The Generation Edition
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We are proud to present the Generation Edition of FrameWorks: A Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Interdisciplinary Humanities. This is our 5th issue.
Who knows if half a decade of the FrameWorks program constitutes an actual milestone, or if just feels like one because the last half a decade has been so momentous. We’ve been awash in events and developments that continue to be unprecedented, world-changing, catastrophic, unparalleled, cataclysmic. Superlatives once reserved for the nigh-unimaginable are now thrown about with alacrity. We live in a post-hyperbolic age.
This is the era that FrameWorks Fellows have had to navigate in their teens and early twenties. These are formative years that will, in some large measure, come to define their outlook on the world. However, if the seven articles in this issue (and the thirty-five articles of the four issues preceding) are any indication, they are not panicking. They are smart, scrupulous, detail-oriented, hopeful, and level-headed.
If ever there was a topic tailormade for reactive snark and moral- izing, it was “Generation.” There are few patterns as predictable and unfounded as each generation’s claim to the moral high ground over generations before and after. Our Fellows studiously avoided this trap. Rather, their approaches were curious and generative. Alice Nguyen’s analysis of the film Saving Face (2004), for example, finds hope for resolution in the generational conflict between a first-generation Chinese American and her queer daughter. Kadilo Buzugbe reads Buchi Emecheta’s novel Second-class Citizen as a bildungsroman to inspire new generations of Nigerian expats to cast off postcolonial shame.
Other pieces carefully contextualize shortcomings and misapprehen- sions of the past to argue the necessity of better practices in the present. Annfaye Sternberg’s careful detailing the 1939 failure by the U.S. to provide refuge for Jewish passengers aboard the M.S. St. Louis is a clarion call for the necessity of sensible and agile asylum policies. Usman Azim shows how shifting generational perceptions of mental health allow for less reductive explorations of Edvard Munch’s artistic oeuvre, especially his seminal work The Sick Child.
Some of our Fellows were inspired by the theme to think about the push and pull that accompanies social change. This is evident in a pervasive interest in revolutionary contexts. Amna Siddiqui compares the role of revolutionary ideology in literary murders committed generations apart
in St. Peterburg and Bangalore. Iyad Chowdhury analyzes Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960) and finds a filmmaker and film at odds with the traditional precepts at the heart of post-partition India’s nationalist zeitgeist. Maryam Azzawi traces one intellectual’s ideological reversal from secularist to Islamist in the leadup to and aftermath of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution in Egypt.
Each of these articles was published because it met the rigorous standards of critical thought and writing to which the interdisciplinary humanities aspire. Each is a testament to its author’s committed hard work. Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials do themselves a disservice if they underestimate Gen Z. If the world is a storm, they may well prove its eye.