Your Neighborhood Meat Packing Plant

Reading Atomik Aztex gave me a glimpse of the meat packing industry of which I have previously been unaware. I did a little research and found the following meat packing plants that are right in our backyard.

Chino

Hallmark Meat Packing

Los Angeles

Bar M Meat Co

Best Buy Meat

Cattlemen's Choice, Inc

Clougherty Packing Company (Farmer John Brand)

Ellensburg Lamb Company Inc (Superior Packing Co)

Luis Meat Market Company Inc

Pacific Meat Packing Co

R B R Meat Company, Inc (Rightway)

United Food Group Llc (Moran Meat)

Sometimes in Claremont, the smell of manure is quite strong. Did you know that it was coming from a slaughterhouse in Chino?

There are so many factors to think about before biting into a juicy hamburger. What are the animals being fed? How are they being killed? What laws protect workers’ rights and are they being enforced?

Here is the link to an informative article on pbs.com entitled, “Meatpacking in the U.S.: Still a "Jungle" Out There?” http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/250/meat-packing.html .

Amitava Kumar's poems

After Jan’s talk about analyzing poetry last Thursday, I wanted to try to analyze some of the poems that we read for Tuesday. There were a couple of poems that I was trying to sort out. The first was “History” and the second was “Iraqi Restaurants”, both of which were written Amitava Kumar. I don’t have any overall thesis regarding the overall message of each of the poems. The following is simply my musings on different components of the poem.

“History,” as the title would indicate, is about history and how it is formed or conceived. I felt as if this poem discussed the way in which colonialism bastardizes certain elements of the colonized culture. The poem begins with the word “They”—indicative of many people, as opposed to the singular peasant. This creates the image that the peasant was outnumbered and the people referred to as “they” could easily overcome the peasant by pure force. I think that it is fairly obvious, but I think that the “they” refers to the colonizers or imperialists.

A common theme that has been brought up on several occasions this semester is the concept of silence, which re-emerges in this poem. The captors gagged the peasant before they removed his nose. The one thing that confused me about this poem was the significance of the nose. In addition, “the dark road” created an ominous and secretive tone to this stanza. It is as if the people who caught the peasant did not want anyone to know what they were doing.

Upon some online research on Wikipedia, I found the idiom “cutting off the nose to spite the face,” which refers to overreacting in order by self-mutilation as opposed to harming your enemy. While I’m still not sure if this connects directly to this usage of cutting off the nose, it was still interesting!

Finally, taking the nose to the museum seems symbolic of putting the nose/a piece of culture on display. By attaching it to the statue that is missing a nose shows that they are fulfilling something that is missing. But then, it almost seems as if they are trying to pass it off on their own. This is also seen in the last few lines “Thus was born the history/that is taught in schools.” Pieces of history of colonized cultures have been integrated into the dominant culture and passed off as “truth” and completeness.

Similarly, I thought that the poem “Iraqi Restaurants” also addressed the issue of tokenization and adoption of other cultural aspects. In the first stanza, the Americans were in Iraq. The statement that the Americans created ovens suggests that the Americans created a situation that would incubate and build heat. This is not a positive image—it made me think that the actions of the Americans build resentment and pressure in the Baghdad homes. The first stanza then ends with the word “waited,” which is mirrored by the break in the poem. It is as if the reader is waiting along with the Americans to see what would happen.

Finally, the second stanza talks about Iraqi cooks in the United States. I took the cooks to symbolize tokenized people. In many of the other stories we have read, food and cooking has been strongly correlated with culture. In “Out on Main Street,” the narrator talked about how she made herself learn how to cook Indian food because that is what she thought was expected of her. In this poem, it is as if the Iraqi cooks are responsible for representing all Iraqis and their culture in America. However, reference to “the Vietnamese before them” made me think of refugees of war and I was not sure what type of analysis this idea would inform.

So those were my random thoughts about the poems. I am a little rusty on my poetry analysis skills, so I hope at least a few things actually made sense!

Food and Prayer and Assimilation

Food and Prayer and Assimilation

By Becca Neril

I was really intrigued with Lahiri’s use of food and prayer in her short story. We first read about Lilia sucking on a piece of white chocolate before bed, while “pray[ing] that Mr. Pirzada’s family was safe and sound” (32). Ten pages later, we read how Lilia would “eat, for the sake of Mr. Pirzada’s family, a piece of candy [she] had saved from Halloween” (42). So, I wanted to point out what I think is a statement about assimilation.

While Lahiri does not detail the style of prayer, the reader assumes that Lilia’s prayer does not follow the traditional Hindu form. From the brief research I conducted while writing this post, I do not believe that there are any central Hindu prayers that involve food. Therefore, because both scenes directly involve food, one can assume that Lilia’s prayer deviates from the traditional Hindu prayer. This is especially true in the second scene when she prays while eating her Halloween candy. Because of this analysis, I think that the author is making a statement about assimilation. Lilia prays, but her prayer is, in essence, ‘Americanized.’ What, then, is the author saying about how/if her prayer will be received? Is her Americanized prayer as legitimate as one that her parents would likely say? These are all questions that I thought of, but don’t really have an answer for. Maybe you do!

