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"All the Feels" ((Expectation: Cultural, societal, familial…
"All the Feels"
Expectation: Cultural, societal, familial normatives, etc… This branch deals with works associated to standards set towards individuals and characters in works. A big part of conflicts in novels is associated with a central character that faces a challenge and in this case an individual must face the consequences for their perceived failures and inabilities to satisfy expectations.
Díaz’s novel explores issues of assimilation, love, dictatorship, and identity crisis. Oscar Wao, the protagonist, searches for love and masculinity throughout the novel; however, his physical appearance prevents this as he is subject to ridicule for not satisfying the Dominican ideals of sexuality. Quotes
- “He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror” (Díaz 19).
- “The white kids looked at his black skin and his Afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color...shook their heads. You’re not Dominican” (Díaz 49).
- “Watching the streaking lights of the traffic below. Reviewing his miserable life. Wishing he’d been born in a different body” (Díaz 190).
- “So, which is it? you ask. An accident, conspiracy or fukú? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s certain is that nothing is certain. We are trawling in silences here” (Díaz 243).
- “White supremacy is the great silence of our world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet” (Díaz).
In her short work, Audre Lorde describes how poetry is hard, strong, precise, useful. She discusses how it gives women a voice to transcend above cultural norms, and it also reveals how art has inherent power. This can be related to many other works in the class and is the central idea of the poem, providing a mechanism for female power and voice while facing the oppressions of society. Quotes
- “As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries” (Lorde 37).
- “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free” (Lorde 38).
- “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change” (Lorde 38).
Munoz’s work takes ideas from Ernst Bloch and applies them to the ideas of a utopia or perfect world. Munoz opens his work by introducing the idea of “queer” and describes the current state of the term. His use of the word "queer" changes slightly throughout the essay and his use of utopias represents the idea of trying to form a hopeful world of acceptance. Munoz explores Bloch’s ideas of hope through what he calls abstract and concrete utopias.Quotes
- “QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer” (Munoz 1)
- “We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (Munoz 1).
- “A Blochian approach to aesthetic theory is invested in describing the anticipatory illumination of art” (Munoz 3).
Ernst Bloch defines his views of hope and describes how hope can be used as a political tool. He defines his idea of unfounded hope that is based on wishful thinking and is a form of false discomfort. Bloch describes how disappointment is something that is built into hope. Bloch's work fits into this category because of his ideas that often relate to individuals who fail to meet expectation or the individuals expecting something of someone and ending up disappointed in them. Quotes
- “This is inevitable, even, for the kind of hope that consists of wishful thinking” (Bloch 339).
- “This also pertains to the kind of hope that fixes upon narrow interests” (Bloch 339).
- “Therefore hope must be unconditionally disappointable” (Bloch 341).
- “For if hope could be annihilated, that is, if it could be literally made nihilistic, it would never have proved so intractable to those despots who represent its opposite” (Bloch 344).
James Baldwin, a Harlem Renaissance writer, explores issues of black beauty and familial love in his short essay. Baldwin tells the story of the final days leading up to his father’s death and how throughout his life, he neglected his father for their perceived differences. Baldwin discusses the feelings he experiences coming home and with his father, with his father condemning him for choosing writing over ministry. Quotes
- “He was black but did not know that he was beautiful” (Baldwin 89).
- “She began to cry at the moment we entered the room and she saw him lying there, all shriveled and still, like a little black monkey” (Baldwin 104).
- “My father asked me abruptly, ‘You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?’” (Baldwin 109).
Tomkins defines the psychological nature of shame and the mental effects it has on individuals. He defines both shame and contempt responses. The difference between the two is that contempt results in a total rejection while shame only results in a partial rejection. This is categorized under expectation because the shame response is generally a reaction to a failure by an individual, a failure to satisfy those around them and themselves. Quotes
- “The shame response is literally an ambivalent turning of the eyes away from the object toward the face, toward the self” (Tomkins 137).
- “Shame humiliation is the negative affect linked with love and identification, contempt disguise the negative affect linked with individuation” (Tomkins 139).
