The College Hill Independent Vol. 44 - Issue 4

THE INDY*

03 “THE POLITICS OF NOT COUNTING CASTE” 10 CASTING MEMORY IN BRONZE 13 KICK ASS, GO TO SPACE

Volume 44 Issue 04 11 March 2022

THE EXPLORATORY ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY*

Volume 44 Issue 04 11 March 2022

This Issue

Masthead*

00 UNTITLED

MANAGING EDITORS Ife Anyoku Sage Jennings Isaac McKenna Alisa Caira

Felix Benton

02 WEEK IN STREAMING Masha Breeze & Nora Mathews

WEEK IN REVIEW Masha Breeze Nora Mathews

03 “THE POLITICS OF NOT COUNTING CASTE” Swetabh Changkakoti

06 NIGHTCORE, POSTMODERNITY, AND THE INTERNET Kolya Shields

07 SHÍMA YAZHÍ AHÉHEE’ / THANK YOU, AUNTIE. Danielle Emerson

08 WHY IS THE SKY BLUE?

FEATURES Anabelle Johnston Corinne Leong Amelia Wyckoff NEWS Anushka Kataruka Nicole Kim Priyanka Mahat ARTS Jenna Cooley Justin Scheer Arden Shostak EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Ayça Ülgen

Becca Siegel

09 “BUT AS WORMS” Hannah Nigro

10 CASTING MEMORY IN BRONZE Keelin Gaughan

13 KICK ASS, GO TO SPACE, REPRESENT THE HUMAN RACE Katherine Xiong

15 ARE YOU BEING SERIOUS? Asher White

17 “I AM YOU”

METRO Jack Doughty Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Sacha Sloan SCIENCE + TECH Rhythm Rastogi Jane Wang BULLETIN BOARD Deb Marini Lily Pickett X Soeun Bae DEAR INDY Cecilia Barron

Erika Lee

18 DEAR INDY

LITERARY Alyscia Batista Annie Stein

19 THE BULLETIN

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

Cecilia Barron

SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deb Marini Peder Schaefer STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Caroline Allen Zach Braner Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Swetabh Changkakoti Danielle Emerson Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Mariana Fajnzylber Edie Fine Ricardo Gomez Eli Gordon Eric Guo Charlotte Haq Billie McKelvie Charlie Mederios Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Alex Purdy Callie Rabinovitz Nick Roblee-Strauss Nell Salzman Peder Schafer Janek Schaller Koyla Shields Ella Spungen Alex Valenti Siqi ‘Kathy’ Wang Katherine Xiong COPY EDITORS Addie Allen Evangeline Bilger Klara Davidson-Schmich Megan Donohue Mack Ford Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Alara Kalfazade Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Tara Mandal Becca Martin-Welp Pilar McDonald Kabir Narayanan Eleanor Peters Angelina Rios-Galindo Ellie Tapping

From the Editors The interface of BeReal is janky—it captures photos from your front and back cameras almost simultaneously. An ominous clock counts down from 2:00, but when it reaches 0:00, nothing happens. Everyone receives a notification simultaneously every day ( Time to BeReal ), but if you wait too long, again nothing really happens. This false pressure, almost a self-referential wink, embodies the BeReal ethos. It’s social media, but Real.

It’s like a return to an imagined golden age of social media, when appearances meant nothing and candidness was the default. I never think too hard about what I post—I just want to take mine as quickly as possible so I can see what mundanity my friends are up to, and receive scrunch-faced photo replies (RealMojis) to my BeReal. I carefully cultivate and cull my (Real) community to only the most essential followers… and yet I also just held my fellow Managing Editors at knifepoint, watching them type in the passwords to their Apple ID accounts so that they can BeReal, too.

BeReal is everything I want from the internet. It’s not glossy, perfectly built, or easy to understand on first use—as flip phones are to iPhones, BeReal is to every other tech startup. It also seems mostly propagated through wordof-mouth (someone hire me!). I’m sure it’ll be commodified someday, turned into another polished and heartless app with premium features paywalled and non-subscribers bombarded by 30-second clips about the diversity efforts at ExxonMobil. But for now, in all its glorious imperfection, giddy nostalgia, and tight-knit communalism, BeReal is my safe space.

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⚠ ️

-IM

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DESIGN EDITORS Anna Brinkhuis Sam Stewart COVER COORDINATOR Seoyoung Kim DESIGNERS Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Elisa Kim Tanya Qu Emily Tom Floria Tsui WEB DESIGN Lucas Gelfond ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvie Bartusek Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Michelle Ding Rosie Dinsmore Quinn Erickson Lillyanne Fisher Sophie Foulkes John Gendron Amonda Kallenbach Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Tom Manto Sarosh Nadeem Kenney Nguyen Izzy Roth-Dishy Lola Simon Livia Weiner GAME MAKERS Loughlin Neuert Maya Polsky WRITING FELLOW Chong Jing ‘CJ’ Gan MVP The Couch — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*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, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures.

Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

WEEK IN STREAMING: Nine Shows You Can Watch RIGHT NOW While You Wait for Season Three of Euphoria If you’re anything like me, you’re obsessed with Euphoria, and waiting for season three is killing you (not to mention putting a dramatic strain on your personal relationships)! Well, the wait is over: here are nine shows that’ll give you your Euphoria fix while you’re jonesing for more!

1. Elation—streaming now on Dworp, the Discovery Channel’s streaming service If you lived for the fun, messy drama of Rue’s battle with drug addiction in Euphoria, you’ll love Elation, which tells the story of not one, but 13 different teenagers in active addiction! This madcap romp proves that 12-year-olds are just like us—they swear, they wear Gucci jumpsuits, they snort oxy off of fidget spinners at the eighth grade dinner dance. As an opioid addict in recovery, I can’t help but praise this show for its realistic portrayal of the trials, tribulations, and craaazy capers of hardcore drug use! That’s why I give it 5/5 slays.

culture.” I’ll be honest, Exuberance loses steam pretty quickly—by the time we had to write episode 5 (“The One Where They All Kiss”), Nora’s and my shared prescription for Colladderall, the stimulant we invented, had expired, and it shows in the writing! That’s why we’re abandoning the show halfway through the first season, and instead teaming up with Pfizer on a new line of medications to make big money bucks—cha-ching! This St. Patrick’s Day, head on down to your local CVS parking lot and find me (I’ll be the one wearing a blue baseball cap and a $10,000 denim smock). Use code “KILL ME, I’M IRISH” for 50% off your order of Colladderall, Bethamphetamine, Post-Nut-Claritin, Garbanzodiazepine, and more!

7. Stewphoria, episodes now on Quibi Yup, the women of Euphoria are back where they belong: in the kitchen! Watch them win your hearts (and your stomachs!) as they compete on a cutthroat gaming show to make the best stewbased dish every week! In response to network criticism, the show will now take a more explicitly feminist stance: any contestant who has not donated to a girl politician in the last six months will be disqualified. [Now for our contractually-obligated ad copy:] Cassie’s slow-cooked ragu will leave you ra-gooped and gagged! Maddy’s face making lobster bisque is so that feel when bae is late, and we are living for it. Bitch better have my slow-cooked pork shoulder served with a chicken broth mirepoix!

4. Young Sheldon— season 92 premiere Catch the new season only on ABC Family every night at 8/7c, between Kelly Clarkson Wants to Kill My Dog! and Toddler Divorce Court.

👙💘😈🍼

5. EEeEwwwww, , on the TV at premiering this spring, only 8. your pediatric dentist’s on that screen in the backoffice (YES, they still let you seat of taxis go there if you’re 20, you This one’s about a ragtag group of orphans who just can’t take anything 2. Ecstasy: Oops, All Trans!— get stuck in a mineshaft, and—you guessed from the prize jar) it—they all have podcasts! Will they make it streaming now on HUH?, out before the old-timey mayor drops a big After tweenager iPadcharger flunks her class anvil on their recording studio, and enacts a the new streaming service in understanding the assignment, she starts law to make all the townspeople cheugy? You offered by PBS KIDS an operation to ratio her school principal on can tell who the good guys are because they’re As a trans woman, I empathized deeply with Jules’ storyline on Euphoria. But I couldn’t help but feel left out of the narrative—most trans people aren’t skinny, white, cis-passing, non-disabled, and upper class. That’s when I found Ecstasy: Oops, All Trans! Everyone’s trans: the students, their parents, their teachers, their pets. And these dolls and creatures are all high off their gourds on hormones! That’s right, Ecstasy: Oops, All Trans! treats trans-affirming hormones as the newest highly addictive designer drug to hit the streets of Smarl, Minnesota—the fictional, suburban town where the show takes place. This kooky, ultra-conservative rock opera with an all-cis cast follows the love story of two trans people who are both named Willow. In a heartwarming season finale that will set the trans liberation movement back 20 years, Willow P. detransitions, while Willow M. dies from an “estrogen overdose.” This show gave me a panic attack, and for that I give it 7/9 slays.

3. Exuberance—streaming now on Ataxia, the streaming service of the Miami Dolphins Nora and I actually wrote this show! We wanted to make something new, but also? Old. Set in a senior home for high school students, this offbeat dystopian comedy about identical gay quintuplets who are each addicted to a different type of allergy medication is sure to tickle your funny bone. Madeleine Albright called it, “A slayngerous missrepresentation of queer

wearing graphic eyeliner and baby tees, and the bad guys’ face glitter spells out “My actions are morally reprehensible.” This is helpful because I like to watch religious cult leaders’ vlogs on my phone during the show and I sometimes miss the part when bad guys look into the camera and say, “Do NOT burn down the DJ Academy when your friend copies your homework! What I’m doing is wrong.” Catch the next episode in a cab near you, between the weather report and Ryan Seacrest’s feature on Dr. Pimple Popper.

6. Mazda’s 2022 Spring Into Summer Gay Drama Sales Event—gooning and baiting now on Cool Math Games Buying cars has never been so gay! Crash into summer with style by leasing an all-new Mazda Girlie, the first car with a cupholder small enough for poppers. No down payment, no insurance, no gender, no problem! I am non-binary and I like this. Tbh, I think it’s good! I love gay car. I love corporate pride.

Twitter: hijinks ensue! If you, like me, watched Euphoria and wondered, “where’s the part where they go on a double date to Dumb and Dumber To and throw up in their French teacher’s minivan?

Where’s the part where they buy edibles on Depop and throw up in their French teacher’s minivan? Where’s the part where they go to a historic Boston residence on a school field trip and everyone calls Kody gay for fainting on the stairs?” then this show is for you. Catch all the looks Buzzfeed News called “not empowering” and “message delivery error: this account has blocked you from sending DMs, please contact Instagram support if you believe we made a mistake.” The writers’ room quit after the first four episodes, so the rest of the show is an ad for one of those algorithmically-generated iPhone games. We can’t lie, Watersortpuzzle 2: Which of These Women is the Ugliest? looks pretty fun!

Check it out on the App Store now.

9.

Oops, we forgot to turn the TV on! Make eye contact with your shadowy reflection and imagine yourself growing old. Is that a wrinkle on your forehead? You should do laundry. How many years have you wasted? How many more will you waste? Maybe this weekend you’ll try that new restaurant that makes sushi look like a burrito. Oh god, is this the rest of your life?

