The College Hill Independent Vol. 41 Issue 7

VOLUME 41 ISSUE 07 06 NOVE MBE R 2020

NEW LIFE IN CRISIS

FERAL READING

CONSIDER THE PORT

A conversation with Quatia Osorio: doula, entrepreneur, mother

On Anna Tsing’s latest “book,” Feral Atlas

A Narragansett Bay for all

Indy Cover A GOOGLE MAPS WALK Yukti Agarwal

Week in Review 02

WEEK IN ___NOUN___ Amelia Anthony & Nick RobleeStrauss

From The Editors “Poetry is not a luxury.” – Audre Lorde

Metro

It is Wednesday evening, Biden just won Michigan, and by the time this goes to print, you’ll know things that we do not. We do know, though, that 60 million people voted for a white supremecist. Or, that many people have died preventable deaths, and that many others do not view the pandemic as a problem.

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CONSIDER THE PORT Peder Schaefer

This is a crisis, regardless of the outcome of the election.

07

WHAT’S IN A NAME? Osayuwamen “Uwa” Ede-Osifo

Features 05

NEW LIFE IN CRISIS Vicky Phan

But it is worth remembering that few crises are all encompassing. That people find ways to survive, to help each other survive, and, even in the most unimaginable of crises, to continue making art. So, while churning out another issue can feel particularly besides-the-point as the country colors its electoral college map red and blue, it is some sort of allegiance to art and to culture that comes to us as both a privilege and a survival strategy.

Arts + Culture 09

ROMAN BRONZES AS SETTLER-COLONIALISM Justin Han, Amanda Brynn, Samuel Kimball, Kaleb Hood & Abby Wells

Science + Tech 17

FERAL READING Tara Sharma

Literary 11

PRINCESSE LAVANDE NUMÉRO UN Olympe Scherer

Ephemera 13

COMMUNICATION AT ITS FINEST Amonda Kallenbach

X 14

when snow ruled the WORLD Madeleine Young

Traducción 15

LA LUCHA POR VOTAR COMO INMIGRANTE ESTADOUNIDENSE Aicha Sama, Translation by Nell Salzman

List 19

Tara Sharma, Sara Van Horn, & Mehek Vohra

Mister Sister Ad 19

Sage Jennings

MISSION STATEMENT The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. 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.

STAFF Week in Review Amelia Anthony Nick Roblee-Strauss | Nation + World Emily Rust Leela Berman Giacomo Sartorelli Anchita Dasgupta | Metro Ricardo Gomez Deborah Marini Peder Schaefer | Arts + Culture Seamus Flynn Alana Baer | Features Alina Kulman Alan Dean Edie Elliott Granger | Science & Tech Gemma Sack Anabelle Johnston Thomas Patti | Literary Kate Ok Bowen Chen | Ephemera Sindura Sriram Anna Kerber | X Maia Chiu Ethan Murakami | List Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn | List Designer Mehek Vohra | Staff Writers Uwa Ede-Osifo Mara Cavallaro Muram Ibrahim Justin Han Izzi Olive Bilal Memon Seth Israel Nell Salzman Victoria Caruso Zach Ngin Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Ella Spungen Sarah Goldman Alisa Caira Laila Gamaleldin Drake Rebman Morgan Awner Elana Hausknecht Rhythm Rastogi Nicole Kim Lucas Gelfond Rose Houglet Joss Liao Nicholas Michael Belinda Hu Leo Gordon CJ Gan Vicky Phan Tammuz Frankel Amelia Wyckoff Auria Zhang Olivia Mayeda Justin Scheer Gaya Gupta Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Marina Hunt Issra Said | Copy Editors Christine Huynh Grace Berg Jacqueline Jia Elaine Chen Sarah Ryan Jasmine Li Nina Fletcher Madison Lease Alyscia Batista | Design Editor Daniel Navratil | Designers Anna Brinkhuis Katherine Sang Isaac McKenna Miya Lohmeier Clara Epstein | Illustration Editor Sylvia Atwood | Illustrators Sandra Moore Katrina Wardhana Floria Tsui Mara Jovanović Hannah Park Jessica Minker Rachelle Shao Yukti Agarwal Sage Jennings Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Joyce Tullis Charlotte Silverman Simone Zhao | Business Isabelle Yang Lauren Brown Evan Lincoln | Web Designer Sindura Sriram | Social Media Christina Ofori | Alumni Relations Jerry Chen | Spanish Translation Felipe Félix Méndez | Senior Editors Tara Sharma Sara Van Horn Cal Turner | Managing Editors Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Ivy Scott | Managing Designer XingXing Shou *** The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

06 NOVEMBER 2020 VOLUME 41 ISSUE 07

@INDYCOLLEGEHILL WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN ______ NOUN

BY Amelia Anthony & Nick Roblee-Strauss

ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou

DESIGN XingXing Shou

The results are finally in! Today, November _________________________________, could not have come sooner. On November 3rd, NUMBER BETWEEN 1 AND 30

_______________ was the projected ________ of the 2020 presidential ________. After counting and recounting all the votes _________, PROPER NOUN

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those exit ________________ seem far away and _____________.

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The president who ___________________ last night is known for their support of fracking, police, and capitalism. These positions were VERB ENDING IN -ED

summarized in their recent public statement: “__________________ the Green New Deal, America ________________________ once again.”

PROFANE VERB

VERB ENDING IN -ED

The _____________ polls indicated a sure victory for the more _____________ candidate on the ballot in key states, but after ADJECTIVE

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________________________ mail-in-ballots, pundits began to ______ their words. Florida, a state full of ________ and finally-enfranchised VERB ENDING IN -ING

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__________, took a surprising turn suggesting a ____________ for the everglades and more _______________ in Miami.

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Wisconsin was also a big surprise, the WI voter block took a _____________ of cheddar and were on their way to the polls in droves ACTION VERB

to vote against___________________________. Meanwhile in battleground ________, Pennsylvania, suburban _________________ decided NOUN ENDING IN -TION

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__________ to take a _______________.

ACTION VERB

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Newly appointed Supreme _______ Justice, ________________ is expected to weigh in on the results of the ________. Rest assured the NOUN

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question of ___________________ the court is answered: prospective Speaker of the House ______________________________________ has YOUR LOCAL ELECTED CONGRESSPERSON

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declared that the American ______________ can expect _________________________ new justices in 2020.

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After a _____________ 4 years, America is _____________ to welcome a _____________ era. But with big wins in the House and Senate, ADJECTIVE

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many speculate a(n) ____________ relationship between Congress and the White house, which for that matter has been painted EMOTION

_______ in honor of America’s _______________s.

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OCCUPATION

Many organizations have advised people to assemble a plan and go-bag in case of ________ surrounding the elections. Popular NOUN

advice included filling up your _______, buying enough _______ in advance, and surrounding yourself with _____________ people. In NOUN

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preparation for _______ in major cities, some mayors are taking _____________ measures: implementing _____________ curfews and NOUN

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putting up _______. This will likely become a ____________________-amendement issue for protestors.

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Meanwhile, cases of ________ have reached six ________________ per day. Your _____________ alt-weekly, the Indy, asks that you please NOUN

UNIT OF MEASUREMENT

wear a _______ in public.

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We wish you peace, happiness, and ________________ in these dark times—literally. Why does the _______ set so early now?

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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WIR

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BY Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Floria Tsui DESIGN XingXing Shou

Twice a day, Monica Huertas, an environmental justice activist from South Providence, makes the long drive down Allens Avenue to pick up and drop off her son from school. Passing the industrialized waterfront always makes her feel the same way. “I’m sick to my stomach,” Monica told the College Hill Independent.

“It’s not only from the nauseating smells but from the deep down feeling that at any moment, if someone throws a cigarette out the wrong way and it catches the wind, that shit is gonna explode.”

Allens Avenue is only a few minutes drive away from Downtown Providence and the wealthy, green neighborhoods of the East Side and Fox Point, but it feels a world away. When driving towards the Port of Providence, the highway looms overhead, elevated on stilts, and abandoned buildings stand next to mounds of asphalt. The Seaplane Diner is across the street from a pile of scrap metal. A lone biker pedals down the road, buffeted sideways by the wind and drag of passing cars.

Farther up Narragansett Bay, at India Point Park, it’s a different story. There, friends gather for picnics on the sloping green lawn and fishermen cast their lines off the pier. At one entrance is a sign that celebrates the building of the park. Albert Veri, the architect, is quoted: “It’s but a beginning. You plant something and it grows. Adjacent areas in time will tie in. This will be the seed.”

Past the sign is a panoramic view of the mouth of Narragansett Bay. You can make out Allens Avenue in the distance, off to the right. The only green that meets the eye is the gentle slope of India Point Park running down towards the water. A woman is out walking her dog.

India Point Park has not been a seed for a green coastline. If anything, the park has been a seed for gentrification in Fox Point. Many Providence residents—like those in Monica’s neighborhood in South Providence and Washington Park—still live with the impacts of an industrialized waterfront. Toxic air, poisoned water, and constant noise are only blocks away from their front doors.

in 2014 that organizes against fracking and natural gas projects across the Northeast. Huertas became the coordinator for FANG’s #NoLNGinPVD campaign that sought to stop the construction of a $180 million liquified natural gas plant proposed by National Grid. While the campaign wasn’t able to halt the construction of the plant—which will be completed in 2021—Huertas and other activists pressured Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza to come out against the construction of the facility. As an offshoot of that activism, Huertas helped form a Racial Environmental Justice Committee in 2016 with the Office of Sustainability in the City of Providence.

“Let’s stop having people at the top, mainly white men, make decisions for us,” Huertas told the Indy.

“Instead of top down, let’s have community folks tell us what they want, what a sustainable system means to them.” Huertas’s work with the Racial Environmental Justice Committee led to the publication of Providence’s Climate Justice Plan in 2019. Nearly 100 pages long, the plan lays out the complex and often overlooked environmental history of Providence, demonstrating how frontline communities—communities of color most impacted by the crises of ecology, economy and democracy—have borne the brunt of environmental impacts. The document also contains suggestions for how Providence can take steps towards a more environmentally just and equitable city. It hopes to ensure that the environmental cleanup doesn’t just lead to gentrification, like at Fox Point, but instead benefits local residents.

One key element of the plan put together by community members is the idea of Green Justice Zones.

