of the detectives’ continuing reconstruction of the case, their (literary) dedication to clarity that has to overgeneralize and omit. This dedication is also the pleasurable benediction of (the) empirically dead body, the study of murdered flesh. This pleasure is not for the continuance of rationality but for pleasure taken in the gratuitous, studied violence done unto the (black)

11 We can call it unscripted on account of this improvisational mode to which I refer in which nothing future is previously known. Not unlike a literary cannon built upon an absent text, the “historical context” or map thereof does not exist, because (indeed, nothing is previously known and) the (cognitive) map is unthinkable outside of the categorical terms of blackness. Pace Jameson’s formulation of “cognitive mapping,” I should like to consider this topology with which we are here concerned not as a spatialized mentality (or as a “Ville Mentality,” after J. Cole) but as a physiognomy, or, better still, as a spatialized mentality that is rematerialized by a body, a mind rematerialized by a black somebody who displaces the primacy of heart with his/her/their body (to be paired with soul). I am thinking here, of course, about “Body and Soul,” but also about Kung Fu Kenny’s assertion (in “The Blacker the Berry”) that he is “as black as the heart of a fuckin’ Aryan.”

12 I am thinking here about James C. Scott’s formulation of the “hidden transcript” that is both the secret discourse of the powerless and the private dialogue of the empowered. See Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1990. I would like to understand this movement and this following as it is parallel to that of the illusory play The King in Yellow thru the literary constitutions of the Carcosa mythos, the occulture and literary cannon from which comes the supernatural allusions of the show.

Fifth World

45

body.13 This scientific manipulation, the creation of a coherent, concise, and consecutive narrative, and this concordant predestination to be clear does not stand up to interrogation. The language of detection, as it is employed by Hart and Cohle, confines them to a false transparency that they can irresponsibly and inconsequentially apply (with police force) to the world, a world which they (or their fathers or grandfathers and so on) used to run—think of them as the descendants of plantation masters.14 Under interrogation, Hart and Cohle appear to us this way, as wretched creatures still trying to find their form in a strange land, and, as they speak their case, reconstruct the narrative in its transparency they find it already (pre-)conceived in opacity, the voice of interrogation having colored it before its conception.15 The accidental note, then, for the sake of the various pleasure taken in transparency, cannot be placed, is willingly ignored, because the pleasure is dependent upon its power of (the) absolute exclusion (of so-called bad notes). This exogamous presence of the dissonant, this unseating presence is superimposed by a black interrogation, which forces upon Hart and Cohle (and their transparent narrative) a penetration—the penetrable and penetrating opacity of a world in which one agrees to live amongst other (black) people, a world which is a great deal more complicated and contradictory and incoherent than their detective language would have it, one which subjects itself to two-way witness.

By and by the interrogating detectives assert and reassert the presence of the seemingly trivial, moving such trivialities from the periphery to the center of attention. This movement is what I have called “sonic reinscription,” here, the rewriting of a suppressed history back into the dominant narrative from which it was excluded. The affect of this, as it is transcribed thru black voice, interrogating voice, is euphonic, such that the dominant narrative becomes intoned or sonorously possessed by the infecting narrative, such as in a chord inversion, giving the heterogeneous narrative offspring (or hideous progeny) “a bit more bite, an element of taunt conducive to curvature as well as interiority”

13 But that Dora Lange was white suggests that she is in fact auxiliary to this “pleasure.” That is to say, that Cohle revels in any narrative casualty (including his own, hence his continuing interest in suicide and self-sacrifice) as all characters are narrated by, are in the narrative of black narrators. All gratuitous violence is interested in, concordant with, and concomitant to violence unto black bodies.

14 Or we could say, more obviously, that the two detectives work for a criminal justice system and a government in the Mississippi Delta region that is generally intent on the legal protection and continuance of the dominant plantation bloc while simultaneously “silencing the century-old African American vision of human development.” See the first page of the opening chapter of Clyde Woods’ Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. New York: Verso, 1998.

15 In other words, as they think their categorical science, the detection already sounded untrue, unhappy, by that category with which it was unconcerned. Categorical detection is made, forced to concern itself with the category of the black (interrogators).

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

(Mackey 115). This new narrative is capable of handling, that is to say, the “repressed” problems of the interior that Hart and Cohle face, remediates them successfully. Indeed, these crucially altered scenes upon which dominant narrative is superimposed upon peripheral narrative, once these scenes are revisited, are some of the most loaded and guttural articulations the show proffers. The technique of forcing the observation, we can say, forcing the eyes towards the issue of what the interrogators want dealt with, is enacted with an incessant assertion of what we would be right to call here, after Barthes, the punctum16 and, more generally, a remapping of the narrative which is drawn “not only in terms of the objects of attention, but equally in terms of what is not perceived, or only dimly perceived, of the distractions, the fringes and peripheries that are excluded or shut out of a perceptual field” (Crary 40). This excluded periphery—that of the black narrative—returns, reinscribes, rematerializes, haunts, shades, darkens, and makes opaque the dominant narrative.17 I should like to posit a second periphery—this one of the valence of the larger show’s text—as it is inhabited by the outcast subjects of the rural white people we have referred to already as displaced, many of whom are pathologically and physically damaged.18 A theoretical annotation to this pathology: once this state of displacement and flattening is rent and understood, the terror of the occult is turned inside out and is felt dearly enough (these rapes and murders are real) to duly precipitate the monstrously and monstrously recalcitrant awareness, the magical realization, the animated incorporation of what could-have-been an emancipatory eschatology (the end of (black) social death) but was poorly reconstructed. The knowledge of this renders wretchedness, pathology, and inarticulacy. And so we see the uncle of Marie Fontenot—the disappearance of whom Cohle believes to be linked with the Dora Lange murder—catatonic under Cohle’s interrogation. Why, we could—practically enough—ask, in this geography of displaced, rural white

16 Roland Barthes refers to the punctum of an image as that which disturbs or upsets the staged photograph or the stadium (that which follows the photographer’s intention, what the photographer wants seen).

The punctum is the accident that “pricks” the attention of s/he or they who beholds the photograph but also “bruises,” is “poignant.” See pages 26-27 of Barthes’ Camera Lucidia. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. I am interested here in the “accident”al quality of the punctum, the strange note that is not in the key, not keyed to a dominant, does not recite or reinforce or center, but actively speaks back, works against the rearguard, decenters, transgresses.

17 We can consider a different, peripheral (excluded) narrative, the domestic (feminine and feminized) narrative, that, following thru the language of haunting, possesses the hyper-masculinity of (especially Hart’s) police work. That story we all just heard of home rules.

18 The interrogation opens multiple lines of recourse to mystical, erotic, religious, and social understandings of multiplicity, here multiple pathologies—“All the gathered / ache of our / severed selves”—, gathered-up pathologies, which were all at once Cohle. See Mackey, Nathaniel. “Grisgris Dancer.” Iowa City: The Iowa Review, 1980.

46

people is there no proletarian impulse towards rebellion?

We should have to conclude that there is some kind of contentment, or opiate, or, barring that, a hope, a belief that this, a “wrong life,” can be revived, lived “rightly,” (Adorno 35). It is this bad logic of undifferentiated race, the understanding that the category of the black is not differentiated from the category and class of these poor white people that would ensure that the social death of black people, as this killing would be understood as the sacrifice of parts-of-awhole and not as the aggression of a specific and privileged part unto another—a sacrifice that could then be understood to cure the pathologies of the whole society. To put it another way, to imprison “criminals” who are necessarily black but allegedly not-because-they-are-black would be to work to cure the society at large. This is the work of the hegemony of criminal justice and the police, both with which Cohle is categorically involved and is therefore infected by (the wretchedness, rendered inarticulate). This explicitly counters his assertion that he “can do terrible things to people with impunity,” because he’s police (E2). Because his character is (this time properly) reconstructed in and thru black interrogation, is motivated by and by a narrative of black interrogation or blackness or the narrative of two black people, his work, his policing has been revealed as monstrous in the same ways the people with whom Cohle is charged with interrogating are monstrously engaged in the subtle suppression of black people.19 An explicit instance in which the critique of the black interrogators is made manifest thru the occult occurs at the site where the dream of empirical reconstruction thru scientific detection is proven to be a lie, or more specifically, when it is apparent that the detectives have been lying to the black interrogators for the past three hours of text, where the dominant narrative is broken by the force of interrogation.20 Take then the fourth episode, whither the two temporalities of the show hinge, whither the reconstructed narrative now seventeen years past is reopened in the show’s narrative present, whither the wrong of a reconstructed past is arraigned to live out rightly in the present. Let me break it down, and let it be broke: this ostensibly “white” 19 I am speaking here of the difference between a productive monstrousness that is of culture meeting the problematic monstrousness that is of occulture. At this crossroad, a precautioned culture (which is a monstrosity that oversteps significant ground, transforming significant difference into signifying homogeneity) is infected by an occulture (which is ostensibly “imagined”); this latter bears (upon the first) un-isolatable, in-transmittable, un-interning/intern-able, altogether present reality that slips away (with) the surface beneath the former’s feet, moves the conversation elsewhere, moves the sight to new sites, demaps.

text has been hijacked by the black interrogators. It is their ghost, the ghost of the radical black tradition that haunts the scientific machine of detection, which is now subject to the three-way witness of reconstructed detection, interrogation, and excluded and returning, re-racializing history.

What silences the proletarian promise in this dedifferentiated class of white people and the value of their occulted cultural critique is that their position was a conscious choice which situates class against race. That is to say, that the plantation bloc “sold” poor whites this situation with the promise of the continued social death of black people. What forces then the representation of this class of white people thru occulted agencies is, ultimately, that hidden transcript which conjures (black) marxian and (satirical) occulted spirit in the first place. It is the black voice that at once unseats and then puts into place.

The occasion then for the breakdown of the dominant narrative is that which also brings the detectives closest to closing the case, the slaughter of Reggie Ledoux, who is wrongly believed to be the murderer and rapist of Dora Lange. For seventeen years, it “was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person,” unburdened by the kind of critical interrogation that now Hart and Cohle are accountable to (E3).

For seventeen years, they understood the case to have ended with a “monster at the end of it,” but now, under black scrutiny, the “monster” is not something that can be killed and with which narrative reconstruction ends but a problem of thought (E3). Hart and Cohle recount their romantic takedown of Ledoux, wherein, as they approach his house, Hart says, “Blam! Bullets cut through right near Rust’s head. We dove opposite ways into the high growth. But they’d already spotted us, and they had something high-velocity. Boom!

Blew apart this tree between us. I mean, it was on.” And, then, Cohle: “Hmm. Heavy shit. Fucking ferns and whatnot bursting all around us, bark flying off of trees. I mean, we were in a fucking shitstorm” (E5). threateningly of “black stars” (E8). This commentary under interrogation is superimposed upon the video of Hart and Cohle approaching the house and capturing Ledoux, dressed only in a towel, posing no physical danger but speaking (or being spoken thru) threateningly of “black stars” that are to rise. He speaks of a dream very different from the detectives’ illusory clean-up of the case, a dream of further complication and of Cohle’s further implication “in Carcosa” (E5). When closest to closing the case, the political work of the interrogation intercedes, speaking thru Ledoux of the rise of “black stars.”21 Ledoux (as an agent of the interrogation) moves the reconstructed narrative from “fucking shitstorm” to something more fun-

20 “Don’t tell a lie on me / I won’t tell the truth ‘bout you,” says Kung Fu Kenny in “The Heart Part IV.” The interrogators know already (in advance) the authorial intention of Hart and Cohle, know already the detectives will have to lie to support it, and can play in advance. To reconstruct a true detection would mean for Hart and Cohle to reconstruct an entire (oc)culture that imposes and polices social death, in other words, to first deconstruct. This they cannot do, and having told a lie on the interrogators, about the detectives is told the truth.

21 It should be unavoidable to think here of “Every Nigger is a Star,” and, more especially, its sampling in the opening track of Kung Fu Kenny’s To Pimp a Butterfly, “Wesley’s Theory,” another instance of theorizing, thinking black against and thru the police power that captured Wesley Snipes. We should also attend carefully to Du Bois’s likening of black men to falling stars, if it is that here they are said to be again on the rise.

Fifth World

47

damental, reposits the narrative in a very different kind of storm. Thru Ledoux, then, the occult, or, more specifically, the demented, levels a fun-demental attack on the dementia of a criminal justice system that unceasingly raises a flag of dementia over its lugubrious chateau. Hart and Cohle, lest we, too, forget, are the heirs to the (legal) enforcement of Jim Crow, the inheritors of that law. The strategies of the interrogation are shown to be intimately bound up with (class) occulture, but its ends are, however latently, racial.

We need to then understand the occult in the show in its work to actively rework a past, to imitate dead styles, as it is necessarily and categorically (a) black (performance). This occulture of the “Yellow King” (which is also the occulture the American deep south) taken at its effaced value, is already a swamped and desperate search for the father. The Du Boisian sonorous e/affect then, the second, occulted sight, this infiltration of the cultural with a periodized and periodizing occulture, the working infiltration of black theory makes this occulture (still a search for the father) a moving (both sad and motile) reconstruction on account of and accounting for something of lost time, and the “search” (for the father) is for nefarious purpose. This sadness, this white melancholia, this self-loathing, this failed search—these things are diffuse, diffused, and archived, and they are attended to by, curated by the archivists—unhappy scientists with tight tautological masks effacing metaphysical pinheads—in the museum of white (oc)culture. They are singularly ocular. They are how the society turns itself into its own and finest spectacle, mines itself of its finest, properly measured up, rightly gauged resources. They are the very systems of domination— the structures of the church, the police, the state as feeling—that can operate in and with righteous impunity. Their terms of self-endearment, however, their made-virtues of sorrow are ceaselessly arraigned by questions that white people do not want asked, by forbidden questions. Nathaniel Mackey has called already the asking of them “liturgical ambush” (95). This is one technique against the observer, and it is how white domination can be momentarily hijacked by black people, imbued with history, and remobilized, sent on its merry way.

