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Distinguished from natural sciences that explore the natural patterns and laws of the material world, the humanities are academic disciplines that focus on human beings and our accumulating human legacies across generations, such as studies of philosophy, languages, literature, history, religion, emotions and politics. The humanities delve into our past and present, our ideologies, our ways of expression, our wisdom, etc., to understand what it is to be human beings, and how we have come to be similar and different. Since the humanities promote empathy and understanding between different human cultures, there are no definitive answers to most questions, and every scholar can have a different version of understanding based on their personal contexts.

The Humanities is a course with ambitions to fulfill the interdisciplinary aspirations shared—no single subject but rather the interaction of many could better answer the questions of humanity. It is why, so far, we have had lectures on history, Latin American studies, philosophy, theatre performance, German studies, photography, race and gender, emotions, religion, social activism, and pleasure, led by faculty and visiting professors with different academic expertise. In the following paragraphs I will explain the focuses of the Humanities course to explain the discipline’s diversity and versatility.

In the first unit of philosophy led by Dr. Robb, we dug into truth, knowledge, conceptual schemes, idealism, translation, and fake news. For instance, we discussed rationalism and empiricism as two approaches to qualify certain beliefs as knowledge. We also examined fake news, including the objectives of misinformation, the power of the provocative language, and the audience’s vulnerability. Meanwhile, inspired by Dr. Robb’s unit, in my paper On Liberty: On Objection, I explored John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty‘s implications for our modern world of fake news by reconsidering its ground on free speech, and the significance of argumentation and objection in a modern context.

In the second unit of theatre performance led by Dr. Greene, we learned theories of spectatorship, watched a musical On the Heights and a monologue Fires in the Mirror, and performed our own plays. It was a reflection on what, how, and why we spectate. It was also a novel experience for me to shift my role as an audience to a creator to create a script, direct a play, and act in a real performance.

In the last unit of history led by Dr. Luis, we focused on a case study of Spanish settlement in Manila and local Sangleys, discussing the miscegenation, cultural diffusion, and conflicts resulting from different populations’ encounters. In my paper for the unit, “Race and Racial Identity in Colonial Latin America,” I explored for the very first time the complexity, fluidity, and socio-economic nature of the concept of race in the context of an historical area where large-scale miscegenation took place. Specifically, I was introduced to how race is not just categorization, but also a tool of oppression yet as well as a tool for anti-oppression as people manipulate/redefine their races through different means.

In unit 4, we had deeper conversations of oppression through the case studies of Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker in the context of racism, white gaze, and the fetish for black exoticism and erotism in the United States. And we delved into how the body of Sarah Baartman was controlled, manipulated and capitalized on to cater to to the western world’s curiosity about exotic black female bodies. Decades later, in opposition to Sarah Baartman, Josephine Baker ironically took advantage of her black body and foreign citizenship to come to fame in the United States as a performer. The unit led us to ponder upon the origins of the racial power hierarchy as well as patriarchy.

In unit 5, we discussed about emotions. What are the sources of emotions? Are emotions physical or mental? What are the categories of emotions and how do different types interact? What are angers and their sources? Are angers justified? What is virtue and how to be virtuous?

In unit 6 & 7, we focused on how body / bodies is/are a tool of self-expression (e.g., sexuality and social activism) and a source of both pleasure and pain through case studies of the HIV pandemic in NYC and gay rights activism and exploration of love, pleasure and religious interpretation of ecstasy.

The topics we have studied over the year, theatre, religion, truth, history, arts, race, human rights, activism, emotions, and pleasure, are all elements that constitute the study of humanities, and ther are the perfect illustrations of the nature of this course, inclusiveness and diversity.

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For the collaborative project, we conducted interviews with interviewees ranging from a former Humes professor, a coffee shop worker, a current Humesters, a non-Humesters, and an art history professor. For this part of my answer to the definition of humanities, I will share their answers to the question and my thoughts on them.

