Tag: Department of Languages

(Director’s note: Johannes Schmidt teaches German in the Clemson Languages Department, where he will offer a course on “Tolerance in the Eighteenth Century” (in German) in the fall of 2020 and on Hanna Arendt and Totalitarianism (in English) in the spring of 2021.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

On November 1, 1755, an earthquake off the coast of Lisbon struck and destroyed a large portion of the city; aided by subsequent fires and massive tsunami wave, it claimed between 30,000 and 100,000 lives (of about 275,000 residents).

It disturbed all aspects of life. Economically, the destruction of one of the most important European port city was felt in all places of trade and commerce. The news of the earthquake reached London within a day; newspapers in Hamburg, my own hometown, reported only a few days later. Colonial politics became magnified; the outbreak of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War) may have been hastened due to the rising tensions caused by an increased desire for control of trade with the New World.

Art and literature took note, and so did the Enlightenment in general, reconsidering the Leibnizian philosophy of optimism. In his Candide, ou l’Optimisme, Voltaire famously makes fun of “the best of all worlds.” Johann Gottfried Herder—who together with Goethe coined the term zeitgeist (spirit of the age)—reprimanded the “philosophes” for hubris; they had falsely proclaimed a golden age that advanced beyond every other historical era and was above every other culture: “‘In Europe now, there is supposed to be more virtue than ever, [than] everywhere in the world has been?’ And why? because there is more enlightenment in the world – I believe that just for that reason it has to be less” (1774).

The faith in Enlightenment only made philosophy too proud of the knowledge gained than aware of that which we cannot control in nature. Unsurprisingly, neither knowledge nor reason predicted this catastrophe. To this day, earthquake predictions are plagued by their unpredictability—much to the vexation of the Italian government concerning the botched warning of the devastating earthquake in the Abruzzo region in 2009. The unpreparedness and our unenlightened–irrational, at times even heartless–response to the COVID-19 pandemic seem to be grounded in the same misgivings about nature and knowledge that many of the European thinkers had before 1755.

Goethe’s observation about the earthquake stands out to me today: “Perhaps, the daemon of terror had never before spread as speedily and powerfully over the world”. As a six-year old, he was terrified, despite being more than 1500 miles away. In Georg Philipp Telemann’s “Ode of Thunder” (TWV 6:3a-b, 1756 [link to the entire piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDW19YqDq64]), we can hear the horrific feeling the existence of an “angry God” must have evoked; we can perceive young Goethe’s fear of the Hebrew Bible’s “wrathful deity” that could not be conciliated: Listen today to the frantic fifth and sixth movement from the Donnerode, entitled “The voice of God shatters the cedars!” [https://youtu.be/7ZUUBmol_HE] and “[The voice of God] makes the proud mountains collapse!” [https://youtu.be/4D-u6VslLlg]. Our anxieties connect us to the desolation people felt in the aftermath of 1755; one might hear the aftershocks in the fifth movement or people fleeing from proud palaces collapsing in the sixth.

It was Kant who—having already studied the physics of the earth’s crust—reminded us of the need for rational-scientific investigation into disastrous occurrences:

“Great events that affect the fate of all mankind rightly arouse that commendable curiosity, which is stimulated by all that is extraordinary and typically looks into the causes of such events. In such cases, the natural philosopher’s obligation to the public is to give an account of the insights yielded by observation and investigation”, he writes in one of his three studies on earthquakes (1756).

Of much needed insight was his proclamation that the event dictated a clear distinction between moral evil and natural disasters. Since all natural occurrences are subject to physical laws, a supernatural cause (divine punishment) for natural disasters must be rejected.

Epidemiologically, the coronavirus does not discriminate. Neither did the earthquake spare the righteous more than the corrupt. Yet, both events show the drastic inequalities brought forth when calamity strikes. While the earthquake affected the rich and the poor alike, the pious and the heretic equally, the nobility and the outlawed in similar ways, the fate of those who survived is very different. The king of Portugal—who spent the holiday away from Lisbon—never set foot into the city ever again; the entire royal family relocated to palaces elsewhere. A king’s luxury mirrored today: the affluent fled the cities hit hard by the pandemic and retreated into their summer homes. In the end, viruses and earthquakes do discriminate.

