The College Hill Independent — Vol. 48 Issue 1

February 09 2024 Volume 48 Issue 01

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FALSE SAFETIES, FALSE MESSIAHS

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A WARNING (GREATER EMPIRES HAVE FALLEN)

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HUNGER STRIKE FOR PALESTINE

THE STEADFAST ISSUE

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

48 01

MANAGING EDITORS

DESIGN EDITORS

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Angela Lian Arman Deendar Kolya Shields

Andrew Liu Ollantay Avila Ash Ma

01 (STEADFAST)

WEEK IN REVIEW

DESIGNERS COVER COORDINATORS Anahis Luna

03 THIS WEEK IN WAVES

ARTS

02.09

Waleed Mustafa

Cecilia Barron & Yoni Weil

04 FALSE SAFETIES, FALSE MESSIAHS Coby Mulliken

06 IN YOUR BED Liliana Greyf

08 THE DEATH OF THE INSTRUMENT Maya Avelino

10 PINCHE ROQUERO David Felipe

11 AUTO-MOON PROJECTOR Sylvie Bartusek

Cecilia Barron Yoni Weil Dri de Faria George Nickoll Linnea Hult EPHEMERA

Colin Orihuela Quinn Erickson FEATURES

Luca Suarez Paulina Gąsiorowska Plum Luard LITERARY

Jane Wang Madeline Canfield METRO

Ashton Higgins Keelin Gaughan Sofia Barnett SCIENCE + TECH

Christina Peng Daniel Zheng Jolie Barnard

12 ON MODERN (FILMMAKING) WOMEN

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13 A WARNING (GREATER EMPIRES FALLEN)

X

Dri de Faria

Theodore Roe

14 HUNGER STRIKE FOR PALESTINE Sofia Barnett, Keelin Gaughan & Ashton Higgins

17 DOLLHOUSE

Claire Chasse, Joshua Koolik & Lola Simon

18 INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE Beatrice Hoang

19 DEAR INDY Solveig Asplund

20 BULLETIN

RL Wheeler & Emilie Guan

FROM THE EDITORS The cover for the first issue of Volume 48 reads ‫نودماص‬, or “samidoun” : we are steadfast. ‫ نودماص‬refers to the rootedness of Palestinians to their native land and to constant, active resistance against Israeli occupation and apartheid.

We (AKA) are 48th in a long line of MEs serving brief five-month terms; we, too, are soon due to leave the Indy, one after the other: this year, then the next, and the next. What hasn’t changed, at least in the past 8 years, is our mission statement. Its current incarnation was created on a four-page Google Doc in 2016 titled “because maybe the indy should have a mission statement?” We concur, if only because any group of students gathering weekly to publish a paper is carrying out a mission, whether or not they acknowledge it.

With this in mind, the Indy stands, steadfast, alongside Palestinian students and their co-strugglers fighting for Palestinian liberation and calling for the immediate divestment of Brown’s endowment from companies profiting from Israeli genocide.

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Masthead*

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Ana Furtado James Langan Tanvi Anand

Julia Cheng Sylvie Bartusek

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

Anji Friedbauer Audrey He Avery Liu Ayla Tosun Becca Martin-Welp Ilan Brusso Lila Rosen Naile Ozpolat Samantha Ho Yuna Shprecher

SCHEMA

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Claire Chasse Joshua Koolik Lola Simon DEAR INDY

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

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, consciousness-raising 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, antiracist, 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

This Week in

c The Indy’s friends at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency have announced their plans in the mid-2030s to adopt a plan to launch their plan for the first space-based gravitational wave detector. We had our two local opinion columnists weigh in on what this would mean for the Indy readership, since, of course, space affects us all one way or another, whether we know it or not..

Yuri Weasel, bricklayer and Indy columnist A dear friend asked me the other day, pausing between drags of lamb broth, “Yuri, what’s your sign?” And while I told him that I don’t really follow astrology, and that he had a little something on his shirt, I offered instead that I do know a thing or two about astronomy. Then I asked if he had seen the recent news out of Europe. After trying to explain for some time why I was so baffled by his ignorance, I came to the sickening realization that I was the weird one for giving so much excited attention to the news out of Europe that he (like so many others, apparently) had missed. The news, as my astronomically-inclined readers will surely have heard by now, is that ESA said yes to LISA. That is, the European Space Agency has approved The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. That’s right. You read that right. (If you’re at all like me, I recommend checking now for appointments at your local emergency room, because beaming smiles lasting longer than four hours are in fact quite dangerous.)

For you Earth-lovers in my readership, let me explain. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which my friends over at ESA tell me should be up in the air in about eleven years, will be, to put it lightly, the crème de la crème and best-ever instrument for measuring gravitational waves in space.

So far, all experimental research on gravitational waves has been conducted on Earth, but these folks are gonna do it in space. And if that weren’t

enough, not only are they sending up one perfect, dazzling little cube made of gold and platinum to sense the wonders of the universe, they’re going to send three. And they’re all going to work together by measuring the distance between themselves using lasers! The three satellites are to orbit the sun in an equilateral triangle, each one 2.5 million kilometers from the other two. Despite this mind-boggling distance, they will be able to sense changes in the distance between each other with a sensitivity of one trillionth of a meter using their handy lasers.

If that’s not sensitive, I don’t know what is.

I recognize that this news means a lot for folks like me—folks whose families have deep ties to the laser industry and can profit handsomely from this project—but also for anyone with a stake in the survival of humanity. That is, the only way out of this dump we call Earth is sadly going to be via the cruel vacuum of space, and hopefully, we will be lucky enough to stumble upon a new home planet. In my estimation, harnessing the power of gravitational waves is just about our only way out, because Lord knows those ordinary rocket ships don’t have enough room for every Tom, Dick, and Jane who fancies a spot. I hope that one day we can find a way to transport all humankind through space, groovily surfing on a massive gravitational wave until we can wipe out on a new home. I am easily convinced that LISA is a bold step in the right direction, and I am literally so excited.

Clarissa Beerman, insurance agent and Indy columnist While I take my colleague Mr. Weasel seriously, it’s the duty of any local opinion columnist to be intensely paranoid. And LISA is freaking me out. I mean, first off, it’s in space, which is highly irregular—most things aren’t. Or maybe most things are, which is even worse, and not worth thinking about. What’s so wrong with measuring

gravitational waves down here on Earth where, ahem, gravity is actually real? The last time I heard about shooting lasers up in space, it didn’t end so well for some of the people involved (I haven’t watched the movies in a while). And on top of all that, it’s going to be a triangle, a triangle of 2.70633 x 10^12 kilometers, hanging above us. Has anyone considered whether that’s even going to fit up there?

Yuri is a good friend of mine, and this is something we’ve disagreed about plenty of times. “Not all development is good, Yuri,” I will say, as he eats his lamb tartare. He’ll tell me I’m not dreaming big enough. But we do agree on one thing: we gotta get out of here. Though his family got their money through laser beams, and my family descended from Sir Isaac Newton’s bastard child, this planet of ours is not worth figuring out. The water is changing, the temperature is not stable, the economy is in a condition, and the French are going insane. But while Yuri looks to the stars for a solution, I look to the ground. What’s going on in there? Surely, there’s gotta be some space for us. Have the ESA, with their pastries and fake French accents, considered shooting some lights down into the netherworld and measuring what waves are happening there?

I’m not against the future, I’m just really scared of it. And I think it’s best, for us and our readers, to exhaust literally all other possibilities before accepting the plans to adopt these plans for LISA. Maybe if LISA had a better name I’d be more inclined to accept her arrival in the coming decade. But I mean LISA?? What is this, 1994? And on top of that, she’s gonna be European. A European Lisa. Great.

CB ‘24 wants a Milky Way and YW ‘24 wants two.

( TEXT YONI WEIL CECILIA BARRON DESIGN TANYA QU ILLUSTRATION SOFIA SCHRIEBER ) VOLUME 48 ISSUE 01

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FALSE SAFETIES, FALSE MESSIAHS Zionism’s eternal end times

( TEXT COBY MULLIKEN DESIGN NADA RODANANT ILLUSTRATION LUNA TOBAR ) c “Folks, were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe,” said President Biden at a White House Hanukkah reception last December. The sentiment is an ominous one. Should I, a Jew living in the United States, want the President to condition my well-being on the survival of a state across the globe? Should American Jews not ask the country in which they live to guarantee their safety, whether or not Israel exists?

To contemporary Zionists, these questions are naïve. As answered by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founder and inaugural Prime Minister, “History has proved that we cannot survive as individuals.”

In a perverse way, he was right: the United States, despite organizing the 1938 Évian Conference for the aid of German Jews, denied the asylum applications of the vast majority of Jewish refugees during World War II. In the wake of the Holocaust, the United States-led coalition rehabilitated Nazi officials to lead the new West German state. Still, Ben-Gurion’s logic is flawed; in creating a false binary between a genocidal colonial accelerationism and a doomed, atomized diaspora, it endangers the lives of both Jews and Palestinians.

How? Consider Palestine in the 1940s—a British colony, three-fourths Palestinian Arab, and the site of mass Jewish immigration since the late 19th century. Though the 1917 Balfour Declaration had made explicit Britain’s intention to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, many Zionists thought Britain’s schedule too slow. And so, in late 1940, the Zionist self-proclaimed terrorist group Lehi sent an emissary to Beirut with a dossier and a mission: contact Otto von Hentig, an officer of Germany’s Foreign Office, and establish an alliance between Lehi and the Nazi government in Berlin. Though Hentig, an admirer of the Zionist project, agreed to pass the documents on to the German ambassador in Ankara, the Berlin office never responded.