Generally, it turned out that the definition of humanities is a question that not everyone can readily have a clear picture of, and most of the answers converged on one vague point: the humanities is ultimately a study of anything human, such as what it is like to be human, distinct from being animals, and the products of human (cultural and social). It is also regarded as one’s understanding that could evolve as time passes. Since it is a subject focused on humans, who are unique and fluid individuals that can’t be easily generalized or defined, humanities are then by definition not as testable as sciences, which could be theorized, tested, generalized, and predicted.

It also leads to an interesting thought: what if it is never appropriate to try to define specifically what humanities are? Since humanities are relational and fluid, referring to definitions by preceding scholars or trying to provide a clear definition for our successors might only be outdated and misleading. Is it better to keep it just as a vague sentence, “anything related to humans”?

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Acknowledgments

This essay is built partially on Dr. Robb’s “On Definitions.” https://hum.davidson.edu/resources/on-definitions-by-prof-robb/

I also consulted lectures and notes from units 1-7.

However frequently and thoughtlessly referred to nowadays, race is a highly fluid and complex historical construct that should be invoked with caution. Sinclair Thomson underscores that “If the enormous, charged literature concerning ‘race’ in twentieth-century social science has shown anything, it is that the category itself is extremely slippery.”[1] It also implies the imperative to understand the concept of race, especially in contexts like colonial Latin America where the encounter of diverse populations spurred significant miscegenation that challenges scholars to rethink the definition of race. By exploring the complexity of race in colonial Latin America, we could better understand the Latin American origin and development of racism. This paper will review two scholarly conversations about race in colonial Latin America and examine how well-accepted and accurate the racial categories were in describing or even altering social realities in the region.

Racial Category in Predicting Socioeconomic Position: 18^th Century Mexico City

In “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753”, Patricia Seed examines the accuracy of racial labels in predicting different racial groups’ positions in the division of labor. She analyzes both the intermediate racial groups that originated from miscegenation (e.g., black-white descents, Indian-white descents, black-Indian descents) and the intermediate groups’ parent groups (i.e., whites, blacks, Indians) for an understanding of the intermediate groups’ family background.[2] Seed focuses on Mexico City, the center of political and economic activities and the hub of large-scale racial and ethnic mingling.[3] She analyzes the census of 1753, which offers racial and occupational information by breaking down the percentage of each racial population (Peninsular Spanish, Creole Spanish, Castizo, Mestizo, Free Mulatto, Free Black, Indian) in different occupations: elite, shop-owners/merchants, managers, artisans, laborers, and servants (ranked according to socioeconomic status).[4]

Seed explains that, in colonial Mexico, three major groups (Spanish, Black, and Indian) formed the following basic combinations: mulato (Spanish-Black), mestizo (Spanish-Indian), and Zambo/Zambaigo (Black-Indian).[5] Additionally, “Castizo referred to a light-skinned mestizo and morisco to a light-skinned mulatto,” whereby “the continuum Indian—mestizo—Castizo—Spaniard paralleled the progression Black—mulatto—morisco—Spaniard.”[6]

According to the census data of free men, Seed finds a significant occupational pattern among different racial groups. Indians (laborers) and blacks (domestic servants) both occupied relatively unskilled jobs and “were at the bottom of the free population.”[7] For the intermediate racial groups, “both mestizos (darker-skinned Spanish-Indian) and mulattoes (Spanish-Black) were more likely to be skilled craftsmen than either of their parent groups…with mestizos more commonly laborers and mulattoes more commonly domestic servants.”[8] Meanwhile, the population of another intermediate group, Castizo (lighter-skinned Spanish-Indian), had the highest percentage as artisans (72%).[9] Comparing the three intermediate groups to their parent group creole Spaniards shows that a significant portion of creole Spaniards was much more likely to be upper-class shop-owners/merchants or elites.[10] As the parent group of creole Spaniards, the peninsular Spaniards had an even greater portion of its population (93.2%) engaging in the aforementioned upper-class occupations.[11] With the census information, Seed establishes a hypothetical pattern with two separate transitions: “The movement from Black or Indian to mestizo or mulatto would have entailed becoming a craftsman. The movement from the intermediate groups to Spanish would have required not the acquisition of skills, but sufficient capital to establish a small shop.”[12] Seed further simplifies the relations that “If Black or Indian upward socioeconomic mobility was achieved by the acquisition of a skill, the upward mobility of mestizos or mulattoes was attained by the acquisition of property.”[13]

