This brief essay was first presented at Emerson College's Global Pathways Film Festival . I reflect on my experiences during the program to develop an understanding and critique of the class and colonial dynamics that inform the United States' global presence.
A draft of this paper was originally presented at the Working Class Academics Conference. This paper considers the historical conflict surrounding Kashmir – a region targeted for its profound natural beauty, industrial potential, & as the only Muslim-majority state in a Hindu nationalist India – and interrogates India’s treatment of Kashmir preceding and during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to problematize the capitalist power's colonial desire of the region.
This write-up was commissioned by the action group Stand With Kashmir towards the development of their April 2020 report on detentions in the region. I focus on the impacts of Abrogation of articles 370 and 35A on the youth population of Kashmir and, more recently, how this is further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A middle-aged Gujarati Muslim and a teenaged Kashmiri Pandit join forces in order to survive. Soon after the Godhra Train Burning of 2002, Asha meets Sanjay. Local anti-Muslim violence erupts and the two flee. They stumble through time to 1990 Kashmir, when Asha's Pandit family faced similar violence.
The remaining walls were lined with wooden shelves, the color of dried blood. The cloth bindings of their books formed a muted, misordered rainbow. He refused to get any closer, worried what they might tell him about Park, the mononym he had been provided. Based on the pungent must of yellowed paper with undertones of eucalyptus coming from the shelves and the age of the building, let alone the age of the buyer himself, Hakim was right to be nervous.
“It had best not,” Park’s breathing was beginning to catch, he turned away, “excuse me.” Hakim swung his head in a tilting motion, obliging. Park undid the button on his starched collar, releasing the flesh that had been spilling over it. Choking back a wet cough, he turned back to Hakim, “Needless to say, you will be staying here until our business is concluded.” Park had remembered the power he carried, confirming Hakim’s fears.
This thesis engages with Fatimah Asghar, a Pakistani-Kashmiri-American poet, screenwriter, and producer. Assigning particular focus to her poem, Kal, I trace the entangled functions of cultural heritage, colonial displacement, and Asian-American identity. In doing so, I draw analogues between the poem’s narrated longing for a lost mother to a diasporic longing for a lost motherland.
“What does he believe in?” She stopped the car at a red light and looked at him, noticing the length of his neck. It was disproportionate to the rest of his body. It wasn’t the length, although it was longer than she would have expected for someone his size, but the thickness that really threw her off. Rather, its lack of thickness. It started wide at his rounded jaw and ran hairless along its length. It broke only at his Adam’s apple, which, much like his shoulders and collarbone, was made prominent only in his neck’s lack.
Due to narratives of US Exceptionalism and the ideological vestiges of colonialism or imperialism, white Americans understand their country as being masculine because heteronormativity dictates masculinity as dominant. In a binary, this leaves the rest of the (non-white) world to be feminine and therefore subordinate. Being Asian-American in the United States comes with a certain cultural conflict between embracing one’s Asianness and the implied femininity that comes with that or one’s Americanness and the implied masculinity that comes with that. What goes unrecognized/untold, and the crux of Ichiro’s conflict, is that even if one decides to be American, an Asian-American is still Asian and will therefore never be American enough.
When the Unicode Consortium centralized emoji, no one tried to establish a methodology for their use and function in common communication. Emoticons, and by extension, emoji, were developed as a consequence of the limitations imposed by technology on communication. Emoji are meant to take the place of customary visual signifiers that societies had developed and exercised before such jarring digitization of socialization and communication (Steinmetz). Therefore, they were meant to be applied freely and as they made sense to the individual users. It is this freedom, this lack of an established order, that allows emoji to societally function as they do.
Such obsession with colour has deprived the members of the human race of their rightful place as the supreme beings on, and of, Earth. The peacock, alongside many tropical birds, employ bright colours for the sake of mating. The natural principle being the more flamboyant and overwhelming the male’s colour scheme, the more likely they would be to mate. Colour vision also benefits predatory animals in that it allows them to discern between potentially poisonous and harmless prey. This practice also benefits the prey by allowing them to propagate their species. But colour vision also presents greater risks to creatures from all walks of life. Animals “gifted” with such an ability are more prone to the distractions of the vibrant palette of a pink dewy sunrise peering over the horizon and asinine shiny objects like cell phones and diamonds. Human beings, unlike other creatures able to discern colour, are not some of God's failed experiments - like the platypus - but rather the pinnacle of evolution and creation, developed to rule over the lesser species such as frogs and dolphins and of course, the platypus.
This poem received Honorable Mention in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards