Embedded Files
Protest Experiments on the Myths of Lux et Veritas
at Yale UniversityProtest Experiments on the Myths of Lux et Veritas
Fall 2019
This is an interactive, multi-dimensional essay. You are free to either use this table of contents to navigate the essay or continue scrolling to read traditionally. To access a PDF version of "Paradise Sought," click here.
- Sarmad Kashani,
a 17th century Armenian-Iranian poet, moments before his Delhi execution, sanctioned by Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir.
a 17th century Armenian-Iranian poet, moments before his Delhi execution, sanctioned by Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir.
Hansen, Waldemar. The Peacock Throne: the Drama of Mogul India. Motilal Banarsidass, 1996.
Or/in summary:
"Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism"by Ben Ehrenreich
A supporter of former president Evo Morales holds a Bolivian flag during clashes with police in La Paz, Bolivia, November 13, 2019.
(AP / Natacha Pisarenko)
(AP / Natacha Pisarenko)
Introduction
Introduction
When a seed is planted onto fertile ground, it might sprout into a tree. This tree might bear fruit, don luscious colors, and/or outlive human beings around it but it shall always, at least, respire and photosynthesize.
Inhale the world’s carbon exhales and turn them into oxygen.
Keep itself nourished and alive while at it.
The sun commits to this practice each day as it rises, shines, and sets. The moon attempts the same steadfastly.
What do we do?
Being human is, at once, the easiest and hardest way to feel unique. I can talk, sing, and write; surely, there must be some point to this added convenience? And yet, magically, even if there is any particular, enriching point to this, it is shared by around 8 billion people.
You and I are of this community and our parents were larger than life or seeds: cognizant to us about where they came from, why they ended up with us, and what they dreamed for us.
Some of us were clothed, fed, and educated. Some of us were not clothed, or fed, or educated. Many of us grew on a story of God. More of us — maybe most of us — grew in a world which seemed to believe in a story of God. This story of life, whichever one was our iteration of it, balances on a reality of life and death to assert itself.
There is a world that you are in. When you are gone, it goes on without you. When you were not here yet, it did not know you. You came from somewhere and you will leave to somewhere. The only relationship we have with the Earth is a temporary one, no matter our theological beliefs. At the departure of this temporary journey, we may leave behind another temporary story or memory – picture, sound, or video in the digital age (when, really, it's the same thing) — doing our very best.
My capstone project is concerned with that conclusion. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa's critical ethnography project Borderlands, this Human Rights final capstone paper is a digital ethnography of power experienced at Yale University and my capability and will to challenge it.
Paradise Sought is an experimental exploration of the human rights arena at Yale University, a place that arguably produces some of the most sought after, highly-skilled technocrats of the world with an ever-widening global reach.
We began our "protext experiments" on the simplest, spiritual belief: in the world of capital and power, to fight for one’s freedom outside the economics of greed and control is to have already won the war against its appropriation of the human.
What could I be capable of and willing to do in order to advocate for human rights at Yale University because it is an imperial stronghold of ongoing wealth and sociopolitical influence?
In Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research, Michelle Fine explains how Cornel West and Chantal Mouffe implored “activist academics” to focus our inquiries “into the supremacist logics of domination, the micro practices of daily subjugation, and the macro structural dynamics of class and political exploitation.” This epistemological focus, they imply, could understand the true backbone of oppressive systems. Mainstream discussions around the advocacy of justice often center a preexisting movement, thought, and industry of human rights. This can mean the United Nations or World Bank/IMF economic policies for the least imaginative or ecosystems of grassroots groups and non-governmental organizations for the most intelligent.
While institutions and traditions can be powerful, critiques of the present or dominant world order should inspire us to think not only within but through and beyond these structures, systems, and theoretical principles.
How did Paradise Sought suggest we do such a thing? In our protest experiments, we sought criticize the University that we loved, in public, to evolve our relationship with our beloved.This paper presents to you my qualitiative reflections on these "protest experiments" and what they revealed to me, and hopefully others, about Yale University's promise of Lux et Veritas.
Where does the discourse on political activism stand at an American college campus credited to the production of an assortment of world leaders and players? Where do I stand in relationship to it? And what am I capable and willing to do to shift it in a direction I find enlightening and truthful? This is the moment that my ethnography hoped to capture from my life to contribute to the human rights field of study. Paradise Sought was meant to be a yearlong campaign that held Yale University accountable for the global ecological destruction and economic marginalization propelled by the colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism the university directly and indirectly benefits from. Eventually, our project culminated in a semester-long effort, at the end of which, all five members of our performance troupe were levied disciplinary action charges, with myself being threatened with immediate suspension if I were to cross such a line again.
Paradise Sought found guidance from the histories and stories of resistance that work to dissect and unveil the otherwise invisible logics of domination, practices of subjugation, and structural dynamics of exploitation that exist in the status quo. This website, primarily intended to be also be presented in the form of a visual exhibition, is a catalog of the ideas that went behind Paradise Sought and an ethnography of our efforts and Yale University's response to it.
— The Hampton Institute: A Working-Class Think-Tank
The 2015 Hampton Reader: Selected Essays and Analyses from the Hampton Institute: a Working-Class Think Tank. Hampton Press, 2015.
Point of Departure & Ideological Foundations
David Ohana explores the politics of progress, dialectics, the Enlightenment, and myth-making in Georges Sorel and the Rise of Political Myth as framed by early 20th century French philosopher Georges Sorel (Ohana, 735). For Ohana, Sorel’s analysis was radical and steadfastly Marxist. Sorel did not believe in the history of the world as a history of dialectics or progress. Instead, he focused on the idea of the renewal of myths as the foundation for history, inspired by Giambattista Vico. Believing that “[a] civilisation needs a myth in order to flourish,” Sorel committed his philosophical practice to the“invent[ion of] such a modern myth for a decadent European civilisation and to distinguish between myth and anti-myth, or, to state it differently, between myth and, utopia and ideology” (Ohana, 736). Though it is irrelevant to my efforts what his project culminated into, or what it was able to amount to in the history of which myths begin to matter and which do not, Ohana argued that Sorel aimed “to reveal the dangers of the bourgeois state of mind: the search for harmony, illusions of progress, democracy, rationalism and optimism, which were a cover for class interest, attempts to temper conflict, appease strife, suppress vitality and harmonise the reality of conflict” (Ohana, 736). Point of Departure & Ideological Foundations
This statement hauntingly represents my experience of class-privilege in Lahore, Pakistan and Yale University.
Ohana concludes this accusation by asserting that the bourgeoisie imposed their political rule by establishing in popular culture “a bourgeois mentality” (Ohana, 736). Ohana called this establishment the “sanctification of the prevailing order” (Ohana, 736).
Could this be a sanctification and mentality that prevails in my life, love, and study today? Summer 2019, I was able to secure an internship at the Human Rights Watch (HRW) headquarters in New York City, located in the Empire State Building. All summer, I was unable to let the nagging feeling dissipate that the construction of my life, the response to my queer politics back home in Lahore and now in America, were the result of this ingenious Ohanian analysis. Walking through a Manhattan island which had public/private spaces delineated on the principles of exclusion and property, or having to clutch my Pakistani passport hard everytime I saw an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) truck in Brooklyn, set the tone of my aspirational summer spent in New York. I was embarrassed that I grew up with the poster of a city that will frankly never see me, or be able to see me, as who I am. My emotional solidarity was always with the 15-year-old black kid I saw pinned down outside a Bedstuy high school and the Central Park Five babies who were satanically wronged by the New York City criminal justice system, only a few years before my arrival to the United States. What prevented America's white supremacy to make me its next target, I wondered all summer. Not a lot, was the answer I arrived to.
So how did Sorel suggest this prevailing order be disrupted?
Sorel’s political strategy and principle was one of “exposure” which I have sought to queer, have sex with, distort, embody, mobilize, transform, and reveal through the course of my capstone project.
To Sorel, exposure meant a “continual undermining of the status quo and the destruction of everything that was ‘established’” (Ohana, 736). In the simplest words, Paradise Sought is a project that determined to continually undermine the status quo of discourse at Yale during my time and attempted to artistically destroy everything, or every illusion, that the University or its bootlickers establish.
When I started this capstone, it was titled 101 Ways To Change The World Today and it aspired to find its roots in an impractically broad literature and history review of past instances of attacks to the prevailing status quo and world order. I hoped to conduct a focused historical review on instances of such “exposure” — or unorthodox consciousness-raising efforts — that the world has already witnessed, from Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation that sparked the Arab Springs to art installations I witnessed this summer that blasted audio clips of sobbing, detained immigrant children across New York City. I had planned to base my capstone on not only implemented examples such as the ones mentioned just now but also on proposed theories and movements to this effect, including but not limited to nonviolence and civil disobedience movements, agitprop, direct action, disruption, guerrilla activism, and public writing activities, etcetera. My methods entailed archival and desk research to explore what I categorized as “unorthodox activism advocating for social justice and human rights.” The primary criteria that I defined “unorthodox” with was advocacy that was uninstitutional, in the public, and artistic. I attacked the broad base of my first criteria in two directions simultaneously: one beginning a focus at Yale first and then towards broader reverberations or coalitions, and the other beginning a focus at Global South, or working class, or indigenous, or other grassroots social movement building histories. This excavation technique and focus is inspired from Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed and Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power, both texts that I was introduced to as part of my Human Rights training at Yale. A valiant project, though not at all feasible for me within the timeline of an undergraduate seminar and the institutional hurdles thrown my way, this approach brought forward — from an expansive preliminary bibliography — a few crucial texts that are integral to the philosophy and machination behind Paradise Sought. These include Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist by Bill Ayers, The Rubaiyat of Sarmad by Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, along with Gaga Feminism, and The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam. My research included a deep engagement with historical movements that engaged, intentionally and unintentionally, with Sorel’s idea of the “exposure.” However, this process brought me to the conclusion that my project required a limitation to the contemporary to be effective. This is to say, though my project did find guidance in past instances and dedications to “exposure” strategies, I needed a contemporary framework of what “exposure” could look like in the increasingly digital 21st century and at Yale. Each sector of the world that wishes to flourish binds itself to a myth. I gathered that there was little productive in cataloguing a diverse peoples’ anti-myths when what my work really required was a deeper excavation of the myths that my person is submerged in and sponsored by. Gaga Feminism quickly became this framework for me. The theory holds Lady Gaga’s life and performance as a queer disruption of capitalist modes of being and feeling that (through art, pop, sex, and tech) reveals the prevailing world order as a myth and invents one to replace it (Halberstam, 14). In Halberstam’s own words: “Recognizing her power as a maestro of media manipulation, a sign of a new world disorder, and a loud voice for different arrangements of gender, sexuality, visibility, and desire, we can use the world of Gaga to think about what has changed and what remains the same, what sounds different and what is all too familiar.”(Halberstam, 5) There is a world that you are in. When you are gone, it goes on without you. When you were not here yet, it did not know you. You came from somewhere and you will leave to somewhere. If you are seeking paradise, you are formulating Earth and evading hell. In his Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin posits that the power of law and justice is mythical (Benjamin, 245-247). And that really, the impossibility of justice within the immediate manifestation of violence in this power of law makes the destruction of this law, in principle, “obligatory” (Benjamin, 249). This first process — the imposition of a power of law that is truly powerless, and the result of a myth — could be understood as “mythic violence” (Benjamin, 248). Benjamin further suggests that this violence “is illustrated by everyday experience” (Benjamin, 248). The myth of America, for example, follows this pattern of violence. America is a settler-colonial nation that did not just once upon a time ethnically cleanse indigenous tribes, it has consistently maintained and forced itself as an imperial state on land still claimed by living, surviving Native nations. One could make the exact argument about the relationship of slavery to modern mass incarceration. The Hampton Institute’s statement from above is copied to represent the continuity of America’s mythic violence. If the myth renews itself, according to Sorel, so does its violence.
