February
16
2024
Volume 48 Issue 02
10
PLOTTING LEXICAL INNOVATIONS IN THE ‘-CENES’ SCENE
12
EPHEMERA FROM THE HUNGER STRIKE FOR PALESTINE
17
BORDER ANGELS, GEO-POETICS, AND MOTOROLAS
THE CERTIFIED ISSUE
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
48 02
Masthead* MANAGING EDITORS
ILLUSTRATION EDITORS
Angela Lian Arman Deendar Kolya Shields
Andrew Liu Ollantay Avila Ash Ma
01 VIRILE DETRITUS
WEEK IN REVIEW
DESIGNERS COVER COORDINATORS Anahis Luna
03 WEEK IN PICTURES: THE GAME
ARTS
02.16
Mick Chivers
Nora Mathews & Charlie Medeiros
04 MY BABY HAS THREE DIMENSIONS Nan/Jack Dickerson
06 ACROSS THE MULTIVERSE Kalie Minor
Cecilia Barron Yoni Weil Dri de Faria George Nickoll Linnea Hult EPHEMERA
Colin Orihuela Quinn Erickson FEATURES
Luca Suarez Paulina Gąsiorowska Plum Luard LITERARY
08 DATE: [sic]
Charlinda Banks
10 PLOTTING LEXICAL INNOVATIONS IN THE ‘-CENES’ SCENE Daniel Zheng
12 EPHEMERA FROM THE HUNGER STRIKE FOR PALESTINE Eden Fine & Ingrid Ansel-Mullen
14 DEFENDANTS OF DIVESTMENT: BDC 41 GO TO COURT Sofia Barnett, Keelin Gaughan & Ashton Higgins
Jane Wang Madeline Canfield METRO
Ashton Higgins Keelin Gaughan Sofia Barnett SCIENCE + TECH
Christina Peng Daniel Zheng Jolie Barnard WORLD
Ana Furtado James Langan Tanvi Anand
15 UNTITLED
Damisa (Sai) Vanaswas
16 COLORING PAGE Ashiya Patel
17 BORDER ANGELS, GEO-POETICS, AND MOTOROLAS
Solveig Asplund
20 BULLETIN
Emilie Guan & RL Wheeler
FROM THE EDITORS As the Indy’s Managing Editors, we like to believe that our paper adds some ounce of significance to the socio-politico-onto-psycho-pharmaco-semio-homo-yonic-phallo-aesthetic landscape. Self-aggrandizement aside, in lieu of a tool to accurately measure Indy’s influence on the zeitgeist, we have observed the multiplicity of the Indy’s material value in profound and really, really important ways. We present to you our wholly comprehensive, Uses of the Indy, unranked: 1. Weapon of mass destruction 9. Paper airplane 2. Rolling paper 10. Paper boat 3. Recycling 11. Letterhead for the 20th annual 4. Kindling Transnational Transsexual 5. Killing fascists Communist International 6. Paper towel 12. Reading material 7. Long pointy medieval shoes 13. Plate 8. Paper mache 14. Worst dental dam ever –AKA
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
STAFF WRITERS
Abani Neferkara Aboud Ashhab Angela Qian Caleb Stutman-Shaw Charlie Medeiros Charlinda Banks Corinne Leong Coby Mulliken David Felipe Emily Mansfield Emily Vesper Gabrielle Yuan Jenny Hu Kalie Minor Kayla Morrison Lucia Kan-Sperling Maya Avelino Martina Herman Nadia Mazonson Nan/Jack Dickerson Naomi Nesmith Nora Mathews Riley Gramley Riyana Srihari Saraphina Forman Yunan (Olivia) He COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS
Solveig Asplund SCHEMA
SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM
X
Claire Chasse Joshua Koolik Lola Simon
Izzy Roth-Dishy Julia Cheng
Eiffel Sunga Jolin Chen Kay Kim Minah Kim Nada (Neat) Rodanant Nor Wu Rachel Shin Riley Cruzcosa Ritvik Bhadury Sejal Gupta Simon Yang Tanya Qu Yuexiao Yang Zoe Rudolph-Larrea Lucy Pham ILLUSTRATORS
Abby Berwick Aidan Choi Alena Zhang Angela Xu Anna Fischler Avery Li Catie Witherwax Cindy Liu Ellie Lin Greer Nakadegawa-Lee Luca Suarez Luna Tobar Meri Sanders Mingjia Li Muzi Xu Nan/Jack Dickerson Jessica Ruan Julianne Ho Ren Long Ru Kachko Sofia Schreiber Sylvie Bartusek COPY CHIEF
Ben Flaumenhaft WEB DESIGNERS
Lucas Galarza Sam Stewart BULLETIN BOARD
Emilie Guan RL Wheeler
Eurie Seo Jolie Barnard Nat Mitchell Yuna Shprecher
Eleanor Park Lucy Pham Mai-Anh Nguyen Na Nguyen SENIOR EDITORS
FINANCIAL COORDINATOR
DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Simon Yang
Audrey He Avery Liu Yunan (Olivia) He
MVPs
Angelina Rios-Galindo
19 DEAR INDY
Julia Cheng Sylvie Bartusek
Anji Friedbauer Audrey He Avery Liu Ayla Tosun Becca Martin-Welp Ilan Brusso Lila Rosen Naile Ozpolat Samantha Ho Yuna Shprecher
DEAR INDY
02
DESIGN EDITORS
Cecilia Barron Yoni Weil
Angela Qian Corinne Leong Charlie Medeiros Isaac McKenna Jane Wang Lily Seltz Lucia Kan-Sperling
*Our Beloved Staff
MISSION STATEMENT The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written,
illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousnessraising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention. While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers. The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
WEEK IN REVIEW
( TEXT NORA MATHEWS & CHARLIE MEDEIROS DESIGN NORA MATHEWS & CHARLIE MEDEIROS ILLUSTRATION NORA MATHEWS & CHARLIE MEDEIROS )
WEEK IN PICTURES: THE GAME
Irish-Catholic storytellers with visual learning styles and self-diagnosed synesthesia, we know the As power of PICTURES ♥. Pictures can tell stories, stories like woman in a triangle dress 🚺 or frowny face ☹ . Some pictures are scary—like Bart Simpson, who has hair that is too spiky and an anti-establishment scowl that clouds his youthful brow. Some are useful, like the map I use to get to the bathroom.
Since the beginning of time, pictures have been used. One thing is for sure: pictures aren’t going anywhere.
This week, we present you with a game: Will you make meaning from this tableau of flat icons? Or surrender yourself to the superficiality of the image…
Combine the pictures below to make new meanings. All answers must use the central sign. As a reminder, some pictures are worth a thousand words, and many of these images evoke at least two. We’ve uncovered fourteen unique combinations. How many can you find? (we’ll give you a hint: HOT + DOG + WATER = ? )
NORA MATHEWS B’24 and CHARLIE MEDEIROS B’24 sound like green.
VOLUME 48 ISSUE 02
03
FEATURES 04
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
FEATURES
My Baby Has Dimensions!
