Author: Hudson Hooton

Colorful Class Trip

The Tenement Museum was very fun and compelling. It colored my view of the historical period we were studying during that time of the semester. Even though we did not see the main suite, it was an amazing opportunity to be in such a well replicated space. I found that being within this space was very different from watching a film or looking at photos in a classroom. Our guide gaves us personal insight into the story of the matriarch of the home we were in. It was immersive to hear about her life when within the replica of her space.

I was struck by our discussion about how colorful the interior was. Hardly any historical periods are represented with lots of color in art. Film directors are usually inclined to use a sepia tone over everything to convey the historicity of the scene. I remember that Carty mentioned that this was a sort of artistic lens. That cinematic language easily informs the viewer that you are watching a period piece of some kind. We often only get the chance to view history through a cinematic lens, and it was refreshing to get away from that. Watching a documentary or period drama, looking at a slide show, or even reading a book would not sufficiently replace the unique chance to be inside the physical space.

 

Welcome to the Week: Stonewall Uprising

The Stonewall Uprising of 1969 is a prime example of the power of active and radical revolution in challenging oppressive systems. LGBTQ+ people were routinely harassed by the police leading to the rebellion, but because they took direct and radical action against this injustice, systemic change began to be addressed. Obviously this development is neither perfect, nor complete, but by challenging the violent actions of a state with impunity, demands for change grew deafening (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/06/harvard-scholars-reflect-on-the-history-and-legacy-of-the-stonewall-riots/). 

Likewise, throughout history, marginalized communities have resorted to active and radical revolution to demand change and challenge the status quo. Where the status quo is concerned, the police often take on the role of a lethal enforcer: the destructive arm of oppressive and marginalizing tendencies in society. I would argue that the American police is one of the most harmful institutions in the history of the modern world, in comparison to other wealthy, industrialized nations*. In a very general and slightly indiscriminate summary, I think many of us can confidently categorize them as a violent, shortsighted, clumsy, hypocritical and bigoted gang of thugs. Not inventors of systemic evils, but certainly perpetrators and perpetuators. However, their blatantly tyrannical violations of rights can sometimes make way for reactive progress.

The Stonewall Uprising made oppression difficult to avoid. Sometimes, people care very little about discrimination or repression when the specific hegemonic forces at play do not harm them directly. It becomes harder for those individuals to remain passive bystanders when active unrest takes places. Radical actions are often necessary to demand change and, more importantly, to make people hear those demands.

Homophobia, and transphobia in particular, is all too rampant today; however, the fact that “people have continued to gather together in June to march with Pride and demonstrate for equal rights” goes to show how far things have come (Library of Congress).

Questions:

What kind of actions are necessary to lead to sustainable and unavoidable calls for change? 

(How) can literature lead to tangible change? How do the readings in this class attempt this? (The Jungle, Silent Spring, No-No Boy, etc etc etc!).

Are direct actions necessary? When do acts of rebellion against tyranny become “too radical”? Or counterproductive?

How does the oftentimes favorable and optimistic view of Stonewall and LGBTQ+ progress with compare and contrast to movements for racial justice? One could argue that systemic racism is so severely ingrained in the US, both culturally and institutionally, that BIPOC driven movements are given far less benefit of the doubt than their counterparts and contemporaries. Keep this crucial note from the Intro in mind: “Stonewall truly represented one at all, was a shift primarily for white cisgender people, as people of color and gender non-conforming people never truly had the benefit of concealing their marginalized identities” (Library of Congress). Is there an intersectional view of radical activism that benefits everyone?

 

*:

Climate Change in Princess Mononoke

Princess Mononoke, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is a fantastic film with themes of climate change, harmful industrialization, and the anthropocene. In Mononoke, the relationship between gods, the environment, and humanity becomes ruptured and shifts into dangerous tension. Essentially, a giant industrial factory town comes at odds with the gods and spirits of the forest. These mythological creatures represent the forest and can be seen as metonymic for the environment as a whole. Industrial pollution disrupts their lives, and these nature-personifications wage war against humanity. This story allows us to consider the disastrous effects of human industrialization on our natural worlds. Their personification allows for the viewer to relate to the climate itself, and forces us to account for their perspective. Also, the beautiful visualizations bring home that impact. As you can see above, the beautiful and verdant representations of nature are at odds with the dark and murky depictions of human settlements. Great movie, highly recommend!

