I was asked to share a reflection/response to the exhibit Anting Anting | Magic Objects by Michael Arcega at a Thacher/CRASE collaborative event “Inspirations from Anting Anting: Magic Objects of Protection.”
Art is not only personal to the artist who created it but also to the person viewing it. I chose the piece “Doña Señorita”: Matriarchal power enhancement. I was drawn to it initially because I love señorita bananas. At a deeper level, the piece makes me remember my home, my family. It symbolizes the generations of Locsin women – past, present and future.
112235121
I am from my mother, my father
From Wo Sin Lok
from Amoy 268 years ago
I am from my family,
small, quiet, large, noisy, 5 in 82
I am from the garnet
hard, durable, yet soft, vulnerable
I am from the diamond
unique, creative, reflecting light to make rainbows
I am from my grandmother
petite, powerful, God fearing,
I am from those who attend Mass, pray the novena
yet believe the theories of Darwin and Lemaitre
I am from the sugar capital of the Philippines
from the home of the aswang
I am from the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
yet believe in the lore of kapre, dwende, tiyanak
I pray the Our Father, Hail Mary and the Glory Be
but say “Tabi Tabi po” to pay respects to the elementals
I am from Washington DC
but call myself a proud Ilongga
I am from the Balay Dako
from the house that burnt to ashes
I am from the Bisaya, Hiligaynon
gentle, soft-spoken, meek
yet direct, honest, to the point
I am from the ones who taught me right from wrong
those who taught me the importance of delicadeza
yet I live in the land where it is non-existent
I am from my Yaya Goya
I am from my Lola Inday
the king, queen, empress, the last word
I am from the Holy Rosary
Ako ang nanay ni Isabel
I am 112235121
Vocabulary:
Ako ang nanay ni Isabel means I am Isabel’s mother.
Aswang means witch
Balay Dako means big house
Delicadeza means being refined or having manners, etiquette. it means having the sense of propriety or how to behave under the circumstance.
Dwende is a dwarf who live in anthills, termite mounds (punso) who are either good or bad
Ilongga refers to the females of the Visayans who speak the Hiligaynon/Illongo dialect.
Kapre is a Philippine mythical tree giant
“Tabi tabi, po” means excuse me, pardon me, please move to the side
Tiyanak is a vampiric creature who imitates the form of a child; sounds like a child and when someone picks it up, it goes back to its true form and attacks.
Liza Locsin is Assistant to the Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a ninth generation Pilipino (of Chinese origin). 112235121 is her number in the Locsin genealogy. There are 82 people in her family on her father’s side.
A Series of Events sponsored by a CRASE Interdisciplinary Action Group Grant
Event #1: Public Enemy, an Adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People
Produced by the Performing Arts and Social Justice Program
On April 25, 2014, water officials from Flint, Michigan celebrated as they pushed the button that moved the city’s water supply from the Detroit River, which had supplied it for decades, to the heavily polluted Flint River. The benefits were almost purely financial.
As a librarian who is passionate about languages, literature, pedagogy, and research, I’m curious about how technology assists their study and practice. I’m also confident that technological innovation needs the critical and constructive perspectives of humanities students and scholars. For these reasons, I wanted to become more proficient in a field that delves into many of these interests and concerns: digital humanities (DH). So, I decided to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (or DHSI) at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
DHSI has been held at the University of Victoria for almost two decades. It’s evolved over time into a 2-week institute where participants take intensive, week-long classes in a particular area of digital humanities. There are also preconference sessions, conversational sessions, and daily colloquia. Longtime practitioners in DH teach, learn, and share ideas and projects alongside professors, librarians, archivists, graduate students, independent scholars, and journalists from all over the world — some who have been using digital tools and methods in their work for a long time, and others, like me, who are just starting out.
I arrived at DHSI with all of the anticipation, excitement, and nervousness that new learning adventures often bring. I soon found that I had nothing to be apprehensive about because DHSI and the University of Victoria provided a welcoming environment. And, any lingering homesickness that I might have been harboring was quickly abated by an assigned reading which mentioned Roberto Busa, a Jesuit priest and librarian who is often cited as the father of digital humanities. I learned that in the late 1940s, Busa asked IBM to assist him with work on the Index Thomisticus, a tool that made Thomas Aquinas’ corpus searchable. This project was a multi-year endeavor and a great example of the Jesuit influence on DH.
