Div II Retrospective Paper
Div I as a whole was a relatively lonely year - though I embarked on plenty of academic journeyâs that were deeply rewarding without the GPA anxiety that colored my high school years, and made several close friends, I felt alone and without a strong community at Hampshire. I entered my Div II with a desire to pin down my academic interests in preparation for a definite career and domestic life which I imagined that I was supposed to desire and work towards somewhat because of this disconnection. I decided to operate with an uncreative focus on my future, as opposed to on building the futures I imagine for myself and my communities because I didnât truly feel a part of one. I was interested in the arrival, as opposed to the process. I left behind a long summer of time spent alone, running around my home town of Los Angeles on various buses and trains, to see some of my favorite bands play. I worked the door at a few DIY music shows around the city, as I was interning for a small LA music collective called Smash Club that I discovered on Instagram. I wrote and produced a short album called All My Friends which I published on Bandcamp and SoundCloud at the very tail end of the summer. A lot of the drive I had to engage in all these different projects came from an intense dissatisfaction with my mental state. I wanted to be busy, and more than that to be busy doing the things that my idealism and social anxiety normally would have prevented me from even trying. My expectations of reality had been permanently shattered by some traumas I went through during the Spring semester - the assumptive world I existed in was all of a sudden very new and endlessly terrifying. I felt that the only thing that I could do was act on the desire/hope/drive/trust that remained in me, that this was the only way forward.Â
I was excited about arriving back to campus after being so socially isolated in LA and ended up pouring a lot of my creative energy and propensity for risk-taking into my social life. I was content not to scrutinize my academics partially because of how early I was into what I knew would be a two-year process, and because I thought it was alright for my priorities to be elsewhere while I took the introductory classes that I intended to shape the start of my Div. I wasnât clear on what areas of study would best guide me towards the subject(s) of my Div III, so the classes I took were all guesses in the direction of interests I already had and wanted to expand upon to reach clarity. I planned on exploring the presence of poetry in children's educational lives, how to introduce more writing programs for lower-class black and brown children who might not regularly interact with poetry in their classes, and investigating the ways that poetry can serve as a tool in mending traumas experienced in childhood (and onward). I took five classes, the most I had taken in one semester up to that point. I hoped that these classes would help me begin to map and specify my driving goals and questions about the intersections of race, childhood, and trauma.Â
Creating Families with Marlene Fried and Pamela Stone, though Iâd intended it to inform the Childhood Studies aspect of my Div II, ended up being much more a reproductive justice studies class. I struggled with it because of the number of students and the style of our class time - as the course went on it became increasingly based in sharing personal information that was pertinent to the content (international adoption, queer parenting, etcâŚ), which was not a sharing style that I felt excited about participating in. The Black Feminist Archive was an amazingly valuable space to me just in the fact that it convened over twenty black people of my same age range into one space for 3 hours every Monday - it was dominated by those people, and we were in turn the subject of its scholarship. Being exposed to that contextualized my place as a black person at Hampshire and in the world, affirming that I shared experiences with some, and that I didnât with others, and asked me to examine some of my privileges and proximities to whiteness with new scrutiny that had never seemed so essential before. The theories that this class and Zahra Caldwells class exposed me to were immensely foundational for the directions my thoughts on black femmehood/womanhood would continue to go in the future - particularly the notes on the perceived excessiveness of the black body, Zahra Caldwellâs definition of black female cool, and the aesthetic of black female cool as it is/has been co-opted by white folks. The Black Feminist Archive also challenged me with the task of contributing to a group presentation on the black body by using archival research and creating my own finding aids. I went to the Smith College archives and found documents that offered insight into the lives of two black women, mainly through words written about them. These classes were invaluable to me, but my learning was also impeded somewhat by my disagreement with the professor's modes of facilitation, and assigning work.
