Prompts for Second Essaylet for the Take-Home Final

1. The very first words of the novel Kindred describe the loss of the protagonist Dana's arm. Octavia Butler subsequently wrote of Dana's loss, "I couldn't let her come back whole."

****What do you take to be the significance of Dana's loss? What is the significance of the necessity of this loss to what you take to be Butler's project in Kindred?****

How does the mysteriousness that surrounds the depiction of this loss -- its specific cause, the mechanism through which it occurs, the suspicions it inspires in authorities, and so on -- contribute (if it does) to the expression of this significance? Is the loss of Dana's arm an adequate registration of the loss of wholeness that Dana has suffered? How can we reconcile the ways in which the representation of this loss seem at once literal, figurative, and euphemistic -- and what (if anything) does this tell us about the anxieties, ambitions, problems the novel is tackling?

2. In Section Two of On Violence, Hannah Arendt repeatedly insists that "power and violence are not the same" -- indeed, she finally insists on the stronger claim that they "are opposites." Similarly, in his Introduction to The Will to Knowledge Michel Foucault doubts whether "prohibition, censorship, and denial [are] truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every society, most certainly in our own[.]"

****Make a case (and substantiate it with evidence from the texts themselves), either, that through these claims Arendt and Foucault are formulating complementary understandings of power and of the political sphere, or that the differences in their understandings of power are nevertheless more salient in their separate conceptions of the political.****

3. Hannah Arendt focused considerable attention in On Violence on the work of Frantz Fanon. Even if she qualified her judgments of Fanon with grudging concessions about the clarity and realism of his thought compared with many others (including Sartre), she still accuses him of "irresponsible" views "praising" or even "glorifying" violence. Now that you have read the Fanon piece Arendt discussed, do these accusations seem accurate and fair, on Fanon's terms? Or even on Arendt's own terms?

****Produce a close reading of Fanon's "Concerning Violence" that either (1) suggests their two pieces provide complementary visions of political power, even if Arendt herself may have overlooked their affinities in her own critique of Fanon, or that (2) shows how the concrete differences in their treatments of the realities of oppression and discontent help us understand larger differences between Arendt's and Fanon's ideas concerning what political freedom is about and what it is for in the first place.****