Book Review: Dealing in Desires

This is a review of Kimberly Kay Hoang’s (2015) Dealing in Desire. Her ethnographic study observes four different bars in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: 1) Kong Sao Bar, 2) Naught Girls, 3) Secrets, and 4) Lavender. Hoang traces different representations of the global financial sector after the 2008 financial crisis and explores the relationship between Asian ascendancy and Western decline. From the local to the international, interactions with clients and hostesses in the bars of Ho Chi Minh City demonstrate a new global trend: the rise in transactions occurring among a global financial sector undefined by traditional social structures (e.g., commercial or national banks). By moving from observer to participant, Hoang develops a deeper understanding of the capital and labour practices that these men and women engage in, highlighting how their everyday experiences demonstrate that nightlife in the city is a way for locals to move up the socio-economic ladder.

“Say Their Names”

Katherine Bischoping and Amber Gazso (2016) use the notion of a “good story” to evaluate how successfully the storyteller conveys their message to the reader. The goal of this observational reflection paper is to explore whether the same criteria of good storytelling (i.e., good reportability, good liveability, good coherence, and good fidelity) can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of narratives told by prisoner rights protestors. I draw on my firsthand experience of a protest outside the Central East Correctional Facility in Lindsay, Ontario to develop my evaluation and conclude that the stories I observed can be analyzed using this criterion.

Pandemagogy and Online Teaching: A Case for Online Teaching

The Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) is not merely a medical crisis; it is also a social one. It has paralyzed all aspects of public life, leading to closures of all “non-essential” public spaces, chief among them, schools. Universities across Canada have shut down and moved online in an attempt to halt the transmission of the deadly virus. What many initially thought would be remote learning for just a few weeks, turned into months. Now, for the foreseeable future, remote learning will be the new normal. However, this poses unique challenges for educators and students, because there is no universal access to high-speed internet in Canada, which means that those who have access to it can transition online with ease; while those who do not have access are left behind. In an effort to work through these challenges, this reflection paper offers an autoethnographic account of online learning and its associated challenges during COVID-19. It makes the case for public internet and pandemagogy.

Memeification of Black Women’s Trauma

This piece discusses the online and offline discourses on the lives and bodies of Black femme and nonbinary individuals and the harm that is so casually inflicted upon us. Through popular stories of harm performed around famous Black women, such as with rapper Megan Thee Stallion, I connect the history of Black women in popular culture to current online spaces that continue to minimize and trivialize our trauma. I seek to highlight that these stories are not an anomaly, but rather sentiments rooted in the misogynoir that is so entrenched in western culture and have been expanded and weaponized within the online sphere. In addition, the piece challenges the universality of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in its implementation, criticizing its propensity to forget its feminine victims. It is important to emphasize where it has failed and where it needs to be intentional about the people it has overlooked, as this is a movement that began online, where this harm is currently taking place, and at the hands and energies of Black femmes, the very people getting hurt. This piece has manifested from many conversations already occurring in online Black feminist spaces about our treatment and our needs. It invites others into the fold and seeks to encourage individuals to critically reflect on how Black femme and non-binary individuals are presented on their timeline in-between the numerous BLM posts that claim to protect them.

A Collective Grievance, A Collective Acquiescence

Can grieving death be the presence of a haunting? In this brief think piece, I draw on memory studies to contemplate the ongoing pandemic of racialized violence against Black and Indigenous people specifically and people of colour more generally. Life and death, surviving and suffering, and tenebrous apparitions are discussed as I synthesize the work of Sharpe (2016), Dean (2015), and Gordon (2008) to consider how we, particularly white scholars like myself, are implicated in a present that is haunted by an insidiously active past. Vision and the nuances of sight are also discussed in relation to whiteness, accountability, and allyship with/in our seemingly over-and-done-with pandemic of anti-Black and settler-colonial violence.

My Life Matters

White supremacy presents Black communities with numerous challenges. We are constantly being injured by the anti-black racism that is deeply entrenched in the policies and practices of dominant institutions. These establishments, including, if not especially, the criminal justice system, purport to be responsible for ensuring the well-being and welfare of all, but only ever protect the rich and white. The recent re-mobilization of the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide has reminded the public of the urgency of tackling anti-black racism, but much work still needs to be done if we want future generations of Black people to live freely. Like Black adults, Black youth are not immune from racist encounters. In such a time of racial crisis, the experiences of Black youth need to be centralized in a movement that opposes racial injustice and white supremacy. Accordingly, this poem adopts the lens of a Black youth to speak to the cost of growing up Black immersed in the dominant anti-black culture of our society, underscoring the troubling realities of what it means to be a Black youth in today’s world.