Joshua Kestin, one of the coordinators for Sunrise Providence, a local hub of the national youth-led climate justice Sunrise Movement, told the Indy that there are two key elements to the zones: stopping polluters from continuing to pollute while increasing funding for environmental remediation projects—new parks, pollution clean up, etc.—in impacted communities. Huertas is working with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, city +++ planners, and other working groups to try and move towards this new model, but shifting decades of tradi“I’m going to go take it down with my damn hands if I tionally racist city policy towards frontline communihave to,” Huertas told the Indy about the infrastructure ties—embodied most of all in racially-tinged zoning on Allens. Huertas initially got involved with environ- decisions—isn’t easy. mental justice after buying her first home. She realized she couldn’t drink the tap water, plant seeds in her +++ backyard, or let her children play in the street because of the impacts of decades of pollution, much of it from The Climate Justice Plan is a part of Providence’s larger the industrial polluters in the Port of Providence. The aim to become carbon neutral by 2050, a goal set by area around the port, where Monica lives, has one Elorza in 2016 via executive order. “We obviously of the highest rates of asthma cases per capita in the cannot continue to have fossil fuels emitted in the port entire state. Rhode Island has the ninth highest asthma if we are going to meet that goal,” Leah Bamberger, the rate in the entire country. The environmental inequi- director of the Office of Sustainability, told the Indy. ties between the South Providence and Washington Right now, Providence is financially compensating Park neighborhoods and the East Side of Providence local community cohorts in two different Green Justice are stark, manifested not only in the appearance of Zones—Olneyville on the Woonasquatucket River each area, but also in the health outcomes of neighbor- and near the port of Providence—to help craft policy hood residents. ideas from the ground up in the spirit of “collaborative Huertas began grassroots organizing with the governance.”

Fighting Against Natural Gas Convergence, or the FANG Providence has taken a few steps down the path laid Collective, in 2015. FANG is an activist group founded out in the plan. Municipal buildings are now hooked up to a 23 MW solar farm, and the city is trying to obtain more coastline access on Public Street near Allens.

Providence is also about to launch the Community Choice Aggregation plan which would allow city

residents to opt-in to more renewable energy blends that are different than those supplied by National Grid.

For example, a customer would be able to choose a 100 percent renewable energy electricity supply and pay a higher price than a typical customer.

With that said, Providence hasn’t pursued the more ambitious ideas laid out in the Climate Justice Plan so far. Bamberger said many of the policy levers outlined in the plan are long-term goals that will have to be pulled by future city councils—such as zoning changes to prohibit new fossil fuel infrastructure, increasing access to renewable energy in Providence, and making greater investments in parks and environmental remediation in frontline communities. For example, Bamberger said that Portland had recently passed a zoning law that bans the building of new fossil fuel infrastructure in their city. Providence hasn’t made those kinds of changes, at least not yet. +++

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METRO

06 NOV 2020

A Narragansett Bay for all

It’s difficult to keep track of distance on Allens. All of the tanks, scrap yards, and metal fences seem to blend together, creating a chaotic symphony of industrial blight. A Honey Dew Donuts is nestled up against the on-ramp to the interstate highway, about halfway down the street. A scrapper, Joshua, was idling his pickup on the black pavement outside. He said he sold metal, mainly old catalytic converters, to Sims Metals and Rhode Island Recycled Metals, two of the larger scrap metal companies on the waterfront. Abandoned cars, pieces of junk, and an overloaded dumpster litter the property of Rhode Island Recycled Metals. The state successfully prosecuted the business in state court in 2015, accusing it of polluting the Providence River, but changes to the operation have been glacial. A satellite image of the property shows a site littered with partially dismantled ferries, shipping containers, and even pieces of an old Russian submarine.

The Shell Terminal is another half mile down the road. Rows of tall white fuel tanks line the backs of barbed wire fences. Staircases spiral up the tanks while

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

black goop drips down them. Pipes pass under the road to a parking lot where tanker trucks pull in to fill up.

As Shell, a multinational corporation, profits off their fossil fuel distribution in the Port of Providence, they place the environmental burden of their business on the local community. Shell dominates space near the waterfront and presents an existential threat via global warming, all without creating significant revenue to provide for services in the city.

“We’re sitting on a volcano right now,” said Kestin.

He told the Indy that the Shell Terminal is incredibly vulnerable to storm surges and rising waters because of how close it is to the coast. The growing threat of weather events caused by global warming heightens these risks. Kestin drew parallels between a possible Shell Terminal disaster and the oil spills in 2017 in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, when over 22,000 gallons of oil were washed into the Gulf of Mexico. That same year, the Conservation Law Foundation, a New England-based environmental advocacy group, filed a lawsuit against Shell contending that the company hadn’t done enough to protect their facility against rising waters, endangering the local Providence coastline. This past September, the case moved forward into the ‘discovery’ phase in Rhode Island Federal District Court, meaning Shell will have to answer whether or not they believe global warming is a threat to their facility.

Near the end of Allens is the National Grid facility.

Here, the company is building their $180 million liquified natural gas plant, subsidized by taxpayer dollars.

The site is right up against the water. It’s to fight against projects like these that Huertas is working with the government to shape the Rhode Island climate justice policy of the future.

“Now that we’re actually in the muck, I feel gross about it,” Huertas told the Indy about advocating for change from within state agencies. “Why do I—why do we, the community, have to pull at their heartstrings to have them see our humanity?” If working within existing structures doesn’t work, Huertas and Kestin are optimistic that change can come through legislation passed at the State House. Kestin told the Indy that states have incredible power to get rid of environmental polluters, either through claiming eminent domain— government seizure of private property for public use— or by passing more stringent environmental laws that would put polluters out of business.

If the General Assembly were to increase taxes for the highest one percent of income earners in Rhode Island, funds might also exist for remediation projects in Green Justice Zones. To make those policy changes happen, Monica and Kestin are working in collaboration with progressive groups across Rhode Island, such as the Rhode Island Political Cooperative and the Sunrise Movement, to try and build electoral political power up at the State House. Huertas and Kestin are also working with Renew New England, a region-wide coalition fighting for racial justice, economic equity, and bold climate action. Renew is writing policy that could be introduced in the Rhode Island General Assembly as early as the next legislative session.

If the political stars align, progressive community organizing and electoral power might collide in Rhode Island, bringing a sea of change to environmental policy across the state. With a number of progressives winning in Democratic primaries and general elections

in fall 2020, the 2021 legislative session could see serious attempts to implement climate justice reform. “This is what democracy with a little ‘d’ looks like,” said Huertas. “In real democracy, every person is counted, every person has a vote, even from the most marginalized areas of the city… this is something that’s really changing. I feel it.” +++ At the very tip of Fields Point, miles away from India Point Park, is another sliver of green. Save the Bay—an advocacy organization with a mission to “protect and improve Narragansett Bay”—has an educational center and office here, only a few hundred feet from the industrialized waterfront.

They’ve remediated this portion of the coastline with a public walking trail and pier, providing for Bay access, and most importantly, providing a window into what a future Providence waterfront could look like.

This portion of the coast feels worlds away from the hustle and bustle of the working waterfront. On the walking trail, fresh Bay winds rustle the tall grass, and birds chirp overhead, casting shadows on the sky. It’s miraculous—there’s no highway noise—allowing one to hear the sound of the sea lapping on the shore rocks and the conversation of a friend. There are benches to sit on and binoculars to peer through. It’s a good place to enjoy the beauty of Narragansett Bay. Walking down towards the water, carefully navigating the slippery black rocks covered with the detritus of the last high tide, it’s hard not to think of India Point Park and the miles of intervening industrial waterfront to the north. What would it look like for India Point Park and Save the Bay to meet, for those two seeds of green to come together and fulfill the promise made by India Point’s original architect? The coast could be made a green space again, giving all Providence residents a chance to access our state’s most valuable natural resource: the Bay. I walked down to the water and sat on a rock with a friend. After driving through miles of industrial hell, it was shocking to find such a beautiful place so close by. The sea calmed me. In a racing world, it’s a blessing to have spaces that are quiet, clean, and green.

Just offshore, a tugboat pushed an oil barge further up the Providence River, towards the fossil fuel tanks we had just passed. I felt the shore shudder beneath me. It knew, like my friend and I knew, that time is running out. As waters rise, where we sat will soon fall beneath the waves. Our only option is to act—now.

A duck bobbed in the water to my right, its yellow beak brightening the gray Bay waters.

PEDER SCHAEFER B‘22 loves Narragansett Bay.

METRO

04

content warning: medical abuse, anti-Black violence, miscarriage In this time of simultaneous quarantine and racial reckoning, Quatia Osorio—a Providence-based doula—has persisted in providing her birth services to pregnant Black women.

Doulas are trained, non-medical professionals who provide emotional and physical support as well as informational guidance to soon-to-be and recent parents. They don’t require a standardized license to practice, but they typically undergo workshops led by other doulas to gain certification from organizations such as DONA International. As a perinatal doula, Osorio works with families across the full spectrum of pregnancy. This ranges from crafting a birthing plan to laboring and postpartum care (aiding new parents on diapering, breastfeeding, the mother’s recovery, and more) to potential bereavement support (if the mother or infant is lost during birth or in a miscarriage).

In mission and methodology, doulas operate differently from both obstetricians—physicians who deliver babies and provide surgical interventions in hospital settings—and midwives—health professionals who help deliver babies in homes, birthing centers, and hospitals. However, some doulas, like Osorio, have their sights set on eventually switching from doula work to certified midwifery.

Osorio’s dream is to open her own birthing center.

Where hospitals have been critiqued for the over-medicalization of childbirth through unnecessary interventions like C-sections, doulas respond by emphasizing the desires and comfort of the parents. They soothe mothers who are in physical pain while ensuring they have sufficient information about the risks and benefits of each proposed medical decision in the delivery room. Like midwives, doulas provide their services in multiple settings; though as Osorio mentioned during our conversation, low-income families often cannot afford both a home birth and a doula.

Osorio is the founder of Our Journ3i, an organization that has provided doula training and services to Black women in the Providence area since 2015. She is also a founding member of the Umoja Nia Collective, a group of doulas who identify as descendants of the African diaspora and focus their services on those “most impacted by environmental and social determinants of health.”

Osorio intentionally works with Black communities as a direct response to the underlying public health crisis killing Black mothers and infants.

The risk of pregnancy-related death for Black women is three to four times greater than that of white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Similarly, according to Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, the rate of Black infant mortality in the state was 12.2 deaths per 1,000 live births from 2013 to 2017, whereas the rate of white infant mortality was 3.5 deaths per 1,000 live births.

This crisis, as described by Osorio, has its roots in the very origins of the practice of gynecology: the brutal mutilation of enslaved Black women at the hands of 19th-century medical “researchers” who were often slave owners themselves. Historian Deirdre Cooper Owens has noted that these white medical professionals of the time viewed Black women as “intellectually inferior to white women, but also physically stronger” and as capable of withstanding more pain. These racialized medical views bleed directly into modern physicians’ life-threatening neglect to take Black women’s concerns seriously, including during childbirth.

“That is the community I serve, that’s the community I represent,” said Osorio. “That does not mean I don’t serve all families and all communities.

But this is the space that I feel has the highest need for help. Black families have the loudest call and they are ignored the most.”