One of the core ideas of Kant’s philosophy of ethics is the importance of human dignity: the incalculable worth of a human being’s life, which is beyond any form of measurement. Free human existence is fundamental. Kant makes perfectly clear that the categorical autonomy of all human beings is absolute and independent of any phenomenological or physiological distinction. This imperative is as valid today as tomorrow. (Kant’s Eurocentric thinking is certainly disturbing and his belief in Western civilization’s supremacy contradicts the inclusiveness that may be suggested in this kind of universal call for autonomy of all peoples and races.) Still, I read this today as an affirmation that there cannot be any material or any other justification for the loss of even a single life.

Protest against racism and inequality, as well as solidarity with all whose human dignity has been and continues to be violated, is not only legitimate but also necessary at all times, especially during natural and manmade disasters. Even more so, for us in privileged positions, it is our responsibility.

(Director’s Note: Seeing  Covid-19 hit Italy early, and hard,  I wrote to a colleague in the Department of Languages, Roberto Risso, for his sense of the situation, below.  Dr. Risso was born and raised in Turin, Italy, where he lived
until eleven years ago.  After relocating to the US, he has lived
in Wisconsin, Maine, and South Carolina. He now lives in the Clemson area,
where he loves gardening and reading.  He is currently an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Clemson University.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

The planetary dimension of the catastrophe became clear to the Belpaese quite early, when a European citizen was said to have brought to Italy COVID 19, a virus originated in China and was spreading fast. Italy has a special bond with China, a mutual fascination that dates back to Marco Polo’s travel and to his famous book. The so-called new Silk Road has a relevance that should never be underestimated in today’s world. Billion of Euros’ worth of commerce and almost half million of Chinese people living in Italy reinforce this bond. And yet anti-Chinese xenophobia hit Italy at the beginning of the pandemic in February 2020: hard-to-watch videos surfaced of Chinese people being insulted and beaten on the streets. Italians were scared, angry, unhappy, very unprepared, but mostly had the decency to admit it from day one.

The virus hit Italy hard from the very beginning: a densely populated territory with areas that are among the most polluted in Europe, by March and April the North of Italy was a hotspot and multiple hundred of victims died daily, especially in the Lombardy region, the economic capital of the country. The harrowing images of the military trucks transporting coffins out of the Lombard city of Bergamo became iconic of the disaster that was taking place under the Tuscan (and Lombard) sun. As a result, new emergency laws were introduced and reinforced: total lockdown for more than a month and after that compulsory masks everywhere. Italians obeyed and thank God they did. And it worked, indeed. By end of April and May the situation was better: from hundred of deaths daily to a few dozen, then few people, a dozen less. But with relaxation of the attention a new wave came, mid-June, and the threat of a new Nation-wide lockdown convinced people to be more careful.

Is it possible to conceive Italy with no tourists? No, of course not. But without planes, and with borders sealed, no tourists came and the only visitors were the boatloads of refugees who came by sea. Singing from balconies, memes, online feuds, political chaos were nothing but distractions; from the beginning of the Second Republic on, politicians have been clowns all along. Since Italy has always been a divided and diverse country, the pandemic did not unite it; Italians did not became any better.  Contrary to what it was said during the lock-down–“Ne usciremo migliori e più forti”, or ‘we will get out of this stronger and better’–did not really happen, unfortunately. What really happened is that, due to the internal immigration of the past, at the beginning of the pandemic many southerners living in the North fled the closing cities and brought the virus with them. Italy has also the oldest population in Europe, second oldest in the world after Japan: the “nonni”, grandpas and grandmas, died like flies, especially in the nursing homes, where, the suspicion is, that nothing was done to avoid contagion. On the contrary, people say (and please remember, vox populi, vox Dei) that the virus was used to get rid of many of them. It is so atrocious that it can be true in a country no stranger to atrocities.

As of July 4^th 2020 the contagion index is anything but uniform: it has increased from June but many central and southern regions are free from Covid 19, and not for lack of testing. Lombardy, where the virus has claimed so many lives in the past, has a level of 0.89 index, which is good, although the nation’s cases as of the beginning of July 2020 are 241,419 which is scary. In four months, twenty thousand jobs have been lost for good.