In this section, we focus primarily on Seed’s analysis of men, but a glance at the socioeconomic position of women helps depict a better picture. Overall, the percentage of women employed in each racial forms an increasing ladder in the following order: Spanish women (14.9%) < Castizo women (21.4%) < Mestizo women (43.5%) < Indian women (533.6%) < Mulatto women (60%) < Black women (87.5%)[14]. Among the women employed, “whiter” women tended to occupy relatively more upper-class positions.[15] That is, the social reality for women in Mexico city implied that fewer upper-class women were employed, and those employed occupied higher socioeconomic positions. Meanwhile, more lower-class women were employed, and those employed occupied lower socioeconomic positions.

The occupational pattern of different races in 18^th century Mexico City that Seed concludes from her study indicates that racial category was a reliable indicator or predictor of the socioeconomic positions in that colonial region. Moreover, the pattern suggests a strong correlation between whiter complexion—or more Spanish appearance—and higher socioeconomic status. Thus, in the case of colonial Mexico City, race as a historical category suggests significant accuracy in describing some aspects of socioeconomic reality—the employment condition of males and females in different racial groups.

Racial Category in Altering Socioeconomic Positions: Colonial Peru

            In the article “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” O’Toole provides more evidence on the fluidity of race as a social construction and how racial category/labeling was effectively utilized as a tool to improve one’s socioeconomic status in colonial Peru.[16]

            In colonial Peru, moreno and morena were a thin line separating the free and respectable and those individuals more proximate to the class of slaves, and while slaves exploited this principle to escape from slavery, free African-descent individuals employed it to maintain their socioeconomic status and well-being.[17]  According to Rachel Sarah O’Toole, black slaves in colonial Peru secured legal freedom from slavery by reaching a manumission agreement along with a separate debt agreement (payment) to their ex-owners.[18] The debt agreement allowed the newly freed slaves to self-identify as moreno/morena (brown person) instead of their biological color of black, which enabled an institutional change of their official racial category.[19] For instance, the ex-slave Catalina del Risco, although referred to by her slaveholder as “my negra [black woman], my slave” in the official manumission document, she named herself in the following debt agreement “not only as free, but also as a morena, or a ‘brown woman’.”[20] In this scenario, Risco transacted a change in her race to morena, and thus distinguished herself from the racial category of black slaves.[21] Although bounding the freed individuals to new financial obligations, this form of debt agreement transformed them from an “object who would garner payment” to “a subject who would pay,” signifying their personal autonomy[22] and worthiness of engagement in financial transactions.[23] In another instance, one of the free people-of-color slaveholders, Toledo, was constantly delegated as a negra criolla by the elite Spanish-descent slaveholders in her slave-exchange agreements with those elites.[24] However, she always corrected the elites through identifying herself as morena in her part of the agreement to distinguish herself from her negra (slaves) and what the elites had called her.[25] This type of maneuver maintained the reputation of slaveholders like Toledo who “earned her living from her slaves’ daily wages, petty merchandising, and debt management,” and whose reputation is “exceptionally critical to her financial wellbeing.”[26] O’Toole states that “more than merely a cultural marker, their status as morena allowed free women of African descent to guarantee that they could engage in the market according to their own volition, and therefore be able to engage in the debt-credit economy that predominated in the colonial Andes.”[27]

            In a word, in colonial Peru, free people used the racial categories of morena and moreno to not only distance themselves from the social class of slaves, but also to signify their financial capabilities as autonomous individuals to enter the economic credit system.[28] This new position, however, was still vulnerable. Financial obligations to their former owners could constrain the freed individuals into a more subtle kind of servitude while upper-class Spanish could still officially delegate the free individuals by naming or categorizing them as negra. However, O’Toole suggests that this manipulation of casta or race terminology was an essential way for people of color to improve and maintain their socioeconomic status. That is, racial category was a powerful tool to alter socioeconomic realities in colonial Peru.

Seed and O’Toole and the Mainstream Conversation about Race

In his work “Was There Race in Colonial Latin America,” Thomson makes clear that both critics of racist thinking and historians have been trying to “denaturalize” race in order to emphasize race as a construct in cultural discourse other than as a natural phenomenon, and to take account of the role of major processes in history in the ideation of race.[29] That is, according to the critics, “the aura of ‘naturalness’ from race” needs to be removed.[30] This idea, not surprisingly, corresponds to the findings demonstrated by Seed and O’Toole.

Seed’s and O’Toole’s case studies of colonial Mexico City and colonial Peru confirm that race as a historical category was evidently present and served as an efficient tool in both predicting and manipulating social realities. More importantly, both Seed and O’Toole agree that other than seeing race as a simplistic biological notion, it should be recognized as a social construction that had been utilized to maintain social order and hierarchy and to exploit the suppressed populations. Meanwhile, race had also been manipulated by the suppressed to improve their socioeconomic status. In a nutshell, Seed and O’Toole support the mainstream idea on race indicated by Thomson that whenever discussions are concerned with “race,” its fluidity and versatility should never be overlooked. Thus, it is much more accurate to describe race as a social and historical construction than a biological category.

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Footnotes

[1] Sinclair Thomson, “Was There Race in Colonial Latin America? Identifying Selves and Others in the Insurgent Andes,” Histories of Race and Racism, 2012, pp. 72-92, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822394334-004, 72.

[2] Seed, Patricia. “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 571. Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 4 (1982): 569–606. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-62.4.569.

[3] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 571.

[4] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 577-580.

[5] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 572.

[6] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 573.

[7] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 582.

[8] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 582.

[9] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 580.

[10] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 580.

[11] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 580.

[12] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 583.

[13] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 583.

[14] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 585.

[15] Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” 585.

[16] Rachel Sarah O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” Ethnicity as a Political Resource, 2015, pp. 209-220, https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839430132-016.

[17] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 217.

[18] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 217.

[19] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 213.

[20] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 214.

[21] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 215.

[22] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 214.

[23] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 217.

[24] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 217.

[25] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 215.

[26] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 216.

[27] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 216.

[28] O’Toole, “The Work of Race in Colonial Peru,” 217-218.

[29] Sinclair Thomson, “Was There Race in Colonial Latin America,” 72.

[30] Sinclair Thomson, “Was There Race in Colonial Latin America,” 72.

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Bibliography

A Conversation With Latinos on Race | Op-Docs. The New York Times, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLLCHbCgJbM.

Andrews, George Reid. Review of Race and the State in Colonial Brazil, by Maria Luiza Tucci Carneiro, Katia de Queiros Mattoso, Laura de Mello E Souza, and A. J. R. Russell-Wood. Latin American Research Review 19, no. 3 (1984): 203–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2503389.

Fisher, Andrew B., and Matthew D. O’Hara. Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Nazzari, Muriel. “Vanishing Indians: The Social Construction of Race in Colonial São Paulo.” The Americas 57, no. 4 (2001): 497–524. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1007831.

O’Toole, Rachel Sarah. “The work of race in colonial Peru” In Ethnicity as a Political Resource: Conceptualizations across Disciplines, Regions, and Periods edited by University of Cologne Forum »Ethnicity as a Political Resource«, 209-220. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839430132-016

Safford, Frank. “Race, Integration, and Progress: Elite Attitudes and the Indian in Colombia, 1750-1870.” Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 1 (1991): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-71.1.1.

Seed, Patricia. “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753.” Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 4 (1982): 569–606. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-62.4.569.

Thomson, Sinclair. “Was There Race in Colonial Latin America? Identifying Selves and Others in the Insurgent Andes.” Histories of Race and Racism, 2012, 72–92. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822394334-004.

Wade, Peter. “The Meaning of ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity.’” In Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 4–23. Pluto Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p73f.6.

I waved my hand towards the cats on the lawn. A chubby one in yellow and white walked cheerfully towards me, rubbing its furry head against my fingers. It was Marco. I stroked his cheek, while he closed his eyes and held out its paw in satisfaction.

Marco was familiar with me, yet I felt so distant from him at times. There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between humankind, and other animals. Aristotle once characterized us as animal rationale endowed with rationality that attributes meanings and purposes to our lives. Animals like Marco, it was once thought, are less rationally dispositioned by nature, and the absence of sophisticated rationality is perhaps what ultimately distinguishes us.

But is this the final answer?

My puzzles over myself and the evolution of humanity surged in. I couldn’t help reflecting on the warning signs that I have been witnessing since childhood: climate aggravation, weakening biodiversity, depleting fuels, incessant warfares. They constantly remind me that we are failing to defend the future against our own insatiable greed. If rationality distinguishes us, how come we end up in such an inextricable morass?

Maybe Rousseau’s answer–amour propre, or self-love–is the ultimate culprit? For times in an economics lab, I observed how the homo economicus in us often got trapped in zero-sum games, failing to benefit mutually with our counterpart for lack of empathy and genuine trust. It seemed for a moment that the purported “rationality” was merely a parochial calculation from which no one was exempt.

Marco yawned, basking in the warmth of sunlight. A shorthair cat would invite me to enjoy the sunshine together, while we, accommodating to the law of the jungle, might loathe the loss of exclusiveness. I then asked myself, “What if rationality is but a pretext of selfishness that dominates all beings?”

The outbreak of COVID-19 sparked a melodrama that seemed to verify my vision: profiteers hoarding to bid up the prices of medical commodities, mistrust, and widespread discrimination. Such news came into my view, filling me with confusion and indignation.

Indignant, I initiated field research on the Chinese face-mask market, trying to reveal the hidden rationales. What I uncovered, however, was entirely contrary to my expectations. My first interviewee, a manager of a local mask manufacturer, revealed her renunciation of profits for low-price mask supplies. It was only for selling more, I thought.

In the subsequent interviews with five more managers, I got similar answers: “Helping the needy is my responsibility, even at my own expense.” It shocked me immensely and shook my perception of businessmen as motivated more by profit-making than by humane considerations or benevolence. Or, was it because of the government’s pressure? In our dialogues, though, they genuinely cited cosmopolitanism and Confucian values as motivations for their deeds. Their words shed a different light on my understanding of humanity: we don’t always pursue the earliest yearnings but often align our self-interest with something sublime and far-reaching that is worth our toils and pains.

During a summer course, I pondered over excerpts from Max Weber’s works. Examining the development of capitalism, he believes that humanity operates on instrumental and value-oriented rationality. While carefully calculating the most efficient means to a specific aim, we devote ourselves to higher values that eclipse parochial calculations. Aristotle would urge us to actively embrace the latter part of Weber’s rationality, since it defines who we are and what we should be, and continuously inspires our noble ideals, be it equality, justice, or freedom. Deeply inspired by Weber and Aristotle, I organized a symposium in an eagerness to share my reflections with my classmates. I know that to understand and adhere to the values is only the first step; the more important, however, is to realize them.

To become a real animal rationale, I am yet to overcome my self-interest and take up social responsibility.

For the second paper, I gathered historians’ opinions on race and racial identity in colonial Latin America. I learned the complexity and fluidity of race as a social construction. Race shall not be determined by simply categorizing complexion, and racial discrimination for whatever ends has never been and will not be justified. No matter what complexion, we are humans, with the same origin and a shared fate on this Earth.

I love taking and collecting photos of the sky. People love its kaleidoscopic forms and colors. Should we not also admire and respect the multicolor nature of humanity?

Unit 1

What is confirmation bias: When you search selectively for evidence to confirm your preexisting beliefs (preconception). Example: If A believes the fish in a specific restaurant makes people feel sick and B that eats at the restaurant gets sick, A would believe that B getting sick is because of the fish.

Two Cultures: The discussion of two cultures resonates with my perception of the Chinese educational system deeply. Like that in the UK, the educational system in China seems as inflexible but more disorganized. Chinese students enter colleges through the Chinese College Entrance Exam, with a high school education that hardly prepares them to locate their interest of study. However, upon finishing the College Entrance Exam, they are required to select a major for their next four years in college, where it is usually impossible to alter the major, which students made with “uneducated” decision–not to mention that the division of disciplines in Chinese universities are sometimes quite confusing. With these barriers to students’ access to further resources and education outside of their intended major, it is only natural that the academia in China is also “culturally” separated like in the UK. The cynicism of philosophy students and the “nerdy optimism” of the natural science students are all too easily distinguishable from their utterly different and implicitly opposing comments on Chinese social media, which I sometimes found annoying–an immature act of knowledge flaunting without an understanding of each other’s disciplines. I hope to not be one of them.

On Bullshit: My confusion of the distinction between lying and bullshitting was unraveled by Frankfurt’s careful explanation. He explains that lying requires the undertaker to first understand what the objective truth is, and then misrepresent both the state of the affair under discussion and the teller’s own state of mind on the subject. On the other side, bullshiters have no regard for the matters discussed above at all, who only pick things to suit their purpose, let their descriptions be false or true. And I also find it very interesting that Frankfurt refers to St. Augustine’s essay “Lying” to demonstrate that most of the tellers of lies are not in the strictest sense “liars” but people who find lies as a means to an end, while a very small portion of people lie only for the pleasure from the articulation and spread of falsity, who are regarded by Augustine as the true liars. Meanwhile, I find the author’s explanation of the cause of bullshit at the end of the article quite reasonable. Based on his assertion that bullshit arises from the mismatched relationship between a lack of knowledge on the topic and the responsibility and needs to voice on the topic, the author interestingly states that democracy’s promotion of citizenship and personal voices have prompted citizens with inadequate comprehension to evaluate and comment on too many affairs happening around them, facilitating the production of bullshit.

Unit 2

Boal says: “the theatre of the oppressed is an unfinished theatre.” What does this mean? Why is it “unfinished”?: To me, the theatre has been a platform to narrate stories from the past while making modern adaptations to provide us with an imaginative narration of our future. Most of the stories of oppression, while having a start, seldom have an end. For instance, while slavery and blatant homophobic and sexist laws have been outlawed in the modern days, they are usually continued in yet a more subtle and undetectable way, such as structural inequality and unconscious biases. Telling the stories of the past oppression, in the more obvious and blatant original form, remind us of the history of such crimes and to not neglect their presence in our modern reality. In unit 6, I watched the films “5B” and “Paris is Burning,” both a form of documentary theatre that narrates stories of oppression, discrimination and marginalization of the queer community by the mainstream society. While the modern world has greatly promoted queer rights compared to the past, there are still ingrained systemic and perceptual biases against the LGBTQ+ community that need more work to identify and remedy. To solve such problems, we need to source their origins and sometimes documentary theatre is the best tool for such retrospection.

Unit 3

History, Colonialism, and Diaspora?: History is the past itself as well as the narration of the past by people. Colonialism is the forceful conquer of a land, its original resident, and the original cultures and the imposition of the conquerers’ rule, cultures, and other aspects of life. Diaspora is a situation where original residents of an area are forced to disperse to other areas due to political, economic, natural reasons and other pushing factors.

My new definition of colonialism: I have always understood colonialism as usually a physical invasion of an indigenous place with imposition of  culture, religion, norms, and governance with force from the invading population, but never perceived how the interaction of the different elements produce the outcome that we examine in retrospect. Dr. Luise’s talk on Deconstructing Systematic Violence in Colonial Manila showed me how the conflict between the Catholic Spaniards’ religion and the unconverted Sangleys’ culture created the two populations’ uneasy coexistence in Manila that intensified into a mass massacre against unconverted Sangleys. Moreover, the talk also exemplified how the colonialists would justify their murderous acts. In the case of Spaniards’ massacre of inca noble soldiers in 1532, the justification of the massacre is self-defense, as a soldier commented: “if one knows the intent of the enemy, he should attack beforehand.” In the case of Manila massacre, one of the justification was Sangleys’ crime of sodomy. The talk gave me a fresh and detailed instance of colonialism.