In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Osorio discussed her continued efforts to pass House Bill 7587, which would establish insurance coverage and reimbursement for perinatal doula services in Rhode Island, how medical students can be actively anti-racist in the Providence hospital system, and the “long suffering” of being a Black woman who fights to preserve the right to life for other Black women The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

05

FEATS

New Life in Crisis A conversation with Quatia Osorio: doula, entrepreneur, mother

BY Vicky Phan ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN Daniel Navratil

06 NOV 2020

The College Hill Independent: Anti-Blackness in medicine has become one critical aspect of the Black Lives Matter movement. How does this crop up in your work with pregnant Black people?

Quatia Osorio: The Black Lives Matter movement is just an added layer that addresses police brutality and [labels] the criminalization of Blackness as a health crisis. We have this additional burden when it comes to a Black mom finding out that she’s gonna give birth to a Black son, and what that looks like in our nation now with the brutality that we’re experiencing. You kind of get worn down and tired of asking, “Why? Why do they hate us so much? What have we ever done to deserve all of this hatred? All of this vitriol? All of this discrimination, all of this bias, all of this… Why?” College campuses should be safe spaces, too.

But we’ve witnessed brutality there. My house should be a safe space, but we witness brutality in people’s homes. My community should be a safe space. Church should be a safe space. There is not a single space that Black people have gone where they have not been attacked or murdered. It is not safe at all. It’s hard. Every day I fight with myself on if I want to continue the pathway to midwifery.

I am a midwife. I am a midwife before I have this degree because I serve my community. I help people who decide to birth people into this world.

That is my calling, that is what I do. But the way this capitalistic system is set up, I have to consider whether or not I’m going to be safe in that profession.

And this is the first time that I’ve had to have a real deep conversation with myself on: “Is the work I’m doing safe for me?”

But that is the plight of Black midwives. One of our elder midwives said, “I do not want to die from the Black woman’s disease”—the long sufferings.

Because that is what it feels like: a long suffering to serve your community.

I can tell you: Every single client that has hired me, hired me because I was Black. Because they are Black. You want cultural representation in the room. In the state of Rhode Island, we have one fulltime Black midwife. One. She showed up in August.

We had zero before then. How can you provide culturally congruent care without the culture that needs the support?

Indy: How have hospital delivery rooms changed due to COVID-19?

QO: Currently at Women & Infants Hospital [the largest birthing facility in Rhode Island], there is a no-movement policy. So whoever you bring into your birth room, now in COVID-19, they cannot leave. Once you’re in the room, you’re in the room.

So this makes a very compromising situation for families. You can’t leave the hospital, go home and check on your kids or get something to eat, and come

back. We as doulas are aware of the fact that there’s no swapping out. Depending on the client, if they’re there for an induced birth, we know that we could be there for three days.

A lot happens in there; every birth is different.

And so there are a lot of questions that need to be addressed prior to going into the hospital, like what we’ll do in case the baby has to go to the natal intensive care unit or what your birth preferences are.

I cannot tell you the number of times we’ve gotten to the hospital and know their birth preference sheet is in their file, but for some reason, the labor delivery nurse can’t find it. I think people just don’t have the education on what all their options are during labor, and so doulas don’t necessarily advocate for our patients. We are trained to provide opportunities for our patients to be empowered to advocate for themselves and ask for what they want.

Doulas are there to support emotionally and physically and hold space for all of this that’s going on in the room. The most traumatic birth experience is a birthing person not being able to be physically present for their child or the person that they love.

It is a hard thing to ask a partner to leave their loved one who’s just given birth to follow their child. It is an even harder thing because the person who has birthed this child absolutely wants someone to stay with their child in the event of an emergency, not realizing their own vulnerability in being left alone with no knowledge.

Indy: Could you speak further on this reality of trauma related to birth or pregnancy?

QO: If you had a shitty birth experience, it doesn’t matter if your kid is two days old or 50 years old––if you ask that mom to relay a bad birth experience, they will remember almost every detail. They remember the names. They remember what was done to them.

They’ll remember how it made them feel, how it hurt them, how it harmed them. And how when they brought it up, it seemed like nobody cared. Because birth trauma is very much real. Birth trauma can make you never want to have a child again. It could cause someone to have sexual or intimate issues in their relationship, cause more of a divide. It could tear a family apart.

Indy: University students tend to take up a lot of space in the Providence area, and both undergraduate and medical students interact with and benefit from the Providence community through interactions and training at local hospitals. What would you like to tell these students?

QO: Please stop asking Black women to work for free on a panel, on your project, in your group.

Please stop coming to us with nothing. We work

with nothing every day, trying to save our community. And I understand you’re a poor student. But try being working poor every day, and someone saying, “Let me take all your knowledge and your cultural experience, and I want to write a paper on it. But I don’t want to compensate you for it.”

Be considerate and intentional in how you want to engage. If you have not done some of the unpacking of your own bias and how the medical industry has influenced how you operate, please take the time to remember that we are human beings.

We’re not data. We are not bodies of further experimentation. Have an understanding of the population and not just at a time where we are most vulnerable and at our worst. A lot of times, that’s where medical students are meeting us.

As people who come to the community, what do you have to offer this community, besides a gainful experience? How much space are you taking up, especially in spaces of Black and brown people?

What cultural work are you doing to resonate with that community, or have you done any? University students definitely do take up a lot of space, but I would like to think that there is a shift in the population that is coming in that really believes in genuine, quality care.

Indy: Can you tell me about the doula reimbursement bill in the State House that you’ve been working on?

QO: That document is a human-rights call for help.

As a Black woman, I’m making 57 cents on the dollar.

Who am I saving if me and my client are both in the welfare line? And the data states that Black maternal mortality rates persist regardless of socio-economic status. We have to highlight Serena Williams and Beyoncé’s stories of their call for help within the medical industrial complex. We have evidence that, regardless of how much money we make, we are still seen as the disposable woman. But it’s great that our bodies produce these babies that continue capitalism and consumerism—no different than slavery.

The burden and labor of Black people at the benefit of a white industry is slavery.

But even the budget that we proposed was nowhere near [what’s] needed to actually invest in these women. Black people make up about 15 percent of the population in the state of Rhode Island, and we’re not really asking for a lot.

Medical providers are seen as these great providers because they have a doula who works with their practice, or they’ll refer patients to doulas.

But I’ve never received a check from a provider. No one is paying us! The family is expected to pay. So if you’re asking that from a family that does not have equitable, disposable income, that can’t afford a doula out of pocket: Who are you really serving?

VICKY PHAN B’21 encourages you to visit journ3i.com and contact House Finance Committee Chair Marvin Abney at (401) 487-1380 or rep-abney@ rilegislature.gov to urge him to pass House Bill 7587.

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WHAT’S IN A NAME?

The debate surrounding Rhode Island’s latest vote on a new title

content warning: discussions of anti-Black violence and and his followers stood for,” said Ian Barbour, the mentions of racial slurs directed at Black, Latinx, and creator of a Facebook page made in 2010 opposing the Asian communities referendum, in an interview with the Indy. “Religious freedom, freedom of self determination, the separaIn 2000, a conversation on reparations—monetary tion of church and state, and the limitation of the state’s compensation for descendants of enslaved Africans— power over individual freedom.” was raised across the United States as both a theoretPlantations are not and should not be synonyical and substantive policy concern. In Rhode Island, mous with freedom. Religious freedom for Quakers however, critical thinking about legacies of slavery had in the Rhode Island colony is an admirable and bright manifested in another way: a debate about the state’s moment in Rhode Island history. But favoring and name “The State of Rhode Island and Providence cherry-picking particular parts of Rhode Island heriPlantations.” tage that are worthy of glory and praise obscure the The United States’ history is inextricably linked to fact that plantations were unquestionable sites of gross slavery, from the Confederate statues people may pass injustice, rape, and genocide. every day to racial disparities in healthcare systems So, here lies the greatest tension in the debate over attributable to colonial-era medicine. Rhode Island, whether to change the name: the production of partial despite some claims to the contrary, is not an exception historical narratives. to this reality.

Barbour most likely refers to the earlier definition Keith Stokes, vice president of the 1696 Heritage of plantation, which is detached from slavery. But for Group—a historical consulting firm dedicated to all pride attached to Rhode Island’s history, we must sharing knowledge about the history of people of color remember that some individuals were not even free to in America—emphasized the magnitude of the slave hold citizenship and autonomy, much less free to exertrade in Rhode Island’s history. cise religious freedom or self-determination. While it Despite the colonial cities of Providence and is true that Roger Williams opposed slavery, his assoWarwick passing statutes limiting the enslavement of ciation with the Quaker abolitionist movement veers Black and Indigenous individuals earlier than several toward Rhode Island exceptionalism. There were still other colonies, Rhode Island continued to thrive off enslaved individuals at the time of Rhode Island’s the labor of Indigenous and enslaved Africans who founding. It is said that as a tiny underdog colony, contributed to the rum, molasses, and sugar econo- Rhode Island built itself into an hub of free trade and mies for nearly two more centuries. freedom. But, free trade—capitalistic economies—and “The slave trade economy is very much a part of the freedom rarely peacefully coexist. early settlement, early success, and certainly origins As Vanessa Quainoo, professor of Africana Studies of early Rhode Island,” Stokes said. “Only Charleston, at the University of Rhode Island, recently said in South Carolina or New York would have higher aProvidence town hall, “A plantation is a profit-based percentages of enslaved [individuals] as a part of the entity and it is contingent upon slave labor—that’s population.” where the profit comes from. Many people argue that In fact, by 1750, the Rhode Island colony did have it’s the demarcation of the land as a beautiful, romantic the highest percentage of enslaved individuals in all ideal [that supports arguments of] preserving the of New England. Nearly a century later when Rhode name.”

Island banned slavery in 1853, as with the previous statThe slave labor that enabled terms such as plantautes, white residents continued to trade and exploit tion economies to emerge conjures images of plunder, enslaved Black populations until the Civil War. assault, and genocide for many Black and indigenous Many prominent Rhode Island politicians and individuals when they see the word “plantation.” But members of the State House of Representatives were for others, when they think of the word “plantation,” also slave traders, most notably John Brown, one of the they replace the reality of slavery with notions of benefactors of Brown University. economic prosperity and a colony full of innovation The linguistic origins of plantation are “a planting and independent thinking. with people or settlers, a colonization,” or in the case of This could explain why 10 years ago, when the Rhode Island state’s name, “a colony, an original settle- referendum to vote for the name amendment was ment in a new land” by 1610s, according to the Online posed as a question on the ballot, for the first time, Etymology Dictionary. The “Century Dictionary” from Rhode Island voters overwhelmingly rejected the 1895 further places a geographical location to planta- change, with 250,446 votes in opposition compared to tions being in the “tropical or semi-tropical country, 71,162 votes in favor. such as the southern parts of the United States, South At the time, there were not enough votes to bring America, the West Indies, Africa, India, Ceylon, etc., about the name change, as most Rhode Island voters in which cotton, sugar-cane, tobacco, coffee, etc., are didn’t have awareness or “sensitivity” to the name’s cultivated, usually by negroes, peons, or coolies.” significance, former State Representative Tony Pires Given how much slave trade thrived in Rhode told the Indy. “It’s a tough sell to make to folks who Island, it is surprising how “plantation” has been haven’t been subject to that level of discrimination.” disembodied from a conversation on slavery. What This past Tuesday, voters across RI once again had could explain why people don’t associate the two? the chance to vote on the amendment. A debate nearly “Preserving the words ‘Providence Plantations’ in 20 years in the making finally yielded an amendment the state name means preserving what Roger Williams that thousands consider to be long overdue. Question 1

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passed with 52.8 percent of the vote.