As of July 1^st citizens from USA, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, India, Saudi Arabia and Mexico have been blocked from entering the Country. Chinese nationals have not been blocked yet. With these conditions it is very hard to foresee the damage to the tourist industry. We will see what the European Union will do about it, since its priorities usually seem to be the well being of German Banks and not the hardships of citizens. What I know for sure, despite all the terrible news and the scary data, is that Italians will move forward despite the ten thousand babies that will not be born in 2021.  In a Country that is already at a level zero birthrate.

Moving forward and rebuilding after catastrophes is what Italians do best.

(Director’s note: Pauline de Tholozany, an  Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages department, specializes in 19^th-century French Literature. Her first book, L’Ecole de la maladresse (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017), is a history of clumsiness in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. She is now working on a second book that focuses on impatience, a feeling that we tend to decry; she is interested in why we do so. Her contribution to this series, posted on Medium.com, is on impatience.  She reports that this project as a whole was inspired by Clemson students’ activism and their legitimate, peaceful, and powerful impatience.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

(Director’s note: Salvador Oropesa, Chair of Languages, earned a PhD in Latin American literature from Arizona State, was born in Málaga, Spain, and studied Spanish Philology at the Universidad de Granada, Spain.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

At this age of wisdom and foolishness, the pandemic arrived with the new year. The citizens of the kingdom of Spain obediently followed the royal decrees and constitutional States of Alarm. Spaniards stayed at home and wore masks. The old folks died alone in residences, and the younger survived thanks to the best cleaning and auxiliary personnel, nurses, and doctors. Tourists disappeared, and the Prado Museum ghosts returned. The old kings and queens painted by Titian, Velázquez, Ranc, Goya, and others were puzzled by the lack of visitors. The bars poured the last beer and turned the lights off, and the school principals closed the doors with keys that no one knew ever existed. People moved to the balconies of their apartments to contemplate deserted streets. They applauded and cheered the work done by the exhausted hospital personnel and police officers. Army soldiers entered abandoned residences to pick up the corpses of our elderly and disinfect the facilities. Grandparents could only see their grandchildren via video WhatsApp and schoolmates became little squares on computer screens and smartphones. Some local representatives, just a few, became beacons of hope amongst a generation of Instagram, hollow politicians. Democracy is boring and managerial, and many representatives got tired of dealing with reality. Teachers, doctors, pharmacists, firefighters, supermarket managers, restockers, cashiers, truckers, and bikers became the city’s lifeblood by delivering goods to those in need and became heroes in their own right while civic servants kept state services functioning.

Spaniards learned again or for the first time, what an exponential chart was. Today’s date, mid-June, the official death toll is more than 28,300, and the highest mortality rate in the world per million inhabitants. The curve has been flattened, and there is a slow return to the new normalcy: the soccer season is finishing with empty stadiums with a virtual audience, and furloughed players. People get sunburnt in the lines at the beach, waiting for their determined square meters to abide by social distancing standards. Churches are practically empty, with marks to determine where you can sit, communion is to only be received by hand, and offerings such as holy water and peace greetings are banned. The government canceled spring Holy Week ceremonies and the summer celebration running of the bulls. Resilience is the new buzz word. Many jobs have disappeared forever, Nissan shut down for good the Barcelona plant.

Many bars and cafes will never reopen, and plastic screens reflect the sadness of a new society, covered by the obligatory face masks. Memes in my Whatssup groups display the new reality. Why is the Committee of Experts secret under the excuse that they will be harassed if we know their names? Democracy and transparency are always casualties of big crises. The nation is not better; we have become too polarized; my friend Javier uses the term “podrido,” ‘rotten.” Javier is the epitome of common sense and cordura, the sanity of the heart as the Latin root ‘cord’ indicates. Tribes are more important than science and common sense. Greeks invented the tragedy to represent situations like this. We all lose, the least fortunate their lives, many their jobs, others, their immediate future like college degrees without a job waiting for them. I talk to my brother and sisters, my nephews and nieces, and their children, my schoolmates, and their feelings are that of being in the middle of a war, with many more months to come and no light at the end of the tunnel. The unaffected and the devastated of the pandemic share the same street as if a random bomb of the resurrected Civil War exploded. “Safe Sport, Safe Tourism” is the new slogan promoted by the Ministry of Health and professional soccer La Liga. Ojalá (I wish.)

