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Episode 34: Incarceration and Prison Abolition, Part 1

by Julián Esteban Torres López in Deconstructing Dominant Cultures Series

Do prisons get rid of social problems, or do they create a lot of them? Should we abolish the prison system? What are the biggest barriers to prison abolition? What should people know about the prison system that most do not know? This is part 1 of a 2-part interview where I speak with Ra Avis to get a glimpse into incarceration and prison abolition. Ra Avis is a once-upon-a-time inmate, a reluctantly-optimistic widow, and a generational storyteller. […]

Udo J. Keppler, "The fettered war god," 20 August 1902, N.Y.: J. Ottmann Lith. Co., Puck Bldg., Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Ultimate Poem is Abstract and We Are All Foreigners

September 13, 2018

I rarely look into broken mirrors— they remind me of my ancestors and I wish to remain dismembered. A phantom limb, untethered. “The ultimate poem is abstract,” wrote Wallace Stevens. Whether I agree with him […]

Mixed, by Nicole Zelniker

The definition of families is widening, whether it’s because of mixed-race relationships, interracial adoption, or numerous other factors. Today, it is important to hear from a growing population about race, their shifting identities, and what family means to them. At the heart of the issue are the mixed-race families. Many mixed-race children have had difficulties fitting in, whether with one race or the other. In mixed-race relationships, one partner may face racism, while the other may not, or else they will experience racism in different ways. Children who have been adopted into families that identify as a race that is not theirs often find that they struggle to fit in with their families as well as with people who identify as their own race. Not only are these families navigating US American culture at large, but they also must navigate their own family structures and what it means to be mixed. [...]
PLACES & NAMES: Poems, by Carl Boon

The poems in Carl Boon’s debut collection, PLACES & NAMES, coalesce two kinds of history—the factual and the imagined—to produce a kind of intimacy that is greater than either fact or imagination. It is this sense of intimacy that brings the poems to life. We encounter real places sometimes—places we see on maps and highway signs—but also places that exist only in the imagination. We encounter names that are both recognizable and almost—or barely—remembered at all: Robert E. Lee next to one of a thousand men named Jackson who went to fight in Vietnam; Jorge Luis Borges next to an unknown boy from Clarita, Oklahoma, who himself would become a poet someday; a man who wishes he were Rocky Marciano hammering the heavy bag in Northeast Ohio, hungry for more than beans or soup. And suddenly it becomes clear how intimately connected in this collection these places and names are as we range from Saigon to northern Iraq; Athens, Ohio, to Libya; Ankara to Pittsburgh; and a strange, sleepy place called Pomegranate Town where someone’s infant dozes in the back of a car on a seaside highway. The people who inhabit these places seem, in a sense, to become those places, inseparable from their geographies and histories, often unable to escape, bound by memory, nostalgia, and tradition. [...]
HUSBAND FATHER FAILURE: Poems, by KG Newman

In Husband Father Failure, KG Newman explores love as metered sacrifice. In the tinted mirror of self-reflection, marriage and commitment are gauged on leverage and endurance while fatherhood — and a morphing understanding of it — is an equalizer, the bond that humbles and keeps him hanging on. From the kitchen to the front yard, from the mountainside to worn sandlots across suburbia — from a gift of life to a plea of guilt — Newman reminds the reader of the fragility of emotion, the irreversible risk of love, and of the perils and rewards of investing in the modern American family. [...]

Vestiges of Courage: Collected Essays, by Mireya S. Vela

Vestiges of Courage is a collection of personal essays that explores inequities and injustice. Raised between two cultures and two languages, Mireya S. Vela discusses how the systems in her family and in society worked to create an abusive environment that felt crushing, confusing, and hopeless. In her book, Ms. Vela delineates her experience of living through sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. This book is much more than a collection of experiences, though. Ms. Vela wants to know how and why abuse thrived in her family. She digs deep to understand why these things happened and how she survived. [...]
Eat The Eight: Preventing Food Allergy with Food and the Imperfect Art of Medicine, by Ron Sunog, MD

In 2015, after a landmark medical study proved that the early inclusion of peanut in the diet of infants prevents peanut allergy, Ron Sunog, MD, set out to develop a great first peanut food for infants. When most physicians and parents did not embrace this important new information, Dr. Sunog was determined to understand why. Eat The Eight examines how difficult it is to acquire and understand good medical evidence, the complex web of reason and emotion through which people filter medical information, and the imperative to thoughtfully temper the science of medicine with the art of medicine. Parents will learn how a healthful diet can be key to reducing their infant’s risk of developing food allergy. [...]

Reporting on Colombia: Essays on Colombia’s History, Culture, Peoples, and Armed Conflict, by Julián Esteban Torres López

Prolonged war has drained Colombia of its most essential natural and human resources and has created an aggressive and vengeful environment of resentment and resistance. Though the second oldest democracy in the hemisphere, an effective modern nation-state has never existed. Its 200+ years of so-called democracy have been a farce given Colombia’s feudalist innards and fascist corporatism exoskeleton. Further, the continuing armed conflict is exacerbated by the country’s historical lack of hegemony, institutionalized and systemic violence, corruption, socio-political exclusion, lack of social mobility opportunities, and foreign intervention. We must curb the traditional might-makes-right conflict resolution method and the state must gain true legitimacy if Colombians are ever to manifest their potential. Julián Esteban Torres López machetes through the tall weeds of Colombia’s power vacuum and fragmented sovereignty, peels the layers of the country’s flirtation with modernity and class consciousness, dissects the insecurity of Colombia’s security policies, and looks to understand who and what stand in the way of Colombia becoming the El Dorado it could become. [...]
Marx's Humanism and Its Limits: Why Marx Believed We Should Achieve Socialism and Communism Nonviolently, by Julián Esteban Torres López

In this long-form essay, Julián Esteban Torres López dissects Karl Marx’s writings to make explicit a Marxian Humanitarian Theory. Torres López surveys and analyzes Marx’s work on violence, revolution, and the treatment of human life, and concludes that not only did Marx see the possibility that socialism and communism could be achieved by peaceful means, but that it should be done so. Torres López challenges the mainstream notion that Marxism has always been a war-machine that leads to tyrannical, authoritarian, and anti-democratic regimes. Instead, Torres López argues that actualizing human potential, while still treating the individual as an end, was the goal Marx endorsed. As Marx got older, he became more moderate in his justifications of violence, and he more intensely adopted the view that humans deserve to be afforded dignity and treated as ends. However, though Marx hoped the road to socialism and communism would not be stained with blood, in most places in the world, he believed, violence used as self-defense would be the lever of revolutions. Nevertheless, though the end may justify force under specific circumstances, much hinges on the uncertainty of the realization of those very ends. [...]

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