Still, Lehi would not stop trying for détente.

Even in 1943, when the scale of slaughter of European Jewry was well-known in Palestine, Lehi (led since 1942 by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir) insisted that an alliance with Germany was preferable to British rule. The preference was more than practical; the group— founded by the quasi-Messianic figure Avraham Stern—advocated a mix of maximalist nationalism, fascism, and anti-imperialism (compiled in Stern’s leaflet Principles of Revival) that, in his mind, complemented Hitler’s national socialism.

Stern’s project was not just political, but also eschatological—that is, he wanted not just to expel the Palestinians and establish a Jewish state, but also to wage holy war and bring about the end times. Mirroring the classical Jewish prophecy of a Messianic Era coincident with the reconstruction of a Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—today the site of the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine—the last of Stern’s 18 Principles of Revival called for a new Temple “as a symbol of the new era of total redemption.” There was to be a “total in-gathering of the

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

exiles [Jews in diaspora] to their sovereign state.”

Though Stern stood at the far-right of the Zionist camp, his ideas about redemption and the diaspora were widespread. In a 1938 address to his left-wing party Mapai, Ben-Gurion declared that he would rather bring only half of Germany’s Jews to Palestine than send all of them to Great Britain, “for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.” Zionism was, in Ben-Gurion’s words, “not for individual redress, but for the deliverance of the people as a whole.” This line of thinking posed a direct threat to the Jews who were actually being slaughtered in Europe; if all that mattered was “historical reckoning,” then the fate of European Jews mattered only insofar as they could advance the Zionist project.

At Évian, Ben-Gurion, fearing that the migration of Jews to safer countries might hamper Zionism’s colonial aims in Palestine, urged his colleagues at the Jewish Agency to “be silent.” In regards to non-Zionist solutions to the peril of European Jews—“equal rights, emigration, … socialism”—Ben-Gurion considered them “witch-doctor’s medicine.” To

Ben-Gurion, a crisis in the diaspora—indeed one so world-ending as the Holocaust—while not necessarily desirable, might force Western powers to accept an accelerated colonization of Palestine. The world’s failure to protect European Jews was, in some sense, his desired outcome. +++ Stern’s messianic ambitions had deep historical roots. Nearly two thousand years prior, in the aftermath of the deadly First Jewish-Roman War, Simon Bar Kokhba, a Jew from the Hebron Hills, began a rebellion. His was different from earlier Jewish revolts; Bar Kokhba considered himself not just nasi—prince of the Jews—but mashiach—the messiah. Legitimized by the endorsement of Rabbi Akiva, a leading Jewish scholar, Bar Kokhba declared that the end times had come and that the redemption of Israel was at hand. He embarked on a project of national renewal: Hebrew was to be revived as the language of the state and Jews who denied Bar Kokhba’s

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eschatological claims were to be punished severely.

There was to be no debate: the end times were here.

After three years of bitter fighting, Bar Kokhba’s revolt floundered. Roman emperor Hadrian’s armies forced Bar Kokhba into the walled town of Betar, where, according to Jewish tradition, he was killed on Tisha B’Av—a Jewish fast day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples.

The first war’s destruction paled in comparison to that of the second; the region’s Jewish population was decimated and entered a centuries-long period of political decline. Jews would be forbidden from entering the rebuilt Roman Jerusalem. In light of Bar Kokhba’s failure, rabbinical authorities stripped Jewish Messianism of its literalism; the danger of another false messiah was too great. When, over a thousand years later, a similar Messianic movement emerged among Yemenite Jews, eminent Jewish scholar Maimonides would recall Bar Kokhba’s revolt to discourage the Yemenites from repeating his errors. Maimonides’ plea was successful; the messiah-to-be lost legitimacy, and—after Maimonides convinced Egyptian sultan Saladin to intervene— the persecution of Yemeni Jews would cease.

And yet, over the past century and a half, the Zionist project has rehabilitated Bar Kokhba from a tragic hero into a model. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s rightwing youth movement Betar took its name from the site of Bar Kokhba’s death, and Ben-Gurion took his name from one of Bar Kokhba’s generals. Israeli first grade textbooks regale children with stories of Bar Kokhba’s heroism, including an anecdote in which he rides a lion into battle.

In adopting Bar Kokhba’s legacy, Zionists claim continuity with a long history of eschatological self-justification. When, in 1960, Israeli archeologist Yigael Yadin presented Ben-Gurion with papyri dating to Bar Kokhba’s revolt, he declared, “We have discovered…dispatches…by the last President of ancient Israel.” He was, in essence, letting Ben-Gurion step into Bar Kokhba’s throne.

Perhaps it is understandable that Bar Kokhba is today so popular among Zionist leaders. He typifies a certain nationalism that, in the words of former Yad Vashem historian Yehuda Bauer, “turns not only against the Palestinians, but against non-Jews generally and, with increasing vehemence, against non-orthodox…Jews as well.” After all, Zionism’s accusations of disloyalty on the part of non-Zionist Jews—or antisemitism on the part of Palestinians— lack salience without the urgency provided by impending doom. Following Bar Kokhba’s eschatological template, the choice becomes simple: either you are with us and have everything to gain, or are against us and have everything to lose. +++ Liberatory projects can exist—have existed— outside the Zionist tradition. An oft-cited example is the early 20th-century General Jewish Labour Bund, which organized Eastern European Jewry and called for Jewish autonomy in the countries in which they lived. Of course, there are problems with blindly embracing doikayt—“hereness” in Yiddish—as a model for today’s Jewish left; Jewish life in Europe was precarious, and life in America is not some moral escape: the United States owes its existence to centuries of dispossession of Native peoples.

There is, however, something equally suspect in pretending that “Jewish safety” is achievable solely through the dispossession of the Palestinian people—indeed through the establishment of a homeland on the very model of those states which

made, in the first place, such “safety” impossible.

From Spain’s expulsion of Jews in 1492 to Eastern Europe’s pogroms to Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, the history of the modern European state is intimately tied to the history of the persecution of Jews. In his book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, David Nirenberg goes even further and argues that Judaism constitutes the “other” against which “the Western tradition” is constructed; that is, “the West” owes its cohesion, in some sense, to its opposition to Judaism. At first glance, Nirenberg’s analysis implies an impossibility to Jewish coexistence in Europe; if Western cultural and political traditions are foundationally anti-Jewish, shouldn’t Jews explore political alternatives, Zionist or otherwise? In framing their project as a necessary departure from the horrors of Jewish life in diaspora, Zionists both employ eschatological histories—that is, the Holocaust as an apocalyptic beginning to the liberation of the Jewish people—and render them anew.

This departure sits uncomfortably with the fact that Israel explicitly models itself off the modern European nation-state. This contradiction is well-captured by Mahmood Mamdani, who calls Zionism “both a product of the oppression of Jews under European modernity and a zealous enactment of European modernity under colonial conditions.” In lieu of a political break, Zionism performs an aesthetic and cultural one; thus emerges the foundational Zionist rhetoric of indigeneity.

Jews who have immigrated to Palestine cease—in the Zionist cultural imagination—to be “Jews” and become “Judeans”: bronze-skinned, industrious Middle Easterners in the mold of Bar Kokhba.

Ironically, this adoption of classically “Oriental” characteristics depends upon the othering and Orientalizing of Palestinians. Zionists, unlike those white settlers in colonial America who claimed Native American ancestry, do not claim Palestinian identity; rather, they claim one that they insist is far older. This claim—and its corresponding erasure of the Palestinians—does not just signify the end times; it constitutes them. By framing Jews as the sole rightful occupants of the land (indeed as heirs to the land come the reckoning), Zionism creates an imperative to subjugate and eliminate the Palestinian Other.

Jerusalem mayor Yusuf al-Khalidi was prescient to this fact. In a 1914 editorial in the Filastin newspaper, he described Palestine as “a nation threatened with disappearance by the Zionist tide in this Palestinian land...threatened in its very being with expulsion from its homeland.” Clearly familiar with Herzl and other Zionists’ rhetoric, Al-Khalidi saw how Zionism’s concern with redemption could translate into quite literal “end times” for the Palestinians. In this sense, Zionism’s foundational metaphor would become reality.

Thirty-four years later, Zionist militias expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine in what is now known as the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic.

Thus began a war—at points “frozen,” but always deadly—that continues to this day. As Mahmoud Darwish, arguably Palestine’s most famous poet, would write on his deathbed, “This permanent war waged by Israel against us is not a war to defend its existence; it is a war over our existence.” For all the Zionist rhetoric of end times and redemption, it is the Palestinians who live under an existential threat. +++

In framing their project as a necessary departure from the horrors of Jewish life in diaspora, Zionists both employ eschatological histories— that is, the Holocaust as an apocalyptic beginning to the liberation of the Jewish people—and render them anew. what Amalek has done to you.” Several verses in the Old Testament command the Israelites to annihilate Amalek—their biblical enemy nation, meant here to signify the Palestinians. This is, of course, a genocidal logic, and a curious biblical reference to make at that.

Hagahot Maimoniyot, a representative 13th-century commentary by scholar Meir HaKohen, described the commandments as applying only “in the Messianic Era, after the full conquest of the Land.”