(Director’s note: Joseph Mai, Associate Professor of French, with an affiliation in World Cinema, team teaches with Angela Naimou, Associate Professor of English, a Creative Inquiry group,“Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality,” dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

If you are as privileged as I am, the current pandemic has meant inconvenient but bearable modifications to daily life: wearing a mask, more time at home, Zoom meetings, perhaps an ill-starred attempt to cut your own hair. But for immigrants held in US mandatory detention centers, the freedom to make such basic choices in healthcare does not exist. For some, the situation has been catastrophic.

I have been thinking of this because, over the past year, my colleague, Dr. Angela Naimou (English), and I have been mentoring a group of students conducting research on the stories that immigrants tell about detention. One of their central activities is to participate in a visit, organized by the El Refugio hospitality house, with people detained at the Stewart Detention Center, located in Lumpkin GA. Stewart is the second largest ICE detention center in the United States, a country with the largest immigration detention system in the world. During our conversations, which take place in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish, we learn a great deal about life in detention, including much about medical distress.

Here is one alarming recent story, though only scarce details are available. On May 24, Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, a husband and father to three children, became the first person to lose his life to COVID-19 in the Stewart facility. Santiago had been arrested at home in Marietta, Georgia on March 2. By March 26 he had requested and been granted voluntary departure to his home country of Guatemala. By April 17, the 34-year-old was sick enough to require a month-long hospitalization, at the end of which he died. Santiago was clearly not a flight risk. His unnecessary death exposes much of the dysfunction and callousness inherent in immigrant detention.

Like most ICE detention centers, Stewart is operated by a private company (CoreCivic), whose main priority is to increase returns for its shareholders. Much of the company’s cost cutting directly affects people’s health and living conditions: low-quality food, sometimes dirty drinking water, extremely overcrowded sleeping and washing facilities, and a lack of medical technology, medicine, and health-care personnel. When immigrants complain of poor conditions or illness, the undertrained staff often respond with punishment such as solitary confinement. Even mental health incidents receive punitive responses, and two men with documented mental health issues have committed suicide at Stewart after being left in solitary confinement.

Given this structural neglect during routine times, the inability of Stewart’s staff to manage this pandemic has been sadly predictable. Just two days before Santiago was granted voluntary departure, immigrants held a hunger strike to demand more protection and possible release. But still most CDC guidelines have been ignored (staff reportedly do not use personal protection equipment, living conditions have changed little, and ICE continues to transfer people from one center to another). To make matters worse, Stewart County has such a spike of COVID-19 that it has declared a state of emergency. Unsurprisingly, the virus has penetrated deep into the facility. Of some 300 employees, over 50 have tested positive. ICE claims that 16 detainees have been infected but there are reliable reports that many cases go untested.

Indeed, it is not easy to know precisely how far conditions have deteriorated inside. The one “safety measure” that ICE has consistently enforced throughout the country has been the suspension of personal visits. This means that the only communication detainees may now have with the outside is through their attorneys (the vast majority do not have one), letters (if delivered), or telephone accounts. Those who have been detained for up to two years and have come to rely on visits from family or community members have grown more isolated.

Thinking about Santiago Baten-Oxlaj can be overwhelming at a time when we are already worried about tumultuous current events. This is especially true when we consider how Santiago and his family’s story touches upon contexts beyond the walls of the detention center: immigrants who are essential workers and who lack health care; undocumented people who fear arrest by ICE or local police participating in 287(g) agreements; people living in tents and kept just beyond our border due to the ironically named “migrant protection protocols” (better known as “remain in Mexico”); at risk incarcerated people throughout the US…

But despite this burden, our research group has continued to explore forms and practices of hospitality that struggle to affirm dignity within this system. Groups such as El Refugio, Project South, SPLC, and the Tahirih Justice Center have sought new ways to support immigrants (through providing telephone accounts, for instance) and demand accountability, transparency, and the release of vulnerable individuals. This summer our students have been thinking of how to aid these efforts and educate those around them.

Bio: Joseph Mai is an Associate Professor of French with an affiliation in World Cinema. He teaches courses on French society and French cinema and literature, and is currently completing a volume on the post-genocide cinema of the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker, Rithy Panh. “Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality” is a Creative Inquiry group, dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality.