Articoli di riviste sul tema "Jewish Center Division"

Abstract: This article focuses on Jerusalem's Musrara—a neighborhood trapped between borders—between 1948 and 1967. Barbed wire running along the eastern side of the neighborhood divided the city of Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Musrara's western border separated it from West Jerusalem, thus enhancing the division between its residents—new immigrants of Middle Eastern descent—and the mainly Ashkenazi population of the western part of Jerusalem. Our analysis of a neighborhood on the margins of Jewish and Arab existence in post-1948 Jerusalem considers the perspectives of immigrants and refugees living on a double border that separated the Eastern-Arab part of the city from its Western-Jewish part, or between "old Jerusalem" and "new Jerusalem." The border also signified the boundary between "first Israel" and "second Israel," or the Jewish frontier and neighborhoods in the city center.

Abstract: This article focuses on Jerusalem's Musrara—a neighborhood trapped between borders—between 1948 and 1967. Barbed wire running along the eastern side of the neighborhood divided the city of Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. Musrara's western border separated it from West Jerusalem, thus enhancing the division between its residents—new immigrants of Middle Eastern descent—and the mainly Ashkenazi population of the western part of Jerusalem. Our analysis of a neighborhood on the margins of Jewish and Arab existence in post-1948 Jerusalem considers the perspectives of immigrants and refugees living on a double border that separated the Eastern-Arab part of the city from its Western-Jewish part, or between "old Jerusalem" and "new Jerusalem." The border also signified the boundary between "first Israel" and "second Israel," or the Jewish frontier and neighborhoods in the city center.

Abstract The critical reception of racist, sexist and anti-Jewish dimensions in the works of canonical authors has moved to the center of philosophical discourse. Many of those who engage in the history of philosophy have defended the established canon and advocated for critical readings. I want to show that the current discourse on Hegel’s treatment of religion misreads his position as “modern”, because it does not take the works of his Jewish contemporaries into account. In my own reading of the Grundlinien, I will show that Hegel’s concept of the division of Church and state does not remain neutral when it comes to religious affiliation but has a clear anti-Jewish bias (I). This serves to show that one can neither adequately identify nor address identity-based discrimination in the works of majoritarian thinkers without an equal commitment to diversifying the canon to include positions of marginalised authorship (II).

Several libraries in New York City have exceptionally rich resources for the study of relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans. The holdings of and access to these collections are discussed; some sources in other parts of the U.S. are mentioned as well. The most important collection is in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Besides books, there is a vast Clipping File, the unique Kaiser Index, manuscript collections, and some audio and visual materials. The Jewish Division of The New York Public Library has unparalleled holdings of Jewish newspapers from around the world, from which relevant articles can be derived. The libraries of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the VIVO Institute ,are also both fine sources. Their book holdings are up-to-date, and YIVO's clipping file is also, including such items as publicity releases from Mayors Koch and Dinkins. YIVO's archives have such important historical holdings as the American Jewish Committee Records (1930s to the 1970s), and some NAACP materials from the thirties and forties. Children's books on this top ic and ways of acquiring information are noted. A list of the major libraries, with addresses, telephone numbers, and hours is in an appendix.

Abstract Classical exegetes’ exploration of structure and order in the Pentateuch is generally perceived as part of an internal-Jewish debate. However, in an exceptional testimonial, the introduction to R. Ovadiah Sforno’s Torah commentary describes a polemic against the Torah grounded in a claim about the Torah’s disorderliness. Responding to this critique, Sforno set out to uncover the Torah’s logical order. His efforts to elucidate the Torah’s order and structure include three aspects: he points to a circular structure that is repeated seven times in Genesis-Numbers, he systematically links the independent legal sections in Deuteronomy, and he discusses the Torah’s division into five separate books. While methodically addressing the question of order, Sforno also offers a response to fundamental theological issues at the center of the interfaith polemic.

The article deals with the early works of Denys Lukiyanovych (1873–1965) on Jewish subjects in the aspect of genre-style specificity and in the context of the history of Ukrainian literature of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The key images and motives of the works, their problems, plot-compositional, linguistic and artistic features, marked by modernity, the tendency to impressionism, combined with a realistic vision of reality, are analyzed. It is proved that D. Lukiyanovych's early prose is characterized by colourful artistic time, multifaceted compositional construction, variety of plot elements (artistic precursions, decorations, etc.), layers of one event to another, and a vivid impressionistic manner. Nevertheless, the writer was able to create a true picture of life with clear realistic features, saturated with elements of naturalism, but not devoid of deep psychological content. Humanism and internationalism, author’s sincere compassion for the ordinary man are manifested in D. Lukiyanovych's literary works. In his early prose some important antipodes emerge, i.e. the «little man» and the «social order», which perhaps most succinctly convey the acute social conflict. Particular attention was also paid to Lukiyanovych's «Jewish people», who exemplify the assertion of high moral qualities that do not depend on nationality, because these traits are inherent by nature. It is the inner, mental reflections that prevail in such authorial images, though there is no complete blurring of the boundaries of the rational and irrational world. Such an interpretation by D. Lukiyanovych of the Jewish theme was a contrast almost to everything written in our literature about Jews before. The original focus is on some human issues: the injustice of power in the treatment of the ordinary man, bureaucracy of the state machine, the class division in a society, often the imbalance of urban lifestyles, which has its own rules, the possibility of discrepancy between the appearance of the individual and his inner consciousness, kindness among people, inability of the followers to enjoy their social rights and freedoms. It is noteworthy that D. Lukiyanovych doesn’t put the problem of the disadvantage of the Jewish people as such at the center of his works, but nevertheless the author focuses more on the «individual» misfortune of each particular person.

On 24 July 1660, a great conflagration broke out in Istanbul. An Ottoman writer conveys the horror of the event: “[t]housands of homes and households burned with fire. And in accordance with God's eternal will, God changed the distinguishing marks of night and day by making the very dark night luminous with flames bearing sparks, and darkening the light-filled day with black smoke and soot.” The fire began in a store that sold straw products outside the appropriately named Firewood Gate (Odun kapısı) west of Eminönü, and it devastated densely crowded neighborhoods consisting of wooden homes. The strong winds of Istanbul caused the fire to spread violently in all directions, despite the efforts of the deputy grand vizier (kaimmakam) and others who attempted the impossible task of holding it back with hooks, axes, and water carriers. Sultan Mehmed IV's boon companion and chronicler, Abdi Paşa, notes that the fire marched across the city like an invading army: the flames “split into divisions, and every single division, by the decree of God, spread to a different district.” The fire spread north, west, and to Unkapanı. According to Mehmed Halife, in Süleymaniye the spires of the four minarets of the great mosque burned like candles. The blaze reached Bayezid and then moved south and west to Davud Paşa, Kumkapı, and even as far west as Samatya. The flames did not spare the Hippodrome (At Meydanı) in the east or Mahmud Paşa and the markets at the center of the peninsula, either. Abdi Paşa estimated that the fire reduced 280,000 households to ashes as the city burned for exactly forty-nine hours. Two-thirds of Istanbul was destroyed in the conflagration, and as many as 40,000 people lost their lives. Although fire was a frequent occurrence in 17th-century Istanbul, this was the worst the city had ever experienced. Thousands died in the plague that followed the fire as rats feasted on unburied corpses and spread disease. Because three months prior to this fire a conflagration had broken out in the heart of the district of Galata, across the Golden Horn from Eminönü, much of the city lay in ruins in the summer of 1660.

The cultural activity of the Municipality of Thessaloniki begins in the first post-war years and especially in the 50’s and later, in order to cover the inability of the Greek state to finance cultural activities outside the capital. This weakness is based on the fact that Greece came out devastated by the German occupation, but also by the civil war, which was the painful result of national division. On the other hand, it was considered a symptom of the Cold War. Consequently, the Municipality of Thessaloniki with its meager forces undertook the task of promoting and familiarizing its citizens with forms of contemporary culture and modern art, as the cultural heritage of the ancient Greek world was in the hands of of the central administration. Along the way, the Municipality of Thessaloniki and its departments take up the organization of art exhibitions, mainly of artists who came both from the city and from the Macedonian hinterland. The first concern of the Municipality was the creation of a gallery with works by contemporary artists and then it implemented a cultural activity, which was to become one of the most important cultural institutions in the country: Dimitria Festival, in the honor of the patron saint of Agios Dimitrios. During the Political Changeover, the Municipality of Thessaloniki increased its activities in the field of Culture as the economic situation of Greece significantly improved being a permanent member of the European Union since 1981. Thus, sponsorships were made by its citizens for the creation of new cultural infrastructure (Vafopouleio Cultural Center, History Center); the architectural wealth of the once prosperous Jewish community was used for cultural purposes, and also the Ottoman buildings, which are scattered throughout the city, were preserved.