Implications of Manifesto as Literature

Hudson Hooton, Kenia Torres, Michael Skrypnyk

Motivated by adversity, collective literature can empower people through expressing their ideas. Oftentimes this is in the form of manifesto, which turns attempts to activate words and turn writing into action. Labelling this work as literature solidifies it in history and allows it to be studied in a different sense. Engaging activism as literature can bring written material with real-world implications and speech-power into a new academic setting. On the other hand, classifying more and more types of written material as “literature” may make the study too broad. Perhaps a more specific categorization could allow for a better, hyper-focused, and narrow examination of activism writing and the history of activism. Is this a piece of literature or an artifact of history? How would categorizing it as one or the other change how we see it? We would need to examine this further and have more time on the assignment to answer these questions!

Alienation in “No-No Boy”

World War II Political Cartoons – by Dr. Seuss

This political cartoon, drawn by Dr. Seuss, depicts Hitler and a Japanese man. The fear preyed upon here is the exagerated idea that their faces will be carved on Mount Rushmore as opposed to American founding fathers. I am not sure if the Japanese man is meant to represent a specific person, but is interesting to note that he does not like the Japanese emperor during the time of WWII in my opinion. It’s crazy to think it might just be a stand-in figure for all Japanese people. This just goes to show why people may still have been hesitant for a book critical of anti-Japanese racism in 1956. Japanese people, and racist charicatures of Japanese people, were a bonafide symbol of villainy.

 

What does it mean to read No-No Boy in this class? In this time period?

This novel is still extremely relevant today, and goes to show how universal the immigrant experience in the US can be. Ichiro feels alienated and isolated as an outsider due to his nationality. This theme is particularly relevant in the context of modern politics and the rise of alt-right xenophobia. There has been a growing sense of nationalism and a backlash against diversity and immigration. In the US, this is particularly relevant for immigrants from Latin America and the Middle East/North Africa, and in Europe it is especially focused on the Middle East/North Africa. In the last few years, the rise of fascism internationally has occurred parallel to this backlash against multiculturalism, meaning both the discriminatory practices against immigrants/people of color/foreigners and the global threat of fascism are still present. Racism and anti-immigration movements, both in policy and socially, reject many individuals who try to find a place in Western societies, mirroring Ichiro‘s personal struggles with being an outsider. This novel is still very important in reflecting the experiences of people of color and immigrants in the West.

Dehumanization in “The Jungle” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”

This podcast, produced by Natalia Flores and Hudson Hooton, aims to explore and analyze dehumanization in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Charlotte Gilman-Perkins’ The Yellow Wallpaper. In The Jungle, Sinclair is determined to reveal cracks in American capitalism, how the system abuses its workers, especially immigrants, that are often more susceptible to the abuses of poor working conditions and the naivety of the American dream. Likewise, Charlotte Gilman Perkins examines the value of the body through a mentally-ill woman, the narrator, placed on bed rest by her husband, a physician, and essentially rendered helpless, inept and sees her sanity vanish by the end of The Yellow Wallpaper. Both have instances of successfully critiquing the dehumanization of oppressed people at the hands of the hegemonically powerful. While Gilman Perkins is intentionally attempting to warn the reader of the perilous danger of gendered dehumanization, Sinclair’s portrayal of the worker dehumanization leaves the reader unclear with what he is attempting to persuade us of. At times, Sinclair is hypocritical and plays directly into the very same oppressive power structure he aims to critique. The podcast was inspired by the stimulating discussions of our classmates, and of course would not be possible without the help of Professor Erica Richardson.

Works Cited

Fredrickson, Barbara L., and Tomi-Ann Roberts. “Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, 1997. 

Min, Sungeun. “Commodification.” Commodification | Neoliberalism, University of Georgia, 2020, http://neolib.uga.edu/commodification.php. 

“Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry.” CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FOUNDATION: Bill of Rights in Action, vol. 24, no. 1, 2008, https://doi.org/https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-24-1-b-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle-muckraking-the-meat-packing-industry.html#:~:text=Sinclair’s%20The%20Jungle%3A-,Muckraking%20the%20Meat%2DPacking%20Industry,new%20federal%20food%20safety%20laws`. 

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Standard Ebooks, 2014.

DuBois’ Mountainous Freedom

When explaining the path of knowledge and ubderstanding to freedom, DuBois says: “Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life” (Chapter 1). In this metaphor, freedom is a peak that one must traverse a difficult road to achieve. The journey to ultimate or true freedom is longer than the highway of emancipation and law but leads to a higher destination. By using the metaphorical imagery of roads and mountain, his comparison indicates that more rewarding and desirable freedom requires more work than declarations of legal freedom. Civil rights and political power are important stepping stones for freedom—a necessary stop on the “highway” to liberty—but getting to the summit is both more arduous and more gratifying, according to DuBois. This is a recurring theme in The Souls of Black Folk: it seems as if he argues that freedom must be a personal and communal self-realization—an achievement that goes beyond the supposed freedom allowed by white lawmakers. Equity, emancipation, and fulfillment require a fully realized identity and culture, which is why he emphasizes things like music, in the “Songs of Sorrow”.