TEXT MASHA BREEZE & NORA MATHEWS DESIGN TANYA QU ILLUSTRATION LIVIA WEINER VOLUME 44 ISSUE 04

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NEWS

“The Politics of Not Counting Caste”

An argument for a caste census

TEXT SWETABH CHANGKAKOTI

DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU

ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON

(in the Age of Surveillance)

03

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Before India’s 2011 Census, an iteration of the country’s decennial project to collect data on its population, media and political discourse was rife with possibility: the possibility of the state collecting data on caste for the first time since independence. Caste—despite immense social mobilization and constitutional intervention in India—continues to be perpetuated through upper-caste patriarchy and controls much of India’s socio-political climate and political economy today. This idea of a caste census was deeply contested on grounds that can broadly be described as morality and practicality. People who opposed it on moral grounds claimed that the acknowledgement of caste and its effects perpetuated caste, instead of helping break its oppressive systems down. On the other hand, people who opposed it on ‘practical’ grounds claimed that given the sheer number of castes India has and its population, it wouldn’t be worth attempting such an operation in the first place.

As was clear to Dalit (a name claimed by people belonging to the ‘lowest’ castes in India, which fall outside Hinduism’s varna system), Bahujan (literally translating to “the majority” of people who have faced caste-based oppression, which includes most ‘lower’ castes), and Adivasi (a name claimed by people from indigenous tribes) or “DBA” activists at the time, both of these claims, and most of these conversations, were based on a projected belief that the status quo was neutral. Collecting census data, in this framing, was an ‘apolitical’ act, and pushing for fine-grained data collection on caste introduced divisive politics into this ‘neutral,’ technical process. Satish Deshpande, a sociology professor at Delhi University and a leading scholar on caste, social theory, and politics, directly addressed this in a 2010 piece in which he urged readers to reframe this discourse around two different questions: “What kinds of damage has India suffered because a caste census has not been held since independence? What is the politics of not counting caste?”

Caste domination is perpetuated in several ways—through direct social boycott and gendered violence, and through economic and opportunity networks that restrict mobility,

NEWS

among others. But upper-caste elites often avoid acknowledging caste domination completely by claiming caste-blindness. Indeed, there are people (myself included) who have benefited from caste privilege for long enough to not know their own caste.

As Deshpande and numerous other DBA scholars have pointed out, caste-blindness manifests in ways that are actively harmful. A casteblind worldview either doesn’t address caste at all, or sees it as a superstructure built over class and, therefore, sees policies designed to address caste inequality purely as tools for class mobility.

For example, the introduction of “reservations,” or caste-based affirmative action in higher education and government jobs, has helped improve Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi people’s educational and professional outcomes significantly over the last three decades. However, this is inefficient from a caste-blind perspective. In this worldview, casteism manifests purely as upper-caste groups enacting direct, caste-based violence on Dalit and Bahujan people. People in cities often wrongly categorize this violence as a distant phenomenon, limited to rural India.

Caste-blindness eliminates any discussion of financial and structural violence, with policies like reservations being seen as pointless as long as financially secure people can benefit from its effects, regardless of their caste.

Starting from the foundation Deshpande established, the “politics of not counting caste” have evolved and have come a long way since 2011. To begin with, the 2011 Census did not include detailed caste information. Rather, the government led by the Indian National Congress (the former ruling party which had been in power for nearly 60 years at the time) and its allies, delegated this task to a separate SocioEconomic Caste Census (SECC) in the same year. The SECC was a colossal operation that spanned all of India’s states and union territories. Its data was first released in 2015, a year after the presently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, and has since been used for every program run by the Ministry of Rural Development, ranging from employment to food security.

Yet even with a piece of state machinery this extensive, the core problem persisted: the caste data was never released, and the data collection itself was drawn out, marred with errors and poor oversight. According to the Print, the government justified this by saying the Registrar General of India (one of the bodies responsible for the SECC) was “not entirely satisfied with the data collection—in terms of both the method and findings.” While the BJP government has repeatedly cited the exact number of errors in their data in arguments against publishing it; this data—perpetually in the process of correction—has still not been made public.

The last 10 years have seen the politics around counting caste expand in a completely different realm. While the SECC’s caste data remains under wraps, the BJP government

has taken significant steps to grow the Indian surveillance state, both through overreaching deployments of technology and by recklessly allowing technological experiments that frame India as a post-colonial playground for Big Tech, as exemplified by the growing use of facial recognition in mass protests. These displays of technological bravado augment existing surveillance infrastructure and perpetuates these structures that have historically functioned to monitor, police, and suppress DBA people.

There was no decennial census in 2021, due to the pandemic, and the 2022 census is yet to be conducted. Still, the BJP government is far from agreeing to conduct a caste census, and— even further—has turned its back on one of its major electoral promises: that of including an Other Backward Class (OBC) category in the census, which broadly enumerates the population of India’s ‘lower’ castes. In this moment, it is essential to highlight the points in support of a caste census that DBA activists have been putting forward for years, and to deconstruct popular arguments against it based on a veneer of pragmatism and morality. +++ One of the core reasons anti-caste activists favor a caste census is visibility. Such a census would make almost all of India’s castes visible in a public database, available for analysis with respect to income, education, and other quality of life indicators. Crucially, this would enumerate the so-called upper-castes in addition to the ‘lower’ ones, and hold the former to account.

Such data, through its very existence, could have significant effects.

To begin with, it would provide an authoritative, extensive source to update and confirm what older surveys and studies in development economics have shown about the effects to which caste correlates. An official caste census would also increase the data’s quality, since answers to surveys that aren’t backed by a central census authority are purely voluntary, as was the case with the SECC, and are much smaller in scale than an official census.

This would subsequently help the production of similar data in areas like educational privilege and occupational mobility, and the cumulative effect of these developments would likely be a greater ability to prove caste’s hierarchical effects. Even if this awareness is not universal (and it likely won’t be), it will be significant enough to catch onto political discourse at a party level. More importantly, in exposing the granular caste divisions of a superficial Hindu majority, and the immense inequalities within them, a caste census will be an authoritative source debunking the growing, problematic perception that religious monoliths will determine India’s political future. The latter is precisely the core belief that the Hindunationalist paramilitary organization known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), along

with its ideological and political offshoots— including the BJP—aims to achieve: that India must become, culturally and politically, a Hindu nation, irrespective of caste. This is a superficial unity, the cracks in which are clear in how these organizations’ foremost leaders have pushed to suppress anti-caste activists and made casteist remarks themselves.

In addition to its political alliances, this group of organizations (colloquially called the Sangh Parivar) has maintained the image of a united majority across caste lines through its long, eventful history of using targeted data collection and digital mobilization to project the image of a Hindu nation.

In late 2019 and early 2020, for example, the BJP’s implementation of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) illustrated how projecting a united majority can be used to marginalize religious minorities. The CAA fast-tracked Indian citizenship for exclusively non-Muslim immigrants from some of its neighboring countries, while the NRC would simultaneously create a register of all ‘legitimate’ citizens of India. Put together, these acts formed a directed, data-mediated attack that, if implemented, would effectively disenfranchise large portions of India’s Muslim population. Their message was clear: in a country where a united Hindu front was the demographic majority, there was no scope for Muslim outsiders to ‘replace’ them.

Another example is Tek Fog, an app BJP operatives use to manufacture hate speech and fake news and propagate it by hijacking Twitter trends and broadcasting WhatsApp messages. By occupying these digital public spaces with their constructed Hindu majority, the BJP manages to hide how drastically caste affects people’s experiences of these digital public spaces. For instance, a 2019 Equality Labs report stated that 13% of hate speech on Facebook in India is explicitly casteist. As a consequence, the BJP’s strategies have the effect of relegating DBA people, women, and Muslims to the margins of an internet occupied majorly by upper-caste Hindu men, but still manage to paint Indian cyberspace as occupied by a united, outwardly ‘casteless’ majority.

The construction of this majority, as used across contexts, requires immense technical infrastructure, wide-reaching databases, and a large network of operatives using such resources—highlighting the heterogeneity and power structures hidden in this image helps take apart its power. A caste census, by breaking down this majority through data, would provide the foundation to achieve this. +++ Arguments against a caste census often claim that the cultural specificity and complexity of caste—the fact that it cannot map to analogies with race, religion, or gender—makes largescale collection infeasible. However, the Indian

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government has repeatedly shown how it stores caste data at a micro-level, in increasingly unsafe and harmful ways.

In the city of Bhopal, for example, the system of policing draws its records and procedures from its colonial history under the British, wherein the Pardhi community, one of India’s many Adivasi groups, was branded a community of “hereditary criminals” under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Both the idea of “hereditary criminals” and the influence of caste on the policing system remain; an investigation by the Transnational Institute in June 2019 found that the Station House Officer of the Kolar Road Police Station was telling his officers “to make night-time visits to the Pardhi basti (slum colony), and pick up and detain anyone outside after dark.” Through incessant verbal and physical abuse, informal community policing systems, and the abuse of power through extortion, the local police subject Pardhi people to sustained, caste-based discrimination.

In the last few years, the central government, alongside criminal tech companies, has been increasing pressure on police stations all over India to digitize their records and push them to the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS), a super-platform meant to be the sole digital repository for crime data in India, with the goal of more accurate predictive policing. Considering the casteist roots of the data available to guide predictions, this goal faces the immense risk of reducing to a feedback loop of caste domination.

This pattern stretches to other government departments swept by a surveillance revolution of sorts, as the current government incentivizes private companies pitching into these services with ‘digital innovations.’ In at least eight municipal corporations across India, for example, primarily Dalit street sweepers and sanitation workers for the government’s Swachch Bharat (“Clean India”) initiative are forced to wear eerily-named Human Efficiency Tracking Systems equipped with mics, cameras, SIM cards, and GPS trackers to help their supervisors keep track of them. The information asymmetry and lack of oversight inherent in this situation raise fears related to surveillance even when these workers go to the bathroom or charge their devices at home.

These systems centralize and ossify local caste-based data used to oppress Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi people across India, given the systemic patterns of police violence and workplace mistreatment that they already face. A caste census, therefore, wouldn’t uncover entirely new information, but allow its collection in a way that is transparent and ethical; it wouldn’t displace these existing systems of oppression, but would help place the people volunteering their individual data to use it as a tool of collective resistance. +++ The clearest differences between data collection

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

as a device for marginalization and data collection as a collective self-portrait arise in the context of intersectionality. Caste intersects with several other heavily policed identity categories.

The portrayal of Muslims in India as a monolithic community fails to point out how caste exists within Muslim groups, and this failure leaves many Dalit Muslims unable to access equivalent educational and economic support available for Dalit Hindus, since the former identities aren’t fully recognized for affirmative accommodations.

Another salient example is that of Dalit trans people. In a longform piece for Scroll.in, Anja Kovacs detailed how trans people in India are subjected to relentless and heavy surveillance through security cameras, government databases, and medical records. Early in its term, the BJP government made an enormous policy push to associate a unique biometric ID (called Aadhaar) with every citizen of the country. In the process, Aadhaar was tied to essential private mechanisms like digital payment apps and state mechanisms like family welfare departments, AIDS control centers, and even the aforementioned Human Efficiency Tracking Systems, and there has been a growing push to link it to voter IDs as well.

This 360º view of every citizen is particularly dangerous for the large communities of trans people engaged in sex work, which is outlawed in India. Specifically, different communities of trans people in India prefer to represent their gender identities in different ways, which often don’t fit into a male-female binary. The options for gender available when registering for Aadhar somewhat crudely reflect this, allowing people to only register as “male”, “female”, or “transgender”.

This avenue for representation is promising to some extent, but is often misused by authorities with access to Aadhaar data; police authorities, for example, know that widespread transphobia severely limits the job opportunities available for trans people in India, and the people Kovacs interviewed have mentioned their fears of having their payment history being tied to their gender identity, which would place them at a higher risk of persecution. This risk compounds in the context of caste identity, given the long history of police brutality against Dalits all across India.