Providence resident Yara Doumani B’22 was shocked, but glad that it passed.

“To me, it has always seemed that white Rhode Islanders would never let the name change slide. Given the deep proliferation of the settler-colonial myth of the United States’ founding, I thought they would respond to the removal of ‘plantations’ in a reactionary way,” she told the Indy.

In the last two decades, the American public has dug deeper into painful histories of slavery, drawing links between the inhumanization and subgjugation of enslaved people to the institutions and norms that are often rendered neutral or written off as “just the way history goes.”

Professor Anthony Bogues, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, points clearly to the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) as a facilitator in opening such conversations. “The public landscape typically reflects dominant values and ideas. What BLM does is force the country to think about some of the monuments and names that are rooted in history having to deal with racial slavery in the United States,” he said to the Indy.

Since the BLM movement began in 2013, viral videos and devastating photographs have circulated the internet depicting the murder of Black people, and public opinion has grown considerably more favorable towards the movement. Social media has provided robust tools to share information, making tangible the sorts of knowledge and images of harm that previously may have only been discussed in theory. Perhaps, in the past, one could claim ignorance of the connotations of a word like “plantation.” But in the aftermath of Black liberation movements, as activists scrutinize the criminal justice system and its deep links to racial dominances, this word conjures strong emotions—both of enslavement and of the many policies sprung up to circumvent the intellectual and physical movement of Black people in the US. The Indy attended a virtual Treasury town hall on October 28 hosted by R.I. General Treasurer Seth Magaziner on the topic of removing plantations from the state name.

One of the legislators who worked on the 2010 ballot referendum, Representative Anastasia P. Williams, frankly reflected in the town hall that, “10 years ago [there was] not enough effort, not enough of a campaign of educating the people on how dark the word is in today’s society.”

“What happened to George Floyd, if that had never taken place for the world to see… this opportunity [and] the crossroad that we find ourselves in today would never have been here for us,” Representative Williams added, “We have to be honest about it. It would’ve been business as usual.”

Given that some Rhode Islanders may not be constantly thinking about the presence of “plantations” in the state’s title—or may not even have been aware of its inclusion, since the state is often referred to simply as “Rhode Island”—the Indy wonders what could explain people’s present-day reluctance to remove such antiquated language from the state name.

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Some have maintained the position that changing the name holds little substantive importance.

“We ought to be working on projects that actually eliminate racial injustices or inequities in the legal system as far as sentencing,” Dr. Patrick T. Conley, Rhode Island Historian Laureate, said to the Indy. “Do something positive and not just knock out the word ‘plantation’ from a state when it has nothing to do with slavery.”

The role of Historian Laureate in Rhode Island is to disseminate information about the state’s history and heritage. Dr. Conley has certainly not shied away from voicing his reactions to a number of op-eds in the Providence Journal questioning the role of diversity as a qualifier for RI supreme court judges and defending why Rhode Island should keep “Providence Plantations” in its official name.

When the Indy further asked if Dr. Conley believed that the state amendment held symbolic power, he answered “No.” Arguing that the word “plantation” has “nothing to do with slavery,” is a bold claim to level—but challenging the misconceptions that lead to such a belief requires thinking through the word’s impact on an individual level. +++ Certain Rhode Island residents like Barbour and Dr. Conley view the state amendment as a misguided attempt to rewrite history and advance political agendas that they believe do not have a place in discussing the state’s name. However, this conversation does not diminish what the state amendment could accomplish.

Movements to remove the second half of Rhode Island’s name have certainly gained traction since the first referendum, however overdue they are, with petition singing campaigns that gained the attention and approval of Governor Gina Raimondo as well as the online “Vote Yes on 1” campaign that features testimonials from residents across the state on why they

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support changing the name.

“Forces beyond our borders changed the meaning of the word ‘plantation.’ We were not innocent in that process, though,” John Brennan wrote for the “Vote Yes on 1” campaign. “In many years, perhaps as many as 90 percent of all the people kidnapped from their homes and sold into slavery on plantations were transported on ships with a ‘Rhode Island and Providence Plantations’ flag and registry.”

As Rep. Williams alluded, it was not until recently that people began to challenge the notion of Rhode Island’s ‘innocence,’ a version of history that downplayed the state’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

“The greatest challenge facing the African heritage and Indigenous people of Rhode Island and really across America is not only racism, it’s invisibility,” said Stokes. “Far too much of our American history is still being taught, interpreted, memorialized from an owner class—the majority viewpoint. We have an opportunity here in Rhode Island in how we tell the inclusive history of all Americans.”

I submit that language has always had power in its symbolism. But, if most of the time, the full name of Rhode Island is not being invoked, why does it matter?

It is the looming invisibility of “Providence Plantations” in the state’s name that depicts the afterlives of slavery.

To see the state’s official name on identification cards, public laws, other official documents or charters is to make plantation and all the experiences that accompany its fraught roots institutionalized. Seeing “plantation” in these contexts almost deifies the word and perpetuates the uneven power dynamics of a word that causes distress, but was incorporated into the official state name by white slave traders.

State Representative Joseph Almedia said in an interview with NPR, “You got a Black man, his picture

BY Osayuwamen “Uwa” Ede-Osifo ILLUSTRATION XingXing Shou DESIGN Clara Epstein

underneath the word plantations. I don’t know. That doesn’t make me feel too good at all.”

The discomfort that Black individuals feel knowing that their home is associated with the name “plantation,” serves as a constant reminder that our ancestors were once considered someone else’s property.

This amendment has once again served as an opportunity to exchange perspectives on the real pain elicited by the word “plantation,” at a time when Rhode Island also considers changing the names of streets and statues linked to colonial era slave-traders.

This state amendment “is not erasing the history of Rhode Island,” said Rep. Williams, “but adding to it and doing it together.”

OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO B’22 is more than ready to discuss the legacies of slavery in America.

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ROMAN BRONZES AS SETTLERCOLONIALISM:

BY Justin Han, Amanda Brynn, Samuel Kimball, Kaleb Hood, and Abby Wells ILLUSTRATION Mara Jovanovic DESIGN Miya Lohmeier

ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND CLASSICISTS FOR MONUMENT REMOVAL

In late 2019, Brown University’s Public Art Committee proposed to relocate the University’s Caesar Augustus monument to the Quiet Green and have a new arm cast for it. It proposed that these actions be accomplished via tens of thousands of dollars from a willing donor, continuing a chain of multiple restorations that have occurred since Moses Ives Brown Goddard donated the statue in 1906 (Goddard’s brother Robert Hale Ives donated Augustus’ counterpart, Marcus Aurelius, to Brown in 1908). On the Quiet Green, Caesar Augustus would peer over the Slavery Memorial, a work Brown commissioned from Black sculptor Martin Puryear in 2014. In response, students have mounted a call to remove two Roman-style monuments on Brown’s campus, including casts of both Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.

As archaeologists and classicists, it might seem that we would be those most in favor of maintaining Brown’s monuments to Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Rather than passive icons of Greco-Roman ideals or tools for the study of art history, these monuments are constant reminders of Brown’s violent colonial past and present, a colonialism that our disciplines were born out of and remain steeped in. We reject how the Public Art Committee has implicated classics and archaeology in their defense of memorials to settler-colonialism and institutionalized white supremacy. We write today to explain our insistence, as Departmental Undergraduate Group leaders in these subjects, that Brown remove and replace these monuments. Moreover, we call for a broader restructuring in arts administration, for donors and committees alike to set their sights on reparative investment in Black and Indigenous lives and careers.

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The field of classics has long been mobilized to glorify Western civilization. We must recognize that apologists for chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide were some of the first in our country to center ancient Greece and Rome in narratives of Western civilization. In such a repositioning, we can refute terms like the “Greek Miracle,” which refers to the idea that the ancient Greeks’ accomplishments were unprecedented across history. Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle certainly did not ‘invent’ rhetoric or logic, even if Aristotle wrote texts called Rhetoric and Logic. While it is clear that ancient Greece made contributions to many fields of study, the hyperbolic celebration of Greek ideas ignores the contributions, and even the presence, of people from non Greco-Roman cultures in antiquity. Casual readers of classical literature emphasize Homer’s epics over the Vedas, completed in India long before the Iliad and Odyssey, and over Mesopotamian texts like The Epic of Gilgamesh. The presentation of Homer or Virgil as pinnacles of literary achievement erases the literary accomplishments of other ancient civilizations, which often appear as a pretext to physical erasure. We can trace this intellectual lineage’s physical consequences from European ‘Great Power’ imperialism to American settler-colonialism, emphasizing that the priority placed on the study of Greece and Rome had more than textual or academic implications.

Ancient Romans did not have the same hierarchical concept of race that we must engage with and overturn today. Roman aristocrats originated from all around the

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Mediterranean—from the Italian peninsula to Anatolia to North Africa. To deny this reality would be to erase the contributions of those peoples to Greco-Roman antiquity. However, Rome’s legacy is not divorced from race and racial prejudice as we know it today. There is a long history of Western intellectuals imposing modern racial distinctions onto the past. For example, Thomas Jefferson defended chattel slavery by discussing the contributions of ancient slaves to philosophy and literature: “Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus were slaves.

But they were of the race of whites.” This anachronistic use of ancient slavery to defend a vastly different institution extends the narrative of whiteness centuries before racial distinctions were used as they are today.

Beyond Jefferson’s use of classical authors to romanticize and justify the actions of the pre-Civil War South, Adolf Hitler also famously called the ancient Greeks and Romans the ancestors of his “ideal, Aryan race.” Hitler idealized the military power of GrecoRoman cultures, saying, “The subjugation of 350,000 Helots by 6,000 Spartans was only possible because of the racial superiority of the Spartans.” Hitler compared his empire to the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire (9th-19th century, neither “holy” nor “Roman”), then asserted that his empire was superior.

The political and intellectual lineage between white supremacy and Greco-Roman leaders is a retrospective, largely imaginary one. It is by no means a quantifiable connection.

The military legacy of ancient figures like Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius does not negate their other contributions to history. But in reality, these statues, created and placed on this campus in the early 1900s, have little to do with Roman history at all.