It is not until Cohle finally meets with the occulted agencies that he has been hunting that his masking is, can be undone. This is the moment when the ends of detection thru scientific rationalism and the ends of the occult are the same, when Cohle and Errol Childress, the hunted monster and center of the web of the occulted agencies responsible for Lange and countless other bodies, meet, and it is revealed that the work of detection was in some sense a training process or a test to become an acolyte for that occulted way of sub-hegemonic speaking: childress: Come with me, little man. Come in here with me. [flies buzzing] Rust? Come on inside, little priest. To your right, little priest. Take the bride’s path. This is Carcosa. You know what they did to me?

Hmm? What I will do to all the sons and daughters

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

of man. You blessed Reggie…Dewall. Acolytes. Witnesses to my journey. Lovers. I am not ashamed. Come die with me, little priest. [exhales sharply] Rust? Rust! [footsteps] [rustling sound] [rumbling] Now, take off your mask (E8).

The work of detection was never, after all, opposed to the occult that was so much a part of it all along. It is only thru the processes of detection that the occult is, more than known, consecrated (“You blessed Reggie…Dewall.”). It is in this moment that things (can) end, and it becomes rather unimportant what determined the speech that startles Cohle into his encounter with Childress, the words being, as it were, spoken without intention—the occult dissolved by the dark of the night sky. As many stars as there are, there is all the more blackness, all the more of those at-once-occulted, now-de-occulted (decollated) black stars. There is an egalitarian move after this unmasking—made quite explicit in the physical struggle between Cohle and Childress in which Cohle is forced, hands barring Childress’ knife, to head-butt his other, compounding facial graft with fatal transference.

I’ll end here on the very same terms as that of our remarkable object of study, True Detective, going to that place where, too, this final confrontation or eschaton is wrought.

This is Fort Macomb, which is also the very house (refuge) of the homeless monster (Childress) and is itself monstrous and ruinous, a sepulcher barring the barricade’s spectral chief (he who at once gave himself to the ruling classes, now left to his own mutations). The fort is the severed plot of a politico-logical trauma, as it were for Childress, as the body of Dora Lange is for Cohle, his (both of them now), their topology of mourning, which is also their field of science/ séance. But this is a most melancholic science, this one devoid of all normative and normalizing functions, de-policed, if you will, recalcitrant to itself as science, without reliable limit. By the time they meet upon the heath, the place has been swamped by the momentous present coming to pass/ past in the body of the manifestation, made manifest there.

It is about that time and high tide. It is only at the site of two American wars—Macomb is haunted by both the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War—and the site of the re-imagination of both, that Childress can affectively harden himself monstrously in the cadaverous rigor of his readymade critique, ultimately as a marxian political agent and a Sadean cultural critic. The fort is our hideaway where a plan (written by the interrogators and thru Childress) is reconstituted. It is the fort that is prematurely sieged by Cohle, where that plan has to be prematurely deployed. The specter acts against itself. We should understand then, deconstructively, that Cohle’s pessimism is an echo of the frustration of his interrogators (his authors) over the assurance that what happens here is what will (always be what will) have happened at the border of the interrogation (the narrative): another failed racial reconstruction. This new reconstruction, in its redoubling recalcitrance, reaffirms the other. How clever is all of this fight and how insufficient. To leave this

48

way, then: insufficient. But so, too, wrong life… cohle: I tell you, Marty, I’ve been up in that room looking out those windows every night here and just thinking: it’s just one story. The oldest. hart: What’s that? cohle: Light versus dark. hart: Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory. cohle: Yeah. You’re right about that…You know, you’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing. hart: How is that? cohle: Well, once, there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning (E8).

The Aryan force here is total—on earth and in sky. Blackness, here coded darkness, has to be exorcised, indeed hunted into the labyrinthine recesses, coaxed out even as it is coaxed by its apposite, and, ultimately, put to use. This is a mandate executed by a plurality of programs, a panoply of the techniques of hegemonic criminal justice. But just so, too, as that mandate is a programmatic condition of the ruling classes en masse, generic hegemony, we must understand the necessity of the exorcism as subject to execution thru a different and equally various panoply of images, a “fantastic panoply” which is the spectral theory that acts upon and against the evolution of the specter, or at least has so far. In this second execution—call it a (policed) second death—the various techniques of oppression are given over to a singular (even as it is variously constituted) involvement in the mobility of a highly differentiated strategic context, one that is constant, of constancy, and consistent in its campaign of social death, which is also the campaign of war. This context, the need for social death, that is to say of food (bad Eucharist) is constructed in “discursive layers” whose variousness and “stratification allows [for] long sequences to remain subjacent to ephemeral formations (Derrida 121). That is to say, we can speak of the taxing power of a hidden transcript upon a dominant narrative and understand dominance as a logic constituted only in relation to “blackness,” but we cannot ignore that categorical blackness is born always into a history of violence and that the hidden, obscured, occulted transcript remains subjacent to that other “ephemeral” logic that is the subtext to dominance: the body of the supernumerary meets the raw force of inexplicable hatred. We cannot say, in this, the show closing, that the performance was lived out rightly, even as it was rightly lived.

But so, too, we should not have expected it to have been.

This endgame, narrative end, the ends of the narrative, were already to have failed, but not for naught. What is reaffirmed by Cohle in this final scene is that even as this theoretical work, this thinking (of) blackness has been done, there is a real problem of praxis remaining, still an anatomy of police power, still thousands of young black men behind bars, still the gratuitous violence unto black bodies. The return look, the return sound, sonic reinscription, this objective transformation of a rural white society into an occulted

phantasm and spectacle, the blackening of the topology (an entire forest of ham, a world in which everyone that looks is seen)—all of this is crucial, but it does not undo the practical structure of the policed and policing world (police hegemony, security state). This theoretical work does, however, think of an active and persistent, shall we say, reconstructed slavery in terms that are more real, more bloated than ever, and it allows the practitioner, the revolutionary to measure up its actual power. A note on this ending: Cohle’s final assurance that the “light’s winning” is spoken with so little clarity that it took the release of the transcript for viewers to be sure of what he had said.

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. E.F.N. Jephcott trans. ed. London: Verso, 2006.

Chesnutt, Charles W. “Dave’s Neckliss,” in Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays, ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Library of America, 2002.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques, and Peggy Kamuf. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Upper Saddle River: Routledge, 1994.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Classic, 1903.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature”. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Ed. James D. Hart.

Rev. Philip W. Leininger. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Fukunaga, Cary J, Nic Pizzolatto, Carol Cuddy, Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan, Tory Kittles, and Michael Potts. True Detective: [the Complete First Season]. 2014.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Bedouin Hornbook. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997.

Schocket, Eric. “Undercover Explorations of the ‘Other Half,’ or the Writer as Class Transvestite” from Representations No. 64, Autumn. Oakland: University of California Press, 1998.

Walker, David. Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Boston: Revised and Published by David Walker, 1830.

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 2009.

Fifth World

49

Where the Wild Things Are: The Demonization of Native Americans by the Puritans Jessalyn Smith

H

umans need to feel in control of themselves and the world around them. Though a fear of the unknown and unpredictable may have been necessary to the survival of early humans, eventually the same survival tactic that defined interactions between humans and their environment began to make its way into social interactions. Many species are inherently violent but the instinct to compete for mates and resources cannot account for all of the human death at human hands. Humans are the most violent of species. According to research lead by Dr José María Gómez, the average amount of deaths cause by the same species is about 0.3% in the animal kingdom. But in human history, the same-species murder rate has reached 10% in the Mesolithic and Medieval ages, over 15% during a period from 3,000 to 1,500 years ago, and then more than 25% around the time Columbus arrived in the New World. These enormous increases in deaths seem to be clustered around events involving the interaction of different peoples, providing good reason to believe that these high rates in human-on human killing has some basis in social and political interactions, not just in territorial struggles (Johnston). With social and political interactions between societies often comes discrepancies concerning culture; it seems that where humans lack understanding, fear forms alongside violence. For humans, borders between territories is much more than just a claim to resources: colonial violence cannot be explained only as a conflict over land.

When the Puritans landed in America in 1620, they were met by the native people of what would eventually become New England. Despite some effort in the beginning, relations between the colonists and the Native Americans were tense. The reason for the uneasy relationship between the two groups of people was the fear that the Puritans had of the natives. This fear came from the Puritans’ inability to control or identify with them. The alien quality of many of the Native American practices were demonized. Beginning with simple differences in culture, Native Americans were seen as distinctly different from the colonists. Because the Native people had a civilization that differed from that of the European settlers, the colonists determined that the Native Americans lacked civilization, they were savages who roamed in the wilderness. In an account of an encounter with a group of Native Americans in Guiana, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, “[The Native Americans] had their eyes in their North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Figure 1. Depictions of Blemmyes, engraving in a 1603 German edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Discovery of Guiana,” 1595. From the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.”

This outlandish depiction of these people made it easy for them to be viewed more like beasts than as people (Gaudio).

This separation of Native Americans from their humanity became morally convenient when it would eventually be determined that they needed to be controlled in ways that one does not control another human.

The Puritans felt it was their duty to bring God to the Native Americans. They believed that America was a land overrun by Satan and that God had placed them there to reclaim that land for Him. In “The Wonders of the Invisible World” Cotton Mather writes, The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories; and it may easily be supposed that the devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus, that He should have the utmost parts of the earth for His possession.

L

ike the demons who occupied this new land, the Native Americans were there to challenge the Puritans; however, the natives were ultimately to be converted by them.

By spreading their religion and settling the wilderness, the Puritans believed that they were taking that land back from the devil. Diseases that the Europeans introduced and that natives had no immunity to were wiping out large populations of Native Americans. The Puritans took this as God

50

clearing a spot for them. In a letter John Winthrop wrote to Nathaniel Rich describing life in the New World, he said.

“For the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess” (U.S., pp.237).

The Puritans made a strenuous effort to subdue large parts of savage human nature. The control sought after in the Christian community is not only restricted to that of things outside the self. For the Puritans, the wilderness was the dwelling place of Satan and was a place of darkness and temptation. There are a multitude of references to Satan in association with the forest in Christian literature and literature written about Puritan society, but this fear of nature also extends to a fear of the fallen nature of man (Takaki).

Christians look to God to tame the urges that they feared they otherwise wouldn’t be able to restrain. The Puritans had a particular focus on the destruction of individual identity in the interest of focusing on the identity and well-being of the community: one’s sinful nature had to be destroyed in order to be redeemed in Christian society. This fallen self consisted not only of moral self, but of the physical self. Anything that was in the basic nature of the human such as gluttony, drunkenness, sexuality, etc. was thought to draw the soul away from God and into the arms of Satan. The Puritans were very strict with themselves because they believed God to be even stricter. They needed the wrath of God to keep the wilderness and the evil inside them in check. Jonathan Edwards, in one of his well-known sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, describes how the only thing keeping humans from slipping into hell is the mere will of God. He reiterates that “The wrath of God burns against [wicked men], their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them” (Edwards, pp. 4).

To distinguish to believers what was holy and what was Satanic, Puritans set up boundaries, figurative boundaries of faith made up by strict rules as well as literal geographic boundaries defined by the settled land and the wilderness.

What lived inside the boundaries of civilization and community was under the control of God and could be trusted; whatever existed outside of the boundaries, in nature, was evil and was an object of fear. The Native Americans lived outside these boundaries; they physically lived outside of the religious community and they didn’t subscribe to the same beliefs or customs. They were described as savage, wild, and ignorant. Associated with the dwelling place of Satan, they were thought to be worshippers of the devil, whether this was of their choice or a product of mere ignorance (Agnew).

The Puritans believed that human nature was evil; humans were good only to the extent that God willed their redemption within the community of Christ. While not in the presence of God and His teachings as relayed by the ministers and magistrates of the Puritan church, humans were subject to the enticements of the devil (Berg). They were thought to have succumbed to the temptations of nature and of Satan;

they worshipped Satan and did his bidding. Proximity to the Native Americans and to the woods was proximity to Satan.

This proximity was dangerous because it could allow the devil to corrupt the righteous souls of the Puritans and the wilderness offered the dangerous temptations of “nature”.

Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narratives, or The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, provides a useful insight into this mentality: The first week of my being among them, I hardly eat anything; the second week, I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash; but the third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory to my taste.

At first, Rowlandson is disgusted by the food that they eat, it is food only fit for savages. But as she becomes hungrier, she is forced to eat. She feels guilty and sad that she enjoys it because she fears she is becoming more like the savages holding her captive. The possibility of finding similarities between herself and the savages who had taken her was terrifying because while it opened up the possibility that they could be less savage and more like the Puritans than she thought, it could also indicate that the devil was indeed rubbing off on her, or even worse, it could mean that she held the same savagery within her all along.

Christianity, as with other religions, provides a set of rules to be followed and a community to be lived within. A community with defined borders, physical and epistemological, that make it easy to locate anything or anyone that does not comply with them. People need these borders to feel as if those around them are in control. Those who aren’t within these borders are feared. But these rules are also set in place to control themselves. Christians do not seek to have individual control but to be controlled by an entity they view as having much more power and wisdom than themselves.

This, to a certain extent releases them from the responsibility of their own actions, while they can claim it is all a part of God’s plan. Because they doubt their own power to tame nature, they put their faith in someone who does; through the distinctions between the place of God’s redemptive power and the place of fallen nature.

Masochism is taking pleasure in relinquishing control and being punished. Stuart L. Charmé describes several cases in which certain traits or patterns exhibited in people who are psychologically masochistic are also exhibited in religious practices. Charmé writes, “Theories of masochism can be divided into six general categories which trace masochism to 1) a distortion of love, 2) a need for punishment, 3) a payment for future rewards, 4) a strategy of the weak or powerless, 5) a flight from selfhood, or 6) an effort to be an object for others” (Charmé, pp. 2). Each of these categories can be seen in the practices of the Puritans. For instance, the masochist identifies a partner as an ideal self and relinquish-

Fifth World

51

es all sense of one’s own self. Thus, the Puritans focused on destroying the self to better serve God and become closer to his divinity. There are examples from the bible of taking God’s wrath and punishment as signs of his love. In Romans 5:3-5: “We rejoice in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.” Or Hebrews 12:5-6: “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him.