Similarly, trans people’s lack of recourse against sexual assault, in addition to higher homelessness rates, and higher surveillance are all issues that are amplified for Dalit and Bahujan trans people on account of their caste identities.

While state violence and surveillance places people with intersecting disadvantaged identities in incredibly precarious positions, trans and DBA activists have pushed for policy changes that do not suppress these identities, but provide higher state support based on how they overlap.

Currently, the government is blind towards the castes of trans people, instead viewing transness as a caste in itself—government surveys all count trans people in the OBC category. Applying policies like reservations for Dalit and Bahujan communities horizontally on the basis of gender,

i.e. if a certain percentage of seats reserved for each broad caste category were dedicated to trans people within these communities, would ensure each identity’s visibility, while also recognizing that people at their intersections deserve greater degrees of support for equal opportunity. A caste census would enable exactly this; the horizontal collection of caste, gender, and religious data is conducive to thorough policy decisions that recognize intersectionality. +++ On February 5 and 6 of this year, 30 notable activists, artists, academics, and politicians came together at Oxford to discuss the possibility of a caste census. Deshpande discussed a new politics of not counting caste, trans Dalit activist Grace Banu talked about horizontal reservations, and people like Suraj Yengde, Ali Anwar, and Anupama Rao added incisive and forceful arguments in support of such a caste census.

The BJP refuses to entertain these claims in lieu of a casteist, Islamophobic, transphobic, and Hindu nationalist status quo, which it maintains through surveillance and marginalization.

Despite this refusal, activists’ efforts make it clear that the movement for a caste census is pushing forward with anticipation for 2022— with the awareness that the act of collecting data can be a means for people to claim agency through collective resistance.

SWETABH CHANGKAKOTI B’24 asks you to see people in numbers and power in people.

FEATS

Nightcore, Postmodernity, and the Internet What we can learn from Duster and sped-up Joni Mitchell songs

KOLYA SHIELDS ‘24 will be launching their DJ career with a “Grime(s)” set solely composed of Stormzy, Skepta, and Grimes songs.

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ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

experience—listening to a different song with a nightcore edit, one that I knew of but didn’t have an attachment to, I found myself focusing on its mediation and editing, amused by the changes and high-pitched voices. Slowcore, on the other hand, has become a TikTok trend.

Edits of songs abound, from the Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas to Drake hits, all slowed and engulfed by waves of reverb. While there remains an impetus to lose yourself in the music, the languid, hazy notes washing over you, slowcore has become just as easy as nightcore to quickly edit and distribute over the internet, remixing recognizable songs in such a way that you cannot avoid an awareness of mediation in contrast to the instantly recognizable tempo and sound of the original song.

If any sort of unity can be grasped from the opposition of nightcore and slowcore, it’s that music, as any form of art, is subsumed into a contested, stratified schema of “quality” and “taste” shaped by political economy, cultural heritage, and technical specification that both intensifies and suppresses the complex multidimensionality of music creation, production, and reception. As with any discussion of the digital, there’s a cultural assumption that online, edited, and coded work is less authentic, less “real,” than live, analog creation. Yet we must hold onto the fluid ethics of postmodern recycling, irony, and skepticism present in nightcore without giving into a vision of cold, lifeless cyberspace. My adoration of “Realiti” reveals that modification and mediation can be a powerful affective experience, an act of love, a way of honoring that art cannot stay the same, that appreciation for its content can lie in its very transformation.

DESIGN ELISA KIM

while nightcore is far more about the song’s production, and its relation to other pieces of media: the “original,” unedited version of the song, other nightcore songs, and “regular” songs in general. However, Jameson also writes that what truly sets postmodernity apart is not art forms’ shifting contextual position within a mediascape, which has always existed in different forms, but our consciousness of this positionality. Music has always been impacted by mediation—pop songs are around 3 minutes long because 78 rpm records could only hold that much music on the vinyl—but today, this mediation is not so much a limit as a signifier.

Nightcore isn’t just a music genre one enjoys listening to—it’s a stance on the “purity” and editability of music, the free distribution of musical experimentation online, and the visibility of mediation in art. There’s a conspicuous ethics of slowcore too—think of pretentious Pitchfork indie boys, the fetishization of liveness in music, and an obsession with the craft of the original recording.

Heavy mediation and post-production editing form a dialectic with live, single-take recording, each carrying contradictory focuses—immediate/mediated, ironic/emotional singular/contextual, center/edge, authentic/ inauthentic. But maybe it isn’t so simple.

Listening to a nightcore version of one of my favorite songs, Grimes’ “Realiti,” I’m flooded with impactful melodies and motifs faster than I’ve experienced before, enticed into an intensely emotional experience, not founded in the earnestness and liveness of slowcore, but the overwhelming speed of meaningful signs rushing past me—that one synth line I love, that drum pattern, that one lyric!—rooted in my prior knowledge of the song and attachment to its specific motifs and segments. Here, nightcore becomes an immersive, immediate affective experience through its hypermediacy, contextuality, and editing. However, this isn’t a universal

TEXT KOLYA SHIELDS

Everyone should download Soundcloud, not just for CupcakKe acapellas and Jersey Club remixes, but to experience the pure gumption required to create a (rather fantastic) Joni Mitchell nightcore remix. Nightcore edits speed up a track and raise the pitch, shortening songs and transforming all matter of vocalists into squeaky nasal-singers. This genre was popularized by Nightcore, a Norwegian musical duo that gained prominence through their edits of Euro and Trance music, which started as a class project in 2002. Although edits were first passed around regional DJ circles via CDs, easy access to online file-sharing in the 2000s, social media, and the extreme simplicity of the edit allowed nightcore to spread across the globe onto new genres and new ears, gaining huge popularity around 2010. The newly massive genre of hyperpop is partially indebted to nightcore; the PC Music Collective, a foundational hyperpop group, lists it as one of their influences, reflecting the way initially niche trends transverse musical forums, reaching new artists’ ears and suddenly appearing on massive corporate playlists that make or break careers.

In contrast to nightcore is slowcore, a genre that emerged offline in the 90s out of indie rock and sadcore characterized by languid tempos, grim lyrics, and minimal instrumentation—think of Duster, or the aptly named Slowdive. Nightcore and slowcore have contradictory approaches to music-making; slowcore zooms in, exalting the listening experience by elongating the notes so that the listener can lose themselves in the artistry, emotion, and atmosphere of the song. Nightcore, however, is a genre perfect for the irony, detachment, and hyper-acceleration of postmodernity. It discloses its own editing and mediation, how the song is filtered and interpolated. Nightcore abstracts a song through shrinkage until you‘re paying far more attention to the absurdity of the chipmunk voices and structure of the song than any poetic lyricism or artistic absorption. People rarely come across a nightcore remix of a song they do not know, but instead revel in the often-ironic twisting of their favorite hits into a new form, suggesting a detachment from “pure” meaning and the sanctity of an original recording—the musical equivalent of postmodern recycling, appropriation, and collage.

With its roots in format and simulation— the typical remix speeds a track by 35%, emulating the sound of a 33 rpm record played at 45 rpm—nightcore is a form fixated on hypermediacy, on making the presence of editing central and obvious. As PC Music founder Danny L Harle is quoted in Complex, “I don’t feel like it’s an interaction from another human to me, it’s just MP3 sound making me feel emotional.” The original work of art fades into the background, overcome by its manipulation. This reflects what cultural theorist Fredric Jameson calls the “mediatization” of postmodernity—how traditional arts like music become self-aware of their own production as a “symbolic message” in the media system and as a stance on what is to be valued and appreciated within the artform.

Slowcore, with its earnest lyrics and expansive instrumentation, suggests devotion to direct emotional connection and meaning in music,

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shíma yazhí ahéhee’/ thank you, auntie.

TEXT DANIELLE EMERSON

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION TOM MANTO

LIT

Shíma yazhí / my aunt sits on shílátsíín / my wrist.

The colors that adorn her hair––łitsxo / orange and yágo doołtizh / blue––

are hand plucked and spun from Father Sky. It is thin and braided, held together with a silver clasp.

Shíma yazhí / my aunt points, “Look.”

Shí / my gaze turns, meeting the dinilchí / pink glow of an early winter morning.

It reflects off her eyes

like frosted headlights from passing cars on the highway. ayóó déézk’aaz / it’s cold out, the air turns my breath into white curls, like smoke from a dying stove ko’ / fire.

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If we were in Tsé’ Bit’á’i / Shiprock,

Shíma yazhí / my aunt would have taken me to Sonics

for a late-night dah woozh / strawberry shake.

Shíma yazhí / my aunt draws little circles around the inside of shílátsíín / my wrist.

The edge of biláshgaan / her nail,

and the pad of her index finger

grazes my skin like sunlight.

She’s warm— her beads are an embrace, as I cry into biwos / her shoulders.

Shíma yazhí’s / my aunt’s secure, protecting me from evil—

like Shímasaní / my grandmother promised.

Her voice makes shíjaa’ / my ears tingle.

I swear I can feel her chapped bidaa’ / lips whisper,

Seed beads.

They’re woven and threaded with nimble ála’ /

hands.

Shíma yazhí / my aunt tells me to repeat after her.

I listen like Shimasaní / my grandmother taught me.

When Shíma yazhí / my aunt was an at’ééd / little girl,

she loved looking at the tł’éé’ yá / night sky.

If given the chance, Shíma yazhí / my aunt would have collected

all the So’ / stars she could carry

in a light dibéłchíʼí / brown pouch.

I’d like to imagine they’d clink and crinkle like

łitso / nickels,

dootłʼizh / dimes,

and łichííʼí / pennies.

Shíma yazhí / my aunt would buy herself a pop and some chips after school

with so’ łání / the constellations,

counting change in bila’ ałts’íísí éí dibéłchíʼí /

the small, brown palm of her hand.

Shíma yazhí/ my aunt never cried. not in front of me, not in front of Shíma / my mother.

Before she sat on shílátsíín / my wrist,

she took care of Shíma / my mother

and my uncle / Shíbizhi.

Her strength came from the prayers she said every abíní / morning.

The woven band on shígaan / my arm, a tribute to the power in her voice.

“Don’t look down.” She’d tell me, “Look up.”

Shíma yazhí spreads bílázhoozh / her fingers like dried naadáá’ / corn stalks along my right álátsíín

—always my right álátsíín.

Shíma yazhí leads me by shígaan across dirt roads and muddy ditch paths.

I wave at neighbors: the old Diné hastiin dóó tsostsʼid bínaahaií / seven-year-old bitsóí / grandson, the nosey Diné asdzáán / woman and bahastiin / her husband, the Chapter House workers, bickering over last week’s meeting.

When I wave, they recognize Shíma yazhí on shíla’.

They smile and wave back—they always smile and wave back.

I follow Shíma yazhí back to the farm.

Sometimes I lose my way.

But I know she’s smiling as I kick rocks behind her,

humming an old song she used to sing along with on the radio.

Shíma yazhí sits on my shíla’ as her last promise before I left shíghan / home.

DANIELLE EMERSON B’22.5 a bíghan éí ayóó ánííníshní / loves her home.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LIT

why is the sky blue?

mother’s hand and celery: sweet, stiff, and acrid “eat this please птичка—” it is green and light, feel yellow marigolds planted in the field by my hands and Mother’s snapping back.

Mint springs like juniper twigs bud from the solid ground where the worms lay, breaking sour bread over rippling water.

