Midterm
Reader Circle: A volunteer-based editing network that pairs USC students and faculiuty with incarcerated writers who are seeking feedback on their creative and nonfiction writing. With my project, was a tale of a Western ghost story! I believe that there is a strong central concept. Clyde feels like a believable outlaw because he is wounded, bitter, and selfish, yet still capable of caring deeply for Johnny and Calida. However, the story could make his relationship with Johnny more emotionally important. We are told that Johnny was Clyde’s only friend, but one specific memory or detail could make Johnny’s death more affecting. Also, Calida, was that his lover? I'm not sure if this was the first part of the story, but if you don't mind developing it maybe as a sequel, I feel like it would be a great part 2 :)
PEP: Creates the opportunity for USC and incarcerated students to learn from each other in a rigorous and collaborative learning environment across a variety of academic disciplines. Through PEP, USC students and facult design, teach and participate in classes with people incarcerated in the CA Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation system.
ONE Archives: Largest repository of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) materials in the world. Founded in 1952, ONE Archives houses millions of archival items including periodicals, books, films, videos, audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records, and personal papers. ONE Archives has been a part of the University of Southern California Libraries since 2010
USC Shoah Foundation: In 1994 USC Shoah Foundation launched an unprecedented effort to record, preserve, and share the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Over the past 30 years, we have built a world-class institute anchored in their voices. Shoah means “catastrophe/destruction”
Master & counter narratives (Sheehan & Neimand; Lyotard): Narratives can be used to persuade people fo positive aims such as justice, equality, and sustainability, but they can also be used to build support for terrorism, authoritarianism, and violence. Counter narratives are an emerging tool to increase the power of our storytelling. Lyotard believes that we should approach master narratives with skepticism—what he calls “incredulity toward master narratives”—because no single, all-encompassing story can adequately represent everyone’s experiences. Instead, he values smaller or “minor” narratives that recognize diverse, local, and lived perspectives.
The carceral state and history: Used to be very public (e.g., public execution), prisons are usually round, having no autonomy, always surveiled, no privacy. Ties to slavery, systemic issues (social and financial inequity). Mainly African Americans, Indigenous, Latinx due to racial profiling, exploitation of prisons, $0.08/hr (helped fight the LA Fires). Women are the fastest growing segment because of drug, property, and sex work– significantly likely to experience SA in prison or their lifetime. Women used to go to hospitals and asylums and also “reformatory” institutes than prisons now
Charlotte West, "Reviving Women's Stories and Critiquing the Carceral State": In 1873, the Indiana Women’s Prison was created to rescue women from male prisons and provide them with more humane treatment. However, Anastazia Schmid and other incarcerated researchers discovered that women at the prison still experienced harsh conditions, physical punishment, forced labor, and even medical experimentation by prison doctor Theophilus Parvin. Their research began in a prison education course in 2012 and eventually became the book Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920. Drawing on their own experiences with incarceration, the authors created a counter-narrative that challenges the traditional story of prison reform and reveals the historical roots of the exploitation of women in prisons.
Julie Nack Ngue (Van Dam), "The Management of 'Grotesque' Bodies": Senegal’s treatment of people considered “unruly” or undesirable developed from colonial ideas about race, gender, health, and social order called “ugly laws.” During both colonial rule and the post-independence government of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, people such as beggars, sex workers, people with disabilities, and those with mental illness were labeled threats to national progress. It is important to note that sometimes people are born with disabilities and the government removed them from public spaces—especially before major events or visits by foreign leaders (just like how Newsome cleared homeless camps in LA but it did not address the systemic issue at hand) to make Dakar appear modern, productive, and attractive to tourists. Many were placed in prisons, labor camps, isolated villages, or asylums that offered little care or support. Women who wandered, behaved differently, or did not meet traditional expectations could be viewed as mentally ill, shameful, or dangerous. Van Dam argues that Senegal’s idea of national progress depended on hiding bodies that did not represent health, beauty, productivity, and order.
Khady Sylla, "An Open Window": The essence of vulnerability, and allowing Sylla to explore her personal experience with mental illness through her friendship with Aminta Ngom who experiences “madness.” Aminta became her “window to the world” and helped her feel less isolated. The film allows her to express her mental illness in her own words and challenges the shame and stigma surroudning it. This creates a coutner-narrative that presents people ith mental illness as a complex human being that deserves to be understood.
Claire de Duras, Ourika: The novella follows Ourika, a Senegalese girl rescued from slavery and raised by a wealthy French aristocratic family. As a child, she believes she belongs within French society, but her perspective changes after she overhears that her race will prevent her from marrying or ever being fully accepted. She becomes increasingly isolated and recognizes that her education and privileged upbringing cannot protect her from racism. A bblack woman’s story constructed through the lens of a white aristocratic author, Ourika’s identity is interpreted and shaped by the European world and is the object of sympathy and pity. On pages 16–18, Ourika explains that she has no one she can fully trust. She does not discuss her suffering with her priest because she does not consider unhappiness a sin. This suggests that having a voice is not the same as feeling able to use it. Ourika has the intelligence and language to explain herself, but she lacks a relationship in which she feels safe enough to be vulnerable. Her silence therefore reflects her social isolation. The doctor provides for Ourika to narrate her own experience with productive talk.
