The College Hill Independent Volume 42 Issue 6

VOLUME 42 ISSUE 6 19 MAR 2021

THIS ISSUE

STAFF COVER

Non Kosher Menorah Ethan Shaw

02 WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in New Acquisitions Emily Rust & Tammuz Frankel

03 NEWS

Victory Day Alan Dean

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Where is Everybody?

Antonia Huth

01

America’s Imagined Community Osayuwamen “Uwa” Ede-Osifo March Madness

NEWS Bilal Memon Rhythm Rastogi Giacamo Sartorelli ARTS Amelia Anthony Nell Salzman

05 S & T

METRO Mara Cavallaro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini

07 FEATURES

SCIENCE + TECH Bowen Chen Anabelle Johnston LITERARY Audrey Buhain Alisa Caira

09

Untitled Ambika Miglani

11

EPHEMERA

Housing is the Cure Jack Doughty & Rose Houglet

12

METRO

A City by the Rising Sea Lucas Gelfond & Peder Schaefer

13

METRO

FEATS Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger Emily Rust DEAR INDY Gemma Sack Cal Turner Sara Van Horn EPHEMERA Liana Chaplain Anna Kerber

How Does the Show Go On? Ella Spungen

15

To Her, I Never Knew Raelee Fourkiller

17

Untitled Yukti Agarwal

WEEK IN REVIEW Loughlin Neuert Nick Roblee-Strauss

ARTS LIT

X Yukti Agarwal Seth Israel SOCIAL MEDIA Justin Scheer

18 X

FROM THE EDITORS This week our hearts are broken. Eight people—among them Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Julie Park, Hyeon Jeong Park—were shot to death in a virulent act of white supremacist hatred in Atlanta on Tuesday. Six of the eight victims were Asian women.

The shootings at the spas are only three among 3,800 reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans documented nationwide since the beginning of the pandemic. Xenophobic sentiments levelled against Asian Americans in the wake of COVID serve to renew the historical invisibility imposed on the community. The shootings are a jolting but clear reminder that our work against structural racism can see no respite. In our resistance to racism, we must be especially empathetic to the needs of those facing multiple marginalities in our society—women, sex workers, immigrants, undocumented and low-income folk.

Here at the Indy, we are learning to be more cognizant of the racist, carceral, statist mindsets that seep into our creative work. We also want to be intentional about providing staff and contributors of color with a safe creative space. To stand in solidarity, we urge you to support grassroots organizations working to protect and uplift Asians in the United States. In Rhode Island, you can support: • Providence Youth Student Movement [PrYSM]—an organization dedicated to uplifting Southeast Asians who are young, queer, trans, and/or survivors of police violence • Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics Rhode Island [Coyote RI]—a group of sex workers, trafficking victims, and allies that promote and advocate for the welfare and safety of members of the sex industry, and resists the criminalization of prostitution - The Indy

BUSINESS Jerry Chen Evan Lincoln Isabelle Yang DESIGN EDITOR Ella Rosenblatt COVER COORDINATOR Sage Jennings

STAFF WRITERS Leela Berman Matthew Cuschieri Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Tammuz Frankel CJ Gan Lucas Gelfond Leo Gordon Gaya Gupta Evie Hidysmith Rose Houglet Amelia Wyckoff Muram Ibrahim Nicole Kim Alina Kulman Olivia Mayeda Drake Rebman Issra Said Justin Scheer Sacha Sloan Ella Spungen

DESIGNERS Malvika Agarwal Anna Brinkhuis Clara Epstein Miya Lohmeier Owen McCallumKeeler Issac McKenna Jieun (Michelle) Song COPY EDITORS Mehek Vohra Alyscia Batista Sojung (Erica) Yun Grace Berg Elaine Chen ILLUSTRATION Megan Donohue EDITOR Nina Fletcher Hannah Park Christine Huynh Madison Lease ILLUSTRATORS Jasmine Li Sylvia Atwood Hannah Chang MANAGING Ophelia DuchesneEDITORS Malone Alana Baer Camille Gros Anchita Dasgupta Sophie Foulkes Peder Schaefer Baylor Fuller Mara Jovanovic SENIOR EDITORS Olivia Lunger Audrey Buhain Talia Mermin Andrew Rickert Jessica Minker Ivy Scott Rachelle Shao Xing Xing Shou Joshua Sun Cal Turner Evelyn Tan Sara Van Horn Joyce Tullis Floria Tsui MVP Dorothy Zhang Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo

MISSION THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT IS A PROVIDENCE-BASED PUBLICATION WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, DESIGNED, AND EDITED BY STUDENTS FROM BROWN AND RISD. OUR PAPER IS DISTRIBUTED AROUND PROVIDENCE’S EAST SIDE AND DOWNTOWN, AS WELL AS ONLINE. IN ADDITION TO PUBLISHING 20 PAGES OF ORIGINAL WRITING, REPORTING, AND ART ONCE A WEEK, THE INDY FUNCTIONS AS AN OPEN WORKSHOP IN WHICH WRITERS, ARTISTS, AND DESIGNERS COLLABORATE AND PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON THEIR WORK. THROUGH AN EXTENSIVE EDITING PROCESS, WE CHALLENGE EACH OTHER TO BE RESPONSIBLE, INTENTIONAL, AND SELF-CRITICAL. WE ARE COMMITTED TO PUBLISHING POLITICALLY ENGAGED AND ACCESSIBLE WORK. WHILE THE INDY IS FINANCED BY BROWN UNIVERSITY, WE HOLD OURSELVES ACCOUNTABLE TO OUR READERS ACROSS THE PROVIDENCE COMMUNITY. THE INDY REJECTS CONTENT THAT EXPLICITLY OR IMPLICITLY PERPETUATES RACISM, SEXISM, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA, XENOPHOBIA, ABLEISM AND/OR CLASSISM. THOUGH THIS LIST IS NOT EXHAUSTIVE, THE INDY STRIVES TO ADDRESS THESE SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION BY CENTERING THE VOICES, OPINIONS, AND EFFORTS OF MARGINALIZED PEOPLE IN PROVIDENCE AND BEYOND. THE INDY IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING: WE ARE ALWAYS WORKING TO MAKE OUR STAFF AND CONTENT MORE INCLUSIVE. THOUGH OUR EDITING PROCESS PROVIDES AN INTERNAL STRUCTURE FOR ACCOUNTABILITY, WE ALWAYS WELCOME LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

WEEK IN REVIEW

TINKER TANKER SOLDIER SPY way to make money off of the worldwide compulsion to spy on their country.

This entangled navy-gazing may give the wrong impression; even if Norway is the only founding member state of NATO to border Russia, the two countries actually have a long history of friendly ties.

This is especially true in the Barents region near the border, where economic, cultural, and social cooperation runs high. Kirkenes, about eight miles from Russia, was the first Norwegian city to be freed from Nazi occupiers by the Soviet army in 1944. Nonetheless, Norway has become increasingly obsessed with the perceived threat of their eastern neighbor in recent years, as the government down in Oslo has gotten stuck on the logic of Russia = big = scary—a free association game sponsored by NATO. Last year, for example, the head of the Norwegian intelligence agency announced in a heavily publicized briefing that Russia and China are currently the biggest threats to Norwegian security. This is a common thread in Norwegian foreign relations: tiny, vain, and intimidated, Norway forgets that world superpowers have bigger fish—or engines—to fry.

Nevertheless, the two countries’ shared love of pickled herring suggests that Russia does occasionally interest itself in small fish. In October 2020, an

-ER

PANDEMIC PORTMANTEUS It’s superfluous to comment generally on ‘just how much has changed’ over the course of the pandemic.

Yet, during this week of administrative reflections, this College Hill Independent writer cannot help but feel struck by how much the pandemic has altered their day-to-day language. The difference between ‘pandemic’ and ‘epidemic’ is no longer obscure; timeshares and shell companies are no longer the most immediate associations when the Bahamas or the Dominican Republic are mentioned in casual conversation. This experience of new vocabulary is not unique. Terms like ‘cottagecore’ and ‘doomscrolling’ developed renewed resonance in our indoor existence. New expressions also emerged for describing pandemic experience, from the now mundane ‘social distancing’ to the more expressive ‘Zoom fatigue.’

Last week, researchers at the Leibniz Institute for German Language (Das Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache) published a formal list of 1,200 German neologisms that emerged over the course of the pandemic. German is well known for its openness to compound words—such as Schadenfreude (‘harm-joy,’ or the pleasure in another’s pain) or Kummerspeck (‘grief-bacon,’ or weight gained from emotional overeating)—and the Leibniz Institute’s glossary is no such exception. The list is replete with anglicisms that have passed into German as compound words (Coronavirushotspot, Superspreaderevent, Zoomparty, etc.) as well as words that ought to move directly into English (e.g., Homeclubbing, Microwedding, and Virusangst). Many words lack readily available English equivalents: for example, Quarantänefestung (the room which one uses for isolation) or Nasenpimmel (the state of having one’s nose poking out over a mask).

Likewise, some of the more playful words on the list rely on humor that does not entirely translate: Gesichtskondom (‘facial condom’) refers to handmade masks, while Zellstoffhamster (‘pulp hamster’) is

used to identify the people who hoarded toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic.

Inspired by the Leibniz Institute, we at the Indy submit the following glossary: a collection of new words, senses, and subentries and that have somehow eluded more formal recognition. +++

Neinsinglichkeit (noun): a claim that there is no single cause for an event with an abundantly clear cause; rare, used only by administration (used in place of Zuperspräder) Ex.: “Brown University says no single cause to recent spike in COVID cases,” by Donita Taylor (Providence Journal, February 28, 2021) is a case study in neinsinglichkeit.

Immunodramatize (verb): to lie about one’s medical records to get earlier access to the Covid vaccine (not to be confused with immunocompromised; see also immunobarbarize) Ex.: The Buxton girls immunodramatized their medical records to get vaccinated early.

Neuedielenken (verb): to term something as a “_____ New Deal,” used predominantly by Sunrisers or people who skimmed that one Naomi Klein article Ex.: Bro it’s like we’re living the Screen New Deal…

Hör auf zu neuedielenken, Hans!

Indeterminate (adjective): a. having had one’s test lost b. having gotten mucus on the cotton swab c. having maybe tested positive (antiquated) Ex.: Hey just a heads up before we hang out, I’ve been so congested I tested indeterminate.

Paxsonsemail (noun): an emergent post-postmodern epistolary form, an experiment in bureaucratic maximalism Ex.: I’m short of word count, I need to try to make my essay more like a Paxsonsemail.

Ex. 2: This Pynchon novel reads like a Paxsonsemail.

Radicalized (past participle): a. having developed leftist politics b. having participated in one protest last summer Ex.: I decided to shop ANTH 0100 after I was radicalized last summer.

Zuperspräder (proper noun): our Typhoid Mary, BDH darling interviewee, and like, no one knows for sure Ex.: Did you hear about what happened with Little Tommy?

Ah, das Zuperspräder?

-TF

ILLUSTRATION SYLVIA ATWOOD

investigation by the Norwegian intelligence agency traced a recent hack against the Norwegian parliament to Russia. On the news comedy show Nytt på Nytt, the comedian Johan Golden pointed out that the most newsworthy part of the story was not that the Russian government had managed to hack the Norwegian government, but that the Norwegian government managed to find out. His co-host added that there’s something hyggelig (that’s the adjectival form of hygge, for those of you into that) about getting attention from Russia, invoking a kind of “Nooo don’t spy on me your so sexy aha.”