To invoke Amalek is to imply that the end times are near. Indeed, they always have been. In 1943, Lehi described its violence against Arabs and the British in terms of a “a war of Gog and Magog [tribes to be defeated by the Messiah in the end times].” Even earlier, Theodor Herzl had imagined in his 1902 speculative novel Altneuland a post-cataclysmic Jerusalem in which the Temple had been rebuilt and Israel had been redeemed. For as long as Zionism has been a salient political force, the “full conquest of the Land” has seemed on the near horizon. Looming behind this conquest has been the “end times,” alternatingly as specter and fantasy, morphing, appropriating, sometimes negating Judaism’s history of catastrophe to produce a narrative of asymptotic eschatology—one in which we stand always just on the edge of the end, never quite there, pushing into an almost-present future.

In Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians since October 7, the narrative enacts itself again and again. Over half of Gaza’s buildings are damaged or destroyed, and amid Israel’s total blockade, 97% of Gazan households lack adequate food. The situation—“apocalyptic,” in the words of UN human rights chief Volker Turk—is not an aberration, nor is it even a culmination. Rather, it is yet another consequence of an ideological project that has constructed itself upon a false safety—one that constantly demands the denial of that very safety to Palestinians. These are the horrors, in essence, of an end times without end.

Darwish concluded his final letter thus: “Know that we are still here; that we still live.”

Existence, he was saying, defies eschatology. And Palestinians, against the odds of this campaign and its antecedents, still exist. The end times will be contested as long as they last.

COBY MULLIKEN B’27 swears that he

didn’t search up “eschatological” in the dictionary before writing this article…

In a now infamous speech last October, Benjamin Netanyahu implored Jews to “remember

VOLUME 48 ISSUE 01

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In Your Bed LIT

( TEXT LILIANA GREYF DESIGN ANDREW LIU ILLUSTRATION CATIE WITHERWAX )

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c On Monday night you had a dream that your Anthropology of Interpersonal Feminisms class was being taught in the airport, and I called you to say that Gertrude Stein was waiting at the next dream-gate.

“Go get your t-shirt signed,” I told you over the dream phone.

“I already saw her,” you answered callously. But Stein’s dream-pronouns were he/him, and we fought because you should have known that. You woke up irritable in the middle of the hot night, and I rubbed the top of your sweaty back in small circles until you settled. We fell back asleep with our feet touching.

When I woke up the next morning you were gone, your pajama pants in a heap on the floor.

We had made breakfast plans with Nina and Mona, but I slept through the alarm. (Or rather, you took the alarm with you on your phone, which was also gone by the time I woke, well into the cafeteria’s lunch hours.) One of them was your freshman roommate and the other her girlfriend, a tall-short pair who had gotten matching stick n’ pokes of the number three on their ring fingers. For the life of me I couldn’t remember which one was which.

I tried to turn my phone on, but it was cold and dead. I strained to hear running water because I thought you had gone across the hall to the bathroom, or to surprise me by washing the cherries I had seen in your fridge. Or maybe you had forgotten about breakfast and gone straight to your French New Wave seminar. I missed you. But searching for you meant having to charge my phone, which meant having to get out of bed. I desperately didn’t want to get out of bed. Canceling abruptly on Mona and Nina was a small gasp of relief, a reminder that plans were not programmed into the joints of my knees. I was a sophomore now, and so there was no need to be anything but self-assured. I could stay under the covers.

That morning I didn’t go to class, just smoked your bong from the bed of your third-floor single, though the window was still closed. You had hung my hoodie over the smoke alarm like the head of a hunted animal. I decided that today could be a day off, my first day spent alone since the semester had begun. I could read, maybe, or try to watch that film you thought defined modernism. I could return my mom’s phone calls. I could learn some words in German and start using them as if they had always been part of my lexicon.

A Paul Preciado book you were reading was open at the foot of the bed; I read the opening paragraphs several times but couldn’t glean any meaning. I was high, I realized, and tired, I had never been so tired. I counted 391 tiles in your ceiling, first by multiplying the 17 horizontal by the 23 vertical, then by counting each individual one. You kept a stash of trail mix in the drawer of your bedside table and I took bites of it.

Nuts first, then cranberries and chocolate for dessert.

I fell back asleep and woke past sunset, though I wasn’t sure of the time. My heart beat hard, like when I was a kid waking up from a dream that I had missed my bus. I hadn’t dreamt at all. You still weren’t there.

I reached for the kombucha on your bedside table and finished it in two gulps; it was flat and warm. Where had you gone?

I felt far from you, unsure of your intentions for the first time in months. All semester I had watched the tip of your nose, the small bump where you had taken out your piercing, and learned to categorize its movements for signs of discomfort, intrigue, desire.

I knew the contours of your face, your lips open as you slept or chewed on the exhale of a nighttime cigarette. “Take me with you, wherever you are going,” I whispered dramatically to you once at a Cold War-themed birthday party, but you had just done poppers and thought I was asking to go to the bathroom. I never did hard drugs, just watched you do them. We were born a month apart but somehow

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

you seemed so much older than me, like a camp counselor who had lent me their hair elastic. You weren’t here, but you would come back to fetch what I was borrowing. There was no need to go anywhere. It was like a gate opened and water rushed through, or really like the gate had been underwater the whole time. We had missed those plans, and so bubbles floated to the surface. It rippled.

That fall the air conditioning had been broken and you didn’t know the number of the person to call, but we had other things to attend to. Like making breakfast plans. Washing our dishes in the bathroom sink. Reading Arendt out loud to each other, or Kierkegaard if we were in a helpless sort of mood. I always listened more to the sound of your voice than the meanings of the words. They were your books; you had read them before. I was being given grace, a moment to play catch up, but I was thinking about last night’s sex instead of learning about the Banality of Evil.

I could count on one hand how many times I had slept in my own bed that whole semester. I knew the optics of such an arrangement, but its excessiveness didn’t bother me. I couldn’t help wanting to be with you. I loved you, I loved being with you. I thought sometimes we would turn into a version of Plato’s Symposium people, those already sort-of-gay androgynous things with four legs and four arms, a combi-

I had wanted for so long to experience this type of quietude again, for you to be my working body, and for me to just arrive at your station, at the finish line, gulping for air.

Those days I had not left your bed and I was arriving, again and again, the window still closed, the sheets still yours. nation of two straight souls who were meant for each other. Late in the night I pushed my body against yours and felt your skin melting a little, like we would just fall right into each other, fill up the inner cavernous places we hadn’t been taught about. I woke up disappointed to see the limits of myself.

You weren’t back on Tuesday morning. I hadn’t set an alarm because I was sure I would wake up to your key turning the lock. I missed my Commodity Fetishism seminar and my section for Family Abolition, and though I briefly considered opening the Lydia Davis for my Thursday History of the New Yorker, I decided that I would skim it during the first few minutes of lecture. Perhaps my conformist phase was ending, and I could finally cut my hair short.

Nothing propelled me upwards, not even on Wednesday. You were coming back, I knew it like I knew the list of American presidents in chronological order. There was nothing to worry about. I still hadn’t read what I had originally planned, the Montaigne essays or the Maggie Nelson sitting just out of reach on your desk, but your absence was unrelenting, and so it seemed I still had plenty of time to brush up on the classics before you returned.

I didn’t leave the bed all weekend long, even on Saturday night, when I knew the shoegaze band you liked was playing in our dorm basement. If you were going to see it, you would come upstairs beforehand to change anyway. But you didn’t come upstairs.

Seven, I said aloud, when the seventh day had gone by. Then—like a child unexpectedly called for dinner while doing math homework—I promptly lost track and stopped counting.

I hadn’t prayed since I was ten, when I recited the last rites to my stuffed animals before bedtime, but some nights I found myself whispering phrases of gratitude. Sometimes I really could not believe my luck. I was being carried through the days, held as if on top of water. No need to do anything. Like a kid on a father’s shoulders. Or like the days when I had been a long distance runner, in early high school. In the final hundred yards my body sprinted, my legs pushing against the track, but the self inside myself rested, sitting down in the vessel of my body as if looking out the window of a speeding train, utterly at peace. I had wanted for so long to experience this type of quietude again, for you to be my working body, and for me to just arrive at your station, at the finish line, gulping for air. Those days I had not left your bed and I was arriving, again and again, the window still closed, the sheets still yours.

I rifled through your bedside drawer and found blue eyeliner, which I used to draw spirals across my stomach. 23 days went by, or maybe 32. Without sitting up, I used the smudged pencil to write synonyms for “waiting” upside down on the wall. Nourishment, I wrote, and custom. Those days, my thoughts often came back to the image of us unpacking this room in September, completely naked and elated to be reunited. We were like clumsy magpies, organizing half a bag at a time and then getting distracted by a shiny object or our bodies. “We are straight up facing Zeno’s paradox right now,” you had said, looking around at the piles of clothes. I laughed and tried unsuccessfully to remember the diagram I had associated with that term. We gave up on the project and let the clothing, mine and yours, form domes on your floor. The remnants of our failure still populated the space now; I could see, even without sitting up, your Snail Mail shirt and the purple socks your high school ex had gotten you for a past Hanukkah. You had been together for only a few months, but I was once jealous of the way she was still pinned at the top of your messages. “What do you even talk about?” I remembered asking you when I saw she had sent a three-minute voice memo.