Awa Thiam, Black Sisters, Speak Out: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa: Thiam argues that Black African women have been spoken about by men, colonial authorities, and Western scholars for too long and must be able to tell their own stories. Through interviews with women from several West African countries, she exposes oppression such as forced marriage, labor, and oppression. Thiam also shows that silence does not necessarily mean acceptance; women may remain silent to survive while resisting through refusal, withdrawal, or other less visible actions (such as the the guinea collective interview). Black women should transform speech into collective action, define feminism according to their own cultural and political conditions, and work in solidarity with oppressed women throughout the world.
Trinh Minh-ha, "Grandma's Story," in Woman, Native, Other (only to p. 83, end of section): Stories are passed down and retold through generations of women to preserve familial and cultural histories “living libraries”. Western academics have wrongfully separated story from history and “fact,” diminishing the significance of storytelling by associating it with ignorance rather than recognizing it as part of the holistic human experience (such as the Dori Laub article on misremembering of how many chimneys were bombed, historians said that there is 1 but the woman said that she remembered seeing four). Oral storytelling, especially by women, has the power to create reality, preserve collective memory, and strengthen communities. Trinh challenges the Western idea of individual authorship, in which one creator owns a text, by showing that the storyteller is a conduit who passes down shared knowledge. Each woman listens to, reshapes, and retells the story, allowing the tradition to remain alive rather than fixed in the past.
Shelley Barry, “Disability and Desire: Journey of a Film-Maker”: After being paralyzed by a gunshot, Barry initially believes that her disability has made her undesirable and incapable of having a fulfilling life. Through disability activism, self-love, spirituality, and filmmaking, she rejects society’s portrayal of disabled people as damaged, helpless, or nonsexual. Her film Whole: A Trinity of Being openly presents her scars, sexuality, relationships, and life in a wheelchair. Barry argues that Black disabled women must create their own images because otherwise their lives will continue to be defined by other people’s assumptions.
“African Statement on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”: African LGBTQI activists argue that queer Africans are not demanding special rights but the same protections already promised to all people. They connect discrimination against LGBTQI people to colonial laws, Victorian morality, patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, and restrictive social norms. The statement challenges the claim that queerness is “un-African,” pointing out that many anti-LGBTQI laws were introduced through European colonialism. It calls on African governments to end violence, abolish discriminatory laws, and uphold equality and human dignity.
Valerie Mason-John, “What’s in a Letter?”: Mason-John examines how labels such as lesbian, dyke, zami, and queer can create identity and community but can also become restrictive. She argues that Western LGBTQI labels cannot always be applied directly to African experiences because openly identifying as queer may place people at risk of violence, imprisonment, or economic exclusion. Drawing on her experiences as a Black African woman raised in Britain, she shows how race, gender, sexuality, culture, and nationality overlap. She ultimately embraces the flexibility of “queer” while recognizing that no label can completely define a person. Together, these selections create counter-narratives by allowing queer, Black, African, intersex, and disabled people to represent their own bodies and experiences.
Jonny von Wallström, "The Pearl of Africa" webseries: Follows Cleopatra “Cleo” Kambugu, a transgender Ugandan woman, and her boyfriend, Nelson, as Cleo prepares to travel to Thailand for gender-affirming surgery. Cleo explains that she has understood herself as a woman since childhood, even though Ugandan society and the law classify her according to the sex she was assigned at birth. Her relationship with Nelson challenges the assumption that transgender people cannot experience genuine love, intimacy, or acceptance. The series also shows the dangers Cleo faces from anti-LGBTQ laws, public exposure, transphobia, and the possibility of rejection by her family and community. By allowing Cleo to tell her story in her own voice, the series creates a counter-narrative to portrayals of queer and transgender identities as foreign or “un-African.” Instead, it presents Cleo as a complex African woman seeking the basic freedom to live openly, define her own body, and love without fear.
Nicole Ephgrave, "Women's Testimony and Collective Memory...": Ephgrave compares women’s experiences in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Rwanda’s gacaca courts. Although these restorative-justice systems gave women more opportunities to testify than conventional trials, they did not always listen to women safely or represent their experiences accurately. Public testimony could expose women to stigma, retaliation, or retraumatization, particularly when discussing sexual violence. Both systems also produced a “singular woman victim”: in South Africa, women were often treated as secondary victims connected to the suffering of men; in Rwanda, official memory mainly recognized Tutsi women as victims while overlooking Hutu women and other complicated experiences. Women were also frequently defined only by rape, which erased their experiences of poverty, imprisonment, family loss, resistance, survival, and even participation in violence. For example, the South African TRC struggled to understand Notrose Nobomvu Konile’s testimony because it did not follow the expected story of grief, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Ephgrave ultimately argues that transitional justice must include multiple narratives rather than constructing one official national story, because women’s experiences cannot be reduced to a single form of victimhood.
Dori Laub, "Bearing Witness": Laub argues that trauma often cannot be fully understood or recorded while it is happening because the experience overwhelms the survivor’s ability to process it. Testimony therefore does not simply report a memory that already exists; the survivor and listener create an understanding of the event together. The listener becomes a witness who must remain present, recognize both speech and silence, and avoid forcing the survivor’s experience into a predetermined interpretation. The article ultimately shows that testimony requires an empathetic listener because telling a traumatic story without being believed or heard can repeat the original trauma. Through careful listening, the survivor can transform fragmented memories into a narrative, reclaim the experience, and begin to escape its continued control over the present.