My hips wash circles on your thigh as we sleep (in mention only), watching the sun dip

beneath the crowded reeds and the stars rise through streaks of midnight blue and cirrus my home – now yours, like mint in the garden and celery in the morning and being cared for was mine.

“Kiss me, please яблоко” softly through the thousand-thread air.

Our love, a gatherer’s affair.

BECCA SIEGEL B’23 enjoys walking on the sunny side of the street.

TEXT BECCA SIEGEL DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES VOLUME 44 ISSUE 04

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X HANNAH NIGRO “BUT AS WORMS”

Hannah Nigro (RISD, Photo BFA 2023) Pieces from But As Worms Above: Inkjet Print, 8.5 x 11 inches.

Below: Mound, (24 x 16 inches) containing dirt from home, rocks from Moonstone Beach, photos printed on rice paper These works come from a larger installation titled “But As Worms,” which addresses a desire to level the human perception of a hierarchical structure within the natural world. The mound acts as a site of passage between the world below to ours above, and both cradles and contains the human-produced image.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

CASTING MEMORY IN BRONZE Unwritten narratives of Benin City, and the imperative of Western museums in restituting cultural heritage Content warning: violence/reference to war, institutional racism

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 04

ILLUSTRATION TOM MANTO

The RISD museum does not have a curator of African art on its staff. As a result, much of the dialogue surrounding this particular piece fell under the responsibility of Dr. Gina Borromeo, Chief Curator and the Curator of Ancient Art, and Jan Howard, the Houghton P. Metcalf Jr.

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

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TEXT KEELIN GAUGHAN

In the language of the Edo people, the word for ‘remember,’ sa-e-y-ama, translates as ‘to cast a motif in bronze.’ The Kingdom of Benin is widely acclaimed for its artistic tradition in the medium of bronze and the contextualization of such artifacts as records of culture and history.

This February marked the 125th anniversary of the sacking of Benin City by British forces and the series of events leading to the forced dispersal of Edo artifacts throughout prominent museums in the Western world. In what could be described only as a genocide, European soldiers decimated the city, burning architectural monuments, ending tens of thousands of lives, and desecrating one of the most enterprising and industrious societies of the ancient world.

Through this exploit of colonial expansion, Britain perpetrated a massacre against culture and art. The plundering of these objects was, in the words of archaeologist and author Dan Hicks, “not a side effect of empire but a technology for performing white supremacy”—in other words, the act of taking was not an afterthought, but an intentional and active participant in cultural genocide. The enormity of loss has made it impossible to quantify or locate the entirety of material culture looted from Benin City. In the recent past, however, Western collectors and cultural heritage museums have begun to engage in conversations about restitution and the return of stolen artifacts to their rightful owners on the African continent.

Providence is home to one such museum.

The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum exhibits the “Head of a King,” a bronze artifact originating from Benin City around the 1700s. Since the initial acquisition of the “Head of a King” by the museum over 80 years ago, the depiction of this artifact as well as its position in the museum collection have evolved.

Through provenance research, advocacy from the Providence community, and a growing global consciousness about the false neutrality of Western museums, this object’s complicated history has been made increasingly visible, spurring conversations about artifact theft and heritage in Western museums.

Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

In the spring of 2017, the RISD museum contacted Nigerian artist and historian Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi and commissioned him to write a manual about the piece. Entitled “The Head in Focus: Benin Art and Visual History,” Nzewi’s essay details the spiritual value of the human head in many early African societies and the specific prestige of the “Head of a King” as an altar to royal ancestry. These commemorative pieces were commissioned by the incoming Oba—the ruler or king of Benin—as a way to honor their predecessor; they are a testament to the advanced lost-wax casting technique used by the Edo people. The entire manual is available to the public on the RISD Museum website.

In an interview with the College Hill Independent on March 2, Dr. Borromeo provided insight into the process of restitution in practice. “My initial task was really to try and find the history of ownership of this piece,” she said. The “Head of a King” was originally donated in 1939 by Lucy Truman Aldrich, who purchased it from the Knoedler Gallery in New York four years prior. However, the annotated catalog—which the gallery also contributed—credited this purchase to Helen Metcalf Danforth. Danforth was the president of the RISD Corporation at the time.

Additional evidence comes from two stickers found on the underside of the head, including a customs stamp and the writing “Imported from France.” These details indicate that the piece likely spent time in a French collection. Borromeo explained that many French dealers came to appropriate these pieces very soon after the looting in Benin took place, and again in the 1930s when the soldiers involved were passing away from old age, after holding the stolen artifacts as personal spoils of war.

The last five years have seen an increase in dialogue about Benin restitution efforts. In November 2018, Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr and French art historian Bénédicte Savoy published “A Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics,” a report advocating for the large-scale restitution of sub-Saharan African artifacts from France. The 252-page document contains comprehensive research about the history of African cultural heritage as it relates to French colonial efforts.

It then delineates a three-phase proposal for executing repatriation. Essentially, the report communicated to Western entities what the people of Nigeria, and other African nations, had been demanding for decades.

Numerous Western governments and institutions—the RISD museum included—have credited this publication as prompting mobilization to assess their own collections of

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METRO TEXT KEELIN GAUGHAN

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION TOM MANTO

colonial-era artifacts. Despite this apparently positive call to action, Sarr and Savoy emphasize that the purpose of these efforts should not be to erase colonial histories or divert culpability from Western museums. Rather, the commitment to returning what was taken and reconstructing discourse surrounding cultural heritage is a concrete step towards reconciling the past.

The Sarr and Savoye report was commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, who had made a declaration the previous year calling for the return of all material heritage to the African continent. Since Macron’s proclamation, however, a sparse total of 28 objects have been repatriated by French museums, and attempts to deaccession cultural property have amounted to very little. Macron himself has since retracted his statement, contending that it is only necessary to return artifacts “whose absence is psychologically the most intolerable,” the Art Newspaper reported. It’s unclear whether these complications are a result of contradicting

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

policies or a lack of legislative framework, but his hypocrisy suggests that proactive efforts to address these concerns remain stalled. Empty gestures of performative activism constitute a great deal of this proclaimed progress.

Just over a week following the Sarr and Savoy report’s publication—on November 30, 2018—students and staff from the Brown-RISD community gathered in the front entrance of the RISD museum in protest of the continued display of the Benin bronze. The demonstration, following the chant of “Heads Up RISD! Decolonization, or Complicity?” prompted the RISD museum staff to become more transparent in their ongoing efforts of restitution. The Museum reported to arts magazine Hyperallergic that they had “initiated a process of communication with Oba Ewuare II and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Nigeria.”

In addition, the “Head of a King” attracted the attention of courses at both Brown and RISD; students visited the object on display and engaged in conversations pertaining to colonial-

ism, imperialism, and cultural property.

With growing media attention, the RISD museum became a target of critical discourse among the student body. “You could really feel the momentum building,” Dr. Borromeo told the Indy. “With museums and society, in general, becoming more aware of social equity…it created this groundswell of action.” She went on to describe the museum’s “All Staff Dialogue” program which involves faculty members in conversations about issues facing museums, of which restitution has become a prominent focal point. From that point forward, what had emanated from the museum alone swelled into an institution-wide initiative, and as of September 2020, the object was officially deaccessioned. +++ Itohan Osayimwese is an associate professor in the History of Art and Architecture and Urban Studies departments at Brown University. She currently teaches a class, “Architecture and

METRO

Urbanism in Africa,” which confronts Africa’s architectural heritage and the duality of the continent as a diverse geographic presence with rich history and an imagined construct depicted through colonial contexts. Professor Osayimwese had a unique undergraduate experience at Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in an interdisciplinary program called “The Growth and Structure of Cities.” She told the Indy that she “always wanted to be an architect,” but that her own perspectives on the field were largely influenced by the Eurocentric survey which dominated architectural scholarship. “There was a clear imbalance,” she said. “The largest continents in the world, Asia and Africa, were so underrepresented in the story.”

Through open conversation with her professors and independent research, it became clear that the absence of these narratives was due to inaccessibility and the disregard of non-Western material history. These gaps in our collective knowledge of specifically the African continent “weren’t just gaps, they were produced through certain processes which we take for granted.” She explained how this lack of history has become a trope among scholars of African history and architecture; it often comes down to questions of evidence, and the idea that little evidence exists of an architectural history on the African continent. “We can’t just accept these narratives,” Professor Osayimwese continued. “Why is there no there there? It’s because 90–95% of African material cultural heritage was removed from the continent during modern colonialism movements.” This ‘lack of history’ is a counterfeit argument.

To put this issue in perspective, Professor Osayimwese proposed an example of a scholar studying Renaissance architecture in Italy. This particular student would more than likely travel to Italy and visit existing ruins, as well as archives with written documentation and artifacts: there’s one place that they would go to access these resources. In comparison, if the same student were studying African heritage and art history, they would likely also visit Europe, and these resources would not all be concentrated in the same location. The dissemination of African material culture makes it incredibly difficult to study, and this is still coming from a perspective of privilege for Professor Osayimwese, as an academic in the US with the means to obtain funding and transportation. “What about someone who is an underprivileged person, not an academic, living in a city in sub-Saharan Africa?” she asked. “What is the likelihood that this person will ever be able to access this material that is so widely dispersed?” She also emphasized the responsibility of scholars to not just study for personal gain but to truly understand and communicate that knowledge with a wider community of people. “We hope that our books and our articles will change the world, in some indirect manner.”

Western academic institutions have a history of perpetuating colonial trauma: according to Dan Hicks, five of the eight Ivy league universities possess looted artifacts from Benin.

Professor Osayimwese noted the importance of framing these conversations “not just as an issue about the Benin bronzes, but the Benin bronzes as symbolic or representative of greater issues.” For example, Brown University has acknowledged its occupation of indigenous land, but meaningful actions to address these legacies and redistribute wealth and sovereignty to indigenous communities are far from fulfilled. The Haffenreffer’s off-site storage facility in Bristol rests on the traditional homelands of the Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples, and was originally built to house stolen indigenous artifacts and ethnographic material from across North America. The museum has begun the moving process by cataloging its collection as it prepares to relocate closer to campus. Yet, this process has been slow and is far from complete.

By lacking urgency on these matters and benefiting directly from colonial institutions like Brown, we contribute to and prolongate this problem.

While the reactive efforts of the Haffenreffer Museum are clearly a movement in the right direction, they underline the universal issue of museums’ careless negligence of what they have in their possession. The fact that complete provenance research is absent from so many museums’ libraries is indicative of the fundamental disconnect between these institutions and the items they profit off of. “They talk as if these objects are very important to their own collections,” Professor Osayimwese said, “but most of these objects are actually in storage, and some of them haven’t ever been opened.” She also lingers on Professor Preucel’s use of the word “consider” in regards to repatriation efforts; the passive connotation of this kind of language and its lack of commitment does not inspire great confidence that the museum is truly dedicated to that effort.

“Museums are taking a very limited and narrow view of what constitutes looting,” Professor Osayimwese told the Indy. The story of Benin City is not an isolated event on the African continent; this particular exploit exists within a larger campaign of militarist colonialism and corporate capitalism simultaneously affecting Ghana, northern Nigeria, and Egypt, to name a few. The emphasis on the Benin bronzes alone serves to assuage some of this guilt, failing to address the bigger issue in question.

‘Looting’ becomes a broad term for a wide range of violence and dispossession. Even in the case of artifacts removed under what may appear to be legitimate transactions of trade, we know that “those kinds of transactions are almost never on equal footing,” Professor Osayimwese said. Monetary exchange does not absolve these acts from their exploitative underpinnings.

