Tu 26 Feb—Billboard Utilization, Truth in Advertising, Subverts
• Links: See new Post for Subvertizing Links and explore
• Webbing: Art Activist/International Shadows Project Show
• Webbing: explore 5 more sites you choose
• continue work with event group: Ass. 2 MUST BE DONE WITH GROUP, Due 4 March
Links mentioned above:
Subverts
Past Subvertizements
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
Smashing the Image Factory
Fighting Guerrilla Graffiti
Do your own searches too and come to class prepared to share them. Print out a page or two of the sites you find to share around.
Song lyrics for download on PDF: "Are My Hands Clean?"
Are My Hands Clean? Lyrics and music by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Songtalk Publishing Co. 1985. Performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Sweet Honey's own website
Wikipedia bio
I wear garments touched by hands from all over the world
35% cotton, 65% polyester, the journey begins in Central America
In the cotton fields of El Salvador
In a province soaked in blood,
Pesticide-sprayed workers toil in a broiling sun
Pulling cotton for two dollars a day.
Then we move on up to another rung—Cargill
A top-forty trading conglomerate, takes the cotton through the Panama Canal
Up the Eastern seaboard, coming to the US of A for the first time
In South Carolina
At the Burlington mills
Joins a shipment of polyester filament courtesy of the New Jersey petro-chemical mills of
Dupont
Dupont strands of filament begin in the South American country of Venezuela Where oil
riggers bring up oil from the earth for six dollars a day
Then Exxon, largest oil company in the world,
Upgrades the product in the country of Trinidad and Tobago
Then back into the Caribbean and Atlantic Seas
To the factories of Dupont
On the way to the Burlington mills
In South Carolina
To meet the cotton from the blood-soaked fields of El Salvador
In South Carolina
Burlington factories hum with the business of weaving oil and cotton into miles of fabric
for Sears
Who takes this bounty back into the Caribbean Sea
Headed for Haiti this time—May she be one day soon free—
Far from the Port-au-Prince palace
Third world women toil doing piece work to Sears specifications
For three dollars a day my sisters make my blouse
It leaves the third world for the last time
Coming back into the sea to be sealed in plastic for me
This third world sister
And I go to the Sears department store where I buy my blouse
On sale for 20% discount
Are my hands clean?
4 min - Jan 6, 2008
...Interview...Music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBWWcNBoHx0
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Transnational Feminist Explorations
Wikipedia entry: transnational feminism
Affinity Project's link for transnational feminism
For a door into one knowledge world of a particular kind of scholarly marxist feminism concerned with transnational movements for social justice check out this essay online:
Transnational Feminism and the Struggle for Global Justice
Johanna Brenner [from New Politics, vol. 9, no. 2 (new series), whole no. 34, Winter 2003]
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From English Professor UMD Martha Nell Smith, whose scholarship and teaching is in Poetry and its Powers:
In the vein of Lily Tomlin, I pass along a video of this spoken word poet, Alix Olson. This is "America's On Sale," which sure seems apt for this election season (and is hilarious, by the way):
2 min - Dec 3, 2006 - 
(18 ratings)
Sale!...Alix Olson: a red-hot, fire-bellied, feminismo-spewin' volcano. Plus she rhymes. (18 ratings) http://youtube.com/watch?v=epIEnFu4w_o
Olson has an even better one called "Dear Diary" (about breaking up with her country), but I've been unable to locate a YouTube performance of that one.
Both she and Alicia Ostriker are participants in the Split This Rock Poetry Festival (featuring Poems of Provocation & Witness), which will be held in Washington, D.C., March 20-23.
Don't you hear this hammer ring?
I'm gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.
- Langston Hughes
To learn more about the Festival, which celebrates our great tradition of poetry of witness and resistance and is an anti-war, visit http://www.splitthisrock.org/.
I hope to see you there!
--mn
--
Martha Nell Smith
Professor of English, Founding Director of MITH
University of Maryland
http://www.mith.umd.edu/mnsmith
Executive Editor and CoordinatorDickinson Electronic Archives
http://emilydickinson.org
301.405.8878 / 301.314.7539 FAX
"If you give us a chance, women can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." - Ann Richards