78 Background: Long Island Jewish Medical Center at Northwell Health is an urban/suburban academic tertiary care hospital located across the street from the Northwell Health Cancer Institute. The Division of Hospital Medicine partnered with Hematology/Oncology and Palliative Care to co-manage inpatient oncology patients on a geographic unit. The goal was to improve patient care through co-ownership and co-accountability of cancer patients in conjunction with a unit-based collaboration with Nursing, Pharmacy, Social Work, Case Management and Physical Therapy. Methods: A unit-based, interdisciplinary care team was formed consisting of Medical Oncologists, Hospitalists, Palliative Care specialists, Radiation Oncologists, as well as unit based and specialty trained nurses, social workers and advanced care practitioners. The team meets Monday thru Friday during interdisciplinary rounds to collaboratively discuss the care plans of each patient. We recently added a hospital-based medical oncologist to support greater continuity and communication. Results: Since full implementation including improvements in patient cohorting, the oncology care model has resulted in a 20% reduction in Medicare readmissions, a significant reduction in CAUTIs and CLABSIs, a 50% reduction in C.diff, a decreased CMI-adjusted length of stay and an improvement in pain management HCAHP scores, despite a 10% increase in CMI. An interdisciplinary approach has also improved documentation of goals of care discussion from 6% to 40-58%, furthering the idea of providing a unified medical voice to a vulnerable population. Conclusions: The oncology care model highlights that implementing multidisciplinary rounding, co-management and population-based geography can deliver a higher quality and more efficient level of care even in the face of higher patient acuity.

This essay proposes a close analysis of the introduction to the Kabbalist text known as Midrash ha-Ne’lam al Eichah, an interpretation of the biblical book of Lamentations which integrates the medieval text of the Sefer ha-Zohar. While the biblical version centers the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., the medieval narrative of the Midrash ha-Ne’lam opens with an anachronistic argument between the two Jewish communities historically formed with the fall of the First Temple: the one in Babylon, the symbol of the Jewish Diaspora, and the other in Jerusalem, the heart of the Holy Land of the Jewish people. Collapsing the destruction of the First Temple with the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the Midrash ha-Ne’lam intersperses literal and figurative meaning to craft a cosmic narrative of loss and longing, which runs parallel to the original biblical account. By focusing on the argument between the Babylonian and Jewish communities, the present article probes into a tension that structures the Jewish condition in the diaspora: the combination of material distance from, and spiritual attachment to, one’s sacred homeland, induces a state of spiritual homelessness. The Midrash ha-Ne’lam paints the “competition” for the right to mourn the loss of the Temple as a family argument between those who stayed in the destroyed homeland and those who have strayed from it many generations before, a tension that reverberates to this day on the inner division between diaspora and Israeli Jews.

This essay proposes a close analysis of the introduction to the Kabbalist text known as Midrash ha-Ne’lam al Eichah, an interpretation of the biblical book of Lamentations which integrates the medieval text of the Sefer ha-Zohar. While the biblical version centers the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., the medieval narrative of the Midrash ha-Ne’lam opens with an anachronistic argument between the two Jewish communities historically formed with the fall of the First Temple: the one in Babylon, the symbol of the Jewish Diaspora, and the other in Jerusalem, the heart of the Holy Land of the Jewish people. Collapsing the destruction of the First Temple with the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the Midrash ha-Ne’lam intersperses literal and figurative meaning to craft a cosmic narrative of loss and longing, which runs parallel to the original biblical account. By focusing on the argument between the Babylonian and Jewish communities, the present article probes into a tension that structures the Jewish condition in the diaspora: the combination of material distance from, and spiritual attachment to, one’s sacred homeland, induces a state of spiritual homelessness. The Midrash ha-Ne’lam paints the “competition” for the right to mourn the loss of the Temple as a family argument between those who stayed in the destroyed homeland and those who have strayed from it many generations before, a tension that reverberates to this day on the inner division between diaspora and Israeli Jews.

Po odzyskaniu przez Polskę niepodległości zauważalny już wcześniej odpływ ludności żydowskiej z Wielkopolski przybrał gwałtownie na sile. Na miejscu pozostała bogata infrastruktura — nieruchomości oraz liczne ruchomości stanowiące na ogół wyposażenie domów modlitwy. Ich utrzymanie wykraczało często poza możliwości finansowe nielicznych pozostałych na miejscu żydowskich mieszkańców. W 1932 r. ukazało się Rozporządzenie Ministerstwa Wyznań Religijnych i Oświecenia Publicznego. Na jego podstawie gminy wyznaniowe żydowskie, których członkowie w zdecydowanej większości wyemigrowali, miały być przyłączone do gmin liczących większą liczbę wyznawców, co miało umożliwić utrzymanie nadal istniejącej bazy materialnej. Zachowana w zespole archiwalnym „Akta miasta Gniezna” korespondencja między władzami miejskimi a miejscowym kahałem pozwala na prześledzenie procesu przejmowania majątków ośrodków przyłączanych do gnieźnieńskiej gminy żydowskiej. Możliwe jest również ustalenie jego składników ruchomych i nieruchomych oraz określenie ich ówczesnej wartości materialnej. W źródłach widoczne są ponadto kontrowersje między wyznawcami judaizmu z likwidowanych gmin a ich współwyznawcami z Gminy Wyznaniowej Żydowskiej w G nieźnie. W 1936 r. pojawiły się nowe plany reorganizacji siatki żydowskich gmin wyznaniowych. Do gminy gnieźnieńskiej zamierzano wówczas przyłączyć teren powiatu wągrowieckiego lub alternatywnie jeden z powiatów należących do gminy gnieźnieńskiej (w praktyce wchodził w grę tylko powiat żniński) przekazać gminie wągrowieckiej. Państwowe władze administracyjne ostatecznie od projektu odstąpiły. Dwa lata później, w związku z reformą podziału administracyjnego kraju, pojawiły się pomysły nowej organizacji przestrzennej gmin żydowskich. Zmian tych nie zdołano wprowadzić do wybuchu II wojny światowej. Jewish religious communities from the Greater Poland and Pałuki borderland during the period of land consolidation (1932–1939) After Poland’s rise to independence, the process of Jewish emigration from Greater Poland, already noticeable before, increased in intensity. Jews left behind a lot of infrastructure and real estate, as well various material possessions, mostly in houses of worship. Maintaining them turned out to exceed the financial capacity of those members of the Jewish community who stayed there. In 1932, a regulation of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education was published, requiring Jewish religious communities most affected by emigration to be incorporated into larger ones, in order to enable the maintenance of the remaining property. Correspondence between the municipal authorities and the local qahal, kept in the “City of Gniezno Files” archival fond, allows to track the gradual appropriation of property from centers incorporated into the Jewish community in Gniezno. It also makes it possible to list movable and immovable property and assess its value at that time. The sources also reveal some conflicts between Jews from the dissolved communities and those from the Gniezno Jewish religious community. In 1936, new plans were developed to reorganize the network of Jewish religious communities. These involved the incorporation of the Wągrowiec province into the Gniezno community, or alternatively, incorporation of one of the provinces belonging to the Gniezno community into the Wągrowiec community (in fact, the only one that could be incorporated in this way was the Żnin province). In the end, the national administration withdrew from this idea. Two years later, in connection with a reform introducing a new administrative division in Poland, ideas for a spatial reorganization of Jewish communities appeared again. However, no such changes were made before the Second World War.