( TEXT NAN/JACK DICKERSON DESIGN MINAH KIM )
1) Light rays enter your eye and your camera through a point of focus. This site is called a lens in both cases. Your iris adjusts the amount of light that can reach your lens—opening the pupil in dark settings and narrowing it in bright ones. A focused image hits the back of your eye, recorded by light-sensitive rods and cones. Light rays cross over each other as they pass into your head, so the image the cells get is upside down. Your brain doesn’t mind. 2) The simplest kind of camera has the same parts: external illumination, a point of focus, and a flipped image recorded by light-sensitive cells. More complicated cameras can sense the amount of light in a system and adjust accordingly. A camera can take a photo, but it isn’t the final resting place of that picture. The image is processed and moved to a bigger digital display, or even printed onto paper. Here it becomes a three-dimensional object. 3) Printing is a site of degradation. Photographic reproduction induces decomposition: a loss of clarity is really a loss of information. Unless you’re using a lossless format, when an image is compressed ‘less important’ information is removed, increasing abstraction. The sharper the digital image, the more data it has, and the more bandwidth it requires to move from one ‘place’ to another. A smaller image is easier to download or attach to an email. 4) You can shrink a photo by means of “lossy compression,” but this will reduce the quality of your image. In the case of JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) compression, this reduction typically transforms every ten pixels into one, working off of patterns in color to produce an approximation of the photo. Pixels with individual colors lose themselves to become their neighbors. The image becomes a generalized reproduction of itself. 5) You can tell an image is extremely compressed when it starts to have a blocky, pixelated look. Compression blurs detail, which may be minor at first, but since an image is compressed each time it is downloaded or altered, decay is soon visible. 6) New iterations of the image will look less and less like the original; the information can’t be put back. Key information (such as on a map, or a portrait) will become fuzzy, or even fully obscured. You can’t fit the details together once you’ve lost them. +++ After a photo is taken by your camera, it’s got to go somewhere. Let’s send it to your computer. You’ve got an image—downloaded, cropped, re-saved, edited, and pasted into a document—hemorrhaging information each step of the way. I’m concerned with what happens when you try to print that image. I will not forget the three-dimensional object. Your printer can probably handle a certain amount of information, but if you’ve got a low-quality image your printer won’t be able to make it look high-quality. God forbid you print it out bigger than it appears on your screen. The printer will demonstrate how little detail is left in the photo. This is the digital source’s fault, though a printer may also reduce the detail of an image depending on how many Dots Per Inch (DPI) it can place.
The machinery of one’s eye and that of a camera are much the same. The body is both a camera and a photograph. Let me try to show you what I mean. You might be left with an image you could practically scrape the pixels off of. You might want to blame your printer. Don’t. The printer can’t fix a low-resolution image. The photo is in your hands—point your pupil(s) at it and let the disappointingly pixelated result slouch onto your rods and cones. I’m tempted to tell you I’ve found an inversion of the human here. As an image ‘moves,’ it loses information. Our bodies record the information produced by their passage through time and space. A body can be a record of injury, medical intervention, age, decay, disease, attenuation, rigorous work. A circular pair of scars on the back of one’s hand from a pair of months. A parent’s strong forearms, a baby’s impossible dimensions. We have compressed mechanisms for recording this information, like IDs, but the body can reproduce itself, and an ID cannot. +++ The passport photo in the mid to top right of the opposite page was taken on an unrecorded day in the late winter of 2021 at the combination gas station post office in the town of Roxbury, CT. It was taken by the postmistress (first name: Rose) for fourteen dollars and ninety nine cents plus tax. She mailed the bonus 2x2 print and the receipt of application for renewal to a rented home at the corner of 87th Street and Columbus Avenue in New York City. The passport itself was sent by the Department of State to the same location in the late spring. This document was promptly scanned and printed in triplicate. The same scan was later cropped, saved, and printed by a home printer at 300 DPI. That image was then cut out with a small knife and pasted onto construction paper, only to be scanned and printed again. Now you’re looking at it. It’s a photo of me. My passport is the only portable form of ID I have right now. It is the main means by which I’m recognized by the state. I’m a white American, this isn’t a site of friction. Potential friction can be smoothed by my family’s money. I have the resources to get my passport replaced if I lose it. I have the privilege of citizenship and documentation. I rarely have to descend into into bureaucratic hell, where people (and entire groups) are ground to nonexistence. Even so, the state, and my ID, reduce me to a static object. Trans theorist Paul Preciado describes this experience in an essay for Libération, A salesperson, a receptionist, an administrator or a customs officer looks at the document, then looks at the body that stands in front of him and states: ‘This isn’t you!’ I am currently suspended between the information provided by my ID and the information provided by my body. This experience extends from the people swiping me in at Brown dining halls to the TSA. In these moments I’ve been caught in a performance out of tune with a larger authoritative body. I’m revealed to be one thing biopolitically and another visually. Preciado positions the trans person as an exile, fleeing their assigned gender at birth for a life without adequate legal representation or support. Inaccurate, faulty, or missing documentation makes a person invisible to the state. This invisibility is imposed upon all disenfranchised people, some of whom are also transgender, and therefore doubly vulnerable. In these moments one isn’t just compressed into a photo or a category, but effaced completely. Your first job as a subject of the state is to
be trackable—without the physical materials for that, you are nothing. These moments of administration-induced suspension are far more dangerous for those with less access to money, state approved documents, legal recourse, and housing. Your ID is largely for the benefit of surveillance institutions—schools, banks, employers, doctors, and the police . These are the same groups founded on and committed to reproducing and extending the violent subjugation of Black and brown people. This means for many people an ID-based interaction carries the threat, if not the active perpetration, of racial violence. To be reduced by an authority into something faceless and non-human is one kind of subjugation. In these moments a photo ID may not give you back your personhood, as it is more likely to be establishing the framework for your oppression. Even the opportunity for self-explanation or self-depiction is a privilege. In the collage on the opposite page, most of the headshots are from expired identification cards, re-printed by me. IDs are supposed to record true information. In most cases, the grubby fingerprints of production and reproduction obscure these personal details. In other cases, the body has moved, rendering ID information irrelevant or incorrect. The body that cut-and-pasted these images cannot fit onto the paper. My ongoing emotional survival as a (transgender) person is predicated upon the conviction that no one photo or iteration or impression of me is final or comprehensive. To say it was final would be too close to a pessimistic ideation. To say it was comprehensive would be something worse. The body recorded by some of these images no longer exists, exists solely retrospectively, or never existed. Even as these IDs are adulterated, they produce adulteration: they impose a story onto the body and lose information in the process. I become like my photos, losing information as I move. These portraits record the linear passage of time, a fluid progression stamped by six static images. An ID is one standardized reproduction of the body. An ID is more real than you are. Even so, these faces are ‘disembodied’—by the edge of the photo, by the state, by formality, by some rigid posture or reality. Someone has been recorded, but it is less clear if that person has been identified. +++ What are the organs of a photo? Would it be possible to record something as mutable as childhood without leaving our fingerprints? Can we record anything without leaving a trace? Significant erosion has taken place. The data that these images were supposed to solidify decayed as the photos were taken and reproduced and imitated. Bodies stiffen, scar, and lose their ability to move. The body is variable. I still want to check it against static images, trying to figure out what’s become of me. Are things going better? Getting worse? An image is a reassuringly fixed yardstick, promising reliable documentation of where things were and what they looked like. I’m often compelled to check that everything is still where I left it. I degrade myself. I’ve made myself into a flat image, I pass it on to you trusting you’ll keep it two-dimensional. I’ve made it impossible to return to a prior format. NAN/JACK DICKERSON’26 has got to settle
on a name.