Today, still, we are obsessed with band-aid problems to human rights issues for a reason. We must ask ourselves: do we still believe a country like America is unique, made for immigrants, and welcoming to all? Does Donald Trump, at the end of the day, have more in common with Bill Clinton, Jeff Bezos, and Andrew Jackson, than he does with his own working-class supporters? Why does Emma Sky still go into Yale classes to profess that “people on ground” are actually fond of the U.S. army? What does it mean that a British woman who had the ability to serve on the Iraqi interim government, during some of the most horrific and captured moments of torture and abuse by a military force, teaches Yale’s “Gateway to Global Affairs” course? What does it mean that Akhil Amar, an instructor who wrote two monologues defending rapist Brett Kavanaugh, teaches Yale’s flagship “Constitutional Law”? How much of that class’s time do you believe might be spent on discussing histories of America’s constitution rooted in First Nations genocides and the Atlantic slave trade?
The Archive(s)
The Archive(s)
Curated by students in “Comparative Ethnic Studies,” a junior seminar in the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program at Yale College (Fall 2018), Global Influences, Local Actions: Student Activism at Yale is a physical exhibition and digital archive of the history of radical protesting and alterity at Yale University.
In their own words:
"Global Influences, Local Actions: Student Activism at Yale represents the culmination of a semester spent critiquing global networks of power as they play out in the history of activism at Yale. This exhibit is an undertaking of intervention: it tells stories that are often left in the background of institutional memories. We consulted archives from Yale Manuscripts and Archives, the various cultural centers, student organizations and publications, and other entities to uncover the stories of student activism from the past 60 years. With testimonies, original documents, photographs, and newspaper clippings, our exhibit recounts how the labor of students of color and their allies led to tangible transformations in the landscape of Yale’s campus over time. Though we approach this project chronologically and organized the exhibit in decades, it is important to note that we do not view student activism as a set of discrete moments. Instead, the students’ work reflects a continuous dialogue with the conditions on campus and in the world. The work of student activists has always been collaborative and their causes multi-faceted, and we aim to reflect such multiplicity in this exhibit.
As you make your way through the exhibit, we ask that you keep in mind that the majority of the students involved in this project are able to engage with this work – and, indeed, with the ER&M program – and to exist at Yale more comfortably because of student activism. Our access to self-determination within this institution is thanks to previous generations of students’ activism. Their work allows us to claim space at Yale as scholars, students, and activists in our own right and through this exhibit. Space and time limit what we can research and display, and we acknowledge that this exhibit does not capture all important elements of the work of those who came before us. Nonetheless, we hope that what you encounter here will convey the transformative effect of student of color activists and their allies on Yale’s campus over the decades, and that our representation of these activists’ legacies will help to solidify their place in Yale’s history."
Selections:
Anthology of Study at Yale/Literature Review:
I firmly believed that I wanted Paradise Sought to be a true, geneological culmination of my human rights study at Yale so I began to draw up a literature review for this project from the various resources, projects, and research directions I have stumbled at in an earnest pursuit of the humanities. So, taking a geneology of the final and other significant projects I have submitted at Yale, these were the particular selections of text that all compounded the ideas and research that resulted in Paradise Sought.Anthology of Study at Yale/Literature Review:
Selections:
FALL 2016 – ARRIVAL AT YALE UNIVERSITY
AMST 135, "U.S. Lesbian and Gay History"George Chauncey
Assignment #1: Critical Ethnography – "The All-Boys Empire of Lahore, Pakistan"
"On a more positive side, however, the emergence of a forceful 21st century reinvigorated the debate and pushed more and more opinions over the fence in Pakistan. The United States Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage in June, 2015 caused havoc on the ideological main-stage in the progressive, educated communities in Pakistan. Hamza Ali Abbasi, a widely- known actor in Pakistan, wrong a long post denouncing the celebration of gay marriage while many other organizations adopted support. The high-school and collegiate level debating competitions took up the subject for discussion while the progressives and the closeted either silently or chaotically changed their profile pictures to the Pride logo. A lot of my friends came out in the past two years and saw partying or being loud while being LGBTQ as a rebellion, a much needed outcry. One of my best friends, who is very popular all over Lahore, has a mother that fights for women rights and a father that actively makes jokes at the expense of LGBTQ people but he tells me, and everyone around him, that in this wavering, unstable platform of a confused Pakistan, being queer is a revolution and at this time in the world, revolt we must."
Assignment #3: Final Paper – "The American Ideal of Masculinity"
"A study of the works left behind by the diarists, essayists, and social critics of the mid-20th century America represent well a very common ideological struggle of gay men. Their recollections reflect how gay men in the ‘40s and the ‘50s were still learning to adjust to the ideals of the society as a whole while simultaneously developing a gay identity that retained its differences. The problem arose when this retention of their newfound individuality had to persist without creating too much of a separation from what many felt the need to categorize as the “normal” world. It is seen in these gay men’s perceptions of masculinity and femininity that early experiences dictated a lot of their conscious choices, or even the ideas they propagated. Throughout this era, it becomes apparent that gay men began leading prominently gay lives, within not only their own consciences, as before, but within the eyes of the world around them. While this new lifestyle brought visibility and a culture of mentorship in the gay world, it also meant that socio-cultural factors such as the regulations of social roles (as those of gender) affected them externally as well as internally. The way the gay identity took shape in these formative years seemed to keep on having a back and forth with society’s expectations from men, most of which seem imbued in one’s preliminary stage of life. The American ideal of masculinity, thus, manifested the homosexual identity into finding respectability through a dislike and detachment from femininity and associated factors, as exemplified best by Donald Vining’s ‘A Gay Diary 1946-1959’ and James Baldwin’s analysis of ubiquitous psychological androgyny in ‘Here Be Dragons,’ originally titled 'Freaks and the American ideal of Manhood.'"
FALL 2017 – FINDING SALMAN RUSHDIE
ENGL 128, "World English Literatures"Stephanie Newell
Assignment #4: Final Paper – "Swallowing the Lot," an essay on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children
"Was the woman ever as docile, or unhinged, as man painted her? Was Friday perhaps as uncivilized and barbaric as Crusoe described him to be? The stories that are written about us can never fully grasp our truths, they may only attempt to understand us and in that lapse lies the danger of being narrated over the agency of narrating our own histories. In advocating for his theory of Orientalism, Edward Said writes that “[t]oo often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent.”1 He argues that society and literary culture determine one another, and how that relationship brings with itself a potential for political impetus. Said defines “orientalism” as a cumulative representation of the East in the canon of the West that allows the latter to restructure, dominate and have an authority over the former. With colonial evolving into the imperial, the western lens continues to translate the uncertainties of the ‘Orient’ to understand it in a way that affirms its inferiority. As canonized, othering depictions of an entire people call instinctively for a resistance to this imposed superiority, the nature and culture of the Orient is further contaminated due to the question of what is intrinsic to it and what is reactionary. How must we, then, pick up our own pens and rewrite our truths in the way most honest to our histories and realities? Raymond Williams suggests that we adopt a process of constantly unlearning “the inherent dominative mode”2 in order to counter and emancipate ourselves from the perceptions of us that have been written off as fact through poetry then policy. In his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie makes an earnest attempt to do just that with an assertive reimagining of the story of post-partition Indian subcontinent that places itself outside the orientalist narrative. It is a deliberate study, under the guise of historical fiction, of the colonial otherization placed on all that was India and the different Indian reactionary movements this cultural colonialism catalyzed. Rushdie delineates and reiterates the novel’s purpose and political implication in two central ways, almost repeatedly. Firstly, he reclaims the narrative on India through a self-important protagonist who believes his fate is tied to that of his country in order to mimic the finality with which orientalist discourse was and is seen as objective. Secondly, he foreshadows the complications of the post-colonial Indian identity through the use of metaphors grand and small to translate the macro-political effects of orientalism into the personal to show their violence. Unraveling one character’s multitudinous, anthropological and historically linked formation of personhood, Rushdie pens a history of India in which the Indian protagonist imposes his subjectivity as truthful with as much force as orientalism is imposed on the stories of all like him."
SPRING 2018 – WHAT OF HUMAN RIGHTS?