This paper examines the structure, message, and content of biblical genealogies in light of literary analysis and social anthropology. In particular, the focus is on the so-called “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10. My basic assumption is that most biblical genealogies are a literary genre employing various devices that carry a message using symbolic numbers, chiastic structure, and anticipation. These lists interact and supplement the narrative, sometimes as a foil to the story line. They are inserted at relevant points of change in the story of mankind from Adam and Eve to Joseph and his brothers. I even propose that these insertions are the earliest form of dividing the book of Genesis into installments, a precursor to weekly Torah readings and to the later division into chapters as in the printed text. The underlying message of this chapter is the value concept of the brotherhood of mankind stemming from one father—Noah. This innovative idea of universal kinship breaks with the common pagan view prevalent in antiquity that man’s place is to serve the gods and to have little or no personal identity. Note that the great urban cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia have left us no real records of family lineage other than the long king lists that reflect dynastic power. No doubt the importance of oral and written lineage stems from a tribal culture like that of the ancient Hebrews and their kindred. This overriding view even shaped the Nimrud pericope, describing his founding the urban centers of Babylon and Assyria. Genealogy became the natural medium expressing this message of universal kinship. Basic to understanding biblical genealogies is discerning two patterns of kinship, one, linear, stretching up to ten generations, and two, segmented genealogies, noting an eponymous “father” and his segmented offspring or wives. Our understanding of these structures in the Bible is shaped by the research of social anthropologists who studied oral genealogy among analphabetic tribes in Africa and the Middle East. I apply these observations and methodology in a detailed commentary on the Table of Nations.

Abstract INTRODUCTION: Acquired hemophilia A (AHA) is a rare disorder caused by an autoantibody targeting factor VIII that causes severe, potentially, life-threatening bleeding. The worldwide incidence is estimated to be 1.5 cases/million with a mortality rate as high as 20-30%. Although occasionally associated with an underlying disorder such as an autoimmune disease or a malignancy, about one half of cases are idiopathic. Due to the rarity of the disease and the lack of prognostic indicators, there is little evidence to define optimal therapy. Effective therapy usually includes both controlling any bleeding with factor replacement or a bypassing agent and immunosuppression to reduce and eliminate the inhibitor. This study evaluates the various approaches to therapy of AHA. METHODS: Between 2000 and 2015, we identified 19 patients with AHA treated at Washington University Medical Center. All patients were treated at our institution and were identified using a search of the Division of Hematology medical records. Each patient's medical record was reviewed and the diagnosis of AHA was confirmed by low factor VIII activity and elevated factor VIII inhibitor. Our data was subsequently de-identified before any further analysis occurred. Laboratory testing was performed at Barnes-Jewish Hospital using standard assays. One patient was excluded as there was no documented testing confirming the diagnosis. Recovery was defined by either factor VIII activity ³50% or inhibitor level <1 BU, or both. RESULTS: Of the 18 eligible patients, 10 were male and 8 were female. The mean age at diagnosis was 70 years old (range 40-86). One patient was diagnosed with lymphoma within a year of diagnosis and one had concurrent rheumatoid arthritis. All of our patients presented with clinically significant bleeding, usually including subcutaneous bleeding. Only one patient died from complications directly related to AHA. The factor VIII activity was ²1% in 11 of 18 patients (range <1-27%) and the median inhibitor levels of 60.2 Bethesda Units (BU). Despite bleeding in all patients, 5/18 (28%) patients did not receive any blood factor treatment to control bleeding. Within our cohort, 10 patients (56%) received recombinant human factor VIIa. To date, doses were compiled in 5 patients and ranged from 8,200 µg-150,000 µg (mean 52,240 µg). Notably, the initial inhibitor level did not seem to correlate with the type of bleeding or the amount of product used. Sequential inhibitor levels were available for 13/18 patients (Figure). Among these patients, 7 achieved recovery within 6 months, with recovery occurring in 32-154 days. Despite 4 patients having persistently identified inhibitors (initial inhibitors ranging from 67-725 BU) for over 1 year and never achieving a recovery, their bleeding stabilized enough to be discharged without further factor product support. The initial inhibitor titer did not seem to correlate with time to recovery. Eighty-nine percent of patients (16/18) were treated with immunosuppressive therapy, all of whom received corticosteroids alone or in combination with other agents. One half of the treated patients received rituximab and all of these patients recovered. DISCUSSION: The rarity of AHA has severely limited the possibility of prospective trials evaluating different treatment approaches. Furthermore, the absence of prognostic markers impairs the ability to guide initial therapy including identifying patients needing blood factor support. In this study, all patients had bleeding at presentation, but 28% of patients did not receive any initial blood factor support and of the 22% of patients with a persistent inhibitor, sustained, long-term blood factor support was not utilized. Similarly, the role of immunosuppression is not well defined. In this study, patients with higher inhibitor titers tended to be treated with multiple immunosuppressive agents despite the lack of evidence that more aggressive treatments are more effective. Immunosuppressive treatment of patients with persistent inhibitors is undefined. It is unclear whether there are other factors that identify patients who are at higher risk of treatment failure or relapse. As new agents for blood factor support, such as recombinant porcine factor VIII are available, and as immunosuppressive therapy continues to evolve, further studies are warranted to address appropriate, cost-effective treatment approaches for AHA. Figure Figure. Disclosures Blinder: Janssen: Honoraria; CSL Behring: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria.

Abstract Primary hemorrhagic stroke is an uncommon but serious complication of sickle cell disease (SCD) with mortality from 20 to 65%. Proposed risk factors include previous ischemic stroke, aneurysms, low steady-state hemoglobin, high steady-state leukocyte count, acute chest syndrome, and transfusion. We performed a retrospective case-control study to evaluate risk factors for primary hemorrhagic stroke in adults (age &gt;18 years) with SCD from Johns Hopkins and Barnes- Jewish Hospitals and Duke University Medical Center from January 1989 to April 2008. Cases had SCD and intraparenchymal (IPH), subarachnoid (SAH), or intraventricular (IVH) hemorrhage confirmed by neuroimaging or analysis of cerebrospinal fluid; traumatic hemorrhages and hemorrhagic conversion of ischemic strokes were excluded. Controls had SCD and ischemic stroke (focal neurological deficits with corresponding cerebral infarcts by neuroimaging). Both were identified by searching the hospital discharge database using ICD-9 codes for acute stroke and SCD and reviewing divisional records. We compared continuous variables by Student’s t-test and calculated odds ratios with exact methods. We identified 19 cases (mean age 29 years, range 18 – 66, 42% male) and 18 controls (mean age 34 years, range 19 – 61, 39% male). Most cases (14/18) had sickle cell anemia (HbSS) and 22% had a prior overt stroke; controls had HbSS (9/17), HbSB0thalassemia (1), or HbSC (7) and 41% had a history of overt stroke. Cases presented with headache (89%) and seizure (37%) and less frequently hemiparesis (27%). Controls presented with hemiparesis (78%), headache (57%), and rarely seizure (11%). Twelve cases had IPH including those with extension to the ventricles (1), subarachnoid (2) or both (2); six had SAH including ventricular extension (1). Potential causes of hemorrhagic stroke included moyamoya (4), aneurysms (3), anticoagulation (1) and ateriovenous malformation (1). Four cases (21%) and no controls died during the initial hospitalization. More cases (82%) than controls (44%, P&lt;0.05) had elevated systolic blood pressure at the time of stroke. At steady-state, cases had lower hemoglobin (mean ± SEM 8.5 ± 0.6 g/dl vs. 9.7 ± 0.6 g/dl), lower blood pressures (systolic 121 ± 4 vs. 127 ± 6 mm Hg, diastolic 71 ± 4 vs. 72 ± 9 mm Hg) and higher platelet counts (399,231 ± 74,024/ul vs. 362,200/ul ± 39,927/ul) than controls, but these differences were not statistically significant. Mean hemoglobin concentration at the time of stroke increased 1.3 g/dl (19%) from steady-state in cases and 0.01 g/dl (2%) in controls (p&lt;0.05). Seven cases had simple transfusions (between 1 and 11 days before their primary hemorrhagic stroke) in preparation for surgery (3), and for aplastic crisis (1), bacteremia (1), acute renal failure (1), or suspected acute chest syndrome (1). Only 1 control was transfused; and 1 with HbSS had a hemoglobin of 14.5 g/dl at the time of stroke (from excessive erythropoietin administration). In this group of adults with SCD, primary hemorrhagic stroke was associated with antecedent transfusion. Identifiable causes include moyamoya from obstructive cerebral vasculopathy, aneurysms and other vascular malformations, and rarely coagulopathy. Mortality was similar to that previously described. The association of recent transfusion and cerebral vasculopathy with hemorrhagic stroke suggests caution in the use of simple transfusion in adults with SCD and moyamoya or cerebral aneurysms. Table 1: Associations with Primary Hemorrhagic Stroke Variable Odds Ratio (95% CI) P-value Genotype (HbSS vs. other) 3 (0.6 – 17) NS Moyamoya 5 (0.4 – 260) NS Transfusion in the last 14 days 13 (1.3 – 630) &lt;0.02 NSAID in the last 14 days 2.9 (0.3 – 36) NS