VOLUME 48 ISSUE 02
05
ARTS
Across The Using the multiverse (and all its forms) to find liberation
( TEXT KALIE MINOR DESIGN RITVIK BHADURY ILLUSTRATION LUCA SUAREZ )
c When you took your first breath, your life fractioned into a million different realities. In fact, everything you’ve done and everything that’s been done unto you has amalgamated into a unique life that is wholly yours. On the edge of this life lie infinitely more, and the further you reach into the expanse, the more diverse these lives will become, the more unfamiliar, and yet still your own. That is, if you believe in the multiverse. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (EEAAO) (2022) and its Best Picture Oscar win gave the multiverse critical renown to its U.S. audience. In directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s multiverse, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) reaches across an infinite number of absurd, poignant iterations of her life in a continuous attempt to find her daughter, whose existentialist depression has become destructive. Upon the film’s conclusion, viewers may feel compelled to tear up at the catharsis of reaching out with open arms after generations of pain, abuse, lost dreams, and heartbreak–of choosing love. Evelyn and Jobutopaki/Joy (Stephanie Hsu) find each other as mother and daughter and—with the ability to navigate the full, eternal, and overwhelming multiverse—reclaim their agency by choosing one another in every universe, everywhere. Only a year after EEAAO’s debut came SpiderMan: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)–another widely influential commercial success, grossing well over $600 million–with its own engagement in the multiverse. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) interacts with the multiverse by saving Uncle Ben, thus changing the established narrative archetype of “Spider-Man.” Miles uses the power of the multiverse to redefine what’s possible in his reality. By disrupting the expected narrative arc of his character, Miles challenges all other versions of SpiderMan in their acceptance of an antiquated truth. The multiverse can also be found in academic explorations of speculative history. Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts” engages in what I would argue is a facet of the multiverse. Her acknowledgment of the archive—records collected and kept by institutions and individuals with historic power—as a place of domination, solidified in our engagement with them, leaves us in the present day with the prerogative to see past the archive, and thus to imagine what else can be truth. In her essay, she creates a multiverse, imagining two Black girls murdered during the Middle Passage comforting each other in their dying moments. The record of these girls is one strictly of pain, but by writing a new narrative, Hartman expands these girls’ legacy past their interactions with oppressive structures. She gives them a new, kinder universe, where they’re afforded interiority and emotion. While EEAAO and Spider-Man: Across the SpiderVerse use the multiverse as entertainment, they allow us to imagine its liberatory nature in this same
06
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
way. The central conflicts in both of these films lie in the way that current circumstances—namely Evelyn and Joy’s strained relationship and Uncle Ben’s death—are accepted as unchangeable. These characters only free themselves of this “powerlessness” once they interact with the multiverse, and grow to understand that their current realities are alterable. The systems within which we live operate on this accepted immutability of power and narrative. Then, in the manner of the multiverse, we must see beyond the institutions of power that have established dominance through violence and rather see the possibility in what these institutions refuse to accredit. This is the work of Donald Glover’s season three Atlanta episode, “The Big Payback.” In the episode, Black Americans receive reparations from white Americans in the present day. While Hartman uses the multiverse to imagine the neglected experiences of those only remembered for their struggle, Glover crafts a universe after struggle, in which a liberatory goal has been achieved. These possibilities exist beyond what is considered accepted or normative by institutions of power, but their subversive nature is what gives them strength. +++ The multiverse is empowered by the logic that, in accepting an infinite possibility of realities, there exists at least one where liberation has been realized. In “The Big Payback”, the imagined universe creates the possibility for our own liberation under the pretense that if it was possible once, even imagined so, then it will be possible again. EEAAO expands this possibility for liberation and love. Evelyn and Joy often fight violently–with swords as samurai, with baton and broom as prisoner and guard, and in their living room, fist to fist–before ultimately surrendering to the love they have for one another. The battle they’ve been fighting loses its momentum; as characters who exist in every universe, Evelyn and Joy are exhausted by choosing cynicism in each one. There is the understanding that in love they will find rest from the constant noise and pressure of every possibility surrounding them. Their love becomes tender and, once more, becomes kind. From Across the SpiderVerse, we learn that in the multiverse, we can use our wealth of opportunity to change what we couldn’t get right the first time: the multiverse is redemption. Believing in the presence of the multiverse lets us imagine universes where mistakes made in this reality are reconciled. There is peace in this idea, however, we cannot let that peace turn to passivity. Instead, it must empower our convictions in remedying the faults of the past and pain of the present. In the infinite possibility of the multiverse there are realities more violent and oppressive than our own. Hartman works within a multiverse still bound by the archive, and implements the possibility of
a more complete and reimagined narrative. The universal language of the multiverse becomes one of constant struggle and liberation, a language we must employ to craft a more liberated world. +++ Embedded in the nuances of the multiverse are truths that we can transmute to liberatory struggle. I believe that it’s the multiverse that can give us the hope and assurance we need to continue our struggles, and the multiverse that enables the possibilities for a just and liberated world. Using the multiverse as resistance means we must constantly challenge what’s possible, what’s ‘real’, and believe that if there’s a universe where liberation has been achieved then it must be possible here. We may find that when we accept injustice it becomes the only reality of our world. This sense of domination is cloying, it renders liberation possible only through the pathways accepted by systems of power. It is Uncle Ben dying in every universe, it is the hopeless belief that “nothing matters.” However, we can find the hope of the multiverse in our own realities. We see it in mutual aid, where we work to directly contradict the greater hegemonic systems to which we are subjected, offering a glimpse into realities where care and love precede profit. We see it in the air, reverberating through our songs as a collective voice. If we can take these inklings of liberation, omnipresent if we care to look for them, and augment them in our imaginations, then we will find the multiverse at our fingertips. An insidious tool employed by those in power is to affirm that our actions do not amount to substantial change, that progress is too slow and our lifetimes too short to see the lasting effects of our resistance. But as the multiverse sees it, the core flaw of this ideology is that it neglects the possibility that our resistance has already worked. It’s hard to see, and it doesn’t always show itself here, in our realities, but somewhere out there we can find solace in the knowledge that versions of ourselves are relishing in the beauty of a liberated world. There is little more comforting than laying down to sleep and imagining our communities liberated. KALIE MINOR B’27 imagines us free in every universe.
ARTS
Multiverse
VOLUME 48 ISSUE 02
07
DATE:
LIT
[sic] ( TEXT CHARLINDA BANKS DESIGN SEJAL GUPTA ILLUSTRATION ABBY BERWICK )
c If I were a sociologist, I would say something like “Black girls are born into violence,” as the opening to a lecture that would make my part-time students/full-time poets snap. But I am not a sociologist. Statistics pain and bore me. If you ask my mother, I was born in a hospital on a Wednesday night. The doctor was shit and white. The nurse was kind; she tried. In that, yes, I was born into American Health, and so perhaps the sociology hit would apply. But I am convinced that we must have a birth that belongs to us. Something like a Protestant who is born then reborn when they choose to find the Lord. I am not a Protestant, but I did get myself born.1 I must not dream. It is only sick people who dream. 1
WOMEN ARE PEEPERS OF THE WORLD SO mostly I seek the condensing feeling of index. Drag that finger down biblical papyrus; it is easy to find me there. Proverbs page 410. Then move down a Book and you can complete me. Ruth page 522. But no, the nonfiction novel is in, girl, you better make it honest. Okay. Between these lines are births—remembering in phases. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, getting yourself born is never timely…Monday: I was three years old and my grandmother died. Tuesday: I am three years old and abuela hoards the right side of our cot. Thursday: she had grey and purple hair—thick and bottom-bumped. Wednesday: Ioni’s hair is buzzed.
I AM LOOKING FOR MY CERTIFICATE OF LIVING (GIRL) BIRTH because my aunt somehow never got my name right. You are your father’s daughter, charleslinda.
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niña linda, peeper of the world: My brother says I am obsessed with birth because I saw a picture of myself straight out of the womb. Bloody, tiny, Black, and baby. Slightly underweight and screaming. I’d be traumatized by that picture too, he jokes. So here you are, performing ekphrasis over and over until you've overridden what you are. He doesn’t say ekphrasis, he sees me typing and says, okay, moving picture writer. I say you are a poet, you know a writer is whatever. 2
absence: (a very long though single moment)
2
LIT
WOMEN ARE PEEPERS OF THE WORLD AND mimesis makes me breathe, but belief in—faith—is not mimicry. Instead it is a noun (plural). These are the things of substance hoped for. These are my evidence of her, unseen. You cannot get yourself born without faith. It is necessary, even, to die a little and forget what you have seen. I tell people I moved to Far Rockaway because it is where I remember my grandmother best. Our little room in her apartment. Tiny shoes and a tiny denim dress. There was a walk-in closet too, the length and width of abuela’s bed. She had three outfits of her own and the rest was for me. This is belief (in). I do not know her home, only my father’s drawer of baby clothes with that very dress. But faith says, put your truth into place. So I am there: Ioni y Chalita. Queens, NY, 2005.
My mother was mad when my brother tattooed my middle name onto his arm. ADREAM in battered ink. To tattoo is to kill the brown. My father thinks it might as well be dirt. I am the dirt on your skin? To dream me is to dirt me? My dream is your dirt, please move me big brother. But he circumcised me there and it is part of my rebirth, so do not equate getting yourself born with sovereignty. The prefix ‘re’ does not mean self-determination. Just again and again and again. In fact, it is due to my father’s euphemisms that I am often deluded about this self that I am. His tenderness traces my making. He asks, are you telling other than the truth? And I answer him in verse, forgive me I guess I lied a little. When I was younger he would come home and whisper, the world stopped while you were sleeping. Thank you for bringing us back again, and I believed him. I got myself born in between having the whole wide world in my hand and my brother’s sighs at celebrations of life.3 When he smiles at me I laugh because our teeth are chipped in the same place, don’t barrel at me. It is difficult to be old and unliked, he says.
