among friends

As in “Emmett Till times Anne Frank.” Read the rest of this entry »

Get Involved! – March 26th

11:00 AM – 4:00 PM – Comfort Station, Nao Bustamante
Campus Center Lobby

5:30 PM – 7:00 PM – E.T.: A Performance Shoot, William Pope.L
Ryan Student Center/Gym
Spots are limited; first-come, first-served. To attend the performance, please arrive a half hour in advance at Ryan Gymnasium.

7:00 PM – 8:00 PM – Open Pizza Dinner
CPGC Café, Stokes Hall

8:00 PM – 10:00 PM – Concluding Roundtable Discussion
Stokes Auditorium
Presentations from among friends artists and students recapping the week’s events.

10:00 PM – ?? – among friends / ”Remaking Rumours” Afterparty, Jen Delos Reyes
Lunt Basement
Performances by musicians involved in the “Remaking Rumours” project.

When John first told me about William Pope.L’s idea of mashing and contrasting E.T. and Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was brutally lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman, I thought it was interesting. I was not prepared for the anger and hurt unleashed by E.T.², the mash-up of the documentary The Murder of Emmett Till with the movie E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, projected onto one screen in Ryan Gym.

The discussion afterwards and the Conversations du Jour the next day made me realize how far my ignorance goes. E.T.² stirred up extreme emotions: voices were raised, a person cried, and I simply had not foreseen it. There are some things that I just don’t get, and that upsets me.

Some information about our upcoming event, as recently posted on the Haverford GO! boards:

In ET^2, we will trace the stories of two E.T. figures: Spielberg’s fictional E.T., who reached te American consciousness in 1982, and real life Emmett Till, whose violent death by lynching shocked the American consciousness in 1955. Although at first their two stories may seem entirely without connection, upon closer inspection the emotions that define these narratives draw them together.

Read the rest of this entry »

ET and Emmett Till. Alienation and alienation. These themes will be central to Pope.L’s performance in March. Ever since our presentation on Wednesday, I’ve been thinking about the ability of images to connect us with a historic moment. Few pictures are more potent than the horrifying image of Emmett’s brutalized face. The now famous photograph galvanized an entire nation to act in outrage at the atrocities of first Emmett’s death and then his murderer’s acquittal. Time magazine recently ran an article showing a series of images depicting the civil rights movement, culminating in the election of Barack Obama. The first image of this series was a smiling picture of a Emmett Till. The narrative of images spanning Till’s own story—from innocence to transformed mutilation and death—carry enormous symbolic weight. They remind us both of the successes of the civil rights movement, as well as the sordid history from which our country is still recovering. Read the rest of this entry »