+++

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The Haffenreffer Museum was drawn into the discourse around heritage and preservation in June 2021, when the Brown Daily Herald published an article regarding fifteen Edo artifacts that were identified as a part of the museum’s collection. Robert Preucel, the museum director, and James Manning, Professor of Anthropology, detailed the museum’s new partnership with the Digital Benin Initiative, committed to assembling a virtual collection of displaced Benin art. In that article, Preucel expressed to the Herald that the museum would “certainly consider returning any of the objects” if provenance research indicates a history of looting.

Over a century has passed since the original act of violence that displaced Benin material culture. But the return of these objects remains stuck in preliminary stages. This stagnation naturally raises an inquiry of time: put bluntly, what exactly are we waiting for? In the Indy’s conversation with Dr. Borromeo, she noted the fact that the deaccessioning of the Benin bronze at RISD was carried out prior to any kind of official documentation from the Nigerian government requesting its return. “Strangely enough, that [documentation] is the sticking point for a lot of museums,” she said. Acts of repatriation, however, do not absolve these institutions from

interrogating the overarching context of heritage museums. Even after the return of artifacts to their rightful owners, museums must work to deconstruct the lens of alterity through which other cultures are represented.

In response to the question of ‘why now?’

Professor Osayimwese shared her mixed feelings of hope and cynicism about ongoing efforts.

“There have been moments like this in the past, though maybe not with quite as much visibility or quite as much energy,” she told the Indy. For instance, during the 1970s the Secretary-General of the United Nations called for the return of cultural objects to Africa, but the subsequent activity quickly faded out. Professor Osayimwese pointed out one major difference to the recent efforts: “Different people are asking,” she said, “The calls for restitution previously were coming from the African continent and now these calls are much broader, and they’re coming from within Western societies.”

While this truth confronts continuing impacts of institutional racism in the world of art history, it also serves as a motivating force for those whose voices have provoked actions.

“I also think it has something to do with the critical mass of people asking and growing awareness of these violent histories,” Professor Osayimwese continued. The physical presence of these objects that don’t belong carries that history into the present: “That’s how the violence continues.”

The truth is that most of the work necessary for redefining these structures has yet to be done. As efforts to rewrite the narratives surrounding cultural objects continue, Western museums must not sever the “then” from the “now.” The act of theft which would bring these artifacts to their current positions is spoken about in the past tense, deflecting agency from the academics and historians who still control these narratives. Professor Osayimwese reflected the importance of thinking about these objects as having multiple values; they exist as historical narratives, as evidence of technological prowess, as achievements in art, as religious symbols, and as documents of political tragedy.

Western thinking in regards to art is so often fixated on hollow aesthetic value as the only indication of worth.

“I think the best outcome would be for these objects to find their way home, and then for us—members of the Brown-RISD community, and of the US and the Western world at large—to engage with them by going there,” Professor Osayimwese said, in response to questions of the continued celebration of the Benin bronzes.

In 2020, architect David Adjaye completed designs for a planned Edo Museum of West African Art located in the heart of the old city, the New York Times reports. This site is being built explicitly to house returned artifacts from European museums, and reconnect communities in Nigeria with their own cultural heritage.

Adjaye emphasizes his intent to reframe what a museum can be: a space of consciousness built for the community first and an international site second. “It’s not going to be a Western model,” he states in the article. The construction of museums should center memory as a living and prospering ethos. Moving forward, Western museums should be stewarded by contemporary African artists and architects, dethroning Western expectations of what African art looks like. More valuable than any act of restitution is reciprocity.

KEELIN GAUGHAN B’25 reads every label in an art museum.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 04

12

Kick Ass, Go to Space, Represent the Human Race

TEXT KATHERINE XIONG

DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

ILLUSTRATION JOSHUA KOOLIK

S+T

Assimilation, Representation, and the Neocolonial Logic of the Queer Space Imaginary

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“I love you to the moon & / not back,” are the opening words of my favorite poem by Chen Chen, one of few poets I’ve read who has a solid grasp of joy. This poem is no exception: Refusing an Earth that’s become the site of so much queer pain, the force of Chen’s “queer zest” punches through the gravitational pull that keeps us earthbound, launching itself past the stratosphere into the giddy emptiness of space.

He brings with him his lover, his “sailor moon jean jacket” (two of them, actually; one each), the promise of a moon cottage and a moon garden. And, of course, you, the reader.

Admittedly, Chen is just one of many queer artists who has taken the moon as a subject.

It’s a giant, glowing orb in the sky, for heaven’s sake, far enough removed from earthly problems to take all the angst we lob at its cratered surface. Of course, it’s almost impossible to write a moon poem nowadays without running up against the desires of all the writers who came before you. But maybe that’s the power of Chen’s poem: that it speaks to, speaks for, even amplifies a longing that was born long before him. Yeah, it’s cliche. Yeah, everyone has said this before. And I love it, Chen says, and you can’t stop me from loving it.

And why should he stop? Why shouldn’t he stay up there in the “lighter / queerer moon gravity”? Why shouldn’t he call us to “love each other / (so good) on the moon”? With so many human hopes riding on this distant celestial object, why shouldn’t he call us to come with him and “not come back”? +++ According to Google Search Trends, the history of the term “gays in space” begins in the mid2000s after the premiere of a stereotype-laden SNL sketch about a ‘fabulous’ gay spaceship crew making sexual passes at aliens and kvetching over cocktails. This is not the worst of queer representation in space, of course. As in most popular media since the Hays Codes, queer people have been deployed in outer space mainly as villainous characters, wrapped up in the violent process of ‘othering’ implicit to so many white, colonial fantasies of the unknown. In the real world, queer people simply haven’t been allowed in space—not openly. A 2008 WIRED article titled “Space, The Final Frontier for Homosexuality” points out that statistically, we must’ve seen some queer people go to space. But in 2008, all we had were commercial astronaut hopeful Lance Bass and Star Trek

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

icon George Takei, both coming out long after their journeys skyward. The very existence of such an article suggests an absence that queer people desired to fill.

My history of “gays in space” begins with the 2016 Netflix reboot of the Voltron space-mecha franchise Voltron: Legendary Defender, whose fandom became my first queer community.

By then, I’d been lurking on Tumblr for years, dipping my toes into fandom to fill a loneliness I couldn’t name. Say what you will about its toxicity and ouroboric gatekeeping—at the time, Tumblr was the only place I had where anyone talked about being queer. Case in point: I found out about the 2015 Supreme Court decision on gay marriage not from mainstream news media, but via a jubilant Tumblr post. I encountered Voltron—whose characters would often be tagged or referred to as “gays in space”—almost exactly one year later.

Without delving too far into the drama of Voltron’s later seasons, I’ll say this—the first two seasons, despite having no openly queer characters, felt like the first seasons of a show that might truly do it right. The crew of strangers’ trust-building process seemed to probe what non-normative relationships (platonic, romantic, or anything in between) could be. Or maybe I felt that way because the Tumblr fandom— comprised largely of queer teenagers and young adults who’d turned to cartoons for stories mainstream TV rarely gave them—felt like a place of queer promise. For most of high school, the Voltron fandom was a maelstrom of energy, filled with queer creators who wanted to go to space, wanted to see themselves in space, and had convened in the virtual space of the Internet to see it through.

Or maybe these things converged in my head because the ‘space gays’ TV aesthetic I’d come to expect—the bubbliness, special brand of positivity, and radical emphasis on solving relationship problems with an ethic of love—had Steven Universe behind it. Steven Universe sped right past the “final frontier” for queerness on children’s TV in 2013, a time when depictions of queer relationships on screen were strictly limited to hand-holding or off-screen confirmations. Even before the show confirmed its queer relationships, navigating non-normative family—a family of female-coded aliens and their half-alien, half-human adopted son (whose ‘biological’ family turns out to be the leaders of an intergalactic empire)—was the show’s M.O. The show’s emphasis on non-normativity mapped onto the setting as well: The visually dazzling outer space the show traverses in later seasons, as well as the extraordinary gem architectures and technologies that give it shape, outline a literal queer landscape for SU’s vision of queer life.

Our imaginations of outer space have long been positioned as existing

forever in the future, forever full of infinite, infinitely better possibilities. After Voltron and Steven Universe, I couldn’t help but see outer space as a site of queer possibility as well, a place to imagine a radically more inclusive future free of historical and present social burdens. And it’s not lost on me how the social Internet, itself a virtual, non-normative ‘space’ through which you could theoretically escape the limitations of your bodily place in the world, helped create that imaginary. For that disembodiment was also part of escaping into the beyond: being allowed to forget I had a body; being allowed to float, as weightless as I might be in Chen’s “lighter / queerer moon gravity,” out into the virtual online world; being allowed to dream of being whatever I wanted to be.

It was euphoric in the same bubbly, highly aestheticized vein as Chen’s poem, with its Sailor Moon jean jackets and moon cottage queerness. Anything was possible. Gay people spiraled into outer space in mass media. Pride marched on, glaringly visible now both because of changing social attitudes and because I was paying attention. And all through high school, this was my mantra: “Kick ass, go to space, represent the human race.” Like so much of my self-understanding at the time, I’d lifted it from a user on Tumblr. +++ But there’s a violence to this idea of boundless possibility—namely, its suppression of history.

To call the unknown a ‘space of potential’ is to declare it devoid of extant social meaning, or at least any social meaning you recognize. Freedom of social meaning means infinite potential, perhaps, but potential for what?

In the 17th century, John Locke outlined a vision of ‘productive’ land onto which certain markers of ‘development’—people hard at work, farmland organized in neatly tilled rows— should be inscribed. The capacity to use land in such productive ways—a capacity ascribed only to white settlers—Locke argued, justified claiming ownership of the so-called New World. He envisioned the New World as ‘empty’ of meaning and full of potential because the markers of sustained human societies that had long lived and thrived in the Americas did not register in his eyes as ‘productive life.’ This despite how indigenous farmers had long known to wait for the land to recover, to work with the patterns of nature rather than conquering them, and in doing so sustained their communities for generations without English concepts of private property. To Locke, that they did not constantly toil and visibly suffer over their land (or enslave people to do so), and that they did not treat land as something to develop, was a sign that the land was wasted, lying in wait for the ‘right’ people.

Perhaps our imagination need not be so willfully, explicitly, or violently colonialist as Locke’s. Yet time and time again, the imaginative playgrounds we’ve inhabited in the tech age have only replicated the inequities of our past and present. Our virtual, disembodied world of the Internet is in fact littered with bodies: Scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observed in 2006 that the Internet, once framed as a virtual, equalizing space where race, class, gender, and so many other axes of difference could ‘fall away’ within the multicultural fantasy of erad-

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icating difference, has become more explicitly defined by sexism, racism, and capitalist force than ever. She gave the example of the ‘promise’ of being able to leave your material, racialized, and gendered body behind—a promise exploited by white Internet trolls, for example, who use the anonymity of the Internet to slip into women-of-color personas to infiltrate activist circles. A promise denied to most queer people and people of color, who instead often find themselves hypervisible as embodied subjects of scrutiny, as cultural explainers, as the unnamed creators of online cultural phenomena, as the butt of animated jokes.

Maybe outer space, supposedly void of (known) intelligent life—and largely composed of literal voids of thinly-spread matter—has the capacity to take on all of these self-centered fantasies. Or maybe we just think that’s the case because we haven’t figured out what we’re looking at when we look up to the sky. Either way, that we only seem to see our own images reflected back in the darkness troubles me. For that impulse has a troubling historical root in extractive desires, asking less, ‘what is my place in this universe?’ and more, ‘what can space do for me?’

Case in point: Our modern inquiry into space emerges directly out of the Cold War logics of the Space Race. It was military money poured into the research behind the man on the moon, behind the brilliant scientific breakthroughs that power our virtual lives today. It is still military money that funds these incursions into space: the missile guidance systems, the never-ending satellite debris.

And it was the militaristic logic of the threatening Oriental Other that captured sci-fi writers’ imaginations. Empire vs. empire storytelling—that is, the individualistic empire (the good guys, the cis/white/male everyman characters, the good Americans, etc.), vs. the faceless empire of inhuman Others—reigned supreme in Star Wars and Ender’s Game. In its first iterations, Voltron replicated those dynamics—dynamics that, at its core, Voltron: Legendary Defender never questioned.

Case in point: the billionaire space race, with its phallic big-rocket shows of force, lurid descriptions of nuking Mars to make way for terraforming efforts, and even suggestions that outsourcing human life and work to a Mars colony could ‘solve global poverty.’ Case in point: how well this self-centered dream of transcending earthly bounds maps onto these tech billionaires’ self-centered desire to transcend their (rich, white, cis, hetero, male) bodies and enter a Meta world where everything is the same—their power, their wealth—except for fewer consequences (for them) and far more human data to sell. Modern sci-fi has followed, even informed, these wild desires, claiming the earth’s destruction as justification for the urge to colonize the stars, claiming the limitations of the human body as justification for uploading our minds to a VR universe where we can ‘live’ and work forever.

Queer writers have tried their hands at injecting tropes and motifs like the space voyage/ first contact/colonialistic scientific methods/exoplanets, with queer, anti-colonial logic. Becky Chambers’ 2019 scientific-utopian novella To Be Taught, if Fortunate, for example, explores a crowdfunded scientific voyage by an appropriately diverse (and happily queer) crew in which,

instead of terraforming planets, the voyagers transform their bodies to survive those new settings. On the face of it, this project seems suitably anti-colonial: Ensuring no traces of human presence leech out during the planet-hopping process occupies a huge chunk of the novel’s drama, and the novel’s ending message to its readers (presented as a final transmission to an Earth that has lost all telecommunications in the crew’s absence) is a plea not to turn to space for escape but to support science for science’s sake, even if said science yields no useful tools for propping up human life.

But in our world, with our historically-burdened ideal of ‘pure’ scientific curiosity—itself an erasure of the violent extractive impulses that nip at science’s heels—what can a narrative of ‘science for science’s sake’ mean? The universe has no need to see itself in order; we desire to see it ordered and comprehensible.

We still scramble to conquer the universe’s unknowns, ‘explorations’ that do not merely coincide with colonial projects, but enable them. The knowledge production projects of the Western Scientific Revolution facilitated European empires’ documentation of the Americas, which in turn fueled and facilitated European monarchies’ extractive desires. Arguing that such work was worth it because of ‘science for science’s sake’ simply mounts a defense against accusations of wrongdoing.

Case in point: Our world’s ‘science for science’s sake’ often comes up in research about exoplanets—particularly the cool, earth-esque ones. You know, just in case. +++ Here’s the queerest thing about queer promise: It doesn’t hold up. Voltron: Legendary Defender didn’t. The same saving-the-free-world Cold War logic, down to the glorification and justification of excessive military force, never fundamentally changed. And the tired, assimilationist representation (in which you can be gay and also ‘just like everybody else’ in the military) didn’t change, either. Despite frequent comments by the showrunners trying to market Voltron as ‘LGBTQ friendly,’ what started off as queer promise and the potential to explore deeper friendships and mutuality dissolved into tired heteronormative tropes: fridging one of the show’s few leading women, having one character confirmed as gay with little buildup or exploration of how that might impact main-cast relationships, burying the gay love interest just episodes after his first—and only other—appearance.The fandom dissolved into paranoia, with parts of it desperately trying to justify these missteps as network decisions and building conspiracy boards around whether the show’s ending was supposed to be different, if the show was actually supposed to be good.

All of this means little in the grand scheme

of battles queer people have fought. In this case, I’m almost glad we lost. Anyone who’s ever been on Tumblr knows how it defanged queerness, reduced it from an ethic of radical, transformative politics to questions about representation, personal aesthetics, and individuals ‘feeling seen,’ and to casual infighting over who was allowed to claim anything as ‘theirs.’ Which is not to say this infighting didn’t happen elsewhere, of course, or to dismiss the power of representation—after all, that representation did change my life. Still, in the process of searching for stories that will love me when parts of the world refuse to do so, I’ve come to wonder which stories might show me how to love the world right. Where are my stories about queer relationships to space? Is it really queer empowerment to participate in the commodification of our own lives, or to make our stories complicit in our planet’s destruction, in the global militarization that’s launched itself skyward? I don’t blame queer folks for looking for an escape, but doesn’t it get old to imagine individual escape instead of collective restoration?

There’s a flip side to this, of course, in that this inability to not project our lives skyward reaffirms how deeply rooted our human existences are to this Earth and the societies we have inscribed on its surface, as violent as that inscription continues to be. It’s telling, for example, that Steven Universe frames Earth—not the far-flung sites of the gem empire, not the unknown planets yet undisturbed by human or gem life—as the site of radical freedom. It means something that Earth, not outer space, is the place to which Steven returns, where he grapples directly, if unsteadily, with his family’s colonial legacy. It means something that Steven, even on his own shaky path to self-understanding, lives in conversation with his family’s historical abuses without letting things slide or sneaking into another body to escape responsibility for them, as his mother did.

Of course the show doesn’t have definitive answers for the real world—and it’s not the mission of a TV show to have them. But it means something that, for an outer space narrative, for a sci-fi/fantasy story, Steven Universe is not about a far-flung future in a galaxy far away, but about restructuring the present, and about coming home.

In Chen’s imaginings of moon love, it’s telling that the moon from which the speaker claims he won’t return looks more like a thinly-veiled, idyllic version of the earthly present than a future specific to the moon. What would happen if we brought this fantasy back down to Earth?

KATHERINE XIONG B’23 really likes staying earth bound.

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TEXT ASHER WHITE

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION ASHLEY CASTANEDA

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Are You Being Serious?

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How TikTok became a platform for bracing avant-garde performance art Emerging from the grainy darkness is the face of a young woman, lit warmly by the glow of a large desktop computer. Her eyes are encircled and winged with alarmingly bold eyeliner that was possibly applied with a Sharpie. Her hair, glossy and streaked with bleach toward the tips, is fashioned into a “swide-swoop” haircut. Her words come somersaulting out of her, excited and emphatic about the online forums and communities that seem to adore her as much as she adores them. But she is also distracted, hyperactive, her eyes darting around the room and occasionally catching on her own Photo Booth reflection.

It can be humiliating to try and explain now, in 2022, why Boxxy was so captivating. The particular way in which she beguiled those who were very online in the late ‘00s is now illegible to the contemporary viewer: Her charm has become antiquated, her style totally obsolete. It’s like the 21st-century Transatlantic accent. They simply don’t make them like they used to. But at the time, there was something devastating about her. “It’s crazy how much beauty standards have changed in just 10 years. She was the Marilyn Monroe of her time,” reflects one commenter on her most popular video. She only posted a handful of videos to her YouTube channel boxxybabee during her initial run in 2007, but the most famous of them has amassed over 24 million views since it was reuploaded in 2009.

I was too young to fully, lucidly experience Boxxy Fever—I was 9 at the time—but I was still hypnotized in the unique way that 3rd graders are by high schoolers. She was the coolest employee at Hot Topic, the jaded but impassioned emo, the hyper–internet-literate nerd, raving enthusiastically in the dark; she was quirky, sincere, self-effacing, sensitive, tuned-in to the moment.

She was also hugely divisive. Her videos, brash and twee, inspired as much ire as they did adoration, and soon 4chan was alight with “flamewars” and a furious army of haters who found her too sincere, too earnest, too committed. For some, this was totally enchanting; for others, it was unwatchably embarrassing. “I love you guys, like really, like, rawr rawr rawr rawr rawr status, like seriously— RAWR,” she signed off.

Both camps must’ve experienced a sort of heartbreak, then, in 2011, when Catie Wayne revealed through a new YouTube channel that Boxxy was only a character. I certainly felt some grief (we never would meet?). Wayne followed this up two years later with a Reddit AMA in which she further detailed her process: “The reason why I don’t portray her more often is because I don’t want to force her. Boxxy videos come out when she feels like coming out.”

Even today, her first videos’ most obvious winks that the shtick is parody are often overlooked, and the videos are instead thought of as a genuine relic of the ‘00s. But in retrospect, it’s strikingly astute satire for its time; that Boxxy was able to captivate (and repel) viewers to the extent that she did indicates a serious command

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of cultural commentary. She nailed the particular tics and mannerisms of the post-emo-Myspace-e-girl in the very era that the archetype was becoming a broader cultural figure. What makes Boxxy so convincing is her performance of an affectation that already was, in itself, hugely performative (in this case, the then-maligned scene subculture). Boxxy was evidently a shrewd observer/participant of contemporary online subcultures and the attitudes behind them, someone who understood what was cool and what was embarrassing— and, crucially, the Internet’s morbid fascination with the embarrassing. In this sense, Boxxy is among the internet’s first masters of deliberate Cringe.

Last year for Vox, Rebecca Jennings took a comprehensive look at TikTok Cringe, offering a sort of genealogy of internet cringe that started with Rebecca Black’s ”Friday” and led to Old People Dueting Other Old People Compilations.

Describing TikTok as a “museum of schadenfreude” (our satisfaction in the misfortune of others), Jennings initially defined cringe as predicated on a lack of self-awareness. But her article hinted at what she saw as an emerging trend of savvy content creators using this—a fascination with this sense of naivete—to their benefit. She profiles Louisa Melcher, who in 2020 posted an earnest, wide-eyed original song that instantly attracted the irony-poisoned vultures of social media threads. Then, Melcher wised up: “‘How can I make this blow up even bigger, even if it requires getting more hate?

How can I get it out to 300,000 people so that even if 200,000 hate it, I’ll have 100,000 fans?’

It was so devious. No one thought I could possibly be doing it on purpose because there was so much hate directly at me.” After all, the viral ecosystem is contingent on a faction of cringe content. Why not cater to the market?

Jennings’s article also surveys a then-nascent Cringe Parody TikTok scene by profiling creator Nate Varrone, who created a character named MrSimpSexual. But MrSimpSexual, with his drawn-on hair and corny catchphrases, is too unsubtle, too clowny, too much like an SNL gag to hold Gen Z’s attention. It’s clear that he’s a character, which aligns him with an entirely different, older avenue of Web comedy (and perhaps even deems Varrone cringe in his own right for so sincerely attempting to be funny— the cycle of violence continues).

The irresistible spark that Boxxy possessed came from the suspension of disbelief that charged her videos. She was real, but how could she possibly have been real? What makes a successful Cringe Creator is their ability to maintain an ambiguity as to whether they’re being serious. If it leans too far in either direction, the illusion topples—if it’s real, the viewer is cruel for laughing at someone’s sincerity; if it’s fake, the viewer has been conned by someone’s irony.

In early 2020, a TikTok user named @_andrewcurtiss lit up the reddit cringe thread r/ Cringetopia (where I generally try to spend as little time as possible) with a video of him roleplaying as a Charizard Pokémon. If Boxxy

pioneered the form, Andrew Curtiss made The Godfather: amping up the intensity, narrowing the cultural specificity, heightening the drama.