3
My mother-birth marked me with a tramp stamp across my hips. Getting yourself born is this: faith in the ink’s contortions. The stamp is subject to my movement, and I send her gliding. See, I used to call everything ‘hideous’ until my mom gave me a look, that is what white people say. Oh and that dress. Just hideous! Oh the pasta is overcooked, gosh it looks hideous! So then I stopped, and now I call the Bible a codex instead of the Word and I wear big pants instead of that denim dress. I tried to blow at my tramp stamp once to write about girls without talk of boys or Jesus. I thought it unfair to be marked up. But she didn't move. She just looked at me and said, PUFFFFF. CHARLINDA BANKS B’24 was born on a Monday.
VOLUME 48 ISSUE 02
09
SCHEMA
Plotting Lexical Innovations in the ‘-Cenes’ Scene: A Volumetric Approach
Anthropocene
Manthropocene Misanthropocene
usefulness
Capitalocene
Eurocene Plantationocene Secularocene Neganthropocene Technocene
Anthrobscene
Chthulucene
ingenuity
Miss Anthropocene
year
ingenuity
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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
Phonocene
ingenuity
usefulness
usefulness
Hellocene
year
year
SCHEMA
c In the early 2000s, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer began suggesting and popularizing the term “Anthropocene” in order to highlight how anthropogenic effects on the earth and environment had reached such a scale that they effectively constituted a new geological epoch. The term took hold quite quickly in academic writing, perhaps because of the neatness of stating in one word that humanity has become a geological force capable of destabilizing the long temporal cycles of the Earth. But almost immediately, the term came under heavy criticism due to its generalizing of all of humanity under the slippery “anthropos,” in which the term locates environmental disaster to a so-called unified humanity as a whole and thus spreads out the blame, so to speak. Environmental thinker and activist Andreas Malm quickly coined the term “Capitalocene” to emphasize how it is not humanity writ large but the mechanism of capitalism that imposes this geological change. Soon enough, neologisms began to spread like wildfire, to the extent that now it feels as if each new piece of writing on the “anthropocene” has to invent a new term, each criticizing the formulation of “anthropocene” while attempting to reorient its semantic direction towards a cause it thinks as more fundamental to this new epoch. This piece, then, will attempt to organize and rank these neologisms or ‘-cenes’ as a way of providing analysis on both the relative conceptual usefulness and the textual ingenuity of this increasingly popular discourse.
( TEXT DANIEL ZHENG DESIGN SAM STEWART )
METHODS Each ‘-cene’ collected is rated on two categories, its ingenuity (how creative or new, linguistically and textually, is the term?) and its usefulness (how relatively productive is the intervention the term makes, does it tell us something new or valuable). These two measures are plotted on a three axis graph alongside the year the term was coined in order to visualize these measurements in three dimensions.
TERM, AUTHOR, DESCRIPTION, & COMMENTARY b Anthropocene: Paul Crutzen/Eugene Stoermer (Ingenuity: 5, Year: 2000, Usefulness: 9) Asserts that anthropogenic effects and impact on the earth have reached such an extent that they constitute a new geological epoch. Commentary: Okay, there are problems, but it mostly holds up due to the textual force of stating in one term that humans have become geologic—also, written by scientists. b Capitalocene: Andreas Malm (3.2, 2009, 8.2) Emphasizes that it is specifically the forces of capitalism that leave these geological impact, and not “anthropos” as a whole. Commentary: Malm, a professor and activist, has criticized calls for “animism” as he says we should not de-emphasize human action: it’s amusing that he perhaps inadvertently set off a ton of that discourse by initiating the coining of these neologisms. Regardless, it’s a solid critique. b Plantationocene: Donna Haraway & Anna Tsing (4.1, 2015, 5.7) Argues that the plantation economy (monocultures, forced labor) is what creates the economic and agricultural structure that eventually leads to geologic effects. Commentary: Usually brought forth in the context of “pluralizing” the anthropocene (you can tell because Haraway is here 3 times), on its own it’s perhaps a bit too narrow in its focus (and just a really clunky term to use or say or write). b Chthulucene: Donna Haraway (3.7, 2016, 2.4) Suggests learning from chthonic (underground) and tentacular beings in order to live and respond to/in a damaged earth. Commentary: Not sure how useful this feels and people always think she means Lovecraft which causes extra confusion, I also can never spell it properly. b Eurocene: Jarius Victor Grove (2.8, 2019, 6.1) Contends that new geologic effects are necessarily a result of war and “geopolitics” emerging out of Europe. Commentary: The larger point is fine (if a little banal), but really the term “eurocene” just does not flow particularly well to me.
b Phonocene: Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway (3, 2021, 1.3) Suggests that we must listen to the “polyphonic symphonies” of birds in order to maintain attention to different ways of being. Commentary: I’m confused here: did birds not sing in the same way in the Holocene, for example? b Secularocene: Mohamed Amer Meziane (3.8, 2021, 5.4) Reads history of secularization as putting forth an ideology that “this world” is the only reality, thus making it a necessary stage in a primitive accumulation that leads to extractivism. Commentary: He’s at Brown now so I hope he doesn’t read this — I think the argument is new and great but perhaps a new term was not necessary? Linguistically, it just doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, although I guess it was originally in French (honestly, half of these were). b Neganthropocene: Bernard Stiegler (5.2, 2018, 5.1) Using language of “negentropy” (reverse entropy), asserts that “anthropology” has turned into “neganthropology” and thus the latter must be used to escape from the traps of the anthropocene. Commentary: My theory is that Mr. Stiegler, a prolific philosopher who got his start because he read a lot of Husserl while in prison for armed robbery, quite enjoyed inventing new terms (psychopower, hypomnesis) and just wanted to get in on this discourse — I feel like I’m losing track of the ‘-cene’ of it all though. Why is this a ‘-cene’? b Anthrobscene: Jussi Parikka (9.1, 2014, 4.5) Highlights “the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious” or obscene practices required to maintain systems of technological extraction that create geologic impact. Commentary: High marks for the linguistic innovation here—modifying the back of the word rather than the front!
b Miss Anthropocene: Grimes (8.4, 2020, 2.7) 2020 album by Grimes, whose titular character proclaims: “imminent annihilation sounds so dope.” Commentary: Sorry to the anonymous Indy editor who claimed that this was her second best album, but Visions and Art Angels are both clearly better… b Manthropocene: Kate Raworth (6.1, 2014, 6.2) Criticizes how the scientific voting body on the anthropocene was composed of almost all men, expands that to investigate the lopsided distribution of who causes and who labels geologic effects. Commentary: Brings our attention back to how much discourse is being located around a niche and unequal scientific field sequestered away into working groups— it’s also really textually efficient, only one extra letter! b Hellocene: Rob Jackson (3.1, 2018, 1) Describes how the climate crisis is right here in front of us, as if it says “hello.” Commentary: Maybe this should be the interpellationocene instead? Extra points for sounding like “holocene,” although this really doesn’t say anything in my opinion (and is certainly not invested in geology). b Technocene: Alf Hornborg (2.7, 2015, 4.6) Argues that technology is the only way in which humanity has become materially capable of leaving geological spikes.. Commentary: Someone told me that this sounds like “techno scene,” which I like but I’m not sure was intentional. DANIEL ZHENG B‘25 -cene.
b Misanthropocene: Raj Patel (7.9, 2013, 5.7) Argues that overlapping catastrophes produce a general sense of apathy, turning people into misanthropes with regard to ecological crisis. Commentary: A good spot of the term “misanthrope” inside the anthropocene. Perhaps the practice of coming up with new ‘-cenes’ to describe our collapse is itself misanthropic.
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( TEXT EDEN FINE DESIGN MIMI YANG CURATION INGRID ANSEL-MULLEN )
EPHEMERA + WORLD
c Thirteen days after the start of the hunger strike for Palestine––and five days after we concluded our week-long solidarity protest by vacating the student center to line the halls of the Watson Institute and physically confront the Brown Corporation—I returned to Leung. I saw no material trace of what we had created the week before. The volume had returned to just above silent. The fliers, books, art-making supplies, and individual belongings had been consolidated and removed from the space, the flow of students reduced to a sparse straggle.