Instead, they are part of a centuries-long tradition that presented Roman emperors as ideal white men and claimed the remarkable accomplishments of GrecoRoman antiquity as proof of the superiority of Western civilization. Though these men were not discernibly labelled as “white” in antiquity, they are today because they have been immortalized as such in the American psyche. We cannot simply reject the identification of white supremacy with the Roman elite, nor can a contextualizing plaque override that choice. We agree that this equation is not grounded in historical fact or the emperors’ biographies, but this prejudiced view of antiquity is a key reason why these monuments must be removed. Brown should instead celebrate intellectual legacies that work to depict the nuances of history.

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and personality Ben Shapiro also speaks about the origins of Western Civilization: “The obvious proof is that the world is overwhelmingly Western. And, with few exceptions, those parts of the world that aren’t aspire to be. Why? Why has Western Civilization been so successful? There are many reasons, but the best place to start is with the teachings and philosophies that emerged from …Athens.”

Tying ideas about Western superiority to Classical civilization clearly remains part of the cultural zeitgeist across many populations in the United States, positing Classical Athens as an origin point for Rome and beyond. These sentiments are not recent in origin— they are foundational to our country’s governing structures. When we see figures from Greco-Roman antiquity monumentalized, we must recognize the intellectual history that they celebrate. These statues do not represent a legitimate, nuanced approach to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity. Instead, they represent an intellectual history developed centuries after the fall of Greece and Rome. We must not replicate a revisionist narrative rife with historical inaccuracies, in which we heroize Roman emperors for qualities they were not monumentalized for.

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A particularly troubling argument for ‘reclaiming’ these monuments is the idea that we need them in order to hold discussions about the contextual changes they have undergone—or about colonialism at Brown more broadly. The claim that the monuments’ presence will somehow inspire critical discussion has been popular amongst critics of Decolonization at Brown’s call to remove them. Many people at Brown— particularly students, staff, and faculty of color and those whose homes are under active colonial occupation—are constantly faced with the everyday realities of colonial violence; they certainly don’t need a copy of a Roman statue to remind them that colonialism exists. The argument that we need these monuments in order to ‘remember’ prioritizes the education of students who lack experiences of colonialism, rather than speaking to the trauma of colonialism. As

Recent movements to reframe how we think about historical figures and events have been met with tremendous pushback from right-wing figures. One of the most salient cases of this pushback comes from Donald Trump himself. On several occasions, the President has portrayed Western civilization as needing defense, and himself as the man to defend it. In a 2017 speech, he said, “Today, the West is confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests.” Right-wing thinker Charlie Kirk often decries emerging movements that cast doubt on national heroes, and called the President the “bodyguard of Western civilization” in his remarks at the 2020 Republican National Convention. This “defense of the West” is predicated on preserving the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity. Conservative author

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archaeologists and classicists who must deal constantly with things that are lost, destroyed, or missing, we see this as a brittle excuse to keep them—we certainly know that discussing things which are not ‘here’ or ‘visible’ is more than possible.

Moving forward, Brown’s Public Art Committee must point a critical eye toward the whiteness and monumentality of campus art and think these features through together. Why are local artists of color (not just RISD alumni), who might benefit so much more from a commission, outside the pool considered? If we were to deactivate the weaponized heritage that monuments to Augustus and Aurelius represent, what objects would fill the void? What can stand instead of a panoptic, military gaze?

As made clear by nationwide debates, such as the open letter recently sent to Boston museums calling for racial equity and social transformation centering Black lives, the insidious influences to be made transparent in arts institutions are countless. Two examples

are art objects’ effectiveness for laundering money and the rich evading taxes through arts investments in non-profit institutions. The glaring impact of the ruling class on arts institutions goes hand-in-hand with the silencing of voices of color. If Brown is now responding to other institutions’ pleas (in New England and beyond) for the cancellation of inequitable structures, it does so with limited fanfare. We can only attest to structural changes when they are announced, as with the recent hire of Avery Willis Hoffman for Brown Arts Initiative (BAI) director. We applaud this decision, but warn against the opacity of hiring practices. The uproar elicited by campaigns like Brown Divest and Warren Kanders Must Go make it clear that University finances and fundraising warrant greater, more critical oversight by students and faculty.

Art boards and committees, including the BAI, David Winton Bell Gallery, and the Public Art Committee, must demonstrate greater consideration of what donors aim to accomplish through

their generosity. The only item on the Committee’s budget is the Percent-for-Art program, which gives one percent of any building’s construction budget to commission artwork. This reliance on donations from entrenched power structures has resulted in very selective strains of public art on campus. Why should the Committee’s dependence on donations preclude an outlet for a more democratic selection of public art?

Why are people of color on this committee so heavily outnumbered? And finally, why does Brown choose conventional monumentality––with either artist or represented being white and male––over other forms of sculptural engagement?

The way Augustus and Aurelius came to campus in 1906 and 1908, through an opaque donation process, is analogous to how Urs Fischer’s Lamp/Bear (Blueno) materialized in 2016. Since it was first revealed to great controversy in 2016, Blueno has shed its associations to the 2008 financial crisis, such that those responsible for accepting its loan can characterize it as harmlessly absurdist, comical, or witty. On the contrary, the inordinate sums of money poured into scanning and casting the bear in bronze, and then spent by billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen to purchase the object, should be remembered as its defining features. Monumentality is too often entangled with unarticulated sources of wealth, and we must exercise sharp caution at donations for continuous restoration. To establish a throughline between Blueno and the monument to Marcus Aurelius, all we need to do is question how their scale is possible.

How do other artworks the Public Art Committee has assembled on Brown’s campus measure up to this assessment? Looking at the works at large, we find that the Roman emperors and modernist bronzes mutually affirm their usefulness to art-historical tradition, at the expense of any other kind of image or practice in Brown’s public spaces. Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone’s Idee die Pietra, a 27-foot cast bronze tree holding up a granite river stone, speaks for Arte Povera, a 1960s Italian avant-garde movement ostensibly relying heavily on found and common materials. Various iterations of Modernist sculpture also predominate, as in the Henry Moore stationed on the Main Green, while Blueno makes overtures to Dada and Surrealism. These dominant strands of Eurocentric art history are not in urgent need of representation. So what guarantee do we have that this insistently Modernist, absurdist, and seemingly innocuous collection of public art will give way to global urgency? Aurelius and Augustus must go, because they are products equally derived, as Brown’s contemporary sculptural works are, from the insidious romanticization of Western civilization.

Those responsible for public sculpture must demonstrate greater prudence, and backing away from the tens of thousands of dollars offered for the relocation and restoration of Augustus would be a start. Moving forward, the Public Art Committee must not arbitrarily grasp at artists of color—for example, those embraced by the global art market and therefore unquestioningly identified with ‘quality.’ Rather, they must seek out local practitioners whose careers might be transformed by a commission from the University.

Instead of standing by the mission values put forth on the Committee’s website, as hollow as “providing a gracious, attractive, and stimulating environment” or serving “the cause of donor relations,” Brown must go above nominal proof of diversity and inclusion in its public art. We maintain that public art should not be shelved as a showing of luxury commodities or the contents of donors’ collections. Instead, it has the potential to serve underfunded careers and artistic practices while providing images worthy of serious contemplation. Brown’s public space can mirror its imagination, paving the way for transformation in its curricula and its relationship to the city it occupies.

D@B B’2X invites you to click here: https://forms.gle/8aUBNyg4SZzKEXQQ9 We, as Departmental Undergraduate Group leaders in Classics and Archaeology at Brown University, coauthored this op-ed in conjunction with Decolonization@ Brown’s most recent response in the Brown Daily Herald, which seeks to address the claims of an anti-removal op-ed and broader opposition. The first essay written on this subject can be found at the Blognonian.

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PRINC ESSE LAVAN DE NUMÉRO UN

BY Olympe Scherer ILLUSTRATION XIngXing Shou DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

It’s 2041, spring. Pollution at an all-time high, and air quality at an all-time low. People walk around Paris with gas masks on, the way soldiers did at Verdun. Nothing to smell except indoors, with an air filter, or online, with a VR headset.

I’m a perfume designer. I’m thirty, and I’m thinking about the two smells: rose and lavender.

Rose won’t do is what I think these days. Rose says mother’s-bathroom-Yankee-Candle. Rose says bad experimental food.

Lavender, on the other hand, says good experimental food. But it also says cheap souvenirs from the French Riviera.

Rose can be elevated, maybe, and lavender recontextualized, but if it were up to me, we’d go with mint, mint and jasmine. Refined, unoppressive. But the princess wants rose or lavender, and I’m not one to rock the boat. I’m just thinking about it.

“The royal wedding is in three months, Clare,” says Clark. The 30-year-old tech speaks with his lips barely moving, to hide the places where his teeth have fallen out. “The event planner wants a demo, yesterday. Just come up with something, it can’t be that hard.”

I clench my fists, then unclench them, because he’s right. It isn’t that hard. A team of wide-eyed interns sends me samples every week in pretty glass vials, which I smell with one nostril and send back with a disapproving note. It’s been like this since January. It’s now May. “It is hard. I can’t put my name on just any smell,” I say, half-believing it.

“Well, it’s time to set a hard deadline,” speaks Michael, the toadlike CTO, in a BBC accent. “The party planner is furious. She picked the flowers out 11 months ago, and the 3-D graphics team has already rendered them. What am I going to tell her when it’s two months before the wedding and we haven’t got a damn scent?”

The conference call is taking place, seemingly, at the highest floor of a tower in Dubai. Twelve of us are sitting in gaudy white leather chairs around an egg-shaped glass table. The simulations are getting better every day, but when you look closely—out the window, for example—some parts of the decor are either static or looping tightly. I spot, in the distance, the same Turkish Airlines plane landing over and over.

“Clare? Do you have anything to say for yourself?” says Clark. I spot one of his missing teeth.

He hasn’t gotten around to buying an avatar, unlike the rest of the meeting’s attendants. There’s a slight glitch in Michael’s immaculate hair, where a receding hairline used to be.

“If we need to find another designer—” starts Michael.

“I’m going for lavender, without my team this time,” I say. “I’ll have a sample ready by Sunday.”

This is the first deadline I’ve set in weeks. Call

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it a rut or depression, it’s all the same. I watch the plane land again, this time against a technicolor sunset, then I exit the call just as Clark sits back and sighs in relief.

The Dubai conference room vanishes, and I’m back in my apartment in Paris, slumped on the couch. The smell of lemon on the floors tells me that the cleaning lady just left.

“Poor Clark,” I reflect.

Clark is the VR project manager. He’s going to turn my finished scent into a few lines of code, so that everyone can whiff something pleasant while they attend, virtually, the royal wedding of Princess Margot to her beloved… Kendall?

Kenneth? Anyways, Clark’s been taking a lot of heat from the suits on my behalf. One wonders how he survives.