Affections and Afflictions With You

This poem is about the underlying discrimination that East Asian people encounter in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. After the pandemic struck, I started to analyze my thoughts and feelings on subtle and covert racism, especially during quarantine, which manifested into this piece. My poem explores firsthand experiences of the kind of microaggressions that second generation immigrants from Asia are regularly subject to, as well as the realities of xenophobia, cultural confusion, and identity disjuncture we often endure. Through the poetic form, I expose how everyday interactions are laden with histories of anti-Asian racism and, more specifically, how the coronavirus has further revealed these concealed racist beliefs. The piece opens up the deep-rooted feelings of displacement I have long experienced and ponders if the recent rise in hate crimes against Asians are mere infestations of a hatred that has been growing for generations.

Editor’s Introduction

The image that undoubtedly captures the embodied reality of living in the ‘post-pandemic’ world as a Black grad student is the viral blurry Mr. Krabs meme surrounded by an angry mob[i]—yeah, that one! I have no idea what’s going on academically—I haven’t fully recovered from the plague of Black death that has become ‘the newly designated disposable bodies of the pandemic’ –my world has shaken. This meme encapsulates the disorientated state I currently occupy. The once urgent and ignited public discourse regarding systemic police reforms are now stagnant, thwarted by state and public debates of the vaccinated vs. unvaccinated that places responsibility on BIPOC to stop the spread of COVID-19. In the ‘post-pandemic world’, death and freedom are immutably interwoven; the freedom to die is set above the unfreedom of containment and ‘forced’ vaccinations—and the freedom to live longer; relatively free, is through the unfreedom of mobility. So, what does life feel like as a Black grad student navigating social media/public feeds that choose to strip colonial, racist, and imperialist histories from strict biopolitical regimes of COVID-19 containment in Canada and at York University? It feels suffocating—it is violent. - Beatrice Anane-Bediakoh, Chief-Deputy-Editor These days, COVID-19 is consistent background noise, while the movements for racial justice are distant memories. We’re so distracted by technology; we don't hear the stories of tragedy or hear the politicians lie casually when they promise change passionately – do those ideas ever really come to life? Time passes and the masses’ attention turns to the next day, but the next day brings Black, Indigenous and People of Colour dying in daylight. So much pain, too many emotions, and just to listen, is a fight. Time is life and these days that’s a luxury. So today, I sit here daydreaming and realize that tomorrow brings the best yet to come. So tonight, I lay here dreaming of an otherwise that fights the tragedy of reality. All while thinking of my son, holding him close, so I don’t let him drown, so I don’t let him down. - Giovanni Carranza- Hernandez, Chief-Deputy-Editor I don’t know what time is. I have long joked that “time is a construct.” It’s an occupational hazard to make such philosophical declarations. But now, I feel the words in my marrow. Was it not a minute ago, that everyone cared about the state sanction killing of Black and Indigenous folx and PoC? Was 2019 not last week, a few sleepless nights away? When was it, that my home went from a mundane reality to an uncanny fact of life? When did today stop being tomorrow? Being Brown, a grad student, queer, enby, femme, it’s always timeless, but now, time is the chokehold of staying still and propelling simultaneously. I am me tomorrow, yesterday, today. I am the construction to which I used to attribute time. - Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa, Founder/Editor-in-Chief

In Defense of #blackAF's Celebration of Mediocrity

This article explores how television and film writer-producer Kenya Barris’ Netflix series #blackAF disturbs and seemingly upends Black millennial woke cultural assumptions about the good life. This, I contend - not discounting the valid classist and colourist critiques of the show - is the animus for Black millennial discontent with #blackAF. Specifically, I reveal the hashtags #blackexcellence and #supporteverythingblack to be ideological blankets covering the unfortunate reality of everyday Black life. These hashtags, which do the ideological work of covering over reality, are made unstable and incoherent by #blackAF’s apotheosizing of mediocrity as a grand cultural accomplishment. In one fell swoop #blackAF manages to give the death knell to Cosbyian respectability politics, which have hitherto been operating in the guise of the hashtag #blackexcellence.

so Angry, so Black

The constant fear that exists within me, in both academic and non-academic environments, to avoid being the ‘angry black woman’ has left me paralyzed and feeling invisible. Academia, even academia that is centered on human betterment, is whitewashed. It is disheartening learning about the oppression of the marginalized from a perspective that can only empathize. It is from this place that I anchor the following poem. What the poem lacks in length it makes up for in raw emotion. The burden of being Black and femme for the entirety of one’s life is a heavy cross to bear. Black women are continuously failed inside and outside of the Black community. Black women are the foot soldiers, the healers, the tacticians, the martyrs, and yet, their compensation is abuse. In this year of 2020, a devastating decade that has still not given us any peace, I fully accept being the angry Black woman. Unequivocally, unapologetically.