Background. One of the integrating, determining and identifying forces of the social progress of the entire human community is the custom and folklore tradition of the smallest sub-ethnic units / constituents individual nations and peoples, their verbal and ethno-cultural (including ethno-musical) sources, that, like rivers and brooks, fill the ocean of culture promoting for life and further development. The structure of the traditional Ukrainian musical culture, along with the well-known the old practices of group singing, itinerant kobzars and lira players, also consists of a powerful musical-instrumental component (herdsman’s folklore, calendarian-ritual chanting and dance). The aim and methods of the research. This article examines the phenomenon of traditional instrumentalism from the point of view of its fundamental influences on the worldviews regarding the formation and functioning of the ethnic sound of Ukrainians based on the longtime field-type, theoretical, pedagogical and practical (scientific and reconstructive musical performing) the experience of the author. The research results. Especially effective and such that, in recent years, was involved in the processes of salvation and “strengthening” (the term by S. Hrytsa) of traditional musical aesthetics, is the method of scientific and executive reconstruction of old folk music genres and forms. Systematic scientific-theoretical and structural-typological analytical work aimed at reproducing prototypes and structural details of reconstructed objects, forms, genres and actions of traditional Ukrainian musical culture, including instrumental, was reflected primarily in the research of S. Hrytsa (2000; 2002; 2015), A. Ivanytskyi (2007), I. Matsiievskyi (2012), B. Kindratiuk (2012), V. Yarmola (2014) and the author of these lines (Khai, M., 2011a; 2011b; 2013 and others). The author of the article thoroughly considers special issues of indexing musical instruments according to the system of E. Hornbostl – K. Sachs with the principle of division into classes, subclasses, categories, subdivisions; for the first time in Ukrainian ethnoorganology he carrys out a complete and consistent grouping of Ukrainian folk musical instruments. It is stated that the most important criteria of all classifications are: form, construction, structure, way of playing, repertoire, manner of performance. The criteria of traditionalism and functioning of folk instruments are determined separately (see: Khai, M., 2011a: 145–261). Based on this, Ukrainian folk musical instruments are considered in the following groups: 1) folk idiophones (self-sounding), 2) folk membranophones; 3) folk chordophones (strings); 4) folk aerophones (wind). Analyzing the existing classifications of national instrumental music, the author puts forward the thesis: areas of distribution and “density of ingrowth” of non-ethnic and authorial elements in the traditional centers of Ukrainian national instrumental music are mostly related to factors of geographical proximity, of natural extinction and administrative-repressive planting of alluvial and so-called “parallel” culture. Experiments on the instrumental traditions of Ukrainians, along with the autochthonous traditional instrumental repertoire, testify to the active functioning at the level of reception / ingrowth of works of other national origin. The interethnic and inter-genre transformation of the folk-instrumental style is connected with the spread of the Moscow, Polish, Romanian and Jewish intonation elements on the territory of the country. Touching the extremely complex and topical problems of archetypal traditional culture, interethnic relations of nations in the modern kaleidoscope of globalization processes, the article focuses on the negative (forced, administrative-aggressive absorption and destruction) and the positive (diversity, enrichment) interactions of the mentioned cultural elements. Characterizing from the positions mentioned here the main features of the ethnic sound ideal in the instrumental tradition of Ukrainians, the author defends its “European model” (tendency to cantilena sound of violin and flute ) as opposed to the type, which dominates the ethnosonic aesthetics of East – tremolo on one string. For the first time in these studies, the thesis is asserted that sounds that imitate the human voice or complement it predominate in Ukraine: flute cantilena, bandura-kobza and partly cymbal arpeggio, which differ significantly and fundamentally from the “Asian” coloristics of one-string tremolo. Conclusions. The final outcome of the study, about the cathartic function of traditional instrumentalism and musical culture in modern social-sublimation processes of human development and, conversely – about neglecting it as a manner to the complete destruction of human civilization as such, steers away from pessimism, inspiring hope for survival in the cataclysms of nature and society as a whole.

