Radical Hope Response by Sabina Arias                                                                                             25/09/17

Arts & Activism                                                                                                                                

Questions/Wonderings:

1.     How do you reconcile a fluency in silence with taking action against oppression? How do these seemingly contradictory positions merge to become a step towards finding your own voice?

2.     How does that reflect on other oppressed groups of people, like women? How is there hope within our silence? How can our contradictions be the source of our strength?

3.     Seeing that Junot’s artistic perception is largely due to the duality of the two worlds that have informed his being, what sort of spaces does the body become today to those who are oppressed such as immigrants? How could vulnerability be a positive force within us for positive change?

Comments:

Two things I liked a lot: The idea that are many worlds that are within one and when he said that black identity gave back much more genius to this world than it ever received.

I found it very interesting when Junot said about American identity that there are concepts that are just not built in  to US culture, like contemplation, morning, complicated contradictory emotions….society miss-educates us. Society gives us a lot prompts to be emotionally reactive. I find a lot of that present in American culture’s thirst for instant gratification. We always want the quick, easy gratification. They are not matters of life and death and yet their consumerism/the provision of their services is what fuels our economy.

We all want happiness. We can’t always have happiness but we seem to quantify it into the things that we buy. Yet we are unable to live with complicated emotions, even if it means equality for somebody afar.

About the “Obsessive monoculture,” I think that America’s governmental regulations are not invasive to the privacy of its people but are also exercicing some form of cultural imperialism because it forces everybody to live by the same cultural norms and it excludes other cultural customs/perspectives.