HMRT 100, "Theories, Practices, and Politics of Human Rights"MAPHR Staff
Final Assignment: "Fixing the Fractures: Alternative Approaches to the Human Rights Movement"
"When Edward Said coined the term Orientalism to define and identify the historically stereotyped and colonial representations of the ‘other’ — the Orient or the Third World — by the ‘West’ — the colonizer or the imperial force —, he let free the unbounded potential for applications of this type of contextual study to the larger realm of world politics or cultural exchange and impact between nation states. This unveiled, in more avenues than one, the complex nexus of power dynamics and historical impositions that determined our political, social, and economic status quo. In repeated examples presented by Said and subsequent students of his theory, the advantage of this representation seemed to be consistently tipped in the favor of a Global North against a Global South. This relationship often translated in global political and social procedures. For example, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed in 1948, France and Britain still boasted both a colonial past and present as they served as active and influential members of the UDHR drafting committee. Today, human rights activists are concerned about the effectiveness of their advocacy frameworks on a postcolonial, transnational stage. In that rethinking, it becomes pertinent to challenge and untangle the historical and social context of the Human Rights (HR) movement as a whole to study the specific features of the framework that make it ineffective, and in what ways. In this paper, I will argue that the social, political and historical contextualization of the contemporary HR movement highlights its current, and doomed, inefficacy. I will show how the HR movement naturalizes and pushes forward a “liberal, pro-Western conception of human rights”, or as Sahar DeAnne Driver would call it, a form of political neo(Orientalism) that must be avoided or transformed for the true realization of HR ideals. This undertaking aims to investigate the formation of an industry of the HR movement, considering “legal, moral, ideological, political, semiotic and strategic” platforms (Driver, 58), to point to its failings in the realms of representation, identity politics, and goals of self-empowerment. To study the theoretical foundations of why apparatuses of the HR industry exhibit what we have earlier called neo(Orientalism), I will note and interpret the findings of Sahar DeAnne Driver in her dissertation, Decolonizing Human Rights: The Challenges of Ensuring The Dignity and Freedom of Iranians Through A Human Rights Framework. I will support Driver’s criticism of the HR movement in two ways: 1) by exemplifying the harms of a neo(Orientalist) HR industry through David Murray’s analysis of the Canadian Refugee Apparatus, and 2) by comparing Driver’s conclusions to Ajamu Baraka’s academic work on “people-centered” human rights as an alternative framework to counter the limitations of the modern HR framework. To further these assertions (and present as evidence the optimistic reality of an alternative implementation of HR ideals), I will illustrate the work and achievements of some contemporary rights organizations and grassroots activists which revitalize their HR work through a people-centered and contextually emancipated approach to their work."
WGSS 378, "Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Human Rights"Graeme Reid
Final Assignment: "If You Ask Me"
“If you ask me why representation is important; I will tell you that on the days I don’t feel pretty, I hear the sweet voice of Missy [Elliott] singing to me. ‘Pop that pop that, jiggle that fat/Don’t stop, get it ’til your clothes get wet.’ I will tell you that right now there are a million black girls just waiting to see someone who looks like them.” — Ashlee Haze, For Colored Girls
"Recently, behemoths like the Human Rights Watch have armed themselves with this tool of representation in queer sexual politics. In April 2018, HRW partnered with the Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality for a video series meant to “confront myths and counteract the isolation of many LGBT people” in the Arab region. The video series, which was a part of a 75-page report titled Audacity in Adversity: LGBT Activism in the Middle East and North Africa, focuses completely on activists and queer persons from the Arab region telling their own stories of actualization and mobilization for the cause of SOGI advocacy. “We don’t want the image anymore of just being victims,” says Zoheir, a gay activist from Algeria, “We want to speak about reality, speak about violence, but also to [show what is] positive”. Through this report, HRW changed the frame of reference in usual transnational activism and instead let run amok the perspectives and subject positions of the “victims” of LGBT rights violations rather than the imperial forces posing as their “saviors”. On the more policy-oriented end of this revitalization of the SOGI rights movement, organizations like the Center for Story-Based Strategy (CSS) are looking at social change approaches through a narrative lens. Through a widely-researched theoretical and creatively-implemented organizing tactic based on the highlighting of varied subject positions, CSS holds conversations with leaders of the HR movement and disseminates stratagems of story-based tactic to other organizations, movements, and activists. They aim to change deeply held cultural values through implicating deeply known cultural symbols, schools of thought, and belief systems in the realm of queer sexual politics. Some of their preferred avenues include unorthodox HR work like powerful persuasion and cultural resistance through online conversations, humor protesting, theatrical social consciousness work, and public audience engagement among other things.
We live in a world saturated by white, cis, heteronormative narratives of men dominating nations, people, and ideas in their prodigal routes to success. From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Daniel Defoe’s Robison Crusoe, the stories the world is told uplift these excluding identities as the only ones deserving happiness, fulfillment, and relief. In his farewell poetry to Said, the champion of many, Darwish imagines being told to carry his homeland wherever he goes, to be a narcissist if need be. The subaltern’s truth-telling in narration, which is essentially representation of people and their differing, non-white, non-heteronormative subjectivities, might be our only means left if we wish to uplift the voices that can best fight their own battles. We must collaborate with the activists and bodies on ground to intelligently devise site-specific, narrative-based campaigns of mobilization and awareness-raising. If you ask me why representation is important, I will tell you that on the days I feel like my grasp of the English language is doomed in its uneasy Subcontinental past, I hear the sweet words of Salman Rushdie or Mohsin Hamid dancing circles around the Orientalist condemnations given to work like theirs. I will tell you that right now there are a million Pakistani queer kids just waiting to see someone who looks like them."
The Method
The Method
“Gaga feminism recognizes that the world rewards the corrupt, the cheaters, and the liars, and that dishonesty pays. Therefore, the only way to advance toward total disruption of inertia and complacency is to steal from the rich, undermine the religious, and upset the moralists. You cannot win in a world where the game is fixed, so resign yourself to losing. Gaga feminism is for the failures, the losers, those for whom the price of success is too high and the effect of losing may even be to open more doors. Gaga feminism is the ideology that motivates the queen in the chess match — as the queen, you can make big moves, bold moves, aggressive moves. You can do damage, take others out, move at will.
“Gaga feminism recognizes that the world rewards the corrupt, the cheaters, and the liars, and that dishonesty pays. Therefore, the only way to advance toward total disruption of inertia and complacency is to steal from the rich, undermine the religious, and upset the moralists. You cannot win in a world where the game is fixed, so resign yourself to losing. Gaga feminism is for the failures, the losers, those for whom the price of success is too high and the effect of losing may even be to open more doors. Gaga feminism is the ideology that motivates the queen in the chess match — as the queen, you can make big moves, bold moves, aggressive moves. You can do damage, take others out, move at will.
You will also have everyone gunning for you, coming for you, following you. You will go down.”
You will also have everyone gunning for you, coming for you, following you. You will go down.”
Gaga Feminism, as a technique, is a Benjaminian offensive to America’s mythic violence, on the scale of 21st century popular culture: “As the environmental crisis turns from bad to worse, as wars break out like wildfire across the globe, as bankers and corporate gamblers take higher and higher shares of the global markets, and as the social rituals that formerly held communities together lose their meaning, it is time to go gaga” (Halberstam, 208). Using the same language of “crisis” as employed in many human rights discourses, Halberstam argues that the politics of Gaga Feminism is the manifesto that we shall “not remain calm” and that “[b]usiness as usual is what created this mess in the first place” (Halberstam, 208). Halberstam describes the prevailing world order under the factual assumption that “businesspeople and corporate fat cats run/ruin the world” (Halberstam, 208). Halberstam paints an ugly, truthful picture of our world where “education, spirituality, sexuality all must function on a business model and every attempt to make changes is greeted with a pragmatic question about where changing things will also mean making money” (Halberstam, 208). Gaga Feminism recognizes that we are living in a new arena of “anticorporate and anticolonial struggle” that has turned “politics into performance and combine[d] anarchist mistrust of structure with queer notions of bodily riot and antinormative disruption” (Halberstam, 209).
These ideas of queering bodily riot and “antinormative disruption” are the first two pillars of Gaga Feminism that my capstone has armed itself with. The third, and final, pillar of my research and praxis is a commitment to Lady Gaga’s own phenomenon, ARTPOP, to connect my attempt at unorthodox activism at Yale with(in) mass reach and popular culture. ARTPOP is the theory of a “reverse Warholian expedition” that seeks to bring high theory or art into popular culture and discourse. While ARTPOP was the name of Lady Gaga’s second studio album, it was also the theory behind Gaga’s artistic collaborations with Inez and Vinoodh, Marina Abrahimovic, and Jeff Koons, among others. Inherently anti-capitalist, while Andy Warhol was concerned with commodifying you and me (our hearts, words, jokes, or desires) to put them in a museum or print them out en masse for sale, Lady Gaga offers another alternative again: to rather take the effort, elitism, and aristocratic concentration of high theory and art in order to put it into public, popular access. Please note that in no way do I believe that Lady Gaga is not, in fact, in her own ways a victim to capitalism and whiteness. My belief in beginning through Gaga Feminism and ARTPOP is an ode to Gaga’s earnest intent on creating a new, less-awful myth of a world for a bullied, confused, 10-year-old me. This is the spirit of Paradise Sought and it finds camaraderie within existing movements in the world, especially the Extinction Rebellion movement, the artistic strategies of which I hope to mirror on an individual scale.
Paradise Sought is an overwriting of the legacy and history of western hegemony by the performance of a contemporary rebellion to its present world order. It is not absolute but it is one kinship represented. As a capstone, it is a set of continuous actions, disruptions, and protests — each linked to a historical example of similar “exposure” and an artistic, theoretical principle. It is an ethnographic catalogue of my experience with conducting this “exposure” protest experiments at Yale to create a new myth for the queer, Pakistani possibilities of a Yale experience. Paradise Sought is a spin on John Milton’s world-famous, crowned glory of Western canon, Paradise Lost. Why Milton? Milton was a radical public writer who led the revolutionary campaign for King Charles I’s execution because he believed that it was the duty of people to execute a guilty sovereign. Paradise Lost enjoys a supreme reputation in the Western canon and engages with Christian myths and values that can be traced to be the progenitors of modern imperialism, gender occupation, and exploitative capitalism in the genealogy of the British Empire and the proliferation of Anglican capitalism. To take the English language’s “greatest epic” — taught in Yale-officiated “Directed Studies” to first-years and as a requirement for all students in schools like Dartmouth until very recent — and turn its myth around is our intention. Without further ado:
These ideas of queering bodily riot and “antinormative disruption” are the first two pillars of Gaga Feminism that my capstone has armed itself with. The third, and final, pillar of my research and praxis is a commitment to Lady Gaga’s own phenomenon, ARTPOP, to connect my attempt at unorthodox activism at Yale with(in) mass reach and popular culture. ARTPOP is the theory of a “reverse Warholian expedition” that seeks to bring high theory or art into popular culture and discourse. While ARTPOP was the name of Lady Gaga’s second studio album, it was also the theory behind Gaga’s artistic collaborations with Inez and Vinoodh, Marina Abrahimovic, and Jeff Koons, among others. Inherently anti-capitalist, while Andy Warhol was concerned with commodifying you and me (our hearts, words, jokes, or desires) to put them in a museum or print them out en masse for sale, Lady Gaga offers another alternative again: to rather take the effort, elitism, and aristocratic concentration of high theory and art in order to put it into public, popular access. Please note that in no way do I believe that Lady Gaga is not, in fact, in her own ways a victim to capitalism and whiteness. My belief in beginning through Gaga Feminism and ARTPOP is an ode to Gaga’s earnest intent on creating a new, less-awful myth of a world for a bullied, confused, 10-year-old me. This is the spirit of Paradise Sought and it finds camaraderie within existing movements in the world, especially the Extinction Rebellion movement, the artistic strategies of which I hope to mirror on an individual scale.