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But what I know to be true about last week—after having spent around 130 hours in the student center from February 2nd to February 9th—is that its impact is persistent, durable, living. We have loads of documentation from the big and visible moments of the past week (via Instagram and dozens of articles in international, national, and local media outlets). But what is harder to preserve are the in-between moments—the ones that proved our stamina necessary to sustain the protest. The folding of hundreds of zines, the reading and writing and lounging on the Leung chairs, the inking of stamps, and the residual red and white on hands and clothing.
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As we were constantly confronting institutional hostility by way of asinine bureaucratic rules, we began organizing covertly. We had to be as decisive, loud, visible, steadfast as we could be outside of institutionally legible channels of communication and approval. We were disallowed from hanging banners, so we carved, stamped, and wore linocut prints. We floated QR codes and flyers around for participants and students in and around the campus center to learn more and get involved. We wrote and collaged zines to disseminate our demands. We uttered invitations to join us with the vocabulary of color and patches and pins. This is our archive of an accumulation of objects, residue, and trash that evidence the hundreds of hands that built this action. In the preservation of detritus, we preserve the easily lost mundane imprint—the affective, the interpersonal, the paint-based, the disposable, the urgently emergent. The Powers That Be (the student- and public-facing
factions of the Brown administration), through weaponized bureaucracy, insist upon curtailing institutional memory of student-led, pro-Palestinian, and pro-divestment organizing on campus. Perhaps these objects—not in spite of their unsearchability and ephemerality, but precisely because of it—can repair those ruptures and losses. EDEN FINE B’25 belives in messy
archives and a free Palestine.
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Defendants of Divestment: BDC 41 Go to Court METRO
( TEXT SOFIA BARNETT, KEELIN GAUGHAN & ASHTON HIGGINS DESIGN ZOE RUDOLPH-LARREA )
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c 19 weeks into the Israel’s genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip, Western institutions like Brown University continue to not just ignore large-scale demands for divestment, but also actively prosecute pro-Palestine student organizing. Less than a week after 19 Brown students’ “Hunger Strike for Palestine,” and shortly following the first Brown Corporation meeting of the year, the Brown University Community Council (BUCC) met on Monday, Feb. 12 at the Campus Center. That same morning, 20 of the 41 students who were arrested last December following their sit-in at University Hall appeared before the Providence 6th District Court to plead “not-guilty” on charges of willful trespassing in University buildings. On the morning of Feb. 14, the remaining 21 students were arraigned. And yet, the question of divestment was glaringly absent from Monday’s BUCC meeting agenda. Only during the last twenty minutes—when the meeting took on a ‘town hall’ format—did the subject come up, as a result of students criticizing the Corporation’s refusal to consider a divestment proposal. “You [have to] make it really clear to students that this is a choice,” President Christina H. Paxson said. “There is a long history of civil rights activism where people willingly violate rules [and] the law, knowing what the consequences will be, and being willing to accept those consequences.” The consequences, evidently, were criminal charges for willful trespassing in University Hall. “It felt like such a circus,” said Gabriela Venegas, one of the 41 arrested students, about her experience in court. “We are 41 students and the University is just using up the city’s resources, time and energy, and they don’t even pay taxes,” Venegas said. “It’s just ridiculous, we went up there, gave our names and addresses, our dates of birth, and then went home, like, are you kidding? And for trespassing? We were in the building before it closed and all we asked for was for the President to listen to us and she again refused.” The sit-in took place on Dec. 11, organized by the Brown Divest Coalition—a collective of students that formed in Fall of 2023—to pressure Paxson and the Brown Corporation to respond to calls for divestment from companies facilitating Israel’s colonial violence in occupied Palestine. The action was also an expression of support and solidarity for fellow Brown student Hisham Awartani, who was the victim of a violent hate crime in Vermont over the University’s Thanksgiving break. “This University preaches its history of activism, and engaged scholarship and human rights values, and tells us all the time that we are the leaders of tomorrow, working for a better world for everyone,” Venegas continued. “And the second we put that into practice, the second we take action like we’re taught in the classroom? We find ourselves being arrested.” This action followed a previous sit-in on Nov. 8, 2023, after which the University facilitated the arrests of 20 students from Brown U Jews for Ceasefire Now (JFCN) in the first student-organized sit-in for divestment since Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza last October. About two weeks after the demonstration, the University dropped the charges. “Regarding the dropping of the charges for Jews for Ceasefire Now, that was done very closely after Hisham was shot. So it’s also very clear that Brown is trying to leverage these charges, and is then only dropping them to save face,” said Jo Ouyang, another protester arraigned earlier this week. Now, the University has chosen to stray from its own precedent and continue pursuing conviction against 41 of its students who sat in University Hall in hopes of having a conversation with the administration about divestment.
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Courtesy of Sofia Barnett Venegas, along with several other arrested students who spoke with the Indy, expressed disdain at the University’s history of retroactively flaunting the legacy of successful student activism, while doing everything in its power to stifle and deter contemporary student organizing. “In years to come they’re going to use our story and put us up on some wall in the Lindemann or Faunce, you know?” Venegas said. “This is a smart institution. They know what they’re doing and they know what game they’re playing. It’s sinister.” The official charge against the 41 Brown students involved in the sit-in is an alleged violation of willful trespassing within a school building (University Hall). This statute is a Title 11 criminal offense, which applies to schools in Rhode Island: it is punishable by a fine of no less than $50 and no more than $500 upon the first offense. At their arraignments on Monday and Wednesday, the 41 students signed a waiver for personal recognizance, allowing them to travel freely without the requirement of posting bail; this acts as a written promise that the defendants will return to court on March 5 for their pre-trial as required and of their own volition. All of the 41 students pleaded not guilty to the trespassing charges. Ouyang expressed how this plea forces the University to reckon with its ongoing history of suppressing student activism. “We are trying to put Brown in the uncomfortable position of having to defend their choice of arresting 41 students that day, and charging them with criminal violations of trespassing,” they said. On March 5, the Court will determine whether or not to take the case to trial. If the 41 members of BDC are convicted, they will face fines as well as criminal violations that will remain on their permanent record, ineligible for an expungement appeal for at least five years. The University’s refusal to drop these charges demonstrates a clear disdain for student organizing in harsh contrast to Brown’s publicized commitment to social justice. Ouyang continued: “[They are] trying to instill this idea that resistance on campus is not allowed or accepted. They are trying to make a political example out of us to repress the student movement further.” Bella Garo, another student currently facing criminal charges from Brown, insists that regardless of outcome, these legal proceedings will not dissuade her from continuing to fight for divestment and Palestinian liberation. “If they think that having a violation on my record is going to deter me from continuing that fight, then they are truly incapable of understanding me as a person and truly incapable of understanding a large portion of their student body,” she said.
Despite the University’s continued inaction, on both Monday and Wednesday, dozens of students in keffiyehs and Divest for Hisham shirts gathered alongside the sit-in protestors at the district courthouse in an expression of solidarity. “Right now, I feel a lot of support from our community,” Ouyang said. “I think [the] movement on campus is going to continue to build. This is not stopping us.” At the BUCC meeting on Monday, Paxson was asked why she did not bring forth BDC’s divestment proposal, a critical and revised edition of the 2020 ACCRIP report recommending Brown’s divestment from companies profiting off the Israeli occupation of Palestine. She answered directly: “Because the Corporation knows what the proposal is, and they don’t want to hear it.” Garrett Brand, who was arraigned on Wednesday, responded to this statement from the University president in front of a crowd of his peers and the Community Council: “The ACURM process takes months, if not multiple years,” he said. “Students already did this in 2019. They went through ACCRIP, which you then dissolved, or turned into ACURM, which—I’m just going to be frank—is another way that this University weaponizes bureaucracy to stifle students.” “You asked to put something on the Corporation agenda, the answer from the Corporation was no,” Paxson said at the meeting. “And there has been some pretty clear guidance on what it would take to put something on the Corporation agenda. That’s where we are at. The meetings (are) over. And if students want to move forward in a productive way, there’s a path there for you. You just have to take the time.” “In the time it took you to just say that to me, five kids in Gaza were just murdered,” he said. Rafah, on the southern tip of Gaza, recently became the most densely populated city on earth, holding an estimated 1.5 million civilians packed into an area barely larger than Providence. It is currently under airstrike by Israeli forces, despite being labeled a “safe zone” from the bombing, and extolled as a point of refuge for civilians evacuating from northern Gaza. The death toll in Gaza continues to mount and Israel has left nowhere for civilians to go. While a humanitarian crisis unfolds across the sea, Brown students refuse to be silent in condemning our university for its complicity. SOFIA BARNETT B’25, KEELIN GAUGHAN B’25, and ASHTON HIGGINS B’26 will not let Brown
silence student voices on campus while touting their activism in admissions brochures.