The main reasons for climate change which are explained in this article are as follows: -Climate pollution by gases with CO2 emission and Greenhouse Effect; Climate contamination of viruses with viruses from nature by animals or glaciers when thawing or produced in Laboratories; Induced Climate Change due to meteorological weapons with high intensity radio waves to produce rains, hurricanes and possible induction of earthquakes; Climate pollution by radiation due wars with irreversible consequences in the climate and Nuclear Winter; Climate Change due the explosion of missiles and atomic weapons in the oceans; Climate Change due the natural cyclical phases of the Earth affected by the cyclical variations of the Earth's magnetic field lines which can be affected by the severe cyclical activity of the sun due storms and sunspot because of the combustion that occurs inside the Sun which is due to the gravitational instabilities produced by the planets of the solar system, asteroids or the Comet Planet; Climate Change due to the invading Comet Planet into the solar system that affects with its gravitational field to the sun with solar storms and the planets with variation of the magnetic field lines affecting the climate, earthquakes and activation of volcanoes and indeed with the entry of many meteors and asteroids to the Earth; Climate change due to the Arm of God Allah explaining all the above reasons being more evident in times of Tribulation. The specific methods and devices of the control and manipulation of the population (inclusive to induce to the concupiscence) in times of new world order (Universal Big Brother Program for the control of human in the Earth) and possible Tribulation are explained in this article: Surveillance programs with all technological devices and networks used by humans systematic methods of persuasive manipulation and indoctrination used by some zombie humans and dark; Through the subjugation of employees and humans (inclusive children teaching them how to manipulate in the same style of the zombies); By enterprises or dark groups so that employees make manipulation games with details (investing work time to play like children) receiving bribes, money or labor benefits or with possible retaliation if they do not obey; Surveillance programs in living and working places with covert technological cameras, coincidence games, activities, plans and events programmed in sequence (inclusive pyrotechnic sounds in sequence); Covert numbers and words (in identification documents, cards, car plates, devices used by humans); Encrypted, hidden codes or small phrases and numbers not visible to the naked eye concealed in objects; Covert words in the speech of zombie humans and from multimedia and channels of traditional technological devices through movies, programs and even newscasts and inclusive to speak in code with the humans who know the surveillance programs and worst using in those channels and programs derogatory words against the Nazarenes (in the style of Nazism with the Jews) in complicity of close acquaintances, zombies and dark who participate profiting from the system for the vile metal; By means of an epidemic and viruses produced in laboratories creating epidemics and chaos in the Earth for the reduction and control of the population; Through strict restrictions and reduction of freedoms; Confinement with subsequent compulsory vaccination to be able to access human rights such as the right to work and the right to travel (with the cover-up of the respective organizations responsibles for it: OIT OMT), without responsibility of the authorities in charge of vaccination worldwide (OMS) for the short or long term counterproductive effects of the vaccinated population due to the risk with the liquid of the vaccines by interfering with the DNA and RNA of the population; Possible marking and elimination of many humans (possibility of control of the pulmonary alveoly or induction controlled of diseases or pain due a virus by means of chips introduced in humans); Control of humans by the introduction of liquid and solid chips in humans (liquid crystals that crystallize in the organism and settle in neurons and receive ultrasonic waves of very low frequency) (possibly inserted from vaccines in global epidemiological programs for population control or invasive medical examination when this is not necessary as a figurative example of review of a patient with a sore in the mouth and introduction of the whole hand in the throat or prostate examination or specific injections to certain objective humans or Nazarenes who have opened the matrix of the darks and the elite that controls the humans in the Earth) in times of epidemic in medical examinations and treatments in hospitals (false medical negligence with breach of the medical oath of the use of Medicine for human good). The possible liquid and solid chips introduced into the human being can be used for mind reading (telepath) and thought induction (double direction: sending and receiving messages in the style of Stephen Hawking and the style of the technology already used in sending probes into space and to the moon) and possible human marking with surveillance program and the possible creation of zombie humans. Humans who have the mind reader chip installed can speak without speaking (the dumb speak playing like the miracles of Jesus Christ). It is possible to detect if the humans who have the mental reading chip installed have psychological alterations without going to a doctor. It is possible to know if humans are good or bad without seeing their actions and without going to a priest. In this way, human beings with the chip installed can be sanctioned before they do somewhat wrong (simply because it is known to be thinking). This can be used to know the fidelity to a political guideline or direction (this is known by the strong rumor in communist countries that already have the technology to detect the fidelity to the political party and possibly this is through this chip installed in the human being and mind reading). The inserted chip can also perform thought induction: this is possibly the apocalyptic mark mentioned in the apocalypse because many humans will perform sins or concupiscence induced and not naturally. Then, this will most probably activate the Wrath of God, the seals, and the trumpets of the apocalypse. It surprises me that actually the OMS wants to bring the vaccination program to Africa when in Africa there are not many dead by the epidemy (possibly for the control and reduction of the population will be in all the Earth). Afterward, the OMS mentioned that wants to insert a manufacturing center of vaccines in many countries and inclusive vigilance programs (possibly for the control and reduction of the population will be effective at the local level). But, what the OMS needs to mention is that it is necessary to eliminate the laboratories of virus creation and not create more vaccine laboratories. Humans do not want more vaccine and injections and laboratories for the creation of vaccines but the elimination of virus laboratories which are most probably used for for the control and reduction of the population: thus, the reason for spreading a virus created in a laboratoy across the Earth is evident: population reduction and control of humanity in preparation for a global elite program (new world order or program 2030 for the control of the dark and of the elite; Connection of covert surveillance cameras (in living and working places) with channels of traditional technological devices through movies, programs and even newscasts (including newscasts that usually make signs of dumb and deaf to those who have already discovered them) used by the dark with the respective programs and in addition, to monitor and tracing to verify the induction to concupiscence through mental reading (chips in humans) and surveillance cameras on line in the best style of James Bond espionage movies (including control of faces, pupils, irises, reflections, details and diseases); Games of judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes (playing at being gods) and also profiting from the vile metal through the system and contributing to the persecution of the Nazarenes; Fake judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes because many of these sins have been induced with technology due the possible induction of thoughts by the liquid cristal settle in neurons and have not been natural (dark inducing sin through technology and playing gods to induce evil and destruction of intimacy and privacy even in the mind of the human being); Retaliation to those who report the surveillance and manipulation programs and marking of humans for mind reading (telepathy) and thought induction (making them sick sending to the hospitals or removing them); Digital identification plan and digital money to do digital control and avoid conflict and protests of marked and Nazarenes in surveillance programs who discover that there is no privacy in their documents and inclusive in theirs mind (telepathy: mind reading and thought induction: artificial intelligence): it surprises that EU mention that has a digital plan for europeans for digital control on line. But, before the epidemy, Europe and the world advanced a lot in technology and the data of humans are digitally in hospitals and institutes that humans need. After, the EU mentions artificial intelligence for human beings. Then and in vaccination and epidemy time, it is possible that the digital control is a new digital control with artifitial intelligence and with possible chips installed in the human being (possibly already installed in many human beings); Games of events and coincidences to cause accidents or conflicts in the life of marked, target or Nazarenes (change games of victim to accused by companies that regulate the order with subsequent rectification of the game made by the same companies when the Nazarenes claim); Games of recognition of the identity of human beings (in the style of the movie Unknown) by enterprises and service stations which are necessary for the daily movement of human beings creating conflicts of manipulation and stress in the marked or Nazarenes Salary payment games (payment of wages with dinners and game of check payment) creating manipulation conflicts and stress in the life of marked, target or Nazarenes Programmed plans of theft and scams of enterprises and humans even knowing of the surveillance cameras for the control of the marked, target or Nazarenes. Then, there is severe control of human beings in their daily activities to verify the follow-up of the matrix and darks that plan situations of concupiscence in the human being. Besides, this is occurring in coincidence with an accelerated new world order program and possible tribulation times and possibly already with the installation of the apocalyptic mark (possible chips introduced in the human being for mind reading and thought induction to induce concupiscence) in humans mentioned in the apocalypse for dark control of humans. The global forms of the severe manipulation and population control in times of new world order and Tribulation are explained in this article are as follows: By increasing taxes; Through armed conflicts and wars create discord, wars and chaos between countries (often bordering countries with the same origins and with the same culture: Russia and Ukraine: war motivated by US OTAN EU): To later usurp its resources (oil energy resource: US Iraq Kuwait); To later control them politically and economically (US Iraq Kuwait) and when these power or developed countries cannot control or usurp their resources, they begin to block them economically (Russia in the war between Russia and Ukraine where besides developed countries influence in the war by printing additional money to use for the war causing imbalance and global economic crisis instead of looking for ways to avoid it) in order to cause chaos and economic crisis with the knowledge and complicity of the world organizations responsible (OEA ONU) and make the population believe that the cause of the economic crisis is the government in power. However, some countries have resisted these blockades (Cuba Venezuela Nicaragua Russia China) and managed to show that it is possible to have governments independent of the control of these powers or countries that believe they own the Earth; To put rulers (governing) of interest in the same countries in conflict; To control them using the pretext of placing military bases in the countries in conflict (NATO OTAN: military bases in some European countries, US military bases: in some South American countries and some countries of Europe). In addition, this is preferable to reduce military bases in other countries and reduction of nuclear weapons, and use the financial resources for the reduction of inequity and poverty on the Earth. Thus, the organizations responsible for the proliferation of nuclear weapons (OIEA) have played an ineffective and passive (cover-up) role, which has caused the risk of a third nuclear world war to be imminent); Through the war against terror: however and actually, this is a false speech used to point to countries that oppose the control or directive of the powers and that have a culture or political structure different from that of the powers and later make conflict and war to later control them or usurp their resources (some Arab and Muslim countries, for example, US, Irak, Lybia and blaming an entire country for terrorism and occupying for years (Afganistán)). In this way and actually, some countries have developed nuclear weapons (North Korea, Iran) to protect themselves in some way and thus, the same thing does not happen to them as to the countries mentioned above (Irak, Lybia) and that have been destroyed with the false discourse of the war against terror. In this way, the best thing is to have good relations with all the countries of the Earth which are again summed in the Bible [1] in a message: Love your brother (all human beings) as yourself! (Mt.22-39) (and not to go around the Earth pointing out terrorists to any country that opposes its guidelines). Therefore, it is possible to reduce the economic resources for the war against terror which can be used to reduce poverty and inequity in human beings; Through the war against drugs: there are many other substances and products consumed by humans that can be harmful to health and that are allowed and have not become a vice (when something is forbidden: this increases the interest in obtaining it explained from the beginning of creation in Genesis [1]: an apple from the tree of good and evil in the garden of Eden: Adam and Eve). In addition, many countries have allowed the use of certain types of drugs for medical purposes (Uruguay, Bolivia) where drug use has gone unnoticed in these countries; Through religión: with a structure of religion that tries to control the population through a guideline and speeches that obey the Vatican and the actual governments of each country (which is evident when there are countries such as Nicaragua that do not follow a guideline of the church and the elite and then, the religion surprisingly actively intervenes in politics): the conclusion is reached and to which many humans have reached, that religion is a power most actually used (along with political and economic power); Through political power by means of the false argument used by politicians to reduce inequity and poverty: where a large amount of resources and money have been allocated to the political powers and rulers of many countries for centuries by the respective organizations responsable (FMI BM) without any results and in many countries poverty and inequity have increased. Besides, the bureaucracy is a structure of order and rules of management and administration used within the governments of each country that contribute to the inefficiency and manipulation of the required procedures in human life that ultimately affect the life of each human being when they require formalities that end up being complicated and time-consuming. Then, this power structure in politics, economics, and religion for the control of the population is ineffective and obeys the interests of the dark who control humans on the Earth, and is used ineffectively by the rulers (governing) of the countries who come to power precisely with the false discourse of reducing poverty and inequity; Through the pretext of climate change: severe climate change due to the emission of CO2 and the greenhouse effect is a complete fallacy. The world organizations involved with the climate (ONU) try to make humanity believe that this is the reason for the severe climatic changes that the human being has experienced on the Earth to obtain economic resources and avoid mentioning God in control of the Earth and course the climate and to avoid mentioning the Omnipotence of God [1] in the control of the Earth and the climate: the severe climate change is frequently due to solar storms and variations in the magnetic field lines of the Earth because of gravitational variations in the solar system or due to the entry of an asteroid or Comet Planet what is controlled and all the Universe by God. Therefore, the climate change is controlled by the Eternal God (wich is explained in the Bibles with a lot of examples with Moses, Josue, Hezekiah) and thus, this is better to use the resources and money for so-called climate change to reduce poverty and inequity in the Earth and increase equity in humans: Human Beings must not believe everything said by the organizations and individuals that control the humans in the Earth and that obey the directions imposed within the matrix triangle of control of the Earth; Through the sport by means of the persuasive manipulation of observers or attendees at sporting events through commercials programs, commentators (hidden words and numbers in speech), players participating in the match: with gestures or sequence of plays, numbers, words or details in the players uniform, referees (make decisión of plays in favor of a team purposely: false bad arbitration) or leading organizers committing sports corruption not applying the rules or discriminating players (Serbian, Russian and Belarusian tennis players at tennis competitions due to some tennis organizations) or teams (Russian sports clubs and inclusive the Russian national team due FIFA decision) at convenience. Besides, when there are countries in conflict or war: instead of uniting the countries in conflict by means of the sport, the respective organizations (FIFA UEFA) discriminate and increase the conflict: discriminating and not allowing the participation of tennis players (including top tennis players), Football Countries and Sport Clubs in international competitions for reasons of restrictions due to the epidemic, conflict or war (including countries that organized previous World Cups: Russia) where the interest, quality and love for this sport has increased and that must be used to unite human beings and countries and not to not allow them to participate: which increases the division and conflict between countries or humans: This is important to highlight and value the position of the ATP for deciding that the ATP does not agree that athletes from certain countries (Russia and Belarus) cannot participate in international tournaments stating that this is against the principles of merit and non-discrimination: then, this is tremendously criticizable that the organization responsible of Football (FIFA UEFA) participates in armed conflicts or war with discriminatory decisions in Football, increasing the war by not allowing countries in conflict to participate in World Cup of Football: FIFA slogan of no to racism and some form of discrimination is a complete farce and used for convenience and interest (in the same style of all the other organizations (mainly ONU, OEA, FMI, BM, VATICAN) that control humans and that in 2000 years of the coming of the Envoy of God have not been able to solve iniquity and poverty), discrimination that has been evident in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine: Football is the main sport in the Earth and it is the one that can unite human beings the most and should be used as a source of union and not división; Through education: where this is used by many countries to induce and manipulate their inhabitants in a certain political direction through the dissemination of knowledge and even the textbooks of the students: many underdeveloped countries have increased illiteracy and degradation in education because this favors the politicians of the country's government: having an ignorant people who do not see what they do with the country's money and who cannot criticize them: the greatness of peoples depends on the education that gives the independence of individuals who are the ones that make the country advance; Through world organizations to control countries: ONU, OEA, Vatican, OTAN, UE: many countries have to obey the guidelines of these organizations, which often do not respond to the needs of the citizens of each country: many institutions in the countries must obey the organizations (the Vatican for the religion) in a rigid way, which is often not in accordance with the situation of the country's citizens, who often need new variants or guidelines (some organizations can cause chaos, conflict or war as for example the war of Russia with Ucrania where the possible annexation of Ucrania to the OTAN and UE is one of the reasons for the war between these two countries. Therefore, there would be no war between these two countries where without those organizations); Through world organizations of espionage (CIA, FBI, KGB, Gestapo, SS): employing persuasive interference in the countries and rulers of some undeveloped countries (some South America and Center America countries and some European, Asia and Africa countries) with the objective of the power countries of control, manipulate or destabilize countries and inclusive simple humans (using the personal data of thousands of people around the world). Through the control and intervention of the Creator God Allah which is necessary and essential in times of Tribulation at the time timely (Holy Bible: Apoc. 6 Apoc. 8:6 Apoc. 5 Apoc. 7 Apoc. 21) due to everything mentioned in this scientific research respect to the control and manipulation of the population (regarding the increase of inequity, discord, and evil among humans) which is not following the guideline given by the envoy of God 2000 years ago: Jesus Christ. Keywords: God, Allah, Jesuchrist, Bible, Creator, Education, Climate change, Population Control, Climate Pollution, Gases CO2, Greenhouse Effect, Epidemic, Viruses, Laboratory, Zombies, Dark, Elite, new world order, OMS, ONU, OEA, Vatican, OTAN, UE, FMI, BM, OIT, OMT, Meteorological weapons, Haarp, Sura, Wars, Sport, Religion, Radiation, Nuclear Winter, Sun, Magnetic field lines, Storms, Asteroids, Comet Planet, Volcanoes, Climate Catastrophies, Tribulation, Taxes, Terror, Drugs, Organizations, Inequity, Poverty, Manipulation, Indoctrination, Technological Devices, Covert technological devices, networks, Newscasts, Surveillance programs, Big Brother Program, Digital Identification Plan, Digital Money, Covert numbers and covert words, Encrypted, Hidden codes or small phrases not visible to the naked eye, Covert words in the speech of zombie humans in multimedia and traditional technological devices, Nazism, Jews, Coincidence games, Activities, Plans, Events Programmed in sequence, Pyrotechnic sounds in sequence, Games of events and coincidences to cause accidents or conflicts, Games of judgments of sin against humans and Nazarenes, Games of recognition of the identity of human beings, Unknown, Companies, Service stations, Salary payment games, Programmed plans of theft and scams of companies and enterprises, Retaliation, Marking, Reduction, False medical negligence, Medical oath, Medicine, Liquid and solid chips in humans, Liquid crystals, Neurons, Ultrasonic waves, Vaccines, Global epidemiological programs, Matrix, Dark, Elite, Mind Reading, Telepath, Thought induction, Apocalipse, Wrath of God.