Digital tools are built a lot faster than they were in the 1940s. I learned that common DH methods and projects – such as text analysis, data visualization, mapping, and online publishing – may have any number of different tools, both open-source and proprietary, that scholars use to help them ask and answer new questions. One tool that I particularly liked experimenting with was Voyant – a simple and easy-to-learn open source text analysis and data visualization tool.
Screenshot of a Voyant Tools analysis of DHSI website text
Playing around and experimenting with different tools was fun, but a common refrain at DHSI was to be reflective and discerning about the use of these tools and their value to one’s particular research or projects. Course facilitators stressed that vetting tools is an important part of their research process.
As a result of the reflection and learning I was encouraged to do at DHSI, my own notion of and interests in digital humanities expanded considerably. I began conceiving of my own DH less in terms of tools and methods like text analysis, and more in terms of creating digital collections in collaboration with community stakeholders.
For example, how can I creatively use, remix, learn, and tell new stories or ask new questions with our existing library collections, both digital and analog? And how can I enhance these stories with multimodal learning and experience – by including aspects such as 3D replicas, sound, maps, and timelines? How can I involve our campus community in this endeavor? And, in keeping with our USF mission of changing the world from here, how do projects like digital exhibits make scholarship accessible and in service to communities outside of academia?
Furthermore, the two intensive classes that I took at DHSI – Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities (facilitated by Robin DeRosa and Chris Friend) and Models for DH at Liberal Art Colleges and Four Year Institutions (facilitated by Angel Nieves and Janet Simon) – encouraged participants to integrate student learning early and often in our DH work. In one of my classes, we talked about creating an online, interactive and open source Early American English literature textbook with and for undergraduates.
I also heard about student DH summer fellowships, where students earned summer course credit for conceiving of and creating a DH project in collaboration with faculty mentors. For example: Lauren White, a junior at Gettysburg College and a double major in Environmental Studies and English, worked with Musselman Library as a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow. Using a platform called Scalar and material curated from her institution’s special collections and archives, White created This is Why We Fight, an interactive timeline of student-led social justice movements at Gettysburg College.
Screenshot of Gettysburg College student Lauren White’s project, “This is Why We Fight.”
Here is another example of a project that I enjoyed learning about: Undergraduate and graduate students and their professor, Dr. Kristin Allukian at the University of South Florida, used a platform called Omeka to create, in consultation with a librarian, a searchable, cataloged digital collection or database of suffrage postcards, and are using this database alongside historical research to analyze and ask questions about these artifacts and their historical context. Their work is online and available for anyone to browse or use.
With examples like these as inspiration, I returned home from DHSI thinking about related projects I’ve worked on in the past, and those I’d like to work on in the future. I’m still interested in text mining and analysis (particularly after reading this article). But as a result of attending DHSI, I’m interested in so much more now.
My time at DHSI inspired me to consider the rich content in the USF library’s digital collections and how I might embark on a digital project or exhibit with students that curates content from and uses these collections to tell a story like the one Lauren White tells in “This is Why We Fight.” For example, what stories might be told with the library’s newly digitized collection of USF Foghorn newspapers? I’ve also been browsing Calisphere’scollectionsand digital exhibits for examples of exhibitions and ideas. Calisphere is a project of the California Digital Library, into which all ten University of California campuses, in addition to other California universities, libraries, and cultural institutions (including USF) have contributed digitized content. Last year, Calisphere began accepting proposals for exhibits, or “curated sets of items with scholarly interpretation that contribute to historical understanding.”
My two week immersion at DHSI was, of course, not nearly enough for me to become fluent in digital humanities. As many people I met at the institute suggested, however: it’s OK to start small, and learn from each other as we embark on this work. Collaboration and continued professional development is key. I now feel comfortable tapping the community from DHSI for help in this endeavor. A few librarians at Gleeson Library | Geschke Center also have interests in digital humanities and digital scholarship. I know our Digitization Librarian, Jessica Lu, our scholarly communications librarian Charlotte Roh, and others are excited to discuss the possibilities of DH at the University of San Francisco, too.