It’s noon and the sky is dark like gray cotton fabric. I see it through my white paned window, in my apartment where the ceilings are high, ornate, and the floors are wooden, splintering, how the French like them. The clean air filter, a big dumb box, is humming softly. I check my messages. BELLA HADID IS FOLLOWING YOU!! says a text from my older sister. Bella Hadid… the model? I vaguely remember her “snatched” waist being all-important to my seventeen-year-old self, even as her modeling career was winding down.

When I got into the perfume business in the early 2030s, it was a respected but little-known industry. I did well for myself thanks to custom orders, but neither I nor any other perfumer was a public figure the way a clothing designer could be. Ten years later, the VR companies released “5-D” simulations—the “5” referring to the five senses. At first, the scent algorithms were rudimentary, simple as a scratch-and-sniff card, and it would take a few months before virtual scents actually wafted through space, as opposed to hanging statically in the nostril like white noise. In early 2032, my cousin Vick, a coder, asked me to design a fragrance for the first virtual nightclub ever, Flux.

Eau d’Extase was born. My first perfume “hit,” so to speak. It’s a very plain apple scent that smells just like sin.

I became a rockstar overnight. Famous the way famous DJs used to be famous. The audio-visual era was over: now, people wanted to smell and taste. +++ My bones hurt from the blow I did yesterday. It’s not a great idea to destroy my nose––it’d be like if a long-distance runner smoked cigarettes. I like to believe that a little bit of debauchery helps my image, like it did Jim Morrison’s.

I drag myself to the bathroom and throw cold water on my face. It’s Thursday, I think. In the mirror, my eyes are bloodshot, my eyelids caked in purple eyeshadow. I’m pale and so is my hair, though my dark roots are starting to show, a black tide in a platinum bob. I smile. I now have three teeth missing, two molars and a front tooth.

I remember wearing purple braces that broke once when I bit into an apple. Now I can’t remember the last time I had an apple. Fruit and vegetable production has all but disappeared nowadays because of disease and clean water shortages, so

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unless you’ve got a greenhouse on your estate, it’s not likely that you’ve consumed even a trace of Vitamin C in the past five years. The irony is that coca and marijuana plants are still being grown plentifully in secret greenhouses, due to the drugs’ profitability (nobody I know would pay $100 for an orange, but for an eighth of weed…) which certainly says something about human nature, but I’m not sure what. It reminds me of a meme I saw the other day—what we thought 2040 would be like: *flying cars* vs. what it’s actually like: *a pirate saying “scürvie.”* I probably could buy multivitamins, but it seems like a waste of money.

Embrace the wasteland, that’s what I say.

My deadline is Sunday––I need to focus. I open the medicine cabinet searching for some Adderall, find the blue pills, and eat one.

The vials, pipettes, and tubes sit on a corner of my marble dining table. Never mind, she unfollowed you, says a text from my phone. I open the message, think of a clever reply, and switch to checking my email. I archive a dozen emails about press appearances, including one very threatening email from my agent. Instead, my eye is drawn to an email title written in lowercase: about your grandmother. I open it. hi, Clare. i hope you don’t mind me contacting you. your mother gave me your email. i’m Anna your cousin, i was with your grandma Chelsea when she passed. like a caretaker, wasn’t just visiting. i was cleaning out her stuff and i noticed that she had this old perfume bottle with your name written on it. it’s dried up but it smells good. smells like the eau d’extasy that your known for. was wondering if your the one who made it. love, Anna.

I archive it immediately and move on to the next email. It’s from Clark.

Can’t wait to see (I mean, smell) the scent Sunday!

I throw my phone against the wall. I pick it up and throw it harder.

I went to Chelsea’s funeral. It sucked. It was held over VR, a shitty rainy day simulation where pretty much everyone in my family had custom skins and I couldn’t recognize any of them. I took something to calm me down, and it still sucked.

The worst part was probably Chelsea’s skin, actually. It looked like a teenager photoshopped a 2-D image of her when she was forty onto an old person corpse template. I know because Chelsea had a freckle on her left hand and the corpse didn’t. No, the worst part was the lack of smell.

Chelsea would’ve hated that. A cloud of Shalimar followed her everywhere. But not to her grave.

“You’re my favorite because you don’t call me grandma,” Chelsea said to me once, when we were sunbathing by a pool in Santa Barbara. I was nine.

“One day I’ll look really old and even your father will call me grandma. Keep calling me Chelsea.”

The plot twist is that I’m a fraud, that I didn’t invent anything so much as stumble upon Eau D’Extase with Chelsea’s amateur distillery to steady me.

It was October and crisp. I was spending a few days with Chelsea because my parents were moving out of our house and didn’t want me in the way. Chelsea owned a farming estate in Northern California with a sprawling apple orchard. She

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told me to go pick some apples so we could make perfume out of them. She watched with her pair of gold binoculars as I ambled from tree to tree and chose the most pungent apples, using the fold of my t-shirt to hold them. My fingers left little bruises in the soft skin of the fruit, forming yellow wrinkles at the surface.

“They’re all rotten!” said Chelsea when she looked at the armful I brought in. She wasn’t mad, just inquisitive. “Rotten!” Two worms made an appearance on a particularly mushy Gala apple.

The greenish creatures danced up and down.

“So what?” I said, and Chelsea laughed. She had the apples distilled, suffocating the worms. The result was an intoxicating, sour, sweet-smelling oil, tacky enough to be relatable but so sexual that it startled. It felt inappropriate for a 12-year-old to wear. I was far from knowing that some of the most sought-after perfumes are made with ambergris, a gray goop found in the sperm whale’s intestine, but then it wouldn’t surprise me. I left the Eau D’Extase prototype with Chelsea before going back to Palo Alto, to my parents.

The next year, the orchard closed after the state of California banned superfluous water use, which included all but crops considered essential. “How are apples not essential?” said Chelsea between coughs. She’d had asthma her whole life, and the bad air quality put her in agony. But she still dressed glamorous and talked shit. I thought about the worms dancing. +++ Chelsea hated roses and she hated lavender. I glance at my empty pipettes, the nearly opaque plastic ones that were phased out years ago. It occurred to me that what this royal fragrance needed was a little bit of grit. To re-contextualize lavender, you need to talk about the grasshoppers that cling to the plant’s reedy stems. You need to talk about the way they bob in the wind like a group of drunk friends. The scent has to mimic the way the petals fall off the stem when you rub it between your thumb and your index finger. The way they feel like dry hollow mouse poops.

People will still tap me on the shoulder in restaurants and ask me about Princesse Lavande Numéro Un. Eleven people fainted at the Royal Wedding (which is to be expected) but a great number more were close to fainting from sensory overload. A stout red-haired woman once came up to me in a hookah bar and told me that whiffing Princesse Lavande had uncovered a joyful childhood memory buried deep in her mind of “summers spent running through my home village with a pale sun hanging low.” By then, I was famous enough to get assassinated, but I didn’t mind. Chelsea was proud of me, somewhere. I know because my face made Vanity Fair, and a famous critic talked about me.

“What do we say to a fragrance that’s just too real?” the byline said.

OLYMPE SCHERER ‘21 is an ex-computer science major.

LIT

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POR Aicha Sama TRADUCCIÓN POR Nell Salzman ILUSTRACIÓN Floria Tsui DISEÑADO Kathryn Li

LA LUCHA POR VOTAR COMO INMIGRANTE ESTADOUNIDENSE LA PANDEMIA COMPLICA EL PROCESO DE VOTACIÓN PARA LOS NUEVOS ESTADOUNIDENSES

originalmente publicado en inglés el 7 de agosto del 2020

We are excited to share that, with the goal of making our work more accessible to Spanish-speaking Rhode Islanders, we will now be publishing Spanish translations of some of our content. Below, we have included a translation of the piece "The Plight and Fight to Vote as an American Immigrant" by Aicha Sama, which is part of our forthcoming digital anthology.

Nos complace anunciar que, con el objetivo de hacer nuestro trabajo más accesible para las comunidades hispanohablantes de Rhode Island, estaremos publicando parte de nuestro contenido traducido al español. A continuación, podrán encontrar nuestra traducción, "La lucha por votar como inmigrante estadounidense", basada en un artículo escrito por Aicha Sama, que forma parte de una antología de traducciones que pronto estará disponible en nuestra página web.

La pandemia en curso ha cambiado la dinámica de votación, complicando aún más el proceso para los nuevos estadounidenses. Debido al alto riesgo de infección, los votantes ahora enfrentan pasos adicionales para obtener boletas de voto ausente y para entender las nuevas acciones legislativas que su estado puede haber tomado. Sin embargo, para los nuevos votantes naturalizados estadounidenses, hay mucho en juego. Veintitrés millones de inmigrantes serán elegibles para votar en las elecciones este año, y hay varias iniciativas para asegurar que la participación de los votantes sea grande en este grupo. El número de votantes inmigrantes elegibles se ha casi duplicado desde 2000, alcanzando un máximo histórico. Con problemas como el crecimiento de la población en centros de detención y la incertidumbre sobre el futuro de los beneficiarios del programa de Acción Diferida para los Llegados en la Infancia (DACA, por sus siglas en inglés), la participación de votantes inmigrantes es más importante que nunca. No obstante, hacer posible el voto para esta población rara vez es sencillo.

Para votar legalmente en Estados Unidos, es necesario ser un ciudadano estadounidense que cumpla con los requisitos de la residencia. Los residentes permanentes legales y cualquier otra persona que no sea ciudadano no pueden votar en la mayoría de las elecciones, por lo que la naturalización es una vía esencial para que los nuevos estadounidenses obtengan el derecho a emitir su voto. Aunque algunas jurisdicciones (sobre todo, San Francisco) han concedido el derecho de votar local a los no-ciudadanos, la verdadera lucha por la reforma nacional de las políticas de inmigración comienza con la representación de las voces de inmigrantes en la boleta federal el 3 de noviembre de 2020. El derecho de votar en elecciones locales es esencial para los grupos interesados en inmigración en los debates sobre el plan crítico de estudios (lo esencial de lo que los estudiantes están obligados a estudiar) dentro de condados específicos, la presencia de la policía en las escuelas públicas y el uso sostenible de la energía. Sin embargo, los derechos federales de votar son esenciales para las políticas generales de inmigración que dictan la seguridad personal de los

inmigrantes; el gobierno federal tiene derechos exclusivos sobre la regulación de las leyes de la inmigración, incluyendo quién puede entrar en el país y cuáles derechos tienen como residentes.

El brote del COVID-19 también ha exacerbado las grandes disparidades entre los nuevos votantes estadounidenses y la pandemia puede impedir que votantes potenciales sean elegibles a tiempo para la elección. Las ceremonias de naturalización, eventos donde inmigrantes reciben su certificado que les permite solicitar un pasaporte y registrarse para votar, han sido canceladas debido a la pandemia.

