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All the Feels (Reinterpretation of American Dream (The Reluctant…

- - - - The Affective Politics of Fear: Sara Ahmed talks about the politics of fear and the many definitions that it has. She talks in particular about fear being bound up by the politics of mobility and its spacial dimension which is further explored in Get Out, the Reluctant Fundamentalist and Notes of a Native Son. The pieces reveal how people of color in the United States, especially those who are people of color, fear their mobility as a potential threat to their citizenship and freedom which is often never granted to them. Ahmen created a bridge to express that fear has a toll on the fluidity of mobility both in social, economic and political situations. She describes the spatial dimension as literal, but could also be articulated as metaphorical. She also talks about fear being concerned with preservation, the temporal dimension of fear and fear involving turning to a place of comfort.
  - - - Aptness of Anger: Amia Srinivasan talks about various thinkings of fear, but I wanted to focus on the the ways that she describes that fear has been used and critiqued in history. She talks about Martin Luther King Jr. and his response to Malcolm X and his ideology. MLK thought that his anger was actually harming the Civil Rights Movement as it did not bring forth any benefits, but instead more setbacks. I think that what is important about her piece is that she talks about the importance of anger and how it is a tool that is okay to use. She makes an argument that acting angry is counter-productive, but being angry could actually lead to actions with benefits.
- - - - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Junot Diaz brings to life the story of Oscar Wao through his fascinations of writing, science fiction and his love life. The book was told through idiomatic language which is has a direct correlation to the vernacular language. The book also has Spanish words mixed into the narrative without needing to give a direct translation. What brought the destruction of Oscar Wao was a sense of decolonial love which was described through the history that was revealed through the book. It is a sense of lost love and the feeling of being wanted and assimilated to to the standards of men at the time.
    - - Can Hope Be Disappoint: Ernst Bloch was making the point that in order for hope to be correctly identified as hope, then it must be disappointed by definition. From page 339 to 340, he talks about unfounded forms of hope which is thinking about hope as wishful thinking and therefore, building sandcastles in the air. There seems to be an important quality of hope which is often forgotten which is a sense of disappointment which is made more clear in the following example. He talks about public activism, an often used political tool, as pertaining to daydreamers who want to swim without touching the water.
      - Gran Fury: Gran Fury is a group of activists in the ACT UP committee who were responsible of sharing the art and photography of the movement. The reason why I placed them here is because the urgency of their artwork perhaps symbolizes a hidden hope. Their art was for the general public to see, but also to educate those who identify in the LGBTQ+ community. They have a lot of art that has bolded letters expressing urgency if safe sex, as well as their normalization of two men and women kissing as a form of love and art.
    - - Moving Politics: Deborah Goulding talks about the important use of emotions during the ACT UP movement and the ways that emotions were used as undefined strategies to create a larger case for change. On page 127 (from the reader), she talks about how the activists who were involved within the movement challenged the LGBTQ+ community to challenge their intentionality and emotions in order to be able to provoke something within the public that would be viewing them. As an expression of this idea, a lot of the artwork that was being released at the time came from a place of anger that would call attention to more people who were either in the LGBTQ+ community, bystanders or even perpetrators. For example, they would have posters with bolded letters exclaiming their anger.
      - Beyond Anger: Martha Nussbaum talks about the ways in which anger has truly marked our culture and politics, and possibly not the most effective manners. She talks about when we experience wrongdoings and we spend our energy and time thinking of ways that we want our perpetrator to suffer as a consequence of their actions. Rather than fixing the larger problem, we are only fixing a piece that will never be able to be healed. Instead, she offers Nelson Mandela as an example. She says, "he did things, in that foul prison, that his fellow prisoners thought perverse. He learned Afrikaans. He studied the culture and and thinking of the oppressors. He practiced cooperation by forming friendships with his jailers" (4/6). She talks about ways that we can dismantle systems of oppression by using the energy that anger gives us to better understand the reasoning of our perpetrators. Rather than internalizing the anger, she asks for us to make it useful and meaningful.
- - - - Shame and Its Sisters-When connecting to assimilation, it is important to look at the consequences of shame and what it is. One page 124, Silvan Tomkins describes shame as an inhibitor of interest and excitement. Similarly, on page 136, shame is described as the most reflect of affects, as it turns the attention to oneself and heightened self-consciousness. A large part of assimilation is a sense of internal hypervisibility and the need to change in order to be accepted in a society that seems more perfect and well off. This sense of hypervisibility of one's self is the leading cause of assimilation and the destruction that it brings upon people.
    - - "Mourning and Melancholia": Sigmund Freud does the comparison between mourning and melancholia which he pinpoints as both being responses to some kind of loss. A lot of the actions that were taken by the characters in the Bluest Eye and the Woman Warrior could perhaps been manifesting a kind of loss to their incomplete assimilation. Ib oafe 246 of his book, he talks about the empty ego and how people begin to feel like they are worthy of a sense of worthlessness as an outcome of melancholia. Melancholia seems as more temporary and relying on time. He describes mourning as a "loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty and ideal and so on" (243).
      - A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia: David Eng and Shinhee Han called Freud's thinking on melancholia and mourning coming from a place of privilege. They thought that his definition had to do more with his worldview and the way that people like him could experience both, as such. Their rearticulation of melancholia and as a "depathologized structure of everyday group experience for Asian Americans" (667). They begin by talking about the condition of whiteness and they articulate that it is a set of norms that people are often feeling pressured to act in. They then talk about assimilation as melancholia which they explain that people of color are often expected to act in ways that would pinpoint them as asserting to whiteness. They explain the reason why assimilation is a melancholic framework for Asian Americans and the reason why is because they will never be able to attain full assimilation. The process of assimilation is always unresolved and neverending which allows for the process of racialization to emerge.