Colette Hayes is an assistant librarian at Gleeson Library | Geschke Center.
Event Organized by:
Jane Bleasdale, Ph.D., jbleasdale@usfca.edu, Assistant Professor, Department of Leadership Studies
Amie Dowling, MFA, asdowling@usfca.edu, Associate Professor, Performing Arts Department
Daniela Domínguez, Psy.D., dgdominguez@usfca.edu, Assistant Professor, Counseling Psychology Department
With Donald Trump in office, 2017 was a challenging year for the transgender community in the United States. President Trump’s inaccurate understanding of sexuality and gender has led to the reversal of Obama-era positions on transgender rights and the creation of policies that attempt to harm transgender students, troops, and workers. Disheartened by these discriminatory attacks, professors Jane Bleasdale, Amie Dowling, and Daniela Dominguez felt the need to take action against President Trump’s attempts to silence and oppress the transgender community.
Sponsored by the Center for Research, Artistic, and Scholarly Excellence (CRASE) and the McGrath Institute for Jesuit Catholic Education, we produced “Trans-Scripts,” an artistic celebration based on the words and lived experiences of people from the transgender community. Trans-Scripts is a dramatic reading that is grounded in intersectional practice, an appreciation for the preservation of transgender rights, and a spirit of resistance to the reversal of progress. This performance featured transgender students and alum, women from El/La Para Trans Latinas, and photographs of transgender women by Kique Bazan of El/La Para Trans Latinas.
Photo credit: Kique Bazan
The process of creating “Trans-Scripts” started with 58 pages of interviews conducted by Professor Bleasdale with transgender individuals who attended K-12 Catholic and Public Schools. The interviews were edited to a 14-page script, and a backdrop of layered text from the Trump administration was added. Six rehearsals were held, and throughout the creative process, the producers provided mentorship, training, and encouragement to performers, which created avenues for them to feel empowered to use their voice and assert the value of their performance.
The final performance took place during the week of Transgender Awareness on November 14, 2017, at the University of San Francisco’s Intercultural Center and included a 30-minute dramatic reading and a 30-minute panel discussion led by the performers. The artists delivered an intimate performance that reflected the sociocultural challenges that Dr. Bleasdale’s participants have experienced throughout their journeys. The performance was infused with music selected by the research participants to help audience members better understand the affective dimensions of their lives. “Trans-scripts” was a performance that was as strong and powerful as the transgender communities it represented.
During the panel discussion, faculty, students, community members, producers, and performers, discussed strategies to dismantle cisgender privilege and other forms of oppression. Performers encouraged professors at the University of San Francisco to deepen their relationships with transgender students in order to build safer, more inclusive, and thriving classrooms where their identities are honored. They also drew attention to the importance of using correct pronouns as a demonstration of respect, awareness, and solidarity with the trans community.
Surrounding the stage were 26 photographs captured by Kique Bazan, a longtime activist for justice with years of experience working with advocacy organizations and an adjunct lecturer at the University of San Francisco (USF). His photography contested conventional social constructions of transgender individuals and encouraged cross-cultural dialogue on the importance of moving beyond the male-female dichotomy to increase understanding of the complex multicultural and intersectional identities of the transgender individuals that emerge and develop within them.
Photo credit: Kique Bazan
“Trans-scripts” was well attended with over 70 guests which included women from El/La Para Trans Latinas, outreach educators from the Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center, the Director of USF’s Counseling and Psychological Services, the Director of the Lane Center, the Director of the Intercultural Center, staff and faculty across USF, and many others. Given the presence of monolingual Spanish-speaking guests from El/La, event programs were offered in English and Spanish. During the panel discussion, I provided translations throughout the dialogue to ensure the participation of our Spanish-speaking guests. During the discussion, audience members expressed powerful emotional responses to the performance.
We believe that our event sent a message to the Bay Area community that the University of San Francisco is interested in creating inclusive and affirming environments where transgender students, staff, and faculty can feel safe, protected, and celebrated.
The day I started writing this essay, two students were killed in yet another high school shooting in the United States. This time it was in New Mexico. The day I came back to revise, a policeman had shot and killed a 6-year old boy in San Antonio. Today, as I go back over this a third time, there was a school shooting in Kentucky. Two students were killed; 18 injured. Every day I have returned to work on this piece, there has been a shooting in this country—two were school shootings. I will type that again: Every day I have returned to work on this piece, there has been a shooting in this country—two were school shootings.
On Monday, December 5, 2017, the nation paid remembrance to the Sandy Hook school shooting, a massacre of 26 people, including 20 elementary school children, which happened five years ago. That same day, a book I’ve been working on for close to two years was published to commemorate and honor those who survived.
And those who did not.
That book, Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, is an attempt to address what public health experts are calling an epidemic in contemporary America. Bullets into Bells pairs 50 poems by a range of American poets with responses from survivors of shootings, community leaders, and activists in the anti-gun violence movement. For example, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jody Williams responds to “Dancing,” an incredible poem by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, that traces the history of ammunition, beginning with Prometheus stealing fire and ending with an indictment of colonial violence and the American propensity for mass killing, most recently at the Pulse Night Club:
They were dancing in Orlando, in a club. Spring night.
Gay Pride. The relation of the total casualties to the history
Of the weapon that sent exploded metal into their bodies—
30 rounds a minute, or 40, is a beautifully made instrument,
And in America you can buy it anywhere—and into the history
Of the shaming culture that produced the idea of Gay Pride—
They were mostly young men, they were dancing in a club,
A spring night. The radio clicks on. Green fire. Blue fire.
About this poem, Williams writes, “I love the myth of Prometheus stealing fire—stealing some of the god Zeus’s power—for the benefit of humans. I’d like to rewrite it for our times. In my version, Prometheus would steal gunpowder, nuclear weapons, and the makings of killer robots and bury them deep in a cave on Mt. Olympus. To save human beings from ourselves.”
In another heartbreaking collaboration, Samira Rice, Tamir Rice’s mother, responds to Reginald Dwayne Betts’ unforgettable poem, “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving.” Betts’ poem begins:
My two young sons play
in the backseat while the video of Tamir dying
plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing
I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar
of poetry.
Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, begins with a heartbreaking confession:
“When I think of Tamir as his mother, the woman who gave birth to him, I wonder why my son had to lose his life in such a horrific way in this great place we call America.” Toward the end of her response, she directs her anger, appropriately trenchant, at larger forces that continue to threaten the marginalized and disenfranchised: “Injustice in this country is pitiful and pathetic. The injustice starts with economics, education, and politicians.”
Samaria Rice’s voice joins a chorus of others – the Emergency Room doctor on call during and after the Sandy Hook shooting; DeAndra Yates, the mother of thirteen-year old Dre Yates, who was killed by a stray bullet fired from outside the birthday party he was attending; Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action Against Gun Violence, and Abbey Clements, the second-grade teacher at Sandy Hook who saved two children. Their words and those of some of America’s most celebrated poets—like former U.S. Poet Laureates Natasha Trethewey, Billy Collins, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Rita Dove—create a chorus that evokes both elegy and action.
None of us involved with the book know if it can have any short or long-term impact in regard to gun violence in the U.S. In truth, probably very little. But, Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro read Abbey Clements’ statement from Bullets into Bells on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The book has received a great deal of attention from the mainstream press, including features in The Washington Post,The Boston Globe, and PBS. So, people are listening. People are reading.
But, are people changing? Are ideas galvanizing? I am not an optimist, but I am not a pessimist either. Somewhere between those poles is a belief that the right series of actions can’t, forever, do nothing.
The West Coast launch of Bullets into Bellswill take place on February 22, 2018 at the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. It will feature poets Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirschfield, and editors Alexandra Teague and Dean Rader. Respondents include Rev. Michael McBride, Catherine Stefani from Moms Demand Action, and George Garvis,Executive Director Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice.
Organized by:
Pedro Lange-Churion, Modern and Classical Languages
Tanu Sankalia, Art + Architecture
Sumer Seiki, Teacher Education
John Zarobell, International Studies
Panelists at Global Manifestos. Photo by John Zarobell.
Global Manifestos was an innovative workshop for students, faculty and the public that encouraged individuals to share their experiences and reactions to the changes in the art community wrought by globalization. This event was part of the Forum for Transnational Collaboration that occurred on November 17th-18th, 2017, which brought scholars from around the world to voice their perspectives on how globalization has affected the art world in their own domains. The workshop provided an opportunity to elaborate on these vocalizations by giving all participants an opportunity to express their own views on globalization in the form of a manifesto that can be articulated in 60 seconds or less. Further, the organizers of the event (all members of the CRASE Art and Globalization Faculty Research Circle) brought camera equipment out to Oakland’s First Friday Arts Walk on October 6th and to the Minnesota Street gallery complex on October 14th to film public participation outside of the academy. We encouraged all participants to speak impromptu, but we also worked with USF students, faculty, and staff to script manifestos during the first day of the Forum that they could read or designate for others to read at the recording on November 18th. All of the participants of the forum were asked to draft or improvise a manifesto on globalization to ensure that many different global perspectives were represented.
The goal of the Global Manifestos Workshop was to present an alternative to the model of economic globalization by providing a platform for multiple and diverse articulations on globalization. The voices of artists, curators, and critics who do not operate in the United States and Europe have been considered marginal but scholars and professionals need to rethink these norms. Further, the sense the public has about the effects of globalization on their daily lives has not been explored in this context. Thus, the focus was to explore the developments of artists and institutions from the (former) periphery that diffuse their own innovations into global culture and, in so doing, transform the meaning of the visual arts, social dynamics and market processes of the art world. We believe that alternative geographies result from new cultural and economic patterns and these develop unprecedented networks of engagement and participation that this forum was able to capitalize on. The resulting film not only presents the global participants, but also local voices from various communities throughout the city who were encouraged to record their own views. We found locals—old and young, with a variety of professional experiences, ethnic backgrounds, and perspectives on the impact of globalization in their lives—to speak on camera. In this way, we have sought to maximize the variety of voices that contribute to the fabric of the completed film.
Jose Luis Aranda, a graduate student from USF, worked with Director Pedro Lange-Churion to edit the final version of the film so none of the manifestos are viewed in complete form. This intentional approach contributes to a kaleidoscopic whole that reflects a wide array of voices that exemplify diversity and demonstrate the many perspectives on preservation in the midst of change.
Sherise Kimura reflects on an artifact as part of 10 x 10: Ten Objects, Ten Stories presented in conjunction with the Thacher Gallery exhibition Something from Nothing: Art and Handcrafted Objects from America’s Concentration Camps, August 21 – November 15, 2017.
Artist unknown. Cane. Circa 1942-1943, National Japanese American Historical Society, San Francisco, California.
On this beautiful wooden cane, the inscription reads in English, “In enemy alien camp, North America, New Mexico, Lordsburg.” The cane is a work of art, but it also served a useful purpose. I heard that many canes were made by older Issei, first generation Japanese immigrant men, to help with walking on the uneven terrain in the camps.
The “enemy alien” camp at Lordsburg has a special meaning to my family and me because my paternal grandfather, whom I never met, was among the Issei held at Lordsburg. Lordsburg was the U.S. Army camp that held the largest number of Issei, who at the time were not allowed to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Later my grandfather was transferred to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Santa Fe Camp and finally returned home to Hawai‘i in November 1945 after nearly three and a half years.
I only learned about this story of my grandfather about two years ago from a book my cousin, Colleen Kimura, wrote about her father. Because my father could offer very little information, I started doing my own research. I was surprised to find records for my grandfather in the National Archives WWII Alien Enemy Detention and Internment case files, which document the detainment and internment of suspected alien enemies under the Enemy Alien Control Program. In his files were his Alien Registration Form, a warrant for his arrest, camp behavior reports, and various administrative and procedural documents including correspondence about his possible parole to the War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp in Jerome, Arkansas, given that his two sons were U.S. soldiers in combat. Most revealing was the transcript of his hearing shortly after his arrest. I learned that his home had been searched as part of the raids after the attack on Pearl Harbor when martial law was imposed in Hawai‘i. Based on some spurious charges, he was declared an alien enemy and recommended for internment for the duration of the war. His family was not told when or where he was being sent.
My grandfather was 54 at the time and had lived in Hawai‘i for 35 years. He was a blacksmith for a living, worked on a pineapple plantation camp with his family, and was active in the local community.
