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All The Feels (Changing the Present (United in Anger (2012) UiA (Gran Fury…

- - - - Diaz, Kingston and Anzaldua recognize how in language, one's past becomes a way of thinking and a way of expression. Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao attempts to subtly normalize the appearance of Spanish words in his text, choosing not to italicize or even specifically note when he is speaking in another language. Like Anzaldua noting that Chicano Spanish is someone's "own language," or simply a way of thinking, Diaz makes the Spanish language another part of his prose, not a disjointed afterthought. Kingston makes this idea apparent as well as she chooses to express connections and thoughts as she understands them: Chinese folk-tales. Anzaldua understands how for Mexican cultures, combinations of English and Spanish become comfortable and commonplace. However, from Americans demanding better English and the internalized fear of speaking a bastardized version of Spanish, Chicano people find themselves conflicted over the very simply act of expressing themselves. Anzaldua illustrates how one's past and its effects on language ought not to be disparaged, but embraced as facets of one's identity.
  - - - A Dialogue on Racial Melacholia, in addition to being concerned with the experience of Asian Americans and their experience upon arriving in America, concerns itself with the loss of whiteness, Asianness, home, and language, and how the loss of these ideals create the emotion of melancholia. In being concerned with past possessions and past connections that are broken upon emigration, this text demonstrates the cultural and personal shifts that occur when displacing oneself. Even thousands of miles away, though, these connections subsist and bring about melancholia for groups of Asian Americans. Here, the text links itself to The Woman Warrior, where Kingston feels a longing to connect once again with China and the fantasy of its culture. This text demonstrates how one's past, represented by anything from language to physical objects, bonds itself to one's current ideals and identity. This bond, when broken, may bring about feelings of Melancholia, as Kingston experiences in her journey of rationalizing her identity as a Chinese American.
      - Both texts rely heavily on the concepts of mourning and melancholia, but the way they explore it reveals why they occupy different time categories. A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia in specifically analyzing Asian American's experience of losing their past, lends itself better toward being a tie one has to the past. Freud however, in exploring the psychological roots of this emotion, lends itself towards exploring how to transcend these emotions. Thus, it provides insight into future movements to fight both mourning and melancholia.
      - Unique racial experiences influence one's thinking and emotions.
  - - - Xandra Ibarra's Tapitio Cock and Spic Ecydis.
        
        A way to better understand this connection is to look at Ibarra's performance art in Tapitio Cock and Spic Ecydis. In the former, Ibarra expresses her dicontent at her culture being simplified and warped by American culture. Her culture was appropriated and sexualized, forming the same internal conflict as both The Woman Warrior and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. On a personal basis, Ibarra did not know how to react and find her personal identity in America, which refuses to see her culture as she does. However, in Spic Ecydis , Ibarra, like Kingston , Chris, and Oscar, find their identity by coming to terms with their personal history. For Ibarra, performative art began to reinforce, not break sexualized stereotypes. And, only shedding herself of this image, and reconciling her "Spic" backround in a new form is the path towards personally accepting her past.
- - - - The selected works of Gran Fury demonstrate how beyond demonstration, ACT UP was able to change the present via art. Utilizing a very period appropriate, advertising style of art, Gran Fury was able to demonstrate the scale, frequently utilizing numbers of people killed, stakes, frequently using themes of being abandoned by the government, while also normalizing the LGBTQ community by frequently showing sexually explicit content. The advertizing art style assisted in all of these fronts, making the problem very simple and clear, while also presenting LGBTQ people in a public spotlight, which they have been denied on account of discrimination. This demonstrates that art, in its accessibility, was one of the many reasons ACT up was successful in fighting the AIDS pandemic: Changing the present is not only hosting rallies.
    - - Deborah Gould analyzes how ACT UP utilized emotions to change the present state of government recognition in the AIDS pandemic. Though ACT up's protest are clearly very provocative, seen in events like throwing ashes onto the white-house lawn, Gould explains the context and utility of such protests. Gould illustrates that ACT UP, instead of reminiscing on grief like those who participated in the memorial quilt and candlelight vigils, mobilized the grief of its members into anger and fury. This fury manifests itself in both art campaigns and provocative demonstrations, which in their very loud and boisterous nature, garner more attention, turn more heads, and really amplify the feeling that the government was killing its people. Gould demonstrates that in a climate of mourning and grief, sometimes these emotions can be turned into fuel for substantial social changes. ACT up uses emotions as a tool to change the present.
- - - - Shame and Its Sister builds off of the image of shame described in The Bluest Eye, accentuating the physiological nature of shame. The very personal nature of shame, being formed through one's feelings of inadequacy towards themselves, is then not only a personal emotion as Tomkin describes. He also explores how shame, in provoking the reaction of shame toward the source of shame, allows for the perpetuation of shame for generation to generation. Then, in trying to break the shame inherent to the Breedlove family and the black community of Lorain, Claudia and Freida need to overcome the shame they feel in themselves. In order to build a better future, there needs to be an assurance that the shame of the present cannot continue. Then, circumnavigating shame also becomes circumnavigating contempt, which as Tomkin notes, has been the tool by which discrimination occurs. To better understand how to build the future, it is apt to consider how avoiding one's personal shame may benefit society as a whole.
      - Sigmeund Freud's Mourning and Melancholia (1917)
        
        Mourning and Melancholia assists The Bluest Eye in detailing the ways in which one experiences the emotions of mourning, the conscious feeling accompanying the loss of a treasured object, and melancholia, a more abstract and subconscious reaction to loss. This work builds off of the ideas of Tomkin's text on shame by detailing the elusiveness of melancholia. How could Freida and Claudia resolve cultural issues if they cannot identify their own subconscious reactions to loss? This leads to the conclusion that these affects can never really be fully removed. They linger in one's mind forever. Then, in achieving a better future, the tangible idea of mourning must be prevented using Tomkin's ideas, but Melancholia requires a collective effort to fully remove. Only when the environment has removed itself of mourning, while still considering the source of that mourning in future actions, can melancholia be cured.
      - The significance of previous generations on oneself.
  - - - The Aptness of Anger reconcile the differing outlooks Nussbaum and Baldwin hold on the paths in achieving the best future. Srinivasan explores more explicitly in her piece the theoretical backing of Baldwin's experiences, while looking to expand Nussbaum's seemingly ignorant stances on anger. Srinivasan explores the problematic side of Nussbaum's arguments, explaining how the same logic that Nussbaum employs is used to silence minority groups from vocalizing their thoughts. Even further, she recognizes that Baldwin's attempts to resist his emotional responses or as she calls it, his affective injustice, as rooted in very apt emotions. But still Srinivasan takes the same side as Nussbaum in recognizing the varying ways that anger can thwart one's end goal. Srinivasan's piece then becomes the mediator between a very harsh outlook on anger and one rooted in personal experience. The piece sees anger as a justified emotion and one worth considering and discussing, but still as a volatile force that may threaten goals for the future.
  - - - Using Bloch and Munoz' usage of hope as a way for discovering the path to the future, we can see Audre Lord's work as a way to see how to walk the path toward the future. She argues that the world, in being unforgiving, is not meant for survival. In this state, the best we can do is hope and speak on these hopes. She argues that the present, in its unforgiging bias, is meant to be transcended as one looks toward the future. Then, hoping for a better future becomes not just a form of wishful thinking, but a way of escaping and realizing a better present. Lord here connects "changing the present" and "pondering the future", as the present motivates the future and dreams of the future better the present. Thinking and acting toward a future, alongside rationalizing hope, becomes the way to realize the future into the present.
      - Accepting the unforgiving aspects of life.
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