“It’s totally mundane,” you told me in a halfhearted attempt to soothe. “She’s trying to decide where to apply early, I’m being a calming foil.” I tried not to worry but brought it back up one of those Friday nights I spent drunk-crying on your pillowcase, home early from some awkward wine night. “Is she going to try to come here?” I asked you sheepishly.

“She could never,” you responded. “She’s not—she wouldn’t fit in. She doesn’t read much.” I understood, finally, what you had been alluding to and breathed deeply. I kissed you on the cheek, and we started to watch a documentary about Margaret Thatcher as we fell asleep.

I wanted to watch the second half of it now, but couldn’t be bothered to get my computer from across the room. When the leaves on the crabapple tree outside your dorm started to purple and wilt, I knew the winter was beginning. Soon, in the time that it took to skim my eyes over two chapters of The History of Sexuality, the tree had lost most of its fruit and swayed more purposefully, unclothed by the wind.

The first snow fell, and a crowd gathered below me.

Then the crowd dispersed, and no one came back for a long time.

I wondered whether there was any psychoanalytic theory I could pick up on this subject, my

LIT

unraveling desire not to reenter the real world, which I had once worked so diligently to participate in.

My classmates returned from their holiday breaks.

Spring took root in my bones. I realized that my birthday must have passed. I congratulated myself by masturbating and only eating the chocolate bits of trail mix.

And then we were juniors. I began to consider how I could not remember whether the sun moved from west to east. I heaved a sigh of relief—not only was I unsure of the meaning of ‘ontology,’ but I couldn’t remember my own middle name. Then we were seniors, then graduating. They were finally done, these supposed best years of our lives, and we could turn down the pressure. The leaves on the crabapple tree grew brown, then withered green and fell up into the sky. My body was always bleeding, and the bed was always clean. Four years went by, then 17. Your pants stayed on the floor. I could not remember what street you lived on, and therefore where I was. I became a mother, held myself like my own child, which I always knew would have my name. Some days I was so exhausted that I slept with my eyes open, conscious of my body even as I couldn’t move it. I barely remembered the sound of your voice, even when it

was berating. Like the time when you had gotten angry with me for pretending I knew who Hegel was. “I don’t get why you feel the need to pretend,” you said, your nose pointing at me. “If you don’t know, just ask.” You were frustrated but still smiling in a lopsided way, almost teasing. I laughed it off and kissed you as a distraction, but thought about what you had said the whole time I was making you come. After we brushed our teeth, my toothbrush in my left hand so I could hold yours with my right, I broke down and sat on your floor hugging my knees, confessing. “I don’t know,” I told you. “I don’t know.”

You were tired and confused by my sudden outburst, wanting to rub my back until I settled, but I refused and shook your shoulders, trying to get your attention. “I don’t know Hegel,” I said. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right, I’ve only listened to the free sample of the Phenomenology, I’ve never even paid for the whole audiobook.”

“I didn’t mean for it to be a big thing,” you said, and tried to kiss my neck. I pushed you away.

“It’s a bigger thing,” I stammered. “I just pretend to understand dialectics, but the only example I know is the Marxist one.” My voice wavered. “I don’t know things like you do, I don’t know.”

I don’t remember how you got me to sleep, but we never talked about it again. If you came back now, I think I would bring it up. I couldn’t remember what you were like in conversation, and so couldn’t decide which conversational mode would serve us. Nor could I remember what you looked like, since it had been 57 years. I didn’t try to imagine. I didn’t pick up any books. Three hundred and-ninety-four months passed through me like a strong wind. The next year was a light breeze on a warm day, a slight silt in the air. A pair of roommates moved into the dorm across the street from yours. Some mornings I watched them through your window, making their beds. They looked like Nina and Mona, like Mona and Nina, like young people I had once pressed my body against, in comfort and in shame. After 70 years in the room, I had my second dream: a water glass being filled so slowly that the cup was never full, could not overflow.

I chalked it up to boredom.

LILIANA GREYF ‘26 is engaging in girlish whimsy.

VOLUME 48 ISSUE 01

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SCHEMA

The Death of the Instrument

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SCHEMA

(

MAYA AVELINO B'24 IS SCHEMING )

VOLUME 48 ISSUE 01

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Pinche Roquero ARTS

Chicanismo, punk rock, and a long history of resistance ( TEXT DAVID FELIPE DESIGN JOLIN CHEN IA LI, ILLUSTRATION MINGJ SUSANA GARCIA )

c Rock and roll has died. Or, at least that’s what members of Los Lobos thought as they witnessed the devastating decline in the quality of rock music in the mid-1970s. Los Lobos was one of the trailblazers of the Chicano rock movement, a new wave of music pioneered by Mexican Americans who were fed up with ongoing discrimination in the States. You see, to identify as Chicano—a word describing people of Mexican descent born in the U.S.—is to not resonate with an Anglo self-image but to instead accept your intersectionality.

In the 1970s, the U.S. government began listing “Hispanic” as an option on the census. The category was for “[people] of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” This generalization of Spanish-speaking groups was unpopular amongst Mexican Americans who wanted to recognize their individuality and unique struggles of finding harmony within two different cultures.

Mexican Americans didn’t want to tailor their cultural traditions, mother tongues, or beliefs to an English-only, American way of life. Rather than settling for “Hispanic,” Mexican Americans relied on the word “Chicano,” deriving from the Nahuatl word “Mexica” (‘x’ in Nahuatl is pronounced like ‘ch’) to take ownership over their cultural hybridity.

Bands like Los Lobos validated the existence of this identity, which added fuel to the Chicano movement of the 1960s. They didn’t resonate with the overly indulgent guitar solos, pretentious lyrics, and inauthentic stage presences they saw in many of the period’s most revered acts. Los Lobos was known for their ability to transcend typical sounds in rock music and incorporate traditional corridos and the Spanish language in their performances.

What started as a group of angsty teens in East L.A. coming together to practice guitars became a critical part of Chicano history. Rock music wasn’t dead, it just needed to be reinvigorated and reframed to be inclusive of varying sounds and artistic backgrounds.

I was angsty once, too. At 16 years old, you could find me rotting in bed, sporting shitty band shirts and black nail polish, hoping to one day learn to play bass guitar. Growing up in a Catholic Latino household is not for the weak. I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to

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listen to rock music, like boys, or get tattoos. My parents never approved of the songs I’d queue on the speaker or the skulls on my clothing. I struggled to merge my adolescence with my culture because I hadn’t yet discovered a space where I could explore both simultaneously. It felt like teenagehood—or what I thought teenagehood had to look like—could only happen outside my microcosm. When I was home, I only spoke Spanish. I internalized the immigrant values my parents perpetuated, took on the baggage of breaking intergenerational poverty, and learned to avoid discussing mental health and sexuality. This meant overworking myself, ignoring my personal needs, and making career choices that would guarantee socioeconomic mobility. When I was out on the streets of L.A., I was an American teen who wanted to do everything he saw in the movies. I was taught by both literature and media to “chase my dreams,” “follow my passions,” and bypass parental expectations. It’s weird to grow up with everything your parents never had. I didn’t feel like I could bring that back home. I code-switched.

I was two different people. It was only when I discovered Chicano rock later in life that I saw I wasn’t alone in my internal conflict. The Chicano rock I listened to allowed me to rebel against both cultural norms I disagreed with and against broader American ways of life. It was me and my self-proclaimed delinquency against the world. +++ Chicanos famously wrestle with their identity. As U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants, growing up in a settler colonial country that states whiteness as the marker of ‘authentic’ national belonging produces a type of cognitive dissonance that can only come from belonging to two vastly different worlds. Most Chicanos only have a conceived perception of what life in Mexico is actually like and thus sometimes feel inadequate compared to ‘real Mexicans.’ It also doesn’t help that it has become increasingly popular for Mexican citizens to chastise Chicanos, often making remarks about how children become too Americanized and ‘white-washed.’ The word ‘pocho’ even emerged to pejoratively describe Mexican Americans, insinuating a lack of Spanish fluency and cultural knowledge.

This exclusion, alongside the existing discrimination against Latinos in America, influenced the creation of Chicano-specific identity spaces. Thus was coined the concept of ni de aqui, ni de alla (neither from here nor from there). This became the foundation on which Chicanos built their creative ideas.

During the Chicano movement’s rise in the 1960s, Mexican American youth rebelled against the popular stereotypes assigned to them—drug-trafficking, lazy criminals fit for little but cheap labor—and the various forms of systemic injustice impacting them, such as segregated educational support for young Latinos. With the Texas Bilingual Act, Texas public schools prohibited students from speaking Spanish from 1918 to 1969. Before the 1947 case, Mendez v. Westminster, Latino students were isolated from their white peers because of assumptions about their intellectual capabilities and cleanliness that were based on racial stereotypes.

They were consistently allotted the fewest classroom materials, teachers, and resources. Ultimately, Latino students were left largely without a clear path to academic success. Few educational opportunities left Chicano youth ineligible for deferment, and as the war in Vietnam intensified, a school-to-army pipeline emerged. As a result, Mexican Americans accounted for 20% of all deaths in Vietnam. The perception of Chicanos as little more than manual labor or disposable bodies in armed conflict pushed early Chicano rock bands to create aesthetic worlds of their own in white-dominated genres.