VISCERA
Ink on Paper
DAMISA (SAI) VANASWAS R’24
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Border Angels, Geo-Poetics, and Motorolas The Transborder Immigrant Tool as Performance Technology and Disturbance c Since the annexation of northern Mexico and signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Mexicans and nuevomexicanos alike have battled violent border politics and exclusionary nationalism in the United States. Dispossessed of their natural land and made to forfeit their geographic citizenship under American governance, folks crossing what we know today as the US-Mexico border do so for economic opportunity, educational attainment, and/or familial (re)unification. In this pursuit, northbound migrants confront the deadliest land conditions in the world, with militant supervision technologies and detention strategies that are progressively fortified by policy each year. In fact, in 2021, encounters, expulsions, and attainments of immigrants from Mexico were at their highest in history, and in 2022 alone, nearly 700 deaths and disappearances were recorded along the border. While these measurements can concretize the hardships of “border-crossing” through catalogs and directories and numbered reports, it’s the stories and tactics of such travelers that render the carceral reality of the borderlands legible. Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Mexico’s northernmost cartels work intimately with punitive laws and organized artillery to eliminate safer points of entry and, subsequently, repress the narratives of this militarized control over the frontier that force migrants to pursue uncharted terrains with little to no direction. The borderlands exist as a disappearing mechanism, a liminal space weaponized by the US imperial machine to disorient and erase the “illegals” coming into our precious country, along with their testimonies. As a result of this dynamic, community-led organizations on both sides of America’s southwest boundary, have emerged to reduce such state-sanctioned obstacles and address the migrant journey as a humanized experience. For example, the Border Angels, a nonprofit based in San Diego, tackles immigration reform from the bottom up. They engage in “water drops,” leaving liters of clean water and canned food throughout the borderlands, as well as conducting outreach to day laborers and managing a bond fund program for those detained by ICE. Cultivating an infrastructure of en-route harm reduction services in tandem with ad-hoc interventions for various encounters with the state, such boots-on-the-ground initiatives echo the values of care that are ingrained in Mexican communities, but do not necessarily bridge the gaps in finding such resources to begin with. As such, contemporary cross-border wayfinding strategies build on the techniques of indigenous predecessors, and carve new paths through the innovation of native surroundings. The barrel cactus, for instance, has historically been used as a signifier of direction. Sun-bent and south-leaning, migrants and Indigenous travelers have leveraged this piece of the desert ecosystem to keep them from losing their orientation during their expeditions. It slouches toward the motherland and away from the breadth of the American landscape performing a natural identification of ‘home’ against the centrifugal force of transnational opportunity. And while Border Angels, the barrel cactus, and other means of localized migrant aid have supported thousands in their trek out of the north end of Mexico, the modern immigration climate—characterized by heightened surveillance and circuitous relationships between land and policy—has grown to demand new navigational technologies that work to resist the state by manufacturing safety and reclaiming spatial sensibility among those deemed alien.
( TEXT ANGELINA RIOS-GALINDO DESIGN EIFFEL SUNGA ILLUSTRATION ANGELA XU ) intervention, Dominguez and his peers created an unprecedented model for artists, activists, and the oppressed to confront injustices extracorporeally. Less than 10 years before the development of the TBT, for example, the Mexican government orchestrated an attack on a Catholic church in Chiapas—known today as the Acteal Massacre—leaving 45 people dead and a community in shambles. In April of 1998, the EDT 2.0 successfully occupied the government’s servers through the use of an app called FloodNet, in the name of centering the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the voices that resisted the paramilitary state that made the massacre possible. In doing this, the EDT team programmed the FloodNet error messaging systems so that broken URL requests would bounce back to the administrators of the website when protesters gathered in the domain. The broken requests, though, displayed only a list of the names of all 45 victims in the attack—and when the site inevitably crashed from heavy protester-dominated traffic, the repeated flash of the 45 names embodied each of the victims in a digital-spiritual performance. Unlike the nature of these virtual sit-ins which aimed to uproot political and economic repression through digitally locating physically disconnected bodies for the sake of visibility, the Transborder Immigrant Tool aimed to uproot such repression by dislocating the digital contingencies of physical movement for the sake of navigational safety. Ultimately, however, the cultivation of these artistic-political-performance technologies in public space—no matter how peripheral or seemingly isolated—allowed for preventative measures to take shape. So, while the EDT successfully saturated the Mexican government’s feed with reminders of the lives that they drew in cold blood, the legibility of their tactics informed a counter-attack program that would override FloodNet in the future. Having assumed control over most of the informal economy and establishing themselves as border surveillance powerhouses, the Narcos of the North engaged in a similar dismantling of the TBT as a burgeoning means of resistance. They shot down anyone and anything that might raise eyebrows among American patrol agents, making the geo-political landscape of the borderlands too dangerous for the device to circulate. Still, although it could not realize its full potential as a practical navigational technology, the Transborder Immigrant Tool materialized the artistic views of the EDT collective and engaged in a wider examination of bordering through the reframing of necessity, citizenship, and optical sensibility. For the EDT 2.0 and b.a.n.g. collaborators, the goal was to dissolve the US-Mexico border completely— to transcend its inertia as a force of surveillance by asking “what is sustenance under the sign of ‘globalization-is-borderization,’ and what are its aesthetics?” And to answer, they built poetry into the device’s geographic mechanics.
**** In 2007, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) emerged from the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 (EDT 2.0) and bits.atoms.neurons.genes (b.a.n.g.) labs of UC San Diego as a positioning device intended for distribution among potential immigrants from Mexico. Fashioned from used, low-cost Motorola phones, Professor Ricardo Dominguez and a team of artists developed the TBT as a “safety net” to be programmed with the locations of several helpful resources throughout the southwest borderlands and directional information to help migrants find them. Included in the code were coordinates of drinking water caches put in place by Border Angels and other NGOs, addresses of “sympathetic Quakers” willing to take them in, and points for the general demarcation of highway networks. The TBT, however, was not a technology that could map immigrants straight from one side of the border to the other. Rather, it was a compass: a way of keeping folks acquainted with the path of their movements so as not to lose themselves in transnational choreography. By returning these pseudo-tracking abilities to migrants even in the face of systematic disorientation, the TBT worked to disrupt common narratives of Mexican immigrants as aimless “invaders,” and in turn paralleled the broader missions of the EDT 2.0 and b.a.n.g. labs as agents of civil, technological disturbance. Drawing from tactics of unified protest, street performance, and Tommaso Tozzi’s “hacktivism,” the Electronic Disturbance Theater theorized digital guerilla perturbation as a form of nonviolent resistance that bolstered accessibility and subverted the bounds of physical proximity. Through demonstrations like “virtual sit-ins” and the commandeering of online traffic for the sake of social
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es choic e . The you mak P O T n S o w r no he from tate whet ic . ie will d d ve or you li -6
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**** Pioneered by writer and scholar Amy Sara Carroll, the TBT was formulated to share poems among its recipients in addition to points of navigation, meant to nourish the soul much as the water barrels nourished their bodies. These poems contained words of resilience and surfaced the ancestral hull of the physical landscape, later translated into several languages and read aloud to be stored as recordings. By theorizing poetry as a terrestrial bloodline, beyond the body and beyond national citizenship, the Transborder Immigrant Tool worked to reconcile panoptic structures of migratory subjugation with the demands of a day-by-day journey. In the quest for belonging—to a land, to a people, to a political system—immigrants are barred from the tools necessary to get them there, and the TBT’s poetic imagination took shape as a guiding grace both spatially and spiritually. Infiltrating the relationship between land, art, and passage, the TBT formulated its script by situating the conditions of the terrain against anticipated feelings of loss, longing, and hopelessness. Carroll articulated messages that would bring migrants encouragement, and remind them of the indigenous navigators that preceded them on the very same land. Cholla, or jumping cactus, attaches. A bud of spines breaks off at the slightest hint of touch. Remove cholla from your skin and clothing in increments, with a rock, a stick, a knife: the bud… large spines left behind…small spines or glochids. Needling needles that remain will work themselves out in the days ahead. Exploring the cholla as a weathering instrument, this poem iterates the wear of transborder movement on the bodies, identities, and minds of Mexican immigrants. The threat of puncturing glochids at the “slightest hint of touch” evokes the palpable vulnerability of those traveling through the borderlands, and calling upon “a rock, a stick, [or] a knife” to remove them reflects their land-based resourcefulness that has historically been synonymized with primitivity. Point by point, bit by bit, immigrants—and the tools they possess—confront loss of agency as one of the few certainties of migration. Assuring that the “needles that remain will work themselves out in the days ahead,” Carroll attempts to ease the immensity of the pilgrimage by crafting a tangible comfort in immediacy, just as the TBT does with its compassing abilities. Reconceptualizing the traditional understanding of “GPS” from a global positioning system to this sort of “geo-poetic system,” the Transborder Immigrant Tool examined poetry as a right rather than a luxury, technology as empathy, and an expansion of citizenship in the face of spatial warfare. The poems themselves existed as live, transient bytes of disturbance art and performance—they could be repeated, written down, and carried with these migrating travelers on the rest of their journey, disrupting the monotony of spatial-political deference and concretizing the EDT 2.0’s artist-activist ambition. **** In his time as a researcher and co-founding member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, Dominguez examined the line between art and activism, and investigated performance as a mitigating medium.