This Feats editor votes for parties that oppose NATO-membership but sees why Norway may feel the need for alliances (read: handholding) when it comes to defense. In the 1960s, the government established a facility intended to serve as a provisional operating headquarters during wars and other crises.

This facility’s location is supposed to be top secret.

Unfortunately for Norwegian leaders, it’s common knowledge; the name of the nearest bus stop is “NATO-anlegget”—the NATO facility. Countries like Russia do not need to put much energy into gathering information about Norway, seeing as we offer it up unsolicited in our easily navigable public transit system.

In the weeks that the Russian purchase of Bergen Engines made waves in Norway, the same news sites reported that several B-1 bombers and around 200 soldiers from the US had landed on Norwegian soil. If Norway is going to be a cute little runway for the American air force, it seems more than fair that spy vessels like the Marjata will be maintained by Russians.

DESIGN MIYA LOHMEIER

Last month, the Russian engineering company TMH International purchased Bergen Engines, a Norwegian company that manufactures motors for trains and ships. The announcement of this purchase rocked the boat in the Norwegian Parliament, as one of Bergen Engines’ primary customers is the Norwegian military. In fact, the Marjata, Norway’s highly advanced spy ship (whose boat is especially floated by the activities of the Russian Northern Fleet), runs on motors made by Bergen Engines. In other words, Russian engineers will be in charge of maintaining the motors of a ship whose main role is to spy on Russia. To top it all off, TMH International is owned by the oligarch duo Iskander Makhmudov and Andrei Bokarev, who have close ties to Putin. In a way, the Bergen Engines purchase could be seen as a win for capitalism—Russian oligarchs have found a

TEXT EMILY RUST + TAMMUZ FRANKEL

WEEK IN NEW ACQUISITIONS

VICTORY DAY

TEXT ALAN DEAN

DESIGN OWEN MCCALLUM-KEELER

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

NEWS

Street action and the future of the Russian opposition

03

In June of last year, the Russia that I had quickly and unexpectedly departed three months prior, as universities shut down and United States citizens were told to come home, was coming back to life like the exhausted cliché of the bear emerging from hibernation. Russia’s Covid cases, official and real, were on the decline, and its population of 144 million wasn’t merely returning to normal, it was celebrating. Among the casualties of the first wave was the much anticipated 75th annual Victory Day parade celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany, usually held on May 9. On the heels of yet another crisis, the parade, even if delayed, was non-negotiable.

In addition to the parade there was another grand exercise in pageantry afoot: the similarly rescheduled constitutional referendum. The final results—a questionable 79% in favor—granted Vladimir Putin two additional six year terms in office and amended a number of other deeply conservative laws into the Russian constitution. Though it was quite clear what the result would be as voting got underway, tensions were running high. I reached out to some of my Russian classmates and friends who, only a few weeks prior, had been directing their questions at me as the Black Lives Matter protests spread across every major city in the US. “How’re you planning to vote?” I asked.

“Against.” “Against.” “I’m not voting.” “Well, in principle I’m apolitical, but my dad is voting against so maybe I will too.”

The last response struck me the most, as indicating something deeper about the apathy that pervades Russian politics. With this still in the back of my mind, I was surprised to see, half a year later at the end of this January, the same friend post a shaky video captioned “going to my first protest…”. In the video was the same Moscow street—where only three-quarters of a year earlier, I had been coming from or going to classes, restaurants or bars—filled by a massive crowd from sidewalk to sidewalk. As I flipped through the next few clips, the crowd was slowly superseded by tear gas, batons and an equally large mass of OMON (Russian riot police) and the optimistic captions by a series of expletives. What these images immediately brought to mind was the US last summer as militarized police imposed de facto martial law throughout the country. The parallels between the two are more significant than they may at first appear—beyond the visual resemblance of violent state repression, both situations demand the question of what comes next when spontaneous protest movements run up against the boundaries of what the existing political system is able to offer. How do we move forward when the obstacle isn’t within the order of things, but that order itself? +++ The protest in question was part of a wave of dissent set off by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s arrest on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from an attempted poisoning in August. Navalny, the most prominent opposition figure of the past decade, was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent, allegedly by Russian state security agents. Navalny’s medical evacuation out of the country was ruled a violation of his parole terms, the result of a 2014 sentencing for embezzlement widely considered to be politically motivated. Undeterred, Navalny landed in Moscow, stepped off the plane (not unironically operated by the budget airline Pobeda, or ‘Victory’) and was immediately detained at passport control. In response, his supporters and the Russian opposition at large urgently called for protests.

The initial protests on January 23 were the largest since the 2011-13 protests which first elevated Navalny to prominence within the opposition.

Moscow saw up to 40,000 people in the streets and 1,500 arrests—thousands more protested and another 3,500 were arrested in other cities. Footage of horrific police brutality spread online like wildfire. In one widely shared video, St. Petersburg police kicked an unarmed elderly woman to the ground when she tried to speak to a detainee. Another officer points a loaded handgun at the crowd. A clip of Moscow police captioned “ANIMALS” shows them viciously beating a mass of bloodied, unarmed protesters on the asphalt.

Navalny was not released. On February 2, the Moscow City Court sentenced him to two and a half years in an infamously harsh penal colony in Vladimir Oblast. The emergency protests staged on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow that same night were brutally put down. Almost cartoonishly dystopian pictures of OMON walling off the city center were followed by videos of people cornered and outnumbered, chanting “We don’t have weapons!” as the police continue to assault them. Two days later, Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov called off the protests, urging supporters to refocus their attention away from street action towards the upcoming Duma elections this fall.

Sporadic actions have continued, but the momentum, energy and rage of the protests have dissipated as quickly as they came. Demonstrations have largely shifted to small, symbolic gatherings aiming to stay as much as possible within the law and out of harm’s way. While the elections are sure to bring a fresh wave of protests to the streets, the chances for an opposition victory (or even substantial gains) are slim. By all appearances, the Russian opposition is spinning in circles. As dangerously close to bursting as the rickety political boiler system may seem, the order built by the Putin government over the last two decades ultimately appears to be as stable as ever.

+++ The complex politics beneath Navalny’s individual spectacle of martyrdom have found little traction in Western coverage of the protests—Navalny has for years been the chosen favorite of Western media seeking a foil for Putin. The incredible personal courage and self-sacrifice he demonstrated in his return only bolsters that image. If the past two months have done anything, it is to further entrench Navalny’s status as a persecuted dissident—which, of course, he is— often to the detriment of understanding his actual politics and the politics of Russia writ large. In fact, beyond his canonization as the anti-Putin, the actual substance of Navalny’s political programs and beliefs rarely seems to interest Western media.

The prominence of the persecuted dissident narrative in such coverage often obscures more than it reveals (even when factually true), as it reduces Russian politics to a clash of the heroic individual and the monolithic state.

It is likewise unable to account for the Russian opposition’s undeniable failure, despite both its own tremendous effort and the precariousness of the government’s situation. The past decade has seen a declining economy, rising inequality and a torrent of other political crises, but against expectations, Putin seems to emerge stronger each time. If the struggle was won by self-sacrifice and moral righteousness, Navalny would have toppled Putin long ago. To truly grasp the situation and, more importantly, to change it, something more is required.

While the dualistic account of Navalny as the counter-Putin remains largely unchallenged, Navalny’s increased prominence has forced Western media to finally acknowledge his long-running nationalism and cooperation with the far-right. This association ranged from regular attendance at the yearly ultranationalist ‘Russian March’ (for which he was expelled from the social democratic Yabloko party in 2007) to a series of abhorrent—and proudly unrecanted—statements from the 2000s comparing migrants to cockroaches and rotten teeth. This distasteful history has ‘flummoxed’ prominent liberal critics like Masha Gessen. In light of this, on February 24, Amnesty International stripped Navalny of his status as a prisoner of conscience. Though this belated controversy has done little to change broader coverage of Navalny in either Russia or the west, it reveals fundamental fault lines in the political coalition that has brought him to this point. After Amnesty’s decision, the first response of Navalny’s core liberal base was to attack his critics on the Russian left as state collaborators orchestrating a conspiracy against him.

What is lost in this important debate on Navalny’s far-right connections is the fact that, by and large, there is not a single prominent Russian politician of the past thirty years who hasn’t flirted with hardline nationalism—as an instrument to power or as a genuine belief. Some of the most active protest movements of the 1990s and 2000s were driven primarily by left-right coalitions such as the National Bolshevik Party (which, since being outlawed in 2007, has rebranded as ‘The Other Russia,’ swapping its former logo of a hammer and sickle on a Nazi flag for a graphic of a grenade). In more pressing and more practical terms, however, Navalny’s connections to the far right are not only disturbing opportunism but a political dead end. If the Putin regime

NEWS has shown itself capable of anything, it is absorbing and deflecting challenges from the right.

One of the most telling moments in recent Russian history has been the unwavering support of the same left-right opposition groups (including The Other Russia) for their supposed arch-enemy Putin’s annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s own double feint, positioning himself as both a nationalist willing to stand up to the NATO and the west and the sole trustworthy defender of (strictly limited) multiculturalism—the only man who can prevent the “really crazy ones” from taking power—has been remarkably successful with power brokers and the electorate alike. While the right-wing fringe can and does exacerbate a hostile cultural climate for migrants, women, LGBT people and other minorities, what it cannot do is mount any kind of meaningful challenge to Putin’s authority.

But what about the rest of Navalny’s coalition? The Russian opposition, which arguably reached its peak in the protests after the rigged 2011 Duma elections (from which Navalny emerged as its leader), is made up of a shaky alliance of anti-government groups across the ideological spectrum. The only common ground of the coalition—which includes liberals, oligarchs Putin failed to win over or suppress, an assortment of fringe nationalists, social justice groups and the left wing of the Communist Party—was and is its enemy: Vladimir Putin. In the last decade, as the opposition’s energy has lagged and burst, it has become clear that not even the charismatic figure of Navalny is enough to hold it together in any other way.

Navalny’s personal beliefs seem to go where the wind blows, as evidenced by his leaps from party to organization to party. Following his expulsion from Yabloko, he co-founded right-wing anti-immigration movements, backed centrist parties based on ‘e-democracy,’ ran for mayor of Moscow, and attempted to run for president (but was blocked by his 2014 conviction).

Navalny’s rhetoric likewise tends to stick to grand polemics and emotional declarations, rarely elaborating on the affirmatively neoliberal political project he advances—being a man of action rather than convictions seems to be both his public brand and his private character.

His own maximally flexible political vision notwithstanding, Navalny nevertheless does have real political constraints. He has to play to and represent his core base—affluent urban liberals and a handful of oppositional oligarchs in favor of some reforms, but only those that won’t threaten their own positions.

The liberal elites want a westernized Russia, a ‘functional’ democratic Russia—in which they are the power-holding class—and want nothing to do with socialist policies of any kind. Since 2013, Navalny’s core supporters have moved to further alienate the left wing, publicly distancing themselves from groups such as Sergei Udaltsov’s Left Front—including refusing to support imprisoned activists—and Socialist Alternative (both of whom came out in force on Navalny’s behalf regardless).