We are the Center for Surgical Health (CSH), an academic community partnership that supports, educates, and advocates for vulnerable Philadelphians with surgical diseases, founded in 2016 by Dr. Jon B. Morris, a leader in surgical education and a general surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Alan Herbst, a current third-year Penn general surgery resident. At the time, Dr. Morris, raised in a Reform Jewish household, had been participating in an RCIA Program to convert to Catholicism. The mission of providing surgery to uninsured patients, primarily undocumented individuals, by helping them obtain insurance and see Penn providers was seen by Dr. Morris as a form of Catholic charity, which he has continued to remain dedicated to as his faith in Jesus Christ has deepened. Dr. Herbst, now Associate Director of Clinics for the CSH, recalls working with Dr. Morris as a sub-intern during his conversion, beginning with passion and a neon poster board inviting people to “See the Surgeon.” Since that time, the CSH has grown from an organization with 10 volunteers, called “personal patient navigators,” who provide insurance support and advocacy at every step of the perioperative continuum, to one with over 50, who have now seen 156 patients and assisted in providing 49 needed procedures. Much of this growth has been brought about through the dedication and vision of Dr. Matthew Goldshore, the Deputy Director of the CSH and a fifth-year Penn general surgery resident, as well as Dr. Carrie Z. Morales, Associate Deputy Director of the CSH and a recent Perelman School of Medicine graduate. Through their leadership, and the talent and commitment of other members of the CSH board, overseen by Director Dr. Morris, the CSH now has policy and research divisions, a surgical equity curriculum, and continues to develop new ways of providing better care.

