Red Rock Point #6

Approximately 2.5 feet wide and 2 feet high the painting of Cranberry Island is done in thick layers of oil paint.  The bottom two thirds of the painting is split into two approximately right triangles with the separating line running from the top right to slightly above the bottom left.  The bottom most triangle is thickly textured and the colors vary on a theme of dark blue.  Dark purple predominates, accented with medium orange.  In the bottom right corner there’s a splotch of reddish brown, dark green, and other earthy tones.  The middle triangle is colored on an overarching theme of light blue heavily accented with white and purple.

 Concluding, Diffracting, and Assessing Your Work
in the "Poetics and Politics of Race" 360°, Fall 2016
DUE by 12:30 p.m. on Fri, Dec. 16

Carol Margaret Davison was rude to Greg Johnson.

For my research project I’d like to explore more of the history behind other races at Bryn Mawr. Perhaps also explore when Bryn Mawr began to accept such a high percentage of international students. I’m not quite sure yet but I look forward to hearing about other student’s ideas and then, maybe combining them with mine to create a better project.

When I was researching for my internship at The Haven, one of the primary facts that I knew about the organization was that they subscribe to the Housing First model. This means that they provide housing as a first step towards ending homelessness. While earlier approaches saw housing as something to be gained once someone has reached benchmarks like attending treatment or getting sober, the Housing First philosophy is radical in its simplicity: Housing comes first, self-directed treatment comes later. Knowing that The Haven was grounded in this orientation to homelessness reassured me somewhat about my decision to work there. In my mind, working at a homeless shelter reeked of old fashioned volunteerism and problematic charity dynamics.

When reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, many may express that they might reach a point in which they hit a wall. From the form and style to the actual content of the text, Beloved is not an easy read and requires support when reading it. Morrison is known for writing to unpack truth, and the road to truth is not always easy or comforting. It evolves going into the pain that may be present, and relying on the feeling and story to make better sense of what happened and how that might apply currently.

       Transatlantic enslavement, from the slave ship and beyond, was and are predicated on various practices of spatialized violence that targeted and continue to target black bodies and profited, as well as continue to profit, from erasing a black sense of place. From the plantation to modern prisons, black spaces of racialized violence sanctioned black placelessness and constraint. These were and are spaces where enslaved blacks were kept “in place” as a consequence of their legal and cultural placelessness. Toni Morrison's invocation of the transatlantic slave trade frames the narrative of Beloved within the context of spatialized violence - a complex, industrial and capitalistic project that specifically targeted and continues to target black identity.

Thomas King opens each chapter of his book the same way – with a story about turtles. The whole world, he says, is balanced on the back of a huge turtle, and that turtle on another turtle, and that turtle on another, etc. etc. etc. He changes the question-asker a little, varies the gender of the storyteller, puts in a few extra details. But the story itself is always the same; “it’s turtles all the way down.”