Navalny has also not, however, drawn meaningfully closer to the right—if anything he now keeps them much more at arm’s length than he did during the 2000s. He instead finds himself in a position of immense rhetorical and symbolic power, capable of drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets, but with practically no coherent vision or direction from there onwards besides, of course, himself. “Anti-corruption” is not a political position—everyone is “anti-corruption” in principle, including Vladimir Putin, whose own reputation is founded on having broken up the political power of the oligarchs in the early 2000s. The question is, rather, what does a politics of “anti-corruption” mean in practice? For Navalny, at least, it does not mean anything close to a redistributive—dare we say socialist—state, and it is not difficult to see how Russia’s aging, impoverished population finds the message that privatization didn’t go far enough to ring false.

Despite the poverty of neoliberal politics, the Russian institutional left is in equally bad if not worse shape. The Communist Party, having long abandoned any real opposition on a national scale, nonetheless maintains a firm grip on the rhetoric and imagery of socialist or even social politics. The federal Communist Party today occupies a comfortable niche of performative resistance far from its militant resistance to the reforms of the 1990s (to which the violence of the state response remains almost entirely written out of Western narratives of the post-Soviet transition). Though more radical members—particularly outside Moscow or St. Petersburg—continue to protest, Gennady Zyuganov (Party leader since 1993 and likely till death) officially opposed the January and February protests. Other left groups remain active but marginal. The ghost of the Soviet Union—remembrance of which has become in many ways a fundamentally conservative, even nationalist, position that the Communist Party and Putin both share—continues to hold the Russian left hostage.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the greater part of the Russian domestic and diasporic elite reactions to the Black Lives Matter protests were largely virulently racist and hostile, especially among vehemently anti-Putin liberals. Beyond their anti-Blackness, what was particularly untenable was the way in which the protests made it impossible to ignore the ever-widening chasm between the real America—blatantly and violently repressive—and the idealized, imaginary West which they believe Russia must become.

Following the disaster of post-Soviet privatization, economic liberalism in Russia has relied on a long-standing discourse of westernization and unfulfillable desire. Rather than admitting to the failure and violence of the privatized economy, the locus of this ideology moves to the alleged absolute incongruity between authoritarian Russia and democratic America. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to call this in part a politics of self-hatred. Regardless, it is a politics of idealism, increasingly detached from the material realities of the modern world. To doubt that America is the epitome of democracy is to collapse its entire structure. How can one square the fact that the shining city on a hill is not only a fiction, but in fact greatly resembles the oligarchic Russian state itself? ‘Westernizing’ is wholly insufficient—the failure of capitalism is the same East and West.

In turn, resistance to these systems of oppression everywhere is inextricably linked. While the recent Russian protests are fundamentally distinct from those in the US last summer in their goals, scale and intensity, they share enough of the same challenges to offer each other instructive solutions for the future. The future of the Russian opposition—and of Russia itself—will not be found in Navalny or the Duma. Rather, it is in and through the protests themselves, the continuous strikes of the past year in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok and other provincial cities, the civil and legal defense watchdogs and regional environmental and indigenous rights organizing that the groundwork of the movement is being built. Navalny the man doesn’t matter—the people fighting on his behalf do. +++ All the dust seemed to have settled when that same formerly ‘apolitical’ friend messaged me a few weeks later with a video of fireworks. Every year on February 23, Defender of the Fatherland Day, originally Red Army Day, Moscow fires off a staggeringly impressive array of fireworks from Sparrow Hills overlooking the city to commemorate members of the Russian military. We had spent the last one together right under the fireworks on the riverbank below the Hills. While on the surface it seemed that everything in Russia, like the United States, had returned to stasis, I would instead suggest that the real lesson of either story is that it only takes so many nameless individuals to act before the situation explodes, leaving streaks of color across a quiet, late winter sky.

ALAN DEAN B’21 prefers marches to parades.

+++ The current methods of resistance seem to be reaching their limit, and while come September and the Duma elections the people will almost certainly be out on the streets again, the way forward seems less clear than ever. The answer for much of the Western media and many Russian liberals seems to be throwing their hands up in dismay, citing Russia’s inherent despotism. But rather than accept this reductive, exoticizing and reactionary interpretation, perhaps the most instructive approach to what is happening in Russia is to look towards the parallel crisis of another slowly crumbling imperial state: the United States.

The eruption of popular energy of the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 has likewise by appearances failed to deliver ‘real’ political change. Despite the Democratic Party’s control of the government, American politics seem to be continuing on their consistently center-right course. But to read this as a failure of the protests would be to completely misunderstand what happened last summer. The Black Lives Matter protests were less the presentation of complaints to the recognized political system than the tearing open of a space for mass politics outside that system—a rejection of the political system’s legitimacy. In this sense they offer something genuinely new, a way to move past the power structure’s unwillingness to confront the crises in which we now find ourselves.

04

Where is Everybody?

S+T

The Fermi Paradox and the search for intelligent life

In 2018, Avi Loeb, then chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-published a paper arguing that the puzzling object ‘Oumuamua, which had just passed through the solar system, may have been a piece of alien technology. The news made few waves beyond the scientific community. Coming from the direction of the star Vega, ‘Oumuamua—seen only as a telescopic image depicting a small speck of light— appeared to possess various anomalies. It accelerated like a comet, but did not have an icy tail, as comets usually do. Its quarter-mile length, elongated shape, and that it was less than a millimeter thick (or else ten times less dense than air) all distinguished it from any other known interstellar object. Most of the scientific community concluded that the object was simply a strange rock—but not Loeb.

In January 2021, Loeb, who received his PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published a book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, now a New York Times bestseller, in which he further outlines his hypothesis.

Calculating that the chances such an object would arise naturally are less than one in a trillion, he argues that it is no less reasonable to assume that ‘Oumuamua was a probe created by extraterrestrials.

The hypothesis has explosive potential. It would finally answer an age-old question: are we alone in the universe?

TEXT ANTONIA HUTH

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG

+++

05

As far back as 2,000 years ago, philosophers like Epicurus and Lucretius thought that humans just like them might live on faraway stars. As modern science continues to expand our understanding of the universe, questions of extraterrestrial life remain elusive. This explains, perhaps, our continued obsession with aliens; three of 2019’s top ten domestic box office successes—Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, and The Rise of Skywalker— explicitly deal with other lifeforms. The shows Cowboy Bebop, The Book of Boba Fett, and Resident Alien, set to premiere throughout 2021, all explore the ways humans might interact with extraterrestrial life. A conspiracy theory stating that aliens helped build the Egyptian pyramids continues to cling to the edges of mainstream discourse, suggesting pervasive enthusiasm for the possibility of human-alien encounters.

And yet, not many people seemed to care about Loeb’s astonishing theory. In a review of Loeb’s book, biologist and legal scholar Dov Greenbaum pointed out that, irrespective of ‘Oumuamua’s origins, the object’s discovery points the finger at the cognitive dissonance dominating mainstream discourse when it comes to alien life. Billions of dollars have been spent looking for proof of life beyond Earth. NASA’s voyager probes, launched in 1977, for example, carry goldplated disks introducing humanity to hypothetical extraterrestrials. The general public’s disregard for Loeb’s contested but reasonable hypothesis suggests, however, that most of us consider the prospect of actually finding such proof highly unlikely, no matter how much we love Star Wars.

Still, there is plenty of reason to believe that aliens are out there. The universe is 13.7 billion years old and over 90 billion light years across. According to Astronomy Now, it contains more stars “than there are grains of sand on a million Earths.” Astronomers utilizing NASA’s Kepler telescope estimate up to 40 billion planets in the observable universe may enable liquid water to pool on their surfaces, a requirement for sustaining Earth-like life. If only 0.01 percent of those planets host life, this would still come out at 40 million planets inhabited by aliens. The sheer size of this number is daunting, which explains, perhaps, why it can be easier to think of the vast emptiness of space, rather than the potential abundance hidden within it.

Planets, presumably the absolute baseline condition for life, first started to form twelve billion years ago. That’s a lot of time for alien life to evolve, especially considering the human species made it from the development of speech to spaceflight in 150,000 years. To the scientific community dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, it appears awfully unlikely that, in all that time and across all those planets, not a single other lifeform or civilization has developed.

Though scientists have been monitoring radio waves since the 1970s, they have yet to detect alien communication or any other artificial signals.

Despite vast technical improvements in radio telescopes, receiver techniques, and computing power, SETI has so far turned up nothing. This conundrum is known as the Fermi Paradox. First formulated by Enrico Fermi in 1950, it describes the apparent contradiction between the theoretically high probability of extraterrestrial life and the total lack of evidence for it. In other words, if the universe is so big and old, where is everybody? +++ Astrophysicists, climate scientists, and science fiction writers have come up with a variety of possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Proponents of the Rare Earth Hypothesis argue that Earth is simply the only planet of its kind. What if complex life can only evolve under a combination of astrophysical and geological conditions that are so rare they exist nowhere but Earth? Though astronomers have found plenty of planets of the right size and distance to their stars, conditions such as a star system’s location within the galactic habitable zone—the cushy middle between the radiation-dense center and the resource-poor outer ring—may be more important than previously assumed. Other factors the Rare Earth Hypothesis considers are the existence of a large moon and plate tectonics, both known to be essential for climate stability on our planet.

Some scientists focus their attention on biochemistry. What if, instead of the necessary planetary conditions, the evolution of life itself is highly unlikely? By mixing water and gases believed to have been present in Earth’s early atmosphere, scientists have attempted to re-create life’s beginnings in the lab, but these experiments have produced little more than a few amino acids.

This indicates that even the formation of simple self-replicating chemical compounds is highly improbable and occurs only over a very long period of time. This hypothesis is supported by the hundreds of millions of years which, as far as geologists can tell, lie between the formation of our planet and the emergence of its first lifeforms.

But there is one caveat: just as we cannot assume Earth-like planetary conditions are common in the universe, we also have to consider that there might be planets which are more hospitable to life than primordial Earth. These theorized planets are known as superhabitable worlds.

Others argue that life may be common throughout the universe, but the kind of intelligence that can create advanced technology, which is much easier to spot, is rare. As far as we know, it has taken 4.6 billion years for Homo sapiens, Earth’s first

species to use complex tools, to arise. If the galaxy is teeming with microbes, or even the alien equivalent of chimpanzees, it will be hard for us to tell, simply because we don’t have the technology to see them at long distances. It is theoretically possible to search for atmospheric traces of life on other planets, such as a methane imbalance, but such measurements are extremely difficult. Within humanity’s present technological limits, SETI is restricted to listening for artificial radio signals, which means that, at least for now, we can only look for aliens by looking for their technology. What’s more, this technology needs to be better than ours. Interstellar communication is possible even at our current level of technology, but it is a bit like trying to contact Australians via a message in a bottle. A pictogram introducing Earth and the human species sent in 1974, for example, will reach its destination, the star cluster M13, in about 25,000 years. Encouragingly, this might indicate the Fermi Paradox is no paradox at all, the lack of proof for extraterrestrial life simply being a feature of the kinds of proof we are able to look for. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, says a popular maxim in SETI. At the same time, the apparent dearth of such technology may indicate that life among the stars, if we are ever to find it, will be very different from the little green men in UFOs we like to imagine. +++ It is possible we have yet to hear from the little green men not because they don’t exist, or because they can’t talk to us, but because they don’t want to. Given that space flight was pure science fiction a mere century ago, we should be careful to assume extraterrestrials simply don’t have the technical abilities to contact us. It’s easy to think of reasons they might choose not to; our own SETI efforts are expensive, and actually venturing out into space, in a way that would be noticeable from faraway, will always be more dangerous than staying on the planet that offers our air, sunlight, and atmospheric radiation-shielding for free. On the other hand, selfreplicating probes have been deemed within reach by the robotics community since the invention of 3D printers. Philosopher Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford calculates that a single such probe would be capable of colonizing the entire Milky Way in 20 million years if it travelled at only one percent of the speed of light. Given the cosmic timescales involved, 20 million years is very little, and we should therefore expect to see, if not the aliens, at least their machines.

