2020 College Summer Institute Closing Symposium Proceedings [full text]
10:15 – 11:15 am, Session I: Aquatic Geographies at the Edge
“The Shrinking Aral: A Sea Evaporating into a Forest of Possibilities”
- Kristina Kim, 3rd-year, Public Policy and Creative Writing
Abstract: In the last 70 years, the Aral Sea has been disappearing to the point of complete desertification, affecting the health, climate, economy, and vitality of the Central Asian people who depend on it. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, it was desiccated by the extensive irrigation practices of the USSR and subsequent leadership. What stands now is a far-stretching desert across the Karakalpakstan region of Uzbekistan, featuring ship graveyards, toxic dust storms, and the displacement of families and communities— and yet, hope is still alive and thrashing. Through intergenerational storytelling, techno raves, and plans of planting a forest, a collective dream for a courageous existence is pursued. Capturing this perseverance (as well as the grief) through the combined perspectives of literature, journalism, photography, and documentaries, my collection of poems and lyrical prose aims to re-imagine our current language surrounding topics of environmental devastation, disaster tourism, and hope, while practicing to re-render the past, present, and future existences of the Aral Sea alongside the cultural backdrop of the Central Asian steppe.
“Borderwaters at the Edge of Empire: Privateering, Smuggling, and Imperial Rivalry in the 1730s British Caribbean”
- Norma (Nell) Williamson Shaffer, 4th-year, History, Statistics
Abstract: The British-Caribbean colonies of the 1730s were far away from Europe but in close proximity to their Spanish-Caribbean counterparts. This unique setting shaped how British subjects viewed conflicts between the British and Spanish Caribbean empires, as rivalries between the European powers were fought through trade, privateering (state-sponsored piracy), and, eventually, outright war. British merchants, politicians, and newspapers all described the Caribbean as a space that both embodied and undermined state power, as both physical borders and distinctions between formal and illicit roles were ambiguous. This paper is based on close readings of records of colonial governance as well as British and colonial magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets that addressed the issue of Caribbean piracy between 1730 and 1739. In this paper, I expand the framework of borderlands theory -- which typically analyzes the historical-spatial dynamics of the boundary region between Mexico and the United States -- to the concept of borderwaters, portraying ocean settings at the periphery of empire as distinctive places with weak state power and unique local relationships. Framing the British Caribbean as a space of borderwaters reminds us that perhaps this space, while at the margin of the vast British Empire, was not truly marginal: British subjects fixated on the Caribbean as a site of geopolitical and symbolic national importance.
"Mapping the Yiddish Aquatic Imaginary"
- Jonah Lubin, 4th-year, Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies
Abstract: Using as a corpus the over 10,000 document strong digital collection of the Yiddish Book Center, this project maps mentions of the Danube, Black Sea, Red Sea, Hudson River, Atlantic Ocean, and the legendary river Sambatyen, as well as the places of publication of their texts. Thus the imagined and material geography and hydrography of the Yiddish world converge upon a single plane, and the transition from a diasporic literature politically committed to the artistic inhabitation of a hostile landscape, to one committed to the memory of a past and distant life becomes plainly visible. The over 3,600 sources are visible on the map and accompanied by a variety of data: total mentions, mentions of bodies of water by city, average distance between body of water and place of publication. This projects aims to present the narrative of Yiddish literature as reflected in its waterways, but also to serve as a useful bibliographic tool for those interested in the subject: alongside the visual representation, the data is presented in a more traditional cited format, with optional context from the original Yiddish texts as well as links to the full documents.
"History Fades to Fable’: The Many Lives of the Croton Aqueduct”
- Bradley Goldsmith, 4th-year, History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine, Computer Science
Abstract: In 1830, New York City still had no stable or sufficient supply of potable water. As a direct result, crises in public health, threats of destructive fires, and concerns for slowed commerce reached a fever pitch early in the decade. From these intertwined, water-sprung concerns emerged the Croton Aqueduct, the first large-scale water supply system in the United States. The works came to transcend their practical function, serving as a locus of American myth-craft, whereby the ancient world became folded into an industrial present. Today the dry aqueduct serves as a recreational trail and continues to shape the cultural identity of New Yorkers—especially those who live among its urban ruins in the towns of Westchester County. Tracing the route along the modern aqueduct trail, this creative nonfiction essay taps a reservoir of 19th century existential anxieties, architectural aesthetics, and folk tales that lay dormant beneath the built landscape. Author Washing Irving’s insight that “history fades to fable” prompts us to wonder what underlies the shift in the aqueduct’s transformation from a symbol of industrial progress to one of quiet, suburban life. In this study of a seemingly simple aqueduct and its new life as a public trail, we uncover a messy reality of a young nation contending with its own sense of history, and the everlasting impulse to construct our own mythologies in the Hudson Valley.
