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february 2022 reading wrap up ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
Mar. 4th, 2022 12:23 amhappy march :^0 i am back with my first reading update since establishing my reading goals for 2022 last february. I am embarrassed to say that i did not read more than 2 books this month since i was expecting to read more; they were pretty short too and i've been shit at managing my time for reading (school has been kind of blegh) but i am still on track with my reading goals this year so. that being said, the two books i read this month were:
1. Passing by Nella Larsen (4.5/5 stars) - incredibly beautiful and haunting like everyone should read this immediatelyyy. irene's quiet restraint and her attempt at repressing her desire to be closer to and her overall growing fascination to yet also jealousy of clare made me swoon, and larsen's writing is so descriptive and effective in conveying the tension between both of them and the difference in their characters. as deborah mcdowell states in her introduction to [my copy of] the book: "Irene paints herself as the perfect, nurturing, self-sacrificing wife and mother, the altruistic 'race woman', and Clare as her diametrical opposite. In Clare, there was 'nothing sacrificial'. She had 'no allegiance beyond her immediate desire. She was selfish, and cold and hard,' Irene reports". the intricacies of race and class that larsen weaves into the construction of her characters and the narrative are also worth noting, for example in the interactions between irene and her maid zulena (there is a scene in the film adaptation of the book between irene, clare, and zulena that i thought expressed again the difference between clare/irene in their characterization but also how this difference is informed by their class standing/how their class standing has informed their life decisions and the way they choose to construct their realities). (on that note -- also recommend watching the film, directed by rebecca hall, i think it slightly missed capturing the complexity of the topics with the intensity it deserved but it is still a successful adaptation and work in its own right, and interesting to compare to the book) to cite mcdowell again, "despite her protestations to [clare's "faults"], irene, with a cold, hard, exploitative, and manipulative determination, tries to protect her most cherished attainment: security, which she equates with marriage to a man in a prestigious profession, the accouterments of middle-class existence -- children, material comfort, and social responsibility. moreover, irene resorts to wily and feline tactics to insure that illusion of security." and "not only does larsen undercut irene's credibility as narrator, but she also satirizes and parodies the manners and morals of the Black middle class that irene so faithfully represents." i think in this way, irene and clare remind me what bell hooks was talking about when speaking of the margin and the decisions that the oppressed, or people who were born in the margin, make to leave that margin because they were taught to move to the center, to overcome oppression by conforming to the ways of the oppressed, and i think that shows in irene and clare to different extents because the act of passing to irene is not a form of survival the way it is to clare, and the sensitivity with which larsen emphasizes this difference contributes to the haunting effect of the novella overall. also interesting to think about how the heteropatriarchal structure within which irene and clare have to live in affect (the viewer's reading of) their relationship and the quiet violence clare endures, both women being bound to structures of heterosexual marriage and domestic living.
"you mean you don't want me, 'rene?
irene hadn't supposed that anyone could look so hurt."
2. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (5/5 stars) - fucking life altering... i'll just insert my goodreads review here:
i cannot stress enough how this should be required reading for every student and educator in academia and in any environment that involves (community) education. freire comprehensively describes the difference between a banking system of education and a liberatory system of education, and explains the dialogical relationship between theory and action to form an educational, liberatory praxis. he expounds on the ways that the oppressors divide and conquer the oppressed to uphold oppressive structures of power that inhibit revolution, and emphasizes the importance of identifying the contradictions between the oppressor and the oppressed in the context of educational spaces. some of the information tends to be repetitive but i think this is mainly a case of constant references to earlier chapters/concepts that he introduces to really build a foundational framework of praxis (could also be due to translation or other factors regarding language, just speculating)
please read asap if you’re a student i read the second chapter for class lol but decided to read the whole thing since it has been on my tbr for a while. really made me feel bleak about how true everything he wrote about was and thinking about my current situation as a student and as someone who hopes to work as an educator one day. think the last few chapters excel at balancing that feeling of bleakness by instilling the importance of doing this work not only for yourself but for other people, especially those continuously oppressed in more complex ways. in the words of assata shakur - “no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that knowledge will help set you free.” [end]
some highlighted quotes:
- "Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the preservers consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility."
- "Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom."
- "The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis."
- "More and more, the oppressors are using science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression.13 The oppressed, as objects, as "things," have no purposes except those their oppressors prescribe for them." - I thought this was a really interesting observation especially when thinking about how the -oppressors- technocrats - in STEM fields unapologetically defend their methods of exploitation of human labor and the Earth's resources. The static mechanization of labor and the world and how it's all so wasteful and cruel. And the emphasis on STEM (often at the expense of the humanities) to trap people in a bubble of oppression and turn genuine beliefs of innovation and envisioning a better reality for the oppressed, for the "development" and "betterment" of the world (of the oppressors).
- "Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside."
- "Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people."
- "If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue. On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility."
and many more.
not even just for participants in academic/educational spaces tbh. for every person who has been affected or exploited by systems of oppression in some way (and some who have (had) the capacity to enact oppression onto others). i think that the realizations that would emerge from reading this could fundamentally alter the way one understands their relationship with the world and their environment dialectically. things aren't meant to exist in complete isolation from one another: education as a tool for universal liberation is an extremely powerful idea that i hope will only materialize more strongly in the coming years.
besides books, i did end up reading quite a few journal articles and book excerpts, most of which were for class and all of which i ended up really liking as well! my favorite was Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness by bell hooks (1981), of which i have published a separate post about here: https://g3ryon.dreamwidth.org/722.html interesting to read in conjunction with freire's text, considering how hooks drew a lot of her own ideas regarding education from pedagogy of the oppressed (evidently in the first chapter of Teaching to Transgress). the main example i thought of when reflecting on this idea of the margin was also in the environment of academia.
other things i read:
- Love in a Hot Climate: Foodscapes of Trade, Travel, War, and Intimacy by Jean Duruz (2016) - found this as a contextual source for my descriptive writing assignment. the language is fluid and thought-provoking: Duruz uses the term "foodscape" to describe the emotional and sensory experience of eating and preparing food and how these experiences are memorialized as a form of cultural preservation. the foodscape is considered in the context of gendered labor and how one associates an "ideology of cooking" with (often invisible) matriarchal structures, due to the idea of cooking as care or as a form of intimacy (as opposed to work). had me thinking a lot about specifically south/east asian emotional connection to food and almost the mythologizing of it? like especially why a lot of diaspora asians write a lot about FOOD specifically and how native asians write and think differently about food. then thinking about the kitchen as a space that exists within a domestic setting and also the "criteria" for authenticity in culture.
- The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates: extremely comprehensive explanation of the history of redlining and how the harm it caused to Black communities lasts today but ultimately fallacious in Coates' appraisal of the Israeli occupation of the state of Palestine. I urge everyone to read this article by Rania Khaled instead which debunks "Israel" as a model for how reparations should be manifested:
https://electronicintifada.net/content/ta-nehisi-coates-sings-zionism/15776
- Wages Against Housework by Silvia Federici: banger. need to find an indonesian translation to hopefully send to my mom one day, definitely been thinking a lot about the "labor of love and care" within the sphere of domesticity (especially after Duruz's article)
- Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960 by Freek Colombijn and Joost Coté: actually the first chapter of their book Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960 which I have since added to my tbr. They outline the history of Jakarta as an autocentric city as the result of colonial reformism (lol), noting that “[U]ltimately modernization of the urban environment was intended to affect a change in human behavior. Traditional behavior was often seen as unruly behavior that needed to be disciplined.” and “[q]uite often the colonial state concluded that objects or behaviors that lacked or protested modernity had to be removed from the cityscape”. reminds me of how freire differentiated modernity and modernization from development (of a nation state): how modernity is not always the same as development because often the consequences that modernity brought (war, imperialism, colonization) hindered the cultural and national development of (colonized/oppressed) nation states, and how development today is understood mostly from an economic view - definitely need to read more on this, if anyone has any recs (hi anthro-oomfarja) lmk <3
- The Art of Mutual Aid by Andreas Petrossiants: reemphasizes the importance and significance of mutual aid especially during covid times (and specific to nyc). addressed mutual aid and collective aid in the context of art and the role of the artist to reconsider their artistic aims within their communities which i really appreciated. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/workplace/430303/the-art-of-mutual-aid/
books i plan on finishing by the end of march:
- quicksand by nella larsen
- the wretched of the screen by hito steyerl
- emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown
- blackshirts and reds by michael parenti
- assata: an autobiography by assata shakur
and that's my update! until next month :-)
1. Passing by Nella Larsen (4.5/5 stars) - incredibly beautiful and haunting like everyone should read this immediatelyyy. irene's quiet restraint and her attempt at repressing her desire to be closer to and her overall growing fascination to yet also jealousy of clare made me swoon, and larsen's writing is so descriptive and effective in conveying the tension between both of them and the difference in their characters. as deborah mcdowell states in her introduction to [my copy of] the book: "Irene paints herself as the perfect, nurturing, self-sacrificing wife and mother, the altruistic 'race woman', and Clare as her diametrical opposite. In Clare, there was 'nothing sacrificial'. She had 'no allegiance beyond her immediate desire. She was selfish, and cold and hard,' Irene reports". the intricacies of race and class that larsen weaves into the construction of her characters and the narrative are also worth noting, for example in the interactions between irene and her maid zulena (there is a scene in the film adaptation of the book between irene, clare, and zulena that i thought expressed again the difference between clare/irene in their characterization but also how this difference is informed by their class standing/how their class standing has informed their life decisions and the way they choose to construct their realities). (on that note -- also recommend watching the film, directed by rebecca hall, i think it slightly missed capturing the complexity of the topics with the intensity it deserved but it is still a successful adaptation and work in its own right, and interesting to compare to the book) to cite mcdowell again, "despite her protestations to [clare's "faults"], irene, with a cold, hard, exploitative, and manipulative determination, tries to protect her most cherished attainment: security, which she equates with marriage to a man in a prestigious profession, the accouterments of middle-class existence -- children, material comfort, and social responsibility. moreover, irene resorts to wily and feline tactics to insure that illusion of security." and "not only does larsen undercut irene's credibility as narrator, but she also satirizes and parodies the manners and morals of the Black middle class that irene so faithfully represents." i think in this way, irene and clare remind me what bell hooks was talking about when speaking of the margin and the decisions that the oppressed, or people who were born in the margin, make to leave that margin because they were taught to move to the center, to overcome oppression by conforming to the ways of the oppressed, and i think that shows in irene and clare to different extents because the act of passing to irene is not a form of survival the way it is to clare, and the sensitivity with which larsen emphasizes this difference contributes to the haunting effect of the novella overall. also interesting to think about how the heteropatriarchal structure within which irene and clare have to live in affect (the viewer's reading of) their relationship and the quiet violence clare endures, both women being bound to structures of heterosexual marriage and domestic living.
"you mean you don't want me, 'rene?
irene hadn't supposed that anyone could look so hurt."
2. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (5/5 stars) - fucking life altering... i'll just insert my goodreads review here:
i cannot stress enough how this should be required reading for every student and educator in academia and in any environment that involves (community) education. freire comprehensively describes the difference between a banking system of education and a liberatory system of education, and explains the dialogical relationship between theory and action to form an educational, liberatory praxis. he expounds on the ways that the oppressors divide and conquer the oppressed to uphold oppressive structures of power that inhibit revolution, and emphasizes the importance of identifying the contradictions between the oppressor and the oppressed in the context of educational spaces. some of the information tends to be repetitive but i think this is mainly a case of constant references to earlier chapters/concepts that he introduces to really build a foundational framework of praxis (could also be due to translation or other factors regarding language, just speculating)
please read asap if you’re a student i read the second chapter for class lol but decided to read the whole thing since it has been on my tbr for a while. really made me feel bleak about how true everything he wrote about was and thinking about my current situation as a student and as someone who hopes to work as an educator one day. think the last few chapters excel at balancing that feeling of bleakness by instilling the importance of doing this work not only for yourself but for other people, especially those continuously oppressed in more complex ways. in the words of assata shakur - “no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that knowledge will help set you free.” [end]
some highlighted quotes:
- "Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the preservers consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility."
- "Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom."
- "The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis."
- "More and more, the oppressors are using science and technology as unquestionably powerful instruments for their purpose: the maintenance of the oppressive order through manipulation and repression.13 The oppressed, as objects, as "things," have no purposes except those their oppressors prescribe for them." - I thought this was a really interesting observation especially when thinking about how the -oppressors- technocrats - in STEM fields unapologetically defend their methods of exploitation of human labor and the Earth's resources. The static mechanization of labor and the world and how it's all so wasteful and cruel. And the emphasis on STEM (often at the expense of the humanities) to trap people in a bubble of oppression and turn genuine beliefs of innovation and envisioning a better reality for the oppressed, for the "development" and "betterment" of the world (of the oppressors).
- "Implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is spectator, not re-creator. In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty "mind" passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside."
- "Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people."
- "If I do not love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue. On the other hand, dialogue cannot exist without humility."
and many more.
not even just for participants in academic/educational spaces tbh. for every person who has been affected or exploited by systems of oppression in some way (and some who have (had) the capacity to enact oppression onto others). i think that the realizations that would emerge from reading this could fundamentally alter the way one understands their relationship with the world and their environment dialectically. things aren't meant to exist in complete isolation from one another: education as a tool for universal liberation is an extremely powerful idea that i hope will only materialize more strongly in the coming years.
besides books, i did end up reading quite a few journal articles and book excerpts, most of which were for class and all of which i ended up really liking as well! my favorite was Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness by bell hooks (1981), of which i have published a separate post about here: https://g3ryon.dreamwidth.org/722.html interesting to read in conjunction with freire's text, considering how hooks drew a lot of her own ideas regarding education from pedagogy of the oppressed (evidently in the first chapter of Teaching to Transgress). the main example i thought of when reflecting on this idea of the margin was also in the environment of academia.
other things i read:
- Love in a Hot Climate: Foodscapes of Trade, Travel, War, and Intimacy by Jean Duruz (2016) - found this as a contextual source for my descriptive writing assignment. the language is fluid and thought-provoking: Duruz uses the term "foodscape" to describe the emotional and sensory experience of eating and preparing food and how these experiences are memorialized as a form of cultural preservation. the foodscape is considered in the context of gendered labor and how one associates an "ideology of cooking" with (often invisible) matriarchal structures, due to the idea of cooking as care or as a form of intimacy (as opposed to work). had me thinking a lot about specifically south/east asian emotional connection to food and almost the mythologizing of it? like especially why a lot of diaspora asians write a lot about FOOD specifically and how native asians write and think differently about food. then thinking about the kitchen as a space that exists within a domestic setting and also the "criteria" for authenticity in culture.
- The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates: extremely comprehensive explanation of the history of redlining and how the harm it caused to Black communities lasts today but ultimately fallacious in Coates' appraisal of the Israeli occupation of the state of Palestine. I urge everyone to read this article by Rania Khaled instead which debunks "Israel" as a model for how reparations should be manifested:
https://electronicintifada.net/content/ta-nehisi-coates-sings-zionism/15776
- Wages Against Housework by Silvia Federici: banger. need to find an indonesian translation to hopefully send to my mom one day, definitely been thinking a lot about the "labor of love and care" within the sphere of domesticity (especially after Duruz's article)
- Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960 by Freek Colombijn and Joost Coté: actually the first chapter of their book Cars, Conduits, and Kampongs: The Modernization of the Indonesian City, 1920-1960 which I have since added to my tbr. They outline the history of Jakarta as an autocentric city as the result of colonial reformism (lol), noting that “[U]ltimately modernization of the urban environment was intended to affect a change in human behavior. Traditional behavior was often seen as unruly behavior that needed to be disciplined.” and “[q]uite often the colonial state concluded that objects or behaviors that lacked or protested modernity had to be removed from the cityscape”. reminds me of how freire differentiated modernity and modernization from development (of a nation state): how modernity is not always the same as development because often the consequences that modernity brought (war, imperialism, colonization) hindered the cultural and national development of (colonized/oppressed) nation states, and how development today is understood mostly from an economic view - definitely need to read more on this, if anyone has any recs (hi anthro-oomfarja) lmk <3
- The Art of Mutual Aid by Andreas Petrossiants: reemphasizes the importance and significance of mutual aid especially during covid times (and specific to nyc). addressed mutual aid and collective aid in the context of art and the role of the artist to reconsider their artistic aims within their communities which i really appreciated. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/workplace/430303/the-art-of-mutual-aid/
books i plan on finishing by the end of march:
- quicksand by nella larsen
- the wretched of the screen by hito steyerl
- emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown
- blackshirts and reds by michael parenti
- assata: an autobiography by assata shakur
and that's my update! until next month :-)
