SOS: ComAlt, Seminar Pre-Writing Week 3
31 January 2017
Word Count: 226
Passages:
“In so doing the metaphor erases the historical presence and agency of the actual indigenous inhabitants of the land, by both murdering the men and sexually conquering the women.” (Tompkins 2012: 84)
“…the alarming impression is that of a wild, many-sided, free-for-all battle or series of battles between hosts of raging lunatics.” (Newman 2013: 50)
News Media Context:
PRESIDENT TRUMP VOWS TO ‘UNITE THE CIVILIZED WORLD’ AGAINST TERRORISM
“Departing sharply from the former Obama administration, Trump vowed to “unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.”
Discussion:
While reading the second chapter of Racial Indigestion and Newman’s histories of the commodification of corn and wheat, I was struck by the irony of the civilized colonizer. Tompkins’ discussion of Sylvester Graham’s story of the mutiny of the Bounty articulates his undeserved righteousness. He preaches of chastity and civility, all the while applauding the completely savage usurpation of pure, untouched Pacific peoples and land. His life’s work to condemn foreign bodies and goods for their grotesque ungodliness is met in modern context with an almost laughable sense of his hypocrisy, knowing just how profane and horrific the costs of colonization were for native peoples – all for the sake of the noble, Euro-American sense of national “civility.”
This false sense of enlightenment is mirrored in the description of the Board of Trade in The Secret Financial Life of Food, where learned, wealthy men have abstracted food into a business of carefully calculated profit. Meanwhile, on the trading floor, hysteria ensues. Even the terms used to explain the workings of the Wheat Exchange – “corner,” and “pit” – have an aggressive, primitive connotation.
I am forced to draw parallels between this ironic savagery of the civilized white man and the current sentiment and rhetoric of our President Trump, preaching all Muslims are evil and uncivilized and Mexicans are rapists, while he himself physically mimics the disabled and boasts about being a sexual predator.
Citations:
Newman, Kara. (2013). The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. (2012). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. NewYork: New York University Press.
Wilner, M. (2017, January 20). President Trump vows to ‘unite the civilized world’ against terrorism. Retrieved from http://www.jpost.com/American-Politics/President-Trump-vows-to-unite-the-civilized-world-against-terrorism-479110
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