11:30 am – 12:30 pm, Session II: Ancient, Primordial, and Monstrous Waters
“Spirit, Flesh, Mind, and Body: Ancient Jewish Ritual Bathing as Described by Justin Martyr and Philo of Alexandria”
- Ruth Schoenfeld, 4th-year, Religious Studies, Classics
Abstract: What, if anything, is ritualistic about ancient Jewish ritual bathing? My paper examines the practice in light of a thesis proposed by Catherine Bell that suggests that theoretical discourse on ritual reflects an Enlightenment distinction between thought and action. Using Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue with Trypho the Jew” and Philo of Alexandria’s “The Special Laws,” as my starting points, I argue that current categorizations of Jewish purifications actually reflect much older dualisms; notably, a Pauline distinction between spirit and flesh and a Platonic one between mind and body. I then demonstrate that these older divisions, while distinct from the one Bell identifies, still continue to trouble our understandings of the practice today.
“Godzilla’s Irradiated Present: Challenges to Modernity in Atomic Era Monster Science Fiction”
- Esteban Mendoza, 3rd-year, Anthropology, Philosophy
Abstract: The creation of the atomic bomb, shaking the foundation of the modern world, produced anxieties related to the very continuity of both human existence and the modern order. Science Fiction films of the 1950s proved uniquely capable of the expression of these nuclear anxieties on screen. Atomic fears, centered around nuclear annihilation and irradiation, found their most popular, and perhaps most potent, expression in the radioactive monster. In this project, I explore the ways in which four sci-fi monster films, all containing creatures that emerge from beneath the sea, represent these anxieties. I argue that nuclear anxiety is the product of a modernity crumbling under the weight of the atomic bomb; the modern project’s belief in inevitable progress, technological utopia, and rationality dissolves in the face of the Bomb. Ultimately, I posit that these films construct the sea as a “mutant ecology”, a phrase coined by Joseph Masco to describe irradiated landscapes, one in which the logics of modernity are broken down by the Bomb’s horror. These films allow us to conceive of a history in which the Bomb is understood not as a mere technological device, but the producer of a breakdown in the modern order.
“‘Insane Alien Beings’: The Misrepresentation of Deep-sea Creatures”
- Andrew Farry, 3rd-year, Fundamentals and English
Abstract: When the deep sea is compared to space, its organisms are implicitly compared to extra-terrestrial, alien beings. I focus on the imaging of deep-sea creatures as aliens, analysing two films directed by James Cameron. One, Aliens of the Deep (2005) is a documentary about deep sea creatures and the possibility of life on Europa, a moon of Saturn. The second, The Abyss (1989), involves aliens which live at the bottom of the ocean. I undertake an analysis of these works by combining Stacy Alaimo’s vision of a Violet-black ecology with Peircean semiotics, to examine how humans construct meaning from the unfamiliar inhabitants of the deep sea. I develop an idea that the imaging of aliens as deep-sea creatures allows humans to both create an unfamiliar which does not threaten anthropocentrism and ignore our impact on the oceans.
“Liminal Spaces as Destinations: Comparing Icarus’s Sea to Euphorion’s”
- Yueran (Alex) Qi, 4th-year, Creative Writing and English Language & Literature
Abstract: In Metamorphoses, Ovid produced a version of the Icarus myth many are familiar with, where the youth escaped from Crete on wings his father fashioned, flew too close to the sun, and drowned in the ocean below. Having read the myth in his childhood, Goethe constructed for his character Euphorion, the ambitious son of Faust and Helen, the same fate. The sea figures in the original myth of Icarus, is the goal Euphorion flew toward, and appears in Part II of Faust as a potential subject for Faust to conquer. I investigated and compared what the sea stood for in the two similar deaths, supporting the comparison with observations on human-sea relationships in both authors’ times. I argued that Ovid set out a dichotomy in his work--between the treatment of the sea and sky—liminal, transitional spaces—as means to get somewhere else, or as ends in themselves; on the other hand, Goethe merged the two poles of Ovid’s dichotomy by presenting Euphorion, as well as other characters, both acknowledging the presence of a destination at the end of their liminal seas, and, as their goals are unreachable, perceive these seas as ends in themselves.
