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Notebook 5
In creating my zine Dle Yaman, I have resisted the countless oppressions that my ancestors’ had faced during the Armenian Genocide from 1915 to present day, through means of my own inter-generational memory and survivance. I am so grateful for the eye-opening and emotionally painful experience that was “taking the red pill” in Ethnic Studies 2 because I have gained an immense amount of awareness about the lived experiences of various groups of oppressed peoples ranging all throughout various countries in this globe and all throughout space and time. Perhaps one of the most disturbing experiences to learn about were the millions of people of African descent forcefully taken from their land, their kin, and their existence as free beings and forced into a state of non-being/non-living through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and African chattel slavery in the USA. Of course, despite the master narrative of the “vanishing” Native Americans, Indigenous peoples are still here and never vanished. They still, to this day, work to prove that their peoples were not massacred in vain as their mere existence, especially presently with the headlines at Standing Rock, shows proof of their survivance. My aim for the zine that I have created this quarter was for it to serve as a kind of “wake work”, a way to remember the millions of lives taken away in Armenia in 1915 and to show that I, as a woman of Armenian descent, am alive and am able to live my life the way my great great great great grandmothers would have wanted me to. I have the most powerful tools to demonstrate my existence right here in the palms of my hands, and that’s a pen, paper, countless books, and my education. I am healthy, I am alive, and I am here to always remember the struggles of, not only my own ancestors but the ancestors of all my friends in solidarity, and resist against the erasure and extermination of their history.
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Notebook 4
Feedback on cydneec1996.tumblr.com page:
a) Summary: Cydnee’s “Ghetto Culture” zine is primarily focused on the trans-historical and transnational contexts of the word “ghetto” and its meaning within communities of color, specifically black women, as well as its movement from the labeling of locations in Southeast San Diego to the labeling of bodies in those communities from the late 1980’s to present day. Growing up in Southeast San Diego, she has witnessed this “ghetto” labeling of those cities with a large, primarily Black/African American population and wants to delve into the reasons why these communities become victims of the “ghetto” stigma. The zine introduces the problematic issue of cultural appropriation and how the meaning of “ghetto” changes when certain characteristics/body features or modes of dress/hairstyle are appropriated by white women versus the natural claim that black women already have on their own hairstyles/body features. I believe the intended audience for her zine are both those communities of color and white communities who reside in locations and areas deemed “ghetto”, specifically Southeast San Diego, as well as students in our Ethnic Studies 2 class.
b) Compelling Quotes: One compelling quote is “The most baffling realization through this google search is that I googled “ghetto women” not “ghetto Black women” yet the images that were presented to me consisted primarily of Black women, some of which were not in a suggestively “ghetto” setting”, which was used as a caption for some of the images posted after googling “ghetto women”. Another quote that I really loved was “Black girls are punished and mocked for their originality while others profit from and co-opt their creations” which effectively demonstrates why cultural appropriation is such an issue in terms of power and race dynamics. Both could be used as single captions layered on top of a collage of images of “ghetto” women and cultural appropriation.
c) Compelling Stories, Facts, or Content: The personal story of you growing up among “ghetto” communities in Southeast San Diego is a great story to include in your final zine as it will add a subjective touch to the reason why you chose the “object” that you did. You can include personal pictures of your community or school and juxtapose that with quotes from administration deeming the “ghetto” community as “unable to succeed academically” even though here you are, at UC San Diego… J
d) Compelling Images: I loved the images regarding cultural appropriation where the same element of style/look is used on black women juxtaposed to white women, and how one is considered edgy and beautiful versus comical or unprofessional. To avoid issues of copyright, you could try drawing those images in cartoon form. For example, one page could have a black woman with dreads and a white woman with dreads on the other side and populate the page with words society would use to describe the black woman versus the white woman.
e) Rewording of Intersectional Analysis: Black women and “ghetto-ness” are almost always innately linked together by American society. A black woman’s confidence is not confidence, but instead cockiness. A black woman’s curvy body is not curvy, but abnormally shaped. A black woman’s bubbly and strong personality is not in fact bubbly and strong, but aggressive and blunt. Black women, as compared to white women racially, have become victims of “ghetto culture” through years and years of both individual and systematic comparison through preexisting power relations present in our society since the enslavement and reproductive control of black women.