Iaido and Dancing Modern were the only classes that I was able to enjoy, as I didnât feel blindsided by some aspect of the class I wasnât prepared for - they both accurately matched the class description, and continued that way for the entire semester. They were also both physically motivated classes, Iaido being a sect of Japanese martial arts involving a dulled katana called an iaito. They both served as grounding points in my day and helped me return to some semblance of safety in and curiosity about my body which I had felt very disconnected from and in some ways scared of for some time. I had not danced since my junior year of high school after I very unceremoniously quit my ballet studio, partially due to its bankruptcy and partially due to the general unkindness of its directors. This return to dance was full of surprises in how much enjoyment I got out of it, and also in that it became a way for me to tap into the Hampshire community by getting more involved with campus dance life. I auditioned for several Div III pieces and composition works that would be choreographed by students and joined the rehearsal process for three, which put me into contact with several other dancers (two of whom Iâm still close friends with and plan to collaborate with this year). That semester was the first time I felt tapped into the larger Hampshire community, and that my academics were not compartmentalized away from my social life - they all started to bleed together and clued me into the essentiality of cultivating joyfulness in and across all areas of my life. I got involved in the music scene on campus as well, forming a two-piece band with a close friend after we listened to each other's Bandcamp discographies, and we played several shows at Hampshire, as well as venues on the West coast over Winter break. Â
I learned that I wanted to write and dance, and that both would have significant places in my Div III, from the classes I took in the next two semesters during the Spring and Fall of 2019. My Fall 2018 schedule was without any literary studies or childhood studies courses, so I took two poetry courses (mostly analytic, though The BreakBeat Poets was partially generative), a modern dance course, and a childhood studies course at Smith. I began a pattern of taking at least four classes every semester, and taking more than half of them off-campus, which pushed me to further expand my assumptive world and connect me with the Five College Area, just as the variety of classes I took in Fall of 2018 had expanded my connection to Hampshire. In high school, I had always dealt with anxiety about my ability to perform well, and would deliberately stay home from school to avoid this feeling. The way many of my high school classes were structured allowed very little room for critical engagement, and it was rare that I ever felt fulfilled by assignments and projects because of it. Once it began to sink in for me that I had control over what classes I took, and that the primary wayâs my performance would be judged would be through my critical engagement (i.e. in-class participation and essay writing), I felt excited by academics, not paralyzed by them.Â
This was also the semester defined by the collegeâs financial crisis. In my friend groups, there was looming dissatisfaction, cynicism, and fear about the turn of events Hampshire seemed to be heading towards. The professors in the off-campus classes I was taking always had plenty of worried questions to ask me. The omnipresence of this concern allowed me to shake some of my self-imposed anxieties loose. The individual and campus-wide scrambling that became so quotidien during this semester destabilized my perception of the university structure, something that previously had been so inaccessible and immaterial that I placed my faith in it without thinking. This deeply flawed system laid bare, combined with my inchoate mental framework of excitement in the face of challenge carved out space for me to unravel the limitations I had previously placed upon how I imagined myself in the present and future due to restrictive academic policies and practices Iâd internalized in high school. Spring 2019 was a turning point in that I began to forgo the future I imagined I should want or should work toward. The classes I took were initially intended to propel me into a deeper understanding of my goals with children's literature and childhood studies, and by the end, that understanding became that those goals were coming from the high school guidance counselor in my head encouraging me to settle on a career as soon as possible. The topics explored by the classes I chose did interest me, and I believe I needed to follow those threads to discover the possibilities of how much farther I could take them. This was a wonderful trade-off in that as I drifted away from the interests that initially drew me to the courses, each one transformed me in terms of how I viewed it.Â