Unit 4

Josephine Baker used her body to step toward a bright personal career as a performer. Her body was then used to represent liberation and integration against racism and discrimination, as she made unconventional (nude) performances and later promoted desegregation in clubs. Her body was also political for purposes of peace and humanity, as she spied on Germans during World War II. Her body was omnipotent, showcasing what a woman of minority and color could achieve in all kinds of personal, social, and political arenas.

1. Josephine Baker is making representations of black people as primitive, exotic,
2. It satisfies European fantasies of primitivism and animalistic nature
3. It can be problematic because it negatively reinforces the stereotypes; it provides a negative stereotypical model for a successful black female’s entertainment career.
4. Josephine’s choice to become a black female entertainment in this way not only reinforces the idea that black people are like that but they enjoy doing that.
5. The symbolism of banana: monkeys; banana plantations; sexual diversity

Unit 5

Injuries may be the focus in grief as well. But whereas grief focuses on the lossor damage itself, anger focuses on the act that inflicted the damage, seeing it aswrongfully inflicted by the target

Transitional Anger. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/apa.2014.19

This distinction made between grief and anger makes much sense to me. Relating back to my personal experiences, grief does feel like a more basic and intuitive response to losses or damages, a mental process solely focusing on the fact that something is lost or damaged without further reference to other contexts of the event. Anger, however, contains a more complex layer of cognitive process that involves judging the causal relationship of the losses/damages, such as who is accountable, whether action that causes the loss is justified, etc. I always thought of grief as a richer and more complex construct while anger as a cruder one. Yet the analysis here challenges my previous perspective.

Unit 6

Paris is Burning

It has been absolutely tormenting for me to see the other side of the New York City depicted in this documentary. The queer community, rejected and neglected in the real world, had to seek refuge in their underground drag shows. It was a means for them to find acceptance and imagined normality, as a means of self-illusion and solace impossible to be found in the real, cruel world. In this world, “the idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart” and “you’ve erased all mistakes, all the flaws, all the giveaways, to make your illusion perfect.” However, it could erase the fact that it can only be a temporary refuge and the queer community had to return to the real world. “The ballroom tells me I’m somebody but when do ballroom’s over you have to convince yourself that you are somebody and that’s where they get lost.” Through this film, I have learned a bit more about the struggle of the queer community in the earlier days.

Unit 7

Shame, Pleasure, and Dilemma.

Shame might be the first movie I have watched that explicitly explores the moral, the sensual, and presumably the philosophical perspectives of sexual pleasure, instead of incorporating sex scenes just for sex scenes. Brandon, the protagonist, is a financial worker with a successful career in New York suffering the unresistible domination of sexual desires over himself. His excessive sexual drive and lack of self-control push him to a lascivious lifestyle: prostitution, hookups, unprotected sex, etc. His desire for sensual pleasure leads to his sexual indulgence, which in turn ironically makes him more and more tolerant of the sensual input, and more in need of extreme stimulation. Such a self-destructive cycle climaxes with the scene where he is physically orgasming but his face displays the extreme agony inside of him. It is that moment where we all understand he has lost the ability to obtain sensual pleasure, and this is more than that. His unrestrained sexual lifestyle made him unable to love others but only capable of having sex. Brandon fails to have sex with the woman he is dating yet immediately afterward has sex with a prostitute. Having his sexual habits discovered by others, his sister and his boss, pushed him to desperate shame, urging him to forgo all his bad behaviors but in the end making him resort yet again to even more unrestrained sexual indulgence. Even though the story of the movie is not widely applicable to the life of most of us, its message about the inner conflicts between our raw, animal desires and morals is profound. It provides a mirror for us to look back into the Brandon inside of ourselves, to examine the forces driving our behaviors and their regulating forces. Which one is prevailing?