Reflection on a Spring Break Experience Abroad–by Grace Gardner

On February 28th, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Mexico City over spring break with the Honors College at the College of Charleston. While there, I had the chance to experience Mexico in an interdisciplinary way: through art, history, and culture. I traveled for a week with eight classmates and my professor, who provided us with a rich and diverse education on all the places and sites we went to.

The experience of taking an interdisciplinary class affected me on a personal, professional and social level. I have learned about many countries in my college career, but being able to travel to a country after learning about it makes for a much more integrated experience. I didn’t just learn about the Aztecs and their contribution to society, but I got to climb Aztec pyramids and touch the ruins in the Museum of Anthropology. I had the opportunity to work on my Spanish language skills, conversing with our taxi drivers and Mexican students.

It was a privilege being able to take this class. For the first time I realized how little I, and most Americans, know about our neighbor to the south. When people hear the word, ‘Mexico,’ it is normally associated with negative images. People often think of drug cartels, party beaches, and illegal immigration when they think of Mexico, but there is so much more to Mexico than that. Traveling to Mexico City has completely shifted my view of Mexico and has given me the opportunity to share that positive image with others. It challenged me to globally rethink my views of other countries, as well as wonder about other countries’ perceptions of the United States. Mexican Americans make up 11% of the United States population and it is necessary to understand Mexican art, history, and culture, in order to strengthen the relationship between the US and Mexico. Reading Mexican political texts has made me rethink my ideas about immigration and economics, and after traveling to Mexico, I firmly believe that a strengthening the ties between Mexico and the United States would be mutually beneficial for both countries.

After dedicating half a semester to the study of Mexico, it was extremely rewarding to travel there myself. I had a wonderful time getting to know my Honors College classmates and professor on a deeper level, and it was an experience I will never forget.

-Grace

 

Half of a Yellow Sun review by Hannah Evans

Clocking in at over 500 pages, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel Half of a Yellow Sun (published in 2006) is a weighty work both in form and subject. It engages with a pivotal event in Nigerian history, the kind of event that creates ‘before’ and ‘after’ stories: the civil war, the Biafran War. It is a war that results from tensions between Igbo and Hausa, north and south, from lingering colonial structures. It is a war that begins with the southern Igbo secession from Nigeria as the Republic of Biafra and the subsequent violent action of the Nigerian government against this new state. It is a war, like any war, that is complicated and violent and flinchingly human. And it is a war that began in 1967, precisely a decade before Adichie was born. Both her grandfathers died as Biafran refugees, and her novel is an imagining of the event through intimate relationships, multiple narratives and multiple times: homage to a national memory. The book takes its title from the powerful image of the rising sun on the Biafran flag.

Creating a film adaptation of such a hefty, complex novel is an ambitious task. Though unconfirmed, many suspect that censors delayed the Nigerian release of the film adaptation of Half of a Yellow Sun due to its content on the Biafran War and a fear that it might incite violence in the wake of the recent Boko Haram attacks. Director Biyi Bandele, in an opinion piece for CNN, discusses this possibility and calls the delay “a clumsy, heavy-handed ban in all but name.” He maintains that no Nigerians who have seen the movie have had any inclination toward violence; rather, the movie has had a great Nigerian reception. It is, I think, a moving, emotional film that reaches in many directions, though I don’t quite think that writer-director Biyi Bandele manages to interweave the narratives of political and personal as seamlessly as Adichie does in the novel. The cast is full of big names. The film centers on wealthy sisters Olanna (Thandie Newton) and Kainene (Anika Noni Rose), Olanna’s lover, Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Kainene’s white British ex-pat novelist lover, Richard (Joseph Mawle). The story spans the decade from 1960 to 1970 in Nigeria. Unlike the novel, the film does so chronologically, interspersing black and white news footage with the more warm-toned narrative. In some ways the film freely gives context perhaps to a fault; it uses maps and words scrawled on the screen to show the characters’ movements around the country.