Aproximadamente 150.000 naturalizaciones han sido pospuestas y no hay garantía de que serán reprogramadas. Al acercarse las fechas del registro de votantes, muchos inmigrantes pueden perder la posibilidad de votar en las elecciones federales este año. La falta de urgencia para reprogramar o crear alternativas virtuales a las ceremonias de naturalización ha causado acusaciones de supresión y discriminación.

Según Joseph Edlow, director adjunto de política de los Servicios de Ciudadanía e Imigración de los Estados Unidos, el departamento “no ignorará la ley federal que claramente exige que estas ceremonias se den en persona, ni por motivos de conveniencia ni para hacer el proceso más expedito”. Esto puede explicar miles de ceremonias canceladas, pero personas como Doug Rand, ex asesor político de la administración de Obama, opinan que los comentarios de Edlow son una excusa débil. Según Rand, “hay desafíos logísticos, pero no son obstáculos insuperables. Todo el país está trabajando a distancia ahora, a una escala que no tiene precedentes... Decir que no se puede hacer no tiene sentido”. +++ Para asegurar una gran participación de votantes inmigrantes, organizaciones como la Asociación Nacional de Nuevos Estadounidenses están trabajando con comunidades locales a través de los Estados Unidos para interactuar con los votantes recién naturalizados y hacer que el proceso de votación sea más accesible para ellos. Estos esfuerzos han incluido la distribución de materiales electorales en más lenguajes, la organización de sesiones de información al votante en varias ciudades y transporte a estas sesiones. Algunos condados han intentado ofrecer interpretación a votantes en las urnas electorales. Dicho esto, los intérpretes deben seguir requisitos específicos en algunos estados. Si no cumplen con estos estándares, se les impide traducir para los votantes en las urnas. Los requisitos pueden ser extensos, como asegurar que el

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intérprete también se haya registrado para votar en la proximidad del votante. En Georgia, fue necesaria una demanda resuelta para permitir que un par de votantes puedan votar con un traductor a su lado.

En particular, muchos inmigrantes que viven en los Estados Unidos bajo DACA han creado organizaciones como Operation Dream Act Now y United We Dream, con el objetivo de empoderar a los inmigrantes para que desarrollen sus propias campañas por la justicia y sus derechos. Otros han organizado sentadas para protestar contra los políticos que han denunciado DACA. Esfuerzos como estos han ayudado a derribar los estigmas contra inmigrantes indocumentados.

Han generado nuevo apoyo para el DREAM Act, un proyecto de ley federal que, de ser aprobado, abriría una vía para que estudiantes indocumentados elegibles puedan legalizar su estatus migratorio.

Los votantes estadounidenses de primera generación en particular crean su propia vía no obstante múltiples retos. Mientras aprenden sobre varias políticas de inmigración, deben lidear con actos de discriminación, como acusaciones de que no son “estadounidenses reales” o que deben “volver a su país de origen”.

Marie*, una inmigrante estadounidense de primera generación y votante primeriza, le dijo a the College Hill Independent: “Tienes que hacer tu investigación. Tengo que ver si las acciones del candidato coinciden con sus palabras. Me mantengo en contacto con otras personas que han investigado para ayudarme en el proceso de decisión”. Amplió su proceso de pensamiento antes de las elecciones este año, afirmando: “Afortunadamente, nunca he sentido culpa ni enfrentado discriminación como una nueva votante o como votante estadounidense de primera generación. Sé que mis puntos de vista sobre la política son míos y, si creo en algo, debería ser capaz de defenderlo. Más bien, siento presión para elegir el candidato “correcto”.

Los jóvenes de primera generación parecen compartir la sensación de estar abrumados durante este proceso cuando aprenden a votar por primera vez.

Ana*, otra estadounidense de primera generación que acaba de graduarse de la secundaria, mencionó a the Indy que se sintió apresurada durante el periodo de registro, mientras se preparaba a votar por primera vez.

Aunque aún no ha votado, Ana mencionó que ya sentía el estigma de que “las generaciones jóvenes no saben nada ni tomarán en serio el privilegio de votar”.

Comentó que simplemente quería vivir en un Estados Unidos que trata bien a la gente y cuyos líderes toman buenas decisiones para todos los estadounidenses.

Ana pudo registrarse con la ayuda de un funcionario en el DMV. Mientras espera su boleta de voto en ausencia, se mantiene informada sobre las noticias de políticas de inmigración y la lucha contra las disparidades raciales.

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Otro nuevo votante que habló con the Indy, Jess*, no se sentía tan preparada para votar. Señaló que quiere votar este año tras finalmente cumplir 18 años, pero aún no ha pasado por el proceso de registro de votantes porque no está segura de dónde empezar. Jess señaló que inicialmente ni siquiera sabía del proceso de registro. También sintió cierta culpa por lo poco que sabía de la política estadounidense y sentía que su conocimiento limitado venía de la escuela, un lugar donde “casi ni hablábamos [de política]”.

La logística del registro de votantes por sí sola puede ser muy estresante, pero agregar las presiones de ser un votante joven e inmigrante en el ambiente político de hoy puede ser suficiente para hacer que la gente no vote. +++ Desafortunadamente, algunos inmigrantes no tendrán esa opción en 2020. De casi 44 millones de inmigrantes que viven en los Estados Unidos, aproximadamente 20 millones están esperando la oportunidad de votar y siguen sin ser elegibles. A pesar de que 8,9 millones de residentes tienen legalmente la capacidad de someterse al proceso de naturalización, la acumulación de solicitudes como resultado de COVID-19 y la administración de Trump que es poco comprensiva han limitado la registración potencial de votantes.

En última instancia, la incapacidad de votar perjudica desproporcionadamente a las comunidades inmigrantes; su acceso limitado a los derechos básicos, como la atención médica o la influencia legislativa sobre la educación de sus hijos, obstaculiza particularmente su poder electoral. Además de la representación inadecuada de los votantes, la quinta parte de los inmigrantes indocumentados adultos viven en la pobreza, según el Pew Research Center. Esta combinación crea una dinámica desalentadora, haciendo que los inmigrantes sean incapaces de influir los sistemas en donde

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trabajan. Incluso después de registrarse,, los votantes de la clase trabajadora a menudo tienen dificultades priorizando la votación debido a su trabajo y a sus familias. Los votantes inmigrantes serían inmensamente beneficiados si el día de las elecciones fuera un día feriado nacional.

Mientras se enfrentan a tales desventajas, los inmigrantes son a menudo criminalizados, por ejemplo muchos inmigrantes indocumentados siguen detenidos en las fronteras o centros de detención de inmigración, pese a no tener antecedentes penales.

El encarcelamiento es un factor importante en la supresión de votantes, puesto que puede hacer que los votantes potenciales no sean elegibles, incluso antes de comenzar el proceso de votación. Según la Oficina de Estadísticas de Justicia, 64 por ciento de las detenciones federales en 2018 fueron efectuadas contra individuos sin ciudadanía estadounidense, dificultando o, en ocasiones, impidiendo que puedan votar.

El aumento de la violencia en la frontera también ha afectado negativamente la percepción y la experiencia de los inmigrantes, y los miles de niños separados de sus padres como testimonio del trato abismal de los inmigrantes en este país. Esto pone más énfasis en la privación de derechos de los inmigrantes en contraste con sus supuestamente conciudadanos, y sólo estos conciudadanos tienen una voz real en las políticas públicas.

ejercer adecuadamente su derecho a la autodefensa.

Protestar contra la supresión de votantes es otro aspecto importante para mejorar el sistema electoral estadounidense en un futuro próximo. Históricamente, la supresión de votantes se ha utilizado para reducir la influencia de los votantes minoritarios, lo que afecta a los votantes inmigrantes, ya que la mayoría de los inmigrantes son parte de las minorías raciales. Por ejemplo, los esquemas de gerrymandering, que a menudo implican la disminución de los votantes minoritarios a muy pocos distritos para suprimir sus votos, siguen ocurriendo en ciudades como Detroit y Atlanta.

Aumentar la conciencia de esquemas similares puede ayudar a proteger a los votantes minoritarios de las estrategias creadas para silenciar su voz política.

La inmigración probablemente será un punto de conversación crítico en las elecciones de 2020. Mientras la inimaginable realidad de los niños detenidos en las fronteras persiste, la gente sigue protestando los sistemas que se benefician de la detención de los inmigrantes. Dado que una gran parte de las posturas políticas de Trump se opone a los inmigrantes, los votos en las elecciones federales de este año son muy importantes para los nuevos votantes estadounidenses.

Como votante estadounidense negro/a de primera generación, estoy experimentando el proceso de votar por primera vez. Pienso a menudo en mi futuro como estadounidense, y estoy trabajando para educarme sobre las principales políticas que representan los +++ candidatos. Estoy emocionada para entrar en mi primer año de universidad como estudiante y votante, Todos tenemos la responsabilidad de mitigar los efectos y espero seguir luchando contra la discriminación de la discriminación y de trabajar por un ambiente más mientras lucho por mejores políticas de inmigración. inclusivo para los estadounidenses y las personas que pronto serán estadounidenses. Un cambio significativo puede comenzar con la votación y la educación de AICHA SAMA B‘24 llevará su pegatina “I Voted” con aquellos que son nuevos en el proceso. Es esencial dar orgullo. a los inmigrantes información completa; hacerlo mejorará la alfabetización política en los EEUU y equipará a *Los nombres han sido cambiados para preservar la los nuevos estadounidenses con las herramientas para privacidad y la seguridad de los entrevistados.

TRANSLATION

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FERAL READING

BY Tara Sharma ILLUSTRATION Audrey Buhain DESIGN Clara Epstein

On October 29, I found myself mildly lost in the digital infrastructure of Anna Tsing’s latest project, a virtual world called Feral Atlas. From what I assumed to be her living room, Tsing—anthropologist and popular science studies scholar best known for her epic ethnography of matsutake fungal relations titled The Mushroom at the End of the World—attempted to shepherd a Zoom room of around 3,000 attendees as each navigated the endlessly layered website on their respective screens.

With Tsing’s voice in the background, I opened the page and clicked on one of many drifting icons, a bluish watercolor blob labeled “Comb Jellies,” which seemed to split the screen open and send me to a surreal map-like illustration of an industrial port city made of intricately sketched container ships, factory rows, a suckling pig caught in highway scaffolding, and a sky full of tangled ropes. The aerial map was spattered with several black dots and a single red one, which, when I scanned my mouse over it, revealed itself to be the Comb Jelly icon. I was sent to another page, this one featuring a series of video poems under the heading “TAKE.” The video poems showed me trains, cargo ships, wholesale vendors, power lines. A tab labeled “field report” sent me to a short essay, the familiar watercolor Comb Jelly icon framing its title: “Alien species can cause severe disturbance.” As I clicked deeper, I gave up on a sense of direction. I spiraled into, out of, around, and through the vaguely familiar fantasy scape.