Paradise Sought is an overwriting of the legacy and history of western hegemony by the performance of a contemporary rebellion to its present world order. It is not absolute but it is one kinship represented. As a capstone, it is a set of continuous actions, disruptions, and protests — each linked to a historical example of similar “exposure” and an artistic, theoretical principle. It is an ethnographic catalogue of my experience with conducting this “exposure” protest experiments at Yale to create a new myth for the queer, Pakistani possibilities of a Yale experience. Paradise Sought is a spin on John Milton’s world-famous, crowned glory of Western canon, Paradise Lost. Why Milton? Milton was a radical public writer who led the revolutionary campaign for King Charles I’s execution because he believed that it was the duty of people to execute a guilty sovereign. Paradise Lost enjoys a supreme reputation in the Western canon and engages with Christian myths and values that can be traced to be the progenitors of modern imperialism, gender occupation, and exploitative capitalism in the genealogy of the British Empire and the proliferation of Anglican capitalism. To take the English language’s “greatest epic” — taught in Yale-officiated “Directed Studies” to first-years and as a requirement for all students in schools like Dartmouth until very recent — and turn its myth around is our intention. Without further ado:
On Earth, we're seeking Paradise
On Earth, we're seeking Paradise
Who We AreOur first performance (and the embryo of Paradise Sought) found its inspiration from an example and practice of anti-materialist resistance in 17th century Mughal India. Shaikh Sarmad was an Armenian-Iranian polymath, poet, and lover who was executed in the Subcontinent because of his influence against then-Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir. Sarmad would roam the streets of capital city Delhi as a vagabond, reciting remarkable verse about the hypocrisy of Emperor Aurangzeb’s sovereign myth and practice of materialism, as he survived on how much his communities (those others destined to life intimate to the streets of empires) adored him.
Numerous historians have set out on the ambitious mission of understanding the facts and figures of Sarmad’s life, from Maulana Azad to Nathan Katz to Nahid Pirnazar and countless other admirers and inquirers of Sarmad. This task is especially daunting because Emperor Aurangzeb sought to erase Sarmad’s name from official histories from the time and a mystic and poet like Sarmad would already hold a disinterest in recorded reputation outside of his verse. In the broadest understanding, Saeed-i-Sarmad was a roaming, naked mystic who would comprise poetry agitating against materialism and politically-motivated religious orthodoxy. Today in Delhi, a shimmering red shrine of Sheikh Sarmad Shaheed adorns the street of the Red Fort (Lal Qila) and its mosque (Jama Masjid). In writing about the pulp-fiction on Sarmad that is available for purchase just outside his shrine, Sarover Zaidi, a student of Syeda Hameed, writes how Sarmad was a malamati — a follower of the doctrine of inviting towards oneself insult and blame for the purpose of self-enlightenment.
In the first segment of Paradise Sought – WHO WE ARE, we sought to announce ourselves as modern-day, cyborg-feminist malamatis.
Sarmad is remembered, in his doctrine and ideology, as symbolizing a critical opposition to Aurangzeb: “[e]ven today, the images on the pulp fiction sold outside the shrine portray Sarmad as a frail naked fakir siting on the ground, pointing his hand towards the ornamentally clothed, head-geared king.” The few authoritative texts that exist on Sarmad’s life differ in some aspects but there are certain features that all historians and writers of Sarmad’s life agree unanimously on. Sarmad was born Jewish in the Iranian region of Kashan, in a vast community and culture of prospering Armenian Christians and Jews. Sarmad is credited obscurely with having dabbled in the study of other religions (Pirnazar, XVI) but multiple accounts posit that, at some point in time while he was still in Iran, Sarmad converted to Islam. By profession, Daghistani assigns to Sarmad the attributes of a shrewd trader (Pirnazar, XX). For Azad: “[i]t was trade which first brought [Sarmad] to India” but his “fate was hitched [instead] to the market of love and beauty, where the accepted currency is not gold and silver but the fragments of broken hearts” (Hameed, 33). When Sarmad arrived in India in 1632, he fell longingly for the gaze of a Hindu boy named Abhai Chand.
Superimposing this history on Yale’s campus was the method and preparation of our performance. We mirrored the market and popularity of poetic verse in Mughal India to 2019’s social economy of tweets, Facebook posts, and short video clips/Instagram stories. The same place where today Sarmad’s shining red shrine stands, Sarmad used to sit naked as the Emperor walked from the Fort to the Mosque. Aurangzeb is known in many contemporary dialogues, positive and negatively, as the true revival of Islam in a decadent, morally-decaying Mughal dynasty. Annoyed by Sarmad’s public indignation in the form of poetry and nudity, Aurangzeb asked Sarmad to cover himself with a blanket. Sarmad told Aurangzeb that he can cover Sarmad’s naked lap with the blanket next to him if he it disturbs Aurangzeb so. As Aurangzeb did so, he saw the bloody heads of his brother, crown prince Dara Shikoh, his three nephews, and their companions — all those history remembers as victims of Aurangzeb’s succession campaign. The Emperor shrieked and put the blanket back before he could cover Sarmad’s nudity. The Emperor shivered for Sarmad rattled the truth. Sarmad then asked: “Tell me, shall I hide your crimes or my body?”
On Sept. 20, my friend Casey Odesser and I spent our Friday afternoons dressed up as techno-cyborg angels and set up an installation that read the signs: “Brett Kavanaugh Partied At A Yale Frat,” “Brett Kavanuagh’s Bros Were Frat Bros,” and “76% of [all] U.S. Congress[members ever have] belonged to a FRAT[ernity].” Our public performance lasted one and a half hours where we chanted the posters, sang peace and feminist justice songs, and looked people in the eye as they walked by and we asked them: “Who controls your booze, body, state, and party?”
In the middle of our performance, a U.S. military-related contingent walked by in formation and marched towards the women’s table where they had their ceremony. I wonder what people back home would think of my protest against male-dominated spaces if they knew that American men and women were peacefully celebrating ceremonies of the military right next to me. I thought about the My Lai village massacre, I thought about Hiroshima and Nagasaki — how they called those bombs “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” how Truman called it a “good bomb.” I thought about the U.S. drone strike this September that struck 40 Afghanis, mostly women and children, attending a wedding in Helmand, Afghanistan.
Our cross campus protest was accompanied with a celebration event my friends and I hosted where we crowdsourced the posters protesting fraternity presence on campus. We left the party and protested outside two fraternities in the first week of September. At each incident, we were able to engage in meaningful discussion with people attending the parties, even though we met initial reluctance to engage.
In the end, the cross campus protest was an important moment of representation because a lot of people walking by were curious as to what our protest sought to identify as an issue because they felt perplexed by the mention of Brett Kavanaugh, fraternities, and the U.S. congress in one messaging. Upon conversation, we were pleasantly surprised to interact with a wide diversity of opinions in the community. Some people thanked us, some congratulated us, friends stopped by to chat, and others either silently acknowledged or pretended to ignore. Personally, I found the last option most embarrassing and unnecessary. In the first 15 minutes of our performance, a Yale official came to announce to us their role in the administration (Director of Cross Campus Events or something?), inquire as to what we were doing, and advice us that the Climate March will be taking place later in the evening in case we were planning on being there for that long. I noted the speed of the institution’s response and how invisible the surveillance had felt before it was announced in the administrator approaching us.
Numerous historians have set out on the ambitious mission of understanding the facts and figures of Sarmad’s life, from Maulana Azad to Nathan Katz to Nahid Pirnazar and countless other admirers and inquirers of Sarmad. This task is especially daunting because Emperor Aurangzeb sought to erase Sarmad’s name from official histories from the time and a mystic and poet like Sarmad would already hold a disinterest in recorded reputation outside of his verse. In the broadest understanding, Saeed-i-Sarmad was a roaming, naked mystic who would comprise poetry agitating against materialism and politically-motivated religious orthodoxy. Today in Delhi, a shimmering red shrine of Sheikh Sarmad Shaheed adorns the street of the Red Fort (Lal Qila) and its mosque (Jama Masjid). In writing about the pulp-fiction on Sarmad that is available for purchase just outside his shrine, Sarover Zaidi, a student of Syeda Hameed, writes how Sarmad was a malamati — a follower of the doctrine of inviting towards oneself insult and blame for the purpose of self-enlightenment.
In the first segment of Paradise Sought – WHO WE ARE, we sought to announce ourselves as modern-day, cyborg-feminist malamatis.
Sarmad is remembered, in his doctrine and ideology, as symbolizing a critical opposition to Aurangzeb: “[e]ven today, the images on the pulp fiction sold outside the shrine portray Sarmad as a frail naked fakir siting on the ground, pointing his hand towards the ornamentally clothed, head-geared king.” The few authoritative texts that exist on Sarmad’s life differ in some aspects but there are certain features that all historians and writers of Sarmad’s life agree unanimously on. Sarmad was born Jewish in the Iranian region of Kashan, in a vast community and culture of prospering Armenian Christians and Jews. Sarmad is credited obscurely with having dabbled in the study of other religions (Pirnazar, XVI) but multiple accounts posit that, at some point in time while he was still in Iran, Sarmad converted to Islam. By profession, Daghistani assigns to Sarmad the attributes of a shrewd trader (Pirnazar, XX). For Azad: “[i]t was trade which first brought [Sarmad] to India” but his “fate was hitched [instead] to the market of love and beauty, where the accepted currency is not gold and silver but the fragments of broken hearts” (Hameed, 33). When Sarmad arrived in India in 1632, he fell longingly for the gaze of a Hindu boy named Abhai Chand.