When talking about intersectionality and how “ghetto” was made to be synonymous with “black women”, the most powerful part is when you discuss the positive and negative connotations of some “ghetto features/styles” in white women and black woman, respectively. It’s effective because some people genuinely have a difficult time understanding why cultural appropriation is not okay. The problem with cultural appropriation is the power dynamic among people of color and white people, always taking something labeled as “other/odd” and stealing it and turning it “edgy or beautiful” just because it’s on a white body.
Definitely relate these identities to structures of power when talking about intersectionality. There are intersections of power and connected systems of power that shape how “ghetto” is perceived and why certain attributes are so negative on black bodies but represented in a positive way on white bodies. You can draw on some frameworks discussed in lecture such as, investment in whiteness, antiblackness, raciality, circulation of black culture, black thought, etc.
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Ravished Armenia Movie Poster - Representation of Armenian WOMAN
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Notebook 3
While looking for other cultural artifacts or cultural productions about the Armenian genocide, I came across an image of an advertisement for a film produced in 1919, about five years after the start of the genocide. At first I was a bit confused, as I assumed the flyer was indicating that there would be some kind of “spectacle” or “show” exploiting some of the Armenian women who lived through the genocide. After doing more research, I found that “Auction of Souls” was a film adaptation of “one of the first documentary memoirs of an eyewitness of Armenian Genocide”, entitled Ravished Armenia (Armenian Genocide Museum Institute). Both the book and the film are based on the detailed account of the horrifying experiences that one Armenian woman, Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian, faced during the genocide. The film first premiered on February 16, 1919 at the Plaza Hotel in New York with an audience of 7000 prominent New Yorkers. The profits raised, approximately 30 million dollars, were donated to The Near East Relief to aid 60,000 Armenian orphans.
Based on my intersectional analysis of the “figure of the refugee” as “female” or “needing to be saved” from Notebook 2, I’d like to further expand this analysis onto this specific cultural production. Perhaps it was necessary to put a seemingly “helpless” Armenian woman at the forefront (as depicted by the movie poster of an Armenian woman trying to release herself from the grip of the Ottoman Turkish man) and how her story could be exploited in order for Americans, mainly wealthier American men, to place their hegemonic ideologies of white patriarchy onto her and her country. In a sense, as much as the film may have accurately depicted the traumatic experiences of Armenians during the genocide, Americans saw the film and through a sort of white-savior complex experienced a big emotional occurrence that just worked to validate their own privilege.
I want to think about the acknowledgement and mourning of genocide as relational to “whiteness”. About 20 or so years after the atrocities of the Armenian genocide, an even more immense crime to humanity occurred during World War II resulting in the extermination of close to six million Jewish people by the Nazi Regime – the Holocaust. In fact, there is a quote from one of Hitler’s speeches where he uses the genocide of the Armenians by Ottoman Turks as justification for his actions by stating “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” (Hitler 1939). As if just because globally people don’t acknowledge or mourn the genocide of millions of people, that means it’s a completely moral and normal thing to do. In relation to whiteness and privilege, Jewish people and Armenian people are both under the socially constructed umbrella of “whiteness” – this is why the Holocaust is remembered as possibly the greatest crime on humanity while the history of the human trafficking of millions of Africans being imported and sold across the Americas as property is promptly swept under the rug. In the book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe states “The disaster of the Holocaust is available as human tragedy in a way that slavery, revolution, and their afterlives are not.” (Sharpe, 34) The fungibility of black lives throughout history is exactly the reason why certain human tragedies are regarded as less important than others in complex racial and religious hierarchies.
Sources
http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/online_exhibition_6.php
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/24/how-the-armenian-genocide-shaped-the-holocaust.html
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