But within about 15 minutes, the Feral Atlas webpage began to crash; the moderator politely interrupted Tsing and asked that everyone quit the website on their own devices and instead follow along via Tsing’s screen-share. After an hour more of shadowing Tsing’s mazing through an ever-expanding virtual collage of imaginative aerial maps, multimedia poems, data visualizations, and ethereal illustrations of organisms in their industrial contexts, an attendee asked the question that was glaring through the glitch: What do you plan to do when your digital world—which, in theory, is designed to reach an audience wider than the academic readership Tsing’s work typically attracts—collapses beneath the strain of the overused ‘real’ one?

Launched on October 20 by Stanford University Press, Feral Atlas is the cumulation of five years of collaboration between Tsing and her editorial and curatorial team—Jennifer Deger, Alder Saxena, and Feifei Zhou—as well as over a hundred scientists, artists, activists, and scholars navigating the relatively new interdisciplinary field loosely labeled the “environmental humanities.” The contours of each discipline are not necessarily meant to be legible; taking up a methodology provisionally named “intimate empiricism” in the website’s description, the project recognizes its own fluid relationship to language, defending its capacity to “draw us close to the worlds we seek to describe and understand, exactly by fostering forms of careful, situated, and sustained attention.” It’s an open-ended approach to language, suggestive of an editorial skew toward the humanities as well as skepticism toward the authority ascribed to traditional scientific description. The project blends text, art, film, poetry, and digital simulations into 79 “field reports” on the sites at which human infrastructure has interrupted the course of ecological entities, producing the intertwined human-nonhuman relationships that constitute the matter of what we now call the “Anthropocene,” or the contested term for the geological era marked by human impact on the environment.

By infrastructure, the editors consider technological apparatuses that function materially, publicly, and by human design. The project’s ambitious temporal scope attempts to assemble the last 500 years of the history of capitalism through a methodology of “patchiness,” Feral Atlas’ own narrative tactic which, according to the website, situates environmental events not as “closed territories” but as “cascading chains of effects.” The patchwork produced is more akin to a puzzle, or a choose-your-own-adventure novel, than a historical timeline. There’s an entry point for all kinds of visitors: visuals for the artist, syllabi for the teacher, framing

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essays for the analyst, diagrams for scientist, grids for the logician, city sketches for the architect, knotty layers of javascript for the coder.

Building a virtual space both microscopic and panoramic, and fashioning a historical timeline both iterative and expansive, Feral Atlas is a contestation of form. In one sense, the project extends out of a lineage of traditional atlases—it contains collections of maps, illustrations, informative tables, and text. But atlases are typically book-bound; in reimagining the atlas, this project is suggestive of a new kind of book. Mimicking the effects of the Anthropocene, this project destabilizes the very tools—art, language, and history—we have always used to understand the landscapes we inhabit.

It is at once a publication, an installation, a video game, and a set of maps, both a series of expanding worlds and a two-dimensional representation of one on a website.

What to call the person before the screen—a spectator, a gamer, or a navigator—is a question left open. As the editors make clear, it’s one of many indeterminacies that mirror the future of the Anthropocene as an unfinished story. For the purposes of this article, and in a suggestion that shifting ecological forms demand new literary ones, I’ll call this person a reader. +++ Describing the notion of nonhuman forms wending their way through human-built worlds designed to repress them, the term “feral” is situated somewhere between the accidental and the intentional. Though continually emergent from human projects, feral entities operate on their own terms. Like invasive plants coextensive with processes of colonization

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On Anna Tsing’s latest “book,” Feral Atlas

fundamentally “shift ecologies past tipping points, changing the relationship between parts and wholes.”

In this case of the hyacinth, it’s the category “smooth/ speed,” the former signaling “surfaces of land and water [that] have enabled colonial governance and industrial development” and the latter “drilling, shipping, global pathogen introduction, and landscape transformation [that] block the healing of local ecologies by denying them time.” The verbs “smooth” and “speed” are co-constitutive—a relationship rendered by a 90-second silent film capturing highways, airport runways, dam reservoir waters, and the engine-powered speed machines that traffic their smooth surfaces.

Completing the trifold of axes is “Feral Qualities,” an analytic attending to the more subtle dynamics of collaboration, the “modes of attunement,” between nonhuman entities and human infrastructure. Formatted as a set of color-coded annotations along the left margin of the feral entity’s field report, these categories guide the reading experience as a professor would, offering the reader tools of analysis and threads of comparison. Hone in on a Quality— say, “Uncontainable,” “Partners,” or “Industrial Stowaways”—as you would sift a novel for a particular theme. Applying the filter reconfigures the atlas in terms of entities’ particular capacities to act upon the infrastructural forms they inhabit. As margin annotations, Feral Qualities formally signal the presence of editorial mediators—but ones who are careful to note the significance of reading these qualities as “openings to think through connections, juxtapositions, and overlaps rather than airtight categories for neat classification.” Feral Qualities not only subverts the conventional directionality by which humans and nonhumans exert influence, but also disrupts the very act of reading itself—interrupting, layering, upending the text. In performing these parallel contestations, Feral Qualities offers a reader ecological figurative tools, an ecological reading practice. +++

and toxin-resistant pathogens produced by industrial farming practices, feral phenomena are inextricable from human life. Capitalist infrastructure, Tsing’s team argues, is both built upon and undermined by the feral processes which cycle through it.

Interfacing with the Atlas, the reader’s first encounter with a feral entity is a contextless one; discrete entities (such as the Comb Jelly) float through a home screen in a kind of nebulous swarm. As (web) pages are turned, each feral entity is revealed to be located at an intersection of three “axes”: Anthropocene Detonators, Tippers, and Feral Qualities. From the home screen, the reader selects a floating orb—say, “dutch elm disease” or “toxic fog,” each represented by a painted icon—and is directed to a map visualizing one of four symbolic world-building Anthropocene Detonators: Invasion, Empire, Capital, or Acceleration.

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Tsing and her team make clear that the website is more than just a catalogue of the Anthropocene’s discrete effects; there is no shortage of scholarly articles to give us this inventory. Instead, this project demands a commitment to “in situ observation”—an attention to the Anthropocene’s endless invocations of varied subjectivities—as a way of generating new and necessary kinds of response. Programmed to continually arrange and rearrange field notes into new forms of archive, analysis, and art, the project materializes a complicated and vibrant universe of relationships planted just beneath the surface of the industrial-ecological conditions in our midst. In a review of Feral Atlas, composer Nicolàs Jaar, whose work increasingly explores the sonic landscapes of shifting ecological forms and whom the Indy interviewed last volume, calls this relational orientation “an intricately granular reimagining of the Anthropocene which allows users to move horizontally across its multiple manifestations.”

The site, he says, “leads us through the dark, serpentine trails of our contemporary condition, urging us to look around rather than ahead.” Jaar pulls some of his language from what the editors loosely state to be the project’s mission: to “[show] the Anthropocene as granular, that is, as the combined but not fully synchronized effect of several processes.”

The closest Feral Atlas comes to resembling conventional Anthropocene scholarship to date is on the “superindex” page, where the axes of Detonators, Tippers, and Qualities organize feral entities into a seemingly logical, grid-like diagram. But floating in the background of this index are semi-translucent words and phrases fading in and out of legibility: “lead,” “DRAIN,” “Avian Flu”—instances of ferality that the Atlas, in its current form, failed to incorporate.

The persistence of these half-legible words, concepts inadequately absorbed by the project, call attention to the Atlas’ indeterminacies, its open ends. It’s one example of formal leakiness indicative of the kind of ‘book’ Feral Atlas might model for the future. Collapsing maps—conceptual, material, and digital—inevitably leads to glitches, imperfect transposals. But if a book can mirror the form of the ecologically disoriented world its readers are learning to navigate, perhaps it can also serve as a guide.

The map-world is peppered by feral entities symbolized by tiny black dots, each representing instances of an ecological encounter with a piece of human infrastructure. Taken out of its aimless drift and reabsorbed into a landscape, the ecological icon is literally mapped onto the modes of production (the Anthropocene Detonators) from which it is inextricable.

Click on a tiny dot—say, “water hyacinth on engineered water”—to find a written field report detailing its characteristics, as well as a “drawer” of pertinent essays by scientists, scholars, and artists, each elaborating upon the entity through their respective form of empiricism. This page also provides information about the “Tipper” within which the entity is cateTARA SHARMA B’20.5 wishes she hadn’t dropped gorized. Undergirding the Detonator maps is the her introductory computer science class. activity of Tipper-verbs like “TAKE,” “BURN,” and “CROWD,” that, in accretion, have the capacity to

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MISTER SISTER 268 wickenden street 401-421-6969 sunday 12-8 wednesday-saturday 12-10

storefront rendition painted by Sage Jennings

LOCAL & ONLINE EVENTS:

BAIL FUNDS & MUTUAL AID

HEALTHCARE RESOURCES

November 4th: Ward 4 Food Drive: Join Senior Deputy Majority Leader Nicholas Narducci and bring non-perishable items to 20 Dorothy Ave for families in need.

AMOR COVID-19 Community Support Fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit https://tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer

These community health centers accept all insurance and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance.

November 8th: Providence Flea Market is extending its outdoor scheduling! Come to the Providence River Greenway (across from 345 South Water St.) from 11-3 to peruse the artisanal crafts and enjoy the live music and food trucks. Mask required for entry.

November 9th: New Voices at the Water Table (Bilingual): Join the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council at the Olneyville Library at 11am for info sessions on flood resilience and environmental consciousness.

November 10th: Come to the Agnes E. Little School from 11:30-1:00 for a Children’s Book Giveaway. Free grade-level children’s books will be distributed along with free school meals.

Ongoing: “Steps to End Prison and Policing: A Mixtape on Transformative Justice.”

A nine-part video series made by activists (including Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, and Ejeris Dixon) offering critical political frameworks for this moment. Proceeds go to BIPOC transformative justice organizations based in Chicago.

FANG Collective Community Bail Fund. As jails and prisons continue to become coronavirus hotspots, they present extremely unsafe conditions for those inside, many of whom are held because they can’t afford bail.

Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Corrections and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective: https://gofundme.come/f/fang-bailfund Project LETS Mutual Aid Fund. Project LETS is working in coalition with grassroots organizations in Rhode Island to provide direct financial assistance to the most marginalized and vulnerable in our community.

Donate here: https://projectlets.org/covid19

This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to pandemic relief and mobilize for racial justice, in addition to our traditional event listings.

Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls - 722-0081 Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & North Providence - 351-2750 Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 These clinics provide free and/or low-cost health services: Clínica Esperanze, Providence - 347-9093 Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347 If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit https://health.ri.gov/covid/testing/ Para más asistencia en español, llama a la línea de apoyo de AMOR: 401-675-1414.