“America, when will you be angelic?When will you take off your clothes?When will you look at yourself through the grave?” America, Allen Ginsberg (1956) Kushner’s “Angels in America” is a spectacle of diverse characters. The entanglement of individuals living and imaginary, along with deliberate choices in production such as having one actor play multiple characters, […]
Read More →Archive for November, 2020
The plague for amphibians
We have been tackling COVID-19 in our daily lives and pondering over other forms of contagions such as the plague, sins, memes, information, beliefs, syphilis, family values, memories, influenza, AIDS, and even fictional diseases like the Shen fever every Monday and Wednesday morning. However, our discussions have been concerned about how humans are affected by […]
Read More →Ignoring the Root Causes (Lubnah’s Augmenter Post)
The town of Oran in Camus’ text is a breeding ground for an epidemic. The money-mindedness of the townspeople, and the culture of working, living and dying in the same manner, described as “feverish yet casual,” along with the shallow social interactions, create the ideal atmosphere for a plague to settle in just as comfortably […]
Read More →A Theoretical Framework for Othering (Maitha’s Augmenters Post)
Among one of the most recurrent themes in Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe is othering, or categorizing certain groups of people as “Us vs. Them”. We witnessed this in the circulated story of how “AIDs travelled by foreign germs down from central and western parts of Africa” (p. 3 – 4). It is […]
Read More →“Hillbrow, scary? You have not seen the half of it.” (Augmenter’s Post_from Mingu)
The video shot on March 30th, 2020, by AmaBhungane, an investigative journalism organization that focuses primarily on exposing political corruption in South Africa, contains scenes of violence from a policeman in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, against people who are “accused of” breaking lock-down rules. In plainclothes, the police seen in the video is running after […]
Read More →(Un)Welcome To Our Hillbrow
Apartheid in South Africa may have been eradicated, but its haunting remnants remained. Transition to a postapartheid society led to a host of problems that the South African government have to grapple with: Anti-apartheid people joining the police, labor disputes, criminal violence, conflicts between factions, the HIV-AIDS epidemics damaging a significant part of the population, […]
Read More →The (Two) Old Men and The Sea
Great wave off the coast of Kanagawa (Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1830) Title of this post is retrieved from Earnest Hemingway, “The Old Man and The Sea” Having established their friendship, what do two men do in their seek for a moment of solace amid the plague-stricken city? Well, they go for a swim together in the […]
Read More →Lavish Excess in the Face of Death? (Siya’s augmenter’s post)
Ding Village hadn’t celebrated like this in years. The villagers couldn’t remember the last time they had seen a ceremony so exciting and lavish. There were tiny firecrackers that exploded with a pop, and great strings of them that popped and crackled for minutes on end. There were fireworks that exploded with a bang or […]
Read More →Death: The High Cost of Living
When coffins are first introduced to the novel in volume one, they serve a utilitarian purpose: Grandpa makes the narrator a narrow wooden coffin to bury him outside the schoolyard. It is a humble coffin, but the narrator is still appreciative and the reader is given a sense that he was buried with respect. But […]
Read More →Plague Arbitrage
The leaves on the trees withered and curled. The scholar trees, whose shallow roots couldn’t absorb enough moisture from the soil, began shedding yellow leaves, as if autumn had come early. The deep-rooted elms remained green, but they attracted legions of insects. The whole insect kingdom converged on their branches and leaves. Small green worms, spotted ladybirds and yellow […]
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