*Note-I am pretty sure that Lilia’s family is Hindu, but please correct me if I am wrong.

Authenticity

Shani Mootoo’s short stories were incredible in that they were able to touch on a number of issues, such as the politics of food, the idea of authenticity, the cultural appropriation from whites, and queer issues and how that plays in the API community. However, I wanted to address the concept of authenticity and the way she addresses it.

The problem of authenticity comes to the foreground when we examine ways in which personal experience and subjective perception factor into the creation of theoretical frameworks. It is not only an epistemological question (validity) but also an ontological one (why does this framework exist, what drew these ideas together and brought them to consciousness.)

Authenticity is something that I’ve always struggled with, and due to that these pieces really spoke to me, and in some ways even paralleled my own experiences. Mootoo starts off ‘Out on Main Street’ with the offhand comment “we ain’t good grade A Indians”. Already, the dilemma underlying authenticity is exposed, because who has made this judgment? who is this cultural authority that dictates who and who is not authentic. And how does one even decide what constitutes authenticity? What are the qualifications that aggregate into this set of standards that then denote authenticity?

The narrator in ‘Out on Main Street’ only sees herself as ‘Indian’ when in the kitchen and in regards to her religion, Hinduism. This is then interesting because even though she practices Hinduism and eats “some kind a Indian food every day”, she still cannot consider herself authentic because she “doh even think ‘bout India unless something happen over dere and it come on de news”. She also is ashamed of the fact that she doesn’t know all the different foods and sweets, and doesn’t seem to realize the impact that living in another country can have on one’s ethnic culture. Before entering the restaurant, the narrator stops to “rumfle up [her] memory, pulling out all de sweet names [she] know[s] from home”, so that she can project authenticity when surrounded by people who will more than likely judge her on her knowledge (which obviously equals authenticity in this case). This resonated with me, as I know that I have done similar actions countless times, if not in such a blatant way. I have actually spent time on Wikipedia ‘learning about my culture’, just so that I could have that knowledge and thus add to my own ‘authenticity’.

The problem with quantifying authenticity in terms of cultural knowledge, love and knowledge of the food, and involvement, besides the obvious marginalization of those in the community that don’t necessarily fulfill these requirements, is the question of application. For example, in “The Upside-Downness of the World” the narrator’s friends, Meghan and Virginia, are seen as authentic by the narrator. They know what seems to be every nuanced detail of India and its culture, worship Hinduism, wear the clothes, and cook and eat Indian food. They even speak in badly imitated accents, while wearing traditional Indian dress. Does all this appreciation and participation in Indian culture transcend their whiteness to authenticity? For the narrator, who is ashamed at what she perceives as her own lack of authenticity, it does. This is obviously problematic in that Meghan and Virginia are appropriating, exoticizing, and fetishizing Indian culture.

But does the fact that Meghan and Virginia obviously consider themselves Indian in everything but actual ethnicity thus render them authentic? That is, is it all subjective and about self-perception? Or rather does authenticity stem from how the larger community views them? This itself is problematic, as exemplified in “Out on Main Street”. By placing this authority in the hands of the community, it delegitimizes the personal opinion of one’s self. For example, someone could easily be dismissed as inauthentic, whether it’s due to their lack of community presence, lack of cultural knowledge, or being multiracial, even if that person personally sees his/herself as authentic. Obviously, that is a huge problem, and helps underline the negotiations and tensions within the very conception of authenticity. There is also the problem in that people who struggle with authenticity are told things such as, ‘you just need to own it’, or propagate other ideas of self-formation, but that helps very little with the reality of social expectations and judgments. The very fact that we must prove ourselves over and over, such as in race competitions and exclusions or the oppression Olympics, speaks to the fact that we are continually forced to play into these cultural and racial stereotypes, and are punished for deviation. And these norms are policed and enforced in all communities, with punishment by delegitimization in cases of deviation. I still feel disassociated from the Christian community on campus despite my past years of involvement and my own personal lifetime experience with Christianity. But because I by no means fit the average idea of what Christian is or how one behaves, I have never felt welcome even though I recognize it is irrational. Why do we even work within these frames? Our society continually determines and boxes people into frames of their own perception (without regard for this person’s own self-conceptualization), and forces people to work within this construction. This in my mind is at the heart of the problem of authenticity.

E. San Juan and Dogeaters

This week, I went back and reread E. San Juan’s “Historicizing the Space of Asian America,” and “Displacing Borders of Misrecognition: On Jessica Hagedorn’s Fictions” in which he discusses the situation of Filipinos, the effects of colonization and decolonization and assimilation. The first time I read this, I felt that the theory and the issues that he was discussing went over my head, however I found that they were much more accessible to me after finishing “Dogeaters.” In addition, I felt that re-reading this article gave me a better perspective with which to approach “Dogeaters.”