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. Conjoining the future-oriented performative mode of disidentification and the forking of the past and the present by ghostly performances, disidentificatory ghostly performances enable not only people of colour but also particularly diasporic populations of colour to challenge racial chains of signification and orchestrate future-oriented visions, where time is of the most compassion, at its utmost capacity.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–168.Axel, Brian Keith. “Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of Study.” History and Anthropology 9.4 (1996): 415–443.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Bush, Christopher. “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” Representations 99.1 (2007): 74–98. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. 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Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons.” Social Text 31.3 (2013): 95–110.Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “Riot Grrrl, Race, and Revival.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22.2–3 (2012): 173–196. Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8.1 (2005): 109–125.Sharma, Preeti, et al. “Nail File: A Study of Nail Salon Workers and Industry in the United States.” UCLA Labor Center and California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, 2018.Shimizu, Celine Parrenas. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Shomura, Chad. “Object Theory and Asian American Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. 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Cities have long been important sites of collective memory. In this paper, I highlight the ritual and memorial functions of cities by focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed by earthquake, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains. By examining the productive relationships between art, landscape and collective memory, I consider how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place, and, in some cases, to forgetting. To address the relationship between memorial objects and the articulation of communities from this unique vantage point, a significant part of my analysis compares memorial initiatives both in and around the old site on which Gibellina once stood. More specifically, my paper compares the aesthetic similarities between the Italian artist Alberto Burri’s design for a large concrete overlay of the city’s remains, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by the American architect Peter Eisenman. To reveal the distinctiveness of Burri’s design in relation to Eisenman’s work and the rich commentaries that have been produced in its name, and therefore to highlight the specificity of their relationship, I extend my comparison to more recent attempts at rebuilding Gibellina in the image of a “frontier city of art” (“Museum Network Belicina”).Broadly speaking, this paper is framed by a series of observations concerning the role that landscape plays in the construction or naturalization of collective identity, and by a further attempt at mapping the bonds that tend to be shared among members of particular communities in any given circumstance. To organize my thoughts in this area, I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of landscape as “a medium of exchange,” in other words, as an artistic practice that galvanizes nature for the purpose of naturalizing culture and its relations of power (5). While the terms of landscape art may in turn be described as “complicated,” “mutual” and marked by “ambivalence,” as Mitchell himself suggests, I would further argue that the artist’s sought-after result will, in almost every case, be to unify the visual and the discursive fields through an ideological operation that engenders, reinforces, and, perhaps also mystifies the constituents of community in general (9). From this perspective, landscape represents a crucial if unavoidable materialization both of community and collective memory.Conflicting viewpoints about this formation are undoubtedly present in the literature. For instance, in describing the effects of this operation, Mitchell, to use one example, will suggest that landscape as a mode of creation unfolds in ways that are similar to that of a dream, or that the materialization of landscape art is in accordance with the promise of “emancipation” that dreams inscribe into imaginaries (12). During the course of investigating and overturning the premise of Mitchell’s claim through a number of writers and commentators, I conclude my paper by turning to a famous work on the inoperative community by Jean-Luc Nancy. This work is especially useful for bringing clarity for understanding what is lost in the efforts by Gibellina’s residents to reconstruct a new city adjacent to the old, and therefore to emancipate themselves from their destructive past. By emphasizing the significance of acknowledging death for the regeneration and durability of communities and their material urban life, I suggest that the wishes of Gibellina’s residents have resulted in an environment for memory and memorialization despite apparent wishes to the contrary. In my reference to Nancy’s metaphor of ‘inoperativity’, therefore, I suggest that the community to emerge from Gibellina’s disaster is, in a sense, yet to come.Figure 1. The “Cretto di Burri” by Alberto Burri (1984-1989). Creative Commons.The old city of Gibellina was a township of Arabic and Medieval origins located southwest of Palermo in the heart of Sicily’s Belice valley. In January 1968, the region experienced a series of earthquakes as it had before. This time, however, the strongest among them provoked a rupture that within moments led to the complete destruction of towns and villages, and to the death of nearly 400 inhabitants. “From a seismological point of view,” as Susan Hough and Roger Bilham write, the towns and villages of the Belice valley were at this time “disasters in the making” (87). Maligned by a particular configuration of geological fault lines, the fragile structures along the surface of the valley were almost certain to be destroyed at some point in their lifetime. In 1968, after the largest disaster in recent history, the surviving inhabitants of the dilapidated urban centres were moved to the squalor conditions of displacement camps, in which many lived without permanent housing into the 1970s. While some of the smaller communities opted to rebuild, a number of the larger townships made the decision to move altogether. In 1971, a new settlement was created in Gibellina’s name, just eighteen kilometres west of the ruin.Since that time, I claim that a pattern of memory and forgetting has developed in the space between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. For instance, the old city of Gibellina underwent a dramatic refurbishment in the 1980s when an internationally renowned Italian sculptor, Alberto Burri, was invited by the city to build a large concrete structure directly on top of the city’s remains. As depicted in Figure One, the artist moulded the destroyed buildings into blocks of smooth concrete surfaces. Standing roughly at human scale, Burri divided these stone slabs, or stelae, in such a way as to retain the lineaments of Gibellina’s medieval streets. Although unfinished and abandoned by the artist due to lack of funds, the tomb of this destroyed city has since become both an artistic oddity and a permanent fixture on the Sicilian landscape. As Elisebha Fabienne and Platzer write,if an ancient inhabitant of Gibellina walks in the inside of the Cretto, he is able to recognise the topic position of his house, but he is also forced by the Verfremdung [alienting effect] of the topical elements to distance himself from the past, to infer new information. (75)According to this assessment, the work’s intrinsic merit appears to be in Burri’s effort to forge a link between a shared memory of the city’s past, and the potential for that memory to fortify the imagination towards a future. In spatial terms, the merit of the work lies in preserving the skeletal imprint of the urban landscape in order to retain a semblance of this once vibrant and living community. Andrea Simitch and Val Warke appear to corroborate this hypothesis. They suggest that while Burri’s structure includes a specific imprint or reference point of the city’s remains, “embedded within the masses that construct the ghosted streets is the physical detritus of imagined narratives” (61). In other words, Simitch and Warke maintain that by using the archival or preserving function to communicate a ritual practice, Burri’s Cretto is intended to infuse the forgotten urban space of old Gibellina with a promise that it will eventually be found and therefore remembered. This promise is met, in turn, by the invitation for visitors to stroll through the hallowed interior of Gibellina as they would any other city. In this sense, the Cretto invites a plurality of narratives and meanings depending on the visitor at hand. In the absence of guidance or interruption, the hope appears to be that visitors will gain an experience of the place that is both familiar and disturbing.But there is a hidden dimension to this promise that the authors above do not explore in sufficient detail. For instance, Nigel Clark analyzes the way in which Burri has insisted upon “confronting us with the stark absence of life where once there was vitality,” a confrontation by the artist that is materialized by “cavernous wounds” (83). On this basis, by interpreting the promise of memory that others have discussed in terms of a warning about the longevity or durability of the built environment, Clark writes that Burri’s Cretto represents “an assertion of the forces of earth that have not been eclipsed by other forms of endangerment” (83). The implication of this particular forewarning is that “the precariousness of human settlement” is guaranteed by a non-human world that insists upon the relentless force of erasure (83). On the other hand, I would argue that Clark’s insistence upon situating the Cretto in relation to the natural forces of destruction ultimately represents a narrowing of perspective on Burri’s work. Significantly, by citing Burri’s choice of supposedly abstracted shapes made from lifeless concrete, Clark reduces the geographical intervention of the artist to “a paradigm of modernist austerity” (82). From Clark’s perspective, the overture to Modernism is meant to highlight Burri’s attempt at pairing the scale and proportion of the work with an effort to convey a sense of purity through abstraction. However, while some interpretations of Burri’s Cretto may be dependent upon its allusion to such Modernist formalism, it should also be recognized that the specific concerns raised by Gibellina go significantly beyond these equivocations.In fact, one crucial element of Burri’s artistic process that is not recognized by Clark is his investment in the American land art movement, which at the time of Burri’s design for Gibellina was led by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and other prominent artists in the United States. Burri’s debt to this movement can be detected by his gradual shift towards landscape throughout his career, and by his eventual break from the enclosed and constrained space of the gallery. On this basis, the crumbling city design at Gibellina obliterates the boundaries as to what constitutes a work of art in relation to the land it occupies, and this, in turn, throws into question the specific criteria that we use to assess its value or artistic merit. In an important way, land art and landscape in general forces us to rethink the relationship between art and community in unparalleled ways. To put it another way, if Clark’s overriding concern for that which lies beneath the surface allows us to consider the importance of relationships between memory, forgetting, and erasure, I argue that Burri’s concern with the surface and the ground make it clear that projects such as the Gibellina Cretto might be better paired with memorial sites that deal in architecture.Figure 2. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Berlin Holocaust Memorial, by Peter Eisenman. Photograph courtesy of the author.A useful comparison in this regard is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin. For one, not only is Eisenman’s site composed of a similar exterior of concrete stelae, those concrete blocks resembling gravestones, but it has also been routinely scorned for the same reasons that Clark raised against Burri as mentioned above. To put it another way, while visitors may be struck by the memorial’s haunting and inspirational configuration of voids, some notable commentators, including the venerable James E. Young, have insinuated that the site signifies a restoration of the monument, derived as it is from a modernist architecture in which recuperation and amnesia are at play with each other (184-224). A more sympathetic reading of Eisenman’s memorial might point to the uniquely architectural vision he held for cultural memory. With Adrian Parr for instance, we find that the traumatic memory of the Holocaust can be effectively transposed through the virtual content of the imagination as personified by visitors to Eisenman’s memorial. That is, by attending to the atrocities of the past, Parr claims that we need not be exhausted by the overwhelming sense of destruction that the memorial site brings to the literal surface. Rather, we might benefit more from considering the event of destruction as but one aspect of the spatial experience of the place to which it is dedicated—an experience that must be open-ended by design. By using the topographical lens that Parr, taking several pages from Gilles Deleuze, describes as “intensive,” I argue that Eisenman’s design is unique for its explicit encouragement to be both creative and present simultaneously (158).On this account, Parr makes the compelling assertion that memorial culture facilitates an epistemic rupture or “break,” that that it reveals an opportunity to restore the potential for using the place occupied by memory as a starting point for effecting social change (3). Parr writes that “memorial culture is utopian memory thinking”—a defining slogan, to be sure, but one with which the author hopes will re-establish the link between memory and the force of life, and, in the process, to recognize the energetic resources that remain concealed by the traditional narratives of memorialization (3). Stefano Corbo corroborates Parr’s assertion by pointing to Eisenman’s efforts in the 1980s to supplement formal concerns with archaeological perspectives, and therefore to develop a theory whereby architecture presages a “deep structure,” in which the artistry or attempt at formal innovation ultimately rests on “a process of invention” itself (41). To accomplish this aim, a specific reference should be made to an early period in Eisenman’s career, in which the architect turned to conceptual issues as opposed to the demands of materiality, and more significantly, to a critical rethinking of site-specific engagement (Bedard). Included in this turn was a willingness on Eisenman’s part to explore the layered and textured history of cities, as well as the linguistic or deconstructive relationships that exist between the ground and the trace.The interdisciplinary complexity of Eisenman’s approach is one that responds to the dominance of architectural form, and it therefore mirrors, as Corbo writes, a delicate interplay between “presence and absence, permanence and loss” (44). The city of Berlin with its cultural memory thus evinces a sort of tectonic rupture and collision upon its surfaces, but a rupture that both runs parallel and opposite to the natural disaster that engulfed Gibellina in 1968. Returning to Parr’s demand that we begin to (re)assert the power of virtual and imaginative space, I argue that Eisenman’s memorial design may be better appreciated for its ability to situate the city itself in relation to competing terms of artistic practice. That is, if Eisenman’s efforts indicate a softening “of the boundary between architecture and the landscape,” to quote Tomà Berlanda, the Holocaust Memorial might in turn be a productive counterpoint in the task of working through the specificity of Burri’s design and the meaning with which it has since been attached (2).Burri’s Cretto raises a number of questions for this hypothesis, as with the Cretto we find a displacement of the constitutive process that writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell describe above in relation to the generative potential of community. Undoubtedly, the imperative to unify is present in the Cretto’s aesthetic presentation, as the concrete surfaces maintain the capacity to reflect the light of the sun against a wide green earth that stretches beyond the visitor’s horizon. On the other hand, while Mitchell, along with Parr and other commentators might opt to insist upon a deeper correlation between the unifying function of the landscape and the forces of life, intensity, or desire, I would only reiterate that Burri’s design is ultimately based on establishing a meaningful relationship with death, not life, and he is consequently focused on the much less spectacular mission of providing solutions as to what the remains should become in the aftermath of total destruction. If there is an intensity to speak of here, it is a maligned intensity, and an intensity that can only be established through relation.Figure 3. The “Porta del Belice” by Pietro Consagra (2014). Wiki Commons.If Burri’s Cretto were measured by the criteria that are variously described by Mitchell and others, the effects that the landscape produces would have necessarily to account for an expression of desire for emancipation from death. However, in a significant departure from Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, Burri’s design by itself is marked by a throughout absence of any expression of desire for emancipation as such. Indeed, finding such a promised emancipatory narrative would require one to cast their gaze away from the Cretto altogether, and towards a nearby urban center that has supposedly triumphed over the very need for a memory culture at all. This urban center is none other than Gibellina Nuova. As a point in fact, the settlers of Gibellina Nuova did insist upon emancipating themselves from their destructive past. In 1971, the city planners and governors of Gibellina Nuova made efforts to attract contemporary Italian artists and architects, to design and build a series of commemorative structures, and ultimately to make the settlement into a “città di frontiera dell’arte”—a frontier city of art (“Museum Network Belicina”). With the potential for rejuvenation just a stone’s throw away from the original city, the former inhabitants appear to have become immediately invested in the sort of utopian potential that would make its architectural wonders capable of transgressing the line that perennially divides art from community and from the living world. Rivalled only by the refurbishment of Marfa, Texas, which in the last twenty years has become a shrine to minimalist sculpture, the edifices at Gibellina Nuova have been authored by some of Italy’s better-known mid-century artists and architects, including Ludovico Quaroni, Vitorrio Gregotti, and, most notably, Pietro Consagra, whose ‘Porta del Belice’ (Figure Two) has become the most iconic urban fixture of the new urban designs. With the hopes of becoming a sort of “open-air museum” in which to attract international visitors, the city is now in possession of an exceedingly large number of public memorials and avant-garde buildings in various states of decay and disrepair (Bileddo). Predictably, this museological distinction has become a curse in many ways. Some commentators have argued that the obsession among city planners to create a “laboratory of art and architecture” has led in fact to an urban center of monstrous proportions: a city space that can only be described as “elliptical and spinning” (Bileddo). Whereas Gibellina Nuova was supposed to represent a rebalancing of the forces of life in relation to the funereal themes of the Cretto, the robust initiatives of the 1980s have instead produced an egregious lack of cohesiveness, a severed link to Sicilian culture, and a stark erasure of the distinctive traditions of the Belice valley.On the other hand, this experiment in urban design has been reduced to a venerable time capsule of 1970s Italian sculpture, an archive that persists but in constant disrepair. More significantly, however, the city’s failure to deliver on its many promises raises important questions about the ritual and memorial functions of urban space in general, of what specific relationships need to be forged between the history of a place and its architectural presentation, and the ways in which memorials come to reflect, privilege or convoke particular values over those of others. As Elisebha Fabienne Platzer writes, “Gibellina portrays its future in order to forget,” as “its faith in contemporary art is precisely a reaction to death,” or, more specifically, to its effacement (73). If the various pastiche designs of the city’s buildings and ritual edifices fail to stand the measure of time, I claim that it is not simply because they are gaudy reminders of a time best forgotten, but rather because they signify the restless hunt for resolution among inhabitants of this still-unsettled community.Whereas Burri’s Cretto activates a process of mourning and working-through that proves to be unresolvable and yet necessary, the city of Gibellina Nuova operates instead by neutralizing and dividing this process. Taken as a whole, the irreparable relationship between the two sites offers competing images of the relation between place and community. From the time of its division by earthquake if not sooner, the inhabitants of Gibellina became an “inoperative” community in the same way that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has famously described. In the specific hopes of uncovering the motives of Burri and those of the designers and architects of Gibellina Nuova, I argue that Nancy uses the terms of inoperability as a makeshift solution for the persistent rootedness of communities in an atomized metaphysics for which the relationality between subjects is an abiding problem. Nancy defines community on the basis of its relational content alone, and for this reason he is able to make the claim that death itself should be a necessary moment of its articulation. Nancy writes that “community has not taken place,” as beyond “what society has crushed or lost, it is something that happens to us in the form of a question, waiting, event or imperative” (11).Though Nancy is attempting to provide his own interpretation of the impervious dialectic between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between “community” and “society,” the substance of his assertion can be brought into a critical reading of Gibellina’s abiding problem of its formations of collective memory in the aftermath of destruction. For instance, it might be argued that if we leave the experience of loss aside, we can perhaps begin to acknowledge that communities are transformed through complex interactions for which their inert physicality provides but one important indication. While “old” Gibellina was not lost in a day, Gibellina Nuova was not created in an instant. For Nancy, it would rather be the case that “death is indissociable from community, and that it is through death that the community reveals itself” (14). Given this claim, while Gibellina Nuova has undoubtedly been shaped and reconstituted by the architecture of the future and the desire to forget, it could equally be argued that this very architecture shares in a reciprocal exchange with the Cretto, a circuit of memory that inadvertently houses an archive of the city’s destructive past. As the community comes into being through resistance, entropy, possibility and reparation, the city landscape provides some clues regarding the trace of this activity as left upon its ground.ReferencesBedard, Jean-Francois, ed. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988. New York: Rizzoli Publishing, 1994.Berlanda, Tomà. Architectural Topographies: A Graphic Lexicon of How Buildings Touch the Ground. 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