3.“shame about inadequacy, and moral guilt is similar to the relationship between the smile of triumph and the smile of love” (Tomkins 133).
Home: This section deals with identity and nostalgia. Works share common ideas of a safe havens, linguistic similarities and differences, and assimilation. Characters face identity crises and an inability to fit into a place they once called home or are searching for a home.
Ahmed describes the notion of fear and how it causes individuals to retreat to a safe haven--a home. Ahmed also describes how fear can be used to generate narratives and is prevalent throughout individuals. She describes how fear is a part of modern life, not just a temporary feeling that we face. Quotes
- “In this way, we can see that fear is that which keeps alive the fantasy of love as the preservation of life” (Ahmed 68).
- “Fear works to align bodily and social space: it works to enable some bodies to inhabit and move in public space through restricting the mobility of other bodies” (Ahmed 70).
- “The turning away from the object of fear involves a turning towards home” (Ahmed 74).
- “It is fear of death...that is generated by such narratives as a means of preserving, that which is” (Ahmed 77).
Bell Hooks opens by describing her nostalgia from growing up in a black community. She discusses the nature of blackness and how society neglects and often ignores blacks, creating the idea of blacks as an otherized group. Hooks mentions the false belief among whites that there is an implied notion of sameness only within the white communities. Hooks states how blacks have historically been wrong done and how a place she and others used to call home is no longer home. Quotes
- “Systems of domination, imperialism, colonialism, and racism actively coerce black folks to internalize negative perceptions of blackness, to be self-hating” (Hooks 166).
- The absence of recognition is a strategy that facilitates making a group the Other” (Hooks 167).
- “A theory of the journey that would expose the extent to which holding on to the concept of ‘travel’ as we know it is also a way to hold on to imperialism” (Hooks 173).
Mohsin Hamid utilizes Changez’s narrative to display the life of a young, Pakistani man living in New York surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. Changez reveals how he is no longer welcome in a place he once viewed as home. He uses the hardships of his job and coworkers as well as his relationship with Erica to display the rejection he experiences from both of them as well as the United States. Quotes
- “Perhaps you have drawn certain conclusions from my appearance, my lustrous beard” (Hamid 75-76).
- “Focus on the fundamentals” (Hamid 98).
- “‘I don’t know what’s up with the beard, but I don’t think it’s making you Mister Popular around here’” (Hamid 130).
- “‘In wartime soldiers don’t really fight for their flags, Changez. They fight for their friends’” (Hamid 153).
- Looking back now, I see the power of that system, pragmatic and effective, like so much else in America” (Hamid 4).
- “‘Pretend I am him,’ I said again. And slowly, in darkness and in silence, we did” (Hamid 105).
Kingston’s novel is broken up into multiple parts, focussing on struggles of assimilation in the United States and fantasies of Chinese legends. The novel takes place both in China and San Francisco and focuses on a mother daughter relationship to explore ideas of identity and familial love versus tradition. Quotes
- “If I made myself American-pretty so that the five or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love with me, everyone else--the Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese boys--would to” (Kingston 12).
- “Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death” (Kingston 16).
- “To avenge my family, I’d have to rage across China to take back our farm from the Communists; I’d have to rage across the United States to take back the laundry” (Kingston 49).
- “‘When I’m away from here,’ I had to tell her, ‘I don’t get sick’” (Kingston 108).
- “And Chinese can’t hear Americans at all; the language is too soft and western music unhearable” (Kingston 172).
This essay focuses on the ideas of trying to assimilate into American culture and norms. Eng and Han use Freud’s melancholia and alter its meaning to describe it as a feeling or reaction to failed assimilation in the United States. They describe the difficulty of assimilation because there is no middle ground and an individual must succumb to new cultural norms. They discuss how Asian-Americans in the United states are viewed as a threat towards the productivity of the United States. Quotes
- “Melancholia might be thought of as underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles with experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization” (Eng and Han 669).
- “In the United States today, assimilation into mainstream culture for people of color still means adopting a set of dominant norms and ideals—whiteness, heterosexuality, middle-class family values—often foreclosed to them" (Eng and Han 670).