For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” The members of the Christian church adore a God that punishes them. The Puritans felt the need to punish themselves for their nature and their individuality.

The Puritans often sought to suppress and destroy the individual. They did not want to get caught up in temporal concerns such as grief, which questioned God’s plan. They also found comfort in the belief that when things went wrong in the community or when the Native Americans threatened them that it was just God punishing them or it was a part of God’s plan. The Puritan’s masochistic tendencies could have had a large role in the demonic characteristics that they placed on the Native Americans. Because they felt that there was something inside them that was worth punishment, they pushed those sinful traits and urges onto others outside of themselves because it was easier to feel in control of them.

According to the Bible, when Lucifer was cast out of heaven, God said to him: “How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn!

You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!

You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.[b]

I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”

But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit.

Those who see you will gaze at you, And consider you, saying: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, Who shook kingdoms,

Who made the world as a wilderness And destroyed its cities, Who did not open the house of his prisoners?”

(Isaiah 14:12-17)

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

In these verses, Lucifer is accused of being the destroyer of civilization and the creator of chaos and of the wilderness.

There is a connection made between nature and evil as well as a relationship between the loss of control and evil. Lucifer is something that God had created, but God could not control him so he was cast out and confined to “the realm of the dead”. You can see here a symbolic and geographic representation of where goodness lies and where evil lies. Lucifer has to be physically removed from heaven; he is place in hell, a domain of punishment and suffering.

The boundaries of faith can easily be transformed into actual, geographical boundaries. There is often one place that is deemed Godly and good; everything outside of it is evil. In the cases of Lucifer, Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, what is originally inside the good space turns out to be evil, it is cast out into the space that is other than that Godly space, the evil space. The Puritans viewed civilization similarly. For the Puritans, community was sacred; what was not a part of that community, what did not lie under the control of God and of the church, was something or someone of Satan and belonged outside of the community.

An infamous example of “purging” the wickedness found inside a community is the Salem witch trials. Beginning in 1692, the trials were conducted in an effort to smother heresy in the colony. Those accused were thought to have been working with the devil or to have been influenced by him.

Some believe there are more political explanations because often the targets were members of the community that criticized the government. The paranoia became contagious.

Eventually, people began to come forward as witches themselves. The fear had spread from the general community to the individual: Satan had infiltrated them; they could no longer trust themselves to have control over their thoughts; the devil was destroying them from the inside out. The community was driven mad and resorted to violence at the prospect of the absence or the penetration of God’s protection (Blumberg). Like Mary Rowlandson, they were terrified at the prospect that there was wickedness inside them. The Puritan’s focus on what was and was not in the community, usually allowed them to feel like they were under control of what was and was not inside themselves. Their community was meant to be an area of purity in a land overrun by Satan and his followers.

R

eligion has historically been and remains a crucial part of society. It is used as a device to organize and moralize the population. Christianity and religion in general are a way for humans to feel in control of their existence. Religion is necessary but it also sets up an inevitable division between people and within believers, creating an outlet for prejudice. There are still groups of people today who find themselves in the same position the Native Americans found themselves in 400 years ago. Homosexuals have faced much discrimination and mistreatment by those who use the bible as justification. Leviticus 20:13 asserts that “If a man has

52

sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” Thus has been used by many a person calling for the execution of homosexuals in America and racism is still a prominent issue in the world. But one does not have to be religious to be homophobic, or racist, or to have a fear of what is different from them.

Nature, in this paper, has come to be synonymous with uncontrollable. Nature is what is outside of the human because humans have made themselves a civilization, and nature is also inside the human. Human nature is not in our control, but control is engrained into human nature. Religion is used as a way for people to take control while simultaneously surrendering it. Humans fear what is outside of themselves, and what is outside of what is familiar to them.

As it turns out, there are things not so familiar that lie within us as well, and it is these things which can be the most frightening. In order to conquer this fear, the Puritans subscribed closely to a rigorous version of the Christian faith.

They relied on God and his power to control their nature for them. They concentrated much of their energy on suppressing what comes naturally. Those who did not concentrate the same attention on suppressing these instincts were subjects of Satan. The Puritans felt it was their duty to take back or destroy what had been taken by Satan. This included the wilderness and the “brutes” that roamed wildly within.

The Puritans sought to control themselves and the Native Americans. Religion and religious leaders control followers of religion. Systematic racism controls people of color and what they can accomplish. Patriarchal society controls women how they are perceived, and how they perceive themselves. Everything in society is created around the control of nature, imagined within and outside of the precariously civilized self. The violence, patronization, dehumanization, and destruction of individualism that comes hand in hand with control did not begin with the Puritans nor did it end with them.

Agnew, Aileen. “The Devil and the Wilderness.” Maine History Online. Web. 2 May 2016.

All About God. “Story of Lucifer.” All About God. AllAboutGod.com, Web. 16 Oct. 2016.

Berg, Philip L. “Racism and the Puritan Mind.” Phylon 36.1 (1975): 1-7. Web. 6 May 2016.

Blumberg, Jess. “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials.” Smithsonian, 23 Oct. 2007. Web. 6 Nov. 2016.

Bush, Sargent, and James F. Cooper. “The Puritans and the Self.” The William and Mary Quarterly 58.2 (2001): 516-21. Web. Charḿe, Stuart L. “Religion and the Theory of Masochism.” Journal of Religion and Health 22.3 (1983): 221-33. Web. 11 October 2016.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Print. 8 July 1741.

Gaudio, Michael P. “Early Visual Representations of the New World.” America in Class. National Humanities Center, 2011. Web. 17 Oct. 2016.

Johnston, Ian. “Humans evolved to have an instinct for deadly violence, researchers find.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 28 Sept. 2016. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.

Lovejoy, David S. “Satanizing the American Indian.” The New England Quarterly 67.4 (1994): 603-621.

Web. 8 May 2016.

Mather, Cotton. “The Wonders of the Invisible World.” Print. 1693.

Takaki, Ronald. ”The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery.” The Journal of American History, Spec. issue of Discovering America 79.3 (1992): 892-912. Web. 9 May. 2016.

Society for Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Strength Out of Weakness : or A Gl o r i ous Manifestation of the Further Progress of the Gospel Among the Indians in New England. 1865. 29.

Print.

Strathmann, Ernest A. “The New World and Sir Walter Raleigh.” American Quarterly 1.1 (1949): 83-91. Web. 17 October. 2016.

U.S. History Online Textbook, ushistory. or. (2016). Dissent in Massachusetts Bay. Web. 6 November.

2016.

Fifth World

53

How Satire Uses Viewer Vulnerability to Sway Undecided Voters Theresa Voyles

I

f you think back on recent election coverage, chances are that at least some of your memories of “news” coverage include satire. Maybe you recall The Daily Show’s coverage of the Florida governor’s race, John Oliver’s mockery of the GOP efforts to rebrand, or Stephen Colbert’s Twitter-mocking of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Maybe you read The Onion’s piece “Midterm Candidates Distancing Selves from United States.” This trend toward satirical reportage has been surging over the last few elections. It’s worth recalling that The Daily Show has gone on the road every two years either for coverage live from the Democrat and Republican conventions, or in midterm years, to locations they considered central to major races. They traveled to D.C. in 2002 and 2010, and visited the swing state of Ohio in 2006. On October 30, 2008 Stewart and Colbert held a pre-midterm rally on the National Mall that attracted over 200,000 people and 2.5 million live viewers.

There have been some noteworthy satire moments in the last few elections: Who could forget the role that Colbert played in educating viewers on campaign finance by starting his own Super PAC, then encouraging his viewers to do the same? And then there was Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin, which played a key role in drawing voters away from the McCain-Palin ticket. This also goes beyond the professional satirists: average citizens are tweeting, facebooking, snapchatting, and creating satirical memes that often go viral. Entire twitter accounts, for instance, are satirical. The Twitter feed for “Top Conservative Cat,” described as a “Colbert conservative,” has over 104,000 followers on Twitter.

Satire has the ability to protect its creator from culpability for criticism, because it is implied rather than overtly stated; in this way, it becomes a powerful tool for dissenters in political and social periods. What better tool than satire exists for voicing criticisms in these unstable times? Satire is more alive today than ever before, finding outlets in literature, television, the internet, comics and cartoons. Messages that would be ignored or punished if overtly declared are reaching millions of people in satirical form, and making a real difference. It may be the most powerful tool that critics have to the world.

In recent years, many people have begun using the blanket term “satire” to refer to any type of humor that involves ridicule, particularly of authority. For the purposes of this North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

paper, satire shall be defined as any piece, whether literary, artistic, spoken, or otherwise presented, which bears the following characteristics: 1. Critique. Satire is always a critique of some form of human behavior, vice, or folly, with the intent of persuading the audience to view it disdainfully and encourages a degree of social change by doing so.

2. Irony. Instead of an obvious statement, comedians are able to exaggerate their claim in the opposite direction. For example, Will Ferrel portrayed George W. Bush as loose and silly to contrast his characteristically stiff and robotic posture and mannerism.

3. Implicitness. Satire is not an overt statement, nor does it come to an explicit verdict. Rather, the critiqued behavior is highlighted within the satirical work by being obviously absurd, most often because it is exaggerated or taken out of its normal context.

All in all, satire is a critique not stated openly, but hinted at with the primary intention of amusing an audience.

As the 2016 Election Day looms, satirical news outlet, The Daily Show, ramped up its media coverage by heading to Texas for a week of shows entitled Democalypse 2014: South

by South Mess. A Comedy Central show relocated to broadcast on-the-spot election coverage. That could strike us as strange, right? But really, it does not. The idea that a satire news show would take election coverage seriously does not come as a surprise. Why has satirical news become such a major player in news media? And, is its increased social power dangerous for our democracy? Does political satire really affect political outcomes? The answer is yes. The question then becomes who is affected by satire, as well as how, and how much?

I

n order to answer the question of the influence of satire in a democratic political system, one must understand who exactly is being influenced Of course, democracy is dependent on popular participation in government, so the only way political satire could affect political outcomes is to influence its audience (the people) enough to sway its political opinion. Needless to say, one might point out the obvious by claiming the people influenced by satirical media are the ones viewing them, but then, who are these viewers? Most are between the ages of 18 and 35, as some shows have over half of their viewers in this category (The Daily Show, 56%,

54

The Colbert Report, 58%) (Gewurz). Voters within this age range make up 31% of the popular vote (NPR), which is significant, as every US presidential election has resulted in a popular vote with margins under 30% (US Elections Project). Among this demographic, satire news is increasingly overtaking mainstream news as a source of voter information, especially for younger and left-leaning voters. One poll showed that nearly one-third of Americans under the age of 40 say satirical news-oriented television programs like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are taking the place of traditional news outlets (Rasmussen). Further research showed that among millennial voters, satire news was not only more common, but also more trusted (Gewurz). Combining the facts that so much of the popular vote is made up of millennials and over half of most satirical show viewers are millennials, political satire does have enough influence on enough people that they could alter election results.

As previously stated, it is becoming more common for young people to be using satirical news outlets as their primary source of information. While some may find this fact horrifying, it may actually not be as bad as it seems. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center has shown that viewers of satirical programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report score notably higher for accuracy on current events than viewers of programs like The O’Reilly Factor or The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. They also score higher than viewers of cable news sources such as CNN and Fox News (Heimlich). This research is backed by a number of other studies, including one by the Annenburg Public Policy Center which found that Colbert’s Super PAC stunt worked as well as a high school civics lesson (Rozansky). This is likely because the 24/7 television news cycle is now almost totally dominated by opinion, expert debates, punditry, and other forms of fluff that don’t actually offer much in terms of objective information. The result is that viewers who watch Fox News, MSNBC, or any other professional news stations are almost less informed about political information than viewers that watch no news at all. And, to make it worse, they are more likely to believe misinformation (Rozansky).

Young news consumers, in contrast, are more apt to question the source of their information and viewers of satire news are more likely to trust Jon Stewart than Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC as a source of news. Keep in mind that this is coming from voters who have increasing distrust in politicians, the media, and other authority figures. Often television news today packages information in stark oppositions that then allow “experts” to present opposite points of view. These oppositions are sometimes, if not oftentimes, based on false binaries, faulty logic, or just hyperbole. Such a format does not enhance the critical thinking necessary for informed democratic participation.

In my research, I’ve found satirists are often falsely blamed for the state of news, but satire, as defined above, simply comments on and highlights the flaws in politics as well as the media. Satire, by nature, exposes, mocks, and

laughs at general thoughtlessness and works by asking the audience to think critically and to question the status quo.

In this way, satirists like Stewart, Colbert, and Oliver function as a corrective for the sensational, and silly, news that is reported on cable television.

W

hen journalists cover political satire, a common angle is questioning how it may influence the outcome of an upcoming election. High-profile stunts get the same treatment. More than 200,000 people attended Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity, while Colbert formed his Super PAC Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow to raise awareness of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Both stunts engendered a chorus of voices asking, “How is this going to affect the vote?”

“Affecting the vote” does not mean that these programs are somehow missing their comedic mark, nor does it prove that satire is removed from the real world of political action and debate. The very idea of a democratic system is premised on the existence of an informed and engaged citizenry (a populace that not only votes, but also thinks, feels, speaks and agitates). The more interesting question one could ask about a piece of satire — or any form of political speech — is how it impacts us as citizens over time. On that count, parody news is accomplishing plenty, and John Oliver’s program is a particularly successful one.

