The concept of Contagion has proven itself to be a multifaceted tool. This idea of the spread of thoughts as well as disease has taken many forms throughout the course. From meme culture and Cholera to religion and AIDS, it has been interesting exploring the dynamic of such an expansion. The themes that have carried […]
Read More →Archive for May, 2019
Train to Busan
Arguably, one of the most important subtexts in Train to Busan is its critiques of Korea’s mounting class issues. Setting the main stage on a train, the film brings together a socially diverse group with essentially no barriers in between. While zombie attacks act as the main propeller of plot development, the conflicts between surviving […]
Read More →Our zombies, ourselves
I’m reminded, whenever I think about zombies, of an op-ed, written by Amy Wilentz, a UC-Irvine journalism prof, that ran in the New York Times around Halloween a few years ago. It had to do with the origins of zombies in the context of New World slavery — a different (but related?) kind of zombie economy to the one […]
Read More →Ebola Outbreak In the Republic of Congo
This video discusses the major outbreak and severity behind the outbreak of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is described as a ‘satanic’ inhibition of the body. It eludes to the fact that Ebola takes control of your body in a physical sense, because after all, it is an ailment, but […]
Read More →Writing the Disease: Ebola ’76
Ebola ‘76 tells a story of Ebola’s arrival to Sudan through Lewis, a factory worker who is infected in Kinshasa (in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and takes the virus back to Nzara, in Sudan —now South Sudan. While the novel talks about society and contagion in ways similar to what we have read […]
Read More →The Role of Song in Roy Cohn’s Death Scene (Angels in America: Perestroika, Act 4, Scene 11)
Roy’s death scene in Perestroika, though short, contains two songs in it. The first comes as the scene starts, as Roy is singing John Brown’s Body softly. The song is a marching song dating back to the American Civil War, sung mostly by Union (the Northern States) soldiers and abolitionists opposed to slavery. John Brown […]
Read More →The Role of Fear in Angels in America
There are a lot of factors that make up Angels in America by Tony Kushner, such as social expectation, labels, sexuality, disease, and so on, but what really ties them all together is the presence of fear. As is said in Als’s summarizing article ‘“Angels in America”: Brilliant, Maddening, and Necessary‘, “fear defined the times.” […]
Read More →Why Perestroika?
When talking about the second play of Angles in America, I could not help but think why would Perestroika be a title for this piece. To begin with, this video gives a brief history of how perestroika came about what were the consequences of such a policy. Perestroika was a policy which aimed to bring […]
Read More →What Donald Trump Learned from Roy Cohn
Seems relevant to conversations about the ongoing relevance of Angels in America to understanding the United States and its place in the world, past and present. More here.
Read More →Angels wrap-up resources
For some reason I always want to make a Talking Heads playlist when I teach these plays. Here’s what else I want to share: For a decade before we both moved to Abu Dhabi, Cyrus Patell and I taught a course on the Square called Writing New York, for which we generated a pretty substantial […]
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