Superimposing this history on Yale’s campus was the method and preparation of our performance. We mirrored the market and popularity of poetic verse in Mughal India to 2019’s social economy of tweets, Facebook posts, and short video clips/Instagram stories. The same place where today Sarmad’s shining red shrine stands, Sarmad used to sit naked as the Emperor walked from the Fort to the Mosque. Aurangzeb is known in many contemporary dialogues, positive and negatively, as the true revival of Islam in a decadent, morally-decaying Mughal dynasty. Annoyed by Sarmad’s public indignation in the form of poetry and nudity, Aurangzeb asked Sarmad to cover himself with a blanket. Sarmad told Aurangzeb that he can cover Sarmad’s naked lap with the blanket next to him if he it disturbs Aurangzeb so. As Aurangzeb did so, he saw the bloody heads of his brother, crown prince Dara Shikoh, his three nephews, and their companions — all those history remembers as victims of Aurangzeb’s succession campaign. The Emperor shrieked and put the blanket back before he could cover Sarmad’s nudity. The Emperor shivered for Sarmad rattled the truth. Sarmad then asked: “Tell me, shall I hide your crimes or my body?”
On Sept. 20, my friend Casey Odesser and I spent our Friday afternoons dressed up as techno-cyborg angels and set up an installation that read the signs: “Brett Kavanaugh Partied At A Yale Frat,” “Brett Kavanuagh’s Bros Were Frat Bros,” and “76% of [all] U.S. Congress[members ever have] belonged to a FRAT[ernity].” Our public performance lasted one and a half hours where we chanted the posters, sang peace and feminist justice songs, and looked people in the eye as they walked by and we asked them: “Who controls your booze, body, state, and party?”
In the middle of our performance, a U.S. military-related contingent walked by in formation and marched towards the women’s table where they had their ceremony. I wonder what people back home would think of my protest against male-dominated spaces if they knew that American men and women were peacefully celebrating ceremonies of the military right next to me. I thought about the My Lai village massacre, I thought about Hiroshima and Nagasaki — how they called those bombs “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” how Truman called it a “good bomb.” I thought about the U.S. drone strike this September that struck 40 Afghanis, mostly women and children, attending a wedding in Helmand, Afghanistan.
Our cross campus protest was accompanied with a celebration event my friends and I hosted where we crowdsourced the posters protesting fraternity presence on campus. We left the party and protested outside two fraternities in the first week of September. At each incident, we were able to engage in meaningful discussion with people attending the parties, even though we met initial reluctance to engage.
In the end, the cross campus protest was an important moment of representation because a lot of people walking by were curious as to what our protest sought to identify as an issue because they felt perplexed by the mention of Brett Kavanaugh, fraternities, and the U.S. congress in one messaging. Upon conversation, we were pleasantly surprised to interact with a wide diversity of opinions in the community. Some people thanked us, some congratulated us, friends stopped by to chat, and others either silently acknowledged or pretended to ignore. Personally, I found the last option most embarrassing and unnecessary. In the first 15 minutes of our performance, a Yale official came to announce to us their role in the administration (Director of Cross Campus Events or something?), inquire as to what we were doing, and advice us that the Climate March will be taking place later in the evening in case we were planning on being there for that long. I noted the speed of the institution’s response and how invisible the surveillance had felt before it was announced in the administrator approaching us.
The second segment of Paradise Sought was a pamphlet distribution and performance art campaign, titled
In its culmination, the Do You Trust Your Educator comprised of the publishing of two pamphlets and the exhibiton of a total of three performances. Our first performance was staged outside "Gateway to Global Affairs" lecturer Emma Sky's "Middle East Politics" seminar. Our second performance was staged outside her "Gateway to Global Affairs" lecture itself. Our third performance was conducted outside and inside Akhil Amar's "Constitutional Law" class.
Our ethnographic aim was to record whether the question “Do You Trust Your Educator?” is a provocative one at Yale.
In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser creates a theory of ideology as a dominant and powerful mechanism of social influence and political control. Understanding the state as the force that possesses the power to ideology, Althusser illustrates a taxonomy of ideological state apparatuses that exert this aforementioned power on national populations (Althusser, 144). He ultimately implicates academia in this expression of power: “the ideological State apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of violent political and ideological class struggle against the [old, non-secular] dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus” (Althusser, 152). Althusser believes that state apparatuses, and especially education, work hard to reproduce “relations of productions” (Althusser, 157) in a capitalist social formation. He means that the schooling institute (or the church or the family) represent instructions of values and virtues that recreate behavior that benefit the social necessity of the capitalist formation of exploitation. What version of morality could one instruct members of a class who would have no choice but to enter a system that discriminates or exploits them? Althusser alleges that the school functions as a determined and designed mechanism of such an instruction that purposefully reifies the class hierarchy:
“The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is…lay), where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their ‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’ virtues.”(Althusser, 156-157)
So, the criminality of the entire schooling system aside, why Emma Sky first? In my experience, I have witnessed that white feminism, and its desperate claim to innocence, is the condition of possibility for the entire structure and idea of white supremacy. Don’t all white men need women to birth them, wives to control, and daughters to own? I first happened upon Emma Sky’s decorated name because my research for Paradise Sought brought me to investigate Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Due to the sketchy nature of the major’s capstone project that took students to Angola to end “preventable child deaths,” to “train non-U.S. security forces,” and to consult the “senior U.S. military authority in the Indo-Pacific Command Area of Operations,” I was intrigued as to where Yale and Global Affairs stand in relation to the concept of imperialism through technocracy and “development” discourses. Here, I came to the information that an individual named Emma Sky teaches the “Gateway to Global Affairs” class at Yale. Who could Emma Sky be? A quick Google search told me that she was a British civilian who worked for the British Council in countries like Palestine and Pakistan before she was made the governor of a province in Iraq during the occupation. As someone who happened to cry real tears at the news that the Yale undergraduate body voted to give George W. Bush a lifetime achievement award, I was terrified and appalled.
i. Slinky, sexy catwalk for Yale's "Middle East Politics" senior seminar:
On the police report that Emma Sky lodged against me, she described herself as the “victim.”
She is the sole victim of an “incident” that occurred on Tuesday, the 5th of November, 2019 in the basement of Watson Center, outside room B39. The entire incident was, thankfully, recorded live and broadcasted openly to a wide Yale audience through my Instagram. I believe that truth and justice may only present itself outside of secrecy. There were around 400 people tuned in, for almost two hours, to see our performance. No one who watched the livestream called 911 or other authorities to report an incident or a victim or a crime. Yet, the police records that an incident took place on Tuesday where Emma Sky was a victim.
A victim of what? No one, I guess, is sure. Over the next week, however, Yale University will dedicatedly waste its resources and time to figure out the truth of Sky’s victimhood. How could Zulfiqar Mannan’s performance art be represented as violence and Emma Sky its victim? It’s a tough one but henceforth, I make the official wager that the University’s true aspiration will strive not as much for the appeasement of Sky as it will for the dissuasion of me and others like me. No matter the critique, the University’s power of property will not be interfered with and if a professor so chooses to mobilize the man with a stick for their personal interests, they must be given the free reign to do so.
Our demonstrations took the form of such a performance – one that requires action from both its audience and subject – because of the inherent contradiction in the presence of both Emma Sky and myself on campus. Sky made a career out of the same War On Terror that irreversibly mutated the history of my home. As she was writing softcore porn about General Ray Odierno, Commander of US forces in Iraq, in her book The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, I grew up in a world interrupted by U.S. imperialism and controlled by the dollar and the pound. As she recruits new World Fellows to boast on her Facebook as she boasts Syrians — Bye Berlin. Thanks for the light, the hope, the Syrians, Sky wrote Oct. 20 – and prepares a new age of American-trained technocrats to help govern the Middle East (or others who might need help governance), I will be returning to a city currently in an unavoidable climate crisis. The air in Lahore has been corrupted so deeply, so widely that all private and public schools in the city have remained closed for almost a week now. Who are the victims and perpetrators of such violence?
Surely, it is not the U.S. military-industrial complex to blame despite the fact that it is the world’s bigger polluter, contributing more than almost 100 countries combined. Surely, it should not be the troop on the ground recruited on the promise of college, or even singularly the meat industry, or even Yale’s investments into the consistently extractive and politically active coal and oil companies. Finding the culpability for the sustained exploitation of the Global South is an enormous and fruitless task that only academics seeking routine comforts can concern themselves with. For people like me, this culpability is a daily decision and it reflects in the perpetuity of a prevailing social order.
Social evils like patriarchal masculinism, racism, and greed do not procreate on the basis of history and tradition alone. They require contemporary investors, bodies, and mouthpieces. Emma Sky is an uncomfortable presence on campus for many. Any English department scholar focusing on orientalism will take twenty minutes to tell you the limitless violence of both of Sky’s published narratives, The Unravelling and In A Time Of Monsters. It will take an international student from the Middle East, with a slight interest in the politics of language and literature, lesser time to do the same. A little critical analysis of power from anyone who studies it can undress within seconds the problem with educators like Sky, who were governing places they had no place or experience to govern in times of unprecedented legalized violence, given their platform. In his review of Sky’s book The Unravelling for The Lobster UK, Professor of History at Bath University, John Newsinger calls Sky a “useful idiot” – someone “engaged in the most monumental self-delusion, playing the traditional role of the ‘useful idiot’, a decent person defending the indefensible.” His argument claims that most militaries require the consolation or insistence of a myth to justify themselves. The charge he levies against Sky asserts that Emma Sky is crucial to the “myth-making” of the American-led Occupation of Iraq. He picks several moments from her book to point out her hypocrisies and perspectives. The one that speaks out most to me is in Sky’s interaction with British General Graeme Lamb, where at one point she credits herself to saying: “These days we have to be more skilled and subtle, and rule indirectly through our cousins. We should therefore embrace the Stars and Stripes as our own.”
Sky has clearly, true to her words, embraced the stars and stripes of America as her own. She is an internationalist who mingles with World Fellows and hands her business cards to kids with good, but still imperial, intentions. Paternalist governance is the magnum opus of her technique and I am not sure she believes anyone who finds her technique criminal. The pamphlets we made were part of a larger organizing campaign, titled Do You Trust Your Educator? The campaign itself was part of research for the capstone project of my Human Rights concentration where I was experimenting with ARTPOP, disruption, and alternativity at Yale to test the limits of my positionality for activism here. Simply, I wanted to see how sincere Yale’s instruction of human rights, social justice, or the fight against oppression is. If I hold the same systems that benefit and create Yale or its power as guilty for crimes against humanity, will it still pat me on the back and call me a scholar?
Professor Emma Sky was informed a week prior that two seniors at Yale would like to distribute pamphlets to her students as part of performance art and research on protest. We tried to meet with her several times, went to her office hours, and informed a student or two in her seminar who declared to us that “no way” will Professor Sky prohibit us from entering her seminar. She’s, apparently, so sweet and not like that at all. If you knew her, you would say that she might actually take you up on the offer and engage in discourse with you!