1:30 – 2:30 pm, Session III: Emotional Waterscapes
“She Saw Me in the Water: Exploring our Paradoxical Relationships with Nature in Three Chapters from a Novel in Progress”
- Orliana Morag, 4th-year, English Language & Literature and History & Creative Writing
Abstract: Novelists frequently depict their characters’ surroundings as mirrors for those characters’ inner turmoil. Books such as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Russell Banks’s Affliction employ setting to capture how their characters deal with conflict. The lake in Housekeeping acts as a space of trauma, but also one of adventure and excitement. The stormy weather throughout Affliction accentuates the main character’s emotional volatility. These excerpts from my novel in progress, She Saw Me in the Water, portray how the protagonist perceives her emotions through the lens of the natural environment. Drawing from psychological studies, interviews with sociologists and artists, paintings, and the novels previously mentioned, these chapters unpack my protagonist’s understandings of her own grief, loneliness, anger, and frustration, all as reflected by her surroundings in upstate New York. Just as often, however, as she affects her environment by viewing it as an extension of herself, the environment affects her by altering her psychological state. From uncontainable joy at the prospect of impending snowfall to crippling flashbacks caused by the weather or specific locations, her mental state fluctuates along with the changes in the outside world. By exploring these contradictions, I encapsulate the duality of the relationship between people and their environments.
“‘Nostalgia is a Shallow Strait’: Water, Memory, and Identity in Yu Kwang-chung’s Poetry”
- Cynthia Huang, 4th-year, Creative Writing and Philosophy, Mathematics
Abstract: In 1950, poet, translator, and essayist Yu Kwang-chung fled from mainland China to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War. When he arrived, he struggled with the impossibility of returning to his homeland and with finding a sense of belonging in Taiwan. This dichotomy was reflected in his poetry, from Sailor’s Sad Songs (1952) to White Jade Bitter Gourd (1974), where he used water imagery as a conduit through which to explore these questions on identity. His references to bodies of water, such as the Yangtse and the Taiwanese strait, often served to articulate his distance from the mainland and his emotional longing for home. This paper tracks the development of Yu’s use of water imagery in his poetry by placing his work in conversation with Classical Chinese literary traditions and the poetic styles of his contemporaries. By using water imagery to integrate classical and modernist influences, Yu found a way to both cement his poetic identity and stay culturally connected to China even though he was unable to physically return. He casted his poetry and nostalgia out of personal memory, into a public literary and cultural discourse.
“Representing the Unrepresentable: Invocations of Water Imagery in Debussy’s Piano Repertoire”
- Victor Cui, 4th-year, Music, French
Abstract: Musicians have long been fascinated by the difficult, multifaceted water, whose many qualities like transparency, clarity, perpetual motion and potentially destructive force pose immense possibilities as well as elusiveness when it comes to musical representation. Claude Debussy (1862-1918), through his acute sensitivity, created an unique oeuvre of piano music that precisely captures the challenging nuance of water, and through that also radically shifted the role of piano from melodic to sonorous instrument, while shaping and reshaping the collective cultural imagination of water. Through a close analysis of four selected piano pieces, I examined how Debussy managed to so vividly invoke water-related themes, despite the inherent ambiguity and ethereality of his art, from the perspectives of six musical elements: form, harmony, figuration, rhythm, register and pedaling. I focused on technical details, as I argued that it was through the utmost detailed-oriented yet oftentimes overlooked musical-maneuvering of the impressionist/symbolist maestro that his music is able to convey the intended message. While enriching the already fecund field of Debussy studies, this investigation is also aimed at helping contemporary composers get a deeper insight into Debussy’s craft, which would in turn inform their own composition.
“‘Defeat of Feeling in the Face of Life’: Understanding Peeperkorn’s Encounter with a Waterfall in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain”
- Teis Jayaswal, 4th-year, Fundamentals: Issues and Texts and Philosophy
Abstract: While nature undoubtedly has the power to soothe the human mind, it concurrently has the potential to evoke the most unbearable form of terror. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann exemplifies nature’s threatening properties through an episode in which a wealthy, strong-built Dutch man named Mynheer Peeperkorn meets an immense, deafening waterfall. Following his encounter with the waterfall, Peeperkorn kills himself. Puzzled by this bizarre series of events, I analyzed the myriad of dualities inherent in Peeperkorn’s character which manifest themselves in the waterfall episode, most importantly the dichotomy between physicality and abstraction as well as that between sensuality and divinity. I concluded that the sound of the waterfall accentuates Peeperkorn’s raw physicality and his inability to experience something beyond corporeal or sensual pleasure. To supplement my literary analysis paper, I performed research in psychology, music and sound studies to examine the interplay of the human mind with the sound of water, using these findings to produce a 30-minute piano and recorded sound composition integrating water sounds from the Pacific Northwest. My musical composition functions as a score for Peeperkorn’s encounter with the waterfall, and in this way, offers an acoustic interpretation of the text. By combining psychology and sound studies research with literary analysis and musical interpretation, I present an original holistic perspective of the waterfall episode in The Magic Mountain.
