Author: Olivia Murphy

Gene Luen Yang’s The Shadow Hero is about the first Asian-American superhero “The Green Turtle” and his origins. The Green Turtle was a character originally created by Chu F. Hing in the 1940’s, but unfortunately had few fans when the comic was released. Yang brings him back in full force while humanizing him with added social commentary in the context of the time period. The Shadow Hero challenges conventions of classic comic books by introducing a more political context and also by

The book is generally described as a graphic novel, but it is meant to invoke the experience of reading a comic book. It could be either one. Specifically, since it is based on a comic from the 1940’s, it has a classic feel, without modern technology and flashy action graphics. It uses a lot of the same conventions as comic books such as the use of onomatopoeia to illustrate an action (“Blam!” “Pow!”)

However, it also breaks away from these conventions by reading more like a graphic novel: there is heavy focus on telling the story as an biography or memoir. Hank narrates a lot on family, their origins, and less on action and adventure in the plot. Comic books, especially older ones, revolve around fights between heroes and villains and resolving, or working towards resolving a conflict. Characters aren’t always written as well fleshed out people with unique personalities and histories, but in Yang’s book they are. This is what makes the book more like a graphic novel than a comic book to me. In addition, the book discusses socio-political issues of racism and xenophobia against Asians in America, and power and government in China. Although comic books have evolved to be much more sophisticated and intellectual than they used to be, it is still noteworthy to discuss Yang’s explicit messages that would be missing from many other comic books.

 

Chapter 10 discusses how from the twentieth century to the twenty-first, New York refined and reevaluated.  Because of the 1965 immigration reform, New York became even more a “city of immigrants” than ever, welcoming hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Caribbean, East and Central Asia, and Russia, among other places. Politically, Rudolph Giuliani made significant changes to New York as a Republican in a Democratic city. Because of his policies regarding the working class and education, he stirred up conflicts in regards to race, although he was commended for his handling of the September 11th tragedy.

One of the most prominent groups of new immigrants Reitano describes are Asians. The Chinese, who had been in America in groups since the 1800’s, were the first ethnicity to experience legal exclusion, forcing them to remain outside of the American political sphere until the policy’s end in 1943. After 1965, Chinatown was able to  expand its numbers, and New York welcomed in Chinese immigrants from Southern China who entered sweatshops, and even more from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Shanghai, speaking Mandarin instead of Cantonese. After 1943, Chinese Americans were able to organize politically, electing the first Chinese American citywide official (John Liu), among several others. The increase in economic prosperity in this community led to several stereotypes of asians being the “model minority” which leads to parents putting excessive pressure on their children.

Another Asian community, Koreans, helped regenerate their communities, establishing small businesses, causing some inter-community conflicts with other ethnic communities.

The next major immigrant group Reitano mentions are Latinos. The first major wave were the Puerto Ricans. Able to travel back and forth between America and Puerto Rico, this community created a multifaceted identity as well as the term to describe this identity, “Nuyorican”. Puerto Ricans contributed a lot to the cultural landscape of the city through things like music, language and longstanding family traditions. Politically, they were influential in the 1960s, electing Puerto Rican legislators and congressmen. Unfortunately, Puerto Ricans characteristically experienced economic disparity throughout their time in New York City.

After Puerto Ricans came Dominicans who had a lot of the same experiences and impacts in the city. Dominicans were also able to travel back and forth, many of them becoming transnational dual citizens, which caused some of them to limit their involvement with American politics. Currently, Latino groups have found ways to prosper in tandem with other ethnic groups, especially through women in the communities.

Reitano closes the chapter by describing The Social Contract. This is the idea that since cities are places where people live and work together, they also form issues of general and personal interest among themselves that the government must respond to. In these passages, she details the changes made to the City through Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani believed that the welfare system allowed the poor to be “lazy” and waste the money of the hard-working middle class. Consequently, he pulled more than 600,000 people from welfare rolls, and established systems where the homeless had to work daily for their food and shelter. In addition to this, Giuliani  transferred money into private institutions and established tax breaks for corporations, among other things. Giuliani also rebuilt the public school system, buffing up security and reducing bureaucracy, while also battling the teacher’s union and cutting aid for many public schools. These are but some of the positive and negative changes he created while altering the city’s social contract. Despite the many conflicts and controversial ideas, he is remembered best for his stoic and intelligent handling of the tragedy of September 11th.

Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry explicitly discusses the phenomenon of intra-racial prejudice on the basis of skin color. Emma Lou was raised in a family of black elitists, who believed that they had more power, were more beautiful and were worth more than other blacks because of their lightness. Emma Lou despite her darkness, and filled with self loathing, carried on these beliefs well into her adult life.