What would Professor Sky do or say if five gay mimes sashayed into her seminar to distribute information about her background and culpability in the military-industrial complex?
She would not say anything, she would place a Yale University cop, the Dean of Student Affairs, and the Dean of AACC outside the door of her seminar. She would hire nine police officers to guard her lecture from the entrance of anyone who is not enrolled because they do not “pay to be there.” She would lodge a police report. She would refuse to engage with these students and she would wax poetic to paint herself as the victim of such an incidence, despite the physical and militant power she is able to employ to make her critics impotent.
Mash’Allah, though, that impotence is a worry only of the masculine. Quoting the impeccable Gloria Anzaldúa, there we were weaponless with open arms, with only our magic. We sang a few feminist justice songs, performed an entire script of revolutionary agitprop theatre, and called out to the people inside that class who knew us to recognize our humanness. We wished for them to recognize that we were their peers, their friends, or lovers, the earnest first-year in that Gateway to Global Affairs lecture, who might need them to open one damn door out of capitalist white supremacy for the echo of the beautiful, joyful screams of the momentarily subalterned. Let the record reflect: we were not silent and yet, through the use of police force and administrational authority, we were silenced.
Her students missed out that day on a glorious performance. They missed out on an unprecedented creative rebellion of a few Third World students in the middle of Yale’s pristine, civilized, and sterile American hallways. My only hope is for them to remember the look on her face at the mere indignation of a voice raised and verse thrown by a Pakistani heart. Remember, remember, this 5th of November, and your private revelation of imperialist dogma and art.
DO YOU TRUST YOUR EDUCATOR?
In its culmination, the Do You Trust Your Educator comprised of the publishing of two pamphlets and the exhibiton of a total of three performances. Our first performance was staged outside "Gateway to Global Affairs" lecturer Emma Sky's "Middle East Politics" seminar. Our second performance was staged outside her "Gateway to Global Affairs" lecture itself. Our third performance was conducted outside and inside Akhil Amar's "Constitutional Law" class.DO YOU TRUST YOUR EDUCATOR?
Our ethnographic aim was to record whether the question “Do You Trust Your Educator?” is a provocative one at Yale.
In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser creates a theory of ideology as a dominant and powerful mechanism of social influence and political control. Understanding the state as the force that possesses the power to ideology, Althusser illustrates a taxonomy of ideological state apparatuses that exert this aforementioned power on national populations (Althusser, 144). He ultimately implicates academia in this expression of power: “the ideological State apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of violent political and ideological class struggle against the [old, non-secular] dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus” (Althusser, 152). Althusser believes that state apparatuses, and especially education, work hard to reproduce “relations of productions” (Althusser, 157) in a capitalist social formation. He means that the schooling institute (or the church or the family) represent instructions of values and virtues that recreate behavior that benefit the social necessity of the capitalist formation of exploitation. What version of morality could one instruct members of a class who would have no choice but to enter a system that discriminates or exploits them? Althusser alleges that the school functions as a determined and designed mechanism of such an instruction that purposefully reifies the class hierarchy:
“The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is…lay), where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their ‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’ virtues.”(Althusser, 156-157)
So, the criminality of the entire schooling system aside, why Emma Sky first? In my experience, I have witnessed that white feminism, and its desperate claim to innocence, is the condition of possibility for the entire structure and idea of white supremacy. Don’t all white men need women to birth them, wives to control, and daughters to own? I first happened upon Emma Sky’s decorated name because my research for Paradise Sought brought me to investigate Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Due to the sketchy nature of the major’s capstone project that took students to Angola to end “preventable child deaths,” to “train non-U.S. security forces,” and to consult the “senior U.S. military authority in the Indo-Pacific Command Area of Operations,” I was intrigued as to where Yale and Global Affairs stand in relation to the concept of imperialism through technocracy and “development” discourses. Here, I came to the information that an individual named Emma Sky teaches the “Gateway to Global Affairs” class at Yale. Who could Emma Sky be? A quick Google search told me that she was a British civilian who worked for the British Council in countries like Palestine and Pakistan before she was made the governor of a province in Iraq during the occupation. As someone who happened to cry real tears at the news that the Yale undergraduate body voted to give George W. Bush a lifetime achievement award, I was terrified and appalled.
i. Slinky, sexy catwalk for Yale's "Middle East Politics" senior seminar:
On the police report that Emma Sky lodged against me, she described herself as the “victim.”
She is the sole victim of an “incident” that occurred on Tuesday, the 5th of November, 2019 in the basement of Watson Center, outside room B39. The entire incident was, thankfully, recorded live and broadcasted openly to a wide Yale audience through my Instagram. I believe that truth and justice may only present itself outside of secrecy. There were around 400 people tuned in, for almost two hours, to see our performance. No one who watched the livestream called 911 or other authorities to report an incident or a victim or a crime. Yet, the police records that an incident took place on Tuesday where Emma Sky was a victim.
A victim of what? No one, I guess, is sure. Over the next week, however, Yale University will dedicatedly waste its resources and time to figure out the truth of Sky’s victimhood. How could Zulfiqar Mannan’s performance art be represented as violence and Emma Sky its victim? It’s a tough one but henceforth, I make the official wager that the University’s true aspiration will strive not as much for the appeasement of Sky as it will for the dissuasion of me and others like me. No matter the critique, the University’s power of property will not be interfered with and if a professor so chooses to mobilize the man with a stick for their personal interests, they must be given the free reign to do so.
On Nov. 5th, 2019, a few friends and I planned to distribute educational pamphlets about Sky to her highly-selective, lazily-titled seminar Middle East Politics. Our distribution of these pamphlets was meant to be performance art – silent, undeniable, and enchanting. We dressed up as mimes to nod to the legacy of miming in leftist demonstration as a mode of making the performativity of reality more obvious. What would Professor Sky do or say if five gay mimes sashayed into her seminar to distribute information about her background and culpability in the military-industrial complex? How would she react to this anti-imperial, pacifist critique from a band of genderqueer, just gay-as-shit Yalies? Would she be able to embarrass us in her class, prove our researched information as half-assed, imprecise, or laughable, and prove her mettle as our educator in instructional graciousness?
On Nov. 5th, 2019, a few friends and I planned to distribute educational pamphlets about Sky to her highly-selective, lazily-titled seminar Middle East Politics. Our distribution of these pamphlets was meant to be performance art – silent, undeniable, and enchanting. We dressed up as mimes to nod to the legacy of miming in leftist demonstration as a mode of making the performativity of reality more obvious. What would Professor Sky do or say if five gay mimes sashayed into her seminar to distribute information about her background and culpability in the military-industrial complex? How would she react to this anti-imperial, pacifist critique from a band of genderqueer, just gay-as-shit Yalies? Would she be able to embarrass us in her class, prove our researched information as half-assed, imprecise, or laughable, and prove her mettle as our educator in instructional graciousness?
Our demonstrations took the form of such a performance – one that requires action from both its audience and subject – because of the inherent contradiction in the presence of both Emma Sky and myself on campus. Sky made a career out of the same War On Terror that irreversibly mutated the history of my home. As she was writing softcore porn about General Ray Odierno, Commander of US forces in Iraq, in her book The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, I grew up in a world interrupted by U.S. imperialism and controlled by the dollar and the pound. As she recruits new World Fellows to boast on her Facebook as she boasts Syrians — Bye Berlin. Thanks for the light, the hope, the Syrians, Sky wrote Oct. 20 – and prepares a new age of American-trained technocrats to help govern the Middle East (or others who might need help governance), I will be returning to a city currently in an unavoidable climate crisis. The air in Lahore has been corrupted so deeply, so widely that all private and public schools in the city have remained closed for almost a week now. Who are the victims and perpetrators of such violence?
Surely, it is not the U.S. military-industrial complex to blame despite the fact that it is the world’s bigger polluter, contributing more than almost 100 countries combined. Surely, it should not be the troop on the ground recruited on the promise of college, or even singularly the meat industry, or even Yale’s investments into the consistently extractive and politically active coal and oil companies. Finding the culpability for the sustained exploitation of the Global South is an enormous and fruitless task that only academics seeking routine comforts can concern themselves with. For people like me, this culpability is a daily decision and it reflects in the perpetuity of a prevailing social order.
Social evils like patriarchal masculinism, racism, and greed do not procreate on the basis of history and tradition alone. They require contemporary investors, bodies, and mouthpieces. Emma Sky is an uncomfortable presence on campus for many. Any English department scholar focusing on orientalism will take twenty minutes to tell you the limitless violence of both of Sky’s published narratives, The Unravelling and In A Time Of Monsters. It will take an international student from the Middle East, with a slight interest in the politics of language and literature, lesser time to do the same. A little critical analysis of power from anyone who studies it can undress within seconds the problem with educators like Sky, who were governing places they had no place or experience to govern in times of unprecedented legalized violence, given their platform. In his review of Sky’s book The Unravelling for The Lobster UK, Professor of History at Bath University, John Newsinger calls Sky a “useful idiot” – someone “engaged in the most monumental self-delusion, playing the traditional role of the ‘useful idiot’, a decent person defending the indefensible.” His argument claims that most militaries require the consolation or insistence of a myth to justify themselves. The charge he levies against Sky asserts that Emma Sky is crucial to the “myth-making” of the American-led Occupation of Iraq. He picks several moments from her book to point out her hypocrisies and perspectives. The one that speaks out most to me is in Sky’s interaction with British General Graeme Lamb, where at one point she credits herself to saying: “These days we have to be more skilled and subtle, and rule indirectly through our cousins. We should therefore embrace the Stars and Stripes as our own.”
Sky has clearly, true to her words, embraced the stars and stripes of America as her own. She is an internationalist who mingles with World Fellows and hands her business cards to kids with good, but still imperial, intentions. Paternalist governance is the magnum opus of her technique and I am not sure she believes anyone who finds her technique criminal. The pamphlets we made were part of a larger organizing campaign, titled Do You Trust Your Educator? The campaign itself was part of research for the capstone project of my Human Rights concentration where I was experimenting with ARTPOP, disruption, and alternativity at Yale to test the limits of my positionality for activism here. Simply, I wanted to see how sincere Yale’s instruction of human rights, social justice, or the fight against oppression is. If I hold the same systems that benefit and create Yale or its power as guilty for crimes against humanity, will it still pat me on the back and call me a scholar?
