A few weeks ago, as I was scrolling through my social media feed, someone commented on Chris Smith’s Devo, a documentary on the Akron, Ohio band. The post pointed out that watching the band’s early performances during the 1970s really solidified them within the lineage of punk. Taken together with their ideological positions and aesthetic, Devo embody punk. Inspired by the Dadaist and other twentieth … Read More Why We Need Art!
We know the power of education. We know of its power to expand one’s worldview and to teach students how to become members of a collective society. However, we also know about the controlling nature of education, the way it becomes an extension of those in power and used as a means of control, to gain and maintain power over a populace. Nazi Germany … Read More The Role of Education in Indoctrination in Anna Seghers’ “A Man Becomes a Nazi”
+ anna seghers, belonging: a german reckons with history and home, history, holocaust, lillian e smith, nora krug, world war ii
The generational trauma of oppression impacts everyone involved: the oppressed and the oppressor alike. While the trauma does not impact each in the same manner, it creates psychological trauma that each must endure. Lillian Smith points this out in Killers of the Dream when she writes “that the warped, distorted frame we have put around every negro child from birth is around every white … Read More We Must Remain Ever Vigilant of Ourselves
Fear arises not just through a lack of action but also through, as Lillian Smith puts it, “the singsong voices of politicians who preached their demonic suggestions to us as if elected by Satan to do so.” The creation of an enemy, of an other, outside of ourselves, someone we look down upon as “uncivilized,” “unintelligent,” “inferior,” or “”bestial,” serves as a weaponization of … Read More “We’d find it hard to have enemies if we cared about what happened to them”: How the Construction of “Enemies” Harms Us All
+ anna seghers, graphic memoir, graphic novels, joe sacco, keum suk gendry-kim, mana neyestani, marjane satratpi, nora krug, rutu modan, syllabus
Last semester, I taught a course entitled The Reverberations of World War II where students read works by Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, Magda Szabó, Intizar Husain, and Yasa Katsuei. The course focused, specifically, on the lead up to the war (Katsuei), the war itself (Seghers, Serge, and Szabó), and the aftermath of the war (Szabó and Husain) across the world from Korea to France to Hungary … Read More World Literature and Graphic Novel Syllabus
Interminable Rambling 