Oliver follows the path forged by “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.” For his part, Stewart parses the mainstream news of the day, often critiquing the sensationalism and laziness of its coverage. The show has also become one of the only places on television (along with “The Colbert Report”) where academics and other public thinkers are invited on to participate in thorough, nuanced discussions of their ideas.

Once it is known who is influenced by satire, it is important to know how they are influenced. Humor can be used as an effective means of evading censorship; depending on how it is received, it can alter peoples’ political opinions. If the audience is not made to laugh, it is possible that audience may be influenced in the manner the comedian was trying to avoid.

When successful, eliciting laughter at another candidate in an election is a tactful move, as undecided voters are more likely to decide they like a candidate if they are made to laugh. For example, Will Ferrell said in an interview that he believed the popularity of playing Bush on Saturday Night Live humanized the real George W. Bush to the country, and ultimately aided Bush’s narrow win over Al Gore (Mathews). However, the opposite effect can happen if the statement is too bold, or just not found funny. Instead of being pressured to laugh by the audience, undecided voters may decide they do not like a candidate if they are not made to laugh and the experience is awkward (Mathews).

To combat this, many satirical shows have big electronic billboards which read ‘laugh’ after a punch line is delivered.

Fifth World

55

Sometimes, viewing satire can lead to such an overwhelming distrust of the candidates or system, that it shies viewers away from voting at all. Even though this was found to be the rarest effect of viewing satire, I found in some cases that voters were so deterred from candidates, and the political system for that matter, that they decided despite every person in america shouting “GO VOTE!” at them, they would not participate in the election.

T

he rise in the use of satirical news as a primary source has led scholars to question the impact of these humorous news outlets on politics. One thing is clear: Satire has made politics more accessible, leading to more informed viewers who have the potential to form more educated opinions to be presented and discussed with others. The advantage of satirical news is that it chooses reports based on comedic value, which—instead of deviating from essential information—often accentuates the news and underscores important issues in politics. Colbert’s super PAC is a prime example. Although the comedian seemed to be exaggerating, current PAC regulation allowed Colbert to do nearly anything he wanted with his committee, which he took full advantage of to accessibly and humorously underscore his unrestricted freedom without deviating from facts. Colbert makes claims inadvertently, which is certainly more effective than spitting opinions at his viewers. It is examples as this that show political satire having an influence on election results merely by the way ideas are received What I tend to think is that people have always liked jokes, and they like them very much when they have nothing to do with politics and they like them less when they have something to do with politics. But they still like jokes.

So our goal really – if they take anything away, I would imagine it would be that you can have a view of the world that is informed by absurdity or humor that still allows you to feel like you are connected to it. But I don’t know that there would be much more than that.

I don’t think that they are watching [satire] and thinking that…what they are taking away from it is a feeling of empowerment or something else that people would maybe think that it is.

-Jon Stewart (Radio Free Europe) This “sense of empowerment” of which Stewart speaks could be the secret to why political satire has so much popularity. Having the power to laugh at those in charge gives a sense of control to those laughing. Other than deciding who is in office, citizens can only sit and watch officials do what they think is best for the country, which can be terrifying, especially for those adamantly against that official.

Satire gives its audience power over those in power, if only for as long as the duration of the show. When Alec Baldwin portrayed Donald Trump on SNL he made the audience laugh by dramatizing Trump’s anger and narcissism in with comedic twist. It is the light-hearted humor, combined with the vulnerability of the audience which allows viewers to be impacted by satire.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

I

n conclusion, political satire affects elections in that it affects the people when they are most receptive. While humor is subjective, the act of laughing is universal. It’s something we feel and to which we can relate. It releases endorphins and makes us feel bonded to those around us.

Humor also helps deconstruct complex issues—not necessarily dumbing down, but clarifying in a way only comedy can. Furthermore, it’s thought-provoking. Unlike politics, there are few rules, if any. Comedians use humor to push the envelope, to color outside the lines—to be honest, authentic and unapologetic—a mindset that’s largely opposed to the one that dictates politics. So really, no, “Saturday Night Live” skits won’t completely determine who becomes president. But they do have influence on the way we think about candidates and policies, and definitely influence the future opinions of Americans.

“Millennials Now Rival Boomers As A Political Force, But Will They Actually Vote?” NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

McClennen, Sophia A. “Does Satire News Influence Elections?” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

Gewurz, Danielle. “Section 4: Demographics and Political Views of News Audiences.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. N.p., 2012. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

“National-1789-present - United States Elections Project.” United States Elections Project. N.p., n.d.

Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

Rasmussen_Poll. “Nearly One-Third of Younger Americans See Colbert, Stewart As Alternatives to Traditional News Outlets.” Rasmussen Reports: The Most Comprehensive Public Opinion Data Anywhere. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

Gewurz, Danielle. “Section 3: News Attitudes and Habits.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. N.p., 2012. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

Heimlich, Russell. “Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. N.p., 2007. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

Rozansky, Michael. “Stephen Colbert’s Civics Lesson: Or, How a TV Humorist Taught America about Campaign Finance.” The Annenberg Public Policy Center, 2 June 2014. Web. “Political Satire: Beyond the Humor | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson.” Harvard News. N.p., n.d.

Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

“Jon Stewart On The Value Of Political Satire.” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

Mathews, Chris. “Politics and the Poe Roof Humor and Satire.” MSNBC. MSNBC, 18 Oct. 2016.

Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

“Laughing to the White House: Why Comedy and Politics Need Each Other.” Pastemagazine.com.

N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2016.

56

Mni Wiconi1: A Discussion of Tribal Lands, Media Representation of Native Peoples, and Federal Environmental Policy Vivian Mellon Snyder

“T

he Standing Rock Sioux, the Cherokee, the Sayisi Dene, the Navajo, the Crow, the Cocopah…”

Federal environmental policy, however broad that term may be, has very specific implications for the many tribal nations located throughout the United States. These sovereign nations are distinct in their interactions with the federal government, in the land on which they are located, and in the ways which they are connected to the land. To acknowledge the sovereignty and diversity of Native American peoples, I shall structure this paper around the effects of federal water policy on each tribe, rather than to divide this paper into environmental topics such as climate change, wildfire, and irrigation.

Necessarily, this paper addresses only a few of the countless environmental injustices faced by Indigenous Nations.

Rather than serving as an explanation of legislative bills, statutes, and warrants for reparation, then, this piece serves to introduce a discussion of those policies as they affect the sovereignty and cultures of those who live within Indian Nation. Vital documents, such as the Clean Water Act, are introduced in the context of the living history of Indian Nation. To preface the arguments made hereafter, however, I will establish the significance of three legal concepts which are necessary to understand the complicated legal interactions between the United States Government and sovereign Indian nations: tribal territorial sovereignty, the plenary power doctrine, and the trust relationship. In tandem, these three concepts reveal the pervasive momentum of legal ideologies which had themselves formed before the United States Government formally existed. Today, they continue to serve as the foundation of the federal government’s intervention in tribal sovereignty.

T

ribal territorial sovereignty might be loosely defined as the notion of a tribe’s right to self government.

The same legislation which grants “state’s’ rights” under the United States Constitution grants rights these rights to Indigenous nations. Legally, then, Indian Nations could fun1 “Water is Life.” This is the rally of the Standing Rock Sioux, who today fight in federal courts for their right to clean water.

damentally be considered as States. Territorial sovereignty, however, mandates the acquisition of territory. These territories are legally defined by borders, and the political rights of sovereignty and jurisdiction are confined within that state’s territory.

Territorial acquisition occurs through terra nullius, a notion which traces its roots to Roman law. Land that has not been previously owned, or land which has been exchanged from one state to another, is considered to be eligible for acquisition. Borders might be defined through two broad processes: original acquisition (occupation) and derivative acquisition (prescription, cession, and conquest & annexation).

Original acquisition, or occupation, is the process of claiming land which is not owned by another state. Occupation typically occurs when land has either been abandoned, or has been newly discovered. Prescription is the second means of land acquisition, denoted by the establishment of a state’s right to land through time. Over period of use, a territory may be said to have been peacefully acquired through a de facto exchange. Cession, alternatively, is the willing exchange of land from one state to another, often through an agreement that benefits both parties in some manner.

Land may be sold, borders willingly redrawn, or exchanged through treaties. Cession may also occur as a result of active compulsion, following or under threat of war. Conquest is the final means of acquisition. Through the defeat of another state in war, the exchange of a territory is forced. The land must first be occupied by military forces, and thereafter annexed, for a state to have legal claim to it (Abdulrahim).

The legal process of land acquisition is critical to the definition of a state. The present ownership of land creates socially constructed terms of sovereignty. Today, the Indian Commerce Clause of the Constitution (Article I, 8, Clause 3) largely determines how the federal government and Indian nations interact with one another. In 1824, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Congress should be held responsible for determining the federal government’s role in intervention with tribal law. The Supreme Court reviews the actions of the executive and legislative bodies of government, as they impact the sovereignty of Indian nations.

Fifth World

57

T

he Plenary Power Doctrine actively restricts the sovereignty of tribal nations. Plenary, or complete and unabridged, power was formally assigned to the United States government through the landmark cases of Gibbons v. Ogden, Lonewolf v. Hitchcock, and United States v. Kagama.

The Dawes Severalty or General Allotment Act of 1887 authorized the president to, through federal authority, allot land to tribal governments as Congress deems fit. (Indian Land Tenure Foundation). Since these lands are granted, owned by the Federal government but under the temporary jurisdiction of tribal nations, territorial sovereignty within American Indian reservations might be yielded void. This is because the land has never been formally acquisitioned by tribal governments, despite modern consensus of rights by original occupation. As discussed later, the coerced or forced relocation of tribes exchanged the land rights to the United States government, and under treaty, cession had occurred.

T

he Trust Relationship, or Trust Doctrine, serves as the legal basis of tribes’ right to contest the actions of the federal government. When the United States government’s acts as to violate the Trust Relationship, by physically or culturally threatening tribes, the trust doctrine offers a form of protection. In 1968, the notion of a trust agreement protected the hunting and fishing rights of Menominee tribe. Later, in United States v. Sioux Nation (1980), the trust doctrine secured Sioux tribal property rights. The trust relationship originated through the legal proceedings of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. In 1831, Chief Justice Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation did not qualify as a sovereign state, but rather as a ward to the authority of the United States. Referencing the government’s right to intervention, as previously established in the Hopewell Treaties, Marshal described the Cherokee Nation as “a distinct political society ...capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself” (Marshall).

Although Marshall argued that the Cherokee Nation would not be granted the authority of a foreign state, a year later in Worcester v. Georgia (1831), he established that they and other Indian nations were effectively sovereign entities, with whom solely the federal government had the right to negotiate. Thus, the Cherokee Nation-- and by that argument, the rest of Indian nation-- and its citizens became the trustees of the United States government (Ezra).

The Standing Rock, Cherokee, Sayisi Dene, Navajo, Crow, and Cocopah are not connected to one another geographically, yet they are connected by the idea of water. To each of these tribes, mni wiconi. Water is life. Legislative and corporate abuse has polluted the water on which these nations depend. Mainstream media has allowed waters to dry, turning a blind eye to tribes’ silenced plight for environmental justice. Each day, the American public is complacent to the political and cultural murder of Native nations.

T

he Cannonball and Missouri Rivers meet in southernmost North Dakota. In the late summer and early fall

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

of 2016, thousands of protesters gathered together to resist the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which, upon its completion, will barrage through a total of 1,825 kilometers in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, until it reaches its final destination in Illinois (Luger). From here, it will connect to the preexisting Bakken Pipeline in Patoka (Energy Transfer Partners, L.P.). As plans stand now, the DAPL will cut through some 50 counties. The pipeline, by technicality, does not fall within the federally recognized borders of the reservation; but the Standing Rock Sioux insist that its construction will threaten their people’s health, culture, and by that right, their dignity.

The organization responsible for the pipeline’s construction, Dakota Access LLC, is a company of Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). The corporation purports that land affected by the pipeline is requisitioned freely. ETP’s own website soothes notions of taken land, speaking to the ethicacy of construction in light of the voluntary land surveys which they are federally required to perform. The surveys, which are described as assessing the civil, environmental and cultural impacts of the pipeline, are undergone following a formal request for voluntary entry onto private land. While ETP assures that agreeing to the survey does not in itself commit landowners to accepting easement, further reading reveals that the refusal to accept the company’s voluntary survey is not without risk of consequence. The ETP Outlines that “In the event that survey permission is denied, laws in each state we propose to operate may require the project to obtain the court’s permission to survey property. In those occurrences where a court order is required for survey, the landowner may be responsible for legal fees related to the proceeding, should the court mandate such payment.”(Energy Transfer FAQ) While is is offered that “landowners are able to provide direct comments to the company regarding the routing,” (Energy Transfer FAQ) the company fails to address to what degree those comments would be considered, if at all. The protests of the Standing Rock Sioux validate this concern of the unsaid, in light of requests for surveys which had gone unanswered.

On February 12, 2013, a representative of the USACE wrote to the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (NATHPO), inquiring as to whether the association had any concerns regarding upcoming borehole testing to be conducted within the Standing Rock Reservation. The Corps has since claimed that the preliminary section 106 process had been concluded, as of January 18, 2015.

The Tribe’s requests for a Class III archaeological survey had gone unanswered in the months between.The Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) all later corresponded with ACE-- as late as March, 2016-- in order to address concerns of environmental damage and threats to sites of cultural significance. Despite the written concerns of threats to culturally significant sites, the Corps finalized plans for construction as planned previously in

58

section 106. On July 25, 2016, the USACE issued Permit 12 and construction proceeded.Later that month, on July 27, 2016, The Standing Sioux Tribe filed a lawsuit against the US Army Corps of Engineers, citing violations of various federal statutes: the Clean Water Act (CWA), Rivers and Harbours Act (RHA), and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe vs. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).