Growing up in Hawai‘i, I heard few personal stories of internment or incarceration, most likely because Hawai‘i did not experience the same mass incarceration of Japanese Americans that had transpired on the mainland. Fewer than 2,000 people, or 1% of the Japanese population in Hawai‘i at that time, were incarcerated. This was largely due to the fact that the Japanese comprised over one third of the population of the Territory of Hawai‘i and their labor was essential to the economy. Interestingly, the memory of internment in Hawai‘i is finding greater public awareness in recent years, with the uncovering of the Hono‘uli‘uli internment camp, the largest of 17 camps in Hawai‘i.
Late in his life, my uncle reflected on his father’s internment and acknowledged the sorrow my grandfather must have felt when he returned to Hawai‘i at the end of the war while the nation celebrated. In 1956 my grandfather eventually left Hawai‘i and his family and returned to Japan, where he passed away two years later. According to my uncle, although he never spoke it, my grandfather felt he had no place in this country anymore–where he had lived most of life, where he had raised his family, where all five of his sons had served in the military⎯but where he had been treated like a criminal.
On October 18, 2017, CRASE hosted writer, social justice advocate, attorney, and activist Khary Lazarre-White. Lazarre-White discussed his work as co-founder of the Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis) and his debut novel Passage (Seven Stories Press). Brotherhood/Sister Sol is a nationally renowned, Harlem based, comprehensive youth development and educational organization that provides rites of passage programming, arts and enrichment based after school care, counseling, summer camps, job training, college preparation and scholarship, and month long international studies programs to Africa and Latin American. In this post, assistant professor of English Samira Abdur-Rahman, moderator of the event, reflects on the themes of Passage.
In “New York State of Mind,” a track on his debut album Illmatic, twenty-year-old Nas raps “I never sleep cause sleep is the cousin of death.” In Passage, we are told that the protagonist Warrior does not shut his eyes when he sleeps, that this is a trait passed down through the generations: “Even when he really slept, and when he was most relaxed, in his deepest dreams, Warrior’s eyes were open.” In the magical, Afro-surrealist world of Passage, we are encouraged to understand these open eyes both figuratively and literally. Open eyes are a metaphor for Warrior’s consciousness, for his acuity as a reader of both the surfaces and deeper implications of his experiences and self.
At the same time, Nas and Warrior are describing the reality of their vulnerability in the tones of a guarded masculinity. Sleeping is dangerous and not being on guard could possibly risk your life and/or the lives of your loved ones. The lyrics to “New York State of Mind” are gritty, yet they also operate at a level of myth making and imagination defying the simplistic designation of gangsta rap or pure street documentary. Nas’s Illmatic was released in 1994 and narrated his life growing up in the Queensbridge Projects. Passage is set in 1993, in the boroughs of Harlem and Brooklyn, but its prose embodies the deep and complex knowledges emblematic of what we now identify as the golden era of hip hop, an era that put New York City’s boroughs on the map. Nas speaks of project living, yet the figurative and literal interiors of his life defy stereotype. So, too, do the interiors of Warrior’s life.
Passage is a novel of the hip hop generation but speaks to the late geographer’s Clyde Wood sense of the symbiotic relationship between blues and hip hop geography. As Lazarre-White stated during his talk, New York City is not simply a geography; it is a character in the novel. Blues tropes are our entry into the world of Passage—they construct a language for Warrior’s encounters with the city, with his ancestors and with his self. In his eloquent study of hip hop aesthetics, Jelani Cobb describes the blue’s bad man figure. Characteristically braggadocious, fearless and mythically strong, the bad man figure was an attempt to resist the very real vulnerabilities that black men faced in the oppressive, racial caste system of Jim Crow.
In the place of myths of badness and heroic strength, the opening scene of Passage describes Warrior’s anger: “It had been the same for years now. Warrior woke angry. Just plain old surly mean. Angry at existence…He knew he was tired…and angry.” The book highlights spaces that produce but also potentially untangle the knot of anger, which allows us to see beyond the misunderstood postures of Warrior’s teen masculinity and takes us deeper into the circles of Warrior’s thoughts, fears and his loves.