Many Chicano artists looked up to Ritchie Valens, a rock and roll pioneer who was one of the first to make rock music in both English and

Spanish. A Chicano himself, Valens rose to the top of the charts, becoming the trailblazer of this movement. For Chicanos everywhere, the intermingling of languages in song was a way of indirectly stating that their identity could encompass both parts of their existence. All-Chicano bands like the Bags, Los Crudos, Aztlan Underground, and El Chicano provided representations that spoke to the Mexican American experience and emboldened Chicano youth during the 20th century. With song titles like “Decolonize,” “We Don’t Need the English,” and “That’s Right We’re That Spic Band!!!” these artists were able to make noise and actively take a stance against extensive oppression. Further, the presence of Chicano artists in predominantly white rock bands, such as Mia Zapata in the Gits, was key in the disruption of rock stereotypes, as it forced the general public to acknowledge Mexican American talent.

Accompanied by other acts of disruption like the East L.A. Walkouts, where over 15,000 Chicano students walked out of their segregated classrooms in a civil rights demonstration, Chicano Rock supported and facilitated organizing against racist and xenophobic laws. The rise of Chicano Rock was revolutionary; it was in this musical medium that Chicano youth were able to carve out a space and find the power and community to advocate for themselves.

In light of this advocacy, many Chicanos recognized the similarities between Black and brown struggles. They were both ostracized by American society and kept out of white musical spaces. Thus, many Chicano artists turned to their Black counterparts for inspiration. Willie Herron, a leader of Chicano punk band Los Illegals, cited James Brown— an African American musician—as one of his greatest influences. Despite the heavy segregation faced by both groups at the time, they managed to interchange ideas within musical circles. Black venues residing in the East Side of San Antonio were essential to the evolution of Chicano Soul (another branch of Mexican American music that influenced Chicano Rock), as they allowed Black and brown audiences to exchange ideas. According to the San Antonio Report, members of the norteño (from the northern part of Mexico) rock band Texas Tornados would frequent these integrated spaces and learn new tricks and performance tips from the Black musicians there. Together, both groups of roqueros (rockstars) were able to stand against white discrimination. +++ Today, Chicano Rock has grown to proportions unimaginable to my angsty, adolescent self. Los Lobos, who are still active, have over 2.8 million total monthly listeners. Today’s Chicano teens build community around newer bands continuing the tradition, like Chicano Batman and Beach Goons.

What started as a way of fighting against unjust legislation and discrimination has also cultivated a welcoming space for the Mexican American identity. Its evolution has allowed us to come together to forge solidarity, collectively reimagine the way we think of ourselves, and ultimately, dream bigger.

I’ll leave you with some of my favorite lyrics: “Necesitas sobrevivir En un sistema no hecho para ti Sin trabajo, sin dinero No hay ningún otro remedio” – Criminal, Generación Suicida And some in English: “Invisible people, the truth is we’re all the same The concept of race was implanted inside your brain It’s time to start all over You best believe we’re taking over” – Invisible People, Chicano Batman DAVID FELIPE B’26 was a teenage dirtbag.

S+T

VOLUME 48 ISSUE 01

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FEATURES

Notes on idolization, representation, and women in film. c 1. When I watched Promising Young Woman (2020) for the first time, my perception of movies changed.

I stared as Carrie Mulligan avenged my 17-year-old self’s qualms with society, destroying rapists, toxic misogynists, and bystanders in her pastel-colored, almost-realistic world. She was violent in a way I’d never seen a leading lady act—in a way I’d never been permitted to act. She didn’t cover the past’s scars or wrinkles. In her rage was mine—well, all that fit in my impassioned 17-year-old body. I decided that the very medium of film, which I had perceived before as unavailable to women creators, was suddenly a feminist project. All thanks to the work of one woman. Or two. As the insides of my mind dripped down the walls in awe, the first credits rolled: “Directed by Emerald Fennell.” Not “costumes designed by,” not “associate produced by.” Directed.

In the following days, I forced my mostly-male family to watch the movie with me. At every twist and turn, I monitored the minuscule muscles in their faces: Did they like it? Was it good enough? I knew that, really, I was not Emerald Fennell, the actress, writer, and director raised by the jewelry mavens of Great Britain. I didn’t make Promising Young Woman.

But when one of my brothers shrugged as her name appeared on the screen and remarked that the film was “okay,” I felt a personal stab of insult. I tried to explain to him why it was good, why he should praise it. It felt like begging him to believe in me.

2. When we idolize people, we attach ourselves to their actions. The stakes of their decisions are our livelihoods. Their losses and wins are our losses and wins. I remember late nights combing over the “Early Life” and “Personal Life” sections of Emerald Fennell’s Wikipedia page, calculating how I could fit my small shoes into her large footprints. I believed that mimicking her actions would be a guarantee to material success. I hoped that one day someone might give me the attention, the budget, and the time of day to make a film that reached people on a massive scale, to see the fruits of my labor 20 feet high in a theater.

3. When I saw the names of female directors on the silver screen, I acted like my dad whenever his favorite sports team won. It felt like a point in an everlasting game, because it was. Only seven women have ever been nominated for the Best Director Oscar, and only three have ever won in its nearly 100-year history. When Chloé Zhao won for Nomadland (2020) in 2021, I shot off my couch in the joy of an unshared victory.

For a gullible moment, it seemed we had arrived at a purely equitable industry, where the era of women as simply side-character actresses and secretaries was long behind

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( TEXT DRI de FARIA DESIGN RILEY CRUZCOSA ILLUSTRATION ELLIE LIN ) us. That same year, though, women comprised only 22% of the United States’ working directors.

4. Through these women, I was trying to understand myself, or, at least, what options lay ahead of me. In Emerald Fennell’s shadow, I could depict rageful murder sprees. In Greta Gerwig’s dust, I could portray moving dramas with effervescent charm. This was the age of Promising Young Woman and Ladybird (2017), cult favorites that were data in my study of the public’s acceptance of female directors. They’re also films that feature cis straight white women on a privileged journey of self-discovery. They’re not what I want to write, but it felt like I was restricted by what Gerwig and Fennell did. I enjoyed these movies, but if these were the only ones made by non-men that really reached the public eye, how could I expect an alternative to do the same?

5. And then, they failed me. Fennell celebrated a violent, directionless masculinity with Saltburn (2023), immediately rewarded when moviegoers fangirled over a cigarette-smoking Jacob Elordi or a naked Barry Keoghan. The carefully structured script sequence that she boasted with Promising Young Woman was gone. It was a mockery of an anticapitalist “Robin Hood” narrative. Gerwig traded her sensitive storylines for Barbie (2023), a white feminist re-drawing of a binary gender line and a massive advertisement for Mattel. I felt as if my close friends had sacrificed their creative practices to appeal to the masses. But if my fandom was only contingent on work being made by women, then I was forced to laud these films. So when Keoghan began to indulge in a narratively purposeless act of necrophilia in front of my parents, I began to defend him to them.

It was then that I realized I’d formed a completely parasocial relationship with women vastly unlike me, whose work would be vastly unlike mine.

My logic was flawed. If I followed it, I’d have to be a fan of all movies by queer directors, for example, whether I liked them or not. I would be ignoring Fennell’s high-class British upbringing, which she unsuccessfully attempted to mock in Saltburn, or Gerwig’s business-personal relationship with Noah Baumbach, an industry expert 14 years her senior.

Even my eventually distant relationship with the word “woman” began to complicate my allegiance. Although they undoubtedly worked hard, that wasn’t their sole claim to fame.

There was privilege, capitalism, nepotism, and more at play.

6. But I suppose to ‘make it’ in the film industry is to have the opportunity to make bad, good, and mediocre movies. Sellout movies. Cheap movies.

Blockbusters. Mainstream-indie movies. If female directors can put their names on marketing schemes or violent borderline pornos, I suppose we as a unified non-male group have gotten somewhere. If, thirty years ago, nobody besides men could climb the capitalist pyramid of the proletariat to run a mainstream set, then having the opportunity to make art that grosses 1.45 billion dollars must mean something about gender equity in the industry. My 17-year-old self painstakingly wishes this were true. But in the era of racialized and gendered capitalism, autonomy is an illusion. Film is a commodity; just because someone with a marginalized identity gets to produce and distribute it, doesn’t mean all women benefit. Barbie does not meet the criteria to be our savior—it is not the magnum opus that proves 100 years of cinematic history wrong. It was sponsored by a multi-billion dollar company, and frankly, much ado about an advertisement. If Gerwig and Baumbach hadn’t written a script that satisfied Mattel’s wishes, they would’ve revised it until it did. Although feminist to some, it didn’t dare touch a critique of consumerism or capitalism with a ten-foot pole—save for Sasha’s (Ariana Greenblat) rant before buying into Barbie again. Justifying Barbie’s social importance in order to salvage Mattel’s floundering profits was always the film’s mission. Even behind the camera, Gerwig is still an agent of hegemonic perspectives.

7. So what, if anything, is the female gaze?

If I portray something as a non-binary femme artist, am I creating evidence of the female gaze’s existence? Likely not. Theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey showed us that women are the image and men the camera. If everything behind the camera is distinctly male, then so too is the perspective: the elusive and ever-present male gaze. Simply putting a woman behind a camera doesn’t suddenly disrupt that. The very idea of femininity is shaped by performance for men.