The protests gained attention around September 4th, and the number of google searches for “Standing Rock Indian Reservation” and “Dakota Pipeline Protest” reached a maximum shortly thereafter, on September 9th. But the resistance against the pipeline has been active much longer, even well before an official lawsuit was filed. On February 13, 2012, the Nationwide Permit 12 was signed (NWP 12) into action by Major General Michael J. Walsh. In Section 1.4 of NWP 12, commenters respond to the Federal Register notice, raising concerns as to whether substances other than dredged or fill materials would be authorized for release into public waters. Officials state that “The activities authorized by this NWP are not limited to discharges of dredged or fill material. This NWP also authorizes structures or work in navigable waters of the United States that require authorization under Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899.

We do not agree that discharges should be prohibited in open waters, below the ordinary highwater mark. Such activities often result in minimal adverse effects on the aquatic environment and qualify for general permit authorization.”

(Nationwide Permit 12 6).

On August 4th, 2016, acting on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux, Earthjustice filed an injunction requesting that the Army Corps of Engineers withdraw the permit (Brave Bull Allard). Later that month, on the 22nd, the Standing Rock Sioux head a peaceful protest against the Corps, blocking construction sites on the Cannonball in a group that police estimated to be as large as 1,500. In response, Greg Wilz organized the removal of water tanks and air-conditioned trailers, which had earlier been brought by the North Dakota Department of Health at the request of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “Based on the scenario down there, we don’t believe that equipment is secure.” In doing so, he threatened the health of protesters as temperatures reached into the 90’s (Homeland Security Cuts Water Supply...).

This events bring us to what may appear to be the climax of resistance: Energy Transfer Partners’ bulldozers tear a 3.3 kilometer trail onto land that the tribe has contested as sacred, while still awaiting legal consensus. As protests continue into November, 2016, over 40 individuals have been arrested for interfering with construction. Many, including a child, were bitten by police dogs.

President Obama brought a partial and temporary peace by relenting to protests-- halting construction 20 miles east and west of Lake Oahe. But the environmental injustices faced by Indian Nation will continue to be perpetuated, unless the policies which had allowed Judge James Boasberg

to rule in Energy Transfer Partners’ favor are reformed entirely. As they stand, current United States environmental legislation fails to protect Native Americans from corporate aggression.

The swell of media coverage of the pipeline had granted a legislative momentum; a movement has occurred amidst an otherwise silent crisis in Indian Nation. While protests had occurred long before they were picked up by mainstream American media, a lack of outward pressure on the federal government had perpetrated legislative inaction. Bringing similar attention to the environmental injustices faced by the Navajo, Crow, and Cocopah nations bears one prospect for reconsideration of United States environmental policies and protection of tribal nations from corporate abuse.

T

he protests of the Standing Rock Sioux have introduced to mainstream American media one image of the many environmental injustices faced by Native American peoples; but the nation’s majority is otherwise unfamiliar with the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples who fight for their right to clean water and sustainable land. The explosion of media coverage has died down as quickly it rose, as most major news sites refer to Obama’s intervention as if it were a resolution. But these issues of land are wide in scope; America’s indigenous people continue each day-- in the absence of media representation-- to be increasingly affected by industrial pollution and the devastating consequences of a changing climate.

To fully understand the severity and implications of a changing Indian country, one must first address the complicated issue of location. Native Peoples are, and (without reconsideration of federal environmental policy) will continue to be, those most vulnerable to environmental concerns.

Historically, federal allocations of land have placed reservations on plots that are hardly sustainable. The relocation of Native American tribes have been coercive, forceful, and on many instances, undebatably violent in nature.

I

n the United States, perhaps the most frequently cited instance of removal is that of the Cherokee. The story of Andrew Jackson’s betrayal in 1830, and some distanced tale of the Trail of Tears, are often referenced in historical cannon. Removal is covered for a week, perhaps even less, and usually, naught spoken of again until America strives to conquer the Western Frontier. The documents and legislation surrounding the removal of the Cherokee, however, are revelatory of broader patterns of the United State’s abuse of the Trust Relationship.

In 1803, Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Henry Harrison (the governor of Indiana, at the time), describing his intention to indebt eastern tribes, and to forcefully relocate those tribes which chose to engage in war with the United States. The sovereignty of Indian Nations had already been loosely established in Federal courts, however, and removal would not take place without fair cause or treaty.

Fifth World

59

Figure 1.

The Hopewell Treaties and Northwest Ordinance reflect the United States government of Native American sovereignty, for fear of tribal military strength. The War of 1812 had demonstrated the collective force of tribal nations, and even in light of defeat, that Native Nations posed enough of a military threat that it would be tactically beneficial to the United States to seek cooperation.

When, however, Andrew Jackson became President, he asserted that the destiny of the United States lied in westward expansion, and that the Federal government’s pandering to tribal land claims was an obstacle to national growth.

During the majority of his time in office, from 1817 to 1826, the civilized tribes (The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks) surrendered shares of land to the federal government. In 1827, amidst pressures from the Georgia State Government to surrender territory in exchange for land west of the Mississippi, the Cherokee Nation drafted a constitution. The Cherokee Nation had already been represented by twenty-four delegates from its eight districts, and for many years had an established government; yet, the constitution publicly asserted the tribe’s sovereignty and national identity. Monroe, then the president of the United States, advocated for treaty diplomacy with tribal governments.

T

he First Nations Sayisi Dene bear clearly the consequences of imposed resettlement. In 1956, the band was forcibly removed from their home at Little Duck Lake, Manitoba, on the Canadian territory’s assertion that their hunting practices were a threat to the Quaminjurak Caribou population. There was no evidence to support the removal of the Sayisi Dene. At the site of resettlement, just outside North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Churchill, poverty and lack of food resources forced many Dene to scavenge through dumpsters. The Manitoba government would bear the responsibility when, by 1973, approximately 117 of the original 250 Sayisi Dene’s lives were taken by extreme poverty and hate crime. (Malone).

The removal of the tribe was utterly devastating. Not only was there a lack of sufficient shelter, but without the caribou which the Sayisi Dene has traditionally hunted, there were no furs for winter clothing, and there was no meat to feed hunting dogs. Starvation and exposure to freezing Canadian winters posed an imminent threat to the band.

In 1957, the director of the Department of Health and Public Welfare, Winnipeg, wrote a letter to an official of the Indian Health Services Department of National Health and Welfare. He wrote of his concerns regarding the threat to public health created by the presence of “Indian squatters” in Churchill, explaining that These people are particularly primitive in their ways and live under the most horrible sanitary conditions…

As you know, Churchill’s townsite is very much in the mind of Government these days and there is evidence that the special circumstances which obtain there may be recognized so that the beginning of a community betterment program may be undertaken” (Night Spirits 56).

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police addressed some of these “primitive” sanitary concerns by executing the tribe’s remaining dogs, which the Sayisi Dene depended on for trapping.

The Sayisi Dene were widely absent from meetings concerning their removal, and Chief Artie Cheekie was most often referenced as being in agreement with Canadian government plans, despite his not being included in planning prior to or during the tribe’s relocation. In the United States as well as Canada, this is a common history for many indigenous peoples. The exclusion of Native peoples in policy making, the perpetual justification of “bettering” tribes status through purported integration, and the failure to consider customs of survival or cultural practices unfamiliar to bureaucratic governments, especially the collective practices of holding land, is decidedly destructive to peoples whose assimilation they strive for.

These circumstances are overwhelmingly familiar within Native memory. Throughout the Americas, nations have been forced to resettle in land with inadequate access to water, food resources, and in a more modern context, infrastructures which would provide even the most basic utilities-- such as heating, air conditioning, and electricity-accessible to all. As long as these issues continue to be unaddressed by the federal government, the health, culture, and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples will be critically threatened by industrial pollution and climate change.

The 1970’s saw the rise of a new wave of political activism in the United States. The movements pushed for civil liberties and environmental regulations, yet failed to include

60

within mainstream efforts any focus on Native American rights. The spiritualistic tropes applied to Native Peoples served to perpetuate the ignorance of a white majority rather than to combat the status of indigenous Americans in society. The trend continues, and today modern environmental movements still place focus on industry without acknowledging the very specific threats faced by Native Peoples. In exploring both past and ongoing environmental tragedies, and the policies-- or lack thereof-- that would have prevented them, an overwhelming pattern emerges: that both federal and private organizations address their aggressions against Native nations only after tragedies have occurred, rather than adhering to policies that would prevent harm to people and land in the first place. The mechanisms of these aggressions are evident in the corrupt legal proceedings which ended in the removal of the Cherokee, and in the misrepresentation of the Sayisi Dene lifestyle in popular media. These bipartite factors are present, as well, in the modern histories of the Navajo, Crow, and Cocopah.

O

n August 5th, 2015, the San Juan River flowed yellow when employees and contractors of the Environmental Protection Agency caused the release of 1.137*107 Liters of a mine’s overflow. The wastewater was heavily concentrated with numerous heavy metals, including cadmium, lead, and beryllium. The Navajo nation was especially affected by the disaster. Navajo farmers, who depend on the river’s water to irrigate fields and raise livestock, were left without access to potable water. Many fields in the arid desert of Arizona withered in the weeks without access to irrigation (Barrasso). A public apology from representatives of the EPA ensued quite rapidly. Meanwhile, promises of periodic water testing and environmental surveys were hurriedly made, in order to assure not just the tribe, but an otherwise skeptical American public, of the federal government’s willingness to take responsibility for grievances of the Navajo nation. $29 million dollars has since been allocated to the cleanup and continued water testing, but the nation seeks further compensation. On August 15, 2016, the Navajo nation filed a class-action lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, demanding reparations for psychological and financial damages. John Hueston, the lead prosecutor of the lawsuit, has stated that: The U.S. EPA has yet to provide any meaningful recovery. Efforts to be made whole over the past year have been met with resistance, delays, and second-guessing. Unfortunately this is consistent with a long history of neglect and disregard for the well being of the Navajo (John Hueston) Among the Navajo, fear remains as to whether trace amounts of heavy metals may have settled within soil, where they might be brought up through erosion and runoff in the future.

The EPA’s apology and subsequent millons-large compensation is reflective of a greater pattern of federal payouts;

Figure 2.

The U.S. government has historically fulfilled its obligation to tribes when issues become too publicised not to do so.

The temporary change in color of the Colorado was obvious to a nation absorbed by headlines, while the statistically significant prevalence of birth defects in Navajo children goes widely ignored. To date, the impact of uranium mines dotting western Indian Nation goes insufficiently addressed by the government. No reparations are made for the silent crisis that sweep across Indian Nation.

The United States Public Health Service (PHS) began a study on uranium miners in 1950. The PHS did not inform the Navajo workers of the risks of radiation that were being studied. It was not until 1990 that the United States Congress addressed the (by then) near 600 deaths attributed to lung cancer, which might have been avoided, had the Federal Government required mining companies to install proper ventilation and offered sufficient protection gear. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 1990 offers monetary compensation to any individual who was exposed to radiation during nuclear weapons testing, or who had been exposed to radiation during employment in one of the numerous uranium mines. A maximum of $100,000 may be awarded to miners, and $50,000 may be awarded to those downwind of nuclear test sites between January 1, 1942 and December 31, 1971 (Radiation Exposure Compensation...).

Since RECA was passed, citizens of the Navajo nation have been awarded a total of $212 million toward offsetting medical costs of the act’s approved diseases (Justice.gov 2). Future claims will be barred as of July 29, 2022. Yet still today, as a result of the federal push to mine uranium ores during the Cold War, Navajo residential lands and farmlands remain littered with at least 1,000 abandoned uranium mines (Justice Department Surpasses...). This is the Navajo’s silent crisis.

I

ncreasing access of higher-level education to Native American students is one potential means of emphasizing the concurrent roles of sovereignty and accountability.

Fifth World

61

When those social systems which oppress native students’ abilities to gain access to equal education are addressed, then internal research would be able to succeed. This is one such goal of the EPA STAR program. The health and educational disparities of the Crow have been combatted through community-based research. Students involved in joint research projects established those issues which they were most exposed to, and in addressing water and soil quality issues, had become those of the tribe most equipped to attending higher education. Many of the students involved in the project pursued graduate degrees in environmental science.Currently, 13,000 people are enrolled members of the Crow Tribe.

Pollution in the Little Bighorn River has led the Crow to seek out drinking water from other sources, however use of the River is still religiously significant and serves ceremonial purpose. There is little allocation of funds from the Indian Health Service to pay for testing or treatment of the water. In the 1970’s children who swam in the river contracted shigellosis, yet the Bureau of Indian Affairs purportedly did not look into the tribe’s reports.

In 2000, community members from the Crow tribe managed to acquisition funds from the BIA, and together formed the Crow Environmental Health Steering Committee (CEHSC), which conducted independent testing of water quality, as well as other environmental concerns. Over recent years, the committee has expanded data collection to include research of suspected cancer clusters in the Crow community. The Crow’s efforts stand as a model of the effectively of community-based research. The data collected serves to directly benefit the tribe, and community involvement in research assures that the pacing of the project is in line with the urgency of the issues being studied.

stablished evidence of climate change confirms not only that the average global temperature is rising, but that there will be significant environmental damages as a result of temperature changes-- namely local extinction, drought, and wildfires. According to the Canada model, these damages will be most drastic near the equator and in already arid regions. The land on which reservations have been placed (in the largely infertile, artificially irrigated southwest, isolated regions) are most immediately susceptible to water shortages, unemployment, and drought. It is important to note that in addition to direct water shortages, the lack of internal industry within reservations financially obligates many Southwestern nations to use what clean water is available as a commodity to liquidate. In the absence of stable economic systems, many tribes develop infrastructure around tourism. Casinos are said to be built to bring in tourism and provide citizens with work, yet the majority of Native American casinos are not Native-owned, and as with the mining industry, Native citizens’ health is put at risk from those external industries which have taken advantage of and profited from their vulnerability. These are issues that are meant to be addressed by the Federal Trust

E

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Doctrine.