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Frequently lumped together as individuals or collectives with shared goals of creating social change, he posits that the difference between an “artist” and an “activist” is in the way that they are criminalized. Activists, on the one hand, are those who address social injustices directly, who blatantly attack our political systems and governmental infrastructures through the movement of bodies and creation of inflammatory rhetoric. Artists, however, can leave their work up for interpretation, their work acting as a return to a blank canvas for consumers to project thoughts and ideologies onto. Under this framework, it is because the TBT both raised a system of poetics as part of its primary function and did not explicitly create cross-border routes for migrants to follow that the founding team was able to retain its position as a group of artists, rather than law-breaking immigrant sympathizers. That is, where the lab members would otherwise be considered fervent, radical, anti-American activists attempting to bring Mexicans into the US illegally, reframing the Transborder Immigrant Tool as a piece of art that was just programmed with the ability to find nearby resources kept the anti-immigrant masses at bay. By both intentionally limiting the technological prowess of the TBT and centering an abstract intervention like poetry, the EDT was able to bolster palatability and even potentially generate buy-in. For most right-wing Americans in the Bush era, a tool that would chart the borderlands for incoming Mexicans was mechanized heresy…but a device that just sent them some poetry? There wasn’t much to lose. And for many immigrants, the promise of a golden compass would have seemed too good to be true…but a phone that could help them find water? It was a godsend that could solve their urgent concerns without commandeering their entire route. Carving a space for the TBT in the debate surrounding artist and activist responsibility, the EDT collective developed several dimensions that worked both together and alongside each other for the sake of making the right hardware visible to the right people. At the same time, though, such deliberate inhibitions lended themselves to a critique of the Transborder Immigrant Tool as a somewhat self-preserving vehicle of both language and direction. If the potential for full geographic stewardship was compromised, who was it really created to please? To this end, the TBT’s reliance on proximity and abstraction reduce its potency. The phone would alert migrants when they were in close reach of the big blue barrels labeled “AGUA” with sounds reminiscent of a metal detector, and loose instructions with vague safety reminders, including messages like: STOP. The choices from now on you make will dictate whether you live or die. and Call 9-1-1 or 0-6-6 beforehand. But by using such riddle-ish prompts and somewhat rudimentary pointing strategies, the TBT reproduced some of the frustrations of misdirection that it intended to defeat in the first place. “You’re getting warmer” politics muddied by a facade of moderacy, fabricated audio landscapes, and restrained routing mechanisms worked together to, in many ways, push migrants in the right direction, but in many other ways, breed disillusionment among those already spread thin. The advice of “Call[ing] 9-1-1 or 0-6-6,” though well-intentioned, ignored the punitive carceral scope of the borderlands that migrants risked everything to evade, and reminding them that they have such little jurisdiction over “whether [they] live or die” reinforced the sticks-andcarrots—punishment-and-reward—complex of the American geo-nationalist state. **** Despite these calculated and, in some ways, frustrating limitations of the device as a pseudo-navigator, the EDT 2.0 was not immune from media retaliation and right-wing criticism. In fact, Fox News ran several stories on the TBT that incited campaigns of hate mail—one such letter, sent to the team from Leonard behind yourworstnightmare444@yahoo.com, read as follows:
Hopefully, you traitors will be shot in the back of your heads when you least expect it. Isn’t it great that you’re relying upon the tax money of Americans to destroy America. Nearly all illegals from Mexico and Central America are NOT Spanish Europeans, but indigenous morons who never invented the wheel. FUCK YOU! It was this sort of reception that motivated the mission of the EDT 2.0 and the Transborder Immigrant Tool as “disturbance art,” more than just a GPS tool. It inverted the landscapes of immigration, both physical and political, to complicate notions of belonging through the prism of innovation and self-determination. Having built the device from foundations of indigenous land-based navigation practices and revolutionary virtual protest tactics, the response from such agitated critics re-articulated the need for a tool like the TBT in the first place—to combat perceptions of Mexicans and other migrants as seditious, parasitic vagabonds in the suburbs of uncivilization. **** The Transborder Immigrant Tool was born from a desire to “dislocate” common locative media strategies and circumvent virtual policing tactics while remaining low-cost and flexible. Crucial to the (albeit somewhat asphyxiated) success of the device itself was the “geo-aesthetic sensibility” that underlined its execution as a performance technology. That is, the EDT 2.0 and b.a.n.g. lab innovators took each facet of the Mexican-American immigrant experience for what it was. At the crux of nationalist laments and a pending economic crisis, the “land of the free” that beckoned to migrants at the time was one that painted them as leeches—criminals to be surveilled. The TBT flipped national surveillance technology on its head, pointing immigrants to immediate temporary safety and keeping a tool in their pockets as they traversed the borderlands in stride. At the same time, by reframing the immigrant struggle as one of fulfilling basic human needs rather than one of transient national identity, the EDT 2.0 and b.a.n.g. labs were able to challenge the bounds of geographic practicality under the framework of performance technology and appease the critical masses, almost by tricking them into telling on themselves. Dominguez, upon reflection of the project, explains that “while TBT did not achieve its imagined goal, the gesture created a series of calls and responses resonating on a global scale, which may yet bloom in the desert of the real.” Just as means of surveillant repression continue to evolve from the American imperial project, memories of systemic erasure continue to motivate innovation from the transient south—and when combined with the legacies of spatial-political inventions like that of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, make way for land-based steering mechanisms to take heed in the future. ANGELINA RIOS-GALINDO B’25 wishes
the wind could tell you where to go.
Choll a, A bud or jumpin g of sp ines b cactus, a sligh tt test h int of reaks off a aches. choll touch t af . Rem the in inc rom your ove sk re a knif ments, wit in and clo th e: h behin the bud… a rock, a ing s d…s mall s large spin tick, es pines or glo left c hids. Need
lin Need g le work s that rem th a in the emselves in will days o ahea ut d.
DEAR INDY
Hump Day: Love, capitalism, and Indie wants to be asked out c Joanna Walsh admits in a chapter of Break.up: “I’m not sure how to begin to make art of love.” Which is precisely how I feel right now, trying to keep up my streak as America’s top advice columnist. And I know that my credibility on the subject of “Valentine’s Day” could be questioned—were an investigation to begin. Indeed, my most memorable Valentine’s encounters come from high school, where every year I received a CandyGram from a Latin teacher who correctly guessed that the Venn diagram of kids who didn’t get Valentine’s, and kids who took Latin, was pretty much a circle.