Both Olanna and Odenigbo are academics in Nsukka committed to the Biafran cause, Odenigbo deemed “the revolutionary,” mostly by Kainene. The film revolves around their personal and romantic conflicts, conflicts that mirror political conflicts. Their personal conflict culminates in the meddling of Odenigbo’s mother, who disapproves of the well-educated Olanna as a match for her son. As she hopes and plots, Odenigbo has a child with Amala, his mother’s housemaid. Olanna ultimately adopts the child, “Baby,” as her own, though not before she in her anger has a one-time, wine-fueled fling with Richard, which causes a rift between her and Kainene. The war eventually resolves and supersedes these conflicts. Of all the characters, I was left wanting more screen time for the compelling and enterprising Kainene and a more complex critique of Richard’s relationship to the other characters and the context as an ex-pat novelist claiming some stake in Biafra.

One of the most interesting parts of the novel, for me, is Adichie’s egalitarian treatment of diverse narrative voices, important among them (arguably most important and overarching), the narrative voice of Ugwu, Odenigbo and Olanna’s houseboy, who ends up fighting in the war. In the film, Ugwu becomes the likeable boy who burns rice and reunites, albeit wounded, with Odenigbo and Olanna after fighting in the midst of war’s horror. In the book, Ugwu becomes a narrator readers sympathize with implicated in the war, who participates in the rape of a girl during the war and carries the guilt with him, and who is one of the most insightful of the novel’s characters. What would the film be like with more of his voice? Similarly, I wanted to see the scene where Kainene, in her anger, burns Richard’s novel-in-progress The Basket of Hands.

It should be said, however, that a film has different constraints than a novel; it is necessarily condensed. Half of a Yellow Sun, the film, is certainly accessible to a wide range of audiences, and I think this is good. Ejiofor, Newton, and Rose all gave a visceral performance. War sequences, like the wrenching scene of the interruption of Odenigbo and Olanna’s wedding by an air strike, move the plot along and give it an underlying sense of the violent tension of the war. For spanning such a long period of time, I thought the film well paced. I liked that it ended with present-day updates on the characters, further blurring the genre lines of fiction and documentary. It did, ultimately, leave me with a small sense of disconnect. The passion was there; the desperation of war was there. However, though the film format makes it more difficult than in a novel, I still wanted to see more of the daringly complex characterization and perspective that make the novel so compelling.

 

Book recommendation: Stand in the Trench, Achilles

If you’ve attended this semester’s WWI poetry readings in Cougar Mall, and even if you haven’t, but are interested, the GAF would like to share Marguerite Johnson’s review of Elizabeth Vandiver’s Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, which Johnson described as a “truly successful interdisciplinary achievement”. The book explores poetry of the Great War, with a special focus on influences from the literature of antiquity, and notes many gruesome but poetic connections between scenes of warfare across the span of time. This August marked the centennial anniversary of the beginning of WWI, but this book’s significance is in its emphasis on certain terrible, but timeless qualities of war. The review can be found online at http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1681.

 

A response to “Reappraising the Fortress City: Risk, Security, and Military Urbanism”

Reappraising the Fortress City: Risk, Security, and Military Urbanism
Urban Studies Convocation, October 16, 2014

Presentation by Jon Coaffee, Ph.D.
University of Warwick

Summary by Kevin Keenan

Dr. Jon Coaffee, a world-renowned expert on terrorism, risk, vulnerability, and resilience delivered the fall 2014 convocation of urban studies majors and minors with support from the Global Awareness Forum.  Dr. Coaffee directs the Resilient Cities Laboratory (ResCity Lab) at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and he is an Exchange Professor at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).   He is trained as an urban geographer, and his research focuses on the physical and social-political aspects of urban resilience.

Dr. Coaffee’s presentation focused on the emergence of “splintered urbanism,” by which he meant the creation of security cocoons to protect people and resources from terrorist attacks in dense urban areas.  These security areas, such as London’s “ring of steel” surrounding the downtown area, and other efforts to secure Canary Warf, are literally inscribed into the landscape with various forms of protective architecture (such as bollards, fences, cordons, and surveillance).  However, these islands of security leave other areas, often poorer and more diverse, with little protection.  He theorized that the terrorist threat is ultimately displaced to these areas.  This thesis is supported with evidence of where bombings in London have actually occurred.  Attacks still occur despite the protected areas, but the risk is displaced to those communities with fewer resources for responding.  Dr. Coaffee asked the audience to think about how security becomes embedded into the everyday practices of some aspects and locations of our lives, but not others.