Coming completely from a place of curiosity (not of assuming I know better or really have any place in this conversation) I wonder if this is a bit demeaning, as it places a bunch of responsibility to achieve freedom on the people whose freedom was stolen.

The Jungle: Unionism

Sinclair explains that packers “had spies in all the unions, and in addition they made a practice of buying up a certain number of the union officials” and that “Anyone who was considered to be dangerous by them would find that he was not a favorite with his boss” (Sinclair, Chapter 10). By explicitly portraying the situation of duress that union members were under, Sinclair decries and exposes union busting as part of his muckraking. He reveals that spies attempt to dissuade workers from organizing.

An article by Peter Zwiebach argues that this type of anti-unionism is still as ever present today as it was during the era of industrialization depicted by Upton Sinclair (Zwiebach 105). Several other articles discuss the fact that despite Sinclair’s polemics, union busting and anti-unionism persists to this day (Block et. al.) (Fast). Despite the fact that some of these articles link the lineage of union activism and organization to Sinclair’s muckraking novel, the impact of The Jungle is far more felt when it comes to food quality investigation. We have discussed this before in class, but it is sad that some of the anti-capitalist critique in the book is overlooked and overshadowed by the food and drug aspect.

 

Zwiebach , Peter. “An American Tragedy: The Decline of U.S. Unionism and Its Human Rights Implications.” Human Rights & Human Welfare, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 101–111. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=hrhw

“Welcome to the jungle: organized labor in decline.” Justice on the Job: Perspectives on the Erosion of Collective Bargaining in the United States. Edited by Richard N. Block, Sheldon Friedman, Michelle Kaminski, and Andy Levin, Kalamazoo, MI, W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2006, pp. 355

Fast, Howard. “It’s not the Jungle anymore.” Social Policy, vol. 32, no. 3, spring 2002, pp. 56+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A87011355/AONE?u=nysl_me_sfc&sid=googleScholar&xid=e343adfc.

 

Bodies in the Machine: Jun, Natalia, Sophia

Jun, Natalia, Sophia

Women with womb-trouble have little room to take care of themselves and are forced by circumstance to continue to work with little care to them despite their medical issues. They have to use their own personal remedies and solutions to chase “the phantom of good health and losing it because she was too poor to continue,” (Sinclair, Chapter 10). They are used for their capacity as a worker and not much more. Even further, their function as mothers just enables Packingtown to have more workers in the future. 

This commodification is not limited to those with womb-trouble. There is “grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest⁠—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal,” (Sinclair, Chapter 14). This resourceful treatment of the meat brought into the processing plant mirrors the treatment of the workers who pack the meat. They are described, not by names, but by titles: “Squeedgie men”, “hoisters”, “wool-pullers” etc. This serves to dehumanize and objectify the laborers. Even their bodies are consumed by the machine of Packingtown: “their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting⁠” (Sinclair, Chapter 9).

Fantasy Casting of The Jungle

Dreamy dreamer Jurgis.
In this adaptation, Ona is ripped.

Jurgis is physically strong and has “thick black hair that curled in waves” and thick eyebrows (Sinclair, Chapter 1). He is young and gigantic (Sinclair, Chapter 2 first page). Because his Lithuanian roots are important to his character and to the story, it may be important to consider reflecting this in our casting. Jurgis is a bit of a contradictory character between appearance and vibe. (slight spoiler alert) I know that despite having strength and strong features, he is beaten down by the brutal life of a meat packing worker. He has lots of energy and enthusiasm and confidence in the American dream, but ultimately he is exploited. In summary, Jurgis is a Lithuanian with strong, dark features and he is a dreamer to be disillusioned through the course of our film. My choice for this role is a young Sean Penn. Dark curly hair, strong eyebrows, Lithuanian roots, and both a sense of energy and also seriousness to take on the disillusionment arc of Jurgis. He may not have the “mighty shoulders and […] giant hands” of Jurgis, but I think he can still convey toughness in his performances (Sinclair, Chapter 1). As Ona is not the protagonist, we get just a bit less information about her appearance and personality. She is feminine, petite, blue-eyed and fair–in contrast to Jurgis physically. She is loving, dutiful, and responsible. She is described as “One of God’s gentlest creatures”, but this is my movie and in my movie she is a tough, muscular woman (Sinclair, Chapter 1). Not sure if she has Lithuanian or immigrant roots, which may pose problems; however, Emily Blunt can both act as a good counterpart to young Sean Penn with her light features, while also being fittingly gritty for the setting of the film. At the time, Sinclair’s use of hyper feminized and hyper masculinized tropes may have been very effective in his muckraking 100 years ago, but I do not think these archetypes are necessary in my fantasy casting in 2023.