Instead of each class supplementing some invisible requirement or standard that I needed to satisfy, they made themselves clear to me as entirely unpredictable sources of specific knowledge, providing me with numerous lenses to look at the world through. This realization of subjectivity in academia greatly decreased my anxiety around choosing a career. Instead of orienting my class taking, and participation around what a class might do for me, I began to see each class as a small community that it was my responsibility to learn how to cultivate. The Stories Children Tell pushed me past my self-consciousness in subjects I didnât feel as confident in, as it was a 300 level psychology course. I was able to create a story study, coded each story for things like locus of control or presence of multiple perspectives, and wrote a lab report analyzing the findings. I also wrote a fifteen-page paper on narratives created to assuage cognitive dissonance, using the history of child sexual abuse by clergy in the Catholic Church as a case study. I developed new confidence for speaking consistently in class in The BreakBeat Poets and began writing again after a long hiatus largely due to the writing assignments we had. Contemporary 3/4 at Amherst College further developed my engagement with the Five College Dance community, putting me into contact with two other black dancers who I performed alongside in both of their self-choreographed works, and introducing me to the Five College Repertory auditions in March which I attended with several Hampshire friends. The band I was in continued to grow in size, and we played more shows that semester in the WMass area, although the number of members and incessant emphasis on performance over song production began to stir up tensions. Â
Reading Contemporary Poetry with Matthew Donovan at Smith, Poetry Writing with Sam Ace at Mt. Holyoke, and my independent study with Hampshire Professor thuy le were all courses that challenged me enormously in my writing and reading practice. In each, my professors put me and other students into contact with several accomplished poets doing readings and Q&Aâs in the Five College Area. Attending these were mandatory parts of the class - sometimes the artists would actually come in and speak with us directly. I had spent the summer in Amherst with friends, and these artist talks that were so sited specific, taking me to different areas of Amherst and NoHo, felt like an extension of the exploring I began doing in the Pioneer Valley by bus and on foot in the Spring of my second year. The band broke up at the semesterâs start, and so I had a lot more free time on my hands. It was a busy semester, the velocity of which was carried over from the previous one. I continued pushing my limits, heightening my class and work-load. I was losing sight of what my concentration was and getting more invested in the individual worlds of my classes. In the end, this was a positive thing. The developments I made while dancing and writing in parallel projects that did not intersect felt immensely truthful and were swift in cutting deep at my obsessions and concerns. It became clear that a work where these mediums did intersect could be majorly effective. Boatâs Leaving, a repertory piece I had been cast in and had rehearsals for twice a week, was a work about a group of people on a journey together, and on the way trying and failing over and over to protect each other from suffering. My independent study brought me to a better understanding of how my writing has failed to address the subjects Iâve intended it to; I learned about what I struggle with in writing, what has been missing. I had intended for the class to focus on intersections between black and Chinese cultural identities, and though I do feel like my subject matter addressed this, thuyâs guidance dove me headfirst into a more broad contemplation on what my true desires were for my writing. What are my concerns? What is it that I see in the world that I want to change? How does the writing build towards this change? How can the language, down to the specificity of my word choice, reflect those desires? What are the links and divides between the personal and the collective? How is it a black feminist act to divulge personal information about queerness, sex, family, love, grief, and the blurring of perpetrator/victim dichotomy to an audience of strangers? These were some of the most interesting questions asked by authors that thuy assigned me to read, such as Simone White, Anne Carson, and Sun Yung Shin. I completed two chapbooks in my two poetry classes that semester considering these questions - Phosphoromancy and Sun Through A Skylight Under Snow - some poems from which I hope to edit and include in my Div III.Â
My class with Nigel Alderman at Mount Holyoke on Modernism also sparked a connection for me between writing about marginalized identities and capitalism that illuminated the path to my Div III. A particular essay by Woolf called Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown got me thinking about writing as a practice of simultaneously rendering reality as it is and changing it. Taking Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism with Iyko Day at MoHo the following semester was the perfect answer to those thoughts for how it answered and expanded my questions about capitalism, race, queerness, and spatial existence. I had been trying to write about those subjects but struggled to make work that held the complexities between them in an honest way. The course illuminated many of these unknown realms, gave me clearer language to wield when speaking about them, and specified the historical sites where my interests overlap. It also introduced me to the concept of anti-relationality, a facet of capitalism that alienates people from each other, and from themselves. This concept cropped up in my TAâing position as well. Being the first facilitating position Iâd ever officially held, it stirred up a lot of anxiety about my ability to be a leader, and hold the vulnerability of students, in addition to the fact that it was a course Iâd not taken before. I often struggled to push myself past my perceived limitations. The class group itself was also difficult to work with. I found that thuy almost always had to take the lead in discussions, and that participation was hard to excite and sustain. Many of the students were planted firmly in their chosen literary form, and I struggled to brainstorm effective ways to get them out of their comfort zones. Despite these roadblocks, identifying these anxieties has made it easier for me to now identify when I am repeating the behaviors that exacerbate them. The class content - considering writing as a space making practice that creates new lenses to see reality through - also contributed to developments I made that began to crystallize my Div III ideas.Â
I canât recall exactly how my interest in cowboy aesthetic, cowboy drag, and its racial implications developed. Some of it was present in my subconscious from seeing my Chinese grandfather in cowboy boots, Stetson hats, and silk vests in old footage, and recalling him teaching me to play âRange of the Buffaloâ on guitar. What I know is that taking Intermediate Installation with Serena Aurora-Himmelfarb and Aesthetics of Racial Cap. at the same time sparked something in my brain and brought me to a fascination with the mobility politics of the American West as they impose themselves upon the Black, Asian, and Indigenous people who have historically lived there. Installation class broadened my understanding of art and coaxed dance back out of me as a valuable, essential method of researching whereas the previous semester I had been trying to define my Div III as solely literary. After naming these interests, Serena sent me work by an LA-based Chinese artist (who I hope to soon have a conversation with) Stephanie Mei Huang, a painter and installation artist doing work using âcowboy dragâ to render the simultaneously belonging and unbelonging of Chinese consciousness in the American West. The class also familiarized me with the concept of assemblage, a combination of things/ideas/items/parts which through their individual pathways moves the entire organism as one entity. This idea comforted me when it came to the number of concepts I was drawing on in writing, performance art, dance, and installation. It freed me creatively and encouraged me to develop a hybridized project, that drew in many disciplines, forms, and methodologies - a feat fit for a Hampshire student.Â
For our assemblage prompt, I drew together a pile of letters and envelopes Iâd collected over the years and sewed them to the back of a Chinese textile jacket my mother made when she was around my age in the shape of a classic Western fringe jacket. I workshopped a short performance piece where I unhinged myself from a wall in the art barn while wearing the jacket, leaned against the wall statically, and then two-stepped around my classmates while singing âCattle Callâ by Eddy Arnold. This jacket is still a convergence site for many of the ideas I am weaving into my Div III. It holds mobility on a personal and collective level - the mobility of the railroad and of my Chinese ancestors who built it, the mobility of black ancestors escaped from slavery, the mobility of letters from California to Hampshire and vice versa, the free mobility of white settlers of the West in comparison to the criminalized mobility of black and Native American people, and how I negotiated my mobility in the summer of 2018 on trains and buses in Los Angeles.Â
The pandemic cut these classes in half, switching them over to Zoom and totally disrupting the trajectory Iâd been on in each. I lost a lot of motivation and momentum going from in-person to screen-locked but still managed to produce a video dance installation that was exciting and interesting for me, both for how it held the progress and discoveries I had made and for the future dance video installations it beckoned me to begin daydreaming about. In turn, the pandemic and historical uprisings for black lives implored me to think on a collective and personal level about concepts my classes introduced me to - particularly relationality, interdependency, and rendering consciousness in the wake of our historical contexts, changed permanently by the events of Spring and Summer. I am coming out of my Div II and into my final year thinking broadly about race, movement and mobility, consciousness rendering and changing, and the tension between the personal and the collective. I still struggle against many of the isolative behaviors I have identified in myself these past few years, but my acknowledgment of them has transformed the way I move through the world and treat the people around me. I continue to learn and grow and strive now to stick to my values by doing something when the actions of another or myself do not align with my values. I intend for my Div III project to be an actionable step towards this project of accountability, by illuminating the unseen - the erased histories of black and brown people in the American West, the love for my blackness and my black community which I resented suppressed in myself for far too long, and the simultaneous racial grief and melancholia that lionizing my proximity to whiteness. I hope to offer new information about pathways towards black and yellow solidarities, trouble the personal/collective dichotomy, and interrogate the propensity of historical narratives and nostalgiaâs like that of the Western cowboy, for good and evil.Â
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
snowghoul
prguitarman
pixelskylines
titsay