This expectation is predicated on the assumption that all civilizations would choose to colonize space if they could do so safely and affordably. Yet, as our own history shows, colonization is by no means a universal process, but rather the product of culturally and historically specific conditions.

YouTuber and Fermi Paradox-nerd Isaac Arthur considers this question from a cultural perspective: He argues that the kind of intelligence and cultural values that lead to the development of technologies enabling spaceflight are likely predicated on a certain tendency for curiosity, willingness to experiment, and risk tolerance. Such traits, he claims, would lead a population to eventually venture into space. Even if

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this weren’t the case, he posits, it seems unlikely that not a single alien or rogue AI has broken its cultural code.

The economist Robin Hanson makes a less speculative argument: The human species at large has settled its planet wherever possible. Even when some populations did not expand into unchartered territories, others eventually did. In fact, lifeforms on Earth generally tend to adapt to fill every ecological niche they can, with stable populations and species consistently branching out via non-trivial mutations and sexual mixing. Hanson concludes that we should expect life elsewhere to be predicated on similar evolutionary principles, and therefore to act in similar ways. Past natural disasters such as supervolcano eruptions and ice ages, as well as genetic bottlenecks when the human population was greatly reduced, suggest that Homo sapiens’ propensity for geographical expansion and cultural diversification has been indispensable to its survival.

From this perspective, it seems logical that humans will, if they can, one day colonize space—if not by settling it, then at least in the form of resource extraction.

Considering the evolutionary and cultural factors that may encourage space exploration and colonization, the Fermi Paradox further confuses.

If it is logical that a lifeform will venture beyond its planet when it can, then what is keeping everyone at home? This question was first seriously considered by economist Hanson in 1998, when he coined the term “Great Filter” to describe the obstacle that must lie somewhere between inanimate matter and expansive life. The ‘Great Filter’ is a probability barrier, ‘filtering’ life such that most of it cannot ‘advance.’ Hanson asks, who or what is the ‘Great Filter’ that is keeping life from expanding across the universe? +++ Many possible Fermi Paradox solutions, such as the Rare Earth Hypothesis and the possibility of a highly improbable evolution of life, are feasible Great Filter candidates. If, say, single-celled life is an unlikely biochemical fluke, this would mean that the Great Filter lies in our past, 3.5 billion years ago, when the first single-celled organisms appeared on Earth. It would mean that all life on Earth, the human species included, has beaten astronomical

odds in making it to the present. Because highly unlikely things are even more unlikely to occur twice, we would be forced to conclude that no other independently evolved life lives anywhere within billions of light years from Earth. A possible caveat is the Panspermia hypothesis, which posits that we ourselves are the aliens, settled or seeded on Earth by someone else. This transposes the origin of life further away in space and time, but leaves the question of its likelihood—and, thus, the Fermi Paradox—unanswered.

Some scientists think the Great Filter might be ahead of us rather than behind us—future technological barriers, not past biological ones, might prevent us from reaching the stars. If the great obstacle keeping everyone else at home happens to civilizations at a technologically advanced stage, it has to be very big. A future Great Filter, according to Bostrom, would have to be an existential catastrophe that ends all Earth-originating intelligent life, or at least permanently and extremely limits any future development. Cultural developments, such as an anti-science movement or the rejection of space colonization in favor of other projects, seem unlikely to have such long-lasting effects. Instead, they would simply prolong the seemingly inevitable. Since an effective filter has to be so probable that it applies to every civilization in the galaxy, astronomical and geological disasters like asteroid impacts and supervolcano eruptions aren’t great candidates either.

Rather, the most universal threat to civilizations in the universe, even those that live in radically different environments than us, might be civilization itself. Nuclear war and high-energy physics experiments have long been feared as potentially world-ending disasters, but, in a world suffering the consequences of Western industrial climate science-denying culture, climate change appears the most daunting Great Filter candidate. In a study titled The Anthropocene Generalized, researchers at the University of Rochester argue that any technological civilization with a growing population will inevitably harvest and use its planet’s resources.

Inevitably, this will have consequences for the ecologies of those planets, leading to changes in the environments lifeforms evolved in and are adapted to and potentially creating destructive feedback loops.

Climate change, the study suggests, may represent a not only catastrophic, but universal, trend.

+++ If the Great Filter is in our future, we have no reason to think it will spare us, warns philosopher Bostrom.

This is why he hopes we are alone. If we continue to find no traces of extraterrestrial life, and even if we do find very simple, microbial life, we will have reason to believe that the Great Filter lies somewhere at the fundamental evolutionary level. But the more complex the life we find, the more past Great Filter candidates would have to be eliminated—if the number of times we know of that single-celled organisms independently evolved rises to two, it is no longer a highly improbable step—and the more likely it would be that the filter is ahead of us. If it turns out that the galaxy is populated by thriving alien empires, the Great Filter—and with it, the Fermi Paradox—doesn’t exist. But if we find anything other than that, the filter looms large, and it seems probable Homo sapiens will go extinct, most likely by our own doing, before we can explore much further than we already have.

The Great Filter thus presents us with a unique dilemma: Either we are heading for a disaster which, by definition, is basically unavoidable—or our future is a bright, but lonely one. Whether ‘Oumuamua was an artificial piece of technology made by an extraterrestrial civilization, or simply the strangest rock we’ve ever seen, thus becomes a deeply existential question. Ultimately, how we meet the challenges we are faced with today determines not only our own future, but will allow us to extrapolate whether or not we should expect to ever find alien life. And, though it would crush our millennia-old dream of meeting other lifeforms, a bright and lonely future would offer meaningful adventures, too. “If we are truly alone in this great, vast cosmos then that leaves us with a terrible responsibility,” writes Keith Cooper. “As the sole beacon of consciousness amongst the stars, we will inherit the Universe, and represent the one, single chance to unlock the secrets of the cosmos.”

ANTONIA HUTH B’21 hopes the Martians take her last.

06

IMAGINED COMMUNITY FEATS

Historicizing the National Flag

TEXT OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO

DESIGN MEHEK VOHRA

ILLUSTRATION JOYCE TULLIS

cw: American imperialism, anti-Blackness, racial slurs

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In 1852, Abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” For me, this question provoked a larger one, how can I as a Black American celebrate the idols, symbols, holidays, and traditions of a nation that rendered my ancestors inhuman, mere subjects of extraction? Douglass remarks that the 4th of July is for the white man to celebrate and for Black Americans to mourn the legacy of slavery. There is an assumed dichotomy, between what the holiday should represent versus what it has. But, the 4th of July is shameful for anyone to celebrate. It is through these rituals that American society glorifies the past and present of the nation.

To legitimate America’s origin story ignores its history of anti-Blackness, Native American dispossession, colonialism, and imperialism. Nonetheless, continuing Douglass’ thread of critique feels like my birthright—a way for me to recognize the privilege I have as a first-generation American while still negotiating the terms of my Americanness. The American Flag is a nationalist icon ripe for critique—a symbol of America that’s too-oft understood separately from the context from which it emerged.

The flag normatively represents the ideas of freedom, liberty, and justice that distinguished the American experiment, in the eyes of the Founders, from other nations. These meanings, extracted from its symbolism, came from an iterative process of knowledge production—socially-created meanings and practices understood as truths. While the flag is imbued with meaning, it is not an innocent vessel that just happens to be misappropriated by certain bad actors. Rather, the flag represents a premise from which the concept of nation-states, originating in the West, are built. Flags are an emblem of a nation’s sovereignty and boundaries even when there are whole communities existing already on the land it assumes. There are institutionalized and social modes of control that codify these artificially-constructed boundaries. As political scientist Benedict Anderson theorized, nationalism invents nations where they did not previously exist. Symbols like the American flag affect and compel citizens in ways that uphold the imagined community. +++ To many Americans, the flag is sacred. It is not to be wrinkled, stained, or stepped upon. It makes people’s blood boil with anger, with visceral disgust, to see the flag desecrated in any manner. In the contentious Supreme Court case Texas vs. Johnson, Gregory Lee Johnson burned the flag in protest of the Reagan administration’s policies. While he was arrested and convicted with desecration of a venerated object in Texas Court, during his appeal, the Supreme Court held in a split decision that flag burning was protected as free speech under the First Amendment.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissented: “It does not represent the views of any particular political party, and it does not represent any particular political philosophy. The flag is not simply another “idea” or “point of view” competing for recognition

in the marketplace of ideas. Millions and millions of Americans regard it with an almost mystical reverence regardless of what sort of social, political, or philosophical beliefs they may have.” Indeed, a 1984 national poll conducted by news magazine Newsweek found that 65 percent of Americans disagreed with the rulings. President George H.W. Bush even endorsed a constitutional amendment to prevent flag burning that led to a political frenzy of Democrats and Republicans aligning themselves as explicitly “pro-flag,” to avoid the condemnation that came with the opposite label, “anti-flag.” To identify as “pro-flag” was to acquiesce to imagined community and to declare that one would not pose a threat to the reigning power dynamics.

A powerful aspect of the flag’s sanctity is its role as touchstone for officers and soldiers in wartime.

They would die for and by the flag. Yet at the same time, underneath the flag, the American military apparatus has had an outsized role in deciding who gets to live and die in other countries. In the name of the flag, violence is condoned and normalized for freedom’s sake. America has tried to impose its fantastical vision upon territories far out of its reach.

The sacrificial element of the flag explains why the flag desecration evokes so much emotion. Justice Rehnquist attempted to locate the flag’s significance universally—as an infallible given. But, the events that provoked and brought attention to the case—the burning of the flag as a political statement or artist Dread Scott’s controversial 1989 exhibit, “What is the proper way to display a US flag?” that placed the flag on the ground—underscore that the flag’s symbolism is and can be contested. It is not a secret that the flag has been repeatedly co-opted by ethno-nationalists who allege to be patriots, but support an America where wealth and political power is primarily concentrated amongst white people.

These viewpoints have been so embedded within the textbooks children read and in the rhetoric politicians use in moments of crisis where they romanticize American’s founding that critiques to the flag seemed to undermine people’s fundamental identity as Americans. If disrespect or damages to the flag are interpreted as a direct attack on America itself, the flag can be understood as a metonymy for the nation. The flag represents a white imaginary nation, running parallel but reluctant to intersect with the lived reality of many marginalized communities.

Symbols and myths in the process of nationhood allowed the founders to view the world in terms of “the possible”—the imagined, as psychologist Rollo May once said. In this imaginary, white males would divvy up land and private property as they saw fit.