- “Despite the fact that they may be US-born...Asian Americans are typically seen by the mainstream as eccentric to the nation….Asian Americans are recognized as hyper ‘model minorities’ --inhumanely productive-- and hence pathological to the nation” (Eng and Han 671).
Anzaldua discusses the cultural divide and differences between American and Mexican cultures. She uses linguistic differences and immigrant status as a Chicana to display where immigrants fall in the scope of American versus Mexican culture. This work deals with the idea of a shifting home where a place that was once home can no longer be called home. Quotes
- “‘If you want to be American, speak “American.” If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong’” (Anzaldua 75).
- “A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves” (Anzaldua 77).
- “To be close to another Chicana is like looking in the mirror. We are afraid of what we’ll see there. Pena. Shame” (Anzaldua 80).
- “This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity” (85).
This novel fits in multiple categories such as expectation (For its ideas of black beauty). The reason it is under loss is for Pecola’s loss of purity and virginity and Cholly’s loss of desire from haunting scene with the two white men. Both characters are scarred from sexual experiences. Quotes
- “Try as she might, she could never get her eyes to disappear” (Morrison 45).
- “How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant store keeper with...his mind honed on the doe eyed Virgin Mary...see a little black girl?” (Morrison 48).
- “He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men ….[H]e hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence” (Morrison 151).
- “A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes” (Morrison 174).
- “She was lying on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her” (Morrison 163).
Loss: This category deals with the challenges associated with a perceived loss. For example, individuals who lose purity, death of loved ones, or a feeling of sadness and dejection that leads to a loss of desire.
In his essay, Freud distinguishes between the two related ideas of mourning and melancholia. He defines mourning as a response when you lose something and describes the pain of it because the individual does not want to let go. He describes melancholia as a pathological form of mourning--an idea rather than a reality. Quotes
- “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person” (Freud 243).
- “The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love” (Freud 244).
- “The essential thing, therefore, is not whether the melancholic’s distressing self denigration is correct, in the sense that his self-criticism agrees with the opinion of other people” (Freud 247).
Nussbaum bases her ideas off of Aristotle and defines anger as completely unproductive and a loss of function. She essentially states that anger only results in a loss of effort and time and that there is no point in displaying the emotion. Nussbaum instead uses the examples and teachings of Nelson Mandela as a method of dealing with and solving issues of anger through forgiveness and patience.Quotes
- “I predict, the arguments proposed by anger will be clearly seen to be pathetic and weak, while the voice of generosity and forward looking reaction will be strong as well as beautiful” (Nussbaum).
- “The payback idea does not make sense” (Nussbaum).
- “Anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted”
In her play, Smith recounts the events leading up to the beating of Rodney king through different voices and monologues of public figures. This play reveals multiple perspectives and focussing on the theme of loss, Smith reveals the divide and destruction of the Los Angeles Riots. The quotes chosen below display the movement behind the reaction to the beating of Rodney King as well as the racial divide among blacks living in the United States. Quotes
- “We weren’t raised like this. We weren’t raised with no black and white thing. We were raised with all kinds of friends: Mexicans, Indians, Blacks, Whites, Chinese. You never would have known that something like this would happen to us” (Angela King 55).
- “People are people. Black, white, green, or purple, I don’t care” (Judith Tur 95).
- “Mr. President...We want to deal with the young men who have been dropped off of America’s Agenda” (Maxine Waters 160).
- “They basically feel that if it’s a black-on-black crime...they don’t have no problem with that. But let it be a white victim, oh, they gonna...they gonna go to any extremes necessary to convict some black people” (Paul Parker 171).
This movie explores the ideas of ignoring black struggles and the injustices blacks face. The use of manipulation and bodies of African Americans in the movie represents the loss of a black life to white supremacy and cruelty. In addition, the movie uses a method of paranoia and distress to communicate the true emotions and feelings of African Americans. Quotes
- "What is your purpose, Chris? In life, what is your purpose?" (Dean).