Capitalism, for one. It’s easy to dismiss Valentine’s as just another ploy designed to convert everyone’s love language to “gift-giving”— expensive gift-giving, preferably. Indeed, Future bemoans in his song “Worst Day”: “Valentine’s Day, the worst day, got too many to please / Spent over a hunnid Gs and she still wasn’t pleased.” Even Future, it seems, can’t keep up.
But now that I’m out of high school, I’ve left Latin and parasocial relationships with teachers (mostly…) behind, and I’m ready to approach Valentine’s with a fresh gaze. Figurative binoculars in hand, I find myself wondering what Valentine’s Day looks like on campus. Put otherwise: what form does romance take in a place that seems entirely hostile to it? Alas, is romance even the right word for the strange mating rituals I’ve witnessed? Couples are seen heading to underwhelming dinners at Massimo and sardining in twin beds, singles seem to be studying flirting in theory but not in praxis, and those in-between people appear to be having a straight-up terrible time. I know I’m supposed to love love, but I don’t love what I’m seeing. So what the fuck should we make of the day?
But while I can see that Valentine’s Day doesn’t inherently hold more romance than any other day in the week, I still think it’s a day that makes us terrifyingly aware of romance and its potential (or lack thereof) in our lives. Who was that guy you made lingering eye contact with on the steps? Did it mean something? Did you match with that girl on Hinge, or are you hallucinating? Could you see yourself marrying her? Who’s the beautiful, mysterious, funny, etc., girl who writes Dear Indy, and how can you ask her out? Will you find love with her? Is love even real?
Or maybe Valentine’s means nothing at all— so here’s bingo. Have fun!
( TEXT SOLVEIG ASPLUND DESIGN OLLANTAY AVILA )
Float an open relationship.
Find out if that couple from high school is still together.
They are.
Grab somebody sexy, tell them HEY
Barry Keoghan is hot!
Pick at a scab (literal).
Pick at a scab (figurative).
Engage in unethical nonmonogamy.
Try the third Bajas.
Text your ex.
Reconsider heterosexuality.
Try to find a good photo of your ugly boyfriend.
Confess your undying love to Indie.
Break up with your long distance partner... it’s time.
Check in with yourself about a threesome. Is it time?
Mark your territory.
Pursue platonic cuddling :)
Take a mysterious walk...
Try a new position (sexual).
Try a new position (political).
Hump day haha.
Entertain a reality in which you are not emotionally closed off.
Go to Philly.
Agree to gentrify move to Queens together.
Get them back.
VOLUME 48 ISSUE 02
19
BULLETIN
The Bulletin 02 /16 / 2024 Upcoming Actions & Community Events Friday 2/16 @9PM-11PM Location: Nelson Fitness Center
Gender Inclusive Swim Join The LGBTQ Center for a safe and exciting swim party for the transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse community! This event will take place after business hours and will not be open to the public, so please check in with the front desk staff when you arrive. Wear whatever you feel comfortable in, and don’t forget to RSVP in the Instagram bio of @the.lgbtq.center for a chance to win a beach towel! Saturday 2/17 @8PM-10PM Location: BankNewport City Center
Le Patin Libre Join the contemporary figure skating group from Montreal, Le Patin Libre, as they showcase a dazzling new routine! There will also be a hot chocolate bar and an ice-skating dance party after the performance! More information can be found at https://www.lepatinlibre.com Saturday 2/24 @10AM-1PM Location: Virtual (registration link in Instagram bio of @sistafireri)
All of Us: Queer and Trans Liberation as Collective Liberation Calling all SISTA Fire members to tune in to this political education workshop hosted by Dana Pederson and Roan Boucher of AORTA! This virtual workshop will explore how anti-trans violence perpetuates harm against all communities of color, as well as moving towards racial and reproductive justice through queer and trans liberation. Saturday 2/24 @8PM-2AM Location: 50 Sims Avenue, Providence, RI
Sour Hearts Ball
( TEXT EMILIE GUAN & RL WHEELER DESIGN ANDREW LIU
Arts Location: 1155 Westminster St, Providence, RI
Rolling: Tuft x PVD Workshops Tuft X PVD is a Black-owned tufting studio, where you can participate in workshops to learn how to make rugs with yarn and a tufting machine. Open to people of all levels, possible designs exhibited on the website range from tigers to juice boxes and everything in between. We recommend booking as soon as you are interested, as workshop slots fill up quickly! Friday 2/23 Location: 240 Westminster St, Providence, RI
The Open Book Tour Come watch 19-year-old singer-songwriter Simone Lipkin perform at bookstores across the country, including Providence’s very own Symposium Books! For a sneak peak, you can listen to her indie pop albums Songs for Depressed Girls and Love Lessons as well as a range of singles on streaming platforms like Spotify. Sunday 2/18 @5PM-8PM Location: 27 Sims Avenue, 2nd floor, Providence, RI 02909
2nd Volume of Shop Hours: A Streetwear Pop-Up Come grab some food and peruse clothes, accessories, and art this weekend at African and Latina-owned arts organization, Public Shop and Gallery. Participating small brands include City Born Kings and Mind Matters Co. Make sure to RSVP and stop by (it’s free)! Saturday 2/24 @4PM-7PM Location: 423 West Fountain Street and 425 West Fountain Street Parking Lot
West End Lights West End Lights is an annual festival run by West Broadway Neighborhood Association. Other participating organizations include Haus of Codec, Moniker Brewery, Urban Greens Co-Op Market, and The Providence Drum Troupe. Stroll through the marketplace, grab a drink, and enjoy some musical performances!
No Valentine this year? No problem! Come dance your broken heart out next Saturday at Planeta PVD, a queer dancing space. Start off the night with some Queeraoke and then dance to music mixed by DJ Lunática, DJ Atlás, and DJ Jamila Afrika. Masks are encouraged and you can grab one when you arrive. Thursday 2/29 @5PM-8PM: Location: 166 Valley Street, Building 6M, Providence, RI
Gallery Night Providence Kickoff and Fundraiser Join Gallery Night Providence for their 2024 kickoff and fundraiser event—the evening will include live music, Jamaican food by JaPatty, puzzle-making, tarot reading, guided origami demonstrations, raffles, and more! There is a $25 suggested donation, which includes a dessert and soft drink voucher, and all ages are welcome! You can register in the bio of @gallerynightprovidence, but you can also show up the night of.
Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers *Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.
Open Doors RI Donation link: https://opendoorsri.org/donate Petition link: linked in Instagram bio of @opendoors_ri
Read about Shanelle Saraceno, who is currently pregnant and unhoused, in The Providence Journal’s article on homelessness in Rhode Island. Please sign the petition below to urge the governor to invest in more winter emergency shelters, and you can donate to Shanelle specifically by writing “Shanelle” when you donate at the link below. Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!
20
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
FEATURE:
Brown Hunger Strike During the week leading up to the Brown University Corporation meetings, 17 undergraduate and graduate students went on a hunger strike from February 2 through February 9. Their demand was that the Corporation listen to protestors and add divestment to the agenda, which the Corporation refused to do. Thus, the students continued their strike until the day of the meetings. During events throughout the week, students, faculty, and alumni leaned on community resiliency through teach-ins, art builds, live music performances, poetry readings, and more. On the seventh day of the hunger strike, there was a 15-minute die-out on the Main Green and regular rallies, including a Labor for Palestine rally, where GLO announced its campaign for divestment and Brown Center for Students of Color workers announced their plan to unionize in the face of the Center’s prior repression of pro-Palestine voices. More than 200 students joined a solidarity fast with the hunger strikers on Thursday morning until the Corporation meetings ended on Friday afternoon. On Friday, they followed Corporation members as they switched meeting venues multiple times to evade the hunger strikers and protestors demanding that the Brown Corporation receive the updated ACCRIP report and discuss divestment in their meeting. Despite the Corporation not meeting these demands, members and supporters of the strike are committed to keep fighting for divestment.
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