The Southwest is already in a 15 year drought. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that droughts will become more frequent. To make matters worse, according to 1990 Census and Indian Health Services, over 12% of tribal housing already lacks sufficient access to electricity and running water. As global climate change causes instances of water shortages increase, droughts will only become more frequent. In the east, the allocation of water resources is determined using the Riparian water system, under which bodies of water that fall within a property’s boundaries are said to be reserved for the use of its owner. In this system, a river that flows between the properties of two people is divided for use. In the east, rainfall is consistent, and the Riparian system is sufficient for raw allocation. In the western United States, however, water shortages are far more prevalent. Rainfall is sparse, and as it is for the Standing Rock Sioux, mni wiconi. Water is life.

Many western states, instead, uphold the Prior Appropriation system. While the Riparian system may trace its roots to English law, the Appropriation system would not gain traction in the United States until the California Gold Rush inspired competition for water rights within the many mining camps. Cooperatively, miners began to divert water to regions where gold had been found previously, and thus was introduced an understanding of water rights that was separate from land itself. Several factors determine the right to appropriate water, primarily including: priority, diversion, beneficial use, and intent. Priority is given to the first person to make use of a body of water. Diversion clarifies that water may be routed away from its natural course. Beneficial use mandates that water may not be wasted, a policy that is highly subjective and described by individual states, counties, and tribal governments. In the west, the right to water is deemed forfeit should it not be made use of for a period of years, or should there be evidence of a company or landowner’s intent to abandon the resource. Finally, intent to make use of water resources must be established through a nonpartisan land survey and application for a water permit.

The Cocopah tribe provides one of the clearest examples of this dependency on water resources. In 1935, the completion of the Hoover dam hailed the largest water reservoir in the United States, to date. This reservoir would serve to irrigate hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the arid southwest, as well as diverting the flow of the Colorado River to regions that were becoming increasingly urbanized. The past several decades have followed suit, with the Colorado’s flow seemingly being diverted from the tribe in greater quantities with each passing year. Amid the media attention given to various environmental concerns, lingering and less-spoken issues of social justice also come to light. The Cocopah Reservation, home to the “People of the River,” has not seen its share of these diverted waters.

The some thousand residents of the reservation now import

62

Bilgen-Reinart, Ustun, and Ila Bussidor. Night Spirits: The Story Of The Relocation Of The Sayisi Dene.

1st ed., Winnipeg, Manitoba, Univ. Of Manitoba Press, 1997.

Braun, Molly, and Carl Waldman. Atlas Of The North American Indian. New York NY, Infobase Publishing, 2009.

Cerrato, JM et al. “Elevated Concentrations Of U And Co-Occurring Metals In Abandoned Mine Wastes In A Northeastern Arizona Native American Community.”. Environmental Science & Technology., vol 49, no. 14, 2015, pp. 8506-14.

Cherokee Nation V. Georgia. 1831,.

“Dakota Access Pipeline FAQ”. 2015.

Donatuto, J et al. “Community-Based Research As A Mechanism To Reduce Environmental Health Disparities In American Indian And Alaska Native Communities”. International Journal Of Environmental Research And Public Health., vol 12, no. 4, 2015.

Figure 3.

their drinking water by truck. The tribe has traditionally depended on the waters for hunting, fishing, and agriculture.

In recent decades, due to a combination of diversion and climate change, the river has dried up almost entirely within the reservation.Today, all of the federally recognized tribal nations with land that lies within the Colorado River Basin hold quantified water rights.

For the Cherokee, Sayisi Dene, Navajo, Crow, and Cocopa h, the inherently complex interactions between tribal and federal governments have created long-standing threats to the preservation of tribal culture. Loss of access to hunting and farming resources, diversion of water, groundwater contamination, and industrial pollution have laid heavy economic and social burdens on the tribes, and yet federal legislation has done little to combat such burdens and fulfill the obligations of the Trust Relationship. Rather than by geographic or cultural borders, thStanding Rock Sioux, Cherokee, Sayisi Dene, Navajo, Crow, and Cocopah are connected by a shared history of reliance on water. Water is undoubtedly a source of life. It is a means of industry and economy; it is a means of sovereignty. Yet the absence of media coverage and political awareness threatens these tribes’ waters. The Standing Rock Sioux have come into public light as of the summer of 2016, and continue to fight for their rights to land in federal court. As they protest the pipeline which has actively destroyed sacred lands and might pollute vital water sources, they have been met when an unusual outpouring of public support. Should the Navajo, Crow, and Cocopah find similar representation in American media, there is greater hope, still, for the future of water rights in Indian Nation.

Eggers, M.J. et al. “Community-Based Participatory Research In Indian Country: Improving Health Through Water Quality Research And Awareness”. Family Community Health, vol 33, no. 3, 2010, pp. 166-174.

Ezra, Jeri. “The Trust Doctrine: A Source Of Protection For Native American Sacred Sites”. Catholic University Law Review, vol 38, no. 3, 1989, pp. 705-735.

“General Allotment Act, Act Of Feb. 8, 1887 (24 Stat. 388, Ch. 119, 25 USCA 331)”.

Goble, Rob, and Doug Brugge. “The History Of Uranium Mining And The Navajo People”. American Journal Of Public Health, vol 92, no. 9, 2002.

Justice Department Surpasses $2 Billion In Awards Under The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. 2015.

Malone, Kelly. “Manitoba’s Sayisi Dene: Forced Relocation, Racism, Survival”. 2016.

McKendry, Jean et al. Burning Questions: A Social Science Research Plan For Federal Wildland Fire Management. 1st ed., Missoula, Montana, National Wildfire Coordinating Group, 2002.

Meyer, Robinson. “The Legal Case For Blocking The Dakota Access Pipeline”. The Atlantic, 2016.

Nation Wide Permit 12. 2012.

National Environmental Policy Act Of 1969, As Amended. 2000,.

Nationwide Permit 12. 2012,.

Nez, H et al. “Environmental Exposures To Metals In Native Communities And Implications For Child Development: Basis For The Navajo Birth Cohort Study”. Journal Of Social Work In Disability & Rehabilitation., vol 14, 2015, pp. 245-69.

North, Dakota Michael T et al. “EPA’S GOLD KING MINE DISASTER: EXAMINING THE HARMFUL IMPACTS TO INDIAN COUNTRY”. 2015.

North, Dakota Michael T et al. “EPA’s Gold King Mine Disaster: Examining The Harmful Impacts To Indian Country”. 2015.

Petch, Virginia, and Virginia Petch. “Relocation And Loss Of Homeland, The Story Of The Sayisi Dene Of Northern Manitoba.”. 2007.

“Plenary Power Doctrine”. 2016.

Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. 1990,.

Sammon, Alexander. “A History Of Native Americans Protesting The Dakota Access Pipeline”. 2016.

“Sayisi Dene: Displaced”. 2016.

24 Stat., 388.. 1902,.

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe V. U.S. Army Corps Of Engineers. 2016,.

Abdulrahim, Walid. “State Territory And Territorial Sovereignty”.

Alexeeff, G et al. “Racial/Ethnic Disparities In Cumulative Environmental Health Impacts In California: Evidence From A Statewide Environmental Justice Screening Tool (Calenviroscreen 1.1).”

American Journal Of Public Health., vol 105, no. 11, 2015, pp. 2341-8.

Yazzie-Lewis, Esther et al. The Navajo People And Uranium Mining. 1st ed., Albuquerque, UNM Press, 2006.

Fifth World

63

Environmental Injustice: A National and International Perspective Janis Arrojado

T

oday, environmental issues are becoming more widespread across the globe. Problems of climate change, ecological degradation, pollution, ocean acidification, and more trouble communities on a national and international level. With these environmental issues, a shocking trend is becoming more perceptible: In low-income and minority communities (LIMC), the environmental conditions are considerably worse than the conditions in which members of high income communities reside in.

D

espite its status as a developed country, the United States has great economic disparity. The top 20% of American households own approximately 84% of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wealth, while the bottom 40% own .3%. This extreme income inequality has detrimental impacts on society, including corrupt political structures, education discrepancies, product monopoly, and more (Scanlon). One of economic disparities bigger impacts is on the environment. Economic disparity leads to national and international environmental injustice, which is a term used to describe how LIMC generally live in poorer environmental conditions compared to high-income communities. Blatant discrimination against low income and minority people can be seen throughout enforcement of environmental policy. One example is the proven correlation between LIMC and their close proximity to waste sites. These groups are targeted because they lack funds and resources necessary for community action against governments and corporations.

Not only limited to the United States, environmental injustice is prevalent worldwide. Compared to developed countries, developing countries are more prone to have more environmentally-related issues. Developing countries are defined to be countries with low per capita income, high rates of unemployment and poverty, and revenue generated primarily from the raw materials/agriculture and manufacturing sects of the economy.

In these low-income and racial minority communities and in developing countries, one can see that the environmental conditions are substandard compared to more affluent areas. In order to investigate the causes and impacts of this issue, I looked at air pollution, waste and waste management, and water quality in LIMC, and comparing these to the conditions of high income communities.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

M

embers of LIMC are more likely to have more hazardous elements in their air compared to white and affluent communities. A recent census shows that people of Hispanic descent are exposed to 11 of the 14 hazardous chemicals associated with human health impacts, which is significantly higher than the chemicals exposed to white people. (Chemicals defined as hazardous include nickel, sulfate, and vanadium.) Asians have more exposure to 7 out of the 14 chemicals, and places with high concentration of African-American people a have higher exposure of 4 out of 14 hazardous chemicals, compared to white communities. Additionally, it was found that people lacking a high school education and/or living in poverty have significant exposure to several of the hazardous chemicals. The disparity of environmental conditions can be seen in cities such as Washington D.C., Los Angeles and Fresno, where rich areas in the cities are less likely to have harmful chemicals in the air compared to the poorer regions (Katz).

In North Carolina, socioeconomic status could be used to predict concentration of particulate matter, PM 2.5. PM 2.5 is is known to have negative impacts on the environment and human health, such as visibility impairment and increased respiratory symptoms. Areas with larger concentrations of low-income and high minority populations were seen to have higher concentrations of PM 2.5 compared to high income communities.

Outdoor air pollution is not the only form of air pollution impacted by income and racial factors. The rates and composition of household air pollution in a community have been seen to be impacted by socioeconomic status. Household air pollution is prevalent in low-income communities, due to the cheaper nature of burning biomass and coal compared to other forms of generating heat. It is estimated that 500,000600,000 low income people in the United States are exposed to household air pollution from burning solids to produce heat for fuel, heating, and cooking. Household air pollution also attributes to outdoor air pollution, and increases the hazardous air particle concentration in many communities (Rogalsky et. al.).

Within LIMC, the presence of many industrial companies is more pronounced than in higher income communities (Migoya). This makes the levels of air pollution in these low income areas more likely to be higher and have harmful chemicals in its composition. LIMC are driven to live

64

near more industrial sites because of the low costs of living around these areas. These factors prove that air pollution has a relationship with LIMC, with the concentration of harmful chemicals in the air increasing in sites of low-income and racial minority communities.

H

azardous waste is defined as “waste with properties that make it dangerous or capable of having a harmful effect on human health or the environment.” It is created through a variety of man-made sources, including chemical manufacturing and metal production, and it exists in different forms, and from solid to liquid, gas, and sludge. Hazardous waste is extremely harmful to the environment, causing wildlife mutation, nitrification, and stunted plant growth among other negative impacts ( Hazardous Waste) .

In our society, LIMC are disproportionately more likely to live near a hazardous waste site. This can be seen in Warren County, North Carolina, known for being one of the triggers of the environmental justice movement. In 1973, the Ward Transformers Company illegally dumped approximately 31,000 gallons of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) along the roadways of North Carolina. Polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) is a chemical used as a coolant in many industrial sites. Because of PCB’s harmful impacts on the environment, the government determined that a landfill needed to be created to store the hazardous waste. Despite numerous protests and raised concerns, the government selected the town of Shocco, North Carolina to be the site for storage.

Shocco, North Carolina is 75% black, and is one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. The landfill was created, and as many feared, caused many issues: the groundwater was polluted, the soil contaminated, and the landscape was severely depleted of aesthetic and biomass, causing a decrease in the value of the land ( PCB Contamination in Warren County ). These devastating effects left many wondering if this was a case of environmental injustice, and if high income communities would ever be subjected to this kind of treatment.

Many years later, race is still seen to be the variable with the highest correlation associated with hazardous waste sites. On average, sites with a hazardous waste facility had 2 times greater percentages of racial minorities in the community than places without a hazardous waste facility. Studies show that 3 out of 5 black and Hispanic people live near an area with an uncontrolled toxic waste site, and 1 out of 2 Asian American and Native American people live near a community with an uncontrolled toxic waste site (Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States ).

The water quality of a community is also impacted by socioeconomic levels within the area. A well known example is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Flint is composed of 56.6% African American people; and 41% of its people live under the national poverty line. In 2014, the city changed its public water supplier from Lake Huron to the Flint River, which was done in an effort to save money for the the city.

The pipes that transferred the water from the Flint River to the city supplier were not treated with an anti-corrosive agent, which caused lead from the water pipes to contaminate the drinking supply of the city. Many people became concerned about the water, which had turned to the color of rust. An investigation in 2016, found that the water had 900 times the EPA limit for lead particles, and the water was observed to have negative human health implications.

Water quality is an issue that not only Flint, but many LIMC. The lead contamination in Flint led to massive health implications for the residents, especially children. It was found that the lead concentration in the bloodstream of children that drank the water went from 2.5% to approximately 5%. The health implications of this include impulsive behavior, aggression, and abdominal pain. Due to the generally low income makeup in the community, hospitalization and medical treatment for lead poisoning is difficult to obtain (Joynes).