One quote from “Displacing Borders of Misrecognition” made me stop and think: “[M]ost Filipinos have been so profoundly “Americanized” that the claim of an autonomous and distinctive identity sounds like a plea bargaining after summary conviction” (San Juan, 122). As we were talking about in class, this Americanization is blatantly obvious in the novel. The characters are deeply influenced by Hollywood movies and the look and the mannerisms of the actors, and are constantly barraged by brand names. Many of the characters, like Rio and Pucha, eagerly accept the Americanized images that are portrayed in the movies and the media, and their identities are definitely shaped by what they see. I must admit, when I first was reading “Dogeaters,” I recognized that these references were there, but I didn’t really think hard about the implications of the omnipresent media and the affect that these images had on the identity-formation of the characters.

I think this quote stood out to me mostly because of the language. The use of “plea bargaining” and “summary conviction” to describe the predicament of the Filipinos, made sense to me the first time I read it, but when I though about it more, it began to confuse me. I understand how E. San Juan draws connections between colonization and decolonization as a process that leaves the Filipinos in a prison-like society. However, I thought it was interesting in the way that it is phrased, it is as if the Filipinos are to blame for their predicament—as if they committed a crime as an individual and must seek a plea bargain.

E. San Juan also says that “Filipino society is a nearly successful replica of the United States” (San Juan, 122). I thought it was interesting that sometimes, there were so many American references that I could almost forget that this novel was set in the Philippines and could imagine it taking place in an American city.

Comparing Discussion Topics

A few weeks ago, Seung Hye mentioned that Asian American Lit was a particularly difficult class to teach because of the fact that it is an English literature course as well as an Asian American Studies course, and the students in the class have very diverse academic (and personal) backgrounds. This comment got me thinking about how difficult it is to talk about a novel or short story in the traditional “literary” sense and also spend ample time discussing its social, political, and economic issues/commentaries. I thought it might be cool to examine the issues I have spent most time discussing in this class related to a certain book or story and compare these issues to things that have come up in other English classes I have taken at Scripps and elsewhere (classes that are only English courses, not cross-listed as Asian American Studies, Black Studies, etc).

I recently read Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables in my Survey American Lit class at Scripps. In our discussion, gender roles did come up, as did social conventions, family structure, and the role of tradition. Importantly, Yamamoto’s story was included in the canon (The Health Anthology of American Literature, Volume E) that we have been using for the course. I flipped through the anthology’s table of contents to examine which other Asian American authors the editors had chosen to include, and I was happy to find Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janice Mirikitani, and Jessica Hagedorn, among a few others that I didn’t recognize. I think it is so, so important to include Asian American writers (as well as other minority writers) in the canon; so often the canons of American and British literature consist of almost all white male writers…but that’s another story, and that situation seems to be improving. However, the whole concept of a few editors choosing which works are representative of ‘American Literature, 1945 to the present,’ seems a little ridiculous to me. Back to the point: the group of students who presented on Yamamoto in American Lit did include a few quotes from King-Kok Cheung’s Rhetorical Silences essay, which I was really glad to see; usually, in most of my English courses, we do not read much or any criticisms of the texts. Nonetheless, I felt that in comparison to some of the discussions we have had in Asian American Lit, the discussion we had in the survey course on race seemed rather “distant.” Students’ comments seemed fairly impersonal to me, and I sensed that some of the students felt slightly uncomfortable discussing race, gender, and cultural issues. And despite the fact that we did discuss gender role reversal, we did not at all touch on the gendering of racialization (or what gender role reversal might mean in a larger context outside just this story). I guess I just felt like in American Lit, we did not push the envelope on race and gender in the same way that we did in Asian American Lit. I almost feel like it would have been “inappropriate” in the American Lit course to bring up the gendering of racialization, institutionalized systems of oppression, or whether we can read cross-culturally without essentializing. What might this mean? Also, because we spent less time discussing issues of race, gender, politics, etc. in the American Lit class, we did spend more time on more traditional “literary” stuff (form, style, etc) that we did not discuss as much in Asian American Lit. Is it possible to give full attention to both literary concerns AND issues of race, class, gender, etc? Can you read a novel both ways at the same time? Does one or the other inevitably get sacrificed in any discussion? I just find it very interesting that you can discuss the same work of literature in two totally different ways depending on the class’ particular academic focus.

In reviewing my notes on The Woman Warrior from Asian American Lit as well as my Contemporary Women Writers (CWW) course, I noticed this same difference between the discussions. While we focused largely on topics like the bildungsroman, the kunstlerroman, a usable past, feminism, family, and voice in CWW, we left out a lot of the discussions we have had in Asian American Lit that really probed into issues of race, class, and gender (especially the Frank Chin piece…I really appreciate reading critiques of literary texts. Sometimes as readers we just tend to take things at face value and not challenge or critique them…). However, by spending ample time on those issues, Asian American Lit did have to sacrifice discussions of some of the things we covered in CWW; it does seem that focusing on one aspect of these texts requires letting go of another. Is there simply not enough time in a class to discuss both traditional “literary” concerns and social, political, and economic issues and commentaries? Is it that we have to narrow down discussion to the focus of the class? Whatever the answer is, I agree with Seung Hye that this class is difficult in that we can really look at the texts from so many different perspectives.

suheir hammad

hope to see you guys tomorrow evening at 8pm at little bridges to listen to suheir!!!!! how crazy is it that she came after we read her.
FMI: Seung Hye sent us an email today about it.