8. The truth is that there is no female gaze; only movies made by non-men and non-misogynistic perspectives. There are also movies that subvert hegemony. Zola (2020) did that. Based on a famous series of tweets from 2015, it follows a stripper, Zola (Taylour Paige), as she tells the story of one insane weekend. The movie wasn’t marketed as a didactic exposé on sex trafficking, but its insidious perils, of course, creep in. Even when the camera moves over Zola’s half-clothed body in a slow, sexualizing pan, I ostensibly feel recognized and even empowered knowing that a woman made the choice to do so and that another woman agreed to shoot it. But just because one woman objectified another woman’s body, it doesn’t nullify the objectification of the body that appears on our screens. The sexualized end product stands alone.

Zola as an exhibit does demand more than a reduction to one shot. When asked about her motives for making the film, Janicza Bravo, the director, remarked “I thought, what is the movie that I, at 17, would want to sneak into?... I have had to exorcize this movie from my body, and that has not been with so much consideration for who is on the other side.” It was a brilliant portrait of Gen-Z storytelling, stylistic expertise, and innovative script structure. And, though its budget was 5 million dollars, it only grossed 4 million in the box office. Bravo didn’t want to win focus groups and watch ticket sales skyrocket. She wanted to tell a story about one experience of a Black low-income sex worker.

9. Agency, at least within the narrow arms of mainstream media, is having access to make the movies one wants to make. It’s the ability to make both Cocaine Bear (2023) and Past Lives (2023), Barbie and Pitch Perfect 2 (2015). But as long as the systemic barriers to mainstream filmmaking resources exist, female film freedom will remain an unattainable mirage. While the “female gaze” might never exist in the way I wished it to at 17, I can let go of my expectations and welcome my own gaze in its unlikeness. In letting go of my territorial position shielding these directors, I released them from the idolized status of my savior.

They became, like any other director, someone whose work I could comment on—not claim.

DRI de FARIA B’26 has beef with Emerald Fennell.

a warning (greater empires have fallen) ( ARTIST THEODORE ROE DESIGN OLLANTAY AVILA )

cotton yarn woven on industrial Jacquard loom

“As a precursor to early computers, the Jacquard loom represented a new age of modernity and industrialization, where cloth that was previously laboriously handwoven became more machine automated: an immediate, loud, industrial process that generates textiles from digital files. However, whenever “advancements” are made in capitalist, colonial systems, people, animals and the land get sacrificed as supposedly unfortunate but necessary consequences in the race forward. In what ways can a digital loom be compared to a car, or missile systems, or other tools advancing genocidal governments? Will we always be prey to industry?

Free Palestine always.”

VOLUME 48 ISSUE 01

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METRO 14

Hunger Strike for Palestine: Action Escalates, Solidarity Strengthens ( TEXT

SOFIA BARNETT, ASHTON HIGGINS & KEELIN GAUGHAN DESIGN ASH MA ILLUSTRATION ALENA ZHANG & MINGJIA LI )

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO c 18 weeks into Israel’s violent genocidal campaign in Gaza, nearly all of Gaza’s population is at risk of state-sanctioned famine. Since October, it is estimated that over 27,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 400,000 face starvation. Every school in Gaza has ceased operation, and every institution of higher education has been destroyed by Israel’s bombardment. Yet, Brown remains invested in this violence even after years-long calls by students and community members demanding accountability and material change from the administration.

19 Brown students are currently on their seventh day of hunger striking to make the topic of divestment unignorable to the Brown University Corporation. This campaign, “Hunger Strike for Palestine,” is the largest and longest-lasting hunger strike in the United States since Oct. 7.

The hunger strike and its related organizing efforts will continue until the meetings of the Brown Corporation on Feb. 8 and 9, 2024. Protestors affirm that they will continue mobilizing until the 2020 ACCRIP report, “To Recommend Divestment from Companies that Facilitate the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territory,” and its addendums are presented to the Corporation for consideration.

Until the strikers’ demands are met, the 19 students plan to continue their hunger strike. Alongside the strikers, students from a variety of organizations under the Brown Divest Coalition will continue to organize supporting activities like teach-ins, art builds, and film screenings in the Stephen Robert ‘62 Campus Center to increase solidarity with Palestine and visibility within the student body.

The Campus Center was initially designated as a student union in 1904 by-then President William H.P. Faunce. President Faunce said that students lacked “a building in some central location devoted to the social and moral welfare of the student body…a building which shall be the fireside and hearthstone of the entire student life.” Hundreds of students and several faculty and staff members are staying in the Campus Center for a 36-hour solidarity fast to demand the University to listen to the strikers’ demands, transforming the heart of campus into a site of collective political transformation.

The students’ collective assembly in the Campus Center—Brown’s most central building and the hub of student life and activities—makes the actions of student organizers impossible to ignore. While two previous sit-ins at University Hall ended with the arrest of all students involved, the hunger strike and presence in the Campus Center is a different story.

While University Hall is officially closed to the public at 5 p.m. every day, the Campus Center is specifically designated to be available for student use 24 hours a day—so long as students are not sleeping in the building or exceeding its maximum occupancy.

University administrators “seem more concerned about enforcing their arbitrary bureaucratic rules and guidelines, than about supporting student activities… which one would assume a student activities office should prioritize.”

However, the University continues to aggressively hinder organizing surrounding the strike.

The Student Activities Office (SAO) has continuously threatened students who choose to stay in the Campus Center with conduct violations, and are actively cracking down on social media posts promoting the strikers’ daily schedule. President of the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO) and one of the leaders in the campus movement for divestment, Sherena Razek, told the Indy that University

Courtesy of the Brown Divest Coalition

administrators “seem more concerned about enforcing their arbitrary bureaucratic rules and guidelines, than about supporting student activities… which one would assume a student activities office should prioritize.” Although protesters have had to adjust their activities and modify their rhetoric to meet SAO demands, Razek affirmed that “this hunger strike is not going to be stopped by technicalities.”

Razek also expressed apprehension regarding the administration’s policing of promotional materials for the hunger strike, noting that she is “really concerned about the way that [the administration] is monitoring and surveilling the social media accounts of student groups.” +++ On Feb. 5, the 19 strikers filed onto the steps of the Campus Center where hundreds of student protesters gathered in support. Student marshals parted the hundreds of students on the Main Green as the coalition of strikers led a procession to University Hall. Two student marshals and one striker then entered University Hall to deliver the fifty-page Critical Edition of the 2020 report produced by the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices (ACCRIP) to President Christina H. Paxson.

ACCRIP’s initial report, released in January of 2020, recommended that the Brown Corporation choose to divest the University’s endowment from companies facilitating the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. The report outlined criteria for identifying companies which “profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.”

ACCRIP members voted in favor of divestment by a two-thirds majority. The specific companies identified for divestment at the time included AB Volvo, Airbus, Boeing, DXC, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Oaktree Capital, Raytheon, and United Technologies.

The report additionally presents the results of an Undergraduate Council of Students (UCS) referendum from the spring of 2020, which revealed that 69% of undergraduate student voters said yes to the question, “Should the Brown University administration divest all stocks, funds, and endowment, and other monetary instruments from companies complicit in human rights abuses in Palestine and establish a means of implementing financial transparency and student oversight of the University’s investments?” The referendum was also supported by 63 members of the University’s faculty and 40 Brown alumni. Now, after four years and countless lives lost under Israeli occupation, progress toward divestment—blocked by the University’s bureaucracy—remains stagnant.

Although Paxson has repeatedly refused to revisit the eight months of work done by committee members in the 2020 report, student organizers reproduced an updated draft of the initial report consisting of several addendums and edits specifically addressing the severity of Israel’s siege on

Gaza and the necessity of timely action from highly regarded institutions.

The ACCRIP revision, titled “Brown Divest Now, A Critical Edition of: ‘To Recommend Divestment from Companies that Facilitate the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territory,’” in particular seeks to address Paxson’s claims that the original report did not adequately demonstrate how Brown’s divestment would contribute to minimizing social harm.

The initial ACCRIP report identified three specific categories of social harm: the building of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building of the separation wall through Palestinian land, and the collective punishment of Palestinian people and demolition of their homes.

BDC’s reconstruction of the report demonstrates how the circumstances characterizing each category of violence in Palestine has worsened, while also introducing three additional subcategories under the umbrella of collective punishment. The updated report now focuses on the crime of apartheid, the crime of genocide in Gaza, and the obstruction of Palestinian rights and access to education—three examples of oppression that directly demonstrate social harm.

The Critical Edition responds to Paxson’s claim that the Brown community is not ready to present its case for divestment to the Corporation. In her response to the letter written by members of the hunger strike, Paxson stated, “I will not revisit the 2020 ACCRIP report.” Instead, she responded that in order for the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management, or ACURM (formerly ACCRIP, disbanded in 2020), to consider divestment action, a new request must be written and submitted. She further claims that “it is not appropriate for the University to use its financial assets—which are there to support our entire community—to ‘take a side’ on issues on which thoughtful people vehemently disagree.” Yet, by continuing to invest in these harmful companies and profit from the facilitation of Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine, the University remains complicit in the perpetuation of violence against the Palestinian people. When the endowment is being used to ethnically cleanse Gaza, it is inherently a political tool.

The strikers and their co-strugglers are refusing Paxson’s request to start from scratch. “We choose to honor the moral legitimacy of ACCRIP and the years of community conversations, research, organizing work, and courage that led to its 2020 decision,” the Critical Edition states. “With similar membership and resources, we see no reason to believe ACURM is any better equipped to produce a more rigorous report than the recommendation that resulted from ACCRIP’s eight-month-long deliberation process.” +++ A similar timeline of escalation in student mobilization occurred before Brown divested from the apartheid in South Africa in 1987. Huge protests on

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the Main Green, a mass occupation of University Hall resulting in 250+ arrests, a hunger strike by four students, and an interruption of a Corporation meeting at which 20 students were put on probation all precipitated before Brown finally divested from companies facilitating apartheid. The hunger strike for South Africa ended with participating students being unenrolled from the University, then re-enrolled days later. Students also disrupted a meeting of the Corporation, read their demands aloud, and were subsequently threatened with expulsion.