Flint is not the only area where the water quality is linked to the racial and economic makeup of the area. In San Joaquin Valley, California, the water quality was proven to have a connection with contaminants and racial and economic makeup in the area. 5,200 people had drinking water with had high amounts of nitrates which exceeded the federal standards. Half of the 5,200 people with high concentrations of nitrates in their water were Hispanic. Additionally, the drinking water of 449,000 people had medium levels of nitrates that varied from just beneath the limit of federal nitrate standards to half the maximum that was legal. Approximately 40% of the 449,000 are Latino (Gross).

Similar to problems faced with waste management sites, low-income and minority populations are at an disadvantage when it comes to improving water quality. In Flint, an investigation showed that governmental officials knew about the water contamination since 2015 (Joynes). Because of the lack of political power and environmental activism in the city, the government did not feel pressure to share the discoveries or to stop the contamination from happening. In addition, the residents in affected areas generally have little legal and environmental education about what they can do to improve water quality.

The government does little to stop the environmental injustice within LIMC;, because access to such education is also determined by socioeconomic and racial factors.

To the contrary, more barriers in the community’s health.

The Clean Water Act is meant to make sure that the water quality of all people in the United States is drinkable and has no harmful impacts on human health. To do this, grants are awarded to upgrade sewage treatment and water supply plants that are government owned. Unfortunately, LIMC have problems getting grants to fix the water quality and supply. Small populations are less likely to receive a grant, and within cities with small populations, there are more low-income and minority populations. Since areas with smaller populations have difficulty obtaining grants to

Fifth World

65

improve publicly owned water infrastructure, LIMC suffer and have more barriers to improve the water quality compared to areas with high income and majority communities (Imperial).

D

isparities in environmental conditions and socioeconomic levels are not only limited to the United States.

The state of the environment in many developing countries is generally worse than that of developed countries. An aspect that contributes to the environmental degradation in developing countries is high rates of urbanization in the countries. It is estimated that by the year 2030, approximately 96% of urbanization will occur in the developing world.

Urbanization, although capable of improving the wealth of a country, can have negative impacts on the environment.

One of the negative impacts urbanization has on the environment is the heat island effect. The heat island effect expresses how the temperature of an urban areas is hotter by a couple degrees than that of a rural area. This effect is created through the high use of impervious surfaces in urban areas, lack of vegetation, and high levels of pollution (“People Living in Low Income Communities”). Developing countries also face environmental threats from developed countries.

One of the ways developed countries exploit developing countries is through using the latter as a means to get natural materials. This hurts the ecosystems and environment of developing countries, and do not assist in restoration. An example is how an Australian mining company chose to extract natural resources from Papua New Guinea, and generated a lot of toxic waste in the process of mining. This led to contamination of the Fly River, where the mining company was located near, causing pollution in the aquatic ecosystem and in the land. Despite causing the massive environmental degradation, the mining company did not assist in the cleanup and restoration of the river.

Another negative effect from developed countries is the usage of developing countries as sites of pollution. Developed countries have strict environmental laws that prevent dumping hazardous waste in the country. To bypass these laws, developed countries place polluting industrial sites in developing countries with more relaxed environmental laws and policies. In the 1980’s, an England-based company named Thor Chemicals Inc. moved its mercury reclamation facility to South Africa. After one year of running, the water in South Africa was found to have 1500 times the amount of mercury legal in the United States. This occurrence shows how many developed countries will use developing countries to place hazardous waste and chemicals, due to more relaxed environmental laws (Harper and Rajan).

Developing countries also face environmental issues due to the tourism industry. Many developing countries use tourism as a way to generate revenue, and to foster the economy. However, tourism has negative impacts on the environment. Natural resources such as water, food, and energy are often depleted by visitors from wealthier countries.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Water is heavily used in tourism, as it is vital to support hotels, golf courses, resorts, and other attractions. In addition to negative impacts on water sources, tourism degrades land. Through building infrastructures to support tourism, the developed country’s habitats, wildlife, and forests are exhausted. This has negative impacts on the natural ecosystem of an area, with interspecies relationships and trophic levels becoming disrupted (“Tourism’s Three Main Impact Areas”).

D

ue to the poor environmental conditions in the places they live, LIMC are likely to suffer from environment-related health issues. Low-income and minority communities are more susceptible to disease and health problems: continual exposure to pollution and toxicity in their everyday life leads to more vulnerable immune systems. Air pollution, to which LIMC are disproportionately exposed, brings with it several issues on human health, such as reduced lung capacity and function and inflammation in the respiratory tract. Asthma, one of the health impacts air pollution has on human health, is seen to be more prevalent in low-income and minority communities (Clark et. al.).

Due to the increased concentration exposure to toxins in air pollution, lower socioeconomic groups are more likely to contract these diseases that deteriorate human health.

Because low-income and minority groups are more prone to be located near a toxic waste facility, there are also more prone to obtain the diseases that come from toxic waste pollution. Toxic waste from hazardous waste facilities can contaminate the land, drinking supply, and food of a community. Nausea, burns, paralysis, and brain damage are all symptoms reported by people living near a hazardous waste facility.

It is clear that economic and racial status of a community has an impact on the environmental conditions of the community. Although this relationship is extremely detrimental to both the human population and the environment, there is hope for improvement. Originating around the 1980s, environmental justice is both a term and movement used to combat the injustices low-income and minority populations face. Environmental justice is defined by the EPA as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies” ( Learn the Basics of Hazardous Waste ). This movement focuses on removing the environmental obstacles that lower socioeconomic and minority communities face. The air pollution, water quality, waste management, and other environmental factors are disproportionately worse for low income and minority populations, and environmental justice seeks to alleviate the inequality ( Environmental Justice ).

An aspect of improving environmental conditions for LIMC is the importance of environmental education for low income and minority populations. These communities

66

are the most affected when it comes to environmental issues; through educating themselves about sustainable practices and environmental policy, these marginalized groups can improve their communities. A study conducted to determine Hispanic women’s (low income) beliefs about recycling shows that women were more inclined to recycle when taught the importance of generating less waste (Pearson et. al.). The results of this study show the importance that education has within communities to improve the condition of the environment.

The support of new technology is another way to improve both environmental and economic conditions for low income minority populations. Supporting green technology will lead to economic stability and improving the environment of a community. Renewable energy is an example of technology that should be supported by both the government and the citizens of an area. Through the support of renewable energy in LIMC , jobs will be generated, air quality will be improved, and the community will save money in the long term ( Bringing the Benefits of Energy and Efficiency and Renewable Energy to Low-Income Communities ).

Although all of these solutions have potential to improve the communities, not all are realistic in LIMC. Environmental and political education, which is a catalyst to adopting sustainability within these underrepresented communities, are not taught within the schools many attend. Most communities do not have the resources to educate constituents about sustainable practices and the importance of the environment. This leaves the job of educating to non-profit organizations that promote environmental justice. Unfortunately, many of these non-profit organizations do not have the means to inform members of LIMC nationally, let alone globally. Even though the environmental justice movement is gaining traction among many, educating members of LIMC will take time and money before it becomes a prominent solution to environmental injustice.

Supporting new technology is a more feasible solution that will allow LIMC to thrive both economically and environmentally. Renewable energy, composting, sustainable agriculture, and more are areas where new technology can support LIMC and improve the environment and economic state of the community. Technology creates stable jobs and growth, and allows the community to sustain itself while improving the environment.

pared to developed countries, as they face political, economic, and social obtacles that hinder environmental improvement. These environmental conditions have lasting health implications for residents in low-income and minority areas, and it is clear that lower socioeconomic status correlates with higher vulnerabilities to sickness.

Although these conditions are bleak, it is important to remember there are solutions to the environmental problems low-income minority communities face. Environmental justice movements can improve the condition of residents, creating awareness and political activism to improve the environment. Education and new technology are also solutions to the environmental injustices that low-income minority communities face. Environmental injustice can be redressed. Improving environmental conditions for all socioeconomic levels will improve economies, both local and international, pollution chemicals composition and concentration, and restore the environment. If we make a change to help low-income minority communities, we can improve the environment for all communities.

I

Martuzzi, M., Mitis, F., & Forastiere, F. (2010). Inequalities, inequities, environmental justice in waste management and health. The European Journal Of Public Health, 20 (1), 21-26.

n a world where economic disparity is extremely prevalent, both in the United States and internationally, it is important to examine the underlying effects poverty has on the environment. Our environment faces threats from growing populations, urbanization, and human need, and LIMC face threats from degrading environmental conditions. Air pollution, water quality, and waste management are all environmental aspects that are affected by the racial and economic composition of a community. Developing countries also have diminished environmental quality com-

5 reasons not to swim with whale sharks in Oslob - Dive Bohol with Sierra Madre Divers. (2015). Dive Bohol with Sierra Madre Divers. Retrieved 16 October 2016.

Bain, R., Cronk, R., Wright, J., Yang, H., Slaymaker, T., & Bartram, J. (2014). Fecal Contamination of Drinking-Water in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Plos Med, 11 (5), e1001644.

Bringing the Benefits of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to Low-Income Communities | Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local, and Tribal Governments | US EPA. (2016). Epa.gov. Retrieved 16 October 2016.

Campbell, C., Greenberg, R., Mankikar, D., & Ross, R. D. (2016). A case study of environmental injustice: The failure in flint. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13 (10), 1-11.

Clark, L., Millet, D., & Marshall, J. (2014). National Patterns in Environmental Injustice and Inequality: Outdoor NO2 Air Pollution in the United States. Plos ONE, 9 (4), e94431.

Environmental Justice | Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. (2016). Deohs. washington.edu. Retrieved 17 October 2016.

Gross, L. (2016). Pollution, Poverty and People of Color: Don’t Drink the Water. Scientific American.

Retrieved 16 October 2016.

Harper, K. & Rajan, S. (2016). International Environmental Justice: Building the Natural Assets of the World’s Poor (1st ed.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Imperial, M. (1999). Environmental Justice and Water Pollution Control: The Clean Water Act Construction Grants Program. Public Works Management & Policy, 4 (2), 100-118.

Joynes, D. (2016). Flint & the Need to Build an Environmental Justice Infrastructure. Law at the Margins.

Retrieved 15 October 2016.

Katz, E. (2016). People in Poor Neighborhoods Breathe More Hazardous Particles. Scientific American. Retrieved 15 October 2016.

Migoya, D. (2016). Denver’s pot businesses mostly in low-income, minority neighborhoods – The Denver Post. Denverpost.com. Retrieved 17 October 2016.

Rogalsky, D. K., Mendola, P., Metts, T. A., & Martin,William J.,II. (2014). Estimating the number of low-income americans exposed to household air pollution from burning solid fuels. Environmental Health Perspectives (Online), 122 (8), 806.

Scanlon, T. (2014). The 4 biggest reasons why inequality is bad for society. ideas.ted.com. Retrieved 16 October 2016.

Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. (1987) (1st ed.). New York.

Fifth World

67

How Conservative Evangelism in Politics Led to Trump’s Victory in the 2016 Presidential Election Emily Hench

T

he 2016 Presidential election season proved itself to be quite the roller coaster ride. The two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have gone head to head on multiple occasions, both within debates as well as outside them. Scandals, callouts, and constant back-and-forth arguments on social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook have allowed no shortage of news stories and clickbait headlines. Although I was unable to vote in this election, I consider this to be the first presidential election of which I was politically conscious, as well as the first in which I actively sought out discussion concerning this topic.

Particularly, I have often thought about the Republican Party nominee, now President Donald Trump. Ever since that fateful day in June 2015, the entire world has witnessed as a wealthy reality star with no prior political experience and a less-than-clean moral ledger has gained enough support not only to receive the Republican nomination, but actually to win the race for the presidency. By no means are Republicans hesitant about his nomination after what normally would have been a close race in the primaries. Widespread support of Trump by Conservative Evangelicals swept the nation after he announced his run for president, and many of these supporters are easily distinguished from the average republican.

I wonder, however, if the “average Republican” exists.

One would require a definition of this term, which might well be divided into sections, with fiscal conservatives in the north at least initially separated from the social (if not racial) interests of those in the south. This division can no doubt be argued. Trump supporters are often characterized as radical, uneducated Republicans who have thrown their support behind the man who “says it like it is.” I have often found myself asking a simple, yet exponentially complicated question: Why has Trump, despite his extremely radical and occasionally unconstitutional views, gained so much support? I have constantly tried to understand how Trump’s ideals could have possibly lined up with the likes of Evangelical Christians. The term “evangelical” in particular has been thrown around by articles and news stories to describe the set of far-right Conservatives whose main reasons for supporting a candidate often have ties back to the stereotypical “God and guns” mentality. Yet the same word is used to describe an entire section of Christianity. Although I do think it is unfair that this word is used so loosely, especially North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

during this most recent political season, I also believe that the recent utilization of the term in a derogatory manner is an interesting matter. For starters, as with any term that is adapted to a particular group, it is partial: obviously only the loud, far-right side of the spectrum is associated with the term. However, the appropriation of the word “evangelical” in this radicalized form has disclosed countless divides within the Evangelical community. Mainly, these conflicts seem to be over social ideals and political views, not theology. When I looked into this, I discovered that, in the 1960’s, the Republican Party had taken a sharp turn to the right, with an increased influx of active Christian voters into the party, mainly caused by major members of the Conservative party beginning to pander towards Christians in order to win elections. This has led me to conclude that the increased pandering of the Conservative Party towards Evangelical Christians in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s has led to the continuing exploitation of Evangelicals and their beliefs as a means to gain political power, as well as directly causing Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 election.

The term “Evangelical” is one that has been heard many times throughout the 2016 election season. Most often, it is used to describe members of the Republican Party whose political views are derived from a particular segment of the Christian faith. “Those who identify themselves as “bornagain or evangelical” Christians constitute a sizable share of the electorate – 36% of registered voters, compared with 37% who are non-evangelical Christians and 27% who identify with non-Christian faiths or with no religion at all. In addition, evangelicals are much more numerous within the Republican Party than among Democrats” (“Exit” 6). The term “evangelical” has recently been used as derogatory term rather than a merely descriptive one. However, the word in this context cannot be applied to all who identify as an Evangelical, as it still has its roots, as well as its origin, in Christianity. The Evangelical denomination has origins dating back to the 18th century. “In general throughout the 18th and on to the 19th century, the whole of the English-speaking world is moving away from traditional religion defined by respect for authority, respect for the past, respect for the tradition, and moving toward a more individualistic, pragmatic, and practical practice of Christianity” (16). The lack of a religious entity with direct ties to the state and federal governments in the US allowed for the Evangelical move-

68

ment to flourish (17).