He’s more infuriating than Boxxy, less conceivably charming. In some ways, he’s the platonic theater kid on steroids: crassly attention-seeking, over-eager, winking, flamboyant—he even has that haircut (!). Most importantly, he never breaks, remaining in character for all of his videos, even the ones in which he’s allegedly “being real.” Shortly after it blew up, Curtiss’s Charizard video was accused of ableism for including mannerisms potentially associated with autism. His apology video is the closest he’s come to acknowledging that there is, in fact, a persona—but his stated obliviousness to this ableist interpretation is confusing and unconvincing: Who was he emulating?

On r/Cringetopia, users post videos—mostly Tiktoks—and others can vote on which category they believe the entry best fits: Cringe (the content is cringe); Non-Cringe (the content is not); Satire (the content is deliberately, knowingly cringe); Chad (the content is “chadworthy,” itself an arbitrary and ironic designation); or Meta (the content relates in some way to r/ Cringetopia itself).

Andrew Curtiss videos, which are regularly posted to the subreddit, are routine toss-ups regarding their appropriate categorizations. The votes are tallied by an automated moderator and posted below: 61% Satire, 30% Cringe, 9% Chad. Or 84% Satire, 14% Cringe, 1% Chad, 1% Met. Or 21% Satire, 79% Cringe. The comments spill with debates on whether or not he’s joking, and to what degree. “This Ain’t Build a Dude” is perhaps his most famous video, and it’s how he will be immortalized: winking and giggling through musical-theater vibratro as Redditors lose their minds.

Alongside him, mitsy270 crafts like-minded work, roleplaying as furries, emo kids, bodybuilders, and anime fans. Her characters are more archetypal, more topical, more legible; they’re also more overtly characters themselves, and her obvious talent belies her plausibility as a legitimate outsider. But Mitsy is still mesmerizing for her chameleonic, Boxxy-like ability to perfectly capture and commit to these performances, with so much fiery, unabashed enthusiasm that it is like staring into the sun.

This technique is unbelievably popular, beyond what Jennnings predicted (compare MrSimpSexual’s 103k follower’s with Mitsy’s 1.6 million, or Andrew Curtiss’s 2.2 million).

Andrew Curtiss and Mitsy succeed where MrSimpSexual fails because they are essentially plausible. They walk a high-wire between guileless eccentricity and smug parody, and the precarious realness of their image illuminates the apparatus of the entertainment form itself: suddenly, we are watching not just a performance on TikTok, but a performance of TikTok; we are watching the performer, the viewer, and the medium. +++ In the early 1980s, another Andrew was experimenting with similar variables, albeit on a much larger platform. The series of appearances Andy Kaufman made on David Letterman’s talk shows between 1980 and 1983 is a complete body of work in its own right, each appearance building subtly on the last to create a longform, serialized masterclass of public performance art.

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Kaufman usually appeared on Letterman to clear his name of a recent public scandal (variously: a public meltdown, an expulsion from SNL, a fight with pro-wrestler Jerry Lawler), often to explain himself and apologize directly to the audience. In each appearance, the fearless and inscrutable performer would scramble meekly to his seat, where he would then unleash a torrent of profound and unrelenting awkwardness.

The talk show is a platform for celebrities to assure the viewer that they are a sane and comfortable person. When celebrities fail to do this convincingly, it’s unsettling; when they seem to actively work against this notion entirely, it’s horrifying. Kaufman’s Letterman appearances find the performer wielding ambiguity and discomfort as his props, sculpting form from the audience’s discomfort as he fidgets and trips over his words. In one of his first appearances of this era, he’s wide-eyed and almost completely wordless, his nose glistening with snot like a dazed two-year-old.

Kaufman’s trade was in matryoshka-doll-style acts that nested characters inside characters inside bits inside bits. What are we to make of an Elvis impersonator and self-proclaimed “song-and-dance-man” desperately pleading for a live studio audience to take him seriously in a neckbrace? The medium of this work is performance itself—to interface with an audience, to be “real.” Is he joking? Is it a ruse? And if so, who’s in on it? This stubborn, lifelong commitment to the bit, this refusal to let the audience off the hook, tore ferociously at the velvet curtain of pop entertainment.

Whether this is ultimately corrosive to our relationship to the media or productive in a weird, apocalyptic, accelerationist way is a matter of opinion. The circus of celebrity is already disorienting as it is; using the public eye as a playground to confuse audiences and obfuscate what is “real” seems almost cruel. It generates a chaos that is perhaps enjoyable only for its creators. On the other hand, it’s certainly socially revealing to identify the moment people stop laughing and start squirming—to really revel in and examine the material of collective discomfort. Rick Rubin once described comedian/aggressor Andrew Dice Clay’s ruthlessly uncomfortable live album The Day The Laughter Died as having “an almost existential quality”; its most famous track (“Hour Back”) consists of Clay slowly losing an audience as they search desperately for a punchline that simply does not exist. Like most of his work, it’s a hard listen, but it’s one of the few times when the chauvinistic and reliably unpleasant Dice Clay arrives at something terribly sad and human. Hearing the audience writhing in their seats as they, in good faith, make a genuine attempt to enjoy the performance is both Beckettian and quintessential proto-cringe.

The most notorious performance art— whether it be on TV or in underground clubs— has tested the threshold of willful viewership.

Paul McCarthy, infamous titan/enfant terrible of contemporary art, rode through the first phase of his 5-decade career with an undying faith in the audience’s appetite for witnessing acts of horrifying debasement as he mutilated his naked body and smeared it with chocolate syrup, mayonnaise, and raw meat. His performances, held in galleries and classrooms throughout the early 1970s, interrogated the morbid curiosity of the viewer with a cynicism that predicted early-internet shock sites, aggregates of user-submitted gore photos that sprung up around the late 1990s. At what point does sympathy become disgust become sympathy? At what point must we totally avert our eyes? His 1976 performance Class Fool, performed at UC San Diego, found him violently flinging his ketchup-covered body around a classroom until he threw up. The performance was to be over when the last audience member, unable to stomach the performance any longer, had left; Class Fool lasted 30 minutes.

TikTok allows for Class Fool to last in perpetuity, and is algorithmically designed to discourage the audience members from leaving the room at all. It also allows for artists to take complete and unprecedented control over

the way their performance is presented. Chic content sharing sites can obscure the positionality of the creators, and TikTok’s endless, media-optimized scroll is anonymizing, like Tinder.

It dissolves a context that would otherwise be implied: at USC, Paul McCarthy was an art student in graduate-level classrooms. In New York, Andy Kaufman was a stand-up comedian orbiting popular comedy clubs. On TikTok, everybody is, supposedly, just some person, and has, supposedly, the same platform. They’re “another user.” Their credentials are irrelevant; we are faced with an unmediated persona.

Comedy TV in the 21st century has been defined by shows built around the premise of second-hand embarrassment (i.e., Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, The Office). But these are fictional, and their fiction consoles the viewer and lowers the stakes. It grants the audience a way out of the world—it’s a parasocial relationship between Netflix viewer and character in the show. In the anarchic arena of social media, this buffer is eliminated. What if “these people” are among us? What if we’re being asked to contend with them?

Provocative character artists now have an advantage: Not only can they be irresistibly hard to watch, but the ambiguity of context or intent makes their performances electrifying.

We end up with an arms race of grotesque and outrageous content that amalgamates the most grating Jim Carrey performances. Who could this possibly be for? Is it cartoonish slapstick for younger kids? Or is it obnoxious to be obnoxious? Is its shamelessness the spectacle in itself? Are we voyeurs or unknowing subjects in a calculated stunt? With online cringe, we feel ourselves watching in the way the best performance art allows us to do. +++ The very notion of cringe requires that we designate certain behavior—or, often, entire identities—as “embarrassing.” Cringe embodies and activates the neurosis of contemporary culture—this is why the most frequent entries into cringe compilations on YouTube are sincere, passionate SJWs, anime stans, or furries— anyone dutifully committed to, shamelessly performative of, or helplessly earnest in their beliefs. It’s why cringe compilations can often be a procession of unknowingly mocked trans people, neurodivergent people, people who look different, or anyone who, for one reason or another, doesn’t “get it.” Being designated cringe can make you liable to merciless cyberbullying, and it can be hard not to see TikTok as a massive, global Lord of the Flies. The genre, by definition, is predicated on cruelty: if something is, in fact, Truly Cringe—as in, the creator did not anticipate its cringiness—then its circulation is ill-advised and mean. Often, in order to preserve our enjoyment of Cringe Content, we have to

reassure ourselves that it is at least in part a joke. Otherwise, we can mine it for something humane and relatable. After all, the fascination with cringe stems from its manifestation of uncomfortable moments that resonate with us and mirror our worst fears about ourselves.

It shouldn’t go without acknowledgement that the three Andrews mentioned here—in addition to Paul McCarthy—are white men.

Their status as symbols of normalcy and power serve as a safety net for them to explore the outer limits of what’s acceptable as performers, and their work demonstrates a comfort with (or desire for) humiliation that only someone with unchecked cultural capital can have. They’re granted a patience, amnesty, and benefit-of-thedoubt that they otherwise wouldn’t receive.

Generously put, they’re making work without the burden of their personhood ever being legitimately threatened, so they can act as reprehensibly as they like.

The desire to create cringe, then, could be seen as a particularly cynical form of cultural criticism. It subverts the politics of outsiderness without quite advancing them, obfuscates the positionality of its creator, and shirks the responsibility inherent in a concrete statement.

But it also scrutinizes the viewer, interrogates our social biases, projections, anxieties. It dares us to accept outrageous behavior as much as it dares us to avert our eyes. +++ Around the same time that Boxxy gained notoriety, MirandaSings began uploading song covers.

She seemed to be an arrogant if heartfelt singer with a confusing, quasi-indie vocal affection; by the second video, the character was pushed far enough to register as obvious parody. She then fumbled, and MirandaSings became overstated and grating, her objective too obvious, her subject too broad. She ended up meeting the inverse fate as Boxxy, soon appearing in Nickelodeon show Victorious before signing a deal with Netflix.

This is a little disappointing, but it’s also understandable. It’s unclear what other moves are available for the cringe creator. To pivot and make anything remotely sincere would be to show their hand and tarnish their legacy.

Perhaps they’ll accidentally push the line too far and become corporatized; perhaps they’ll briefly acknowledge the limits of their persona with a sincere apology video; perhaps they’ll completely break character and fade away. Or perhaps they’ll keep performing until we avert our eyes, until the last few audience members have left.

ASHER WHITE RISD’22 misses when Vine was still around.

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HYUNG JIN (ERIKA) LEE “I AM YOU” SECTION EPHEMERA

DEAR INDY

How to Spend the Next Few No Good, Very Bad Weeks (Courtesy of ) What a terrible, terrible time. When it’s sunny, it’s cold. When it’s warm, it’s raining. The ground is muddy, the air is hostile, and it’s midterms. I got caught listening to Sufjan Stevens again, and my recently searched on Instagram is just a list of all my sworn enemies. It’s gotten bad for me, and apparently for you all too. Dear Indy’s readers ask me: what do we do??? And I respond with a listicle, the listicle of all listicles.

1. Don’t make any decisions. My mom always tells me never to make any big decisions when I’m sick. Like, when I had the flu and wanted to change my concentration, bleach my eyebrows, and block my friends.

I think the same goes for this wasteland period of early March. Everything feels a bit sickly—the trees, the sidewalks, the people.