Brown’s choice to divest came after other peer institutions led the charge, and Congress’s Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. Student organizers later expressed regret that the University seemed only to act on its moral obligation when it aligned with national trends in higher education.

Former UCS President Matt Carol told the Brown Daily Herald in February of 1986, “Brown had a chance to take more of a leading role and they blew it.”

Exactly two decades after divesting from South African apartheid, Brown divested from companies profiting from genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Notably, Brown’s divestment in March 2006 came nearly two years after the U.S. Congress declared the atrocity a genocide in July 2004, and months after the first universities began divesting for the cause in April 2005. Brown was the tenth educational institution to divest, and 51 others would eventually follow suit into 2008. Brown has the responsibility to finally set the trend for peer institutions divesting from Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine. It is high time Brown stops treading water until Harvard and other peer schools tell us to divest—students are already shouting it loud and clear: ‘Divest now!’ +++ At a rally on Monday, Gabriela Venegas, an organizer with BDC, emphasized to protestors and co-strugglers that the University will not be pardoned for its gross negligence and failure to stand up for humanity.

“Time will pass and they will send out apologies, but they will never be able to wash it off,” Venegas said. “All we want is a ceasefire and an end to the bombings and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. Just please stop the bombing, stop using our tax dollars to massacre children. How many more decapitated kids and bombed hospitals do we have to see?”

“None of this could have happened without the funding of the United States and the silence from institutions like Brown University,” Venegas continued.

Hostile living conditions in the Gaza Strip between December 2023 and February 2024 have created acute food insecurity for over 90% of the population, as classified by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. This is a targeted and intentional phenomenon; Israeli attacks on local markets and food warehouses, as well as the total blockade on roads used to transport humanitarian aid have created conditions of scarcity throughout the entire region. According to the UN, 80 percent of people facing catastrophic hunger in the world are Gazans.

“What they’re using is a tactic that we see the government do all the time. They think that by delaying a vote, a resolution, a bill… that people will forget. That we’ll go back to our lives. But none of us can live peacefully until the people of Palestine are free.”

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“Time will pass and they will send out apologies, but they will never be able to wash it off,” Venegas said. “All we want is a ceasefire and an end to the bombings and an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. Just please stop the bombing, stop using our tax dollars to massacre children. How many more decapitated kids and bombed hospitals do we have to see?”

The decision to hunger strike for Palestine serves to underscore the severity of Gaza’s mounting starvation. Hunger strikes have long been used as a form of peaceful protest by Palestinian political prisoners as early as 1968, following the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and east Jerusalem by the Israeli military. Since then, there have been over 25 mass and group hunger strikes for ending solitary confinement and improving living conditions for incarcerated Palestininans—the most recent of these was a 141-day hunger strike by Hisham Abu Hawash, drawing attention to the detention of Palestinian prisoners without charge or trial in 2021.

The refusal of food by incarcerated Palestininans has been used both to reclaim agency under conditions of imprisonment and countering the ways in which the Israeli government has perpetuated violence in prisons. Beyond prison walls, hunger strikes have been used as an act of resistance in the name of those with nothing left to put on the line but their own bodies.

Given that the University administration still refuses to meet the protesters’ demands, the strikers have gone over 160 hours without food. One anonymous striker noted, “I feel very weak and tired so I’m in [a wheelchair] to conserve my energy. Also I feel lightheaded like I might tip over.” Despite the physical toll starvation is taking, the striker added that “being around the other strikers makes me feel better though. And I love seeing all the support for the cause from people at rallies or friends visiting.”

The striker further states that this act of solidarity, however, pales in comparison to the forced starvation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. “We’re privileged to be able to choose to not eat to bring light to their plight that Brown is complicit in,” they continued. “In 2006 Israeli officials said they were going to put the Palestinians on a diet and calculate the minimum caloric intake necessary. And now North Gaza is being starved. This is nothing.” +++ Razek also told the Indy that graduate students at Brown “are part of a broader international labor struggle for justice.” She emphasized that “as higher educators, we can’t make a claim to solidarity and stand idly by while universities are being blown up,” citing the scholasticide in Gaza. Razek continued, “students, faculty, the brightest scholars and academic administrators of these universities are being… indiscriminately killed.”

At a rally co-hosted by GLO and the Palestine Solidarity Caucus on Wednesday named “Labor for Palestine,” Razek announced that GLO will be taking on divestment as their spring campaign.

The Caucus, a subset of GLO, has been organizing rallies and events centering Brown’s presence as a leader in international higher education in the fight for Palestinian liberation. Razek noted that “Brown loves to situate itself as part of the international intellectual community. And it is. So, it’s appalling for institutions of higher learning in the US [like Brown] to be silent on the annihilation of higher education in Gaza.” In their pledge, GLO wrote that “it is imperative that all members of the Brown community take action and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

Razek further explains why GLO’s participation in the campus movement is so necessary: “Given the severity of the situation in Gaza and the total destruction or partial destruction of every single institution of higher learning there on the ground, we have a duty as grad workers to respond…as workers here, it’s our duty to hold our employer accountable to our fellow workers, to the students that we teach and care about, and to our employers’ purported values of higher learning.”

+++ The current hunger strike and complementary instances of student mobilization are the result of the University’s months of silence and refusal to honor the virtues of its student body.

Last December, 41 students were arrested from the Brown Divest Coalition for sitting in at University Hall. The University refuses to drop the charges of trespassing against its own enrolled students with their court dates set for Feb. 12 and 14. BDC’s sit-in took place five weeks after the first sit-in of the year, where 20 Jewish students sat in University Hall, and were eventually led out in handcuffs by the University’s Department of Public Safety. These students’ charges were eventually dropped after the horrific shooting of our classmate Hisham Awartani in a hate crime. That same clemency has notably been withheld from the second round of demonstrators. In the face of intensifying pressure from students, the University is escalating the consequences for civil disobedience and peaceful protest. BDC told the Indy that “Brown has not been willing to negotiate with us regarding our charges so far… and denied our request for a dismissal with community service or a donation… [to the state indemnity fund]”.

However, students remain steadfast in their movement for divestment, and are even in coalition with local politicians to maximize city-wide advocacy and solidarity.

Miguel Sanchez, City Councilor from Ward 6 and former staffer to Governor Dan McKee, spoke to students and co-strugglers on Monday in the Campus Center. Sanchez, who was unilaterally fired by McKee on Oct. 27 following pro-Palestinian social media statements, encouraged students to remain staunch in their efforts to get through to the Corporation.

“Keep that pressure on the President and on the Board of Trustees,” Sanchez said. “What they’re using is a tactic that we see the government do all the time. They think that by delaying a vote, a resolution, a bill… that people will forget. That we’ll go back to our lives. But none of us can live peacefully until the people of Palestine are free.”

While the current demand is for the Brown Corporation Board to simply consider divesting from weapons manufacturers that are currently profiting off of genocide, the long-term goal of such action is far greater. Although Paxson stated at a vigil back in December that “sadly, [Brown] cannot control what happens around the world and country”–this is far from true. As Paxson pushes the idea that Brown’s hands are tied, student activists continue to push back.

Despite Paxson’s consistent claim that the University’s endowment cannot operate as a political tool, Palestinians have for years been advocating to powerful institutions that financial investment in the Israeli military complex actively contributes to their dehumanization. Paxson and the administration’s refusal to recognize their complicity in Israel’s apartheid regime–even after the International Court of Justice has stated there is reasonable cause to investigate Israel for committing genocide–shows their complete disregard for Palestinian life. Brown’s inability to recognize the Israeli government’s atrocities as crimes against humanity, demonstrates a clear failure to uphold its stated mission to “serve the community, nation, and the world.”

Now more than ever is the time for Brown to take action and hear the demands of its students.

Venegas said: “The whole world is watching. And we will never, ever let them forget.”

SOFIA BARNETT ’25, ASHTON HIGGINS ‘26, and KEELIN GAUGHAN ‘25 remain steadfast in their

support for Palestinian liberation.

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VOLUME 48 ISSUE 01

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EPHEMERA

(

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BEATRICE HOANG )

DEAR INDY

The Beginning of the End: Reality check, failed resolutions, and Indie’s not well-adjusted ( TEXT SOLVEIG ASPLUND DESIGN ASH MA ILLUSTRATION ASH MA ) cThe camera cuts to a dimly lit bedroom. The place? Providence. Somewhere on Congdon Street. Second floor. The mood? Electric. We see a girl. She’s typing furiously, head down, brows furrowed–but not in the way that’ll require Botox later. As she writes, timely cultural wisdom and academic acumen flow through her fingertips. She’s retained all the information from her readings. Her room is beautifully decorated, immaculately neat. Also, her pixie cut looks great. Really chic. After a few minutes of concentrated energy, she gently closes her laptop, and sighs peacefully. She’s ahead of all her work! The time? 10pm. She drifts blissfully off to sleep, and the camera fades to black.

At least, that’s how I imagined the start of the semester would be going.