On “Coming Home” and Global Memory of the Cultural Revolution

Response by Maya Novák-Cogdell

On Friday, October 24th, the Greater Chinese Association of Charleston, in partnership with the Chinese Studies department at the College of Charleston, hosted a discussion and screening of the film Coming Home (2014). The film spans decades and centers on how one Chinese family was splintered by the Cultural Revolution, and how they were able, in some capacities, to put the pieces back together. The discussion that followed the film was equally interesting, giving audience members, some with very personal connections to the effect of the Cultural Revolution, an arena to voice their (varied) opinions on China’s memory of the Great Leap Forward, the Down to the Countryside movement, the Red Guards, and communism with Chinese characteristics, as well the film itself.

The movie begins in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, and centers on a small family, Li, Yu and their daughter, Dandan, Yanshi. Li, accused of being a rightist, has been imprisoned, and later is sent to the countryside to be re-educated, fracturing the family for many years, and causing its remaining members to be judged by others on account of the reasons for Li’s absence. However, the movie’s primary focus is on the way the family reunites, attempting to forge new ties where the previous intimate family dynamic is irreparably damaged; marked by the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution that forced them apart in the first place.

Following the film screening, a panel of C of C faculty members with distinct connections to China set up in the front, and opened the flood for questions, interpretations criticism of the film, which quickly lead to an open discussion on the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Lei Jin commented that Chinese people can have many kinds of memory of the events and times. Official memory, social memory and personal memory were three differentiated by Dr. Jin. Of the three, official memory, created, in a sense, by the Chinese government, acknowledged the events of the time but did not dwell on the horrors or account for any lasting effects. Dr. Jin noted that in a newly-renovated Chinese history museum in Beijing, the Cultural Revolution received only one small exhibit space, which glossed over the true impact of the era. Social memory, specifically representations in film and literature, were pronounced to be more honest and telling of what conditions and experiences were really like. However, censorship on both the individual and state levels is seen as a barrier for these mediums (even Coming Home) in informing the audience. Finally, personal memory was described as being the most anxiety provoking of all three—many audience members recalled that family members or friends who had been directly impacted by the Cultural Revolution were not quick to share their stories; most outright refusing to acknowledge what had happened, or giving only the history that the Party had approved. In one heated moment during the event, a man stood to confidently declare (to the outward chagrin of most of the crowd) that the Cultural Revolution had only affected a minority (one to five percent, in his estimation) of the population, and that most Chinese citizens actually benefitted from it, and now held it to be a positive part of their national history. His opinion was not widely held by those assembled, and yet could be seen as an extension of the exact re-configuring of history that we were dissecting.

Another audience member remarked about wanting to know more about how understanding of the Cultural Revolution era depended on the age of the narrator. The story might vary widely, one could argue, depending on if the narrator was of the generation of the Red Guard vs. the previous generation they were taught to mistrust, or of the children of Red Guard members, born into a time where much of history was taboo. Age group membership, panelists and audience members agreed, seemed not to affect the willingness of the individual to share their personal memory, and instead had a greater impact on the kinds of art created, particularly in the representations of the Red Guard in this media—both negatively as an expression of guilt and no-so-negatively, causing the audience to identify them as acting out of fear, or because of their youth, and effectively humanizing, if not apologizing for their actions.

Connections between the Cultural Revolution and the Holocaust are frequently drawn, but personally I find that comparisons to the Dirty Wars in Latin America are more accurate, specifically regarding collective national/regional and global memory. While, likely because of the maintained cultural integrity of Jewish communities in worldwide diaspora, as well as the global intervention and action in World War II, public knowledge and memory of the Holocaust is brutal, but widespread, and German reparations domestically and outwardly have been carefully exacted. There have been, however, no Nuremberg trials for the events of the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, among other nations formerly ruled by military dictatorships (juntas), war criminals have been granted amnesty or have avoided trial. In most cases, this stems from a perception that people want to move on from these events, echoed by the unwillingness of survivors to share their experiences. Literature, particularly an increase in postmodern resistance literature, and the usage of magical realism and fragmentation to express an inability to trust the “official story” and the need to create a narrative, or at least perception of one’s own, also seems to reflect the events of the Dirty War. It seems almost ironic that although the Cultural Revolution targeted rightists and the Dirty Wars leftists; intellectuals, doctors, and students were persecuted in both series of conflicts.