- "By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could. Best president in my lifetime. Hands down" (Dean).
- “Do they know I’m -- Do they know I’m black” (Chris).
Pride: Passion, anger, desire. This section deals with works that are based off of underlying "anger" and desire for a change. What separates this section from others is the response to these emotions.
Srinivasan coins the term “affective injustice” in her excerpt and uses this to explain, in partial contrast to Nussbaum, that anger is sometimes counterproductive depending on the situation. Srinivasan discusses how individuals or groups suffering from a harsh condition or reality are capable of experiencing productive anger--pride.QUOTES:
- “Politics ‘as the crow flies’ is a politics that insists on what should have been rather than what it is” (Srinivasan 124)
- “What makes anger intelligible as anger, and distinct from disappointment, is that anger presents its object as involving a moral violation: not just a violation of how one wishes things were, but a violation of how things ought to be” (Srinivasan 128).
- “Second is what I want to call affective injustice: the injustice of one’s situation and one’s desire to better one’s situation” (Srinivasan 135).
Gould's work describes the ACT UP movement and the protests and demonstrations fighting for queer rights and AIDS activism. ACT UP's main idea was to take anger and grief and turn it into a movement. ACT UP became a movement of coming out and pushed for equality and recognition of the queer community. QUOTES:
- “ACT UP offered an alternative route for grief: confrontational AIDS activism” (Gould 224).
- “ACT UP harnessed griefs to anger and both feelings to confrontational action” (Gould 223).
- “The ACT UP leaflet acknowledged lesbian and gay grief, but in affixing grief to anger and confrontational activism, it offered an alternative” (Gould 229).
- “Where an understanding of death as the result of deviant sexual practices typically evoked shame, and where and where an understanding of death as the result of a virus might evoke terror and despair” (Gould 241).
Gran Fury rose from the ACT UP movement. It was a series of art activism that protested the injustices and need for more attention towards the AIDS crisis. Gran Fury often singled out prominent figures in American culture and politics. .These images is are examples of some of the artwork that was published by Gran Fury. The picture "Read My Lips" portrays homosexuality and calls upon acceptance and care. The image of “Silence=Death” portrays one of the main ideas of ACT UP. Quotes
- “Up to this point, the only emotion we had directly articulated was anger” (AF).
- “The main idea came from demos where we yelled ‘shame’ at public figures doing nothing about AIDS” (TK).
- “Like many other ‘memory losses’ or elisions, epidemics, genocide, and crises as they affect women and people of color are never acknowledged as such within the dominant, self-centered culture which defines itslef through the very exclusion of these communities” (Saalfield and Navarro 353).
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Twilight, Los Angeles -Anna Devere Smith
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At times, both Baldwin and Kingston are seen as failures to their parents for not following directly in their cultures
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Cholly serves as an example of contempt as his experience of being ridiculed by two white men rejects him of all worldly love and pleasure.
Similar to Tomkins's contempt, Cholly exhibits signs of melancholia and an inability to love (Freud quote #2).
Quote 3 of Freud relates to the idea that Oscar falls into the critique of those around him and suffers even further because of his self-criticism.
Oscar serves as an example of Tomkins's shame; however, his finding of true love with Ybón prevents him from falling into contempt as seen with Cholly.
Though Oscar often retreats to his safe-haven, he does display the ideas of Nussbaum. This is exemplified by his acceptance of his death at the end and lack of attempt to retaliate to other characters in the novel.
Quote 2 of Ahmed is exemplified by Oscar's fear of never discovering masculinity and being the only Dominican to die a virgin
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Oscar's hope for sexual pleasure is filled with disappointment and is an example of unfounded hope until he is able to finally find intimacy with Ybón.
Quote 3 of Twilight, Los Angeles relates to Gran Fury because both groups and individuals sought and called out prominent public figures to enact change for the queer and black communities.
Hooks's defining of the Other relates to the lack of attention given towards white supremacy and violence towards African Americans--a central theme of Get Out
Gran Fury can be seen as an attempt to work within the utopias and hope that Munoz describes for the queer communities
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