In reality, it’s 2am and I find myself engaged in a staring competition with yesterday’s socks, which lay haplessly on the wooden floor beside me. I just tried to type at a speed faster than 1 WPM, and it appears to have driven my wheezing computer to the brink. In reality, I’m realizing, work is work, and always a lot harder than I think it’s going to be. In fact, college is always harder than I think it’s going to be.

Which is strange, because it’s my eighth time around this rodeo and so you’d think by now I’d have it down, or at least have accepted that I don’t.

But no, because for some unfathomable reason, there’s still something in the air that keeps me pining for a world in which everything goes as planned. Maybe it’s the fresh coat of snow on the ground, or a new batch of resolutions stewing in my notes app. Maybe it’s some exorbitantly expensive produce in the fridge. Some nice pears. If I’m being honest, though, both my resolutions* fell through over dinner last night, and tomorrow morning, the snow will probably be washed away by the rain.

Nancy Mairs, I think, puts it nicely when she writes: “One does not, after all, finish adjusting to life.” So in this first issue, I write about unrealistic hope, when to let go, and what the fuck to do with your last semester. *Eat more protein and be less mean.

Dear Indy, How do I make the most of my last semester here?

Anxiously, Doomsday Prepper

Dear Doomsday Prepper, Thank you for your inquiry. I admire its simplicity, and, I must admit, I am feeling similarly. Obviously, my own agenda is not entirely publishable (given how some of it will require the element of surprise), but you may feast on my dregs: 1.

Dear Indy,

r t over winte the girl I me t I . u o ic b tr a c g le in se think es, but it wa m I can’t stop ti r u n o fo y r z e ra h oth becomes c nly saw eac this once life e it a shot to f break. We o o o g t le ly bab ld giv know I’ll pro ow do I know if I shou at’s h t ouldn’t, wh u b sh I s, u if d n A camp ? re o ething m n flings? become som ay to reflect on vacatio w the best

Dear A Reality Check,

Needing, heck A Reality C

Can I be honest? The chances that it’ll become something more are very slim. And I’m not just saying this out of spite, or because I had a decidedly un-romantic winter break—along the lines of voraciously consuming dragon-centric adult fantasy and arguing daily with a seventh grader—but because it’s the truth. Break flings do not age like fine wine; they age like Stop and Shop cheese. By which I mean that while it’s a great deal for what you’re getting, and highly enjoyable in the short term, it’s equally (arguably, more) important to know when to stop eating it.

One day you’ll sprinkle it on your pasta without sniffing the container, and you’ll sort of never be able to eat that brand of parmesan again.

Which is not to say that what you guys had wasn’t special, or important. Imagine a dinner party—it’s been extraordinarily fun, the conversation is flowing (electric, even). Someone brought egg tarts.

It’s awesome. But at some point—and to the attuned party-goer, this moment is clear—the dinner is over. No one wants to say it, but it is. And the longer you stay, awkwardly elongating the conversation through the “who-do-we-know-in-common” or the “what’s-your-thesis-about” pathways, the more it actively degrades the beautiful memory you’ve created.

So while there’s no reason to entirely ghost, I’d suggest you remove yourself before you make this faux pas. It’s polite to keep in touch, and to keep the potential of the relationship in your back pocket, but don’t place any bets on it. The universe gave you something special—just don’t overstay your welcome.

Get on a roof. And let me know when you’ve figured out how.

2. Kiss in the stacks.

3. Do other things in the stacks.

4. Confess your feelings to a member of the Comparative Literature department. Whether student or faculty is up to interpretation.

5. Download all your computer can carry from the Brown Library.

6. On that note: steal.

7. Ask someone out in person. Handle the rejection with grace.

8. Make an athlete friend.

9. Make out with a friend.

10. Argue with the annoying kid in class.

11. Orgy?

12. Whip out those funky pants you’ve been afraid to wear.

13. Realize you were right to be afraid.

14. Hatch an elaborate plan to get back at your campus enemy. Methodically plant the seeds until May. Smirk deviously throughout. But, at graduation, realize that you’re above it all, that your anger has dissipated through the sheer play-act of revenge.

Strange, isn’t it, how powerful the mind is? Halt your plans. Graduate with peace in your heart.

15. Get back at your campus enemy.

16. Go braless.

17. Make a rich friend. Saltburn is now or never.

18. Overshare to at least one professor.

19. Tell someone they’re cute.

20. Tell someone they’re ugly.

21. Submit to Dear Indy.

22. Confess your undying love to Indie.

Make the most of this semester… or else.

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The Bulletin BULLETIN

02.09.24 ( TEXT EMILIE GUAN & RL WHEELER DESIGN OLLANTAY AVILA )

Arts Saturday 2/10 @11AM-4PM 400 Harris Avenue, Unit E, Providence, RI

LitArts RI Writing + Wellness Resource Fair LitArts RI is hosting a huge resource fair to support the writing and living of community creatives, including housing help, creative grant opportunities, writing sessions, print consultations, and much more! Over a dozen local art and social organizations will be tabling.

Saturday 2/10 @12PM-3PM 27 Sims Avenue, 2nd floor, Providence, RI

Radical Self-Love Drop by this Saturday for an afternoon of practicing radical self-love through making art, responding to prompts, and reading short texts. Activities are geared towards adults but can be modified for children. The event is free and open to the public, and RSVP (can be found in the instagram bio of @ publicnotprivate) is recommended but not required.

Every Thursday @5PM-6PM Public Shop, Gallery, Studios, 27 Sims Avenue, Providence, RI

New Creative Writing Club with Youth Pride Inc. Come to this drop-in space each Thursday, where you can write in a range of genres and play games in community with others, ranging from 14–23 years old. The space will be facilitated by Jordan Scott, who writes poetry and children’s books and has experience in education and event organizing. You can email programs@youthprideri.org with any questions.

Until Saturday 2/22 AS220 Main Gallery, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

Ocean State A$$ Calendar Exhibition Take a look at this ongoing art exhibition of digital and risograph calendars created by Ocean State A$$. You can also buy calendars for $25 or more to further support this sex workers collective and mutual aid organization. For more, you can visit https://beacons.ai/oceanstateass.

Upcoming Actions & Community Events Monday 2/12 @6PM-8PM Stonewall House, 22nd Benevolent St, Providence, RI

Love Remix: Growing Together Join the Gender and Sexuality Peer Counselors for an evening of love-themed performance art, including topics on community, connection, and queering notions of intimacy. A taco bar and sweet treats will be available!

Tuesday 2/13 @4PM-6PM 271 N Main Street, Providence, RI

Youth Policy Panel Discussion Rhode Island for Justice & Community is partnering with United Way of Rhode Island to host a discussion panel about empowering youth to make an impact on the community and amplifying youth voices. The QR code to RSVP can be found @ri4cj and on instragram all are welcome to attend.

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!

Wednesday 2/14 @12:30AM-2PM, 5:30PM-7PM| Providence Foundation, 30 Exchange Terrace, Providence, RI

RIPTA Public Hearings Show up to the statewide RIPTA Public Hearings— Providence specifically will hold a hearing for the proposed service eliminations and reductions on Wednesday, February 14th. Call for increased driver pay to ensure better working conditions and prevent cuts to RIPTA service!

Wednesday 2/14 @5PM-7PM 545 Pawtucket Avenue, Pawtucket RI

Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR)’s Anniversary Gathering

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

Come celebrate seven years of community work and resistance with a night of music, food, raffles, and community! The event is completely free, but please email cata@amorri.org if you can and plan to bring a dish to share! Also please wear a mask if attending.

*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.

Thursday 2/15 @4:30PM-6PM DeCiccio Auditorium, Salomon Center for Teaching

2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Join civil rights lawyer and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill, for an exciting lecture on “Reimagining a New American Democracy.” This lecture is the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity’s 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture.

More information can be found in the feature below.

Wide Awakes Collective

Instagram: @wideawakescollective Venmo: @WideAwakes-PVD CashApp: $wideawakesPVD

Based in Kennedy Plaza, Wide Awakes is an organization that engages in mutual aid and direct action, centering abolition.

Mount Pleasant Community Library

Rhody Grows Hope Drop-Off Hub Rhody Grows is a sustainable, grassroots garden that centers environmental and food justice. They are currently accepting clean used yogurt and salad containers and will repurpose them to make gardening pots to grow food! Please drop them off at Mt. Pleasant Community Library any time they’re open!

Feature 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture This year, the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture, hosted by the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, will be delivered by Sherrilyn Ifill. This lecture series was established by the OIED in 1996; former Mayor of New York David Dinkins was the first speaker. Martin Luther King had visited Brown University twice during the 1960s and in 1967 notably gave a speech on the Vietnam War and U.S. civil rights movement. Almost 60 years later, his anti-war conviction remains timely and important to remember.

Keynote speaker Sherrilyn Ifill will deliver a lecture on “Reimagining a New American Democracy.”

Ifill was the seventh President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. During her nine year term, she championed tirelessly for civil rights issues including voter suppression, educutional inequity, and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. Additionally, Ifill taught law for more than 20 years at University of Maryland School of Law and published many academic articles and commentaries on complex racial justice challenges. She has also been named TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the world, TIME’s Women of the Year, and Glamour’s Women of the Year because her leadership has advanced the national conversation on civil rights in remarkable ways.

Everyone is encouraged to attend the lecture, which will take place in the Salomon Center for Teaching!

Registration on Eventbrite is required (https://shorturl.at/cmCWZ).

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