Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2013-2014: Violence

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
  • Publication
    “All Are Punished”: Violent [Self-]Destruction in Pieter Bruegel’s Triumph of Death
    (2014-05-01) Schnittman, Samuel
    Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Triumph of Death (Prado, Madrid) has received relatively little scholarly attention for obvious reasons: its rampant annihilation of humanity and dour pessimism bear little resemblance to his more typical representations of peasants and folly with humanist, satirical undertones. Perhaps even more puzzling than this disjuncture is its eerie combination of eschatology within a fully earthly apocalypse. To reconcile these paradoxes, we must analyze Bruegel's formal and iconographic links with Hieronymus Bosch and earlier Netherlandish visual traditions amidst contemporary, religious, and political struggles during the nascent Dutch Revolt. This enigmatic Bruegel picture suggests the complex—and violent—relationships among death, earth, hell, and general humanity during an era marked by ferocious conflict and merciless punishment.
  • Publication
    World War II on the Equator: Antifascism, Gender, and Democracy in Ecuador’s May Revolution of 1944
    (2014-05-01) Franco, Robert
    From May 28-31, 1944, masses of indigenous, political, student, and labor groups came together in Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador, to overthrow the Liberal President Carlos Arroyo del Río and install the populist José María Velasco Ibarra for a second term. In this project I focus on the use of antifascism by a number of political and interest groups that participated in the May Revolution of 1944, the gendered makeup of the antifascist movement and the May Revolution, and the ideas of democracy held by Ecuadorians during World War II. By tracing the movements of three groups — the Movimiento Popular Antitotalitario de Ecuador (MPAE), the Alianza Democratica Ecuatoriana (ADE), and the Alianza Femenina Ecuatoriana (AFE) — new debates on the May Revolution can begin surrounding the motivations of its participants and the construction of its memory.
  • Publication
    The Gendered Nature of Quaker Charity
    (2014-05-01) Anamwathana, Panarat
    For a holistic understanding of violence, the study of its antithesis, nonviolence, is necessary. A primary example of nonviolence is charity. Not only does charity prevent violence from rogue vagrants, but it also is an act of kindness. In seventeenth-century England, when a third of the population lived below the poverty line, charity was crucial. Especially successful were Quaker charity communities and the early involvement of Quaker women in administering aid. This is remarkable, considering that most parish-appointed overseers of the poor were usually male. What explains this phenomenon that women became the main administrators of Quaker charity? Filling in this gap of knowledge would shed further light on Quaker gender dynamics and the Quaker values that are still found in American culture today.
  • Publication
    State of the Arts: Government, National Identity, and the Arts in Singapore
    (2014-05-01) Teo, Shawn
    In the 1960s, countries in Southeast Asia such as Indonesia and Malaysia were wreaked by ethnic violence. Race riots broke out in Malaysia in 1969 between Chinese and Malays. In 1973 and 1974 anti-Chinese riots and pogroms erupted in Indonesia. Amidst a sea of ethnic unrest, the Singaporean government became aware that the multiethnic nature of Singapore rendered it vulnerable to riots.Memories of the 1964 race riots and the 1950 Maria Hertogh riots were still fresh. The government hoped that the creation of a cohesive national identity would reduce the risk of ethnic and racial violence. In this project I examine the development of national identity in Singapore from 1965-1990 to see how the government and civil society interacted to create a national identity.
  • Publication
    Once and for all: The Spanish Civil War and the Nationalist Concentration Camps
    (2014-05-01) Perez, Steven Jay
    This project examines the Nationalist concentration camps of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). First, it outlines the ideological origins of the war. Second, it covers how the Nationalists' ideological beliefs translated into extreme violence during the early months of the war. Third, it analyzes how an increasing number of Republican prisoners of war during the campaigns of 1937 led to the creation of the Inspección de Campos de Concentración de Prisioneros (ICCP), the bureaucratic department designed to administer the expanded camp system and classify Republican prisoners. Finally, this project examines the system of "reeducation" in the camps, the psychobiological studies conducted on the prisoners and the results of these studies. Ultimately, this study uncovers why and how the Nationalists attempted to create a "new" Spain.
  • Publication
    Ciudad Juárez: Mexico’s Violent Cradle of Modernity in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
    (2014-05-01) Mathew, Shaj
    Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño owes much of his current literary celebrity to the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, 2666. The novel comprises five parts, which ultimately coalesce to create a harrowing portrait of violence against women in a Mexican border town. As this grisly scene unfolds, Bolaño implicates the novel's characters—and, more broadly, the reader—in a crime equally disturbing: inaction, indifference, and thus complicity. However, Bolaño offers artistic solutions to the bleakness of the modern condition: reading and writing. In creating this utterly sui generis novel—and violating established literary norms in the process—Bolaño thus enacts the very solution that he offers to the problems of modernity, a time in which "poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated."
  • Publication
    Buried: The Defiant Unspoken in Emile Habiby's The Pessoptimist
    (2014-05-01) Shihadah, Sarah
    Palestinian author Emile Habibi's 1974 novel, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptomist, endures as both a political and an artistic milestone in the legacy of modern Arabic literature. A masterpiece of ironic narrative and social satire, Habibi's unconventional novel powerfully represents the absurdity of the post-1948 Palestinian experience defined by a nationalism that views them as antithetical. At once sobering and farcical, Habibi's novel illustrates the "open tragedy" of the Zionist project as seen by its victims. Through the tightly wound paradoxes of alienation, affiliation, imagination, and loss which both drive and haunt the novel, I examine contemporary importance of this text as a "subaltern" narrative to represent an enduring and defiant Palestinian voice.
  • Publication
    “Comfort Women Wanted”: Uncovering Violent Past and Entering New Age of Activism Through Visual Language
    (2014-05-01) Ha, Yae-Jin
    During the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 1900s, approximately 200,000 young Korean women were coerced into serving as sex slaves for the Japanese soldiers. Known as comfort women, much of their existence and stories was obscured until recently. With only 55 of these women still surviving, the need to raise awareness of their experience has never been greater. What role has art played in this effort, and how has it been used to create a discourse between older and newer generations, as a physical evidence of their emotional scars, and as a healing mechanism? In addition, what does early modern Japanese erotica known as shunga reveal about attitudes toward sex and women in Japanese culture?
  • Publication
    The Debt of a Hand
    (2014-05-01) Cotzias, Antonios
    Adam and Eve, summoned by the snake, seize the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and taste the fall. They find themselves guilty and naked and hide from a god who will damn them both to the mortal and subjugating cultivation of the soil (culture). We are thus already in the very violence of a distance, taking up the form of a political shame. I will be following the way that technique becomes the pharmakon of the privileged being which has broken away from its own nature. In view of a transformative engagement that calls on us, on thought, and on politics, to transgress the passivity of interpreting and of mourning, the necessity a political involvement will have to pass through the dimension of technology.
  • Publication
    Mollifying the Muses: An Exploration of Conflict in the Life and Works of Iannis Xenakis
    (2014-05-01) Butner, Davis
    The early life of Iannis Xenakis, a modern day Renaissance scholar who would come to redefine the limits of musical composition and sound-driven spatial design in the 21st century, was overshadowed by adversity, conflict and alienation. Fleeing from his home country in 1947 after a nearly fatal wound to the face during the Greek Revolution, Xenakis' newfound life and career in the atelier of French architect Le Corbusier allowed for the budding engineer to explore a collective passion for music and mathematics within his work. Nevertheless, just as a giant facial scar would stand as a permanent physical symbol for the brutality Xenakis experienced, one can easily detect similar memories of a chaotic past embedded in the compositional framework of the avant-garde designer/composer, tormented by tension and estranged symbols of war. By analyzing these immersive elements of conflict and duality which characterized Xenakis' creative methodologies, one may begin to formulate an innovative discourse in the development towards new experiential musically influenced performance spaces.