Category: Spring 2021

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An Abolitionist Response to Disaster

cuomo cancel rent

By Capri Jones

high rent = murder sign

The worldwide COVID-19 death toll just hit 1.6 million, amounting to a spectacular disaster. Since the virus’ discovery in December 2019, it has wiped out entire communities, and forced hunger, houselessness, and an inability to receive medical attention. The death and suffering that COVID has caused is spectacular. As Rob Nixon defines it in his book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, spectacular violence is, “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.” While this may be the case for the pandemic itself, the events that cultivated the environment for death to become a new normal were not spectacular. Instead, they took place over time. It’s important to premise this article with the understanding that disasters are not natural. They are not nature’s best effort at revenge on the human species, or the result of a god punishing its people. Disasters are political, meaning that during events like the COVID-19 pandemic, life and death are predetermined. The conditions that led COVID-19 to develop, and in turn kill so many people, were crafted by the oppressive systems that we live under. It was by no accident that the virus became so deadly, instead, COVID-19 became weaponized by the war-like conditions baked into our capitalist system. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on the underlying disaster of the commodification of housing in the United States. But it is important to note that this is not the only underlying disastrous aspect of the pandemic that took place over time. The housing crisis is only one facet of the austerity-based society that has ripped away any access to safety—economic, medical, community—in an era of neoliberal globalization. It is with this understanding of death in 2020, that analyzing an abolitionist response to disaster is essential. I argue that abolition of the systems that cultivated the environment for premature death by COVID-19 to become a new normal is the only solution for survival in an epoch that is, and will continue to be, stricken by a myriad of crises.

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Blood Stained Artifacts: Decolonizing the Remnants of 19th Century Imperialism within the Products of Modern Day Colonialism

rosetta stone at british museum

By Zara Kabir

Colonialism is a stain of the old world that continues to bleed into the present. The ghosts of European explorers still haunt us today, their sins forming a heavy cloud that continues to shape and direct discourse on how a post-Colonial global world can learn from their mistakes, not simply escape them. The imperialistic nature of the Age of ‘Discovery’ left many European nations wealthy and the once thriving communities that they pillaged in poverty. Stripped of their culture, language, and artifacts, those living in colonies found the foreign language and practices of Europeans thrust onto them—there is nothing quite more true for those suddenly made subjects of the British Royal Crown.

 

The British Empire was once the world’s largest and wealthiest empire. Within nearly 70 years since the emancipation of the Indian Subcontinent from British rule and the start of rapid decolonization, we have been able to critically analyze the Empire and the methods through which it colonized nearly 1⁄4th of the world’s population at one time. Postcolonial theory has specifically allowed once colonized peoples to look back on their own histories and better examine the human costs of imperialism. Critical analysis of these complicated and bloody histories has manifested areas of concern, including spaces in which modern colonialism continues to exploit the Empire’s former subjects.

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Glorification as Exploitation: Chinese Food Delivery Workers’ Image and Labor Conditions

delivery driver on bike

By Xixi Jiang 

They are easy to spot in their bright yellow or blue heavy-duty jackets; they deftly weave through rush hour traffic on their quiet electric bikes; they are an indispensable part of Chinese urban life today. They are food delivery riders, most likely working for one of China’s two biggest competing online food delivery service platforms, Meituan (美团外卖) and Ele.me (饿了么). This relatively new branch of the service sector has seen a tremendous expansion in market size over the past decade, from 21.68 billion yuan (3.31 billion USD) in 2011 to an estimated 664.62 billion yuan (101 billion USD) in 2020.[1] Following the industry boom, there has also been an increase in attention devoted to the working conditions of delivery riders, who are the backbone of this lucrative business. In this essay, I will consider the public perception of food delivery workers, which range from friendly strangers to civilian heroes; these glorified images, produced consciously and unconsciously by corporations and consumers alike, have come to mask the dangerous conditions of their work and, more importantly, to supplant real benefits in wages and protection for the workers. The construction of public personas is certainly not the entire cause of their present predicament, but studying it may give way to larger investigations into the positive stigmatization of certain kinds of work, and call for more direct ways of being in solidarity with workers.

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Excerpts from “the clearing”

brooklyn street under subway

By Xandi McMahon

walking down broadway

where in this beyond are they taking me?1

the rickety old tin-can car approaches its stop running mid-october breeze over the platform. at the broadway bridge we scream. loudly, freely, there is no reason not to. take us into sherman creek park and down harlem river drive. east to west we hold this narrow island. and

my eye—which rests only on beauty—holds            you (i don’t desire much else.) 2

the hundreds of streets escape into my calves and the muscles of my back. heaps of orange and brown we fall into the full family of it all. out of nowhere it becomes dark. enter rats!

at battery park we are silent. some amazement of joy that we had found our way out that far.3

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Suburban Wasteland: Beneath the Illusion of Idyllic Living

suburban roof

By McKenna Hall

I grew up in the suburbs, in a house that was identical to others, bound by picket fences and sprawling verdant yards. There were children with their grubby bare feet running throughout the streets and darting behind bushes. Lemonade stands and kickball and neighbors asking you to come out to play were scattered throughout like dozens of acorns. Paths in the forest led to fallen logs and secret forts. Summers were spent in the sticky humidity walking to the local pool or riding bikes that meticulously balanced slushies and bags of chips. It was a suburban fantasy. 

 

But then one day, some neighbors started to notice a smell. A rotting smell coming from the thick of the clouds hanging overhead. Illness and death had hid itself within these clouds, secretly running rampant throughout the streets. It latched itself within the people’s homes and deliquesced into their lemonade. Slowly, it found itself within the people and began to rot them as well. Some families decided to search for the source of this decay.  They peeled back the suburban facade in order to discover the true nature of the suburb’s being – the suburb was a sacrifice zone.

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slush

new york cold street

By Marina Sage Carlstroem

I pulled back my curtain, trying to escape from the blank, bright screen in front of me. Outside the window, I found only more whiteness: smooth blankets of powder coated the steps on fire escape ladders, cars sloshed through puddles of sleet. The grating rhythm of a metal shovel meeting concrete sidewalk only distracted me further from the work at hand. Try as I might to blame the gathering storm for my avoidance, I hadn’t gotten much of anything done since I’d moved just a few blocks from Oliver.

 

Almost a year earlier, we’d found ourselves nestled into the corner of the dining hall after our freshman seminar, arguing about Plato over plates of waffle fries. He’d left the table and come back with coffees in both hands—black for him, ice and oat milk for me— I tried to hide my grin behind my cup, surprised that he’d recalled my usual from a hum-drum class ice-breaker. I joked about delegating people into factions based on La Croix flavor preferences, but he’d never heard of them. His lack of a clear British accent masked his ignorance of American culture, but its cadence lingered in his speech, soothing and playful. He spoke softly but not without confidence, like every phrase was an important secret; eyes widening and narrowing like someone trying to get the perfect focus through a camera lens, never leaving my own. Our plates lay stacked and bare on the table as the lunch rush turned to dinner, and we traded playlists, childhood photos, and google map renditions of our homes. I woke up 10 minutes earlier the next Tuesday morning, unsure if I was embarrassed to be putting on mascara for class or excited to have a reason to.

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