They would govern themselves with utmost regard to the individual’s constitutional liberties. The flag as a rhetorical device was used to consolidate America as an exceptional, divine-originating place. The creation of the nation-state was chiefly concerned about unity amongst white people. +++

“The American Flag is a nationalist icon ripe for critique—a symbol of America that’s too-oft understood separately from the context from which it emerged” “Behold: the Star Spangled Banner, as she Gracefully rises to her post of duty And gently flutters in the morning breeze Across our native land and above the seas; She proclaims her message of liberty and freedom ...

From early sunrise until the close of day, Triumphant, the Stars and Stripes are waving.

Symbol of a freeborn sovereign people” — Charles Ulysses Gordon, 1950, tribute to the American Flag The unfurling of the American flag, though not the Stars and Stripes familiar to us now, marked the transformation of American British colony into a nation. The American flag represented a novel, egalitarian, and democratic society. While the flag was used during wartime first in the War of 1812, it also played a vital role in the Civil War; according to Historian Marc Leepson, the Stars and Stripes rallied support for Union soldiers against the Confederacy. Social reformer Henry Ward Beecher, once said, “[The flag] is not a painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. It is the government. It is the free people.” Such patriotic rhetoric placed the American flag as the antithesis to the Confederate flag, in the perspective of the Union army; they viewed themselves on the right side of history, fighting for the nation’s existence. The flag became a national symbol with the power to move armies. Concurrently, toward the end of the 19th century, ideas of Social Darwinism and the white man’s burden bolstered ethnonationalism linked to Anglo-Saxon heritage. Years before Texas vs. Johnson, there were flag protection movements initially directed at commercial or political misuse of the flags. Flag protection also became used as a defense mechanism against influxes of Eastern European immigrants and larger fears of industrialization and urbanization disrupting the prevailing small-town, Christian, community-oriented way of life. The flag has been a powerful force in producing nationhood based on rituals of exclusion.

The tribalism underlying the flag protection movements underscored the imagined myth that there was a group of people entitled to be Americans.

The mythology around the American flag makes it seem as if this ‘true American’ tribe exists. Gordon

FEATS refers to America as his “native” land. The myth notwithstanding, America continues to be a settler colonial society. The genocidal acts committed against Indigenous people served to physically cleanse the land of their presence, a far cry from the land just being there up for grabs for deserving Americans, as alluded to by the Manifest Destiny doctrine. The use of “freeborn sovereign people” is also revealing of the modes of exclusion at play in America’s creation.

The millions of enslaved people brought forcibly during the Transatlantic Slave trade were not “free,” but the poem alludes even further that they were not viewed as human beings or people. Enslaved individuals were the walking dead, suitable only for labor.

The American flag ignores these histories.

The erasure of enslaved people from the nation-building project was also evidenced in the 1900 musical hit caricaturing Black people, “Every race has a flag but the coon.” This was at a moment where Black scholars were wrestling with an articulation of what it meant to be African-American; for these white men to deny that the American flag or any flag at all represented Black people was to also deny that Black people even had an identity to take pride in. This was an explicit acknowledgement—a widespread sentiment if it was commercially profitable for white audiences—that Black people were never a part of America’s imagined world. Although in later years, America tried to distinguish itself as a “nation of nations,” a country tolerant to diversity or multiculturalism, America was meant to be a white country from the very beginning. Placed in its historical context, the American flag is inextricably linked to a narrative that equated American culture to white culture—a dangerous connection given that the only thing that could characterize a “white culture” is a shared history of plunder and conquest justified by white supremacy.

Hill rioters expressed a deep love for America and could not fathom how the outside world did not view the 2020 elections as rigged. They labelled themselves ‘patriots.’ In this moment, the white imaginary that the flag has always embodied was more visible. The rioters were living in a mythical world, one in which they had been robbed of an election. They were using the symbolic power of the American flag to justify their vision for a US, a different one than that which the voters had chosen.

Once again, the point of where nationalism begins and patriotism ends is difficult to define. These rioters carrying the American flag as they hung nooses and beat officers, all while describing themselves as patriots, underscores the existence of a “cult of flag,” as Billig argued. Patriotism is arbitrary, ranging from a justification of intervening in Iraq to these rioters descending upon Capitol Hill. Yet, critiques of the flag are understood as unpatriotic. One need only be reminded of the backlash that football player Colin Kaepernick received for kneeling during the National Anthem to understand this. This cult of flag is not only prominent within Trump’s electorate; every time that Biden speaks he has multiple flags behind him. As appealing as his talks of unity and bipartisanship seem in comparison to a former president who repeatedly stokes the flames of racial division, Biden’s image still operates within the

new, daily rituals. Land acknowledgments are an example. Even if the physical presence of Indigenous communities has decreased in a land, their history and presence will not be forgotten. Rather, historicizing the meanings of the flag is an entry point for white American society to be repeatedly implicated as the source of pain and trauma for marginalized communities.

OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO B’22 agrees with James Baldwin, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

+++ Within three weeks of the tragedy of 9/11, the oldest flag factory in the nation had tripled its production.

People all across the nation displayed flags on their lawns, car windows, and more to show solidarity and empathy with the victims of the attacks. The embrace of the flag could be felt from both ends of the political spectrum, as journalist George Packer said, “September 11 made it safe for liberals to be patriots.”

But, for some communities, displaying the flag was about survival. “Unpatriotic” was more than an insult; this label would be followed by hate crimes, profiling, detainment. The intelligence community treated anyone who appeared to be Arab, Middle Eastern, North African or whose names were interpreted or misinterpreted for ‘Muslim’ names as terrorist suspects. No amount of pledging allegiance to the flag could change who was defined as American and who was defined as a foreigner. Counterterrorism efforts were less about reducing violence and more about satisfying a predetermined description of threats to national security. Brown communities were stripped of their agency and autonomy as their existence became pathologized and operationalized. The flag was understood to be a signaller of who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’ of the imagined community. Accepting the flag’s symbolism does not protect brown communities from how terrorism is articulated in racial terms. Thus, the line between patriotism and nationalism becomes blurry. In the War on Terror, nationalism was refashioned into necessary patriotism to defend one’s state, even when the government’s discriminatory and cruel practices warranted the opposite. All of the rituals that involved exercises of devotion to the flag (the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem) and the link between these events to bodies of authority, state legislatures, and Congress created in political geographer Gerald Webster’s opinion a reservoir of nationalism that the Bush administration capitalized on. To wave one’s flag in this moment was to support the war and to support the war was to be a “True American.” Requiring people to prove their Americanness shows that America’s multicultural pride is falsely based, when markers of the white imaginary—being Christian, speaking English—are more powerful indicators of Americanness than any flag could convey.

Decades after the War on Terror, this same nationalism blinding people to the horrors committed by the government rings a familiar tune. The Capitol

imagined community of America. Unity rhetoric still allows the ruling elites to be comfortable with living in an unequal and inequitable America, sustained on economic and cultural divisions.

Because of the weight of the flag’s symbolism in sustaining these hegemonic origin stories of America, the flag itself can never be reclaimed, nor should this be the goal. To try and restore honor to the flag is reductive given that the history of coloniality, land disposession, and slavery have produced structurally-violent systems that cannot be fixed overnight.

To expect individuals to remain uncritical of their country under such conditions denies them the expression of grief and sorrow that begins processes of healings. We must understand that each person who bears witness to the flag carries with them a different chapter—some mistaken for the entire book, others ignored as if they were footnotes. Perhaps, there is hope that the experiences of those banished to the peripheries of the white imaginary world can deconstruct the narrative and power of the flag through

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EPHEMERA

ARTWORK AMBIKA MIGLANI

METRO

How RI organizers, under COVID, illuminate the intersections and imperative of housing justice

For housing justice organizers nationwide, 2021 has so far been filled with exhaustive organizing for housing justice in the face of unresponsive lawmakers. On the executive level, organizers correctly anticipated that the Biden administration would implement yet another meager, weaklyenforced extension of the eviction moratorium, lasting only through March 31. Groups across the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC)—a decade-old movement for urban justice and against dispossession and forced displacement, of which DARE is a founding member—staged protests in January and co-signed an “Executive Action Statement” demanding “a universal and comprehensive eviction and utility shut-off moratorium” enforced by the Department of Justice.

On the state level, DARE invited community members to the State House on February 27 to advocate for stronger protections for those facing evictions. As Dan McKee’s incoming gubernatorial administration laid forth a housing agenda born of long-defended austerity measures, DARE—at the protest and through a co-drafted letter—demanded that attention be given to immediate relief for tenants. The state response, activists emphasized, must coincide with and come out of legislative commitments that reflect DARE’s decades-long imperative toward housing justice.

“Why are protections not talked about right now, and why has the CDC moratorium been every 30 days and left tenants and homeowners to worry,” Wright implored a Rhode Island government in transition. “It shouldn’t be that way… Evictions and utility shut-offs need to stop, that’s all to get us through this pandemic, and, long term, we need housing.”

Lady Lawrence, an organizer with Housing=Health in Boston, told the Indy that housing justice activists who have been building

+++ To activists like Wright and Lawrence, the connection between housing justice and public health, both pandemic-related and produced by systems like mass incarceration, is clear; in fact, COVID represents a symptom of the very ways in which institutional responses have long neglected their interconnectedness.

“In states where eviction protections lapsed, a new study estimates that 433,700 excess individuals have contracted COVID, and 10,700 people have died from the virus,” detailed the RTTC. “It is no surprise today that Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income households bear the greatest burden of this pandemic, experiencing the highest rates of COVID infections, including those caused by the highest rates of housing insecurity.”

These figures inform the urgency of DARE’s eviction-related demands. At the “Housing is the Cure” protest, the group outlined a set of policy proposals and moral imperatives: the extension of the eviction and foreclosure moratorium through the remainder of the pandemic, the cancellation of rent and utility debt, and the expansion of eviction protections beyond displacements due to nonpayment.

DARE’s organizing structure also accounts for how housing justice—particularly in the pandemic—intersects with other related exploitative crises under racial capitalism. In their “Principles of Unity” statement, DARE delineates their ideological commitment to solidarity building as a means to combat how “systems of oppression aim to maintain power by continuing to divide and conquer our communities.” Tangibly, this emphasis on collectivity manifests in DARE’s very composition: its primary committees are Behind the Walls (a prison abolitionist campaign) and the Tenant and Homeowner Association (THA, a South Providence-based low-income tenant advocacy group).

“There’s a connection,” emphasized Wright, “in areas of concentrated poverty, you’re gonna end up in a grave, in prison, or on the streets. And the fact that we’re in this pandemic is screaming that if we don’t fix justice, and have laws that support BIPOC communities in those areas, we’re going to end up with a public health crisis that we will not be able to get rid of.”

During the COVID pandemic, DARE has further centered how, as Lawrence captured, “police violence and housing injustice are both modalities of violence. Sometimes they kill us quickly with a bullet, but they’re killing all of us in slow motion.”

This shared philosophy was reified by DARE’s participation in a recently-formed, Rhode Islandbased coalition that advocates for a budget that seeks to address the ravages of austerity. Consisting, among others, of sections devoted to Criminal and Housing Justice, their demands emphasized the need for funding universal housing programs for formerly

+++ Little precedent exists for housing justice activists to expect a legislative response aligned with their “universal and comprehensive” vision, one that is required to counteract long-entrenched oversight.

As an alternative to state-induced precarity, DARE has come to embrace that “building real security” within communities necessitates “accountability to one another” through collective action by those enduring experiences of poverty and associated criminalization. This is a claim they have been staking for 30 years but whose mandate is urgently sculptive for housing justice movements amid the pandemic.