The third chapter of the book is titled “Alva” after a character of that name. This character is a light-skinned, ethnically ambiguous, attractive man. He and Emma Lou meet…. the dichotomy of their “relationship” is heavily influenced by their perspectives of blackness and the value placed on different kinds of black people. In this respect, Emma Lou and Alva actually think the same, like many others: light is better, blackness is inherently bad. The closer one is to white, the better. So when Alva, a man who characteristically takes advantage of others for his own amusement and gain, appears to have noticed her, Emma Lou latches on to him. She is attached to him because to her, he is the perfect man– a person of color she could legally be with, but not black looking in the slightest– and the perfect man could only take interest in someone who is worthy of noticing. So his noticing her builds up a certain amount of confidence in her, as she began to imagine her life with purpose, someone who loved her for who she was and would fulfill her familial dreams of whitening her bloodline. However, of course at the end of the chapter doesn’t even remember her.

Alva’s chapter redirects the plot of the novel to the next chapter where she begins to reconstruct her understanding of herself, blackness and the way she views others.

 

Nella Larsen’s novel is entitled “Passing”. In the novel, two African-American women are light enough to “pass” as white women. Therefore, we can interpret that the main reason for the title of the book is to reference the two main characters and their experiences passing for white.

In the 1920’s, passing for a white woman brings great advantages and privileges. As white women, Irene and Clare can dine and visit where ever they want. They can freely enjoy the company of white men and women, which means they can participate in the activities of high society without discrimination. They get respect and admiration from most other people. Understanding these advantages helps us to understand why they would sacrifice their own racial heritage to pass as white women. Irene wants to hold on to her black culture, but Clare is too far gone.

Passing could also be a reference to the passage of time, as Clare and Irene were childhood friends, and chose to continue their relationship as adults. In addition, it could also refer to Clare’s sudden passing (death) at the end of the novel.

 

Journal for Mon 4/4

-Read over entries thus far and reflect on the entries themselves and on process of reading/writing journals.

• What do you like/ dislike about your own entries?
• Compare journaling to note-taking.
• Do you like the writing journal? Dislike? Why

Reading over my journal entries, I noticed some patterns and growth. I like the way I use language and vocabulary to express my meaning. In addition, I am able to toe the line between formality and informality: I answer the questions but can also go off on my own tangent asking my own questions. After journaling every week, I can see that I have gotten better at creating a “flow” when I’m writing these journals, and I can now transition more cohesively from thought to thought. One thing I dislike about my own writing is sometimes it appears stiff, and journals are supposed to be fluid and not strict in its syntax and structure.

As for the journals themselves, my favorite ones are the ones where we answer questions about a text. I loved writing about BreadGivers and The Arrival because I truly enjoy analyzing texts and finding new meanings.

Journaling is a little bit like note-taking. Both of them require the writing down of thoughts and ideas inspired by the class, or a text. However, note-taking is for recording important information that one needs to remember, as well as storing questions and thoughts to answer and reflect on at a later time. Journaling, on the other hand, is where you get to expand on those thoughts and questions. It is simply the communication of ideas about something.

I like the writing journal. It allows me space to creatively express my thoughts about the things we learn in the class. By doing the journals, we record some of the most important details and are free to explore tangents of ideas and get deeper into the texts.

 

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is a beautiful and moving book illustrating the trauma of immigration and all its loneliness and discovery. The book is a graphic novel and utilizes absolutely no written language. There are many peculiar elements  and fantastical images within this book that actually relate to the scary and frightening things real people go to that make them want to leave their homes.

The book starts out very realistic and straight forward, showing us a man leaving his family on a train to get to a new country. But right when this first chapter ends, Tan draws the man’s wife and daughter coming back home without him, and long shadows of the spiked tail of some kind of lizard-monster can be seen in the clouds above them. This is the first element of surrealism and for me it set a very ominous tone for the book. I began expecting more scary surreal elements, and I found them. But there are also magical things of beauty and innocence awaiting.

When the protagonist reaches his new city, he is bombarded with new symbols and people and buildings like he’s never seen before. The author created an interesting hieroglyphic written language for the text that makes no sense to either the protagonist or the reader. This was brilliant thinking. In making the book, his goal was really to have the reader feel the experience of being an immigrant in all its anxiety, fear and excitement. That partly why no one in the text speaks: he can’t read or understand anyone, and so neither can we. He draws objects in a notebook to try and communicate with the people he meets, and that is also how we understand what is going on. It is almost like we are the protagonist, since we can only understand what he understands, no more or less.

Because of this idea Tan sets up for us, I theorized that all the fantastic elements were also a device to illustrate things characters were feeling or experiencing. His wife and daughter, for example, were experiencing fear and loneliness after he left them, and we experience it with them because of the visual in the sky. The monster in the skies might represent that the country they are living in is colonized and is in a state of war- like being taken over by a dark beast. That would give them a reason to leave. Likewise, all the unusual food and objects and animals he comes across are to further illustrate how different his new environment is from his old one. In reality, the same kinds of fruit and vegetables and animals are found in many places in the world. It is funny to think that bread would look so drastically different from one place to another but thats how he experienced it being in a new place.

When the protagonist meets new people, he learns of their experiences. One man he meets, a grocer, tells him that he escaped his home country with his wife. In their homeland, giant beings in suits were sucking up his people with machines. My guess is this was supposed to symbolize the implementation of some kind of concentration or internment camp: people being forced to flee or they will be stolen away and put somewhere mysterious. These are a select few of such symbols and elements Tan uses in The Arrival to connote and demonstrate what immigrants go through.

The scene where Vito reaches America is extremely poignant and powerful. It creates a sharp contrast with other depictions about the trip to Ellis Island, which are usually characterized as beautiful, joyous and hopeful. Instead, in this film, the camera pans over the faces of immigrant after immigrant and all of the faces are somber and worried. They are clustered together and forced on this tumultuous journey and there is not much joy to be had.

The way the film shows this scene is very interesting. The music is cultural and not necessarily sad or triumphant. In fact, there is a kind of ominous tone to the music actually, which I suppose sets the mood of the film, which is that America is not necessarily the land of the free and beautiful, for some especially.

In addition, the people on the ships can see the skyline of New York, but their view is blocked by the harbor and other ships. When they get off the boat they are forced through equal parts humiliating and infuriating customs. So it is as if their status as immigrants literally gets in the way of the hopes and dreams of their new lives in America. This is also seen later when Vito gets to his room facing the Statue of Liberty. His window is dirty and smudged but he looks out at the monument and sings a bittersweet melody in Italian. The idea is that he cannot access the America that was projected to him and so many others like him, (“give me your tired and poor and restless, etc) and that that image is stained. From his perspective, it is as if he is too “dirty”( the window) to access that version of America that can give him equal opportunity.

“Bread Givers” is a look into lives of those who have little but sacrifice and give much. In it, the Smolinsky women diligently work all day, in and out of the home to provide. The vast majority of their provisions go straight to Reb Smolinsky, the man of the household. He preaches daily about getting into heaven, and spends his time studying the word of God whilst his family provides for him to live in comfort. By this context, the title of the book is very telling.

A Bread winner is the title given to the person who earns a living for a household, as they earn money to “win” bread (or food or supplies) which keeps their family alive. However, I think the idea of the Bread Giver is very significant. Not only does the Bread Giver earn the wages and win the bread, but they give it away. A bread winner gives to themselves, but a bread giver gives their earnings away. This idea is reflected in the novel, as the women are the ones sacrificing their hopes and dreams for the man. Reb Smolinsky’s family gives all they have away to him, which defies traditional  gender roles as well as the idea of the American Dream (everyone working hard to earn what they get, every man for himself).

The scene in which Bill the Butcher uses the empty carcass of pig to demonstrate how to kill a human is very interesting. It immediately follows the scene in which Amsterdam sees another of the men who were once with the Dead Rabbits when he was a child.

The lighting is pretty normal, with daylight shining on the two of them inside the dark Butchers. Something about the light and the music creates a sort of intimacy between the two men, despite the morbidity of their actions. Bill becomes almost this sort of fatherly figure, instructing the young Amsterdam, who initially is curious and trusting.

The music from the previous scene flows into the music of the Butcher scene, and it is a bittersweet, lilting string solo. This music is maintained throughout this scene, even as the two of them hack at the flesh of the pig. The music actually gets louder when Bill passes the knife along to Amsterdam, increasing the intensity of the scene. As Amsterdam hacks at the pig, a more ominous sounding music layers over it to transition this scene to the next.

When Bill hands him the knife, the camera flashes to posters commemorating the Victory of the Natives over the Dead Rabbits, and then to a flashback of Vallem handing Amsterdam the razor 16 years before. This shows that Amsterdam has not forgotten how Bill took his father’s life. He shows some indecision, but quickly and precisely imitates Bill in stabbing the pig. The viewer is left wondering why this scene is important. Is Amsterdam joining in Bill’s efforts? Does he have any wish to continue in his father’s footstep in defending his Irish brothers and sisters? All we see is his indecision, but violent ability.