Professor Emma Sky was informed a week prior that two seniors at Yale would like to distribute pamphlets to her students as part of performance art and research on protest. We tried to meet with her several times, went to her office hours, and informed a student or two in her seminar who declared to us that “no way” will Professor Sky prohibit us from entering her seminar. She’s, apparently, so sweet and not like that at all. If you knew her, you would say that she might actually take you up on the offer and engage in discourse with you!
What would Professor Sky do or say if five gay mimes sashayed into her seminar to distribute information about her background and culpability in the military-industrial complex?
She would not say anything, she would place a Yale University cop, the Dean of Student Affairs, and the Dean of AACC outside the door of her seminar. She would hire nine police officers to guard her lecture from the entrance of anyone who is not enrolled because they do not “pay to be there.” She would lodge a police report. She would refuse to engage with these students and she would wax poetic to paint herself as the victim of such an incidence, despite the physical and militant power she is able to employ to make her critics impotent.
Mash’Allah, though, that impotence is a worry only of the masculine. Quoting the impeccable Gloria Anzaldúa, there we were weaponless with open arms, with only our magic. We sang a few feminist justice songs, performed an entire script of revolutionary agitprop theatre, and called out to the people inside that class who knew us to recognize our humanness. We wished for them to recognize that we were their peers, their friends, or lovers, the earnest first-year in that Gateway to Global Affairs lecture, who might need them to open one damn door out of capitalist white supremacy for the echo of the beautiful, joyful screams of the momentarily subalterned. Let the record reflect: we were not silent and yet, through the use of police force and administrational authority, we were silenced.
Her students missed out that day on a glorious performance. They missed out on an unprecedented creative rebellion of a few Third World students in the middle of Yale’s pristine, civilized, and sterile American hallways. My only hope is for them to remember the look on her face at the mere indignation of a voice raised and verse thrown by a Pakistani heart. Remember, remember, this 5th of November, and your private revelation of imperialist dogma and art.
Yale Daily NewsStudents protest professor’s seminar | Audrey SteinkampProtests against faculty draw controversy | Matt KristoffersonMANNAN: In defense of a liberating educationGITTLER: Paradise Sought, not found
ii. Your Silence Kills outside LC 102, "Gateway to Global Affairs" on Nov. 7, 2019
Your Silence Kills was a continuation of our performance on November 5, from which we learned that we would have to conduct all our activities outside Yale classrooms because imperialist professors are, of course, not going to allow us to even symbolically interrupt their pedagogies. For these purposes, our performance included a big poster that read – "YOUR SILENCE KILLS" –, as we brought our pamphlets to distribute, and conducted a performance in which an anonymous Abu Ghraib prisoner was being taken selfies with by a U.S. army.
As these selfies were being taken, I asked: "Why are you taking a picture with that dead body? Who killed you? Who killed them? Who are you? Why are you taking a picture with that dead person?"
Our second performance's success felt to me the number of Emma Sky's World Fellows who showed up outside her lecture to engage in a dialogue with us. These pictures below capture the moment members of Paradise Sought are having a lively, passionate discussion with around five World Fellows outside Sky's lecture. We were forced to delete the livestream by one student in Professor Sky's class for the safety of a Turkish World Fellow who was concerned about the statements she made about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Your Silence Kills was a continuation of our performance on November 5, from which we learned that we would have to conduct all our activities outside Yale classrooms because imperialist professors are, of course, not going to allow us to even symbolically interrupt their pedagogies. For these purposes, our performance included a big poster that read – "YOUR SILENCE KILLS" –, as we brought our pamphlets to distribute, and conducted a performance in which an anonymous Abu Ghraib prisoner was being taken selfies with by a U.S. army.
As these selfies were being taken, I asked: "Why are you taking a picture with that dead body? Who killed you? Who killed them? Who are you? Why are you taking a picture with that dead person?"
Our second performance's success felt to me the number of Emma Sky's World Fellows who showed up outside her lecture to engage in a dialogue with us. These pictures below capture the moment members of Paradise Sought are having a lively, passionate discussion with around five World Fellows outside Sky's lecture. We were forced to delete the livestream by one student in Professor Sky's class for the safety of a Turkish World Fellow who was concerned about the statements she made about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
iii. The U.S. Constitution is the Law of Stolen Land...Upheld by YALE RAPISTS
By our third performance, we had realized the strategies the University employed to undermine, bore, and obstruct us. As a result, we made our messaging clear, added a guitar to our musical performances, and hoped to conduct the entirety of our performance outside Professor Akhil Amar's lecture.
We also launched a statement and setlist for our performance:
On Dec. 4 2019, Paradise Sought conducted an epistemological interruption performance at Yale’s William L. Harkness Hall for Akhil Amar’s Constitutional Law class. This was the third performance of a campaign titled, “Do You Trust Your Educator?”
We were successfully able to begin our performance at 11.10 AM when we began constructing a shrine outside Sudler Hall, where Amar teaches Constitutional Law, with Do You Trust Your Educator’s second publication of this semester, a Trans pride flag, an LGBT pride flag, and our banner that read: “The U.S. Constitution is the Law of Stolen Land…Upheld by Yale Rapists.” Then, Casey Odesser led a wonderful performance of Martha Wainright’s “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Nika Zarazvand was present live-streaming and helping with the props. As Casey was still performing, I was positioned outside Sudler Hall as an Angel with a Pitchfork distributing our pamphlets. Professor Akhil Amar walked in to the class, greeted us kindly, and invited us to come in for a 5-minute presentation. When our musical performances finished, it was 11.35 AM, at which point Casey and I were able to silently walk through Sudler Hall holding up our banner. At the end of our slinky atonement walk, Akhil Amar allowed us to present. We were not expecting this level of engagement and welcoming but I read out some parts of the pamphlet out loud, and ended by chanting “Feminists Of The Word: UNITE!” As we were departing, Professor Amar asked us to stay, an invite that we appreciated greatly but were not able to accept due to our existing academic commitments. Since then, I have sent Professor Amar a thank-you note for reviving our hopes in the University. I offered to cook him Pakistani food but I think he’d rather meet at a restaurant. We are very excited for what such a conversation could look like, especially because we are very interested in whether he will share information with us about The Federalist Society, which Amar is a contributor to, that might add to the information present on the Society's Right Wing Watch page, which members of Paradise Sought are contributors to in their extra time.
We are very happy with our performance today and urge Professor Emma Sky to rethink her actions and treatment of our art inspired by the conduct and grace performed by Professor Akhil Amar today.
We are aware that our inability to accept Akhil Amar’s invite to stay for lecture might be considered rude or disrespectful by some.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, this one was to honor you.
Students stage performance protest at Amar lecture | Alayna Lee
We also launched a statement and setlist for our performance:
On Dec. 4 2019, Paradise Sought conducted an epistemological interruption performance at Yale’s William L. Harkness Hall for Akhil Amar’s Constitutional Law class. This was the third performance of a campaign titled, “Do You Trust Your Educator?”
We were successfully able to begin our performance at 11.10 AM when we began constructing a shrine outside Sudler Hall, where Amar teaches Constitutional Law, with Do You Trust Your Educator’s second publication of this semester, a Trans pride flag, an LGBT pride flag, and our banner that read: “The U.S. Constitution is the Law of Stolen Land…Upheld by Yale Rapists.” Then, Casey Odesser led a wonderful performance of Martha Wainright’s “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Nika Zarazvand was present live-streaming and helping with the props. As Casey was still performing, I was positioned outside Sudler Hall as an Angel with a Pitchfork distributing our pamphlets. Professor Akhil Amar walked in to the class, greeted us kindly, and invited us to come in for a 5-minute presentation. When our musical performances finished, it was 11.35 AM, at which point Casey and I were able to silently walk through Sudler Hall holding up our banner. At the end of our slinky atonement walk, Akhil Amar allowed us to present. We were not expecting this level of engagement and welcoming but I read out some parts of the pamphlet out loud, and ended by chanting “Feminists Of The Word: UNITE!” As we were departing, Professor Amar asked us to stay, an invite that we appreciated greatly but were not able to accept due to our existing academic commitments. Since then, I have sent Professor Amar a thank-you note for reviving our hopes in the University. I offered to cook him Pakistani food but I think he’d rather meet at a restaurant. We are very excited for what such a conversation could look like, especially because we are very interested in whether he will share information with us about The Federalist Society, which Amar is a contributor to, that might add to the information present on the Society's Right Wing Watch page, which members of Paradise Sought are contributors to in their extra time.
We are very happy with our performance today and urge Professor Emma Sky to rethink her actions and treatment of our art inspired by the conduct and grace performed by Professor Akhil Amar today.
We are aware that our inability to accept Akhil Amar’s invite to stay for lecture might be considered rude or disrespectful by some.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, this one was to honor you.
Students stage performance protest at Amar lecture | Alayna Lee
The third and final segment included our coalition work that Paradise Sought did with the organization, Yale Students for Justice in Palestine (Yale SJP), where we sought to both capitalise and honor on the human spirit of Yalies to raise awareness and funds for the ongoing Israeli aggression and violence in Palestine. Our work with Yale SJP involved contribution in a teach-in, arranging trips to and from the Palestine Museum in Connecticut, and most significantly, throwing the best damn raves New Haven had ever seen.
For our first, we screened the legendary documentary "Palestine Underground" and for the second, we screened "La Haine."
PALESTINE UNDERGROUND + RAVE
For our first, we screened the legendary documentary "Palestine Underground" and for the second, we screened "La Haine."
PALESTINE UNDERGROUND + RAVE
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Yale invites you to learn and rave with us this Friday.
We will begin with the screening of Boiler Room’s ecstatic “Palestine Underground” documentary and continue into a night of trip-hop, trap and techno — with tunes spun after by moong!rl, 6raj, and Frames.
"Palestine Underground" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-R8S7QwO1g) by Boiler Room, 4:3 and Ma3azef documents the resilience of a burgeoning music scene undeterred and fuelled by political restrictions, building bridges through a shared sound and identity.
For the past ten years, Palestinian music collective Jazar Crew have been fostering a vibrant party scene in Haifa, as an alternative to the mainstream club scene in Israel.
Thanks to the internet, they've connected with artists in Ramallah, Palestine, and defied the separation wall to travel to the West Bank and organise events with Techno DJs Sama' and Oddz, and members of the tantalising hip hop and trap scene, the collectives Saleb Wahad and Bltnm.
Palestine Underground follows a week in the life of these artists and friends, in the lead up to the first Boiler Room in Ramallah in June this year.
Credits to Hazal Özgür for the amazing event graphic.