“There’s a question about how the THA works to go beyond what legislation can capture, and the answer to that is that we’re made up of community members. We live it,” Wright explained, emphasizing the political capital and community building potential inherent to tenants’ making demands informed by lived experience. “You cannot walk a mile in my shoes, but you will hear my voice today, about housing issues and beyond.”

During the pandemic, for instance, Wright recounted that her emotional investment in this work—as well as DARE’s legislative strategy—is founded in amplifying burgeoning grievances voiced by those facing imminent eviction and centering their stories as the substance from which housingrelated decision-making must shape itself. These sentiments toward community care and stewardship echo visions shared by housing justice organizers nationwide, including members of Housing=Health and the NUH. In anticipation of the shortcomings of state relief, Johnson similarly highlighted that unhoused persons have always been, and will continue to be, left to ruggedly sustain their own well-being.

“One word would be survival, whether through community or on the individual level,” Johnson outlined, referencing how the NUH conducts much of its organizing alongside those who have sought care through encampments.

At this juncture, where balance between harm-reduction and systemic shifts remains hard to strike, Johnson identified space for transformative coalescence amongst tenants, the unhoused, and the poor across state lines. “Building a network throughout the region, including in Rhode Island, is the basis and beginning of it,” he insisted, expressing interest in coordinating new opportunities for collective action with groups like DARE. “Sometime in 2021, we’re gonna take some road trips, start building this network, and see where our process can fit in.”

ILLUSTRATION OLIVIA LUNGER

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against systemic conditions of inequality for decades have come to see the COVID pandemic as a “spike in the fever” during which the crucial, comprehensive, and collaborative scope of their work finally becomes illuminated. Despite differences in local contexts, for example, both Rhode Island and Massachusetts activists spoke to the increased relevance that their demands—ones that cut across intersecting issues and organizing coalitions—hold in the face of COVID as a convergence of long-endured systemic harm.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

For over 30 years, Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) has been struggling for systemic change while balancing the need to secure immediate harm reduction for Rhode Island tenants.

Often this relief has come in the form of legislative demands. Terri Wright, DARE’s leading housing justice organizer told the College Hill Independent that the COVID pandemic in particular should impose a sense of urgency on lawmakers. “Our demands have no choice not to [resonate],” said Wright. “Everyone who needs to be listening can hear them; they can hear stories of struggle.”

With COVID deaths closely attributed to housing insecurity, DARE—through a suite of legislative, executive, and budgetary proposals—has articulated in recent months that “Housing is the Cure” to immediate and long-term social, economic, and public health crises. In parallel with legislative pleas, activists have found themselves dedicating much of their efforts to underscoring their mode of organizing—one that is focused on intersectional housing justice that extends beyond legislation—as best positioned to heal from the pandemic and move beyond the conditions that incubated its disparate violence.

In fact, despite organizers having been “at the table forever,” as Wright described, a disconnect persists between institutional responses and the comprehensive demands DARE and partner organizations insist upon. “Enough with the bills, enough with the laws that don’t support us,” she said. “The time is now.”

TEXT JACK DOUGHTY AND ROSE HOUGLET

HOUSING IS THE CURE

incarcerated persons and reinvesting funds from the Department of Corrections to transitional housing programs and vouchers.

In his organizing through Massachusetts’ National Union of the Homeless local, Paul Johnson alluded to several anecdotes that reaffirm the shortcomings of institutional responses to the housing crisis—even as the Commonwealth purports to be the only “right-to-shelter” state and spends disproportionately more on housing per resident than Rhode Island. Johnson explained that the unhoused persist to be treated predatorily, countering the state’s lip speak: “What you have in South End Lower Roxbury is a funnel into both homelessness and the criminal injustice system.” Exemplifying this disconnect, Johnson denounced the private purchase of a historic public housing development—The Lenox Apartments—and the associated dispatch of armed security guards to police a low-income, historically Black community as the property is privatized.

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh’s abetting of this rapid closure with developers, despite the community organizing and “legal efforts to stop the land transfer” Johnson described, represents the institutional neglect that groups like DARE and the NUH insist must be combatted and circumvented.

Continued state belligerence of this nature, in fact, is what catalyzed the resolidification of the National Union of the Homeless in 2018-2019 after its dissolution in the early 1990s.

JACK DOUGHTY B‘23 and ROSE HOUGLET B‘23 urge readers to follow DARE’s call script demanding immediate relief and look forward to expanding movements for housing justice in Providence.

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A CITY BY The Shell Terminal and the future of Providence

TEXT LUCAS GELFOND AND PEDER SCHAEFER

DESIGN XINGXING SHOU

ILLUSTRATION IRIS WRIGHT

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nationwide. Companies like Shell exercise vast influence over the political systems meant to keep them in check. A CLF victory would be a triumph of the legal system—and citizen advocates—over the immense corporate power of Shell. Fossil fuel giants in coastal communities across the US might have to spend huge sums of money on retro-fitting their facilities. But, as CLF is only able to sue for permitting violations and debatable language in the Clean Water Act, it cannot use the law to put on trial the very existence of such fossil fuel facilities and the huge amount of damage—like rising sea levels—they are causing to the city. The case’s scope is narrow, and the chances of victory slim, but CLF’s lawsuit could mobilize public support against the existence of companies like Shell and extract moral dues from polluters. Finally, after decades of knowing, Shell would have to acknowledge and pay for some aspect of the climate change they’ve caused.

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In 1635 the Great Colonial Hurricane sent a 22-foot storm surge tearing through Narragansett Bay. One year later, Roger Williams colonized the land that he began to call Providence. Generations since have transformed the local topography, stripping the landscape of natural protections against storm surges and rising waters. In 1938 and 1954, two more large storms hit Providence, flooding vast swaths of Downtown. Government leaders built a hurricane barrier a decade later, but they didn’t take into account rising seas due to climate change.

Now, another 1635-like storm would nearly overtop Providence’s only defenses, and the low-lying industrial facilities at the port of Providence—such as Shell’s Providence Terminal—would be destroyed, unleashing toxic waste into Narragansett Bay. The Conservation Law Fund (CLF) is suing Shell for failure to prepare their facility for climate change, provoking larger questions about how the city will adapt to rising water, bigger storm surges, and the power of massive polluters like Shell. Preparing Providence for climate change requires shattering the myth of a static, never-changing landscape. The city can choose to do nothing and eventually be destroyed, or build new coalitions around ambitious designs in pursuit of a radically re-imagined, climate-adapted Providence.

The Providence Shell Terminal and the Conservation Law Fund’s case The Providence Shell Terminal is one of dozens of industrial facilities that reside on Allens Avenue, a long stretch of road that runs alongside the Providence River, away from Downtown and towards Fields Point. The east side of Allens Avenue is manmade; the land rests on an area that was once a marsh estuary. Maps from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management show that the waterfront slowly expanded over decades through a combination of dredging and dumping of city trash. Most of the riverfront is inaccessible to the public or littered with scrap—old tires, rusted manhole covers, and even a decommissioned submarine—and other toxic waste. A flood here would be catastrophic for the ecosystem of the Narragansett Bay and the Rhode Islanders who depend on it.

In 2017, the Conservation Law Fund sued Shell in Rhode Island federal district court, alleging that the company is aware of climate-related dangers to their 75-acre facility but has done little to mitigate such risks. Last September, the lawsuit moved into legal discovery in federal court, requiring Shell’s team of lawyers to present evidence to defend their

The Fox Point Hurricane Barrier and the topography of Providence

facility. The CLF lawsuit is based on a federal law passed in 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which acknowledges that most environmental laws are not properly enforced— mostly due to bipartisan austerity measures—and so allows for ‘citizen’ reporting. CLF’s lawsuit accuses Shell of numerous violations of the RCRA and Clean Water Act, mainly concerning visible oil sheen, failure to correctly report pollutant concentration, and a lack of disaster preparedness.

The most compelling accusation CLF puts forth, however, is an allegation of a “Failure to Prepare SWPPP [Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan] in Accordance with Good Engineering Practices.” The suit claims that Shell knows of sea level rise and the extreme weather events expected as climate change occurs, but has failed to take this knowledge into account in the design of their Providence terminal.

The CLF has precise legal arguments and sophisticated scientific climate modeling on its side. In addition, the federal judge hearing the case, William E. Smith, has a reputation for being friendly to environmental causes. Nonetheless, CLF President Brad Campbell told the College Hill Independent that his team of lawyers are in the middle of a David versus Goliath fight. Shell is the seventh largest company in the world and has nearlimitless legal and lobbying resources. Shell’s lawyers have already attempted a variety of diversionary legal tricks, like claiming that the CLF’s case doesn’t have standing in federal court or that debates about climate change don’t apply to Shell’s permits. A representative from Shell told the Indy that the company does not comment on ongoing litigation.

Campbell told the Indy that a successful suit would finally make the economic cost of climate inaction transparent, putting a price tag on rising sea levels. The case would also set a precedent in federal court that could impact low-lying fossil fuel facilities

In 1954, Hurricane Carol dumped 12 feet of water in Downtown Providence, causing $1.9 billion in damages, adjusted to 2021 dollars. In the years that followed, thanks to federal funding and public outcry, planning and construction began on the hurricane barrier. State and federal leaders chose to build at Fox Point, deciding against other proposals, such as floodgates at the mouth of the Narragansett Bay or across Fields Point, because they were economically and ecologically infeasible, despite protecting port infrastructure. The massive barriers further south of Providence would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and could have destroyed the fragile estuary ecosystems at the head of the Bay. Still, as it stands, the Fox Point barrier protects only the wealthiest parts of Providence—such as Downtown and the cluster of historic buildings at the base of College Hill—leaving marginalized communities in Olneyville and Washington Park vulnerable.

Providence’s natural topography, formed by glaciers thousands of years ago, has typically protected the city from large storm surges. Most of the residential areas of Providence are above sea level, a byproduct of powerful ice sheets moving back and forth over the land, creating the narrow channels, bluffs, and hilly terrain that today define much of the city. Before colonization, the head of Narragansett Bay was also a thriving marshland and estuary. Indigenous peoples of the region, such as the Wampanoag and Narragansett, worked the land to provide food and shelter for their communities without destroying the local ecosystem. Since colonization, Europeans, exploiting the labor of enslaved Africans, have levelled hills and pushed earth into the Providence River, altering parts of the landscape that once acted as carbon sinks, rainwater storage, and natural barriers against storm surges.

Specific parts of Providence, such as Fields Point, are victims of the terraformed landscape, and are now only a few feet above sea level, but most of the city is protected by gentle hills. In cities without rolling terrain, such as low-lying Miami, New Orleans, and Boston, building protective dikes and tidal gates is economically infeasible, but in Providence, a smaller barrier could protect most of the city. However, the current Fox Point Hurricane Barrier wouldn’t protect the city in the

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THE (RISING) SEA long-term, according to Executive Artistic Director of WaterFire Barnaby Evans, but it would be a good place for a larger dike to be built, due to its placement at the narrowest point of the river. Evans said the new structure, which would have to be resilient to long term pressures of higher tides and rising sea level predictions, as well as storm surges from hurricanes, would cost over a billion dollars and might take a decade to build.

Such a solution, however, is not without its risks.