2:45 – 3:30 pm, Session IV: Local Waters: Access, Connections, and Relationships
“Water Heroes: Representing and Celebrating Local Perspectives in Hawai’i’s Theatre for Young Audiences”
- Alisa Boland, 4th-year, History, Creative Writing
Abstract: Hawaiʻi’s local playwrighting culture has blossomed over the course of the 20th century and especially since the 1970s. Hawaiʻi’s homegrown plays portray local experiences, affirming community identity and countering the fetishized portrayal of Hawaiʻi in mainland mass media. While academics have studied how Hawai’i’s local theatre subverts the stereotyping of Hawaiʻi’s culture for adult audiences, little has been said about local theatre performed for young audiences (TYA). Understanding how Hawaiʻi’s homegrown TYA portrays the islands is particularly important because of TYA’s recognized pedagogical power and the strong impact that media stereotyping has on child self-esteem. Through interviews with local playwrights and analysis of the motif of water in five plays produced at Honolulu Theatre for Youth, I found that these TYA plays portray and uplift local value systems, filling a representational gap in the media that Hawaiʻi’s young audiences consume. Further, these plays symbolically link a local understanding of water to virtue, dignifying Hawaiʻi’s culture. My written analysis of Hawaiʻi’s TYA speaks to the unique possibility of TYA to meet the pedagogical and developmental needs of children underrepresented in mass media.
“Radio Waves: Exploring Place Attachment and Self-perception among Young Water Stewards”
- Ruby Rorty, 3rd-year, Economics and Environmental & Urban Studies
Abstract: Youth environmentalists have risen to prominence over the past few years. Thus far, public discussion has focused on national and international figures, including Greta Thunberg, the Sunrise Movement, and This Is Zero Hour. Local issues and the young people who work on them remain largely unrecognized. In addition, reporters covering the youth environmental movement tend to project a savior narrative onto these young people and label them as activists, rather than centering their personal stories. This project offers an alternative approach to covering youth environmentalism that is locally focused and prioritizes the self-identity of the advocates involved. Because the worst impacts of environmental change are localized, understanding local-level environmental issues and advocates is essential to developing climate resilience. Furthermore, by limiting ourselves to a preconceived model of youth activism, we may fail to recognize the expansion of the environmental movement beyond the traditional activist archetype. I investigated the nature(s) of youth-led local environmental advocacy by conducting a series of interviews with young people doing water work in their communities. Our conversations focused on my interviewees’ sense of place and their approaches to local environmental advocacy. Ultimately, the young people I interviewed did not primarily identify as activists, but instead used other terms, including ‘steward’, ‘storyteller’, and ‘artist’. Everyone I interviewed described early experiences in nature that solidified their attachment to local land and water, and the Indigenous environmentalists I spoke to also said that their cultures’ beliefs about reciprocal care between people and nature influence their work. I turned each conversation into a podcast episode, compiled episode-specific resource packets containing further reading, and wrote a nonfiction essay incorporating the stories of the individuals I spoke to. Together, these products provide an alternative to standard reductive media coverage of youth environmentalists.
“Aspiring to Anthropocene: Technocrats’ Struggle to Control Water in 19th Century Mexico City”
- Claire Potter, 4th-year, History and English Language & Literature
Abstract: Nineteenth-century Mexico City had both too much and too little water; sewage and polluted rainwater flooded the streets, but potable water was scarce. In this narrative nonfiction essay, I tell the story of how powerful technocrats tried to address the crisis by establishing centralized control over the city’s water. They instituted a surveillance system to monitor water carriers, drained the lakes around the city, and planted forests to retain groundwater. I argue that these three projects reveal a larger attitude that elite government officials had towards nature and the lower classes. They saw nature as raw material that they could manipulate to achieve their ambitions for the city and treated poor laborers like their tools. The essay reveals the pitfalls of this technocratic approach to addressing environmental disaster. Attempts to solve the water crisis entrenched and perpetuated inequality in the city and its hinterlands. Elite optimism for the possibilities of human technology belied just how difficult it was to reshape the region’s hydrography. Drastically changing the natural flow of water created nearly as many problems as it solved, and helped shape Mexico City’s contemporary water crisis. Today, returning the terrain to its natural state is not an option; there is no technology that could erase the environmental impact of previous generations. Nevertheless, by studying the flaws of the narrow technocratic mindset that brought Mexico City where it is today, anyone concerned with the future of the city or facing a water crisis in their own home can better understand how to move forward.