There’s coughing and snot everywhere. People are always napping and waking up from naps and leaving to go take naps. You are sick, I am sick, we are all a bit sick. Leave the big decisions to me; you just sit there and look pretty.

2. Watch TV. Watch whole seasons and series.

Then watch clips of those shows on YouTube. Then watch the bloopers and the outtakes, the behind-the-scenes shorts and interviews with the cast. Get lost in the magic of network television. Imagine yourself in the writer’s room, calling the shots, shouting out “it’s showbiz baby!” on set.

Eventually, you’ll exhaust all of the shows.

You’ll stop caring about them. Someone who read this week’s Week in Review will ask “Hey, did you watch the last episode of Stewphoria? The one where Maddy spills her ragu into Cassie’s beef bourguignon?” And you can respond, with earned righteousness, “No, actually. I don’t watch that show anymore.”

5. Buy a good book. I certainly don’t expect you to read it. But buying it is half the work.

You might end up reading a page or two.

Maybe you’ll even read the first chapter without checking your phone. You probably won’t read it ever again, but you can take it with you to read in a park and look like the kind of person who reads in parks. Books feel nice in your hand. When you’re feeling down, it will sit next to you on your desk, and you can pick it up and flip through its sharp pages. “I’m pretty smart, I mean, I bought a book just for fun,” you’ll think to yourself. And that’s true (enough)!

6. Go to the mall. Window shop, buy a pretzel, sit in the food court. Maybe get something from one of those kiosks: a snowglobe or a Providence-themed stuffed animal or a pop-up birthday card. Blow your savings at Dave & Busters and mock the little kids crying because you beat them at Dance Dance Revolution. You could double feature the new Spiderman and Batman at the mall’s movie theater if you really hate yourself.

Or, better yet, watch Jackass. I can smell the Sephora all the way from over here.

7. Stop buying things. I realize most of my advice has been buying things. Buy these things, then stop.

9. Do something nice and don’t tell anyone.

Give your friend a cutesy little note or compliment a stranger. Carry an old lady’s bags or help a kid cross the street. Save someone who’s drowning or get that damn cat out of the tree. Yes, these are nice things to do, but more importantly, they will make you feel better. It’s still a net positive. I mean, you saved that cat! The old lady didn’t break her back! The stranger was complimented!

They’d all be dead without your generosity.

Now, don’t go around telling people you did this. Not only is it annoying and tacky, but it will make me feel bad about myself when you tell me. And I look so good—you don’t want to be the reason my makeup gets smudged, do you? So keep it to yourself.

The old lady is eternally grateful, trust me.

10. Really go out one night. Go out beyond the limit, go out into the unknown. Use all the substances or none—I won’t tell. I just need you to go out with the intent to go out, to dance and to rage, to run into people and compliment them effusively, to be the life of the party, to gyrate on the table. You, on the dance floor, with sweat stains and a glorious smile: that is what I daydream about. Maybe you bump into the love of your life on the dance floor. Maybe you bump into a Tinder match. Maybe the love of your life is your Tinder match. The only thing you need to have is a destination, but the destination doesn’t need to be that fun (it’s never that fun, anyway). Because, young one, when you have a destination, you can leave the destination, and what is more euphoric than leaving a party? Exiting the sweaty mass and finding your jacket in the place you left it should be enough to solve your March blues. I want to see you running out into the street, ignoring the cold, falling over and scraping your knee, screaming and laughing and being a little annoying. I want you to have some regrets—they’ll distract you from the weather.

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DESIGN SAM STEWART

8. Daydream. Find a comfortable place with direct sunlight. Stick your face into it, and close your eyes. What do you want to dream about? What do you want to be true? I imagine myself on the beach in the summer, no work to be done, no internship to bullshit, no meetings to attend. My feet are in the sand, and I look really good. I’m getting tan, too, so I’m looking even better than usual. I’m wearing a cute bathing suit, my skin is hydrated (finally). I look good.

Wait…I look really really good. Anyways, I’m getting distracted. This doesn’t have to be your dream. Maybe your dream is running through a field with a flock of golden retrievers. Or maybe you dream about your crush asking you out, and going on a first date (to the RISD museum, because where else?), and what you would wear and what you would say. Don’t worry too much about whether this will happen or not: I don’t tan that well, and my skin is almost always dry (I still look really good anyway). It’s just an

exercise in getting outside of your head a little bit, imagining the future, and stopping yourself from buying any of the other items from steps 1–6.

TEXT CECILIA BARRON

3. Listen to Ariana Grande. “Thank U, Next!” Am I right? Or, if you’re not an arianator, try to find something similar.

Maybe you’re a little monster, or a barb, or a member of the Beyhive. Something nostalgic, but not in the nostalgic, melancholy sense. I want 2012, bar mitzvah, what are thooooseeeeee energy. Mitt Romney-era energy. Side bangs energy. No more crying to Sufjan Stevens.

4. Buy food. I’m talking Chinatown, or Knead Doughnuts, or your own private tea tasting room at Ceremony. Buy yourself something you absolutely could not justify buying every day. It just has to be something that feels whole: slightly gross, a little greasy, very indulgent. Eat it and remind yourself that there is food to be made out there—or at least food to be eaten. Maybe you’re one of those people who likes dipping their fries in a milkshake and telling everyone it tastes really good. Or maybe you eat pickles and peanut butter. Or maybe your entire diet is a compilation of TikTok food-hack-recipe-concoctions. I don’t care what it is, I just want you to eat it. Beyond the rote trays of the dining hall or the fluorescence of your whining fridge, there is a world of caloric excess that is yours to behold.

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Upcoming Actions & Community Events Friday 3/11 6-8 PM: Trans & Non-Binary Community Circle This is a virtual event for the trans community, by the trans community to “heal, teach, & plan for action” in response to anti-trans legislative attacks in both the US and RI. In Rhode Island, S2501 effectively bans trans girls from participating in school sports, and H7539 restricts teaching about racism and oppression in school, prohibits discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in sex ed, and prevents trans & non-binary students from being addressed by their correct name and pronouns. The Community Circle will be a space to connect, plan, and organize before these bills are scheduled for hearings.

Pre-register at: lu.ma/TransRI Sunday, 3/13 4-7 PM: Rent Relief Pop-Up Clinic If you’re behind on rent, gas, or electric bills, funds are available through RentRelief RI to help. The George Wiley Center will be hosting walk-in appointments to help apply for these funds. Both Spanish and English assistance available. For more info, email georgewileycenterri@gmail. com or call 401-728-5555 Location: White Electric Coffee Co-op, 711 Westminster St., Providence Tuesday, 3/15 4-9 PM: Community Bake // Haus of Codec Fundraiser Join Haus of Codec—RI’s first LGBTQ+ Youth Shelter—at Flatbread on Tuesday. Every pizza sale (dine in, take out, or delivery) will benefit Haus of Codec. All you have to do is eat pizza.

Location: Flatbread Providence, 161 Cushing St., Providence

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers *Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities. +

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Community Support Needed Donate at https://givebutter.com/amor4sol AMOR is fundraising for Sulayman, “Sol”, a Gambian father to an 8-year old boy from Providence. Sol was detained by ICE in late 2018, and ultimately deported to Gambia in March of 2019. Now, his family are beginning the process of getting Sol back to the US to reunite with his wife and son. Any help would be appreciated.

Support a Black mom who is grieving Donate at tinyurl.com/Black-mom-grieving This fundraiser is intended to raise money for a Providence community member who has faced several trials this past year: assaults on her family at the hands of police, traumatizing DCYF raids, and the passing of close family members and friends, including her father. While battling cancer, she is also the primary caretaker of several grandchildren, and needs the funds to provide for them and pay for her father’s service.

Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There are currently 16 outstanding requests for aid, equal to $1600. Help QTMA fill this need!

Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD, Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support weekly survival drives on Saturdays at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in need.

Railroad Fund PVD Venmo: theorytakespraxis The railroad fund provides sustainable support to people currently incarcerated in Rhode Island. Please donate and help Railroad support a friend who is in need of continued survival and support this winter.

Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund 2022 Venmo: OSA-funds Support local sex workers by donating to the venmo above and consider buying an Ocean State A$$ calendar, on sale at Fortnight Wine Bar, Hungry Ghost Press, Symposium Books, Mister Sister Erotica, and RiffRaff.

COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new or used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

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!

Statement from the Brown Grad Labor Union (GLO) The Brown Grad Labor Union will be holding a rally on the Faunce steps at 12 PM next Tuesday (3/15) to demand a REAL raise from Brown.

The grad workers who teach our classes and go to school with us are living paycheck to paycheck and can barely make ends meet. While other schools in the Ivy League are offering a 25% raise this year, Brown is offering a 4.25% ‘raise’ (a paycut with inflation), which is harmful to our peers and incredibly disrespectful. Join us next Tuesday—and wear blue!

No to the Ukraine War: Statement from Brown War Watch Brown War Watch is the student peace and anti-war activist group at Brown University. Since 2017, we have educated about and agitated against aggressive foreign policy through weekly discussion meetings, public lectures and panels, film screenings, protests, analysis articles, and political actions. We welcome people of all political and religious beliefs united by the quest to build a more peaceful world. See the end of this statement for ways you can join us.

Brown War Watch condemns warmongering in any shape or form.

We strongly oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine which is driven by odious nationalistic and imperialistic ambitions, and shows disregard for the lives, livelihoods and aspirations of Ukrainians. The horrific human costs of the war are already apparent and will only grow more grim with every day of war; the animosity it engenders will poison the region and international policy for the foreseeable future, accelerating war profiteering, the climate crisis, and the gross misallocation of resources toward human suffering and away from human uplift.

We call on the Russian government to agree to an immediate ceasefire and retreat from occupied Ukrainian territories, while also committing to serious negotiations about tensions. We decry President Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons and castigate the use of weapons that break the Geneva conventions and cause horrific human suffering. We revere the courage of Russian anti-war protestors and activists and hope a wave of Russian citizens may be inspired by them, and act with them.

Our heart breaks for the millions of war refugees created by this unjust act of aggression, and we denounce in the strongest terms the racist treatment of refugees at the Ukrainian border. We call on all countries to welcome and support refugees from this and all conflicts across the globe regardless of their race or religion. We denounce the embedded racism in the media’s coverage of this conflict, and its perpetual willingness to ignore ongoing oppressions across the globe, such as the unparalleled humanitarian disaster in Yemen, because of this deep-rooted racism.

Wars do not happen in a historical and international relations vacuum. We oppose the long-standing bellicosity of US foreign policy toward Russia, including their support for the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. We oppose the steady and relentless expansion of NATO toward the Russian borders despite the successive generations of statesmen assuring Russia this would not happen. We urge the United States and its partners to show a serious commitment to non-intervention in Ukrainian affairs, so that a peaceful resolution to the crisis may prevent the loss of more lives to violence. The United States must lead a path of de-escalation.

Preventing the wasteful escalation of a new Cold War, with Ukraine as a pawn and proxy war, must be an international priority. Given the urgency of the climate crisis we face and the ongoing global pandemic we have not a moment to lose.

Brown War Watch urges everyone to work for peace. The movement for peace in Providence is building and we need your help. Led by local groups, we are taking to the public squares to advocate for immediate and peaceful solutions. On February 5, before the invasion, we protested against the escalations. This past weekend, on March 6, after the invasion, a still bigger crowd continued to press for peace. This war is only going to get worse - much worse - and we need to respond with more people and greater determination. You can find more information on upcoming local and national actions through our website brownwarwatch.com.

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