Manmade infrastructure disrupts natural estuary systems and such a dike still leaves the port area— including fossil fuel facilities like Shell’s—completely unprotected. Abandoning such low-lying land might be the only feasible option for Providence to adapt, Evans told the Indy.

Urban resilience experts, like Brown University professor Kurt Teichert, advocate for natural climate change solutions like regreening, allowing the land to naturally rewild by removing manmade structures and replanting estuary environments. Newlygreened areas would absorb excess water from storm surges and extreme rainfall events. The community could even reconstruct Sassafras Hill—a dune area that used to protect the coast along Fields Point— restoring Providence’s pre-1900s topography. Evans told the Indy that such solutions might unburden the Earth of what generations of humans have done to it.

City officials so far have failed to act on either re-greening or armoring approaches to adaptation.

Leah Bamberger, director of Providence’s Office of Sustainability, told the Indy that the city has yet to hold formal discussions or do any planning for a re-imagined hurricane barrier. Bamberger said that while the current barrier only has 20 to 30 years of useful life left before it needs to be completely rebuilt, such a project is difficult to set in motion.

Infrastructure projects of this scale require a robust public process, are unexciting to residents, and are extremely expensive. As current Mayor Jorge Elorza sets his sights on a gubernatorial run in 2022, he seems content to pass this generation-defining problem off to the next mayoral administration.

What would it mean to transform ‘Providence’?

Providence as it is today did not exist before Roger Williams, and it is shortsighted to assume the city will always be the same. Companies like Shell thrive when their power and the environment they’ve created seems inevitable. Instead of bowing to the status-quo, the community could embrace adaptive tools like re-greening, dikes, and abandonment to imagine a radical future city that places racial, economic, and environmental justice—not profit motives—at its center. The climate crisis demands change. Even the definition of a city as a home we currently imagine as being stable and constant could alter as we come to grips with land that might no longer be recognizable as Providence.

Community-organized environmental justice and white environmentalism Monica Huertas, a Providence-based environmental justice activist, has a vision for a city that gives the most marginalized residents a waterfront view.

Huertas’ neighborhood, Washington Park, is one of several Black and brown communities most impacted by economic and environmental injustice.

The area around the port also has one of the highest per capita rates of asthma in the state. But it doesn’t

have to be that way. Huertas told the Indy about La Perla, a poorer neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico that looks over the Atlantic Ocean. She envisions a similar, rising-waters-ready future for her neighborhood in Providence: clean air and water, green space, water access, and playgrounds. Most importantly, in her vision, polluters like Shell are gone, regulated out of existence by state law.

In 2015 Huertas began organizing with the Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG) Collective against the $180 million liquified natural gas (LNG) facility proposed by National Grid on Allens Avenue. The LNG facility is barely a mile away from the Shell terminal, but when Huertas asked CLF to provide legal help for FANG’s organizing, CLF wouldn’t help. She said that FANG was forced to hire a sub-par lawyer that failed to properly represent them at a hearing during the permitting process. The facility eventually won approval despite the community backlash and construction is almost complete. While Huertas said that CLF lawyer Amy Moses had reached out to her about the Shell lawsuit, Huertas felt that CLF had ignored the local community’s needs. “They need to go out there and ask what the community wants,” Huertas told the Indy about CLF’s outreach. “It’s not very meaningful, it’s very tokenizing and not involved [with the community] at all. They need to get their act together.” Huertas is skeptical of white environmentalism, which she sees as a ploy by well-educated lawyers to pose as environmental champions in anticipation of future political careers or corporate board memberships. “All of these national environmental groups are based on eugenics, and the idea that we want to conserve the environment for the white race and white people not for anybody else,” said Huertas. “It’s conservation for who?”

Campbell, the president of CLF, said that public support for their cases was important and that local communities, even if they were not one of the plaintiffs, often played a central role in litigation proceedings. In a follow-up, the CLF emphasized that as a small nonprofit, they don’t have the resources to take on every campaign, such as the case against the LNG facility. “In all of our cases, we do our best to reach out to the community throughout the process to ensure we’re all working towards the same goal,” CLF Press Secretary Jake O’Neill told the Indy in an email.

The tension between community organizers like Huertas and environmental organizations like the CLF is important because whoever defines the climate agenda in the coming years will also control the built environment of the city. For centuries, marginalized communities and their pursuit of climate justice have been ignored. If the concerns of community organizers like Huertas aren’t centered, the same systemic inequities will be repeated as Providence is reimagined in the coming decades.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rhode Island School of Design architecture Professor Anne Tate has taught studios focused on radically adapting and reimagining the port of Providence area. Student proposals for the port area have varied wildly.

One student called for re-greening the land and separating Fields Point from what was once Starve Goat Island, allowing water to fill in between the two. Another proposal called for a conversion of the then-decommissioned storage tanks into affordable housing units or a series of connected nightclubs.

Several address practical concerns for the city, like building a row of windmills on the port or building a gravity flow sewage treatment facility which benefits from the port’s low elevation. Because of the abundance of stakeholders who would be affected were the area to be transformed, Tate told the Indy that she doesn’t have a favorite solution—each proposal addresses a different priority.

Tate’s approach—ambitious, specific, and community driven—is exciting, making it easier to galvanize political momentum toward a project’s completion compared with more general top-down municipal plans. “Sometimes you have to begin with crazy bold propositions and see what can accrue to that,” she told the Indy. Visionary design can present compelling solutions that bring together disparate voices, forming new consensus and galvanizing broad support for transformative projects, even if they are less feasible in the short term. “The role of design can be catalytic in that way,” said Tate. “If there’s a vision of where we want to go, then we can get there together.”

Climate change is a massive disruption to the status-quo, but also a huge opportunity to reimagine Providence. The city’s port is exposed to storm surge and rising waters. The hurricane barrier is aging. Providence’s estuarine ecosystems have been destroyed. Proposals for adaptation exist— regreening the land, building a dike, reimagining the port—but a spark is needed to jumpstart change.

The CLF’s underdog case against Shell could provide that initial push, or a speech by an organizer like Huertas, or aggressive action by city officials.

A broad coalition—designers from RISD, portside community members, local Indigenous communities, the mayor—could together meet the climate crisis with creativity, seizing the momentum and power from polluters like Shell who thrive in stasis. As climate rhythms continue to shape the organization of our communities, Providence will either buckle under new stresses or redefine its discrete physical and historical borders—regardless, the future demands the end of the city as we know it.

PEDER SCHAEFER B’22.5 and LUCAS GELFOND B’23.5 are ready to (re)plant Sassafras trees on a newly (re)built Sassafras Hill.

Climate catastrophe, visionary design, and the future of Providence In 2021, Providence is already in the midst of climate catastrophe. While CLF’s case could set a powerful national precedent, a decision is years in the making. Another 1635-like mega storm could hit the city while CLF and Shell lawyers dither about in the courthouse, arguing over permits while the rising waters lap their black-heeled dress shoes.

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HOW DOES THE SHOW GO ON?

TEXT ELLA SPUNGEN

DESIGN MICHELLE SONG

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

American theatre in stasis and crisis

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There is a moment, always, before the lights go down, when it occurs to everyone in the audience that something is happening, something worth paying attention to. Anticipation charges the air, filling the gaps between knees and bringing pre-show conversations to a close. In that moment, the audience reaches a collective agreement to hush, listen, and wait. Behind the curtains, scrambling settles. Then, as if on cue (and it is): the lights dim, the curtain rises, the performers slip on stage, and that agreement is held for the duration.

Sometimes, in the middle of watching a performance, I turn away from the stage to examine the faces in the audience around me. I watch laughter ripple through the crowd, search for my own expressions reflected back at me, see shock, joy, and grief play across the faces of neighboring attendees, and feel the warmth of shoulders pressed up against mine.

For 90 minutes, or two hours, that dark room is its own miniature world, sequestered from the outside, hovering beyond time and space.

Then, last March, everything stopped. Theaters went dark, the miniature worlds became two-dimensional, and neighbors were relegated to strangers. For an industry that had required in-person interaction, relying on both artist and audience, the pandemic presented not just a challenge but an existential threat.

That crisis arrived at the perfect moment—theater was and is stuck, wedded to a traditional form and marked by systemic racism. Given the time to step back, creatives have used the COVID crisis to break through theatre’s stasis as a white, inaccessible physical space, pushing instead into new digital forms and pursuing anti-racist work to reimagine what theater can be.

In the weeks after it became clear that in-person theatre was not going to be an option, something else began to trickle out. Zoom was jerry-rigged to serve as a makeshift stage as the hybrid and the digital crept in. Artists began creating made-for-online works, audio plays, drive-in performances, and XR (extended reality) experiences—Chekov’s The Seagull was staged on The Sims 4 by director Celine Song. Just as the pandemic provided an opportunity for creatives to expand theatre beyond the physical, the freeze in productions and nationwide outrage over police brutality last summer also sparked a long-overdue confrontation over the racism and exclusion embedded in American theatre.

Storytelling has been a feature of the human experience for as long as we have had language; the pandemic, perhaps, presents the next frontier of this fundamental artform. +++

The phrase ‘virtual theatre’ always felt vaguely oxymoronic to me, for its fundamental clash between the flat digital realm and the viscerally inhabited, spatial theater. I talked to Brown/Trinity Repertory Masters of Fine Arts students, and to “Piehole,” a group of alumni who have been creating theatre together for over 10 years. I asked each of them: “If we take away the factors that traditionally define theatre, what distinguishes the form?”

Alexa Derman, a playwright pursuing her MFA at Brown, burst out laughing in response. Slowly I realized my line of inquiry was flawed. The founding members of the theatre collective helped me realize my mistake.

“Part of [Piehole’s] mission is pushing the edges of what theatre can be. I don’t know if the question of what makes something theatre is really part of that…‘Theatre is perpetually dying,’ right? So let’s just go and make a bunch of stuff and call it theatre; let’s give theatre more possibilities than what a traditional way of thinking about it might lead you to believe,” said Tara Ahmadinejad, director, co-creator, and founding member of the collective. Piehole explores ideas of collective authorship and the use of form to shift audience perception, often employing digital media and unconventional spaces to stage live art. The theater collective worked with video game developer Tender Claws before the pandemic to create a mixed VR and live, immersive theatre experience called The Under Presents. The contrast between pre-pandemic live theatre and post-pandemic virtual theatre might be, anyway, a false dichotomy.

I had been asking what theatre is, but these theatremakers aren’t wasting their time with that question, especially not now. They are simply moving toward what theatre can be. The best art emerges not from defining borders but rather pushing them, thinking around them, imagining a world without them. In striving to create a binary—is this theatre or isn’t it?—I was restricting imaginative thinking and even duplicating the exclusionary practices of the industry. For so long, the industry has boxed out those who challenged the status quo, setting definitive boundaries of what theatre is in order to dictate who it could be made by and for—specifically, for most of theatre’s history, white bodies and stories.

Besides, no one knows the answer to my question, and Alexa Derman’s audio play Possession, unroots it entirely. The play, made exclusively for audio, never to be staged live, was featured in the recent new play festival ‘writing is live’ (the strikeout of the usual title a nod at the not-liveness of the productions in this year’s festival). It mimics a true crime podcast, digging into the constructed archive, false history, and cultural ripples of a lesbian cult murder that never was. Possession embodies the way the pandemic has deemed traditional parameters of the genre irrelevant. “I’m not as interested in, you

know, what is theatre?” Derman told the College Hill Independent. “And more interested in, how can the material conditions under which something is made influence and excite new possibilities? … My ideal way of consuming Possession would be like, put it in your pocket and go grocery shopping,” she said.