Warrior loves his two best friends, one a teenage girl who lives in a house of three generations of Caribbean women. He receives letters from his other best friend, the incarcerated brotherman, a victim of police brutality and the criminal justice system. Warrior’s teacher mother and musician father are loving parents. They respect and understand their son enough to impart on him diasporic lessons, instructions in black history and aesthetics. They respect him enough to listen to him, to let him argue with them, to understand that Warrior is dealing with new terrains of both violence and identity. They love Warrior, yet they cannot offer him complete protection as he navigates the realities of the outside, of the brutal winter, of the blue soldiers who torture and disfigure young black bodies. Still they are committed to helping him through his passage.
At the event, Lazarre-White commented on the significance of the word “passage”—its allusion to the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and noted it as indicative of the rites of passage needed by Warrior to transition into a new phase. In articulating the hauntings of the past and the possibilities of Warrior’s passage, the novel’s characters speak in folkloric syntax, through riddles, aphorisms and paradoxes, through the language of the everyday, the magical and the sublime. The novel speaks this way because it acknowledges the complex ways that young people feel, experience and narrate their worlds.
Samira Abdur-Rahman’s current book project is Sites of Instruction: The Geography of Black Childhood.
Ken Yoshioka reflects on a trip to Topaz, Utah in response to the Thacher Gallery exhibition Something from Nothing: Art and Handcrafted Objects from America’s Concentration Camps, August 21 – November 15, 2017.
In my parent’s house sat two wooden root stands that we used for potted plants. I had never given them much thought until I saw a wood stand carved from the trunk of a small tree in the exhibit Something from Nothing: Art and Handcrafted Objects from America’s Concentration Camps at the University of San Francisco Thacher Gallery. To see something so beautifully created out of ordinary tree parts reminded me of a time when I took my family on a national park road trip through Utah. When we were planning the trip back across Highway 50, my wife related that we would be passing through Delta, where the Topaz relocation camp was located. On an impulse, I decided we should go and see the site.
Driving out to what seemed to be nowhere and seeing the desolate landscape brought me to tears as I thought of the years spent in such a place by my mom’s family. I actually called my mom from Topaz and found out which block her family resided in during their time there. As I remember standing in the hot sun in the place my mom was incarcerated, I am reminded of the objects of beauty in the form of arts and crafts that were created, essentially, something from nothing. I had read that many took up a craft to deal with the “nothingness” of the camps. My parents never really talked about the camps and it was only after researching accounts of what life was like did I realize the enormity of those years. When I spoke to my mom from Topaz, she spoke of the difficulties but also about making the best of the situation. I actually interviewed my dad regarding his remembrances in the camp his family was incarcerated in Tule Lake. I related that the information would be invaluable for a paper I was writing but he was insistent that those interviews were to stay private. Two voices, one of resignation and one of bitterness, sadness and shame.
Now I look at those beautiful wood stands and I am reminded of the resilience of those who endured the camps, who endured with Gaman, meaning: “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.”
Professor Tanu Sankalia discusses the history of Treasure Island and how earthquake risk, toxic contamination, and sea-level rise still imperil plans for large-scale, capital intensive, development on the island.
The man-made, low-lying, Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Photo copyright Barrie Rokeach 2017.
Few Bay Area residents are entirely aware of Treasure Island’s presence, and fewer still know its history: when it was built, how it has been used over the past decades, and what are plans for its future. Despite its very central location in the San Francisco Bay, this flat, low-lying, man-made island has remained at the periphery of most people’s local and geographical consciousness.
As an architect and urban planner, Treasure Island first caught my attention when plans for its redevelopment were unveiled in 2005. The project was promoted as a cutting-edge sustainable development, especially at a time in the early 2000s when sustainability had caught on rapidly among architecture and planning firms. Yet I was intrigued as to how a multi-billion dollar development that consumed great resources, required massive new infrastructure, and was proposed on what appeared to be a risky site (more about this later), could actually be sustainable.
Over the last eight years, my research on the planning and design history of the redevelopment project, together with contributions from a group of excellent scholars on a range of historic and contemporary issues concerning the island, has recently culminated in a co-edited book, Lynne Horiuchi and Tanu Sankalia, Eds., Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island published by the University of Hawaii Press. While our work focuses on a single site and underscores its local significance, it also reaches out to topics of global importance such as the Pacific Rim, New Deal, world’s fairs, World War II, Cold War military industrial complex, nuclear contamination, sustainability, and eco-cities, among others. This research has also informed my teaching as I have been able to use Treasure Island as a case study in the urban planning and design course I teach in the Masters of Science in Environmental Management (MSEM) program at USF.