Westerners, especially at the time of these traumas, were not as concerned with China or Latin America as we were with (Western) Europe, which likely also informs our heightened awareness of the Holocaust and our lack of awareness of the Cultural Revolution or the Dirty Wars. This then, makes events like this one, fostering discussion and critical thought about a difficult and relatively unfamiliar topic, more important. Audience members noted that though the plot had “Chinese characteristics”, the story was universally accessible, and could be adapted and applied to other eras of violent political and cultural anguish and upheaval. In the face of the ongoing and consistently appalling violence in Iraq, Syria, Mexico and Somalia, etc., it is even more important for students, faculty, and especially community members (the inclusion of which greatly diversified the discourse and analysis), to come together and actively participate in didactic memory of past trauma, to foster a dedication to eradicating suffering in the world we all live in.

A Student’s Reaction to An Evening with David Finkel

by Logan Finley

David Finkel is a man oozing with stories. As he conveyed the circumstances surrounding the men and women affected by war, his words seemed propelled by deep convictions. Often, his awareness to the audience passed into oblivion, as he entered into his own mind- a mind tortured with the stories. There were moments throughout his speech that the remnants of what he experienced while in Iraq not only exploded off of the pages, but filled the aisles and crept into the hearts of those who were listening. The surrounding theme of the talk was stories; stories of brokenness, stories of devastation, stories of remorse, stories of the men and women who not only fought a battle in the Iraq War but also the war that was waged after their return home. I believe David himself said it best, “Good Soldiers is only half of the story. Its an ongoing war when you return.”

He portrayed the story of Shumann, a man labeled as the “good solider”. A man who experienced deployment three times before leaving as an injured and dead man in a red cross helicopter. His wounds weren’t external but internal. Finkle depicted the story of Michael Emory, who lost his daughter and wife because of his irrational actions. Now, his relationship with both is fully expressed through phone calls and a cross country distance from his family. Amanda Doster’s story was told. She is a woman battered by the loss of her husband, constantly living within the grips of a false reality that he’s alive somewhere and will be returning home to her one day. And finally, the story of Danny was told- the story of a man who couldn’t find his way out of the deep, dark depression that encompassed him until the day he hung himself, in order to obtain some sense of solace.

We all have a  story being written, a grand, and meaningful script to follow. Everyone in the universe has some war being waged inside of them and your individual story comes out when you choose to either fight or submit. This life unfortunately is not constructed around peace. After hearing David Finkle explain the affects of war, it illustrates just how desperate this world is for something more meaningful- a ray of light, if you will. I believe wholeheartedly that our generation has the ability to unite and shine a light bright enough to eliminate the shadows caste by a war zone. It is time to rewrite the story of humanity. Opposed to destruction and violence, love and peace will be the ink. Opposed to war, unification will be the pen, and opposed to enemies, friendships will be the scribe. [1]

[1] (Sleeping At Last- Mars) This song was playing in my head the entire time David Finkle was speaking. If War had a theme song, I believe this would be it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtU_7SHYEnI

 

C of C Model United Nations

Model UN is an annual simulation designed for students at the College of Charleston to practice the skills of international diplomacy, negotiation, and public speaking. During this 2-day event held on November 7-8 students will represent different countries will have the opportunity to learn about the history, culture, politics, and economy of the country they choose to represent. This is a great opportunity to learn about and debate global issues and develop leadership skills.

Students will be asked to do background research on the country they represent and on issues discussed in their committees. Each student will also be required to prepare a one-page position paper. Finally, students will meet for a General Assembly meeting in November for the final debate. In fall 2014, we will discuss the following issues:

1)   The use of drones in peacekeeping missions.

2)   Ebola and pandemic outbreak prevention and containment

3)   Sovereignty, territory, and natural resources

4)   One other TBD!

In order to get involved, visit http://modelun.cofc.edu to view the list of available countries, and send an email to CharlestonModelUN@gmail.com in order to reserve your spot!