In audio, with the usual physical aspects of theatre flattened into sound and inference, the language of the play takes center stage. +++ Theatre is an old, static form. It is also one that has, for as long as it has existed, only been available to a shamefully slim group: the white, the wealthy, the able bodied, the metropolitan. Racism and exclusion run to the very foundation of American theatre, to its early roots in minstrelsy and blackface. While performance art and theatre can be traced back thousands of years, the first truly American musical was the minstrel show in the late 1800s, wherein white actors donned blackface and degraded Black people through racist stereotypes. The phrase ‘Jim Crow’ comes from Thomas Rice’s virulently racist song-and-dance caricature of Black people. The old standards of musical theatre—The Sound of Music, South Pacific, The King and I—invariably have allwhite casts and/or trade in racist stereotypes.

Today, such overt racism may not boil at the surface, but blackface is barely a memory. Theater companies continue to tokenize BIPOC artists and use them for their emotional and physical labor.

Theaters perpetually center whiteness, filling their creative teams, boards, casts, and seasons with white stories and faces. Plays by Black writers, or directed by Black directors, are relegated often to second-stage or smaller productions. Unsustainable and long-held labor practices push theatremakers, especially BIPOC and disabled theatremakers, to the point of breaking because ‘the show must go on.’

The list does go on.

In July 2020, as a response to the nationwide reckoning about police brutality and race in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a coalition of theatre artists of color released a document entitled We See You White American Theatre, detailing the white supremacy and patriarchy ubiquitous in the sphere and enumerating demands for long-overdue institutional change. The 29 page document lays out, in meticulous detail, how to fundamentally overhaul white American theatre in the service of true equity and representation—spanning from culturally competent practices to fair working conditions. Specific demands include Indigenous land acknowledgement practice, anti-racism training, eliminating the six-day rehearsal week and day-long technical rehearsals, the hiring of majority BIPOC writers, designers, and directors for the foreseeable future, and restorative

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justice for past harm inflicted on BIPOC theatre companies.

With theaters shuttered, all the frantic urgency that had justified pushing anti-racism work to a back burner came screeching to a halt. No longer were limited time and too many priorities valid excuses for avoiding confronting racism among theater establishments, and many have truly engaged with this work for the first time over the past year. These demands make it clear that American theatre needs more than reform to rid itself of the structural racism at its core—it requires a complete restructure from the top down. The pandemic provided a unique opportunity for a true reckoning of the industry and the destructive norms that have been upheld for as long as theatre has existed in the United States.

“I was talking to a director yesterday who was like, ‘Damn, if this pandemic hadn’t hit, I just would have died,’” said Watring. “At the rate of work, the expectation of work, the hours, the no pay, the no health care, the suck it up, the whisper campaign that controlled theatre for so long.”

The pandemic has presented a two-pronged question for the industry: what will theatre look like, in terms of the art that is created, after this?

And who will create it and thrive in its creation?

Whiteness has long been the default in theatre, with a Western aesthetic and tradition revered as the foundation from which to draw practice and convention. A more expansive understanding of the form, catalyzed in part by the limitations of the pandemic, may expand too, the breadth of theatrical and cultural traditions enriching mainstream theatre. +++ Resident Piehole creative Tara Ahmadinejad and her team had expected an in-person production of her play, Disclaimer, at the Public Theater in New York.

The initial work, conceived by Ahmadinejad in the aftermath of the 2017 Muslim Ban, had imagined an intimate gathering that confronted the fraught relationship between the US and Iran. When it became clear the play would run online, they set upon the text, tearing it apart to adapt it for the new medium.

A core experience of the play was the possibility that the audience would be inserted into the narrative as a member of Ahmadinejad’s family in an attempt

to humanize the Iranian experience and create a tangible urgency to prevent war with Iran. “How do you find that vulnerability, when looking at a screen automatically makes a wall come up?” asked Piehole creator Alexandra Panzer. The answer: transforming the setting into an online Persian cooking class and highlighting random audience members on Zoom throughout the virtual production.

By both refusing to pre-record and putting the audience on the spot, Disclaimer constructed a sense of potential that is so key to liveness. “Someone could drop a prop, the gun could actually go off. The potential in the air that you don’t have when you watch a film is recreated through all the different ways that you’re on the edge of your seat a little.

Your in-moment-ness is on the line too,” said performer Alice Winslow.

Through the tension created by the threat of participation, Disclaimer reaches for a sense of liveness—a pursuit at the core of most work being done in theatre throughout the pandemic. If liveness is that thing––that intangible feeling that makes artists and audiences come back time and again to theatre––the more fruitful question, then, is how to foster liveness in virtual theatre. It’s a question that theatermakers beyond the pandemic would be well served to continue asking themselves.

“I think that question of liveness has to do with presence and a sense of event, like something is really happening right now, and I’m a part of it in some way. Even when you go see a live play in a theater, sometimes…you just feel like, this thing is not alive.

If we all just quietly snuck out, they would just keep going. It feels like they don’t even know we’re here.

And other times you can see a play, a play play, that has the fourth wall up, no audience interaction, but it feels alive,” said Ahmadinejad. “It’s hard to say exactly what the difference is between those two things, because it’s sort of esoteric. It’s something about the energy. But that distinction is something that drives the work that we’ve been doing.” +++ The pandemic, in forcing mainstream theatre to expand beyond conventions, opened up possibilities for transformation. The effect is a double act of status quo deconstruction: compelling the entire industry

to think outside traditional performance—thus drawing the experimental into the spotlight—and drawing back the curtain on its pervasive racism and issues of accessibility. Indeed, the unique ability of online theatre to transcend spatial boundaries (your home is the theater) and, in many cases, temporal ones, expanded the reach of the form to unprecedented audiences previously restricted by their disability, income level, or location.

At this moment, the art that endures is that which digs deep into the question of what made pre-pandemic theatre worthwhile, drawing inspiration to create theatre that defies boundary. It is the art that leans into, rather than away from, the moment.

Liveness carries an urgency, a pulling forward, that keeps a viewer riveted. It is a collective energy, the act of realizing a shared experience in a group of strangers. It is the potential for something to go wrong, for human error. It’s the question of how much of what you’re seeing—in Zoom theatre, including the chat—is intentional. “I think why I crave liveness is sort of the violent act of it. It doesn’t exist anywhere else except in the room,” described Watring. A sense of liveness is easiest to acquire in person, but it is not impossible to achieve virtually.

We must do so, as this sort of true connection is fundamentally human, especially in the face of profound isolation and quarantine.

Without the usual, physical box of ‘theatre,’ artists are free to sink their teeth into the idea of liveness and medium—to reacquaint themselves with the form. In some ways, if considered properly, the pandemic is an opportunity for a creative, though not financial, revival in a stagnant industry. It has forced the injection of currents of innovation and digital creativity, something at which leading theater voices have long balked.

The pandemic has created the space for something new and greater—a reimagining of what theatre can be into the future—as the physical reconfiguring of the space forces a conceptual overhauling of the discipline. Theatre’s racist, exclusionary forces and the stiffness of its aesthetic borders are bound up in one another; both must be surpassed if theatre is to maintain its relevance into the future.

ELLA SPUNGEN B’23.5 wants to touch your shoulder in a Brown University theatre space.

16

To Her, I Never Knew

LIT

by r.

TEXT RAELEE FOURKILLER

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

ILLUSTRATION RAELEE FOURKILLER

sickly clear liquid pumped into Her arms i remember the scar the yellow brown ooze trickling down into a plastic throwaway pouch sleepy-eyed sipping chocolate milk after waking in the backseat of the car i held Her hand i rubbed curly coils of teddy bears fur, the one the doctor gave Her and she gifted me.

17

she came from that kinda dust bowl family clothes on the line pop you on the head with a wooden spoon bare foot running kind pink bandanas tied covering chemo cinnamon sprinkled after school sweet tea scooped full of cane sugar from the blue tub falling dust to the wind sweeping away like tears who have passed making their way from one body to another. i’ve never known the whispers pricks of memories she carried that struck in the night shuddering light a door opened floorboards creaked in childhood chest connecting shag carpet she swam in the slow beat of Conway Twitty paired so well with longing. never did i see the shadows that crept from Her back lower lower pulling into deepest hollows cranked down with years of hurt absence in space where truth should have lay sideways nature shifting memory attempting to find [ ] when fiery hurt scalding came again.

//

Her body spoke in ticks that repeated once they ended gloss glazed over floating look when she lit up another just as she finished the last the faraway remembrance pulling Her back as the days light faded into another i still could not have known. sutures lined chest forget me nots five o’clock blooms running circles round a knowing that lurks from cracks in the wall she remained separated inside herself tied to places of Her memory creeping at a hum starting in toes.

when children should have been inside the stars called out in their place i heard Her recounting the past tangled mess of vulnerability and scarring that tethers a mother to a daughter twisted line wraps itself round their hearts lying in belly unraveled with each soul she creates to repeat down the line laying holding spirit safe unfurling happens strangled desolation attempts to sever us strand nearly slips caught by membranes knowing place.

tearing an act practiced by guilt this pooling space it inhabits loudness that silence carries my place this twisted hanging thread blowing Silently from both directions i feel not much less than free. // She left this openness a nothingness sphere that waited waited to be forgotten a memory transformed into shadows imbuing shame : anger : surrender morphed body into being its vessel being nighttime’s lullaby grief’s song. whispering, i weave sinew emotions hoping to find a semblance of Her before distance claimed mind leaving an outline for us i enact memory a body of water waits floating carrying me back to where I began a coiled thread RAELEE FOURKILLLER B’22 is always nostalgic and longing for the sun.

X

18

A MUNCH OF PROVIDENCE 5 PROVIDENCE BREAKFAST SANDWICHES

Amy’s bacon Hash It Out: The Trend-Setter

Bagel Gourmet sausage, egg & cheese: The Sustainer

-

By Cole Triedman

Louie’s sausage, egg, & cheese: The Torpedo This sandwich is a blast of goop that activates all corners of consciousness and travels through your systems like a nuclear warhead. that it took two minutes to prepare. Opening some unabashed blankets of American cheese.

Crisped half sausage-links curl out from under-

pact goodness. Its remarkable density would be

Trend-Setter takes the day. Between sweet pil-

This thing has structure; each bite leaves an artful contour. I hate to pay $8.64 for a break-

plain about a BG breakfast sammy. 8.5/10

splurge. 9.5/10

Ratty DIY sammy: The Mosaic

Meeting Street Cafe bacon, egg & cheese: Poofy McGee

race to the Ratty after class for a spot in the egg

My favorite part of this sandwich was the

briney impression as a prominent aftertaste.

7.6/10

tastes like

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ARTWORK CHARLOTTE SILVERMAN

Unscorable.

FARGO STREET POP UP Drawings hand printed onto vintage clothing.

137 Brook Street Tues-Thurs 11-4pm & Fri-Sun 11-5pm, ".charlottesilverman.com Instagram: @fargo.street

3/10

ARTWORK “KOSHER MENORAH” BY ETHAN SHAW

BULLETIN BOARD