We will begin with the screening of Boiler Room’s ecstatic “Palestine Underground” documentary and continue into a night of trip-hop, trap and techno — with tunes spun after by moong!rl, 6raj, and Frames.
"Palestine Underground" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-R8S7QwO1g) by Boiler Room, 4:3 and Ma3azef documents the resilience of a burgeoning music scene undeterred and fuelled by political restrictions, building bridges through a shared sound and identity.
For the past ten years, Palestinian music collective Jazar Crew have been fostering a vibrant party scene in Haifa, as an alternative to the mainstream club scene in Israel.
Thanks to the internet, they've connected with artists in Ramallah, Palestine, and defied the separation wall to travel to the West Bank and organise events with Techno DJs Sama' and Oddz, and members of the tantalising hip hop and trap scene, the collectives Saleb Wahad and Bltnm.
Palestine Underground follows a week in the life of these artists and friends, in the lead up to the first Boiler Room in Ramallah in June this year.
Credits to Hazal Özgür for the amazing event graphic.
SJP and ISO present: "La Haine" + Rave
Did you have fun at our rave screening of "Palestine Underground" last month?! That was just the beginning.
Join Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and International Students Organization at Yale for a screening of "La Haine" and a rave afterwards with moong!rl, classtraitor, and Anteo Fabri$ spinning sick beats from midnight to late.
"La Haine' (French pronunciation: [la ɛn], literally Hate) is a 1995 French black-and-white drama film written, co-edited, and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. It is commonly released under its French title in the English-speaking world, although its U.S. VHS release was titled Hate. It is about three young friends and their struggle to live in the banlieues of Paris. The title derives from a line spoken by one of them, Hubert, "La haine attire la haine!", "hatred breeds hatred."
Credits to Hazal Özgür for the amazing event graphic.
As a result of the success of our last, individually-organized rave, Yale's International Student Organization reached out to us to help us fund the rave. Due to our collaboration, we reached an insanely wide and numerous audience of Yale first years. Eventually, the party was shut down around 5 a.m. because we live in an American neighborhood but we were successfully able to raise around $660, which were all donated to hospitals in Gaza due to most recent Israeli aggression.
Join Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and International Students Organization at Yale for a screening of "La Haine" and a rave afterwards with moong!rl, classtraitor, and Anteo Fabri$ spinning sick beats from midnight to late.
"La Haine' (French pronunciation: [la ɛn], literally Hate) is a 1995 French black-and-white drama film written, co-edited, and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. It is commonly released under its French title in the English-speaking world, although its U.S. VHS release was titled Hate. It is about three young friends and their struggle to live in the banlieues of Paris. The title derives from a line spoken by one of them, Hubert, "La haine attire la haine!", "hatred breeds hatred."
Credits to Hazal Özgür for the amazing event graphic.
As a result of the success of our last, individually-organized rave, Yale's International Student Organization reached out to us to help us fund the rave. Due to our collaboration, we reached an insanely wide and numerous audience of Yale first years. Eventually, the party was shut down around 5 a.m. because we live in an American neighborhood but we were successfully able to raise around $660, which were all donated to hospitals in Gaza due to most recent Israeli aggression.
Conclusion: F*ck Yale, it never deserved me.
Conclusion: F*ck Yale, it never deserved me.
As the semester was coming to an end, I received an e-mail from the Yale College Dean's Office asking me to come in for a meeting discussing my "conduct" in school. The meeting was bureaucratically simple and I was handed "charges" that the University was levying against me.
My charges were: 1) defiance of authority, 2) interference with University functions, and 3) imperiling of Yale community values. I was allowed to respond to these charges and the attached proof (my literal own Facebook posts of live recordings of our first Emma Sky performance and the accompanying YDN article) with one written statement and however I choose to represent myself. I decided to stick with the assigned or expected advisor, Dean Angela Gleason of Morse College, for what was going to be an "Executive Committee" trial hearing.
I responded to the Executive Committee as following:
To the Yale College Executive Committee,
I am responding to the investigation of my conduct on campus on Nov. 5, 2019 where I was confronted by a police officer outside Emma Sky’s classroom. I would like to begin by expressing to you my sheer disappointment at the events of that day, and that it has been a tremendous learning opportunity for me and my team.
My performance on Tuesday, the 5th of November, was part of field research and experimentation for my HMRT 400 capstone project and Morse CPA grant art exhibition, Paradise Sought. This segment of our project, which resulted in the altercation in question, concerned critiquing authority
In a campaign titled, Do You Trust Your Educator, we were hoping to design and distribute citable, factual, and argumentative pamphlets (all public information) about Yale faculty whose careers, dialogues, and associations we found may be imperiling the integrity and values of the Yale community.
In this vein, we wrote pamphlets on Professor Sky and hoped we would be able to distribute them in her class silently. We assumed it would take us less than a minute. We were aiming for 45 seconds. A part of our performance was to conduct a mime-inspired catwalk as we conducted the distribution to call to focus the performative nature of reality and use shock of queerness as a moment inspiring earnest engagement and curiosity (in Sky’s students).
Such a description of the performance should already reflect that what occurred on November 5 was an experimental failure. I am cognizant of that. Before I briefly illustrate my side of the events on November 5, I would like the Executive Committee to consider that our “protest”/performance on November 5 was followed up by a performance on November 7 outside Emma Sky’s Gateway to Global Affairs lecture in LC 102. On Thursday, November 7, we conducted a performance that was experimentally adjusted from our experiences two days prior to maximize engagement, represent authenticity, and avoid interference with University functions. As we are not on trial for our performance on November 7, I will take the liberty for such to indicate that our second performance was received better by the University in terms of our compliance with Undergraduate Regulations. If this is the case, I would like the Executive Committee to consider our efforts as conducted in good spirits, heart-wide-open to constructive input, and for the advocacy of a better world for you and I to live in now. We are at the crossroads of an irreversible climate catastrophe. I sincerely believe that Yale would want its scholars to challenge the University to dream bigger for its patrons and our shared global community.
As for our actions on November 5, I would like to strongly contest some elements of the charges levied against us. I wholeheartedly believe that despite our energy or commitment, we were unable to interfere with University functions, defy any authority, and imperil or even tangibly challenge anything let alone the integrity and values of the Yale community.
Yes, we had planned a silent pamphlet distribution that was distastefully received by Professor Sky, resulting in the presence of a cop and a dean.
I apologize that our passions recognizing the invincible power of the dean, the cop, and ultimately, Emma Sky might have caused sound or noise disturbance for Sky. Am I positive that the decibels of our sound disruption could match or seem small in comparison to the Wednesday garbage truck on High Street, Yale a capella groups rehearsing in WLH, or random visitors peeking in to LC classrooms? Fairly so. To respond to Officer Teague’s statement and my role in it: I was loud in my communication with the dean at times, I did sing two songs, and perform a spoken word poem out loud. Each of these and other similar actions were pleas and cries for help directed to the dean, Officer Teague, Emma Sky, and my peers in her class. I was entirely devastated that this was how Sky was allowed (or accepted) to react to Yale students who were not strangers to many individuals taking that class. I apologize if you feel that this consequence merits disruption of Emma Sky’s class or disorderly conduct.
I would strongly posit that our entire “protest”/performance was successfully disrupted and interrupted by Yale authorities and Emma Sky. I am already being reprimanded in that my best friend does not talk to me anymore because, like Sky, he feels personally targeted that we came to a class he was in. I am already being punished because Morse might revoke their CPA funds for our project and, thus, abruptly stop the production of Paradise Sought as an exhibition and presentation of research, which includes so much more than Sky or even the Do You Trust Your Educator campaign. We were in constant communication with Head of Morse Catherine Panter-Brick before our action. We distributed the pamphlet to Sky a week prior. We informed the student who would be presenting on the day of the class, who reminded us their seminar’s meeting time on the day of our performance. We felt like we were playing by the rules and still using art to call out a political contradiction on campus. If there are further punitive measures that the University feels it must still take to discourage my honest scholarly inquiry into the limits of performance in protest, I will be deeply saddened but determined to continue seeking truth and light.
Yours sincerely,
Zulfiqar Suhail MannanB.A. English (Human Rights Scholar)Morse College 202018th November, 2019
–
On December 5, an Executive Committee comprised entirely of white men, save from one old, white woman and a non-voting black man, decided to hold me responsible for all three charges and gave me the punishment of PROBATION until the end of my time at Yale.
A probation meant that "[t]he student is in official jeopardy. The commission of a serious offense while on probation will normally result in suspension or expulsion. A student on probation may not participate in a Year or Term Abroad, or hold leadership or officer positions in any registered Yale College student organization, any varsity athletic team or club sport, or any other organization that receives University funds. Additional terms of probation may be enforced by the Executive Committee or the UWC in individual cases."
Four other members of Paradise Sought also faced Executive Committee trials and were all punished by a REPRIMAND.
A reprimand means that "[t]his is a matter of internal record only. Records of reprimands in college deans’ offices will be destroyed when students graduate."
I am still unsure about why I was given preferential treatment (LOL) but I believe the connotations are obvious for anyone who is willing to make the analysis.
As a result of my probation, I was kicked out of the Yale College Class Day planning committee over an e-mail.
I am writing this from my home in Lahore and I am happy. I have decided that I will not be following a career traditional to a Yalie and I hope to cleanse my soul from the dirt of living in a First World nation built on the backs of brown and black people by returning to the land I am indigenous to. I am beyond grateful that, in this moment of ecological crisis, I have at least the privilege to be indigenous to a land.
Yale, and my best friend who no longer refers to me as "Zulfi" and only as "Zulfiqar Mannan" because I'm sure it allows him to be more comfortably racist about me, never deserved the earnestness, sincerity, and love I was willing to shower the place with.
In fact, after watching Wild, Wild Country and finding out what happened to Seneca Village, I am entirely disenchanted from the idea that there can be any salvation for the American. So long as the idea of America exists, the idea of privilege on the basis of violent, disproportionate oppression will do so too.
Elihu Yale funded Yale College by enslaving people who spoke my language, looked like me, and wore the Subcontinental heart that has allowed me to exist at Yale as a brown, queer person but with dignity – for folks like me, there is no Lux here, and certainly no Veritas, but a lot of U.S. dollars.
As a result of the God-fearing, truthtelling, and justice-oriented upbringing I received from my mother, White Supremacy will not have this Lahori do their evil, imperialist bidding.
FEMINISTS OF THE WORLD: UNITE! – in the Subcontinent ;)
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