This does, however, create a blurred area as to the definition of the Evangelical between the denomination and its beliefs and the people who align themselves within it. The church’s lack of a solidified image has led to a reliance on marketing their faith to others in an attempt to recruit new members. The focus on advertising has the side effect of disconnecting the advertiser from the society it is attempting to evangelize, thus exposing a sizeable flaw in this system. Perhaps this lack of connectivity to society is what has drawn some evangelicals to the extremes of the Republican Party.

“Many poor people in America undermine their economic interests by voting for Republican politicians who are interested in further concentrating wealth in the hands of the affluent. They do so, in part, because the Republicans appeal to their religious propensity” (Barber 15). Many conservative Christians feel that their faith is becoming insignificant.

“A growing share of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, including some who self-identify as atheists or agnostics as well as many who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” Altogether, the religiously unaffiliated . . . . now account for 23% of the adult population, up from 16% in 2007” (“U.S.” 5). With every passing year, churches are beginning to feel more and more estranged from the political powers that seem to try and undermine them at every step.

Thus, many Christians have flocked to far right politicians in order to try and revitalize their faith’s validity through lawmakers that share their beliefs, even if their overall policies do not align in their favor.

The Republican Party, often referred to as the Conservative Party or the Grand Old Party (abbreviated as GOP) emerged in 1854 from the Whig Party as a group opposed to the continuation of slavery (“Republican” 8). However, by the early 1900’s, views within the party began to shift. ”By the late 1950s conservatives had established a strong base of support in the growing southwest. For much of the century wealthy easterners had controlled the Republican Party, but in the postwar years a growing number of businessmen and political leaders from the Sunbelt, many of whom had prospered in the postwar industrial boom, began playing a greater role in national politics” (Dallek 8). In the late 50’s and early 60’s, two distinct groups emerged from the Conservative Party. There were the moderate Republicans, whose policies shared many similarities with Democratic policies, and the radical right, whose beliefs and policies aligned with what we see in the Conservative Evangelicals of the 2016 election. The emergence of the radical right, also referred to as the religious right, has had a heavy hand in politics ever since they emerged within the political scene.

One of the most influential political events leading to the rise of the religious right was the 1964 election in which Lyndon B Johnson, the democratic nominee, was opposed

by Barry Goldwater, the republican nominee. Johnson won the election by a landslide, winning 486 out of the 538 political votes. “But whereas liberals saw the election results as the

final repudiation of the American right, conservatives took solace in Goldwater’s 27 million votes and vowed not to repeat their mistakes” (28). Even though Goldwater ultimately ended up losing the election, his supporters continued to remain loyal to his policies and beliefs. “Goldwater was charismatic, unapologetically conservative, and unambiguously guided by principle. For him, principle, not power, was the core of politics. Such a personality proved successful in bringing the South and the West, and the young and the energetic, into the GOP and the conservative movement for the first time” (38).

One of the most widely talked about issues within the far right sphere has been reproductive rights, specifically the right to have a legal abortion. Abortion is a topic that continues to pop up time and time again in congress as well as amongst voters, yet the two sides of this issue seem to be at an impasse. Generally, the Republican Party is seen as the Pro-Life party, while the Democratic Party normally takes the pro-Choice side. These positions mainly concern abortion specifically, with other matters involving reproductive rights being brushed to the side. In the modern day, we have seen these two perspectives clash again and again, with little to no progression on abortion law. Although a hot topic on the debate stage in recent years, reproductive rights used to be a simpler, quieter matter that never drew too much attention. “. . . As recently as the 1970s, views on abortion didn’t break down along party lines. As a number of academic studies have pointed out, abortion has been transformed from an incidental political issue to a core litmus test over the past 30 years” (Kliff 1). For quite a while, there was no concern over the topic of abortion in congress. Even today, it is a topic at the fringes of the political spectrum when compared to other, more pertinent topics, as “…most Americans don’t view the issue as a priority to debate in this or any other election. It is an obsession at the edges of politics, but it is the passion of the edges that controls U.S. public life.”

(Fineman, 14). One of the only reasons this issue is brought up so much in today’s political scene is due to the media’s emphasis on events surrounding Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice conflict. Before the 1970’s, abortion received little attention from both politics and the media. Abortion is still a highly contested issue to this day, and whether it will be resolved soon is unclear. “Anti-abortion Republicans — which is to say nearly all Republicans — want to score points with their own supporters by trying to cut off government funding for Planned Parenthood, and GOP presidential candidates will be at the forefront of doing so in Congress” (Fineman, 16).

It seems that as long as the GOP remains largely Pro-Life, the topic of abortion will be slow to fade into irrelevance.

With these events from the past taken into account, we now shift our gaze towards the 2016 Presidential election. A certain Donald J Trump, now President, has had no shortage of headlines and publicity, and most do not speak well of him. His unpolished political practices and his uncensored opinions has given him countless unflattering moments in

Fifth World

69

the nation’s spotlight. Even with all of this negative attention and affiliation, many of his supporters have remained fiercely loyal. Out of these unyielding members of Trump’s base, many identify themselves as Evangelical Christians. “. . . Headed into the general election, Republican evangelicals were among Trump’s strongest supporters. In [a] June telephone poll, fully 94% of GOP evangelicals say they would vote for Trump over Clinton if the election were held today, as do 88% of white mainline Protestants and 81% of Republican Catholics” (“Churchgoing” 4). However, it is important to note that not all Christians, including Evangelicals, support Trump and his policies. In fact, “. . . Trump was the preferred nominee of just 34% of those who attend religious services weekly, including 15% who had been steady supporters (i.e., had consistently supported him across the three separate surveys in December 2015, March 2016 and April 2016). Two-thirds of regular churchgoing Republicans were not supporting Trump for the GOP nomination even in April” (2).

With this taken into account, what in particular drew the 34% of churchgoers to Trump’s side? This schism can be attributed to many of the very factors we have already touched upon, such as the 1964 election, the struggle over abortion, and the constant fear of becoming irrelevant. Another notable feature of Trump’s campaign was his endless stream of conflicting comments on a multitude of issues, and many of his top evangelical supporters have already admitted this. “[His leading evangelical advocates] admitted that Trump has a morally problematic personal background and omitted mention of his positions on theologically weighted issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and religious freedom” (9).

Even now as President-Elect, he has backtracked on many of the planks for his campaign, while still leaving others unclear. According to ontheissues.org, his perspective on abortion has shifted from “Planned Parenthood is important, but abortions must stop” (August ‘15), to “[We should] defund Planned Parenthood.” (October ‘15). Just four months later, he then stated that “Planned Parenthood does great work on women’s health” (February ‘16) just to turn back less than a month later with the statement “Millions are helped by Planned Parenthood, but defund it.” (February ’16) (“2016” 1).

One would think that the avoidance of this issues would draw more concern from his churchgoing supporters as a whole, seeing as all three of the aforementioned points are hot topics for politically-aware Christians, yet there is an absence of any large-scale attempt to make Trump reveal his true opinions. There are also the Conservative Evangelicals themselves, a group who have seemingly thrown out the moral standards behind their faith for a man who claims to support them. Trump has riled up his supporters to the point where even the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name during one of his speeches would send the crowd off into a storm of jeers and booing. To any voter outside of the Trump base, these word-activated actions may seem like utter nonsense.

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

However, to the individuals within the pro-Trump sphere, these actions are entirely justified. After all, one of Trump’s favorite go-to topics during speeches and debates is Clinton herself, and all of the bad things she has done as well as the things she will do if she becomes president. Ultimately, “Trump has benefitted indirectly from a strong belief of evangelicals that the two terms of Barack Obama has led the country to the brink of destruction. Obama was bad enough in their eyes; having the Clintons back in the White House would be the end” (7).

Thousands, if not millions, of voters have taken up the Trump card without hesitation, eager to join the call to “Make America Great Again!” Yet even the motto of the campaign itself has its flaws. Namely, it does not clarify who America will be great for, or how it will be made great ‘again’. I general, the statement is made vague, and I believe that this vagueness is quite intentional. The non-specific wording used in this statement allows the listener to impose their own meaning upon the words. To a struggling working-class family, it might appear as a situation to strive for, a place where life is easier for workers and dependents alike. To an Evangelical, it sounds like an affirmation that their faith still holds meaning in America, and that its influence and prestige can someday be re-established. This skillful use of a phrase, as well as his constant manipulation of the emotions of his supporters, his continual use of bold claims to instill shock value, and his constant denial of many of his scandals and miscellaneous quotes, has ultimately led to a dramatic shift in the Conservative world. The scope of the political field has most certainly changed now that the results of the election have named Trump as our next president. Now that he has emerged victorious, the government will surely be affected by the policies he decides to pass, as well as any important decision he makes, for years to come, and he will certainly stamp his name all over the books. After all, he is Donald Trump, and one of his specialties seems to be sticking around longer than it is good for him, just to make sure his name stays relevant.

Evangelical support of Trump has most certainly been caused by lasting effects from religious right efforts in the 60’s, beginning with Barry Goldwater’s run for president in 1964, as well as today’s emphasis on issues that the Conservative movement has been hyper focused on since its early years. Having grown up as a Christian myself, I feel ashamed that these people with near identical beliefs as myself fall so easily for a man such as Trump. However, I feel that they do not go to Trump for his religious beliefs, even if he claims to be devout. Through all of his speeches and all of his debates, Trump’s strength lies in his ability to rile up the crowd with a surge of emotions and bold claims. Perhaps this was one of the things that drew Evangelicals out onto the political scene. In the years before the 1960’s they had kept to themselves, and mostly avoided anything involving politics. By keeping to themselves, their fear and doubt festered and grew, while the world carried on without their words. Once

70

Barry Goldwater stepped onto the scene, Evangelicals saw a man who was willing to voice their opinions, and who sought to put their long-reserved political beliefs into law.

Undoubtedly, when they first began to set foot onto the political landscape, the shock of discovering the political events that had happened without them hit Evangelicals full force. This shock was what most likely jump-started Evangelicals into the full-force frenzy we still see today. Decades upon decades of radical leadership as well as radical voting practices have accumulated into a large, seemingly unfixable mess. The compound fear of obsoleteness and the built up biases against certain groups and views have all compounded into a political mess that will surely take years, if not decades, to correct.

As a nation, we must learn to mend the bonds between Democrats and Republicans, as well as divisions within the parties themselves. We must take the time to truly analyze our political situation, and set our emotions aside in order to look at how certain outcomes will affect our nation as a whole. If groups that feel wronged, excluded, or unheard are willing to sit down and calmly express their opinions in a reasonable way, perhaps more people will be willing to listen to them instead of discarding them as a radical, obnoxious movement. Not only should this compromising be used throughout our political system, but it should also be used amongst our own voters, both with politics as well as everyday issues. Countless times, I have seen people needlessly argue and fight due to the absence of compromise. It is never a bad thing to have differing opinions from those around you, but if one’s tactic of defending that opinion involves irrational acts, we must be able to see why they act in such a way, as well as how we can come to a point of understanding with them. I hope that, in the years to come, an understanding can be reached, and that we are able to move towards a more collaborative future.

Barber, Nigel. “Why Religion Rules American Politics.” Huffington Post, 19 Sep. 2012. Accessed 3 Oct. 2016.

Dallek, Matthew. “The Conservative 1960s.” The Atlantic, Dec. 1995. Accessed 3 Oct 2016.

Fineman, Howard. “Why U.S. Politics Is Obsessed With Abortion.” The Huffington Post, 2 Dec. 2015.

Accessed 25 Oct 2016.

Kliff, Sarah. “How abortion became a political litmus test.” The Washington Post, 24 Oct. 2011. Accessed 25 Oct 2016.

“Republican Party (definition).” Dictionary.com, N.d. Accessed 10 Oct 2016.

Smith, Gregory A. “Churchgoing Republicans, once skeptical of Trump, now support him.” Pew Research Center, 21 July 2016. Accessed 3 Oct. 2016.

Smith, Gregory A. “Exit polls and the evangelical vote: A closer look.” Pew Research Center, 14 Mar. 2016. Accessed 3 Oct. 2016.

Smith, Gregory A. “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious.” Pew Research Center, 3 Nov. 2015. Accessed 25 Oct 2016.

“2016 Presidential Candidates- Donald Trump.” On the Issues, N.d. Accessed 25 Oct 2016.

Fifth World

Acknowledgements We should first like to thank our peers in the Research in Humanities program who were not able to join us on the editorial board but whose contributions have nonetheless been invaluable. We too should like to thank our friends, our families, and the sundry others who have made this journal possible and our lives good. We are deeply indebted to Avra Janz, Vanessa Lin and Elizabeth Beyer, who have worked hours much too late in the design and production of this journal. We are grateful to the many members of the faculty and the administration at NCSSM, including Dr. Todd Roberts, Chancellor; Dr. Katie Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor, Vice Chancellor for Academic Programs; Ms. Elizabeth Moose, Dean of Humanities, and the Humanities faculty; the Library staff, including Dr. Robin Boltz, Ms. Stephanie Barnwell, Ms. Melissa Cox, Ms. Lacey Hudspeth, Ms. Sherron Johnson, and Ms. Sarah Stokes. Our deepest appreciation also goes to the NCSSM Foundation for its generous support of our work.

Above all, we should like to thank Dr. David Cantrell. His faith in us as people and as scholars, his dedication, not only to this journal, but to each of our individual works, and his continuing efforts to build this program have inspired and encouraged us. This journal would have never been possible without his time and attention.