The Army Corps of Engineers built Treasure Island between 1936-1937 with New Deal money. It was constructed concurrently with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, to serve as San Francisco’s airport, at a time of major transportation infrastructure expansion. Between 1939-1940 the island hosted the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE), which shifted the focus of world’s fairs as venues of science and industry to representations of international unity exemplified in the idea of a Pacific Rim interconnected through commerce and trade. World War II scuttled this utopian imagination, and in early 1942 Treasure Island was converted into an active naval base that cycled 4.5 million US soldiers on their way to and back from the Pacific theater of war. After World War II, Naval Station Treasure Island focused on training and distribution activities until it was officially closed in 1997. In 2011, the City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a redevelopment project for a new sustainable city of 19,000 residents, which critics and commentators see as an example of twenty-first century, “ecotopian” urbanism.
Underlying Treasure Island’s historical narrative, our research found that since its conception, the island has remained a contested site with federal and local agencies vying for its control. These agencies have recurrently shaped the physical character of the island (what we call urban reinventions) through ambitious projects like the airport, world’s fair, military base and now, eco-city. But despite these important historical lessons, which are crucial in understanding how cities and communities conceive projects, the material risks—earthquakes, toxic soil and rising seas—surrounding its latest grand vision are rather pressing.
Treasure Island was built on the shoals of the natural Yerba Buena Island from dredged bay mud filled into a trough enclosed by a sea wall made of large boulders. The shoals, which function as bedrock into which tall buildings must pierce their foundations, are deeper away from the island. Although most buildings in the proposed plan are clustered where the shoals are shallower, there is considerable infrastructure on parts of the island that geotechnical reports (produced in the first reuse plan of 1996) indicate to be unstable. Given the island’s proximity to some of the Bay Area’s largest earthquake faults, a significant tremor can cause the landfill to function like jelly.
Toxic soil remains a major concern on Treasure Island. The US Navy established a Damage Control School in 1947 during its tenure on the island to train naval personnel in decontamination procedures in the event of an atomic, chemical or biological attack. For training purposes they built a mock training ship—the USS Pandemonium—from scrap metal, which was periodically contaminated with cesium-137 and a diluted solution of radioactive bromine-82. In 1971, they dragged this mock ship from the northwest to the southeast of the island further spreading radioactive substances across the island. According to the Department of Toxic Substances Control, the state agency charged with monitoring toxic cleanup at Treasure Island, the island’s soils contain a long list of toxic chemical substances harmful to humans including plutonium and radium. Furthermore, the current Historical Radiological Assessment report that the Navy must produce to guide management and remediation of toxic soils states that the island’s soils simply cannot return to their pre-military state.
Almost twenty years after the redevelopment process for the island was initiated, we have greater awareness about climate change, global warming, and one of its major effects—sea level rise. Maps produced by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) and the San Francisco Public Press show Treasure Island and the edges of San Francisco Bay under threat from rising seas and storm surges. There are plans to raise the entire island and build a higher, stronger seawall to protect against this danger. Still there is little evidence—especially considering the example of Miami Beach, which is constantly inundated despite its massive seawalls and giant pumps—that such measures will actually succeed.
The Bay Area indeed needs more housing, which Treasure Island’s development could well deliver. There are also many good ideas such as manmade wetlands, urban agriculture and energy efficient buildings, in the redevelopment plans. But they well may be great ideas in the wrong place. Why jeopardize billions of dollars in development and risk the lives of almost twenty thousand residents on an unstable, contaminated, low-lying island site?
Looking back to the very construction of Treasure Island and its recurrent urban reinventions, I am reminded of the German writer W.G. Sebald’s prescient observation that “it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.” It is in moments of vulnerability that governments, cities, and communities take on ambitious and, often, risky projects. In recognizing this risk, it still may not be too late to rethink the viability of development on Treasure Island.
I was asked to share a reflection/response to the exhibit Anting Anting | Magic Objects by Michael Arcega at a Thacher/CRASE collaborative event “Inspirations from Anting Anting: Magic Objects of Protection.”
Event Organized by:
